C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Ernest Lesigne’s “Socialism Without Statism” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Ernest Lesigne’s “Socialism Without Statism“.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.60 for every additional copy.

This booklet contains three provocative letters on socialism, government and property by the French mutualist journalist and historian Ernest Lesigne; three letters which constitute theses on freed-market anti-capitalism, and three defenses of a smallholder, co-operative economy as the only liberating solution to the social problem. The three letters in this collection are:

These “Socialistic Letters” are selections from a series of twelve letters published by Lesigne in the French paper Le Radical during 1887. The three appearing here in English were translated by the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, and re-printed in his newspaper Liberty in the same year.

“The entire code of law is the book of guarantees imposed to prevent property, the means of production, the instru­ment of liberty, dignity, equality, from passing out of the hands of the primitive monopolist into those of the con­tem­p­o­r­ary producer; the Code is the isolation of servants con­front­ed with the coalition of masters; it is the pro­hib­it­ion of real con­tract between employer and employee; it is the constraint of the latter to accept from the former exactly the minimum of wages indispensable to sub­sist­ence; and in any case where all these guarantees may have been vain, where a few laborers, by a fortunate stroke, may have succeeded in accumulating a little cap­it­al, the Code is a trap set to catch these little savings, the canal­iz­ation ingeniously organized so that all that has tem­por­ar­ily left the hands of the monopolist may return to them by an adroit system of drainage, – so that the water, as the saying is in the villages, may always go to the river. . . .”