POSITIVITY OF ANARCHISM tion is thus bound to be exploltatlve and repressive. The more centralized and the better equipped it is, the more it wlll partake of the nature of the State, exploltatlve and oppressive in fact as well as by anarchist definition. E. J. Hobsbawm, who is a communist, says that people are moved to revolutionary action by a sense of urgency and despair. Extreme poverty and unenlightened repressive measures of a system that shows signs of weakness and decay provide accordingly its most suitable conditions. A revolutionary situation occurs when the oppressed, who constitute the bulle of society, see a unique chance of changing the structure of the latter so as not to be exploited any longer and be able to live in freedom. But when a revolution lasts ten, twenty, forty years, and more, most of them, if not ail, marked by military activity, what is called a revolution is no longer such a unique chance, and can no longer be dictated, in the person of 11ts militants, by a sense of urgency and despair. Having become institutlonalized and professlonallzed in its catabollc moment, lt does not so much express the will of the oppressed as it strikes them like the scourge of any common war. Wars are expensive, and there is no way of paying for them but by oppression and exploitation. Let absolute priority be given to the catabolic moment of revolution and a State is automatically created, glven strength and justification. All exlsting states, in fa.et, whether they were born or not from revolution, stress their right to be there and to command the alleglance of society by clalming to be there first and foremost as an apparatus for the defence and preservation of society against the threat of forelgn nations. There is always a foreign enemy to be guarded against when a State wishes to strengthen and perpetuate itself. Not otherwise there wm always be a counter revolutionary enemy, and for the same reason, for a revolutionary organization that has secured a hold upon soclety as a whole. As a matter of fact, the stressing of the catabolic moment of revolution glves rise to a new kind of imperiallsm, and the so-called class struggle is made to pivot from a vertical to a horizontal plane. The class enemy is allegedly no linger at home, but abroad or acting on behalf of some power abroad. For anarchlsts it is the anabollc moment of revolution that always needs to be stressed, and never to be sacrlficed. It ~$ indeed the one for whlch the exploited and oppressed directly make, if given a chance, by the creation of soviets, workers' councils, the giving of the land to those who work it, and by other such measures that exclude political mediacy of party 115
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