ANARCHY: IS
PRIVATE PROPERTY PUBLIC THEFT?
Notes and
Sources
The notorious
remark 'All property is theft' comes from P-J Proudhon's 1840 book What is Property? An
Inquiry into the Principle of right and government. Proudhon did not in fact mean that no one
should own any private property at all and his statement was probably made to
give the bourgeoisie a fright.
Beards and
bombs: The Idea and The
Deed: there were intellectuals such as Prince Peter Kropotkin (author of Mutual
Aid and The Conquest of Bread
which are still in print) and activists who seized upon these ideas. The
thinkers rarely approved of the violent approach.
Six heads of
state were assassinated by Anarchists in the twenty years before 1914;
President Carnot of France in 1894; Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897; Empress
Elizabeth of Austria in 1898; King Humbert of Italy in 1900; President McKinley
of the United States in 1901; and another Premier ofSpain, Canalejas, in 1912.
None of them could qualify as a tyrant.
Denial of
existence of society:
this is the view of Murray Rothbard in his book For A New Liberty (1978).
Green movement: from the introduction to Green
Politics by Spretnak and
Capra;
'The new society
would move away from quantitative to qualitative values and goals; away from
the impersonal towards the personal and interpersonal; and away from the
earning and spending of money towards the meeting of real human needs'.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was a quite remarkable person. She was a Jewish immigrant to
the US from Russia who apart from her publishing and activism caused a scandal
by horsewhipping the deformed Anarchist orator Johann Most just as he was about
to give a speech. From George Woodcock's Anarchism:
'Emma Goldman
with her emotional oratory, her enormous courage, and her generous advocacy of
unpopular causes, really belongs in a frame larger than the Anarchist movement
alone can give her, for, Russian though she was by birth, she represented in a
very broad sense the best traditions of American radicalism. She faced many a
hostile crowd for the sake of free speech, she went to prison for her advocacy
of birth control, and she helped to introduce Ibsen and his contemporaries to
the American public'.
WTO and
copyright: the new
agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property means that every WTO member
country has to have a copyright law, even countries such as India which
previously had none.
Michael Jordan: the original of this example was
published by Robert Nozick in 1974 using Wilt Chamberlain.
‘From
each according to his ability…..’ comes from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha
programme, p325.
Marx wisely wrote
very little about Utopian ideals. Here is one example: ‘..while in
communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each
can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
fisherman, herdsman, or critic.’ (from The German Ideology)
Stephen Peplow
Handout for the July 2002 meeting of HKPC’s Kowloon Branch