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Title: Dyer D. Lum on Anarchy Author: Dyer D. Lum Date: 1887 Language: en Topics: anarchy Source: Retrieved on 25 January, 2019 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/aparsons/parsonsanarchismp2ch6.html Notes: Chapter VI of Albert Parsons' Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis (1887). From The Alarm. Pgs. 158-159 missing
The statesman, intent on schemes to compromise principles and tide over
clamorous demands for justice, says it is disorder and spoliation. New
taxes are then levied to defend the state, to repress incendiary talk,
and protect privileged prerogatives. Or false and surface issues are
prepared to distract attention, to embroil citizens in partisan
quarrels, and furnish new offices for the spoils-hunter. The people pay
the bills and the statesman remains.
The priest, intent on saving souls, and setting less value on temporal
things--for others--says it is abolition of marriage, atheism, and draws
a picture of a state wherein his voice would be derided, yet ever
careful to bring no testimony to corroborate his dismal forebodings of
social chaos.
The financier, intent on new schemes for manipulating public credit to
personal ends, says it means "a dividing up"; that the lazy and
worthless want to share with the industrious and honest the fruits of
industry; and thousands believe it and never think to ask whether any
one ever saw an anarchist who believed in this fancied "divvy."
The landlord, comfortably collecting toll for the use of land from those
who have been placed upon this earth, says it is the destruction of the
foundation and framework of society and removal of all incentive to
progress and then proeeeds to invest tolls received in fresh acres.
The merchant seeking by every means to obtain a monopoly of the market,
says it is the negation of freedom, a gigantic despotism in which life
would be burdened with prison rules and social intercourse regulated
with clock-like regularity.
One and all incessantly dinning this into the public ear, their cry
re-echoed by that social prostitute, the "able editor," in whose sheet
their respective callings are advertised., the timid shrink from the
word, women grow old, and children learn to believe an anarchist is a
first cousin to Old Nick. And, laughing in their sleeves over their
success, the statesman lays pipe for a re-election the priest pictures
another world where corner lots have no speculative value, the financier
busies himself in cutting coupons and computing interest, the landlord
in figuring how soon he may safely raise rents, the merchant in
converting "surplus values" in to profits.
In the tenement house human beings are huddled like sheep in a pen; in
the factories women and children crowd out husbands and fathers; in the
potter's field trenches are continually opened and filled; in the cities
vice and crime are spreading gaudy attractions for idle feet; In the
country able bodied men vainly seek employment; men grow disheartened
and sullen, women overworked and cross girls and boys dejected and lost.
Yet while rent and interest are collected and profits amassed society is
safe and law and order secure, though
Our fathers are praying for pauper pay, Our mothers with Death's kiss
are white; Our sons are the rich man's serfs by day, And our daughters
his slaves by night.
Yet anarchy will not down, but continues to gain adherents, and says to
the statesman: Your surface issues Pre dead [?] and party questions
misguiding. We ask justice, and would stop the spoliation from which we
have so long suffered Producing all, we too often lack food and warmth
and clothing. Where all are prosperous the state must be so too, and
uitill we are state interests are of secondary importance to us.
It says to the priest: There can be no healthful organization of the
moral forces while poverty sets at our hearths and vice beckons our
youth to gayer scenes than home can afford. Give us freedom from
unrequited toil and enforced destitution and our emotional natures will
warm into unity from higher aspirations.
It says to the finacier: - Your function in society should not lie
determined by monopoly, but under equal opportunities. Your privileges
are our restriction; your charters our disenfranchisement. We demand
freedom to co-operate in financial as in other matters; to co-operate
for mutual banking is well as for mutual insurance; and when yon ore
shorn of privileges we may co-operate to base credit upon all wealth
well as on that you would dictate. For equal opportunities would destroy
your perogative to fashion and control a medium of exchange. Justice
would reign and interest cease, because it could not. It says to the
landlord; Equal opportunities give you no monopoly of the soil. Again,
monopoly has conferred a chartered right and men are disinherited.
Destroy this chartered privilege and strong wins will labor with joy and
find in mutual credit new avenues to invade the prov- ince of nature.
Co-oporation would enlarge production. extend consumption and equalize
distribution. Overproduction and underconsumption would become myths,
and demand would seek supply with unfailing regularity without other
guarantee than absence of restriction
It says to the merchant Exchange is a social function, and, in the
absence of the monopolies of money -and land, labor, free from
artificial resrtiction, free to co-operate in mutual banking to organize
credit based on all products, thus free to connect use with possession
of soil, free from the enforced payment of interest for monopoly money,
free from enforced payment of rent for production would through
co-operation organize exchanges and leave you free to whistle for
profits.
To them all it says: gentlemen, we ask no privilege, -we propose no
restriction; nor, on the other hand will we permit it. We have no new
shackles to propose, -we seek emancipation from shackles. We ask no
legislative sanction for co-operation asks only for 'A free field and no
favors; neither will we permit their interference.
It asserts that in freedom of the social unit lies the freedom of the
social state. It asserts that in freedom to the capitalization of all
acquired wealth lies social advancement and the death of interest. It
asserts that in freedom to possess and utilize soil lies social
happiness and progress and the death of rent. It asserts that in freedom
to co-operate the labor exchange will displace the penny-pinching
tradesmen and prove the death of profits. It asserts that in freedom
from restriction co-oporation will result and in free co-operation
capital will seek labor as well as provide guarantees for security. It
asserts that order can only exist where liberty prevails, and that
progress leads and never follows order. It asserts, finally that this
emancipation will inaugurate liberty equality, fraternity.
The world of activity is one of inducements. Why should I do thus or so?
Because my highest interests are concerned. To follow a given course, to
advocate certain meaures, there must be sufficient inducement therein to
satisfy my mind that such is for my interest to do so. We propose no
change in human nature, we, take it as we find it.
And ask Does anarchism offer any inducements superior to those of the
present system? Can self-interest see any advantage in the change? It is
a question of comparison of weighing of advantages and disadvantages.
Self-interest shall be umpire.
Let us see what are the inducements now offered, what are the prizes in
the lottery of life, and the chances of winning them. We find Men placed
apon earth dependent upon labor for enjoyment of life. In our zone
nature withholds, her gifts and makes them the reward of exertion. Every
faculty of individuality is thus aroused to exertion and self-reliance
developed, We do not pluck and eat, but labor and develop natural
resources, and hence provide. Herein lies the cause of progress, of
civilization. Natural conditions must be accepted and our activity
governed in accordance therewith.
But at the first glance we see that our efforts are limited by
artificial regulations. Nature has placed us upon the earth, but we are
denied its use for productive purposes. We find the source of all
production resting in land, and on every lot we find the placard:
"Taken." Nature's gift has been monopolized, and artificial conditions
are first to be surmounted before access can be had to the use of soil.
Held, not for use, but for sale, it assumes a speculative value. Have
you a lot, a homestead left to you? This speculative value extends over
to it, Increases your taxes, places a fine upon all improvements, and
where such are made requires increased exertions to meet new exactions.
Society says that you have no natural. right to the soil. The right to
produce must be bought. You must first accumulate through production
before you can have access to the source of production, hence you must
crave employment. You must realize sufficient profits from the sale of
time or products before you can purchase the right to produce for
yourself. Therefore, you work for others, and from the values you create
there is diverted one part to the owner of land, from whom you purchase
the right to remain on earth, under the form of rent, and another
portion to the employer as inducement for giving you employment instead
of starving, under the form of -rofits. After these requirements are met
you receive wages. And were we studying political economy instead of
glancing at some of its salient points, it would be seen that this
applies as well to the farmer as to the laborer.
The laborer's wages are paid in the form of money, the current medium of
exchange. Advancement lies in saving, in economy, in postponement of
marriage, in accumulating money by which privilege may be purchased or
capital secured. Possession of land is not enough; there must be joined
to it ability to use. But labor saved is only wealth till turned to
reproductive use, when it becomes capital. But here, again, artificial
conditions are introduced. Society in its wisdom having privileged the
landlord, now grants prerogatives to the capitalist. It limits the
medium of exchange to a particular form of wealth. All credit must flow
through a specified sluice. A, B, and C seek through co-operation to
escape from the necessity of working for others. A has wealth saved in a
house; B has wealth saved in machinery; C has wealth saved in products;
all having equal exchangeable value. But their wealth bad cannot be
capitalized into wealth used, save by purchasing monopoly money. As a
basis for mutual credit it is valueless; as a basis for sale or mortgage
it can command money, be capitalized. Thus by this privilege conferred
upon one form of wealth to constitute the sole medium of exchange and
basis for credit another toll is laid upon industry in the form of
interest.
All these artificial complications by which the surplus value of
production is diverted from the producer into the coffers of the, so to
speak, complicators of normal social relations require the support of
the source of interference, hence taxation claims its share before the
residual sum is dealt out as wages. Therefore it is that, as under
slavery and serfdom, the producer works for as little as may be
necessary to support him. The competition of labor for privilege to live
keeps the minimum of wages at the line of cost of subsistence, while
taxation, profits, and rent have no determinable limit. Labor, lying
tinder all these super-imposed burdens, paying all these exactions, is
necessarily remunerated by this iron law of wages. Anarchism must offer
emancipation from this enforced subjection of labor to land and capital,
and, logically, in proclaiming emancipation it must proclaim freedom to
the oppressed--Emancipation from the thralldom of man to land; the
individual right to possession and use, carrying with it the right to
co-operate for guaranteeing security and protection. Emancipation from
the thralldom of man to capital, the individual right to utilize all
wealth, and the right through co-operation to organize mutual credit
with the same facility we are now graciously permitted in mutual
insurance.
Emancipation from bondage to rent would base all titles upon occupancy
and use; would open avenues of escape to the toiler, and in nowise limit
the farmer's capacity to produce, nor his ability to enjoy the reward
thereof. In increased production, application to labor would be
lightened, the necessity for struggle lessened, an inflation of wealth
would ensue, distribution be more equitably adjusted, and natural right
to a footing on earth receive social sanction and, through co-operation,
social guarantee.
Emancipation from bondage to interest would join means to possession of
the source of production. Co-operative effort would offer sanction to
co-operative credit, and in freedom to capitalize all products. Interest
would be abolished in the same sense as petroleum "abolished candles.
Labor, free from the exactions of speculative rent, and released from
necessity to buy a monopolized medium of exchange, would offer as
inducements to exertion: Opportunity to freely enjoy the fruits of
industry without paying toll. Opportunity to the endless increase of
wants and means to wrest from nature their supply. Opportunity to the
use of all wealth had in the extension of productive activity.
Opportuinity to freely co-operate to secure:
1. Protection and security from invasion of these natural rights.
2. Insurance against depredation and risks.
3. A medium of exchange based upon wealth saved, having social sanction,
discharging social functions, and serving social ends.
4. The organization of labor exchanges from which profits would have
fled to join rent and interest.
5. The organization of all forms of activity, and thus release from
enforced taxation.
In short, where capital seeks labor, where supply waits upon demand,
where order follows progress, where authority dissolves under the genial
glow of liberty, and necessity for wage-labor disappears.
The present system offers government to defend privilege.
Anarchist-socialism offers co-operation to extend opportunites. The one,
in making co-operation compulsory and fostering privilege, sets a
premium upon greed and culminates in tyranny. The other, in removing
privilege, places a premium upon voluntary co-operation, and tends to
eliminate greed.
First, we might ask: Why should there be any? Are not our cities filled
with evidences of ceaseless traffic? Is not capital ever on the alert
for investment in profitable enterprises? Are not our western towns
rivaling each other in "booms" in real estate, thus testifying to
increasing revival of business? Is not the army of the unemployed
steadily diminishing, and demand for labor increasing? Are not our
public documents teeming with statistical columns showing national
prosperity'? The building trades find employment in building new and
,grander palaces; - in their decoration and furnishing- an army of
skilled employes find remunerative labor; in the clothing and adornment
of their inmates thousands are fed and clothed. On every hand new church
spires arise, as if to serve as exclamation points to the astonishment
which the voice of anarchy arouses.
Festive revelries were never more frequent; people marry and are given
in marriage, and display to reporters the bridal gifts; luxury is
creating new demands upon industry; salaries of officials and popular
preachers are raised, and pews sell at a higher premium; in fact,
everything goes as merry as a marriage bell were it not for the
discordant note of frequent strikes.
Ah! Here is a depth which statistical compilations of productions and
exports does not reach, it seems. Let us peer beneath the veneering of
"national prosperity," and see if the structure be sound or wormeaten.
Let us see if the gilded rays of boulevard prosperity radiates into
tenement-denizened streets and "nigger alley"; whether the magic wand of
the speculative genie of the business boom has transformed these humble
homes.
Alas! to ask is to answer; the toiler still delves on in his weary
tread-mill round, and finds advancing age but brings added cares and
disquietudes. To him the business boom and national prosperity are only
visible when seen recapitulated in the eloquent words which flow front
the "able editor's" prostitute pen.
In his thinking moments the artisan dreams of a co-operative society in
which freemen will combine to wrest from nature her hidden wealth, in
which liberty to labor will no longer be restricted as a boon to crave,
in which with manly independence, he may look forward to the calmer
enjoyment of the fruits of industry in old age. Nor stands he alone. The
farmer wonders if his mortgage will ever be paid. The tradesman asks
whether life has no other aim than the constant necessity of counting
pennies. The clerk thinks that there cannot be room at the top for all,
and what if he should miss his hold on the ladder?
Through all grades of society unrest prevails, because in all success
depends upon ability or craft to climb over the fallen forms of your
associates; to rise out of the slough by using them as stepping stones,
though every upward step plunges them deeper into the abyss.
Modern society, monarchical, parliamentary, and republican alike, cries
with one voice: Law and order first and foremost, liberty and progress
secondary and resultant. Anarchy says: Not so; law must not deny
liberty, order must not precede progress; they are causes, not results.
It proclaims progress first, to which' order must adapt itself; liberty
at all times, over which law has no control.
It whispers to the artisan, the laborer, the miner, the factory hand,
the farmer the tradesman, the clerk, to all whose hearts have not been
seared by the blighting, hand of successful greed: Your happiness lies
in freedom front artificial restrictions, not in strife for privilege.
Look over the broad fields teeming with golden grain and then at the
numberless acres held by speculators to extort from human necessity an
onerous toll as prerequisite condition to their use to further increase
production. Look over the crowded human bee-hives where the toilers
jostle each other and then at the vacant lots surrounding them, serving
but as receptacles for broken crockery. Ask yourselves by what title
deed has the landlord disinherited you from nature's estate? Has God set
his seal to it? Is nature's sign-manual there? Have you surrendered your
natural claim to a footing on earth? Whence, then, the privilege to him
and the restriction upon you? There is but one answer: The law so
ordains!
You dream of co-operation, but when you essay it you find rent and
interest as firmly seated astride your shoulders as was the Old Alan of
the Sea upon Sinbad. Not only are you denied possession of the source of
production-land-but monopoly also steps in to dictate upon what
conditions you may have the means of production by conferring the
privilege of capital on a certain form of wealth only. Your buildings,
your machinery, your products, your possessions, the reward of honest
industry, may be used, but not capitalized: they cannot be made the
basis of credit except in the terms of the monopoly money furnished for
the purpose of selling to you permission to utilize your own credit. To
the question: Why is this so? again there is but one answer: The law so
ordains!
Instead of praying,. From rent and interest, good Lord, deliver us!
Strike down that which breathes vitality into their grasping tentacles,
crush it, throttle it, damn it like freemen, and assert our right to
cooperate in producing wealth without making terms with the land-robber,
and to co-operate to furnish mutual credit without paying toll to the
credit robber.
Anarchy is freedom from artificial regulation and restriction; and, in
freedom, the farmer, as well as the artisan and all the classes into,
which society is now divided, will find that wider scope to activity
will bring increased comfort; and in freedom to use of land and to
organize credit, rent, interest, and profits will disappear together
like bats before the dawning light; and in co-operation find full
security for wealth attained and opportunity for its application.
In anarchy labor and capital would be merged into one, for capital would
be without prerogatives and dependent upon labor, and owned by it. The
laborer would find that to produce was to enjoy and The nightmare of
destitution banished. The artisan would find in co-operation that nature
alone remained to be exploited. The tradesman would find that production
offered greater inducement than exchange, unless he accepted a position
of competence and ease in the labor exchange which would supplant
isolated stores. The clerk, no longer with his horizon bounded by a
ribbon counter, would have full scope to display his talents in any
direction. The farmer, above all, free from irksome care to meet
interest, to dread foreclosure from enforced taxation, with his family
growing up around him, and rendered secure by a common title and mutual
inter-dependence, or seeking in insurance indemnity for depredation.
would find in anarchy release from useless drudgery and his labor
crowned with plentiness and peace.
The only question then likely to arise would be: Who would not be an
anarchist?
Now that questions of forms of faith in theology and government have
ceased to divide men into hostile factions, that political as well as
religious toleration has become firmly rooted as a social virtue,
economic questions rise into greater importance. Here again we find the
old struggle of past centuries under new standards; again liberty is
arrayed against authority on other fields. Co-operation in religion has
passed out of the held of strife and been declared victorious; our creed
is no longer dealt to us. Co-operation in government has won its place
in the world's history; our rulers no longer claim divine right to
govern. The scaffolding of past centuries has brought mankind to the
completion of the social structure. Reason and intelligence on the one
hand and neccesity and discord on the other are instructing them in its
aims and preparing them for the application of the requisite means It is
the dream of the toiler, the hope of the thoughtful, and the goal of the
progressive humanitarian.
How shall we substitute co-operation? Efforts have been many,
satisfactory results few. Unforseen obstacles are met to be overcome;
artificial environments limit freedom of action; chartered privileges
impede progress; restrictions hamper and clog activity.
Co-operation in the distribution of products sacrifices the producer to
the consumer. Buying at the lowest competition price, and following
current trade principles, it would swell profits for the benefit of
customers. If it tends to lesson prices the consumer, so far as he is a
producer, but gives from one band what the other hand gains. An English
writer indulges in the following criticism on the system.
The co-operative wholesale society is a gigantic middleman. In its
workshops it pays the lowest of competition wages. In the language of
one of the workers in one of the shoo factories: "The workmen have to
work for what they can get; they know there is no true co-operation." In
its transactions with other producers it pays the lowest of competition
prices. The profits made out of the retail prices are distributed among
the members labor is depressed. In short, it is as far from displaying a
single feature of real co-operation as any private trader is who uses
the weapons of competition and. capitalism for his personal ends,
regardless of the interests of others.
Even where success attends the enterprise it can hardly rank as even
ameliorative. The few, the stockholders, the customers alone are its
beneficiaries; the great mass are left, and further, so far as
cooperation lifts a few out of the social slough it is at the expense of
less fortunate fellow-creatures, who find their own fate more
irrevocably fixed in becoming stepping-stones upon which the few mount
to privileged enjoyment. Co-operation to eliminate the middleman and
retaining rent and interest is but a sorry makeshift for the bright
ideal our dreams bad presaged.
Anarachy presents a wider and grander view of co-operation than that
involved in joint stock or profit-sharing concerns--a view which
requires no elaborate scaffolding to erect nor exercise of legislative
authority to preserve. It seeks no charter, for it asks no privileges;
it seeks no aid, for it contains within itself capacity to provide for
all needs. All it asks is a free field-the removal of restrictions which
limit its scope and deny it full exercise. And as it finds these
restrictions in legislative sanction given to privileges, in chartered
rights bestowed upon some, it demands their abrogation.
It claims for co-operation of freemen ability to discharge any social
function, and as production and exchange are the principal directions in
which modern activity manifests itself it imperatively demands as means
of industrial emancipation that neither shall be endowed with privilege,
that the source of production and the means of exchange cannot be
subject to letters patent.
With freedom of access to land, to hold for occupancy and use, Testing
upon this common title, common needs will draw occupants and users to
co-operate to secure what is beyond the power of the individual to
obtain. The common title would produce independence, mutual reliance and
organization, and precisely as privilege was eliminated fraternity of
spirit and common aims would naturally arise. Co-operation would not
have to be invented, it would be evolved; common needs would require
common efforts, and whenever union would...
[pgs. 158-159 missing]