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Title: Words of a Rebel Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1885 Language: en Topics: anarchism, classical Source: Retrieved on August 27, 2006 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/words/wordsofarebeltoc.html
Words of a Rebel
Peter Kropotkin
It is evident that we are advancing rapidly towards revolution, towards
an upheaval that will begin in one country and spread, as in 1848, into
all the neighbouring lands, and, as it rocks existing society to its
foundations, will also reopen the springs of life.
To confirm our view, we do not even have to invoke the testimony of a
celebrated German historian,(1) or a well-known Italian philosopher,(2)
both of whom, having deeply studied the history of our times, have
reached the conclusion that a great revolution was inevitable towards
the end of this century. We need only watch the panorama that has
unrolled before us over the past twenty years; we need only observe what
goes on around us.
When we do so, we perceive two major facts emerging from the murky
depths of the canvas: the awakening of the peoples, in contrast to the
moral, intellectual and economic failure of the ruling classes; and the
agitated yet powerless efforts of people of wealth to hinder that
awakening.
Yes, the awakening of the peoples!
In the suffocating atmosphere of the factory as much as in the darkness
of the cookshop kitchen, under the roof of the granary as much as in the
streaming galleries of the mine, a new world is taking shape these days.
Among those shadowy masses, whom the bourgeois despise as much as they
fear them, yet from whose midst has always stirred the breath that
inspired the great reformers, the most difficult problems of social
economy and political organization are posed one after another,
discussed, and given new solutions dictated by the sense of justice.
These discussions cut to the heart of society’s sickness. New hopes are
awakened, new ideas emerge.
Opinions mingle and vary to the point of infinity, but two streams of
ideas already sound more and more distinctly in this din of voices: the
abolition of individual property and communism; and the abolition of the
State, its replacement by the free commune, and the international union
of working men. The two ways converge in a single aim: Equality. Not
that hypocritical formula of equality, inscribed by the bourgeoisie on
its banners and in its codes for the easier enslavement of the producer,
but true equality: land, capital and work shared by all.
It is in vain that the ruling classes seek to stifle these aspirations
by imprisoning men and suppressing their writings. The new ideas
penetrate people’s minds, take possession of their hearts in the same
way as in the past the myth of the rich and free lands of the East
possessed the hearts of the serfs when they rushed into the ranks of the
crusaders. The idea may sleep for a while; if its appearance on the
surface is prevented, it may burrow beneath the soil, but that will lead
only to its resurging stronger than ever before. You have only to look
at the present reawakening of socialism in France, the second revival in
the short space of fifteen years. When the wave breaks it rises even
higher an instant afterwards. And as soon as a first attempt is made to
put the new ideas into practice, they will stand up before everyone in
all their simplicity, in all their splendour. Let one attempt be
successful, and the awareness of their own strength will give the
peoples a heroic impulse.
This moment cannot be long delayed. Everything brings us near the point
when poverty itself, which forces the unfortunate to take thought,
reaches the point of forced unemployment, when the man who has already
started to think is torn from the narrow setting of his workshop and
thrown into the streets, where he quickly comes to know both the
viciousness and the powerlessness of the ruling classes.
And, in the meantime, what are these ruling classes achieving?
While natural sciences are assuming a vigour that reminds one of the
last century when the great French revolution was approaching and while
bold inventors open up new horizons each day to the struggle of humanity
against the hostile forces of nature, social science — a bourgeois
creation — remains silent and is content to work over its outdated
theories.
But perhaps these ruling classes are making progress in practical
matters? Far from it. They remain obstinately intent on waving their
ragged banners, on defending egotistic individualism, competition
between man and man and nation and nation, and the omnipotence of the
centralizing State.
They change from protectionism to free trade, and from free trade back
to protectionism; from reaction to liberalism and from liberalism back
to reaction; from atheism to superstition and from superstition back to
atheism; always fearful, always looking towards the past, ever less
capable of realizing anything that lasts. Everything these ruling
classes have achieved has in fact been a contradiction of whatever they
have promised. They promised to guarantee us freedom to work-and they
have made us slaves to the factory, to the owner, to the overseer. They
took the responsibility for organizing industry, for guaranteeing our
well being, and they have given us endless crises and resultant poverty;
they promised us education-and we are reduced to the impossible task of
teaching ourselves; they promised us political freedom, and have led us
on from one reaction to the next; they promised us peace, and have given
us wars without end. They have failed in all their promises.
But the people are weary of it all; they are beginning to ask each other
where they have ended up, after letting themselves be gulfed and
governed for so long by the bourgeoisie. The answer to that question can
be seen in the economic situation that now afflicts Europe. The crises
that hitherto were passing calamities have become chronic. The crisis in
cotton, the crisis in the metal industry, the crisis in watchmaking, all
of these crises now occur simultaneously and take on permanence.
At the present moment one can count several millions of people out of
work in Europe; tens of thousands prowl from town to town, begging for
their living or rioting and with threats demanding work or bread! As the
peasants of 1787 wandered by thousands over the roads without finding in
the rich soil of their country, appropriated by the aristocrats, a plot
of land to cultivate or a hoe to till it, so today the workers wait with
idle hands for lack of access to the materials and me tools needed for
production because they are in the hands of a few idlers.
Great industries are allowed to die, great cities like Sheffield are
turned into deserts. There is poverty in England, above all in England,
for it is there that the “economists” have most thoroughly applied their
principles, but there is poverty also in Alsace and hunger in Spain and
Italy. Unemployment exists everywhere, and with unemployment, mere lack
becomes real poverty; anaemic children and women ageing five years in a
single winter; sickness moving with great sweeps through the ranks of
the workers! This is what we have attained under the rule of the
capitalists.
And they talk to us of over-production! Over-production? When the miner
who piles up mountains of coal has no money to pay for a fire in the
depth of winter? When the weaver who produces miles of cloth cannot
afford shirts for his ragged children? When the mason who builds a
palace lives in a hovel, and the seamstress who creates masterpieces for
the fashionable dress shops has only one ragged shawl to protect her in
all weathers?
Is this what they call the organization of industry? One might rather
call it a secret alliance of the capitalists to tame the workers by
hunger.
We are told that capital, that product of work of all humankind which
has been accumulated in the hands of the few, is fleeing from
agriculture and industry for lack of confidence. But where will it find
its perch, once it has left the strong-boxes?
In fact, it has many advantageous destinations. It can go to furnish the
harems of the Sultan; it can supply the wars, sustaining the Russian
against the Turk and, at the same time, the Turk against the Russian.
Or, alternatively, it can be used to found a joint stock company, not to
produce anything, but simply to lead in a couple of years to a
scandalous failure as soon as the financial bigshots have withdrawn,
taking millions with them as the reward for their “idea.” Or, again,
capital can be used to construct useless railways, over the Gothard, in
Japan, across the Sahara if need be-provided that the Rothschilds who
underwrite them, the engineers in charge and the contractors can make a
few million each.
But above all, capital can plunge into speculation, the great game of
the stock exchange. The capitalist gambles on artificially induced
increases in the price of wheat or cotton; he gambles on politics, on
the rising prices induced by some rumour of reform or some leaked
diplomatic note; and very often-we see it every day-the government
officials themselves dabble in these speculations.
Speculation killing industry-that is what they call the intelligent
management of business! It is for that the capitalists tell us that we
should support them!
In brief, economic chaos is at its height. However, this chaos cannot
last for long. The people are tired of crises provoked by the greed of
the ruling classes; they want to live by working and not to suffer years
of poverty, seasoned by humiliating charity, for the sake of perhaps two
or three years of exhausting work, sometimes more or less assured, but
always badly remunerated.
The worker is becoming aware of the incapacity of the governing classes;
their incapacity to understand his own new aspirations; their incapacity
to manage industry; their incapacity to organize production and
exchange.
The people will soon declare the deposition of the bourgeoisie. They
will take matters into their own hands as soon as the propitious moment
offers itself.
That moment cannot be far off, since the very difficulties that are
gnawing away at industry will precipitate it, and its advent will be
hastened by the breakdown of the State, a breakdown that in our day has
entered its final precipitate phase.
If the economic situation of Europe can be summed up in these
words-industrial and commercial chaos and the failure of capitalist
production-the situation in politics can be defined as the rapid
breakdown of the State and its entire failure, which will take place
very soon.
Consider all the various States, from the police autocracy of Russia to
the bourgeois oligarchy of Switzerland, and you will not find a single
example today (with the possible exception of Sweden and Norway)(3) of a
State that is not set on an accelerating course towards disintegration
and eventually, revolution.
Like wornout old men, their skin shrivelled and their feet stumbling,
gnawed at by mortal sicknesses, incapable of embarking on the tide of
new ideas, the States of Europe squander what strength remains to them,
and while living on credit of their past, they merely hasten their ends
by squabbling like aged gossips.
Having reached a high point in the eighteenth century, the old States of
Europe have now entered into their decline; they are falling into
decrepitude. The peoples-and especially those of Latin race-are already
looking forward to the destruction of that power which merely hinders
their free development. They desire autonomy for provinces, for
communes, for groups of workers drawn together, no longer by a power
imposed on them, but by the links of mutual agreement, by free consent.
This is the phase of history on which we are entering, and nothing can
hinder its realization. If the ruling classes could understand the
situation they would hasten to put themselves in the van of such a
movement and its aspirations. But, having grown old in their traditions
and having no other object of worship than their money bags, they oppose
the new current of ideas with all their strength. And, inevitably, they
are leading us towards a violent outburst. The hopes of men and women
will see the light of day-but the dawn will be accompanied by the
rumbling of cannon and the rattle of machine-gun fire and it will be
illuminated by conflagrations.
After the decline of the institutional life of the Middle Ages, the
nascent States made their appearance in Europe, consolidating themselves
and growing by conquest, by intrigue, by assassination, but as yet they
interfered only in a small sphere of human affairs.
Today the State takes upon itself to meddle in all the areas of our
lives. From the cradle to the grave, it hugs us in its arms. Sometimes
as the central government, sometimes as the provincial or cantonal
government, and sometimes even as the communal or municipal government,
it follows our every step, it appears at every turning of the road, it
taxes, harasses and restrains us.
It legislates on all our actions. It accumulates mountains of laws and
ordinances among which even the shrewdest of lawyers can no longer find
his way. Every day it devises new cogwheels to be fitted into the
wornout old engine, and it ends up having created a machine so
complicated, so misbegotten and so obstructive that it repels even those
who attempt to keep it going.
The State creates an army of employees like light-fingered spiders, who
know the world only through the murky windows of their offices or
through their documents written in absurd jargons; it is a black band
with only one religion, that of money, only one care, that of attaching
oneself to any party, black, purple, or white, so long as it guarantees
a maximum of appointments with a minimum of work.
The results we know only too well. Is there a single branch of the
State’s activity that does not arouse revolution in those unfortunate
enough to have dealings with it? Is there a single direction in which
the State, after centuries of existence and of patchy renovation, has
not shown its complete incompetence?
The vast and ever growing sums of money which the States appropriate
from the people are never sufficient.. The State always exists at the
expense of future generations; it accumulates debt and everywhere it
approaches bankruptcy. The public debts of the European States have
already reached the vast, almost incredible figure of more than five
milliards, i.e. five hundred million francs!(4) If all the receipts of
the various States were employed to the last penny just to pay off these
debts, it could hardly be done in fifteen years. But, far from
diminishing, the debts grow from day to day, for it is in the nature of
things that the needs of States are always in excess of their means.
Inevitably the State seeks to extend its jurisdiction; every party in
power is obliged to create new employment for its supporters. It is an
irrevocable process.
Thus the deficits and public debts continue and will continue, always
growing, even in times of peace. But as soon as a war begins, however
small, the debts of the States increase at an alarming rate. There is no
ending; it is impossible to find our way out of this labyrinth.
The States of the world are heading full steam for ruin and bankruptcy;
and the day is not distant when the people, tired of paying four
milliards of interest each year to the bankers, will declare the failure
of State governments and send the bankers to dig the soil if they are
hungry.
Say “State” and you say “war.” The State strives and must strive to be
strong, and stronger than its neighbours; if it is not so, it will
become a plaything in their hands. Of necessity it seeks to weaken and
impoverish other States so that it can impose on them its laws, its
policies, its commercial treaties, and grow rich at their expense. The
struggle for preponderance, which is the basis of economic bourgeois
organization, is also the basis of political organization. This is why
war has now become the normal condition of Europe. Prusso-Danish,
Prusso-Austrian, FrancoPrussian wars, war in the East, war in
Afghanistan follow each other without a pause. New wars are in
preparation; Russia, Prussia, England, Denmark, all are ready to unleash
their armies. And at any moment they will be at each other’s throats.
There are enough excuses for wars to keep the world busy for another
thirty years.
But war means unemployment, economic crisis, growing taxes, accumulating
debts. More than that, war deals a mortal blow to the State itself.
After each war, the peoples realize that the States involved have shown
their incompetence, even in the tasks by which they justify their
existence; they are hardly capable of organizing the defence of their
own territory, and even victory threatens their survival. Only look at
the fermentation of ideas that emerged from the war of 1871, as much in
Germany as in France; only observe the discontent aroused in Russia by
the war in the Far East.
Wars and armaments are the death of the State; they accelerate its moral
and economic failure. Just one or two great waft will give the final
blow to these decrepit machines.
But parallel to war outside is war within.
Accepted originally by the people as a means of defending all men and
women, and above all of protecting the weak against the strong, the
State today has become the fortress of the rich against the exploited,
of the employer against the proletarian.
Of what use in fact is this great machine that we call the State? Is it
to hinder the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist, of the
peasant by the landlord? Is it to assure us work? To protect us from the
loan-shark? To give us sustenance when the woman has only water to
pacify the child who weeps at her dried-out breast?
No, a thousand times no! The State is there to protect exploitation,
speculation and private property; it is itself the by-product of
the-rapine of the people. The proletarian must rely on his own hands; he
can expect nothing of the State. It is nothing more than an organization
devised to hinder emancipation at all costs.
Everything in the State is loaded in favour of the idle proprietor,
everything against the working proletarian: bourgeois education, which
from an early age corrupts the child by inculcating anti-egalitarian
principles; the Church which disturbs women’s minds; the law which
hinders the exchange of ideas of solidarity and equality; money, which
can be used when needed to corrupt whoever seeks to be an apostle of the
solidarity of the workers; prison-and grapeshot as a last resort-to shut
the mouths of those who will not be corrupted. Such is the State.
Can it last? Will it last? Obviously not. A whole class of humanity, the
class that produces everything, cannot sustain for ever an organization
that has been created specifically in opposition to its interests.
Everywhere, under Russian brutality as much as under the hypocrisy of
the followers of Gambettas, the discontented people are in revolt. The
history of our times is the history of the struggle of the privileged
rulers against the egalitarian aspiration of the peoples. This struggle
has become the principal occupation of the ruling class; it dominates
their actions. Today it is neither principles nor considerations of the
public good that determine the appearance of such-and-such a law or
administrative decree; it is only the demands of the struggle against
the people for the preservation of privilege.
This struggle alone would be enough to shake the strongest of political
organizations. But when it takes place within States that for historical
reasons are declining; when these States are rolling at full speed
towards catastrophe and are harming each other on the way; when, in the
end, the all-powerful State becomes repugnant even to those it protects:
then all these causes can only unite in a single effort: and the outcome
of the struggle cannot remain in doubt. The people, who have the
strength, will prevail over their oppressors; the collapse of the States
will become no more than a question of time, and the most peaceful of
philosophers will see in the distance the dawning light by which the
great revolution manifests itself.
THERE are periods in human existence when the inevitability of a great
upheaval, of a cataclysm that shakes society to its very roots, imposes
itself on every area of our relationships. At such epochs, all men of
good will begin to realise that things cannot go on as they are; that we
need me great events that roughly break the thread of history, shake
humanity out of the ruts in which it is stuck, and propel it towards new
ways, towards the unknown, towards the search for the ideal. One feels
the inevitability of a revolution, vast, implacable, whose role will be
not merely to overthrow an economic machine based on cold exploitation,
on speculation and fraud, not merely to throw down the political ladder
that sustains the rule of the few through cunning, intrigue and lies,
but also to stir up the intellectual and moral life of society, shake it
out of its torpor, reshape our moral life, and set blowing in the midst
of the low and paltry passions that occupy us now the livening wind of
noble passions, great impulses and generous dedications.
In those eras when prideful mediocrity stifles all intelligence that
does not kowtow to authority, when the niggardly morality of compromise
creates the law, and servility reigns supreme; in such eras revolution
becomes a need. Honest men of all classes call down me tempest, so that
it can burn up with its breath of flame the pestilence that afflicts us,
blow away the miasmas that stifle us, and sweep up in its furious
progress all that debris of the past which weighs down on us, stifles
us, deprives us of air and light, so that in the end it can give us a
whole new atmosphere’ instinct with life, with youth, with honesty. It
is not merely the question of bread that is posed in such epochs; it
becomes a question of progress against immobility, of human development
against brutalization, of life against the foetid stagnation of the
marsh.
History has retained for us the memory of such an epoch: that of the
decadence of the Roman Empire; humanity today is passing through another
such decadence.
Like the Romans of the decadence, we find ourselves facing a fundamental
transformation which is affecting the minds of men and which only waits
for favourable circumstances to become transposed into actuality. If the
revolution imposes itself in the economic domain, if it has become an
imperious necessity in the political domain, it assumes even more
urgency in the field of morality.
Without moral links, without certain obligations which each member of
society develops in his relations with others, no kind of society is
possible. Thus we encounter these moral links, these sociable customs,
in all human groups; we see them well-developed and rigorously put into
practice among primitive peoples, who are the living remnants of what
all humanity was in its beginnings.
But the inequality of fortunes and conditions, the exploitation of man
by man, the domination of the masses by a few, have undermined and
destroyed through the ages these precious products of the pristine
stages of our societies. Large industry based on exploitation, commerce
based on fraud, domination by those who call themselves “the
Government,” can no longer tolerate co-existence with those principles
of morality, based on the solidarity of all, which we still encounter
among the tribes who have been driven back to the verges of the policed
world. What solidarity can exist between the capitalist and the worker
he exploits? Between the head of an army and the soldier? Between the
governing and the governed?
Thus we see that the primitive morality, based on the identification of
the individual with his fellows, is replaced by the hypocritical
morality of various religions, which search through sophistry to give
legitimacy to exploitation and domination, and confine themselves to
condemning only the most brutal manifestations of these phenomena. They
relieve the individual of his moral obligations towards his fellows and
impose them on him only in relation to a Supreme Being-an invisible
abstraction, whose wrath you can avert and whose good will you can
purchase, provided you pay his so-called servitors well.
But the more and more frequent contacts that occur these days between
individuals, groups, nations and continents, impose new moral
obligations on humanity. And as religious beliefs begin to vanish, we
realize that if we want to be happy we must assume duties, not towards
some unknown being, but towards all those with whom we enter into
relationships. We understand more and more clearly that the individual’s
welfare is no longer possible in isolation; it can only be sought in the
welfare of all-the happiness of the human race. The negative principles
of religious morality: “Thou shalt not steal! Thou shalt not kill!” are
being replaced by the positive principles of a humane morality,
infinitely broader and growing from day to day. The sanctions of a
deity, which one could always violate at the price of appeasing him
later on with offerings, are being replaced by a sentiment of solidarity
with one and all which tells human beings, “If you want to be happy, do
to others as you would like others to do to you.” That simple
affirmation, that scientific induction which has nothing to do with
religious prescriptions, opens in an instant a whole immense horizon of
perfectibility, of betterment for the human race.
The need to recreate our relations on this principle, so sublime and so
simple, becomes more evident from day to day. But nothing can or will be
done in that direction while exploitation and domination, hypocrisy and
sophistry, remain the bases of our social organization.
I could bring a thousand examples to support my argument, but let us
limit ourselves now to a single one-the most terrible of all-that of our
children. What can we do for them in modern society?
Respect for childhood is one of the finest qualities that developed in
humanity as it accomplished its painful march from the state of savagery
to its present condition. How often has one not seen the most depraved
of men disarmed by the smile of a child? But such respect is vanishing,
and among us today the child has become a machine of flesh-and-blood, if
it has not been turned into a plaything for bestial passions.
We have been shown recently how the bourgeoisie massacre our children by
making them work long hours in the factories.(6) There, they are
physically ruined. But that is not everything. Corrupt to the core as it
is, society also kills our children morally.
It reduces education to a routine apprenticeship which gives no
expression to young and noble passions and no release to that need for
idealism which emerges at a certain age in most children, and so it
insures that children who are naturally so varied become less
independent, proud and poetic, that they hate their schools and either
turn in on themselves or seek elsewhere an outlet for their passions.
Some will search in novels for the poetry that is lacking in their
lives; they will stuff their minds with this literary rubbish, cobbled
together by and for the bourgeoisie at a penny or two a line, and they
will end up, like the young Lemaitre, slashing open the bellies and
cutting the throats of children in the hope of becoming “celebrated
murderers.” Others will give themselves up to execrable vices. Only the
mediocrities, those who have neither passion nor impulse nor any sense
of independence will get through it all without trouble. This minority
will provide society with its contingent of good citizens with niggardly
mentalities who admittedly do not steal handkerchiefs in the street, but
“honestly” rob their customers; who have no passion but secretly visit
the brothel to get rid of the gravy from the stewpot, who stagnate in
their marshes and curse whoever tried to stir up their muck.
This is how it is for boys! As for the girls, the bourgeoisie corrupt
them at an early age. Absurd children’s books, dolls done up like
whores, the mother’s dresses and her example, the chatter of the
boudoir-nothing is lacking to turn the child into a woman who will sell
herself to the highest bidder. And that child already spreads the
infection around her: do not working-class children look with envy on
this over-dressed girl, with her elegant demeanour, a courtesan at
twelve years old? But if the mother is “virtuous”---in the way a good
middle-class woman understands the term-then the situation is even
worse. If the child is intelligent and passionate, she will take at its
true value this double morality which consists in saying: “Love your
neighbour, but plunder him when you can! Be virtuous, but only up to a
certain point, etc.” and, stifling in that atmosphere of Tartuffian
morality, finding in her life nothing of the beautiful, sublime,
inspiring, nothing that breathes of true passion, she will throw herself
headfirst into the arms of the first comer, provided he can satisfy her
appetite for a life of luxury.
Consider these facts, think about their causes, and admit that we are
right to declare that a terrible revolution is inevitable if we are
finally to cleanse our societies down to the roots, for as long as the
causes of the gangrene from which they suffer remain, there can be no
cure.
As long as we have a caste of idlers, sustained by our work under the
presence that they are necessary to govern us, these very idlers will
remain a pestilential influence on public morality. The besotted playboy
who spends his life in the pursuit of new pleasures, in whom the feeling
of solidarity for other people is destroyed by the very manner of his
existence, and in whom the most vilely egotistical feelings are
nourished by the very manner of his life; such a man will always lean
towards the grossest kind of sensuality, and he will degrade everything
he touches. With his moneybags and his brutal instincts, he will
prostitute women and children, he will prostitute art, the stage, the
press-he has already done so! He will sell his country and those who
defend it, and, though he is too cowardly to do the deed himself, he
will arrange the slaughter of the best people of his fatherland on the
day he has reason to fear the loss of his wealth, the sole source of his
pleasure.
All this is inevitable, and the writings of the moralists will do
nothing to change it. The plague is already on our doorsteps; we must
destroy its causes, and even if we have to proceed by fire and iron, we
must not hesitate. It is a question of the salvation of humanity.
IN the preceding chapters we came to the conclusion that Europe is
proceeding down a steep slope towards a revolutionary outbreak.
In considering the methods of production and exchange, as they have been
organized by the bourgeoisie, we found a situation of irremediable
decay. We see the complete absence of any kind of scientific or
humanitarian basis for public actions, the unreasoning dissipation of
social capital, the thirst for gain that led men to an absolute contempt
for all the laws of social behaviour, and industrial war without an end
in sight: in all, chaos. And we hailed the approach of the day on which
the call, “An end to the bourgeoisie!” would echo from all lips with the
same unanimity as hitherto characterised the call for an end to the
dynasties.
In studying the development of the State, its historic role, and the
decomposition that is attacking it today, we saw that this type of
organization had accomplished in its history everything of which it was
capable, and today is collapsing under the weight of its own
presumptions; that it must give way to new forms of organization based
on new principles and more in line with the modern tendencies of
humanity.
At this very time, those who watch attentively the development of ideas
in the heart of present-day society are fully aware of the ardour with
which human thinking these days is working towards the complete revision
of the assumptions we have inherited from past centuries and towards the
elaboration of new philosophic and scientific systems destined to
provide the foundations for societies in the future. It is not merely a
matter of the gloomy reformer, wornout by a task beyond his strength and
by a poverty he can no longer endure, who condemns the shameful
institutions that bear down on him and who dreams of a better future.
It is also a matter of the scholar, who may have been raised with
antiquated prejudices, but gradually finds them being shaken, and who
gives ear to the currents of ideas that are moving through the minds of
the people and one day emerges as their spokesman and proclaims them to
the world. “The critic’s pickaxe,” cry the defenders of the past, “is
undercutting with great blows the whole of the heritage that has been
transmitted to us as revealed truth; philosophy, the natural sciences,
morality, history, art, nothing is spared in this work of demolition.”
Nothing indeed is spared, down to the very foundations of our social
institutions- property and power-attacked with equal strength by the
slave in the factory and by the intellectual worker, by the man who has
an urgent interest in change as much as by the man who will recoil with
fright on the day he sees his ideas take on flesh, shake free of the
dust of the libraries, and become manifest in the tumult of popular
realization.
The decay and decomposition of accepted forms and the general discontent
with them; the arduous elaboration of new forms of social organization
and the impatient longing for change; the rejuvenating impulse of the
critic in the domain of the sciences, of philosophy, of ethics, and the
general ferment of public opinion. And on the other side the sluggish
indifference or criminal resistance of those who hold on to power and
who still have the strength, and sporadically the courage, to oppose
themselves to the development of new ideas.
Such was always the condition of societies on the eve of great
revolutions; such is the condition of society again today. It is not the
overexcited imagination of a crowd of hotheads that reveals it, but calm
and scientific observation, to such an extent that even those who excuse
their guilty indifference by saying: “Stay calm! There is no danger
yet!” will admit that the situation becomes steadily more inflamed and
that they no longer have any idea where we are going; having relieved
themselves by such an admission, they return to their thoughtless
ruminations.
“But it has been announced so often, that revolution of yours,” the
pessimist sighs in our ears: “Even I believed in it for a while, but it
has not happened.” It will be all the more mature when it does. “On two
occasions’ the revolution was on the point of breaking out, in 1754 and
1771,” a historian tells us in speaking of the 18^(th) century.(7) (I
had almost written: in 1848 and 1871). But since it has not even yet
broken out, it can only be all the more powerful and productive when it
happens at the end of the century.
But let the thoughtless people continue their slumber and the pessimists
grumble; we have other things to do. We must ask what will be the nature
of that revolution which so many people expect and for which they
prepare, and what should be our attitude in the presence of that
eventuality.
We are not making historical prophecies: neither the embryonic condition
of sociology, nor the present state of history which, according to
Augustin Thierry,(8) “merely stifles the truth under conventional
formulae,” give us the authority to do so. Let us then confine ourselves
to posing a few quite simple questions.
Can we admit, even for a moment, that the immense intellectual work of
revision and reformation that goes on in all classes of society, can be
satisfied by a simple change of government? Can we claim that the
economic discontent which grows and spreads from day to day will not
become manifest in public life as soon as favourable circumstances-such
as the disorganization of authority-appear as the results of yet
unforeseen events?
Is posing these questions a solution? Obviously not.
Can we believe that the Irish and English farm workers, if they see the
possibility of seizing the land which they have coveted for so long, and
driving away the landlords they hate so cordially, would not seek to
profit from the first outbreak to attempt the realization of their
hopes?
Can we believe, if there were a new 1848 in Europe, that France would be
content merely to send Gambetta packing so as to replace him with M.
Clemenceau,(9) and not make an effort to see what The Commune might do
to ameliorate the lot of the workers? Can we imagine that the French
peasant, seeing the central power in disorder, would not do his best to
lay hands on the rich meadows of the holy sisters as well as the fertile
lands of the great merchants who-once they have established themselves
around him do not cease to enlarge their properties? That he will not
take his stand beside those who offer him their support in realizing his
dream of steady and well-paid work?
And can we believe that the Italian or the Spanish or the Slavic peasant
will not do the same thing?
Do you think that the miners, weary of their poverty, of their suffering
and of the massacres that firedamp explosions wreak among them (all of
which they still endure-though murmuring-under the watchful eyes of the
company guards)-do you think that they would not do their best to
eliminate the owners of the mines if one day they could sense that the
demoralized guards had become unwilling to obey their chiefs?
And consider the small craftsman, crouching in his damp cave of a
workshop, his fingers frozen and his belly empty, striving from dawn to
dusk to earn enough to pay the baker and feed his five little mouths,
who become all the more dear to him as they grow pallid from their
privations. And think of this other man, who has lain down under the
first archway he came to, because he cannot pay his twopence to sleep in
the common lodging house. Don’t you think they would like to find in
some sumptuous palace a dry and warm corner to shelter their families,
which may indeed be more worthy than those of the wealthy? Don’t you
think they might like to see common stores stocked with enough bread for
all those who have not learnt how to live in idleness, with enough
clothing to fit the narrow shoulders of the workers’ children as well as
the soft bodies of well-to-do brats? Do you believe that those who live
in rags are unaware that they could find in the shops of the cities more
than enough to supply the essential needs of all the inhabitants, and
that if all the workers could apply themselves to the production of
useful objects, instead of wasting their energy on producing items of
luxury, they would provide enough necessities for the whole community
and for many neighbouring communities?
Finally, must we not admit that such things are becoming evident
everywhere and find expression on all men’s lips in moments of crisis
(don’t forget the siege of Paris!), and that the people will seek to put
them into practice on the day they feel strong enough to act?
The wisdom of humanity has already answered these questions, and here is
its reply.
The coming revolution will have a universality distinguishing it from
its predecessors. It will no longer be one country that launches itself
into the turmoil, it Will be all the countries of Europe. In the past,
local revolutions may have been possible, but today, when one thinks of
the shaken equilibrium of all European States and the links of
solidarity that have been established on the continent, a local
revolution cannot succeed though it may survive over a short period. As
in 1848, a disturbance in one country will inevitably spread to the
others, and the revolutionary conflagration will embrace the whole of
Europe.
But if in 1848 the rebellious cities might still place their confidence
in changes of government or constitutional reforms, this is no longer
the case today. The Parisian worker will not expect from any government-
even a government like that of the Commune-the accomplishment of his
wishes; he will set to work himself, saying as he does, “Then it will be
done for certain!”
The people of Russia will not wait for a Constituent Assembly to grant
them possession of the land they cultivate: once they have any hope of
success they will try to seize it for themselves; they are already
seeking to do that, as witness the continued peasant insurrections. It
is the same in Italy and in Spain; and if the German worker allows
himself to be lulled for a while by those who would like everything to
be done by telegrams from Berlin, the example of his neighbours and the
incapability of his leaders will soon teach him the true revolutionary
way. Thus, the distinct character of the coming revolution will consist
in international attempts at economic revolution, made by the people
without waiting for the revolution to fall like manna from the heavens.
But already we see the pessimist, with a sly smile on his chops coming
to us with “A few objections, just a few objections!” So be it. We will
listen to him and give our answers.
Each day, in a whole range of tones, the bourgeois press praises the
value and the importance of our political liberties, of the “political
rights of the citizen”: universal suffrage, free elections, freedom of
the press and of meeting, etc.
“Since you have these freedoms,” they say to us, “what is the point of
rebelling? Don’t the liberties you already possess assure the
possibilities of all the reforms that may be necessary, without your
needing to resort to the gun?” So, let us analyze, from our point of
view, what these famous “political liberties” are worth to the class
that owns nothing, rules nobody, and has in fact very few rights and
plenty of duties.
We are not asserting, as has sometimes been said, that political rights
have no value to us. We know very well that since the days of serfdom
and even since the last century, we have made a certain amount of
progress; the man of the people is no longer the being deprived of all
rights that he was in the past. The French peasant can no longer be
flogged at the roadside, as he still is in Russia. In public places,
outside his factory or workshop, the worker considers himself the equal
of anyone, especially in the great cities. The French worker is no
longer that being lacking in all human rights who in the past was
treated by the aristocracy as a beast of burden. Thanks to the
revolutions, thanks to the blood which the people shed, he has acquired
certain personal rights whose value we have no desire to minimize.
But we know how to draw distinctions, and we assert that there are
rights and rights. There are those that have a real value and those that
do not, and whoever tries to confound them is only deceiving the people.
Certain rights like, for example, the equality of the peasant and the
squire in their personal relations, or the corporal inviolability of the
person, have been won through great struggles, and are so dear to the
people that they will rise up rather than allowing them to be violated.
But there are others, like universal suffrage, freedom of the press,
etc., towards which the people have always remained lukewarm, because
the know perfectly well that these rights, which have served so well to
defend the ruling bourgeoisie against the encroachments of royal power
and of the aristocracy, are no more than an instrument in the hands of
the dominant classes to maintain their power over the people. These
rights are not even real political rights, since they provide no
safeguard for the mass of the people; and if we still decorate them with
that pompous title it is because our political language is no more than
a jargon elaborated by the ruling classes for their own use and in their
own interest.
What, in fact, is a political right if it is not an instrument to
safeguard the independence, the dignity and the freedom of those who do
not yet have the power to impose on others a respect for that right?
What is its use, if it is not and instrument of liberation for those who
need to be freed? The Gambetas, the Bismarcks, the Gladstones need
neither the freedom of the press nor the freedom of meeting, because
they can write what they want, can meet whomsoever they wish, and
profess whatever ideas they please; they are already liberated. They are
free. If there is any need together, it is surely to those who are not
powerful enough to impose their will. Such in fact is the origin of all
political rights.
But, looked at from this viewpoint, have the political rights we are
talking of been created with an eye to those who alone need safeguards?
Obviously not. Universal suffrage can sometimes and to a certain extent
protect, without the need for a constant recourse to force in
self-defense. It can serve to re-establish the equilibrium between two
forces which struggle for power, without the rivals being forces to draw
their swords on each other as they did in the past. But it can be no
help if it is a matter of overthrowing or even limiting power, or of
abolishing domination. Since it is such an excellent instrument for
resolving in a peaceful manner any quarrels among the rulers, what use
can it possibly be to the ruled?
Does not the history of universal suffrage tell us this? Whenever the
bourgeoisie has feared that universal suffrage might become a weapon in
the hands of the people that could be turned against the privileged, it
has fought it stubbornly. But the day it was proved, in 1848, that
universal suffrage held nothing to fear, and that one could rule the
people with an iron rod by the use of universal suffrage, it was
immediately accepted. Now the bourgeoisie itself has become its
defender, because it understands that here is a weapon adapted to
sustain its domination, but absolutely harmless as a threat to its
privileges.
It is the same with freedom of the press. What, in the eyes of the
bourgeoisie, has been the most conclusive argument in favor of freedom
of the press? Its powerlessness. Yes, its powerlessness. M. de
Girardin¹⁰ has written a whole book on this theme: the powerlessness of
the press. “Formerly — he says — we burned witches because people had
the stupidity to believe they were all-powerful; now people commit the
same stupidity regarding the press, because they believe that it also is
all-powerful. But it is nothing of the kind; it is as powerless as the
witches of the middle ages. Hence, more persecutions of the press!” This
is the contention that M. de Girardin offered in the past. And when the
bourgeoisie discuss the freedom of the press among themselves, what
arguments to they advance in its favour?
“Look at England, Switzerland and the United States,” they say. “In all
of them the press is free and yet capitalist exploitation is better
established in them than in any other country; its reign is more secure
among them than anywhere else.” And they add, “What does it matter if
dangerous doctrines are produced. Don’t we have all the means of
stifliling the voices of the journals that protect them without even a
recourse to violence? And even if one day, at a time of agitation, the
revolutionary press becomes a dangerous weapon, so what? On that day it
will be time enough to destroy it with a single blow on the most
convenient pretext.”
As for the freedom of meeting, the same kind of reasoning holds. “Give
complete freedom of meeting.” Say the bourgeoisie. “It will do no harm
to our privileges. What we have to fear are the secret societies, and
public meetings are the best way of paralyzing them. But if, in a moment
of excitement, public meeting should get out of hand, we would always
have the means of suppressing them, since we hold the powers of
government.”
“The inviolability of the dwelling? Of Course! Write it into all the
codes! Cry it from rooftops!” say the knowing ones among the
bourgeoisie. “We don’t want policemen coming to surprise us in our
little nests.” But we will institute a secret service to keep an eye on
suspects; we will people the country with police spies, make lists of
dangerous people, and watch them closely. And if we smell out one day
that anything is afoot, then we must set to vigorously, make a jest of
inviolability, arrest people in their beds, search and ransack their
homes! But above all we must do this boldly and if anyone protests too
loudly, we must lock them up as well, and say to the rest, ‘What would
you have us do, gentlemen? We must deal firmly with the situation!’ And
we shall be applauded.”
“The privacy of correspondence? Say it everywhere, write and cry it out,
that correspondence is inviolable. If the head of some village post
office opens a letter out of curiosity, sack him at once and proclaim
loudly that he is a monstrous criminal. Take good care that the little
secrets we exchange with each other in our letters shall not be
divulged. But if we get wind of some plot being hatched against our
privileges, then let us not stand on ceremony; let us open everyone’s
letters, allocate a thousand clerks to the task if necessary, and if
someone takes it on himself to protest, let us say frankly, as an
English minister did recently to the applause of parliament. ‘Yes,
gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart and the deepest of distaste that we
order letters to be opened, but it is entirely because the country (i.e.
the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) is in danger.”
This is what these so-called liberties can be reduced to. Freedom of
press and of meeting, inviolability of home and all the rest, are only
respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged
classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to
undermine those privileges, the so-called liberties will be cast
overboard.
This is quite natural. Humanity retains only the rights it has won by
hard struggle and is ready to defend at every moment, with arms in hand.
If men and women are not whipped in the streets of Paris, as they are in
Odessa, it is because on the day a government dared to attempt this
people would tear its agents to pieces. If an aristocrat can no longer
make way for himself through the streets with the help of blows
delivered right and left by the staves of his servants, it is because
any of the servants who got such ideas into their heads would
immediately be overpowered. If a degree of equality exists between the
worker and his employer, at least in the streets and in public
establishments, it is not because the worker’s rights are written into
the law but because, thanks to revolutions in the past, he has a feeling
of personal dignity that will not let him endure an offense from anyone.
Yet it is evident that in present-day society, divided as it is between
masters and serfs, true liberty cannot exist; it will not exist so long
as there are exploiters and slaves, governments and governed. At the
same time it does not follow that, as we await the day when the
anarchist revolution will sweep away all social distinctions, we wish to
see the press muzzled, as in Germany, the right of meeting annulled as
in Russia, or the inviolability of the person reduced as it is in
Turkey. Slaves of capital that we all are, we want to be able to write
and publish whatever seems right to us, we want to be able to meet and
organize as we please, precisely so that we can shake off the yoke of
capital.
But it is high time we understood that we must not demand these rights
through constitutional laws. We cannot go in search of our natural
rights by way of a law, a scrap of paper that could be torn up at the
least whim of the rulers. For it is only by transforming ourselves into
a force, capable of imposing our will, that we shall succeed in making
our rights respected.
Do you want to have freedom to speak and write whatever seems right to
you? Do you want to have the liberty to meet and organize? It is not
from a parliament that we seekers of freedom should ask permission, nor
must we beg a law from the Senate. We must become an organized force,
capable of showing our teeth every time anyone sets about restraining
our rights of speech and meeting; we must be strong, and then we may be
sure that nobody will dare dispute our right to speak, to write, to
print what we write, and meet together. The day we have been able to
establish enough agreement among the exploited for them to come out in
their millions in the streets and take up the defense of our rights,
nobody will dare to dispute those rights, nor any others that we choose
to demand. Then, and only then, shall we have truly gained such rights,
for which we might plead to parliament for decades in vain. Then those
rights will be guaranteed to us in a far more certain way than if they
were merely written down on a bit of paper.
Freedoms are not given, they are taken.
¹⁰ Emile de Girardin (1806–1881), an active journalist in Paris from the
1848 Revolution down to the Third Republic; he almost single-handedly
invented the cheap popular press in France with his La Presse, as early
as 1836; he was a clever feuilletonist, and the Vicar of Bray of French
journalism, supporting all the timely adventurers at the right time.
1.
IT is to the young that I wish to speak now. Let the old-I mean of
course the old in heart and spirit-put these pages aside without tiring
themselves pointlessly by reading something which will tell them
nothing.
I assume you are about eighteen or twenty; that you are finishing your
apprenticeship or your studies; that you are about to enter into life. I
imagine you have a mind detached from the superstitions people have
tried to inculcate in you; you are in no fear of the Devil and you do
not listen to the rantings of priests and parsons. Furthermore I am sure
you are not one of those popinjays, the sad products of a society in
decline, who parade in the streets with their Mexican trousers and their
monkey faces and who already, at their age, are dominated by the
appetite for pleasures at any price. I assume, on the contrary, that
your heart is in the right place, and it is because of this that I am
speaking to you.
An urgent question, I know, lies before you.
Many times you have asked yourself, “What shall I become?” In fact, when
you are young you understand that, after having studied a trade or a
science for several years-at the expense of society, let it be noted-you
have not done so in order to make yourself an instrument of
exploitation. You would have to be very depraved and vicious never to
have dreamed of one day applying your intelligence, your capacities and
your knowledge to help in the liberation of those who still swarm in
poverty and ignorance.
You are one of those who dreamed in this way, are you not? Very well,
let us see what you might do to turn your dream into a reality.
I do not know into what condition you were born. Perhaps, favoured by
fortune, you have made scientific studies; you intend to become a
doctor, a lawyer, a man of letters or science; a wide field of action
opens up before you, and you are entering into life with broad knowledge
and proven aptitudes. Or you are an honest artisan; your scientific
knowledge is bounded by the little you have learnt at school, but you
have had the advantage of knowing at first hand the life of harsh labour
which the worker must lead in our days.
For the sake of argument, I am assuming that you have received a
scientific education. Let us suppose you are about to become a doctor.
Tomorrow, a man in a worker’s blouse will call you to visit a sick
person. He will lead you into one of those alleys where neighbours can
almost shake hands over the heads of the passers-by; you will climb in
foetid air and by the shivering light of a lantern up two, three, four
or five flights of stairs covered in slippery filth, and in a dark, cold
room you will find the invalid, Iying on a straw pallet and covered in
dirty rags. Pale, anaemic children, shivering under their tatters, look
at you through great, wide-open eyes. The husband has worked all his
life twelve or thirteen hours a day on any jobs he could get; now he has
been out of work for three months. Unemployment is not unusual in his
trade; every year it happens periodically; but normally, when the man
was idle, the woman would take casual work-washing your shirts, perhaps,
and earning a dollar or so a day; but now she has been bedridden for two
months, destitution rears its hideous face before the family.
If you show an honest look and a good heart, and speak frankly, the
family will tell you a good many things. They will tell you that the
woman on the other side of the partition, the woman with the
heartbreaking cough, earns her wretched living by ironing; that on the
floor below all the children have fever, that the laundress on the
ground floor will not see the spring, and that in the next door house
things are even worse.
What would you prescribe for all these sicknesses? Good food, a change
of air, less exhausting work? You would very much like to say that, but
you dare not, and you hurry broken-heartedly out of the house with a
curse on your lips.
Next day you are still thinking about those inhabitants of the slums,
when your colleague tells you that a footman came to fetch him in a
coach. It was for one of the inhabitants of a rich mansion, a woman,
exhausted by sleepless nights, who gives all her life to her boudoir, to
paying visits, to balls and to quarrels with her boorish husband. Your
colleague has prescribed for her a less frivolous way of life, a less
rich diet, walks in the open air, calm of mind and some exercises at
home which might partly make up for the lack of productive work! One
woman is dying because, all her life, she has never eaten or rested
enough; the other is wilting because all her life she has never known
what work is.
If you have one of those apathetic natures that can adapt itself to
anything and in the face of the most revolting facts can console itself
with a sigh and a glass of beer, you will harden yourself to these
contrasts, and, given your nature, you will have only one idea, which is
to make yourself a niche in the ranks of the pleasure-seekers so that
you will never find yourself a place among the poor.
But if you are a real man, if each feeling is translated within you into
an act of will, if the beast within you has not killed the intelligent
being, one day you will go back to your house, saying: “No, it is all
unjust! It cannot continue like this! It is not a question of curing
sicknesses; they must be prevented. A little bit of well being and
intellectual development would be enough to wipe from our lists half the
sick people and their sicknesses. To hell with drugs! Fresh air, proper
feeding, less brutalizing work: that is where we must start. Without
these things, the whole occupation of a doctor is no more than a
trickery and a deception.”
That day you will begin to understand what socialism means. You will
want to know more about it, and if altruism is more to you than a word
void of meaning, if you apply to the study of the social question the
severe inductive standards of the naturalist, you will end up in our
ranks, and like us you will work for the social revolution.
But perhaps you will say: “To the Devil with practice! Let us devote
ourselves, like the astronomer, the physicist, and the chemist, to pure
science! That will always bear its fruits, even if it is only for later
generations.” But before you do that, let us determine what you will be
seeking in science. Will it be simply the enjoyment-which is certainly
immense-that you will gain from the study of the mysteries of nature and
the exercise of your intellectual faculties? If that is so, let me ask
you how the scholar who cultivates science to pass his life agreeably
differs from the drunkard who also seeks in life no more than immediate
enjoyment and finds it in wine? It is true that the scholar makes a
better choice of the source of his pleasures, since they are more
intense and more durable, but that is all. Both of them, the drunkard
and the scholar, have the same egotistical aim, personal enjoyment
But of course you will tell me you are not seeking such an egotistical
life. In working for science, you have every intent of working for
humanity, and that idea will guide you in the choice of your research.
What a beautiful illusion! And who among us, giving himself for the
first time to science, has not cherished it for a moment?
But if you are really thinking of helping humanity, if that is what you
aspire to in your studies, you will find yourself facing a formidable
objection, for, in so far as you have any sense of justice, you will
immediately observe that in present-day society, science is only a kind
of luxury that makes life more agreeable to a few, and remains
absolutely inaccessible to almost the whole of humanity.
For example, it is more than a century since science established strong
cosmological notions, but what increase has there been in the number of
people who hold such notions or who have acquired a spirit of truly
scientific criticism? Hardly a few thousands, lost in the midst of
hundreds of millions still sharing prejudices and superstitions worthy
of barbarians and destined in consequence to serve for ever as the
playthings of religious imposters.
Or take a look at what science has done to elaborate the rational
foundations of physical and moral hygiene. It tells you how we must live
to preserve our bodily health, how we can maintain in good condition our
human collectivities; it shows the way to intellectual and moral
happiness. But does not all the immense work carried out in these
directions remain as dead words in our books? And why is that? Because
science nowadays is carried on for a handful of privileged people,
because the social inequality that divides wage-earners from the owners
of capital turns all our teachings about the conditions of a rational
life into a mockery for nine-tenths of humanity.
I could cite you many more examples, but I will be brief: just come out
of Faust’s study, whose dust-blackened window panes hardly allow the
daylight to reach the books, and look around you; at every step you
yourself will find proofs to support my contention.
It is no longer a question at this moment of accumulating scientific
truths and discoveries. It is more important to spread the truths
already gained by science, to make them enter into human life, to turn
them into a common domain. This must be done in such a way that the
whole of humanity may become capable of assimilating and applying them,
so that science will cease to be a luxury and will become the foundation
for the life of all. Justice demands that it happen in this way.
I would add that the interests of science itself also impose this
solution. Science makes real progress only when a new truth enters a
situation that is ready to accept it. The theory of the mechanical
origin of heat, stated in the last century in almost the same terms as
Hirn and Clausius(11) enunciate it today, remained for eighty years
buried in academic memoirs until our knowledge of physics was
sufficiently expanded to create a milieu capable of accepting it. Three
generations had to pass by until the ideas of Erasmus Darwin on the
variation of species were welcomed from the mouth of his grandson and
accepted, not without pressure from public opinion, by the scholarly
academicians. For the scholar, like the poet or the artist, is always
the product of the society in which he lives and teaches.
The more deeply you look into these ideas, the more you will realize
that before anything else is done we must modify the state of affairs
which today condemns the scholar to overflow with scientific truths
while almost the whole of humanity remains what it was five or ten
centuries ago, in the condition of virtual slaves, mere machines
incapable of adapting themselves to established truths. And the day you
accept that idea, which is at once broadly humanitarian and profoundly
scientific, you will lose all your taste for pure science.
You will devote yourself to seeking ways to bring about that
transformation, and if you do not abandon the impartiality that has
guided you in your scientific investigations, you will inevitably adopt
the cause of socialism; you will put an end to sophistry and find your
place among us; tired of working to create enjoyment for that small
group which already has so much of it, you will apply your knowledge and
devotion to the immediate service of the oppressed.
And you can be sure that then, when you have fulfilled your sense of
duty and feel a true harmony between your sentiments and your acts, you
will discover within yourself forces whose existence you had never even
suspected. And one day-which with all due respect to your professors
will not be long in coming-when the modifications you have worked for
become evident, then, drawing new strengths from collective research and
from the powerful co-operation of the masses of workers who will put
themselves at its service, science will take on an impetus in comparison
with which the slow progress of today will seem like the simple
experiments of schoolboys.
Then you will be able to take joy in science, since that joy will be
available to all humanity.
2.
If you have finished your studies in law and are preparing yourself for
the bar, it is likely that you too have illusions about your future
activity-granted that you are one of those who know the meaning of
altruism. Perhaps you think like this: “To consecrate one’s life without
truce or surrender to bringing about the triumph of a law that is the
expression of supreme justice; what vocation could be finer?” And you
enter life full of confidence in yourself and in the vocation you have
chosen.
Very well, let us open at a venture the chronicles of the judiciary, and
see what life has to tell you.
Here is a rich landowner; he is asking for the expulsion of a tenant
farmer who is not paying the rent agreed on. From the legal viewpoint,
there is no question; if the farmer does not pay, he must go. But when
we analyze the facts, this is what we learn. The landlord has always
dissipated his rents on high living, the farmer has always worked hard.
The landowner has done nothing to improve his property, yet its value
has tripled in fifteen years, thanks to the surplus value given the soil
by laying down a railway, making new local roads, draining marshes,
clearing bushland; while the farmer, who has largely contributed to
raising the value of the land-is ruined; having fallen into the hands of
speculators and burdened himself with debt, he can no longer pay his
rent. The law, always on the side of property, makes a technical
decision in favour of the landlord. But what would you do, if legal
fictions have not yet killed in you the sense of justice? Would you
demand that the farmer be thrown out on the road-which is what the law
says-or would you demand that the landlord return to the farmer all the
share of surplus value that is due to his labour, which is what equity
would dictate? On what side would you stand? For the law, but against
justice? Or for justice, which would make you against the law?
And when workers go on strike against their employers without giving the
required fortnight’s notice, on what side would you be found? On the
side of the law, which means on the side of the employer who, profiting
from a time of crisis, made scandalous profits (as you will see from
reading about recent trials), or on the side of the workers who at the
same time were getting a wage of two and a half francs and watching
their wives and children wasting away? Would you defend the fiction
which affirms the “freedom of agreement”? Or would you uphold equity,
according to which a contract concluded between a man who has dined well
and one who sells his work in order to eat, between the strong and the
weak, is not a contract at all?
Here is another case. One day in Paris, a man is prowling around.
Suddenly he seizes a steak and runs. He is caught and questioned, and it
turns out that he is an unemployed worker and that he and his family
have had nothing to eat for four days. People beg the butcher to let him
go, but the butcher wants to taste the triumph of “justice,” he
prosecutes, and the man is condemned to six months in prison. Such is
the will of the blind goddess Themis.12 Doesn’t your conscience rebel
against the law and against society when it sees such verdicts given
from day to day?
Or, to give another example, would you demand the application of the law
against that man, ill-treated and scoffed from childhood, growing up
without hearing a word of sympathy, who in the end kills his neighbour
to take five francs from him? Would you demand that he be guillotined
or-worse, that he be shut up for twenty years in a prison when you know
that he is sick rather than criminal, and that in any case society as a
whole must bear the responsibility for his crime?
Would you demand that the weavers who in a moment of exasperation set
fire to their factory be sent to prison? That the man who has shot at a
crowned tyrant be sent to prison? That the military should fire on the
insurgent populace when it plants the flag of the future on the
barricades? No, a thousand times no!
If you apply your reason instead of repeating what you have been taught,
if you analyze and remove the law from that fog of fictions in which it
has been veiled to conceal its origins, which lie in the will of the
strong, and also to mask its substance, which has always been the
consecration of all the opressions bequeathed to humanity by its bloody
history-you will acquire a supreme contempt for that law. You will
understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to find
yourself each day in opposition to the law of conscience, with which you
will find yourself trying to accommodate; and as the struggle cannot
continue, either you will stifle your conscience and become a mere
rascal, or you will break with tradition and come to work among us for
the abolition of all injustices, economic, political and social. But
that will mean that you are a socialist, that you have become a
revolutionary.
And what about you, my young engineer, who have dreamed of bettering the
lot of the workers through applying science to industry? What sad
disillusion and vexation awaits you! You give the youthful energy of
your intelligence to elaborating a railway project which, by clambering
along the edges of precipices and penetrating the hearts of granite
mountain giants, will bring together two lands divided by nature. But
once you have reached the site of this work, you will see whole
battalions of workers decimated by exhaustion and sickness in the
building of a single tunnel, you will see thousands of others going home
with a few dollars and the unmistakeable signs of consumption, you will
see human corpses -the victims of a vicious avarice-marking off every
metre you have pushed you line forward, and once the railway is
completed you will see it becoming a highway for the cannon of invaders.
Perhaps you have devoted your youth to a discovery that will simplify
production and, after many efforts and many sleepless nights, you have
finally completed and confirmed this precious discovery. You set out
applying it, and the result exceeds all your hopes. Ten thousand, twenty
thousand workers are thrown out on the streets. Those who remain, mostly
children, are reduced to the condition of machines. Three, four, perhaps
ten employers will make fortunes and celebrate with brimming glasses of
champagne! Is this what you have dreamed about?
Finally you make a study of recent industrial advances and you find that
the dressmaker has gained nothing, absolutely nothing, through the
discovery of the sewing machine; that the worker on the Gothard dies of
ankolystosis in spite of diamond drills;13 that the mason and the
labourer are unemployed as before despite the introduction of Giffard
lifts. If you discuss social problems with the independence of mind
which has guided you in your technical problems, you will arrive
inevitably at the conclusion that, under the regime of private property
and the wages system, each new discovery, even when it augments slightly
the worker’s well being, also makes his servitude all the heavier, his
work all the more brutalizing, unemployment more frequent and crises
sharper, and that he who already possesses all the luxuries is the only
one who will seriously benefit.
What will you do then, once you have reached that conclusion? Perhaps
you will begin to silence your conscience with sophistries; then, one
fine day, you will say goodbye to your honest dreams of youth and set
out to gain for yourself the right to luxuries, and then you will find
your way into the camp of the exploiters. Or perhaps, if you have a good
heart, you will say to yourself: “No, this is not the time to make
discoveries! Let us work first to transform the mode of production; when
individual property is abolished then each new industrial progress will
be made for the benefit of all humanity; and the mass of workers, who
today are mere machines, will become living beings and will apply to
industry and intuition sustained by study and informed by manual skill.
Technical progress will take on in the next fifty years an impetus we
dare not dream of today.”
And what can one say to the schoolteacher-not to the one who sees his
profession as a tedious trade-but to the other who, surrounded by a
happy band of kids, feels at ease among their animated looks, their
happy smiles, and seeks to awaken in their little heads the humanitarian
idea he cherished when he was young?
Often, I see that you are sad and knit your brows. Today, your favourite
student, who indeed is not so good in Latin but is good-natured
nonetheless, told with enthusiasm the tale of William Tell. His eyes
shining, he seemed to wish to kill every tyrant on the spot, as he
recited with fire in his voice these passionate lines of Schiller:
<em>Before the slave as he breaks his chains,
before the free man, do not tremble!</em>
But when he went home, his mother, his father and his uncle reprimanded
him severely for his lack of respect for the parson and the policeman.
They lectured him by the hour on “prudence, respect for authority,
submission,” and so he put aside his Schiller to read “The Art of Making
Your Way in the World.”
And yesterday you learnt how badly some of your best students had turned
out: one does nothing but dream of military glory, and another
collaborates with his employer in embezzling the wretched pay of the
workers. And you, having put so much hope in these young people, now
reflect on the sad contradiction that exists between real life and the
idea.
You are still reflecting on it, but I foresee that in two years, having
experienced disillusion after disillusion, you will abandon your
favourite authors, and you will end up saying that Tell may have been an
impeccable father, but he was also a bit of a fool; that poetry is an
excellent thing for reading by the fireside, particularly when one has
spent a whole day teaching the rules of compound interest, but
that-after all-poets always soar in the clouds and their verses have
nothing to do either with life or with the next visit of the school
inspector.
Alternatively, your youthful dreams develop into the firm convictions of
your mature years. You would like to see a broad humanitarian education
for all, in the school and outside it, and seeing that this is
impossible in present conditions, you set about attacking the very
foundations of bourgeois society. Then, suspended by the minister, you
will quit schooling and join us in showing adults who are less educated
than you, what is important in knowledge, what humanity should be, what
it could be. You will come to work with the socialists in the complete
transformation of present-day society and its redirection towards
equality, solidarity and freedom.
And now for you, young artist, whether you are a sculptor, a painter, a
poet or a musician! Are you not aware that the sacred fire which
inspired so many of your predecessors is lacking today among you and
your kind? That art is banal? That mediocrity reigns?
And could it be any different? The joy of having rediscovered the
antique world, of having turned back to the forces of nature, that
inspired the masterpieces of the Renaissance, no longer exists in
contemporary art: the revolutionary idea has not yet inspired it, and in
its absence artists today think they have found something as good in
realism’ which strives to represent a drop of dew on a leaf like a
photograph but in colour, to imitate the muscles of a cow’s rump, or to
represent meticulously, in prose or verse, the suffocating mud of a
sewer or the boudoir of a lady of love.
“But if this is really the situation,” you ask, “what can be done?”
If the sacred fire you claim to possess is no more than a snuffed and
smoking candle, then you will continue to do as you have done, and your
art will soon degenerate into a craft to decorate the parlours of
shopkeepers, into the scribbling of libretti for operettas and of
journalistic frivolities like those of Emile de Girardin; most of you in
fact are already making your way fast down the fatal slope.
But if your heart truly beats in unison with that of humanity, if, as a
true poet, you have the ear to listen to life, then, confronting the sea
of suffering whose tide rises around you, the peoples dying of hunger,
the corpses piled in the mines and Iying mutilated in heaps at the feet
of the barricades, the convoys of exiles who will be buried in the snows
of Siberia and on the beaches of tropical islands; confronting that
supreme struggle which is now going on, echoing with the sorrowful cries
of the defeated and the orgies of the victors, with heroism at grips
with cowardice, enthusiasm fighting against baseness-you can no longer
stay neutral! You will come to stand beside the oppressed, because you
know that the beautiful, the sublime and life itself are on the side of
those who fight for light, for humanity, for justice!
But now you interrupt me. “If the abstract science is a luxury,” you
ask, “and the practice of medicine a sham, if law is injustice and
technical advances are instruments of exploitation; if education is
defeated by the self-interest of the educators and if art, lacking a
revolutionary ideal, can only degenerate, what is there left for me to
do?”
And my answer is this. “An immense task awaits which can only attract
you, a task in which action will accord completely with conscience, a
task that can win over the most noble natures and the most vigorous
characters.”
“What is this task,” you ask. I propose to tell you.
3.
Either you compromise constantly with your conscience and end up one
fine day saying: “To Hell with humanity, so long as I can gain and
profit from all the advantages, and the people are stupid enough to let
me do so!” Or you take your place on the side of the socialists and work
with them for the complete transformation of society. Such is the
inevitable conclusion of the analysis we have made; and such will be the
logical decision which all intelligent people will inevitably reach if
only they reason wisely and resist the sophisms whispered in their ears
by their bourgeois education and the self-interested views of those
around them. And once that conclusion has been reached, the question,
“What to do?” naturally offers itself.
The answer is easy.
Merely shake yourself free of your world in which it is customary to say
that the people are no more than a heap of brutes, go out to meet those
very people, and the answer will emerge of its own accord.
You will see that everywhere, in France as in Germany, in Italy as in
the United States, and in all places where there are privileged and
oppressed, a gigantic development is taking place in the heart of the
working class, whose aim is to break for ever the servitudes imposed by
capitalist feudalism and lay the foundations of a society based on
justice and equality. It is no longer enough today for the people to
express their woes in those laments sung by the seventeenth century
serfs and still by Russian peasants, whose melody breaks one’s heart.
They work now, with full consciousness of what they are doing, and fight
against all obstacles to their liberation.
Their thought is constantly engaged in divining what needs to be done so
that life, instead of being a curse for three quarters of humanity,
shall be a joy for all. They approach the most challenging problems of
sociology, and seek to resolve them with their own good sense, their
powers of observation, their hard experience. To make common cause with
other unfortunate people, they group together and organize. They form
societies sustained with difficulty by tiny contributions; they seek to
make contact over the frontiers and, more effectively than the
philanthropical rhetoricians, they prepare for the day when wars between
peoples will become impossible. To know what their brothers are doing,
and to become better acquainted with them, as well as to elaborate and
propagate ideas, they maintain at great cost in sacrifice and effort
their working class press. Finally, when the time comes, they rise up
and, staining the paving stones of the barricades with their blood, they
leap forward to the conquest of those liberties which later on the rich
and the powerful will corrupt into privileges and turn against the
workers who won them.
What continual efforts are demanded, what unceasing struggles! What
tasks begun again and again, sometimes to fill the gaps created by
weariness, by corruption, by persecution; sometimes to resume the
studies that were rudely interrupted by mass exterminations!
Their journals are created by men who have been forced to steal their
scraps of education by depriving themselves of sleep and food; the
agitation is sustained by pennies wrung out of scanty necessities,
sometimes out of dry bread; and all that goes on in the continual fear
of seeing one’s family reduced to the starkest poverty as soon as the
employer realizes that “his worker, his slave, is playing with
socialism!”
This is what you will see, if you go among the people.
And in that endless struggle, how often the worker, as he sinks under
the weight of obstacles, has said to himself in vain: “Where are these
young people who have been educated at our expense, whom we have fed and
clothed while they studied, and for whom, our backs bent under burdens
and our bellies empty, we have built these mansions, these colleges and
museums, and for whom, with our wan faces, we have printed their fine
books which we cannot even read? Where are they, these professors who
claim to possess humanitarian knowledge and for whom humanity is not
worth as much as a rare species of caterpillar? These men who talk of
freedom and never defend ours which day by day is trampled under foot?
These writers, these poets, these painters, this whole gang of
hypocrites, who speak of the people with tears in their eyes yet are
never to be found among us, helping in our endeavours!”
Occasionally a young man does turn up who has been dreaming of drums and
barricades and who is on the lookout for sensational scenes; he will
desert the cause of the people as soon as he sees that the way of the
barricades is long, that the work to be done on the way is onerous, and
that the laurel crowns he may win are mingled with thorns. More often
they are individuals of unfulfilled ambition who, having failed in their
first ventures, attempt to capture the voice of the people, but later
will be the first to thunder against them as soon as the people wish to
apply the principles they themselves have professed; it may be they who
will have the cannon aimed at the “vile multitude,” should it dare to
step beyond the point which they, the leaders, have indicated.
Add the stupid insults, the haughty contempt, the cowardly calumnies
expressed by the greater number, and you will see what the people can
expect from bourgeois youth to help them in their social revolution.
Lover of pure science, if you have opened your minds to the principles
of socialism and understand the full significance of the approaching
revolution, do you not recognize that the whole of science must be
reorganized to suit the new principles; that we will have to carry out
in this domain a revolution whose importance will vastly surpass that
accomplished in the sciences during the eighteenth century? Do you not
understand that history, today a convenient mythology regarding the
greatness of kings, of notable personalities, of parliaments-must be
entirely recast from the popular point of view, from the viewpoint of
the work accomplished by the masses in the phases of human revolution?
That social economics-hitherto concentrated on capitalist
exploitation-must be entirely re-elaborated, both in its fundamental
principles and in its innumerable applications? That anthropology,
sociology and ethics must be completely revised and that the natural
sciences themselves, seen from a new point of view, must undergo a
profound modification both in their concepts of natural phenomena and in
their methods of exposition? If you do understand these things, why
don’t you start making these changes and devote your insights to a good
cause? But above all come to our aid with your rigorous logic in
combatting secular prejudices and elaborating through synthesis the
foundations of a better organization; above all, teach us to apply to
our reasoning the boldness of true scientific investigation, and,
teaching by example, show us how one must sacrifice one’s life for the
triumph of truth!
And you, physician, whom hard experience has led to understand
socialism, do not tire of telling us-today, tomorrow, every day in every
occasion-that humanity is doomed to degenerate if it remains in the
present condition of living and work; that your drugs will remain
powerless against sickness while 99 per cent of humanity vegetate in
conditions absolutely opposed to those that science teaches; that it is
the causes of sickness which must be eliminated-and how are we to
eliminate those causes? Come then with your scalpel to dissect with a
meticulous hand this society on its way to collapse, tell us what a
rational way of life could and should be, and, as a true doctor, repeat
to us untiringly that one does not hesitate to amputate a gangrenous
limb when it might infect the whole body.
And you who have worked on the applications of science to industry, tell
us frankly what has been the result of your discoveries; reveal to those
who dare not yet stride boldly into the future what possibilities of new
inventions are carried within the knowledge we have already acquired,
what industry could be under the best conditions, what humanity could
produce if it produced always in such a way as to augment its
productivity. Offer the people the support of your intuitions, or your
practical spirit, of your talents of organization, instead of putting
them at the service of the exploiters.
And you, poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, if you have understood
your true missions and the interests of your art as well, come and put
your pen, your brush, your chisel at the service of the revolution.
Retell, in your prose rich with images or on your gripping canvases, the
titanic struggles of the peoples against their oppressors; inflame the
hearts of the young with the marvellous revolutionary breath which
inspired our ancestors; tell the woman how splendid her husband’s
actions will be if he gives his life to the great cause of social
emancipation. Show the people what is ugly in present-day life, and put
your finger on the causes of that ugliness; tell us what a rational life
might be if it did not have to stumble at every pace because of the
ineptitude and the ignominies of the present social order.
All of you who possess knowledge and talents and good heart as well,
come with your companions to put them at the service of those who have
the greatest need of them. And be confident that if you come, not as
masters, but as comrades in the struggle; not to govern but to seek your
inspiration in a new setting; less to teach than to understand and
formulate the aspirations of the masses and then work unslackeningly and
with all the energy of youth to introduce them into daily life: be
confident that then, but then only, you yourselves will be living
complete and rational lives. You will see that every one of your efforts
made in this direction will bear fruit amply; and this feeling of accord
established between your acts and the commands of your conscience will
give you energies which you would not suspect existed if you were
working for yourself alone.
To struggle in the midst of the people for truth, justice, equality-
what could you find more splendid in the whole of life?
4.
I have taken up three long chapters demonstrating to well-to-do young
people that when they face the dilemma that life offers them, they will
be forced, if they are brave and honest, to take their places in the
ranks of the socialists and embrace with them the cause of the social
revolution. This might appear to be a simple truth. Yet in speaking to
those who have been subjected to the influence of their middle class
environment, what sophistries one has to counteract, what prejudices one
must try to overcome, what mercenary motives one must seek to push
aside!
But I can be more direct in speaking to you, the young people who
yourselves come out of the populace. The very force of circumstances
makes you willing to become socialists, so long as you have the courage
to reason and to act according to your conclusions. In fact, modern
socialism has emerged out of the depths of the people’s consciousness.
If a few thinkers emerging from the bourgeoisie have given it the
approval of science and the support of philosophy, the basis of the idea
which they have given their own expression has nonetheless been the
product of the collective spirit of the working people. The rational
socialism of the International is still today our greatest strength, and
it was elaborated in working class organization, under the first
influence of the masses. The few writers who offered their help in the
work of elaborating socialist ideas have merely been giving form to the
aspirations that saw their first light among the workers.
To have emerged from the ranks of the working people and not to dedicate
oneself to the triumph of socialism, is to misunderstand your own true
interests, to deny your own cause and your historic mission at the same
time.
Have you forgotten the times when you were still a child and would go on
a winter’s day to play in your dark alley? The cold bit into your
shoulders through your thin clothes and the mud filled your broken down
shoes. Sometimes you would see passing by at a distance plump and richly
clothed children who looked haughtily down on you, but you knew
perfectly well that these spoilt brats, so spick and span, were not
worth as much as you and your comrades, either in intelligence, or good
sense, or energy. But later, when you let yourself be shut up in a dirty
workshop from five to six in the morning, and for twelve hours had to
stand beside a noisy machine, and became a machine yourself in following
day by day and years on end the pitiless cadence of its movements,
during all this time they-the others-were going happily to their lessons
in colleges, in fine schools, in universities And now these same
children, less intelligent but more educated than you, have become your
bosses, and enjoy all the pleasures of life, all the benefits of
civilization. And you-what expectations do you have?
You go home to a tiny apartment, dark and damp, where five or six human
beings swarm in a few square metres, where your mother, exhausted by
life and grown old from cares rather than from age, offers you as your
meal some bread, potatoes and a blackish liquid which ironically passes
as coffee; for your only distraction you have always the same question
on the order of the day, that of knowing how you will pay the baker and
the landlord tomorrow!
But must you really follow the same wretched way of life that your
father and your mother have endured for the past thirty or forty years?
Must you work all your life to obtain for a few the pleasures of
wellbeing, of knowledge and of art, and keep for yourself the continual
anxiety over that scrap of bread? Must you renounce for ever everything
that makes life good so that you can devote yourself to providing all
the advantages that are enjoyed by a handful of idlers? Must you wear
yourself out, and know only poverty and starvation when unemployment
comes close? Is that what you expect from life?
Maybe you will resign yourself. Seeing no way out of the situation,
perhaps you will say to yourself: “Whole generations have suffered the
same fate, and since nothing can be changed, I must endure it too! So
let us work and try to live as best we can.”
So be it! But if you do this, life itself will take on the task of
enlightening you.
One day the crash will come, a crisis that is no longer temporary like
those in the past, but one that will kill off whole industries, that
will reduce to poverty thousands of workers and decimate their families.
You will struggle, like the rest, against that calamity. But you will
soon see for yourself how your wife, your child, your friend, are
succumbing gradually to their privations, weakening before your eyes,
and, for want of food and care, dying on some wretched pallet, while
life, careless of those who perish, rolls on in its joyous multitudes
down the streets of the great city, brilliant with sunshine. Then you
will understand how repulsive this society is, you will think about the
causes of the crisis, and you will plumb me depths of that inequity
which exposes thousands of men to a handful of idlers; you will realise
that the socialists are right when they say that society could and
should be transformed from top to bottom.
Another day, when your employer makes yet another reduction in wages, to
rob you of a few pence to augment his fortune even farther, you will
protest, but he will answer arrogantly: “Go and eat grass if you do not
want to work for that rate.” You will then understand that your employer
is not only seeking to shear you like a sheep, but that he also thinks
of you as belonging to an inferior race; not content with holding you in
his claws through the wages system, he seeks to make you a slave in
every other respect. Then you will either bend your back, renouncing any
feeling of human dignity and end up suffering all kinds of humiliation;
or the blood will rise to your head, you will see with horror the slope
down which you are sliding, you will resist and, thrown out on the
street, you will understand when the socialists say: “Revolt! Revolt
against economic slavery, for that is the cause of all slaveries!” Then
you will come to take your place in the ranks of the socialists, and
will work with them for the abolition of all slaveries: economic,
political and social.
One day you may hear the story of the young girl whom you once liked so
much for her open gaze, her slender figure and her animated
conversation. Having struggled year after year against poverty, she left
her village for the city. She knew life there would be hard, but at
least she hoped to earn her bread honestly. But by now you can guess the
fate that overtook her. Courted by a young bourgeois, she let herself be
trapped by his fine words, and gave herself to him with the passion of
youth, to find herself abandoned at the end of a year, with a baby in
her arms. Ever brave, she did not cease struggle, but she succumbed in
the unequal fight against hunger and cold and ended up dying in some
hospital or other. What can you do about it? Perhaps you will push aside
your painful memories with a few stupid words: “She isn’t the first or
the last!” you will say, and one evening we will hear you in some cafe,
seated among other brutes of your kind, soiling the young woman’s name
with filthy slanders. Or perhaps your memories will move your heart; you
will seek out the contemptible seducer to throw his crime in his face.
You will think about the causes of these incidents of which you hear
every day, and you will understand that they cannot cease while mankind
is divided into two camps; the poor on one side and on the other the
idlers and the playboys with their fine words and brutal appetites. You
will understand that it is time to level out this gulf of separation,
and you will hasten to range yourself among the socialists.
And you, women of the people, has this story left your cold? As you
caress the blonde head of that child which crouches beside you, do you
never think of the fate that awaits it if the present social order does
not change? Do you never give a thought to the future that is in store
for your young sister, for your children? Do you want your son to
vegetate as your father vegetated, with no care but the need for bread,
no pleasures but those of the tavern? Do you want your husband and your
boy to be for ever at the mercy of the first comer who may chance to
have inherited from his father an interest to exploit? Would you like to
see them always remaining the slaves of the employer, the cannon fodder
of the powerful, the dung that serves to fatten the fields of the rich?
No, a thousand times no! I know very well that your blood boiled when
you heard that your husband, after loudly proclaiming a strike, ended up
accepting---cap in hand-the conditions contemptuously dictated in a
haughty tone by the big business men! I know that you admired those
Spanish women who went into the first ranks to present their breasts to
the soldiers’ bayonets during a popular uprising!
I know that you repeat with respect the name of the woman who lodged a
bullet in a satrap’s breast when he chose one day to outrage a socialist
held in prison. And I know also that your hearts beat when you read how
the women among the people of Paris gathered together under a rain of
shells to encourage “their men” in heroism.
I know all this, and that is why I do not doubt that you also will end
by coming to join those who work for the conquest of the future.
All of you, sincere young people, men and women, peasants, workers,
clerks and soldiers, will understand your rights and come to us; you
will come to work with your brothers in preparing the revolution which,
abolishing every kind of slavery, shattering all chains, breaking with
the old traditions and opening new horizons to all humanity, will
finally succeed in establishing in human societies the true Equality,
the true Liberty, work for all, and for all the full enjoyment of the
fruits of their labour, the full enjoyment of all their faculties; a
life that is rational, humane and happy!
Do not let anyone tell you that we are only a tiny handful, too weak
ever to attain the grand objective at which we aim. Let us count
ourselves and see how many of us there are who suffer from injustice. We
peasants who work for another and eat oats to leave the wheat for the
master-we are millions of men; we are so numerous that we alone form the
mass of the people. We workers who wear rags and weave silks and
velours, we too are multitudes, and when the factory whistles allow us
our brief period of rest we flood the streets and squares like a roaring
sea. We soldiers who follow the beat of the drum and receive bullets so
that our of officers can win medals and ranks, we poor fools who up to
now have known nothing better than to shoot our brothers, it would be
enough for us to turn our rifles for the faces of those decorated
personages who command us to turn pale. All we who suffer and who are
outraged, we are an immense crowd; we are an ocean in which all could be
submerged. As soon as we have the will, a moment would be enough for
justice to be done.
THE spectacle offered by Europe at the present moment is very sad to
see, but it is also very edifying. On the one side, there is a coming
and going of diplomats and statesmen which increases visibly whenever
the air of the old continent begins to smell of gunpowder. Alliances are
made and dismantled; human beings are traded and sold like cattle to
make sure of alliances. “So many millions of heads guaranteed by our
house to yours; so many acres to feed them, so many ports to export
their wool,” and he who can best dupe the others in such trafficking
comes out the winner. This is what in political jargon is called
diplomacy.
On the other side there is no ending the flow of armaments. Every day
brings us new inventions for the better extermination of our fellows,
new expenditures, new borrowings, new taxes. Crying up patriotism,
promoting chauvinism, fanning the hatreds between nations, become the
most lucrative lines in politics and journalism alike. Childhood has not
been spared; children are enrolled in battalions, and taught to hate the
Prussians, the English, the Italians; they are trained in blind
obedience to the governments of the moment, whether they be blue, white
or black. And when the age of twenty-one had sounded for them, they will
be loaded down like mules with ammunition, rations and tools, guns will
be thrust into their hands, and they will be told to march to the sound
of the trumpet, and to fight like savage beasts without ever asking why
or for what purpose. Whether they face Germans or Italians who are
starving to death-or their own brothers who have rebelled against
need-the trumpet sounds, and men must be killed!
This is the conclusion of all the wisdom of our governments and our
teachers! This is all they have been able to offer us as an ideal, in an
age when the poor of all countries stretch out their hands to each other
across the frontiers!
“Ah! you did not want socialism? Very well, you shall have war, war for
thirty years, war for fifty years!” said Alexander Herzen(l4) after
1848. And you have it! If the cannon ceases to thunder for a while in
the world, it is just to take breath, to start again somewhere else with
renewed vigour, while the European war-the grand tournament of the
peoples -has been a threat for the past ten years, without anyone
knowing why we shall be fighting, or beside whom, or against whom, or in
the name of what principles, or to safeguard what interests!
In the old days, if there was a war, at least one knew why people were
killing each other. “Another king has insulted ours; let us overwhelm
his subjects.” “Some emperor wants to take away one of our provinces!
Let us die to keep it for His Most Christian Majesty!” People fought to
sustain the rivalries of kings. It was stupid, but at least in such
cases the kings could enrol only a few thousand men. But these days
whole peoples throw themselves upon each other, and why the Devil do
they do it?
Kings no longer count in matters of war. Victoria does not take offense
at the insults that are showered on her in France; the English would not
stir to avenge her. But can you guarantee that within two years French
and English soldiers will not be at each other’s throats over supremacy
in Egypt?(15) It is the same in the East. However autocratic and
ill-natured a monarch he may be, Alexander-of-all-the Russias will
swallow all the insolences of Andrassy and Salisbury without budging
from his den in Gatchina,(l6) so long as the bankers of Petersburg and
the industrialists of Moscow-who these days call themselves
“patriots”-have not given him the order to set his armies in motion.
In Russia, as in England, in Germany as in France, men no longer fight
for the good pleasure of kings; they fight for the integrity of revenueS
and for the growing wealth of the Three Powerful Ones, Rothschild,
Schneider, Anzin;(17) for the benefit of the barons of high finance and
industry. The rivalries between kings have been superseded by the
rivalries between bourgeois societies.
Indeed, people do still speak of “political preponderance,” but try to
translate that metaphysical entity into material facts; examine how the
political preponderance of Germany, for example, makes itself manifest
at this moment, and you will see that it is quite simply a matter of
economic preponderance in international markets. What Germany, France,
Russia, England, and Austria are all trying to win at this moment is not
military preponderance; it is economic domination. It is the right to
impose their goods and their customs tariffs on their neighbours; the
right to exploit industrially backward peoples; the privilege of
building railways in countries that do not have them and in this way
becoming masters of the frontiers; the right, in the last resort, to
appropriate from a neighbour either a port that will activate commerce,
or a province where surplus merchandise can be unloaded.
When we fight today, it is to guarantee our great industrialists a
profit of 30%, to assure the financial barons their domination at the
Bourse, and to provide the shareholders of mines and railways with their
incomes of tens of millions of dollars. This is so evident that if we
were just a little more consistent, we would replace the birds of prey
on our flags by golden calves and other ancient emblems by bags of gold,
and change the names of our regiments, hitherto borrowed from the
princes of the blood, to those of the princes of industry and finance; a
Third Schneider regiment, a Tenth Anzin, a Twentieth Rothschild. We
would know at least for whom we were doing the slaughtering.
Opening new markets, imposing one’s own merchandise, whether good or
bad, is the basis of all present-day politics-European and
continental-and the true cause of nineteenth century wars.
In the last century England was the first to inaugurate the system of
large industry for export. It piled its workers into the cities, yoked
them to rationalised work patterns, multiplied production and began to
accumulate mountains of products in its warehouses. But these goods were
not intended for the ragged folk who made the cotton and woollen fabrics
and were paid just enough to survive and multiply. The ships of England
ploughed their way through the oceans, seeking buyers on the European
continent, in Asia, in Oceania, in America, certain of not finding
competitors. A black poverty reigned in the towns, but the manufacturer
and the merchant grew visibly rich; the wealth drawn from abroad
accumulated in the hands of a few, and the economists applauded and
urged their compatriots to follow suit.
Already, at the end of the last century, France was beginning on the
same evolution. By transferring power, by attracting the bare-footed
peasants to the towns and by enriching the bourgeoisie, the revolution
gave a new impulse to economic evolution. At this point the English
bourgeoisie became alarmed, even more than they had been by the
republican declarations and the blood spilt in Paris; supported by the
aristocracy, they declared a war to the death on the French bourgeoisie
who threatened to close the European markets to English products.
We know the outcome of that war. France was defeated, but it had won its
place in the markets. The two bourgeoisies-English and French -even at
one time made a touching alliance; they recognized each other as
brothers.
But France, on her side, soon went beyond the limit. Through production
for export, she tried to monopolize the markets, without taking into
account the industrial progress that was moving slowly from the West
into the East and dominating new countries. The French.bourgeoisie
sought to broaden the circle of its profits. For eighteen years it
placed itself under the heel of the Third Napoleon, always hoping that
the usurper would impose economic rule over the whole of Europe; it only
abandoned him when he showed himself incapable of this.
Now it was a new nation, Germany, that introduced into its territory the
same economic regime. She also depopulated her fields and piled the
hungry people into the towns, which doubled their population in a few
years. She also began mass production. A formidable industry, armed with
the latest equipment, supported by technical and scientific education
lavishly provided, in its turn piled up products destined not for those
who made them, but for export and the enrichment of the masters. Capital
accumulates and seeks advantageous places of investment in Asia, Africa,
Turkey, Russia; the stock exchange in Berlin rivals that in Paris and
seeks to dominate it.
At this point a common cry burst out from the heart of the German
bourgeoisie let us unify under no matter what flag, even that of
Prussia, and profit from that power to impose our products and our
tariffs on our neighbours, end lay hold of a good port on the Baltic and
on the Adriatic as Soon as possible! They wished to break the military
power of France which had been threatening for twenty years to lay down
the economic law of Europe and to dictate its commercial treaties.
The war of 1870 was the consequence of these developments. France no
longer dominates the markets; it is Germany that seeks to dominate them,
and she also, through the thirst for gain, seeks always to extend her
exploitation, without regard for the crises and crashes, the insecurity
and poverty that eat away at her economic structure. The coasts of
Africa, the paddies of Korea, the plains of Poland, the steppes of
Russia, the pusztas of Hungary, the Bulgarian valleys filled with
roses-all excite the greed of German speculators. And every time such a
speculator travels over these sparsely cultivated plains, and through
their towns which have so little industry, and beside their quiet
rivers, his heart bleeds at the spectacle. His imagination tells him how
he might extract whole sacks of gold from these untouched riches, how he
would bend these uncultivated people under the yoke of his capital. He
swears that one day he will carry “civilization,” which is what he calls
exploitation, into the East. While he waits for this, he will try to
impose his merchandise and his railways on Italy, on Austria and on
Russia.
- But these countries in their turn are freeing themselves from the
economic tutelage of their neighbours. They also are slowly entering the
orbit of the “industrial” countries, and their newly born bourgeoisies
ask nothing better than to enrich themselves through export. In only a
few years Russia and Italy have made a prodigious leap forward in the
extension of their industries, and since the peasants, reduced to the
blackest of poverty, can buy nothing, it is for export that the Russian,
Italian and Austrian industrialists are striving. They need markets now,
and as those of Europe are already taken up, it is on Asia and Africa
that they are forced to concentrate their efforts, condemned inevitably
to come to blows because they have failed to agree on sharing out the
spoil.
What alliances could stand firm in such a situation, created by the very
character given to industry by those who direct it? The alliance of
Germany and Russia is a matter of pure formality; Alexander and William
may embrace as much as they choose, but the bourgeoisie emerging in
Russia cordially detests the German bourgeoisie, which repays it in the
same coin. We remember the general outcry raised in the German press
when the Russian government augmented the tariffs by a third. “A war
against Russia-say the German bourgeoisie and the workers who follow
them-would be even more popular than the war of 1870.”
So what? Is not the famous alliance between Germany and Austria also
written in sand, and are these two powers-which means their respective
bourgeoisies-very far off a serious dispute over tariffs? And those twin
siblings, Austria and Hungary, are they not also on the point of
declaring a tariff war-their interests being diametrically opposed on
the matter of exploiting the southern Slavs? And even France, is it not
itself divided on matters of tariffs?
Indeed, you did not want socialism, and you shall have war! You are in
for thirty years of war, if the revolution does not put an end to this
situation which is as absurd as it is ignoble. But this you must also
know. Arbitration, equilibrium, the suppression of permanent armies,
disarmament, all are beautiful dreams with no practical meaning. Only
the revolution, having put instruments and machines, raw materials and
the whole wealth of society in the hands of the worker and reorganized
the whole of production so as to satisfy the needs of those who produce
everything, can put an end to wars over markets.
Each working for all, and all for each-that is the only condition which
can lead to peace among nations, who demand it loudly but are frustrated
by those who hold the monopoly of social wealth.
“A LL that you say is very true,” our critics often say to us.] “Your
ideal of anarchist communism is excellent, and its realization would in
fact lead to well-being and peace on earth; but so few want it, and so
few understand it, and so few have the devotion that is needed to work
for its achievement! You are only a tiny minority, your feeble groups
scattered here and there, lost in the middle of an indifferent mass, and
you face a terrible enemy, well-organized and in control of armies, of
capital, of education. The struggle you have undertaken is beyond your
powers.” This is the objection we hear constantly from many of our
critics and often even from our friends. Let us see what truth there is
in it.
That our anarchist groups are only a small minority in comparison with
the tens of millions who populate France, Spain, Italy and Germany
-nothing could be more true. Groups who represent a new idea have always
begun by being no more than a minority. But is that really against us?
Just now, it is the opportunists who are the majority: must we then, by
chance, become opportunists? Up to 1790 it was the royalists, the
constitutionalists, who formed the majority in France; should the
republicans, then, have renounced their republican ideas and joined the
royalists, when France was making great strides towards the abolition of
royalty?
It is not important that numerically we are a minority; that is not the
real question. What is important is to know whether the ideas of
anarchist communism are in harmony with the evolution which is taking
place in human consciousness, especially among peoples of the Latin
race. But on this subject it is clear that revolution is not taking the
direction of authoritarianism; it is taking the direction of the most
complete freedom of the individual, of the producing and consuming
group, of the commune, of the collective, of free federation. Evolution
is being produced, not in the direction of proprietary individualism,
but in the direction of production and consumption arranged in common.
In the large cities communism scares no one, of course, so long as it is
a question of anarchist communism. In the villages the same inclination
prevails, and apart from a few areas of France where special
circumstances exist, the peasant is now progressing in many ways towards
the common use of the implements of work. That is why, each time we
expose our ideas to the great masses, each time we speak to them of the
revolution as we understand it in simple and comprehensible terms,
giving practical examples, we are always greeted by their applause, in
the industrial centres as well as in the villages.
And could it be otherwise? If anarchy and communism had been the product
of philosophic speculations, created by savants in the dim lights of
their studies, these two principles would have found no echo. They are
the statements of those who understand what the workers and peasants are
saying when they are released for a day or so from the daily routine and
set themselves thinking about a better future. They are statements of
the slow evolution that has occurred in people’s minds during the course
of this century. They project the popular conception of the
transformation that must soon begin to carry justice, solidarity and
brotherhood into our towns and our countryside. Born of the people,
these ideas are acclaimed by the people every time they are exposed to
them in a comprehensible manner.
There in fact lies the true power of the ideas of anarchism and
communism, and not in the number of active adherents, organized in
groups, who are courageous enough to incur the danger of the struggle,
the consequences to which one exposes oneself in fighting for the
popular revolution. Their number grows from day to day and it continues
to grow, but it will only be on the very eve of the uprising that it
will become a majority in place of the minority it now is.
History is there to tell us that those who have been a minority on the
eve of the revolution, become the predominant force on the day of the
revolution, if they truly express popular aspirations and if-the other
essential condition-the revolution lasts long enough to allow the
revolutionary idea to spread, to germinate and to bear its fruit. For we
must not forget that it is not by a revolution lasting a couple of days
that we shall come to transform society in the direction posed by
anarchist communism. An uprising of short duration can overthrow a
government to put another in its place; it can replace a Napoleon by a
Jules Favre(18) but it changes nothing in the basic institutions of
society.
It is a whole insurrectionary period of three, four, perhaps five years
that we must traverse to accomplish our revolution in the property
system and in social organization. It took five years of continual
insurrection, from 1788 to 1793, to batter down the feudal landholding
system and the omnipotence of the crown in France; it would take three
or four to batter down bourgeois feudalism and the omnipotence of me
plutocracy.
It is above all in that period of excitement, when people’s minds work
with accelerated vitality, when everyone, in the sumptuous city home as
in the darkest cabin, takes an interest in communal things, discusses,
talks and seeks to convert others, that the anarchist idea, now being
spread slowly by the existing groups, will germinate, bear its fruit and
plant itself in the broad mass of human minds. It is then that the
indifferent ones of today will become partisans of the new idea. Such
has always been the progress of ideas, and the great French Revolution
can serve as an example.
Of course, that revolution never went so deeply as the one of which we
dream. It did no more than overthrow the aristocracy, to replace it by
the bourgeoisie. It did not touch the system of individual property; on
the contrary, it strengthened it by introducing bourgeois exploitation.
But it achieved an immense result of its own through the final abolition
of serfdom, and it abolished that serfdom by force, which is far more
effective than the abolition of anything by means of laws. It opened the
era of revolutions, which since then have followed at short intervals,
drawing nearer and nearer to the true social revolution. It gave the
French the revolutionary impulse without which peoples can stagnate for
centuries under the most abject oppression. It bequeathed to the world a
stream of fertile ideas for the future; it awakened the spirit of
revolt; and it gave a revolutionary education to the French people. If
in 1871 France created the Commune, if today it willingly accepts the
idea of anarchist communism while other nations are still in the
authoritarian or cnstitutionalist phase (which France traversed before
1848, or even before 1789), it is because, at the end of the eighteenth
century, she passed through four years of great revolution.
Yet remember what a sad picture France offered only a few years before
that revolution, and what a feeble minority were those who dreamed of
the abolition of royalty and feudalism!
The peasants were plunged in a poverty and an ignorance of which today
it is hard even to form an idea. Lost in their villages, without regular
communications, not knowing what was happening fifty miles away, these
beings yoked to the plough and living in pest-ridden hovels seemed
doomed to eternal servitude. Any common action was impossible, and at
the least sign of insurrection the soldiers were there to cut down the
insurgents and hang the leaders above the village fountain on a gibbet
eighteen feet high. At most a few inspired propagandists wandered
through the villages, fanning the hatred against the oppressors and
reawakening hope among a few individuals who dared to listen. At most a
peasant risked himself to ask for bread or a little reduction in taxes.
We only have to read through the village records to become aware of
this.
As for the bourgeoisie, its leading characteristic was cowardice. A few
isolated individuals occasionally took the risk of attacking the
government and reawakening the spirit of revolt by some audacious act.
But the great mass of the bourgeoisie bowed down shamefully before the
king and his court, before the noblemen and even before the nobleman’s
lackey. Only read the municipal records of the period, and you will be
aware of the vile servility that impregnated the words of the
bourgeoisie in the years before 1789. Their words ooze with the most
ignoble servitude, with all due deference to M. Louis Blanc(19) and
other adulators of that prerevolutionary bourgeoisie. A deep despair
inspired the few real revolutionaries of the period when they cast an
eye around them, and Camille Desmoulins was justified in making his
famous remark: “We republicans were hardly a dozen in number before
1789.”(20)
But what a transformation three or four years later! As soon as the
power of royalty was even slightly eroded by the current of events, the
people began to rebel. During the whole year of 1788 there were only
half-hearted riots among the peasantry. Like the small and hesitant
strikes today, they broke out here and there across France, but
gradually they spread, became more broad and bitter, more difficult to
suppress.
A year earlier people hardly dared to demand a reduction of taxes (as
nowadays one hardly dares demand an increase in wages). A year later, in
1789, the peasants were already going far ahead. A great idea rose to
the surface: that of shaking off completely the yoke of the nobleman, of
the priest, of the landowning bourgeois. As soon as the peasant saw that
the government no longer had the strength to resist a rebellion, he rose
l up against his enemies. A few brave men set fire to the first
chateaux, while the mass of people, still full of fear, waited until the
flames from the conflagration of the great houses rose over the hills
towards the clouds to illuminate the fate of those tax farmers who had
placidly witnessed the torturing of the precursors of the peasant
revolt. This time the soldiers did not come to suppress the
insurrections, for they were otherwise occupied, and the revolt spread
from village to village, and overnight half of France was on fire.
While the future revolutionaries of the middle class were still falling
over themselves before the king, while the great personages of the
coming revolution sought to take control of the uprising through bribes
and concessions, villages and towns rebelled, long before the gathering
of the States General and the speeches of Mirabeau. Hundreds of riots
(Taine knew of at least three hundred) broke out in the villages, before
the Parisians, armed with their pikes and a few unreliable cannon,
stormed the Bastille.
From this point, it became impossible to control the revolution. If it
had broken out only in Paris, if it had been just a parliamentary
revolution, it would have been drowned in blood, and the hordes of the
counter-revolution would have carried the white flag from village to
village, from town to town, massacring the peasants and the poor. But
fortunately from the beginning the revolution had taken on another
shape. It had broken out almost simultaneously in a thousand places; in
each village, in each town, in each city of the insurgent provinces, the
revolutionary minorities, strong in their audacity and in the unspoken
support they recognized in the aspirations of the people, marched to the
conquest of the castles, of the town halls and finally of the Bastille,
terrorizing the aristocracy and the upper middle class, abolishing
privileges. The minority started the revolution and carried the people
with it.
It will be just the same with the revolution whose approach we foresee.
The idea of anarchist communism, today represented by feeble minorities’
but increasingly finding popular expression, will make its way among the
mass of the people. Spreading everywhere, the anarchist groups , however
slight they may be, will take strength from the support they find among
the people, and will raise the red flag of the revolution. And this kind
of revolution, breaking out simultaneously in a thousand places, will
prevent the establishment of any government that might hinder the
unfolding of events, and the revolution will burn on until it has
accomplished its mission: the abolition of individual propertyowning and
of the State.
On that day, what is now the minority will become the People, the great
mass, and that mass rising up against property and the State, will march
forward towards anarchist communism.
We are often reproached with having taken as our slogan word anarchy
which stirs up fear in so many minds. “Your ideas are excellent – we are
told – but you must admit that you have made an unfortunate choice in
naming your party. Anarchy, in current speech, is the synonym for
disorder, for chaos; that word awakens in the mind the idea of colliding
interests, of individuals at war with each other, who cannot succeed in
establishing harmony.”
Let us begin by observing that an activist party, a party which
represents a new tendency, rarely has the chance of itself choosing its
name. It was not the Beggars of Brabant¹ who invented that name which
later became so popular. But, from being a nickname – and an almost
inspired one – it was taken up by the movement, generally accepted, and
soon became its glorious title. In the end the word seemed to contain a
whole idea.
And the sans-culottes of 1793² It was the enemies of the popular
revolution who invented that name; but did it not condense a whole idea,
that of the revolt of the people, ragged and tired of poverty, against
all these royalists, self-styled patriots and Jacobins, well-dressed and
spick-and-span, who in spite of their pompous speeches and the incense
burnt before them by middle-class historians, were the true enemies of
the people, because they despised the populace deeply for its poverty,
for its libertarian and egalitarian spirit, for its revolutionary
ardour?
It was the same with the word nihilists,³ which has so intrigued the
journalists, and which led to such games with words, in both the good
and the bad sense, until it was finally understood that here was not a
question of a baroque and almost religious sect but of a true
revolutionary force. Launched by Turgenev in his novel, Fathers and
Sons, it was taken up by the “fathers” who used the nickname to take
revenge for the disobedience of the “sons”. The sons accepted it, and
when later they found that it led to misunderstandings and tried to shed
it, it had become impossible. The press and the people in Russia did not
want to describe the Russian revolutionaries by any other name. Besides,
the name was not entirely inappropriate, since it embraced an idea: it
expressed a negation of all the features of present-day civilization
that are based on the oppression of one class by another; the negation
of the existing economic system, the negation of governmentalism and
power, of bourgeois politics, of routine science, of bourgeois morality,
or art put at the service of exploiters, of customs and habits made
grotesque and detestable by hypocrisy which past centuries have
bequeathed to present day society – in brief, the negation of all that
bourgeois society now loads with veneration.
It was the same with the anarchists. When in the heart of the
International there rose up a party that fought against authority in all
its forms, that party first took on the name of the federalist party,
then called itself anti-statist or anti-authoritarian. At that epoch it
even avoided assuming the name of anarchist. The word an-archy (as it
was written then) might have attached the party too closely to the
Proudhonians,⁴ whose ideas of economic reform the International then
combated. But it was precisely to create confusion that the adversaries
of the anti-authoritarians took pleasure in using the name; besides, it
enabled them to say that the very name of the anarchists proved that
their sole ambition was to create disorder and chaos, without thinking
of the result.
The anarchist party hastened to accept the name that was given to it. It
insisted first of all on the hyphen uniting an and archy, explaining
that under that form, the word an-archy, of Greek origin, signified no
power, and not “disorder”; but soon it accepted the word as it was,
without giving a useless task to proof-readers or a lesson in Greek to
its readers.
The word was thus returned to its primitive, ordinary and common
meaning, expressed in 1816 in these words by the English philosopher
Jeremy Bentham.⁵ “The philosopher who wants to reform a bad law does not
preach insurrection against it…. The character of the anarchist is quite
different. He denies the existence of the law, he rejects its validity,
he incites men to ignore it as a law and to rise up against its
implementation.” The meaning of the word has become even broader today:
the anarchist denies not only existing laws, but all established power,
all authority; yet the essence remains the same; the anarchist rebels –
and this is where he begins – against power, authority, under whatever
form it may appear.
But this word, we are told, awakens in the mind the negation of order,
and hence the idea of disorder, of chaos!
Let us try to understand each other. What kind of order are you talking
about? Is it the harmony of which we dream, we anarchists? The harmony
that will establish itself freely in human relations once humanity
ceases to be divided into two classes, on sacrificed to the other? The
harmony that will arise spontaneously from the solidarity of interests,
when all men will form the same single family, when each will work for
the well-being of all and all for the well-being of each? Evidently not!
Those who reproach anarchism for being the negation of order are not
speaking of that future harmony; they speak of order as it is conceived
in our present society. So let us take a look at this order which
anarchy wishes to destroy.
Order, as it is understood today, means nine-tenths of humanity working
to procure luxury, pleasure and the satisfaction of the most execrable
of passions for a handful of idlers.
Order is the deprivation for this nine-tenths of humanity of all that is
necessary for a healthy life and for the reasonable development of the
intellectual qualities. Reducing nine-tenths of humanity to the
condition of beasts of burden living from day to day, without ever
daring to think of the pleasures man can gain from the study of science,
from artistic creation – that is order!
Order is poverty; it is famine become the normal order of society. It is
the Irish peasant dying of hunger; it is the peasant of a third of
Russia dying of diphtheria, of typhus, of hunger as a result of need in
the midst of piles of wheat destined for export. It is the people of
Italy reduced to abandoning their luxuriant countryside to wander over
Europe seeking some tunnel or other to excavate, where they will risk
being crushed to death after having survived a few months longer. It is
land taken from the peasant for raising animals to feed the rich; it is
land left fallow rather than being given back to those who ask nothing
better than to cultivate it.
Order is the woman selling herself to feed her children; it is the child
reduced to working in a factory or dying of starvation; it is the worker
reduced to the state of a machine. It is the phantom of the worker
rising up at the doors of the rich. It is the phantom of the people
rising up at the gates of the government.
Order is a tiny minority, elevated into the seats of government, which
imposes itself in that way on the majority and prepares its children to
continue the same functions in order to maintain the same privileges by
fraud, corruption, force and massacre.
Order is the continual war of man against man, of trade against trade,
of class against class, of nation against nation. It is the cannon that
never ceases to roar over Europe; it is the devastation of countryside,
the sacrifice of whole generations on the battlefield, the destruction
in a single year of wealth accumulated by centuries of hard toil.
Order is servitude, it is the shackling of thought, the brutalizing of
the human race, maintained by the sword and the whip. It is the sudden
death by fire-damp, or the slow death by suffocation, of hundreds of
miners blown up or buried each year by the greed of the employers, and
shot down and bayoneted as soon as they dare complain.
Order, finally, is the drowning in blood of the Paris Commune. It is the
death of thirty thousand men, women and children, torn apart by shells,
shot down, and buried alive, under the streets of Paris. It is the
destiny of Russian youth, immured in prisons, isolated in the snows of
Siberia, the best and purest of them dying by the hangman’s rope.
That is order.
And disorder? What is this you call disorder?
It is the uprising of the people against this ignoble order, breaking
its fetters, destroying the barriers, and marching towards a better
future. It is humanity at the most glorious point in history. It is the
revolt of thought on the eve of the revolution; it is the overthrowing
of hypotheses sanctioned by the immobility of preceding centuries; it is
the opening out of a whole flood of new ideas, audacious inventions, it
is the solution of the problems of science.
Disorder is the abolition of ancient slaveries, it is the uprising of
the communes; it is the destruction of feudal serfdom, the effort to
make an end to economic servitude.
Disorder is the insurrection of peasants rising up against priests and
lords, burning castles to give place to farmsteads, emerging from their
hovels to take their place in the sun. It is France abolishing royalty,
and delivering a mortal blow to serfdom in all of Western Europe.
Disorder is 1848, making the kings tremble and proclaiming the right to
work. It is the people of Paris who fight for a new idea and who, while
succumbing to massacre, bequeath to humanity the idea of the free
commune, and open for it the way towards that revolution whose approach
we foresee and whose name will be “the social revolution.”
Disorder – what they call disorder – is all the ages during which whole
generations sustained an incessant struggle and sacrificed themselves to
prepare a better existence for humanity by freeing it from the servitude
of the past. It is the ages during which the popular genius took its
free way and in a few years made gigantic steps forward, without which
men would have remained in the condition of the slave of antiquity,
cringing and debased by misery.
Disorder is the blossoming of the most beautiful passions and the
greatest of devotions, it is the epic of supreme human love.
The word anarchy, implying the negation of order, and invoking the
memory of the most beautiful moments in the life of the peoples – is it
not well chosen for a party that marches towards the conquest of a
better future?
¹ The true beginnings of the resistance to Austrian rule in Belgium,
which ended in its independence in 1830, was the rebellion of 1789 to
1790, inspired by the French Revolution, which was defeated at the time
but left a lasting heritage of resistance to Hapsburg rule.
² The word “sans-culotte” was actually first used in 1789. It did not
mean bare-bottomed, but referred to those more radical – and usually
lower middle class – revolutionaries who chose to wear pantaloons
(trousers) in preference to the culottes (knew breeches) favored by the
aristocrats.
³ The word “nihilists” was certainly not “launched” by Turgenev, though
he popularized it in Fathers and Sons. (1861). The Oxford English
Dictionary cites a use in 1817 by an American theologian, and the
concept of nihilism cropped up in the religious word battles of the
Reformation period.
⁴ The word anarchist was first used in a positive way by Proudhon
himself, in What is Property? (1840), but it had already been used in a
derogatory way against the Levellers during the English Civil War of the
17^(th) century (they were called “Switzerising anarchists”) and by the
Girondins against the enragés during the French Revolution.
⁵ Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was the founder of Utilitarianism and
famous for his declaration that the only true criterion of political
action was that it should promote the greatest happiness for the
greatest number. He was an influential penal and legislative reformer.
1.
When we say that the social revolution must be achieved by the
liberation of the Communes, and that it is the Communes, absolutely
independent, liberated from the tutelage of the State, that alone can
give us the necessary setting for a revolution and the means of
accomplishing it, we are reproached with wanting to recall to life a
form of society that has already outlived its time. “But the Commune,”
they say, “belongs to another age! In setting out to destroy the State
and put free communes in its place, you are looking to the past; you
want to lead us back into the heart of the middle ages, to reignite the
old communal wars, and destroy the national unities that have been so
painfully achieved in the course of history.
Very well, let us consider this criticism.
First, we must understand that comparisons with the past have only a
relative value. If, in fact, the Commune as we envisage it were really a
mere return towards the Commune of the Middle Ages, must we not
recognize that the Commune today cannot possibly clothe itself again in
the forms it assumed seven centuries ago? And is it not evident that if
it were established in our days, in our century of railways and
telegraphs, of cosmopolitan science and research into pure truth, the
Commune would have an organization so different from that which it had
in the twelfth century that we would be in the presence of an absolutely
new fact, emerging in new conditions and leading inevitably to
absolutely different consequences.
Besides, our adversaries, the defenders of the State, under its various
forms, should remember that we can raise against them, objections as
good as theirs. We in our turn can say to them and with much more
reason, that it is they who have their eyes turned towards the past,
since the State is a form just as old as the Commune. Only there is this
difference; while the State in history represents the negation of all
freedom, the triumph of the absolute and the arbitrary, the ruin of its
subjects, torture and the scaffold, it is precisely in the liberties of
the Commune and in the uprisings of peoples and Communes against the
State that we rediscover the most beautiful pages of history. Certainly,
in transporting ourselves into the past, it is not towards Louis Xl, a
Louis XV, a Catherine 11 that we turn our attention; it is rather
towards the communes or republics of Amalfi and Florence, those of
Toulouse and Laon, of Liege and Courtray, of Augsburg and Nuremberg, of
Pskov and Novgorod.
It is not a matter on which we should be satisfied with mere words and
sophistries; it is important to study and analyse closely, and not to
imitate M. de Laveleye29 and his zealous students who confine themselves
to telling us, “But the Commune belongs to the middle ages! In
consequence it must be condemned!” “The State is a whole past of crime,”
we answer, “and therefore it is condemned with much more justification.”
Between the Commune of the middle ages and that which might be
established today, and probably will be established soon, there will be
plenty of essential differences: a veritable abyss opened up by the six
or seven centuries of human development and harsh experience. Let us
examine the principal differences.
What was the purpose of that “conjuration” or “communion” made by the
burgesses in such and such a city? It was a very modest one: to liberate
themselves from the lords. The inhabitants, merchants and artisans, came
together and swore not to allow “anyone whatever to do harm to one among
them or to treat him from this time onward as a serf”; it was against
the long-established masters that the Commune rose in arms. “Commune,”
said an author of the 12^(th) century, quoted by Augustin Thierry,30 “is
a new and detestable word, and this is how it must be understood:
taxable people shall pay once only a year the rent they owe their lords.
If they commit an offence, it shall be discharged by a legally fixed
penalty; and the peasants shall be entirely exempt from the levies of
money it has been customary to impose on them.”
Thus it was actually against the lords that the Commune rose up in the
middle ages. It is from the State that the Commune of today is seeking
to liberate itself£ This is an essential difference, for we must
remember that it was actually the State, represented by the king who,
later on, realizing that the Communes wished to make themselves
independent of the lords, sent its armies “to punish,” as the Chronicle
says, “the presumption of these ne’er-do-wells, who, in the name of the
Commune, make a show of rebelling against the crown.”
The Commune of tomorrow will know that it cannot admit any higher
authority; above it there can only be the interests of the Federation,
freely accepted by itself as well as the other communes. It will know
that there can be no middle way: either the Commune will be absolutely
free to adopt all the institutions it wishes and to make all the reforms
and revolutions it finds necessary, or it will remain what it has been
up to today, a mere branch of the State, restricted in all its
movements, always on the point of entering into conflict with the State
and sure of succumbing in the struggle that will follow. The Commune
will know that it must break the State and replace it by the Federation,
and it will act in that way. More than that, it will have the means to
do so. Today it is not only small towns that raise the banner of
communal insurrection, it is Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Cartagena,31 and
soon all the great cities will unfurl the same flag. This will mean an
essential difference from the Commune of the past.
In freeing itself from the lords, did the Commune of the middle ages
free itself also from those rich merchants who, by the sale of
merchandise and capital goods, had gained private wealth in the heart of
the city? Not at all! Having demolished the towers of the overlord, the
inhabitant of the town very soon saw within the Commune itself the
citadels of the rich merchants who sought to subdue him being built, and
the internal history of the Communes in the middle ages was that of
bitter struggle between the rich and the poor, a struggle that ended
inevitably with the king’s intervention. As a new aristocracy took shape
in the very heart of the Commune’ the people, having fallen into the
same kind of servitude to the lord within the city as it had hitherto
suffered to the lord outside, understood that it had nothing to defend
in the Commune; its members deserted the walls they had built to gain
their liberty and which the regime of individualism had turned into the
ramparts of a new servitude. Having nothing to lose, the people let the
rich merchants defend themselves, and these relations were usually
limited to a treaty for the defence of urban rights against the lords,
or perhaps a pact of solidarity for the mutual protection of the
citizens of the communes on their distant journeys. And when real
leagues were formed among the towns, as in Lombardy, Spain and Belgium,
these leagues were too lacking in homogeneity and too fragile because of
the diversity of privileges, and soon broke up into isolated groups or
succumbed under the attacks of the neighbouring states.
How different from the groups that might come into existence today! A
small commune could not survive a week without being forced by
circumstances to establish stable relations with industrial, commercial
andartistic centres, and these centres, in their turn, would feel the
need to open their doors wide to the inhabitants of nearby villages, of
the surrounding communes, and of the more distant cities.
If one of these cities were to proclaim the Commune tomorrow, wereto
abolish within itself all individual property, were to introduce
complete communism, i.e. the collective enjoyment of social capital, of
thetools of work and the products of that work, in a mere few days-
provided it were not surrounded by hostile armies-the convoys of carts
would arrive at the markets. The traders would send to the city from
distant ports their cargoes of raw materials. The products of the city’s
industries, having satisfied the needs of the population, would go to
seek buyers in the four corners of the earth. Visitors would arrive in
crowds, peasants, citizens of nearby towns, and foreigners, and they
would depart to tell in their own homes of the marvellous life of the
free city where everyone worked, where nobody was any longer poor or
oppressed, where all enjoyed the fruits of their labour, without anyone
seizing a lion’s share. There would be no fear of isolation; if the
communists in the United States had reason to complain in their communal
colonies, it was not because of isolation, but rather because of the
intrusion of the surrounding bourgeois world in their communal affairs.
The fact is that today commerce and exchange, while overflowing the
bounds of national frontiers, have also destroyed the walls of the
ancient cities. They have established a cohesion that did not exist in
the middle ages. All the inhabited places of western Europe are so
intimately linked with each other that isolation has become impossible
for any of them; there is not a village, however highly perched it may
be on its mountain ridge, that has not an industrial and commercial
centre towards which it gravitates, and with which it cannot break its
links.
The development of the great industrial centres has done even more. Even
today, of course, parochialism can create many jealousies between
neighbouring communes, delaying their alliance and even inflaming
fratricidal struggles. But even if such jealousies may at first hinder
the direct federation of two communes, their federation can in fact be
established by the mediation of the great centres. Today, two small
neighbouring municipalities may have nothing that really links them
directly; the scantiness of the relations they maintain serves rather to
create conflicts than to link them in the bonds of solidarity. But the
two of them have already a common centre with which they are in constant
communication and without which they could not survive; and whatever may
be their local jealousies they will see themselves obliged to come
together through the mediation of the large town where they get their
provisions and to which they take their products; each of them will have
to become part of the same federation so as to maintain their relations
with the urban focus and group themselves around it.
Yet this centre will not be able to establish an intrusive preponderance
of its own over the communes in its environment. Thanks to the infinite
variety of the needs of industry and commerce, all inhabited places have
already several centres which they are attached, and as their needs
develop, they will enter into relations with further places that can
satisfy new needs. Our needs are in fact so various, and they emerge
with such rapidity, that soon a single federation will not be sufficient
to satisfy them all. The Commune will then feel the need to contract
other alliances, to enter into other federations. Belonging to one group
for the acquisition of food supplies, it will have to join a second
group to obtain other goods, such as metals, and then a third and a
fourth group for textiles and works of art. Take up an economic atlas of
any country, and you will see that economic frontiers do not exist: the
zones of production and exchange of various products interpenetrate each
other, tangle with each other, impose themselves on each other. In the
same way the federations of Communes, if they were to follow their free
development, would very soon start to mingle and intersect, and in this
way form a network that would be compact, “one and indivisible,” in
quite a different way from these statist groupings whose parts are no
more than juxtaposed, like the rods bundled around the lictor’s axe.
Thus, let us repeat, those who come and say to us that the Communes,
once they are freed of the tutelage of the State, will clash together
and destroy each other in internecine wars, forget one thing: the
intimate pattern of linking that exists already between various
localities, thanks to the centres of industrial and commercial
gravitation, thanks to the multitude of these centres, thanks to their
incessant intercourse. They do not take into account what the middle
ages actually were, with their closed cities and their caravans trailing
slowly over difficult roads under the eyes of the robber barons; they
forget those currents of men, of merchandise, of telegrams, of ideas and
feelings, that now circulate among our cities like the waters of rivers
that never dry up; they have no real idea of the difference between the
two epochs they seek to compare.
Besides, is not history there to prove to us that the instinct for
federation has already become one of the most pressing needs of
humanity? It will be enough one day if the State becomes disorganized
for one reason or another, if the machine of oppression fails in its
operations, for the free alliances to appear of their own accord. Let us
remember the spontaneous federations of the armed bourgeoisie during the
Great Revolution. Let us remember the federations that surged up
spontaneously in Spain and saved the independence of the country when
the State was shaken to its foundations by the conquering armies of
Napoleon. As soon as the State is no longer in a position to impose a
forced union, union rises up of its own accord, according to natural
needs. Overthrow the State, and the federal society will surge out of
its ruins, truly one, truly indivisible, but free and growing in
solidarity because of its freedom.
But there is another thing to be considered. For the burgesses of the
middle ages the Commune was an isolated State, clearly separated from
others by its frontiers. For us, “Commune” no longer means a territorial
agglomeration; it is rather a generic name, a synonym for the grouping
of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social Commune
will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity. Each group in the
Commune will necessarily be drawn towards similar groups in other
communes; they will come together and the links that federate them will
be as solid as those that attach them to their fellow citizens, and in
this way there will emerge a Commune of interests whose members are
scattered in a thousand towns and villages. Each individual will find
the full satisfaction of his needs only by grouping with other
individuals who have the same tastes but inhabit a hundred other
communes.
Today already free societies are beginning to open up an immense field
of human activity. It is no longer merely to satisfy scientific,
literary or artistic interests that humanity constitutes its societies.
It is no longer merely to pursue the class struggle that men enter into
leagues.
One would have difficulty nowadays finding one of the multiple and
varied manifestations of human activity that is not already represented
by freely constituted societies, and their number keeps on growing
unceasingly, each day invading new fields of action, even among those
that were once considered the preserve of the State. Literature, arts,
sciences, education, commerce, industries, transport, amusements, public
health, museums, far off enterprises, polar expeditions, even
territorial defence against aggressors, care for the wounded, and the
very courts of law: everywhere we see personal initiative emerging and
assuming the form of free societies. This is the tendency, the
distinctive trait of the second half of the 19^(th) century.
Taking free flight, and finding an immense new field of application,
that tendency will serve as the basis for the society of the future. It
is by free groupings that the social Commune will be organized, and
these groupings will overthrow walls and frontiers. There will be
millions of communes, no longer territorial, but extending their hands
across rivers, mountain chains and oceans, uniting individuals and
peoples in the four corners of the earth into the same single family of
equals.
I.
ON the 18^(th) of March, 1871, the people of Paris rose against a rule
that was generally detested and despised, and proclaimed the city of
Paris independent, free, and belonging only to itself.
This overthrow of central power was made without the usual scenes of a
revolutionary uprising: on that day there were neither volleys of shot
nor floods of blood shed behind the barricades. The rulers were eclipsed
by an armed people going out into the streets; the soldiers evacuated
the city, the bureaucrats hastened towards Versailles, taking with them
everything they could carry. The government evaporated like a puddle of
stinking water under the breath of a spring wind, and by the 19^(th),
having shed hardly a drop of its children’s blood, Paris found itself
free of the past that had contaminated the great city.
At the same time, the revolution that had been accomplished in this way
opened up a new era in the series of revolutions, by which the people
march forward from slavery to freedom. Under the name of The Paris
Commune a new idea was born, destined to become the point of departure
for future revolutions.
As is always the case with great ideas, it was not a product of the
conceptions of an individual philosopher. It was born of the collective
intelligence; it sprang from the heart of an entire people. But it was
vague in the beginning, and many among those who helped to realize it
and who even gave their lives for it, did not imagine the event as we
conceive it today; they did pot fully understand the revolution they
were inaugurating& nor the fecundity of the new principle which they
were seeking to put into execution. It was only with practical
application that one began to perceive its future importance; it was
only in the working out of the thought from this time onwards that the
new principle became more and more specific and clear, and appeared in
all its lucidity, all its beauty, its justice and the importance of its
results.
As soon as socialism had taken a new impetus in the five or six years
preceding the Commune,(33) one question above all preoccupied the
elaborators of the coming social revolution: the question of knowing
what form of political grouping among societies would be the most
propitious for that great economic revolution which current industrial
development imposes on our generations, and which must lead to the
abolition of individual property and the communalizing of all the
capital accumulated by preceding generations.
The International Workingmen’s Association gave that response.
Association, it said, should not be restricted to one nation; it should
extend beyond all the artificial frontiers. And soon that great idea
would penetrate the hearts of the people and capture their minds.
Hounded since then by an alliance of all the reactionaries, it has
nonetheless survived, and as soon as the obstacles raised to its
development are destroyed to the cheers of the insurgent people, it will
be reborn stronger than ever.
But it remained to be seen what would be the integral parts of that vast
Association. At that time two great currents of ideas confronted each
other with their solutions to that great question: the Popular State on
the one hand, and Anarchy on the other.
According to the German socialists, the State should take possession of
all accumulated wealth and give it to workers’ associations; it should
organize production and exchange, and keep watch over public life, over
the functioning of society.
To this the majority of socialists of Latin race, replied that such a
State -even admitting that by some impossible chance it could
exist-would be the worst of tyrannies, and they opposed this ideal with
a new ideal copied from the past; an-archy, that is to say, the complete
abolition of States, and reorganization from the simple to the complex
through the free federation of the popular forces of producers and
consumers.
It was soon admitted, even by “Statists” less imbued with government
prejudices, that Anarchy indeed represented a greatly superior form of
organization than that envisaged in the popular State; but, they
declared, the anarchist ideal is so far beyond us that we cannot concern
ourselves with it at the present time. At the same time, anarchist
theory lacked a concrete and simple formula with which to define its
point of departure, to give body to its aims, and to show that they were
based on a conception that had a real existence among the people. The
federation of workers’ corporations and groups of consumers across the
frontiers and apart from the existing States, still seemed too vague a
concept; and at the same time, it was easy to perceive that they could
not comprehend the whole diversity of human manifestations. A clearer
formula, one that was easier to comprehend, and which had its basic
elements in the reality of things, was needed.
If it had been merely a matter of elaborating a theory, we might well
ask how important theories are. But until a new idea has found a form of
expression that is clear, precise and derived from actual existence, it
will not seize on people’s minds or inspire them to the point of
embarking on a decisive struggle. The people do not plunge into the
unknown without gaining the support of a reliable and clearly formulated
idea which serves, so to speak, as a springboard from which to take off.
And this takeoff point, life itself will indicate.
For five months while it was isolated by the siege, Paris had lived its
own life and it had come to understand the vast economic, intellectual
and moral powers at its disposal; it had glimpsed and understood the
strength of its initiatives. At the same time, it had seen that the band
of l brigands who had seized power did not know how to organize anything
-either the defence of France or the development of the interior. It had
seen how this central government had set itself against all that the
intelligence of a great city might bring to fruition. It had seen more
than that: the powerlessness of any government to ward off great
disasters or to assist positive evolution when it is ripe for
fulfilment.. During the siege it had suffered frightful poverty, the
poverty of the workers and defenders of the town, beside the indolent
luxury of the idlers. And it had seen the failure, thanks to the central
power, of all its attempts to put an end to this scandalous regime. Each
time the people wished to take a free initiative, the government doubled
its fetters, and the idea was born quite naturally that Paris should
turn itself into an independent Commune, able to realize within its
wails the will of the people.
Suddenly, the word Commune, began to emerge from every mouth.
The Commune of 1871 could not be any more than a first sketch. Born at
the end of a war, surrounded by two armies ready to give a hand in
crushing the people, it dared not declare itself openly socialist, and
proceeded neither to the expropriation of capital nor to the
organization of work, nor even to a general inventory of the city’s
resources. Nor did it break with the tradition of the State, of
representative government, and it did not attempt to achieve within the
Commune that organization from the simple to the complex it adumbrated
by proclaiming the independence and free federation of Communes. But it
is certain that if the Commune of Paris had lived a few months longer,
the strength of events would have forced it towards these two
revolutions. We should not forget that [in the French Revolution] the
bourgeoisie devoted four years of the revolutionary period to proceed
from a moderate monarchy to a bourgeois republic; it should not surprise
us that the people of Paris could not overleap in a single day the gulf
that separated the anarchist Commune from the rule of bandits. But we
must also realize that the revolution, which in France and certainly
also in Spain, will be communalist. It will take up the work of the
Paris Commune where it was halted by the assassinations perpetrated by
the men of Versailles.
The Commune succumbed, and the bourgeoisie took its revenge in the way
we know, because of the fear the people had created among their rulers
by shaking off the yoke of government. Events proved that there were
indeed two classes in modern society: on the one hand, the man who
works, who gives to the owner more than half of what he produces, and
who in the meantime accepts too easily the crimes of his masters; on the
other hand the idler, the glutton, animated by the instincts of the wild
beast, hating his slaves and ready to massacre them like wild beasts.
After having surrounded the people of Paris and cut off all their exits,
the rulers released on them soldiers brutalized by barrack life and
wine, and said to them openly in the Assembly: “Kill the wolves, the
she-wolves, and the cubs!” And to the people they said:
Whatever you do, you will perish! If you are taken with arms in your
hands-death! If you beg for mercy-death! To whatever side you turn your
eyes, left, right, before, behind, above, below-death! You are not only
outside the law; you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex will be
able to save you, either you or yours. You will die, but before that you
will savour the agony of your wife, of your sister, of your mother, of
your daughter, of your son, even down to the cradle! Before your eyes
they will drag the wounded from the ambulances to slash them with sword
bayonets and bludgeon them with rifle butts. They will drag them, still
alive, by their broken legs or bleeding arms, and throw them into the
river like bags of ordure that scream and suffer.
Death! Death! Death!
And after this frantic orgy upon a pile of corpses, after the mass
exterminations, a vengeance both mean and atrocious was to
continue-floggings, thumbscrews, unendurable fetters, blows of prison
guards, insults, hunger, all the refinements of cruelty.
Are the people likely to forget these great deeds?
“Down, but not out,” the Commune is being reborn today. This is not
merely a dream of the conquered caressing in their imagination a
beautiful mirage of hope. No! The Commune today becomes the precise and
visible aim of the revolution that already rumbles near us. The idea
penetrates the masses, gives them a flag to march behind, and we firmly
count on the present generation to accomplish the social revolution of
the Commune, and in this way put an end to the ignoble exploitation by
the bourgeoisie, rid the people of the tutelage of the new State, and
inaugurate in the evolution of the human species a new era of liberty,
equality and solidarity.
2.
Ten years separate us already from the day on which the people of Paris,
overthrowing the government of traitors which had seized power on the
fall of the Empire, constituted itself a Commune and proclaimed its
absolute independence. Yet it is still towards that date of the 18^(th)
of March, 1871 that we turn our glance, and from which we retain our
best memories; it is the anniversary of that memorable day which the
proletariat of the two worlds proposed to celebrate solemnly, and
tomorrow evening, hundreds of thousands of workers’ hearts will beat in
unison’ fraternising across frontiers and oceans, in Europe, in the
United States, in South America, in memory of the revolt of the Paris
proletariat.
This is because the idea for which the French proletariat shed its blood
in Paris, and for which it suffered on the beaches of New Caledonia, is
one of those ideas which embraces within itself a whole revolution, a
broad idea which can gather under the folds of its banner all the
revolutionary tendencies of the people marching towards their
liberation.
It is true that if we limit ourselves merely to observing the actual and
palpable deeds accomplished by the Paris Commune, we have to admit that
this idea was not vast enough, that it embraced only a minute part of
the revolutionary programme. But if, on the other hand, we observe the
spirit that inspired the masses of the people after the action of the
18^(th) of March, the tendencies that tried to emerge and did not have
the time to reach the domain of reality because, before flowering, they
were already stifled under the mounds of corpses, we will then
understand the scope of the movement and the sympathies that it inspired
in the hearts of the working masses of the two worlds. The Commune
gladdens our hearts, not for what it achieved, but for what it has
promised one day to achieve.
Whence comes this irresistible fascination which draws towards the
movement of 1871 the sympathies of all the oppressed masses? What idea
does the Paris Commune represent? And why is that idea so attractive to
the proletarians of all countries, of all nationalities?
The answer is an easy one. The revolution of 1871 was a strikingly
popular movement. Made by the people itself, born spontaneously in the
heart of the masses, it is within the great mass of the people that it
found its defenders, its heroes, its martyrs, and it was above all
because of this “rabble” character that the bourgeoisie never forgave
it. At the same time, the basic idea of that revolution, certainly
vague, perhaps even unconscious, but nonetheless very pronounced and
penetrating all its actions, is the idea of the social revolution,
seeking to establish at last, after so many centuries of struggle, true
liberty and true equality for all.
It was the revolution of the “rabble” marching to conquer its rights.
It is true that people have sought and still seek to distort the true
meaning of that revolution, and to represent it as a simple attempt to
conquer independence for Paris and turn it into a petty State within
France. Yet nothing is less true. Paris did not seek to isolate itself
from France, just as it did not seek to conquer it by arms; it made no
attempt to enclose itself within its walls like a Benedictine within his
cloister; it was not inspired by a narrow parochial outlook. If it
demanded its independence, and sought to prevent the intrusion into its
affairs of any kind of central power, it was because it saw in that
independence a means of quietly elaborating the bases of future
organisation and of developing within itself a social revolution that
would completely transform the system of production and exchange by
basing it on justice; would completely modify human relations by
establishing them on a foundation of equality; and reform our social
morality by giving it as a basis, the principles of equity and
solidarity.
Thus, communal independence was only a means for the people of Paris,
and the social revolution was its end.
This end would certainly have been accomplished if the revolution on the
18^(th) of March had been able to follow its free course, and if the
people of Paris had not been mowed down, sabred, shot and disembowelled
by the assassins of Versailles. To find a simple idea comprehensible to
everyone and expressing in a few words what must be done to accomplish
the revolution was, in fact, the preoccupation of the people of Paris
from the first days of their independence. But a great idea is not
developed in a day, no matter how rapid may be the elaboration and
propagation of ideas during a revolutionary period. It always takes a
certain time to develop, to permeate the masses and to be translated
into action, and this time was lacking for me Paris Commune.
It was lacking all the more because, for the last ten years, the idea of
modern socialism has been going through a transition period. The Commune
was born, indeed, between two epochs in the development of modern
socialism. In 1871 the authoritarian, governmental, and more or less
religious socialism of 1848 no longer retained its influence over the
more practical and libertarian minds of our own epoch. Where will you
find today a Parisian who would agree to shut himself up in a
phalansterian barracks? On the other hand, collectivism, which wanted to
harness to the same chariot both the wage system and collective
property, remained incomprehensible, unattractive and beset with
practical difficulties of application. And free communism, anarchist
communism, had barely seen the light of day and hardly dared confront
the attacks of the worshippers of government.
Indecision reigned in people’s minds, and the socialists themselves did
not feel audacious enough to hasten to the destruction of individual
property, since they did not have a well defined objective in view. So
everyone let themselves be lulled by the reasoning that the somnolent
have been repeating for centuries: “Let us make sure of victory first!
Then we will see what can be done.”
Make sure of victory first! As if there was any way of transforming
society into a free commune without laying a hand on property! As if
there could be any real way of defeating the enemy so long as the great
mass of the people was not directly interested in the triumph of the
revolution, in witnessing the arrival of material, moral and
intellectual well-being for all! They sought to consolidate the Commune
first of all while postponing the social revolution for later on, while
the only effective way of proceeding was to consolidate the Commune by
the social revolution!
It was the same with the governmental principle. In proclaiming the free
Commune, the people of Paris proclaimed an essential anarchist
principle; but as this principle had only feebly penetrated people’s
minds at this time, they stopped in mid-course, and in the heart of the
Commune the people continued to declare themselves in favour of the old
governmental principle by giving themselves a Communal Council copied
from the old municipal councils.
If we admit, in fact, that a central government is absolutely useless to
regulate the relations of Communes between each other, why do we grant
the necessity to regulate the mutual relations of the groups that
constitute the Commune? And if we concede to the free initiative of the
communes the task of coming to an understanding between themselves on
enterprises that concern several cities at once, how can we refuse this
same initiative to the groups of which a Commune is composed? A
government within the Commune has no more right to exist than a
government over the Commune.
But in 1871 the people of Paris, which had overthrown so many
governments, was only involved in its first attempt at revolt against
the governmental system itself: it submitted to governmental fetichism
and gave itself a government. We know the consequence. It sent its
devoted sons to the Hotel-de-Ville. Indeed, immobilised there by fetters
of red tape, forced to discuss when action was needed, and losing the
sensitivity that comes from continued contact with the masses, they saw
themselves reduced to impotence. Paralysed by their distancing from the
revolutionary centre-the people-they themselves paralysed the popular
initiative.
Brought into being during a transitory period when the ideas of
socialism and authority were suffering a profound modification;; born at
the end of a war, in an isolated situation and under the threat of
Prussian cannon, the Paris Commune was doomed to succumb.
But, thanks to its eminently popular character, it started off a new era
in the series of revolutions, and through its ideas was the precursor of
the great social revolution. The unprecedented massacres, cowardly and
ferocious at the same time, by which the bourgeoisie celebrated its
fall, the ignoble vengeance which the executioners have exercised for
the past nine years on their prisoners, these cannibalistic orgies have
driven an abyss between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that can
never be closed. When the next revolution comes, the people will know
what they have to do; they will know what awaits them if they do not
carry off a decisive victory, and they will act accordingly.
In fact, we know now that the day when France bristles with insurgent
Communes the people will no longer feel the need to give themselves a
government and expect revolutionary initiatives from that government.
After having swept out the parasites that feed upon them, they will
seize hold of all social wealth to own it together according to the
principles of anarchist communism. And when they have completely
abolished property, the government and the State, they will freely
constitute themselves according to the necessities dictated by life
itself. Breaking its chains, and overthrowing its idols, humanity will
then march towards a better future, no longer recognizing either masters
or slaves, and holding in veneration only the noble martyrs who paid
with their blood and sufferings for those first attempts at emancipation
that have lightened us on our path towards the conquest of liberty.
3.
The fetes and public meetings organized on the 18^(th) of March in all
the towns where there are organized socialist groups, deserve our
attention, not merely as a demonstration by the army of the working
class, but even more as an expression of the feelings that animate the
socialists of the two worlds. Our numbers can better be counted in this
way than by any kind of bulletin, for they show aspirations that have
developed in full freedom without the influence of electoral tactics.
In fact, the workers, when they gather on this day, do not limit
themselves in their meetings to praising the heroism of the Parisian
proletariat or to demanding vengeance for the May massacres. While they
reinvigorate themselves by memories of the heroic struggle in Paris,
they are already forging an alliance that extends into the future. They
discuss the lessons that must be drawn for the forthcoming revolution
from the Commune of 1871; they ask each other what were the mistakes of
the Commune, not to criticise individual men, but to emphasize how the
presumptions about property and authority among the workingclass
organizations of the time hindered the revolutionary idea from opening
out, developing, and illuminating the whole world with its vivifying
light.
The lessons of 1871 have profited the workers of the whole world so
that, breaking with old prejudices, they have been able to state clearly
and simply how they understand their revolution. From now onwards it is
certain that the next uprising of the Communes will not be a simple
communalist movement. Those who still think that an independent Commune
must be elected to try out economic reforms are lagging behind the
development of the popular mind. It is by revolutionary socialist
actions, by abolishing individual property, that the Communes of the
next revolution will affirm and constitute their independence.
The day on which, in consequence of the development of the revolutionary
situation, the governments are swept out by the people and
disorganization is created in the ranks of the bourgeoisie who can only
survive through the protection of the State, the insurgent people will
not wait for any old government in its marvellous wisdom to decree
economic reforms. They will abolish individual property by themselves
taking possession, in the name of the whole people and by violent
expropriation of the whole of social wealth which had been accumulated
by the work of past generations. They will not stop short at
expropriating the owners of social capital by a decree that will remain
a dead letter; they will take possession and establish their rights of
usufruct immediately. They will organize the workshops so that they
continue production. They will exchange their hovels for healthy
habitations in the houses of the well-todo; they will immediately find
ways of utilising the riches accumulated in the cities; they will take
possession of it as if all this wealth had never been stolen from them
by the bourgeoisie. Once the industrial baron who seized his booty from
the worker has been evicted, production will continue, shaking off the
fetters that hinder it, abolishing the speculations that kill it,
getting rid of the muck that hinders its development, and changing it
according to the needs of the moment under the impetus provided by
freedom of work. “Never did people work in France as in 1793, after the
land was torn out of the hands of the lords,” said Michelet.(36) Never
have people worked as they will work on the day work becomes free, the
day on which every kind of progress achieved by the worker will
contribute to the well-being of the whole Commune.
On the subject of social wealth a distinction has been made that has
divided the socialist party. The school that nowadays calls itself
collectivist, substituting a kind of doctrinaire collectivism for the
collectivism of the former International (which was nothing more than
antiauthoritarian communism), tried to establish a distinction between
the capital used in production and the wealth that sustained the
necessities of living. Machines, factories, means of transport and
communication, and the land itself, were distinguished as one type,
while housing, manufactured products, clothing, provisions were
distinguished as another. One class should become collective property;
the other was destined, according to the learned representatives of that
school, to remain private property.
They have tried to establish that distinction. But the good sense of the
people has quickly seen through it all, understanding that the
distinction is illusory and impossible to establish. Defective
theoretically, it falls down before the practice of life. The workers
have realized that the houses they inhabit, the coal and gas they burn,
the food which the human body burns to sustain its life, the clothes
with which people cover themselves to sustain their existence, the books
they read to instruct themselves, not to speak of the pleasure they gain
from living, are all of them integral parts of life, as necessary for
the success of production and the progressive development of humanity,
as the machines, manufacturers, raw materials and other factors in
production. They have understood that to sustain property for the sake
of its riches would be to maintain inequality, oppression, exploitation,
and to paralyse in advance the results of partial expropriation.
Clambering over the obstacles put in their way by the collectivism of
the theoreticians, they proceed directly towards the more simple and
more practical pattern of anti-authoritarian communism.
In fact, in their gatherings, the revolutionary workers have clearly
affirmed their right to the whole of social wealth and the need to
abolish individual property, as much to defend the values of consumption
as those of production. “On the day of the revolution, let us seize hold
of all wealth, of all the resources accumulated in the towns and cities,
and we will hold them in common”-so say the spokesmen of the working
mass, and the hearers confirm it by their unanimous assent.
“Let everyone take from the heap what he needs, and be sure that in the
storehouses of our cities there will be enough provisions to feed
everyone until free production gets into its stride. In the shops of our
cities there are enough garments to clothe everybody, Iying there unsold
in the midst of general poverty. There are even enough objects of luxury
for everyone to pick and choose according to his taste.”
That is how the working mass envisages the revolution: The immediate
introduction of anarchist communism and the free organization of
production. These are two established points, and in this respect the
Communes of the revolution that growls at our doors will not repeat the
errors of their predecessors who, by shedding their blood so generously,
have cleared the path to the future.
The same kind of agreement has not yet been established-though that
agreement is not far off-on another, no less important point: the
question of government.
We know that the two schools are facing each other, completely divided
on this question. “On the very day of the revolution,” says one group,
“we must constitute a government to assume power. Strong and resolute,
this government will make the revolution by decreeing this and that and
coercing people to obey its decrees.”
“What a sad illusion!” say the others. “Any central government, setting
out to rule a nation, will inevitably be formed of disparate elements,
conservative in its essence, and nothing more than a hindrance to the
revolution. It will merely hobble the Communes which are ready to march
forward, without being able to inspire the backward Communes with a
revolutionary urge. The same will happen in the heart of an insurgent
Commune. Either the communal government will do no more than sanction
what has already been done, and it will then be a useless and
potentially dangerous mechanism; or it will attempt to act with prudence
and regulate what should be elaborated freely by the people themselves
if it is to be viable; it will apply theories where society should be
elaborating new forms of communal life with the creative force that
rises up in the social organism when it breaks its chains and sees new
and broad horizons opening out before it. Men who hold power will hinder
that impulse, without producing anything on their own of which they
might be capable if they remained in the heart of the people, working
beside them in elaborating a new organization instead of closing
themselves up in offices and exhausting their energies in idle debate.
That will be a hindrance and a peril; powerless to do good but
formidable in its possibilities of evil; thus, it has no reason to
exist.”
No matter how just and natural this reasoning may be, it still clashes
with secular prejudices, accumulated and approved by those who have an
interest in maintaining the religion of government alongside the
religion of property and godly religion.
This prejudice, the last of the series: God, Property, Government, still
exists and it is a danger to the forthcoming revolution. But one can
already see it crumbling away. “We will see to our own affairs,” the
workers are saying, “without awaiting the orders of a government, and we
will go over the heads of those who seek to impose themselves in the
guise of priest, proprietor or ruler. And for this reason we must hope
that the anarchist party will continue to fight vigorously against the
religion of governmentalism, and that it will not be diverted from its
own path by letting itself be dragged into power struggles; in our view,
we can all hope that in the few years left before the revolution, the
prejudice in favour of government will be aufficiently broken down and
will no longer have the power of leading the working masses in the wrong
direction.
At the same time there has been one regrettable deficiency in the recent
popular gatherings. Nothing, or almost nothing, has been done in the
countryside. Activity has been restricted to the towns. The country does
not seem to exist for the urban workers. Even the orators who speak of
the character of the coming revolution avoid mentioning the rural areas
and the land. They are familiar neither with the peasant nor with his
desires, and so they take no chances of speaking in his name. Need one
dwell at length on the perils that result from this? The emancipation of
the proletariat will not even be possible while the revolutionary
movement fails to embrace the countryside. The insurgent communes will
be unable to maintain themselves for a single day, if the insurrection
does not spread at the same time among the villages. When taxes,
mortgages and rents are abolished, when the institutions that protect
them are scattered to the four winds, it is certain that the villages
will understand the advantages of that revolution. At the same time it
would be imprudent to count on the diffusion of revolutionary ideas in
the villages without advance preparation. We must first find out what
the peasant needs, how the revolution is understood in the villages, and
how they think of resolving the thorny question of landed property. We
must let the peasant know in advance what the workers of the towns-their
natural allies- are thinking, and we must assure them that there is
nothing to fear in the way of measures that may be harmful to
agriculture. As for the workers in the cities, they must accustom
themselves to respecting the peasant and marching in a common accord
with him.
But for that to happen the worker must accept the obligation to help the
propaganda in the villages. In each town there must appear a small but
special organization, a branch of the Agrarian League, to carry on
propaganda among the peasants. This kind of propaganda must be
considered a duty, in the same way as propaganda in the industrial
centres.
The beginnings will be hard, but therein lies the success of the
revolution. It will be victorious only on the day when the workers in
the factories and the cultivators in the fields march hand in hand to
the conquest of equality for all, carrying happiness into the cottage as
well as into the buildings of the great industrial agglomerations.