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Title: On "Exchange" Author: Joseph DĂ©jacque Date: September 21, 1858 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, mutualism, essays, 1800s, Source: https://libcom.org/library/exchange Notes: Translator Shawn P. Wilbur, 28/2/2012
“Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an
eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth,
one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of
contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also
of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have
arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state
where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or
his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person
whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established
naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of
others, but in the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and
desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its
tides full sweep and each day they will find their level.”
(The Human Being, Letter to P.-J. Proudhon.)
Exchange, like all things, can be considered from three perspectives:
the past, the present, and the future.
In the past, those who would gather the scattered products of industry
and agriculture in a bazaar, the merchants who would spread under a
portico what they called their merchandise, would thus engage, to a
certain degree, in exchange. Today, we call this commerce, which is to
say parasitism, and we are right to do so. For if, relative to the state
of places and minds, they had been of some use in their time, in our own
time those who keep shops have not the same excuses for continuing to
live at the expense of the producers and consumers. The trader is purely
and simply a legal thief. In a district of the city, for example, where
just one bazaar would be sufficient, and where a few hundred employees
could easily provide the service, there exist perhaps a thousand shops
and six thousand, or even ten thousand, owners or clerks. To the extent
that there are more intermediaries than those hundreds strictly
necessary to meet the needs of exchange, there are parasites, thieves.
And now, if we consider how much labor these shops have cost, how much
manpower and materials have thus been diverted from their true
destination, let us judge the quantity of production squandered daily to
satisfy the appetites of that rapacious and pedantic bourgeoisie, a
caste of monopolists and mercenaries destined by collegiate education
and paternal tradition for the noble mission of salesman, civil service
brats, practiced from infancy in the handling of coins, raised with a
love of plunder. The character of commerce is not debatable: it is
organized pillage. It legally robs both those who produce and those who
consume.
The shopkeeper—at wholesale, wholesale to the public, or retail—is not
the only intermediary between the producer and consumer. That triple
usury only fastens itself to their flanks in the last instance.
The producer who does not have in their possession the instruments of
labor (and that is the majority, if not the totality), is also exploited
by another sort of parasite—the industrialist—the head of the factory
and his clerical staff, to say nothing of the banker and his assistants,
fed by the manufacturer, and consequently fed by the worker, since
nothing productive is done except by the worker’s hands, and since
everything done by those hands passes under control of the owner. In
exchange for the instruments of labor the workers delivers their labor
to the master and receive a wage from him. They give the master an apple
to eat, so that the master will leave them the seeds. What a curious
compensation! What a laughable exchange! It is the same for the peasant
with regard to the landlord, for the proletarian with regard to the
proprietor. The proletarians have built the house; the masons,
carpenters, roofers, joiners, locksmiths, painters, to say nothing of
the quarry-workers, lumberjacks, miners, foundry workers and smiths,
potters and glass-blowers, all those who work the earth, the sand and
stone, the wood and iron have labored there. It is they who have made
the house, from the foundations to the roof’s peak. Well! To live there,
even in the attic, they still must pay an odious, quarterly tribute,
house-rent, to the fortunate lazy-bones who holds the property. All
these proprietors, these landlords, these factory bosses and their
clerical personnel, their superiors, the bankers, and the budgetary
bureaucracies, all these are so many swarms of locusts who swoop down on
the harvest of the towns and the countryside, and devour the wheat while
it is green, the bread before it is cooked. Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!
And yet all these vampires are within the law, these rogues are honest
people! Will you rely then on official qualifications?
Such is exchange, as the reactionaries understand it, otherwise known as
commerce, or exploitation, or theft. It is exchange in civilization, in
its barbarity, in its primitive savagery, exchange in its original
arbitrariness, exchange by divine right, commerce in its absolute
despotism.
At the present time,—not in fact, since commerce, exploitation, and
theft always have legal force, but as an idea,—exchange is understood
differently.
The uselessness of the owner and shopkeeper once recognized, we say to
ourselves: everything that is useless is dangerous, and what is
dangerous should be suppressed; the intermediary must disappear.
Parasitism, like the barren fig tree, is condemned by the masses to be
cast in the revolutionary inferno to be destroyed. “That which does not
produce is unworthy of life.” The idea of justice, growing more
prominent in public opinion, has expressed exchange thus: the right to
the possession of the instruments of labor, that is, to free credit; and
the right to the possession of the fruits of their labor, that is the
democratization of property, universal and direct commerce,—a formula
for social transition which in the political order corresponds to this:
the right to the instruments of government, that is, democratization of
government, universal and direct legislation.
Commerce and government thus understood,—commerce, as direct exchange,
and government, as direct legislation—is a transitory organization which
preserves the tradition of the past, while letting the future begin to
speak. As soon as we could apply this organization, that is, as soon as
we want it, our society, which declines today in misery and slavery,
amidst bundles of sticks and piles of coins, will immediately enter into
an ascending phase of wealth and liberty. The mark of authoritarian
prejudice, the stain of propertarianism and legalism will be little by
little wiped from the human brain; intellectual and moral exercise will
develop the anarchist sentiment in the individual; industrial and
legislative exercise will develop the sentiments of social community and
individual liberty in society.
In beginning this article, I only wanted to speak of exchange, and I
have been led to also speak of government. It was the least that I could
do. Indeed, if contract is the law between the laborers, law is the
contract between the people. A national or departmental or communal
administration should no more make laws than an agricultural or
industrial administration should make contracts. It is the business of
all the laborers in the group to contract among themselves and with
others, as legislation is a matter for all the inhabitants of a commune
or nation. The administration, whether agrico-industrial, or communal,
or national, does not command, but obeys. The administration is the
delegate; the group of laborers or inhabitants is the master—and doesn’t
the master always have the right to stop the wages and immediately
dismiss the agent who fulfills their functions poorly?
Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally
and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a
compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not
completely just is injustice. Direct exchange, that reform introduced
into popular thought by Proudhon, is still a halfway measure. It is an
addition of capacities, the diversification of the commercial census.
However, we require not only the absolute overthrow of commerce that we
require, but also the overthrow of constitutional or contractual
commerce. We require, with regard to productive and consumptive
circulation, the declaration of the individual rights of the human
being, and the proclamation of the commonwealth, the res publica, that
is, the freedom of production and consumption accorded to every
individual with regard to the unity and universality of capital.
Nonetheless, a change similar to that which direct-exchange would
produce would be a great social improvement, towards which all laborers
should strive today. All their efforts should be directed towards this
point, and we will arrive there before long, I hope. But in the end,
that point is not the goal, that progress is not justice. It is only a
stage on the best route, a step made in the direction of justice. We can
relax and refresh ourselves there for a moment; but it would be
dangerous to sleep there. In revolution it is necessary to double or
triple the stages; we must gain ground on the enemy, if we want to
escape their pursuit and instead track them down. The point farthest
from the past, passing through the present, that is the point that we
must try to reach. Abandoning commerce to enter into direct-exchange, we
must push all the way to natural-exchange, the negation of property;
moving from governmental authority to direct legislation, we must push
all the way to anarchy, the negation of legalism.
By natural exchange I mean the unlimited liberty of all production and
all consumption; the abolition of every sign of property, whether
agricultural, industrial, artistic or scientific; the destruction of all
individual monopolization of the products of labor; the demonarchization
and demonetization of manual and intellectual capital, as well as
instrumental, commercial and monumental capital. Every individual
capital is usurious. It is a hindrance to circulation; and everything
that hinders circulation hinders production and consumption. All of that
is to be destroyed, and the representative sign as well: it accounts for
the arbitrariness in exchange, as well as in government.
In mechanics, we almost always proceed from the simple to the composite,
and then from the composite to the simple. One man discovers the lever,
a simple instrument, endowed with a certain power. Others come who take
hold of it, and in their turn make of it a more complicated device. They
add wheels and gears, and they increase its power tenfold. However,
continual frictions occur which are detrimental to the operation of this
mechanism. One overloads it with other wheels and gears; one obtains
results that appear more satisfactory, but always very imperfect, and
above all small in relation to the care and labors spent on the
improvement. Then there comes another engineer, free from the spirit of
routine and having in his head the idea for a new motor; experiment has
shown to him that an old mechanism overloaded with complications will
not be repaired; that it must be replaced by simplifying it; and having
cast down this malformed thing,—which drags along its blade on the edge
of a ditch whose flow, exhausted at its source, no longer feeds it
sufficiently,—he reconstructs on entirely new plans a considerably
simplified machine, driven by steam or electricity, which functions this
time without loss of force and produces a hundred times what was
produced by the old apparatus.
It is the same for the social organism. Primitive commerce has been the
lever, the simple and artless instrument of circulation; production and
consumption have received an initial impetus. Today, it is an old
mechanism which disgraces progress, which has, between its gears of
metal, ground up enough (more than enough) of the laborers, of whose
sweat and blood and tears it is the expression. Innumerable
modifications, each more complicated and more monstrous than the others,
have been supplied; and still it isn’t worth a thousandth part of what
it has cost the proletarian. This is ruinous for the producer as well as
for the consumer.
Direct-exchange, the possession by the laborer of the products of his
labor, will certainly change the face of things and accelerate in
considerable proportion the movement of production and consumption, and
thus it will increase the amount of individual and social well-being.
But numberless upsets will still take place, and circulation will not
always be free, and without the liberty of circulation there is no
liberty of production, no liberty of consumption.
Once more there will be progress, but not justice. An evolution is not a
revolution.
In principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor?
I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of
workers will cry out.
Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen
to me:
No, it is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a
right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of
those needs.
To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have
possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a
product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not
to us. And isn’t all property theft?
For example, suppose there is a tailor, or a cobbler. He has produced
several garments or several pairs of shoes. He cannot consume them all
at once. Perhaps, moreover, they are not in his size or to his taste.
Obviously he has only made them because it is his occupation to do so,
and with an eye to exchanging them for other products for which he feels
the need; and so it is with all the workers. Those garments or shoes are
thus not his possessions, as he has no personal use for them; but they
are property, a value that he hoards and which he can dispose of at his
own good pleasure, that he can destroy if it pleases him, and which he
can at least use or misuse as he wishes; it is, in any case, a weapon
for attacking the property of others, in that struggle of divided and
antagonistic interests where each is delivered up to all the chances and
all the hazards of war.
In addition, is this laborer well justified, in terms of right and
justice, in declaring himself the sole producer of the labor
accomplished by his hands? Has he created something from nothing? Is he
omnipotent? Does he possess the manual and intellectual learning of all
eternity? Is his art and craft innate to him? Did the worker come fully
equipped from his mother’s womb? Is he a self-made man, the son of his
own works? Isn’t he in part the work of his forebears, and the work of
his contemporaries? All those who have shown him how to handle the
needle and the scissors, the knife and awl, who have initiated him from
apprenticeship to apprenticeship, to the degree of skill that he has
attained, don’t all these have some right to a part of his product?
Haven’t the successive innovations of previous generations also played
some part in his production? Does he owe nothing to the present
generation? Does he owe nothing to future generations? Is it justice to
combine thus in his hands the titles of all these accumulated labors,
and to appropriate their profits exclusively to him?
If one admits the principle of property in the product for the laborer
(and, make no mistake, it really is a property, and not a possession, as
I have just demonstrated), property becomes, it is true, more accessible
to each, without being for that better assured to all. Property is
inequality, and inequality is privilege; it is servitude. As any product
will be more or less in demand, its producer will be more or less
harmed, more or less profited. The property of one can only increase to
the detriment of the property of the other, property necessitates
exploiters and exploited. With the property of the product of labor,
property democratized, there will no longer be the exploitation of the
great number by the smallest minority, as with property of labor by
capital, property monarchized; but there will still be exploitation of
the smaller number by the larger. There will always be iniquity, divided
interests, hostile competition, with disasters for some and success for
the others. Without doubt these reversals and triumphs will not be at
all comparable to the miseries and scandalous fortunes which insult
social progress in our time. However, the heart of humanity will still
be torn by fratricidal struggles which, for being less terrible, will
not be less detrimental to individual well-being, to well-being in
general.
Property is not only inequality, it is also immorality. Some producer
favored with a lucrative specialty could, in their prosperity, use their
daily earnings as an excuse to distract from their work a woman (if he
is a man), or a man (if she is a woman), and infect them with the virus
of idleness, the contagious germ of physical and moral degradation, the
result of prostitution. All the vices, all the depravations, all the
pestilential exhalations are contained in that substantive hieroglyphic,
a case that is only a coffin, a mummy from ancient civilizations, which
has arrived in our time carried by the tides of commerce, by centuries
of usury,—property!
Thus let us accept direct-exchange, like direct legislation, only
conditionally, as an instrument of transition, as a link between the
past and the future. It is a question to present, an operation to
accomplish; but let that operation be like the welding of a transpresent
cable with one end touching the continent of the old abuses, but whose
other end unwinds towards a new world, the world of free harmony.
Liberty is Liberty: let us be its prophets, all of us who are
visionaries. On the day when we will understand that the social organism
must not be modified by overloading it with complications, but by
simplifying it; the day when it will no longer be a question of
demolishing on thing in order to replace it by its fellow, by
denominating and multiplying it, on that day we will have destroyed,
from top to bottom, the old authoritarian and propertarian mechanism,
and recognized the insufficiency and harmfulness of individual contract
as well as the social contract. Natural government and natural
exchange,—natural government, which is the government of individuals by
individuals, of themselves by themselves, universal individualism, the
human self [moi-humain] moving freely in the humanitary whole
[tout-humanité]; and natural exchange, which is individuals exchanging
of themselves with themselves, being at once producers and consumers,
co-workers and co-inheritors of social capital, human liberty,
infinitely divisible liberty, in the community of goods, in indivisible
property. On that day, I say, of natural government and natural
exchange, an organism driven by attraction and solidarity will rise up,
majestic and beneficent, in the heart of regenerated humanity. And
authoritarian and propertarian government, authoritarian and
propertarian exchange, machineries overburdened with intermediaries and
representative signs, will collapse, solitary and abandoned, in the
dried-up course of the flood of ancient arbitrariness.
So let all these Babylonian institutions perish quickly, with their
unnatural wheels and gears, and on their ruins let the universal and
fraternal solidarization of individual interests, society according to
nature, be enthroned forever!
People of the present, it is necessary to choose. Not only is it immoral
and cowardly to remain neutral, it is degrading, but still there is
peril. It is absolutely necessary to takes sides for or against the two
great, exclusive principles that the world debates. Your salvation is at
stake. Either progress or devolution! Autocracy or anarchy!—For a
radically flawed society, radical solutions are required: for large
evils, grand remedies!
Choose then:
—Property is the negation of liberty.
—Liberty is the negation of property.
—Social slavery and individual property, this is what authority affirms.
—Individual liberty and social property, that is the affirmation of
anarchy.
People of progress, martyred by authority, choose anarchy!
[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur; revised 2/28/2012]