A. L. and V. L. Gordin

Pan-Anarchy Manifesto

(1918)

 



Note

Source: Manifest pananarkhistov, Moscow, 1918

 


 

Pan-anarchy literally means all-embracing anarchy, 'pan' being 'all' in Greek. Pan-anarchy is a comprehensive and articulate anarchy. Aside from the ideal of no government, or anarchy proper, it entails four other ideals, namely:
- communism, with its 'everything belongs to everybody';
- pedism, or the liberation of children and youth from the vice of servile education;
- cosmism (national-cosmopolitanism), the total emancipation of oppressed nationalities; and, finally,
- gyneantropism, that is, the emancipation and humanization of women.

Taken together, these five ideals fall under the general heading of 'pan-anarchy'. Pan-anarchy implies a synthesis (unification) of all the principal social ideals, actions and aspirations aiming towards a basic overthrow and reconstruction of all society - the economy, the family, the school, international relations and the institutions of government.

In the economic sphere pan-anarchy entails the replacement of capitalism by communism, the abolition of private property in land, means of production and consumer goods. In the family it means the replacement of polygamy and the traffic in women by genuine love between individual man and woman, as well as the end of male domination of the family and of life as a whole, both in fact and in law, the free participation of women in all branches of labour and art and their equal enjoyment of all the benefits of society. In the school it means the replacement of present-day book learning, which indoctrinates our children and youth with religious and scientific prejudices, by a practical education in technical crafts which will be useful in everyday life and which will afford them freedom, self-reliance and the ability to create things by themselves with originality and independence of mind.

It also means that the existing territorial system, with its fatherlands and state frontiers and national and private territorial ownership, will be replaced by a national-cosmopolitan order in which there are neither fatherlands nor frontiers but only free unions of free peoples to whom the whole earth belongs in common. 'The whole earth to all humanity' - such is the motto of pan-anarchy, as opposed to the territorialism and imperialism of predatory nations which declare that 'the whole earth is mine'.

In the realm of governmental organization and its relation to the individual, pan-anarchy stands for the elimination of authority, of the state, and of all forms of compulsion - courts, prisons, militias, etc. - and for the administration of society by means of voluntary agreements and consultation.

Pan-anarchy is the ideal of the Union of the Oppressed Five [state subjects, poor, young, nationalities, women]. It summons together all the oppressed to create a world-wide organization, an International of the Oppressed, a World Union of the Oppressed Five for the destruction of the existing order which is founded on five forms of oppression. Pan-anarchy takes the initiative in encouraging the unification of all five oppressed groups in contemporary society into a Worker-Vagabond International, a Youth International, an International of Oppressed Nationalities, a Women's International and an International of Individual Personalities, as well as the eventual formation of one joint International of the Oppressed founded on the principle of the equality of all the oppressed.

Pan-anarchy stands for pan-destruction, for the elimination of all five types of oppression in existing society. Thus the aim of pan-anarchy is not the liberation of one group of oppressed through the oppression of the rest, as for example in the inauguration of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but the liberation of all the oppressed, of all humanity, of all downtrodden elements. Pan-anarchy, moreover, is the liberation of humanity from the slavery of capitalism and the state, the slavery of formal education and of household drudgery, and the slavery of nationalism.

Pan-anarchy will destroy all five forms of oppression in contemporary society: (1) economic, (2) political, (3) national, (4) educational and (5) domestic. More simply, pan-anarchy insists that there be neither rich nor poor, neither rulers nor subjects, neither enslaving teachers nor enslaved pupils, neither male masters nor female slaves. For pan-anarchy each of these demands is of equal importance. Any superiority of one oppressed element over another, whether through leadership or domination, pan-anarchy brands as exploitation of human beings in favour of a particular class or group.

But pan-anarchy does not only mean emancipation from the five forms of oppression. It also means the emancipation of oppressed humanity from two deceptions: the deception of religion and the deception of science, which are in essence merely two varieties of the same deception, the deception of the oppressed by the oppressors. Pan-anarchy declares that religion and science were invented as a means of distracting attention from oppression and from the real tangible world, substituting for it an intangible world, either supernatural (religion) or abstract (science). Pan-anarchy views science as a reformed religion and nature as a reformed God. Science is the religion of the bourgeoisie, just as religion was the science of the nobility and slave-holders.

Pan-anarchy proclaims universal statelessness, cosmic anarchy, anarchy everywhere! All forms of religion and science are not only devices of bourgeois oppression, nets and snares, lures and bait for the oppressed. They are also fraudulent and barbarous, narrow and stupid, naive and comical, muddled and contradictory. Science is one of the stupidities of the European savage, just as religion is a stupidity of the Asiatic savage. Both form a single tissue of confusions and contradictions: God and no God, cause and no cause; God the real builder and God building from ‘nothing’, meaning that he himself is the absolute 'nothing', a non-God; cause traced to the first cause, becoming self-cause or no cause.

God and Nature are made in man's image, anthropomorphic. The Eskimo envisages them from his hunting in the form of a white bear (the world originated from the white bear); the Hebrews from their trades (God the carpenter, the tailor). Newton, Kant and Laplace envisage Nature according to European mechanics, Darwin and Spencer according to English horse-breeding (natural selection followed the pattern of artificial selection in English horse-breeding). The rule of heaven and the rule of nature - angels, spirits, devils, molecules, atoms, ether, the laws of God/Heaven and the laws of Nature, forces, the influence of one body on another - all this is invented, formed, created by society (sociomorphic).

God is an image of the absolute Asian monarch. The laws of heaven, the laws of the stars, the astrology of Assyria and Babylonia - these are the laws of emperors. The laws of Nature are the laws of the state; natural force is coercion. The forces of Nature resemble the European constitutional monarchs and constitutional bureaucracy, and sometimes Nature even resembles the president of a democratic republic!

Pan-anarchy teaches that the universe is neither man nor society. It has neither beginning nor end, neither origin (cosmogony) nor cause, neither laws nor knout-like forces. The universe and every natural phenomenon is always 'itself ', anarchist-individualist or anarchist-communist, so to speak. The universe and all its phenomena are spontaneous. In the universe and in every phenomenon there is nothing external, no coercive order, but rather anarchy, i.e. internal (immanent) order, independent and spontaneous. There is no natural force but only actions and affinities; and things, actions and affinities are identical.

For pan-anarchy the basic error of religion and science is that the first is the fruit of fantasy and the second the fruit of the intellect (mental configurations or abstractions). Thus pan-anarchy holds only feelings, or rather muscles and technics, to be genuine. Pan-anarchy regards only technics as the culture of the people, the toilers, the oppressed, technics in the broad meaning of the term, embracing all crafts, all practical arts, and so on, which it calls pan-technics.

With regard to the study of society, pan-anarchy rejects all sociological laws or social evolution and development, replacing these with sociotechnics, the building of society with the explicit right of social experimentation, improvisation and invention. Pan-anarchy, clothed in technicalism, means not only total and universal anarchy but also anarchy now. Instead of Social-Democratic evolution and reform, it advances the slogan of Social Revolution, upholding the golden anarchist rule: Straight on towards our goal!

And so:

Long-live Pan-Anarchy!

 


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