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Title: Moribund Society and Anarchy Author: Jean Grave Date: 1893 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, anarchist communism Source: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-communism/jean-grave-moribund-society-and-anarchy-1893/
“Moribund Society and Anarchy” first appeared in France about a decade
since, published by P. V. Stock, printer of numerous works pertaining to
Anarchy. The conscience (?) of the French army, which the Dreyfus affair
has since revealed in all its delicate scrupulosity, was immediately
incensed by the chapter entitled “Militarism,” and the author was
speedily arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years imprisonment. The
book was suppressed, and the French army, presumably, breathed more
freely.
A mistake! When persecution begins the gospel spreads. Men were anxious
to know what it was that had so frightened the “free government” of
France as to call forth such severe punishment of a poor shoemaker. The
work was circulated, translated in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
Jewish; only in English it remained untranslated. Several times
announcements that we were about to have an English version appeared;
still it was not forthcoming.
In 1897 the writer met Jean Grave at the residence of an exiled French
comrade in London, and there engaged to undertake the work, the author
concurring. Although originally prompted by the English comrades and
their promise of a publisher, later developments have made it more
expedient to get out an American edition. Among these the only one which
really concerns the public is the gigantic stride toward militarism
which this country has taken during the past year. Previous to that I
was exceedingly dubious as to the effect of the famous prosecuted
chapter, which was likely to fall flat on the unmilitary American
public. But now that we have entered upon the “manifest destiny” of
“civilized nations;” now that our government has resorted to the same
tactics of colonization, protection, subjugation, and conquest; now that
our standing army has been increased four-fold, and military
place-hunting is the ambition of the hour; now that our workingmen are
seizing the opportunity to barter their “free citizenship in the
greatest country on earth” for the abject service of man-killing on
foreign soils at the rate of $15.60 per month and keep, this proscribed
Chapter XIII comes with its own note—a most discordant one indeed—into
the war-chorus at present holding the public ear. And the translator
devoutly prays that as in France the great sin was its distribution
among the soldiery, the like offense may be repeated here, where the
army is still in a nascent condition and the man not yet buried under
the uniform. Look in the glass and see how you like the reflection,
soldiers!
The P. V. Stock edition having been suppressed, E. Pouget, the daring
publisher of Père Peinard, brought out another, ostensibly published in
London. Though inelegant in appearance it contains an additional
chapter; and it is from this Pouget edition that the present translation
has been made. I have adhered as strictly as possible to the text, being
unwilling to make either additions or subtractions, though it has
sometimes seemed to me that Mr. Grave is unnecessarily diffuse.
As to the principal object of the work, that of furnishing an inclusive
criticism of the institutions of our moribund society and the necessity
of its speedy dissolution, I think any fair-minded reader will be
convinced that it has been pretty thoroughly done. As to the “What
next?” it is far less certain.
With this, however, Jean Grave,—sturdy, patient, indomitable Jean Grave,
sitting today in his fifth-floor Parisian garret, untouched by his
imprisonment, convinced as ever, steadily writing, writing to the
workers of the world, casting forth images of the “Future
Society,”—would not agree. He is sure of his remedy—Communism; I, of his
criticism, Anarchy.
Voltairine de Cleyre.
June, 1899.
I have a friend who shows a strong desire, a truly touching desire, to
understand things. Naturally, he aspires to that which is simple, great
and beautiful. But his education, fouled with the prejudices and lies
inherent in all the education called “higher,” almost always stops him
in his dash towards spiritual deliverance. He would like to free himself
completely from traditional ideas, from the ancient routines where his
mind is bogged down, despite himself, but he cannot. Often, he comes to
see me and we have long talks. The doctrines of anarchism, so maligned
by some, so misunderstood by others, greatly concern him; and his
honesty is great enough, if not to embrace them all, at least to
understand them. He does not believe, as so many people believe in his
circles, that those doctrines consist solely in blowing up houses. He
glimpses, on the contrary, in a fog that will perhaps dissipate, some
beauties and harmonic forms; and he takes an interest in them as we do
in a thing that we like, but which seems still a bit terrible to us, and
which we dread because we do not understand it well.
My friend has read the admirable books of Kropotkin, and the eloquent,
fervent and wise protestations of Elisée Reclus, against the impiety of
governments and societies based on crime. Of Bakunin, he knows what the
anarchist journals, here and there, have published. He has labored
through the uneven Proudhon and the aristocratic Spencer. And recently,
the declarations of Etiévant have moved him. All of that sweeps him
along, for a moment, toward those heights where the intelligence is
purified. But from those brief excursions through the realm of the
ideal, he returns more troubled than ever. A thousand obstacles, purely
subjective, detain him; he loses himself in an infinity of ifs, ands and
buts, an inextricable forest, from which he sometimes asks me to
extricate him.
Just yesterday, he confided in me the torment of his soul, and I said to
him:
— Grave, whose judicious and manly spirit you know, is going to publish
a book: Moribund Society and Anarchy. This book is a masterpiece of
logic. It is full of light. This book is not the cry of a blind and
narrow-minded sectarian; nor is it the tom-tom beat of an ambitious
propagandist; it is the considered, reflective, reasoned work of one who
is passionate, it is true, of one “who has faith,” but who knows,
compares, questions, analyzes, and who, with a singular lucidity of
critique, glides among the facts of social history, the lessons of
science, the problems of philosophy, in order to reach those infrangible
conclusions of which you are aware, and of which you can deny neither
the greatness nor the justice.
My friend sharply interrupted me:
— I deny nothing… I understand, indeed, that Grave, whose ardent
campaigns I have followed in La Révolte, dreams of the suppression of
the State, for example. Myself, I do not have all his boldness, but I
dream of it too. The State bears down on the individual with a weight
that is greater, more intolerable each day. Of the man it unnerves and
exhausts, it makes only a bundle of flesh to tax. His sole mission is to
live for it, as a louse lives on the beast on which it has fixed its
suckers. The State takes from the man his money, pitifully acquired in
this prison: work; it filches from him at every minute his liberty,
already shackled by the laws; from his birth, it kills his individual
and administrative faculties, or it distorts them, which amounts to the
same thing. Assassin and thief—yes, I am convinced that the State is
indeed this sort of double criminal. As soon as a man walks, the State
breaks his legs; as soon as he stretches out his arms, the State busts
them; as soon as he dares think, the State takes his head, and tells
him: “Walk, take, and think.”
— Well? said I.
My friend continued:
— Anarchy, on the contrary, is the winning back of the individual, it is
liberty of development for the individual, in a normal and harmonic
sense. We can define it, in short, as the spontaneous utilization of all
the human energies, criminally squandered by the State! I know that… and
understand why all sorts of young artists and thinkers, — the
contemporary elite — look forward impatiently to rising to that
long-awaited dawn, where they glimpse not only an ideal of justice, but
an ideal of beauty.
— Well? said I anew.
— Well, one thing concerns and troubles me, the terrorist side of
Anarchy. I detest violent means; I have a horror of blood and death, and
I want anarchy to await its triumph from the coming justice alone.
— Do you believe then, I replied, that the anarchists are drinkers of
blood? Don’t you feel, on the contrary, all the immense tenderness, the
immense love of life, with which the heart of a Kropotkin swells. Alas!
Those are struggles inseparable from all human struggles, and against
which we can do nothing… So!… do you want me to give you a classical
comparison? The earth is parched; all the little plants, all the little
flowers are burned by a blazing, by a persistent, deadly sun; they
blanch, wilt, and they will die… But then a single cloud darkens the
horizon, it advances and covers the blazing sky. Lightning and thunder
burst forth, and the waters stream over the shaken earth. What matter if
the lightning has broken, here and there, an oak grown too tall, if the
little plants that would have died, the little plants watered and
refreshed, straighten their stems, and again raise their flowers in the
newly calm air?… We should not, you see, be moved too much by the death
of the ravenous oaks… Read Grave’s book… Grave has said, in this regard,
some excellent things. And if, after having read this book, where so
many ideas are turned over and clarified, if after having thought
through it, as befits a work of such intellectual stature, you cannot
manage to reach a stable and calm opinion, you would be better off, I
warn you, to give up becoming the anarchist that you want to be, and
remain the good bourgeois, the inveterate and hopeless bourgeois, the
bourgeois “despite himself,” that perhaps you are. . .
Octave MIRBEAU.
[This section translated by Shawn P. Wilbur]
Anarchy signifies the negation of authority. Now, authority claims to
justify its existence by the necessity of defending social
institutions—the family, religion, property, etc.—and it has created a
mass of tools to secure it in the exercise of its functions and its
sanctioning privilege. Chief among these are the law, the magistracy,
the army, the legislative and executive power, etc., so that, forced to
reply to all these, the idea of Anarchy had to attack all social
prejudices, go to the bottom of all human knowledge, in order to
demonstrate that its conceptions were in conformity with the
physiological and psychological nature of man and adequate to the
observance of natural laws, whilst our present organization, established
contrary to all logic and common sense, causes our societies to be
unstable, overturned by revolutions, themselves occasioned by the
accumulated hatred of those who are crushed under these arbitrary
institutions.
In combating authority, then, the Anarchists had to attack every
institution of which power had constituted itself the defender, and the
necessity for which it seeks to demonstrate in order to justify its own
existence. Thus the scope of Anarchistic ideas was widened. Starting
out, with a simple political negation, the Anarchist has had to attack
economic and social prejudices also, to find a formula which, while
denying private property, the basis of our present economic order,
should at the same time affirm our aspirations for a future
organization. Hence the word Communism naturally came to be coupled with
the word Anarchy.
Further on we shall see that certain lovers of the quintessence of
abstraction have sought to claim that, from the moment Anarchy signified
complete expansion of individuality, the words Anarchy and Communism
protested against such a coupling. Against this insinuation we shall
prove that individuality cannot develop except in the community; that
the latter cannot exist unless the former evolves freely; and that they
mutually complement each other.
It is this diversity of problems to attack and to solve which has made
the success of Anarchistic ideas, and contributed to their rapid growth;
so much so that, launched forth by a group of unknown persons without
means of propaganda, they today more or less invade art, science, and
literature. Hatred of authority, social demands, date far back; they
arise as soon as man is able to recognize that he is oppressed. But
through how many phases and systems was it necessary that the idea
should pass, before it could assume its present form!
One of the first who formulated it in its intuitional stage was
Rabelais, in describing the life of the Abbey of Thelemes. But how
obscure it still was! How little he believed it applicable to society in
its entirety, since entrance into the community was reserved to a
minority of privileged persons attended by a train of domestics attached
to their person!
In 1793 the Anarchists were much talked of. Jacques Roux and “the
madmen” appear to us to have been the ones who, during the Revolution,
saw most clearly, and sought the best means of turning it to the
‘benefit of the people. Hence the bourgeois historians have left them in
the shade. Their history is still to be written; the documents buried in
the archives and the libraries still await him who shall have the time
and the courage to dig them up, bring them to light, and reveal the
secret of things still very incomprehensible to us, in that tragic
period of history. We can therefore scarcely form any appreciation of
their program. One must come down to Proudhon before he sees Anarchy
positing itself as the adversary of authority and power, and beginning
to take definite shape. But as yet it is but a theoretical enemy;
practically, Proudhon, in his social organization, leaves in existence,
under different names, the administrative machinery which is the very
essence of government. Up to the end of the empire Anarchy appears under
the form of a vague mutualism, which, in France, during the first years
that followed the Commune, foundered in the misled and misleading
movement of co-operative associations for production and consumption.
But before coming to this impotent solution, a sprout had detached
itself from the springing tree. In Switzerland, the International had
given birth to the “Jurassian Federation” in which Bakounine propagated
the idea of Proudhon,—Anarchy the enemy of authority—but developing,
enlarging, incarnating it in social demands. From this epoch dates the
true dawn of the present Anarchist movement.
Certainly many prejudices still existed, many illogical notions appeared
in the ideas promulgated. The propagandist organization still contained
many of the germs of authoritarianism; many of the elements of the
authoritarian conception still survived. But what of it? The movement
was launched; the idea grew, purified itself, and became more and more
defined. And when, not quite thirteen years ago, Anarchy was affirmed at
the Congres du Centre, in France, though still very feeble, though the
act of a very weak minority (having against it not only those satisfied
with the present social order, but also those pseudo-revolutionaries who
only see in popular demands a means of grasping at power) the idea
contained sufficient expansive force to take root without any other
means of propaganda than the fervor of its adherents. It had sufficient
vigor to induce the supporters of the capitalistic regime to injure and
persecute it, and men of good faith to discuss it,—a proof of strength
and vitality. Hence, in spite of the crusade of those who could consider
themselves, in some degree, leaders of any of the divers divisions of
public opinion, in spite of calumnies, excommunications, condemnations,
in spite of the prison, the idea of Anarchy has made headway. Groups
have been founded, propagandist organs have been created in France,
Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, Norway, America,
Australia, in the Slavic tongue, in German, Jewish, Tcheque, Armenian,—a
little everywhere and in all idioms. But what is more important, from
the little group of mal-contents by whom they were formulated,
Anarchistic ideas have radiated through all classes of society. Wherever
man displays his cerebral activity they have infiltrated. Art, science,
literature, are impregnated with the new ideas and serve as vehicles for
them. These ideas commenced at first in unconscious formulas, in
illy-defined aspirations, more often caprices than real convictions.
Today not only are Anarchistic ‘aspirations formulated, but men know
that it is Anarchy they are spreading, and boldly place the label on it.
The Anarchists are not, then, the only ones to find that things are bad,
and to desire a change. These complaints, these aspirations, are
expressed by the very persons who believe themselves defenders of the
capitalistic order. Still more, men begin to feel that they ought not to
confine themselves to sterile desires, but should work for the
realization of what they demand. They begin to understand and proclaim
action, propaganda by deed; that is to say, that having made the
comparison between the pleasure which the satisfaction of acting as one
thinks is bound to bring, and the annoyances which one must endure for
the violation of a social law, they try, more and more, to conform their
life to their manner of conceiving things, according to the degree of
resistance which the particular temperament may offer to the harassments
of social prosecution.
That Anarchistic ideas have been able to develop with this energy and
rapidity, is because, while running counter to accepted opinions and
established prejudices, while frightening, at the first exposition,
those to whom they were addressed, they were answers, on the other hand,
to their secret sentiments, their undefined aspirations. They offered to
humanity, in a concrete form, that ideal of well-being and liberty which
it had scarcely dared to outline in its hopeful dreams. At first they
frightened their opponents, because they preached hatred or contempt of
a number of institutions believed to be necessary to the life of
society; because they demonstrated, contrary to received ideas, that
these institutions are bad in the very essence, and not because
intrusted to the hands of weak or wicked individuals. They taught the
people that not only must the latter not be contented with changing the
persons in power, with partially modifying the institutions which govern
them, but that, before all, the people must destroy that which makes men
bad, which makes it possible for a minority to make use of social forces
to oppress the majority; they taught that what until now has been taken
for the cause of the evils from which humanity suffers, is but the
effect of a still more profound evil, that it is the very basis of
society which must be attacked. Now, we have observed in the beginning
that the basis of society is private property. Authority has but one
excuse for existence: the defense of capital. Bureaucracy, the family,
the army, the magistracy, flow directly from private property. The work
of the Anarchists, then, has been to demonstrate the iniquity of the
monopoly of the soil and of the fruits of the labor of past generations,
by an idle minority; to sap authority by showing it to be detrimental to
human development, by exposing it in its role of protector to the
privileged, by proving the emptiness of the principles under cover of
which it justifies its institutions.
That which contributed to alienate the ambitious and intriguing from
Anarchistic teachings was just that which led the thinker to study them,
to question himself as to their message, viz., that they offered no
place to personal preoccupations or paltry ambitions, and could in no
way serve as a stepping-stone to those who see, in the demands of the
workers, nothing but a means of carving themselves a position among the
exploiters. The butterflies of politics have nothing to do in the ranks
of the Anarchists. Little or no chance for petty personal vanities, no
procession of candidatures opening a career to all kinds of hopes, and
all sorts of recantations. In the political and authoritarian Socialist
parties an ambitious person can bring about his “ conversion” by
insensible degrees; no one perceives that he has changed till long after
the conversion is accomplished. Among the Anarchists this is impossible,
because he who would consent to accept any office whatever In the
present society, after having demonstrated that all those who are in
office cannot remain there except on condition that they become
defenders of the existing system, would at the same moment incur the
epithet of renegade, for he could have no semblance of a reason to
justify “evolution.” Thus that which provoked the hatred of intriguers
at the same time awakened the spirit-of investigation in honest men; and
this explains the rapid progress of the Anarchistic idea.
What reply, indeed, can be made to those who prove to you that if you
want a thing well done you must do it yourself, and delegate it to
nobody? With what can you reproach those who make you see that if you
wish to be free, you must commission no one to “direct” you? What answer
is there to those who ‘ show you the causes of the ills from which you
suffer, indicate the remedy to you, but do not make themselves the
dispensers of it,—on the contrary, taking care to make people understand
that the individual alone is able to comprehend his own needs, is the
judge of what he should avoid?
Ideas strong enough to inspire men with a conviction which makes them
fight and suffer for the propagation thereof, without expecting anything
directly from those ideas, were, in the eyes of sincere men, worth being
studied; and that is what has happened. Hence without heeding the
clamors of some, the rancor of others, the attempts of governments, the
idea grows and progresses without cessation, proving to the bourgeoisie
that the truth can neither be suppressed nor silenced. Sooner or later
it will be reckoned with.
Anarchy has its victims,—its dead, its imprisoned, its exiled; but it
remains alive and strong, the number of its propagandists constantly
increasing;—propagandists conscious of their acts, because they have
understood all the beauty of the conception; accidental propagandists
also, content with hurling their cries of hate against the institution
which has clashed most with their secret sentiments and their instincts
of justice and truth.
By its amplitude the Anarchistic idea shelters and draws to it all those
who have the feeling of personal dignity, the thirst after the beautiful
and true. Should not the ideal of man be released from all fetters, all
constraint? Have not all the divers revolutions he has wrought, pursued
this end? If he still submits to the authority of his exploiters, if the
human mind still struggles under the pressure of the vulgarities of
capitalistic society, it is because accepted ideas, routine, prejudice,
and ignorance, have been till now stronger than its dreams and desires
for emancipation, precipitating it, after it has driven away the
reigning masters, into a fresh abandonment of them, at the very moment
it expects to free itself. Anarchistic ideas have come to bring light
into the minds not only of the workers, but also of thinkers of every
category; helping them to analyze their own feelings, stripping bare the
causes of misery and indicating the means of destroying them, showing to
all the route to follow and the end to be attained, explaining why
previous revolutions have been abortive. It is this close relation with
the secret sentiments of individuals which explains their rapid
extension, which gives them their strength and renders them
irrepressible. Governmental fury, oppressive measures, the rage of
frustrated ambition, may set themselves against the ideas and their
propagators; today the opening is made; they can no longer be prevented
from making headway, from becoming the ideal of the disinherited, the
motors of their attempts at emancipation.
Capitalistic society is so paltry, so narrow; large aspirations find
themselves so cramped in it; it annihilates so many good intents, so
many hopes, crushing and killing so many individualities that cannot
stoop to its narrow views, that, could it succeed in stifling the voice
of every living Anarchist, its oppressions would raise up new ones,
equally implacable.
“Anarchy and Communism protest against being coupled together,” declared
certain dishonest adversaries, little anxious to throw light upon the
question. “Communism is an organization; an organization prevents the
development of individuality;—we will have none of it!” “We are
individualists, we are Anarchists; nothing more!” exclaimed after them
certain persons, sincere in the sense that they desired to appear more
advanced than all their comrades, and having no originality their own.
They entangled themselves in exaggerations, pushing the ideas to
absurdity; and around them collected the whom the governing class has an
interest in introducing among its adversaries, to divide or mislead
them.
Now, behold those Anarchists launched into discussions Anarchy,
Communism, the initiative, organization; the harmful useful influence of
groups; egoism and altruism; in fine, lot of things one more absurd than
the other. For, after being thoroughly discussed by honest opponents,
the end of it is that all want the same thing, though calling it by
different name. As a matter of fact the Anarchists who demand Communism
are the first to recognize that the individual has not been put into the
world for society’s sake; that, on the contrary, the latte has been
formed solely for the purpose of furnishing the former greater facility
for evolution. It is quite plain that when certain number of persons
group together and unite their forces they have in view the obtaining of
a greater sum of enjoyment with a less expenditure of energy. In nowise
have they the intention of sacrificing their initiative, their will,
their individuality, for the benefit of an entity which did not exist
before their union, which will disappear with their dispersion. To
economize their forces while continuing to wrest from nature the things
necessary to their existence, and which they could not obtain but by the
concentration of their efforts, was certainly the motive which guided
those human beings who first commenced to group themselves; or what, at
least, must have been tacitly understood as such, if not completely
reasoned out in their primitive associations, which associations might
well be, even had to be, temporary and limited to the duration of the
effort, falling apart when the result was once attained.
No Anarchist, therefore, thinks of subordinating the existence of the
individual to the progress of society. Freedom of the people, complete
freedom in all their modes of action, is all we ask. And if there be
those who repudiate organization, who swear by the individual alone, who
say that they despise the community, declaring that the egoism of the
individual should be his only rule of conduct, and that the adoration of
his ego should come before and above all humanitarian considerations,
—believing themselves to be therein more advanced than others —such
people can never have studied the psychological and physiological nature
of man, never have given themselves an account of their own feelings;
they have no idea of what constitutes the real life of man, its
physical, moral, and intellectual needs.
Our present society exhibits some of these perfect egoists: the
Delobelles, the Hjalmar Eikdals, are not rare; they are found not only
in romances. Without meeting any great number of them, it is sometimes
given to us to run up against these types who think only of themselves,
who see nothing in life but their own persons. If there is a tempting
bit on the table they appropriate it without scruple. They live largely
outside while their folks at home are dying of hunger. They accept the
sacrifices of all who surround them,—father, mother, wife, children—as
their due, while they shamelessly put on dignified airs and take their
ease. The sufferings of others are not counted, provided that their own
existence runs smoothly. Still worse, they do not even perceive that
others suffer for them and through them. When they are fed and
well-disposed, humanity is satisfied and refreshed! Behold the type of
your perfect egoist in the absolute sense of the word! -But we may also
add it is the type of a very sorry individual. The most repugnant
bourgeois does not even approach this type; he, at times, still has love
for his own people, or at least something akin to it which takes its
place. We do not believe that the sincere partisans of the most
exaggerated individualism have ever had the intention of giving us this
type as the ideal of future humanity; no more than the
Communist-Anarchists have meant to preach abnegation and renunciation
for the individual in the society which they anticipate. Disclaiming the
entity “society,” they equally disclaim that other entity, the
“individual,” which those who have carried the theory to absurdity tend
to create.
The individual has a right to his entire liberty, to the satisfaction of
all his needs; that is understood. Only, as there exist more than a
billion of individuals on the earth, with equal rights if not with equal
needs, it follows that all these rights must be satisfied without
encroaching on one another; otherwise that would be oppression, which
would render the success of the revolution futile.
What tends greatly to befog our ideas is that this adulterate society
which governs us, based upon the antagonism of interests, has made
people prey upon one another, and forces them to tear each other to
pieces in order to secure to themselves the possibility of living. In
the existing society one must be either robber or robbed; there is no
middle way. Today the one who helps a neighbor runs great risk of being
duped; hence the belief, among those who do not reason, that men cannot
live without fighting each other. The Anarchists, however, say that
society should be based on the strictest solidarity. In that society
which they wish to realize, it must not be that individual happiness,
were it only in its very least important division, be attained at the
expense of another individual. Personal well-being must flow from the
general well-being; when an individual feels himself injured in his
autonomy or in his belongings, all other individuals must feel the same
injury in order that they may remedy it. So long as this ideal is not
realized, so long as this goal is not reached, societies will be but
arbitrary organizations, against which persons who feel themselves
wronged will have the right to revolt.
If men could live isolated, if they could return to the state of nature,
there would be no discussion as to how they should live: each would live
as he pleased. The earth is big enough to accommodate everybody. But
would the earth, if left to itself, furnish sufficient for all to live
upon? This is less certain. It would probably mean ferocious war between
individuals, the “struggle for existence” of the early ages, in all its
fury. It would be the cycle of evolution already run through and
recommencing,—the stronger oppressing the weaker until superseded by the
cunning, until money-value should displace force-value. If we have had
to traverse this period of blood, of misery and exploitation, which is
called the history of humanity, it is because man has been egoistic in
the absolute sense of the word, without any corrective, without any
mitigation. He has had in view from the outset of all his associations,
nothing but the satisfaction of his immediate desires. Whenever he has
been able to enslave a weaker fellow he has done so without scruple,
seeing only the amount of work to be got out of the victim, without
reflecting that the necessity of surveillance, the revolts he will have
to suppress, will end, in the long run, in compelling him to perform an
equally onerous labor, and that it would be better to work side by side,
lending each other mutual aid.
It is thus that authority and property have succeeded in establishing
themselves. Now, if we wish to overturn them, it cannot be done by
beginning our past evolution over again. If this theory that the motive
of the individual should be egoism pure and simple,—the adoration and
culture of the ego,—were admitted, one would necessarily declare that
the individual should launch into the melee and work to gain the means
of self-gratification without concerning himself as to whether he
crushes others at his side. To affirm this would be to confess that the
coming revolution should be made by and for the strong, that the new
society must be a perpetual conflict between individuals. If it were so
we should have no reason to proclaim the idea of general
enfranchisement. We should rebel against the existing society only
because its capitalistic organization did not permit us likewise to
possess.
It may be that among those calling themselves Anarchists there are some
who regard the question from this standpoint. This would explain to us
the defections and recantations of persons who, after having been most
ardent, have deserted their principles to range themselves among the
defenders of the existing society, because it offered them
compensations. Certainly we do combat this society because it does not
afford us satisfaction for all our aspirations; but we also comprehend
that our own interests, rightly understood, would have this satisfaction
of our needs extended to all the members of society. Man is always
egoistic, he always tends to make of his ego the centre of the universe.
But with the development of his intelligence he comes to understand that
if his ego wishes to be satisfied there are other egos that equally wish
to be satisfied, (those that have not been have made it understood that
they had a right to be) whence sentimentalists and mystics have come to
preach renunciation, sacrifice, devotion to one’s neighbor.
Social authority, while continuing to preach the oppression of the
individual for the sake of the collectivity—this dogma has contributed
to its maintenance even as much as force has— social authority has had
to modify itself, to concede a larger share to individuality. For if
narrow, badly understood egoism is opposed to the functioning of
society, renunciation and the spirit of sacrifice are fatal to
individuality. To sacrifice oneself for others, above all when they are
indifferent to you, does not enter into every one’s disposition. And
besides it would, in the long run, be even prejudicial to humanity, for
it would allow narrow minds, egoistic in the the bad sense of the word,
to rule; that type of humanity farthest from perfect would come to
absorb the others. Altruism, properly so-called, could not, therefore,
take root either.
But though egoism or altruism, separately, each pushed to its extreme,
is pernicious to the individual and society, united they are resolved
into a third term, which is the law of future societies. This law is
Solidarity.
Many of us will combine with the intention of realizing one of our
aspirations. This association having nothing forced in it, nothing
arbitrary, prompted only by some need of our being, it is quite evident
that the more pressing the need the more force and activity shall we
contribute to the association. All having cooperated in production, we
shall all have rights in consumption; that is plain; but as the sum of
needs will have been calculated (counting in those which must be
foreseen) that the satisfaction of all may be attained, solidarity will
have no trouble in securing to each his share. Is it not said that man’s
nature is to have his eyes bigger than his stomach? Now, the more
intense his desire is the greater an amount of activity will he devote
to its realization. Thus he will come to produce not only sufficient to
satisfy the co-participants, but also those in whom desire would not
have been awakened but for the sight of the thing produced. Man’s needs
being infinite, infinite will be his means of satisfying them, and it is
this variety of needs which will concur in the establishment of general
harmony.
In our present society, wherein we are accustomed to depend upon the
toil of others to obtain the things necessary for existence, there is
but one object: to procure money enough to enable one to buy what he
wants. Now, as manual labor does not even enable one to keep himself
from starving, he who has only this resource, seeks to obtain money by
every means except work, becoming an official, journalist, or what-not,
including blackmailer. He who has a start goes into commerce and
increases his income by robbing his contemporaries; he gambles in
stocks, he speculates, or makes others work for him. People engage in
all %orts of occupations, more or less dishonorable, except the one
thing necessary that all might have their share,—useful production. So
that each one pulls the cover over himself without concerning himself
about those whom he lays naked, whence this unreasoned egoism which
seems to have become the sole motive of human actions.
But as man grows refined, he comes also to live not only for himself and
in himself. The type of the humane egoist, perfectly developed, is to
suffer with the sufferings of those who surround him, to have his
enjoyment spoiled by the reflection that others, owing to the vicious
social organization in which we live, may suffer by it. Among the
bourgeoisie there are persons whose sensitiveness is certainly highly
developed; when the influences of environment, education, or heredity,
leave them leisure to reflect upon social misery and turpitude; when
they reckon up their existence, they try as much as possible to remedy
misery with charity. Whence, philanthropic works! But the habit of
believing society normally constituted, the habit of considering poverty
eternal, the result of the laborer’s misconduct, engenders an unfeeling
character, inquisitorial in its philanthropy. Because for the man born,
educated, brought up in the hothouses of wealth and luxury, it is very
difficult, even impossible, save under exceptional circumstances, to
come to doubt the legitimacy of the situation he occupies. For the
parvenu it is still more difficult, for he believes he owes his
situation to his talent and his work. Religion, conceit, and the
economists, have so reiterated that work is a punishment, that poverty
is the result of the improvidence of those who are a prey to it, that
how can you expect him who has never had to struggle against adversity
not to believe himself of a superior essence! From the day he begins to
doubt it, sets himself to study the social organization, if he is
sufficiently endowed to understand its viciousness, his pleasures will
be poisoned at their fountainhead. This man will suffer when he says to
himself that his luxury necessitates the misery of a mass of workers,
that every one of his possessions is purchased at the expense of the
sufferings of those who are sacrificed to produce them. If this man’s
combativeness is developed equally with his sensitiveness he will make
one more rebel against the social order which does not secure moral and
intellectual satisfaction even to him. For it must not be forgotten that
the social problem is not confined to a simple material question. We
certainly do contend, and that before everything else, that all should
have enough to eat. But our demands are not limited to this; we also
contend that each should be able to develop himself according to his
faculties, and to procure those intellectual gratifications which the
needs of his brain create. True that for many Anarchists the question
stops there; and that is what has brought about these divers
interpretations and discussions of egoism, altruism, etc. Nothing more
urgent than the stomach question! Only it would be dangerous to the
success of the revolution to stop there, for then one might just as well
accept the Socialistic State, which could, and would, secure all in the
satisfaction of their physical needs.
If the next revolution were to confine its objects to the sole problem
of material life, it would greatly risk being arrested or the way,
degenerating into a vast revel of gluttony, which, the orgy once over,
would not be long in surrendering the insurgent: to the blows of
capitalistic reaction. Happily this problem, paramount today to the
workingmen whose future is rendered uncertain by more and more prolonged
periods of idleness, as we admit, is not the only one which will be
solved in the next revolution. Without doubt the first work of the
Anarchists towards making the revolution a success, will be to seize
social wealth, to call upon the disinherited to take possession of
stores, machinery, and the soil; to install themselves in healthy
localities, destroying the rat-holes in which they are forced to remain
today. The revolutionists should destroy all the old parchments which
guarantee the functioning of property; the offices of bailiffs,
notaries, register of land surveys, register of deeds, the entire civil
staff, should be visited and “cleaned out.” But to do all this work
something more than famishing people is needed,—individuals, conscious
of their individuality, jealous of all their rights, determined to
conquer them and capable of defending them once they are acquired. This
is why a question of subsistence only would be powerless to effect such
a transformation; and it is also why there rise up, together with the
right to subsistence which the Anarchists demand, all these questions of
art, science, and philosophy, which they are forced to study, to fathom,
to elucidate, and which are the cause of Anarchistic ideas embracing
every branch of human science. Everywhere have arguments in favor of
these ideas been found, everywhere there have risen up adherents who
furnished their quota of demands, and reinforced the principles with
their special knowledge. The sum of human learning is so great that the
most privileged brains can appropriate only a portion; likewise the
conception of Anarchism though condensed by certain minds which outline
its bases and trace its program, cannot be elucidated but by the
collaboration of all, by the help of each one’s knowledge. And this it
is which gives it its strength, for it is the collaboration of all which
enables it to sum up all human aspirations.
“You are too abstract!” This is an objection frequently raised against
the Anarchists by many people. They say that since we address ourselves
to the workers we should make man fruitful propaganda if we should take
up less elevated subjects By the preceding chapters we have seen that it
is the development of the ideas themselves which has drawn us into the
treatment of questions not always within the scope of those whom w
address; this is a fatality to which we submit and against which we can
do nothing. To those who are just beginning to nibble at the social
question our writings may often appear dry; this we do not deny. But can
we alter the fact that the question: which we treat and which must be
treated, are dry in them’ selves? Can we prevent the principles which we
defend, linked together as they are, identified with every branch of
human knowledge, from leading those who wish to elucidate them to study
things they did not before deem necessary? And, moreover, has not all
this preparatory work to which they would condemn us, been already
performed by our predecessors, the Socialists? Do not the capitalistic
classes themselves work for the demolition of their society? Are not all
ambitious radicals, Socialists more or less deeply dyed, bent upon
demonstrating to the workers that the present society can do nothing for
them; that it must be changed?
The Anarchists therefore have only to analyze this enormous work, to
coordinate it, to extract its essence. Their role is limited to proving
that it is not by changing governors that the ills from which we suffer
may be cured; that it is not by merely modifying the machinery of the
social organism that we shall prevent it from producing those evil
effects which the very bourgeois, desirous of getting into power, knows
so well how. to show up. But our task is complicated precisely because
the ideas which we advocate are abstract. If, indeed, we were willing to
content ourselves with declamations and assertions, the task would be
rendered easy, both for us and for our readers. The more difficult the
problems to be solved the more need is there to acquaint ourselves with
arguments and logic. It is easy to say and write, “Comrades, the bosses
rob us! The bourgeoisie are drunkards! Rulers are scoundrels! We must
rebel, kill the capitalists, set fire to the factories!” Moreover,
before any one wrote it the exploited had sometimes killed their
exploiters, the governed had revolted, the poor had rebelled against the
rich; yet the situation was in nowise altered. They had changed rulers.
In 1789 property changed hands; subsequently the people revolted, hoping
thereby to force it to change hands again. Yet the governing continued
to oppress the governed, the rich continued to live at the expense of
the exploited; nothing was altered. Since it was written the people have
likewise revolted, and nothing is altered. Hence it is not a question of
saying or writing that the laborer is exploited; it is necessary to
explain to him above all how in changing masters he does not cease to be
exploited, and how, were he to put himself in his master’s place, he
would in turn become an exploiter, leaving behind him the exploited who
would then make against him the same complaints he now makes against
those he would like to have dispossessed. It is necessary to make him
understand further how the capitalistic classes have interested him in
the existing society, persuaded him to defend the privileges of his
exploiters while he believes himself defending his own interests in an
organization which, in fact, has nothing for him but promises never to
be realized.
By its organization, based upon the antagonism of interests, our
bourgeois society charges itself with the task of bringing the workers
to a revolution. Now, the workers have always made revolutions, but have
forever allowed the benefits thereof to be juggled away, because they
“did not know.” The role of the propagandist, then, is to teach the
workers; and to teach them one must give demonstrations to them.
Assertion makes believers, but not conscious ones. At the time when,
even for the most advanced Socialists, authority was the basis of all
organization, there was nothing wrong in having mere believers. On the
contrary it facilitated the task of those who set themselves up as
directors. One could go ahead with assertions; one was believed
according to the degree of authority he had been clever enough to
acquire; and as the directors did not exact of their proselytes a
knowledge of why they were to act, but only to “believe” strongly enough
to make them blindly obey received orders, they had no need of killing
themselves to furnish arguments. Believing in providential men who were
to think and act for them, the mass of proselytes did not need to learn
much. Had not the leaders a plan of social organization already prepared
in their heads, which they would hasten to execute once they were
carried into power? To know how to fight and kill each other, that was
all they asked the common herd to know and to do. The leaders once in
power the dear people had nothing to do but wait; everything would come
to them at the proper time without their troubling themselves about it.
But Anarchistic principles have come to overthrow all this. Denying the
necessity of providential men, making war upon authority, and claiming
for each individual the right and the duty to act under the pressure of
his own impulses only, of submitting to no constraint or restriction of
his autonomy; proclaiming individual initiative as the basis of all
progress and of every truly libertarian association, Anarchism cannot
content itself with making believers; it must, above all, aim to
convince, that its converts may know why they believe, that the
arguments with which they have been furnished may have struck home, that
they may have weighed, discussed and considered the value of these for
themselves. Hence a propaganda more difficult, more arduous, more
abstract, but also more effective.
From the moment the individual relies solely on his own initiative, he
must be enabled to exercise it effectively. That such initiative may
adapt itself freely to the action of other individuals, it must be
conscious, reasoned, based upon the logic of the natural order of facts.
That all these separate acts may converge to a common end, they must be
animated by a common idea, well understood and clearly elaborated;
whence it follows that nothing but a close, logical, and thoroughly
defined discussion of the principles can open the minds of those who
adopt them, and lead such to reflect for themselves. Hence our method of
procedure, which, instead of causing us to get a lot of rhetorical
fireworks out of any idea we take up, leads us to turn it over in all
its aspects, to dissect it, even to its final toms, in order to extract
from it the greatest possible amount of argument.
Ah, it is no small thing to overthrow a society as we talk of doing,
above all when it is desired that this social upheaval shall be
universal as we wish it to be! It is clear that the people who compose
this society, however cruel it may be to them, are not going to see the
necessity of its overthrow as we do, all in a moment, having been
accustomed to look upon it as the palladium of their safety and the
means of their well-being. They know very well that this society does
not furnish them what it has promised, but they cannot understand the
necessity for its total destruction. Has not every one his little reform
to propose, which is to grease the wheels and make the machine run to
the satisfaction of all? They want, therefore, to know whether this
upheaval will be profitable or prejudicial to them, whence arise a mass
of questions leading to the discussion of every branch of human
knowledge, in order to know whether they will survive in the cataclysm
we would provoke. And hence the perplexity of the worker who sees
unfolding before him a multitude of questions which they took good care
not to teach him at school, discussions which it is very hard for him to
follow, subjects which for the most part he hears treated of for the
first time;—questions, however, which he must study to the bottom and
solve if he desires to be able to profit by this autonomy which he
demands, if he does not want to use his initiative to his own detriment,
and, more than all, if he wishes to get on without providential men.
When a question, however abstract it may be, presents itself to the
investigations of the Anarchist propagandist, he cannot make it
otherwise than abstract; nor can he pass it by in silence, under the
pretext that those to whom he speaks have never heard of it. To explain
it in plain, clear, precise, and concise language; to avoid
“thousand-legged words,” as one of our comrades puts it,—that is words
which are understood only by the initiated;—to avoid burying one’s
thought in high-flown and redundant phraseology, or seeking after
phrases and effects, this is all that can be done by those who have it
at heart to propagate the principles, to spread them and make them
understood among the masses; but we cannot mutilate them with the excuse
that they are not accessible to the people. If it were necessary to
evade every question which the majority of readers are not able to
understand upon first enunciation, we should be condemned to return to
declamation, to the art of stringing out meaningless phrases one after
the other, and saying nothing. This role is too well played by the
bourgeois rhetoricians for us to attempt to supersede them in it. If the
workers want to emancipate themselves they must understand that this
emancipation will not come of itself; that they must obtain it; and that
self-education is one of the forms of the social struggle. The
possibility and the continuance of their exploitation by the
capitalistic class proceed from their ignorance. They must know how to
free themselves intellectually if they wish to be able to free
themselves materially. If they already recoil before the difficulties of
mental emancipation, which depends solely upon their own willingness,
what then will it be before the difficulties of a more active struggle
in which it will be necessary to expend an altogether incommensurate
force of character and amount of will! Useless and injurious as it is,
the bourgeoisie has nevertheless succeeded in concentrating in the
brains of a few all the scientific knowledge necessary to the present
development of humanity. If we do not want the revolution to be a step
backward, the worker must be able intellectually to replace the
bourgeoisie which he wishes to overthrow; his ignorance must not be an
obstacle to the development of sciences already acquired. If he does not
know them thoroughly he must be able to comprehend them when he finds
himself in their presence.
To be sure we quite understand all this impatience; we can imagine that
those who are hungry would like to see the dawning of the day when they
will be able to appease their hunger: we are perfectly aware that those
who submit to the yoke of authority only by suppressing their anger, are
impatient to shake it off, desirous of listening to words in conformity
with their condition of mind, reminding them of their hatreds, their
desires, their aspirations, their thirst for justice. But however jreat
this impatience, however legitimate the demands and the iced of
realizing them, the idea advances only by degrees, penetrates the mind
and lodges there only when matured and elaborated. When we consider that
the bourgeoisie which we wish to overthrow took centuries of preparation
before it overturned the royalty, it should cause us to reflect upon the
work of elaboration which we have to do. In the fourteenth century, when
Etienne Marcel attempted to seize the power for the benefit of the
bourgeoisie, already organized in corporations, the bourgeois class
already felt itself to be strong; for a long time it had been aspiring
to authority and had organized itself for that purpose, had educated and
developed itself, had worked for its enfranchisement by endeavoring to
obtain from the baronage the freedom of the communes. It was not,
however, till four centuries later that it succeeded in winning the long
coveted boon.
Assuredly we hope not to have to wait so long for our enfranchisement
and the overthrow of capitalistic exploitation. Its complete collapse at
the end of so short a period of power is hurrying it on to a speedy
fall. Yet if the bourgeoisie was able in 1789 to substitute itself for
“divine right,” it was because it had prepared itself intellectually for
such substitution; and the more rapid the downfall the more haste should
we workers make to prepare ourselves intellectually, not to replace the
power which we must destroy but to organize ourselves so as to prevent
any aristocracy’s substituting itself for that which has given way. The
idea of free individual initiative once being established, people should
be enabled (we cannot repeat it too often) to learn how to reason and to
combine their initiative. If they have not the will to deliver
themselves from their own ignorance, how will they be able to make
others understand when they themselves have not been able to learn? Let
us have no fear, then, of discussing the most abstract questions; each
solution obtained is a step forward on the pathway of emancipation.
Leaders being discarded, the knowledge hitherto in their possession must
be diffused among the masses; and there is but one means of bringing it
within their reach, which is, that, while continuing to go forward we
persuade them to interest themselves in questions which interest us.
Once more: Let us make ourselves as clear as possible; but let us not
mutilate ourselves for then, instead of bringing the masses to us we
should be brought to them; instead of going forward we should go back
ward,—truly a queer way of understanding progress.
It is upon the contention that “ man is too evil to know to govern
himself,” that authoritarians base their justification of the power they
wish to establish. “ Power is necessary to reform mankind “ is the reply
to the Anarchists when they speak of establishing a society based upon
solidarity, entire equality, and absolute autonomy for the individual,
without authority, rule, or constraint. “Man is evil.” Undoubtedly! But
may he become better, and may he become worse? Is any change in his
present condition possible, either for good or ill? Can he be improved
or deteriorated physiologically and morally? And if evolution in one
sense or another be possible (as history proves that it is) does the
heritage of ancient laws, the harness of old institutions, tend to make
men better, or do they help to make him worse? The answer to this
question will tell us which of the two, modern man or the social state,
must be reformed first.
Nowadays no one denies that the physical environment has an enormous
influence upon the physiological constitution of man; now, with still
greater reason the intellectual and moral environment must influence his
psychological constitution.
Upon what is our present society based? Does it tend to create harmony
among men? Is it so managed that the adversity of, one shall be felt by
others, in order that all may be led to diminish or prevent it? Does
personal well-being flow from general well-being, and is no one
interested in disturbing the operation thereof? This society of kings,
priests, merchants, and employers—does it permit all generous ideas to
come forth, or does it not rather tend to stifle them? Has it not at its
command, for the purpose of crushing the weak, this brute
force—money—which puts the most generous and least egoistic at the mercy
of the most greedy and least scrupulous?
To study the mechanism of capitalistic society is sufficient to discover
that it can produce nothing good. Aspirations towards lie good and the
beautiful must be perennial in the human race, rot to have been choked
by the rapacity and narrow, unreasoning egoism which official society
has inculcated in it from the cradle. This society, as we have observed
in the preceding chapter, is based upon the antagonism of interests, and
makes every individual the enemy of his neighbor. The seller’s interest
is opposed to the buyer’s; the stock-raiser and the agriculturist ask
for nothing better than a “good epidemic and a good hailstorm” among
their neighbors, in order to raise the price of their commodities, when
they do not have recourse to the State which “protects” them, while
seizing, by virtue of “superior right,” the products of their
competitors; the development of mechanical appliances tends to greater
and greater division of the workers, throwing them out of employment and
leading them to disputes among themselves for the chance to take each
other’s jobs, and the number of these is increasing largely beyond the
demand. In fine, everything in our traditional’ “society” tends to split
up mankind.
Why is there idleness and misery at the present moment? Because the
stores are glutted with products. How is it that it has not yet occurred
to anybody to set them on fire or take possession of them, and thus
procure that employment which is refused, by creating among the workers
themselves the markets which their exploiters go so far to
seek?—“Because we are afraid of the soldiers and militia,” does some one
say? This fear is real, but it does not of itself suffice to explain the
apathy of the starving. How many occasions present themselves in the
course of one’s life to do wrong without the slightest risk, and yet one
does not commit it for other reasons than for fear of the soldiery. And
besides, the starving, if they should all unite, are numerous enough, in
Paris, for instance, not to be afraid of the troops, to hold the
police-force in check for a whole day, empty the stores, and have a good
feast for once. In the case of those who go to prison for tramping and
begging, is it in reality the fear of prison which makes them beg for
that which it would cost them no more to take? It is because in addition
to cowardice there is a sentiment ‘of sociability which prevents people
from returning evil for evil, and makes them submit to the heaviest
shackles in the belief that these are necessary to the functioning of
society. Does any one believe that force alone would suffice to insure
respect for property, were it not mingled in the people’s minds with a
character of legitimacy which makes them accept it as the result of
individual labor? Have the severest penalties ever prevented those who,
without troubling themselves whether it were legitimate or not, have
wished to live at the expense of others, from carrying out their
intents? What would it be, then, if people, studying over their misery
and discovering its cause in property, were of a nature so given to evil
as is popularly alleged? Society would not endure another moment; there
would then be “the struggle for existence” in its most ferocious
expression, a return to pure barbarism. It is precisely because man has
tended towards what is better, that he has allowed himself to be ruled,
enslaved, deceived, exploited, and still repudiates violent measures to
effect his final enfranchisement.
This declaration that “man is born to evil,” and that there is no change
to hope for, means, when analyzed: “Man is bad society is therefore bad,
and there is nothing to hope for, either from one or the other. What is
the use of losing one’s time in seeking for a perfection which humanity
cannot attain? Let us look out for ourselves as best we can. If the sum
of gratifications we obtain is made up of the tears and blood of the
victim we have sown along our route, what does it matter to us? On must
crush others to escape being crushed himself. So much the worse for
those who fall.”—Well, let the privileged one who have thus far managed
to bolster up their sway, to send the workers to sleep, to transform
them into defenders of their masters’ privileges, first by promising
them a better life in the other world, then, when they ceased to believe
in God, by preaching to them morality, patriotism, social utility, etc.,
and today by making them hope to gain, through universal suffrage, a
multitude of reforms and improvements impossible to effect, (for the
ills which flow from the very essence of the social organization cannot
be prevented so long as we attack the effects only, without finding the
cause, so long as society itself be not transformed)—let the exploiters
of the poor, then, proclaim the unadulterated right of force, and we
shall see how long their sway will last! Force will balance force.
When man first began to group together with his fellows, he must still
have been much more of an animal than a human being; ideas of morality
and justice did not exist in him. Having had to struggle against other
animals, against all nature, his first groups were formed out of the
necessity for an association of forces, not by the desire for
solidarity. No doubt these associations were, as we have already said,
temporary at the start, limited to the capture of the game to be hunted
or the overthrow of the obstacle to be conquered, later to the repulse
or killing of an assailant. It was only by thus practicing association
that men were brought to understand its importance; and the societies
thus formed continued to live and became permanent. But on the other
hand this life of continual struggle could not help developing the
sanguinary and despotic instinct in people. The weaker had to submit to
the rule of the stronger when they did not serve the latter as food. It
could not have been till much later that cunning gained a precedence
equal to that of force.
When we study man in his earliest appearance it must be admitted that he
was then a wicked enough animal indeed; but since he has reached his
present development and formed conceptions of which he was formerly
incapable, what reason is there why he should stop and go no further? To
attempt to deny that man may still progress is to be as much in error as
if one had affirmed, at the time he dwelt in caves and had nothing but a
club or a stone weapon as a means of defense, that he would not one day
become capable of building the opulent cities of today, of utilizing
electricity and steam. Why shall man, who has reached the point of
guiding the selection of domestic animals in the direction of his needs,
not reach the point of guiding his own tastes in the direction of the
good and beautiful of which he begins to have conceptions? Little by
little man has evolved and does evolve every day. His ideas are
constantly modified. Physical force, though sometimes thrusting itself
upon him, is no longer admired in the same degree. Ideas of morality, of
justice, of solidarity have developed; they have so much weight that the
privileged, to succeed in maintaining their privileges, are obliged to
make people believe themselves exploited and gagged in their own
interest. This deception cannot last. People begin to feel themselves
too cramped in this illy-balanced society. Aspirations which began to
come to light centuries ago, at first isolated and incomplete, today
begin to assume definite shape; they are found even among those who may
be classed among the privileged of the present organization. There is
not a single person who has not at times uttered his cry of revolt or
indignation against this society, still governed by the dead, which
seems to have undertaken the task of crushing all our sentiments, acts,
aspirations, and from which we suffer the more in proportion to our
development. Ideas of liberty and justice are becoming more defined;
those who proclaim them are still in the minority, but a minority strong
enough to make the possessing classes uneasy and afraid.
Man, then, like all other animals, is but the product of an evolution
worked out under the influence of the environment in which he lives and
the conditions of existence he is forced to submit to or combat; only,
more than other animals, or at least in a higher degree, has he come to
reason upon his origin, to formulate aspirations for his future. It
depends upon him to conjure this fatality of “evil” alleged to be
attached to his existence. By succeeding in creating for himself other
conditions of life he will succeed in modifying himself also. For the
rest, without going further the question may be summarized thus: “Has
every individual, good or bad, the right to live as he likes, to revolt
if exploited, or if others seek to bind him to conditions of existence
repugnant to him?” The pets of fortune and those who are in power claim
to be better than others; but it would suffice that “the bad” should
overthrow them and establish themselves in their place, thus inverting
the roles, to have equal reason with the first for being “good.” The
system of private property, by putting all our social wealth in the
hands of a few, has permitted these to live as parasites at the expense
of the mass whom they have enslaved, and whose product only serves o
keep up their show and idleness, or to defend their interests. This
condition, recognized as unjust by those who submit to it, cannot last.
The workers will demand free possession of what .hey produce, and will
revolt if the denial of the request continues. Vainly does capitalism
seek to entrench itself behind the argument that “man is evil;” the
revolution will come. Then it will appear either that man is indeed
incapable of perfectibility, (we have just seen the contrary) in which
case there would be a war of appetites, and whatever theirs might be the
capitalistic classes would be doomed in Advance, since they are the
minority,—or that man is evil because institutions help to make him
such; in which case he may elevate himself to a social state which will
contribute to his moral, intellectual, and physical development, and
manage to transform society in such a way as will effect the solidarity
of all its interests. But however it be, the revolution will come! The
sphinx interrogates us and we answer without fear, for we Anarchists,
destroyers of laws and property, we know the key to the enigma.
Before proceeding with the exposition of our ideas it will be well to
review the institutions which we wish to destroy, to discover upon what
bases capitalistic society rests, the positive value of these bases, and
why and how society is transformable only on condition that the entire
organization be changed; why no improvement will be possible so long as
this transformation is not wrought. From this study the reasons why we
are Anarchists and revolutionists will naturally follow.
Protection to private property and hereditary transmission of the same
in families,—this is the principle upon which existing society rests.
Authority, the family, the magistracy, the army, and every hierarchic
and bureaucratic organization, which stifles and devours us, proceed
from this principle. There is religion also, but we leave it aside,
since science, bourgeois though it be, has killed that.
We do not propose to give the history of property. That has been done,
again and again, by Socialists of all schools; all have shown that it is
nothing else than the result of robbery, fraud, and the right of force.
Here, therefore, we have only to notice certain facts which demonstrate
its iniquity and exhibit the evils which flow from it; which prove that
proposed reforms are but snares to deceive the exploited, and that, to
prevent the evils we wish to cure, we must attack their principal
source, the present proprietary and capitalistic organization.
Science shows us today that the earth owes its origin to a nucleus of
cosmic matter, primevally detached from the solar nebula. This nucleus,
by the effect of its rotation upon its axis and around the central star,
became condensed to such a degree that the compression of the gases led
to their conflagration; and this globe, son of the sun, like that which
had given it birth, must then have shone with its own light in the Milky
Way like a very small star. The globe cooled, having passed from the
gaseous to the liquid state, then to a slimy condition, then, becoming
more and more dense, to complete solidification. But in this primitive
furnace the association of different gases was effected in such a
fashion that their various combinations had given birth to those
fundamental materials which form the composition of the earth: minerals,
metals, free gases suspended in the atmosphere. The operation of cooling
progressing by degrees, the action of air and water upon the minerals
helped to form a coating of vegetable earth. During this time the
association of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, begot in the
depths of the waters, a species of organic jelly, without definite form,
without organs, without consciousness, but already endowed with the
faculty of changing place by pushing out pro longations of its substance
on the side towards which it wished to go, or rather on the side upon
which some attraction made itself felt; endowed, too, with this
additional faculty of assimilating foreign bodies taken into its
substance and thereby nourishing itself. Finally, endowed with one last
faculty: having reached a certain degree of development, the power of
dividing itself in two and giving birth to a new organism, in every
respect similar to its progenitor.
Behold the modest beginnings of humanity! So modest that it is only very
much later, after a long series of evolutions, after the formation of a
certain number of types in the chain of beings, that we come to
distinguish the animal from the vegetable. To trace the whole series up
to man would be to rewrite here the history of evolution, which modern
science explains in a manner so clear and comprehensible to those who
are willing to judge without prejudice, that we can only refer the
reader to it, contenting ourselves with instancing merely the principal
facts in support of our demonstration concerning the arbitrary
monopolization of a part of the soil by a certain set of individuals,
who take possession of it for their own profit and that of their
descendants, to the injury of others less favored and of future
generations. It is perfectly plain that this explanation of the
appearance of man upon the earth destroys all the marvelous story of his
creation. No more God, nor creative entity! Man is but the product of an
evolution of terrestrial life which is itself but the product of a
combination of gases which gases have in turn undergone an evolution
before attaining the power of combining in the density and proportions
necessary to the development of vital phenomena.
The theory of the supernatural origin of man being set aside, the idea
that society, such as exists, with its divisions of rich and poor,
governed and governing, proceeds from a divine will, no longer holds
good. Authority, so long propped up by its “supernatural origin,”—a
fable which has contributed at least as much as brute force to maintain
it—was in its turn exhausted under the discussion and menaced with ruin;
today it entrenched itself behind universal suffrage and majority rule.
But authority could maintain itself intact only so long as it was not
discussed. We shall see further that it no longer has any means to
support itself save force. Hence we may say that property and authority,
being placed under discussion, are on the highroad to extinction, for
what is discussed is scarcely revered any longer; that which force alone
sustains force can destroy.
The vegetable sustains itself at the expense of the mineral and the
atmosphere, the animal at the expense of the vegetable and, later, at
the expense of the animal itself. But there are no preconceived ideas in
this, having in view the establishment of any hierarchy among beings, on
the part of a creator, or of a nature-entity, who should have created
the vegetable to serve as food for the animal, the animal and vegetable
to feed man or to be slaves to the human race in order to create the
happiness of the elect. There is only an evolving sequence of natural
laws, which so resulted that the condensation of gases having formed
minerals, there was nothing but vegetable life which could assimilate
the mineral and transform it into an organic combination capable of
hastening the birth of animal life.
The evolutional origin of man being admitted it becomes evident to all
that, when the first thinking beings appeared upon the earth, there
could no longer be any need of a tutelary providence to facilitate their
development, and consequently nobody to assign to some a directing power
over their fellows, to others property in the soil, and to the great
mass misery and privation, respect for their masters, with the sole
function of producing for the benefit of the latter. However “the
struggle for existence” having begun as the sole law for individuals, to
eat in order not to be eaten was their sole preoccupation. But when they
commenced unconsciously to practice this other and higher vital law,
assistance in struggle, heredity having developed in them the instincts
of combativeness, of oppression towards the victim, (everything being a
prey to man, even man himself) it follows according to all the evidence
that this spirit of struggle and domination, stored up in the brain by
past generations, sought to gain like precedence in the organized
collectivity. Those persons who possessed it in the highest degree
imposed their will upon those who possessed it in a lesser degree. This
authority, being established, followed the fluctuations of human
intelligence, and transformations of the social organization were
effected accordingly as force, the religious spirit, or commercialism,
were triumphant. Authority under its divers modes of operation,
therefore, has maintained itself up to the present time, and will
maintain itself until man, freed from error and prejudice, reconquers
himself entirely, renouncing the imposition of his will upon others in
order not to have to submit to the will of those stronger than himself.
But the divine origin of authority and property being denied by
bourgeois science itself, the bourgeoisie have sought to give them solid
and natural bases. The economists have taken social facts resulting from
a bad organization, and setting them up as “ natural laws,” making them
the cause of what exists while they are but the effects, decorating
these absurdities with the name of science, they have pretended to
legitimize the most monstrous social crimes, the most heinous piracies
of capitalism, blaming the causes of poverty upon the poor themselves,
setting up the most monstrous egoism as a law of social conservation,
when, on the contrary, as we have seen in one of the preceding chapters,
egoism is but a cause of conflict, of loss of energy, and retrogression,
if it be not tempered and softened by this other more evolved and humane
law of solidarity.
Bourgeois society being founded upon capital, and this being represented
by money, the economists, in order to mask the peculiar role it plays in
the work of production and exchange, have reduced everything to capital.
The man who impregnates his wife and begets children, expends capital;
but he creates some also, for the child, become a man, will be—capital!
The muscular power which the workman spends in production—capital!
(Observe, by the way, that besides their arms the workmen, in the
performance of no matter what sort of work, bring to bear an amount of
intelligence often superior to that of the contractor; but as it would
then be necessary to count two portions of capital for the workman, and
as that would embarrass the economists in their calculations, they pass
this over in silence). Yet as all this reduction of human activity to
capital does not explain the origin of money-capital, the economists
have discovered that “money-capital is that portion of labor which
industrious and provident persons have not immediately consumed and have
held in reserve for future needs.” Right here the calculation becomes
interesting. All capital put into use, the economists dogmatically
affirm:—
reconstitute itself completely;
value, which represents an insurance-premium to cover the said risks.
Now, the workman, who is paid right along for his labor and consequently
runs no risks, has a right to the first claim only, permitting him to
replace his capital expended; that is to say, to feed, clothe, and lodge
himself and finally to repair the strength which he has depleted. He
should not produce more children than the excess of his wages permits
him to bring up.
But the employer—Oh! it is a different affair with him! In the first
place he invests an original capital, the money necessary to pay the
workmen, settle for purchases, etc., which represents the pleasures of
which he has deprived himself. This capital, like that of the workman,
ought to bring in sufficient to replace itself, but in addition the
insurance premium for the risks it runs, which constitutes the profit of
the exploiter. Secondly, if it be an industrial enterprise, there are
buildings and machines for the employees,—still more capital to be
reproduced and to bring in its insurance premium. But this is not all.
The exploiter’s intelligence is capital, too, and none of the least. A
capitalist must know how to make judicious employment of his capital,
how to manage his business and himself; he must inquire as to what
products it is advantageous to produce, where they are in demand, etc.
This third capital must be restored out of the enterprise. Observe that
if the investor be an engineer, a scholar, or a doctor, the premium must
be much greater, because, costing more dearly to establish, they
consequently cost much more dearly to repair.
This subtle distinction established, transforming into capital the
divers elements of production, the division seems fair: the capitalist
pockets three-fourths of the product for his share and the trick is
played. The workman has received his pay, why should he complain? Let
him economize also and he may likewise invest his savings in enterprises
and triple his share! Let him stop spending his money foolishly in
saloons! Let him not have so many children! The struggle is hard; they
must learn how to curtail their pleasures if they want to increase them
later, pack of loafers that they are!
Would the gentlemen economists, who talk to us of the greater
intelligence of the capitalists, venture to affirm that those who, by a
stroke on the bourse, by stock-jobbing and monopolies, sweep away
millions, have expended an intelligence a million times superior, we
will not say to that of the workman who may pass as an artist at his
trade, but to that of even the humblest workman in the lowest trade?
Take a workman, supposing him to be one of the most favored, earning
good wages as compared with the least favored, having no periods of
enforced idleness or sickness. Can this workman live the larger life
which ought to be assured to those who produce, in order to satisfy
their physical and intellectual needs while working? Nonsense! He cannot
satisfy the hundredth part of his needs, however limited they be. He
must reduce them still further if he wants to save a few pennies for his
old age. And however great his parsimony he will never manage to save
enough to live without working. The savings accumulated during his
productive period will hardly amount to compensation for the deficit
which old age brings, unless he receive an inheritance or some other
windfall which has nothing to do with work. And for every one of these
privileged workers how many wretched ones are there who have nothing to
appease their hunger! The development of machinery has permitted the
exploiters to reduce the number of their hands; the unemployed, become
more and more numerous, have diminished wages and multiplied periods of
enforced idleness; sickness reduces them still further, so that “the
wage-earner in good circumstances” tends more and more to become a myth,
and, instead of hoping to get out of his misery, the worker must expect,
if capitalistic society endures much longer, to sink still deeper in it.
Now, let us suppose that the well-situated workman, instead of
continuing to invest his savings in values of any kind, sets himself up
in business on his own account after he has gathered together a certain
amount. This is becoming more and more impossible, thanks to machinery,
which requires the concentration of enormous capital and leaves no room
for the isolated workman; but we will assume its possibility and suppose
that this workman-employer works alone. If the postulate of political
economy be true, that every faculty of man is employed capital, and that
it produces a fortune for him who puts it into use, here is an
individual who invests money-capital, force-capital, and
intelligence-capital; having to divide with nobody it will not be long
till he sees his money-capital increase ten-fold in his hands, and
becomes in his turn a millionaire.
In practice the workman who works alone on his own account is rarely to
be found. The small employer, with two or three workmen, lives perhaps a
little better than those he employs, but he must work as hard, if not
harder, constantly pressed as he is to meet his obligations; he can
expect no improvement, happy if he manage to maintain himself in his
comparative comfort and escape failure. Big profits, big fortunes, life
“ driven four-in-hand,” are reserved to the big proprietors, big
share-holders, big manufacturers, big speculators, who do not work
themselves but employ workmen by hundreds; which proves that capital is
indeed accumulated labor, but the labor of others accumulated in the
hands of one person—a robber! For the rest the best proof that there is
something fundamentally vicious in the social organization, is that
machinery, a development begotten by all our acquired knowledge
transmitted from generation to generation, and which consequently ought
to benefit every human being, rendering all lives broader and easier by
the fact that it increases their power of production and furnishes them
the means of producing much more while working fewer hours,—machinery
has brought nothing but an increase of misery and privation to the
workers. The capitalists are the only ones to benefit by the advantages
of mechanical inventions, which enable them to reduce the number of
their employees, and with the help of the antagonism thus established,
competition between the unemployed and the employed, they profit by
lowering the wages of the latter, poverty forcing the former to accept
the price offered, even though it be less than the amount necessary to
their maintenance and restoration of energy; which proves that the
pretended “natural laws” are violated by their own operation, and that
consequently if they be laws they are far from being natural.
On the other hand it is certain that the capitalists, with all their
capital, all their machinery, could produce nothing without the
co-operation of the workers, whilst the latter, by coming to an
understanding among themselves and uniting their forces, could produce
very well without the assistance of capital. But setting that aside the
conclusion we want to draw is this:—From the moment it is admitted that
the capitalists cannot put their capital into use without the
co-operation of the worker, the latter becomes the most important factor
in production, and in all logic ought to receive the greater share of
the product. Now, how comes it that it is the capitalists, on the
contrary, who absorb the greater share of the product? The less they
produce the more they get! And the more the workers produce the more
they increase their chances of idleness, and have consequently less
chances to consume! How comes it that the more the stores are crammed
with products the more the producers die of hunger, and what ought to be
a source of general wealth and enjoyment becomes a source of misery for
those who labor?
From all this it follows clearly that private property is accessible
only to those who exploit their fellows. The history of humanity shows
that this form of property was not that of the first human associations;
that it was only at a much later period of their evolution, when the
family commenced to emerge from promiscuity, that private property
begins to be seen in property common to the clan or tribe. This would
prove nothing against its legitimacy if such appropriation had operated
otherwise than arbitrarily; we speak of it merely to prove to the
bourgeoisie; who have tried to make an argument in its favor by claiming
that property has always been what it now is, that that argument no
longer has any value in our eyes. For the rest, did those who declaim so
much against, the Anarchists for demanding expropriation by force
distress themselves very much about expropriating the nobility in 1789,
and frustrating the peasantry who had made themselves useful by hanging
country squires, destroying charter-houses, and seizing seigniorial
wealth? Did not the confiscations and sales, either fictitious or at
absurd prices, which were made, have for their object the spoliation of
the former possessors and the peasants who hoped for a share, in order
that the bourgeoisie might monopolize the spoil to their own profit? Did
they not make use of the out-and-out right of force, which they masked
and sanctioned by legal comedies? Was not this spoliation iniquitous,
(admitting that which we demand to be so, which it is not) seeing that
it was not done for the benefit of the collectivity, but helped solely
to enrich certain traffickers, who straightway hastened to make war upon
the peasants that had thrown themselves into the assault upon the
castles, by shooting them or treating them as brigands? The bourgeoisie,
then, are badly out of place in crying out against robbery when we want
to force them to make restitution, for their property is itself but the
fruit of robbery.
Property, the family, authority, have developed along parallel lines; of
this there is no doubt. Granting that men united their efforts under the
pressure of a common need, of some obstacle to be overcome against which
individual efforts had exhausted themselves in vain, it follows that the
benefits resulting from this co-operation of forces were shared in
common. These associations being temporary, confined to the immediate e
obtained, there is likewise no doubt that the first human association
must have been, as it still is among certain mammiferous animals,—some
of the anthropoid apes—the nucleus of the family; that is to say, a
group of one or a number of females and their young around the strongest
male, who, in order to preserve his authority, expelled from the horde
all the young males that had become old enough to give him umbrage. But
as to whether this authority of the male was complete and assumed sway
over every group from the start, it would be rash to decide; for though
we find, among savages, examples in which the association having
increased in numbers, by the grouping together of several family centers
the authority of the male is preponderant, yet by a number of very
convincing examples, by a number of customs such as that of couvade it
would seem that the mother-right of primogeniture was the first
recognized.[1] Certain peoples exist in which the children belong to the
tribe of the mother; others in which the authority of the male is
already recognized, but in which his sister’s children inherit his
possessions to the exclusion of his own. This would go to establish a
transition from maternal to paternal authority. Another transitional
characteristic is this custom of couvade, by which, when the woman is in
confinement, it is the man who goes to bed, swallows drugs, and receives
congratulations upon his delivery. In this one feels that the man, in
order to affirm his authority over his progeny, needs facts to prove his
paternity. He would not need them if it were not contested by anterior
customs, which have perhaps disappeared, but the memory of which is
perpetuated by the practice of retroactive customs that the former gave
rise to.
As to the union of men and women, how many times has its form not been
changed? At the outset, the very beginnings of humanity, there is no
form of marriage; the most complete promiscuity reigns between the
sexes; the male cohabits -with the first female that comes in his way,
who on the other hand accepts or submits to the caresses of all the
males that take her. As men develop and become a little less brutal,
though a great amount of promiscuity still reigns, they commence to
distinguish a primitive sort of relationship. They have not yet learned
to distinguish the terms father, mother, brother, sister, very
definitely, but unions between tribes having the same totem, or the same
common origin, are forbidden; the women, however, continue to belong to
all the men, and the latter to all the women, of the tribe. Later on,
the male having been acknowledged, the latter begins to recognize
certain degrees of consanguinity and affiliation; but marriages continue
to take place between brothers and sisters, the son inherits any member
of his father’s harem without scruple. A still further step in.
evolution must be taken before the mother of the heir ceases to be
included in the inheritance.
Observe also that if there be peoples among whom a single male may
possess several females, on the other hand there exist some among whom
the females possess several males. But these progressive steps, these
changes of custom, do not follow logically, one after the other,
mutually eliminating each other, as a more complex one appears. Rather
these customs are founded one upon the other, fused and confused in such
a manner that they can no longer be recognized. Their combinations are
so multiplied, customs are so superimposed upon each other, eliminating
one here, another there, that it is only by studying the observations of
former travelers and still existing tribes that we are enabled to form
an approximate idea of human evolution.
From all this, then, it follows that property has rested upon other
bases than those upon which it is today supported, has had another
method of division, and owes its present destiny only to force, cunning
and robbery; for it is quite clear that the family having begun in
common association, individual property could not then exist, and,
consequently, that what originally belonged to all could not become the
property of individuals without some sort of spoliation. In like manner
the family has been quite different from what it now is. And the
bourgeoisie, which claims that these two institutions rest upon
unassailable and immovable bases do not know what they are talking
about, since there is no reason why that which has evolved at all should
not evolve further. Their affirmation would prove only one thing, which
is that if these two institutions were not to progress any more, they
must be very near their decadence. For it is a law of life that that
which no longer advances, perishes and disintegrates, in order to give
birth to other organisms having a period of evolution to run through.
And the truth of this axiom is so apparent that the bourgeoisie have
been forced to recognize it by admitting divorce as a corrective to
marriage, which they would have preferred to maintain indissoluble.
True, divorce is applicable only in special cases, can be obtained only
by means of a lawsuit, of proceedings without number, and requires the
expenditure of a great deal of money, but it is none the less an
argument against the stability of the family, since, after having so
long repudiated it, they have at length recognized it as necessary, and
since it has so powerfully shaken the family by breaking up marriage,
which sanctions the family. What more candid confession in favor of free
unions could be asked? Does it not become plainly evident that it is
useless to seal with a ceremony what another ceremony may unseal? Why
have an old woman in pants with a belt around his waist to consecrate a
union which three other old women in gowns and caps can declare null and
void?
The Anarchists, therefore, reject the institution of marriage. They say
that two beings who love each other have no need of the permission of a
third in order to go to bed together. From the moment that their wishes
so incline them, society has no reason to spy upon them and still less
to intervene in the matter. Further the Anarchists say this: “By the
mere fact that they have given themselves to each other, the union of a
man and a woman is not therefore indissoluble; they are not condemned to
finish their days together if they become antipathetic to each other.
What they have made of their own free will they can unmake of their own
free will. Under the empire of passion, the pressure of desire, they saw
each other’s good qualities only; they shut their eyes to each other’s
defects; they became united; and behold, their life in common effaces
the good qualities, brings out the defects, sharpens the angles which
they cannot round off. Is it necessary that these two beings, because in
a moment of passionate effervescence they deceived themselves with
illusions, should pay a whole lifetime of suffering for the error of a
moment, which made them take for a profound and eternal passion what was
but the result of an over-excitation of the senses? Nonsense! It is time
to return to more healthy notions!”
Has not the love of man and woman always been stronger than all laws,
all prudery, all the reprobation, which men have sought to attach to the
performance of the sexual act? In spite of the blame cast upon the woman
who deceives her husband—we do not here speak of the man, who has always
known how to take the biggest half in matters of morals,—in spite of the
role of Pariah which our modest society reserves for the unmarried
mother, has it ever, for a single moment, prevented women from making
cuckolds of their husbands, or girls from giving themselves to whoever
pleases them, or knows how to profit by a moment when the senses speak
louder than reason? History and literature talk of nothing else than men
and women cuckolded and girls seduced! The creative impulse is the prime
motor of man; we hide it, but we yield to its pressure. For the few
passionate souls who, weak and timorous, commit suicide together with
the beloved being, (sometimes not daring to break with prejudices or not
having the moral force to struggle against the obstacles put in their
way by custom and the idiocy of imbecile parents), there are countless
numbers who mock at prejudices—in secret. All these prejudices have only
helped to make us frauds and hypocrites; that is all.
Why be stubborn in seeking to regulate what has escaped long centuries
of oppression? Rather let us recognize, once for all, that the feelings
of mankind elude all regulations, and that entire liberty is necessary
in order that they may unfold completely and normally. Let us be less
puritanic and we shall be more candid, more moral.
The man who owns property, wishing to transmit the fruit of his rapine
to his descendants, (the woman having been considered up till now as
inferior, and rather as property than as an associate) it is evident
that man has fashioned the family with a view to insuring his supremacy
over woman; and to be able to transmit his possessions to his
descendants at his death, he had to make the family indissoluble. Based
upon interests, and not upon affection, it is plain that some force and
sanction were necessary to prevent separations under the shocks
occasioned by the antagonism of interests. Now, the Anarchists, who have
been accused of wanting to destroy the family, want only to destroy this
antagonism; to base the family upon affection in order to render it more
permanent. We have never set it up as a principle that a man and woman
who desire to finish their days together shall not do so, for the reason
that we want unions to be free. We have never said that the father and
mother should not bring up their children, because we demand that the
liberty of the latter shall be respected, and that they shall no longer
be considered as things—property—by their progenitors. Certainly we do
want to abolish the legal family; we want men and women to be free to
give themselves and take themselves back whenever they please. We want
no more of a stupid and uniform law, regulating relations in regard to
feelings so complex and varied as those which result from love. If a
human being’s feelings be inclined to inconstancy, if his love cannot
fix itself upon one object, as those who want to regulate sexual
relations pretend, what does it matter to us? What can we do about it?
Since up to the present hour repression has succeeded in preventing
nothing and has only given us new vices, let us leave human nature free;
let it evolve in whatever direction its tendencies and aspirations
incline it. It is intelligent enough today to find out what is useful or
harmful to it, to discover by experience its proper line of evolution.
The law of evolution acting freely, we are certain that it will be the
fittest, the best endowed, who will have the chance to survive and
reproduce themselves. If, on the other hand, the human tendency be, as
we think, inclined to monogamy, the permanent union of two beings who,
having met each other, having learned to know and esteem each other, end
by becoming one, their union growing intimate and complete, their wills,
thoughts, and desires being identical, such will have still less need of
laws to constrain them to live together. Will not their own desires be
the’ surest guarantee of the indissolubility of their union?
When men and women no longer feel themselves riveted to each other, if
they truly love each other, this love will result in leading them
reciprocally to seek to merit the love of the being they have chosen.
Feeling that the beloved companion may fly away from the nest the day
that he or she no longer finds in it the satisfaction once dreamed of,
each will try all means to attach the other completely to him or
herself. As with those species of birds, in which, during the mating
season, the male arrays himself in new and splendid plumage, in order to
appear seductive to the female whose favors he wishes to attract, human
creatures will cultivate those moral qualities which will make them
beloved and render their society agreeable. Based upon such sentiments,
unions will become more indissoluble than the most severe laws or the
most violent repression could make. them.
We have not attempted a criticism of existing marriage, which is
equivalent to the most shameless prostitution:—Business marriages in
which affectionate sentiments play no part; marriages of accommodation,
arranged, especially among bourgeois families, by the parents, without
consulting those who are to be united; unequal marriages in which we see
aged semi-paralytics, thanks to their money, uniting^ their old,
decaying carcasses with the freshness and beauty of very young girls, or
old hags purchasing with a pile of dollars the complaisance of young
pimps, who pay with their skins and a little shame for their thirst of
getting rich. Such criticism has been made again and again; what is the
use of reverting to it? It suffices to have demonstrated that sexual
union has not always been arrayed in the same formalities, and that it
cannot attain its greatest dignity save by ridding itself of all
fetters. What is the use of seeking for anything else? [2]
The question of property is so mixed up with that of authority that in
treating of the former in its special chapter we could not do otherwise
than treat of the origin and evolution of the latter. We shall not
therefore return to these, but shall concern ourselves only with the
present period, with the authority which is claimed to be based upon
universal suffrage, the law of the majority. As we have seen, the divine
origin of property and authority being sapped, the bourgeoisie has had
to seek a new and more solid basis for them. Having themselves destroyed
the basis of divine right, and helped to combat that of the right of
force, they sought to substitute therefore that of money, by causing the
chambers to be elected under the quit-rent regime, that is to say by a
certain category of individuals who paid the highest taxes. Later there
was some question of including “qualifications;” this came from the
excluded fraction of the bourgeoisie. But all that could be of no long
duration. From the moment that authority was put under discussion it
lost its strength, and those who had hitherto taken no part in the
choice of their masters, were not slow to demand the right to give their
opinion upon this choice. The bourgeoisie, who feared the people, did
not want to make any concession; they had the power, they wanted to keep
it. In order to obtain universal suffrage the workers had to revolt. The
bourgeois members whom they carried into power were eager to trick them
out of this newly-acquired right, to cut the claws of the monster which
they thought would devour them. It was only in the long run, through
seeing it in operation, that they came to understand that it was not
dangerous to their privileges, that it was but a fiddle upon which one
must know how to play, and that this famous weapon for enforcing
demands, which the workers believed themselves to have acquired, (they
had paid for it with their blood) was but a perfected instrument of
authority, which enslaved those who made use of it at the very moment
they expected to emancipate themselves.
Indeed what is universal suffrage if not the right of the governed to
choose their master, the right of choosing the rod to be whipped with?
The voter is sovereign—so far as to be able to choose his master! But he
has not the right to dispense with him; for the one that his neighbor
will have chosen will be his. From the moment he deposits his ballot in
the box he has signed his abdication; he has no more to do but bend to
the caprices of the masters of his choice; they will make the laws, will
apply them to him, and throw him into prison if he resist.
We do not wish to institute a trial of universal suffrage at this point,
nor to examine all the correctives, all the improvements that different
people have wished to bring to bear upon it, to obviate the caprices of
the elected and secure the sovereignty of the voter by giving him the
means of forcing the former to keep his-promises. It would lead us too
far, and is, besides, of no importance to us, since we wish to prove
that there ought not to be a majority-law any more than a divine right,
and that the individual ought not to be subjected to any other rule than
that of his own will. And, moreover, in analyzing the operation of
universal suffrage we shall come to the proof that it is not even the
majority that governs, but a very small minority, issuing from a second
minority, which is itself but a minority chosen from among the governed
masses. That women and children, who submit equally to the laws, should
be excluded from the right of sharing in the vote, is purely arbitrary.
If we deduct further those who for one reason or another do not make use
of this “ right,” we find ourselves in the presence of a first minority,
recognized most arbitrarily as the only ones fit to choose masters for
all. In the second place, it is theoretically the majority which on
election day decides who is elected out of this original
circumscription; but practically the choice of the voters is divided
among six, eight, ten, and often more candidates, not counting those
who, not finding their opinions represented among the crowd of
candidates, vote contrary to their ideas. The successful candidate is,
therefore, once more but the product of a second minority. In the third
place, those elected being once assembled, it is again the majority
which, theoretically always, is supposed to decide among them; but here
again opinions being divided into groups and sub-groups innumerable, it
follows in practice that small cliques of ambitious persons, standing
between the extreme parties, decide the vote by lending their voices to
those that offer them the most for it. From the little just said it is
apparent that the pretended sovereignty of the voter comes down to a
very small affair; but it must be observed that in order not to befog
the reader we have simplified our criticism, and supposed that every
voter acted logically and conscientiously. But if we include in the
account all the intrigues, jobbing, ambitious calculations; if we take
note that before being ratified the laws’ must come before another
assembly, the senate, which in turn is elected by another category of
voters; if we take into account that the legislative power is composed
of five hundred and some odd deputies, and that each voter casts his
ballot for only one, and that consequently his will goes for less than
one five-hundredth of the general will, still further reduced by the
veto of the senate, we shall end by perceiving that individual
sovereignty enters in so infinitesimal a quantity into the national
sovereignty that at last we do not find it at all.
Yet all this is still of minor importance. Universal suffrage has a
still more disastrous effect, viz: that it gives birth to the reign of
nonentities and mediocrities, as we shall prove. Every new idea in
advance of its epoch is, by the very fact of such advance, always in the
minority at the start. Very few and far between are the minds open
enough to adopt and defend it. This is an acknowledged truth, and the
conclusion is that people with truly broad and intelligent ideas are
always in the minority. The bulk of the masses professes average current
ideas; it is they who compose the majority; it is they who will choose
the representative, who, in order to be elected, will take good care not
to offend the prejudices of his constituents or to shock received
opinions. On the contrary, in order to succeed in collecting as many
people as possible under his banner, he must round off his sharp corners
and select a stock of commonplaces to get off before those whose
suffrages he covets. That he may not frighten them, he must outdo them
in stupidity. The more flat, mediocre, and insipid he is, the more
chance he has of being elected.
If the workings of all manner of groups be thoroughly
examined,—committees, representative congresses, associations for mutual
help, societies of artists, litterateurs, etc.,—you will always see the
offices in these hierarchic organizations, elected by universal
suffrage, held by persons who, setting aside their ambitious desire of
showing themselves off, getting themselves talked about, or creating a
situation at the expense of their colleagues, and a certain capacity for
intrigue, are the most mediocre of the lot. For no original mind that
occupies itself solely with the realization of its ideal, can do
otherwise than clash with all those—and they are legion—who follow the
laws of holy routine. Everybody cries out, “Look at the jackass!” He who
seeks the truth and would make it prevail, has no time to stoop to the
shabby wire-pulling behind the scenes. He will surely be beaten in the
electoral lists by him who, having no original ideas, accepting those
received by the greater number, will have less trouble in insinuating
his projecting angles (which he has not) in a manner to offend no one.
The more one wishes to please people the more the average line of ideas
adopted must be disembarrassed of new and original conceptions, and
consequently the aforesaid line will be found trite tame, and mediocre.
This is all there is of universal suffrage,—a sonorous ass’s skin,
giving out nothing but noise under the blows of those who wish to make
it speak!
But though authority is discussed, jeered at, lashed, it is,
unfortunately, far from having disappeared from our customs. People are
so used to being led by a string that they would imagine themselves lost
the moment there was no longer anybody to keep them tied. They are so
accustomed to seeing the gendarme’s cap, the belted paunch of the mayor,
the meddling and official insolence of the bureaucracy, the
sorry-looking countenances of judge and policeman, appear in their lives
at every turn, that they have reached the point of becoming accustomed
to these filthy promiscuities, considering them as things which are
certainly disagreeable, on which, when occasion offers, they never miss
playing a dirty trick with satisfaction, but which they cannot imagine
disappearing without humanity’s being dislocated at once! Strange
contradiction of the human mind! Men submit to this authority with
reluctance, they scoff at it, violate it when they can, and believe
themselves lost when any one talks of doing away with it. A matter of
habit, it seems!
But this prejudice is so much the more illogical, if we may use the
term, so much the more stupid, when the ideal of each individual in
regard to “ good” government, is to have one which he would have the
chance to cashier the moment it tried to prevent him from acting as he
pleased. It was to flatter this ideal that the bourgeoisie invented
universal suffrage.
If the republic has enjoyed so much credit among the workers; if, after
so many deceptions, universal suffrage is still considered by the
governed as a means of enfranchisement, it is because they have been
made to believe that by changing the men in power they could change the
system of exploitation which oppresses us into a system from which
welfare and felicity for all would result. Profound error, which allows
the intriguing to lead the workers astray, in pursuit of illusory
reforms, incapable of bringing about any change in their situation, and
accustoming them to expect everything from a change of personnel in this
machine for oppression called the State;—an error which, in every
revolution, has permitted schemers to juggle away popular victories, to
install themselves in the sinecures of those who have been swept away by
the revolutionary tempest, and to form a new caste of exploiters by
creating around them new interests, which, once established, have
succeeded in imposing their authority, reducing to silence those who had
had the naïveté to carry them to the pinnacle of power!
What an abyss of contradictions is the human mind! If one discusses with
individuals even slightly intelligent, they will readily agree that if
all men were reasonable there would be no need of government. They
themselves could get along easily without it. But unfortunately all men
are not reasonable; some would abuse their strength to oppress others,
to live at others’ expense and do nothing. To guard against these
inconveniences some authority is necessary “to keep them straight.”
Which in concrete terms comes back to saying that, taken in a lump,
people are too bad to come to an understanding among themselves, but
that, taken individually or in fractions, they know how to govern
others, and that we must make haste to put the power into their hands,
in order that they may enforce their will upon all. O unhappy logic! How
human reasoning doth trip thee up!
So long as there are persons to give commands, will they not necessarily
be in antagonism with those they command? Will not those in power, if
they be sincere, have ideas of their own to further? And these ideas,
though they may be good, may also be very bad. Drowned in the mass, they
will remain without power; with authority in the hands of those who
profess them, they will be thrust upon those who reject them. And the
more sincere the individuals in power the more pitiless would they be
against those who should revolt against their way of seeing things,
being convinced that they were working for the good of humanity.
In the preceding chapter we saw that our political slavery is determined
by our economic situation’. We have soldiers, judges, ministers, etc.,
because we have bankers and proprietors; the one entails the other. If
we succeed in overthrowing those who exploit us in the workshop, if we
succeed in ridding ourselves of those who have got us by the entrails,
there will no longer be any need of the force which protects them; it
will have no more reason for existence. In fact there is a necessity for
government, for laws, for deputies to make these laws and a magistracy
to apply them, for a police-force to maintain the decisions of the
magistracy, because those who possess need some force to defend what
they have seized against the claims of those they have dispossessed.
But the worker—what has he to defend? What matters to him all this
governmental paraphernalia, the expense for whose maintenance he alone
bears, without deriving any profit therefrom, and which is there solely
to teach him that he has no rights save that of starving in the midst of
the abundance lie has created? In the somber days of revolt, when misery
grown more intense urges the workers into the street en masse, it is
again these “social” institutions which stand before them and bar their
route to the future. We must, therefore, destroy them, and take good
care to reconstitute no new aristocracy, which could have but one
purpose: to enjoy the most and the quickest at the expense of its
protégés. What matters the choice of the hand that strikes you? It is
not to be struck at all, that one should aim at! Let us not forget that
whatever the name in which the new authority clothes itself, however
benign it may seek to appear, whatever be the amendments it proposes,
whatever be the mode of recruiting its personnel, we shall none the less
have to encounter the following dilemma: Either its decisions will have
the force of law and be obligatory upon all, in which case all our
existing institutions will be needed to apply them and enforce respect
for them,—hence renunciation of liberty,—or people will remain free to
discuss governmental decisions, conform to them if they please, or send
authority hunting a job if it annoys them,—in which case liberty remains
intact, but the government is useless though remaining a fetter and a
menace!
Conclusion: No Government.
Authority, as we have seen, springs from that right which arrogates
force to itself. But man having widened the field of his thought it
became necessary for this authority to justify its existence. Combining
with religious sentiment and the support of the priests, it claimed to
be of divine origin, assumed the form of an exclusive caste, and
eventually succeeded in resisting the brutal power of the king and the
nobles: thus the magistracy was founded. And when the bourgeoisie seized
the power, in 1789, they took care not to destroy this pillar of social
order. (Moreover, did not the nobility of gowns belong much more
properly to the bourgeoisie than to the nobility of the sword?) They
were thus relieved of the task of searching for a mode of recruit more
in accord with the new aspirations.
Divine right having gotten a powerful shock in the decapitation of Louis
XVI, the magistracy could not continue to lean upon the said right
without the risk of likewise passing under this equalizing leveler.
Hence they invented, or rather deified, the “law.” The magistracy was
constituted its guardian and incorruptible administrated, so-called. The
trick was done; the most redoubtable and necessary institution for the
defense of privilege succeeded in preserving itself, and becoming the
priestess of this new entity, the law, created by the new masters. The
submission of France to the regime of the “law” is, in fact, one of the
conquests of ‘89 whose benefits the bourgeois historians are exceedingly
fond of setting forth. The codification of authority, according to
these, its censer-bearers, had the immediate effect of legitimizing the
most shameless arbitrariness. From then on Frenchmen were all to be
equal; the people no longer had anything to demand. ‘Thereafter there
was to be but one master, before ‘whom, it is true, all had to bow,
which had the effect of equalizing their situations. This master was the
“law.” But we who are not satisfied with words, when we try to find out
what the workers have gained by this transformation, see that they have
got just one more duping. In fact, in the time of the absolute monarchy,
when the king and the nobles constrained the peasant to serve them,
there was no way of deceiving oneself about it; the formula “for such is
our good pleasure” showed whence they derived their rights: they claimed
them by the right of the sword only, counting much more upon that than
the divine will; consequently it was upon force that their claim was
based. Their orders were obeyed, their claims were submitted to; but
because the people were in no condition to resist them. There were at
least no imbeciles to come and say to us—repeating the phrases of the
interested—that we must obey because it is “the law,” and it is the duty
of every one to conform thereto until it be changed.
If it be admitted that the law may change it is thereby presumed that
the law may become retrogressive; and to acknowledge that, is to admit
that from its very nature it may injure some one, for there are always
individuals in advance of their generation. The law, then, is not just;
it has not that respectable character with which men have sought to
invest it. If this law injures my interests or violates my liberty why
should I be compelled to obey it, and what is the unalterable compact
which can justify these abuses? In scientific matters when the savants
after great research and labor at length formulate what is called a
natural law, it is not because a majority or “chamber,” composed of
persons believing themselves superior to the rest of mortals, has
decided, by virtue of its members’ will, that natural forces were
ordered to conform to such or such a mode of evolution. We should laugh
in the face of the imbecile who would make such a pretense. When a
natural law is proclaimed, it is because it has been discovered that if
a certain phenomenon be produced, if a certain chemical combination had
been effected, it is by virtue of such and such a force, or the
existence of such and such affinities; the environment in which the
phenomenon took place being given, it was impossible for it to be
otherwise. Given forces set in motion under given conditions produce
given results; this is mathematical. Therefore the newly-discovered law
does not come upon the scene to govern the phenomenon, but to explain
its causes. These laws may be discovered, doubted, and even denied; the
divers substances which compose our earth will none the less continue to
combine according to their properties or affinities, the earth will
turn, without any force being needed to protect the evolution thereof,
or punish, those who might want to “violate the laws.”
In our society it is otherwise. These laws seem to be made to be
violated; because those who made them consulted only their personal
preferences, the interests of those whom they represented, and the
average degree of moral evolution in their epoch, without taking into
account the character, tendencies, and affinities of those who were to
submit to them,—which, moreover, would be impossible, the diversity of
individual character and tendencies being given. Each estate has its
laws; not can there be any single and universal law in sociology, as
there is in physics, under penalty of its becoming arbitrary and
inapplicable. In fact there is not, in our society, a single law which
does not injure some of its members, either in their material interests
or their ideas; not a single law which each triumphant party has not
been able to turn against its adversaries. Power once obtained, every
illegal party becomes legal, for it is that party which, through its
creatures, administers the “law.” We may then conclude that the law
being nothing but the will of the strongest, one is obliged to obey it
only when toe weak to resist it; that nothing really legitimizes it, and
that this famous “legality” is only a question of more or less force. So
when these rogues oppose the workers with their supreme argument,
“legality,” the latter may laugh in their faces and ask if any one ever
came to consult the toilers about the making o those laws. And even if
the people should have adhered t these laws for a time, the latter could
have no effectiveness except so long as those who accepted them
continued to believe them useful, and were willing to conform to them.
It would be funny if, under the pretext that at a given moment of on
life we had agreed to a certain line of conduct, we were force to adopt
it for the rest of our existence, without being able 1 modify it,
because to do so would be to displease a certain nun her of persons who,
for one cause or another finding profit for themselves in the existing
order, would like to crystallize the present condition. But what is more
ridiculous still, is to desire to subject us to the laws of past
generations, the pretend that we should believe we owe respect and
obedience to fancies which it pleased certain nincompoops to codify and
set up as laws fifty years ago! The presumption of wanting to enslave
the present to the conceptions of the past!
At this point we hear the recriminations of all the makers of laws and
those that get their living out of them; they naively fall into line and
cry out with the others that society could not exist if there were no
longer any laws; that people would be cutting each other’s throats if
they had- no tutelary authority to keep them in fear and respect of
acquired rank and condition.
:Later we shall see that, in spite of law and coercion, crimes continue
to be committed; that the law’s are powerless to repress or prevent
them, since they are the result of the vicious organization which
governs us; and that, consequently, we must not seek to maintain or to
modify the laws, but to change the social system.
But what makes us still more indignant is that certain persons are
audacious enough to set themselves up as judges of others. So long as
authority leaned upon its divine source, so long as justice passed for
an emanation from God, we can understand that those invested with
authority should have believed themselves peculiar beings, endowed by
the divine will with a portion of its omnipotence and infallibility, and
should have imagined themselves fit to distribute rewards and
punishments to the herd of vulgar mortals. But in our century of science
and free criticism, when it is recognized that all men are kneaded out
of the same dough, subject to the same passions, the same caprices, the
same mistakes, today when an agonizing divinity no longer comes to
animate with its breath the ever fallible reason of mortals, we ask
ourselves how it comes that there are men ignorant Id, enough, or
presumptuous enough, to dare to assume in cold blood jilt and with
deliberate intent the terrible responsibility of taking away another
man’s life or any portion of his liberty. When, in the most ordinary
affairs of daily life we are most of the time unable to succeed in
analyzing not only the causes which prompt our immediate neighbors to
act but very often the true motives of our own acts, how can anybody
have the self-sufficiency to believe himself capable of disentangling
the truth in an affair of which he knows neither the beginning, nor the
actors, nor the motives which prompted their actions, and which comes
before the tribunal only after being magnified, commented upon,
distorted by the misrepresentations of those who participated in it in
any way whatsoever or, more frequently, have heard of it only through
the repetitions of others?
You, who pose as severe and infallible judges of this man who has killed
or robbed, do you know the motives which prompted him? Do you know the
circumstances of environment, heredity, or even chance, which influenced
his mind and led him to commit the act with which you reproach him? You,
the implacable men that hurl your anathema against the accused whom
public force has brought before your bar, have you ever asked yourselves
whether, if placed in the same circumstances and surroundings under
which” this man acted, you would not have done worse? If, even, you were
the impeccable, austere, and stainless men you are supposed to be, you,
who with a word pitilessly cut off human life and liberty, you would not
dare to utter your decisions if you had thoroughly reflected on human
frailty; were you conscious of what you are doing, you would recoil
appalled before your task! How could you help being troubled with
nightmares! How could your dreams help being peopled with specters of
the victims which your pretended justice creates every day! Were it not
for that official unconsciousness which stupidity and habit give, you
would end by succumbing to the weight of remorse and the haunting of
phantoms evoked by your judgments. Our epoch of criticism and positive
science no longer admits the principle of distributive justice, nor
recognizes the legitimacy of a superior authority rewarding the good and
chastising the wicked. Against this ancient doctrine, which the
conceptions of the age during one period of humanity’s evolution
rendered logical, we promulgate the opposite idea. We no longer see
actions as good or bad, except as they are agreeable or disagreeable to
us, and in consequence act accordingly. We approve or become
enthusiastic, defend or attack, according to the benefit or injury
received by our interests, our passions, and our conceptions of the
ideal. The common need of solidarity which leads people subjected to the
same attacks to unite for their defense is to us the guarantee of a
future social order less troubled than our own. We do not judge, but
work and struggle; and we believe that universal harmony will result
from the free action of all men, when once the suppression of private
property no longer permits a handful of persons to enslave their
fellows. Hence we cannot admit that, six weeks or six years after an act
has been committed, a group of persons supported by armed force should
assemble to judge, in the name of some entity or other, and reward or
punish the author of the act. That is hypocrisy and cowardice. You
reproach a man with having tilled, and to teach him that he was wrong
you have him killed by the executioner, society’s hired assassin! The
executioner and you have not even the excuse of. having risked your own
necks, since you proceed under cover of an armed force which protects
you. We are at war with the ruling caste: recognize, gentlemen of the
magistracy, that you are its retainers, and let us alone with your big
words and fine phrases. Maintain the privileges whose care is confided
to you, use the force which ignorance concedes to you, but leave justice
in peace; she has nothing to do with you!
That you might be able to judge appreciatively of the ignominy of your
role in beating down others, we would like, O judges, that it might
happen to you that, being innocent, you should fall into the clutches of
your fellows, to be judged in your turn. In such a situation you might
learn what anguish and terror they have had to pass through who have
filed before your bar, and whom you have tortured, you, magistrates, as
the cat tortures the mouse. With the floods of eloquence from the
prosecuting attorney pleading against you rolling about your ears, you
might see passing before your eyes the specters of those unfortunates
that, during your career, you have immolated upon the altar of social
vengeance; you might ask yourselves then, with terror, if they also were
not innocent. O yes, we would heartily wish that there might be one
among you falsely accused, who should go through the terrors of those
that come before your bar. For if, his innocence being one day admitted,
he were reinstated in his functions, it is strongly to be presumed that
he would re-enter his place in the tribunal only to tear his robe and
apologize for his criminal life as magistrate, judging haphazard and
trafficking in human lives.
Science, today, admits without dispute that man is the sport of a
multitude of forces to whose play he is subjected, and that free will
does not exist. Environment, heredity, education, climatic and
atmospheric influences, act upon man in turn, now clashing with each
other, now combining, but exercising an undeniable influence upon his
brain, and whirling him about under their impact as the teetotum spins
under the gyratory motion of the fingers of the player who sets it
agoing. According to his heredity, his education and environment in
which he lives, the individual will be more or less docile to the
stimulus of certain forces, more or less refractory to certain others;
but it is none the less sure that his personality is but the product of
these forces. Having stated these facts, a number of savants, whose
acknowledged chief is C. Lombroso, tried to establish a criminal type.
They applied themselves to a search for anomalies that should
characterize this type, which they claim to have discovered; and after
having wrangled a good deal over the aforesaid type, created by
themselves, they decide for energetic repression, life imprisonment,
etc.—-Man acts under the influence of causes external to himself; hence
he is not responsible for his acts. The savants recognize this, and
therefore decide for—repression!
Hereafter we shall have occasion to explain this contradiction. For the
present let us examine the principal anomalies designated by the
criminologists as the characteristic of criminality:
Old wounds;
Anomalies of the skin;
Anomalies of the ears and nose;
Tattooing.
There are many others which seem to us to have no more relation to a
person’s mentality than the foregoing, but our ignorance of anatomy does
not permit us to discuss them thoroughly. Let us rest content with those
we have just enumerated. Wounds:—It is quite evident that a person who
bears the marks of old wounds may be something else than a regular
criminal, especially if he received those wounds in an accident, while
at work, or in risking his life to save one of his fellows. Until now we
had believed that criminality consisted rather in giving blows than
receiving them; it appears that the contrary is the case for
science,—that it is he who gets wounded! Brothers, let us bow! As to
anomalies of the nose and ears, we have sought in vain for what relation
they could have to the brain; we have not found it. But there is better
to follow. Lombroso concedes that many cases which he instances as
anomalies are frequently found among those whom he calls honest people.
These, then, are anomalies tending to become generalities! Till now we
had been inclined to believe that an anomaly was a case of departure
from the generality. Lombroso’s science tends to prove the contrary. Sad
inconsequence, which proves, more than anything else, that men who have
gotten astride a hobbyhorse, shut themselves in one corner of science,
finish by losing a proper conception of things in their entirety, and
have but one object: to include all things under those particular
studies which they have embraced.
To have an ear or a nose badly shaped,—the nose especially! Nothing can
be more disagreeable,—above all if this defective conformation is
carried to the extreme limit of the ludicrous! There is nothing very
gratifying in carrying around a sack of lard on one’s face, or a
wine-spot on one side of it; it is often unpleasant enough both to those
who look at them and those who have them; however, we should have
thought that persons so afflicted were affected painfully enough,
without being regarded as criminals besides! But since Lombroso says so,
stretching his theory to its furthest consequences, we are led to demand
that midwives and accoucheurs be obliged to put to death all the newly
born who shall come into the world with a pug-nose or a deformed ear.
Every pigmentary spot, evidently, can be naught else but an indication
of our black perversity. Thus I, too, (it seems to me I remember having
some of these spots—somewhere—I am an Anarchist, which is by some people
considered an indication of criminality to begin with)—I—the thing fits!
I am destined to be but a common criminal! Death to him, death to him!
The theory predicts that I shall die on the scaffold!
After applying the theory to all amenable thereto, there would probably
be but very few survivors; but how perfect would humanity be, morally
and physically! We should never recoil before the consequences of a
theory founded upon observation as this is!
As to tattooing, we had not up to the present taken it as an indication
of very elevated aesthetics. O no. It is a remnant of atavism which
leads certain men “to highten their natural beauty” by means of
embellishments pricked into the skin, precisely as our ancestors of the
stone age might have done. This same atavism still leads many women to
have their ears pierced in order to hang pieces of metal or brilliant
pebbles from them, exactly as the Botocudos of Brazil, or certain
Australian and African tribes, cut their lips, the cartilage of the
nose, or the lobes of the ears, in order to insert wooden or metal
rings, which, so at least it seems to them, have the effect of bestowing
unequaled beauty upon them. We decidedly look upon such proceedings as a
trifle primitive; but we had not seen any character of ferocity in the
custom. However, since Lombroso informs us that there is, we certainly
hope that we shall get rid not only of those who tattoo themselves, but
of those who have their ears pierced and dye their hair!
Lombroso has also tried very hard to discover a type of the political
criminal, supporting the theory upon information quite as imaginary; [3]
but to follow him into this region would carry us too far away from our
subject: we shall keep to the criticism of criminalism properly
so-called.
For that matter, some few more enlightened savants themselves have not
been slow to offer criticism upon the by far too fanciful theories of
the criminalistic school, and have victoriously demonstrated the lack of
consistency in the pretended criminal characters sought to be attributed
to those designated by that label. Among others Dr. Manouvrier, in his
course on “ Criminal Anthropology,” before the Anthropological Society
in 1890, ‘91, refuted, in an admirable manner, the theories of Lombroso
and the criminalistic school concerning the alleged born criminal. After
having demonstrated the falsity of the observations upon which the
Italian savant and his imitators depended in creating the criminal type,
by taking as subjects of observation only individuals already deformed
by prison life or by an abnormal existence, Manouvrier declared that
persons might have such or such aptitudes as would adapt them to such or
such acts, but that they are not, by the conformation of their brain or
their skeleton, predestined to accomplish those acts and become what are
called criminals. A certain sort of aptitudes might indifferently,
according to the circumstances, prompt the person to do an act reputed
honorable, as well as one reputed criminal. For instance a powerful
muscular organization may, in a moment of fury, make a vigorous man a
strangler; but quite as easily it may make one of the officers who
arrest the criminal. Violent instincts, contempt of danger, carelessness
of death, whether it be give or take, are indifferently the vices of the
criminal or the virtues demanded of the soldier. A crafty disposition,
inclined to deceit, cunning, and insinuating, may make the swindler who
thinks of nothing but schemes for robbery and fraud; but they are also
the qualities required to make an admirable detective or examining
magistrate.
Drawn on by the truth of his argument the doctor did not, moreover,
hesitate to acknowledge that, very often, it is difficult to distinguish
the alleged criminal from the alleged honest man; and that many an
individual out of prison ought to be in it, and vice versa. And after
having, with the other savants, admitted that man is but the sport of
circumstances, according to the sum total of which he acts at any given
moment; after having denied free will; after having recognized that
justice is but a figment, and is, in fact, nothing but revenge exercised
by society, which substitutes itself for the individual wronged, the
doctor unfortunately, stops short; after having given utterance to
perceptions which bring him very nearly in touch with the Anarchists, he
thence comes to the conclusion that present penalties are not severe
enough and that they must be increased. He intrenches himself, it is
true, behind social preservation. Those acts reputed criminal, he says,
shake society; society has the right to defend itself, by substituting
itself for individual revenge, and smiting those who trouble it with a
penalty severe enough to take away from them any desire to continue.
Whence comes this flagrant contradiction between perceptions so broad
and conclusions so narrow, since the latter demand the maintenance of
what is shown by the premises to be absurd? This contradiction, alas, is
not to be ascribed to their authors; it is essentially in the nature of
human imperfection. Man cannot be universal. The savant who devotes
himself passionately to a study attains prodigies of sagacity in that
particular groove of science which he has hollowed out. By deduction
after deduction he succeeds in solving the most arduous problems coming
under that domain, which he has undertaken the task of cultivating; but
as he has not been able to keep abreast in the study of all the
sciences, of all social phenomena, the result is that he remains behind
the progress of the other sciences; therefore, when he seeks to apply
the admirable discoveries which he has made to other human conceptions,
it follows that he most frequently applies them wrongly and draws an
erroneous conclusion from a truth which he has demonstrated. In fact if
the anthropologists who have studied man, analyzed him, and reached some
comprehension of his true nature, had studied sociology with equal
success, passed all the social institutions which govern us through the
sieve of reason, no doubt their conclusions would have been different.
Since they have admitted that man acts under the impulse of external
influences, they should be led to seek what these influences are. In
considering the reputed criminal and his acts, the study of the nature
of these acts should necessarily force itself upon their minds and make
them seek to find out why they are in antagonism to the laws of society.
Here it is that the influence of environment, the prejudices of
education, comparative ignorance of scientific questions which they have
not studied, unknown to themselves combine to dictate to them
conclusions so favorable to the existing order of things. These make it
impossible for them, though they recognize that order as bad, though
they demand some ameliorations in favor of the disinherited, to conceive
anything better outside of authority. Accustomed to stir only with the
chain around their necks and under the stings of the whip of power, it
seems the more independent ones should certainly like to be rid of these
themselves, or that a small minority should; but their conceptions
cannot allow that humanity is able to go forward without
leading-strings, dungeons, and chains.
If we study what crimes are the most anti-social, most common, and
against which the code is chiefly directed, we shall soon discover that
outside of crimes of passion, which are very rare, and concerning which
judges and physicians agree that leniency should be used, attacks upon
property furnish the largest contingent of crimes or misdemeanors. Hence
arises the question to which only those who have studied society in its
nature and effects can reply: “Is property just? Is an organization
which creates such a number of crimes defensible?” If this regime
involves so many crimes as an inevitable reaction it must be very
illogical, it must crush out many interests; and the social compact, far
from having been freely and unanimously agreed to, must be distorted by
arbitrariness and oppression. This is what we have undertaken to prove
in this work; and the fundamental vice of the social organization being
recognized, we shall show by the evidence that in order to destroy
criminals we must destroy the social conditions which beget them. Let
society once be so arranged that every individual shall be assured of
the satisfaction of all his needs; that nothing shall fetter his free
evolution; that in the social organization there shall be no more
institutions of which he may avail himself to enslave his fellows, and
you will see crime disappear. If there remain a few isolated natures so
corrupted or degenerated through our existing society as to commit
crimes for which no other cause than folly can be assigned, such cases
will be taken up by science and not by the executioner, the paid
assassin of capitalistic and authoritarian society.
You say you make war upon thieves and assassins; but what is a thief, or
an assassin? Persons who claim the right to live without being useful,
at the expense of society, you will say. But cast a glance over your
society and you will discover that it is swarming with thieves, and
that, far from punishing them, your laws are made for the express
purpose of protecting them. Far from punishing laziness, society holds
it up as an ideal, and awards the pleasure of doing nothing to those who
can, by no matter what means, succeed in living well without being
useful. You punish as a thief the unfortunate who, having no work, risks
imprisonment to get hold of a piece of bread to appease his hunger; but
you take off your hat and bow to the millionaire monopolist who by the
help of his capital has cornered at a bargain those things necessary for
the consumption of all, that he may sell them back at an enormous
profit! You are eager to present yourselves, very humbly and
submissively, in the ante-chamber of the financier who, by a stroke on
the bourse, has ruined hundreds of families to enrich himself from the
spoil! You punish the criminal who, to gratify his taste for idleness
and debauchery, victimizes somebody; but who inculcated in him this
idleness and debauchery, if not your society? You punish him who
operates on a small scale, but you support whole armies that you may
send them over-sea to operate on a large scale Against peoples unable to
defend themselves. And the exploiters who kill not only a few persons,
but exhaust entire generations, crushing them with overwork, cutting
down their wages day by day, driving them into a corner with the most
sordid poverty,—Oh, for such exploiters you reserve your sympathies, and
will, if need be, put all the forces of your society at their service.
And the law, whose timid guardians you are, —when the exploited, tired
of suffering, lift up their heads and demand a little more bread, a
little more rest, you make that law the humble servant of the privileged
against the “untimely” demands of the barefooted mob. You punish the
imbecile caught in your nets, but the adventurer strong enough to break
through their meshes,—him you let go in peace! You imprison the tramp
who steals an apple in passing, but you put at the disposal of the
proprietor all the machinery of your law, that he may be enabled to rob
the poor devil who owes him a few cents on the article which has cost
him hundreds in labor, and which represents a part of his very life!
Your justice cannot find rigors enough for the thieves in rags, but it
protects those who operate upon a class, an entire nation! Have not all
your institutions been established to assure to the possessors
undisputed possession of what they have taken from the dispossessed?
But still more revolting to us are all these hypocritical forms employed
to make us consider sacred the theatrical buffooneries, with which the
bourgeoisie surround their sinister motives, and which they have not the
courage to avow frankly. And what is most revolting to us is the
attitude of all these mountebanks who, under pretense of attacking the
existing regime, attack only the men who apply its texts and the manner
in which they apply them, but take good care to respect the essence
itself, making believe that there may be a number of methods of applying
the law and that among that number there is but one good one; that among
the men who climb into power some may be found honest enough, broad
enough in their views, men, in short, the like of whom does not exist,
who will be able to disentangle this one good method and make use of it
to the satisfaction of all. Truly, we know not which to admire most: the
knavery of those who utter these stupidities, or the naïveté of those
who continue to look up to this farce, the entire weight of which they
alone support. It is hard to understand that, amongst the countless
number of persons who have undergone the examinations of “justice,” not
one has yet been found sufficiently free from prejudice to go and lift
up the robes of those who had struck him and show the public that all
these togs serve but to mask men subject to the same weaknesses and
errors as the rest of humanity, not counting the crimes inspired by
their class interests.
Hence for us Anarchists, who attack authority, legality is one of those
hypocritical forms which we must most energetically assail, in order to
tear off the tinsel which serves to hide the recantations and the shames
of those who govern us. Too long have these mummeries been respected;
too long have the people believed that these institutions emanated from
some superior essence which, causing them to float in an ethereal
sphere, enabled them to soar above human passions. Too long have people
believed in men distinct from their fellows, men of a special mould,
charged with distributing here below—“from each according to his
necessities, to each according to his needs”— that ideal justice which
each regards from his own point of view, according to the condition in
which he is placed; justice which these men filled as they are with the
most backward and superannuated ideas, have codified in order to defend
the exploitation and enslavement of the weak by those who have managed
to create and force upon others their own predominance. It is time to
break with these absurdities and openly attack these worm-eaten
institutions whose aim is to lessen human personality; the free man does
not admit this claim of individuals arrogating to themselves the right
to judge and condemn other individuals. The idea of justice, such as
existing institutions imply, has fallen with that of divinity; the one
involved the other. The idea of God’s inspiring magistrates with the
verdict to be pronounced caused the infallibility of man’s justice to be
accepted, as long as the masses were backward enough to believe in a
super-terrestrial existence, in some benevolent being existing outside
of the material world, busying itself with what went on on our planet,
and regulating the actions of all the people who inhabited it. But the
belief in God being destroyed, faith in the supernatural having
disappeared, human personality alone remaining with all its defects and
passions, this inviolability and supreme character which are the essence
of divinity, and with which the magistracy re-invested itself in order
to keep itself above society, must likewise disappear, and allow those
whose eyes have been opened to see what is really hidden by these,—
oppression and exploitation of one class by another, fraud and violence
elevated into a principle and transformed into “social institutions.”
Science has helped us to lift the veil; it has furnished us with the
weapons which have assisted to strip the colossus. It is too late for it
to be able effectually to turn backward and endeavor to reconstitute in
the name of the metaphysical entity, society, what it has wrested from
the metaphysical entity, divinity. The savants must manage to eliminate
from themselves, completely, the bourgeois education they have received,
and study social phenomena with the same strictness and
disinterestedness with which they have approached the study of any
special science. Then, when they are no longer influenced by
considerations or prejudices foreign to science, they will no longer
conclude in favor of the condemnation of criminals, but like we, rather,
in favor of the destruction of a social state which makes it possible
that there should be within its bosom, and because of its own vicious
organization, some persons reputed honest, and others reputed criminal.
This is a truth which is beginning to be recognized and is making its
way in the scientific world; the modifying influence of environments
upon organized beings is no longer combated save by the old fogies of
official science. It is acknowledged today that the soil and climate,
the obstacles or advantages in the way of living found by the organisms
of a continent, have an influence upon their development as great as the
other laws by which, exclusively, their adaptation or their tendencies
to variability have heretofore been sought to be explained, if not
indeed, greater. As to man, who has always been made a separate and
distinct being, the new truth was harder to admit; the more so that he,
also, is able to transform the environment by which evolved. But at
length it was admitted that man, like all other animals, u subject to
the same influences and evolved under the pressure o the same original
causes. When it became necessary to explain his moral evolution
according to the same laws, the task was still more difficult; and even
some of those who deny free will, who recognize that man acts only under
the pressure of external circumstances—even some of those cannot accept
the law in all consequences,—that is to say, so far as to trace the
causes man’s criminality to the entire social organization and to demand
the transformation of the latter. The boldest—and they are rare—admit
indeed in principle, that the social organization is bad, that it needs
reforms, that some of its institutions beget misdemeanors; but to them
the grand culprit is still the evil nature of mankind which necessitates
a bridle upon their passions, and which society, defective as it is, can
alone succeed in repressing. Moreover, in order to minimize the
responsibility of society as a whole, they cut up the social environment
into several slices, which they likewise baptize with the name of
environments, and upon which they saddle the evil effects of the
influence produced. As to society, they say, it does, perhaps, leave
something to be desired; but such as it is, it protects the weak against
the wicked, guarantees individuals in the free exercise of their right
to labor, and furnishes them a surer, more effective, and cheaper
protection than as if they were forced to defend themselves. In a word,
they conclude, society is a contract of mutual insurance established
between individuals; if misdemeanors occur, they are much more
attributable to the evil nature of man than to the social organization
itself.
Certainly we are far from pretending that man is a model of perfection:
indeed he is a sorry animal enough, who, when he is not crushing his
fellows under his heel, licks the heels of those who crush him; but
summing it all up, man does not act exclusively under the influence of
bad instincts, and the beautiful sentiments of love, charity,
fraternity, devotion, and solidarity, sung and exalted by poets,
religionists, and moralists, prove to us that, though he sometimes act
under the impulse of evil sentiments, he has a fund of idealism, a
yearning after perfection; and it is this yearning which- society
represses and prevents from developing.
Man is not created unique, either morally or physically. Like other
animals, of which he is but a superior specimen, he is the product of a
concourse of circumstances, of combination and association of matter. He
has struggled to develop himself, and if he has contributed in a large
measure to the transformation of the environment wherein he is situated,
the latter has in turn influenced the customs he has adopted, his manner
of living, thinking, and acting. Under the empire of his character and
passions, therefore, he established society, and continues to have a
certain amount of influence upon its operations. But it must not be
forgotten that he has continued to evolve since the establishment of
society, while the latter, after being organized in various groups, has
always remained based upon authority and property. Changes of detail
have been brought about by revolutions; power and property have changed
hands, passed from one caste to another; but society itself has not
ceased to be based upon the antagonism of individuals, the competition
of their interests; nor has it ceased to press down with all its weight
upon the development of their minds. Surrounded by society they are born
into the world, within the environment it offers them they acquire their
first ideas, and learn a mass of prejudices and lies which they come to
recognize as false only after many centuries of criticism and
discussion. Hence we are bound to acknowledge that the influence of the
social environment upon the individual is immense, that it weighs upon
him with all the heft of its institutions, with the collective strength
of its members and that acquired by the long duration of its existence,
whilst the individual, in reacting upon it, is reduced solely to his
unaided strength.
Society, which is a first essay at solidarity, should have for its
object the betterment of individuals, teaching them to practice this
solidarity in view of which they have come together, to love each other
as brothers, leading them to put all things in common: joys, pleasures,
gratifications, pains, sorrows, and sufferings, toil and production.
Society has, on the contrary, found nothing better to do than to divide
them into a number of castes, which may be resolved into two principle
ones. . governors and possessors on the one side, the governed and n
possessors on the other. On the side of the first contentment and
plethora; on the side of the second misery, privation, and anæmia; the
result of which division is to pose these two categories of individuals
as enemies, between whom a ferocious war is perpetuated,—a war which can
end only in the irretrievable enslavement of the second or the complete
destruction—so far as concerns class privilege at least—of the first.
But the defective and ill-conceived organization of society into two
distinct classes does not stop here in its pernicious effects. Based
upon antagonism of interests it opposes individual against individual
within each class; it sows warfare among them by its institution of
private property which forces per to hoard in order to secure themselves
against the morrow those necessaries which society cannot guarantee to
them. Private competition is the great actuating force of the present
society; whatever be the business, profession, or kind of work to which
people devote themselves, they have to fear the competition of those who
choose the same department of activity. To increase their incomes, their
chances of success, or sometimes simply not to go under themselves, they
are forced to speculate in the ruin of their competitors. Even when they
league together it is always only to the detriment of those dependent
upon their special occupation. Founded upon this struggle between
individuals, society makes of every creature the enemy of all others; it
provokes war, crime, theft, and all the misdemeanors which are
attributed to the evil nature of man, though they are but the
consequence of the social order, and which society helps to perpetuate,
though under the new moral notions acquired by humanity they would
totally disappear.
This struggle between individuals has the effect of leading the
possessors to make war upon each other, to divide them and prevent them
from seeing their caste interest, which would b to work to insure their
powers of exploitation by avoiding and stalling everything which would
open the eyes of the exploited,—a war which causes them to commit a
multitude of mistakes that contribute largely to their downfall. If the
capitalistic classes were truly united among themselves, if their
members no longer had private interests and were moved solely by the
interests of caste, given the power which the possession of fortune,
authority, and all the administrative machinery, coercive and executive,
secures to them, given their intellectual development, necessarily
superior to that of the workers the nourishment of whose brains they
apportion to the nourishment of their bodies, the bourgeoisie might, for
an indefinite period, rivet upon the exploited the yoke of poverty and
dependence under which it now holds them. Happily the thirst to own, to
shine, to parade, and to amass, makes them give themselves up to a
warfare among themselves not less cruel than that in which they engage
the workers. Eager to possess, they heap error upon error; the workers
finally take an account of things, become acquainted with the causes
whence flows their misery, and conscious of the subjection in which they
are held.
But the same war which goes on among the capitalists goes on also among
the workers; and while the first compromises the stability of the
bourgeois edifice, the second helps to secure its continued existence.
Forced to struggle among themselves in order to snatch the vacancies in
these dungeons which the capitalists offer them, the workers regard each
other as so many enemies while they are led to consider him who exploits
them as a benefactor. Starved by the bourgeoisie, who in exchange for
their toil give them just enough to keep them from dying of hunger, they
are, at the very start, led to treat as an enemy the one who comes into
the workshop to compete with them for the place they have had so much
trouble to obtain. The scarcity of these vacancies again sharpens the
competition, causing them to offer themselves at a lower price than
their competitors. So that the anxiety of the daily struggle for daily
bread makes them forget that their worst enemies are their masters. For
the bourgeoisie, strengthened, it is true, by fortune, intellectual
supremacy, and the possession of the governmental forces, are, after
all, but a feeble minority in comparison with the multitude of workers;
nor would the former be long in surrendering to the more numerous class,
had they not found means for dividing the latter and making the same
contribute to the defense of their privileges.
All this, therefore, certainly shows us that man is far from being an
angel. He has even been a brute in the fullest acceptation of the word;
this is true enough also. When men first became organized into societies
they based these societies upon I their instincts for struggle and
mastery; and this explains why society is so badly constructed. Only,
society has remained bad. Its authority resting in the hands of a
minority, the latter have turned it to their own profit; and the more
society has evolved the more this concentration of power in the hands of
a few has tended to increase and develop the evil effects of these
ill-omened institutions. Man, on the contrary, in proportion as his
brain has developed, as facilities for procuring the means of
subsistence have increased, has felt evolving within him that sentiment
of solidarity which he had already obeyed in founding the first groups.
This sentiment of solidarity has become such a necessity that religions
have carried it to the extreme of sacrifice, preaching charity and
self-renunciation, and therein finding a new element for exploitation.
To what dreams of social reorganization, of plans for the happiness of
humanity has the longing to live harmoniously with our fellows not given
birth! But society was there, stifling with all its weight the good
instincts of man, reviving in him his savage primitive egoism, forcing
him to consider other people as so many enemies whom he must overthrow
in order not to be overthrown himself, accustoming him to look with a
dry eye upon those who disappear, ground up in the monstrous gearing of
the social mechanism, he being powerless to help them under pain of
being caught himself in the same insatiable jaws, which mainly devour
the good and the innocent who yield to their humanitarian sentiments,
allowing the survival only of the malicious who have learned how to push
others into those jaws in order to delay their own fall.
You make a great outcry against the lazy, against thieves and assassins;
you berate the “fundamentally evil” side of human nature; and you do not
perceive that these vices would most naturally disappear were they not
supported and developed by the social organization. How can you expect a
man to be a worker when, in the organization which governs us, work is
considered degrading, reserved for the Pariahs of society, and since the
cupidity of those who exploit him has made it a torture and a slavery?
How can you expect to be free from lazy people when the ideal, the goal
of attainment for everybody who wants to rise in the world is to succeed
in amassing, by no matter what means, money enough to live without doing
anything or by making others work? The greater the number of slaves a
person manages to exploit, the higher his situation and the more respect
he receives; the greater, likewise, the amount of income he gets out of
it. You have made society a hierarchy, with the top of the social scale
(considered as a reward for merit, intelligence, and industry) reserved
precisely for those who have never done anything! Those who by one means
or another have succeeded in perching on the summit, eat, drink, and
wanton, without the slightest employment for their ten fingers. They
offer the spectacle of their idleness and indulgence to the exploited,
who, at the bottom of the ladder, sweat, suffer, and produce for them,
receiving in exchange just enough to keep from starving to death,
without being able to hope to get out of their condition but. by some
stroke of chance. And you are astonished that people have a tendency to
want to live without doing anything! For our own part we are astonished
at one thing only: that there are still people stupid enough to work! In
the presence of the example furnished him by society, the individual’s
ideal cannot be anything else but to succeed in making other people
work, in exploiting others in order not to be exploited himself. And
when the means of legally exploiting him of his labor fail, other
devices are sought. Commerce and finance are also licit methods,
accepted by the law, yielding enormous incomes when followed on a big
scale, but to which, when one is able to go in only on a small scale,
are added certain proceedings which enable one to walk between the
borders of the code and even excuse one for stepping on them a little if
one can do it without getting caught. Fraud and deceit are the
exceedingly useful auxiliaries which enable one to increase his income
manifold.
For those who cannot operate under these conditions another resource is
left: the exploitation of human credulity, swindling, and other
analogous methods. Lower still there remain brutal robbery and
assassination. According to the means at one’s disposal, according to
the environment in which one has grown up, one or another of the methods
just enumerated is made use of, or they may perhaps be combined in order
to. escape as long as possible, the severities of the code which is
supposed to defend society. Poverty and suffering, this is the lot of
the workers; leisure and all sorts of indulgence to those who by force,
cunning, or the right of birth, have become their parasites. Here is
solidarity for you!
How can you expect people not to tear each other in pieces, when they
must ask themselves how they and theirs are to eat on the morrow if
their competitor obtain the place in the workshop which they themselves
covet? How can you expect solidarity in them when they reflect that the
mouthful of bread which they sometimes give to the beggar passing by,
may fail them later? How could they think about solidarity when they are
forced to struggle every day for the conquest of bread; when there are a
multitude of enjoyments which will ever remain a closed paradise to
them? It may be, perhaps this necessity for locking elbows in the
struggle which has brought them nearer together, little by little
transformed this sentiment into the desire to love one’s neighbor; but
however that may be, it is to society that we must trace the
responsibility for the survival of the war between individuals and the
animosities which flow from it. How can you expect that men will not
desire what is bad, when they know that the disappearance of such or
such a person will allow them to go up another round of the ladder, that
the disappearance of such another is a chance in favor of their getting
the place they covet, the elimination of a dangerous competitor? How
should a man resist the evil instigations of his nature, when he knows
to a certainty that what will be an injury to his neighbor must be a
benefit to himself? You say that man is evil! We say that he must have
strong tendencies to become good or society would get on worse than it
does, and crimes and disasters would be of more frequent occurrence.
In spite of all the stimulus of evil surroundings, man has been able to
develop aspirations towards solidarity, harmony, and justice; and even
these good sentiments have been exploited by those who live at his
expense. These dreams of happiness, these tendencies towards something
better, have given rise to a class of parasites who have speculated upon
such aspirations by promising their realization. Still worse, these good
sentiments have been punished as subversive of the social order; and in
spite of all, the tendency of humanity is to move in the direction of
their realization. And you dare to talk about the evil nature of man!
The noble sentiments of humanity, its aspirations after liberty and
justice have been hunted down and punished, because those who had
succeeded in ridding themselves of the narrow and ferocious egoism which
helps to perpetuate the present society, having begun to dream of an era
of contentment and general harmony, ended by asking themselves how it
happens that society, having been constituted for the advantage of all,
turns out only to secure the privileges of the few. The unavoidable
conclusion was that society is badly organized, that its institutions
are vicious, that they must disappear in order to give place to a more
equitable and rational organization. But, as those who are in possession
do not wish to abandon their privileges, they have prohibited these
aspirations as subversive; whence new struggles, new causes for the
development of bad instincts.
The pernicious influence of society upon the morals of the individual
being discovered, it is easy to suppress the bad instincts and develop
the good. Your society based on antagonism of interests having produced
the struggle between individuals, procreates the malevolent beast called
“civilized man.” Conceive, then, an organization based, on the contrary,
upon the strictest solidarity. Make it so that private interests shall
no longer be opposed to each other, nor contrary to public interests.
Make it so that personal well-being shall flow from the general
well-being, or produce it. Make it so that, in order to live and to
enjoy, people need not fear the competition of their fellows. Make it so
that by associating their energies and aspirations they may find their
expectations realized thereby. Make it so that this association shall
not be turned to the detriment of neighboring groups.
You are afraid of the lazy! Make work attractive. Instead of riveting it
upon a small minority of society to whom it becomes a torture, do away
with all your State machinery, your useless offices, and organize your
society in such a way that each shall be led, by mere force of
circumstances and not by any authority whatever, to co-operate in social
production. Make work useful, necessary, and so that it may be a
hygienic exercise instead of a torture. From the present organization
you reap a harvest of wars, crimes, thefts, fraud, and misery. This is
the result of private property and authority; it is the influence of
environment making itself felt. If you would have a society in which
reign confidence, solidarity, and well-being for all, base it upon
liberty, reciprocity, and equality.
Religion, property, authority, the family, having slowly evolved from
human aspirations, became gradually defined; but as they became precise
in conception, as their purposes grew clear, they became the nucleus of
an evolution which, as it developed, led them to concentrate more within
themselves, and gradually transformed them into well-defined castes,
each having its attributes and privileges. Of these the military caste
was not the last to form, develop, and become preponderant everywhere.
For wherever it was compelled to cede the foremost rank to the
sacerdotal caste, it yielded merely an honorary precedence. Was it not
at bottom the military caste which could, by its co-operation, insure
stability of power in the hands of those who held that power? Did it not
furnish the nominal or real chiefs in whom was summed up the omnipotence
of caste?
In all this conflict of interests the idea of “the country” held very
little place. Group fought against group, tribe against tribe, and, in
historic times, city against city; whole peoples, even, sought to
enslave other peoples; nations, indeed, commenced to be distinguished;
but the notion of a “fatherland” was still very vague and uncertain. We
must come down to modern times before we see the idea of “the country”
formulated, exact, and setting its authority above that of kings,
priests, or warriors, who are no more than servants of this new
metaphysical entity, “the country,” priests of the new religion. In
France it was in 1789 that the idea of the country, together with that
of the law, revealed itself in all its potency. It was an idea congenial
to the bourgeoisie to substitute the authority of the nation for that of
divine right, to present it to the workers as a synthesis of all rights,
and to lead them to defend the new order of things by affording them the
belief that they were struggling for the defense of their own rights.
(For it is well to observe that the idea of the country, the nation, as
it is called, summed up the whole of the people, their rights and
institutions, rather than the soil itself. It was only little by little,
and under the influence of ulterior causes, that the idea of the country
shrunk and shriveled to the narrow sense taught today, of love of the
soil without concern for those who live upon it or the institutions in
operation among them.) But whatever the prevalent idea of the country,
the bourgeoisie found it too much to their interest to cultivate that
idea not to seek to develop it in men’s minds and make a religion of it,
in the shelter of which they could preserve their sturdily contested
authority. At all events the defense of the soil was but too good a
pretext for maintaining the army necessary to the support of their
privileges, and the “collective interest” an invincible argument for
compelling the workers to contribute to the defense of said privileges.
Happily the spirit of criticism grows and spreads day by day, and man no
longer content with words wants to know their meaning. If he does not
grasp it at the first attempt, his memory is capable of storing up the
facts, deducing consequences and drawing a logical conclusion from them.
What, in reality, does the word “country” represent, beyond the natural
affection one has for his family and his neighbors, and the attachment
engendered by the habit of living upon one’s native soil? Nothing, less
than nothing, to the major portion of those who go off to get their
heads broken in wars of whose causes they are ignorant and whose cost
they alone pay, as workers and combatants! Successful or disastrous,
these wars cannot alter their situation in the least. Conquerors or
conquered they are the ever-to-be-exploited, submissive cattle, subject
to impress, which the capitalist class is anxious to keep under its
thumb.
If we agree to the interpretation given it by those who talk the most
about it, “the country” is the soil, the territory belonging to the
State of which one is a subject. But States have only arbitrary limits;
such limitation most frequently depends upon the issue of battles.
Political groups were not always constituted in the same manner as they
exist today, and tomorrow, if it pleases those who exploit us to make
war, the issue of another battle may cause a portion of the country to
pass under the yoke of another nationality. Has it not always been the
same throughout the ages? As, in consequence of the wars they have made
upon each other, nations have appropriated, then lost again or retaken
the provinces which separated their frontiers, it follows that the
patriotism of these provinces, tossed first to this side then to that,
consisted in fighting sometimes under one flag, sometimes under another,
in killing their allies of the day before, in struggling side by side
with their enemies of the day after:—first proof of the absurdity of
patriotism!
And, moreover, what can be more arbitrary than frontiers? For what
reason do men located on this side of a fictitious line belong to a
nation more than those on the other side? The arbitrariness of these
distinctions is so evident that nowadays the racial spirit is claimed as
the justification for parceling peoples into distinct nations. But here
again the distinction is of no value and rests upon no serious
foundation, for every nation is itself but an amalgamation of races
quite different from each other, not to speak of the interminglings and
crossings which the relations operating among nations, more and more
developed, more and more intimate, bring about every day. According to
such a method of calculation, the ancient division of France into
provinces was more logical, for it took into account the ethnic
differences of the populations. Yet today even this consideration would
no longer have any value; for the human race is moving too rapidly
towards unification and the absorption of the variations which divide
it, to leave any distinctions remaining save those of climate and
environment which will have been too profound to be completely modified.
But wherein the inconsistency is still greater, on the part of . the
major portion of those who go to get themselves killed without having
any motive for hatred against those designated to them as their enemies,
is that this soil which they thus go forth to defend or to conquer does
not and will not belong to them. This soil belongs to a minority of
property-owners, who, sheltered from all danger, bask tranquilly in
their chimney-corners, while the workers foolishly go out to slay each
other, stupidly permitting themselves to take up arms for the purpose of
wresting from others the soil which will serve—their masters, as a means
to exploit themselves—the workers—still further. We have seen in fact
that property does not belong to those who possess it: robbery, pillage,
assassination, disguised under the pompous names of conquest,
colonization, civilization, patriotism, have been its not least
important factors. We shall not, therefore, repeat what we have already
said concerning its formation; but if the workers were logical, instead
of defending “the country” by fighting—other workers, they would begin
by getting rid of those who command and exploit them; they would invite
all the workers, of whatever nationality, to do the same, and would all
unite in production and consumption at their ease. The earth is vast
enough to support everybody. It is not lack of room nor the scarcity of
provisions that has brought about these bloody wars in which thousands
of men have cut each other’s throats for the greater glory and profit of
a few; on the contrary, it is these iniquitous wars to which the desires
of rulers, the rivalries of the ambitious, the commercial competition of
the great capitalists have given birth, which have fenced off the
peoples as distinct nations, and which, in the middle ages, brought
about those plagues and famines that mowed down those whom the wars had
spared.
Just at this point, however, the capitalist, and with him the gullible
patriot, interrupt, exclaiming: “But if we no longer had an army the
other great powers would come in and make laws for us, massacre us and
impose conditions upon us still harder than those, we are now subjected
to.” Some, even though not believing in patriotism, exclaim: “We are not
patriots; certainly property is badly divided, society does need
reformation; but admit with us at least that France is in the vanguard
of progress. To let it be dismembered would be to permit a step
backward, to lose the fruit of past struggles; for, vanquished by a
despotic power, what would become of our liberties?”
Most assuredly we have no intention at this time of tracing a line of
conduct for Anarchists in case of war. Such conduct must depend upon
circumstances, condition of mind, and a multitude of things which it is
impossible to foresee; we desire only to treat the question from the
standpoint of logic, and logic tells us that wars being enterprises for
the profit of our exploiters solely, we can take no part in them.
We have seen that no matter whence authority proceeds, he who is
subjected to it is always a slave. The history of the proletariat proves
to us that national governments are not afraid to shoot down their
“subjects” when the latter demand a few liberties. What more, then,
could foreign exploiters do? Our enemy is the master, no matter to what
nationality he belongs! Whatever the excuse with which a declaration of
war be decorated or disguised, there can be nothing in it at bottom but
a question of bourgeois interest: whether it be disputes on the subject
of political precedence, commercial treaties, or the annexation of
colonial countries, it is the advantage of the privileged alone—of
rulers, merchants, or manufacturers,—which is at stake. The republicans
of today humbug us nicely when they congratulate us upon the fact that
their wars are no longer made in the interest of dynasties, the republic
having replaced kings. Caste interest has replaced dynastic
interest,—that is all; what difference does it make to the worker?
Conquerors, or conquered, we shall continue to pay the tax, to die of
hunger when out of work; .the almshouse or the hospital will continue to
be our refuge at old age. And the capitalistic class would like us to
interest ourselves in their quarrels! What have we to gain by it?
As to fearing a worse condition, the stoppage of progress in case a
nation should disappear, this is failing to take into account what
international relations are nowadays, and the general diffusion of
ideas. A nation, today, might be divided, parceled out, dismembered, its
name taken away, yet you could not succeed, short of utter
extermination, in changing its proper foundation, which is diversity of
character and temperament, the very nature of the races composing it.
And if war were declared, all these liberties, real or pretended, which
are claimed as our especial Jot, would be speedily suspended, the
Socialist propaganda muzzled, authority reinstated in the hands of the
military power; and we should no longer have anything for the most
thorough absolutism to envy.
War, consequently, can bring no good to the workers; we have no
interests engaged in it, nothing to defend but our skins; it is our
lookout to defend them still better by not exposing ourselves to get
holes put through them, for the greater profit of those who exploit and
govern us. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, have an interest in war;
it enables them to preserve the armies which keep the people respectful,
and defend their institutions; through it they can succeed in forcing
the products of “their industry” on others, opening up new markets with
cannon shots. They alone subscribe to the loans which war necessitates,
the interest upon which we, the workers, alone pay. Let the capitalists
fight themselves, then, if they want to; once more: it is no concern of
ours. And, moreover, let us revolt once for all; let us endanger the
privileges of the bourgeoisie, and it will not be long till we see those
who preach patriotism to us, appealing to the armies of their
conquerors, be they German, Russian, or of no matter what country. They
are like Voltaire, their- patron: he did not believe in God, but judged
that some religion was necessary to the common people; they have
frontiers between their slaves, but for themselves they mock at such
when their interests are at stake.
There is no “country” for the man truly worthy of the name; or at least
there is but one,—that in which he struggles for true right, in which he
lives and has his affections; but it may extend over the whole earth!
Humanity is not to be chucked into little pigeon-holes, wherein each is
to shut himself up in his corner, regarding the rest as enemies. To the
genuine individual all men are brothers and have equal rights to live
and to evolve according to their own wills, upon this earth which is
large enough and fruitful enough to nourish all. As to your countries by
convention, the workers have no interest in them, and nothing in them to
defend, consequently, on whichever side of the frontier they may chance
to have been born, they should not, on that account, have any motive for
mutual hatred. Instead of going on cutting each other’s throats, as they
have done up to the present, they ought to stretch out their hands
across the frontiers and unite all their efforts in making war upon
their real, their only, enemies: authority and capital.
We have shown that “the country” is a sonorous word designed to induce
the workers to defend an order of things which oppresses them. We shall
see now if the “love of country,” this “holy sentiment,” this “love of
the soil which is born in every one,” is so deeply rooted in those who
make the declaration; whether it rises from purely subjective causes, as
among the workers, or from purely material causes, from vulgar
preoccupations of mercantile interests. It is among the writings
published by themselves for their own use that we must search for their
innermost conviction. It is edifying.
To hear them when they are addressing the workers there is nothing so
sacred as the country; every citizen should be ready to sacrifice his
life or his liberty for the defense of the country. In fine, according
to them the country represents the highest degree of the general
interest; to make sacrifices for it is to sacrifice for one’s own and
one’s self. We have only to rummage among their treatises on political
economy to convict them of lying; to see that all these high-sounding
phrases, these sentiments which they parade, are nothing but bluffs for
the benefit of the simpletons who let themselves be duped by the like,
masks which they take care to leave in the dressing-room when among
their intimates. Here is what one of their political doctors, whose
authority is officially recognized, says:
“It is the interest of the governing classes, of the preponderance which
they hold and for which they are indebted precisely to a continuation of
the state of war, which artificially maintains that state among
civilized peoples.” [4]
Could anything be neater? And our good capitalists, who declaim so
loudly against the frightful Anarchists that have the audacity to
demonstrate to the workers how their interest is antagonistic to the
interests of the bourgeois class, make no mistake among themselves in
properly defining this antagonism, in order to find a basis for their
governmental system. But here is a still more damaging admission:
“Motives or pretexts are no more lacking under the new regime than they
were under the old; but under the one as under the other, the true
motive of every war is always the interest of the class or party in
possession of the government,—an interest which must not be confounded
with that of the nation or the mass of consumers in the body politic;
for as much as the governing class or party is interested in the
continuation of a state of war, so much is the nation governed
interested in the maintenance of peace.” [5]
As to the advantage which the governing class finds in the continuation
of a state of war, the same author goes on to tell us:
“War without implies peace within; that is to say, a period of easy
government, during which the opposition is reduced to silence under pain
of being accused of complicity with the enemy. And what is more
desirable, above all when the opposition is troublesome and its forces
nearly balance those of the government? In fact if a war be
unsuccessful, it inevitably involves the downfall of the party which
undertook it; but if, on the other hand, it be successful, (and it is
not undertaken unless some favorable chances are assured) the party
which engaged in it and carried it to a satisfactory issue, acquires,
for a time, a crushing preponderance. How many motives are there, not to
speak of the small profits to which it opens the way, for not letting a
favorable opportunity to make war escape!” [6]
As to the “small profits,” here is an enumeration of them:
“But, up to our own day, it has been the inferior classes, those whose
influence counts the least, who have generally furnished the common
soldiers. The wealthy classes have escaped by a money sacrifice; and
this sacrifice, ordinarily very moderate, has been more than compensated
for by the market which the state of war offered to members of the said
classes, upon whom the proscription of foreigners and the obligation of
passing through the military schools (access to which was, in fact,
impossible to the poorer classes) ‘conferred the monopoly of the
remunerative offices’ of the military profession. Finally if war be
cruel to the conscripts who, according to the forcible popular
expression, furnish ‘ meat for the cannon,’ the departure of these
impressed troops, brought up to farm labor or in the workshop, by
diminishing the supply of hands has the effect of increasing wages, and
thus palliating the horrors of war to those who escape military
service.” [7]
This is categorical. We see that the “sacred love” of the metaphysical
entity, “country,” is nothing more than exploitation and “small
profits;” but the avowal is complete; it is a triumphant retort to those
who would object that “there is a public opinion of which the governing
are forced to take account,” that “a war may be just and obtain the
assent of the public,” that “it is wrong to declaim against war in
general,” that “there may be cases into which rulers are dragged in
spite of themselves,” and moreover that “war is a consequence of the
existing social state,” that “one may declaim against it or deplore its
necessity,” but that “we are compelled to submit to it.”
Let us continue to quote:
“Nevertheless, whatever be the power of the men who decide peace or war,
and the influence of the class from which the political, administrative,
and military staff is recruited, they are, as we have just observed,
obliged to reckon, in a certain measure, with the much more numerous
class whose interests are involved in the various branches of
production, to whom war is a nuisance. Experience all the time
demonstrates that the resisting force of this pacific element is in
nowise proportionate to its mass. The vast majority of the men who
compose it are absolutely ignorant, and ‘nothing is easier than to
excite their passions or lead them astray as to their interests.’ The
enlightened minority is less numerous; and besides, what means would
these latter have of getting their opinions to prevail, in the presence
of the powerful organization of the centralized State?” [8]
Thus our capitalists do not hide from themselves the fact that they see
nothing in war but a means of continuing their exploitation of the
workers; the massacres which they organize serve to rid them of the
surplus which encumbers the market. To them armies are created with the
sole view of furnishing place and rank to those of their dependents by
whom they would otherwise be importuned. To them, finally, these wars
which they pompously call “national,” making the hollow, sounding words
“country,” “patriotism,” “national honor,” vibrate in the ears of the
naive,—to them these wars are but pretexts for “small profits.”
War upon “small profits”! War upon all the wars undertaken in the name
of the “country” or “civilization”!! For now that patriotism is
beginning to decline, this new mockery—“civilization”—is used a great
deal in launching the workers on a crusade against inoffensive peoples
whom the capitalists would exploit and whose sole offense consists in
being behindhand in reaching that degree of development which we have
agreed to call present civilization.
Ostensibly it is to punish a band of imaginary marauders and secure our
national preponderance that wars like the expedition to Tunis are
undertaken, while the real object is to open up a new country to the
rotten financial operations of a few dubious schemers; it is to secure a
free field to these parasites upon the social revenue that the money
wrung from the workers by taxation is expended in armaments; it is to
realize “small profits” from the offices created in the conquered
countries that these new markets, which enable the capitalists to get
rid of their stale products, are opened with cannon shots, that a robust
youth is impoverished, that a multitude of young men is sent to perish
in an unaccustomed climate or be massacred by people who, after all, are
at home, and are only defending what belongs to them.
War upon these “small profits,” these expeditions to Senegal, Tonquin,
the Congo, Madagascar, forever being: undertaken in the name of
“civilization,” which has nothing to do with such expeditions, that are
brigandage, pure and simple! We exalt patriotism at home, and shoot or
decapitate, as brigands or pirates, those who are guilty of nothing but
defending the soil on which they live, or of having revolted against
those who have imposed their rulership upon them in order to exploit and
enslave them! [9]
But we shall have to return to this question in a special chapter upon
colonization; let us confine ourselves for the moment to the patriotism
of the governing classes. Recent events have laid it bare in all its
hideous reality. The secrets of our armaments and defenses betrayed,
through the complicity of the employees of the bureau of the minister of
war; the most disgraceful intrigues, operating with this whirlpool of
billions to the detriment of the taxpayers’ pocketbooks and the security
of the country! The government, instead of hunting down the guilty,
sought to cover them up and throw a veil over the most shameless
turpitudes! [10] We behold the great manufacturing
metallurgists—deputies for the most part, having old military officers
at’ the head of the list—becoming furnishers of arms, cannon,
armor-plate ships, powder, and other explosives, to foreign nations, and
delivering to them the latest engines of destruction, without concerning
themselves that these may one day serve against our army and contribute
to the massacre of those of our compatriots whom they, in their capacity
of governors, will have sent to the frontier to be pierced by bullets.
Is it not the Grand International Swindling. Association of Jewish and
Christian Bankers which owns our railways, holds the key of our
arsenals, and has the monopoly of our supplies? O bourgeois! Talk no
more, then, of your patriotism! If you could parcel out your “country”
and sell it in shares you would do it speedily!
What did you do in 1871, in the Franco-Prussian war, which terminated
for us, as everybody knows, in paying an indemnity of five billion
francs? To whose interest was it to pay this indemnity, if not to that
of the bourgeoisie alone in order to remain sole master of the power to
exploit the “country”? Now, in order to pay this indemnity upon whom did
they “draw at sight”? Upon the workers! A loan was made, reimbursement
for which was guaranteed by the taxes which had to be levied, and which
the workers alone have to pay since they alone work, and since work
alone is productive of wealth. Let us pause to admire this
sleight-of-hand trick. The bourgeoisie, having to pay the war indemnity,
in order to get the Prussians out of power and pocket the taxes
themselves, had to borrow the money necessary to pay it; but as this
money was not immediately in the pockets of the famishing workers, the
capitalists alone subscribed to the loan, thus lending to themselves the
money which they needed. But the workers alone will have to toil for
ninety-nine years to repay this loan, principal and interest, which
never entered their pockets. Behold capitalistic “patriotism” in all its
splendor!
After this let any one deny that “virtue is always rewarded.”
It is impossible to speak of the fatherland and patriotism without
touching on that frightful plague of humanity, militarism. In studying
mankind’s origin and the course of its evolution, we noted that the
warrior caste was one of the first to be constituted and to impose its
authority upon other members of the clan or tribe. A little later this
caste was re-divided into chiefs and simple warriors, as a former step
in advance had divided the tribe into warriors and non-warriors, all
members of the clan having originally been warriors in case of need. We
do not know whether humanity followed a regular course of progress; that
is to say whether it passed successively through the three stages of
hunting, pasturing, and agriculture. That it began by hunting and
fishing, the gathering of plants and wild fruits, there is no doubt. As
to knowing whether tribes passed from this first stage into the
pastoral, then into the agricultural, after the manner one takes his
bachelor’s degree in a course in science and letters, we are not so
sure. We believe, however, that these different ways of procuring food
must have been combined according to the natural resources of the
regions inhabited. Thus hunters might continue to live principally by
the chase, even after having found the means of cultivating some
alimentary plants, before they succeeded in domesticating animals. But
be that as it may, the warrior caste continued to remain preponderant
and to preserve a large proportion of power even when forced to share
it; and this caste has remained the firmest support of those who have
succeeded to authority. So long as it remained a closed caste,
recruiting itself from within, making war upon its own account, the
population suffered greatly from its depredations, the armed man
standing on no ceremony about taking from the peasant at his pleasure;
but the tithe once paid, and no troops or castle being in his
neighborhood, the peasant might hope for a little respite; at all events
he was not constrained to give the best years of his life to re-enforce
the battalions of his exploiters. There came an epoch, however, when the
lords began to arm the peasants on their domains during emergencies.
Then by«means of bounties or by stratagem, they attracted such as it was
desired to have enlist in the king’s armies. But it was left to the
bourgeoisie to throw the burden of its defense entirely upon its slaves.
It is the bourgeoisie which has perfected the system by forcing the
workers to devote a certain portion of their youth to the defense of
their masters. But since it could not, without some danger, put arms
into their hands and say to them: “Protect me in my possessions,” it
invented the worship of “the country.” And it is by the help of this lie
that it has succeeded in getting the workers to submit ever since to
this blood-sucking tax. It is by help of this sophism that for several
generations it has been able to take away the strongest and healthiest
of their youth, to send them to rot, morally and physically, in the
dungeons called barracks, without any one dreaming of resisting or
escaping, without a single voice being raised to inquire by what right
people are asked to be transformed for seven, five, or, in the last
resort, three years, into automatons, machines for killing and food for
cannon.
Nevertheless there have been protests. There have always been some;
desertion and insubordination were necessarily born with the institution
of standing armies, but these were scarcely conscious acts; the
deserter, the insubordinate, did not appeal directly to individual
rights; their acts were undoubtedly due to feelings of personal
repugnance which they hardly took the trouble to analyze. Let us go
further: the protests raised in literature against war and militarism
were scarcely more than explosions of feeling, and hardly, if at all,
supported by logical deductions based upon human nature and individual
rights.
The army! The country! But the bourgeoisie and the litterateurs, its
censer-bearers, had intoned so many praises in their honor, heaped up so
many sophisms and lies in their favor, a to succeed in making them
appear embellished with all the qualities with which they had decorated
them, and nobody dare to question the existence of the said qualities;
it was posited as a fact that the army was the reservoir of all the
civic qualities an virtues. Hardly a romance in which we do not find the
portrait of “the brave old soldier,” model of loyalty and probity,
attached to his old general, whose servant he had been, following his
master through all the vicissitudes of the latter’s existence, helping
that master to escape the snares spread by invisible enemies, and
finally giving his life to save his superior’s. Or again—for a
change—saving an orphan, hiding him and bringing him up, making a hero
of him, and furnishing him the means of entering into possession of the
fortune which the enemies of his family had stolen from him!
Anon behold how the poets exalted the brave troopers! Military honor,
devotion, fidelity, loyalty, were the least of their virtues. The
bourgeoisie had to commit this tremendous blunder of forcing everybody
to pass a longer or shorter time under its flags before men could see
that, under the brilliant tinsel with which the poets and litterateurs
had been pleased to cover their idol, were hidden nothing but infamies
and rottenness. The volunteering for a year and twenty-eight days has
done more against militarism than all that anybody had previously been
able to say against it. As long as the workers were the only ones to
sacrifice their youth, to become brutalized in the barracks, as long as
the public knew nothing of the army but its stage-setting, the
glittering of its brass, the rolling of its drums, the gilt of its
stripes, the flapping of the flag in the wind, the clatter of arms, in
fine all the apotheosis with which it is surrounded when exhibited to
the people, so long did the litterateurs and poets help to swell this
apotheosis in their works, to contribute their share of lies to the
glorification of the monster. But with the day they were put in a
position to study the institution closely; with the day they had to bow
to the brutalizing discipline themselves; when they themselves had to
endure the rebuffs and coarseness of the fellows with stripes on their
sleeves;—with that day respect departed; they commenced to pull off the
mask from the infamy; they belittled these “virtues” which their
forefathers had been so ready to extol; and the soldier, including the
officer, began to make his appearance before the public in his true
character,—that is to say in the character of an alcoholic brute, an
unconscious machine!
Ah! One must have sojourned in that hell to understand all that a man of
refined sensibilities can suffer there; one must have worn the uniform
to know all the vileness and idiocy it engenders. Once matriculated you
are no longer a man, but an automaton bound to obey the nod and beck of
him who commands. You have a gun in your hands, but you must submit
without flinching to the insolence of every petty officer who vents upon
you his ill-humor or the fumes of the alcohol he has drunk. Not a move,
not a word, or you may pay for it with your whole life or with many
years of your liberty. In addition they will take care to read to you,
every Saturday, the penal code, whose refrain “Death, death, death!”
will haunt your brain whenever the instincts of rebellion begin buzzing
beneath your skull.
But what exasperates you most are the thousand and one minutiae of the
trade, the meddlings, the annoyances of rule. And for the subaltern who
bears a grudge against you, or who, without having a grudge, is simply
an unconscious brute, there are numberless opportunities daily to find
fault with you, to make you submit to vexations of every sort which his
brutishness may find pleasure in inflicting upon you. At roll-call for a
poor adjustment of a strap, one button more tarnished than the rest, for
the probable neglect to put on braces, etc., you’ get a blackguarding;
the guard-house, and fault-finding inspections without end! Kvery seam
of your clothes is inspected; you are even made to open your garments to
let your underclothes be inspected. [11] There is more to follow in the
dormitories: a bed out of plumb—a blackguarding! “Beds square as
billiard-tables!” is the hideous expression continually dinned into your
ears and well known to those who have been through the barracks. Your
effects badly arranged on the floor—blackguarding again! But the
consummation of the art is to make you wax the soles of the extra pair
of boots hung on the wall over the head of your bed, requiring that the
heads of the nails shall appear without a spot of wax on them!
And the inspections! No end to these, either. Saturdays the inspection
of arms, always with the same observations and epithets of “Dirty
soldier”! “Pig”! and similar amenities. For a variation you have
examinations as to your cleanliness, when your captain assures himself
that your hands and feet are clean! Every month there is something still
better,—the so-called “hospital inspection;” [12] then the pork-butcher
of the regiment examines your most private parts! Have delicacy of
feeling, and they will make it a laughing stock in the army; your
delicacy will soon be crushed under the ignoble paw of your commanders.
“The army is the school of equality;” so say the hirelings of the
bourgeoisie. Equality in brutalization—yes! But that is not the equality
we want.
Our inspections continue; every three or six months (I no longer
recollect which) there is a kitchen inspection by a commissary of some
sort; every year a general inspection by the commander of the division.
During the fortnight which precedes this latter there is a clean-up in
the barracks; kitchens and premises are cleaned. For a diversion you
have one day an inspection by the sergeant of the week, [13] next day
the company inspection, then regiment inspection, brigade inspection,
division inspection, corps inspection, [14]—inspections are endless! At
each of these inspections you must arrange your outfit on your bed:
first a handkerchief,—which is religiously preserved for these
occasions—which you spread out delicately on your bed; on this
handkerchief you must arrange your brushes, your extra pair of boots,
your drawers—which likewise are hardly ever taken out except on those
particular days—an undershirt rolled up in a certain way, and of a
certain length, your night-cap, your grease-box, your bottle of polish,
a needle-case, thread, and scissors. In order that this exposition may
be made according to the rules, illustrative placards are posted in the
bunk-room, which must be consulted every moment in order to know the
exact place for the everlasting brush, the bottle of polish, and all the
other equally important objects. For you must be very careful to put
every object in its place! If not, you will soon hear a storm of
imprecations bursting upon your ears, vomited forth by whichever of your
chiefs happens to perceive the irregularity. Know that the death penalty
would not be too heavy to expiate such negligence! Horror! Abomination
and desolation! A bottle of polish in the place intended for the
grease-box! It would be the ruin of France if the general should come to
know of it! We have already spoken of the consummation of the art, but
here is sublimity attained: they make you wax the feet of the bed! [15]
It is in those inspections at which a general presides that the
servility of the subaltern and even of the superior officers is shown.
Front the instant the general is spied, you behold these officers, so
arrogant before the poor devil of a private, crawl and cringe, range
themselves most humbly behind the general, who on the other hand draws
himself up,—when he is not broken down with paralysis [16]—proud as
Lucifer! And his eyes! Fulminating lightnings upon the wretch who lays
himself open to an observation from the grand chief! The officers are
all topsy-turvey; there is a trooper with a needle short, or who, having
forgotten that the fortnight ended the night before, has buttoned his
overcoat on the left side when he ought to have buttoned it on the
right! The colonel stammers with fury, the commander quakes under his
tunic, the captain is green with fright; the corporal alone says
nothing; he knows that every one of them, commencing with the sergeant,
will take satisfaction out of him. His course is clear; he will turn
around and revenge himself upon the delinquent.
Between times, while there is no inspection in view—usually on Saturday
afternoon—in order to liven you up a bit, they call for fatigue-duty in
the quarter; this consists in making you walk up and down the
barrack-yard gathering into heaps the stones and pebbles that may be
found therein. After an hour of this agreeable pastime, you go up again
to the bunk-room; the little piles of pebbles are scattered by the
passers of the week, so you begin again the following Saturday. The
military trade has a number of these spiritual little distractions.
And when in the evenings, after days thus spent, you feel a desire to
chat with your companions in slavery, their conversation is not of a
nature to uplift your morals or inspire you. with ennobling thoughts.
You perceive a group convulsed with laughter; you approach imagining you
will hear something instructive: it is some idiot rehashing smutty
jokes, neither new nor wittily told. You turn away and fall in« with
another group of imbruted creatures, who appear to have no pleasures
except in recalling the gluttonies they have been indulging in, or in
anticipation of the feast they are going to bury themselves in when the
paltry bet they have made, (the amount for which was received from their
parents) shall have brought in a few cents. Vulgar gluttony and
debauchery! Do not try to go beyond these for they will not understand
you! Nothing any longer exists outside of these two pleasures. After
this are you astonished that, at the end of three years of this regime,
so many men come out of the barracks fit for nothing but policemen and
detectives? The army is nothing but a school for demoralization ; it can
produce nothing but spies, drones, and drunkards. Small indeed is the
number of those who are unaffected by those three years of
brutalization, and even they retain some traces of it for a long time
after they have left the army.
Oh, this brutal and abject discipline, which breaks a man utterly,
crushes his spirit, deforms his character, destroys his will! Horrible
machine for brutalization, to which you deliver up a young man who only
asks the opportunity to develop his sentiments towards the beautiful and
the true, whose energies might be unfolded in the daily struggle for
life, whose intellect might expand under the impulse of knowledge
already acquired and the necessity of knowing more! Military discipline
lays upon him a leaden weight which will cramp him and contract his
brain forever, slackening even the rhythm of his heart-beats. After
having ground him for three years in the multiple gearings of its
hierarchy, it will give you back a shapeless rag, if it have not
completely devoured him!
We have seen, O savage bourgeoisie, that this fatherland of which you
wish to make us the defenders, is but the organization of your
privileges; this militarism, that you teach is a duty to which all
should conform, is instituted solely for your defense, all the burden
whereof you cast upon those against whom it is directed. It furnishes
you, into the bargain, with the chance to bestow rank, honors, and
emoluments upon those of your relations incapable of performing more
elevated functions, the aforesaid ranks and emoluments serving at the
same time to stimulate the unhealthy ambitions of those who abandon the
class whence they sprang to become your convict-keepers!
What are your country, your frontiers, your arbitrary boundaries between
peoples to us? Your country exploits us, your frontiers stifle us, your
nationalities are strangers to us! We are men, citizens of the universe;
all men are our brothers; our only enemies are our masters, those who
exploit us, who prevent Ms from evolving freely, developing the
plenitude of our forces. We no longer wish to serve you as playthings,
to be defenders of your privileges, to have the degrading livery of your
militarism, the brutalizing yoke of your discipline thrust upon us. We
want to bow our heads no longer; we want to be free.
And you, poor devils destined to fall under the stroke of the military
law, and who read in the newspapers the recitals of injustices committed
every day in the name of discipline, who have not gone without hearing
from time to time the story of other infamies of which those who were
silly enough to enlist have been the victims, will you not indulge in
some reflections on the life which awaits you in the barracks? And all
you who had never, until now, beheld the military life save through the
smoke of the incense burned before it by the poets, can you not
understand all the knavery of these bourgeois writers who have
celebrated in every key the “military virtues,” the “honor of the
soldier,” and “warlike dignity?” Go, poor devils, who for the sake of
the word “country,” or for fear of the court-martial, are going to waste
the best years of your youth in these schools of corruption called
“barracks.” Go, and know the destiny that awaits you! If you wish to
finish your term of service without accidents, leave behind you with
your civil clothes ever)’ sentiment of personal dignity; crush out of
your heart every feeling of independence; the “virtues” and “military
honor” require that you be nothing more than killing machines, passive
brutes; for if you have unluckily preserved in your heart, under the
livery with which they clothe you, the least grain of pride, it may
prove fatal to you. If some drunken veteran is pleased to insult you,
and if he have stripes upon his sleeves, take care to hide the jerk
which in spite of you will twitch your muscle under the insult; the hand
which you have lifted to strike the insulter in the face—carry it with
military precision to your cap and salute; if you open your mouth to
reply to threat or insult, twist it into saying, “Brigadier, you are
right!” And yet a gesture, a word, the slightest sign of emotion might
be interpreted as irony, and draw down punishment upon you for want of
respect to your superior! Whatever be the insult or outrage, nerve
yourself against the anger which will prompt you to resent it; remain
calm, insensible, inert,—your hand in its place, your heels close
together! That’s well! You remain impassive under the injury? You do not
flinch? No.—Well and good! You are good soldiers. That is what the
country demands of its defenders!
“But if it be impossible for us to remain calm,” you will ask; “if, in
spite of us, the blood rise to our heads making us blush?” Then there is
but one thing for you: do not set foot in this prison, whence you cannot
reissue without being debased, brutalized, corrupted. If you wish to
remain men, do not be soldiers; if you cannot stand humiliations do not
don the uniform. If, however, you have already committed the imprudence
of clothing yourselves therewith, and some day you find yourselves in
the situation of being unable to control your indignation—neither insult
nor strike your superiors— . . . . . . .
Let daylight through them! You will pay no more for it.
Colonization is extending too widely, in the present epoch, for us to
neglect to treat separately of this hybrid product of patriotism and
mercantilism combined,—brigandage and highway robbery for the benefit of
the ruling classes! A private individual goes into his neighbor’s house,
breaks everything he lays his hands on, seizes everything he finds
convenient for his own use: he is a criminal; society condemns him. But
if a government find itself driven to a standstill by an internal
situation which necessitates some external “diversion;” if it be
encumbered at home by unemployed hands of which it knows not how to rid
itself, of products which it cannot get distributed; let this government
declare war against remote peoples which it knows to be too feeble to
resist it, let it take possession of their country, subject them to an
entire system of exploitation, force its products upon them, massacre
them if they attempt to escape this exploitation with which it weighs
them down,—oh, then, this is moral! From the moment you operate on a
grand scale it merits the approbation of honest men. It is no longer
called robbery or assassination; there is an honorable word for covering
up the dishonorable deeds that government commits: this is called
“civilizing” undeveloped peoples.
And let no one deem this exaggeration. No nation is reputed to be a
colonizing one save when it has succeeded in getting out of a country
the maximum product it is capable of yielding. Thus England is a
colonizing country, because she knows how to “reward” her colonies with
the prosperity of the people she sends out to rule them, how to gather
back into her coffers the taxes with which she burdens them. In the
Indies, for instance, those whom she sends out make colossal fortunes.
The country, to be sure, is completely ravaged from time to time by
frightful famines that decimate hundreds of thousands of people. But of
what moment are the details so long as John Bull can market his
manufactured products and thereby succeed in obtaining, for his own
advantage, what the soil of Great Britain could not produce? Such are
the benefits of colonization!
In France it is different; we are not colonizers. Oh, reassure yourself;
that is not to say we are any the less brigands, that our conquered
people are less exploited! No; only we are less “practical.” Instead of
studying the peoples we conquer we deliver them over to the caprices of
the sword; we subject them to the regime of the “mother country;” if
these peoples cannot bend to it, so much the worse for them! They will
disappear little by little under the degenerating influence of an
administration to which they are not accustomed. What of it? If they
revolt we hunt them like wild beasts, track them like deer! Pillage in
that case is not only tolerated but approved; it is called a “raid.” The
ferocious beast which we train and keep, under the name of “soldier,” is
let loose upon inoffensive peoples. The latter behold themselves
delivered over to every excess which these unchained brutes can
conceive; their women are violated, their children’s throats are cut,
whole villages are given to the flames, entire populations are driven
into the plains where they are destined to perish miserably.
Is that all? Let it pass; it is a civilized nation carrying civilization
to savages!
Certainly, upon thorough examination of what goes on around us there is
nothing illogical or abnormal in all this; it is, in fact, the result of
our present organization. It is nothing astonishing that these high
feats of arms obtain the approval and applause of the bourgeois world.
The bourgeoisie is interested in these strokes of brigandage; they serve
as a pretext for maintaining permanent armies; they occupy the
praetorians who, during these slaughters, set their hands to more
serious “labor;” these armies themselves serve to unload a whole pack of
idiots and worthless persons by whom the bourgeoisie would be much
embarrassed, and who, by virtue of a few yards of gilt stripes, are made
their most furious defenders. These conquests facilitate an entire
series of financial schemes by means of which they may skim off the
savings of speculators in search of doubtful enterprises. They will
monopolize the stolen or conquered lands. These wars cause massacres of
workers whose excessive numbers embarrass them; the conquered countries
being in “need” of an administration, there is a new market for a whole
army of office-seekers and ambitious persons whom they thus harness to
their chariot, whereas had these latter remained unemployed its route
might have been hampered thereby. Still better, there are peoples to
exploit, to be yoked in their service, upon whom their products may be
forced, whom they may decimate without being held accountable to any
one. In view of these advantages the bourgeoisie need not hesitate; and
the French bourgeoisie have so well understood this that they have
launched headlong into colonial enterprises. But what astonishes and
disheartens us is that there are workers who approve of these infamies;
who feel no remorse in lending a hand to these rascalities, and do not
understand the flagrant injustice of massacring people in their own
homes, in order to mould them to a way of living not natural to them.
Oh, we know the ready-made rejoinders which it is customary to make to
those who become indignant at too flagrant injustices: “They have
revolted, they have killed our people; we cannot endure it. . . . They
are savages, they must be civilized . . . . The needs of commerce
require it. . . . Yes, perhaps it was wrong to go among them in the
first place, but the colonies have cost us too many men, too much money,
to abandon them now,” etc.
“They have revolted; they have killed our men!” Well, what else? What
were we doing in their country? Why did we not let them alone? Did they
ever come and ask anything of us? We have tried to impose laws upon them
which they do not want to accept. They have revolted; they have done
well. So much the worse for those of us who perish in the struggle; they
should have refrained from participating in these infamies.
“They are savages; they must be civilized.” Let any one take up the
history of conquests, and then tell us which were the most savage,—those
who were called so, or the “civilized.” Which are in greatest need of
being civilized, the conquerors or the inoffensive peoples who generally
welcomed their invaders with open arms, and as the reward for their
advances have been tortured and decimated? Take the history of the
conquests in America by Spain, of India by England, of Africa, Cochin
China, and Tonquin by France, and then boast about “civilization.”
Remember, too, that in these histories you will find recorded only the
“great events,” whose importance has left traces; but if you were to
picture to yourself all the “little events” of which these are composed
and which pass by unperceived; if you were to bring to light all the
turpitudes which are absorbed in the imposing mass of the principal
facts, then what would it be? You would recoil affrighted before these
horrors!
For ourselves, having spent some time in the naval service, we have
listened to the description of numbers of scenes which prove that when a
soldier arrives in a conquered country, he considers himself, by that
mere fact, absolute master therein; for him the natives are beasts of
burden, which he may order about at will; he has the right to seize upon
every object which suits him; woe to the native that would oppose him!
He will not be slow in teaching that the law of the sword is the only
law;—the institution which protects property in Europe does not
recognize it in another latitude. And in all this the soldier is
encouraged by the officers who preach by example, by the administration
which puts the cudgel in his hand that he may superintend the natives it
employs upon its works. How many repugnant actions are naively recounted
to you as altogether natural occurrences! If you happen to say of some
native who revolted and killed his oppressor, that he did well, you
should hear the cries of stupefaction which greet your remark! “What!
Since we are the masters, since we command them, they must obey us; if
we let them alone they would all revolt, they would drive us out! After
having spent so much money and so many men, France would lose the
country! She would have no more colonies!” Behold what an effect
military discipline and brutalization have upon the minds of the
workers. They endure the same injustices, the same turpitudes, with
which they are helping to burden others; and they no longer feel the
ignominy of their conduct; they have come to serve, unconsciously, as
the instruments of despotism and to boast of this role, not realizing
its baseness and infamy.
As to “the needs of commerce,” here, indeed, we have the genuine motive.
Messieurs the bourgeois being embarrassed with products which they
cannot dispose of, find nothing better to do than to go and declare war
against poor devils powerless to defend themselves, in order to impose
these products upon them. To be sure it would be easy enough to come to
an understanding with them; one might traffic with them by means of
barter, not being overscrupulous, even, about the value of the objects
exchanged; these latter being valueless to them save when attractive to
the eye, it would be easy enough to get the best of them and realize
fine profits therefrom. Was it not thus before the dark continent was
penetrated? Were we not, through the intermediary of the coast tribes in
communication with the tribes of the interior? Did we not get the same
products then as we get now?—“Yes, it is possible that it was so, but
the devil of it is that to operate in such a way takes time and
patience; it is impossible to go in on a grand scale; one must figure on
competition; ‘commerce must be protected.’”—We know what that means: two
or three fast iron-clads, in double-quick order, half-a-dozen gun-boats,
a body of troops to be landed—salute! Civilization is going to perform
its work! We have taken a people, strong, robust, and healthy; in forty
or fifty years from now we shall have them turned into a horde of
anæmics, brutalized, miserable, decimated, corrupted, who will shortly
disappear from the surface of the globe. Then the civilizing job will be
finished!
If any one doubt what we here assert let him take the accounts of
travelers, let him read the descriptions of those countries in which
Europeans have installed themselves by the right of conquest: everywhere
the native populations decrease and disappear; everywhere drunkenness,
syphilis, and other European importations mow them down in great swaths,
atrophy and anæmiate those who survive. And can it be otherwise? No, not
when such means are employed! Here are peoples who have another mode of
life than ours, other aptitudes, other needs; instead of studying these
needs and aptitudes, seeking to adapt them to our civilization
gradually, insensibly, not demanding that they take any more of it than
they can assimilate, we try to bend them to it at a single blow, we
break everything asunder; and not only do they become refractory but the
experience is fatal to them.
How glorious might the role of the so-called civilized man have been,
had he but understood it, and had not he himself been afflicted with
these two pests, government and mercantilism,—two frightful plagues, of
which he would do well to consider how to rid himself before seeking to
civilize others. The education of undeveloped tribes might go on
peacefully and bring into civilization new elements, capable in the
course of their adaptation, of putting new life into it. Let no one talk
to us of the duplicity and ferocity of the barbarians. We have but to
read the accounts of those truly courageous men who have gone into the
midst of unknown tribes, urged on solely by the ideal of science and the
desire for knowledge. Such persons have succeeded in making friends of
these people, have gone among them, having nothing to fear; duplicity
and ferocity came in only with these miserable traffickers who falsely
decorate themselves with the name of travelers, seeing nothing in their
travels but a good commercial or political deal. They have excited the
animosity of these peoples against the whites by cheating them in their
exchanges, by failing to keep their agreements, by massacring them, if
need be, when they could do it with impunity. Go to, go to,
philanthropists of commerce, civilizers by the sword! Forbear your
tirades on the benefits of civilization! That which you call thus, that
which you disguise under the name of colonization, has a name perfectly
denned in your code, when it is the act of a few obscure individuals: it
is called “pillage and assassination by armed bands.” But civilization
has nothing in common with your highway-robber practices!
What the ruling classes must have is new markets for their products and
new peoples to exploit; for this they send out their Solcillets, their
de Brazzas, their Crampels, Triviers, etc., in search of unknown
territories, there to open up factories which shall deliver these
countries over to their unlimited exploitation. They commence by
exploiting commercially and finish by exploiting in every way, when once
these tribes have been brought under their protectorate. What they stand
in need of is immense tracts of earth which they may gradually annex
after having depopulated them;—do they not need plenty of room whereinto
they may divert the surplus population which embarrasses them? What have
you done with the tribes of Polynesia, which all travelers agreed in
depicting to us as strong and vigorous peoples, .and who are now
disappearing under your rule, you “civilizers”?
But at the rate your civilization is going on, if the workers are bound
to succumb to the struggle to which you deliver them up, you, in your
turn, will not be long in succumbing likewise under your indolence and
laziness, even as fell the Greek and Roman civilizations, which having
reached the pitch of luxury and exploitation, having lost all the
faculties of struggle, in preserving the faculty of enjoyment, succumbed
much more under the pressure of their own bloated nervelessness than to
the blows of the barbarians, who, entering into the struggle in the
fullness of their strength, had no great trouble to overturn this
rapidly decaying civilization. As you have undertaken to destroy these
races,—not inferior, as we shall show later on, but merely retarded,—you
tend in like manner to destroy the working class, which you also qualify
as inferior. Day by day you seek to eliminate the worker from the
workshop, replacing him by machines. Your triumph would be the end of
humanity; for, losing little by little the faculties acquired by the
necessity for struggle, you would return to the most rudimentary
ancestral forms of society and humanity would soon have no other ideal
than that of an association of digestive sacs commanding a nation of
machines, waited upon by automatons, having nothing human left but the
name.
This question of colonization immediately brings up that of the
so-called inferior races: for have not those actions of the whites that
have led to the extinction of these conquered peoples been attempted to
be justified by the argument of so-called race inferiority? Is this not,
moreover, the same argument employed against the worker to justify the
exploitation to which he is subjected by taxing him with belonging to
the inferior classes? Does it mean, then, that for the capitalist, and
even for certain savants, the worker is but a beast of burden whose sole
role consists in creating prosperity for the “elect,” and reproducing
other beasts of burden who in their turn may work out the happiness of
the descendants of the “elect,” and so on? However, we workers do not
believe ourselves lower than anybody else; we believe our brains to be
quite as capable of cultivation as those of our exploiters if we but had
the leisure and means for it. Why should it not be the same with races
said to be inferior?
If it were nobody but the politicians who asserted the inferiority of
races an attempt to refute their assertion would be quite unnecessary;
at the bottom of their hearts they care very little whether the
assertion be proven or disproven, since it is but a pretext anyway; if
it were shown to be false they would not fail to find others. But
certain savants have tried to bring science to the support of this
theory and prove that the white race is a superior race. There was a
time when man believed himself to be the centre of the universe; he not
only thought that the sun and stars revolved around the earth., but he
declared that all this had been so created with a sole view to his
advent. This is called the anthropocentric theory. Long centuries of
study were required to eradicate these vain illusions, and make man
understand the insignificant place he held in nature. But his ideas of
domination are so strong and tenacious, he renounces them with so much
difficulty, that after having lost the sceptre which he claimed over the
stars he fell back upon the declaration that the terrestrial globe with
all its products had been made on purpose to serve as a cradle for him,
the king of creation. Again dispossessed of this fictitious kingdom by
science, which shows that he is but the product of evolution, the result
of a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances, that there was nothing
premeditated in his coming into being, and consequently, that nothing
could have been created with a view to his advent, man’s spirit of
domination was incapable of resolving to accept the facts as they are
and consider itself an intruder; summing everything up it re-intrenched
itself in this idea of superior races, and as a matter of course every
race declared itself to be the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the
most perfect. It is in virtue of this declaration that the white race
absorbs all others, and upon their elimination the savants base the
declaration!
The savants have, moreover, endeavored to justify their opinion by
propping it upon the three following supports:
First, the antiquity of the inferior races is explicitly recognized by
the scientific world as equal to that of the white race; consequently
the stationary condition of the former, whereas the latter have
progressed, proves absolute inferiority;—
Second, undeveloped peoples generally inhabit the most favored climates
which ought to have helped to hasten their development;—
Third, savage children whom it has been sought to bring up in European
fashion have in nowise fulfilled the hopes of their educators.
Further examples are given in the cases of those agglomerations of
savages penned up in villages, which have remained unchanged for
hundreds of years, as well as the negro republic of Hayti with its
endless revolutions.
One need not go very far into history to discover that the “universal
concensus” is not always proof. Up to the time that Galileo proved that
the earth revolved around the sun it had been almost universally
believed that it was the sun which revolved around the earth. Universal
consent, therefore, proves nothing if it be not supported by facts; and
again, in the case cited above the apparent facts seemed to support the
erroneous opinion. Do the facts corroborate the opinion that all races
are of equal antiquity? This is what we want to know.
Upon the Egyptian monuments there have been found representations of
certain African types still existing in our days, which would, indeed,
prove a relative antiquity; it is also averred that these tribes,
formerly subject to the Egyptians, do not appear to have progressed. At
first glance this would seem to be in favor of the partisans of the
inferiority of races, but a deeper examination would show this
conclusion to be too hasty. As a matter of fact the admitted antiquity
of the Egyptian monuments is about eight thousand years; let us put it
in round numbers at ten thousand. Thus in ten thousand years these
tribes do not appear to have progressed, while the white race has made
that progress with which we are familiar. But at the epoch when these
monuments were raised Egypt already represented a very advanced
civilization; the difference between these backward tribes and the
builders of the temples of Philæ, Karnak, and Memphis was already
enormous; the Egyptians had already passed through the pre-historic
period which is estimated at hundreds of thousands of years. [17] Slow
indeed must have been the progress of man during the quarternary epoch,
and the period of development is still longer if the existence of man
during the tertiary epoch be admitted. The ten thousand years of
stagnation of the tribes in question represent, then, but an
insignificant amount in the history of the unfoldment of humanity, and
it is probable that ten thousand years after he had cut the. first stone
the primitive Egyptian would have presented hardly any sensible
improvement to the observer, and would also have appeared to be of a
fundamentally inferior race. On the other hand these Egyptians, who made
the great progress attested by their science and their monuments, are
not whites; and this same people, which is classed among the “superior”
races of antiquity, is now classed among the “inferior” races. Its
English overlords have thoroughly demonstrated that. What a mass of
contradictions! For the necessities of the argument the Egyptians are
alternately both “superior” and “inferior.”
The skulls and jaw-bones of Cros-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Naulette,
which date back to a remote epoch, present characteristics so simian
that while studying them the anthropologists were in doubt whether to
class their possessors among the ancestors of man or among the large
anthropoid apes. In the presence of such humble beginnings are we happy
in designating ourselves “the phœnix of humanity”? And by what right do
we speak of the inferiority of other races when their present condition
proceeds from our barbarous persecutions? Thus the present inferiority
of the red-skinned race proves nothing; for let it not be forgotten that
the aboriginal civilizations which were developing at the time of the
European conquests were destroyed by their invaders; and the descendents
of the aborigines, hunted, despoiled, massacred, were compelled little
by little to retreat and be annihilated before the conqueror. Highly
flourishing civilizations thus disappeared, no one knowing what they
might have brought forth; we cannot judge of them by the brutalized and
degenerate natives which the United States is in the course of wiping
out. I will not instance in example the Empire of Mexico nor that of the
Incas; upon the arrival of the Spaniards these empires were already on
the highway to decay. For that very reason they were unable to resist.
The Hurons, the Iroquois defended themselves with much greater energy
than the Aztecs and Peruvians.
One might suppose that in order to prove the equal antiquity of races
there remained one last resource,—that of making researches in as yet
unexplored strata and comparing the age of the skeletons which would
certainly be found therein. But -this resource is illusive; no possible
means of establishing the exact concordance of the formation of earthy
strata in the divers parts of the world exists. How then can we discover
a perfect concordance between the remains found in these strata? To sum
up, this question of the equal antiquity of races is an insoluble one
and quite without value in the solution of the problem of virtual
equality. Has it the least importance to those who consider all progress
derived from the incessantly changing influence of environments?
“Undeveloped peoples generally inhabit the most favored countries,”
declared Prof. G. Herve, one of the partisans of the theory of
inferiority of races, in one of his courses on zoological anthropology
at the Anthropological College. This declaration remains to be proven.
Can it be applied to the Esquimaux or the inhabitants of Tierra del
Fuego; to the Red-skins, destitute of all those animals which they might
have domesticated; or to the negroes who live in the region of the
marshes of the Nile, or the endless forests of the Congo; or to the
Tongoos of the Siberian steppes; or to the Bushmen of the waterless
deserts of Kalahari? One should not distort the truth so violently. And
besides there remains to be decided the momentous question: which are
the most favored countries, those which require labor or those which do
not?
Furthermore this declaration may quite as easily be turned against the
position which it is intended to defend. Is it not precisely this
facility of existence which has left many tribes stationary? Having
wherewith to satisfy their primary needs without work, men may very
easily have failed to experience that quickening of faculties which
continued to lie dormant, whilst other peoples forced to wrest their
daily existence from soil and climate, have been led to develop
instincts and faculties which in turn have awakened others, and thus
launched them upon the pathway of progress. The others, being “favored,”
could live without exertion.
Then follow the arguments drawn from the attempts to educate certain
African tribes, or from colonies’ of savages which, it is claimed, have
been left to develop themselves in villages on their reservations. It
may be that there have been’ unfruitful attempts at such education; that
would prove no general conclusion, seeing that questions would arise as
to what were the conditions under which these attempts were made, in
what situation was the group experimented upon found, and whether causes
of degeneracy had not been suffered to remain. These examples prove so
much less since there are also instances of the contrary. The Iroquois
of Canada are in every respect equal to the whites around them. The
greatest geographer of Mexico is an Aztec, and we have the satisfaction
of knowing that the “greatest warriors of the world” were neatly turned
out of Mexico by the descendants of the “inferior races.” Many
generations are necessary to render any new acquisition permanent;
however great its powers of development no individual brain can, during
the course of its single existence, go through that evolution which it
required entire generations for the race to go through. Negative results
in individuals, therefore, prove nothing, even granting the attempt to
have been made under practical conditions, for they may be offset by
many positive results just as the progress of the whites may be disputed
on account of many instances of retrogression. Do not ethnographical
works quote the cases of red-skins, negroes, or other “savages” who have
been successfully instructed, and who had attained a considerable degree
of knowledge, but who, seized with contempt for what had been taught
them, have thrown aside the garments of civilization to resume their
nomadic existence?
That atavism may sometimes be more powerful than the faculty of
perfectibility nobody denies; but such examples in nowise prove the
imperfectibility of the race, since the same individuals subjected to
European education did certainly, during that period of their existence,
advance along the path marked out by their educators.
This same Herve, whom we once more quote, for it is by him that we have
heard “the inferiority of races” best sustained, again instances the’
fact that the savage appears more apt in childhood than at an adult age.
But what does that prove? The less developed the race the earlier must
the little ones learn to provide for themselves, to evince an already
dawning sagacity. As to the adults, if their cerebral development is
arrested at an early age it does, indeed, involve the consideration of a
physical fact, viz: the obliteration of the cranial sutures. Contrary to
the white races the consolidation first takes place in the anterior
portions, so that the development of the brain is arrested, at the
outset, in precisely the most active centers of intelligence. This early
closing of the futures might be a proof of inferiority if it were proven
that the white races had not passed through this stage. But it has been
discovered by examination of pre-historic skulls that the sutures
originally closed from the front backwards and at an early age,
precisely as among our so-called inferior races. In our own days cases
of atavism in which this same process occurs are instanced. What, then,
remains of this argument?
The example of the republic of Hayti and its military revolutions is
quoted for the purpose of turning it into ridicule; hut need we go very
far back in our own history to find similar examples less excusable
since we pretend to be superior? At all events the Haytians reconquered
their independence from the French: who were the superiors,—those who
regained their liberty or those who wanted to keep a people in slavery?
Besides one must ignore history completely not to recognize progress
among the Haytians, notwithstanding their Souloques, counterparts of our
Badingues. When we reflect that the greater-number of our self-styled
civilized people suffer and die in misery to enrich a minority of idlers
and parasites, when we remember that the exploited furnish the force
which defends their exploiters, can we believe that we have the right to
be very proud and brag of our superiority?
And as for the groups of savages which have been allowed to exist, can
we believe that conditions have been procured for them which permit them
to expand fully? Certainly we do not want to assert that all races are
absolutely identical; but we are persuaded that all have certain
aptitudes, certain moral, intellectual, and physical qualities, which,
had they been allowed to evolve freely, would have enabled them to take
their part in the labor of human civilization. Thus for example, did not
these miserable Australians, so low in the scale of humanity, invent the
boomerang, that projective missile with its curious power of returning
to the thrower, which the Europeans, in spite of their ability, have not
succeeded in imitating, and which all their science of ballistics is
unable to explain? To be sure the invention of the boomerang has been of
no great profit to the history of humanity, but since the ingenuity of
its inventors was able to express itself in an object absolutely
peculiar to themselves, while the lance, the tomahawk, and the arrow
have been known to all other races, who will tell us that, under other
conditions, this faculty might not have evolved in more important
directions? But no; the white race,—aided by the Jewish race which has
become white by the necessities of the case,—wants to invade all,
exploit all. Wherever it has intruded itself the retarded races have had
to disappear. In face of the ruins which its conquering fury has heaped
up in the presence of the massacres which its exploitations have brought
about, one may well inquire whether its role has not been quite as much
pernicious as beneficent.
One hundred and fifty thousand years, perhaps, were required for us to
emerge from animality; and ten thousand years have witnessed the
extinction of the Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, Roman, Hindoo, and
Mauritanian civilizations, whilst the Mongolian race was continuing a
parallel development. Today we witness the beginning of the decadence of
the Latin races, which will shortly become a death-agony unless a social
transformation occurs in time to rejuvenate the physical and moral decay
entailed by the capitalistic system. Perhaps, if the nations continue to
intrench themselves behind their frontiers, our prestige may be taken
from us by the Slavic races, which appear younger to us, having more
lately come into the current of European civilization. But how long will
that period last? What will come after? What will be the regenerating
current which will come to restore our anæmiated race, exhausted by the
excesses of a badly directed civilization? Every civilization, in its
decline, has seen a new race surging in, which, being capable of
assimilating the knowledge of the race it replaced, yielded in exchange
a new brain, new aptitudes, young and vigorous blood; and this
disappearance of civilizations would seem to show that every race has
but a certain amount of energy and ability to expend, after which it
disappears or remains stationary.
Relative to the foregoing, however, some friends object that today there
are no more races, that the civilized world is divided into States,
(remains of a past which is in discord with present reality) but
constituting an indissoluble whole,—civilization from France to Russia
and from America to Australia being the same civilization everywhere;
that there are no longer any opposing races, but opposing classes.
Assuredly we also are convinced that, given facilities of locomotion
from one country to another, the enormous extension of international
relations, races are bound to disappear by fusing, mixing with each
other through intercrossings; that is the very reason we are choked with
indignation at seeing entire tribes disappear before they have been able
to contribute to our civilization the original share which they may have
potentially possessed. When we reflect upon the massacre of inoffensive
tribes, on whole races vanished or about to disappear, our thoughts
overflow with sadness and melancholy; for we ask ourselves if these
“inferior” brothers did not possess some of those qualities, so many of
which are lacking in us. The white race could not understand the
retarded races; it has broken them. If it had sought to bring them up to
a higher phase of development, it could only have done so after the
course of a long evolution; but it has never desired to educate; it has
desired to exploit, and exploitation becomes extermination in the long
run.
To sum up: in view of our rage for mastery let us ask ourselves whether
the civilization of the Iroquois, for example, was much inferior to
ours. Are we right in proclaiming ourselves superior to the Incas, who
had at least learned how to secure food and shelter to all the members
of their society, while poverty gnaws our modern civilization? Nothing
justifies the theory of the alleged “inferior races; “it serves only to
justify the crimes of the alleged “superior” races.
We have demonstrated—at least we hope so,—the right of every individual,
without exception, to evolve without constraint; the right of every one
to satisfy his needs fully; and hence the illegitimacy of authority,
property, and all the institutions which the exploiting class has
established to defend those privileges which can only be secured by the
spoliation of the masses. It remains for us to examine the means for
overturning this state of things which we attack, for founding the
society which we demand in the future, and to prove the legitimacy of
these means; for many persons who admit our criticisms of the existing
social condition, who applaud our vision of a harmonious world, fly into
transports at the idea of employing violence. In their opinion it would
be better to proceed step by step through persuasion, seeking gradually
to ameliorate existing conditions. “Everything in nature,” they tell us,
“is transformed by evolution; why, then, not proceed in the same way in
sociology instead of wishing for sudden ruptures? While seeking to
transform society by force, you risk wrecking everything without
producing any good; above all you risk getting crushed yourself;
bringing about a reaction not less violent than the attack and thus
causing a set-back to progress for several centuries.” This reasoning
which is addressed to us by honest men, who discuss solely with a desire
for enlightenment, rests upon a semblance of truth and merits being
considered.
It is true that everything in nature is transformed by a slow process of
evolution, by an uninterrupted sequence of progress acquired little by
little, imperceptible if followed throughout its course, bursting upon
the eye only when we pass suddenly from one period to another. It is
thus that life progressed upon our globe, it is thus that man emerged
from animality; and therefore it is that man in the nineteenth century
no longer resembles man in the age of stone. But one thing only is
ignored, viz., that in order that this evolution should go on without
shocks it must meet no obstacles in its way; if it does, and the
acquired impulse is stronger than the obstacles, it breaks them; if not,
it is abortive. Every time that a shock occurs between progress and some
existing thing there is a revolution, whether it be the swallowing up of
a continent or the disappearance of a molecule in an organism,—the size
of the thing does not matter. Nowadays it is admitted that great
geologic revolutions, far from having been provoked by frightful
convulsions and sudden changes proceeding from violent propulsions in
the interior of our globe, are but the product of slow causes and
imperceptible changes which have continued their effects through
thousands of centuries. We know, likewise, that these same causes which
have brought the earth to that condition in which we behold it are
continuing their operation in our own days and preparing a new
transformation. Everywhere the rains gnaw into the mountains, filter
through them, and disintegrate the hardest granite. Nothing reveals the
slow work of disintegration which is going on, or betrays it to the eye
of the tourist. Generations pass away without any appreciable
modification being noticed. But some fine day the mountain crumbles,
dragging down forests and villages, filling up the beds of rivers,
altering their courses, sowing ruin and desolation in the cataclysm. Yet
the excitement once over, life soon resumes its course, issuing stronger
and more intense than ever from every pore of this wreckage of
materials. The evolution took place very slowly, but there came a moment
when it could no longer continue without imperiling the existing order
of things; it continued its course, and the mountain, undermined,
crumbled, overwhelming everything upon its surface.
Another instance: It is known that the sea is retreating little by
little from some of our coasts and invading others; its waves, dashing
their foam over certain plains, detach therefrom the materials which
leave room for it to encroach upon the land, whilst these same
materials, transported to other places, aid the solid earth in gaining
upon the sea. The work goes on so slowly that it is scarcely
perceptible,—a few centimeters per century, it appears. That will not,
however, hinder a day from arriving— at the end of ten thousand or a
hundred thousand years,—what matters the length of time?—when the
barrier which resisted the floods will be no longer compact enough to
sustain the assault; it will give way before a final shock, and the sea,
borrowing new strength from the very resistance it meets upon its march,
will invade the plain, destroying everything in its course until it is
arrested at the foot of a new barrier, which will dam up the flood
afresh for a longer or shorter period, according to the degree of
resistance it may possess.
It is the same with our societies: the social organization, the
institutions created to defend this organization, represent the barriers
which are opposed to progress. Everything in society, on the other hand,
tends to overthrow these barriers. Ideas are modified, habits are
transformed, gradually sapping respect for ancient institutions which
preserve themselves and seek to continue to direct society and
individuals. The slow work of dissociation is sometimes imperceptible to
a generation. Customs do, indeed, disappear, or a prejudice is effaced;
but these disappearances have been brought about so slowly that they
take place without any one being conscious thereof; nobody but old men
who compare the customs of their youth with those of the youth that have
succeeded them notices that manners have changed. But though manners
have changed, institutions, the social organization, have remained the
same; they continue to oppose their barriers to the floods which attack
them, breaking impotently at their feet, contenting themselves with
carrying off a stone here and there. The floods in their rage may tear
out thousands of such; what does a stone matter in comparison with the
imposing mass of the barriers? Nothing at all, only—this stone, the
waves roll it away with them and, in the next attack, hurl it against
the wall whence it was torn, make use of it as a battering ram to tear
out others, which in turn are transformed into a means of attack. The
struggle may last for thousands of years; the cliffs seem undiminished
till some day when, undermined, they fall before a new assault, leaving
a free passage to the triumphant waves.
Most assuredly we should ask no better than that the evolution of our
society should be accomplished in a slow but continuous fashion; we
should like it to proceed without shocks; but that does not depend upon
us. We fulfill our task of propaganda, we sow our ideas of renovation;
it is the drop of water which infiltrates, dissolves the minerals,
scoops a pathway, and comes out at the foot of the mountain. Can we
prevent the mountain from crumbling, breaking the props by which you
have hoped to render it firmer?
The bourgeoisie alone is interested in having this transformation take
place without jars. Why, then, instead of trying to keep the mountain as
it is, propping it to that end, do they not help us to level it and
enable the water to flow slowly toward the plain, carrying away the
useless or harmful materials to where they may elevate the surface of
the soil till it be equalized? Insensate beings! They are not willing to
yield up any portion of their privileges. Like the cliffs they deem
themselves invulnerable to the surges that attack them. What matter to
them the few concessions that have been wrung from them during a
century? Their prerogatives are so great that the void is scarcely felt.
But the wave has made the breach; with the very materials torn from the
exploiters it renews the attack, creating therefrom a weapon to finish
their destruction. We have contributed to evolution; let them take it
upon themselves and their senseless resistance if it be transformed into
revolution!
And certainly a little unprejudiced study of the operation of the social
mechanism would be sufficient to show that the Anarchists have been led
to become revolutionists solely by the force of circumstances. They have
discovered that the cause of the ills from which society suffers is
within its own organization; that all the palliatives proposed by
politicians and Socialists can ameliorate absolutely nothing, because
they attack effects instead of removing the cause. When one is well-fed,
his needs more or less satisfied, it is easy to wait. But those who are
physically and intellectually hungry, having once recognized the cause,
are no longer satisfied with entertaining a future prospect; they are
tempted to pass from the domain of speculation to that of action. Is it
not natural for people fully convinced of an idea to seek to propagate
it, to translate it into action? Can a man strongly impressed with a
truth prevent himself from trying to get others to accept it, and above
all to realize it by conforming his actions to it? And is it not, in our
present society, an act of revolt to endeavor to put our new ideas into
practice? How then can it be expected that those who have done
everything to propagate these new ideas, to make the evils from which we
suffer understood, to explain the causes of them, to show the remedy, to
bring the attainments of a better society within reach; how can it be
expected that these men shall put themselves athwart the advance inarch
of those who seek to realize the ideas which have been explained to them
and say to them, “Content yourselves with the pleasures of anticipation,
continue to suffer, have patience; perhaps some day your exploiters will
consent to make some concessions to you!” It would be horrible mockery!
Oh, truly we should ask nothing better than that the bourgeoisie should
themselves understand the odious role they play, give up exploiting the
workers, make restitution of their machinery, houses, lands, and mines
to the collectivity, which would thereupon organize itself in order to
put all these into operation for the benefit of all, and substitute the
reign of solidarity for that of competition. But can any one seriously
hope to see the day when capitalists and exploiters will arrive at such
an ideal of disinterestedness while today they have not army, police,
and magistrates enough to repress even the most innocuous demands? To
spin fine theories, to speculate about a better future is admirable; but
if the recognition of the ignominies of the present society were
confined to a parlor philosophy, to after-dinner discussions among
well-fed people, if it were limited to vain recriminations against the
existing order of things, to sterile aspirations towards a better
future, it would be too much like the philanthropist who with a
well-filled belly and well-stocked purse says to the wretch dying of
hunger, “My friend, I pity you with all my heart; your fate interests me
in the highest degree; I am making all sorts of vows that it shall be
ameliorated; meanwhile be sober and saving,”—and passes on thinking he
has discharged his duty. Ah, but in that case the bourgeoisie would have
a fine chance for a good, long season of exploitation before it, and the
workers would be very far from seeing the end of their sufferings.
Happily, as we have seen, there is but one step from . aspiration to the
desire to realize it, and many temperaments are inclined to take this
step; the more so that the theory of Anarchism being essentially one of
action the more numerous are the revolutionary temperaments found among
them. Hence the multiplication of those acts of revolt which timorous
spirits deplore, but which according to us are simply proofs of the
progress of our ideas. It would be playing into the hands of the
exploiter to preach resignation to the exploited; we leave that role to
Christianity. It is not by resignation or by hope that one changes his
condition, but by action; now the best way to act is to get rid of the
obstacles trammeling your route. Men have prostrated themselves before
power long enough, awaited their redemption by providential saviors long
enough, believed in political changes and the efficacy of the law quite
too long. The putting of our ideas into practice requires men conscious
of themselves and of their strength, knowing how to make their liberty
respected without becoming tyrants over others, expecting nothing from
any one else but everything from themselves, from their own initiative,
activity and energy. These men are not to be found by preaching
resignation, but revolt.
Furthermore the idea of Anarchism in nowise rejects the cooperation of
those who, having little taste for active struggle, confine themselves
exclusively to spreading the principles, preparing a future evolution;
it does not even require that these be accepted in their entirety. Every
attack upon prejudice, everything which destroys an error or proclaims a
truth, comes under their domain. The Anarchists disdain no contribution,
reject no assistance, and ask no better than to join hands with all who
have something new to offer. They content themselves with coordinating
such efforts, synthesizing aspirations in order that people may be able
to read into their own desires.
Finally it is impossible for the Anarchists to be pacific, even if they
so wished; they will be urged into action by the sheer force of
circumstances. Can one endure the meddling of officials after one
understands the contemptible part they play? Can one submit to the
insolence of lawyers when reflection has robbed them of the sacred
aureole by which they were formerly surrounded? Can one respect the rich
man wallowing in his luxury when one knows that it is wrought from the
misery of hundreds of families? Can one consent to go into the barracks
to serve as a sport for his exploiters’ keepers, after one has
discovered that “the country” is but a pretext, and that the real role
reserved for him is to cut the throats of his brothers in misery? When
one sees that poverty is the result of a bad social organization, that
people are dying of hunger only because others are gluttons and heap up
fortunes for their descendants, one is not satisfied to go off and die
in a corner of the poorhouse There comes a moment when, pacific though
the sufferers be, force is answered by force, and exploitation by
revolt.
Those who would like to see society transformed without shocks must make
up their minds to surrender the hope; it is impossible. Ideas in the
course of evolving lead to revolution. We may regret it, deplore it, but
the fact is there; we must accept our lot, lamentations cannot prevail
against it. And since revolution is inevitable there is but one means of
preventing it from going against progress, viz., to take part in it,
endeavoring to utilize it towards the realization of the ideal in view.
We are not of those who preach acts of violence; nor those who want to
devour the employer and the capitalist, as these formerly devoured the
priest; nor of those who incite people to do this or that, or accomplish
such and such an act. We are convinced that people do not do anything
but what they themselves have decided to do. We believe that actions are
taught by example and not by writing or counsel. Therefore we confine
ourselves to drawing the conclusions of things in order that people may
themselves decide what they want to do. But we are also convinced that
the ideas, when well understood, must in their ascending march multiply
acts of revolt. The more they penetrate the mass the more will
consciousness of them be awakened, the more intense will become the
appreciation of their worth, and consequently the less will men be
willing to submit to the meddlings of authoritarian power and the
exploitation of capitalistic robbers, the more frequent and more
multiplied will become acts of independence. This result has nothing
disconsoling for us, quite the contrary; for every act of individual
revolt is an ax-stroke against the props of the social edifice which is
crushing us. And since it is admitted that progress cannot go on without
shocks and victims, we salute those who disappear in this terrible
tempest, hoping that their example will raise up champions more numerous
and better armed, whose blows may have greater effect. But whatever the
number of those who perish in the struggle, it is still very small
compared to the innumerable victims daily devoured by the social
Minotaur. The more intense the struggle, the shorter; and in consequence
the more lives, else devoted to poverty, sickness, consumption, and
degeneracy, will be spared.
Some men, with good intentions we like to believe, appear stupefied at
seeing the Anarchists repudiate certain means of struggle as contrary to
their principles. “Why should you not try to get possession of power,”
they say, “in order to force people to put your ideas into
practice?”—“Why,” exclaim others, “ should you not send your own men to
the chamber as deputies, or into the municipal councils, where they
could be of service to you and would have the advantage of authority to
propagate your ideas among the masses?” On the other hand some
Anarchists, imagining themselves very logical, carry their reasoning to
absurdity; with Anarchy as an excuse they accept a mass of ideas which
have nothing to do with it. Thus under color of attacking property
certain persons have constituted themselves defenders of theft; others
apropos of free love have come to sustain the most absurd fancies, which
they would not hesitate to qualify as debauchery and vulgar excess if
practiced by the bourgeoisie; the most extreme however are those who war
upon principles. “Another prejudice,” they say, and declare, “I laugh at
principles; I ‘sit down’ on them; to hasten the revolution all means are
good; we must not allow ourselves to be checked by scruples which are
out of season.”
Those who make use of such language are, in our opinion, mistaken, and
if they reflect thoroughly upon it they will soon discover that not all
means are good to bring about Anarchy; there are some which are quite
the contrary. They may present an appearance of success, but will really
have the effect of retarding the acceptance of the idea, of giving
triumph to a person at the expense of the thing; and consequently,
whether it be admitted or denied, there follows from the ideas which one
professes a directing principle which must guide him in the choice of
the means suitable for putting those ideas into practice or facilitating
a comprehension of them;—a principle as inevitable as a natural law,
which one cannot transgress without being punished by the transgression
itself, for it carries one farther away from the proposed goal by
producing the contrary of the results hoped for.
Thus, for example, take universal suffrage, allusion to which was made
at the beginning of this chapter. It is easy to say with some of our
opponents who, seeing nothing but immediate facts, ask us, “Why do you
not try to send your own men to the chamber where they could enact the
changes which you demand, or, at least, more easily group together the
forces which will organize the revolution?” By a well understood and
well directed opposition the ballot might certainly bring about a
revolution as well as any other means; but as it is a perfected
instrument of authority it could produce nothing but an authoritarian
political revolution; this is the reason that Anarchists repudiate it
equally with authority itself. If our ideal were merely to accomplish a
transformation of society solely by means of the strong hand, which
would mould the masses according to a given formula, we might try to
make use of universal suffrage, seek to canvass the crowd in order to
get them to confide the care of their destiny to some of our people,
making the latter masters for the application of our theories. While
treating of universal suffrage in the chapter on authority, however, we
observed that it was effective only in giving birth to mediocrities,
that it permitted too much of platitude and flatulency on the part of
those who aspire to be delegates for a sincere and even moderately
intelligent man to consent to solicit a candidacy.
The very thing which makes the weakness of the collectivist party in
electoral struggles is that the relatively more intelligent men have
been overthrown by the “opportunists” who reckon upon the shallow
paroquets of the rostrum only; and that they have wanted to keep
intact—though not everywhere—their revolutionary program, and at the
same time to present a program of reforms. The voter who is of course
very stupid, says to himself: “If I must, after all, revolt, what is the
good of asking for reforms? If these reforms do not prevent the
necessity for recourse to arms, what is the use of sending deputies to
propose them in the chamber?” If he does not go through this reasoning
in the concrete form here given—which would in fact be a little above
the average intelligence of the voters—it is at least what has come out
of the debates at the campaign meetings, what has intuitively presented
itself to his mind; and he has voted for the Radicals, who boasted of
the efficacy of the reforms which they promised him, or for a few
opportunists who likewise preached the virtues of parliamentary
panaceas, giving them plausibility and substance—with the idea of
flattering the workers—by attacks upon the bourgeoisie; taking good care
not to speak of revolution and finding more profit in intriguing with
the old political parties to secure the election of their candidates,
basing their action upon the adage: “Pass me the cinnamon and I will
pass you the senna.” [18]
Another nullifying defect: universal suffrage is a means of stifling
individual initiative which we proclaim, and which we should on the
contrary seek to develop with all our might. Suffrage is an instrument
of authority, and what we are after is the complete enfranchisement of
human individuality; it is an instrument of repression, while we seek to
inspire revolt. Far from, being able to serve us, universal suffrage can
but fetter us; we must fight it. Since we tell people not to deliver
themselves up to masters, to act according to their own inspirations,
not to submit to the repression which forces them to do what they think
wrong, we cannot, under pain of being illogical, tell them to be plastic
under the intrigues behind the scenes of an electoral committee, to
choose men who are to be charged with making laws for them which all
must obey, and into whose hands they must resign all will and
initiative. Therein would lie a flagrant contradiction which would
strike even the least clear-sighted; for this contradiction would break
the weapon in our very hands, showing us to be what we really should be
did we lower ourselves to such means: common fakirs.
Furthermore we are aware of the imperfections of human nature; in so
choosing we should greatly risk falling in with the ambitious and
intriguing, who, once in the midst of the bourgeois environment, would
profit thereby to create for themselves situations and let the ideas go.
As to those who were sincere we should only be sending them into an
environment of rottenness where they could do nothing but declare their
powerlessness and retire, or else yield to parliamentary customs and
become bourgeois in their turn. Now, we, who seek to caution the masses
against infatuation with persons; we, who seek to make them understand
that they have nothing to expect from such persons, we should be doing
finely to try to lift somebody to a pinnacle!
The treachery of persons could not fail to cast discredit upon the
ideas. There would be many more of those who would say, “The Anarchists
are no better than the rest,” than of those who would know Enough to
separate persons from ideas and not blame the weakness and unworthiness
of the former upon the latter. After having lost much precious time and
vainly exhausted our strength in winning triumphs for those individuals,
we should again be compelled to lose more time not less precious to
exhaust our forces, not less vainly, in order to prove these persons
were traitors, but that their treason in nowise invalidated the justice
of our avowed principles,—and then begin over again by presenting other
candidates! Go to! The comparison to the rotten apple which spoils a
whole basket of sound apples is very trite, but it is always true; how
much more so when it is a question bf putting a healthy apple not indeed
into a basket but into a dung-cart of rotten apples. We have, therefore,
no service to expect from universal suffrage, not only because it can do
nothing, but above all because it is contrary to the end in view, the
principles which we defend.
Other opponents and some Anarchists as well claim that in time of
revolution it will be necessary to have authority, not exactly of a
chief,—they do not go so far as that,—but to recognize some one’s
supremacy and to subordinate ourselves to his admitted superior skill.
Strange anomaly! Remnant of the prejudices with which we have been
imbued, atavistic return begotten of our education, which makes us,
while proclaiming liberty with loud voices, recoil before its
consequences and deny its efficacy, and leads us to demand authority in
order to obtain—liberty! O inconsistency!
Is not the best means of becoming free to make use of liberty, acting up
to the best of its inspirations, rejecting the tutelage of no matter
whom? Did you ever see anybody begin by fettering the legs of a child
that he wanted to teach to walk? There are things, they tell us, with
which some people are acquainted better than others; it would be well
before acting to consult these individuals and to subordinate our
actions to their teachings. We have always been with those who contend
that individual action does not exclude a common understanding where
collective action is in question; that organization follows from this
understanding,—a sort of division of labor rendering every individual
interdependent upon the others, impelling him to adapt his actions to
those of his companions in struggle or in production; but it is a long
way from this to admitting that every person should be forced to
surrender his will into the hands of whomsoever he should recognize as
more skillful than himself in some particular thing. When we go out in
camping parties with a number of friends, for example, and put ourselves
under the guidance of one of our company having better knowledge of the
spot selected, does it follow that we have made him our master and that
we are bound to follow him blindly everywhere he pleases to lead us? Do
we give him the power to constrain us in case we should refuse to follow
him? No. If there be one among us who knows the way we follow him where
he leads us because we suppose him capable of taking us where we want to
go, because we know he is going there himself; but we have in no sense
abdicated our own will and initiative. If in the course of the journey
another of us perceive that he whom we have commissioned to guide the
company is mistaken, or is trying to lose us, we make use of our
initiative to inform ourselves and if necessary take a route which seems
more direct or agreeable. It should not be otherwise in times of
struggle. At the outset Anarchists must renounce the warfare of army
against army, battles arrayed oh fields, struggles laid out by
strategists and tacticians maneuvering armed bodies as the chess-player
maneuvers his figures upon the chess-board. The struggle should be
directed chiefly towards the destruction of institutions. The burning up
of deeds, registers of land-surveys, proceedings of notaries and
solicitors, tax-collectors’ books; the ignoring of the limits of
holdings, destruction of the regulations of the civil staff, etc.; the
expropriation of the capitalists, taking possession in the name of all,
putting articles of consumption freely at the disposal of all;—all this
is the work of small and scattered groups, of skirmishes, not regular
battles. And this is the warfare which the Anarchists must seek to
encourage everywhere in order to harass governments, compel them to
scatter their forces; tire them out and decimate them piecemeal. No need
of leaders for blows like these; as soon as some one realizes what
should be done he preaches by example, acting so as to attract others to
him, who follow him if they are partisans of the enterprise but do not,
by the fact of their adherence, abdicate their own initiative in
following him who seems most fit to direct the enterprise, especially
since some one else may, in the course of the struggle, perceive the
possibility of another maneuver, whereupon he will not go and ask
authority from the first to make the attempt but will make it known to
those who are struggling with him. These, in turn, will assist or reject
the undertaking as seems most practicable.
In Anarchy those who know teach those who do not know; the first to
conceive an idea puts it into practice, explaining it to those whom he
wishes to interest in it. But there is no temporary abdication, no
authority; there are only equals who mutually aid each other according
to their respective faculties, abandoning none of their rights, no part
of their autonomy. The surest means of making Anarchy triumph is to act
like an Anarchist.
It would be the same were we to review all the methods of struggle which
are proposed to us. Thus out of hatred to property, certain Anarchists
have come to justify theft, and pushing the theory to absurdity have no
blame for theft practiced by comrade upon comrade. Assuredly we do not
pretend to try the thief,—we leave that task to the bourgeois society of
which he is the product; but in contending for the destruction of
private property what we have principally fixed on for destruction is
the appropriation by a few, to the detriment of all, of all the means of
existence. Now for us all those who, by no matter what means, seek to
create a situation for themselves which will enable them to live as
parasites upon society, are bourgeois and exploiters, even when they do
not live directly upon the toil of others; and the thief is only a
bourgeois without capital who, unable to exploit us legally, seeks to do
it illegally, with no objection to becoming a fervent admirer of judge
and policeman as soon as he is a proprietor himself.
What may we preach as believers in the revolution that we may the more
certainly bring it about? The uplifting of human dignity and character,
independence of the will which makes us resent command, makes us rebels
against despotism and repudiate what seems false and absurd to us. Now
all roundabout means, all the expedients which necessitate the use of
platitudes, deals, meannesses, tricks to avoid technicalities, to get
around a law, are in our opinion injurious to the propaganda and
contrary to the end in view; for they force us into the same base acts
which we repudiate elsewhere, and instead of uplifting character they
lower and debase it, by accustoming people to exhaust their energies in
petty channels. Thus, for example, just as much as we approve and should
like to see an increase of those acts on the part of individuals who,
pushed to extremities by our bad social organization, forcibly take
possession of what they need in broad daylight, openly proclaiming their
right to existence, just so much do actions, belonging to the catalogue
of ordinary thefts leave us cold and indifferent; for there is nothing
of the character of a demand in them, which we would fain see attached
to every act of propaganda.
It is likewise with “the propaganda by deed.” How it has been wrangled
over! What an amount of fallacy has been uttered apropos of it, both by
those who combat and those who extol it! “Propaganda by deed” is nothing
more than thought transferred into action; and in the preceding chapter
we observed that to feel a thing profoundly is to want to realize it.
This is a sufficient reply to detractors. But, per contra, there are
some Anarchists more incensed than enlightened who have, in turn, been
more anxious to relegate everything to propaganda by deed; to kill the
capitalists, to knock employers on the head, set fire to the factories
and monuments, that was all they could think of; whoever failed to talk
about burning or killing was unworthy to call himself an Anarchist!
Now, as to action our position is this: We have already said that action
is the flowering of thought; but furthermore this action must have an
aim, we must know what it is about, it must tend towards an end sought
and not turn against itself. Let us take for example the incendiary
burning of a factory in full operation; it employs a large number of
workmen. The director of this factory is an average employer, neither
too good nor too bad, of whom nothing in particular is to be said.
Evidently if this factory is set afire, without either rhyme or reason,
it can have no other effect but to throw the workmen into the street.
These latter, furious at the temporary access of misery to which they
are thereby reduced, will not hunt for the reasons which prompted the
authors of the deed; they will most certainly devote all their anger to
the incendiaries and the ideas which led them to take up the torch.
Behold the consequences of an unreasonable act! But let us, on the other
hand, suppose a struggle between employers and workmen,—any sort of
strike. In a strike there surely are some employers more cruel than
others, who by their exactions have necessitated this strike or by their
intrigues have kept it up longer by persuading their colleagues to
resist the demands of the strikers; without doubt these employers draw
upon themselves the hatred of the workers. Let us suppose one of the
like executed in some corner, with a placard posted explaining that he
has been killed as an exploiter, or that his factory has been burned
from the same motive. In such a case there is no being mistaken as to
the reasons prompting the authors of the deeds, and we may be sure that
they will be applauded by the whole laboring world. Such are intelligent
deeds: which shows that actions should always follow a guiding
principle.
“The end justifies the means” is the motto of the Jesuits, which some
Anarchists have thought fit to apply to Anarchy, but which is not in
reality applicable save to him who seeks egoistic satisfaction for his
purely personal needs, without troubling himself about those whom he
wounds or crushes by the way. When satisfaction is sought in the
exercise of justice and solidarity the means employed must always be
adapted to the end, under pain of producing the exact contrary of one’s
expectations. [19]
That there is this divergence among Anarchists ‘in the way of looking
upon methods of action is because some of them, more carried away by
temperament than controlled by principles, though they believe
themselves to be fighting for Anarchy, really have in view only a
revolution, imagining that it, by its very essence, leads to every
Anarchistic ideal, exactly as the Republicans of yesterday imagined they
saw the opening of an era of grandeur and prosperity for all as soon as
the republic should be proclaimed. It would be useless to recapitulate
the illusions which have succeeded each other in the minds of the
working-classes since the putting into operation of the republican
regime.; let us be forewarned against the not less terrible ones which
would await us did we expect everything from the revolution, did we make
it our end while it is but a means. Such persons start out with a notion
with which they are saturated,—a notion laudable enough in itself,—that
elements may be gathered together for the purpose of stirring up a
revolution; that these may become numerous enough to attempt uprisings,
may create situations from which the revolution must burst forth; and
that organized revolutionary groups may guide its evolution in whatever
direction it shall please them to give it impulse. Hence their
acceptance of means which, to them, seem likely to hasten the hour of
the revolution; hence their efforts at trying to unite everything having
a revolutionary appearance under a mixed program, leaving aside details,
nice distinctions which would prevent a common understanding and force
them to dispense with some who seem to be of revolutionary temperament.
We, on the other hand, are convinced that the revolution will come from
without our ranks and before we shall be numerous enough to provoke it.
We believe that the vicious organization of society leads inexorably
thereto, and that an economic crisis, complicated with some political
occurrence, will be sufficient to fire the powder and provoke the
outburst which our friends would create. It is perfectly evident to all
who do not cheat themselves with words or hide their heads under their
wings to avoid seeing the facts, that the situation cannot be much
further prolonged. Discontent is too general: it was that that gave so
much strength to the Boulangist movement, which became abortive only
through the stupidity and cowardice of its leaders; but where they
failed others may succeed. Though it no longer has the definite
character reached during the Boulangist movement, the discontent is none
the less there, quite as wide-spread and profound. Far from subsiding
the commercial crisis is increasing: the task of employing the workers
becomes more and more difficult; those who are out of work behold the
constant lengthening of their periods of enforced idleness; the army of
the unemployed becomes more and more numerous. Winter brings us a
repetition of the endless tales of beggars shivering from the nippings
of frost and hunger, anxiously awaiting at the gates of barracks,
hospitals, restaurants, and the doors of a few philanthropists the hour
for the distribution of a bowl of soup and a bit of bread. And as this
situation cannot be prolonged forever, as people will end by getting
tired of starving, they will revolt.
Now, we believe that Anarchistic action will be felt so much the more in
this revolution the more the ideas of Anarchism have been propagated,
comprehended, elucidated, freed from all the chaff of prejudices with
which habit, heredity, and education have encumbered us. What we seek
before all is to state our ideas precisely, to spread them, to gather
together comrades thoroughly conscious of their position, avoiding every
concession which might conceal any portion of our ideal, unwilling to
accept, for the sake of increasing our numbers, any alliance or
compromise which at a given moment might become a fetter or set afloat a
doubt about what we desire. Once more: the revolution is not for us an
end, but a means,—inevitable to be sure, and to which we are convinced
we must have recourse,—but which is without value save for the end we
seek to make it serve. Let us, then, leave the task of making
revolutionists, to society, by its crying injustices creating
malcontents and rebels; let us seek to make individuals conscious,
knowing what they want; in a word perfect Anarchists, revolutionists
truly, but such as do not stop with giving a blow but know why they give
it.
We know all about the answer of some of our opponents at this point;
they will ask us: “What have your fine theories about initiative and the
spontaneity of individuals accomplished so far? What are all your
scattered and unrelated groups doing? Are you not yourselves obliged to
oppose the acts and theories which are sought to be passed off under the
name of Anarchy and which you refuse to accept as such?”—It is quite
clear that the Anarchist propaganda is far from having returned all the
results which its extent would warrant, far from having been understood
by all those who proclaim themselves its defenders; but this only shows
the necessity of their further elaboration, of not fearing too frequent
repetition, in order that attention may be concentrated upon the points
sought to be elucidated, And besides if the efforts of the Anarchists
are slightly lacking in conscious coordination, actual, tangible
organization, these efforts are none the less considerable. They have at
least the spirit of connection, the coordination given by a common
vision of an object in view and sharply defined. Whether in France,
Spain, Italy, England, America, or Australia, the Anarchists want the
abolition of private property, the destruction of authority, complete
autonomy of the individual without any restriction. This is the common
basis of the idea. Certainly there may be differences in the employment
of the means for reaching it; the ideal has not yet been attained; we go
forward insensibly, and when we shall have come to be no longer afraid
of certain words by which dissimilar things are now confounded, we shall
soon see an understanding established between the different
international groups, and a truly earnest and entirely libertarian
organization,—an understanding and an organization so much the more
durable that they are the result of practice, and not of a factitious
understanding made up of concessions.
As to whether there are acts and theories between which and ourselves we
should draw the line of separation, it is evident that there is a kind
of propaganda—subsidized to be sure—which has slipped in among us, and
which the exaggerative temperament of some fair and square comrades has
helped to spread, against which we should forearm ourselves with all our
might. But it is not by crying out against the principles nor by urging
on the revolution only, that we shall succeed in escaping false
brothers, false ideas, false principles. There is but one means of
distinguishing Anarchistic ideas from those which have been given
currency for the purpose of side-tracking the movement: to work still
harder to elucidate them, to weed out the remains of authoritarian
prejudices still more thoroughly from our proceedings, to make ourselves
understood by those to whom we address ourselves, and enable them to
discern whether such and such an act be Anarchistic or not; this will be
much more effectual than proceeding to excommunications in the lump.
Doubtless those who are impatient to see our dream of happiness and
harmony realized may be discouraged by what actually goes on in our
ranks; it may make them despair of ever seeing a general understanding
issue from the chaos of ideas which under the name of Anarchy war more
or less upon the bourgeoisie. But is it not characteristic of every new
idea which would destroy the existing order of things, that it
momentarily creates chaos and disorder? Once more: Let us leave the
impatient ones to do their fuming! Let us give precision to our ideas,
and the theories, becoming better considered and more definite, will
coordinate themselves so much the better that they contain nothing
forced, that no fetter shall have been placed upon the free evolution of
minds. We cannot repeat too often that it is by developing the
Anarchistic idea that self-conscious men are created, and the chances
for the success of the revolution augmented.
What has helped to lead many comrades into the error that “principles
are a chain, a hindrance in the struggle,” is that, perceiving this very
discord of ideas and efforts, despairing of seeing a force adequate for
the purposes of revolution gather together, they treat the serious
discussion of ideas as metaphysical; and, not finding in our own midst
the force which they fancied themselves able to seize by other means,
they return to authoritarian methods, which they naively imagine they
have divested of authority because they have changed the names. Anxious
for the struggle they do not perceive that, though apparently isolated,
the efforts of the combatants nevertheless converge towards the same
goal, that nothing is lacking to give this coordination the power they
wish to impart to it save that it be reasoned out; and that this last
can come about only through the diffusion of our ideas.
“When a comrade promises us his help,” say these, “we want to be able to
count on him, and to be sure that he will not, under the pretext of
liberty and personal autonomy, fail to respond when the day of action
comes.” We are entirely of the opinion of these comrades; but we
consider also that it is a part of the propaganda to demonstrate that no
person should engage therein unless he is certain of being able to stand
by it; that a thing once undertaken, it is a matter of honesty to
fulfill one’s promises. Of course this again raises the question of the
struggle against dissolving conceptions noticed above; but it is
incumbent upon our propaganda to show the good effects of complete
understanding and confidence between comrades. What, indeed, could all
the engagements undertaken and exacted beforehand accomplish? Though it
should be inscribed in colossal characters upon programs prepared in
advance that people must be bound by the agreements they enter into,
what could be done so long as none had power to constrain those who
should violate those agreements?
Let us listen less to our impatience and more to our reason, and we
shall see that “metaphysics” is not always where we suppose it to be.
In treating of the question “Why we are revolutionists,” we endeavored
to show that the poverty and discontent engendered by our bad social
organization leads directly to revolt, and that since we are constrained
by the force of circumstances to take part in this revolution we have
every interest in preparing ourselves for it. There is another reason
which we have mentioned only incidentally and which is also very
important, for it explains why the Anarchists decline to struggle to
obtain some of the reforms offered to the workers as panaceas or as
evolutional means for achieving their emancipation gradually. We have to
show that the capitalistic organization being given, the separation of
society into two classes, one of which lives at the expense of the
other, no melioration can be granted to the exploited class without
lessening the privileges of the exploiting class; consequently either
the reform is illusory, a decoy used for the purpose of lulling the
worker to sleep and making him exhaust his energies in the conquest of
soap-bubbles which burst in his hands when he seeks to grasp them, or,
if it really might alter the situation, the privileged class, which is
in possession of the power, will put forth every effort to prevent its
application or turn it to their own profit; hence we must always come to
the same ultima ratio—force. We do not intend to review all the reforms
invented by hard-up politicians, nor to criticize all the electoral
canards hatched in the brains of office-seekers; we should have to write
hundreds of volumes. We believe we have amply demonstrated that the
sources of misery lie in our bad economic organization; the reader will
therefore understand that we leave aside all those remedies which embody
political changes only. As to economic reforms worth the trouble of
discussing, they are very few, and easy to enumerate:
An income tax;
Reduction of the hours of labor and the fixing of a minimum wage;
Increase of taxes upon inheritances and abolition of collateral
heirships;
If we make an additional note of the formation of syndicates and their
transformation into cooperative societies for production we shall have
listed all the reform baggage of those who seek to transform society by
evolution. In quantity it is meager; let us have a look at the quality.
An income tax! For a considerable period this panacea was extolled, but
of late it seems to have lost slightly in favor. It is one of those
which the politicians use to dazzle the eyes of the workers; one of
those also which have enjoyed most credit, for it appeared to aim to
make the rich support the. expenses of the State; it seemed intended to
reestablish the equilibrium between citizens by making each defray the
expenses of society according to the services received therefrom. But to
study the mechanism of society and find the sources of riches is
sufficient to enable one to understand that the pretended reform would
reform nothing, that it is nothing but a miserable bait designed to lure
the workers astray by leading them to hope for improvements which will
never take place, at the same time preventing them from discovering the
true means of emancipating themselves. Undoubtedly there are some
capitalists who are really frightened at the bare mention of this
reform, already seeing themselves “despoiled” for the benefit of “the
vile multitude; “ the bourgeoisie is full of just such tremblers,
frightened at the least noise, hiding at the slightest alarm, but
bawling like calves when any one speaks of touching their privileges. It
may also be that among those who propose it there are some who actually
believe in its efficacy. The outcries of the former and the naïveté of
the latter admirably contribute to the deception of the workers, making
them take in dead earnest this child’s play which prevents them from
giving ear when some one shows them that they have nothing to hope from
their exploiters, that their emancipation can be real only on the day
there are no more privileges.
Under the regime of tithes the workers “knew where they were at”
concerning what they paid to their masters and tyrants: so much for the
lord, so much for the priest, so much for this one, so much for that
one. At the end they perceived there was not much for themselves. This
made a revolution; the bourgeoisie seized the power; the people having
fought to abolish the tithes it would not have been politic to
reestablish them; the bourgeoisie therefore invented the tax and
indirect tribute. After this plan the tithe is always deducted
beforehand, but it is the capitalists, traders, and other middle-men who
advance the sums thus deducted for the benefit of the State, and who are
thus left with a free hand to reimburse themselves royally from the
pockets of producers and consumers; and as these latter have no business
directly with the treasury they can form no exact estimate of what share
they have to pay, and all goes for the best in this best of all possible
bourgeois worlds.
It is said we have to pay an annual tax of one hundred and thirty to one
hundred and forty francs a head, in France: what is that?—Why deny
oneself the pleasure of having a government which busies itself with
your happiness for so modest a sum? Really it is nothing at all and one
would be stupid to do without such a blessing for the sake of a little
thing like that! It is, indeed, nothing; and the worker does not
perceive that being the only one to produce he is the only one to pay;
he has not only his own bill to settle but that of all the parasites who
already live from the product of his labor.
By whatever sophisms the bourgeois economists seek to prop up their
system in order to justify the existence of capitalists, one thing is
sure: Capital does not reproduce itself and can be nothing but the
product of labor; now, as the capitalists themselves do not work their
capital is therefore the fruit of others’ work. All this commerce
between individual and individual, nation and nation, all these
exchanges, all this transit, is the result of labor only; and the profit
which remains to the middleman is the tithe torn from the labor of the
producers by the owners of capital. Is it by means of the money spent
that the earth produces the grain, vegetables, and fruits we need for
our nourishment; the flax and hemp we must have to clothe ourselves; the
pasturage necessary to fatten the cattle on which we feed? Is it by the
power of capital alone that the mines yield us the metals used in our
industries, or in making the machines and tools we require? Is it
capital which transforms raw material and fashions it into objects for
consumption?—Who would dare make the claim! Political economy itself,
the object of whose existence is to ascribe everything to capital, does
not go so far; it merely tries to prove that capital being indispensable
to the putting of all sorts of exploitation into operation, it deserves
a share—the biggest share—for the dangers and casualties it is
considered to have risked in the enterprise. To demonstrate the relative
unimportance of capital it is sufficient to repeat the oft-quoted
hypothesis, “Let us imagine the disappearance of all monetary values,
gold, silver, bank-notes, commercial paper, drafts, checks, and all
other bills of exchange; should we therefore stop producing?” Would the
peasant therefore cease to till his bit of ground, the miner to extract
his subsistence from the mine, the mechanic to fabricate articles for
consumption? Would not the workers find some means of getting along
without cash in exchanging their products, and to continue to live and
produce without money?
The rational answer to these questions leads us to conclude that capital
is but a means by which the parasites mask the superfluousness of their
presence and justify the middle-man whom they thrust upon the producers
for the purpose of deducting in advance their tithe of the labor of
others. Thus whatever means the State may employ to- attack their
incomes, these attacks must in the end recoil upon the producers, since
the incomes themselves come only from labor. So much the greater will be
the burden with which they are freighted; so much the more heavily will
it fall upon the workers, swelled as it will be by the middle-man; and
in the final reckoning this boasted reform will be transformed, through
the facts of our bad social organization, into a still greater means of
exploitation and robbery.
Next after the income tax, which has had its day, the most vaunted
reform of the present time is reduction of the hours of labor and the
fixing of a minimum wage. To regulate the relations of capital and labor
in favor of the workers, to obtain an eight-hour day instead of one of
twelve, seems at first sight a tremendous progress; and it is not
surprising that many allow themselves to be caught by it, using all
their energies to obtain this palliative, believing themselves to be
thus working for the emancipation of the proletarian class. In the
chapter on authority, however, we observed that it has but one role,—to
defend the existing order of things; therefore to ask that the State
interfere with the social relations between labor and capital is to give
proof of the greatest want of logic, for its interference can turn out
profitably only to him whose defender it is. In examining the tax-reform
we noted that the role of the capitalist is to live at the expense of
the producer; now, to counsel the workers to go and ask the capitalists
to curtail their profits at the same time they are using every means to
increase them is to make most abominable sport of those you advise.
Simple political changes, very far from having an importance equal to
this, have required revolutions to be effected.
If the working day were reduced to eight hours, say the defenders of
this reform, it would diminish the periods of enforced idleness which
result from over-production; everybody would work, and the workers would
be enabled to increase their wages in consequence. At first sight this
reasoning seems logical, but nothing can be falser to him who has
thoroughly considered the phenomena engendered by the vicious
organization which today is by courtesy called society. In the chapter
on property we have shown that if the stores are glutted with products
it is not because production is too great but because the majority of
the producers are reduced to poverty and cannot consume according ‘to
their needs. The most logical means therefore for the laborer to secure
work for himself would be to take possession of the products he has
created and of which he has been cheated, and consume them. We will
expatiate no further in this direction; it remains to us to show that
the application of the proposed reform would not bring the slightest
pecuniary advantage to the workers.
When a capitalist invests his capital in some industry he does so
because he hopes thereby to make it fruitful. Now, in the present
conditions the employer calculates that he must have the workman ten,
eleven, or twelve hours, in order to get out of him the estimated
profit. Reduce the working day to eight hours and the employer will find
himself injured, his calculations upset; but as his capital must bring
him in so much per cent, (his special labor as a capitalist consisting
of getting his profit, —buying in the cheapest and selling in the
dearest market possible,—in short robbing all those with whom he has
dealings,—such being his business) he will hunt up some new device to
reimburse himself for what it has been endeavored to take away from him.
Three ways will present themselves to him: to increase the price of his
products, to reduce the wages of his workmen, or to make them produce in
eight hours the same amount they now do in twelve. The promoters of the
reform have guarded against one of these by asking for the fixing of a
minimum wage. It is not likely that the employers would resort to an
increase in the price of goods, embarrassed as they are by competition;
at any rate the dearness of the cost of living keeping pace with the
rise of wages proves to us that it would not be long before the worker
carried all the burdens of the reform; and though his present daily
wages were maintained for the eight-hour day he would be still poorer
than now, for the increase in the price of articles of consumption would
make his wages actually less. Have not North and South America shown us
that wherever the workman has succeeded in getting higher wages,
articles of consumption have increased proportionately? And wherever he
has succeeded in making twenty francs a day he needs twenty-five to live
after the style a workman getting a good living is supposed to live, so
that he has always remained in the same place.
But in these days of steam and electricity competition does not permit
delay; one must produce “quick and cheap.” It will not, then, be by
increasing the price of their goods that the exploiters will try to
“catch up.” The last method, that of producing in eight hours what is
now produced in twelve is the one always pointed out to the exploiters
anxious to keep their profits intact. The workman must therefore produce
faster; consequently the encumbering of the market with products which
the reform is intended to prevent, the periods of idleness sought to be
avoided, would recur just as before, since production would remain the
same and the worker would not have been put in a position to consume
more.
But the inconveniences of the so-called improvement would not be limited
to this failure alone; there would be others more serious. First, the
reduction of the working day would have the effect of stimulating the
perfection of mechanical appliances and hastening the displacement of
the workman of flesh by the workman of iron, which in a well-organized
society would be progress, but would be found to be an aggravation of
misery to the worker in our present society. Moreover, being compelled
to produce faster the workman would consequently be obliged to
accelerate all his movements, to concentrate his attention more and more
upon his work; all his energies would thus be in a state of continual
tension more injurious to his health than longer hours of work. The time
is shorter, but being bound to expend more strength in less time he
would become fatigued more and more rapidly. If we consider England,
which is given as an example by the partisans of this project, and where
the nine-hour day is in operation, we shall see that far from being an
improvement the shorter day is on the contrary an aggravation to the
workers. It is to Karl Marx, the oracle of those who put forward this
fine scheme, that we turn for proofs to support our assertion. For
instance if we open Marx’s Capital we find, on page 105, this extract
from the report of a factory inspector:
“‘To maintain the quantity of our products,’ says the firm of Cochrane,
British Pottery, Glasgow, ‘ we have had recourse to the usage, on a
large scale, of machines which render skilled workmen superfluous, and
every day demonstrates that we can produce much more than by the old
method. The nine-hour factory law has had the effect of hastening the
introduction of machinery.’”
On page 180 of the same book:
“Although the factory inspectors never weary, and rightly too, of
setting forth the favorable results of the legislation of 1844 and 1850,
they are nevertheless forced to admit that the shortening of the day has
already caused an intensification of labor which attacks the health of
the worker and, of course, his productive energy itself.
“In the majority of cotton and silk manufactures the excessive strain
exacted by machine work, (the speed of machinery having been accelerated
to an extraordinary degree of late years), appears to be one of the
causes of the extreme mortality resulting from pulmonary affections
which Dr. Grennhown has noted in his last admirable report. There is not
the slightest doubt that the tendency of capital to catch up, through
the systematic intensification of labor, for what it has had to
relinquish (since the lengthening of the day is forbidden by law), and
to transform every improvement in mechanical contrivance into a new
means of exploitation, must lead to a condition in which a fresh
diminution of hours will be inevitable.”
The displacing of the worker by the machine, increase of liability to
sickness for those who remain in the workshop, annihilation of the
reform to the point of bringing back the situation to the identical
place it started from—without counting additional aggravations—such are
the advantages of this blessed reform! Is this sufficiently conclusive?
But the advocates of the eight-hour system interrupt us, saying: “Yes,
but this progress in mechanics would go on just the same if we were
working twelve hours; and since the shortening of the day must bring
about some temporary relief, enabling us to stay only eight hours in the
workshop instead of twelve, there is in fact some moral progress with
which we content ourselves while waiting for more.”—This evinces their
natural kindheartedness and proves that the partisans of this so-called
reform are not hard to please; but we Anarchists, who are more exacting,
consider it a waste of time to bother with reforms which can reform
nothing. What is the use of becoming propagandists of a thing which is
good only so long as it is not applied, and when it is, is bound to turn
against its proposed object? Of course the development of machinery will
go on, but at present it is fettered by the everlasting red tape it
encounters, forever dragging out its weary length. Everybody knows what
an amount of effort it requires to get a new invention adopted. The
exploiters being put into the dilemma of losing their profits or doing
away with the red tape, the result will be to hasten the march of events
and further the social revolution which we feel to be near. Now, as this
revolution is inevitable we do not want to be surprised by it, but to be
ready to profit by it to the best of our knowledge when it comes. We
therefore seek to make the workers understand that they have nothing to
gain by such childish efforts, and that society is transformable only on
condition that the institutions which govern it be destroyed.
Oh, the organization of this exploiting society which is crushing .us is
too well combined! It is not enough to modify its machinery, to improve
its mode of acting, for us to believe its results can thereby be
changed. Have we not seen how every new improvement, every development
of machinery immediately turns against those who toil, becoming a means
of exploitation to those who have set themselves up as masters of social
wealth? If you desire progress to benefit all, if you want the worker to
succeed in emancipating himself, commence by destroying the cause of
those effects you would suppress. The poverty of the workers is caused
by their being obliged to produce for a lot of parasites who have been
clever enough to turn the best part of all products to their own profit.
If you are sincere do not waste time in trying to conciliate
antagonistic interests; do not seek to ameliorate a condition which can
never be productive of good; destroy parasitism. But as this cannot be
expected on the part of those who are parasites themselves; as it cannot
be the work of any law, the whole system of exploitation must be
destroyed, not modified.
Aside from these two reforms there is a third to which certain thinkers,
enlightened at that, attach some efficacy, viz., an increase of the tax
upon inheritances, where collateral heirs are concerned. Increase this
tax and the same effects heretofore stated as regards the progressive
income tax would speedily manifest themselves. Moreover such a measure
would scarcely be possible outside of real estate, and even then it
would be rendered perfectly useless by the impetus it could not fail to
give to anonymous societies and to the system of “ stock held in trust.”
Property-owners would get around it by renouncing family domains,
contenting themselves with becoming lessees or tenants of their castles,
mansions, and hunting-grounds, while anonymous associations would spring
up to take charge of the leasing or renting of such immovable property,
and have the laugh on the State. It is readily understood that under
this system the number of inherited estates over which the State would
have control would be very much reduced, and the law rendered useless.
Consequently the suppression of collateral heirships would be likewise
restricted, seeing that a lot of previous agreements between the
testator and those whom he wishes to favor, may accord the latter
certain claims upon the fortune of the former otherwise than by way of
inheritance. To prevent this hundreds of laws would be required,—laws
which would interfere with every act, with every relation of life,
depriving people of the free disposition of their fortune; and, worse
still, under such an inquisitorial system should we not inevitably come
to the inquisition itself? Either a revolution or a coup d’état would be
necessary to make people submit to measures so vexatious. Revolution
upon revolution; would it not be better to have one that would make us
go forward than one which would establish meddlesome laws?
Furthermore, admitting that these laws might have some influence upon
the regime of property, in what way would the situation of the worker be
improved? Property would again change hands, but it would not be put
into the hands of the workers. The State would become the proprietor.
The State would be transformed into a syndicate for exploitation; and we
have already seen, in treating of authority, that nothing in favor of
the workers must be expected from it. So long as money remains the level
of the social organism those who possess it will know how to use it for
their own profit. Whether the State will directly exploit those estates
that fall into its hands, or sub-let them to private persons, it will
always be to the profit of those who already possess. Let us even
suppose, which might possibly be, that it should be to the profit of a
new caste; in any event it could not be but detrimental to the
generality of the people.
But if we admit the possibility of the application of this reform, this
other hypothesis must also be admitted. The bourgeoisie, which set up
the dogma of the infallibility of private property; the bourgeoisie,
whose whole penal code is based solely upon the legitimacy of this
property, and with a view to its defense, will then have allowed an
attack to be made upon this proprietary organization which it claims on
the contrary to be immutable. Will somebody tell us how much time it
would take to bring the bourgeoisie to allow what they would consider an
attack upon their rights; how much time it would take afterwards before
it would be discovered, upon application thereof, that the so-called
reform had reformed nothing at all; and finally whether the time so lost
would not equal in length that judged necessary for the realization of
our “utopias?”
It would be useless here to make a criticism of the “societies for
production and consumption;” we have shown that we are in pursuit of
general enfranchisement; the complete and separate enfranchisement of
the individual cannot be effected save by the integral enfranchisement
of all. Of what moment to us, then, are these petty means for the
enfranchisement of a few persons? For the rest, with the concentration
of capital, the continuous development of machinery, ever demanding the
putting of more and more enormous capital into operation, these same
means of enfranchising small groups of persons break to pieces in their
hands before they have produced any results.
Other reformers seek to contribute their quota to the labor of human
emancipation by urging the development of that branch of knowledge they
have taken up with; but quickly carried away by the violence of the
struggle, the difficulties to solve, they end by transforming their
fixed idea into a hobby-horse to which they attribute every desirable
quality, outside of which they see nothing worthy of acceptance, and
which they offer as a panacea bound to cure all the ills from which our
unhappy invalid, society, suffers. And how many sincere persons are
found among these fanatics! Amongst this jumble of ideas how many good
ones there are, which might produce excellent results in humanity’s
favor if applied in a sanely constituted society! But applied separately
in a corrupt society, they only yield results contrary to those expected
when they are not nipped in the bud before any one has succeeded in
applying them. Among these people, convinced of a fixed idea, we may
instance one who is typical in affording the conclusion we wish to
draw,—M. G. Ville, with his system of chemical fertilizers. We do not
wish to enter into a detailed explanation of the said system. Let it
suffice to say that M. Ville, having made an analysis of plants, found
that they were invariably composed of fourteen elements, but varying in
quantity in each different family. On subsequent analysis of the air and
soil, he found that the plant takes ten of its component elements from
them; that it therefore only remained to him to -supply, in the shape of
manures, the other four elements lacking, which are lime, potassium,
phosphorus, and azote: Thereupon he established a whole series of
chemical fertilizers, based upon the soils to be cultivated and the
plant to be produced. By quoting the figures and exhibiting the results
he shows that with our present state of knowledge four or five times the
regular harvest may be reaped from the same soil, with but a slight
outlay for fertilizers compared with ordinary manures; that more cattle
can be raised on a smaller area of prairie, and the price of meat thus
lowered. But at this point he darts off into the conclusion that the
solution of the social question lies in the improvement of agriculture.
“Alimentary products becoming abundant,” says he, “every one will profit
thereby; the proprietors by reaping harvests whose abundance will enable
them to sell at a low price, the workers, who by purchasing cheaply will
be enabled to live more comfortably, to economize their wages, and
become capitalists in turn” . . . and everything will be for the best in
this best of all possible societies!
We are satisfied of the sincerity of M. Ville; as far as our slight
knowledge of the matter entitles us to judge, his system appears
perfectly rational; we do not deny the good effects which the general
application of his method would produce in the condition of the workers,
if the workers could benefit by anything at all in the present society.
On the contrary his figures support the Anarchists’ assertion that
according to the data of science products might, with much less labor,
be rendered so abundant that there would be no need of apportioning
them; that every one might consume out of the common fund according to
his needs or desires, without fear of scarcity, as certain pessimists
who can see nothing for humanity but weighing, measuring, and balancing,
seem to fear, though they go so far as to concede to you that they
themselves could of course get along without authority, but that it is
necessary to repress the evil instincts by which the rest of humanity
are possessed.
In a little pamphlet, “The Products of the Earth,” one of our friends
has shown from official figures that even in its present infantile state
of agriculture, its entire product is very considerably in excess of
consumption. M. Ville shows that by the judicious use of chemical
products, without additional labor, the earth may be made to return four
or five times as much as at present. Is not this a triumphant
confirmation of what we say? But he is mistaken in seeing in his system
the solution of the social question, and in believing that products
rendered thus abundant will be so cheap that the workers will be able to
live by spending little and saving much. If M. Ville had read the
bourgeois economists, among others M. de Molinari, he would have learned
that “the superabundance of products in the market has the effect of so
lowering the price of these products that their production being no
longer remunerative to the capitalist drives capital out of these
branches of production until the equilibrium is reestablished and things
brought back to where they started from.” If M. Ville had been less
absorbed in his learned calculations, and had taken some slight account
of the functioning of society, he would have seen that, although there
is now an enormous excess of production over consumption, there are
people dying of hunger; he would have seen that the very best
theoretical calculations are defeated of their aims in our present
social practice. Nature aided by intelligence and human labor may indeed
succeed in producing, at small cost, the wherewithal to nourish the
human race; but commerce and stock-gambling, the proprietor and the
capitalist, will also succeed in getting their discount thereon, in
making goods scarce in order to sell them at a dearer price, and, in an
emergency, in preventing their production altogether in order to raise
the fictitious prices still further, and maintain them at a fixed rate
through rapacity, greed for lucre, and parasitism. For example let us
take coal; coal is a ready-made product. It has only to be extracted
from the soil; the beds are so abundant that they are spread all over
the surface of the globe and are practically inexhaustible. And yet its
price is kept at a relatively high rate; not every one can be warm
according to the requirements of temperature; its abundance has not made
it accessible to the workers. This is because the mines have been
monopolized by powerful Companies which limit the output of coal, and
which, in order to escape competition, have ruined or bought up small
operators, preferring to leave such acquisitions unworked rather than
encumber the market and reduce the price, which would reduce their
incomes.
What has happened with coal is likewise taking place with the land. Is
not the small proprietor, eaten up, squeezed to the wall by usury, daily
expropriated for the benefit of the capitalist? Does not property on a
big scale constantly tend to reconstitute itself? Does not the use of
agricultural machines result in giving impetus to the formation of
agricultural syndicates and establishing those powerful anonymous
companies already dominant in the manufacturing world, as they are the
invariable rule in the mining world?—If we should succeed in making the
earth yield four or five times as much, they would reduce by so much the
area of cultivated lands, and the rest would be transformed into hunting
grounds or pleasure parks for our exploiters. This is already beginning
to take place in France, and is an accomplished fact on the estates of
the English lords in Scotland and Ireland, the populations whereof are
trampled upon and decimated for the benefit of the deer and foxes whose
spirited death agonies will serve as pastime to a “select” public
similar to that which applauded the lectures in which M. George Ville
uttered the philanthropic harangues mentioned above!
Ah, it is because society is so constituted that he who possesses is
master of the world! The exchange of products taking place only by the
help of capital, money becomes their sole dispenser. All the
improvements, all the progress created by labor, industry, and science,
go on ever accumulating in the hands of those who already possess,
becoming a means of still severer exploitation, weighing down those who
possess nothing with still more frightful poverty. The perfecting of the
processes of production renders the laborers less and less necessary to
the capitalist, increases competition among them, forces them to offer
their services at a lower price. Behold, then, how in dreaming you do
the workers a service! The social organization reverses your intent so
that you work for their exploitation, riveting more firmly the chain
whose formidable weight is crushing them.
Certainly, M. G. Ville, you pictured there a beautiful dream: to work
and multiply products so that everybody might have enough to eat; to
enable the worker to save up a few cents to ward off the incertitudes of
the morrow, though scarcely the perfection of human ideals, is as much
as could be expected from one whose situation does not expose him to
suffer the physical and moral evils that overwhelm the disinherited.
Yes, even that is much; but it is only a dream, alas! so long as you
have not destroyed the system of exploitation which renders all its
promise deceptive and illusory. Capitalism has more than one string to
its bow; and admitting that the multiplicity of products would reduce
them to a relatively low price, that the worker could save his wages,
there would come in another factor, at this point, which you have
yourself mentioned: the increase of population. At the present moment
the industrial market is encumbered with products; the development of
machinery daily increases the number of the unemployed. These, in order
to obtain employment, are forced to compete with each other, to work for
a lower wage. Now, as progress fulfils its task and ever continues
growing, as each man can in reality produce for ten, when the population
shall have doubled, production will have increased twenty-fold, and this
prosperity which you figure on creating for the workers, will go to
swell the income of the manufacturer, who will pay his slaves so much
the less when they have become more numerous in the market.
You say that the demands of the workers are in a certain measure
justified, as long as they do not assume a violent form; but have you
reflected that they have been struggling for thousands of years; that
these ever fruitless demands were born together with the historic
period? Know, then, that if they do take violent form, it is because all
satisfaction has been denied them. Must they remain upon their knees
repeating, “Thank you,” when they have never obtained anything save by
laying their masters low at their feet and taking the liberties they
wanted? Our masters thinking they were addressing slaves might
disdainfully say, “Couch your demands politely; we will then consider
whether we ought to grant them.” But those who behold in the
enfranchisement of the workers nothing but an act of justice and not a
concession, will say, “We want” so-and-so. So much the worse for the
dudes whom such language offends.
Everything is linked together in this system which is crushing us. To be
animated with good intentions is not enough to obtain the result
desired; no amelioration is possible save by the destruction of the
system. It is established solely for exploitation and oppression. We do
not want to modify exploitation and oppression but to destroy them. To
this conclusion all who are capable of lifting themselves above the
narrow standpoint of the circumstances in which they themselves are
placed, must inevitably come,—those who are capable of facing a question
in its entirety and understanding that revolutions are not the creations
of men alone, but of institutions which bar the path of progress, and
that consequently they are necessary and inevitable. Let all those who
sincerely desire to work for the future of humanity understand, once for
all, that if they would succeed in realizing their particular ideals
they must not traduce nor seek to fetter the Revolution; it alone can
enable them to attain their goal by preventing parasitism from stifling
progress or twisting it to the profit of vampires.
Reforms! Reforms! When will men discover that they have exhausted their
best energies upon reforms without ever getting anything by it? The
people are tired of struggling for utopias more futile than that of
individual enfranchisement, since the only objection which can be raised
against the latter is that it is unrealizable,—a purely gratuitous
assertion, seeing that it has never been tried, while the realization of
any reform is sufficient to demonstrate its ineffectualness. The
Anarchists are reproached with being a hindrance to the peaceful
emancipation of the workers, with being opposed to reforms. Double
mistake! The Anarchists are not at all opposed to reforms; it is not the
reforms themselves which we fight, but the lies of those who would set
them up as an ultimate goal for the workers, knowing as we do that where
they are not lies such reforms are but plasters for social ulcers. Let
those who believe in reforms work for their realization; we see nothing
wrong in that. On the contrary the more the bourgeoisie try them the
sooner the workers will see that in spite’ of continual changes they
still retain the same old thing, The point where we rebel is when people
offer these reforms to us as panaceas, and say to the workers: “Be very
good, very mild, very calm, and we will see whether we can do anything
for you!”—Then we who understand how illusory these reforms are, and
that the exploiters are occupying a usurped position, we say: “Workers,
they are making fools of you! Their promised reforms are only snares,
and they want to make you beg for such things as alms into the bargain,
while you really have the right to obtain much more. You are at liberty
to try the means they offer you; but knowing beforehand that they can in
no way contribute to your emancipation, do not tarry in the vicious
circle into which they wish to drag you, but organize for the purpose of
taking possession of what is your due. Leave the laggards to amuse
themselves with such deceptions; the Revolution engendered by the evil
social organization, is here, advancing, growing formidable, and
compelling you, in spite of yourselves, to take up arms and make good
your right to live. Once having taken them up, do not be simple enough
to content yourselves with reforms which will leave the cause of your
ills still in existence. Behold the trap that has fooled you, behold the
ideal towards which you should strive! It rests with you not to lose
time with sops and to know enough to help on the overthrow of this
worm-eaten and everywhere cracking edifice which they still presume to
call society. Do not stay it by stopping up the holes with these
plasters they propose to you; make a clean sweep, that you may not be
trammeled in the reconstruction of a better society.”
But when, driven to the necessity of admitting the evil functioning of
the social organization to which we are subjected, honest opponents of
the Anarchistic idea confess that this organization needs to be
transformed and allow that the means so far proposed are illusory, they
think they have made an enormous concession, and they seek most
earnestly for new and better remedies to apply. They even go so far as
to acknowledge that an Anarchistic society is the most magnificent ideal
which can be hoped for from human evolution. But—there is always a
but—overcome by inherited prejudices, the legacy of our ancestors and
nurtured by education, relations, and apathy, they hasten to add that it
is scarcely realizable,—and forever remain in a state of speculation.
“Bad as it is, society still insures a relative degree of security, a
certain rate of progress, which a revolution might sacrifice. Let us,”
say they, “seek gradually to improve what we have; slowly, indeed, but
surely.” If we answer them that there are people who suffer, perish,
through this so-called security, this so-called civilization, they do
not hesitate to admit that the capitalist class is ignoble in its
exploitation; that by its rapacity it justifies the revolt of the
exploited; some even admit that the revolution is inevitable, “but,”
they add, “it is to be regretted, for the revolt may be defeated and
ourselves thrown backward. Doubtless,” they say, “it is very easy to
establish the diagnosis of a disease, but to cure it, is another thing;
and the difficulties are very much greater in sociology, for we are
still in the infancy of the science concerning it. The rational and
experimental method only can lead to any results, and Anarchism is in no
sense scientific; it is a pure speculation emanating from praiseworthy
sentiments but based upon no experimentation.”
At first sight this reasoning seems logical; it is indeed true that when
the disease is known only by its effects one cannot determine its real
causes; but after its starting-point is actually known, its therapeutics
is easy. If up till then there has been hesitation, trying first this
remedy and then that, it is because the effects of such remedies upon
such and such a conjunction of physical troubles were known; but as
different causes may occasion the same pathological disturbance, it
followed that what was good in one case was ineffectual or injurious in
another. This is the reason why medicine in our days is rather empirical
research than real science when it is a question of curing. It is also
the reason why in social therapeutics, in which the same hiatuses, the
same ignorance have existed, revolutions have broken out which have come
to nothing, reforms have been attempted which yielded no
results,—reforms fluctuating from one system to another, without
preventing the growth of misery, without stopping the exploitation of
the masses. The effects were sought to be destroyed without troubling as
to the causes which produced them, and which allowed them to continue;
the governmental label was changed, certain purifications of the
official staff were effected, and afterward there was much astonishment
because the evils complained of, and which it was supposed would thus be
gotten rid of, reappeared more vigorous than ever, after an
insignificant interruption, and resumed their normal course as if
nothing had happened.
Nowadays it is understood in medicine that the best way of combating
disease is to prevent it, by suppressing, through a thorough
understanding of hygiene, the causes which engender it. The Anarchists
are attempting to effect the same operation in social hygiene. They have
sought for the causes of the diseases from which human society is
suffering, traced them to their sources, renounced universal
panaceas,—which they leave to political charlatans—and fortified with
the knowledge gained from the comparative study of systems in operation
and proposed reforms, they proclaim to the people:—
“The evils from which you suffer flow from the vicious organization of
society, authority and property are the motors of all this enginery
which is crushing you; in vain will you change the wheels, replace them,
alter them,—their function is to grind you in their whirling teeth; you
will be ground as long as you do not destroy them together with the
principles whence they derive their strength, authority and property.
Get rid of the causes if you do not want to experience the effects.”
In physiology, when, after considerable groping in darkness the causes
of a disease which up till then had been known only by its effects, are
at length discovered, it may happen that the method of curing it is
completely reversed; what had before been forbidden to the patient may
now be prescribed for him, and what had been prescribed before may now
be forbidden. In politics this is called a revolution. It happens that
the innovators are treated as madmen and visionaries by the regulars;
they are accused of putting the patient’s life in danger, of
disregarding a mass of hypotheses, each one more convincing than the
other. And these clamors pursue them until repeated results compel those
who have no confidence save in the formulas of the past to be silent.
The physician who experiments with a new method, does on a small scale
what the Anarchists want to do on a large scale with our entire society;
when he leaves the beaten paths of routine to apply the new data he must
not heed the outcries of retrogrades, if he be certain of his science,
his studies, his observations. It is the same in sociology. Is it the
fault of the Anarchists if society is so organized that people cannot do
what they please without running against a prohibitory law or coming in
conflict with a central power which claims to know what is wanted better
than the persons interested, to furnish them with what it deems useful
for them and deny them what it judges harmful? Society has been so
organized that people cannot get out of it without overthrowing it; let
the bourgeoisie not complain if in order to be free people dream first
of breaking down what stands in their way.
In order to experiment one must go from theory to practice, and even in
the most carefully established calculations there will always be an
unknown quantity which timorous spirits will use as an argument for
rejecting all innovation. Must one be condemned to inaction because of
reactionists? The cause of the evil being discovered there is nothing to
do but run the surgeon’s knife into the tumor, that its generative
causes may be extirpated; and surgery every day teaches us not to shrink
from the ablation of growths or organs which are atrophied, parasitical,
or gangrened. Why should we fear to operate upon and to destroy what
everybody except those who live thereby agrees is bad or of evil
promise? We know that right here we shall be answered that society
cannot be treated as an individual; that the latter may disappear
without any perturbations resulting, while the overturning of society
may lead to a loss or set-back for all humanity, etc.; and then they
begin talking to us again about the necessity of acting slowly,
gradually, by the pathway of reforms. That is what they call the
experimental method!
Ah, well! Whatever our opponents say, it is they who are the
empiricists; the experiments they have been making for centuries with
the reforms and plasters which they recommend to us, prove to us that
there are no true and effective reforms save those which attack the
institutions, the bases, upon which society rests. Now, to touch
institutions is the Revolution. The bourgeoisie, which holds the power,
will not allow its own existence to be imperiled; so long as it holds
the power it will make use of it to defend the system of organization
which forms its strength. From the moment it should perceive that
universal suffrage would tend to take its authority away, its
bureaucracy, magistracy, police, and army would immediately be put in
motion to arrest the destroying flood. The only reforms it will allow to
be adopted will, therefore, be those which will not touch the
institutions whence its privileges are derived; the only remedies it
will consent to have tried are those which will attempt to mitigate the
evils without attacking the causes. Such are the reforms we have seen
adopted since the existence of universal suffrage,—the projects which at
present serve as platforms for the political parties; reforms which so
long as they are projects only, set the worker floating on an ocean of
felicities, but which being adopted, lead to no sensible results,—lucky,
indeed, if they do not become a new means of exploitation and
enslavement in the hands of our masters.
Ah! It is because society is so organized that everything beautiful and
good must finally concentrate in the hands of those who possess capital.
Every fresh step in progress profits him, and him only, who has the
wherewithal to put it into operation. Does there arise a new invention
which enables production to go on more rapidly and with less expense? He
who possesses will profit by it to diminish his working force, the
eliminated part of which, thrown upon the street, will go to swell the
somber army of the unemployed, the starving, while the rest will
continue to toil as hard, as long, as before, even seeing their wages
reduced in consequence of the competition waged against them by those
who have been thrown out of the workshop. That is what your
experimenting proves to us; that is what the reforms which have been
tried have done; and these are the irrefutable objections we have to
offer against all the projects that may be presented to us;—which proves
very conclusively that we are right in retorting the epithet of
“empiricists” upon those who claim that the ideas of Anarchism are not
established by the experimental method. Moreover the strongest objection
which such persons have so far been able to bring against the Anarchists
is to say to them, “Your theories are very fine, but they cannot be
realized.” This is not an argument. “Why can they not be realized?” we
ask, and instead of answering us with reasons they bring forward their
fears. They tell us that with man’s evil nature it is to be feared that
he would profit by his liberty to stop working altogether; that when no
mediating power existed it might happen that the stronger would exploit
the weaker, etc. The Anarchists have shown the lack of foundation for
these fears by proving that this evil tendency in man, these
shortcomings in his character, are stimulated and encouraged by the
present social organization which sets one against the other, forcing
them to tear from each other the pittance it apportions with such
exceeding parsimony. They also show, and support their assertions with
proofs, that every social system based upon authority cannot but beget
evil effects; since power is vested in persons subject to the same
defects as other men, it is clear that if men do not know how to govern
themselves, still less do they know how to govern others.
The great objection which remains consists, then, in assertion that as
Anarchism has not so far been put to the test, it is condemned to remain
a pure speculation, since it cannot be tried without overturning what
has been proven to be bad. This is not serious and will not bear
discussion. Because our forefathers allowed themselves to be exploited,
should we, therefore, submit to exploitation? Because they bowed their
necks to the yoke of authority should we, therefore, continue to be
driven b the goad of power? Because the ideal of liberty and justice,
after having been a vague and undefined aspiration of humanity, barely
begins to shape itself in our days, must we renounce its application and
wait till there are no more fearful ones? You agree that our ideal is
beautiful. It is possible if individuals desire, and know how to conform
their actions to it; this also you admit, and we ask no more. Those,
then, who want to realize it, can only spread it, group together, stand
shoulder to shoulder; and on the day they are numerous enough to
overthrow all obstacles, they have only to live, according to their
affinities and tendencies.
We want to be free: so much the worse for the slaves who, trembling at
the idea of losing their chains, rally around their masters; we need not
listen to their lamentations, for after all they will be with us when we
have become the stronger. We want to be free: so much the worse for
those who still want masters, and the more so that the masters usually
want none of them except to pit them against others. Yes; the
empiricists are those who want to destroy the effects, leaving the
causes in existence, those who propose emollients when the operator’s
scalpel is needed, those who seek to put the patient asleep, hoping that
nature alone will act, while a small operation would relieve the patient
immediately. It is surprising how people cheat themselves with words,
how aphorisms seem to acquire weight when it is a question of preaching
routine and fear of innovation. “One must go forward by carefully
feeling one’s way,” they tell us; “humanity never advances by sudden
leaps.” They forget that here it is three or four thousand years, for
the Latin races only, that these experiments and step-by-step policies
have been going on, that the exploited have awaited the realization of
the promises made to them, have waxed passionate and struggled to obtain
the same reforms forever promised though their situation has in nowise
altered. We always suffer from the same evils, and now they propose to
apply the same old poultices under the name of “the rational method.”
Intelligence has grown, science has broadened, industry has widened to
an immeasurable scope; pleasures have been refined and multiplied; but
who profits by this progress?—Always the idle, possessing minority! Who
famishes in order to produce without profiting thereby?—Always the
spoliated masses! Ever since humanity has formed itself into societies,
the exploited have made their complaints and lamentations heard; they
have struggled without pause or relaxation to obtain concessions from
their masters, which might soften their lot; they have prostrated
themselves like flunkeys or again stood proudly erect, importuned at
times like beggars or again recovered strength when the measure of
poverty and oppression, being full, forced them to revolt, making death
preferable to their existing condition. And yet this condition has
always remained the same. Often their masters have been compelled to
make room for them in legislative halls; often they have had to grant
the reforms demanded; very often they themselves have been compelled to
put restrictions upon their exploitations and authority. Have the
governed been less oppressed, the exploited less squeezed? Has not
poverty been as intense as ever, wealth concentrated in the hands of a
privileged few, day by day becoming fewer?
Well, then, to propose to poor wretches to keep on with the experimental
method, confining demands to new reforms just as empirical, (since those
which would be likely to destroy the generating cause must be renounced
for fear of the revolution) is to ask the mass of the workers to consent
to be exploited indefinitely, seeing that the experience of the past
proves to us that so long as the organic bases of society are unchanged
these so-called reforms will always turn to the profit of those who hold
wealth and power.
Finally, this: our opponents, when honest, do not hesitate to admit the
present social organization is bad, vicious, and arbitrary, the
bourgeoisie deriving their luxury and idleness solely from the poverty
and overwork it imposes upon the toilers. They admit with us that the
situation cannot last, that revolt is inevitable, that the social
organization is forcing us into it; for there must necessarily come a
time when the wretched will weary of starving while compelled to toil
like beasts of burden. Well, then, since the conflict is inevitable—and
legitimate—why exhaust strength in trying to avoid it? Why seek to make
others hope for a pacific solution which you know to be impossible? Is
not this a benevolent playing into the hands of the exploiters who seek
to lull the intelligence of the workers to sleep by lying promises, in
order to muzzle them more easily and lengthen the period of their
exploitation? This is another of the consequences of the vicious social
organization to which we are subjected, that he who is not squarely with
the exploited and does not accept all their demands, finds himself
necessarily on the side of the exploiters. All his good will and
intentions in desiring to relieve our sufferings are nothing but
narcotics, which, while dulling the edge of the miseries of the poor,
deliver us over, bound hand and foot, to our exploiters.
If the conflict be inevitable would it not be better to prepare for it
by seeking to develop within the minds of all the idea of a regenerated
future society which, after all, is admitted to be good?—“If it were
practicable,” add these well-meaning conservatives by way of corrective
and as a concession to conservatism.—Is not such enlightenment necessary
in order that when the day is come, those who take part in the
revolution, may be able to profit by the struggle they will be called
upon to sustain; that they may know what institutions are hurting them
and must be destroyed; that they may not once more be turned into
ridicule by their exploiters? Would this not be more rational and
scientific than to lose one’s time deploring what cannot be prevented;
than to devote oneself to protecting what is acknowledged to be bad
under the pretext that it might be worse? Is it not, in fact, an utter
want of logic to claim that because new ideas have not yet been applied,
their application must be indefinitely postponed, because we do not know
what they might bring forth? Is it not reasoning under pressure of fear
of the new, and apathy in breaking off acquired habits, to conclude that
one must be satisfied with what he has, (though seeking to improve it
meanwhile) for fear of greater evils?
It has been amply demonstrated that the present society cannot be
improved so long as the bases of organization are not transformed. Now,
to reject the application of a new idea with the excuse that it has not
been tested, is to reason in an absolutely unscientific fashion, for it
would condemn humanity to utter immobility, new ideas being always more
or less in contradiction with the ideas of the majority at a given time;
and every time a new discovery is made it must be experimented upon to
determine its value. If we had already had the experience, it would no
longer be a new idea; it would already have struggled to obtain the
necessary tests; it would be already prepared for admission into current
practice. And besides, (it is a trifle vulgar and has been said a
thousand times, but it is profoundly true) if one has the small-pox he
does not seek to improve it but to get rid of it. We are dying of
poverty and spoliation, we want to get rid of what is killing us; what
worse can we get afterwards?
I know that at this point our opponents will drag out the “chestnut” of
“compromising progress, the triumphs of science lost in the cataclysm,
the human mind risking retrogression as the consequence of the victory
of the masses, more corrupt and less learned than the class in power.”
Further on we shall show the inaneness of such a fear, but let us for
the moment accept the argument, such as it is; what weight can it have
with those who suffer unjustly and are tired of suffering? What do
progress and the marvels of industry matter to those who are considered
to be no more than their instruments, without ever profiting by them?
What do science and the discoveries of the human mind matter to those
who suffer and to whom society refuses the means of developing their
intelligence, if these must forever help to bind them faster in their
slavery and brutishness? Go, then, and tell them that you greatly
deplore the misery in which they are steeped; that you pity them, with
all your heart, for the sufferings they undergo; but that their sudden
enfranchisement involving the risk of a set-back to the march of
progress, it is imperative that the great mass continue to accept toil
and suffering, in order that an inconsiderable minority of
scholars—chosen from among another minority of parasitical possessors
who absorb the product of all solely for their personal profit— may have
the facilities for laboring at the solution of scientific problems! Have
the courage of your convictions, and go and talk this to those who are
starving or whose strength is exhausted in forced and protracted labors,
and see what sort of a welcome you will get! In vain would you add that
their patience will not be lost . . . to future generations, that the
latter, in the long run, will reap the fruit of their ancestors’
abnegation . . . when they have succeeded in finding and applying useful
reforms; the starving would answer you that they relinquished
Christianity because it promised them a paradise only after death; you
others cannot even promise that to their descendants, and they are tired
of toiling and suffering for others; they want to enjoy the fruits of
their pains and labors, not in their posterity, but right away! —And
they are right.
If you do not want progress to be stranded, or the marvels of science to
disappear, stop opposing the claims of the disinherited; instead of
trying to prop up unhealthy and ruinous institutions, help us to clear
the ground that no obstacle may irritate the popular wave, or seek to
arrest it with stupid and unjust prejudice when it rushes to the assault
of institutions which oppose it. Instead of ranging himself on the side
of the defenders of the past, let whosoever thinks and really wants to
work for the development of the human mind, array himself on the side of
those who only ask to profit by their share of the happiness and light
which they have helped to produce. Leave those who unjustly desire to
monopolize all these joint products, the fruits of solidarity, to
themselves; let these representatives of the past cling desperately to
their stolen prerogatives, which evolution at every step shows to be
unjust. Though you cannot thus avoid the cataclysm which their blind
obstinacy makes inevitable, you may help to save from wreck those
conquests of science which humanity could not, indeed, lose, without
great damage. But know this: there are people who are suffering, dying
of poverty, who can develop neither their bodies nor their minds, from
whom all that which you fear may disappear has already been taken away;
they are tired of being despoiled of it, they want to possess it also.
Help them to get it; it will only be justice. This is the sole means of
helping to preserve it. If you do not do this, blame nobody but
yourselves and your own timorousness for the disasters which may follow
the victory of the masses, if disasters there be.
Finally, as a last objection, we are told that, in spite of all,
progress asserts itself; that the average level of the worker has been
raised, that his intelligence has grown, his situation improved, his
requirements have increased and found wherewith to be satisfied; that
the law itself has evolved; the penal code gradually assuming a
character plainly conformable to general utility. We shall review all
these claims, and try to sift out what is really true in them.
It is evident that the moral level of the worker has been raised; his
wants have increased with the facilities for satisfying them; nowadays
he eats meat and drinks wine at every meal, which he did not do barely
fifty years ago. But it must also be remembered that this depends more
than anything else on his power of production having likewise increased
enormously. It is nothing astonishing then if, expending more energy, he
requires more nutritive aliment to restore it. Fifty years ago the
workman wore a blouse for his Sunday dress and dined on vegetables and
cheese, thinking he had broken the record of feasting when on a Monday,
at the barrier, (fortifications about’ Paris, used as a rendez-vous for
pleasure parties), he had eaten a rabbit and drunk several bottles of
wine; that lasted for a whole week and was naturally not repeated every
Monday. But on the other hand while in the workshop, he was not
harnessed to a machine which forced him to follow its accelerated
movements. The greater part of all work being done by hand, he went on
in his old-fashioned way, producing what he could; the employer was
frequently his workmen’s chum, spending his holidays with them, asking
no more of them than to give a stronger pull when he needed to deliver
the work on time, and letting them go on comfortably the rest of the
while. Today the workingman is no longer anything but a machine, utterly
unacquainted with his exploiters most of the time; in this direction,
therefore, there has been a moral loss.
His needs have grown,—that is sure,; he wants a relative luxury which he
formerly did without,—that is evident. But this results, as we have
already seen, from the increase in the expenditure of his energies on
the one hand, and on the other, from his intellectual development;
whence it comes that though the relations between himself, and his
exploiters rank him beneath them, he acquires a greater consciousness of
his own worth and personal dignity. This luxury, these wants, tie knows
to be legitimate, for he has earned them.
Nor will any one dare maintain that this increase in expenditures is
superfluous on the part of the worker; no one will dare contest his
right to partake of the wealth he has helped to create. Nobody but the
economists of the old school are still stupid enough to charge him with
improvidence, or have the effrontery to preach economy to those who can
satisfy only the fewest of their desires. It would be still more out of
place to reproach the worker with the new wants he has created for
himself, since at the present . moment he pays for them with the
severest privations, and since that sort of prosperity—altogether
relative—which he enjoyed during the period of the development of
industry, is now barely maintained by a very limited number of the
privileged employes of each corporation, while the great mass are again
forced to live on wages which, in consequence of periods of enforced
idleness, have been reduced to the same rate as fifty years ago.
While the needs of the workers have doubled, the means of production
have been multiplied ten-fold; the increase in wages and the reduction
in the price of products would have enabled them to satisfy this
increase of needs; but the capitalists alone have benefited most
definitely and extensively by the excess of production, and today the
worker with his new needs and the impossibility of satisfying them, on
account of the multiplicity of his periods of enforced idleness, is more
miserable than before; for over and above his misery he is conscious of
not having deserved it, knowing that he alone is the producer of all
which is consumed or possessed. What he also knows, is that if the
stores are crammed with products, reducing him to idleness, it is
because he and his are forced to deprive themselves and cannot consume
as they wish. He knows that what creates his exploiters’ wealth creates
poverty for him. Had he been allowed to consume at will, and had he not
been driven to produce, the stores would not be crammed, there would be
no periods of enforced idleness while he and his family are starving.
This is what every worker must say to himself, who reflects, compares
the results obtained and reasons upon the facts unfolded during his
existence. Yes, the worker has developed; yes, he has seen the
outflowering of progress, which vanishes when he seeks to grasp it; and
the acuteness of his sensations has come to make him suffer today from
what would scarcely have touched him formerly. And here again
experience, far from making him hope for a gradual improvement, reveals
to him an ever growing poverty, its increase becoming heavier and
heavier, and always more debasing. Far from fearing an abrupt
transformation, he who reflects will seek with all his might to hasten
it.
There remains the alleged amelioration of the laws, their raison d’etre
conforming more and more to the general welfare rendering them
protectors of public utility. And this again is an illusion, for the
best laws are by their very nature falsified in practice, distorted from
their purpose in the application. The penal code is always just as
severe, weighs with equal vexation upon the poor, while remaining
equally indulgent, equally benevolent to the privileged. The law is
always just as ferocious towards him who steals a rabbit from his
neighbor, but it lets the bankers who operate with millions “work” at
their ease; the stock-jobbers of the bourse, the lottery swindlers of
the “General Union,” the Panama sharks, the “Mary-Renauds,” the “Mace
Bernauds,” the founders of pepper mines and sugarloaf quarries, may
catch suckers in perfect security; if some magistrate should venture to
poke his nose into their affairs and ask for explanations, instead of
having them brought before him between two constables, like vulgar
Anarchists, he very humbly goes to them, taking good care to cut short
his indiscretion, which he himself recognizes to be out of place. He is
ready, however, to get even with the first wretch who may have helped
himself to a meal without paying for it, because he had no cash.
All are equal before the law: that is understood. But let a drunkard
make some slight resistance to the “cop” that is maltreating him, let
him merely curse at him, and he will be sentenced for “resisting an
officer in discharge of his duty;” let him complain that he has been
robbed of his tobacco by some of these brutes who have left him
half-dead on the station-house plank and he will have a narrow escape if
they do not get him sentenced for “using violence” against them. It is
notorious among those who frequent police courts that every person who
is tried for “outrages” or “resistance” against the police, is always
advised by his lawyer not to deny the accusation, even though false, but
merely to throw himself on the mercy of the court. The maximum penalty
is always given to those who are bold enough to contradict the
conclusions of the magistrate, or the testimony of the police. The law
is a fine thing! It is equitable! This is true in the sense that it may
serve, in case the power changes hands, to strike tomorrow those who use
it today.
Finally, if every branch of human knowledge be reviewed, it will be seen
that all our aspirations are hindered by the present social
organization; that the mass is always oppressed for the benefit of a
small minority which takes more from the collectivity than it gives
back. The fears set forth concerning the disappearance of certain things
now existing in the advent of the revolution, relate only to things of
whose nature the masses may have, can have, no knowledge, while as to
positive facts, it is amply proven that they are bound to gain by a
social transformation. Let us laugh at these tremblers, and fear not to
redouble our blows against a society which can no longer defend itself
save by the help of sophisms and lies.
“And what then?” ask many of our opponents, after we have shown the evil
effects of the vicious social organization which governs us, and made
them understand that no reform is possible under the present regime;
that by the very nature of existing institutions the best of them are
bound to react against their original purpose and become a further
aggravation to the miseries of the exploited; that those which might
indeed effect a change in the lot of the worker cannot do so save on
condition of attacking the aforesaid institutions; and that since such
are rejected by the governing classes, it would require a revolution to
realize them. Now, it is this revolution which frightens most people;
the general overtoppling of things it would occasion makes them recoil
before the remedy even after recognizing the evil. “Yes,” say they,
“perhaps you are right; it is true society is badly constituted; some
change must take place. The Revolution!—Maybe—I cannot say—but
afterwards, what then?”—Afterwards, we reply, there will be full liberty
for individuals, the possibility for all to satisfy their physical,
moral, and intellectual needs. Authority and property being abolished,
society being no longer based, as now, upon the antagonism of interests,
but, on the contrary, upon the strictest solidarity, people, being sure
of the morrow and no longer having to hoard up provision against the
future, will cease to regard each other as enemies ready to devour each
other for the sake of getting a mouthful of bread or taking another’s
job in some exploiter’s sweatshop. The causes of struggle and animosity
being destroyed, social harmony will reestablish itself. Some
competition between the divers groups may indeed arise, some emulation
in attaining what is best, the ideal aim which will always expand in
proportion as people find it easier to satisfy their aspirations; but
this competition must be but brief, since neither mercantile,
proprietary, nor governmental interest will stand in the way, and those
competitors who are behindhand will have every facility for assimilating
the progress made by their happier competitors.
What creates poverty today is the congestion of products, which choking
up the warehouses occasions enforced idleness and hunger among those who
cannot find work until the said products have been distributed. This
alone shows the abnormal state of our present society. In that society
for which we are striving, the more abundant the products the more
easily will harmony among people be established, since they will no
longer be under the necessity of measuring the means of existence. The
quicker the production, the faster the perfection of mechanical
appliances proceeded, the more rapidly would the amount of productive
labor incumbent upon each be reduced, the sooner would it become what it
really ought to be, a mere gymnastic exercise requisite for the health
of the muscles. In a normally constituted society, labor would lose the
character of toil and suffering which it has acquired through its
intensity, in these our days of exploitation. It would no longer be
anything more than a diversion in the midst of all the other employments
in which people would engage merely for their own pleasure just as they
do in their studies, as expressions of the needs of their temperaments,
undertaken under penalty of otherwise being gradually transformed into
mere digestive sacks, which the bourgeoisie would soon become if their
sway could be firmly secured; which a certain species of ant has already
become, it being incapable of feeding itself, and starving to death when
there are no slaves about to give it food. [20] “Yes,” say our opponents
again, “what you want is very good; it is certainly the highest ideal
which humanity could attain; but there is no way at all of telling that
it would get along so nicely as you imagine,—that the strong would not
want to impose their will upon the weak, or that there would not be lazy
ones seeking to live at the expense of those who work. If no bounds be
set to restrain the masses, who shall say whether instead of being a
step in advance this revolution will not be a retrogression? If you
should be conquered, would it not retard the movement for twenty,
thirty, fifty years, and perhaps more? If you conquer, will you be able
to prevent private revenge? Who knows whether you may not be ‘snowed
under’ by the masses? From one end to the other there will be an
unloosing of bestial passions,—violence, savagery, and all the horrors
of mankind returning to animality.”
To this we reply that with the economic crisis constantly accentuating,
involuntary idleness becoming more and more frequent, the difficulties
of getting a living more and more pronounced every day, and political
entanglements more aggravated, keeping relative pace with the increase
of folly on the part of those who hold “the reins of government,” we are
marching steadily towards this revolution, which will be brought about
by the force of circumstances, which nothing can prevent, and concerning
which, therefore, there is but one thing to do, viz., to be ready to
take part in it in order to turn it to the profit of the principles we
champion. But this fear of the unknown is so strong, so tenacious, that
after having admitted the logic of all our objections and agreed to the
truth of all our deductions, our opponent begins again: “Yes, that is
all true; but would it not be better to act prudently? Progress advances
by slow degrees; brutal action should be avoided; we might perhaps
succeed at last in getting the bourgeoisie to make concessions!”
Assuredly if we had to deal only with insincere people that contradict
for pure love of contradiction, because they are determined not to be
convinced, the proper thing to do would be to quit the discussion, turn
our backs, and give them Cambronne’s answer. [21] Unfortunately the most
sincere people in the world, affected by their surroundings, education,
and habituation to authority, likewise believe that everything is lost
when they see it disappear from their horizon; and having no further
answer to make, regularly come back, without perceiving it, to their
first argument, unable to imagine a society without laws, judges, or
policemen, wherein people should live side by side, mutually aiding each
other instead of leaping at each other’s throats. What can we say to
them? They want proofs that society will go on as we foresee. We may
draw conclusions from the logic of events, form a comparison of them
through the arguments we may gather from the analysis thereof. But
palpable proofs! Experiment alone can give them to us, and these
experiments can only be made by commencing with the overthrow of
existing society!
But one thing is left for us to say to them: We have shown you that the
present society begets poverty, creates famine, entails the ignorance of
an entire class,—the most numerous at that,—prevents the development of
new generations by bequeathing to them a heritage of prejudices and lies
which it preserves alive. We have shown you that its organization tends
to insure the exploitation of the mass for the benefit of a privileged
minority. We have shown you that its evil functioning, together with the
development of new aspirations in the breasts of I he workers, is
leading us to a revolution. What more do you want us to say?—If we have
got to fight, let it at least be for the realization of what seems just
and best to us!
Shall we be conquerors or conquered? Who can foresee? If we waited to be
sure of the victory before demanding our rights, we might wait centuries
for our emancipation. Moreover we do not dictate circumstances; much
oftener they sweep us along; the most we can do is to foresee them that
we may not be submerged in the flood. Once in the melee the duty of the
Anarchists will be to exert all the energy of which they are capable
towards carrying the masses along with them.—That there may be acts of
private vengeance in the coming revolution, massacres, deeds of
savagery, is very likely. Not only can nobody prevent it, but nobody
ought to prevent it. If the propagandists are outdone by the crowd, so
much the better. Let them shoot everybody who would turn the revolution
into sentimentality! For if they suffered reactionary measures in order
to save a few victims, they might also permit such as would stem the
revolutionary outburst for the purpose of preventing an attack upon
those institutions which must disappear, causing it to spare what ought
to be destroyed. The struggle once begun sentimentality will be out of
place; the masses should ignore all phrase-makers, and pitilessly crush
everything which would stand in the way. All that we can do is to
declare, from now on, that the doing away with individuals can be of but
small moment to the workers; that it is institutions they must attack;
that it is these that must be sapped, overthrown, destroyed, and no
vestige of them allowed to remain, thus preventing any reconstruction of
them under other names. Capitalistic society is strong only by virtue of
its institutions and because it has succeeded in making the workers
believe that they are interested in the preservation of these
institutions; because it has succeeded partly through their own will,
partly by force, in making them its defenders. Reduced to their own
unaided strength the capitalistic class could not resist the revolution;
and how many of them would have the slightest will to do so?
Individuals, therefore, are not dangerous, taken individually. But if,
on the day of the revolution, there be some who are obstacles, let them
be swept away by the tempest! If private revenge be indulged in, so much
the worse for those who have served to resurrect such vengeance! Their
evil deeds must have been many for hatred of their personality to be
unappeased by the destruction of their caste and the abolition of their
privileges; so much the worse for those who stay behind to defend them!
The masses never go too far; it is only the leaders who think so,
because they shrink from moral or practical responsibility. No silly
sentimentalism, even though the fury of the masses should miscarry and
break upon more or less innocent heads! To silence our pity we have only
to recall the thousands of victims which the present social Minotaur
devours daily for the sake of the all-powerful belly of the bourgeoisie.
And if some of these people get strung up to lampposts, knocked on the
head at some street-corner, or drowned in the river, they will only reap
the harvest that their class has sown. So much the worse for them!
Whoever is not with the people is against them.
For us workers the situation is clear: On one side we have the existing
society with its cortege of poverty, uncertainty for the morrow,
privations and sufferings without hope of allayment, —a society in which
we are stifled, in which our brains sicken for want of light, in which
we must crush down deep into the obscurity of our being all our
sentiments of beauty, goodness, justice, and love;—on the other side,
the future!—An ideal of liberty, happiness, intellectual and physical
satisfaction, the complete unfolding of our individuality! Our choice is
made. Whatever the future revolution may bring forth, whatever happens
to us, it cannot be for us worse than our present condition. We have
nothing to lose and everything to gain by a change. Society fetters us;
well, let us overthrow it. So much the worse for those who get crushed
in the fall; it will be because they tried to shelter themselves under
its walls, or to cling to its rotten supports. They should have been on
the side of the abolitionists.
“Your ideas are all right in theory, but they are riot practicable; men
need some tangible power to govern them and force them to respect the.
social contract.” Such is the objection urged against us as a last
resort by advocates of the present social order, when after thorough
discussion we have answered their arguments and demonstrated that the
worker can hope for no sensible improvement of his lot while the
machinery of the present social system is preserved. “Your ideas are all
right, but they are not practicable; man is not yet sufficiently
developed to live in such an ideal state. In order to put them into
practice human beings must first have become perfect,” is added by many
other persons, undoubtedly sincere, but who misled by education and
habit, see only the difficulties and are not yet sufficiently convinced
of the principles to work for their realization. And in addition to
these avowed adversaries and these indifferentists who may become
friends, there rises up a third category of persons more dangerous than
declared opponents. These latter pretend to be animated with enthusiasm
for our ideas; they loudly assert that nothing can be greater, that the
present organization is worthless and must vanish before the new idea,
that it is the goal towards which humanity is tending, etc. “But,” they
add, “it is not immediately practicable; humanity must be prepared for
it, brought to understand this happy condition;” and under this pretext
of being practical they seek to revive those reform projects which we
have just shown to be illusory. They perpetuate existing prejudices by
flattering those to whom they speak, and seek personally to profit as
much as possible from the present situation; before long their ideal
vanishes to make room for the instinct towards the preservation of the
existing order of things. Unfortunately it is but too true that those
ideas which are the end and aim of our aspirations are not immediately
realizable. The number of persons who have understood them is yet too
small a minority to exercise any immediate influence upon events or the
course of our social organization. But is that any reason why we should
not work for their realization? If one is convinced of the justice of
his principles why not try to put them in practice? If everybody were to
say, “It is not possible,” and passively accept the yoke of the present
society, it is plain that the capitalistic order of things would still
have many centuries to run.
If the first thinkers who fought the Church and the monarchy on behalf
of natural ideas and independence; who faced the executioner and the
scaffold in order to proclaim these, had said “it is not possible,”
while dreaming of their ideal, we should, today, still be bound by
mystical conceptions and seignorial rights. It is because there have
always been people who were not “practical,” but singularly convinced of
a truth and seeking to disseminate it, wherever they could, with all
their might, that man, today, begins to be familiar with his own origin,
and to get rid of his superstitions concerning divine and human
authority. In one of the chapters of his really valuable book, “Outlines
of a Morality without Authority or Duty,” M. Guyau develops this
admirable idea: “He who does not act as he thinks, thinks incompletely.”
Nothing can be truer. When one is thoroughly convinced of an idea, it is
impossible for him, feeling it, not to seek to spread it and endeavor to
realize it. How often do disputes arise between friends over trivial
matters, in which each maintains his own view without any other motive
than the conviction that he is in the right of the matter. Yet to please
one’s friend, or even to avoid wounding him, it would cost nothing to
let him speak his mind without either approving or disapproving; since
the thing he maintains is of no real importance to our convictions, why
not let him have his way? And this we often do in a conversation
concerning things about which we have no fixed opinion; but directly
something about which we have an opinion comes up, presto! we take sides
and dispute with our best friend in defense of our own opinion. Now, if
people act this way about trifles, how much stronger must be the impulse
received when it is a question of opinions which have to do with the
future of all humanity, the enfranchisement of our class, our posterity,
and ourselves!
Truly we understand that not every one can bring the same amount of
resistance to bear in the struggle, the same degree of energy in
combating existing institutions. Temperaments and characters are not all
moulded alike. The difficulties are so great, poverty so severe,
persecutions so multiplied, that we comprehend how there must be degrees
in efforts towards the propaganda of what is admitted to be true and
just. But acts are always in proportion to the impulse received and the
intensity of one’s faith in his beliefs. Very often one may be deterred
by considerations of one’s family, one’s relations, or the necessities
of earning one’s daily bread; but whatever be the force of these
considerations, if one is really a man they will never go so far as to
make him swallow all the infamies that spread out before his eyes. There
comes a time when one sends considerations to the devil, remembering
that he is a man and that he had dreamed of something better than what
he has been compelled to submit to. —He who is incapable of making any
sacrifice for the principles he claims to profess, does not really
believe in them at all; he decorates himself with the label merely for
show, because at some time it looked well, or because he pretends to
justify certain vices, by the help of these principles: beware of taking
him into confidence,—he will deceive you.
As to those who seek to profit by existing institutions, ostensibly for
the purpose of aiding the propaganda of new ideas, they are ambitious
knaves who flatter the future in order to enjoy the present in peace.
It is, then, quite plain that our ideas are not immediately realizable;
we do not hesitate to admit it. But they will become so through the
energy .exerted by those who will understand them. The greater the
intensity of the propaganda the nearer the hour of realization. It is
not by yielding to existing institutions that we shall do battle with
them, nor yet by hiding our light under a bushel. To fight these
institutions, to work for the advancement of new ideas we must have
energy; this energy can come from nothing but conviction. Those, then,
who already have the conviction must find their men and labor to impart
it to them.
Reforms being inapplicable, as we think we have shown, It would hence be
conscious deception to recommend them to the workers. Furthermore we
know that the force of circumstances will infallibly drive the workers
to a revolution: crises, enforced idleness, the development of
machinery, political complications, all conspire to throw the workers
upon the street, and compel them to revolt in order to affirm their
right to existence. Now, since the revolution is inevitable and all
reforms illusory, nothing remains but to prepare for the struggle; that
is what we are doing by moving directly towards our object, leaving to
the ambitious the business of carving out positions and sinecures for
themselves from the misery they pretend they would assuage.
Just here, however, we anticipate an objection: “If you recognize that
your ideas are not yet ready to be put in practice,” it will be said,
“are you not preaching abnegation to the present generation for the sake
of future generations, in asking them to strive for an idea whose
immediate realization you cannot guarantee to them?” In nowise do we
preach abnegation; we merely refuse to delude ourselves as to the facts,
nor are we willing to encourage enthusiasts in deceiving themselves. We
take the “acts as they are, analyze and set them forth thus:—A class
which owns all and is unwilling to give up anything on the one side; on
the other side a class which produces all, possesses nothing, and has no
other alternative than a cowardly cringing to its exploiters, slavishly
waiting for them to throw it. a bone to gnaw, having no longer dignity,
pride, or any quality which uplifts human character, or else to revolt
and imperatively demand what is refused to all its genuflections. For
those who think only of their own personality, .those who want to enjoy
themselves at any price and no matter how, there is nothing pleasant in
the alternative. We would advise all such to yield to the exactions of
present society, to try to chip out their own little niche, not to look
where they plant their feet, not to be afraid of crushing those who
hinder them; such people have nothing in common with us. But to those
who think they can be really free only when their liberty ceases to
trammel the liberty of the weakest of their fellows; to those who cannot
be happy until they know that the pleasures in which they delight have
not cost some disinherited one his tears, to them we say that there is
no abnegation on the part of any one who recognizes that one must
struggle to be free.
We proclaim this material fact, that there can be no enfranchisement of
humanity save through the application of our principles; it rests with
humanity to decide whether it will free itself completely, at one
stroke, or whether there must forever be a privileged minority which
will profit by all its progress at the expense of those who are dying of
want while producing for others. Shall we be the ones to see the morning
shine? Will it be the present generation, or that which follows it or a
still later one? We do not know, we do not care; it will be those who
will have enough energy and courage in their breasts to want to be free,
who will find the way to obtain freedom.
Most assuredly what we have just said in the preceding chapter is
contrary to all the language of political parties, which promise
mountains and marvels, whose meanest reform is bound to bring an Edenic
period to those that shall have supported it. But we who have no
personal expectations to realize from the infatuation of the masses, we
who want them to be able to guide themselves, we do not need to seek for
means to delude them. To give more force to our thoughts, more direction
to our acts, we must see our way clearly, warding off all illusions,
freeing ourselves from every prejudice which might lead us astray. Our
ideas can only be rendered applicable through the energy exerted in
spreading and diffusing them by those who understand them. Success
depends upon the strength we shall put into the service of the
revolution; but since we cannot exert this strength immediately, since
we cannot at once pass from theory to practice, it must be admitted that
there are obstacles in the way. Were our ideas immediately realizable we
should be altogether inexcusable in not attempting the solution without
further delay. Now, whatever these difficulties may be, they are the
things we must find out in order to surmount rather than deny them. And
moreover that we do make propaganda is exactly in order to be able to
put our ideas into practice, for if they were immediately realizable,
the force of circumstances alone would suffice. We must get used to
looking at things coldly, and not persist in regarding the object of our
desires through magnifying glasses, and the thing to be dreaded through
the little end of the lorgnette. It is the truth alone that we are
seeking. If we deceive ourselves we also deceive others, and the
revolution thus brought about would have to be begun all over again.
Generally it is only when they are at the end of their arguments, that
our opponents advance the objection of the impracticability of our
ideas; and we must admit that this objection is always embarrassing,—not
in reality but in appearance; for in our present society our ideas do
indeed appear utopian. It is very hard for a person who has never looked
beyond existing arrangements to be able to understand how people could
live .without government, laws, judges, policemen, or rod of any sort,
without money or any representative of values, seeing we have so much
trouble to get along in the world now, when the laws are supposed to aim
at simplifying relations. We cannot answer this objection with facts,
because what we desire is still theory. We may instance the tendencies
which are carrying humanity along, enumerate the attempts which society
has made on a small scale; but what value can these have for the biased
mind whose aspirations never go beyond the amelioration of that which
is?
Deny the force of the objection? That would be acting like the ostrich;
the objection would still be there!—Answer with sophistry? We should be
driven into a corner from which it would be impossible to get out,
except by more sophistries. And our principles could never gain anything
by such tricks. Since we wish to elucidate our ideas, to be able to
answer every objection, we must search for all the arguments which can
be brought against us, bring them up ourselves even, in order to answer
them as best we can. But above all we must seek to be clear and exact,
and not to be afraid of the “true” truth, since it is that we are
seeking. We assert that our ideas rest upon the truth, and we must prove
it by searching for that truth anywhere and everywhere.
We are bound to admit that such a declaration is not likely to attract
the crowd nor stir up the masses; and some of our comrades may accuse us
of wanting to cast discouragement and despair among our ranks, because
we do not conceal the weak points in our theory. These reproaches can
proceed only from a remnant of the education received from political
parties. Why promise what is not in our power to keep, and as a
consequence create in advance a reaction which would turn against our
ideal? If we were a political party anxious to get into power, we might
make a lot of promises to people in order to get ourselves carried to
the top; but it is u different thing with Anarchy; we have nothing to
promise, nothing to ask, nothing to give. And when after having pointed
out the facts which demonstrate the tendency of humanity towards this
ideal, our opponents object that our ideas are impossible, nothing
remains to us but to come back to the proofs of the abuses proceeding
from all our institutions, the falsity of the bases upon which these
rest, the emptiness of these reforms by which charlatans would divert
the people’s attention, and to remind them of the alternative open to
them,—either to continue to submit to exploitation or to revolt,—at the
same time demonstrating to them that the success of this revolution will
depend upon the energy with which they “ will” the realization of what
they know to be good. This is our task: the rest depends on others, not
on us.
For our own part we are not exactly partisans of a propaganda
accomplished by means of sonorous or sentimental phrases; their effect
is to make people hope for an immediate triumph, which is impossible.
They enter the movement, all fire, imagining the end will be reached
tomorrow morning; then one by cue they disappear, and no more is heard
of them. How many have we seen join the groups during the last dozen
years who could talk of nothing but “overthrowing, like Sampson, the
pillars of the temple!” Where are they today?
Our ideal is to fulfill a less brilliant and grandiose task, but a more
lasting one. Instead of confining our efforts to capturing people
through sentiment, we seek above all to win them through logic and
reason. We certainly do not want to underrate those whose ability
consists in winning people through an appeal to feeling. To each his
task, according to his temperament and his conceptions. But for
ourselves we prefer securing conviction rather than belief. All those
who take part in the propaganda should know what difficulties await
them, that they may be ready to meet them and not be discouraged by the
first obstacle in the way. Long and arduous it stretches out before our
gaze; and before girding one’s loins for the march it would be well to
consult one’s powers of endurance; for there will be victims whose blood
will dye the rugged places and the turnings of the road, and corpses
will mark its stages. Let those whose courage is weak remain behind;
they can only be a hindrance to the advancing column.
Another very generally accepted prejudice among Anarchists is to
consider the masses as plastic dough, which may be moulded at will and
about which there is no necessity of troubling oneself. This notion
comes from the fact that, having made one step in advance of the rest,
these people consider themselves in a way as prophets, and as much more
intelligent than common mortals. “We shall make the masses do
so-and-so,” “we shall lead them at our backs,” etc. Verily a dictator
would not talk differently. This way of regarding the masses is an
inheritance from our authoritarian past. Not that we wish to deny the
influence of minorities upon the crowd; it is because we are convinced
of such influence that we are so concerned. But we think that, in the
time of revolution, the only weight the Anarchists can have with the
masses will be through action: putting our ideas in practice, preaching
by example; by this means only can the crowd be led. Yet we should be
thoroughly aware that, in spite of all, these acts will have no effect
upon the masses unless their understanding has been thoroughly prepared
by a clear and well-defined propaganda, unless they themselves stand on
their own feet, prompted by ideas previously received. Now, if we shall
succeed in disseminating our ideas, their influence will make itself
felt; and it is only on condition that we know how to explain and render
them comprehensible that we shall have any chance of sharing in the
social transformation. Hence we need not be afraid of not obtaining
followers, but rather to be on the watch for hindrance from those who
consider themselves leaders.
In times of revolution its precursors are always outdone by the masses.
Let us spread our ideas, explain them, elucidate them, remodel them if
necessary. Let us not fear to look the truth in the face. And this
propaganda, far from alienating the adherents of our cause, cannot but
help to attract thereto all who thirst after justice and liberty.
THE END.
[1] We shall not cite the facts in question here, having no intention of
making a resume of them and more particularly desiring to explain how we
understand the family of the future. Those readers who wish to study the
question more deeply may refer to the works of Letourneau: Sociology”
and “Evolution of the Family;” and to that of Elie Reclus: “Primitive
Folk,” in which they will also find references to the sources from which
these authors have drawn.
[2] Logically, the explanation of the manner of raising children in
future society as we understand it, should be inserted here; but this
question being treated in “Society on the Morrow of the Revolution,” we
refer the reader to the article: “Children in the New Society.”
[3] I do not know whether Jean Grave had seen Prof. Lombroso’s article
on the “Physiognomy of the Chicago Anarchists,” one of a aeries on
“Criminal Anthropology,” published in the Monist, Chicago, April, 1891,
wherein he admits in a foot-note that his analysis was based upon
portraits in Capt. Schaack’s book, which, as he had learned later, were
incorrect!—Translator.
[4]
G. de Molinari, “Political Evolution in the Nineteenth Century.” This
work must have appeared in book form since its publication in the
Journal des Economistes.
[5] The same, page 70.
[6] The same, page 63.
[7] The same, page 68.
[8] The same, page 68.
[9] These exploits have a worthy counterpart in the present brutal war
of the Americana againat the Filipinos.—Proofreader.
[10] Since the above was written the famous Zola trial has given a
farther demonstration of the government’s intention to make Dreyfus the
scapegoat of its Judases in high places.—Translator.
[11] In the United States army this pleasing little ceremony does not
take place at roll-call, but at “inspection,” and if anyone be sent to
the guardhouse for “clothes offenses” he is fined by the captain or
given so many days incarceration.—Translator.
[12] The hospital inspection has been abolished in the United States
army. —Translator.
[13] This officer corresponds most nearly to the sergeant of the guard
in the United States army, I believe, whose term, however, lasts only
twenty-four hours.—Translator.
[14] have here substituted United States army terms for the French
translations as being more adapted to American soldiers.—Translator.
[15] Wax plays a great role in the army. This reminds us of an officer
of a company of marines who announced to his men that there being a
surplus in the commissary the rations were to be increased from the next
day on, and it was his duty to see that they should touch them up
with—wax and enamel!
[16] The sort of paralysis here alluded to is especially prevalent in
France, and is technically called Landry’s Paralysis. The patient loses
control of the urinary organs.—Translator.
[17] It is to be regretted that the author did not give his authority
for this large estimate. Prof. Cope the American paleontologist once
said in my bearing that the approximate time of man’s presence on earth,
so far as known, was thirty-two thousand years.—Translator.
[18] The adage smacks somewhat of the nation of cooks; in oar ruder
Anglo-Saxon, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”—Translator.
[19] The author’s manner of rejecting the Jesuit doctrine reminds me of
the reply of Justus Schwab to the query, “Does the end justify the
means?” He answered: “That depends on the end.”—Translator.
[20] See Chas. Letourneau’a “Origin of Property.”
[21] Readers of Victor Hugo will recollect Cambronne’s answer at
Waterloo; those who do not know “Les Miserables” may be informed that
Anthony Comstock would not allow me to print it.—Translator.