Politics: Anarchism - Human Nature

-'The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.'.

-We have an innate sense of entitlement, he argues, meaning that mankind is born with a belief that we are entitled to anything in nature as long as we have worked to gain it.

-To this robust defence of private property, he adds that we must be free to enter economic relations with others - this must be unregulated if it is to be mutually beneficial.

-For him, the only impulse we have when we are born is towards some kind of natural justice - we do understand the difference between good and evil, but there is nothing that compels us to act in any particular way.

-It depends on our experiences of life whether we follow the rules of natural justice.

-He professed to be a lover of freedom but insisted that the natural state of mankind is to live in communities and to be mutually supportive.

-Indeed, he argued that we are free only if we live in such groups.

-He wrote in 1872, 'To be free means every man living in a social milieu not to surrender his thought or will to any authority, but his own reason and his own understanding of justice.'.

-In 'Evolution and Revolution' (1891), he stated: 'But whether it is a question of small or large groups of the human species, it is always through solidarity, through the association of spontaneous, coordinated forces that all progress is made...they will owe it to their coming together more and more intimately, to incessant collaboration, to this mutual aid from which brotherhood grows little by little.'.

-Was an early advocate of the idea that we are capable of moral perfection.

-Argued that if people are allowed to use private judgement, they will not infringe on the freedom of others, so laws are unnecessary.

-In 'Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution', he challenged the beliefs held by Social Darwinists, arguing that in most of the animal world, creatures are cooperative and not competitive.

-Most animals live in natural social groups and engage in mutual aid.

-Thus, he concluded, this was the natural state of mankind too.

-He stated, 'Therefore combine - practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral. That is what Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position of their respective classes have done'.

-Also linking with economics, he pleaded, 'Don't compete! Competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!'.

-He and his communist colleagues said that mankind is naturally sociable, so people will find freedom within voluntary social groups - 'Are bees in a hive free?', he would ask.

-'Yes' was his answer because they voluntarily and naturally live collectively without any external force.

-His belief in self-sufficiency and equality in small communities made him popular within the commune movement which arose in the 1960s among young, so-called hippies.

-His ideas for promoting self-sufficiency have also endeared him to contemporary 'anarcho-environmentalists' who combine the ideas of communal living with the preservation of scarce resources and opposition to further industrialisation.

-Above all, he is known for his assertion that anarchy represents order and that the kind of utopia he envisaged is capable of becoming a reality.

-He was, perhaps, the most scientific of all anarchist thinkers.

-'It's true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don't see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don't see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, "greed" simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with.'

-His hopes for a reconciliation between individualism and collectivism are summed up in these words, in 'What is Property?, (1840): 'When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical - all constraints having disappeared - it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.'.

-He had the most pessimistic view of human nature in the anarchist movement.

-He argued that the ego - the desire for our own self-realisation even at the expense of others - is the main driving force of the individual's life aspiration.

-He insisted humans are rational creatures who understand our self-interest, but we are also without morality.

-Social morality restrains us and prevents us from being truly liberated - the only way in which people would cooperate with each other would be for selfish reasons - when they saw it as in their self-interest to do so.

-His followers, egoists, developed a reputation for extreme violence and opposing any form of organised society.

-She was involved in a number of social causes, not least of which was the emancipation of women and the tolerance of homosexuality, and she championed the idea of free love.

-It is claimed she was the first anarcha-feminist.

-She popularised anarchism's main idea, by connecting its ideal to the emancipation of the individual and the replacement of exploitation by the idea of mutual love.

-Once freed from oppression, she preached to sizeable crowds in the US, the true nature of our loving feeling for each other can be released.

-She raged against virtually every enemy of individual liberty - the modern state, religion, nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, patriarchy and bigotry of any kind.

-In her book, 'Anarchism and Other Essays' (1910), she summed up anarchism thus: 'Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion and liberation of the human mind from the coercion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. It stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals.'.

-By undertaking similar work, he believed, people would have a greater sense of collective consciousness.

-This theory drew inspiration from the animal kingdom.

-According to Darwin's theories, animals were engaged in a struggle based on the survival of the fittest.

-This promoted competition for scarce food resources, with only those able to adapt to a changing environment able to prevail in this struggle.

-Under capitalism, it was argued, humans were engaged in a similar struggle, in which some would succeed and prosper while others would fail and remain poor.

-Thus, inequality was natural, according to supporters of this theory.