Translated from the French by Charlatan Stew, 1995
We would like the human species to
live in harmony with nature, of which it is an integral part. For
us, living means neither dominating nor exploiting nor
manipulating. We feel, therefore, that no living being should be
considered or treated as an object, as a commodity.
We don't want to see lives subjugated
to institutions, structures and relations that organize and administer
the production and reproduction of the processes of domination,
division and exploitation.
At present, the essence of our lives
is reduced to meeting the obligations and obeying the constraints that
torment, weaken and shatter our awareness and sensitivity to the
world. These daily exactions paralyze the faculties which might
permit us to conceive of our lives as something other than the
instruments and materials of a system of oppression and exploitation.
WHAT WE WANT IS COMMUNITY AND MUTUAL AID
We want to live in a society that
really is a society, that is, an association of individuals. This
would be a society where classes no longer exist, a society without the
categories and status distinctions which grant benefits and privileges
to some while others submit to constraints and restrictions. It
would be a society in which relations between living beings would no
longer be based on domination and submission.
It would be a society without power, without hierarchy and, of course, without a state.
There would be no rivalry and competition, and, of course, no money.
There would be no wage labor, no unemployment and, obviously, no capitalism.
It would be a society made up of many
and different kinds of associations, where every person would be able
to participate or not participate according to her or his inclinations
and desires.
In order to live together, to partake
in activities, to create, to make decisions and to settle their
differences, human beings would come to understandings and formulate
agreements without the need of recourse to either hierarchies or
representative institutions.
When their lives are no longer
submitted to the yoke and the illusions of the "market," whatever
people choose to produce and decide to use will be the fruit of their
tastes and preferences. The disappearance of the ideas of profit,
market advantage, and competition will lead individuals to reflect on
the usefulness, goals, means, conditions and consequences of their
actions, both between themselves and with respect to the rest of nature.
WHAT WE WANT IS WHAT WE CALL ANARCHY
So we are anarchists.
But...names mean so little. What matters is that in the society
we would like to see, the individual would be respected in body and
mind.
Given the oppression, exploitation
and constraints of the present order, it is inevitable that resistance,
disgust, indignation and revolt will arise. These forms of
rejection of humiliation and suffering must become the source of
dreams, thoughts and reflections whose communication gives confidence
to individuals and provokes acts of disobedience and the emergence of
relationships and associations that foster the abolition of everything
that, for millennia, has reduced humans to marionettes, functioning as
instruments, thrown away when no longer needed.
It is vital to reject this world, so
destructive of lives, and to seek every way to escape it and destroy
it. All the attempts to improve or reform it only highlight,
purely and simply, what a fraud it is.
The important thing is to get rid of
all the life-crushing machinery, which, in various forms (institutions,
beliefs, customs, rituals...), mutilate individuals physically and
mentally.
It is important to create a society
in which lives are no longer dependent on the mechanisms that produce
"dominators" and "dominated," "winners" and "losers."