💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › freedom-press-london-notes-jun-1888.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:19:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Notes [Jun, 1888]
Author: Freedom Press (London)
Date: June, 1888
Language: en
Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 2, No. 21, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3069, retrieved on April 14, 2020.

Freedom Press (London)

Notes [Jun, 1888]

Last month a million slaves obtained their liberty in Brazil. The

newspapers were filled. with touching descriptions of the joy of the

aged emperor in thus beholding upon his death-bed the peaceful results

of a wise series of preparatory measures. Here was, indeed, an example

of an enormous social change brought about in accordance with the

principles of law and order. What an encouraging example for European

parliamentarian Socialists!

Turning, however, to Number 33 of La Révolte we find an extract from the

Porvenir, a Portuguese Socialist paper, written before the official

announcement of the emancipation, which throws a somewhat new light on

the matter, a light carefully obscured by the bourgeois journals. The

extract runs as follows:

"At Grajahu, in the Maranhao, the authorities have been obliged to flee

before the revolted slaves. At the Barra Mensa the director of the

plantation has been lynched. Campos also is in a state of revolution.

The detachment of police has been reinforced by troops from Nictheroy.

At Ubatuba the blacks and the policemen had an open fight and the

"representatives of order" got the worst of it. At Ouro Preto mutinous

slaves surrounded the houses of the 'Liberals' and besieged them. The

police deputy has fled. Flying companies (of troops) hold the country

but dare not measure forces with the bands of fugitive blacks." A state

of things that reminds some of us of the state of things in Russia which

preceded the free gift of emancipation from the Great White Czar to his

faithful peasants. So true is it, "Who would be free, himself must

strike the blow."

The Brazilian slaves base forced their way out of the frying-pan only to

find themselves in the fire. Their masters who supported them as beasts

of burden at an expenditure of £45 each per annum, will now, according

to the Pall Malt Gazette, as employers paying competition wages, leave

them to support themselves as free men on £20 a-year. Well, personal

liberty is worth the winning even at the cost of semi-starvation. It is

the necessary first step towards the true freedom of Communist

Anarchism.

The Jewish refugee who explained before the aristocrats of the Sweating

Commission that he preferred to work 17 hours a day in London instead of

13 hours in Russia, because in London he had more freedom, spoke like a

true man. But when will the victims of private property learn that they

have but a miserable fragment of freedom after all? Why should a man

toil either 13 or 17 hours a day for a master, or rather a series of

masters, each of whom appropriates a slice out of the produce of the

worker's labor, so that after all only a wretched pittance remains for

himself, when lie might work only five or six hours and amply supply his

needs, if he had free use of the means of production and no idle

monopolists to support? Is a man truly free who is the slave of an

unnecessary and removable economic system, upheld by an immoral and

destructable law?

Louise Michel's humane attitude towards her would-be assassin has

produced its natural effects. Pierre Lucas is deeply penitent for his

mad outrage and lie has been acquitted at the Rouen assizes amid the

enthusiastic applause of the people. The idea of the justice of the

punishment of criminals by society has received a sharper check by this

one true-hearted action than by years of preaching.