[We publish here a translation into English of a poem from Albert Libertad, a seminal French anarchist communist following the same red thread of Joseph Dejacque.[1]
Like Dejacque, Libertad rejected the Proudhonist schemes of their contemporaries, and his epigones Bakunin and Kropotkin, in favour of a wholistic (i.e., involving a total transformation of human beings and society) and comprehensive vision of a fully emancipated society, which could only exist as a world communist order—an authentic fraternity of all humankind.
Indeed, according to Libertad, “the communist current and the individualist current fused at last into one another and…. found their logical outlet in anarchism.”[2]
This poem written by Libertad and published in the pages of the newspaper L’Anarquie is at once an indictment against the passivity of the exploited before the spectacle of capitalist democracy and a rousing call to revolt against every aspect of the system that keeps us in material and intellectual impoverishment.
Our publication of this writing is not meant as a cosigning of every aspect of Libertad’s politics, but it is a recognition of his contributions and place within the history of the revolutionary movement for the emancipation of our class.]
You are the criminal, oh People, since you are the Sovereign masses.
You are, it is true, the unconscious and naive criminal.
You vote and fail to see that you are your own victim.
And yet, have you not experienced enough to know that the deputies who promise to defend you—like all governments of the present and the past—are liars and powerless?
You know it and you complain! You know it and you elect them!
Rulers, whoever they may be, have worked, work, and will work for their own interests, for those of their class, and for those of their cliques.
Where and how could it be otherwise?
The governed are subordinates and exploited—do you know any who are not?
So long as you fail to understand that it depends solely on you to produce and live as you wish,
So long as you endure—out of fear—and fabricate for yourself—because you believe that authority is necessary—bosses and leaders, know this well:
Your delegates and masters will live off your labour and your foolishness.
You complain about everything! But are you not the cause of the thousand plagues that devour you?
You complain about the police, the army, the justice system, the barracks, the prisons, the administrations, the laws, the ministers, the government, the financiers, the speculators, the civil servants, the bosses, the priests, the property owners, wages, unemployment, parliament, taxes, customs officers, rentiers, the price of food, leases and rents, long hours in the workshop and the factory, the meagre sustenance, the countless deprivations and the infinite mass of social iniquities.
You complain, but you want the system in which you vegetate to continue.
Sometimes you rebel, but only to start over again.
You are the one who produces everything, who sows and tills, who forges and weaves, who kneads and transforms, who builds and manufactures, who feeds and fertilizes!
So why is your hunger not satisfied?
Why are you the one poorly clothed, poorly fed, poorly housed?
Yes, why are you not your own master?
Why do you bow down, obey, serve?
Why are you the inferior, the humiliated, the offended, the servant, the slave?
You create everything and possess nothing?
Everything exists thanks to you, and yet you are nothing.
I misspoke—you are the elector, the voter, the one who accepts things as they are.
The one who, through the ballot, ratifies all your miseries.
The one who, by voting, consecrates all your servitudes.
You are the willing servant, the obliging domestic, the lackey, the groveler, the dog that licks the whip, crawling under your master’s fist.
You are the sergeant major, the jailer, and the informant.
You are the good soldier, the model doorman, the benevolent tenant.
You are the loyal employee, the devoted servant, the sober peasant, the worker resigned to his own enslavement.
You are your own executioner.
So, what are you complaining about?
You are a danger to all of us—free men, anarchists.
You are as much a danger as the tyrants, as the masters to whom you surrender, whom you choose, whom you support, whom you sustain, whom you protect with your bayonets, whom you defend with brute force, whom you exalt with your ignorance, whom you legalize with your ballots, and whom you impose on us through your idiocy.
You are the Sovereign masses, flattered and deceived.
You are dazzled by speeches.
Posters seduce you; you are delighted by nonsense and trivialities; keep yourself content while you wait to be shot in the colonies and massacred on the borders beneath the shadow of your flag.
If self-interested tongues salivate over your royal excrement, oh Sovereign masses!
If candidates, hungry for office and bloated with inanities, brush your spine and the rump of your paper autocracy,
If you become drunk on the incense and promises poured over you by those who have always betrayed you, who deceive you, and will sell you out tomorrow,
It is because you resemble them.
It is because you are worth no more than the horde of your famished flatterers.
It is because, having failed to rise to the awareness of your individuality and your independence,
You are incapable of freeing yourself.
You do not want to—and therefore, you cannot—be free.
Go on, vote!
Trust in your representatives, believe in your elected officials.
But stop complaining.
The yokes you bear—you are the one who puts them on.
The crimes you suffer—you are the one who commits them.
You are the master, the criminal, and—ironically—you are also the slave and the victim.
We, who are weary of the oppression of the masters you provide us,
Weary of enduring their arrogance,
Weary of enduring your passivity,
Come to call you to reflection, to action.
Come now, act boldly:
Shed the narrow garb of legislation,
Scrub your body harshly so the parasites and misery that devour you may die.
Only then will you be able to live fully.
The criminal is the Electorate!
Albert Libertad – March 1st, 1906
[1] Victor Serge, who would later become involved with the Bolsheviks, mentions Libertad in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951), writing about him that: “No one knew his real name, or anything of him before he started preaching. Crippled in both legs, walking on crutches which he plied vigorously in fights (he was a great one for fighting, despite his handicap), he bore, on a powerful body, a bearded head whose face was finely proportioned. Destitute, having come as a tramp from the south, he began his preaching in Montmartre, among libertarian circles and the queues of poor devils waiting for their dole of soup not far from the site of Sacre Coeur. Violent, magnetically attractive, he became the heart and soul of a movement of such exceptional dynamism that it is not entirely dead even at this day.”
[2] Excerpted in Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism (2014), pg. 75.
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