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Title: Law and Authority Author: PĂ«tr Kropotkin Date: 1886 Language: en Topics: law, authority, the state, Source: Retrieved on March 1st, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/lawauthority.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]]. Proofread version retrieved on October 4th, 2019, from [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=309. Notes: Printed by the New Temple Press, Norbury Crescent, Norburt, S.W.
“When ignorance reigns in society and disorder in the minds of men, laws
are multiplied, legislation is expected to do everything, and each fresh
law being a fresh miscalculation, men are continually led to demand from
it what can proceed only from themselves, from their own education and
their own morality.” It is no revolutionist who says this, nor even a
reformer. It is the jurist, [Joseph] Dallois, author of the Collection
of French law known as “Repertoire de la Legislation.” And yet, though
these lines were written by a man who was himself a maker and admirer of
law, they perfectly represent the abnormal condition of our society.
In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil.
Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a
law to alter it. If the road between two villages is impassable, the
peasant says: — “There should be a law about parish roads.” If a
park-keeper takes advantage of the want of spirit in those who follow
him with servile observance and insults one of them, the insulted man
says: — “There should be a law to enjoin more politeness upon
park-keepers.” If there is stagnation in agriculture or commerce, the
husbandman, cattle-breeder, or corn speculator argues, “It is protective
legislation that we require.” Down to the old clothesman there is not
one who does not demand a law to protect his own little trade. If the
employer lowers wages or increases the hours of labour, the politician
in embryo exclaims, “We must have a law to put all that to rights,”
instead of telling the workers that there are other, and much more
effectual means of settling these things straight; namely, recovering
from the employer the wealth of which he has been despoiling the workmen
for generations. In short, a law everywhere and for everything! A law
about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a
stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human
indolence and cowardice.
We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in
us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority;
we are so perverted by this existence under the rule of a law, which
regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our
development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things
continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for
ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is
possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of Law, elaborated by a
representative government and administered by a handful of rulers; and
even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thraldom,
its first care had been to reconstitute it immediately. “The Year I. of
Liberty” has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men
put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of Law and
Authority.
Indeed, for some thousands of years, those who govern us have done
nothing but ring the changes upon “Respect for law, obedience to
authority.” This is the moral atmosphere in which parents bring up their
children, and school only serves to confirm the impression. Cleverly
assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to
prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral
goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same
divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the
law, and defends it against rebels.
Later, when we enter upon public life, society and literature,
impressing us day by day and hour by hour, as the water-drop hollows the
stone, continue to inculcate the same prejudice. Books of history, of
political science, of social economy, are stuffed with this respect for
law; even the physical sciences have been pressed into the service by
introducing artificial modes of expression, borrowed from theology and
arbitrary power, into knowledge which is purely the result of
observation. Thus our intelligence is successfully befogged, and always
to maintain our respect for law. The same work is done by newspapers.
They have not an article which does not preach respect for law, even
where the third page proves every day to demonstrate the imbecility of
that law, and shows how it is dragged through every variety of mud and
filth by those charged with its administration. Servility before the law
has become a virtue, and I doubt if there was ever even a revolutionist
who did not begin in his youth as the defender of law against what are
generally called “abuses,” although these last are inevitable
consequences of the law itself.
Art pipes in unison with would-be science. The hero of the sculptor, the
painter, the musician, shields Law beneath his buckler, and with
flashing eyes and distended nostrils stands ever ready to strike down
the man who would lay hands upon her. Temples are raised to her;
revolutionists themselves hesitate to touch the high priests consecrated
to her service, and when revolution is about to sweep away some ancient
institution, it is still by law that it endeavours to sanctify the deed.
The confused mass of rules of conduct called Law, which has been
bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken
the place of those stone monsters before whom human victims used to be
immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they
should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.
This new worship has been established with especial success since the
rise to supreme power of the middle class — since the great French
Revolution. Under the ancien regime, men spoke little of laws; unless,
indeed, it were, with Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, to oppose them
to royal caprice; obedience to the good pleasure of the king and his
lackeys was compulsory on pain of hanging or imprisonment. But during
and after the revolutions when the lawyers rose to power, they did their
best to strengthen the principle upon which their ascendancy depended.
The middle class at once accepted as a dyke to dam up the popular
torrent. The priestly crew hastened to sanctify it, to save their bark
from foundering amid the breakers. Finally the people received it as an
improvement upon the arbitrary authority and violence of the past.
To understand this, we must transport ourselves in imagination into the
eighteenth century. Our hearts must have ached at the story of the
atrocities committed by the all-powerful nobles of that time upon the
men and women of the people, before we can understand what must have
been the magic influence upon the peasant’s mind of the words, “Equality
before the law, obedience to the law without distinction of birth or
fortune.” He, who until then, had been treated more cruelly than a
beast, he who had never had any rights, he who had never obtained
justice against the most revolting actions on the part of a noble,
unless in revenge he killed him and was hanged — he saw himself
recognized by this maxim, at least in theory, at least with regard to
his personal rights, as the equal of his lord. Whatever this law might
be, it promised to affect lord and peasant alike; it proclaimed the
equality of rich and poor before the judge. The promise was a lie, and
to-day we know it; but at that period it was an advance, a homage to
justice, as hypocrisy is a homage rendered to truth. This is the reason
that when the saviours of the menaced middle class (the Robespierres and
the Dantons) took their stand upon the writings of the Rousseaus and the
Voltaires, and proclaimed “respect for law, the same for every man,” the
people accepted the compromise; for their revolutionary impetus had
already spent its force in the contest with a foe whose ranks drew
closer day by day, they bowed their neck beneath the yoke of law to save
themselves from the arbitrary power of their lords.
The Middle Class has ever since continued to make the most of this
maxim, which with another principle, that of representative government,
sums up the whole philosophy of the bourgeois age, the XIX century. It
has preached this doctrine in its schools, it has propagated it in its
writings, it has moulded its art and science to the same purpose, it has
thrust its beliefs into every hole and corner — like a pious
Englishwoman, who slips tracts under the door — and it has done all this
so successfully that to-day we behold the issue in the detestable fact,
that, at the very moment when the spirit of turbulent criticism is
re-awakening, men who long for freedom begin the attempt to obtain it by
entreating their masters to be kind enough to protect them by modifying
the laws which these masters themselves have created!
But times and tempers are changed since a hundred years ago. Rebels are
everywhere to be found, who no longer wish to obey the law without
knowing whence it comes, what are its uses, and whither arises the
obligation to submit to it, and the reverence with which it is
encompassed. The rebels of our day are criticizing the very foundations
of Society, which have hitherto been held sacred, and first and foremost
amongst them that fetish, law. Just for this reason the upheaval which
is at hand is no mere insurrection, it is a Revolution.
The critics analyse the sources of law, and find there either a god,
product of the terrors of the savages, and stupid, paltry and malicious
as the priests who vouch for its supernatural origin, or else,
bloodshed, conquest by fire and sword. They study the characteristics of
law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human
race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to
crystallise what should be modified and developed day by day. They ask
how law has been maintained, and in its service they see the atrocities
of Byzantinism, the cruelties of the Inquisition, the tortures of the
Middle Ages, living flesh torn by the lash of the executioner, chains,
clubs, axes, the gloomy dungeons of prisons, agony, curses and tears. In
our own days they see, as before, the axe, the cord, the rifle, the
prison; on the one hand, the brutalised prisoner, reduced to the
condition of a caged beast by the debasement of his whole moral being,
and on the other hand, the judge, stripped of every feeling which does
honour to human nature, living like a visionary in a world of legal
fictions, reveling in the infliction of imprisonment and death, without
even suspecting, in the cold malignity of his madness, the abyss of
degradation into which he has himself fallen before the eyes of those
whom he condemns.
They see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their
laws are about; to-day voting a law on the sanitation of towns, without
the faintest notion of hygiene, to-morrow making regulations for the
armament of troops, without so much as understanding a gun; making laws
about teaching and education without ever having given a lesson of any
sort, or even an honest education to their own children; legislating in
all directions, but never forgetting the penalties to be meted out to
ragamuffins, the prison and the galleys, which are to be the portion of
men a thousand times less immoral than these legislators themselves.
Finally, they see the gaoler on the way to lose all human feeling, the
detective trained as a blood-hound, the police spy despising himself;
“informing,” metamorphosed into a virtue; corruption, erected into a
system; all the vices, all the evil qualities of mankind countenanced
and cultivated to insure the triumph of law.
All this we see, and, therefore, instead of inanely repeating the old
formula, “Respect the law,” we say, “Despise law and all its
attributes!” In place of the cowardly phrase, “Obey the law,” our cry is
“Revolt against all laws!”
Only compare the misdeeds accomplished in the name of each law, with the
good it has been able to effect, and weigh carefully both good and evil,
and you will see if we are right.
Relatively speaking, law is a product of modern times. For ages and ages
mankind lived without any written law, even that graved in symbols upon
the entrance stones of a temple. During that period, human relations
were simply regulated by customs, habits and usages, made sacred by
constant repetition, and acquired by each person in childhood, exactly
as he learned how to obtain his food by hunting, cattle-rearing, or
agriculture.
All human societies have passed through this primitive phase, and to
this day a large proportion of mankind have no written law. Every tribe
has its own manners and customs; customary law, as the jurists say. It
has social habits, and that suffices to maintain cordial relations
between the inhabitants of the village, the members of the tribe or
community. Even amongst ourselves — the “civilized” nations — when we
leave large towns, and go into the country, we see that there the mutual
relations of the inhabitants are still regulated according to ancient
and generally accepted customs, and not according to the written law of
the legislators. The peasants of Russia, Italy and Spain, and even of a
large part of France and England, have no conception of written law. It
only meddles with their lives to regulate their relations with the
State. As to relations between themselves, though these are sometimes
very complex, they are simply regulated according to ancient custom.
Formerly, this was the case with mankind in general.
Two distinctly marked currents of custom are revealed by analysis of the
usages of primitive people.
As man does not live in a solitary state, habits and feelings develop
within him which are useful for the preservation of society and the
propagation of the race. Without social feelings and usages, life in
common would have been absolutely impossible. It is not law which has
established them; they are anterior to all law. Neither is it religion
which has ordained them; they are anterior to all religions. They are
found amongst all animals living in society. They are spontaneously
developed by the very nature of things, like those habits in animals
which men call instinct. They spring from a process of evolution, which
is useful, and, indeed, necessary, to keep society together in the
struggle it is forced to maintain for existence. Savages end by no
longer eating one another, because they find it in the long run more
advantageous to devote themselves to some sort of cultivation, than to
enjoy the pleasure of feasting upon the flesh of an aged relative once a
year. Many travelers have depicted the manners of absolutely independent
tribes, where laws and chiefs are unknown, but where the members of the
tribe have given up stabbing one another in every dispute, because the
habit of living in society has ended by developing certain feelings of
fraternity and oneness of interest, and they prefer appealing to a third
person to settle their differences. The hospitality of primitive
peoples, respect for human life, the sense of reciprocal obligation,
compassion for the weak, courage, extending even to the sacrifice of
self for others, which is first learnt for the sake of children and
friends, and later, for that of members of the same community — all
these qualities are developed in man anterior to all law, independently
of all religion, as in the case of the social animals. Such feelings and
practices are the inevitable results of social life. Without being, as
say priests and metaphysicians, inherent in man, such qualities are the
consequence of life in common.
But side by side with these customs, necessary to the life of societies
and the preservation of the race, other desires, other passions, and
therefore other habits and customs, are evolved in human association.
The desire to dominate others and impose one’s own will upon them; the
desire to seize upon the products of the labour of a neighbouring tribe;
the desire to surround oneself with comforts without producing anything,
whilst slaves provide their master with the means of procuring every
sort of pleasure and luxury — these selfish, personal desires give rise
to another current of habits and customs. The priest and the warrior,
the charlatan who makes a profit out of superstition, and after freeing
himself from the fear of the devil, cultivates it in others; and the
bully, who procures the invasion and pillage of his neighbours, that he
may return laden with booty, and followed by slaves; these two, hand in
hand, have succeeded in imposing upon primitive society customs
advantageous to both of them, but tending to perpetuate their domination
of the masses. Profiting by the indolence, the fears, the inertia of the
crowd, and thanks to the continual repetition of the same acts, they
have permanently established customs which have become a solid basis for
their own domination.
For this purpose, they would have made use, in the first place, of that
tendency to run in a groove, so highly developed in mankind. In children
and all savages it attains striking proportions, and it may also be
observed in animals. Man, when he is at all superstitious, is always
afraid to introduce any sort of change into existing conditions; he
generally venerates what is ancient. “Our fathers did so and so; they
got on pretty well; they brought you up; they were not unhappy; do the
same!” the old say to the young, every time the latter wish to alter
things. The unknown frightens them, they prefer to cling to the past,
even when that past represents poverty, oppression and slavery. It may
even be said that the more miserable a man is, the more he dreads every
sort of change, lest it may make him more wretched still. Some ray of
hope, a few scraps of comfort, must penetrate his gloomy abode before he
can begin to desire better things, to criticise the old ways of living,
and prepare to imperil them for the sake of bringing about a change. So
long as he is not imbued with hope, so long as he is not freed from the
tutelage of those who utilise his superstition and his fears, he prefers
remaining in his former position. If the young desire any change, the
old raise a cry of alarm against the innovators. Some savages would
rather die than transgress the customs of their country, because they
have been told from childhood that the least infraction of established
routine would bring ill-luck, and ruin the whole tribe. Even in the
present day, what numbers of politicians, economists, and would-be
revolutionists act under the same impression, and cling to a vanishing
past. How many care only to seek for precedents. How many fiery
innovators are mere copyists of bygone revolutions.
The spirit of routine, originating in superstition, indolence, and
cowardice, has in all times been the mainstay of oppression. In
primitive human societies, it was cleverly turned to account by priests
and military chiefs. They perpetuated customs useful only to themselves,
and succeeded in imposing them on the whole tribe. So long as this
conservative spirit could be exploited so as to assure the chief in his
encroachments upon individual liberty, so long as the only inequalities
between men were the work of nature, and these were not increased a
hundred-fold by the concentration of power and wealth, there was no need
for law, and the formidable paraphernalia of tribunals and
ever-augmenting penalties to enforce it.
But as society became more and more divided into two hostile classes,
one seeking to establish its domination, the other struggling to escape,
the strife began. Now the conqueror was in a hurry to secure the results
of his actions in a permanent form, he tried to place them beyond
question, to make them holy and venerable by every means in his power.
Law made its appearance under the sanction of the priest, and the
warrior’s club was placed at its service. Its office was to render
immutable such customs as were to the advantage of the dominant
minority. Military authority undertook to ensure obedience. This new
function was a fresh guarantee to the power of the warrior; now he had
not only mere brute force at his service; he was the defender of law.
If law, however, presented nothing but a collection of prescriptions
serviceable to rulers, it would find some difficulty in insuring
acceptance and obedience. Well, the legislators confounded in one code
the two currents of custom, of which we have just been speaking, the
maxims which represent principles of morality and social union wrought
out as a result of life in common, and the mandates, which are meant to
ensure external existence to inequality. Customs, absolutely essential
to the very being of society, are, in the code, cleverly intermingled
with usages imposed by the ruling caste, and both claim equal respect
from the word. “Do not kill,” says the code, and hastens to add, “And
pay tithes to the priest.” “Do not steal,” says the code, and
immediately after, “He who refuses to pay taxes, shall have his hand
struck off.”
Such was law; and it has maintained its two-fold character to this day.
Its origin is the desire of the ruling class to give permanence to
customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage. Its character is
the skilful commingling of customs useful to society, customs which have
no need of law to insure respect, with other customs useful only to
rulers, injurious to the mass of the people, and maintained only by the
fear of punishment.
Like individual capital, which was born of fraud and violence, and
developed under the auspices of authority, law has no title to the
respect of men. Born of violence and superstition, and established in
the interests of consumer, priest and rich exploiter, it must be utterly
destroyed on the day when the people desire to break their chains.
We shall be still better convinced of this when, in the next chapter, we
have analysed the ulterior development of laws under the auspices of
religion, authority and the existing parliamentary system.
We have seen in the previous chapter how law originated in established
usage and custom, and how, from the beginning it has represented a
skilful mixture of social habits, necessary to the preservation of the
human race, with other customs, imposed by those who used popular
superstition, as well as the right of the strongest for their own
advantage. This double character of law has determined its own later
development during the growth of political organisation. Whilst in the
course of ages the nucleus of social custom inscribed in law has been
subjected to but slight and gradual modifications, the other portion has
been largely developed in defections indicated by the interests of the
dominant classes, and to the injury of the classes they oppress. From
time to time these dominant classes have allowed a law to be extorted
from them which presented, or appeared to present, some guarantee for
the disinherited. But then such laws have but repealed a previous law,
made for the advantage of the ruling caste. “The best laws,” says
[Thomas Henry] Buckle, “were those which repealed the preceding ones.”
But what terrible efforts have been needed, what rivers of blood have
been spilt, every time there has been a question of the repeal of one of
these fundamental enactments serving to hold the people in fetters.
Before she could abolish the vestiges of serfdom and feudal rights, and
break up the power of the royal court, France was forced to pass through
four years of revolution and twenty years of war. Decades of conflict
are needful to repeal the least of the iniquitous laws, bequeathed us by
the past, and even then they scarcely disappear except in periods of
revolution.
The history of the genesis of capital has already been told by
Socialists many times. They have described how it was born of war and
pillage, of slavery and serfdom, of modern fraud and exploitation. They
have shown how it is nourished by the blood of the worker, and how
little by little it has conquered the whole world. The same story,
concerning the genesis and development of law has yet to be told. As
usual, the popular intelligence has stolen a march upon men of books. It
has already put together the philosophy of this history, and is busy
laying down its essential landmarks.
Law, in its quality of guarantee of the results of pillage, slavery and
exploitation, has followed the same phrases of development as capital;
twin brother and sister, they have advanced hand in hand, sustaining one
another with the suffering of mankind. In every country in Europe their
history is approximately the same. It has differed only in detail; the
main facts are alike; and to glance at the development of law in France
or Germany is to know its essential traits, its phases of development,
in most of the European nations.
In the first instance, law was a national part of contract. Such a
contract was agreed upon between the legions and people at the Champs de
Mars,[1] a relic of the same period is preserved even yet in the Field
of May of the primitive Swiss cantons despite the alterations effected
by the interference of centralising and middle-class civilisation.
It is true that this contract was not always freely accepted. Even in
those early days the rich and strong were imposing their will upon the
rest. But at all events they encountered an obstacle to their
encroachments in the mass of the people, who often made them feel their
power in return.
But as the Church on one side and the nobles on the other, succeeded in
enthralling the people, the right of law-making escaped from the hands
of the nation and passed into those of the privileged orders. Fortified
by the wealth accumulating in her coffers, the Church extended her
authority; she tampered more and more with private life, and under
pretext of saving souls, she seized upon the labour of her serfs, she
gathered taxes from every class, she increased her jurisdiction, she
multiplied penalties, and enriched herself in proportion to the number
of offences committed, for the produce of every fine poured into her
coffers. Laws had no longer any connection with the interest of the
nation. “They might have been supposed to emanate rather from a council
of religious fanatics than from legislators,” observes an historian of
French Law.
At the same time, as the baron likewise extended his authority over
labourers in the fields and artisans in the towns, he, too, became
legislator and judge. The few relics of national law dating from the
tenth century are merely agreements regulating service, statute labour,
and tribute due from serf and vassals to their lord. The legislators of
that period were a handful of brigands organised for the plunder of a
people daily becoming more peaceful, as they applied themselves to
agricultural pursuits. These robbers exploited the feelings for justice
inherent in the people, they posed as the administrators of that
justice, made a source of revenue for themselves out of its fundamental
principles and concocted laws to maintain their own dominations.
Later on, these laws collected and classified by jurists, formed the
foundation of our modern codes. And are we to talk about respecting
these codes, the legacy of baron and priest?
The first revolution, the revolt of the townships, was successful in
abolishing a portion only of these laws, the charters of enfranchised
towns are, for the most part, a mere compromise between baronial and
episcopal legislation, and the new relations created within the free
borough itself. Yet what a difference between these laws, and the laws
we have now! The town did not take upon itself to imprison and execute
citizens for reasons of State: it was content to expel anyone who
plotted with the enemies of the city, and to raze his house to the
ground. It confined itself to imposing fines for so-called “crimes and
misdemeanours” and in the townships of the twelfth century may even be
discerned the just principle to-day forgotten, which holds the whole
community responsible for the misdoing of each of its members. The
societies of that time looked upon crime as an accident or misfortune; a
conception common amongst the Russian peasantry at this moment.
Therefore, they did not admit of the principle of personal vengeance as
preached by the Bible, but considered that the blame for each misdeed
reverted to the whole society. It needed all the influence of the
Bysantine Church, which imported into the West the refined cruelties of
Eastern despotism, to introduce into the manners of Gauls and Germans
the penalty of death, and the horrible fortunes afterwards inflicted on
those regarded as criminals. Just in the same way, it needed all the
influence of the Roman code, the product of the corruption of Imperial
Rome, to introduce the notions as to absolute property in land, which
have overthrown the communistic customs of primitive people.
As we know, the free townships were not able to hold their own. Torn by
intestine dissensions between rich and poor, burgher and serf, they fell
an easy prey to royalty. And as royalty acquired fresh strength, the
right of legislation passed more and more into the hands of a clique of
courtiers. Appeal to the nation, was made only to sanction the taxes
demanded by the King. Parliament summoned at intervals of two centuries,
according to the good pleasure or caprice of the Court, “Councils
Extraordinary,” Assemblies of Notables, Ministers, scarce heeding the
“grievances of the King’s subjects” — these are the legislators of
France. Later still, when all power is concentrated in a single man, who
can say “I am the State,” edicts are concocted in the “secret counsels
of the Prince,” according to the whim of a minister, or of an imbecile
King; and subjects must obey on pain of death. All judicial guarantees
are abolished; the nation is the serf of royalty, and of a handful of
courtiers. And at this period the most horrible penalties startle our
gaze — the wheel, the stake, flaying alive, tortures of every
description, invented by the sick fancy of monks and madmen, seeking
delight in the sufferings of executed criminals.
The great Revolution began the demolition of this framework of law,
bequeathed to us by feudalism and royalty. But after having demolished
some portions of the ancient edifice, the Revolution delivered over the
power of law-making to the bourgeoisie, who, in their turn, began to
raise a fresh framework of laws, intended to maintain and perpetuate
middle-class domination amongst the masses. Their Parliament makes laws
right and left, and mountains of law accumulate with frightful rapidity.
But what are all these laws at bottom?
The major portion have but one object — to protect private property,
i.e., wealth acquired by the exploitation of man by man. Their aim is to
open out to capital fresh fields for exploitation, and to sanction the
new forms which that exploitation continually assumes, as capital
swallows up another branch of human activity, railways, telegraphs,
electric light, chemical industries, the expression of man’s thought in
literature and science, etc. The object of the rest of these laws is
fundamentally the same. They exist to keep up the machinery of
government, which serves to secure to capital the exploitation and
monopoly of the wealth produced. Magistrature, police, army, public
instruction, finance, all serve one God — capital; all have but one
object — to facilitate the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist.
Analyse all the laws passed for the last eighty years and you will find
nothing but this. The protection of the person, which is put forward as
the true mission of law occupies an imperceptible space amongst them,
for, existing society, assaults upon the person, directly dictated by
hatred and brutality, tend to disappear. Nowadays, if anyone is
murdered, it is generally for the sake of robbing him; rarely from
personal vengeance. But if this class of crimes and misdemeanours is
continually diminishing, we certainly do not owe the change to
legislation. It is due to the growth of humanitarianism in our
societies, to our increasingly social habits rather than to the
prescriptions of our laws. Repeal to-morrow every law dealing with the
protection of the person, and to-morrow stop all proceedings for
assault, and the number of attempts, dictated by personal vengeance and
by brutality, would not be augmented by one single instance.
It will, perhaps, be objected that, during the last fifty years, a good
many liberal laws have been enacted. But, if these laws are analysed, it
will be discovered that this liberal legislation consists in the repeal
of the laws bequeathed to us by the barbarism of preceding centuries.
Every liberal law, every radical programme, may be summed up in these
words, abolition of laws grown irksome to the middle-class itself, and
as an extension to all citizens of liberties enjoyed by the townships of
the twelfth century. The abolition of capital punishment, trial by jury
for all “crimes” (there was a more liberal jury in the twelfth century),
the election of magistrates, the right of bringing public officials to
trial, the abolition of standing armies, free instruction, etc.,
everything that is pointed out as an invention of modern liberalism, is
but a return to the freedom which existed before Church and King had
laid hands upon every manifestation of human life.
Thus the protection of exploitation directly by laws on property, and
indirectly by the maintenance of the State, is both the spirit and the
substance of our modern codes, and the one function of our costly
legislative machinery. But it is time we gave up being satisfied with
mere phrases, and learned to appreciate their real signification. The
law, which on its first appearance presented itself as a compendium of
customs useful for the preservation of society, is now perceived to be
nothing but an instrument for the maintenance of exploitation, and the
domination of the toiling masses by rich idlers. At the present day its
civilising mission is nil; it has but one object, to bolster up
exploitation.
This is what is told us by history as to the development of law. Is it
in virtue of this history that we are called upon to respect it?
Certainly not. It has no more title to respect than capital; the fruit
of pillage; and the first duty of the revolutionists of the nineteenth
century will be to make a bonfire of all existing laws, as they will of
all titles to property.
The millions of laws which exist for the regulation of humanity, appear
upon investigation to be divided into three principal categories —
protection of property, protection of persons, protection of government.
And by analysing each of these three categories, we arrive at the same
logical and necessary conclusion: the uselessness and hurtfulness of
law.
Socialists know what is meant by protection of property. Laws on
property are not made to guarantee either to the individual or to
society the enjoyment of the produce of their own labour. On the
contrary, they are made to rob the producer of a part of what he has
created, and to secure to certain other people that portion of the
produce which they have stolen either from the producer or from society
as a whole. When, for example, the law establishes Mr. So-and-So’s right
to a house, it is not establishing his right to a cottage he has built
for himself, or to a house he has erected with the help of some of his
friends. In that case no one would have disputed his right. On the
contrary, the law is establishing his right to a house which is not the
product of his labour; first of all, because he has had it built for him
by others to whom he has not paid the full value of their work; and next
because that house represents a social value, which he could not have
produced for himself. The law is establishing his right to what belongs
to everybody in general to nobody in particular. The same house built in
the midst of Siberia would not have the value it possesses in a large
town, and, as we know, that value arises from the labour of something
like fifty generations of men who have built the town, beautified it,
supplied it with water and gas, fine promenades, colleges, theatres,
shops, railways and roads leading in all directions. Thus, by
recognising the right of Mr. So-and-So to a particular house in Paris,
London or Rouen, the law is unjustly appropriating to him a certain
portion of the produce of the labour of mankind in general. And it is
precisely because this appropriation and all other forms of property,
bearing the same character, are a crying injustice, that a whole arsenal
of laws, and a whole army of soldiers, policemen and judges are needed
to maintain it against the good sense and just feeling inherent in
humanity.
Well, half our laws, the civil code in each country, serves no other
purpose than to maintain this appropriation, this monopoly for the
benefit of certain individuals, against the whole of mankind.
Three-fourths of the causes decided by the tribunals are nothing but
quarrels between monopolists — two robbers disputing over their booty.
And a great many of our criminal laws have the same object in view,
their end being to keep the workman in a subordinate position towards
his employer, and thus afford security for exploitation.
As for guaranteeing the product of his labour to the producer, there are
no laws which even attempt such a thing. It is so simple and natural, so
much a part of the manners and customs of mankind; that law has not
given it so much as a thought. Open brigandage, sword in hand, is no
feature of our age. Neither does one workman ever come and dispute the
produce of his labour with another. If they have a misunderstanding they
settle it by calling in a third person, without having recourse to law.
The only person who exacts from another what the other has produced, is
the proprietor, who comes in and deducts the lion’s share. As for
humanity in general, it everywhere respects the right of each to what he
has created, without the interposition of any special laws.
As all the laws about property, which make up thick volumes of codes,
and are the delight of our lawyers, have no other object than to protect
the unjust appropriating of human labour by certain monopolists, there
is no reason for their existence, and, on the day of the Revolution,
social revolutionists are thoroughly determined to put an end to them.
Indeed, a bonfire might be made with perfect justice of all laws bearing
upon the so-called “rights of property,” all title-deeds, all registers,
in a word, of all that is in any way connected with an institution which
will soon be looked upon as a blot in the history of humanity, as
humiliating as the slavery and serfdom of past ages.
The remarks just made upon laws concerning property are quite as
applicable to the second category of laws; those for the maintenance of
government, i.e., Constitutional Law.
It again is a complete arsenal of laws, decrees, ordinances, orders in
council, and what not, all serving to protect the diverse forms of
representative government, delegated or usurped, beneath which humanity
is writhing. We know very well — Anarchists have often enough pointed
out in their perpetual criticism of the various forms of government —
that the mission of all governments, monarchical, constitutional, or
republican, is to protect and maintain by force the privileges of the
classes in possession, the aristocracy, clergy and traders. A good third
of our laws — and each century possesses some tens of thousands of them
— the fundamental laws on taxes, excise duties, the organisation of
ministerial departments and their offices, of the army, the police, the
Church, etc., have no other end than to maintain, patch up, and develop
the administrative machine. And this machine in its turn serves almost
entirely to protect the privileges of the possessing classes. Analyse
all these laws, observe them in action day by day, and you will discover
that not one is worth preserving.
About such laws there can be no two opinions. Not only Anarchists, but
more or less revolutionary radicals also, are agreed that the only use
to be made of laws concerning the organisation of government is to fling
them into the fire.
The third category of law still remains to be considered, that relating
to the protection of the person and the detection and prevention of
“crime.” This is the most important, because most prejudices attach to
it; because, if law enjoys a certain amount of consideration, it is in
consequence of the belief that this species of law is absolutely
indispensable to the maintenance of security in our societies. These are
laws developed from the nucleus of customs useful to human communities,
which have been turned to account by rulers to sanctify their own
domination. The authority of the chiefs of tribes, of rich families in
towns, and of the king, depended upon their judicial functions, and even
down to the present day, whenever the necessity of government is spoken
of, its function as supreme judge is the thing implied. “Without a
government men would tear one another to pieces,” argues the village
orator. “The ultimate end of all government is to secure twelve honest
jurymen to every accused person,” said Burke.
Well, in spite of all the prejudices existing on this subject, it is
quite time that anarchists should boldly declare this category of laws
as useless and injurious as the preceding ones.
First of all, as to so-called “crimes” — assaults upon persons — it is
well-known that two-thirds, and often as many as three-fourths, of such
“crimes” are instigated by the desire to obtain possession of someone’s
wealth. This immense class of so-called “crimes and misdemeanours” will
disappear on the day on which private property ceases to exist. “But,”
it will be said, “there will always be brutes who will attempt the lives
of their fellow citizens, who will lay their hands to a knife in every
quarrel, and revenge the slightest offence by murder, if there are not
laws to restrain and punishments to withhold them.” This refrain is
repeated every time the right of society to punish is called in
question.
Yet there is one fact upon this head which at the present time, is
thoroughly established; the severity of punishment does not diminish the
amount of crime. Hang, and, if you like, quarter murderers, and the
number of murders will not decrease by one. On the other hand, abolish
the penalty of death, and there will not be one murder more; there will
be fewer. Statistics prove it. But if the harvest is good, and bread
cheap, and the weather fine, the number of murders immediately
decreases. This again is proved by statistics. The amount of crime
always augments and diminishes in proportion to the price of provisions
and the states of the weather. Not that all murders are actuated by
hunger. That is not the case. But when the harvest is good and
provisions are at an obtainable price, and when the sun shines, men,
lighter hearted and less miserable than usual, do not give way to gloomy
passions, do not from trivial motives, plunge a knife into the bosom of
a fellow creature.
Moreover, it is also a well-known fact that the fear of punishment has
never stopped a single murderer. He who kills his neighbour from revenge
or misery does not reason much about consequence; and there have been
few murderers who were not firmly convinced that they should escape
prosecution.
Without speaking of a society in which a man will receive a better
education, in which the development of all his faculties, and the
possibility of exercising them, will procure him so many enjoyments,
that he will not seek to poison them by remorse — without speaking of
the society of the future — even in our society, even with those sad
products of misery, whom we see to-day in the public-houses of great
cities — on the day when no punishment is inflicted upon murderers, the
number of murders will not augment by a single case; and it is extremely
probable that it will be, on the contrary, diminished by all those cases
which are due at present to habitual criminals, who have been brutalised
in prison.
We are continually being told of the benefits conferred by law, and the
beneficial effect of penalties, but have the speakers ever attempted to
strike a balance between the benefits attributed to laws and penalties,
and the degrading effect of these penalties upon humanity? Only
calculate all the evil passions awakened in mankind by the atrocious
punishments formerly inflicted in our streets! Man is the cruelest
animal upon earth; and who has pampered and developed the cruel
instincts unknown, even amongst monkeys; is it is not the king, the
judge, and the priests, armed with law, who caused flesh to be torn off
in strips, boiling pitch to be poured into wounds, limbs to be
dislocated, bones to be crushed, men to be sawn asunder to maintain
their authority? Only estimate the torrent of depravity let loose in
human society by the “informing” which is countenanced by judges, and
paid in hard cash by governments, under pretext of assisting in the
discovery of “crime.” Only go into the gaols and study what man becomes
when he is deprived of freedom and shut up with other depraved beings,
steeped in the vice and corruption which oozes from the very walls of
our existing prisons. Only remember that the more these prisons are
reformed, the more detestable they become; our model modern
penitentiaries are a hundred-fold more abominable than the dungeons of
the middle ages. Finally, consider what corruption, depravity of mind,
is kept up amongst men by the idea of obedience, the very essence of
law; of chastisement; of authority having the right to punish, to judge
irrespective of our conscience and the esteem of our friends; of the
necessity for executioners, gaolers and informers — in a word, by all
the attributes of law and authority. Consider all this, and you will
assuredly agree with us in saying that a law inflicting penalties is an
abomination which should cease to exist.
Peoples without political organisation, and therefore less depraved than
ourselves, have perfectly understood that the man who is called
“criminal” is simply unfortunate; that the remedy is not to flog him, to
chain him up, or to kill him on the scaffold or in prison, but to
relieve him by the most brotherly care, by treatment based on equality,
by the usages of life amongst honest men. In the next revolution we hope
that this cry will go forth:
“Burn the guillotine; demolish the prisons; drive away the judges,
policemen and informers — the impurest race upon the face of the earth;
treat as a brother the man who has been led by passion to do ill to his
fellow; above all take from the ignoble products of middle-class
idleness the possibility of displaying their vices in attractive
colours; and be sure that but few crimes will mar our society.”
The main supports of crime are idleness, law and authority; laws about
property, about government, laws about penalties and misdemeanours; and
authority, which takes upon itself to manufacture these laws and to
apply them.
No more laws! No more judges! Liberty, equality, and practical human
sympathy are the only effectual barriers we can oppose to the
anti-social instincts of certain amongst us.
[1] The annual assembly of the early Franks, originally held in March,
there the first month of the year.