THE LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST REVOLUTION or, as others would put it... THE ANARCHIST REVOLUTION +========================================================================+ | | | For more information on Anarchism, Collectivism, Syndicalism, and | | the Social Revolution, please visit: | | | | http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/index.html - | | AnarchyArchives - An expansive and ambitious collection of texts | | from all the great Anarchist thinkers and theorists, such as Emma | | Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Alexander Berkman, Pierre Joseph | | Proudhon, and best of all, Mikhail Bakunin. | | | | http://www.anarchism.net - Liberty and Justice For All. | | | | http://www.spunk.org - Spunk Library (resource guides and old | | texts on the subject of anarchism). | | | | http://www.infoshop.org - InfoShop (roadmap to the anarchist | | world). | | | | http://www.anarchosyndicalism.net - Anarcho-Syndicalism 101 | | (guides and texts on the practice of Syndicalism and | | revolutionary worker action). | | | | http://www.punkerslut.com - Punkerslut Freethought (let it all | | collapse). | | | | http://www.RaiseTheFist.com - Silence is Defeat (the police state | | is happening now). | | | | http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/guestwriters/bobchurchill.html | | - The Allegorical Tale of the Satanist and the Queer - There is much | | to learn from this story. | | | | http://www.ZMag.org - Anarchy Watch | | | | For protection while sharing files online, please use | | PeerGuardian2, available for free from http://www.phoenixlabs.org. | | Also, you can use BlockList Manager. Download it from afterdawn.org: | | | | http://www.afterdawn.com/software/p2p_software/p2p_tools/ | | the_blocklist_manager.cfm | | | | Enjoy the reading! | | This document brought to you by BloodLogic; | | http://thepiratebay.org/user/BloodLogic | | | +========================================================================+ The Wealth of Nations (1776) - An Excerpt from Chapter 8 of Vol. 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------ by Adam Smith ------------- What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour. It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. BUT WHOEVER IMAGINES, UPON THIS ACCOUNT, THAT MASTERS RARELY COMBINE, IS AS IGNORANT OF THE WORLD AS OF THE SUBJECT. MASTERS ARE ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE IN A SORT OF TACIT, BUT CONSTANT AND UNIFORM COMBINATION, NOT TO RAISE THE WAGES OF LABOUR ABOVE THEIR ACTUAL RATE. TO VIOLATE THIS COMBINATION IS EVERYWHERE A MOST UNPOPULAR ACTION, AND A SORT OF REPROACH TO A MASTER AMONG HIS NEIGHBOURS AND EQUALS. WE SELDOM, INDEED, HEAR OF THIS COMBINATION, BECAUSE IT IS THE USUAL, AND ONE MAY SAY, THE NATURAL STATE OF THINGS, WHICH NOBODY EVER HEARS OF. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders. The Capitalist System --------------------- By Mikhail Bakunin ------------------ Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism which no bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of account altogether the following question: In what way did property and capital ever fall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, when envisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be answered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment against the present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement that property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own productive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their capital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat, all live at the expense of the proletariat. (Speculation and exploitation no doubt also constitute a sort of labor, but altogether non-productive labor.) I know only too well that this mode of life is highly esteemed in all civilized countries, that it is expressly and tenderly protected by all the States, and that the States, religions, and all the juridical laws, both criminal and civil, and all the political governments, monarchies and republican - with their immense judicial and police apparatuses and their standing ...
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