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Title: Government? Author: Ricardo Flores MagĂłn Date: February 12, 1914 Language: en Topics: government, anti-state, anti-authoritarianism Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2020 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/magon/works/regen/gobierno.html
There are people, who in good faith ask this question: how would it be
possible to live without government? And they conclude saying that a
supreme chief, a crowd of officials, large and small, such as ministers,
judges, magistrates, legislators, soldiers, jailers, policemen, and
executioners, are necessary.
These good people believe that without authority we would all turn
ourselves over to excesses, the result being that the weak would always
be the victim of the strong.
This could happen only in this case: that the revolutionaries, through a
weakness of the guillotine, would leave afoot social inequality. Social
inequality is the fountain of all the antisocial acts that the law and
the bourgeois consider crimes with theft being the most common of those
crimes. Well, when all mankind will have the opportunity to work the
land or to dedicate itself, without the need to work for salary, to be
able to survive, who will take theft as a profession the way it is seen
now? In the society that the libertarians long for, land and all methods
of production will no longer be objects of speculation for a determined
number of proprietors instead they will be the common property of the
workers and as before there will be only one class: that of the workers
with the right of all to produce and consume in common, what need would
there be to steal?
It will be said that there are persons given to idleness and that they
would take advantage of another’s work to live instead of working. I
have lived in different prisons; I have spoken with many thieves, with
hundreds of thieves; almost all of them have stolen out of necessity.
There is no constant work: salaries are meager, the working day of
laborers is truly exhausting; the scorn of the proprietary class for the
proletariat class is irritating; the example of living in idleness,
luxury, abundance, in the vice of doing nothing useful that the
capitalist class gives to the working class, all of this causes some
workers, out of starvation, indignation, or as an individual protest
against the plunder of the bourgeois, to rob and they become criminals,
to the point of murder, to take what is necessary to live.
The profession of theft is definitely not one of the happiest. It
requires great activity and waste of energy on the part of the thief,
major activity and major energy that in many cases is required to
recover some task; so to complete a theft, the thief has to stake out
his victim, study his practices, be careful of policemen, plan a map,
risk his life or freedom, in continued anxiety, without limit in this
case of work, and assume that a man does not come to him for happiness,
but instead forced by necessity or the anger of seeing himself in
misery, when the rich pass by his side intoxicated by wine, luxury, his
mouth twisted with the hiccups of satiation, dressed in suedes and fine
clothes, enveloping in one scornful look the poor people who sacrifice
in the workshop, the factory, the mine, the furrow ...
The immense majority of the jail population is composed of individuals
who have committed a misdemeanor against property: theft, swindling,
fraud, falsification, etcetera, while in a small minority of
delinquents, prisoners with crimes against people, are found. Once
private property is abolished, when one will have all of the means to
choose a job of one’s liking, but beneficial to the community;
humanizing the work in a virtue that will not effect the patron and make
him rich, but to satisfy necessities; returning to the industry the
thousands and thousands of day laborers that today corner the government
in its offices, in the districts, and the prisons themselves; all will
be put to work to gain sustenance, with the powerful help of machinery
of all kinds, it will be necessary to work only some two or three hours
daily to have everything in abundance. Would there then be those who
prefer theft to be able to live? Man, although the most perverse, always
likes to attract the esteem of all. This can be observed today, although
the way in which humanity lives weakens the best instincts of the
species, and if it is so, why not admit that man would be better in the
cavity of a free society?
In referring to the crimes against people, the major part is the product
of the sickness in which we live. Man lives in a constant state of
nervous over excitement; the misery, the insecurity of winning the bread
of the next morning; the offenses of authority; the certainty that he is
victim of political tyranny and capitalist exploitation; the desperation
of seeing the child without clothes, education, future; the spectacle,
nothing constructed of the struggle of all against all, that is born
specifically of the right of private property, that facilitates the
shrewd and the malicious to accumulate capital by exploiting the
workers; all of that and much more fills the heart of man with
bitterness, makes him violent, angry, and nudges him to take out a
revolver or dagger to attack, many times for trivial issues. No society
exists in which savage rivalry between human beings satisfies all
necessities, soothes sufferings, softens tempers, and strengthens in
them the instincts of sociability and solidarity. All of which are so
strong that, in spite of worldly disputes of all against all, they have
not died in human beings.
No, there is no need to fear life without government; we long for it
with all of our hearts. There would be, naturally, some individuals
given to criminal instincts; but politics would take charge of attending
to them, as ill as they are, because those poor people are victims of
[atavismos], illnesses inherited of inclinations born of anger from the
injustice and brutality of the environment.
Mexicans: remember how the rural populations of Mexico have lived.
Communism has been practiced in the rural huts; authority has not been
missed; before, to the contrary, when it was known that an agent of
authority was coming near, the men would flee to the forest because
authority is only present when men are needed for the barracks or for
contributions to maintain the parasites of the government and
nevertheless life was more tranquil in those places where laws were not
known nor the threat of the gendearme with his club.
Authority is not missed except to maintain social inequality.
Mexicans: Death to Authority!
Long Live Land and Liberty!