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Title: Without Bosses
Author: Ricardo Flores Magón
Date: March 21, 1914
Language: en
Topics: bosses, workplace struggles, anti-capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 4th August 2020 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/magon/works/regen/jefes.html

Ricardo Flores Magón

Without Bosses

To want bosses and at the same time to want to be free is to want the

impossible. It is necessary to choose once and for all between two

things: either to be free, completely free, refusing all authority, or

to be enslaved perpetuating the power of man over man.

The boss or government is necessary only under a system of economic

inequality. If I have more than Pedro, I naturally fear that Pedro will

grab me by the neck and will take from me what he needs. In this case, I

need a government or a supervisor to protect me against the possible

attacks of Pedro; but if Pedro and I are economic equals; if we both

have the same opportunity to profit from the riches of nature, such as

land, water forests, mines, and everything else, just as the riches

created by the hand of man, like the machineries, houses, railroads, and

the thousand and one manufacturers, reason says that it would be

impossible that Pedro and I would grab each other by the hair to dispute

the things that we both profit from equally and in this case there is no

need to have bosses.

To talk of bosses between equals is a contradiction, unless we speak of

equals in servitude, brothers in chains, as we workers are now.

There are many who say that it is impossible to live without bosses or

government; if it is the bourgeois that say such things, I admit they

are right in their reasoning because they fear that the poor will seize

them by the neck and will snatch away their riches that they have

amassed by making the worker sweat; but for what do the poor need bosses

or government?

In Mexico, we have had and have hundreds of proofs that humankind does

not need bosses or government if not in the case of economic inequality.

In the rural villages and communities, the people have not felt it

necessary to have a government. Until recently, the land, forests,

water, and fields have been common property of the people of the region.

When government is spoken of to those simple people, they start to

tremble because for them government is the same as an executioner; it

signifies the same as tyranny. They live happily in their freedom,

without knowing, in many cases, the name of the President of the

Republic, and they only know of the existence of a government when the

military chiefs pass through the region looking for men to convert into

soldiers, or when the federal tax collector comes to collect taxes. The

government was, then, to a large part of the Mexican population, the

tyrant that pulled the working men out of their homes to convert them

into soldiers, or to savagely exploit that they would snatch away the

tax in the name of the tax authority.

Would these populations feel the need to have government? They needed it

for nothing and they could live in that way for hundreds of years, until

the natural riches were snatched away for the benefit of the neighboring

landholders. They did not eat one another, the way that those who have

only known the capitalist system feared would happen; a system in which

each man has to compete with everyone else to put a piece of bread in

his mouth; the strong do not exert tyranny over the weak, as happens

under a capitalist civilization, in which the most idle, greedy, and

clever rule over the honest and good. All were brothers in these

communities; they all helped out, and sensing equality, the way it

really was, they did not need authorities to watch over the interests of

those who had them, fearing possible attacks of those who did not have.

In these moments, for what do the free communities of the Yaqui of

Durango, of the South of Mexico and so many other areas in which the

people have taken possession of the land, need government? From the

moment that they consider themselves equals, with the same right to the

Mother Earth, they do not need a boss to protect the privileged against

those without privileges, because all are privileged.

Let us open our eyes, proletariats: the government should only exist

when there is economic inequality. Adopt then, as a moral guide, the

Manifesto of September 23, 1911.