E. V. Zenker

“ Labour thus in itself, at the same time, is a force that makes for equilibrium and productivity, which one might think should secure mankind against every want. But in order to work, labour must define and determine itself—that is, organise itself. What are, then, the organs of labour, that is, the forms in which human labour produces and fixes values and keeps off want? These forms or categories are: division of labour, machinery, competition, monopoly, the State or centralisation, free exchange, credit, property, and partnership. ”

“ The more spiritual, the more interesting, the more sublime and the more sacred ideas become for men, the greater becomes their respect for them, and the less becomes the freedom of the Ego as regards them. But as these ideas are merely creations of man's own spirit,—fiction and unreal forms,—all the so-called progress made by Liberalism is regarded by Stirner as nothing else than increasing self-delusion and constant retrogression. True progress evidently lies for him only in the complete emancipation of the Ego from this dominion of ideas that is in the triumph of egotism. ”

“ Our enemy is the owner who keeps the land for himself, and makes the peasant work for his advantage. Our enemy is the manufacturer who fills his factory with wage-slaves; our enemy is the State, whether monarchical, oligarchical, or democratic, with its officials and staff of officers, magistrates, and police spies. Our enemy is every thought of authority, whether men call it God or devil, in whose name the priests have so long ruled honest people. ”

“ It would be more than sad if we had to demonstrate the truth of these views again to-day, although our own age, or at least, we Continentals, seem in our condemnation of Anarchism to have lost all calmness, and to have abandoned those principles of toleration and Liberalism of which we are generally so proud. It has been rightly said that the freedom of conscience must include not only the freedom of belief, but also the freedom of unbelief. In that case the right of freedom of opinions must not be confined merely to the forms of the State: one should be equally free to deny the State itself. ”

“ The robber is a hero, the protector and avenger of the people, the irreconcilable enemy of the State, and of all civic and social order founded by the State, who fights to the death against all this civilisation of officials, nobles, priests, and the crown. The Russian robber is the true and only revolutionary, the revolutionary sans phrase, without rhetoric derived from books, indefatigable, irreconcilable, and in action irresistible, a social revolutionary of the people, not a political revolutionary of the classes. ”

“ For only when we have ceased to thrust aside the theory of Anarchism as madness from the first, only when we have perceived that one can and must understand many things that we certainly cannot like, only then will Anarchists also place themselves on a closer human footing with us, and learn to love us as men even though they often perhaps cannot understand us, and of their own accord abandon their worst argument, the bomb. ”

“ By a popular revolution the Society does not mean a movement regulated according to the classic patterns of the West, which is always restrained in face of property and of the traditional social order of so-called civilisation and morality, and which has hitherto been limited merely to exchanging one form of politics for another, and at most to founding a so-called revolutionary State. The only revolution that can do any good to the people is that which utterly annihilates every political idea. ”

“ And what, as a matter of fact, would be the consequences of Anarchy? Imagine wanton, idle mothers, without conscience and seeking only enjoyment—and Grave admits that such exist to-day, and that in a future society they cannot be compelled to support their children,—imagine that such persons are set free from the duty of caring for their own offspring, of suckling and attending to them, and that it is to be left to mere chance and the "enthusiasm" of others, whether a child gets milk, or even is fed and cared for. ”

“ The man who, in his capacity as a doctor, a geographer, or physicist, would never allow subjective influences to trouble his method, deals with politics quite apart, as if there were not also a science of politics that, like any other science, regards freedom from the subjective standpoint, or from love and hatred as the first condition of the validity of its propositions. Reclus, the celebrated geographer, goes so far, as a politician, as to deny the value of political economy and to assert that every workman knows more, and is better acquainted with social laws, than the learned economist. ”

“ The enthusiast for humanity leaves out of consideration persons as far as his enthusiasm extends, and walks in a vague ideal of sacred interest. Humanity is not a person but an ideal—an imagination.
All progress of public opinion or emancipation of the human mind, as hitherto proceeding, is accordingly for Stirner worthless labour, a mere scene-shifting. As Christianity not only did not free mankind from the power of ancient spectres, but rather strengthened and increased them, so too the Reformation did not remove the chains of mankind a hair's-breadth. ”

“ The doctrine of antithesis, applied to politics, implies freedom and order. The first is realised by revolution, the second by government. Thus there is here a contradiction; for the government can never become revolutionary for the very simple reason that it is a government. But society alone—that is, the masses of the people when permeated by intelligence—can revolutionise itself, because it alone can express its free will in a rational manner, can analyse and develop and unfold the secret of its destination and its origin, and alter its beliefs and its philosophy. ”

“ As Stirner had to acknowledge that this union or society cannot exist without freedom being limited in every way, he declared—since after all he requires union for some things—"absolute freedom" a creature of the imagination, as the opposite to "individuality," which is the main thing. But can it be believed that Stirner has set up an "absolute freedom" all of his own making, to place it in contrast with individuality. In other words, freedom is merely the possibility of living one's individuality, of being an "individual" in Stirner's sense. Freedom is the absence of every outside influence ”

“ Man loses both his character as a man, and freedom, and becomes only a tool. Prosperity increases for the masters, poverty for the men; the distinction of caste begins, and a terrible struggle becomes manifest, which consists in increasing men in order to be able to do without them. And so the general pressure becomes more and more severe; poverty, already heralded by the division of labour, at last makes its appearance in the world, and henceforth becomes the soul and sinews of society.
As opposed to its aristocratic tendencies, society places freedom or competition. ”

“ It may be considered as indifferent whether we are accustomed to regard society as a natural thing or only as a product of my thought, as something real and concrete or as a mere conception, and yet the range of this first assumption far surpasses the value of academic contention. No bridge leads from one of these standpoints to the other, and as deep a gulf separates the conclusions which are drawn from these premises. If society is a thing, something actual like the individual, then it is subject to the same laws as the rest of nature ”

“ Would it not be simpler as the inauguration of Anarchist Communism, to do away with the guarantee of property at once, and then to watch quietly and see how individuals deprived each other of their possessions? The result would be just the same, but there is a well-understood contradiction in first declaring all property as a common possession—in which the reality of society which Kropotkin denies is thereby recognised—and then giving to each person the right to dispose as he pleases of everything. ”

“ The pamphlet Evolution and Revolution is nothing but a rechauffé of the well-known commonplaces of Anarchism; but the noble personality of Reclus that stands out before us at every sentence, the honourable intention, the high moral desire, the inspired hope which make even the errors of opponents so touching, give the little book the same importance for his followers as the Contrat Social once possessed, and makes his decoction the quintessence of Anarchist thought, in its noblest, purest, and also—as a consequence—its most nebulous form. ”

“ The touching confidence which a nation, all too naïve in politics, had placed in its princes had been shamefully deceived and abused. All dreams of union and freedom seemed to be extinguished for a long time, and the flunkeyism which was unfortunately only too rampant in the nation, ran riot, while frank souls stood aside in disgust. The more eager the spiritual enthusiasm had been on the threshold of two centuries, the deeper now did apathy weigh upon men's spirits in the period of the forties. ”

“ But those who know history and can lay claim to any well-ordered reasoning power, however small, know quite well that a theoretical propaganda of revolution must necessarily be translated into action long before theorists have decided that the time for it has come. None the less the theorists are enraged with the 'fools' and excommunicate and ban them. But the fools find sympathy, the mass of the people secretly applaud their boldness, and they find imitators. ”

“ Now his union does not exclude individuality and freedom, but only absolute individuality. But this last Stirner cannot admit, because it also he regards merely as a "spectre," an "obsession," a "fixed idea." But whether he admits it or not, what is Stirner's "individual" but an idea, something absolute? Stirner had begun with the intention of slaying Feuerbach's idea of "man" as a retrograde idealist fallacy, and of creating, like Prometheus, a new man, the Unmensch, in the Ego completed into a microcosm, and, as such, complete in itself, separate and independent. ”

“ It might seem surprising that a savant of Reclus's calibre does not himself perceive a refutation that is so obvious. But Reclus is a type: who does not know the figure—even here not seldom seen—of the earnest savant, full of the purest love and devotion for mankind, who dabbles in politics in his leisure hours? It is as if in this time of leisure his spirit seeks to free itself from the severe discipline of his professional life. ”

“ The police alone, whether zealous or lax, is here, as elsewhere, only the most subordinate factor in history. But if we remember the proletariat that swarms in the numerous cities of Italy, in its economic misery and moral degradation; if we consider the peculiar tendency of this nation towards political crime and the paraphernalia of secret conspiracy; if we remember the days of the Carbonari, the Black Brothers, the Acoltellatori, and others,—we shall find in Italy, quite apart from the police and their work, sufficient other reasons for the growth of Anarchism. ”

“ But Stirner places the reverence of the ancients for the State, the reverence of the Christian for God, and of modern times for humanity and freedom, all upon the same level,—they all seem to him ghosts, spectres, possession by spirits and hauntings,—and he seeks to establish the same conclusion as regards the ideas of truth, right, morality, property, and love,—the so-called sacred foundations of human society. ”

“ Free association, or freedom which limits itself to expressing equality in the means of production and equivalence in articles of exchange, is the only possible, the only right, and the only true form of society. ”

“ He fought against social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a moral order of society—two propositions which can never be proved by experience, but rather contradict all experience. ”

“ At last, by competition, the production of wealth gets definitely ahead of the production of men, by which statement Proudhon destroys the dogma of Malthus, which, we may remark, was no more proved than his own. But this competition is also a new source of pauperism, because the lowering of prices which it brings with it only benefits, on the one hand, those who succeed, and, on the other, leaves those who fail without work and without means of subsistence. ”