Anarcho Communists

"Education still remains the privilege of a small minority, for it is idle to talk of education when the workman’s child is forced at the age of thirteen, to go down in to the mine or to help his father on the farm. It is idle to talk of studies to the worker, who comes home in the evening crushed by excessive toil with its brutalizing atmosphere. Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions, freedom is a vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of political rights, but he soon sees the at breath of liberty leads to the uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions, and reverts to repressive legislation and government by the sword."

"We must recognize, and loudly proclaim, that every one, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable, as, before everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exception , the means of existence at its disposal."

"We can already catch glimpses of a world in which the bonds which bind the individual are no longer laws, but social habits--the result of the need felt by each one of us to seek the support, the co-operation, the sympathy of his neighbours. Assuredly the idea of a society without a State will give rise to at least as many objections as the political economy of a society without private capital. We have all been brought up from our childhood to regard the State as a sort of Providence; all our education, the Roman history we learned at school, the Byzantine code which we studied later under the name of Roman law, and the various sciences taught at the universities, accustom us to believe in Government and in the virtues of the State providential. To maintain this superstition whole systems of philosophy have been elaborated and taught; all politics are based on this principle; and each politician, whatever his colours, comes forward and says to the people, "Give me the power, and I both can and will free you from the miseries which press so heavily upon you.""

"From the cradle to the grave all our actions are guided by this principle. Open any book on sociology or jurisprudence, and you will find there the Government, its organization, its acts, filling so large a place that we ome to believe that there is nothing outside the Government and the world of statesmen."

"We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no pinion of their own."

"The landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source."

"What we do want is so to arrange things that every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity in the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming skill in it; next, that he shall be free to work at his trade without asking leave of master or owner, and without handing over to landlord or capitalist the lion's share of what he produces."

"That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all — an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party color, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied."

"It is evident, as Proudhon has already pointed our, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete disorganization of the system based upon private enterprise and wage labor. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand, in its entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of the whole people."

"Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish wages, though it introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things. It only substitutes the State, that is to say, Representative Government, national or local, for the individual employer of labor. Under Collectivism it is the representatives of the nation, or of the district, and deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of production — in the interests of all."

"The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers — in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage."

"The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all reduction has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it."

"It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men — and such are not wanting in the collectivist party — can remain partisans of national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons history has given them — in France, in England, in Germany, or in the United States."

"It is not sufficient to distribute the profits realized by a trade in equal parts, if at the same time thousands of other workers are exploited. It is a case of PRODUCING THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF GOODS NECESSARY TO THE WELL-BEING OF ALL, WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE WASTE OF HUMAN ENERGY."

"The mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put in motion at the pit's mouth."

"To emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments, for her, for the "emancipated" woman will always throw domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life. It will come to pass. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half."

"Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices an absolutely unsound education and training to see Government, legislation and magistracy everywhere around, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with out eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under government tutelage."

"The State is abdicating and appealing in its holy functions to private individuals. Everywhere free organization trespasses on its domain. And yet, the facts we have quoted let us catch only a glimpse of what free agreement has in store for us in the future, when there will be no more State."

"While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers... unknown to posterity have created of late a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming, as farming is superior to the old three fields system of our ancestors. Science seldom guided them, and sometimes misguided... they proceeded in the empirical way; but... they have opened a new field of experimental research for the physiology of plants. They have created a totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have 6 and 9 crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils because they make the soils themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it: otherwise it would raise up the level of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping not 5 or 6 tons of grass on the acre, as we do, but from 50 to 100 tons of various vegetables on the same space; not £5 worth of hay but £100 worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbage and carrots, and more than £200 worth under intensive horticultural treatments. This is where agriculture is going now."

"A great number of the Paris maraîchères... export the whole of their crop to England."

"What chiefly attracts the gardener to the great cities is stable ; and this is not wanted so much for increasing the richness of the soil—one tenth part of the manure used by the French gardeners would do for that purpose—but for keeping the soils at a certain temperature. Early vegetables pay best, and in order to obtain early produce not only the air but the soil as well must be warmed... by putting great quantities of properly mixed manure into the soil; its heats it..."

"[I]n market gardening the soil is always made... Consequently, it is now a usual stipulation in the renting contracts of the Paris maraîcheres that the gardener may carry away his soil, down to a certain depth, when he quits his tenancy. He himself makes it, and when he moves to another plot he carts his soil away..."

"Let us take, for example, the orchard—the marais—of M. Ponce, the author of a well known work on the culture maraîchere.., covered only two and seven-tenths acres. The outlay for his establishment, including a steam engine for watering... reached £1,136. ...[W]hen returning from Paris they brought in manure, for which £100 was spent every year. Another £100 was spent on rent and taxes. But how to enumerate all that was gathered every year... More than 20,000 pounds of carrots... 20,000 pounds of onions, radishes and other vegetables... 6,000 heads of cabbage; 3,000 of cauliflower; 5,000 baskets of tomatoes, 5,000 dozen of choice fruit; and 154,000 heads of salad; in short, a total of 250,000 pounds of vegetables. The soil was made to such an amount out of forcing beds that every year 250 cubic yards of loam had been sold. Similar examples could have been given by the dozen... No less than 2,125 acres are cultivated round Paris in that way by 5,000 persons, and thus not only the 2,000,000 Parisians are supplied with vegetables, but the surplus is also sent to London."

"The above results are obtained with the help of warm frames, thousands of glass bells, and so on. But even without such costly things, with only 36 yards of frames for seedlings, vegetables are grown in the open air to the value of £200 per acre. ...[I]n such cases the high selling prices of crops are not due to the high prices fetched by early vegetables in winter; they are entirely due to the high crops of the plainest ones."

"[A]ll this wonderful culture has entirely developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, it was quite primitive. But now the Paris gardener not only defies the soil—he would grow the same crops on an ashphalt pavement—he defies the climate. His walls, which are built to reflect light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his frames and pépinières have made a real garden, a rich Southern garden, out of the suburbs of Paris. He has given to Paris the 'two degrees less of latitude' after which a French scientific writer was longing; he supplies his city with mountains of grapes and fruit at any season; and in the early spring he inundates and perfumes it with flowers. But he does not only grow articles of luxury. The culture of plain vegetables on a large scale is spreading every year; and the results are so good that there are now practical maraîchers who venture to maintain that if all the food, animal and vegetable, necessary for 4,500,000 inhabitants of the departments of Seine and had to be grown in their own territory (3,520 square miles), it could be grown without resorting to any other methods of culture than those already in use—methods already tested on a large scale and proved to be successful."

"And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal of an agriculuralist. In the painful work of civilisation he has shown us the way to follow; but the ideal of modern civilisation is is elsewhere. He toils, with but short interruption, from 3 in the morning till late in the night. He knows no leisure; he has no time to live the life of a human being; the commonwealth does not exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his family. He cannot be our ideal; neither he nor his system of agriculture. Our ambition is, that he should produce even more... with less labour, and should enjoy all the joys of human life. And this is fully possible."

"[I]f we put aside those gardeners who chiefly cultivate the... primeurs—strawberries ripened in January, and the like—if we take only those who grow crops in the open field, and resort to frames exclusively for the earlier days of the life of the plant and if we analyse their system, we see that its very essence is first, to create for the plant a nutritive and porous soil, which contains both the necessary decaying organic matter and the inorganic compounds; and then to keep that soil and the surrounding atmosphere at a temperature and moisture superior to those of the open air. The whole system is summed up in these few words. If the French maraîcher spends prodigies of labour, intelligence, and imagination in combining different kinds of manure so as to make them ferment at a given speed, he does so for no purpose but the above: a nourishing soil and a desired equal temperature of the air and the soil. All of his empirical art is devoted to the achievement of these two aims. But... the soil can be improved by hand, but it need not be made by hand. Any soil... can be made by machinery. ...[W]e shall see manufactures of as soon as there is a demand for them."

"[A]t present, when fraud and adulteration are exercised on such an immense scale in the manufacture of artificial manure, and the manufacture of manure is considered as a chemical process, when it ought to be considered as a physiological one, the gardener prefers to spend an unimaginable amount of labour rather than risk his crop by the use of a pompously labelled and unworthy drug. But it is a social obstacle which depends upon a want of knowledge and a bad social organisation, not upon physical causes."

"[L]et us not overrate the productivity of the exporting countries, and let us remember that the vinegrowers of Southern Europe drink themselves an abominable piquette; that s fabricates wine for home use out of dry raisins bought from Asia; and that the peasant who sends his apples to London, drinks real cider only on great festivities. Such a state of things will not last for ever; and the day is not far when we shall be compelled to look to our own resources for many of the things which we now import. And we shall not be the worse for that."

"The resources of science, both in enlarging the circle of our production and in new discoveries, are inexhaustible. And each new branch of activity calls into existence more and more new branches, which steadily increase the power of man over the forces of nature."

"If we take all into consideration; if we realise the progress made in the gardening culture, and the tendency towards spreading its methods... if we watch the cultural experiments which are being made now—experiments today and realities tomorrow—and ponder over the resources kept in store by science, we are bound to say that it is utterly impossible to foresee at the present moment the limits as to the maximum number of human beings who could draw their means of subsistence from a given area of land, or as to what a variety of produce they could advantageously grow in any latitude."

"All we can say now is, that, even now, 600 persons could easily live on a square mile; and that... 1,000 human beings—not idlers—living on 1,000 acres could easily, without... overwork, obtain... a luxurious vegetable and animal food, as well as the , wool, silk and hides necessary for their clothing. As to what may be obtained under still more perfect methods—also known but not yet tested on a large scale—is better to abstain from any forecast: so unexpected are the recent achievements of intensive culture."

"We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination."

"Those who can be horror-stricken at seeing the population of this country increase by one... every 1,000 seconds who think of a human being as a mere claimant upon the material wealth of mankind, without being at the same time a contributor to that stock. But we, who see in each newborn babe a future worker capable of producing much more than his own share of the common stock—we greet his appearance."

"Few books have exercised so pernicious an influence upon the general development of economic thought as Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population exercised for three consecutive generations. It appeared at the right time, like all books which have had any influence... and it summed up the ideas already current in the minds of the wealth-possessing minority. It was precisely when the ideas of equality and liberty, awakened by the French and American revolutions, were still permeating in the minds of the poor, while the richer classes had become tired of their amateur excursions into the same domains, that Malthus came to assert, in reply to Godwin, that no equality is possible; that the poverty of the many is not due to institutions, but is a natural law... and that law cannot be changed by any change of institutions."

"He thus gave to the rich a kind of scientific argument against the ideas of equality; and we know that all dominion is based upon force, force itself begins to totter as soon as is no longer supported by a firm belief in its own rightfulness."

"As to the poorer classes—who always feel the influence of ideas circulating at a given time amid the wealthier classes—it deprived them of the very hope of improvement; it made them skeptical as to the promises of the social reformers; and to this day the most advanced reformers entertain doubts as to the possibility of satisfying the needs of all; in case there should be a claim for their satisfaction, and a temporary welfare of the labourers resulted in a sudden increase in population."

"Science, down to the present day, remains permeated with Malthus's teachings. Political economy continues to base its reasoning upon a tacit admission of the impossibility of rapidly increasing the productive powers of a nation, and of thus giving satisfaction to all wants. This postulate stands, undiscussed, in the background of whatever political economy, classical or socialist, has to say about exchange-value, wages, sale of labour force, rent, exchange and consumption. Political economy never rises above the hypothesis of a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life; it takes it for granted. And all theories connected with political economy retain the same erroneous principle. Nearly all socialists too, admit the postulate. Nay, even in biology (so deeply interwoven now with sociology) we have recently seen the theory of variability of species borrowing a quite unexpected support from its having been connected by Darwin and Wallace with Malthus's fundamental idea, that the natural resources must inevitably fail to supply the means of existence for the rapidly multiplying animals and plants."

"In short, we may say that the theory of Malthus, by shaping into a pseudo-scientific form the secret desires of the wealth-possessing classes, became the foundation of a whole system of practical philosophy, which permeates the minds of both the educated and uneducated, and reacts, (as practical philosophy always does) upon the theoretical philosophy of our century."

"Industrial wealth has grown at a rate which no possible increase of population could attain, and it can grow with still greater speed. But agriculture is still considered a stronghold of the Malthusian pseudophilosophy. The recent achievements of agriculture and are not sufficiently well known; and while our gardeners defy climate and latitude, acclimatise sub-tropical plants, raise several crops a year instead of one, and themselves make the soil they want for each special culture, the economists nevertheless continue saying that the surface of the soil is limited, and still more its productive powers; they still maintain that population which should double each thirty years would soon be confronted by a lack of the necessities of life!"

"Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills."

"Belief in an ice-cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy; but before my eyes a grand picture was rising, and I wanted to draw it, with the thousands of details I saw in it; to use it as a key to the present distribution of floras and faunas; to open new horizons for geology and physical geography. But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody's mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low. Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?"

"In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay."

"Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial units (village communities) connected with guilds, these latter arising out of the common prosecution of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence."

"Mutual aid, even though it may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side of this current, powerful though it may be, there is, and always has been, the other current — the self-assertion of the individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in its much more important although less evident function of breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized, which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element. It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete, unless these two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as it has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy, and, later on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted, established, and maintained."

"One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good."

"As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy — and they were made under the medieval city organization, — once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow... To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol. For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle."

"It is especially in the domain of ethics that the dominating importance of the mutual-aid principle appears in full. That mutual aid is the real foundation of our ethical conceptions seems evident enough. But whatever the opinions as to the first origin of the mutual-aid feeling or instinct may be whether a biological or a supernatural cause is ascribed to it — we must trace its existence as far back as to the lowest stages of the animal world; and from these stages we can follow its uninterrupted evolution, in opposition to a number of contrary agencies, through all degrees of human development, up to the present times. Even the new religions which were born from time to time — always at epochs when the mutual-aid principle was falling into decay in the theocracies and despotic States of the East, or at the decline of the Roman Empire — even the new religions have only reaffirmed that same principle. They found their first supporters among the humble, in the lowest, downtrodden layers of society, where the mutual-aid principle is the necessary foundation of every-day life; and the new forms of union which were introduced in the earliest Buddhist and Christian communities, in the Moravian brotherhoods and so on, took the character of a return to the best aspects of mutual aid in early tribal life. Each time, however, that an attempt to return to this old principle was made, its fundamental idea itself was widened. From the clan it was extended to the stem, to the federation of stems, to the nation, and finally — in ideal, at least — to the whole of mankind."

"In primitive Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, in the writings of some of the Mussulman teachers, in the early movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of "due reward" — of good for good and evil for evil — is affirmed more and more vigorously. The higher conception of "no revenge for wrongs," and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality — a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness. And man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race."

"Unless Socialists are prepared openly and avowedly to profess that the satisfaction of the needs of each individual must be their very first aim; unless they have prepared public opinion to establish itself firmly at this standpoint, the people in their next attempt to free themselves will once more suffer a defeat."