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Title: Without government Author: Max Baginski Language: en Topics: alienation, anarchy, individualism Source: Retrieved on September 24, 2011 from http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/BaginskiMax/baginski_max.html
The gist of the anarchistic idea is this, that there are qualities
present in man, which permit the possibilities of social life,
organization, and co-operative work without the application of force.
Such qualities are solidarity, common action, and love of justice.
To-day they are either crippled or made ineffective through the
influence of compulsion; they can hardly be fully unfolded in a society
in which groups, classes, and individuals are placed in hostile,
irreconcilable opposition to one another. In human nature to-day such
traits are fostered and developed which separate instead of combining,
call forth hatred instead of a common feeling, destroy the humane
instead of building it up. The cultivation of these traits could not be
so successful if it did not find the best nourishment in the foundations
and institutions of the present social order.
On close inspection of these institutions, which are based upon the
power of the State that maintains them, mankind shows itself as a huge
menagerie, in which the captive beasts seek to tear the morsels from
each other’s greedy jaws. The sharpest teeth, the strongest claws and
paws vanquish the weaker competitors. Malice and underhand dealing are
victorious over frankness and confidence. The struggle for the means of
existence and for the maintenance of achieved power fill the entire
space of the menagerie with an infernal noise. Among the methods which
are used to secure this organized bestiality the most prominent ones are
the hangman, the judge with his mehanical: “In the name of the king,” or
his more hypocritical: “In the name of the people I pass sentence”; the
soldier with his training for murder, and the priest with his:
“Authority comes from God.”
The exteriors of prisons, armories, and churches show that they are
institutions in which the body and soul are subdued. He whose thoughts
reach beyond this philosophy of the menagerie sees in them the strongest
expression of the view, that it is not possible to make life worth
living the more with the help of reason, love, justice, solidarity. The
family and school take care to prepare man for these institutions. They
deliver him up to the state, so to speak, blindfolded and with fettered
limbs. Force, force. It echoes through all history. The first law which
subjected man to man was based upon force. The private right of the
individual to land was built up by force; force took way the claims upon
homesteads from the majority and made them unsettled and transitory. It
was force that spoke to mankind thus: “Come to me, humble yourself
before me, serve me, bring the treasures and riches of the earth under
MY roof. You are destined by Providence to always be in want. You shall
be allowed just enough to maintain strength with which to enrich me
infinitely by your exertions and to load me down with superfluity and
luxury.”
What maintains the material and intellectual slavery of the masses and
the insanity of the autocracy of the few? Force. Workingmen produce in
the factories and workshops the most varied things for the use of man.
What is it that drives them to yield up these products for speculation’s
sake to those who produce nothing, and to content themselves with only a
fractional part of the values which they produce? It is force.
What is it that makes the brain-worker just as dependent in the
intellectual realm as the artisan in the material world? Force. The
artist and the writer being compelled to gain a livelihood dare not
dream of giving the best of their individuality. No, they must scan the
market in order to find out what is demanded just then. Not any
different than the dealer in clothes -who must study the style of the
season before he places ‘his merchandise before the public. Thus art and
literature sink to the level of bad taste and speculation. The artistic
individuality shrinks before the calculating reckoner. Not that which
moves the artist or the writer most receives expression; the vacillating
demands of mediocrity of every-day people must be satisfied. The artist
becomes the helper of the dealer and the average men, who trot along in
the tracks of dull habit.
The State Socialists love to assert that at present we live in the age
of individualism; the truth, however, is that individuality was never
valued at so low a rate as to-day. Individual thinking and feeling are
incumbrances and not recommendations on the paths of life. Wherever they
are found on the market they meet with the word “adaptation.” Adapt
yourself to the demands of the reigning social powers, act the obedient
servant before them, and if you produce something be sure that it does
not run against the grain of your “superiors,” or say adieu to success,
reputation and recompense. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them
platitudes about which they can laugh, prejudices which they hold as
righteousness and falsehoods which they hold as truths. Paint the whole,
crown it with regard for good manners, for society does not like to hear
the truth about itself. Praise the men in power as fathers of the
people, have the devourers of the commonwealth parade along as
benefactors of mankind.
Of course, the force which humbles humanity in this manner is far from
openly declaring itself as force. It is masked, and in the course of
time it has learned to step forward with the least possible noise. That
diminishes the danger of being recognized.
The modern republic is a good example. In it tyranny is veiled so
correctly, that there are really great numbers of people who are
deceived by this masquerade and who maintain that what they perceive is
a true face with honest eyes.
No czar, no king. But right in line with these are the landowners, the
merchants, manufacturers, landlords, monopolists. They all are in
possession, which is as strong a guarantee for the continuance of their
power, as a castle surrounded by thick walls. Whoever possesses can rob
him who possesses nothing of his independence. If I am dependent for a
living on work, for which I need contrivances and machines, which I
myself cannot procure, because I am without means, I must sacrifice my
independence to him who possesses these contrivances and machines. You
may work here, he will tell me, but only under the condition that you
will deliver up the products of your labor to me, that I may trade with
and make profit on them.
The one without possessions has no choice. He may appeal to the
declaration of human rights; he may point to his political rights, the
equality before the law, before God and the archangels — if he wants to
eat, drink, dress and have a home he must choose such work as the
conditions of the industrial mercantile or agricultural plants impose
upon him.
Through organized opposition the workingmen can somewhat improve this
condition; by the help of trade unions they can regulate the hours of
work and hinder the reduction of wages to a level too low for mere
living. The trade unions are a necessity for the workingmen, a bulwark
against which the most unbearable demands of the class of possesors
rebound; but a complete freeing of labor — be it of an intellectual or
of a physical nature — can be brought about only through the abolition
of wage work and the right of private ownership of land and the sources
of maintenance and nourishment of mankind. There are heart-rending cries
over the blasphemous opinion that property is not as holy a thing as its
possessors would like to make it. They declare that possessions must not
be less protected than human life, for they are necessary foundations of
society. The case is represented as though everybody were highly
interested in the maintenance of the right of private property, whereas
conditions are such that non-possession is the normal condition of most
people.
Because few possess everything, therefore the many possess nothing. So
far as possession can be considered as an oppressive measure in the
hands of a few, it is a monopoly. Set in a paradox it would read: The
abolition of property will free the people from homelessness and
non-possession. In fact, this will happen when the earth with its
treasures shall cease to be an object of trade for usurers; when it
shall vouchsafe to all a home and a livelihood. Then not only the bent
bodies will straighten; the intellect free itself as might the bound
Prometheus rid himself of his fetters and leave the rock to which he is
chained, but we shall look back on the institutions of force, the state,
the hangman, et al, as ghosts of an anxious fantasy.
In free unions the trades will organize themselves and will produce the
means of livelihood. Things will not be produced for profit's sake, but
for the sake of need. The profit-grabber has grown superfluous just as
his patron, the state, which at present serves by means of its taxes and
revenues, his anti-humanitarian purposes and hinders the reasonable
consumption of goods. From the governing mania the foundation will be
withdrawn; for those strata in society will be lacking which therefore
had grown rich and fat by monopolizing the earth and its production.
They alone needed legislatures to make laws against the disinherited.
They needed courts of justice to condemn; they needed the police to
carry out practically the terrible social injustice, the cause of which
lay in their existence and manner of living. And now the political
corruptionists are lacking who served the above-mentioned classes as
helpers, and therefore had to be supported as smaller drones.
What a pleasant surprise! We see now that the production and
distribution of means of livelihood are a much simpler matter without
government than with government. And people now realize that the
governments never promoted their welfare, but rather made it impossible,
since with the help of force they only allowed the right of possession
to the minority.
Life is really worth living now. It ceases to be an endless, mad
drudgery, a repugnant struggle for a mere existence.
Truth and beauty are enthroned upon the necessity of procuring the means
of existence in a co-operative organized manner. The social motives
which to-day make man ambitious, hypocritical, stealthy, are
ineffective. One need not sell his individuality for a mess of pottage,
as Esau sold his primogeniture.
At last the individuality of man has struck a solid social foundation on
which it can prosper. The individual originality in man is valued; it
fructifies art, literature, science, which now, in so far as they are
dependent upon the state and ownership--which is far-reaching--must take
the direction of prescribed models that are acknowledged, and must not
be directed against the continuance of the leisure classes.
Love will be free. Love's favor is a free granting, a giving and taking
without speculation. No prostitution; for the economic and social power
of one person over another exists no longer, and with the falling off of
external oppression many an internal serfdom of feeling will be done
away with, which often is only the reflex of hard external compulsion.
Then the longing of large hearts may take tangible shape. Utopias are
arrows aimed into the future, harbingers of a new reality.
Rabelais, in his description of life in the "Thelemite Abbey," wrote:
"All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according
to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when
they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor, sleep, when they had a
mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did
offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor do any other thing. In all
their rule and strictest tie of their order, there was but this one
clause to be observed: 'Do What Thou Wilt.'
"Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in
honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth
them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is
called honor. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint
they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble
disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake
off that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved;
for it is agreeable to the nature of man to long after things forbidden,
and to desire what is denied us. By this liberty they entered into a
very laudable emulation, to do all of them what they saw did please one.
If any of the gallants or ladies should say, 'Let us drink,' they would
all drink. If any one of them said, 'Let us play,' they all played. If
one said, 'Let us go a walking into the fields,' they went all. If it
were to go a hawking, or a hunting, the ladies mounted upon dainty
well-paced nags, seated in a stately palfrey saddle, carried on their
lovely fists either a sparhawk, or a laneret, or a marlin, and the young
gallants car- the other kinds of hawks. So nobly were they taught, that
there was neither he nor she amongst them, but could read, write, sing,
play upon several musical instruments, speak five or six. several
languages, and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and
prose. Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
dexterous and skilful both on foot and horseback, more brisk and lively,
more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of weapons, than
were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and handsome, so miniard
and dainty, less forward, or more ready with their hand, and with their
needle, in every honest and free action belonging to that sex, than were
there."