Note: In the given text, the phrase "Individual Property" applies to what we consider now "Private Property" such as machinery, factories, and fields. The "Individual Property" in this text is not the one that rightfully belongs to each of us individuals.
You know it. Individual property is the right to exclusive and absolute possession that some privileged people called owners have over things that should belong to everyone, because they are either a product of nature or a product of all working men.
The land was given by nature in common to all men, to serve the needs of all; Instead, some, through fraud or deception, began in primitive times to gradually take over the land and call themselves its legitimate owners. Later they began to make this land work by slaves, who were the soldiers taken in the war. When slavery, properly so called, later ceased, a new form of slavery began, no better than the old one, the wage-earning began; the men who, through good faith or carelessness, had been left with nothing were called to work these lands.
Then the worker began to bend his neck under the yoke of work; Since then the worker, the laborer, has voluntarily become the slave of the owners, of the lords who steal a little a day on their toil and increase their wealth and property. But this property was unjust from its beginning, because it had its origin in robbery and fraud and was increasing through continuous thefts, which the laws, always friendly to the rich, have at all times protected and helped.
The first owners were thieves, predators, innkeepers, who suckled under the name of conquerors of towns.
Ancient history tells us horrendous carnage committed by some peoples against other peoples to deprive them of their lands. But the conquered lands are divided only between the leaders of the conquering armies and the rulers of the victorious nation.
To the soldiers who, in the name of the country, were made to face death on the battlefield, nothing ever came to them.
And the blood of the peoples stripped of their lands and assets by other peoples led by ambitious rulers, was the first baptism of this right of INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY; It was an infamous baptism that marks this forever infamous principle of bourgeois institutions with the stain of crime.
From its beginning, individual property is destined to perish, because it has no foundation of justice; Since property and wealth cannot be the result of honest work, they are, yes, or of violent theft or the continuous and progressive exploitation of entire generations of workers.
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Property and wealth cannot be the fruit of work, however continuous and incessant it may be, since you, who live only by not dying of work and fatigue, would now be rich, while you certainly do not expect to be, even working forever, since today's earnings are not enough for tomorrow.
Thus, individual property, which is a privilege of the few, individual property that condemns all true workers who do not own anything to hunger, is destined to fall; the property of all things was common to all men, and therefore all men were owners of all things that nature had not particularly gifted to anyone.
Individual property was a theft to the detriment of the entire human race, because it preserved for the privileged few what belonged to all men. Flawed in its origin and in all its individual manifestations, individual property is necessarily destined to fall back on common property. The land, the products of agriculture and industry, the machines, the instruments of all work, will once again become the property of all men bound up in a solemn and beneficial pact: FIRST RIGHT, TO LIVE; FIRST DUTY, TO WORK.
And for what reason should the machines belong to the rich? Have they built them? Are they the ones they hope to make them work and render them useful? They have done nothing.
Why should the lands belong to the privileged few who do not use fatigue to make them fruitful, while others only think of working them even knowing that the owners keep most of the products?
Have you ever seen among you, oh workers of the field, some of these idle exploiters of your fatigue come to help you in your daily work on the lands that they claim to belong to them, to make them more fruitful? Certainly not.
They, the masters of the lands on which you exhaust your existence, have just the time to consume daily the income that you with your sweat procure for them, or to play at the bag what would be enough for your family for many years of comfortable and quiet life .
If the lands and machines were to belong exclusively to some, they should belong to those who make them produce with their work. Without the class of lords and owners who produce nothing and instead consume almost all the products of the land and machines, these would not cease to be useful, because the work of the farmer and the worker makes them fruitful. But without the working class what would not be of men and especially of the so-called ruling class?
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Work is then the first element of social life, and around the glorious banner of work, humanity will lovingly extend its hand; and then under the formidable impulse of the great revolution, individual property will have perished and will be converted into COMMON PROPERTY.
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