The Anarchist Handbook

by Michael Malice

In one sense, anarchism is nothing more than the declaration that “You do not speak for me.” Everything else is just implementation.

Communism, which assumes that men “have equal rights by nature,” contradicts its own proposition until it comes to this, that men have no right at all by nature. For it is not willing to recognize, for instance, that parents have “by nature” rights as against their children, or the children as against the parents: it abolishes the family.

When the Revolution stamped equality as a “right,” it took flight into the religious domain, into the region of the sacred, of the ideal.

Have Chinese subjects a right to freedom? Just bestow it on them, and then look how far you have gone wrong in your attempt: because they do not know how to use freedom they have no right to it, or, in clearer terms, because they have not freedom they have not the right to it.

I derive all right and all warrant from me; I am entitled to everything that I have in my power. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah, God, if I can; if I cannot, then these gods will always remain in the right and in power as against me, and what I do will be to fear their right and their power in impotent “god-fearingness,” to keep their commandments and believe that I do right in everything that I do according to their right, about as the Russian boundary-sentinels think themselves rightfully entitled to shoot dead the suspicious persons who are escaping, since they murder “by superior authority,” “with right.”

I think it belongs to him who knows how to take it, or who does not let it be taken from him, does not let himself be deprived of it.