WHAT ARE GOVERNMENTS?
IS IT POSSIBLE TO
EXIST WITHOUT GOVERNMENTS?
THE cause of the miserable condition of the workers is slavery.The cause of slavery is legislation.Legislation rests on organised violence.
It follows that an improvement in the condition of the people is possible only through the abolition of organised violence.
"But organised violence is government, and how can we live without governments? Without governments there will be chaos, anarchy;all the achievements of civilisation will perish, and people will revert to their primitive barbarism."It is usual not only for those to whom the existing order is profitable, but even for those to whom it is evidently unprofitable, but who are so accustomed to it they cannot imagine life without governmental violence, to say we must not dare to touch the existing order of things.The destruction of government will, say they, produce the greatest misfortunes-riot, theft, and murder-till finally the worst men will again seize power and enslave all the good people.
But not to mention the fact that all-that is, riots, thefts and murders, followed by the rule of the wicked and the enslavement of the good -all this is what has happened and is happening, the anticipation that the disturbance of the existing order will produce riots and disorder does not prove the present order to be good.
"Only touch the present order and the greatest evils will follow."Only touch one brick of the thousand bricks piled into a narrow column several yards high and all the bricks will tumble down and smash!
But the fact that any brick extracted or any push administered will destroy such a column and smash the bricks certailily does not prove it to be wise to keep the bricks in such an unnatural and inconvenient position.On the contrary, it shows that bricks should not be piled in such a column, but that they should be rearranged so that they may lie firmly, and so ithat they can be made use of without destroying the whole erection.
It is the same with the present state organisations.The state organisation is extremely artificial and unstable, and the fact that the least push may destroy it not only does not prove that it is necessary, but, on the contrary, shows that, if once upon a time it was necessary it is now absolutely unnecessary, and is, therefore, harmful and dangerous.
It is harmful and dangerous because the effect of this organisation on all the evil that exists in society is not to lessen and correct, but rather to strengthen and confirm that evil.It is strengthened and confirmed by being either justified and put in attractive forms or secreted.
All that well-being of the people which we see in so-called well-governed states, ruled by violence, is but an appearance- a fiction.
Everything that would disturb the external appearance of well-being-all the hungry people, the sick, the revoltingly vicious - are all hidden away where they cannot be seen.But the fact that we do not see them does not show that they do not exist; on the contrary, the more they are hidden the more there will be of them, and the more cruel towards them will those be who are the cause of their condition.It is true that every interruption, and yet more, every stoppage of governmental action - that is, of organised violence-disturb this external ap-pearance of well-being in our life, but such disturbance does not produce disorder, but merely displays what was hidden, and makes possible its amendment.
Until now, say till almost the end of the nineteenth century, people thought and be lieved that they could not live without governments.But life flows onward, and the conditions of life and people's views change.And notwithstanding the efforts of governments to keep people in that childish condition in which an injured man feels as if it were better for him to have some one to complain to, people, especially the labouring people, both in Europe and in Russia, are more and more emerging from childhood and beginning to understand the true conditions of their life.
"You tell us but that for you we should be conquered by neighbouring nations-by the Chinese or the Japanese-" men of the people now say, "but we read the papers, and know that no one is threatening to attack us, and that it is only you who govern us who, for some aims, unintelligible to us, exasperate each other, and then, under pretence of defending your own people, ruin us with taxes for the maintenance of the fleet, for armaments, or for strategical railways, which are only required to gratify your ambition and vanity;and then you arrange wars with one another, as you have now done against the peaceful Chinese.You say that you defend landed property for our advantage; but your defence has this effect-that all the land either has passed or is passing into the control of rich banking companies, which do not work, while we, the immense majority of the people, are being deprived of land and left in the power of those who do not labour.You with your laws of landed property do not defend landed property, but take it from those who work it.
You say you secure to each man the produce of his labour, but you do just the reverse; all those who produce articles of value are, thanks to your pseudo-protection, placed in such a position that they not only never receive the value of their labour, but are all their lives long in complete subjection to and in the power of non-workers."Thus do people, at the end of the century, begin to understand and to speak.And this awakening from the lethargy in which governments have kept them is going on in some rapidly increasing ratio.Within the last five or six years the public opinion of the common folk, not only in the towns, but in the villages, and not only in Europe, but also among us in Russia, has altered amazingly.
It is said that without governments we should not have those institutions, enlightening, educational and public, that are needful for all.
But why should we suppose this? Why
