“Even in a society, where the development of individual ability
is tied up with the administration of the political state, or to the
forces of economic life, even there, real productivity, in everything
requiring the expenditure of capital, depends on as much of free
individual power as can find its way through the shackles imposed
upon it. Only, under such conditions, the development is an unhealthy
one. It is not the free development of individual ability, exercised
on a basis of capital, that has brought about conditions under which
human labor-power can be nothing but a commodity; it is the shackling
of these powers through the political life, of the state or in the
circuit of economic processes. An unprejudiced recognition of this
fact is at the present day a necessary first step to everything that
has to be done in the field of social organization. For the
superstition has grown up in modern times that the measures needed
for the welfare of society must come from either the political state
or the economic system. And if we pursue any further the road along
which this superstition has started us, we shall set up all manner of
institutions that, far from leading man to the goal towards which he
is striving, will increasingly aggravate the oppressive conditions
from which he is seeking to escape.”