The Individualist Anarchists Quotes

“From Smith's principle that labor is the true measure of price—or, as Warren phrased it, that cost is the proper limit of price—these three men (Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx) made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms, interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure to labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Just as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement "Property is theft" is usually misunderstood, so it is easy to misunderstand Benjamin Tucker's claim that individualist anarchism was part of "socialism." Yet before Marxists monopolized the term, socialism was a broad concept, as indeed Marx's critique of the "unscientific" varieties of socialism in the Communist Manifesto indicated. Thus, when Tucker claimed that the individualist anarchism advocated in the pages of Liberty was socialist, he was not engaged in obfuscation or rhetorical bravado. He (and most of his writers and readers) understood socialism to mean a set of theories and demands that proposed to solve the "labor problem" through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem varied (e.g., poverty, exploitation, lack of opportunity), as did explanations of its causes (e.g., wage employment, monopolies, lack of access to land or credit), and, consequently, so did the proposed solutions (e.g., abolition of private property, regulation, abolition, or state ownership of monopolies, producer cooperation, etc.). Of course, this led to a variety of strategies as well: forming socialist or labor parties, fomenting revolution, building unions or cooperatives, establishing communes or colonies, etc. This dazzling variety led to considerable public confusion about socialism, and even considerable fuzziness among its advocates and promoters.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Slaves and master do not make a society; "free and equal" beings do.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“The idea of government sprang in barbarous times from the authority of the leader in war, and the patriarchal rule of the head of the family; it grew up in the superstition born of the fears of an ignorant age; and on the brute instincts and childishness, the ignorance and fears of mankind it has prospered ever since, until progress began slowly and surely to cut away the ground under its feet.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Is the Somebody (the consumer of surplus value) the beggar, the invalid, the cripple, the discoverer, the gambler, the highway robber, the burglar, the defaulter, the pickpocket, or the common swindler? None of these, to any extent worth mentioning. The aggregate of wealth absorbed by these classes of our population compared with the vast mass produced is a mere drop in the ocean, unworthy of consideration in studying a fundamental problem of political economy. These people get some wealth, it is true; enough, probably, for their own purposes: but labor can spare them the whole of it, and never know the difference.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“The Anarchist does not want to destroy all existing institutions with a crash and then inaugurate the substituting process on their ruins. He simply asks to be let alone in substituting false systems now, so that they may gradually fall to pieces by their own dead weight. He asks the humble privilege of being allowed to set up a free bank in peaceable competition with the government subsidized class bank on the opposite corner. He asks the privilege of establishing a private post office in fair competition with the governmentally established one. He asks to be let alone in establishing his title to the soil by free occupation, cultivation, and use rather than by a title hampered by vested rights which were designed to keep the masses landless. He asks to be allowed to set up his domestic relations on the basis of free love in peaceable competition with ecclesiastically ordered love, which is a crime against Nature and the destroyer of love, order, and harmony itself. He asks not to be taxed upon what has been robbed from him under a machine in which he has practically no voice and no choice. In short, the Anarchist asks for free land, free money, free trade, free love, and the right to free competition with the existing order at his own cost and on his own responsibility,— liberty.
Is there any violence in all this? Is there artificial levelling? Finally, is there any want of readiness to substitute something in the place of what we condemn? No, all we ask is the right to peaceably place Liberty in fair competition with privilege. Existing governments are pledged to deny this. Herein will reside the coming struggle. Who is the party of assault and violence? Is it the Anarchist, simply asking to be let alone in minding his own business, or is it the power which, aware that it cannot stand on its own merits, violently perpetuates itself by crushing all attempts to test its efficiency and pretensions through peaceable rivalry?”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of morals to be imposed upon the individual. "Mind your own business" is its only moral law. Interference with another's business is a crime and the only crime, and as such may properly be resisted. In accordance with this view the Anarchists look upon attempts to arbitrarily suppress vice as in themselves crimes. They believe liberty and the resultant social well-being to be a sure cure for all the vices. But they recognize the right of the drunkard, the gambler, the rake, and the harlot to live their lives until they shall freely choose to abandon them.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his "Wealth of Nations,"—namely, that labor is the true measure of price. But Adam Smith, after stating this principle most clearly and concisely, immediately abandoned all further consideration of it to devote himself to showing what actually does measure price, and how, therefore, wealth is at present distributed. Since his day nearly all the political economists have followed his example by confining their function to the description of society as it is, in its industrial and commercial phases. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be. Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped it, and, in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“In these barriers (Freedom of will) there is no compulsion. This I feel only when a foreign force controls me and a foreign will seeks to assert itself through my action. Against this I revolt, and only when the foreign will has become my own by virtue of my insight, only then shall I not submit myself, but still act in liberty. To do good in consequence of free insight is true virtue, and to act independently true egoism.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Liberty! Do you now know what liberty is? You clamor for it. I tell you: Be free, for you are free! No other liberty can come to you except that which you carry within you. You are you, an ego, a will, wholly for yourselves, resting within yourselves; what more do you want? Is that not liberty enough? Of what more, then, do you want to be free?”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“In the near future men will wonder how Mr. Spencer, "the philosopher" of the nineteenth century, could have allowed his devotion to the bourgeoisie to so cloud his morality (for we cannot believe that it was his judgment that was at fault) as to cause him to say that the rich supported the poor. How do they do it? By standing by and seeing the poor work, taking away all their products, and giving back to the workers just sufficient to keep them in working order,—in many cases not even as much as that ...”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Mr. Spencer says that the "miseries of the poor are thought of as the miseries of the deserving poor, instead of being thought of, as in large measure they should be, as the miseries of the undeserving poor." So conservative a political economist as John Stuart Mill has admitted, nay, positively stated, that no one but a romantic dreamer could believe that in modern society the rewards are proportioned to the work, and that even those poor people, commonly called the "undeserving poor," whose condition might with perhaps a trace of justice be said to be due to their own faults, have done and do more work than those who enjoy much worldly prosperity. One would need to be a philosopher to appreciate the. fact that poverty and misery are proportional to the laziness of the individual. The ordinary mortal, on being told that a man works a great many hours in a day, or, as they are popularly and with good reason called, "long hours," immediately jumps to the conclusion that that man's wages are small. The harder as well as the longer a man works, the smaller his wages are.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“If these propositions are sound, there is no antagonism between social and individual interests. That alone is good for "society" which is good for all its members. To ask any number of individuals to sacrifice themselves for "society"—that is, for the rest of the membership—is to deprive them of every motive for wishing to lead a social life. The individual has no need for society, if it does not tend to increase his happiness.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“And so, it seems to me, it is with our prisons. They are filled with criminals which our virtuous State has made what they are by its iniquitous laws, its grinding monopolies, and the horrible social conditions that result from them. We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them. Is it too much to expect that the new social conditions which must follow the abolition of all interference with the production and distribution of wealth will in the end so change the habits and propensities of men that our jails and prisons, our policemen and our soldiers,—in a word, our whole machinery and outfit of defence,—will be superfluous? That, at least, is the Anarchists' belief. It sounds Utopian, but it really rests on severely economic grounds.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“Force is the essence of all positive governmental institutions. Under any conceivable interpretation of Jefferson's talk about the consent of the governed, every existing government is outlawed beyond recovery, and the "just powers" vanish into thin air.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908

“When the collective moral sense is relieved of the incubus of law, it may still be unjust in many instances, but its injustice will take a less permanent form and one more capable of rectification, whereas its sense of justice may be perpetually widened and increased by the growth of knowledge and human sympathy. Certainly, judging from its present influence, it will be strong enough to serve as a restraint upon those individuals who refuse to respect the rights of others. But when Society has ceased deliberately to condemn certain of its members to infamy and despair from their birth, there are both physical and moral grounds for the belief that the "criminal classes" will cease to exist. Crime will become sufficiently rare to give the mass of the population courage to face the fact that moral depravity, like madness, is a terrible affliction, a disease to be carefully treated and remedied, not punished and augmented by ill-treatment. We know this now, but we are too cowardly or too Pharisaical to admit it.”
― Frank H Brooks, The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908