Labour Syndicates, trusts of employers, agricultural co-operation, co-operation for export, etc.), political, intellectual, artistic, educational, and so on. What formerly belonged without a shadow of doubt to the functions of the State, or the Church, enters now into the domain of free organisation.
This tendency develops with a striking rapidity under our very eyes. It was sufficient that a breath of emancipation should have slightly limited the powers of Church and State in their never-satisfied tendency towards further extension—and voluntary organisations have already germinated by the thousand. And we may be sure that every new limitation that may be imposed upon State and Church—the two inveterate enemies of freedom—will still further widen the sphere of action of the free organisations.
Future progress lies in this direction, and Anarchism works precisely that way.
Passing now to the economic views of Anarchists, three different conceptions must be distinguished.
So long as Socialism was understood in its wide, generic, and true sense—as an effort to abolish the exploitation of Labour by Capital—the Anarchists were marching hand-in-hand with the Socialists of that time. But they were compelled to separate from them when the Socialists began to say that there is no possibility of abolishing capitalist exploitation within the lifetime of our generation: that during that phase of economic evolution which we are now living through we have only to mitigate the exploitation, and to impose upon the capitalists certain legal limitations.
Contrarily to this tendency of the present-day Socialists, we maintain that already now, without waiting for the coming of new phases and forms of the capitalist exploitation of Labour, we must work for its abolition. We must, already now, tend to transfer all that is needed for production—the soil, the mines, the factories, the means of communication, and the means of existence, too—from the hands of the individual capitalist into those of the communities of producers and consumers.
As for the political organisation—i.e., the forms of the commonwealth in the midst of which an economic revolution could be accomplished—we entirely differ from all the sections of State Socialists in that we do not see in the system of State Capitalism, which is now preached under the name of Collectivism, a solution of the social question. 'VS e see in the organisation of
