equivalent; and as the bank would be able to lend the labour cheques' money without interest, and every association would be able to borrow it on payment of only 1 per cent, or less to cover the administration costs, capital would lose its pernicious power; it could be used no more as an instrument of exploitation.
Proudhon gave to the system of Mutualism a very full development in connection with his anti-Government and anti-State ideas; but it must be said that the Mutualist portion of his programme had been developed in England already by William Thompson (he was a Mutualist prior to his becoming a Communist) and the English followers of Thompson—John Gray (1825, 1831) and J. F. Bray (1839).
In the United States, the same direction was represented by Josiah Warren, who, after having taken part in Robert Owen's colony, "New Harmony," turned against Communism, and in 1827 founded, in Cincinnatti, a "store" in which goods were exchanged on the principle of time-value and labour cheques. Such institutions remained in existence up till 1865 under the names of "Equity Stores," "Equity Village," and "House of Equity."
The same ideas of labour-value and exchange at labour-cost were advocated in Germany, in 1843 and 1845, by Moses Hess and Karl Grün; and in Switzerland by Wilhelm Marr, who opposed the authoritarian Communist teachings of Weitling.
On the other side, in opposition to the strongly authoritarian Communism of Weitling, which had found a great number of adherents among working men in Germany, there appeared in 1845 the work of a German Hegelian, Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt was his real name), "The Ego and His Own," which was lately rediscovered, so to say, by J. H. Mackay, and very much spoken of in Anarchist circles as a sort of manifesto of the Individualist Anarchists.[1]
Stirner's work is a revolt against both the State and the new tyranny which would have been imposed upon man if authoritarian Communism were introduced. Reasoning on Hegelian metaphysical lines, Stirner preaches therefore the rehabilitation of the "I" and the supremacy of the individual; and he comes in this way to advocate complete "a-moralism" (no morality) and an "association of egoists."
- ↑ A French translation of it was published at Paris in 1900, and an English translation, under the above title, was published by B. R. Tucker at New York in 1907.
