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  What is Communist Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman

"But you yourself know very well what you want, and so does your neighbor.
You want to be well and healthy; you want to be free, to serve no master,
to crawl and humiliate yourself before no man;  you want to have well-being 
for yourself, your family, and those near and dear to you.  And not to be 
harassed and worried by the fear of tomorrow.

You may feel sure that every one else wants the same thing.  So the whole 
matter seems to stand this way:


	You* want health, liberty, and well-being.

Everyone is like yourself in this respect.
Therefore we all seek the same thing in life.

Then why should we not all seek it together, by joint effort, helping
each other in it?

Why should we cheat and rob, kill and murder each other, if we all seek
the same thing?  Aren't *you* entitled to the things you want as well as 
the next man?

Or is it that we can secure our health, liberty, and well-being better 
by fighting and slaughtering each other?
Or because there is no other way? Let us look into this.
Does it not stand to reason that if we all want the same thing in life,
if we have the same aim, then our *interests* must also be the same?  In
that case we should live like brothers, in peace and friendship; we should 
be good to each other, and help each other all we can.

But you know it is not at all that way in life.  You know that we do not
live like brothers.  You know that the world is full of strife and war, of 
misery, injustice, and wrong, of crime, poverty, and oppression.

Why is it that way then?

It is because, though we all have the same aim in life, our *interests
are different*.  It is this that makes all the trouble in the world.

Just think it over yourself.

Suppose you want to get a pair of shoes or a hat.  You go into the store
and you try to buy what you need as reasonably and cheaply as you can.
That is *your* interest.  But the store-keeper's interest is to sell it
to you as dearly as he can, because then his *profit* will be greater.
That is because everything in the life we live is built on making a profit,
one way or another.  We live in a *system of profit-making*.

Now, it is plain that if we have to make profits out of each other, then
our interests cannot be the same.  They must be different and often opposed
to each other."				-Alexander Berkman