The Anarchist Handbook

by Michael Malice

“Since no one believes in antinomianism, the answer is somewhere to the other side of the bar.”

Antinomianism in ethics is anarchism in a sociopolitical context, the belief that the imposition of authority is illegitimate.

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

Inherent in this argument is that governments are, by their nature, invasive and predatory—this being the anarchist view of the nature of government.

Anarchism is not a location. Anarchism is a relationship, one in which none of the parties has authority over the other.

Citizenship by geography is landline technology in a post-smartphone world.

At base level, all anarchism claims to do is to resolve one major problem in interpersonal relationships: the forceful interjection of the state. Curing cancer would make things a lot better for many people.

An anarchist world would still have murderers, and thieves, and evil men and women. It simply wouldn’t put them in a position to enforce their evil on everyone else via getting elected and decreeing the law.

If government was an effective mechanism at solving or preventing crime, crime would be as minor a political issue as fashion is. Everyone needs to feel safe in their person, just as everyone needs clothing. Yet only one is a political issue year in and year out.

Since the term itself—anarchism—is a negation, there is a great deal of disagreement on what the positive alternative would look like. The black flag comes in many colors.

Little will be gained for the cause of equality and justice if our ancestors, at the first institution of government, had a right indeed of choosing the system of regulations under which they thought proper to live, but at the same time could barter away the understandings and independence of all that came after them, to the latest posterity.

It is usually said “that acquiescence is sufficient; and that this acquiescence is to be inferred from my living quietly under the protection of the laws.” But if this be true, an end is as effectually put to all political science, all discrimination of better and worse, as by any system invented by the most slavish sycophant.

Thus what has been called the law of nations, lays least stress upon the allegiance of a foreigner settling among us, though his acquiescence is certainly most complete; while natives removing into an uninhabited region are claimed by the mother country, and removing into a neighbouring territory are punished by municipal law, if they take arms against the country in which they were born.

Allowing that I am called upon, at the period of my coming of age for example, to declare my assent or dissent to any system of opinions, or any code of practical institutes; for how long a period does this declaration bind me? Am I precluded from better information for the whole course of my life? And, if not for my whole life, why for a year, a week or even an hour? If my deliberate judgement, or my real sentiment, be of no avail in the case, in what sense can it be affirmed that all lawful government is founded in consent?

Lastly, if government be founded in the consent of the people, it can have no power over any individual by whom that consent is refused. If a tacit consent be not sufficient, still less can I be deemed to have consented to a measure upon which I put an express negative.

When a blockhead makes me out in the right, I grow distrustful of my rightness; I don’t like to receive it from him. But, even when a wise man makes me out in the right, I nevertheless am not in the right on that account. Whether I am in the right is completely independent of the fool’s making out and of the wise man’s.

All the same, we have coveted this right until now. We seek for right, and turn to the court for that purpose.

Whether I am in the right or not there is no judge but myself. Others can judge only whether they endorse my right, and whether it exists as right for them too.

A “sense of right” and “law-abiding mind” of such a sort is so firmly planted in people’s heads that the most revolutionary persons of our days want to subject us to a new “sacred law,” the “law of society,” the law of mankind, the “right of all,” ,and the like. The right of “all” is to go before my right. As a right of all it would indeed be my right among the rest, since I, with the rest, am included in all; but that it is at the same time a right of others, or even of all others, does not move me to its upholding.

But the social reformers preach to us a “law of society.” There the individual becomes society’s slave, and is in the right only when society makes him out in the right, when he lives according to society’s statutes and so is—loyal.

In consideration of right the question is always asked, “What or who gives me the right to it?” Answer: God, love, reason, nature, humanity, etc. No, only your might, your power gives you the right (your reason, therefore, may give it to you).

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.

And if for the whole world something were not right, but it were right for me, that is, I wanted it, then I would ask nothing about the whole world.

But nature cannot entitle me, give me capacity or might, to that to which only my act entitles me.

No, equal labor does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have labored and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then—“it serves you right.” If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a , “well-earned right” of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right.

The “commonwealth of right,” as the Vossische Zeitung among others stands for it, asks that office-holders be removable only by the judge, not by the administration. Vain illusion! If it were settled by law that an office-holder who is once seen drunken shall lose his office, then the judges would have to condemn him on the word of the witnesses. In short, the law-giver would only have to state precisely all the possible grounds which entail the loss of office, however laughable they might be (that is, he who laughs in his superiors’ faces, who does not go to church every Sunday, who does not take the communion every four weeks, who runs in debt, who has disreputable associates, who shows no determination, etc., shall be removed. These things the law-giver might take it into his head to prescribe for a court of honour); then the judge would solely have to investigate whether the accused had “become guilty” of those “offences,” and, on presentation of the proof, pronounce sentence of removal against him “in the name of the law.”

He who, to hold his own, must count on the absence of will in others is a thing made by these others, as the master is a thing made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be over with all lordship.

Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many, or (as one is likely to imagine about a republic) if all be lords, that is, despotize one over another. For this is the case when the law given at any time, the expressed volition of (it may be) a popular assembly, is thenceforth to be law for the individual, to which obedience is due from him or toward which he has the duty of obedience. If one were even to conceive the case that every individual in the people had expressed the same will, and hereby a complete “collective will” had come into being, the matter would still remain the same. Would I not be bound today and henceforth to my will of yesterday? My will would in this case be frozen.

Because I was a willer yesterday, I am today without will: yesterday voluntary, today involuntary.

The State practices “violence,” the individual must not do so. The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.” Crime, then—so the individual’s violence is called; and only by crime does he overcome the State’s violence when he thinks that the State is not above him, but he is above the State.

Now, if I wanted to act ridiculously, I might, as a well-meaning person, admonish you not to make laws which impair my self-development, self-activity, self-creation. I do not give this advice. For, if you should follow it, you would be unwise, and I should have been cheated of my entire profit. I request nothing at all from you; for, whatever I might demand, you would still be dictatorial law-givers, and must be so, because a raven cannot sing, nor a robber live without robbery.

Solely from the principle that all right and all authority belong to the collectivity of the people do all forms of government arise. For none of them lacks this appeal to the collectivity, and the despot, as well as the president or any aristocracy, acts and commands “in the name of the State.”

Children that now once come into the open, and live through an hour without the rod of discipline, are no longer willing to go into the cell. For the open is now no longer a supplement to the cell, no longer a refreshing recreation, but its opposite, an aut—aut. In short, the State must either no longer put up with anything, or put up with everything and perish; it must be either sensitive through and through, or, like a dead man, insensitive.

What is the ordinary criminal but one who has committed the fatal mistake of endeavoring after what is the people’s instead of seeking for what is his? He has sought despicable alien goods, has done what believers do who seek after what is God’s. What does the priest who admonishes the criminal do? He sets before him the great wrong of having desecrated by his act what was hallowed by the State, its property (in which, of course, must be included even the life of those who belong to the State); instead of this, he might rather hold up to him the fact that he has befouled himself in not despising the alien thing, but thinking it worth stealing; he could, if he were not a parson.

Can I assume that one commits a crime against me, without assuming that he has to act as I see fit?

One sees here how it is “Man” again who sets on foot even the concept of crime, of sin, and therewith that of right. A man in whom I do not recognize “man” is “sinner, a guilty one.”

If, as in the Revolution, what “Man” is is apprehended as “good citizen,” then from this concept of “Man” we have the well-known “political offences and crimes.” In all this the individual, the individual man, is regarded as refuse, and on the other hand the general man, “Man,” is honored.

And with what unction the butchery goes on here in the name of the law, of the sovereign people, of God, etc.!

Society would have every one come to his right indeed, but yet only to that which is sanctioned by society, to the society-right, not really to his right. But I give or take to myself the right out of my own plenitude of power, and against every superior power I am the most impenitent criminal.

Right has had to suffer an attack within itself, from the stand-point of right; war being declared on the part of liberalism against “privilege.”

The “equality of right” is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace, which, be it said, one may also acquire by his desert; for desert and grace are not contradictory, since even grace wishes to be “deserved” and our gracious smile falls only to him who knows how to force it from us. So people dream of “all citizens of the State having to stand side by side, with equal rights.” As citizens of the State they are certainly all equal for the State. But it will divide them, and advance them or put them in the rear, according to its special ends, if on no other account; and still more must it distinguish them from one another as good and bad citizens.

With absolute right, right itself passes away; the dominion of the “concept of right” is cancelled at the same time. For it is not to be forgotten that hitherto concepts, ideas, or principles ruled us, and that among these rulers the concept of right, or of justice, played one of the most important parts.

Right—is a wheel in the head, put there by a spook; power—that am I myself, I am the powerful one and owner of power. Right is above me, is absolute, and exists in one higher, as whose grace it flows to me: right is a gift of grace from the judge; power and might exist only in me the powerful and mighty.

The Constitution is like a “No Guns Zone” sign for conservatives, in that the only people it would bind are those who are already generally honest and peaceable.

Malice is notorious for writing about himself in such a way as to confuse and annoy the reader, for no discernable purpose whatsoever.

State action proceeds independently of any democratic justification. The purest example of this could be seen during the 2012 Democratic Convention. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sought to amend the party platform to include a reference to God and to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He put the edit to the convention floor, seeking to approve the change via acclamation. Having failed to receive the outcome he sought, he asked for a revote. Then he tried again. Finally, he simply pretended that those in the audience— unanimously Democrats and democrats—had agreed with him.