What Anarchists Want [Leaflet]

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We Anarchists, who have been represented to you as being all that is bad, issue this leaflet so that you may learn what it is we want. 

We want you to understand that we are workers like yourselves, not popularity seekers, place hunters, would-be organizers or leaders, but simply workers and teachers. We want not your votes or your money, only your heart and hand. We want not to rob but to stop the gigantic and cruel robberies from the toilers day by day. We want not to murder, but to prevent the slow, painful, and bloody murder of the workers and their children by this awful system of Monopoly and Competition that requires vast armies, navies, and police, composed of our own kith and kin, to maintain it so that the idlers may live in splendour and the workers linger their few years in want and wretchedness. We want you to learn that Governments protect these infamies, and a few rascally financiers govern the Governments, which are of their creation. We want to have all this changed so that all may live in peace and contentment. It is not by killing landlords that we can dispose of their class effectually and gain the power to cultivate and control the land, but by refusing to pay rent for the soil that belongs to no man : Not by assassinating capitalists do we become more able to organize and control our industries, but by refusing to work any longer for masters, and determining to take over the means and materials by which we work and using them in the interest of the whole of the people : It is not by blowing up statesmen that that we can destroy their power over us, but by ceasing to vote for them, no longer-giving them our consent to be taxed to pay for the policemen and soldiers, gatling guns and dynamite, with which they have always endeavoured to crush the workers in their struggle for FREEDOM. 

We want you to educate yourselves and each other in these matters, take no part whatever in the maintenance or administration of any part of the present order of things, that produces so much evil, but do all that lies in your power to weaken and destroy it so that a better condition of things shall grow up in response to the nobler needs and aspirations of the people. What we Anarchists want, you can now see is full and complete Freedom, Intellectual, Social, and Economic, the abolition of all trace of the domination of men by men, whether it be by the tremendous power which the exclusive possession of the means of life gives, or whether it be by the concession of power to a government. Freedom we want and Freedom we will have, and to our enemies and yours we frankly declare that we consider all or any means used toward the attainment of Freedom to be right and justifiable. Instead of loving violence, as we are accused, we hate it and are determined to abolish it, but we will not admit that any concession should be made to injustice. It must be resisted and can only thus be removed. Force and violence keep you in chains while your masters rob you. Force can only be repelled by Force. By Force alone will you at last be able to break the chains of your Slavery. 

Issued by the “COMMONWEAL” Anarchist Croup. Lectures and Discussions every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. at the Club Autonomie. No. 6 Windmill Street, Tottenham Court Road W.

[We believe this dates to 1892/93]