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Title: The Right To Live Author: Max Baginski Date: January 1912 Language: en Topics: natural law Source: Retrieved on September 24, 2011 from http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/t4b9j4 Notes: From: Mother Earth, January 1912..
Modern man is plentifully equipped with political rights. He has the
right of citizenship, provided he be virtuous and not an Anarchist; he
may elect his own rulers and jailers; he even enjoys, as one of the
majority, the privilege of witnessing the government act “in the name of
the people.”
This privilege is a particularly bad hoax, because the activities of the
government and courts have usually the sole purpose of intensifying the
robbery and subjection of the people; in other words, the people — in
their own sacred name — doom themselves to dependence and slavery.
The hollowness and sham of political rights becomes fully apparent when
we consider that all of them combined do not include the right to live.
The right to live, — that is, the securing of the means of existence,
the organization of society in a manner to insure to each the material
basis of life and make it as self-evident as breathing, — this right
present society cannot give to man.
The barbaric character of the dominant forms of existence is never so
offensively demonstrated as when we subject the right to live to a
critical test. This right is attacked and nullified daily in a thousand
various ways by coercion, poverty, and dependence. It is cruel irony to
justify the existence of the murderous machinery of government, with its
brutal imbecile laws, on the around that it is necessary for “the
protection of life and property.”
Among the thousands of laws and statutes there is not a single paragraph
that guarantees to each member of society the right to live. The tender
care for property is of little avail; for it is the chief characteristic
of a society based on the sanctity of property that the great majority
do not possess sufficient property to justify the expensive machinery of
police, courts, jailers and hangmen.
The right to live is primarily dependent upon possession and consequent
power. But as only a small minority is in possession and control, the
right to live remains a chimera so far as the majority is concerned.
Anarchism regards the right to live as the pivot of its philosophy. It
considers it the indispensable foundation of a society that claims to be
humane.
Today the needy, the hungry and the homeless man finds no providence, no
court where he may appeal the right to live. Were he to claim it, to
test this right, he would soon find himself in the workhouse or prison.
In the midst of fabulous wealth, he often lacks even the bare
necessaries of existence. He stands isolated, forsaken. In a glance, at
every turn, he beholds a plenitude of food, clothing and comforts, a
thousandth part of which would save him from despair and destruction.
But not even the minutest right to live gives him the power over the
things, the lack of which turns him into a social pariah.
What avail the rights of citizenship, political “liberties,” or his
one-day sovereignty as a voter, when he is deprived of the right to live
and robbed of the use of the things he needs?
When everything, every essential of life is the monopoly of a certain
class — secured by laws, armies, courts, and scaffolds — it is evident
that the possessing class will completely dominate life, with the
consequent subjection of the rest of the people.
The demand of the right to live is the most revolutionary demand of our
day. The privileged are aware of it. Wherever the demand is voiced
seriously, where it is accompanied by corresponding action, where the
disinherited resort to expropriation, to the general strike, the
guardians of “order” at once realize that the banner of the social
revolution is fluttering in the wind.
Ceterum censeo! What is to-day hypocritically called “order” must fall
and perish ere the right to live may become a joyous reality.