We march thru muck and blight and pain
To crush the men who make the chains
We march
We march
March of the anarcho-communists

Further Reading:

Foreward to No Gods, No Masters by Daniel Guerin

Why this title Neither God nor Master?

In his 1957 book The Political and Social Ideas oj Auguste Blanqui, Maurice Dommanget, renowned for his tireless erudition, stated-agreeing here with Louis Louvet's Worldwide History oj Anarchism-that the catch-phrase Neither God nor Master might be an adaptation of a 15th century German proverb to be found in Act I, Scene II of the 1 659 tragicomedy, Peter's Feast, or the Atheist ConJounded, written by Devilliers, a sort of fore-runner of Moliere's DonJuan.

In 1870, while the imperial plebiscite was in progress, one of Auguste
Blanqui's youngest disciples, Doctor Susini, had issued a pamphlet entitled The More God, the More Master.

In the twilight years of his life (1 805-1881), during November 1880, Blanqui himself launched a newspaper which he endowed with the title Ni Dieu ni Maitre (Neither God nor Master) .

After the great revolutionary's death, a number of groups and newspapers
laid claim to the title. It was displayed on the walls of the Maison du Peuple in the Rue Ramey in Paris. From then on it was the catch phrase of the anarchist movement, even if the latter's inspiration was so very different from-not to say contrary to-Blanquism's.

As we shall see in Volume II of this anthology, Peter Kropotkin, in his Paroles d'un Revolte ( 1 885) took the catch phrase for his very own, in the following terms:

On his death-bed, the man who, more than anybody else, was the embodiment of this system of conspiracy, the man who paid with a life of imprisonment for his commitment to that system, uttered these words, which amount to an entire program: Neither God nor Master!

After the bomb outrage mounted by the anarchist Auguste Vaillant against the Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1893, the bourgeois authorities retaliated by passing the so-called "criminal" laws in order to stamp out anarchism. Following the debating of the bills, onlooker Alexandre Flandin shouted from the gallery in the Palais Bourbon: "Anarchists strive to implement the motto Neither God nor Master."

In July 1896, the libertarians of Bordeaux issued a manifesto in which they
eulogized "the beauty of the libertarian ideal of Neither God nor Master."
A little later, Sebastien Faure, writing in Le Libertalre of August 8-14 that year, declared: "Blanqui's catch-phrase, Neither God nor Master, cannot be dissected, but must be embraced in its entirety .... "

During the 1914-1918 war, Sebastien Faure revived the catch-phrase and,
once peace had returned, the Libertarian Youth founded in Paris adopted the name Ni Dieu ni Maitre, as Le Libertaire reported on June 25, 1919.
Although, as has been seen, the motto in question had not originated exclusively with anarchists, with the passage of time it came to be theirs. Hence the title given to this anthology.

The text here offered is, in a sense, the hefty dossier of evidence in a trial in
defense of a reputation. Anarchism, in fact, has been victimized by undeserved slurs-slurs that have come in three shapes.

For a start, those who defame it contend that anarchism is dead. It is alleged not to h ave survived the great revolutionary ordeals of our times: the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Revolution, instead of leaving it out of place in this modern world characterized by centralization, large political and economic units and the totalitarian mind-set. As Victor Serge had it, anarchists had no option left but to "switch, under the lash of events, to revolutionary marxism."


Secondly, its detractors, the better to discredit it, offer a quite contentious
slant on its teachings. Anarchism is alleged to be essentially individualistic, particularist and refractory to any form of organization: preferring fragmentation, atomization, and inward-looking little local units of administration and production; incapable of unity, centralization or planning; nostalgic for a "golden age;" tending to hark back to obsolete forms of society; sinning through a childish optimism, its " idealism" prone to pay no heed to the hard and fast realities of the material infra-structure; incorrigibly petit-bourgeois, existing on the margins of the modern proletariat's class movement.

In a word, "reactionary."

Finally, some commentators are especially diligent in commemorating,
and craftily publicizing only its deviations, such as terrorism, the maverick
outrage, propaganda by explosives.

In the anthology which we offer the reader, the documents can speak for
themselves. In re-opening the case for examination, we are not merely seeking, retrospectively, to undo an injustice, nor to make a great display of erudition. For in fact it seems that anarchy's constructive ideas are alive and well and that they can, provided they are re-examined and held up to critical scrutiny, help contemporary socialist thinking to strike out in a new direction. Consequently, this anthology has a bearing upon the realms of thought and of action alike.

The readings were either unpublished or no longer readily accessible, or had been kept hidden in the shadows by a conspiracy of silence. They have been selected on grounds either of rarity or of interest: being doubly interesting by virtue of the richness of the contents or the exceptional promise of their form.

Unlike other volumes similar to this, no attempt has been made to arrive at
an exhaustive inventory of all the writers subscribing to the libertarian view:
nor have we sought to beatify anyone by exception or omission. Attention has focused upon the great masters, and those we have considered their second-rate epigones have been left out. This opening volume of our anthology begins with three of the pioneers of 19th century anarchism: Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin.

-Daniel Guerin

https://libcom.org/library/no-gods-no-masters-anthology-anarchism