HOW TO CREATE THE FREE SOCIETY, AND EXTRACT FROM "THOUGHTS OF AN ANARCHO-PACIFIST" by Derrick A Pike 2 THE ELIMINATION OF POVERTY AND WAR The serious radical who wishes to eliminate poverty and war soon discovers that he or she is faced with three main problems: What is the exact nature of our present society that produces these social evils; what is the nature of a peaceful society that will serve the needs of everyone; and how exactly are we to abolish the former and produce the latter. It is comparatively easy to discover at least some characteristics of our society and to realise that the state creates and perpetuates all the social evils including war itself. For that reason, it is not new to say that the state must be abolished. Ana rchists have been saying just that for years. It is more difficult to discover the nature of the ideal society because such a society can be designed only after we know the true nature of human beings. Perhaps the most serious problems, however, are those concerned with the revolution. We must know how to behave to produce our ideals. In view the above, it will be realised that if we are to understand pacifism completely then the number of subjects to study is vast. When I was a young man and began collecting books for my study, I soon found that, except those concerned with biology and most divisions of technology and science, I had books on almost every subject. The subjects concerned with peace and other desirable social ideals are many, and although I am now going to attempt to give a short summary of the answers to the three main problems mentioned above, those who really care for society must discover much, much more for themselves. Let us start with the nature of our society. We live in a state society and in it there is a separate group of people called a government. The government exists ostensibly to direct affairs, but its real main and overriding purpose is not to work for the people's welfare but ensure its own continuous existence. Governments cannot do any job unless they exist. So rulers are always loath to give up office and every government will fight a war to the end, although all their people may be destroyed while they do so. The secondary purpose of governments is to divide labour and wealth unequally. As a result, there are a few idle and rich people and many workers and poor people. To ensure their survival and to achieve their secondary purpose, governments strive to fulfil several minor purposes, which means that they control the lives of the people in almost every way. Because governments control all people, society as we know it is the result of that control. The way governments want people to behave is called the law. Obedience to the law is achieved by the combination of the carrot (money and other rewards), the stick (violence of one form or another), and the control of belief (propaganda and censorship). These three elements I call the power machinery, and it is used so that an unjust and pyramidal society is created. Because reward and privilege for some people and groups within society are so great, and because society is very complex, it is extremely difficult to decide who has the real power and who has not. In Britain, the real rulers are not only the men and wom en at Westminster but also the large power groups such as the bankers, the clergy, and the armed forces. These groups can dictate to the government and this they do. They control the government so that it serves their interests, and in so doing are in charge of affairs. Because the state pattern of society is so hopelessly inefficient, even comparatively simple social problems remain unsolved. This being so, most people would refuse to support any government were they not under the continuous threat of violence. People are bribed and bamboozled and when that fails violence is used upon their person. Violence, as Tolstoy said, is the keystone of power. Support the status quo, obey the law, or you go to prison. Nevertheless, even with the threat of violence no government could exist without war. Like frightened animals most people believe that they must be prepared to fight. Believing this, they accept that they need a central government to direct and plan their defence against any foreigners who might attack them. For governments, war is the ultimate method of obtaining obedience; no state can exist without war and the threat of it. It can be proved that people are innately good in the sense that it is their nature is to cooperate with and help others rather than be forever at variance with them. When people behave evilly, as they do today, it is because their true nature has been perverted and because they find themselves in a deleterious environment. So the society we want to create will make use of people's need to cooperate. It will not have a government, but it will have groups of people who advise others on the use of technolo gy and on the best way to manage social affairs. These people will have no authority backed by violence. Their advice will be taken because it is given with love and the desire to obtain the best for all. There will be planning and direction without government because people will govern themselves. There will be an abundance of wealth because it will be produced by everyone and for everyone, because it will not be produced for profit, and because none will be wasted on governments and their violence. To create our ideal society, we must remember that the end never justifies the means. This is so because the means we use shape the ends we achieve. We cannot travel backwards and arrive at a point up ahead. It follows that we must start now as we intend to go on - behave now, as far as possible, as if we were already in our ideal society. We must not do anything that we would not do were we in our utopia. This means that we must not join any revolutionary group, violent or nonviolent, and we must not make a living by working for any group that is an essential part of the state pattern. We must not work in the police force or the military or in the artificial economic groups, such as those connected with banking and insurance. We must not work to give some people unnecessary luxuries. By the judicious dissemination of our ideals, all our activities will become worldwide. We shall recognise no national barriers because there will be none in the future. Anyone who considers all this to be complicated and airy-fairy should realise one very simple fact: The states can be abolished simply by refusing to do violence. States cannot exist without war, so if we abolish war we shall abolish the states. It is not simply that wars will cease when people refuse to fight. The states rest on the keystone of violence, and so when people refuse to support the violent component of the power machinery, the states will collapse. As we destroy all the undesirable elements in our present society, we must simultaneously build our new organisations. We must start now to build our ideal groups and communities in which the amount of our labour is diminished by the proper use of science and technology, in which there are equal shares for all, and in which people have the time and inclination to enjoy a cultured leisure. If people do all the things I have described to produce the anarchist society, they will have the necessities and luxuries of life, and they will live in peace, loving one another instead of killing one another. 15 CREATING THE FREE SOCIETY Many people want to reduce the suffering in the world and they want to do it by making changes in society. Unfortunately, only the anarchists realise that to obtain good conditions for everyone we must exchange our present form of society for an entirely new one. Only they want to destroy the state and replace it with a truly free and rational society. Now, what does this involve? The population of the world is divided into about one hundred and seventy groups - the number varies. The people in each group all organise their social life in the same way, so that they make up what is called a state. The word 'state' is a description of a certain pattern of behaviour. There is no reason the world has to be divided like this or why each group within it has to be a state. Therefore when we say that the state must be destroyed, we mean only that the population of the world must be divided differently, or not all, and that people must organise their social life in an entirely different way. Within each state is a government that is supposed to exist to plan and create an ordered society that will serve everyone. But governments do not exist to fulfil this purpose, and they fail to plan society so that most people do not have the essentials of life. And worse, governments are the cause of destruction, suffering, and death. Therefore, because the state makes the existence of governments possible and needs these social evils to exist, it must be destroyed. The state exists only because people behave in a certain way; therefore, it will be destroyed when people behave differently. It follows that the destruction of the state is possible without killing anyone. We can destroy the state simply by changing our behaviour. Only certain objects now used by the state will be destroyed; many others will be put to a new use. When people behave in a different social way, they will live a different kind of life and make use of different kinds of objects. While the state is being destroyed, people and things will be destroyed only if people attempt to use violence to make the change or resist it. Anarchists will fail to change society if they try to do so by violence because their violence would have to be organised, and that would mean setting up a group that was constructed in the same way as the state. They would create the very pattern o f society they were striving to destroy. The argument that they could use violence and then after victory convert their society into the ideal is fallacious. Their rulers would cling to power for the same reasons they cling to it today. Even to assume tha t the anarchists would be victorious is to be in error. Governments have many fighting men and an abundance of weapons so that in any revolution their victory is assured. The anarchist's only hope would be to influence more than half of their government's fighting personnel so that they had them fighting with them at the barricades. Clearly, that would be impossible. Governments can, by threatening death, always make men fight for them. And men will fight even if it means the certain death they were promi sed if they did not. That is why in the battle of the Somme, during WW1, more than a million men went 'over the top' only to be mowed down by the machine guns. ('Over the top', for those too young to understand, is to leave the trenches and advance across no-man's-land) Because mass violence needs a form of government to direct it, and for other reasons, we must not attempt to abolish the state by having any kind of violent revolution. No form of violence will produce the ideal society. Therefore there must be no violent demonstrations, no political assassinations, and no bizarre form of violence, such as poisoning food in shops. The way to destroy the state is not by using violence but by refusing to use it. Governments cannot retain their power unless they employ police to force people to obey and service men and women to fight their wars. The states would collapse without wars to unify them. So anarchists, whether they object to violence on principle or not, should refuse to fight. Like the anarcho-pacifists, they must, as far as war is concerned, be conscientious objectors. Refusing to fight in war is just one aspect of refusing to support the state. To produce the ideal society, people must refuse to support all aspects of it. They must never be part of the government or take any kind of employment that the state offers. T hey must also refuse to work for the institutions that support the state, such as the banks, the insurance companies, and the churches. The state pattern will be destroyed when people no longer make use of it. So anarchists must, by spreading their philosophy, make more anarchists. When there are enough people ignoring the state and not making use of it, it will disappear. There is another valid argument for not making use of the state. In the state, we do not decide our own destiny or direct our own affairs. Like little children who cannot look after themselves, we take orders from others. That is bad enough, but there is more. The people from whom we take the orders, the real rulers and their minions, are often people of a very low intelligence and morality. Many are unhealthy, senile, adulterous and corrupt. They are utterly contemptible. To allow such people to plan ou r society and to force us to fight for them is damn stupid. And what make the stupidity even worse is the fact that we are taking orders from people who have, on their own, no real power. Often they are old and weak individuals who could not force anybody to do anything. They can rule us only because we give them the power to do so. The people themselves actually provide the power for governments to rule. Therefore, to take the power from the rulers no violence is necessary, all we have to do is refuse to give it to them. When the states no longer exist, people will still have to live in an organised society. Therefore, while destroying the state, anarchists must build their free society. They must create independent communities where people organise themselves and live in freedom. Because the state cannot be destroyed without at the same time replacing it with the free society, it is judicious to refer to its destruction as the creation of the new society.