3.

No problem is more important, and we urge all our comrades to study it in all its aspects and discuss it continually in view of the fact that realizing it is a task that sooner or later will be imposed upon us. On that expropriation, and its good or bad application, the immediate success or the temporary failure of the revolution depends.

In fact, none of us can ignore that any attempt at revolution must be condemned in advance if it does not respond to the interests of the great majority and find means to satisfy them. It is not enough to cherish a noble ideal. Man does not live by high thoughts or superb discourses, for he needs bread as well; the belly has even more rights than the brain, for it nourishes the entire organism. Very well! If on the morrow of the revolution the popular masses have only words at their disposal, if they do not recognize by facts whose evidence is as blinding as sunlight that the situation has been transformed to their advantage, and if the overturning of power ends up as merely a change of persons and formulas, nothing will have been achieved. There will remain only one more disillusionment. And we shall have to put ourselves once again to the ungrateful task of Sisyphus, rolling his eternal rock.

For the revolution to be anything more than a word, for the reaction not to lead us on the morrow to the same situation as on the eve, the conquest on the day itself must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not find themselves even poorer today. You will remember the naive republicans of 1848 proposing to put "three months of poverty at the service of the provisional government." The three months of poverty were accepted with enthusiasm, and indeed they were repaid when the time had gone by, but with grapeshot and mass transportation. The poor had hoped that the painful months of waiting would be enough for those mitigating laws to be passed that would transform them into free men and assure them, with work, their daily bread. Instead of asking, would it not have been a surer method to take? Instead of making a show of their poverty, would it not have been preferable to put an end to it? There is no doubt that devotion is a great and beautiful thing, but it is not devotion but betrayal when we abandon to their wretched fate all those who march beside us. That those who take part in the fight may die is fitting, but their deaths must be useful! Nothing is more just than that the men of devotion should sacrifice themselves, but the people in general should profit from the sacrifice of these valiant ones!

Only a general expropriation can satisfy the multitudes who suffer and are oppressed. From the domain of theory we must enter that of practice. But for expropriation to respond to the need, which is to put an end to private property and return all to all, it must be carried out on a vast scale. On a small scale, it will be seen only as a mere pillage; on a large scale it is the beginning of social reorganization. Undoubtedly we shall show ourselves entirely ignorant of the laws of history if we imagine that, in the twinkling of an eyelid, a whole vast country might become our field of experiment. The peoples of France, Europe, the world, will not turn into anarchists by a sudden transformation; yet we know that on the one hand the insanity of governments, their ambitions, their bankruptcies, and on the other hand the incessant propaganda of ideas will result in great disturbances of equilibrium. At such a time we must act. But how often already have the revolutionaries been surprised, letting events pass by, without utilizing them for their cause, seeing a propitious turn of fortune flee without seizing on it!

So, when these days come -- and it is for you to hasten their coming -- in which a whole region and great cities with their suburbs will have got rid of their governments, our work is marked out; all industrial and other plants must be returned to the community, social property held by individuals must be returned to its true master -- which is all of us, so that each can have his full share of the goods available for consumption, so that production of all that is necessary and useful can continue, and that social life, far from being interrupted, can be carried on with the greatest energy. Without the gardens and fields that give us produce indispensable for life, without the granaries, the warehouses, the shops that gather together the products of work, without the factories and workshops that provide textiles and metalwork, without the means of defence, without the railways and other ways of communication that allow us to exchange our products with the neighbouring free communes and combine our efforts for resistance and attack, we are condemned in advance to perish; we shall stifle like a fish out of water which can no longer breathe though bathed entirely in the vast ocean of air.

Let us remember the great strike of railway engineers that took place a few years ago in America. The great mass of people recognized that their cause was just; everyone was fed up with the insolence of the companies, and was happy to see them placed at the mercy of their workers. But when the latter neglected to take hold of the railway lines and locomotives of which they were masters, when the movement of goods of all kinds was interrupted, when produce and merchandise went up double in price, public opinion changed sides. "The companies may rob us and break our arms and legs, but it is these fools of strikers who leave us to die of hunger!" Do not forget such incidents! The interests of the crowd must be safeguarded and its needs as well as its instincts for justice must be fully satisfied.

Yet it is not enough to recognize the principle; it must be applied.

It is often repeated to us: "Try then to touch the peasant's plot of land, the labourer's shack, and you'll see how they'll greet you! A jab with a pitchfork and a good kick!" Fair enough! But, as we have already said, we have no intention of touching either the plot of land or the shack. We shall be very careful not to attack our best friends, those who, without knowing it today, will certainly be our allies tomorrow. It is for their benefit that expropriation will be carried out. We know that there exists a level of income below which lies destitution and above which lies superfluity. In each town, in each country, that level is different; but popular instinct is not deceived, and without it being necessary to lay down statistics on fine paper and fill a whole series of volumes with figures, the people will know how to regain its dues. In our beautiful society it is a scanty minority that has allocated to itself the better part of the national revenue, that has built for itself the palaces in the cities and the great homes in the country, that in the banks accumulates bullion, notes and bonds of all kinds which represent the savings of collective work. Seize all that, and at the same blow you liberate the unfortunate peasant every clod of whose ground is encumbered with a mortgage, the small shop- keeper who lives constantly in fear as he foresees bills falling due, distraints, inevitable failure, and all that lamentable crowd who have no bread for the morrow. Would that multitude remain indifferent on the eve of the revolution, could it fail to understand on the very day of uprising that it depends on itself whether it remain free or fall back into poverty and eternal anxiety? Or will it again have the naivete1, instead of liberating itself, to name once again a government of people with supple hands and glib tongues? Will it have no awareness that thus it will replace old masters by new ones? Let it do its own work if it wants that to be done, and confide it to representatives if it wishes to be betrayed.

We know that reasoning is not everything. It is not enough that those who are concerned recognise what their concern really is: to live without continual worries about the future and without the humiliation of obeying masters; our ideas regarding property must also change, and public morality must be changed accordingly. We must understand without hesitation or reserve that all products, the whole of what man has accumulated and made use of, are due to the common work of all, and have only one owner, humanity. We must see private property clearly for what it is in reality, a conscious or unconscious theft of the wealth of all people, and take hold of it joyously for the common benefit when the hour of reckoning sounds. In earlier revolutions, when it was a question of replacing a king of the older line by a king of the younger line, or of substituting lawyers in "the best of all republics," proprietors succeeded to proprietors, and the social system did not change. Thus the placards proclaiming "Death to Thieves," which at that time were placed at the entrances to all the palaces were in perfect harmony with current morality, and many a poor devil who laid fingers on a coin of the realm or perhaps even on bread in the baker's shop, would be shot as an example of the people's justice.

The worthy national guard, incarnating all the infamous solemnity of the laws the monopolists drew up for the defence of their properties, proudly showed the corpse laid out on the palace steps, and his comrades praised him as a champion of right. But those placards of 1830 and 1848 will not be seen again on the walls of the insurgent cities. For theft will no longer be possible when everything belongs to all. "Take and do not waste, for all this belongs to you, and you will have need of it." But destroy without delay everything that should be overthrown: the penal fortresses and the prisons, the forts directed against the towns and the unhealthy quarters where you have so long breathed an air heavy with poison. Instal yourselves in the palaces and mansions, and make a bonfire of the piles of bricks and wormeaten wood that were your hovels. The instinct to destroy, which is so natural and so just because it is also an urge to renew, This, of course, is a modification of the famous aphorism by Kropotkin's great predecessor, Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) who in 1842 declared "The passion to destroy is also a creative urge." Trans. ⁷⁴ will find much to satisfy it. So many outworn things to replace! For everything will have to be remade: houses, whole towns, agricultural and industrial plant, in fact every material aspect of society.

To each great event in history there is a corresponding evolution in human morality. For the morality of equals is certainly not that of the charitable rich and the grateful poor. In a new world we will need a new law, and it is clearly a new world that manifests itself. Our adversaries have been endlessly lamenting: "The gods depart! the kings depart! the prestige of authority is vanishing!" And who will replace the gods, the kings and the priests, if it is not the free individual, relying on his own strength? Naive faith departs. Make way for science! Good will and charity disappear. Make way for justice!

It is well known that, despite the laws supposed to protect children, the factories and even the coal mines of Europe are swarming with children, who often work twelve hours a day. Peter Kropotkin.

1848 it was absorbed into Mazzini's Italian National Committee. Trans.