GOVERNMENT IS VIOLENCE essays on ANARCHISM and PACIFISM

THE END OF THE AGE

An Essay on the Approaching Revolution (1905)

Part V

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It is generally thought that the cruelest slavery is personal slavery: when one man can do anything he likes with another, torture, mutilate, kill him, while that which we do not even call slavery, the deprivation of the possibility of using the land, is thought merely a certain somewhat unjust economical institution.

But this view is quite false. That which Joseph did with the Egyptians, which all conquerors have done with the vanquished nations, which is now being done by men to men in the deprivation of the possibility of using the land - is the most dreadful and cruel slavery. The personal slave is the slave of one, but the man deprived of the right to use the land is the slave of all. Even this is not the principal calamity of the land slave. However cruel might have been the owner of the personal slave, in view of his own advantage and that he might not lose the slave, he did not force him to work incessantly, did not torture him, did not starve him, whereas the man deprived of the land is always obliged to work beyond his strength , to suffer, and to starve, and can never for one minute be completely provided for and be set free from the arbitrary will of men, especially from that of evil and avaricious men. Yet even this is not the chief calamity of the land slave. The worst is that he cannot live a moral life. Not living by labour on the land, not struggling with nature, he is inevitably obliged to struggle with men, to endeavor to take from them by force or cunning that which they have acquired from the land and from the labour of others.

Land slavery is not, as is thought even by those who recognize deprivation of land as slavery, one of the remaining forms of slavery, but is the radical and fundamental slavery, from which has grown and grows every form of slavery, and which is incomparably more painful than personal slavery, and in many cases, as it was in Russia (when the serfs were emancipated with but a small portion of land), is a deceit which can only for a time conceal from the slaves their true position.

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