And, now that the anarchists are in a ferment over preparations for the future, it is worthwhile to re-examine the question calmly and without preconceptions. I shall do so briefly from my point of view as a communist or associationist; others will do so, should they wish, from the individualist point of view. (I use the word ‘associationist’ as an alternative to the word ‘communist,’ not because I like pointless new jargon, but because I forsee the possibility that the communist anarchists will gradually abandon the term ‘communist’; it is growing in ambivalence and falling into disrepute as a result of Russian ‘communist’ despotism. If the term is eventually abandoned this will be a repetition of what happened with the word ‘socialist.’ We who, in Italy at least, were the first champions of socialism and maintained and still maintain that we are the true socialists in the broad and human sense of the word, ended by abandoning the term to avoid confusion with the many and various authoritarian and bourgeois deviations of socialism. Thus too we may have to abandon the term ‘communist’ for fear that our ideal of free human solidarity will be confused with the avaricious despotism which has for some while triumphed in Russia and which one party, inspired by the Russian example, seeks to impose worldwide. Then perhaps we would need another adjective to distinguish us from the rest — and this could well be associationist or societist or such like, although it seems to me that simply to use the term ‘anarchist’ would suffice.
