Since every creation is the culmination of countless contributors, no single individual should be able to claim it as their own
The value of all goods and services have been created by the accumulated labour of the countless workers of the past, and is only maintained by todays workers. Humanities wealth today owes its value to the fact that it is a part of the greater whole. Countless human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Others, scattered across the globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins. There is not one thought or an invention which is not common property, born of past and present labour.
Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added minute improvements to the original, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, and the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it. Each discovery and advance owes its being to the physical and mental efforts of the past and the present. By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate even the slitest protion this immense whole and say “This is mine, not yours?” However over the ages It has come about that means of production have been seized by the bourgeois few.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 1. Our riches (p. 51).