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Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939)
Individualist Anarchist, editor of the IA periodical Liberty.
An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government.
This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will.
I define Anarchism as the belief in the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty; or, in other words, as the belief in every liberty except the liberty to invade.
It is a very easy matter to tell who is an Anarchist and who is not. One question will always readily decide it. Do you believe in any form of imposition upon the human will by force? If you do, you are not an Anarchist. If you do not, you are an Anarchist. What can any one ask more reliable, more scientific, than this?
When I describe a man as an invader, I cast no reflection upon him; I simply state a fact, Nor do I assert for a moment the moral inferiority of the invader's desire. I only declare the impossibility of simultaneously gratifying the invader's desire to invade and my desire to be let alone. That these desires are morally equal I cheerfully admit, but they cannot be equally realized. Since one must be subordinated to the other, I naturally prefer the subordination of the invader's, and am ready to co-operate with non-invasive persons to achieve that result.
Aggression is simply another name for government.
And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
For, just as it has been said that there is no half-way house between Rome and Reason, so it may be said that there is no half-way house between State Socialism and Anarchism.
Taking this view of the matter, the Anarchists contend that defence is not an essential of the State, but that aggression is.
The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.
The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control.
We aim to decrease invasion only because, as a rule, invasion increases the total of pain (meaning, of course, pain suffered by the ego, whether directly or through sympathy with others).
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.
Anarchy means a slow growth of the principles of liberty and justice; the gradual dropping of the 'thou shalts' and the 'thou shalt nots' of laws and consitutions as men slowly learn that it is better to be governed by reasonable and intelligent conviction from within than by compulsion from without...
The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that 'the best government is that which governs least,' and that which governs least is no government at all.
The main question ... is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law ...
[Voting is] merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.
Our purpose is the abolition, not only of all existing States, but of the State itself.
The State is a principle, a philosophical error in social existence. The State is chaos, rioting under the guise of law, order, and morality. The State is a mob, posited on unscientific premises. We propose to supplant the mob by that true social order which is pivoted on the sovereignty of individualities associated for mutual well-being under the law or natural attraction and selection,— Liberty.
[W]e do not, in the best sense of the word, discard government. On the contrary, it is government that we are after. The State is not government, since it denies Liberty. The State becomes impossible the moment you remove from it the element of compulsion. But it is exactly at this point that government begins. Where the State ceases government begin, and, conversely, where the State begins government ceases.
We assert that delegated authority assumed to be vested in any titled or elected person, not excepting God himself, is, in the very nature of the case, a lie, a fraud, and, moreover, a scientific impossibility, since the individual is the only source of authority, and, even if he would, could not alienate from his personality the control of himself by contract. Hence we regard all popes, kings, emperors, presidents, and persons in authority everywhere as impostors and usurpers, and the constitutions, "vested rights," and other lying parchments under which they claim the right to rule as binding only on such as freely give their consent.
What we mean by the abolition of the State is the abolition of a false philosophy, or, rather, the overthrow of a gigantic fraud under which people consent to be coerced and restrained from minding their own business.
The purpose of Liberty, boiled down to its ultimate essence, is the abolition of authority. Liberty denies the authority of anybody's god to bind those who do not accept it through persuasion and natural selection. Liberty denies the authority of anybody's State to bind those who do not lend voluntary allegiance to it. Liberty denies the authority of anybody's 'public opinion', 'social custom', 'consensus of the competent', and every other fashionable or scholarly despot, to step between the individual and his free option in all things.
Anarchism means no government, but it does not mean no laws and no coercion. This may seem paradoxical, but the paradox vanishes when the Anarchist definition of government is kept in view. Anarchists oppose government, not because they disbelieve in punishment of crime and resistance to aggression, but because they disbelieve in compulsory protection.
[The Anarchists] have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller.
There is no freedom that I would grant to any man that I would refuse to woman, and there is no freedom that I would refuse to either man or woman except the freedom to invade... whoever has the ballot has the freedom to invade, and whoever wants the ballot wants the freedom to invade. Give woman equality with man, by all means; but do it by taking power from man, not giving it to woman.
[Karl Marx] was an honest man, a strong man, a humanitarian, and the promulgator of much vitally important truth, but on the most vital question of politics and economy he was persistently and irretrievably mistaken.
[1] Are not the laboring classes deprived of their earnings by usury in its three forms,—interest, rent, and profit?
[2] Is not such deprivation the principal cause of poverty?
[3] Is not poverty, directly or indirectly, the principal cause of illegal crime?
[4] Is not usury dependent upon monopoly, especially upon the land and money monopolies?
[5] Could these monopolies exist without the State at their back?
[6] Does not by far the larger part of the work of the State consist in establishing and sustaining these monopolies and other results of special legislation?
[7] Would not the abolition of these invasive functions of the State lead gradually to the disappearance of crime?
[8] In that case, would not the State have been entirely abolished?
[9] Would not this be the realization of Anarchy and the fulfillment of Proudhon’s prophecy of “the dissolution of government in the economic organism”?
To each of these questions we answer: Yes.
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