In a back alley of the City, an attempt was made to rob a jewelry shop, and the thieves, surprised by the police, escaped by clearing themselves a passage with revolver shots. Later, two of the thieves, discovered in a house in the East End, defended themselves again with revolvers and died in battle.

At base, there is nothing extraordinary about this in the present society, unless it is the exceptional energy with which the thieves defended themselves.

But these thieves were Russians, perhaps Russian refugees, and maybe they also went to an Anarchist club on days of public meetings, when they were open to everybody. And naturally the capitalist Press avails itself to declare war upon the Anarchists. If one were to believe the bourgeois papers one would think that anarchy, that dream of justice and love amongst men, is nothing but theft and assassination; and with these lies and calumnies they certainly succeed in turning away from us many people who would be with us if they only knew what we want.

Thus it will not be useless to state once more the position of Anarchists respecting the theory and practice of theft.

One of the fundamental points of Anarchism is the abolition of the monopoly of the land, raw material, and the instruments of production, and thereby the abolition of the exploitation of other people’s labour by those who hold the means of production. Any appropriation of other people’s labour, everything that serves to enable a man to live without giving to society his quota of production is, from the Anarchist and Socialist point of view, a theft.

The landlords, the capitalists have stolen from the people, by violence or by fraud, the land and all the means of production, and in consequence of this initial theft they are enabled, day by day, to take away from the workers the products of labour. But they were happy thieves, for they became strong; they made laws in order that they might justify their situation, and they have organised a whole system of repression to defend themselves against the claims of the workers as well as against those who would like to replace them by doing as they did themselves. And today their theft is called property, commerce, industry, etc., the name of “thief” being reserved, in common language, for those who would like to follow the example of the capitalists, but, because they arrived too late and in adverse circumstances, cannot do it without putting themselves in conflict with the law.

However, the difference of names currently used does not suffice to hide the moral and social character of the two situations. The capitalist is a thief who has succeeded either by his merits or by those of his ancestors; the thief is an aspiring capitalist who is but waiting to succeed to become a capitalist, in fact, and live without working on the product of his theft, that is to say, on other people’s labour.

As enemies of the capitalists, we cannot sympathise for the thief who aspires at becoming a capitalist, and being in favour of their expropriation by the people for the profit of all, we cannot, as Anarchists, have anything in common with an operation whose object is to get some wealth to pass from the hands of one owner into those of another.

Naturally, I mean to speak of the professional thief, of the one who does not want to work and seeks to means to live as a parasite on the labour of others. It is quite another thing when it is a question of a man to whom society has denied the means of labouring, who steals in order not to die of hunger or let his children starve. In that case the theft (if one can call it that) is a revolt against social injustice, and can become the most sacred of rights and even the most imperious of duties. But the capitalist press avoids speaking of these cases, because then it would have to put on trial the social order that it is its mission to defend!

Certainly the professional thief is also, in large part, a victim of the social environment. The example that comes from above, the education received and the disgusting conditions in which they are often forced to work easily explain how men, who are not morally superior to their contemporaries, given the alternative of being exploited or exploiters, choose to be exploiters and try to become such by the means within their reach. But these extenuating circumstances can also apply to capitalists and the substantial identity of the professions remains that much better demonstrated.

Thus Anarchist ideas cannot drive people to become thieves any more than to become capitalists. On the contrary, by giving to the discontented an ideal of superior life, and a hope of collective emancipation, they turn away, as far as possible in the present midst, from all these legal or illegal doings which are but an adaptation to the capitalist system and tend towards perpetuating it.

Notwithstanding all this, the social midst being so strong and personal temperaments so different, there might possibly be amongst the Anarchists a few who go in for thieving as there are some who go in for commerce or industry; but in that case both are acting, not because of their Anarchist ideas, but in spite of these.