Speech To The People by Carlo Michelstaedter

You beat me and you are in the right to do so! You'll kill me and you'll still be in the right! But my right is that of the free word, and your duty is to listen to me. For if the act was brutal and if it justifies the brutal expression of your surprise, it was not brutal the intentional, it was not your enemy. It is love for you, for the idea that today brings you together that has made me rebel and rebel against an enthusiasm that does not correspond to your will, O brothers, to that will that makes you strong against the tyranny of Spain. If tomorrow you still had to reunite and not with the indeterminate outrage of today, but with fresh indignation, with a fresh wound, with the threat present, if you were to meet here tomorrow and affirm your will to the end, to make success with the facts and in the present life, and for the personal interests in each and every single one of you - against the authority constituted by the law, against the authority constituted by money, against the government and the bourgeoisie - that ideal that moves you now, brothers, that marvelous instrument that you have now applauded would measure strength on you - and shots from above would respond from front, back and center; and at the sides other shots to sow death among your ranks, to drown your anger in blood, to bring down forever your most cherished hopes. As long as these hopes are vague and distant, as long as you suffer your material and social miseries in silence, you are an innocuous bunch of unhappy ones to be exploited; and bourgeois society exploits you, in peace and in silence; and as it holds on to the yoke of your need and your weakness, there is no need to make you feel the deadly force of your weapons.But it prepares its weapon in silence and peace and she knows how to cover them with the luminous appearances of humanity and progress, and you - you applaud them! ... But the day that you acquire full awareness of your rights and your strength, the day you will be gathered around your heroes, around the "Ferrer" [reference to Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, anarchist thinker and agitator] of your revolution, under the banner of liberty for the people, the day you want to affirm the beginning of a new life of justice and faith - that day, brothers, the humanity and the progress of the bourgeoisie will reveal their true face, they will hold you in a circle of iron and fire, without mercy for the slaves who rebel. - You will be slaves forever if you fail to unmask the miserable hypocrisy of the bourgeois power, which covers its defenses with flowers and hides the dagger in its bosom. But the power is yours, brothers, to you belongs the future, because you have "faith", and yours is the right. - Bourgeois society, because it has usurped power that does not belong to it, with the strength that comes only from your current weakness, since it has no other faith than the thirst for profit, no other right than tyranny, needs the science that encapsulates in it the opprobri of its arrogance, the science that gives her the immeasurable weapons of strength and devices of war that dominate the sea, the earth and the sky, needs the government that draws from your own ranks the men necessary to keep you slaves, guards, riflemen , soldiers. Brothers, you have applauded the symbol of the power that crushes you.- But you will shake yourself out of your inertia, you will all join together, you will each bear the contribution of your brotherly love and of your desperate strength, born out of daily suffering - and then you will be invincible, then this vain bourgeois power building that dominates you and that you respect, that dominates you only because you respect it, it will crumble with all its laws, its institutions, its vain science, its hypocritical morality, the armies of the preparers, the armies of the executors of the tyranny will disappear: scientists, clerks, soldiers will be extinct races, in this new world.- And it will be a world where "man" will reign, the man of work, the man who is sane of body and mind, the man who will not have a need for unjust laws, unjust because they're complicated, to be protected by his brother, not by militias and weapons laboriously devised to protect his enemies: but his faith, and the common work, and the close team of fraternal love, will be his government and law and defense in the realm of work and justice. Brothers, this man sleeps in each of you and waits for the day he will awaken-brothers, I may be a dark one, but in me sleeps the voice of that man. As soon as I go out and go back into the darkness, these are my first words and they will be my last. Tomorrow perhaps in the hands of bourgeois justice lurking around us I will suffer the fate that awaits Derrer. But if it can enlighten your conscience, hasten your awakening and approximate the advent of "man" and of the subrum, then I will be pleased with my death. Goodbye brothers - long live work and justice - death to the bourgeoisie

This speech, despite being hair-raising at times (such as briefly dismissing scientists as bourgeois), remains a rousing call for the masses to take up either Marxism or Anarchism (which one it isn't clear).

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