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Sections (Content) :
• 1
...written laws, which were like spiders' webs, and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but easily be broken by the mighty and rich.
• 2
The Chairman: Is there a good deal of what we call Bolshevism among these workers in the steel mills?
Mr. Fitzpatrick (Union Member): The only Bolshevist I saw ever over there are the mill town officials...
• 3
And, in fact, what do we find throughout history? The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class, when, all the other classes having become exhausted, the State falls or rises, as you will, to the condition of a machine; but it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of the State that there should be some privileged class or other which is interested in its existence. And it is precisely the united interest of this privileged class which is called Patriotism.
• 4
Prison is about social control, it is about punishing working-class people who step out of line, and it is a "big stick" to hold over the rest of us.
[Section 1: Le Brankard, Lille, 20th May 2004, Page 12.]
• 5
...the central tenets of libertarian ideology: that the law and the police were not neutral entities but the tools of the state and propertied classes to structure everyday life in favor of capital; that the state was the main barrier to change, which, if it was to come, could not come gradually or legally through reform but instead demanded violent action by the dispossessed.
• 6
...what is that peril?
Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if we find you afterwards.
And by what authority, kind gentlemen?
By our law.
And your law, — is it just?
As just for you as it was for us....
I repeat the question, Is your law just?
Not quite just, but necessary.
• 7
The whole trend of the great employing interests is to set up an oligarchy of wealthy parasites, neither toiling nor spinning, yet for whom the whole body of workers would be compelled to labor in degradation and poverty. And if unopposed, they would not only bring about this condition, but in so doing would rob the people of every right they have—free speech, free press, free assemblage, legislative representation, trial by jury, and all the rest.
• 8
...the shape of reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and the hateful industrialism which has reduced the people of Europe to a state of slavery, and all but stifled among them the best instincts which are the heritage of the human family.
• 9
No previous economic system has understood so well as capitalism to identify itself with the existing political form of a given country. In republican America it allies itself with corrupt politics, in autocratic Russia with Czardom, in militaristic Germany with the aristocracy, in Spain with clericalism.
• 10
It is the government of the property holding classes. Its purpose is to protect private property and keep the workers, who have no property, in subjection. Its most important laws are laws of oppression. Its most important buildings are court houses and prisons. Its most important servants are policemen, detectives and soldiers.
• 11
It is a heinous crime in the eyes of a legislature, composed exclusively of capitalists and landlords, and representing no other interests than their own, for us to try, by any means, to obtain for ourselves and for the comfortable subsistence of our families, a larger share of our own produce than these our masters choose to allow us.
• 12
What horror! So much for the benefits that the State has brought us. Arrogating to themselves the resources that are the common wealth of our planet, the capitalists grind us into a poverty that denies us the right to live. Not that the State punishes them for it: worse still, it protects them through a battery of laws.
• 13
We know in what a wretched condition European agriculture is. If the cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner, he is robbed by the State. If the State taxes him moderately, the money-lender enslaves him by means of promissory notes, and soon turns him into the simple tenant of a soil belonging in reality to a financial company. The landlord, the State, and the banker thus plunder the cultivator by means of rent, taxes, and interest.
• 14
...the plundered found that the courts, the governor, and the legislature of their State, and the Congress of the United States were the tools of the plunderers...
• 15
Political liberty is but the beginning of liberty. The freeman like the farmer must plant afresh every year if the world is not to starve. Our fathers put an end to the abuse of government by kings. We must put an end to the abuse of government by classes.
• 16
In their [Capitalist] hands they have all the means of production; and thus they suppress not only the possibility of free experimentation in new ways of communal living, and the right of workers to live freely by their own efforts, but also the right to life itself; and they oblige whoever is not a boss to have to allow himself to be exploited and oppressed if he does not wish to die of hunger.
They have police forces, a judiciary, and armies created for the express purpose of defending their privileges; and they persecute, imprison and massacre those who would want to abolish those privileges and who claim the means of life and liberty for everyone.
["Anarchist Propaganda," by Errico Malatesta, from "Malatesta: Life and Ideas."]
• 17
...government is either brutal, violent, arbitrary domination of the few over the many, or it is an instrument devised to secure domination and privilege to those who, by force, or cunning, or inheritance, have taken to themselves all the means of life, first and foremost the soil, whereby they hold the people in servitude, making them work for their advantage.
["Anarchy," by Errico Malatesta.]
• 18
As it stands, however, the law may well favor the factory-owner who need take no account of the damages he inflicts on others in pursuit of profits and 'progress.'
• 19
Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretense of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labor for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please.
• 20
Private property, guarded by the state, increasingly exploits the poor; and the poor less and less use what they produce. If the government did not wholeheartedly maintain this swindle, the masses would not suffer it.
• 21
Food and drug violations, lavish use of pesticides, defective automobiles, professional malpractise, building code violations, to name a few situations, are a much larger hazard to life and limb than crimes of violence on our streets. Other assaults on the human body, such as air and water polution, are only now being brought under the rule of law.
What, then, is the explanation of the difference between our society's vastly greater preoccupation with street crime than with business crime? Why are there fantastic disarities in the penalties imposed on a car thief as contrasted with a corporate official who knowingly refused to report severe adverse drug effects to the FDA and to physicians, or on an unemployed $50 check-forger compared with company executives convicted of conscious and systematic price-fixing on a massive scale in violation of the antitrust laws? Law schools simply avoid teaching students about the privileges and immunities granted business crime.
• 22
What does the State do? It protects the rich and their ill-gotten wealth; it suppresses the attempts of the workers to recover their rights, if these attempts are thought dangerous to the rich.
["An Anarchist Manifesto," by Max Nettlau, May 1st, 1895, issued By the London Anarchist Communist Alliance, printed and published at the Metropolitan Printing Works, 127, Ossulston Street, Euston Road, N.W..]
• 23
When I see a flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not ask myself which side I am on.
• 24
Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
• 25
The policeman who arrests the "red" does not understand the theories the "red" is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him.
• 26
...when property is used as an instrument to take away the rights of those who may happen not to possess property, it is used to an unlawful purpose...
• 27
...were not the land, the water, the light, all free before governments took shape and form?
• 28
...oligarchy... A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.
• 29
...oligarchies have both the extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.
• 30
As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labor to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth.
• 31
...the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery and wretchedness.
• 32
...as the poor had nothing but their freedom to lose, it would have been in the highest degree absurd for them to resign voluntarily the only good they still enjoyed, without getting anything in exchange: whereas the rich having feelings, if I may so express myself, in every part of their possessions, it was much easier to harm them, and therefore more necessary for them to take precautions against it; and, in short, because it is more reasonable to suppose a thing to have been invented by those to whom it would be of service, than by those whom it must have harmed.
• 33
There is still no organized lobby in Washington to represent adequately the interests of buyers of goods and services. The drug industry has the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association with lobbyists registered with Congress. The individual druggists are banded together in the American Pharmaceutical Association. Physicians have the American Medical Association to promote their often antediluvian interests. But who represents the man who takes his doctor's prescription to the pharmacist to have it filled with drugs manufactured by Upjohn? No one.
• 34
The politician is usually a representative of the great trusts...a creature owned by the big moneyed interests which depends for their profits upon cheap labor....
• 35
Dozens of soldiers in uniform, relieved for a few hours of such laborious work as waiting for trouble are seen strutting in and out of the railway trains, pompous and important as defenders of the bosses' and private property.
• 36
The state itself, by its very organization, tends to politicize every economic action.
• 37
...a government which is not conservative is not a government.
• 38
Thus, nearly all the favors which governments confer on trade and manufactures, are contrary even to sound policy or justice; and, judging of them by the law of profit and loss, we should infer, that all this attention, bestowed by government on trade, had done more ill than good. But political economy is, in great part, a moral science. After having calculated the interests of men, it ought also to foresee what will act upon their passions. Ruled, as they are, by self-interest, pointing out their advantage will not be sufficient to determine their pursuit of it.
• 39
When many millions of men, without heat, without ill will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force?
• 40
Thus the majority of well-to-do people feel instinctively, if not consciously, that their advantageous position depends on the ownership of the land. To this is due the fact that the parliaments in their pretended cares for the good of the masses propose, discuss, and adopt the most varied measures which are to improve the condition of the masses, but not the one which alone really improves the condition of the masses and is indispensable to them, the abolition of the ownership of land.
[Section 7.]
Chronology :
April 11, 2020 : The State -- Added.
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