So far, then, as their socialism goes, there is admittedly no real
difference between Parsons, the Chicago anarchist, and Liebknecht, the
leader of the German socialists. Indeed, as I have said, the anarchists
seem to show a tendency even to outbid the socialists in their
socialism. Socialists generally say that, while committing all
production to the public authority, they have no idea of interfering
with liberty of consumption. Their opponents argue, in reply, that they
would find an interference with consumption to be an inevitable result
of their systematic regulation of production; but they themselves always
repudiate that conclusion. They would make all the instruments of
production common property, but leave all the materials of enjoyment
individual property still. Ground rents, for example, would belong to
the public; but every man would own his own house and furniture, at
least for life, if he had built it by his own labour, or bought it from
his own savings, because a dwelling house is not an instrument of
production, but an article of enjoyment or consumption. But some of the
more representative spokesmen of the anarchists would not leave this
last remnant of private property standing, and strongly contend for the
old primitive plan, still in use among savage tribes, of giving those
who are in want of anything a claim--a right--to share the enjoyment of
it with those who happen to have it. They would municipalize the houses
as well as the ground rents, and no one should be allowed a right to a
spare bed or a disengaged sofa so long as one of the least of his
brethren huddled on straw in a garret in the slums, or slept out on a
bench in Trafalgar Square. In a recent number of _Freedom_, for example,
Prince Krapotkin announces that "the first task of the Revolution will
be to arrange things so as to share the accommodation of available
houses according to the needs of the inhabitants of the city, to clear
out the slums and fully occupy the villas and mansions." Anarchist
opinions are no doubt capricious and variable. There are as many
anarchisms as there are anarchists, it has been said. But this tendency
to go further than other socialists, in superseding individual by common
property, has repeatedly appeared in some of their most representative
utterances.
The Jurassian Federation of the International adopted a resolution at
their Congress in 1880, in which they say: "We desire collectivism, with
all its logical consequences, not only in the sense of the collective
appropriation of instruments of production, but also of the collective
enjoyment and consumption of products. Anarchist communism will in this
way be the necessary and inevitable consequence of the social
revolution, and the expression of the new civilization which that
revolution will inaugurate."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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