Te Anarchist Library

Anti-Copyright
May 21, 2012
mile Armand
Mini-Manual of Individualist Anarchism
July 1
st
, 1911
Essay writen in 1911 and published in lEncyclopdie anarchiste
(19251934), work in four volumes edited by Sbastien Faure.
Retrieved on February 7, 2010 from libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com
mile Armand
Mini-Manual of
Individualist Anarcism
July 1
st
, 1911
2
10
the exchange of vital products between individualist-anarchist pos-
sessors of the necessary engines of production, apart from every
capitalist intermediary; etc., are acts of revolt agreeing essentially
with the character of individualist-anarchism.
3
Contents
I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4 9
Te individualist-anarchist is never accountable to anyone but
himself for his acts and gestures.
Te individualist-anarchist considers association only as an ex-
pedient, a makeshif. Tus, he wants to associate only in cases of
urgency but always voluntarily. And he only desires to contract, in
general, for the short term, it being always understood that every
contract can be voided as soon as it harms one of the contracting
parties.
Te individualist-anarchist proscribes no determined sexual moral-
ity. It is up to each to determine his sexual, aective or sentimental
life, as much for one sex as for the other. What is essential is that
in intimate relations between anarchists of diering sexes neither
violence nor constraint take place. He thinks that economic inde-
pendence and the possibility of being a mother as she pleases are
the initial conditions for the emancipation of woman.
Te individualist-anarchist wants to live, wants to be able to ap-
preciate life individually, life considered in all its manifestations.
By remaining master meanwhile of his will, by considering as so
many servitors put at the disposition of his self his knowledge, his
faculties, his senses, the multiple organs of perception of his body.
He is not a coward, but he does not want to diminish himself. And
he knows well he who allows himself to be led by his passions or
dominated by his penchants is a slave. He wants to maintain the
mastery of the self in order to drive towards the adventures to
which independent research and free study lead him. He will rec-
ommend willingly a simple life, the renunciation of false, enslaving,
useless needs; avoidance of the large cities; a rational diet and bodily
hygiene.
Te individualist-anarchist will interest himself in the associa-
tions formed by certain comrades with an eye to tearing themselves
from obsession with a milieu which disgusts them. Te refusal of
military service, or of paying taxes will have all his sympathy; free
unions, single or plural, as a protestation against ordinary morals;
illegalism as the violent rupture (and with certain reservations) of an
economic contract imposed by force; abstention from every action,
from every labor, from every function involving the maintenance or
consolidation of the imposed intellectual, ethical or economic regime;
8
f) the monopoly of the State or of every executive form replacing
it, that is to say its intervention in its role as centralizer, adminis-
trator, director, organizer in the relations between individuals, in
whatever domain;
g) the loan at interest, usury, agio, money-changing, inheritance,
etc., etc.
III
Te individualist-anarchist makes propaganda in order to se-
lect individualist-anarchist dispositions which he should have, to
determine at the very least an intellectual atmosphere favorable to
their appearance. Between individualist-anarchists relations are es-
tablished on the basis of reciprocity. Comradery is essentially
of the individual order, it is never imposed. A comrade which
pleases him individually to associate with, is one who makes an
appreciable eort in order to feel himself to live, who takes part in
his propaganda of educational critique and of selection of persons;
who respects the mode of existence of each, does not encroach on
the development of those who advance with him and of those who
touch him the most closely.
Te individualist-anarchist is never the slave of a formula-type or
of a received text. He admits only opinions. He proposes only theses.
He does not impose an end on himself. If he adopts one method of
life on one point of detail, it is in order to assure more liberty, more
happiness, more well-being, but not at all in order to sacrice himself.
And he modies it, and transforms it when it appears to him that to
continue to remain faithful to it would diminish his autonomy. He
does not want to let himself be dominated by principles established
a priori; it is a posteriori, on his experiences, that he bases his rule of
conduct, nevertheless denitive, always subject to the modications
and to the transformations that the recording of new experiences
can register, and the necessity of acquisition of new weapons in his
struggle against the environment without making an absolute of
the a priori.
5
I
To be an anarchist is to deny authority and reject its economic
corollary: exploitation and that in all the domains where human
activity is exerted. Te anarchist wishes to live without gods or mas-
ters; without patrons or directors; a-legal, without laws as without
prejudices; amoral, without obligations as without collective morals.
He wants to live freely, to live his own idea of life. In his interior
conscience, he is always asocial, a refractory, an outsider, marginal,
an exception, a mist. And obliged as he is to live in a society the con-
stitution of which is repugnant to his temperament, it is in a foreign
land that he is camped. If he grants to his environment unavoidable
concessions always with the intention of taking them back in
order to avoid risking or sacricing his life foolishly or uselessly, it
is because he considers them as weapons of personal defense in the
struggle for existence. Te anarchist wishes to live his life, as much
as possible, morally, intellectually, economically, without occupying
himself with the rest of the world, exploiters or exploited; without
wanting to dominate or to exploit others, but ready to respond by all
means against whoever would intervene in his life or would prevent
him from expressing his thought by the pen or by speech.
Te anarchist has for enemy the State and all its institutions which
tend to maintain or to perpetuate its stranglehold on the individual.
Tere is no possibility of conciliation between the anarchist and any
form whatever of society resting on authority, whether it emanates
from an autocrat, from an aristocracy, or from a democracy. No com-
mon ground between the anarchist and any environment regulated
by the decisions of a majority or the wishes of an elite. Te anarchist
combats for the same reason the teaching furnished by the State and
that dispensed by the Church. He is the adversary of monopolies
and of privileges, whether they are of the intellectual, moral or eco-
nomic order. In a word, he is the irreconcilable antagonist of every
regime, of every social system, of every state of things that implies
the domination of man or the environment over the individual and
the exploitation of the individual by another or by the group.
Te work of the anarchist is above all a work of critique. Te an-
archist goes, sowing revolt against that which oppresses, obstructs,
6
opposes itself to the free expansion of the individual being. He agrees
rst to rid brains of preconceived ideas, to put at liberty tempera-
ments enchained by fear, to give rise to mindsets free from popular
opinion and social conventions; it is thus that the anarchist will
push all comers to make route with him to rebel practically against
the determinism of the social environment, to arm themselves
individually, to sculpt his internal statue, to render themselves, as
much as possible, independent of the moral, intellectual and eco-
nomic environment. He will urge the ignorant to instruct himself,
the nonchalant to react, the feeble to become strong, the bent to
straighten. He will push the poorly endowed and less apt to pull
from themselves all the resources possible and not to rely on others.
An abyss separates anarchism from socialism in these dierent
regards, including there syndicalism.
Te anarchist places at the base of all his conceptions of life: the
individual act. And that is why he willingly calls himself anarchist-
individualist.
He does not believe that all the evils that men suer come exclu-
sively from capitalism or from private property. He believes that
they are due especially to the defective mentality of men, taken as a
bloc. Tere are not masters because there are slaves and the gods do
not subsist because some faithful kneel. Te individualist anarchist
loses interest in a violent revolution having for aim a transformation
of the mode of distribution of products in the collectivist or commu-
nist sense, which would hardly bring about a change in the general
mentality and which would not provoke at all the emancipation of
the individual being. In a communist regime that one would be as
subordinated as presently to the good will of the environment: he
would nd himself as poor, as miserable as now; instead of being
under the thumb of the small capitalist minority of the present, he
would be dominated by the economic ensemble. Nothing would
properly belong to him. He would be a producer, a consumer, put a
litle or take some from the heap, but he would never be autonomous.
7
II
Te individualist-anarchist dierentiates himself from the anar-
chist-communist in the sense that he considers (apart from prop-
erty in some objects of enjoyment extending from the personality)
property in the means of production and the free disposition of the
product as the essential guarantee of the autonomy of the person.
Being understood that that property is limited to the possibility of
puting to work (individually, by couples, by familial groups, etc.)
the expanse of soil or the engine of production indispensable to the
necessities of social unity; under condition, for the possessor, of not
renting it to anyone or of not resorting pour its enhancement to
someone in his service.
Te individualist-anarchist no more intends to live at any price,
as individualist, were that as exploiter, than he intends to live under
regulation, provided that the bowl of soup is assured, clothing certain
and a dwelling guaranteed.
Te individualist-anarchist, moreover, does not claim any system
which would bind the future. He claims to place himself in a state of
legitimate defense with regard to every social atmosphere (State, so-
ciety, milieu, grouping, etc.) which would allow, accept, perpetuate,
sanction or render possible:
a) the subordination to the environment of the individual being,
placing that one in a state of obvious inferiority since he cannot treat
with the collective ensemble as equal to equal, power to power;
b) the obligation (in whatever domain) of mutual aid, of solidarity,
of association;
c) the deprivation of the individual and inalienable possession
of the means of production and of the complete and unrestricted
disposition of the product;
d) the exploitation of anyone by one of his fellows, who would
make him labor on his account and for his prot;
e) monopolization, i.e. the possibility for an individual, a couple,
a familial group to possess more than is necessary for its normal
upkeep;