Conceptual Origins
In 1840, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a French anarchist, wrote What Is Property?, a question to which he famously answered "property is theft". By this, Proudhon meant that legitimate private property could result only from an individual's labor and all other capital was, in effect, stolen. This economic world view converged in the minds of radicals with the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakunin's concept of propaganda of the deed, the use of physical violence against political enemies as a method of inspiring the masses.
A marginal sector of European individualist anarchism derived the idea of individual reclamation as a means of breaking down what they perceived as the robbery of the laboring class by capitalists, politicians and the church. The individual's expropriation was regarded as legitimate resistance against an unfair social order, an ethical right to even the distribution of wealth.
Read more about this topic: Individual Reclamation
Famous quotes containing the words conceptual and/or origins:
“I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead—the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)