Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/54

 It is easy to see, however—as has been indicated more than once by Anarchist writers, and lately by the French professor, V. Basch, in an interesting work, "Anarchist Individualism: Max Stirner" (1904, in French)—that this sort of Individualism, aiming as it does at the "full development," not of all members of society, but of those only who would be considered as the most gifted ones, without caring for the right of full development for all—is merely a disguised return towards the now-existing education-monopoly of the few. It simply means a "right to their full development" for the privileged minorities. But, as such monopolies cannot be maintained otherwise than under the protection of a monopolist legislation and an organised coercion by the State, the claims of these Individualists necessarily end in a return to the State idea and to that same coercion which they so fiercely attack themselves. Their position is thus the same as that of Spencer, and of all the so-called "Manchester school" of economists, who also begin by a severe criticism of the State and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the property monopolies, of which the State is the necessary stronghold.

Such was the growth of Anarchist ideas, from the French Revolution and Godwin to Proudhon. The next step was made within the great "International Working Men's Association," which so much inspired the working classes with hope, and the middle classes with terror, in the years 1868–1870—just before the Franco-German War.

That this Association was not founded by Marx, or any other personality, as the hero-worshippers would like us to believe, is self-evident. It was the outcome of the meeting, at London, in 1862, of a delegation of French working men, who had come to visit the Second International Exhibition, with representatives of British Trade Unions and Radicals, who received that delegation.

Already in 1830 Robert Owen had made an attempt at organising, beside his "Great National Trades' Union," an "International Union of All Trades"; but the idea had soon to be abandoned, in consequence of the wild prosecutions that the British Government directed against the National Trades' Union. However, the idea was not lost. It smouldered in England; it found followers in France; and after the defeat of the Revolution of 1848, it was taken by some French refugees across the Atlantic, and propagated in the United States, in a paper, L'Internationale.