“Anarchy pays little attention to the shady combinations of politics. It professes the most profound disdain for politicians. The promises of the place-seekers interest it only as they disclose all the inanity of politics, and only as they can be made use of to demonstrate that the social organisation will not be transformed until the day when a resolute attack shall be made against its economic defects.
“If the politicians believe the lies they retail, they are simple ignoramuses or imbeciles; for the slightest reasoning should suffice to make them understand that, when a disease is to be cured and its return prevented, its causes must be attacked. If they lie purposely, they are rascals; and, in the one case as in the other, they deceive those whose confidence they win by their babble and their intrigue.
“Those who exploit the actual economic organisation will always seek to direct to their own profit all the attempts at amelioration that are suggested, and there will always be people who are dismayed by brusque changes and who prefer to rely on middle terms which seem to them to conciliate all interests.
“It will always be for the advantage of the masters to deceive the oppressed regarding the veritable means of enfranchisement, and there will always be enough cormorants greedy of power to assist them in their work of muddling questions.
“Anarchy demonstrates the inanity of every attempt at amelioration which attacks only the effect while letting subsist the cause.
“So long as the wealth of society shall be the appanage of a minority of loafers, this minority will employ it in living at the expense of those whom it exploits. And, as it is the possession of capital which makes strength and gives the mastery of the social organisation, they are always in a position to turn to their own profit every amelioration which is undertaken.
“For an amelioration to benefit all, privileges must be destroyed. It is to re-enter into the possession of that of which they have been despoiled that the efforts of those who possess nothing ought to tend. To break the power which crushes them, to prevent its reconstitution, to take possession of the means of production, to create a social organisation in which social wealth can no more be concentrated in the hands of a few,—this is what the anarchists dream.
“If the exploitation of man is to be prevented, the bases of the economic order must be changed: the soil and all that which is the product of anterior generations must rest at the free disposition of those who can work them, must not be monopolised for the gain of any party whatsoever,—individual, group, corporation, commune, or nation.
“This is what the partisans of partial reforms do not comprehend, and yet this is what conscientious study of economic facts demonstrates. Nothing good can come from the activity of the charlatans of politics. Human emancipation cannot be the work of any legislation, of any concession of liberty on the part of those who rule. It can only be the work of the fait accompli, of the individual will affirming itself in acts.”