The Social Monster

By Johann Most

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poverty, and from poverty into misery, and now it comes upon us, that if this movement is allowed to go on for any length of time, the human race, morally degraded, will die out from physical want in the midst of a world of plenty.

But such a state is downright insanity, and demands peremptorily a thorough reorganization of the social order. The establishment of an entirely new social system.

To go back to the small industry of former days is not possible, however. The advantages of the mass-production and the organization of labor are too apparent ever to be given up.

Consequently, nothing else is left but to make common property out of all that, which forms the fundamental conditions of production and exchange: to introduce communism.

In this point all agree who are dissatisfied with the existing order, and want another which can make all men free; and equal and happy. It is therefore simply a bad piece of malice or a big piece of stupidity, when some people say of the anarchists, that in this very point they have taken up an adverse position.

No! The anarchists are socialists, because they too want a radical social reform; and they are communists, because: they too feel convinced that community of property must form the only basis of such a reform. But there are something more. They have also a characteristic mark of their own, and neither socialism nor communism will ever fully satisfy them until thoroughly pervaded by the spirit of anarchism and, stamped with its mark.

Meanwhile it is so much the more necessary for the anarchists to keep the character-mark of their stand point indicated by their very name, as there is quite a number of communists who -- singularly enough -- designate the future social order as a ,,State," the ,,State of the Future," the ,,State of the People," etc., and provide this state with the most, monstrous. governmental machinery and laws by the bushel, as if the communistic society should be nothing but a mass of idiots taken care of by a number of mandarins.

Of course, no consistent socialist or communist will have anything to do with such an idea. They know too well that the state is and always was a mere instrument of suppression and that the reigning class always has used and still uses this instrument to protect their privileges and force the mass of the people to submit. But what meaning could such an instrument of suppression have in a free country? There are no privileges to protect and no unprivileged to keep in awe.

The establishment of communism is unthinkable