Note 1326 — Chapter IV · : THE ANARCHISTS

“Society itself is every day creating beings imbued with anti-social feelings and incapable of leading honest, industrious lives.” (Kropotkin, quoted by Eltzbacher, loc. cit., p. 221.) “Seeing that the organisation of society is always and everywhere the one cause of all the crimes committed by men, its conduct in punishing criminals is clearly absurd or obviously insincere. Every punishment implies guilt, but the criminals in this case are never guilty. We deny the so-called right of society to bestow punishment in this arbitrary fashion. A human being is simply the unwilling product of the natural or social environment in which he was born and reared and under whose influence he still remains. The three great causes of human immorality are inequality, whether political, economic, or social; ignorance, which is its natural result; and slavery, its inevitable consequence.” (Bakunin, Programme de l’Alliance internationale de la Démocratie socialiste, in Sozial-politischer Briefwechsel, pp. 332-333.)

“Property and want are the great incentives to crime. But if defective society organisation is the cause of crime, an improvement in organisation should cause a disappearance of crime.” (Jean Grave, La Société future, pp. 137-138.)