INTRODUCTION that the chief enemy was the State. E-ventshave proved the rightness •of the anarchist contention. To-day capitalism is dying, not from :the action of the workers, but from the action of the State. The ·expropriators are indeed being expropriated; but not quite in the way . Marx foresaw. But the State, gaining strength from its absorption ,of economic power, becomes more menacing, oppressive and destructive than ever before. And gradually, as the power of the State in- -creases, so do we find the organs of political and reformist action -lining themselves up beside it, becoming part of its very fabric. The ,trade unions become the State organisations for the regulation of Jabour, the co-operative societies dovetail into the state-controlled :schemes of distribution, the Labour Party and the Communist Party become the mouths through which the State attempts to speak to the ·workers. The struggle against the State is one which the workers must ·fight for themselves. Leaders will only lead them back into the old :governmental ambushes. Only by their own attack on authority, by using the power controls of society, the means of production and dis- ·ttibution which in reality lie in their hands, can the workers defeat :and destroy the State. And when they have destroyed it, their course ,of action must lie not in the directions laid down by political parties, ,,of a centralised ' workers' ' State governed by a party bureaucracy, 'Which will bring back all the evils of government and exploitation in .ilfl aggravated •form, but in the direction pointed out by Kropotkin :and the other anarchists, towards a free society based on 'the principle ,of an energetic initiative of the individual, of groups and of free :agreement.' G.W. 8 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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