Gérard and Didier

What we Want

June, 1995

Copied from original

Translated from the French by Charlatan Stew, 1995

We would like the human species to live in harmony with nature, of which it is an integral part. For us, living means neither dominating nor exploiting nor manipulating. We feel, therefore, that no living being should be considered or treated as an object, as a commodity.

We don't want to see lives subjugated to institutions, structures and relations that organize and administer the production and reproduction of the processes of domination, division and exploitation.

At present, the essence of our lives is reduced to meeting the obligations and obeying the constraints that torment, weaken and shatter our awareness and sensitivity to the world. These daily exactions paralyze the faculties which might permit us to conceive of our lives as something other than the instruments and materials of a system of oppression and exploitation.

WHAT WE WANT IS COMMUNITY AND MUTUAL AID

We want to live in a society that really is a society, that is, an association of individuals. This would be a society where classes no longer exist, a society without the categories and status distinctions which grant benefits and privileges to some while others submit to constraints and restrictions. It would be a society in which relations between living beings would no longer be based on domination and submission.

It would be a society without power, without hierarchy and, of course, without a state.

There would be no rivalry and competition, and, of course, no money.

There would be no wage labor, no unemployment and, obviously, no capitalism.

It would be a society made up of many and different kinds of associations, where every person would be able to participate or not participate according to her or his inclinations and desires.

In order to live together, to partake in activities, to create, to make decisions and to settle their differences, human beings would come to understandings and formulate agreements without the need of recourse to either hierarchies or representative institutions.

When their lives are no longer submitted to the yoke and the illusions of the "market," whatever people choose to produce and decide to use will be the fruit of their tastes and preferences. The disappearance of the ideas of profit, market advantage, and competition will lead individuals to reflect on the usefulness, goals, means, conditions and consequences of their actions, both between themselves and with respect to the rest of nature.

WHAT WE WANT IS WHAT WE CALL ANARCHY

So we are anarchists. But...names mean so little. What matters is that in the society we would like to see, the individual would be respected in body and mind.

Given the oppression, exploitation and constraints of the present order, it is inevitable that resistance, disgust, indignation and revolt will arise. These forms of rejection of humiliation and suffering must become the source of dreams, thoughts and reflections whose communication gives confidence to individuals and provokes acts of disobedience and the emergence of relationships and associations that foster the abolition of everything that, for millennia, has reduced humans to marionettes, functioning as instruments, thrown away when no longer needed.

It is vital to reject this world, so destructive of lives, and to seek every way to escape it and destroy it. All the attempts to improve or reform it only highlight, purely and simply, what a fraud it is.

The important thing is to get rid of all the life-crushing machinery, which, in various forms (institutions, beliefs, customs, rituals...), mutilate individuals physically and mentally.

It is important to create a society in which lives are no longer dependent on the mechanisms that produce "dominators" and "dominated," "winners" and "losers."