ABSTRACT
Among all the forms of social organization which history has to show, there are very few which appear to be really free from oppression; and these few are not very well known. The notion of force is far from simple, and yet it is the first that has to be elucidated in order to formulate the problems of society. Oppression proceeds exclusively from objective conditions. The first of these is the existence of privileges; and it is not men's laws or decrees which determine privileges, nor yet titles to property; it is the very nature of things. As Marx clearly understood in the case of capitalism, and as a few moralists have perceived in a more general way, power contains a sort of fatality which weighs as pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey; nay more, it is in so far as it enslaves the former that, through their agency, it presses down upon the latter.
