Anarchist Communism is a modification, rather an evolution, of
Anarchist Socialism. Most Anarchist Communists, I believe, do look
forward to great changes in the distribution of people upon the earth's
surface through the realization of Anarchism. Most of them agree that
the opening up of the land together with the free use of tools would
lead to a breaking up of these vast communities called cities, and the
formation of smaller groups or communes which shall be held together by
a free recognition of common interests only.
While Socialism looks forward to a further extension of the modern
triumph of Commerce--which is that it has brought the products of the
entire earth to your door-step--free Communism looks upon such a fever
of exportation and importation as an unhealthy development, and expects
rather a more self-reliant development of home resources, doing away
with the mass of supervision required for the systematic conduct of such
world exchange. It appeals to the plain sense of the workers, by
proposing that they who now consider themselves helpless dependents upon
the boss's ability to give them a job, shall constitute themselves
independent producing groups, take the materials, do the work (they do
that now), deposit the products in the warehouses, taking what they want
for themselves, and letting others take the balance. To do this no
government, no employer, no money system is necessary. There is only
necessary a decent regard for one's own and one's fellow-worker's
self-hood. It is not likely, indeed it is devoutly to be hoped, that no
such large aggregations of men as now assemble daily in mills and
factories, will ever come together by mutual desire. (A factory is a
hot-bed for all that is vicious in human nature, and largely because of
its crowding only.)
The notion that men cannot work together unless they have a
driving-master to take a percentage of their product, is contrary both
to good sense and observed fact.
As a rule bosses simply make confusion worse confounded when they
attempt to mix in a workman's snarls, as every mechanic has had
practical demonstration of; and as to social effort, why men worked in
common while they were monkeys yet; if you don't believe it, go and
watch the monkeys. They don't surrender their individual freedom,
either.
In short, the real workmen will make their own regulations, decide when
and where and how things shall be done. It is not necessary that the
projector of an Anarchist Communist society shall say in what manner
separate industries shall be conducted, nor do they presume to. He
simply conjures the spirit of Dare and Do in the plainest workmen--says
to them: "It is you who know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut; you
will know how to organize your work without a dictator; we cannot tell
you, but we have full faith that you will find the way yourselves. You
will never be free men until you acquire that same self-faith."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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