Moribund Society and Anarchy by Jean Grave

Most assuredly what we have just said in the preceding chapter is contrary to all the language of political parties, which promise mountains and marvels, whose meanest reform is bound to bring an Edenic period to those that shall have supported it. But we who have no personal expectations to realize from the infatuation of the masses, we who want them to be able to guide themselves, we do not need to seek for means to delude them. To give more force to our thoughts, more direction to our acts, we must see our way clearly, warding off all illusions, freeing ourselves from every prejudice which might lead us astray. Our ideas can only be rendered applicable through the energy exerted in spreading and diffusing them by those who understand them. Success depends upon the strength we shall put into the service of the revolution; but since we cannot exert this strength immediately, since we cannot at once pass from theory to practice, it must be admitted that there are obstacles in the way. Were our ideas immediately realizable we should be altogether inexcusable in not attempting the solution without further delay. Now, whatever these difficulties may be, they are the things we must find out in order to surmount rather than deny them. And moreover that we do make propaganda is exactly in order to be able to put our ideas into practice, for if they were immediately realizable, the force of circumstances alone would suffice. We must get used to looking at things coldly, and not persist in regarding the object of our desires through magnifying glasses, and the thing to be dreaded through the little end of the lorgnette. It is the truth alone that we are seeking. If we deceive ourselves we also deceive others, and the revolution thus brought about would have to be begun all over again.

Generally it is only when they are at the end of their arguments, that our opponents advance the objection of the impracticability of our ideas; and we must admit that this objection is always embarrassing -- not in reality but in appearance; for in our present society our ideas do indeed appear utopian. It is very hard for a person who has never looked beyond existing arrangements to be able to understand how people could live without government, laws, judges, policemen, or rod of any sort, without money or any representative of values, seeing we have so much trouble to get along in the world now, when the laws are supposed to aim at simplifying relations. We cannot answer this objection with facts, because what we desire is still theory. We may instance the tendencies which are carrying humanity along, enumerate the attempts which society has made on a small scale; but what value can these have for the biased mind whose aspirations never go beyond the amelioration of that which is?