What we want

We want the complete, integral emancipation of the individual.

We want his most absolute economic emancipation.

But since, in order to develop, the individual must unite his efforts with the efforts of his fellow men; since it is only the state of society that allows him to develop his faculties, we want a society where it is no longer the will of the dead that dominates.

We want a society where the individual, freed from all hindrance, having to fight only against natural difficulties, can move at ease, associating according to his needs, according to his affinities, breaking the association when it is an obstacle or when it has accomplished the work for which it had been formed, to reform other groupings, with a view to new needs to satisfy, new goals to achieve.

Finally, as the individual is not an entity, nor an abstract being, that we know that there is not only “the Individual”, but individuals, it follows logically, for us, that, in order to develop freely, healthily, the rights of each must take into account neighboring rights, that they must harmonize through agreement and not confront each other.

It is absurd to speak in the singular of the rights of the individual, when it is demonstrated that the isolated individual would never have been able to acquire the development that he has achieved over the centuries, but that, without doubt, he would have been incapable of satisfying the primary needs of life, weak and helpless as he is.

Since it began, human evolution has been nothing but a long conflict of interests and opposing appetites where the strongest, the most skillful, the most favored, exploiting the need for understanding and security that united men in society, knew how to impose their supremacy on the greatest number, exploiting them, oppressing them, and, to ensure this exploitation, gave a life of its own to society, attributing to it a life of its own under the word, thus creating for it interests antagonistic to the interests of the individuals who make up its existence. So that the society created so that each, in his relations with others, would find more well-being, more freedom, a greater sum of enjoyments due to a lesser expenditure of efforts, served only a minority of parasites who, under the pretext of ensuring the life, well-being and freedom of each, of preventing the encroachment of some on others, of ensuring justice for all, made themselves the masters, confiscating for their own profit all the benefits of the association, leaving to the great majority only burdens, ignorance and misery. As they are organized, our societies are not associations of free and equal men, but conflicts of interest where those who hold power and capital mercilessly crush those they have dispossessed, where the words law, justice, freedom, diverted from their meaning, are only rules to ensure those who have set themselves up as masters the possibility of ensuring their domination, their exploitation.

Instead of being based on agreement, on the community of interests, our current societies are based on the antagonism of interests.

The interest of the rulers is to develop their authority in order to ensure the obedience of the governed, while the interest of the governed is to restrict, every day, the authority of the rulers if they do not want, one day, to find themselves completely dominated.

The interest of the boss is to get as much work as possible from his serfs in return for a lower salary and an ever greater subordination, while the interest of the employees is to obtain a higher salary for less work, more freedom in the workshop.

The interest of the trafficker is to sell as expensively as possible, to deceive the buyer on the quality of the goods, the interest of the parasites who have managed to slip in as intermediaries in the relations between consumers and producers is to make people believe in the reality of the services they are supposed to provide and to get the most profit from them.

There is not even the doctor and the pharmacist who do not want their little epidemic, when business is down.

In administrations based on hierarchy, the interest of subordinates is the disappearance of the superiors whose position they covet. Even in families where the interest of heirs is to see the realization, in the short term, of the “hopes” that have been taken into account in the contracts negotiated for the couplings that have been rigged.

Relations between individuals are not for the purpose of mutual aid, but bartering in which each seeks to “sink” the other.

All this, it is true, is masked by a veneer of conventionalism that transforms the most ferocious appetites into unctuous words of love, friendship, deference and sympathy; but the roles with which the courts are overloaded show us how thin the veneer is and that, often, when the “hopes” take too long to be realized, some know how to give them a helping hand.

Our bourgeois societies are the most perfect example of this outrageous individualism which, placing the individual above contingencies, demands for him the most absolute rights without taking into account the rights of individuals.

For too long societies have been diverted from their goal; they must return to the role for which they were established: to bring more well-being, more facilities for the development of individuals, more freedom by reducing the time devoted to the struggle for existence.

To arrive at this society, the result of the free agreement of those concerned, we want everything that is the land, the subsoil, buildings, tools, everything that is the product of nature and the work of past generations to be taken from those who have appropriated them unduly and to return to the free disposal of those who will have to implement them, that they are no longer monopolized by individuals or groups exploiting them for their own profit.

The tools, above all, should not be social, understood in the sense of property of any social entity, nor corporate, we want them to be at the disposal of those who need them to produce and implement them by themselves, either as an individual or in a group.

We want, everywhere, the abolition of wages, since everyone will have free disposal of the products of their work; we also want the abolition of money or any other exchange value, the distribution of products should be carried out directly between producers and consumers grouped by needs and affinities where the exchange of products will no longer be anything but a mutual exchange of services.

We want the disappearance of the State, of all government, whatever it may be, centralized or federal, dictatorial or parliamentary, based on a more or less restricted suffrage, more or less broadened by a so-called representation of minorities. All groups placed above individuals have a fatal tendency to dominate them, to develop to the detriment of their freedom.

We want the disappearance of standing armies because they have no other objective than the defense of the privileged, that they are only schools of debauchery, debasement and humiliation and a perpetual threat of war between peoples.

We want groups and individuals who are in constant contact with each other to settle themselves, without suffrage or delegation, questions of general interest, as they will have known how to settle, within their groups, questions of private interest.

Finally, as the liberation of individuals will not come to them from any providence, celestial or parliamentary, as the privileged will only renounce their privileges when those they have dispossessed know how to tear them away from them, the anarchists recognize that only revolt can free those who want to escape from the present constraints to establish a society of justice and freedom on the ruins of today’s society of arbitrariness and dispossession.

Given what exists, the means of emancipation are not up to anyone to choose. By claiming to be part of the revolution, anarchists are not expressing a preference, they are stating a fact, suffering the consequences of a distorted society, diverted from its goal.

While waiting for the spirit of revolt to grow among the oppressed, while waiting for them to become aware that one obtains only the freedoms that one knows how to take, the concessions that one knows how to impose, while recognizing that partial improvements, in the present society, in which one must live and from which one cannot abstract oneself, have no value relative to the complete emancipation that every individual must seek, while working, always and ceaselessly, to prepare the revolution which, alone, will emancipate individuals by wiping the slate clean of the institutions of oppression and exploitation, the anarchists recognize that, especially for the workers who, every day, every hour, have to defend the wages that their exploiters grant them, to defend their freedom and their dignity in the workshop, there are struggles for partial improvements to be supported — even if it were only the defense of what has been acquired over the centuries -, but that these struggles — which the facts impose — must never absorb all the efforts of individuals, nor make them lose sight of the general revolt, the only one capable of freeing them. Working for the future is also a way of improving the present.

Trade unionism and its struggles for the defense of wages, the reduction of working hours or the obtaining of better methods in the organization of work is a fatal consequence of the economic organization that governs us. While waiting for the revolution that must liberate them, workers have to defend their daily lives, but while helping them in this struggle, the role of anarchists is to make them understand how precarious are the improvements that do not in any way undermine the very basis of the capitalist regime, since they must be started again every day; how fleeting is the improvement brought about by an increase in wages, since, extended to each corporation, it has the result of increasing the cost of living and that the reduction of working hours itself is only obtained by an intensification of production during working hours.

Contrary to what the trade unionists claim, trade unionism cannot be sufficient in itself; by itself it in no way represents the general emancipation that must be pursued by every conscious being. It is only one of the phases of the ongoing struggle. Let us put it as the most important if we wish, but only one of the sides.

For if it is urgent for the workers not to let themselves starve while waiting for the revolution, it remains no less true that they will obtain all the well-being to which every human being is entitled, all the freedom and development to which they must aspire, not by reductions in working hours, nor by increases in wages, but by a complete transformation of the political and economic regime, that is to say by the social revolution.

To achieve this revolution, everything that aims to destroy or weaken political or economic authority is good: workers’ unions against the bosses, tenants’ unions against the owners, groups to obtain a rational education for children, consumer leagues against retailers, the fight against alcoholism, leagues — like that of Human Rights — against the abuse of power, against the omnipotence of judges, of resistance against the encroachments of the police, etc., etc.

Finally, as in the aftermath of the revolution only the forms of groupings that have prepared the movement will develop, the anarchists have, from now on, to seek what forms could, from now on, take the production groups, based on affinities and common needs.

All these means of struggle are all the better because they can group together on specific points individuals who think differently about the whole, and it is not necessary to have converted them to an overall view in order to make them work for the revolution, the latter being, in reality, only the sum of general discontent and not the result of a philosophical idea, however just it may be.

There is only one danger to be avoided: it is the spirit of particularism which tends to make each person consider that his means are the means par excellence and to consider other means not only as insufficient, as useless, but very often as adversaries of those who use them — we mean means which can cooperate, without being the negation of one another.

This is what happened to the anarchists who fell into syndicalism, which today makes them seek a way to escape anarchist propaganda, or else, like the neo-Malthusians[1], who, starting from the just idea of freedom for women to escape “unwanted” maternity and, for all individuals, in general, to have children only as much as they please and when they are in physiological conditions allowing them to hope for healthy offspring, have come to erect as a dogma that, to make the revolution, one must no longer have children, and make the social question a question of population, when it is, above all, a question of poor distribution of wealth.

To demolish present-day society, it is not essential that all the blows strike the same point at once. There may be as many points of attack as there are conceptions, but anarchists must always be guided by their conception of the future society if they wish to escape the deviations inherent in the importance that each person attaches to his own efforts and which soon make the means become the end.

Also, if anarchists wish to get involved in all the struggles that have as their goal the dismantling of the capitalist fortress, the disappearance of an abuse, the redress of an injustice, the distribution of an iniquity, they also wish to keep their eye on the final goal, to which all scattered efforts must tend, consciously or not, the disappearance of capitalist society and the establishment of a harmonious society where the individual freed from exploitation and the domination of various parasites will find a way to develop his potentialities for his own greater good and that of his fellow men.

[1] The anarchist Paul Robin, founder in 1896 of the League for Human Regeneration, developed neo-Malthusian ideas: contrary to the current pro-natalist policy, he advocated contraception and abortion to limit births.