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

Industrialization And Socialism / 37
probable duration of that authority can be calculated from the more or less general
desire for a true government-that is, fo r a scientific government. And just as the
right offorce and the right of artifice retreat before the steady advance of justice, and
must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty of the will yields to the
sovereignty of reason, and must at last be lost in scientific socialism. Property and
royalty have been crumbling to pieces ever since the world began. As man seeks justice
in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.
Anarchy-the absence of a master, of a sovereign-such is the form of government
to which we are every day approximating, and which our accustomed habit of
taking man fo r our rule, and his will fo r law, leads us to regard as the height of disorder
and the expression of chaos ...
Wherever this work is read and discussed, there will be deposited the germ of
death to property; there, sooner or later, privilege and servitude will disappear, and
the despotism of the will will give place to the reign of reason. What sophisms, indeed,
what prejudices (however obstinate) can stand before the simplicity ofthe following
propositions:
1. Individual possession is the condition of social life; five thousand years of
property demonstrate it. Property is the suicide of society. Possession is a right;
property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and,
by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize law, government,
economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth.
2. All having an equal right of occupancy, possession varies with the number of
possessors; property cannot establish itself.
3. The effect of labour being the same fo r all, property is lost in the common
prosperity.
4. All human labour being the result of collective fo rce, all property becomes, in
consequence, collective and unitary. To speak more exactly, labour destroys
property.
5. Every capacity fo r labour being, like every instrument of labour, an accumulated
capital, and a collective property, inequality of wages and fortunes (on the
ground of inequality of capacities) is, therefore, injustice and robbery.
6. The necessary conditions of commerce are the liberty of the contracting parties
and the equivalence of the products exchanged. Now, value being expressed
by the amount of time and outlay which each product costs, and liberty