[Republication of this or any other article does not entail endorsement or encouragement of the views expressed by its author. -Ed]
Originally published in the Spanish language on the front page of ‘Regeneración’, March 18, 1918, Los Angeles, edited by Ricardo Flores Magón, translated into English for the expanded 1977 Cienfuegos Press edition of the 1913 booklet ‘Land and Liberty‘
Comrades:
The clock of history is nearing the time, when, with its inexorable hand, it will indicate the instant in which this already dying society will finally die.
The death of the old society is near. It will happen very soon, and only those interested in its continuing existence, those who profit from injustice and those who see with horror the Social Revolution where they will have to work side by side with their former slaves will deny this.
Everything indicates, with force of evidence, that the death of bourgeois society will not be long in coming. The citizen looks grimly at the policeman whom he considered yesterday as his protector and support. The assiduous reader of the bourgeois press, sweeps men aside and drops with dismay the prostituted sheet in which appears the declarations of the chiefs of states. The workers strike without caring if national interests are damaged or not, already aware that the fatherland does not belong to them but to the rich.
You can see faces in the street that clearly show their interior discontent while their arms are agitating to build barricades. You hear murmurs in the bars, in the theatres, in the trams and in each home, especially in ours, the homes of the poor. You cry when a son leaves for the war, or you can die of a broken heart when you think that tomorrow, or even today, that young man who was the happiness of the home, who, with his freshness and kindness turned the sad existence of his old parents into one of happiness, will be armed and facing a young man like himself, a young man he cannot hate because he does not know [him].
The flames of discontent are encouraged and fanned by a tyranny, which in all countries is becoming increasingly cruel and arrogant. Everywhere fists become clenched, minds become exhalted, hearts beat with violence, and those who do not murmur, shout, longing for the moment when their hardened hands will drop the work tools and take up the rifle that is waiting for the hero’s caress.
Comrades: The moment is solemn. It is the moment before the greatest political and social catastrophe that history has recorded: the insurrection of all the people against their present conditions.
It will certainly be the blind impulse of the suffering masses. It will be, without doubt, the chaotic explosion of anger, unrestrained by the guard’s revolver or the hangman’s gallows. It will be the overflowing of all indignation, of all bitterness, and in the chaos that will follow new tyrants will be born, because in such cases with regularity charlatans become leaders.
Therefore, it rests with you, the consciencious, to prepare the people’s minds for this moment, but not for the insurrection, as that will be born of tyranny.
Prepare the people, not only to await this great event with serenity, but also prepare them for those who would drag them along the paths of flowers and in the end subject them to the same enslavement that they suffer today.
For the rebellion to succeed without unconsciously forging with its own hands new chains that will again enslave the people, it is necessary that we, who do not believe in Government, that we, who are convinced that Government in all its forms and whoever is at its head is a tyranny because it is not an institution created to protect the weak, but to protect the strong, must use every circumstance to spread, without fear, our sacred anarchist ideal, the only human, the only just and the only true.
Failing to do this is to betray the aspirations of the people for a liberty whose only limits are natural ones, a liberty that will not endanger the conservation of the species.
Failing to do this is to leave the poor in the hands of those who will sacrifice them to their own interests.
Failing to do this will affirm the conviction of our enemies who claim “that the day is far off when we will be able to implant new ideas”.
Activity, activity and more activity is what we must have at this moment.
Let each man and each woman that loves the anarchist ideal spread it with tenacity, without thinking of danger or taking notice of ridicule or considering the consequence.
To work comrades, and the future will be our ideal.
LAND AND LIBERTY!
Given in Los Angeles, State of California, United States of America, the 16th of March 1918.
Ricardo Flores Magon
Librado Rivera
Also
LGBTQ people in Mexico, from Wikipedia
Jacinto Lives! Memories from St. Louis, by a few sad anarchists in St. Louis (2021)
La batalla de Oaxaca, de Laura Castellanos y Heriberto Paredes (2019)
Librado Rivera, by Dave Poole (1980)
Preface to ‘Land and Liberty’, by Albert Meltzer (1977)
The Pacification of the Yaqui, by Librado Rivera (1927)
From Behind the Bars, by Librado Rivera (1923)
Patriotism, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1917)
On the March, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1917)
The War, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1917)
The Roundup, by Enrique Flores Magón (1917)
The Barricade and the Trench, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1915)
The Death of the Bourgeois System, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1915)
To the Soldiers, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1914)
The Traitors!, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1912)
A Livelong Propagandist, by William C. Owen (1912)
Manifesto of the Organizing Junta of the Mexican Liberal Party to the People of Mexico (1911)
Manifesto to the Workers of the World, by the Mexican Liberal Party (1911)
Will this Struggle be Drowned in Blood?, by Voltairine de Cleyre (1911)
The Rifle, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1911)
Cannon Fodder, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1910)
The Means and the End, by Praxedis G. Guerrero (1910)
Anarchists & Socialists debate the Mexican Revolution (featuring anti-Indigenous/anti-Mestizo racism)
“…standing out amongst our enemies [who are engaged in a smear campaign against Mexican revolutionaries], Luigi Galleani of Cronaca Sovversiva and Jean Grave of Les Temps Nouveaux.”
-Ricardo Flores Magón, Regeneración, Los Angeles, April 13, 1912
Observations and Comments on the Mexican Revolution, from Mother Earth (1911)
The Mexican Revolt, by Voltairine de Cleyre (1911)
Open Letter to Eugene V. Debs, by Lucille Norman (1911)
Murderous Silence: Luigi Galleani and Cronaca Sovversiva, from Regeneración Sezione Italiana (1911)
The Mexican People are Suited to Communism, by Ricardo Flores Magón (1911)
When Put to the Test, by William C. Owen (1912)
Anarchists Who Are All Talk?, by Estela Arteaga / No More Charades!, by Lucia Norman (1916)
U.S. Socialists and the Mexican Revolution, by Dan La Botz (2010)
“The Whole World is Our Country” [featuring racism from Luigi Galleani], by Kenyon Zimmer (2015)
Also
Voices of Mexican Anarchists and Supporters
