Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

156 / ANARCHISM
Without the gardens and fields that give us produce indispensable for life, without
the granaries, the warehouses, the shops that gather together the products of
work, without the fa ctories and workshops that provide textiles and metalwork,
without the means of defence, without the railways and other ways of communication
that allow us to exchange our products with the neighbouring free communes
and combine our efforts for resistance and attack, we are condemned in advance to
perish; we shall stifle like a fish out of water which can no longer breathe though
bathed entirely in the vast ocean of air. ..
But destroy without delay everything that should be overthrown; the penal fortresses
and the prisons, the forts directed against the towns and the unhealthy quarters
where you have so long breathed an air heavy with poison. Install yourselves in
the palaces and mansions, and make a bonfire of the piles of bricks and worm-eaten
wood that were your hovels. The instinct to destroy, which is so natural and so just
because it is also an urge to renew, will find much to satisfY it. So many outworn
things to replace! For everything will have to be remade: houses, whole towns, agricultural
and industrial plant, in fact every material aspect of society.
46. Jean Grave: Means and Ends (1893)
In these passages/rom Moribund Society and Anarchy,jean Grave emphasizes the need/or
anarchist methods to be consistent witlJ anarclJist ends.
AT THE OUTSET ANARCHISTS MUST renounce the warfare of army against army, battles
arrayed on fields, struggles laid out by strategists and tacticians maneuvering
armed bodies as the chess-player maneuvers his figures upon the chess-board. The
struggle should be directed chiefly towards the destruction of institutions. The burning
up of deeds, registers of land-surveys, proceedings of notaries and solicitors,
tax-collectors' books; the ignoring of the limits of holdings, destruction of the regulations
of the civil staff, etc.; the expropriation of the capitalists, taking possession in
the name of all, putting articles of consumption freely at the disposal of all-all this
is the work of small and scattered groups, of skirmishes, not regular battles. And this
is the warfare which the Anarchists must seek to encourage everywhere in order to
harass government, compel them to scatter their forces; tire them out and decimate
them piecemeal. No need ofleaders for blows like these; as soon as someone realizes
what should be done he preaches by example, acting so as to attract others to him,
who follow him if they are partisans of the enterprise but do not, by the fact of their
adherence, abdicate their own initiative in following him who seems most fit to direct
the enterprise, especially since someone else may, in the course of the struggle,