I.

The higher phase of communist society is the war of all against all; it begins when economic equality, the equal valuation between bodily and mental labor, and the equal conditions of life have been realized. Then the minds develop, the masses dissolve again into nothing but individuals—out of the balancing effect of life-technique now arise pure selves. In this phase, the human being—the “I”—will take full possession of itself. But it will no longer be our primitive ego, which arrogantly seeks to appropriate the entire phenomenal world for itself alone. A new “I” will emerge out of the awakening consciousness of the birth of tragedy thus far; the conflict of the Own and the Foreign will erupt simultaneously before all people and must be resolved by them. The will of the individual to assert themselves beyond themselves and against all others determines the form of society. The inner relation of a human being to themselves—the “I,” the recognition of one’s own creative authority alone—can bring forth the general idea, the formation of the communal being. Whether I, the individual, know how I relate to all others—everything arises from this gradational awakening of the self. But whether this awakening is rooted in the I as the highest will to a personally alive, supra-personal power, or whether it is projected outside us as a mere static formation, a petrification of a consciousness of the Foreign, a naked will to dominate—this determines the truth of community. The conflict of the Own and the Foreign, of isolation and adaptation—the only decisive driving force of all action, of all will—lies within us, in our relation to the original form of community. In the family, our decision to resolve this conflict has hitherto been bound. The patriarchal family is the dominion of the overvalued idea of man—the falsification of a contingent being, the father, into a ruler. From this arises, clearly, in the broadest formation of community as a supra-personal idea, the domination of blind authoritative power—the power of the Foreign, of illusion: as if our innermost authority, our deepest relational form to all others, were truly fulfilled and expressed by a sterile concept, a delusion. This leads from the blind subordination of the “I,” of the Own, to the compulsion of the Foreign, to the subordinating idea of militarism and capitalism, of the current state, through to the dictatorship of the proletarian masses, in which the I, the Own, initially still disappears. But personal experience—the I—is not merely economically grounded. It cannot be equated with the anarchist conception of economic autonomy, nor is it federalist; rather, the I is the most centralist matter in the world. “Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society conditioned by it.” — Engels. This sentence is false. Law—if it is not to be a mere convention, if it is to be neither "natural law" nor "bourgeois law" but only variable, differentiated law—exists, in its truest sense, only after the resolution of the grossest injustices, only after the overcoming of economic difficulties. Then it exists as law through the self-responsibility of the I toward itself. This I is the rebel, the autonomous one. But it has gone through the school of centralism, through the compromises of communism, and now confronts the totality—all others—with the demand for personal experience. Not only production as labor is the content of human life, as communism teaches. Not even the preservation of life is the meaning of life. Rather, human labor is the expansion of one’s own experience, the full unfolding of a will, its “I and You,” its balance above the abyss of murder, violence, and theft—the conquest of its own lawfulness, the dissolution of its boundaries, of its own compromise formations; the technique of knowing oneself. The revolution against one’s own convention becomes the war of all against Me. I must triumph over Myself!

II.
Response to Lenin's Polemic Against Anarchism

The doctrine of the Commune is opposed by the doctrine of the Ego. This Ego, which seeks to assert itself against the world, can only be understood as without limits—that is, society is a compromise-formation, against which the Ego exercises its drive toward the Absolute, its creative drive. Within society, within communism, the individual Ego will always reappear; it cannot be eliminated, because solidified compromises create the ground on which the destructive tendencies of this Ego grow and spread. At the head of every legislation should stand the sentence: the truth of human life is the formation of compromise. This is reality, and the final logic visible to us today must necessarily lead to the compromise of communism. The rebel who refuses to be socialized—that is Me, when I say: I murder, rape, and steal at any time. How far I can carry this out is determined by the relation of My power to the power of others. Here, compromises form by themselves. My opposition to society, to communism, lies within Me, and this power cannot be integrated into a fixed compromise by communism—if only because, for example, the “use-enjoyment” (Nutznießung) of the communist, that is, their opposition to property formation, essentially consists in generalizing theft through “use-enjoyment” in order to abolish it thereby. But this use-enjoyment is only another form of theft, which is never fundamentally avoidable—just like property and the compromise entered into by all. In contrast, the power of the individual has its limits—and the power of all individuals against each other would necessarily lead to communism; it would necessarily have to form this compromise from the counter-power inherently latent in the exercise of one-sided power. Communism, arising from the class struggle of the proletarian against capitalist exploitation, will in its course dissolve the masses—at the moment of progress into the higher phase—spontaneously into a multitude of individuals; thus this mass will be reconstituted anarchistically. The individuals, through their acquired experience, will no longer naively consider their power to be boundless, but will understand the compromise-formation that inherently attaches to every individual act; they will use their power within or beyond a certain preservation-convention. No act is absolutely unconditional in itself—even for the most radical act, the truth of human life applies: the formation of compromises that arise by themselves. After the overcoming of economic and class contradictions, the war of all against all will begin—the very foundation of humanity will have to be revised.

The anarchic Ego, despite its awareness of the compromises inherent to it, is inopportune. On the path of the dissolution of the mass into the Ego, communism may someday appear as the most opportune. The dictatorship of the proletariat only ends class antagonisms. Then the human being—the Ego—will prove itself.

Panarchos