As to the problem of the exact exchange of equivalents which so frets
the reformers of other schools, to him it does not exist. So there is
enough, who cares? The sources of wealth remain indivisible forever; who
cares if one has a little more or less, so all have enough? Who cares if
something goes to waste? Let it waste. The rotted apple fertilizes the
ground as well as if it had comforted the animal economy first. And,
indeed, you who worry so much about system and order and adjustment of
production to consumption, you waste more human energy in making your
account than the precious calculation is worth. Hence money with all its
retinue of complications and trickeries is abolished.
Small, independent, self-resourceful, freely cooperating communes--this
is the economic ideal which is accepted by most of the Anarchists of the
Old World to-day.
As to the material factor which developed this ideal among Europeans, it
is the recollection and even some still remaining vestiges of the
mediæval village commune--those oases in the great Sahara of human
degradation presented in the history of the Middle Ages, when the
Catholic Church stood triumphant upon Man in the dust. Such is the ideal
glamored with the dead gold of a sun which has set, which gleams through
the pages of Morris and Kropotkin. We in America never knew the village
commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a broad tide-sheet and
swept over the country inclusively; among us was never seen the little
commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently, out of
primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself. There was no
gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own;
there was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form
of European civilization. The idea of the little commune, therefore,
comes instinctively to the Anarchists of Europe,--particularly the
continental ones; with them it is merely the conscious development of a
submerged instinct. With Americans it is an importation.
I believe that most Anarchist Communists avoid the blunder of the
Socialists in regarding the State as the offspring of material
conditions purely, though they lay great stress upon its being the tool
of Property, and contend that in one form or another the State will
exist so long as there is property at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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