All the most important things are done unnoticed, modestly, simply; neither ploughing, nor building, nor grazing cattle, nor even thinking, can be done in uniforms amid illuminations and the roar of cannon. The illuminations, the roar of cannon, music, uniforms, cleanliness, and glitter, with which we are accustomed to connect the idea of the importance of an occupation, always serve on the contrary as signs that the matter lacks importance.
Great and real affairs are always simple and modest.
And so it is with the most important affair before us: the solution of the terrible contradictions amid which we live.
And the things that solve those contradictions are these modest, imperceptible, apparently ridiculous acts: serving oneself, doing physical labour for ourselves and if possible for others-which we rich people have to do if we understand the misfortune, wrongfulness, and danger of the position into which we have fallen.
What will result if I, and a dozen or two others, do not despise physical work but consider it essential for our happiness, tranquillity of conscience, and security? The result will be, that one or two or three dozen people, without conflict with anyone and without governmental or revolutionary violence, will solve for themselves the apparently insoluble question that presents itself to the whole world, and will solve it in such a way that they will live better, their consciences will be more at ease, and the evil of oppression will no longer terrify them: the result will be that other people will see that the good they seek everywhere is close at hand, that the apparently insoluble contradictions between their conscience and the arrangements of the world solve themselves in the easiest and most joyous manner, and that instead of being afraid of the people around us we should draw near to them and love them.
The apparently insoluble economic and social question is the question of Krylov’s box.1 It opens simply. But it will not open until people do the first and simplest thing, and just open it.
The apparently insoluble question is the old one of the. exploitation by some men of the labour of others, and in our time that question is expressed by property.
Formerly men took the labour of others simply by violence-slavery. To-day we do it by property.
Property to-day is the root of all evils: of the sufferings of those who possess it or are deprived of it, the reproaches of conscience of those who misuse it, and the danger of collision between those who have a superfluity and those who are in need. Property is the root of the evil, and at the same time is the very thing to gain which all the activity of our society to-day is directed. It guides the activity of our whole world.
States and Governments intrigue and go to war for property: for the banks of the Rhine and territories in Africa, China, or the Balkan Peninsula. Bankers, traders, manufacturers, and landowners work, scheme, and torment themselves and others for property; officials and artisans struggle, cheat, oppress and suffer for the sake of property; our Law Courts and police defend property; our penal settlements and prisons and all the horrors of our so-called repression of crime, exist on account of property.
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
