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Title: Why we are Anarchists
Author: Louise Michel
Date: 1891
Language: en
Topics: introductory, anarchist history, Libertarian Labyrinth
Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/louise-michel-why-we-are-anarchists-1891-2/

Louise Michel

Why we are Anarchists

We are Anarchists because it is absolutely impossible to obtain justice

for all in any other way than by destroying institutions founded on

force and privilege.

We cannot believe that improvement is possible, if we still keep up the

same institutions, now more rotten than in the past, or if we merely

replace those whose iniquities are known by new men.

These latter become in their turn what the others were, or else become

barren.

After the gradual changes of past centuries the hour has come when

evolution cannot be separated from revolution, as in all birth they must

be accomplished together. You can no more retard the birth of a system

than you can that of living being.

In what would you that we should help those who govern—their work being

only exploitation and wholesale murder—it has never been otherwise: the

reason for the existence of a state is nothing but the accomplishment of

some crime or other in order to assure the domination of a privileged

class.

An equal division of wealth would also be as mad as capitalism is

criminal: to expect any amelioration of misery by modifying laws is a

piece of stupidity of which we are not capable: we have seen the work of

men whose illusions have only been able to perpetuate misery — millions

of years being insufficient for the least amelioration of the lot of the

workers. We can now see the fin-de-siècle cutthroats and assassins. That

is better. We can see power on trial — we can judge it for what it is

worth.

The land which belongs to all can no more be divided than the light

which also belongs to all.

When free groups of men will use for the general welfare machines which

reduce the hours of labour to a few, and in many forms of production the

toil of rough work will be annihilated, there will remain for the

intellect of the time, some time for the pursuit of art and science; and

when men are delivered from the struggle for existence, they will also

be delivered from crime and grief.

The ideal alone is the truth — it is the measure of our horizon. Time

was when the ideal was to live without eating an other up. Is it not so

still under another form which exists in the so-called civilized

countries where the exploiter eats up the exploited? Do not the people

in nocks fertilize the soil by their sweat and blood?

That is what we want to destroy — this annihilation — this eating of man

by an other man.

The old bogie of “Society” is dead. It is time that she was buried with

the worms burrowing in her vitals, in order that the air may be pure for

young Anarchy, which will be order and peace under freedom instead of

order kept by the murder of the multitudes.

How did I become an Anarchist? This is how. It was during a four months

voyage for New Caledonia while looking at the infinity of the sea and of

the sky — feeling how miserable living beings are when taken

individually — how great is the ideal when it goes beyond time and

beyond the hecatombs as far as the new aurora.

There I deeply felt how each drop of water of the waves was but

microscopic, but how powerful it was when joined to the ocean.

So also ought each man to be in humanity. As for the third question I am

not the least bit in the world “chief” of the “International school”;

the word “directrix” which my comrades have joined to my name is worth

nothing either, for each of us gives freely according to his conscience

the courses of instruction with which he or she has charged him or her

self.

What would you have? Our tongue is poor, the words are old and so they

ill express new ideas.

And finally is it not time that our limited tongues should fall into the

ocean of speech and of human thought? What will be the language of

mankind delivered to the new Aurora — Anarchy!