Property is the root of all evil, and the division and safeguarding of property occupies the whole world.
What then is property?
People are accustomed to think that property is something really belonging to a man. That is why they call it ‘property’. We say of a house and of one’s hand alike, that it is ‘my own’ hand, ‘my own’ house.
But evidently this is an error and a superstition.
We know, or if we do not know it is easy to perceive, that property is merely a means of appropriating other men’s work. And the work of others can certainly not be my own. It has even nothing in common with the conception of property (that which is one’s own)-a conception which is very exact and definite. Man always has called, and always will call, ‘his own’ that which is subject to his will and attached to his consciousness, namely, his own body. As soon as a man calls something his ‘property’ that is not his own body but something that he wishes to make subject to his will as his body is-he makes a mistake, acquires for himself disillusionment and suffering, and finds himself obliged to cause others to suffer.
A man speaks of his wife, his children, his slaves, and his things, as being his own; but reality always shows him his mistake, and he has to renounce that superstition or to suffer and make others suffer.
1 Krylov’s fable tells of a box which several people failed to unlock. It turned out that it was not locked at all; one had only to raise the lid.-A. M.
In our days, nominally renouncing ownership of men, thanks to money and its collection by Government, we proclaim our right to the ownership of money, that is to say, to the ownership of other people’s labour.
But as the right of ownership in a wife, a son, a slave, or a horse, is a fiction which is upset by reality and only causes him who believes in it to suffer-since my wife or son will never submit to my will as my body does, and only my own body will still be my real property-in the same way monetary property will never be my own, but only a deceiving of myself and a source of suffering, while my real property will still be only my own body-that which always submits to me and is bound up with my consciousness.
Only to us who are so accustomed to call other things than our own body our ‘property’, can it seem that such a wild superstition may be useful, and can remain without consequences harmful to us; but it is only necessary to reflect on the reality of the matter to see that this superstition, like every other, entails terrible consequences.
Let us take the most simple example.
I consider myself to be my own property and another man to be my property also.
I want to be able to prepare a dinner. If I did not suffer from a superstitious belief in my ownership of the other man, I should teach that art, like any other that I needed, to my own property, that is to my own body; but as it is, I teach it to my imaginary property, and the result is that when my cook does not obey me or wish to please me, or even runs away from me or dies, I am left with the unsatisfied necessity of providing for myself, but unaccustomed to learning, and with a consciousness that I have spent as much time worrying over that cook as would have sufficed me to learn cooking myself.
So it is with property in buildings, clothes, utensils, landed property, and property in money. All imaginary property evokes in me unsuitable requirements that cannot always be satisfied, and deprives me of the possibility of acquiring for my true and unquestionable property-my own body-that knowledge, that skill, those habits, and that perfection, which I might acquire.
The result always is that with no benefit to myself-to my true property-I have expended strength, sometimes my whole life, on what was not and could not be my property.
I arrange what I imagine to be my own library, my own picture-gallery, my own apartments and clothes, and acquire my ‘own’ money in order to buy what I want, and it ends with this, that busy with this imaginary property, as though it were really mine, I quite lose consciousness of the difference between what is my property, on which I really can labour, which can serve me and will always remain under my control, and that which is not and cannot be my own, whatever I may call it, and cannot be the object of my activity.
Words always have a clear meaning until we intentionally give them a false one.
What then does property mean? Property is that which belongs to me alone and exclusively, that with which I can always do just what I like, that which no one can take from me, which remains mine to the end of my life and which I must use, increase, and improve.
Each man can own only himself as such property.
And yet it is just in this very sense that people’s imaginary property is understood-the very property for the sake of which (in a vain effort to do the impossible: to try to possess things external to oneself, which cannot be one’s own) all the terrible evil of the world takes place: wars, executions, courts of law, prisons, luxury, vice, murder, and people’s ruin.
So what will come of it if a dozen people plough, split logs, and make boots, not from necessity but because they recognize that man must work and that the more he works the better it will be for him? The result will be that a dozen men, or were it but one man, both by his consciousness and by actions will show men that the terrible evil from which they suffer is not a law off ate, the will of God, or some historic necessity, but is a superstition, neither strong nor terrible but weak and insignificant, which need only be no longer believed in (as people believe in idols) for us to be free from it and destroy it like a flimsy cobweb.
Men who work to fulfil the joyous law of their life, that is, who work to fulfil the law of labour, will free themselves from the superstition of personal property so pregnant with calamities, and all the world’s institutions which exist to maintain that supposed property outside one’s own body will become for them not merely unnecessary but irksome; and it will become clear to all that these institutions are not indispensable, but are harmful, artificial, and false conditions of life.
For a man who regards work not as a curse but as a joy, property outside his own body, that is, the right or power to use another man’s labour, will be not merely useless but irksome.
If I like to prepare my dinner and am accustomed to doing so, the fact of another man doing it for me deprives me of an accustomed occupation and does not give me the satisfaction I gave myself: besides which the acquisition of imaginary property will be useless to a man who regards labour as life itself, fills his life with it, and so is less and less in need of the labour of others, that is, less and less in need of property to fill his idle time-for pleasure and for the adornment of his life.
If a man’s life is filled with labour he does not need apartments, furniture, and a variety of handsome clothes: he needs less expensive food and does not need conveyances and distractions.
Above all, a man who regards labour as the business and joy of his life will not seek to lessen his labour at the cost of other people’s work.
A man who regards his life as work, will make it his aim, in proportion as he acquires skill and endurance, to accomplish more and more work and so fill his life ever more and more completely.
For such a man, placing the meaning of his life in labour and not in its results, not in acquiring property, that is, the labour of others, there can never be any question about implements of labour.
Though such a man will always choose the most productive implement, he will get the same satisfaction from work even if he has to use the least productive.
If there is a steam-plough he will plough with it, if there is none he will plough with a horse plough, and if that also is lacking he will use a wooden peasant-plough, or for lack of that will dig with a spade, and under all conditions equally he will attain his aim of spending his life in work useful for others, and so will obtain full satisfaction.
And the condition of such a man, both in external and internal respects, will be happier than that of one who makes the acquisition of property the aim of his life.
Externally such a man will never be in want, for people seeing his desire to work will always try to make his work as productive as possible-as they do with the water power that turns a mill-wheel-and that it should be as productive as possible they will make his material existence secure, which they do not do for one who strives after property. And security of material conditions is
