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

Revolutionary Ideas And Action /61
Abolition of Religion, be it Catholic or Jewish, Protestant or other. Abolition of
clergy and altar, of priest-be he curate or pope, minister or rabbi-of Divin ity, be it
an idol with one person or with three, autocracy or universal oligarchy;
Rather man-at once creature and creator-with no God now but Nature, no
priest but Science, no altar but Humanity.
Abolition of personal property, ownership of the soil, buildings, workshops,
stores and of anything that is an instrument of labour, production or consumption;
Rather, collective property, one and indivisible, held in common.
Abolition of the family, the family based on marriage, the authority of father
and spouse and on inheritance;
Rather the great family of man, a family as one and indivisible as property.
The liberation of woman, the emancipation of the child.
At last, the abolition of authority, privilege and strife.
Rather, liberty, equality and fraternity embodied in humanity;
Instead, all of the implications ofthe triple formula transplanted from theoretical
abstraction to practical reality, to positivism.
Which is to say Harmony, the oasis of our dreams, no longer fleeing like a mirage
before the caravan of generations but delivering to each and every one of us, under
its fraternal auspices and in universal unity, the sources of happiness, the fruits of
liberty: a life of delights at last after more than eighteen centuries' worth of agony in
the desert wastes of civilization!
Of Government
No more government, that machine press, that fulcrum for the lever of reaction.
All government-and by government I mean all delegation and all authority beyond
the people-is essentially conservative-narrow-mindedly conservative, backward-looking
conservative-just as selfishness is a part of human nature. In the case
of man, the selfishness of one is tempered by the selfishness of the others, by the solidarity
that nature has established between him and his fellows, no matter what he
may do. But, government being singular and therefore bereft of counter-balance, it
follows that it arrogates everything to itself, that anyone who fails to prostrate himself
before its image, everyone who contradicts its oracles, everything that poses a
threat to its survival, in short, everything that represents progress, is necessarily its
enemy. Thus, a government emerges-initially as an improvement upon a predecessor
government-and soon, simply to survive the new thinking that poses a threat to
it, it will summon the reaction to its aid; from the arsenal of the arbitrary it will draw