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Title: Wanted: Order
Author: Louisa Sarah Bevington
Date: May 1893
Language: en
Topics: anarchy
Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/louisa-sarah-bevington-wanted-order-1893/

Louisa Sarah Bevington

Wanted: Order

Yes! order. That is what we Anarchists are struggling to get in the

place of the shameful “chaos and disorder” that we see around us.

The disorder in the World and the Misery of the Workers is caused by the

system of Monopoly and Capitalism, and by the brutal working of the

laws, made by Monopolists and Profitmongers to protect themselves and

their dishonest gains.

It is to the interest of Monopolists and Capitalists to make you believe

that Anarchists are “enemies of society”. They tell you that Anarchists

want to turn the world “upside down.”

Workers! “The world is upside down already” and the Anarchists are

people who are giving their whole lives and powers in trying to set it

on its feet.

Anarchists are not enemies of society, but they are enemies of the

Capitalist system of Competition and the Government by Mammon, which

keeps society in wretched confusion, filling it with Crime, Fraud, and

Cruelty, and making men the enemies of one ^another, instead of friends.

Under the present Mammon-based system of society, everything is in the

wrong place, and goiis by contraries. Everything is out of proportion.

Everything is put to false and fatal uses. There is waste everywhere;

there is want everywhere.

All the natural resources of our rich and beautiful world are at the

disposal of a few idle men. Workers are set to make shoddy clothes, to

jerry-build houses and to manufacture and mix rubbish and poison in

foods and drinks.

The starving and shivering poor must pay back their hard won earnings

for these wretched mockeries, which their own hands have been forced to

make only for the exploiters’ profit.

Is this “order”?

Language is used to defraud and deceive. The commercial advertiser, the

politician, the priest, and even the labour-leaders use fair words for

their own ends, either to make you buy some profit-making sham, or

believe some profit-protecting lie.

If a man is rich, no matter by what means he has become so, he is

flattered, allowed to live in idleness, and to dominate the lives of the

workers. He is so far free; and law (which, mark you, knows nothing of

justice) protects him in his idleness.

If a man is poor, there is one rigid condition on which alone society

allows him the necessaries of life, he must become the wage-slave of

some exploiter. He must give his time and powers of body and mind to

producing something to present to a profitmonger. Then a pittance will

be returned to him, and he must live on it how he can. The exploiter

pockets his present; the slave pockets his hopelessness.

Not merit, not need, decided who shall be supplied with the world’s

resources. Money, or credit the phantom of money, decided that. And law

protects and upholds this arrangement, and perpetuates the human hell

that it results in. . Is this order?

It is said that soldiers and police, armies and arsenals, torpedoes,

dynamite, and the taxes that go to pay for all this brute force, are

“necessary”. Necessary for what? “Why, to keep dis-order in the world!*’

Workers! citizens! the “order” which is kept by these brutal means is

the order of a smart tomb, with a putrefying corpse inside it.

Corruption is the order of the present day. Monopoly and Exploitation

are two great, cruel Crimes. Society is heaped up, in its present

hideous disorder, on these Crimes as its foundation.

All the anxious sorrows of the workers, all the depravity and

degradation of those whose lot is yet lower in the social Chaos, are due

to these two great cruel Crimes. All Governments came into existence,

and remain in existence, to protect these two great Crimes to protect

the Monopolist and to protect the Exploiter. (Aye, and to protect the

priests and other menial hangers-on to the skirts of mammon ! )

All wars are fought to defend Monopoly to open markets for the

profitmongers, to secure wage-slaves for the exploiter, to force the

will of the strong upon the weak and of the rich upon the poor. How

long?

Mammon governs Man; and until Mammon be destroyed, and the fiction of

“Property” be abolished, none of us can help ourselves. Till then all

must stifle the voice of honesty within the hearts, and compete for

money in order to live. And all must compete for profit (that is,

defraud and over reach other competitors) if life is to be free from

anxiety, if leisure is to be enjoyed or the faculties allowed full

development and exercise.

Mammon makes law; and law holds your necks under the yoke of this

anomalous, homicidal system, where there is Private Property there must

be Government. And where there is Government there cannot be Freedom or

Justice.

“Law and Order” are jingled together in a phrase, by those whose turn it

serves to pretend that they mean the same thing. We Anarchists declare

to you — and it is a matter of social life and death that you heed us, —

that where there is man made law there can be no order. It is to get

Order that we are determined to abolish Law.

Law hinders Order. Law keeps food out of hungry stomachs; for it

protects the stores of the exploiter, and punishes with penal servitude

the starveling who would seize a loaf. Law keeps the rich, rich: and the

poor, poor. Law keeps safe the gains of the sweater and the swindler.

Law forbids Industry to till uncultivated lands, unless at the

exploiter’s bidding; and takes from the worker the fruit of his tillage,

should he be employed.

Workers, insist that all this shall be changed. Refuse to be governed.

Resist the exploiter. We must get possession of the means of life. When

everyone is fitly occupied and everyone’s needs fitly supplied, when men

co-operate as friends having common ends in view, and when each is

allowed the scope proper to his own individuality, then and not sooner

will Order take the place of Chaos, and Society be worth the name.

We Anarchists do not desire to enrich ourselves. We do not want your

money. We do not want to rule over you. We do not want praise, or pay,

or privilege, or power. We want for you, for ourselves, for all, free

access to the Means of life, We want Justice. We want Honesty. We want

Human Brotherhood. We want ORDER.