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What About the Workers? Part 2: "Neutrality, Out!"

© David Poulson

Eugene Adam was born in a small French village but at an early age displayed signs of a precocious intelligence. He very soon rejected the idea of spending the rest of his life as an over-worked and under-paid farm labourer and made strenuous efforts to acquire the skills of, first a carpenter and then a cabinet maker. He left the country and spent most of his life in Paris.

While still in his teens, Adam heard a speech given by Sebastien Faure, a fiery French anarchist, and he began to read as much anarchist literature as he could get hold of. After the outbreak of world War One, however, he was disappointed that famous anarchists like Peter Kopotkin and Jean Grave expressed the view that German militarism had to be crushed at all costs.

Although most anarchists did not share this view, the lack of consistency in people he had up till now admired caused Lanti to withdraw his support for anarchism. He remained, however, committed to the ideas of revolutionary socialism and, after 1917 and the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia, he decided that Marx's communism, (http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Qua... ) not Bakunin's anarchism, (http://www.cp-tel.net/miller/BilLee/quot... ) was the best philosophy for a socialist to adopt. (He soon learned the error of his ways, of course).

During the war, Lanti was conscripted but did not fight in the trenches. For four years he was part of the crew of an ambulance. Other members of the group were Catholic priests and one of them introduced Lanti to Esperanto. He learned it quickly and well and after the war he began to edit an Esperanto journal, intended to promote socialist ideas among working men, He also founded the organisation known as S.A.T. (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda).

I can't think of a better way to introduce this stormy petrel of Esperanto-land than by quoting the words of his friend and collaborator Gaston Waringhien, some photographs of whom can be seen here: http://www-city.europeonline.com/home/zs...

"When Diogenes was asked what his native land was, he replied: "I am a citizen of the world."

That old story defines the new idea which the famous cynic, Diogenes, the boldest of the Greek philosophers, conceived to describe the true condition of the wise man in - or, more accurately, outside of - the State. It was the first time in the history of the human race that any thinker had dared to raise his head against that frightening monster, the Nation State which, under various more-or less perfect forms, from clans to enormous oriental empires, or the small Greek cities, has obstinately suffocated every kind of individuality.