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Title: The Modern State Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1913 Language: en Topics: state, the State Source: Peter Kropotkin, "Modern Science and Anarchy", ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2018) Notes: This essay first appeared in 1913 as part of the augmented French edition of Modern Science and Anarchy [as "La Science Moderne et l'Anarchie"]. Some chapters were taken from earlier articles in Les Temps Nouveaux, while others seem to have been written specifically to be included here. In 1914, The Modern State began to be translated into English and serialized in the London's Freedom, but that was interrupted in the middle due to the outbreak of World War I and the incompatibilities between Freedom and Kropotkin in regard. It was also published as a specific book/brochure, at least in Amsterdam, with a foreword by Domela Nieuwenhuis (see here: https://archive.org/details/KropotkinDeModerneStaat/mode/2up).
What is important to us is to analyse the distinctive features of
society and the modern State in order to determine where we are going,
what is attained today, and what we hope to conquer in the future.
The current society is certainly not the outcome of any principle,
logically developed to be applied to the thousand needs of [human] life.
Like any living organism it represents, on the contrary, a very
intricate outcome of thousands of struggles and thousands of
compromises, of survivals of the past and of longings for a better
future.
The theocratic spirit of high antiquity, slavery, imperialism, serfdom,
the medieval commune, ancient prejudices, and the modern spirit — all
these are found more or less represented, with all nuances, in all
imaginable forms of mitigation [in modern societies]. Shadows of the
past and outlines of the future; customs and conceptions dating from the
Stone Age and tendencies towards a future which is scarcely emerging on
the horizon — all these are found in continual struggle, in every
individual, in every social stratum, in every generation, as in society
as a whole.
However, if we consider the great struggles, the great popular
revolutions which took place in Europe and America since the twelfth
century, we see a principle emerging. All the uprisings were directed at
the abolition of what had survived of ancient slavery in its mitigated
form — serfdom. All had the aim of freeing either villagers or
townspeople, or both, from the obligatory labour that was imposed upon
them by law in favour of particular masters. To recognise the right of
man to dispose of his own person and to work as he pleases and for as
long as he pleases, without anyone having the right to compel him — in
other words, to liberate the person of the peasant and the artisan, such
was the objective of all the popular revolutions: the great uprisings of
the communes in the twelfth century; the peasant wars in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries in Bohemia, Germany, and the Netherlands, the
revolutions of 1381 and 1648 in England, and, finally the Great
Revolution [of 1789–1793] in France.
It is true that this goal was only partially attained. As the individual
freed himself and he conquered his personal liberty, new economic
conditions were imposed upon him to paralyse his liberty, to forge new
chains, to bring him back under the yoke by the threat of starvation. We
have seen a recent example of this when the Russian serfs, liberated in
1861, were forced to buy back the land they had cultivated for
centuries, which brought ruin and misery, so their enslavement was
recreated. What was done in Russia today was also done, in one way or
another, everywhere in Western Europe. Physical compulsion disappeared,
new forms of constraint were established. Personal serfdom abolished,
servitude reappeared in a new form — the economic form.
And yet, despite all that, the dominant principle of modern societies is
that of individual freedom, proclaimed, at least in theory, for
everyone. By law, work is no longer obligatory for anyone. A caste of
slaves, forced to toil for their masters, does not exist; and, at least
in Europe, there are no more serfs obliged to give to their master three
days’ work a week in return for [the use of] a plot of land to which
they remain bound all their life. Everyone is free to work if he wants,
as long as he wants, and at what he wants.
That is — in theory, at least — the dominant principle of current
society.
However, we know — and socialists of every shade [of opinion] never
cease demonstrating it every day — to what extent this freedom is
illusory. Millions and millions of men, women, and children are
constantly forced by the threat of hunger to alienate their liberty, to
give their labour to a master under the conditions that he wishes to
impose upon them. And we know — and we try to clearly prove it to the
masses — that, in the form of land-rent [rente], house-rent and interest
generally paid to the capitalist, [1] the worker and the peasant
continue to give, to several masters instead of one, the same three days
a week; very often even more than the three days, just to obtain the
right to cultivate the land or to even have a roof over their head [de
vivre sous un abri].
We also know that if one day an economist took the trouble to practice
[real] political economy and calculate all that the various masters
(boss, landlord, middle-men, shareholders and so on, in addition to the
State) levy directly or indirectly on the wages of the worker, we would
be amazed at the meagre share left for him to pay all the other workers
whose products he consumes: to pay the labour of the peasant who has
grown the wheat he eats, the bricklayer who built the house he lives in,
those who made his furniture, his clothes, and so on. We would be struck
to see how little goes to all the workers who produce what this other
worker consumes compared to the immense part which goes to the barons of
modern feudalism.
However, this dispossession of the worker is no longer done by one
master lawfully imposed on the person of each worker. There is for that
an entire mechanism, extremely complicated — impersonal and
irresponsible. As in past centuries, the worker gives a considerable
part of his work to the privileged; but he no longer does it under the
whip of a master. The compulsion is no longer a bodily constraint. He
will be thrown onto the street, forced to live in a slum, to never have
enough to eat, to see his children perish from starvation, to beg in his
old age; but he will not be put on a bench in a police-station in order
to be administered a beating for a badly sewn coat or a badly cultivated
field, as was done during our lifetime in Eastern Europe and formerly
practiced across Europe.
Under the present regime, often more ferocious and pitiless than the
former, man retains, nevertheless, a feeling of personal liberty. We
know that for the proletarian this feeling is almost an illusion. Yet we
must recognise that all modern progress and all our hopes for the future
are still based on this feeling of freedom, however limited it may be in
reality.
The most destitute of tramps, in his moments of darkest misery, will not
exchange his stone bed under the arch of a bridge for the bowl of soup
which would be guaranteed to him every day along with the chain of the
slave. Better yet. This feeling, this principle of individual liberty,
is so dear to modern man that continually we see whole groups of workers
accepting months of misery and marching against bayonets merely to
maintain some acquired rights.
Indeed, the most obstinate strikes and the most desperate popular
revolts today stem from questions of liberty, of acquired rights, rather
than from questions of wages.
The right and liberty of a man to work on what he wants and as much as
he wants, thus remains the principle of modern societies. And the
strongest accusation we raise against current society is to prove that
this freedom, so dear to the workers, is continually rendered
illusionary by the necessity of selling his [labour] forces to a
capitalist; that the modern State is the most powerful weapon for
maintaining the workers in this necessity by means of the privileges and
monopolies which it continually bestows upon one class of citizens to
the detriment of the worker. We begin to understand, in fact, that the
principle on which all are agreed is continually evaded by a series of
monopolies; that he who owns nothing becomes again the serf of those who
do own, since he is forced to accept the terms of the master of the land
or the factory in order to work; since he pays to the rich — to all the
rich — an immense tribute, thanks to the monopolies established in their
favour. These monopolies are attacked by the people, not [only] for the
idleness they allow the privileged classes but above all for the
domination which they assured them over the working class.
The great criticism that we direct at modern society is not that it has
taken the wrong path by proclaiming that henceforth everyone will work
as he wants and as long as he wants; but in having created conditions of
ownership that do not permit the worker to work as he wants and for as
long as he wants. We describe this society as cruel because, after
having proclaimed the principle of individual liberty, it has placed the
worker of the fields and industry in conditions which nullify this
principle; because it reduces the worker to a state of disguised serfdom
— to the state of a man which misery forces to toil to enrich the
masters and to perpetuate his own condition of inferiority. He must
forge his own chains.
Well, if that is true; if this principle, “You will work at what you
want and as long as you want,” is really dear to modern man; if every
form of obligatory and servile work repels him; if his individual
liberty trumps all else — then the activity [conduite] of the
revolutionary is indicated.
He will reject all forms of a disguised serfdom. He will work to ensure
that this freedom is no longer just a word. He will seek to know what
prevents the worker from really being the sole master of his [mental]
abilities and his arms; and he will work to abolish these barriers — by
force if necessary — while at the same time taking care not to introduce
other barriers which, while perhaps procuring an increase in well-being,
would once more cause man to lose his freedom.
Let us then analyse those obstacles which, in current society, reduce
the freedom of the worker and enslave him.
Nobody can be forced by law to work for others. Such is, we say, the
principle of modern societies, conquered by a series of revolutions. And
those of us who have known serfdom in the first half of the last century
[in Russia], or else have only seen its remnants (in England, for
example they had been preserved until 1848 in the form of the forced
labour of children who were removed by law from their impoverished
parents, if they were in the Workhouse, and transported to the cotton
factories in the North), those amongst us who have known the mark etched
by these institutions upon the whole of society will understand with a
single word the importance of the change produced by the definite
abolition of legal servitude.
But if the legal obligation to work for others no longer exists between
individuals, the State thus far has retained the right to impose
obligatory work on its subjects. More than that. As the relations of
master and serf disappeared from society, the State more and more
extended its right to the forced labour of citizens; so much so that the
powers of the modern State would make the jurists who tried to establish
royal power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries blush with envy.
Today, for example, the State imposes compulsory education on all
citizens. An excellent thing in principle, so long as we consider it
from the point of view of the right of the child to go to school even
though their parents seek to keep them at home or send them to the
factory or to an ignorant sister [from a convent]. But in reality — what
has become of the information given today in primary schools? A whole
body of doctrines is instilled, created to secure the rights of the
State over the citizen; to justify the monopolies that the State bestows
on whole groups of citizens; to proclaim sacrosanct the right of the
rich to exploit the poor and [thus] become rich thanks to this poverty;
to teach children that vengeance [vindicte], [when] carried out by
society, is supreme justice and that conquerors were the greatest men of
humanity. [2] Worse than that! State-controlled teaching — a worthy heir
to instruction by the Jesuits — is the perfect means of killing any
spirit of initiative and independence and to teach the child servility
of thought and action.
And when the child has grown, the State will force him to do compulsory
military service and it will command him, in addition, to do various
[kinds of] labour for the municipality and the State in the case of an
emergency. Finally, by means of taxes, it will oblige every citizen to
perform a formidable amount of work for the State as well as for the
protected of the State — while making him believe that it is he who
voluntarily establishes it himself and who disposes, through his
representatives, the sums of money which flow into the coffers of the
State.
Once again a new principle has been proclaimed. Personal servitude no
longer exists. There are no more serfs of the State as there were in
past centuries even in France and England. A king can no longer order
ten or twenty thousand of his subjects to come build fortresses for him
or build the gardens and palaces of Versailles in spite of the
“prodigious morality amongst the workers, whose bodies are carried away
every night in carts,” as Madame de Sévigné wrote. [3] The palaces of
Windsor, Versailles and Peterhof are no longer built by means of corvée
labour. [4] It is by means of taxes, under the pretext of productive
works and under the pretext of protecting the liberty of the citizens
and increasing their wealth, that the State demands all these services
from its subjects.
We are the first to applaud the abolition of the principle of serfdom
and to indicate its importance for the general advancement of the ideas
of liberation. To be [physically] brought from Nancy or Lyons to
Versailles to build palaces for the amusement of the king’s favourites
was far harder than paying so much in taxes — so many days of labour —
even though these taxes would also be spent on unnecessary works or even
on works harmful to the nation. We are grateful, and more than grateful,
to the men of 1793 for having freed Europe from corvée labour.
But it is nevertheless true that in proportion as the liberation from
personal servitude of man to man was achieved during the course of the
nineteenth century, servitude towards the State was always growing. From
decade to decade the work demanded by the State from each citizen grew
in number, in variety, in quantity. Towards the end of the nineteenth
century we even see the State regaining its right to corvée labour. It
imposes, for example, on railway workers (a recent law in Italy)
compulsory work in the event of a strike — corvée labour, because it is
corvée labour — for the benefit of the big companies that own the
railways. From the railway to the mine, and from the mine to the
factory, there is but a step. And once the pretext of public safety, or
even only of necessity or public utility, has been recognised — there is
no longer any limit to the powers of the State.
If the miners or the railway employees have not yet been treated as
guilty of high treason every time they went on strike [5] and not hung
high for that, it was only because the need has not yet been felt. It is
more convenient to take advantage of some threatening gestures by a few
strikers to shoot the crowd at point blank range and to send the
ringleaders to hard labour. This is commonly done today, in a republic
as in a monarchy.
Until now “voluntary servitude” has sufficed. But on the day when the
need, or rather the fear of this need, was felt in Italy, Parliament did
not hesitate for a moment to pass a law to this effect although the
Italian railways still remain in the hands of private companies. For
“oneself” — in the name of “public safety” — the State will certainly
not hesitate to do, with even more severity, what it already once did
for its favourite, the big companies. It did it well in Russia. In
Spain, it went as far as torture to protect the monopolists. Indeed,
since the terrible tortures practiced in Montjuich in 1896, torture has
returned to Spain, [as] an institution for the benefit of the current
protected of the State, wealthy financiers. [6]
In fact, we are heading so far down this path, driven by what those
favoured by the government whispered to it, and the second half of the
nineteenth century has gone so far towards centralisation, that, if we
are not careful, we shall soon see the discontented, the strikers — no
longer shot as fermenters of revolt and looting but guillotined and
transported to the pestilent swamps of some colony for simply neglecting
a public service.
They do it in the army — they will do it in the mines. The Conservatives
are already loudly demanding it in England.
For we must not be mistaken. Two great movements, two great currents of
ideas and action characterised the nineteenth century. On the one hand,
we saw a sustained struggle against all the vestiges of the former
servitude. Not only did the armies of the First Republic abolish serfdom
as they marched victoriously through Europe; but when these armies were
driven out of the lands they had liberated and serfdom was restored
there, it could no longer maintain itself for long. The inspiration of
the revolution of 1848 definitely carried with it Western Europe; It
[serfdom] had to die even in Russia in 1861 and seventeen years later in
the Balkan peninsula.
More than that. In every nation man worked to claim his rights to
personal freedom. He emancipated himself from prejudices concerning
royalty, the nobility, and the upper classes and by a thousand small
acts of revolt performed in every corner of Europe he affirmed, by the
very use he made of it, his right to be recognised as a free man.
Moreover, the whole intellectual movement of the century — poetry,
fiction, drama, when they ceased being a mere amusement for the leisured
class [les oisifs] — bore this character. Taking France, think of Victor
Hugo, of Eugène Sue in his Mystères du Peuple [Mysteries of the People],
of Alexandre Dumas — the father, of course — of George Sand, etc.; then
of the great conspirators, Barbès and Blanqui, of historians like
Sismondi and Augustin Thierry. And we see that they have all expressed
in literature the movement which has taken place in every corner of
France, in every family, in every conscious individual to free the
individual from the habits and customs of an era of personal servitude.
And what has been done in France has been done everywhere, more or less,
always to free men, women and children from the customs and ideas which
centuries of servitude had established.
But alongside this great liberating movement, another which
unfortunately also had its origins in the Great [French] Revolution, was
going on at the same time. This one had for its purpose to develop the
omnipotence of the State in the name of that vague and ambiguous term,
which opened the door to all ambitions and treachery — the public good.
[7]
Coming from the time when the Church sought to conquer souls to lead
them to salvation, bequeathed to our civilisation by the Roman Empire
and Roman Law, this idea of the omnipotence of the State has silently
made tremendous progress during the last half of the century that has
just ended.
Just compare compulsory military service as it exists today with the
forms it had taken in past centuries — and you will be terrified by the
ground gained by this servitude towards the State under the pretext of
equality.
Never did the serf of the Middle Ages let himself be deprived of his
human rights to the same degree as modern man, who voluntarily abdicates
them through a spirit of voluntary servitude. At the age of twenty —
that is to say at the age which has the most thirst and need for
freedom, of the “abuses” even of freedom — the young man lets himself be
imprisoned for two or three years in a barracks [conscripted into the
armed forces], where he ruins his physical, intellectual and moral
health. Why?… To learn a trade which the Swiss learn in six weeks and
the Boers learned, better than the European armies, by clearing the land
and crossing their grasslands on horseback.
Not only does he risk his life but he goes further in his voluntary
servitude than the serf. He lets his commanders control his love-life,
he leaves the woman he loves, he makes a vow of celibacy and he
glorifies obeying like an automaton his commanders of whom he can judge
neither the knowledge, nor the military talent, nor even the integrity.
What serf of the Middle Ages, apart from the stable boy who followed the
armies with the baggage, ever agreed to march to war under the
conditions imposed today upon the modern serf stupefied by the ideas of
discipline? Worse! The serfs of the twentieth century undergo even the
horrors, the abominations of the punishment battalion in Africa — the
Biribi — without rebelling.
When at that time did the serf — peasant or artisan — renounce his right
to oppose his secret leagues to those of his Lords and to defend by arms
the right to join together? Was there an epoch in the Middle Ages so
dark that the people of the cities renounced their right to judge the
judges and to throw them into the water on the day when they did not
approve of their judgments? And when then, even during the darkest
periods of the old oppression, did we see the State having the real
possibility of perverting all teaching, from primary education to the
University, through its system of schools? Machiavelli had long dreamt
of it, but his dream was not achieved until the nineteenth century!
We therefore have had an immense progressive movement working during the
first half of the [last] century to completely liberate the individual
and his thought; and an immense regressive movement which imposed itself
on the former during the whole of the second half of the century to
re-establish the servitude of old for the benefit of the State — and to
increase it, to portray it as voluntary. It is the salient
characteristic of the period.
But this only relates to direct servitude. As for indirect servitude,
obtained by means of taxation and capitalist monopoly [and] less visible
at first sight, it grows every day. It becomes so threatening that it is
time to seriously study it.
If the State, by military service, by the education which it directs in
the interests of the rich classes, by the Church, and by its thousands
of functionaries, already exercises a formidable power over its subjects
— this power is further increased tenfold by means of taxation.
An innocuous instrument in its infancy, welcomed and called for by
taxpayers themselves when it was introduced to replace corvée labour,
taxation has today become, in addition to a very heavy burden, a
formidable weapon, a power all the greater because it disguises itself
under a thousand [different] aspects, capable of directing the whole
economic and political life of societies in the interest of the rulers
and the rich. For those who are in power now use it not only for carving
out [high] salaries but above all to make and unmake fortunes, to
accumulate immense wealth in the hands of a privileged few, to establish
monopolies, to ruin the people and enslave them to the rich — and all
this without the taxpayer even suspecting the power they have given to
their rulers.
“What is more just, though, than taxation?” the defenders of the State
will no doubt tell us. “Look,” they will say, “a bridge built by the
inhabitants of a town. The river, swollen by the rains, will carry it
away if it is not repaired at once. Is it not natural and right to call
upon all the inhabitants of the town to repair this bridge? And as the
great majority have their own work to do — is it not be reasonable to
replace their personal labour, their inexperienced corvée labour, with a
payment which will make it possible to call upon specialist workers and
engineers?”
“Or else,” they say, “here. A ford that becomes impassable in certain
seasons. Why should the inhabitants of the neighbouring towns not tax
themselves to build a bridge? Why should they not pay [so much] per head
instead of all coming with a spade in their hands to repair this
embankment? To shore-up this route? Or again, why build a granary into
which each inhabitant will have to pour so much wheat a year to avert
food shortages instead of entrusting the State to take care of food in
case of scarcity in return of a trivial tax?”
All this seems so natural, so just, so reasonable, that even the most
stubborn would have nothing to say about it — even more so provided that
a certain equality of conditions prevails in the town. And, providing
multiple examples of this kind, the economists and the defenders of the
State in general hasten to conclude that taxation is justifiable,
desirable from every point of view and… “Long live taxation!”
Well, all this reasoning is false. For if certain communal taxes really
have their origin in communal labour, done together — taxation or rather
the formidable and manifold taxes that we pay to the State have a very
different origin — conquest.
It was on the conquered peoples that the monarchs of the East and later
on the Emperors of Rome levied corvée labour. The Roman citizen was
exempt; he dumped it on the peoples under its domination. Until the
Great [French] Revolution — partly to the present day — the supposed
descendants of the conquering race (Roman, German, or Norman), that is
to say the so-called “nobles,” were exempted from taxation. The peasant,
the black bone conquered by the white bone, alone figured on the list of
those subject to “corvée labour and taxation” [“corvéables et
taillables”]. [8] The lands of the nobles and the “ennobled” paid
nothing [in France] until 1789. And up to the present day the
stupendously rich English landowners pay next to nothing for their
immense estates and keep them uncultivated until their value has
increased tenfold.
Thus the taxes we are now paying to the State come from conquest,
serfdom — never from freely agreed communal labour. Indeed, when the
State overwhelmed the people with corvée labours in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was not a question of those
works which the hamlets or villages undertook by the free consent of
their inhabitants. Communal works continued to be carried out by the
inhabitants of the communes. But alongside this work hundreds of
thousands of peasants were brought under military escort from remote
villages to build a national road or a fortress; to transport the
provisions needed to supply an army; to follow, with their exhausted
horses, the nobles setting off to the conquest of new castles. Others
toiled in the mines and factories of the State; others again, under the
whips of functionaries, obeyed the criminal whimsies of the masters,
digging the ponds of the royal castles, or building palaces for kings,
lords and their courtesans while the women and children of these corvée
labourers fed upon the weeds of the uncultivated fields, begged on the
roads, or, starving, fell under the bullets of soldiers when attempting
to plunder the convoys of exported wheat.
Corvée labour, imposed first upon the conquered races (as the French,
the English, the Germans now impose it upon the blacks of Africa) and
later on upon all the peasants; such was the origin — the true origin —
of the taxes which we today pay to the State. Will we be surprised then
that it has retained to our days the stamp of its origin?
It was an immense relief for the countryside when, at the approach of
the Great [French] Revolution, the corvées labour for the State were
replaced by a kind of fee — taxation paid in money. When the Revolution,
at last bringing a ray of light into the cottages, abolished part of the
salt tax [9] and land tax [10] which weighed directly on the poorest and
when the idea of a more equitable (and also more beneficial to the
State) tax began to appear, there was, we are told, a general
contentment in the country. Especially amongst the peasants more or less
enriched by trade and lending at interest.
But until the present taxation has remained faithful to its original
source. In the hands of the bourgeois which has seized power, it has
never ceased to grow and never ceased being employed mainly for the
benefit of the bourgeoisie. By means of taxation, the gang of rulers —
the State, representing the quadruple alliance of the king, the Church,
the judge, and the lord-soldier — has never ceased to extend its powers
and to treat the people like a conquered race. And today, by means of
this invaluable instrument which strikes without us directly feeling the
blows, we have become almost as enslaved by the State as our fathers
formally were by their landlords and masters.
How much work does each of us give to the State? No economist has ever
sought to estimate the number of working days that the worker in the
fields and factories gives each year to this Babylonian idol. We would
search the textbooks of political economy in vain to find an approximate
estimate of what the man who produces wealth gives of his labour to the
State. A simple estimation based on the budget of the State, the nation,
the provinces, and the municipalities (which also contribute to the
expenditure of the State) would say nothing; because it would be
necessary to estimate not what is in the coffers of the treasury but
what the payment of each Franc paid to the Treasury represents of the
real expenditures made by the taxpayer. All we can say is that the
amount of work the producer gives each year to the State is immense. It
must reach, and for certain categories [of worker] exceed, the three
days of work a week that the serf once gave to his lord.
And note well that, whatever may be done to overhaul the basis of tax
assessment, it is always the worker who bears the entire burden. Every
centime paid to the Treasury is ultimately paid by the worker, the
producer.
The State may well trim to a certain extent the revenue of the rich. But
it is also necessary for the rich to have an income that this income is
made, produced by someone — and that can only be done by he who produces
something by his labour. The State demands from the rich its share of
the spoils; but where do these spoils come from, which ultimately
represents so much sold wheat, iron, porcelain or cloth — all the result
of the labour of the producer? Apart from the wealth that comes from
abroad and which represents the exploitation of other workers — the
inhabitants of Russia, the East, Argentina, Africa — it is still the
workers of the country itself who must give so many days of their labour
to pay tax, as well as to enrich the rich.
If the tax levied by the State — compared to its immense expenditures —
seems to be a little less heavy in England than in the other countries
of Europe, it is for two reasons. One is that Parliament, half composed
of landowners, favours them by allowing them to levy an immense tribute
on the residents of the towns and countryside and pay only a small tax;
and the other — the main one — is that of all the European countries
England is the one which levies most upon the labour of the workers of
other nations. [11]
We are sometimes told that a progressive tax on income would, according
to our rulers, strike the rich for the benefit of the poor. This was
indeed the idea of the Great [French] Revolution, when it introduced
this form of taxation. But today all that we obtain by slightly
progressive taxation is to trim a little of the revenue of the rich; we
take a little more than before from what he has taken away from the
worker. But that is all. It is always the worker who pays, and who
generally pays more than what the State takes from the rich.
Thus we were able to see for ourselves in Bromley how immediately after
the tax on inhabited houses in our municipality was increased by around
five francs per year on all worker housing — (a half-house, as they say
in England) — the rent went up by the amount of 60 centimes per week, or
about 30 francs a year. The owner of the building immediately dumped the
increase on his tenants and he took advantage of the blow to augment his
exploitation.
As for indirect taxes, we not only know that it is the objects consumed
by everyone that are especially hit by taxation (the others yield
little) but also that any increase of a few centimes on the tax upon
beverages, or coffee, or wheat results in a much higher increase in the
prices paid by the consumer.
It is evident, moreover, that only he who produces, who creates wealth
by his labour, can pay taxes. The rest is only a division of the spoils
taken away from he who produces — a division which for the worker always
amounts to an increase in exploitation.
So we can say that, apart from the taxes levied upon the riches made
abroad, [12] the billions paid each year to the public Treasury — in
France, for example — are levied almost entirely on the labour of the
ten million workers possessed by France.
Here the worker pays as a consumer of drinks, sugar, matches, petrol;
there, it is he who, when paying his rent, pays the Treasury the tax
which the State has levied on the owner of the house. Here again, by
buying his bread he pays the property taxes, the rent for the land, the
rent and taxes of the bakery, the [costs of governmental] overseeing,
the [expenditure of the] Ministry of Finance, and so on. There, finally,
by buying a dress, she pays taxes on imported cotton, the monopoly
created by protectionism. By buying his coal, when travelling by train,
he pays the monopolies of the mines and of the railways, created by the
State in favour of capitalists, the owners of the mines and the railway
lines — in short, it is always he who pays all the aftereffects of the
taxes that the State, the province, the municipality levy on the soil
and its products, the raw material, the factory, the revenue of the
employer, the privilege of education — everything, everything that the
municipality, the province and the State see coming into their coffers.
How many days of labour a year do all these taxes represent? Is it not
very probable that, having added them all together we would find that
the modern worker toils more for the State than the serf formerly worked
for his master?
But if it were only that!
But the reality is that taxation gives rulers the means of rendering
exploitation even more intense, of holding the people in misery, to
create legally, without speaking of theft or of [massive frauds like]
the Panamas, fortunes which capital could never have accumulated alone.
Taxation is so convenient! The naïve — the “dear citizens” of election
times — have been brought up to see in taxation the means of
accomplishing the great civilising works useful for the nation; and they
accept all sorts of taxes so easily! But the rulers know perfectly well
that taxation offers them the most convenient means of making great
futures at the expense of the small; to impoverish the masses and enrich
the few; to better deliver the peasant and the proletarian to the
manufacturer and to the speculator; to encourage one industry at the
expense of another, and all industries in general at the expense of
agriculture, and especially the peasant or the whole nation.
If tomorrow they dared to vote in the Chamber 50,000,000 francs for the
benefit of the landowners (as [Lord] Salisbury did in England in 1900 to
reward his Conservative voters [13]), all of France would cry out as one
man; the Ministry would be immediately toppled [par terre]. Well, by
means of taxation the same fifty millions from the pockets of the poor
are placed in those of the rich without them noticing the filching. No
one cries out — and the same end is attained marvellously. So much so
that this function of taxation goes unnoticed by those who make the
study of taxes their speciality.
It is so simple! It is enough, for example, to burden the peasant, his
horse and his cart, or else his windows, with a few additional centimes
[in taxes] to thereby ruin tens of thousands of farming households.
Those who already hardly succeeded in making both ends meet, those who
already the slightest shock could ruin and relegate to the ranks of the
proletariat were crushed this time by the slight increase in taxation.
They sell their plots and go to the cities, offering their arms to the
owners of the factories. Others sell their horse and start working hard
with the spade, hoping to recover. But a new increase in taxes, which is
undoubtedly done in a few years, brings the final blow: they become
proletarians in their turn.
This proletarianisation of the weak by the State, by the rulers, is done
continuously, year after year, without making anyone cry out, except the
ruined whose voice does not reach the general public. This has been seen
on a grand scale during the last forty years in Russia, especially in
central Russia, where the dream of the bigwig industrialists of creating
a proletariat has been realised by means of taxation — whereas a law
which would have sought to ruin a few millions of peasants by a single
strike of the pen would have made everyone cry out, even in Russia under
absolute government. Taxation has accomplished quietly what the
legislator did not dare to do openly.
And the economists who bestow upon themselves the title “scientific” —
to then speak to us about the “established” laws of economic
development, of “capitalist fatalism,” and its “self-negation” when a
simple study of taxation would alone explain a good half of what they
attribute to the supposed inevitability of economic laws. It is that the
ruin and expropriation of the peasant — such as was done in England
during the seventeenth century and which Marx had described as
“primitive capitalist accumulation” — continues to this day, year after
year, by the means of this so convenient instrument — taxation.
Far from growing according to immanent laws of internal growth, the
strength of capital would be badly paralysed in its expansion if it had
not the State in its service which, on the one hand, creates new
monopolies (mines, railways, water supply, telephones, measures against
workers associations, action against strikers, privileged education,
etc., etc.) and, on the other hand, builds fortunes and ruins the masses
of workers by means of taxation.
If capitalism has helped to create the modern State, it is also — let us
not forget — the modern State that creates and nourishes capitalism.
Adam Smith had already indicated, more than a century ago, this power of
taxation; [14] but the study whose outlines he had indicated was not
continued and today to show this power of taxation we must gather our
examples from everywhere.
So let us take the taxation of land which is one of the most powerful
weapons in the hands of the State. The eighth report of the State Bureau
of Labor [of Illinois] offers a wealth of evidence to show how — even in
a democratic State — the fortunes of millionaires were made simply by
the way the State struck the land and building in Chicago.
This great city has grown by leaps and bounds, reaching 1.5 million
inhabitants in fifty years. Well, by imposing taxes on built property
while only imposing it slightly on undeveloped property, even in the
most central streets of the city, the State created the fortunes of
millionaires. Plots of land on such-and-such a great street worth fifty
years ago six thousand francs for a tenth of a hectare have now reached
the value of five million to six million francs.
It is obvious however that if the tax had been “metric,” that is to say
so much by the square metre whether built-upon or undeveloped — well yes
if the land had been municipalised, such fortunes would never have
accumulated. The city would have benefited from the increase in its
population, reducing accordingly the taxes on the houses inhabited by
workers. Now, on the contrary, since it is the six- and ten-storey
houses inhabited by the workers which bear the bulk of the taxes, it is
the worker who is forced to work to enable the rich to become even
richer; and, on the other hand, he is forced to live in unhealthy slums
which, as is well known, arrest even the intellectual development of the
class that inhabits these slums and delivers it all the better to the
manufacturer. The Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics of Illinois Taxation, 1894, is full of striking information
on this subject.
Or else let us take the English arsenal of Woolwich. Formerly, the land
on which Woolwich grew up on was only a warren, inhabited only by
rabbits. Since the State built its great arsenal there, where 20,000 men
work in State factories manufacturing devices of destruction, Woolwich
and its neighbouring communities have become a populous city. [15]
One day, in June 1899, a member of Parliament asked the government to
increase the wages of the workers. “What is the point?” replied the
economist-Minister Goschen, “It will all be absorbed by the landlords!…
During the last ten years wages have risen by twenty percent; but in the
meantime the rents of the workers rose by fifty per cent. The increase
of wages (I quote verbally) had the effect of sending a larger sum into
the pockets of the landlords” (millionaires already). The minister’s
argument was evidently specious; but the fact that millionaires absorb
most of the wage increases is worth addressing. It is perfectly true.
In addition, the inhabitants of Woolwich, like those of any other great
city, are continually summoned to [pay] double and triple taxes to
drain, channel [the sewer system], pave [the streets of] the city, which
once polluted has now become healthy. And, thanks to the system of
taxation on land and property in force, all this mass of money went to
enrich the landlords by the same amount. “The landlord is everywhere in
the habit of selling back to the citizens in detail what they have
already paid for in common,” said, quite rightly, the journal of the
Woolwich Co-operators, Comradeship. [16]
Or else, a steam ferry has to be taken to cross the Thames and to
connect Woolwich with London. Initially, it was a monopoly which
parliament created in favour of a capitalist, authorising him to
establish a link by steam ferry. Then, after a while, as the monopolist
charged too much for the crossing, the municipality bought-back from the
monopolist the right to maintain this ferry. The whole cost to the
taxpayers was 5.5 million francs in eight years. But then, a small plot
of land near the ferry rose in value to seventy-five thousand francs,
which is obviously pocketed by the landowner. And as this plot will
continue to rise in value, here is a new monopoly established, a new
capitalist added to the legions of others already created by the English
State. [17]
But what! The workers in the Woolwich State factories eventually form a
union and, through [their] struggles, they succeeded in securing their
wages at a higher level than in other factories of the same kind. They
also founded a [consumers’] co-operative and so cut their living
expenses by a quarter — and “the best of the harvest” goes to the lords!
[18] When one of these gentlemen decides to sell a plot of his land, his
agent announces to us in the local newspapers (this is verbatim): “The
high wages paid by the Arsenal to workers, thanks to their unions, as
well as the existence in Woolwich of a prosperous co-operative [society]
render this land eminently suitable for building of worker’s dwellings.”
Which means: “You can pay dearly for this plot, gentlemen builders of
workers’ houses. You will easily recoup on the rents.” And they pay,
they buy to build, to be repaid later on by the worker.[19]
But that is not all. A few enthusiasts, with untold sorrows and immense
work, succeeded in founding in this same Woolwich a sort of co-operative
city of working class maisonettes. The land was bought by a
co-operative; it was drained, [the sewers] channelled, and the streets
build in co-operation; then the plots were sold to workers who, always
thanks to the co-operative, could build their maisonettes cheaply. [20]
The founders [of the scheme] congratulated themselves on its success and
enquired about the terms under which they could buy a hectare of land to
enlarge their co-operative city. They had paid the rate of 37,500 francs
per hectare (£500 per acre) for theirs; now they are asked for 75,000
francs for the next hectare… Why? “But, gentlemen, your city is going so
well that it has doubled the value of this land.”
Absolutely! Since the State has constituted and maintains the monopoly
of land in favour of Mr. So-and-So, they have [simply] toiled to enrich
this gentleman and to render the extension of their worker city
impossible.
“Long live the State.”
“Work for us, poor creature who thinks you can improve your lot by
co-operatives without daring to touch at the same time, property,
taxation, and the State!” [21]
But, without going to Chicago or Woolwich, do we not see in every great
city how the State, merely by imposing a heavier tax on the six-storey
house inhabited by workers than upon the private mansion of the rich,
establishes a formidable privilege in favour of the latter? It allows
him to pocket the increase in value given to his property by the growth
and beautification of the city — especially by the house with six floors
where the misery which beautifies the city for a beggar’s wage throngs.
Or else, we are surprised that the cities grow so rapidly to the
detriment of the countryside. And we do not want to see that the entire
financial policy of the nineteenth century was to burden the farmer —
the real producer, since he managed to obtain three, four and ten times
more produce from the soil than before — to the benefit of the cities,
that is to say the bankers, the lawyers, the merchants, and all the pack
of sensualists [jouisseurs] and rulers.
And do not tell us that the creation of monopolies in favour of the rich
is not the essence of the modern State and the sympathies which it finds
amongst the rich and educated who have passed through the schools of the
State. Here is an excellent recent example of the use of taxes in
Africa.
We know that the principal objective of the war of England against the
Boers was to abolish the Boer law which prevented blacks being forced to
work in the gold mines. The English companies founded for the
exploitation of these mines did not make the profits they had been
expected to. Well, here is what Earl Grey said to parliament: “They must
dismiss from their minds the idea of developing their mines with white
labour. Means had to be sought to induce the natives to seek,
spontaneously, employment at the mines… an incentive to labour must be
provided by imposition of a hut-tax of at least £1, in conformity to the
practice of Basutoland; and also by the establishment of a small
labour-tax, which these able-bodied natives should be required to pay
who are unable to show a certificate for four months’ work.” (Hobson,
The War in South Africa, p. 234). [22]
So here is serfdom which they did not dare to introduce openly but which
was introduced by taxation. Assume every miserable hut struck with 25
francs [that is, £1] of tax and serfdom is made. And Rudd, the agent of
Rhodes, dots the i’s [and crosses the t’s] by writing: “If under the cry
of civilisation we in Egypt lately mowed down 10,000 or 20,000 Dervishes
with Maxims, surely it cannot be considered a hardship to compel the
natives in South Africa to give three months in the year to do a little
honest work.” Always two or three days a week! There is no escape. As
for paying for the “honest work,” Rudd bluntly stated: 60 to 70 francs
per month is “morbid sentimentality.” Quarter that would be amply
sufficient (Ibid., p. 235). [23] That way, the black will not enrich
themselves and will remain a serf. They must take from him, by tax, what
he earns as wages; he must be prevented from giving himself rest.
And indeed, since the English have become the masters of the Transvaal
and of the “blacks,” the extraction of gold rose from 313 million francs
to 875 million [per annum]. Nearly 200,000 “blacks” are now forced to
toil in the mines to enrich the companies that were the primary causes
of the war. [24]
But what the English did in Africa to reduce blacks to poverty and to
impose forced labour on them, the State did for three centuries in
Europe in relation to the peasants; and it does it again to impose the
same forced labour onto the workers of the towns.
And academics speak to us about the “immutable laws” of Political
Economy!
Remaining still in the domain of recent history, we might tell of
another blow made by means of taxation. We could entitle it: “How the
British Government took 4.6 million francs from the Nation to give them
to the Big Tea Merchants — a Farce in one Act.” On Saturday, 3 March
1900, it was learned in London that the government was going to increase
by two pence (twenty centimes) per pound (per 450 grams) the customs
duty on tea. Immediately, on Saturday and Monday, twenty-two million
pounds of tea which were in customs in London awaiting payment of the
tax were taken out by the merchants by paying the previous duty; and,
Tuesday, the price of tea in all the shops in London was raised by two
pence [per pound]. If we count only the twenty-two million pounds
removed on Saturday and Monday, this would already make a net profit of
44 million pennies, or 4,583,000 francs taken from the pockets of the
taxpayers and given to the tea merchants. But the same manoeuvre was
carried out in all the other customs, in Liverpool, in Scotland, etc.
without counting the tea which had been taken out of the customs before
notification of the tax increase. It will no doubt be about ten million
given by the State to these gentlemen.
The same goes for tobacco, beer, spirits, wine — and here are the
wealthy enriched by about 25 million [francs] taken from the poor. And,
“Long live Taxation! Long live the State!”
And you, children of the poor, thus learn in the primary school (the
children of the rich learn something else at university), learn that
taxation has been created to relieve the poor dear peasants from corvée
labours, replacing them with a small annual payment to the coffers of
the State. And tell your mother, bent under the weight of years of work
and domestic toil [d’économie domestique] that they teach you there a
great and beautiful science — Political Economy…
Take, indeed, education. We have come a long way since the time when the
community itself found a house for the school as well as the teacher and
where the wise man, the physician, the philosopher, surrounded himself
with voluntary pupils to transmit to them the secrets of his science or
his philosophy. Today, we have so-called free education provided at our
expense by the State; we have secondary schools, universities,
academies, subsidised scientific societies, scientific mission — what
have you.
Since the State asks no better than to always extend the sphere of its
power and that the citizens demand nothing better than to be exempted
from thinking about matters of general interest — to “emancipate”
themselves from their fellow citizens by abandoning common matters to a
third party — everything works out perfectly. “Education,” says the
State, “delighted, ladies and gentlemen, to give it to your children! To
lighten your cares, we will even forbid you from meddling with
education. We will write all the programmes — and no criticism, please!
First, we will stupefy your children by the study of dead languages and
the virtues of Roman Law. That will make them pliable and submissive.
Then, to deprive them of any inclination to revolt, we shall teach them
the virtues of the State and of governments as well as contempt for the
governed. We will make them believe that they, having learned Latin,
become the salt of the earth, the leaven of progress, that without them
humanity would perish. This will flatter you; as for them, they will
swallow it up marvellously and become as vain as hell. That is what we
need. We will teach them that the misery of the masses is a “law of
nature” and they will be delighted to learn it and to repeat it.
However, changing the teaching according to the varying tastes of the
times, we will tell them that sometimes this is the will of God,
sometimes that it is an “iron law” which causes the worker to be
impoverished as soon as he begins to enrich himself, since he has
forgotten in his well-being to have children. [25] All education will
have the purpose of making your children believe that there is no
salvation outside the providential State! And you will applaud, will you
not?”
“Then, after having made the people pay for the cost of all education —
primary, secondary, university and academic — we will arrange ourselves
in such a way as to keep the best portions of the budgetary pie for the
sons of the bourgeois. [26] And this great fellow, the people, boasting
of their universities and their scholars, will not even perceive how we
will construct government as a monopoly for those who can afford the
luxury of colleges and universities for their children. If we told them
point blank: You will be governed, judged, accused and defended,
educated and stupefied by the rich, in the interest of the rich — they
would without doubt revolt. It is obvious! But with taxation and a few
nice, very “liberal” laws stating to the people, for example, that they
must have undergone twenty examinations to be admitted to the high
office of judge or minister — the fellow will find that very good!”
And this is how, one thing leading to another, the government of the
people by the landlords and the wealthy bourgeois, against which the
people once revolted when they saw it face-on, is reconstituted in
another form under the disguise of taxation with the consent and almost
the applause of the people!
We need not talk about taxation for the military because everyone should
already know what to expect on that. When, then, was the permanent army
not the means of keeping the people in bondage? And when did a regular
army succeed in conquering a country if it met a people in arms? [27]
But take any tax — direct or indirect: on land, on income, or on
consumption, for contracting debts of the State or under the pretext of
paying them (because they never are); take the tax for war or public
education, analyse it, see to what it ultimately leads you, and you will
be struck by the immense force, by the omnipotence which we have given
to our rulers.
Taxation is the most convenient form for the rich to keep the people in
misery. It is also the means for ruining entire groups of farmers and
industrial workers as they manage through an incredible series of
efforts to increase ever-so-slightly their well-being. It is at the same
time the most convenient instrument for making government the eternal
monopoly of the rich. Finally, it allows, under different pretexts, the
forging of the weapons which will one day be used to crush the people if
they revolt.
An octopus with a thousand heads and a thousand suckers, like the sea
monsters of the old tales, it makes it possible to envelop all society
and to channel all individual efforts so as to make them result in the
enrichment and governmental monopoly of the privileged classes.
And so long as the State, armed with taxation, continues to exist, the
liberation of the proletarian cannot be accomplished in any way, neither
by the path of reforms nor even by revolution. For if the revolution
does not crush this octopus, if it does not destroy its head and cut off
its arms and suckers, it will be strangled by the beast. The revolution
itself will be placed at the service of monopoly, as was the [French]
revolution of 1793.
Let us continue to examine how the modern State, that which established
itself in Europe after the sixteenth century and later in the young
republics of the two Americas, works to enslave the individual. After
having accepted the personal emancipation of a few strata of society
that had broken the yoke of serfdom in the free cities, it applied
itself, as we have seen, to maintaining serfdom for the peasants as long
as possible, and to re-establish economic servitude for all under a new
form, bringing its subjects under the yoke of its functionaries and a
whole new class of privileged bureaucrats, the Church, the landlords,
merchants, and capitalists. And we have just seen how the State wielded
taxation for this purpose.
We are now going to take a look at another weapon which the State knew
so well how to use — the creation of privileges and monopolies to the
benefit of some of its subjects to the detriment of others. Here we see
the State in its true function, fulfilling its true mission. It applied
itself to this from its beginnings: it is even this which enabled it to
form and group under its protection the lord, the soldier, the priest
and the judge. The sovereign was recognised at this price. To this
mission it remains faithful to this day; and if it failed, if it ceased
to be a mutual insurance [company] between the privileged, that would be
the death of the institution — of the historical growth which has taken
a form determined by this end and which we call State.
It is striking, indeed, to note to what extent the creation of
monopolies for the benefit of those who already possessed these
[privileges] from birth or else those with theocratic or military power
was the very essence of the [social] organisation that started to
develop in Europe in the sixteenth century, replacing that of the free
cities of the Middle Ages.
We can take any nation: France, England, the German, Italian or Slavic
States — everywhere we find in the emerging State the same character.
This is why we need only look at the development of monopolies in a
single nation — England, for example, where this development has been
studied best — to understand and grasp this essential role of the State
in all modern nations. [28] None offers the least exception.
It is very clear, indeed, how the establishment of the emerging State in
England since the end of the sixteenth century and the establishment of
monopolies in favour of the privileged went hand in hand. [29]
Even before the reign of Elizabeth, when the English State was still in
its infancy, the Tudor kings always created monopolies for their
favourites. Under Elizabeth, when maritime commerce began to develop and
a whole series of new industries were introduced in England, this
tendency became even more marked. Each new industry was erected as a
monopoly, either in favour of foreigners who paid the Queen or in favour
of Courtiers whom they made a point of rewarding. [30]
The exploitation of the alum deposits in Yorkshire, salt, tin mines, the
coal mines around Newcastle, the glass industry, the improved
manufacture of soap, pins, and so on — all these were set up as
monopolies which prevented the development of industries and tended to
kill the small industrialists. For example, to protect the Courtiers to
whom the soap monopoly had been granted, they went so far as to forbid
individuals from making soap for their laundry at home.
Under James I [31] the creation of “concessions” and of patents
continued to increase until 1624 when finally, at the approach of the
Revolution, a law was passed against monopolies. But this law was a
two-faced law: it condemned the monopolies and at the same time not only
retained those that existed but authorised new and very important ones.
Besides, it was violated as soon as it was passed. They benefited from
one of its paragraphs which assisted the old corporations of the towns
in establishing monopolies in a certain town initially and later to
extend them to entire regions. From 1630 to 1650, the government also
took advantage of “patents” to establish new monopolies. [32]
It took the Revolution of 1688 to put an end to this orgy of monopolies.
[33] And it was not until 1689, when a new Parliament (which represented
an alliance between the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the
landed aristocracy against royal absolutism and the camarilla [34] )
began to function, that measures were taken against the creation of new
monopolies by the royalty. The economic historians even say that for
nearly a century after 1689 the English parliament was watchful [jaloux]
of not allowing the creation of industrial monopolies that would have
favoured certain manufacturers over others.
It must indeed be recognised that the Revolution and the coming to power
of the bourgeoisie had this consequence and that in this way great
industries, such as cotton, wool, iron, coal, etc., could develop
without being hindered by monopolists. They could even develop into
national industries, in which a mass of small entrepreneurs could take
part. This enabled thousands of workers in the small workshops to
contribute the thousand improvements without which these industries
could never have advanced.
But meanwhile the statist bureaucracy was forming and strengthening.
Governmental centralisation which is the essence of every State made its
way — and soon the creation of new monopolies in new spheres
recommenced, this time on a far larger scale than in the times of the
Tudors. Then, the art [of monopolising] was in its infancy. Now, the
State was mature.
If Parliament was prevented to a certain extent by the representatives
of the local bourgeoisie from interfering in England even in emerging
industries and from favouring some at the expense of others, it carried
its monopolist activity to the colonies. Here it acted on a grand scale.
The [East] India Company, [35] the Hudson Bay Company in Canada [36]
became fantastically wealthy kingdoms, given to groups of private
individuals. Later on, concessions of territories in America, of
gold-fields in Australia, privileges for navigation, and the seizure of
new branches of business, became in the hands of the State the means of
granting to its favourites [protégés] fabulous incomes. Colossal
fortunes were amassed in this way.
True to its double composition, of bourgeois in the House of Commons and
of landed aristocracy in the House of Lords, the English Parliament [37]
first applied itself throughout the eighteenth century to
proletarianising the peasants and delivering the cultivators of the
soil, bound feet and hands, to the landowners. By means of acts of
“demarcation” (Enclosure Acts), by which Parliament declared the
communal lands the private property of the lord, as soon as the lord had
surrounded them with any fence, [38] nearly 3,000,000 hectares of
communal land passed from the hands of the communes to those of the
lords between 1709 and 1869. [39] Overall, the result of monopolist
legislation by the English Parliament is that a third of all the
cultivatable land of England now belongs to 523 families.
Demarcation [of boundaries] was an act of open robbery but in the
eighteenth century the State, which had been renovated by the Revolution
[of 1688], already felt strong enough to defy discontent and possibly
the insurrections of the peasants. Had it not for that the support of
the bourgeoisie?
For if Parliament thus endowed the lords with estates, it also favoured
the bourgeois industrialists. By driving the peasants out of the
villages into the towns, it gave the industrialists the “hands” of
hungry peasants. In addition, by virtue of Parliament’s interpretation
of the Poor Law, the agents of the cotton manufacturers roamed the
workhouses, that is to say the prisons in which proletarians without
work were confined with their families; and from these prisons they
carried away carts full of children who, under the name of workhouse
apprentices, had to work fourteen or sixteen hours a day in the cotton
factories. Many a town in Lancashire has a population which bears to
this day the stamp of its origin [in this practice]. The impoverished
blood of these hungry children, brought from the workhouses of the
South, and made to work [in the factories] under the whip of the foremen
to enrich the bourgeois of the midlands, often from the age of seven, is
still seen in the stunted and anaemic population of these small towns
[of Lancashire and Yorkshire]. This lasted until the nineteenth century.
Finally, Parliament always crushed by its legislation the national
industries in the colonies to aid infant industries [in mainland
Britain]. Thus the textile industry of India, which had attained such a
high degree of artistic perfection, was killed. They delivered this rich
market to English rubbish. The weaving of cloth in Ireland was killed in
the same way in favour of the cotton-works of Manchester.
We thus see that the bourgeois Parliament, anxious to enrich its
customers by the development of large national industries, during the
eighteenth century opposed that individual industrialists or distinct
branches of English industry should be favoured at the expense of the
others — it made up for this by the proletarianisation of the great mass
of the agricultural population and the colonies which it delivered to
most ignoble exploitation by powerful monopolists. At the same time, if
it could, it maintained and favoured in England even the mining
monopolies established in the preceding century, such as that of the
Newcastle mine-owners which lasted until 1844 or else that of the copper
mines which lasted until 1820. [40]
As of the first half of the nineteenth century new monopolies began to
be emerge under the protection of the Law before which the old ones were
merely children’s toys.
Initially, the attentions of business tycoons were on the railways and
the main lines of ocean navigation subsidised by the State. Colossal
fortunes were made in a few decades in England and in France with the
help of “concessions” received by individuals and companies for the
construction of railway lines, generally with the guarantee a certain
[minimum] revenue.
To this were added the great metallurgical and mining companies for
supplying the railways with rails, iron or steel bridges, rolling stock,
and fuel — all realising fabulous profits and immense speculations on
the acquired lands. Big companies for the construction of iron ships,
and especially for production of iron, steel, copper for war material as
well as for this same material — warships, cannons, guns, swords, etc.;
the large canal enterprises (Suez, Panama, etc.) and finally what was
called “the development” of countries backward in industry followed
closely. Millionaires were thus created by steam, by half-starved
workers, who were pitilessly shot or transported to forced labour as
soon as they made the slightest attempt at revolt.
The construction of a vast network of railways in Russia (begun in the
[eighteen-]sixties), in the peninsulas of Europe, in the United States,
in Mexico, in the republics of South America — all these were sources of
unheard-of riches, accumulated by a real robbery under the protection of
the State. What misery it once was, when a feudal baron plundered some
merchant caravan passing near his castle! Here, they were hundreds of
millions of human flocks being fleeced by business tycoons with the open
connivance of States, of governments — autocratic, parliamentarian or
republican.
But that is not all. [41] Soon they were joined by the construction of
ships for the merchant navy subsidised by the various States, subsidised
shipping lines, submarine cables, and [transcontinental] telegraphs; the
boring of isthmus and tunnels, the beautification of cities inaugurated
under Napoleon III, and finally — dominating all this like the Eiffel
Tower dominates the neighbouring houses [in Paris]—the borrowing of the
States and the subsidised banks! All these dances of the billions became
material for “concessions.” Finance, commerce, war, armaments, education
— all were used to create monopolies, to manufacture billionaires. [42]
And let no one try to excuse these monopolies and concessions by saying
that in this way they succeeded, nevertheless, in carrying out a mass of
useful initiatives. Because for every million of capital usefully
employed in these enterprises the founders of these Companies added
three, four, five, sometimes ten millions to the burden of public debt.
We need only recall Panama, where millions were devoured to “float” the
Companies and only a tenth of the money paid by the shareholders went to
the real work of piercing the isthmus. But what was done in Panama was
done with all companies, without exception, in America, in the Republic
of the United States, as in the European monarchies. “Nearly all our
railroad companies and other incorporations are loaded down in this
way,” said Henry George in Progress and Poverty. “When one dollar’s
worth of capital has been really used, certificates for two, three,
four, five, or even ten have been issued, and upon this fictitious
amount interest or dividends are paid.” [43]
And if it were only that! [44] When these great companies are formed,
their power over human agglomerations is such that it can only be
compared to that of the brigands who once held the roads and levied a
tribute upon every traveller whether he was on foot or the head of a
merchant caravan. [45] And for every millionaire who emerges with the
aid of the State there are millions that pour down in the ministries.
The pillage of national wealth which has been done and is still being
done with the consent and with aid of the State — especially where there
are still natural resources to grab — is simply sickening. We must look
at, for example, the great Trans-Canadian [railway] to get an idea of
this pillage authorised by the State. All the best land on the shores of
the Great Lakes in North America or in the big cities along rivers
belongs to the company [the Canadian Pacific Railway] that received the
privilege of building this line. A strip of land seven and a half
kilometres wide on each side along its entire length was given [by the
Canadian Federal Parliament] to the capitalists who undertook to build
the Trans-Canadian; [46] and when this, advancing towards the west,
crossed unproductive plateaus, the equivalent of this strip of land was
allocated a bit everywhere, where there were fertile lands which would
soon reach a high value. Where the State still distributed land to new
settlers free of charge, the land was allocated to the Trans-Canadian
was divided into lots of one square mile, placed like the black squares
on a chessboard in the midst of the lands which the State gave to the
settlers. With the result that today, the squares belonging to the State
and given to the emigrants being all inhabited, the land given to the
capitalists of the Trans-Canadian is worth hundreds of millions of
dollars. And as to the capital that the Company was supposed to have
spent to build the line, it represents according to all three or four
times the sum that was actually spent.
It is absolutely the same wherever we look, so much so it becomes
difficult to name a single big fortune due solely to industry, without
the aid of any monopoly of governmental origin. In the United Sates, as
Henry George had already noted, it is absolutely impossible.
Thus the immense fortune of the Rothschilds owes its origin entirely to
the loans made by the founder banker of the family to kings, to fight
either other kings or their own subjects.
The no less colossal fortune of the Dukes of Westminster is entirely due
to the fact that their ancestors obtained from the whims [bon plaisir]
of kings the lands upon which a great part of London is now built; and
this fortune is maintained solely because the English Parliament,
contrary to all justice, does not want to raise the question of the
blatant appropriation of the land of the English nation by the lords.
As for the fortunes of the big American billionaires — the Astors, the
Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, [the Carnegies [47] ], the trusts of oil,
steel, railways, and even matches, etc. — all have their origin in
monopolies created by the State.
In a word, if someone one day made a list of the riches that were seized
by the financiers and business tycoons with the aid of privileges and
monopolies established by States; if someone succeeded in evaluating the
riches that were thus withdrawn from the public wealth by all
governments — parliamentarian, monarchist and republican — to give them
to individuals in exchange for more or less disguised brides — the
workers would be amazed, outraged. These are incredible figures, hardly
conceivable for those who live on their meagre wages.
Alongside these figures — a product of pillage — those spoken to us by
the anointed treatises of political economy are trifles, crumbs. When
the economists want us to believe that at the origin of Capital the poor
would find behind the hoarded money the privations of the bosses from
the profits of their industrial establishments, either these gentlemen
are ignorant or else they knowing say what is not true. [48] The rapine,
the appropriation, the plunder of national wealth with the aid of the
State by “interesting” the powerful — this is the real source of the
immense fortunes accumulated each year by the lords and the bourgeois.
Perhaps it will be said: “But you are talking of the monopolisation of
the riches in virgin countries, newly conquered by the industrial
civilisation of the nineteenth century.” And it will be added: “This is
not the case for the older countries, so to speak, in their political
life, such as England or France.”
Well, it is absolutely the same in the countries most advanced in their
political life. The rulers of these States continually find new
opportunities to deprive the citizens for the benefit of their
favourites [protégés]. Was “Panama,” which served to enrich so many
business tycoons, not purely French? Was it not an application of the
Enrich yourselves! attributed to Guizot; and alongside Panama, which
ended in a scandal, have there not been hundreds of others which
flourish to this day? We have only to think of Morocco, the Tripoli
adventure, that of the Yalou in Korea, the plunder of Persia, etc. [49]
These acts of high fraud are still occurring every day and they will
only end after the social revolution.
Capital and Sate are two parallel growths which would be impossible the
one without the other and which, for this reason, must always be
combated together — both at once. The State would never have been able
to form and acquire the power which it possesses today — not even that
which it possessed in the Rome of the emperors, in the Egypt of the
Pharaohs, in Assyria, etc. — if it had not favoured, as it did, the
growth of landed and industrial capital and the exploitation first of
the tribes of pastoral people, then peasant farmers and later still
workers of industry. It was by protecting with its whip and its sword
those to whom it gave the possibility of monopolising the soil and of
getting hold of (first by pillage, and later by the forced labour of the
conquered) some tools either for the cultivation of the soil or for
obtaining industrial products; it was by forcing those who possessed
nothing to work for those who owned (land, iron, slaves) that little by
little was formed this formidable organisation that is called State. And
if capitalism would never have reached its present form without the
watchful, thoughtful and continuous aid of the State, the State in its
turn would never have reached this formidable strength, this power of
absorption, the possibility of holding in its hands the whole life of
every citizen it has today, if it had not consciously worked with
patience and method to constitute Capital. Without the help of Capital,
royal power would never even have managed to free itself from the Church
and without the help of the capitalist it would never have been able to
lay hands on the whole existence of modern man, from his first days at
school to his grave.
That is why, when it is said that Capitalism dates from the fifteenth or
sixteenth century, this statement can be considered as having some
utility — as long as it serves to affirm the parallelism of the
development of the State and Capital. But the fact is that exploitation
of the capitalist already existed where there were the first seeds of
individual ownership of the soil, where the [exclusive] right of
such-and-such individuals to graze livestock on such-and-such land, and
later the possibility of cultivating such-and-such land by forced or
hired labour had been established. At this very moment, we can see
Capital already achieving its pernicious work amongst the Mongol
pastoral peoples (the Mongols, the Buryats) who are just emerging from
the tribal phase. It is sufficient, indeed, for commerce to leave the
tribal phase (during which nothing could be sold by a member of the
tribe to another member), it is enough that trade becomes individual, so
that capitalism already appears. And as soon as the State (coming from
outside or developed within such-and-such a tribe) puts it hands on the
tribe by taxation and its functionaries, as it does with the Mongolian
tribes, the proletariat and capitalism are already born, and they
necessarily begin their evolution. It is precisely to deliver the
Kabyles, the Moroccans, the Arabs of Tripolitania, the Egyptian fellahs,
[50] the Persians, etc. into the grip of the capitalists imported from
Europe and to the indigenous exploiters that the European States are
making their conquests in Africa and Asia. And in these countries,
recently conquered, we can see on the spot how the State and Capital are
intimately linked, how one produces the other, how they mutually
determine their parallel evolution.
ERA
The economists who have recently studied the development of monopolies
in various States made this remark that in England — not only in the
eighteenth century, as we have just seen, but also in the nineteenth
century — the creation of monopolies in national industries and also of
these combinations between bosses to raise the prices of their products
that we call cartels or trusts has not reached the extent it has
recently taken in Germany.
However, this fact is explained not by the virtues of the political
organisation of the English State — which is just as monopolist as the
others — but, as these same economists point out, by the island location
of England which allows the cheap import of goods (even bulky goods with
low prices) and the free trade that results from it.
Furthermore, having conquered colonies as rich as India and having
colonised (always thanks to its maritime location) territories like
North America and Australia, the English State found such numerous and
such immense opportunities in these countries to create monopolies of a
colossal stature that it directed its principal activity there.
Without these two reasons, it would be the same in England as elsewhere.
In fact, Adam Smith had already pointed out that three bosses never meet
without conspiring amongst themselves against their workers — and,
obviously, also against consumers. [51] The tendency to form
combinations of bosses — cartels and trusts — has always existed and we
find in Macrosty’s book a number of facts that show how the bosses
conspired against consumers. [52]
The English parliament, like all other governments, favoured these
bosses’ conspiracies; the law only struck agreements between workers,
which it punished as conspiracies against the security of the State.
But there was, besides this, the free trade which was introduced in the
forties [of the nineteenth century] and the low prices of imports by sea
which quite often thwarted the conspiracies of the bosses. Being the
first to create big industry at home which little feared foreign
competition and demanded the free import of raw materials; having given
at the same time two-thirds of its land to a handful of lords who drove
the peasants off their estates; and thus forced to live on imported
wheat, barley, oats and meat, England was forced to maintain free trade.
[53]
But free trade also allowed the import of manufactured goods. And then —
it has been ably recounted by Hermann Levy — each time a combination
between bosses was formed to increase prices, either of sewing thread,
or cement, or glassware, we imported these goods from abroad. Inferior
for the most part in quality, they nevertheless competed when the
inferior quality was not considered important. In this way the plans of
the bosses who had devised a cartel or a kind of trust were frustrated.
But — what struggles to maintain free trade which was by no means to the
taste of the great landowning lords and their farmers.
However, starting around the years 1886–1895 the creation of large
cartels or trusts of bosses monopolising certain industries began to
occur in England as elsewhere. And the cause — we learn today — is that
bosses’ syndicates began to be organised internationally so as to
include entrepreneurs of the same industries in the protectionist
countries as well as those in England. [54] In this way, the privilege
established in Germany or in Russia in favour of German or Russian
manufacturers spreads to the countries of free trade. The effect of
these international syndicates is being felt everywhere. They contribute
to a high degree to price increases. They raise not only — it must be
noted — the prices of these specific goods targeted by the syndicate but
those of all goods.
Need we add that these syndicates or trusts enjoy under a thousand
relationships (banks, etc.) the high protection of the States whereas
workers international unions are outlawed by these same governments.
Thus the French government banned the International and the Belgian and
German governments immediately deport the agitator from England
encouraging the organisation of an international workers trade union.
But we have never seen an agent of the trusts expelled from anywhere.
[55]
To return to the English parliament, it has never failed in the mission
of all governments of ancient and modern States: that of promoting the
exploitation of the poor by the rich. In the nineteenth century, as
before, it never failed to create monopolies as soon as the opportunity
presented itself. Thus Professor Levy, who wants to show how England is
superior to Germany in this respect, nevertheless is forced to recognise
that the English parliament did not fail to take advantage of any lack
of opportunities for foreign import in order to foster monopolies.
Thus the monopoly of Newcastle coal merchants on the London market was
assisted by the law until 1830 and the cartel of these merchants was
broken only in 1844 during the strong Chartist agitation of the time. As
recently as 1870–1880 these coalitions of shipping companies, the
Shipping rings which we have heard so much about, were formed —
fostered, it goes without saying, by the State.
But if there was only that! All that could be monopolised was
monopolised by the English parliament.
As soon as we started to light the towns with gas, to bring pure water
from afar, to channel the sewers, to build tramways, and finally, just
recently, to install telephones, the English parliament never failed to
set up these public
services as monopolies in favour of privileged companies. So that today,
for example, people living in the towns of Kent and several other
counties have to pay preposterous prices for water and it is impossible
for them to bring and distribute the needed household water by
themselves: parliament granted this privilege to companies. Elsewhere it
is the gas, elsewhere the trams, and everywhere, until 1 January 1912,
it was the monopoly on telephones.
The first telephones were introduced in England by several private
companies. And the State, parliament, obviously hastened to grant them
the monopoly to install telephones in such-and-such towns, such-and-such
regions, for thirty-one years. Soon most of these companies were
amalgamated into a single powerful national company and then it was a
scandalous monopoly. With its master-lines and its “concessions,” the
National Telephone Company charged English people five to ten times more
for the telephone service than was paid elsewhere in Europe. And as the
Company, armed with its monopoly, was making a net profit of
twenty-seven million per year (official figures) on an annual
expenditure of seventy-five million, it certainly did not press itself
to increase the number of its stations, preferring to pay large
dividends to its shareholders and to increase its reserve fund (having
already reached more than one hundred million in fifteen years). This
increased the “value” of this company and, consequently, the amount that
the State would have to pay it to repurchase its privilege if it were
forced to do so before the thirty-one years had passed. This situation
had as a result that the private telephone, which had become so common
on the continent, was in England only for the merchants and the rich. It
was only on 1 January 1912 that the telephone system of the monopolist
Company was repurchased by the post and telegraph administration after
having enriched the monopolists by several hundred millions. [56]
This is how we create an increasingly large and phenomenally wealthy
bourgeoisie in a nation where half of the adult men wage-earners, more
than four million men, earn less than thirty-four francs per week and
more than three million — less than twenty-five francs. Now, thirty-four
francs per week in England with the current prices of foodstuffs is
hardly the bare minimum for a family of two adults and two children to
live and pay [the rent on] their dwelling at the rate of five francs per
week. The scrupulous studies of Professor Bowley and of [Benjamin]
Rowntree in York, complemented by those of Chiozza Money, have fully
established it.
If such was the creation of monopolies in a country of free trade, what
to say about the protectionist countries where not only the competition
of foreign products is rendered impossible but where the great iron
industries, railway manufacturing, sugar, etc., always hard-pressed to
find money, are continually subsidised by the State? Germany, France,
Russia, the United States are the true breeding-grounds of monopolies
and syndicates of bosses protected by the State. These organisations,
very numerous and sometimes very powerful, have the potential to raise
the prices of their products in appalling proportion.
Ores — almost all ores — metals, raw sugar and sugar refineries, ethanol
for industry and a number of specialised industries (nails, pottery,
etc.), tobacco, oil refining and so on — all this is formed into
monopolies, cartels, or trusts — always thanks to the intervention of
the State, and very often under its protection.
One of the best examples of this last kind is offered by the German
sugar syndicates. The production of sugar being an industry subject to
supervision by the State and to some extent in its management, 450 sugar
refineries met under the patronage of the State to exploit the public.
This exploitation lasted until the Brussels conference which limited a
little the interested protection of the German and Russian governments
in the sugar industry — to protect the English refiners. [57]
The same thing happens in Germany in several other industries, such as
the brandy syndicate, the Westphalian coal syndicate, the protected
syndicate of Steingut Fabriker pottery, the Union of manufacturers of
nails made with German wire, etc., etc., without speaking of the
shipping lines, the railways, the industries for war material and so on,
nor of the monopolistic syndicates for the extraction of ores in Brazil,
and so many others.
You can go to America — we find the same thing there. Not only in the
times of colonisation and at the beginnings of modern industry but today
still, every day, in every American town scandalous monopolies are
formed. Everywhere it is the same tendency to favour and to strengthen,
under the protection of the State, the exploitation of the poor by the
propertied and the crafty. Each new advance of civilisation brings new
monopolies, new methods of exploitation fostered by the State in America
as in the old States of Europe.
Aristocracy and democracy, placed within the framework of the State, act
the same. Both, having come to power, are equally enemies of the
simplest justice towards the producer of all wealth — the worker. [58]
And if it were only the vile exploitation to which entire populations
are delivered by States to enrich a certain number of industrialists,
companies or bankers! If it were only that! But the evil is infinitely
deeper. It is that the big railway, steel, coal, oil, copper, etc.
companies, the big banking companies and the big financiers become a
formidable political power in all modern States. We only have to think
of the way in which bankers and large financiers dominate governments in
matters of war. Thus, we know that the personal sympathies for Germany,
not only of Alexander II but also of Queen Victoria, influenced Russian
politics and English politics in 1870 and contributed to the crushing of
France. We then saw how much the personal sympathies of King Edward VII
mattered in the Franco-English agreement. [59] But there would be no
exaggeration to say that predilections of the Rothschild family, the
interests of the high bank in Paris and the Catholic bank of Rome are
much more powerful than the predilections and interests of queens and
kings. We know, for example, that the attitude of the United States
towards Cuba and Spain depended much more on the monopolist senators in
the sugar industry than on the sympathies of the American statesmen
towards the Cuban insurgents. [60]
As long ago as 1882, when England, Germany, Austria, and Romania, taking
advantage of the isolation of France, leagued themselves against Russia
and a terrible European war was about to break out, we showed in Le
Révolté what were the real motives for rivalry between States and the
wars that would result. [61]
The cause of modern wars is always competition for markets and the right
to exploit nations backward in industry. In Europe we no longer fight
for the honour of kings. Armies are pitted against each other so that
the revenues of Your Most Powerful Rothschild or Schneider, the Most
Worshipful Company of Anzin or the most Holy Catholic Bank of Rome may
remain unimpaired. Kings no longer count.
In fact, all wars waged in Europe during the last hundred and fifty
years were wars for commercial interests, rights of exploitation.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century great industry and world
commerce, supported by a navy and colonies in America (Canada) and Asia
(in India), began to develop in France. Thereupon England, which had
already crushed its competitors in Spain and Holland, anxious to keep
for itself alone the monopoly of maritime commerce, of sea-power, and of
a colonial empire, took advantage of the revolution in France to begin a
whole series of wars against it. Since then it understood what [riches]
the monopolised outlet for her growing industry would bring it.
Finding itself rich enough to pay for the armies of Prussia, Austria,
and Russia, it waged during a quarter of a century a succession of
terrible and disastrous wars against France. France had to bleed itself
dry to sustain these wars; and only at this price was it able to uphold
its right to remain a “great power.” That is to say, it retained its
right not to submit to all the conditions that the English monopolists
wished to impose upon it to the advantage of their commerce. It retained
its right to have a navy and military ports. Frustrated in its plans for
expansion in North America (it had lost Canada) and in India (it had to
abandon its colonies), it obtained in return permission to create a
colonial empire in Africa — on condition that it did not touch Egypt —
and to enrich its monopolists by pillaging the Arabs in Algeria.
Later on, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the turn
of Germany. When serfdom was abolished as a consequence of the uprisings
in 1848, and the abolition of communal property forced young peasants in
mass to leave the country for the town, where they offered their “idle
hands” at starvation wages to the entrepreneurs of industry — great
industry began to flourish in various German States. German
industrialists soon realised that if the people were given a good
practical education they would quickly catch up with great industrial
countries like France and England — on condition, needless to say, of
procuring for Germany advantageous outlets beyond its frontiers. They
knew what Proudhon had so well demonstrated: [62] that the industrialist
can only succeed in substantially enriching himself if a large portion
of his products is exported to countries where it can be sold at prices
they could never obtain in the country of origin.
So in all the social strata of Germany, that of the exploited as well as
of the exploiters, there was a passionate desire to unify Germany at any
price: to build a powerful empire capable of supporting an immense army,
a strong navy, and capable of conquering ports in the North Sea, in the
Adriatic, and — one day — in Africa and the East — an empire which could
dictate economic law in Europe.
For this [to succeed], it was evidently necessary to break the strength
of France, which would have opposed it and which then had, or seemed to
have, the power to prevent it.
Hence — the terrible war of 1870, with all its sad consequences for
universal progress which we suffer from even today.
By this war and this victory over France, a German Empire, that dream of
radicals, socialists and, in part, German conservatives since 1848, was
at last constituted and soon made itself felt and its political power
and its right to dictate the law in Europe recognised.
Germany, on entering a striking period of youthful activity, indeed
quickly succeeded in increasing its industrial productivity by double,
treble, tenfold and at this moment the German bourgeoisie covets new
sources of enrichment throughout the plains of Poland, the steppes of
Hungary, the plateaus of Africa, and especially around the railway line
to Bagdad — in the rich valleys of Asia Minor which can provide German
capitalists with a hardworking population to exploit under one of the
most beautiful skies in the world; perhaps, one day, also Egypt.
Therefore, it is ports for export and especially military ports in the
Mediterranean Adriatic and in the Adriatic of the Indian Ocean — the
Persian Gulf — as well as on the African coast in Beira, and later in
the Pacific Ocean, that these German colonial tycoons wish to conquer.
Their faithful servant, the German Empire with its armies and
battleships, is at their service.
But everywhere these new conquerors encountered a formidable rival, the
English who bar their way.
Jealous of keeping its supremacy on the seas, jealous above all of
holding its colonies for exploitation by its [own] monopolists;
frightened by the success of German Empire’s colonial policy and the
rapid development of its navy, England redoubled its efforts to have a
fleet capable of definitely crushing the German fleet. It also looks
everywhere for allies to weaken the military power of Germany on land.
And when the English press sows alarm and terror by pretending to fear a
German invasion, it knows very well that danger does not lie there. What
it needs is the power to launch the regular army to where Germany, in
accord with Turkey, might attack some colony of the British Empire
(Egypt, for instance). And for that it must be able to retain at home a
strong “territorial” army that can drown in blood, if necessary, any
workers’ revolt. It is for this reason, predominantly, that military
science is taught to young bourgeois, grouped in squads of “scouts.”
[63]
The English bourgeoisie of today wants to act towards Germany as it
twice acted towards Russia in order to halt, for fifty years or more,
the development of that country’s sea-power: once in 1855, with the help
of Turkey, France, and Piedmont; and again in 1904 by hurling Japan
against the Russian fleet and against its military port in the Pacific.
[64]
That is why for the past two years we have been living on the alert,
expecting a colossal European war to break out at any time.
Besides, we must not forget that the industrial wave, in rolling from
West to East, has also invaded Italy, Austria and Russia. And these
States are in their turn asserting their “right” — the right of their
monopolists to the feeding frenzy in Africa and Asia.
Russian brigandage in Persia, Italian brigandage against the desert
Arabs around Tripoli, and French brigandage in Morocco are the
consequences.
The consortium of brigands, at the service of the monopolists who govern
Europe, has “allowed” France to seize Morocco, as it “allowed” England
to seize Egypt. It has “allowed” Italy to seize a part of the Ottoman
Empire to prevent it being seized by Germany, and it has allowed Russia
to take Northern Persia so that England might seize a substantial strip
of land on the shores of the Persian Gulf before the German railway
reached it!
And for this the Italians disgracefully massacre harmless Arabs, the
French massacre Moors, and the hired assassins of the Tsar hang Persian
patriots who endeavour to regenerate their country by a little political
liberty.
Zola was right to say: “What scoundrels respectable people are!” [65]
All States, we said, as soon as great industry develops itself in the
nation, are made to seek war. They are driven by their industrialists,
and even by workers, to conquer new markets — new sources of easy
riches.
But there is more. In every State there exists today a class — a clique,
rather — infinitely more powerful even than entrepreneurs of industry
and which, too, pushes for war. It is high finance, the big bankers, who
intervene in international relations and who foment wars.
This is done today in a very simple manner.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages most of the major city-republics of
Italy had ended up by getting into debt. When their period of decay had
begun, owing to their wish to conquer rich markets in the East and the
conquest of such markets bringing endless wars between the
city-republics, these cities began to incur immense debts to their own
guilds of big merchants.
The same phenomenon occurs today for States, with bankers’ syndicates
very willing to lend against a mortgage on their future income.
Naturally, it is mainly on the small States that this is practised.
Bankers lend them money at seven, eight, ten percent, knowing that they
can “realise” the loan only at seventy or eighty percent. So that, after
deducting the “commissions” to banks and middlemen — which amount to ten
to twenty and sometimes up to thirty percent — the State does not even
receive three-quarters of the amount inscribed in its ledger.
On these amounts, swollen in this way, the indebted State must now pay
both interest and depreciation. And when it does not do so at the
appointed time, the bankers ask for nothing better than to add the
arrears of interest and depreciation to the principal of the loan. The
worse the finances of the debtor State grow, the more reckless the
expenditure of its leaders — and the more willingly are new loans
offered to it. Whereupon the bankers, setting themselves up as a
“consortium” one day, lay hands on certain taxes, certain duties,
certain railway lines.
This was how the big financiers ruined and later annexed Egypt by
England. The more foolish the expenditure of the Khedive, the more they
encouraged him. It was annexation by small doses. [66]
It is the same way that they ruined Turkey to take its provinces little
by little. It was also the same thing, we are told, for Greece, that a
group of financiers pushed for war against Turkey to seize part of
defeated Greece’s revenues.
And that is how Japan was exploited by high finance in England and the
United States before and during its wars against China and Russia. As
for China, for several years it has been partitioned by a syndicate
representing the great banks of England, France, Germany and the United
States. And since the Revolution in China, [67] Russia and Japan demand
to be allowed to join this syndicate. They want to profit by it to
extend not only their spheres of exploitation but also their
territories. The partitioning of China, prepared by bankers, is thus the
order of the day.
In short, there is in the lending States a complete organisation in
which rulers, bankers, promoters of companies, [68] tycoons and all the
shady gentlemen Zola has so well described in L’Argent lend a hand to
exploit whole States. [69]
Where the naive believe they have discovered deep political reasons, or
national hatreds, there are only plots hatched by the buccaneers of
finance. They exploit everything: political and economic rivalries,
national enmities, diplomatic traditions and religious conflicts.
In all the wars of the last quarter of a century we find the hand of
high finance. The conquest of Egypt and the Transvaal, the annexation of
Tripoli, the occupation of Morocco, the partition of Persia, the
massacres in Manchuria, the massacres and international looting in China
during the Boxer riots, the wars of Japan — everywhere we find great
banks. Everywhere high finance has had a decisive voice. And if up till
now a great European war has not yet broken out, it is because high
finance hesitates. It does not quite know which way the scales will fall
for the millions that will be brought into play: it does not know on
which horse to put their millions.
As for the hundreds of thousands of human lives that war would cost —
what has finance to do with them? The mind of the financier reasons with
columns of figures which balance each other. The rest is not his domain:
he does not even possess the imagination to bring human lives into his
calculations.
What a despicable world would be unveiled if only somebody took the
trouble to study high finance behind the scenes! We can guess it
sufficiently, if only from the small corner of the veil lifted by
“Lysis” in his articles in La Revue (published in 1908 in a volume
entitled Contre l’Oligarchie Financière en France [Against the Financial
Oligarchy in France (Paris: Bureaux de “La Revue,” 1908)]).
From this work we can, in fact, see how four or five big banks — Crédit
Lyonnais, Société Générale, Comptoir National d’Escompte, and Crédit
Industriel et Commercial — have a monopoly of large financial operations
in France.
The bulk — nearly eight-tenths — of French savings, amounting every year
to about two thousand million [of francs], is poured into these great
banks; and when foreign States, great and small, railway companies,
towns, industrial companies from the five parts of the globe present
themselves in Paris to secure a loan, they address themselves to these
four or five great banking companies. These banks have a monopoly on
foreign loans and have at their disposal the necessary machinery to
boost them.
It is evident that it was not the skill of the directors of these banks
that created their lucrative position. It was the State, the French
Government in the first place, that protected and favoured these banks
and created for them a privileged position, which soon became a
monopoly. And then the other States, the borrowing States, strengthened
this monopoly. Thus Crédit Lyonnais, which monopolises Russian loans,
owes this privileged position to the financial agents of the Russian
government and to the Tsar’s finance ministers.
The business transacted by these four or five companies amounts to
thousands of millions. Thus, in two years, 1906 and 1907, they
distributed in various loans seven and a half thousand million — 7,500
million, including 5,500 million in foreign loans (“Lysis,” p. 101). And
when we learn that the “commission” of these companies for organising a
foreign loan is five per cent for the “syndicate of middle-men
[apporteurs]” (those who “arrange” new loans), five per cent. for the
underwriting syndicate, and from seven to ten per cent for the
syndicate, or rather trust, of the four or five banks we have just
named, we see what immense sums go to these monopolists.
Thus, a single middle-man who “arranged” the loan of 1,250 million
contracted by the Russian government in 1906 to crush the revolution
thereby received — “Lysis” tells us — a commission of twelve million!
We can therefore understand the secret influence on international
politics exercised by the big directors of these financial companies,
with their mysterious accounts and with the plenary powers that certain
directors exact and obtain from their shareholders — because they must
be discreet when paying twelve million to Monsieur So-and-So, 250,000
francs to a certain minister, and so many millions, as well as awards,
to the press! There is not, says “Lysis,” a single major newspaper in
France that is not paid by the banks. This is understandable. We can
easily guess how much money it was necessary to distribute to the press
when a series of Russian loans (State, railway, land bank loans) were
being prepared during the years 1906 and 1907. How many pen-pushers
[plumitifs] waxed fat on the loans can be seen from the book by “Lysis.”
What a windfall, in fact! The government of a great State beleaguered! A
revolution to crush! This does not happen every day!
Well, everybody is more or less aware of that. There is not a single
politician who does not know the ins-and-outs of all this
jiggery-pokery, and who does not hear mentioned the names of the women
and men who “received” large sums after each loan, great or small,
Russian or Brazilian.
And everyone, if he has only the slightest knowledge of business, also
knows very well how all this organisation of high finance is a product
of the State — an essential attribute of the State.
And it would be this State — the State which is so careful not to
diminish its powers or reduce its functions — which in the mind of
statist reformers should become the instrument for the emancipation of
the masses?! What nonsense!
Whether it is stupidity, ignorance, or deceit which makes them assert
this, it is equally unpardonable in people who believe themselves called
to direct the fate of nations.
Let us now go a little deeper and see how the State has created a whole
class of men in modern industry directly interested in turning nations
into military camps, ready to hurl themselves at one another.
There are now, indeed, immense industries that employ millions of men
and which exist for the sole purpose of producing war material: which
makes the owners of these factories and their financial backers have
every interest to prepare for war and to fan the fear that wars are
always ready to break out.
It is not a matter of the small fry — the manufacturers of low-quality
firearms, shoddy swords, and revolvers that always misfire, as we have
in Birmingham, Liège, etc. These barely matter, although the trade in
these weapons, carried on by exporters who speculate in “colonial” wars,
has already attained some importance. So we know that English merchants
supplied weapons to the Matabele when they were preparing to rise
against the English, who were imposing serfdom upon them. [70] Later on,
French manufacturers, and even well-known English manufacturers, made
fortunes by sending firearms, cannons, and ammunition to the Boers. And
even now they talk of quantities of weapons imported by English
merchants into Arabia — which will cause tribal uprisings, the plunder
of a few merchants and English intervention, to “restore order” and make
some new “annexation.”
Besides, these little facts no longer count. It is well known what
bourgeois “patriotism” is worth and far more serious events have been
witnessed recently. Thus, during the last war between Russia and Japan,
English gold was supplied to the Japanese so that they might destroy
Russia’s emerging sea-power in the Pacific Ocean, which England had
taken umbrage to. But at the same time the English coal companies sold
300,000 tons of coal at a very high price to Russia to enable it to send
Rojdestvensky’s fleet to the East. Two birds were killed with one stone:
the coal companies in Wales made a great deal of money and the
financiers of Lombard Street (the centre of financial operations in
London) placed their money at nine or ten percent in the Japanese loan,
and mortgaged a substantial part of the income of their “dear allies”!
These are but only a few facts amongst thousands of others of the same
kind. We would learn fine things about all this world of our rulers if
the bourgeoisie did not know how to keep their secrets! So let us move
on to another category of facts.
We know that all the great States have favoured, alongside their [own]
arsenals, the creation of huge private factories that manufacture
cannons, battleships, warships of smaller size, shells, gunpowder,
cartridges, etc. Immense amounts are spent by all States to obtain these
auxiliary factories, where the most skilled workers and engineers are
concentrated.
Now, it is obvious that it is in the direct interest of the capitalists
who have invested their capital in these enterprises to constantly
maintain rumours of war, to incessantly press [the need] for armaments,
to sow panic if need be. Indeed, that is what they do.
And if the chances of a European war sometimes grow less, if the
gentlemen of the government — though themselves interested as
shareholders in the great factories of this kind (Anzin, Krupp,
Armstrong, etc.) as well as the great railway companies, coal mines,
etc. — if the rulers sometimes require coaxing in order to make them
sound the war-trumpet, they are compelled to do so by chauvinistic
opinion fabricated by newspapers, or even by fermenting insurrections
[to justify invention and annexation].
Indeed, is there not that prostitute — the big press — to prepare minds
for new wars, to hasten those that are likely [to break out] or, at
least, force governments to double, to treble their armaments? Thus, did
we not see in England, during the ten years preceding the Boer War, the
big press, and especially its assistants in the illustrated press,
skilfully prepare minds for the necessity of a war “to arouse
patriotism”? To this end no stone was left unturned. With much bluster
they published novels about the next war in which we were told how the
English, beaten at first, made a supreme effort and ended by destroying
the German fleet and establishing themselves in Rotterdam. A lord spent
a great deal of money to stage a patriotic play across England. It was
too stupid to break even but it was necessary for those gentlemen who
intrigued with Rhodes in Africa in order to seize the Transvaal gold
fields and force the blacks to work in them.
Forgetting everything, they even went so far as to revive the cult —
yes, cult — of England’s sworn enemy, Napoleon I. And since then work in
this direction has never ceased. In 1905 they almost succeeded in
driving France, governed at that time by Clemenceau and Delcassé, into a
war against Germany — the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the
Conservative Government, Lord Lansdowne, having promised to support the
French armies by sending an English army corps to the continent!
Delcassé, attaching undue importance to this ridiculous proposal, very
nearly launched France into a disastrous war.
In general, the more we advance with our statist bourgeois civilisation,
the more the press, ceasing to be the expression of what is called
public opinion, applies itself to manufacturing that opinion by the most
infamous means. The press, in all great States, is already [just] two or
three syndicates of financial tycoons; which manufacture the opinion
needed in the interests of their businesses. The big newspapers belong
to them and the rest are of no account.
But this is not all: the gangrene goes even deeper.
Modern wars are no longer just the massacre of hundreds of thousands of
men in every battle — a massacre which those who have not followed the
details of the great battles during the war in Manchuria and the
horrific details of the siege and defence of Port Arthur have absolutely
no idea. And yet the three great historical battles — Gravelotte,
Potomac, Borodino (Moscow) — which lasted three days each and in which
ninety to hundred and ten thousand men were killed and wounded on both
sides, these were child’s play in comparison to modern warfare! [71]
Great battles are now fought on a front of fifty, sixty kilometres; they
last not three days, but seven days (Liaoyang), ten days (Mukden); [72]
and the losses are one hundred, one hundred and fifty thousand men on
each side.
The devastation caused by shells fired with precision from a distance of
five, six, seven kilometres by batteries placed in a position which
cannot be discovered [by the enemy] as they use smokeless powder is
unimaginable. It is no longer chance. The key positions occupied by the
enemy are divided on a map into squares and the fire from all the
batteries is concentrated on each square successively in order to
destroy everything that is there.
When the fire from several hundred cannons is concentrated on a square
kilometre, as is done today, there is no area of ten square metres that
has not been struck by a shell, not a bush that has not been cut down by
the howling monsters sent from nobody knows where. Seven or eight days
of this terrible fire drives the soldiers to madness; and when the
attacking columns — after having been repelled eight to ten times, but
gaining a few more metres every time — finally reach the enemy’s
trenches, a hand-to-hand struggle begins. After throwing hand-grenades
and pieces of pyroxyline at each other (two pieces of pyroxyline tied
together with a string were used by the Japanese as a sling [73] ),
Russian and Japanese soldiers rolled in the trenches of Port Arthur like
wild beasts, striking each other with their rifle-butts, knives, tearing
each other’s flesh with their teeth…
The western workers still have no idea about this terrible return to the
most dreadful savagery that is modern warfare, and the bourgeois who do
know are careful not to tell them.
But modern wars are not just the slaughter, the madness of massacre, the
return to savagery. They are also the destruction of human labour on a
colossal scale; and we continually feel the effect of this destruction
in time of peace by an increase in the misery amongst the poor, parallel
to the enrichment of the wealthy.
Every war is the destruction of a formidable [amount of] material, which
includes not only the war material itself but also things most necessary
for everyday life, to society as a whole: bread, meat, vegetables,
foodstuffs of all kind, draught animals, leather, coal, metal, clothing.
All this represents the useful work of millions of men over decades; and
all this will be wasted, burnt or scrapped in a few months. But that is
already wasted even now, in anticipation of war.
And as this war material, these metals, these provisions must be
prepared beforehand, the mere possibility of a new war in the near
future brings about in all our industries shocks and crises that affect
us all. You, me, we all feel the effects in every detail of our life.
The bread we eat, the coal we burn, the railway ticket we buy, the price
of everything depends on the rumours spread by speculators, on the
likelihood of war [breaking out] in the near future.
The necessity for preparing in advance a formidable [amount of] war
material and a mass of provisions of every kind, necessarily produces in
all industries shocks and crises from which everyone, and especially
workers, suffers to a terrible extent. Indeed, this was seen quite
recently in the United States.
Everyone, no doubt, remembers the terrible industrial crisis that
ravaged the United States during the past three or four years. In part,
it is still continuing. Well, the origin of this crisis — whatever may
have been said by “learned” economists who know the writings of their
predecessors but ignore real life —t he true origin of this crisis lay
in the excessive production of the main industries which was carried on
for several years in anticipation of a great war in Europe and also war
between the United States and Japan. Those who pushed [the idea of]
these wars knew very well the effect these predictions would have on
American industries. For two or three years, indeed, there was a
feverish activity in metal production, coal mining and the manufacturing
of railway equipment, material for clothing, preserved foodstuffs.
The extraction of iron ore and manufacture of steel in the United States
reached quite unexpected proportions during those years. It is above all
steel that is consumed during modern wars and the United States produced
it in fantastic amounts, as well as metals, such as nickel and
manganese, required to manufacture the kinds of steel needed for war
materials. It was in the supplies of iron, copper, lead and nickel that
there was most speculation.
It was the same with supplies of wheat, preserved meat, fish and
vegetables. Cottons, cloth and leather followed closely. And since every
great industry gives rise to a number of smaller ones around it, the
fever for production far in excess of the demand spread more and more.
The lenders of money (or rather credit) who fuelled this production,
profited by this fever — this goes without saying — even more than the
chiefs of industry.
And then, at a stroke, production suddenly stopped without anyone being
able to appeal to a single one of the causes which preceding crises had
been attributed to. The truth is that from the day when European high
finance was sure that Japan, ruined by the war in Manchuria, would not
dare to attack the United States and that none of the European nations
felt sufficiently sure of victory to unsheathe the sword, European
capitalists refused [to provide] new credit to the American
money-lenders who fuelled over-production as well as to the Japanese
“nationalists.”
“No more war in the short term!” — and steel mills, cooper mines, blast
furnaces, shipyards, tanneries, speculators on commodities, all suddenly
reduced their operations, their orders, their purchases.
It was then worse than a crisis: it was a disaster! Millions of working
men and women were thrown onto the street in the most abject misery.
Great and small factories closed, the contagion spread like an epidemic,
sowing terror all around.
No one can describe the sufferings of millions (men, women and
children), the broken lives, during this crisis while immense fortunes
were being made in anticipation of the mangled flesh and piles of human
corpses about to be heaped up in the great battles!
That is war; that is how the State enriches the wealthy, keeps the poor
in misery and year by year makes them more enslaved to the rich.
Now a crisis similar to that in the United States will in all likelihood
occur in Europe, and especially in England, as a result of the same
causes.
Everybody was astonished around the middle of 1911 by the sudden and
completely unexpected increase in English exports. Nothing in the
economic world predicted it. No explanation has been given for it —
precisely because the only possible explanation is that immense orders
came from the continent in anticipation of a war between England and
Germany. As we know, this war failed to break out in July 1911 but if it
had started, France and Russia, Austria and Italy would have been forced
to take part.
It is evident that the great financiers, who fuelled by their credit the
speculators in metals, foodstuffs, cloth, leather, etc., had been warned
of the threatening turn in the relations between the two maritime
rivals. They knew how both governments were accelerating their military
preparations and they hastened to make orders which increased English
exports in 1911 beyond measure. [74]
But it is also to the same cause that we owe this recent extraordinary
rise in prices of all foodstuffs without exception, although neither the
yield of last year’s harvest nor the quantities of all kinds of goods
accumulation in warehouses justified this increase. The fact is,
moreover, that the rise in prices affected all goods not just provisions
and demand continued to grow whilst nothing explained this exaggerated
demand apart from the expectations of war.
And now it will suffice for the great colonial speculators of England
and Germany to come to an arrangement concerning their share in the
partition of East Africa and that they agree on “the spheres of
influence” in Asia and in Africa — that is to say, on the next conquests
— for the same sudden stoppage of industries that the United States
suffered to occur in Europe.
In fact, this stoppage was already starting to be felt at the beginning
of 1912. That is why in England the coal companies and “the Cotton
Lords” proved so intransigent towards their workers and drove them to
strike. They expected a reduction of orders, they already had too many
goods in [their] inventories, too much coal piled up around their mines.
When we closely analyse these facts of the activity of modern States, we
understand the extent to which the whole life of our civilised societies
depends — not on the facts of economic development in nations but on the
way in which various circles of privileged people, more or less favoured
by the State, react to these facts.
Thus it is evident that the entry into the economic arena of such a
powerful producer as modern Germany, with its schools, its technical
education widely spread amongst its people, its youthful spirit, and the
organisational capacities of its people, changed relations between
nations. A new adjustment of forces had to happen. But, given the
specific organisation of modern States, the adjustment of economic
forces is hindered by another factor of political origin: the
privileges, the monopolies formed and maintained by the State.
Fundamentally, in modern States — specifically formed to establish
privileges in favour of the rich at the expense of the poor — it is
always high finance which lays down the law in all political
considerations. “What will Baron Rothschild say?” or else “What will the
syndicate of great bankers in Paris, in Vienna, in London say?” has
become the dominant element in political issues and relations between
nations. It is the approval or disapproval of finance that makes and
breaks ministries across Europe (in England there is also the approval
of the official Church and of the brewers to consider; but the Church
and the brewers are always in agreement with high finance, which is
careful not to touch their income). And — as a Minister is after all a
man who values his office, its power, and the opportunities of
enrichment they offer him — it follows that questions of international
relations are today reduced in the final analysis to knowing whether the
favoured monopolists of a particular State will take this or that
attitude towards the favourites of the same calibre in another State.
Thus, the state of [economic] forces involved is given by the technical
development of the various nations at a certain point in history. But
the use which will be made of these forces depends entirely on the level
of subservience to their government and the statist form of organisation
to which people have let themselves be reduced to. The forces which
could have provided harmony, well-being, and a new flowering of a
libertarian civilisation if they had free play in society — when
implemented within the framework of the State, that is to say, an
organisation specifically developed to enrich the wealthy and to absorb
all advances for the benefit of the privileged classes — these same
forces become an instrument of oppression, privilege and endless wars.
They accelerate the enrichment of the privileged, they increase the
misery and subjugation of the poor.
This is why economists who continue to consider economic forces alone,
without analysing the statist framework within which they operate today,
without taking into account statist ideology, nor the forces that each
State necessarily places at the service of the wealthy in order to
enrich them at the expense of the poor — this is why these economists
remain completely outside the realities of the economic and social
world.
We have briefly reviewed some of the essential functions of the State,
its legislation on property, taxes, the formation of monopolies and
finally defence — in other words, the right of war.
And we noticed this fact, significant to the highest degree, that in
each of these functions the State always pursued, and still pursues, the
same goal: to deliver the mass of the population it controls to groups
of exploiters, to ensure to them the right of exploitation, to extend
it. It is with this aim that the State was formed — it is what makes up
its essential mission to the present.
The legislation of States on the right of ownership has never had,
anywhere, the aim to ensure to each the fruits of his labour as academic
science on Law proclaims. On the contrary, the State law has always
aimed, it still does, to dispossess the great mass of the nation of a
large part of the fruits of its labour, to the advantage of a privileged
few. To keep the masses in a state close to poverty and to deliver them:
in antiquity —to the lord and the priesthood, during the Middle Ages —
to the lord, the priest and the merchant, and today — to the industrial
and financial entrepreneur in addition to the previous three: such was
the essential function of all States, theocratic, oligarchic or
democratic.
Tax, as we have seen, is an instrument of a formidable power that the
State wields to this end. This instrument allows the rulers to continue
the expropriation of the poor in favour of the rich — the perfected
expropriation which, without it being any less efficient, is not
obvious. It allows them to artificially maintain poverty despite the
immense growth in the productivity of human labour—without resorting for
that [task] to the brutal forms of direct appropriation which were used
in the past. What the feudal lord did, when he was extorting his serfs
under the protection of the State, the State does now under an
“acceptable” form by means of tax — but always in favour of some rich
person, and by also sharing a part of the loot between the rich and its
numerous functionaries.
We then saw how the State wields and still wields industrial, commercial
and financial monopoly; and how it allows groups of entrepreneurs and
business tycoons to quickly accumulate immense fortunes, by
appropriating the product of the labour of the subjects of the State.
And we showed how it is that all the new sources of enrichment offered
to civilised nations, either as a consequence of technical and
scientific progress or by the conquest of industrially backward
countries, find themselves monopolised by a small minority of privileged
people. This allows the State to enrich its coffers and to always extend
its remits and power.
Finally, we saw what a terrible weapon to perpetuate social
inequalities, monopolies and privileges of all sorts represents this
other remit of the State: the maintaining of armies and the right of
war. Under cover of patriotism, defence of the homeland, the State uses
the army and wars for the same goal. Throughout history, since antiquity
to the present day, conquests were always conducted to deliver new
populations to be exploited by classes favoured by the State. It is the
same today: every war is waged to profit bankers, speculators, and the
privileged. And in peacetime, the fabulous sums allocated to armaments,
as well as loans by States, allow the rulers to create immense fortunes
and new exploiters, chosen [from] amongst their favourites.
In this deep-rooted tendency to enrich some groups of citizens at the
expense of the labour and sacrifices of the entire nation resides the
very essence of this form of centralised political organisation which is
called State and which only developed in Europe, amongst the peoples
which had demolished the Roman Empire, after the period of the free
cities — that is to say, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Note well that this is not in any way about what is called “abuse of
power,” such as the atrocities continuously committed by all governments
towards their subjects or conquered nations, as soon as it is a question
of protecting people of the privileged class. We are not talking for the
moment of the banditry of functionaries, the illegal extortions carried
out by all rulers, the insults and suffering they lavish on the
governed, nor the national hatred that they spread and uphold. In this
respect, it suffices to note that “power” and “abuse of power”
necessarily go hand in hand, and that functionaries have inevitably
established a solidarity [amongst themselves] which allows them to
forget what they like to call “the sad necessities of the exercise of
power.”
Therefore we do not stop at these “sad necessities.” We restrict
ourselves to considering the very essence of the organisation which was
formed on several occasions in human societies and which, each time that
it was reborn, always carried the same characteristic of mutual
insurance between the church, the soldier and the lord, to live at the
expense of the labour of the masses. Modern times only offer this
difference: the wealthy commercial bourgeois, industrialists and
moneylenders, and a horde of functionaries came to join the preceding
trinity.
It is in the interest of the privileged — not of the nation — that the
State took the land away from the peasants to give to groups of
monopolisers, and that it drove a good part of the farmers away from the
villages. And, that once masses of out of work proletarians started to
accumulate in the cities, State legislation delivered these hungry
proletarians to the favourites of royalty, to the industrial bourgeois,
and later to moneylenders, to business tycoons, to big finance. All this
teeming mass was put at the service of the government’s minions.
Later, when the privileged classes, who had developed with great skill
and wisdom this political form — the State — began to notice that the
exploited masses were trying to throw off the yoke, they knew how to
find a new way to broaden the basis of their exploitation. Conquest had
been, since the beginning of time, a means of enrichment not for the
conquering nations (to those was given “the glory”), but for the ruling
classes of these nations — just think about the riches delivered by
Napoleon I to his generals and to his “military nobility!” Also, when
technical discoveries and advances in navigation allowed States to
maintain big standing armies and a powerful navy—the ruling classes knew
how to use this navy and these armies to conquer “colonies.” It is in
this way that Dutch, English, French, Belgian, German and even Russian
bourgeoisies applied themselves in turn to the conquest of industrially
backward nations — which now leads to the partition of Africa and Asia
between them.
These States, that is to say, these bourgeoisies — because the workers
gain nothing, except a few crumbs fallen from the table of the rich —
these bourgeoisies thus end up becoming simultaneously masters and
exploiters of vast populations, in addition to their “dear” fellow
countrymen. As for the workers, they are won over in turn by promises of
easy prey made by their masters. In the meantime they ask for customs
“protection” against foreign competition and, duly prepared by a
criminal press in the pay of capitalists, they are ready to pounce on
their neighbours to fight over the pickings, instead of rebelling
against their compatriot exploiters and their all powerful weapon, the
State.
That is what ancient and modern history shows us. And yet, following an
error of judgment which truly becomes tragic, while the State that
provides the most terrible weapons to impoverish the peasant and the
worker and to enrich by their labour the lord, the priest, the
bourgeois, the financier and all the privileged gangsters of the rulers
— it is to this same State, to the bourgeois State, to the exploiter
State and guardian of the exploiters — that radical democrats and
socialists ask to protect them against the monopolist exploiters! And
when we say that it is the abolition of the State that we have to aim
for, we are told: “Let us first abolish classes, and when this has been
done, then we can place the State into a museum of antiquities, together
with the stone axe and the spindle!” [75]
By this quip they evaded, in the fifties of the last century, the
discussion that Proudhon called for on the necessity of abolishing the
State institution and the means of achieving this. And it is still being
repeated today. “Let us seize power in the State” — the current
bourgeois State, of course — “and then we will make the social
revolution” — such is the slogan today. [76]
Proudhon’s idea had been to invite the workers to pose this question:
“How could society organise itself without resorting to the State
institution, developed during the darkest times of humanity to keep the
masses in economic and intellectual poverty and to exploit their
labour?” And he was answered with a paradox, a sophism.
Indeed, how can we talk about abolishing classes without touching the
institution which was the instrument for establishing them and which
remains the instrument which perpetuates them? But instead of going
deeper into this question — the question placed before us by all modern
evolution — what do we do?
Is not the first question that the social reformer should ask himself
this one: “The State, which was developed in the history of
civilisations to give a legal character to the exploitation of the
masses by the privileged classes, can it be the instrument of their
liberation?” Furthermore, are not other groupings than the State already
emerging in the evolution of modern societies — groups which can bring
to society co-ordination, harmony of individual efforts and become the
instrument of the liberation of the masses, without resorting to the
submission of all to the pyramidal hierarchy of the State? The commune,
for example, groupings by trades and by professions in addition to
groupings by neighbourhoods and sections, which preceded the State in
the free cities [of the Middle Ages]; the thousand societies that spring
up today for the satisfaction of a thousand social needs: the federative
principle that we see applied in modern groupings — do not these forms
of organisation of society offer a field of activity which promises much
more for our goals of emancipation than the efforts expended to make the
State and its centralisation even more powerful than they already are?
Is this not the essential question that the social reformer should ask
before choosing his course of action?
Well, instead of going deeper into this question, the democrats,
radicals, as well as socialists, only know, only want one thing, the
State! Not the future State, “the people’s State” of their dreams of
yesteryear, but well and truly the current bourgeois State, the State
nothing more and nothing less. This must seize, they say, all the life
of society: economic, educational, intellectual activities and
organising: industry, exchange, instruction, jurisdiction,
administration — everything that fills our social life!
To workers who want their emancipation, they say: “Just let us worm
ourselves into the powers of the current political form, developed by
the nobles, the bourgeois, the capitalists to exploit you!” They say
that, while we know very well by all the teachings of history that a new
economic form of society has never been able to develop without a new
political form being developed at the same time, developed by those who
were seeking their emancipation.
Serfdom — and absolute royalty; corporative organisation — and the free
cities, the republics of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries; merchant
domination — and these same republics under the podestas and the
condottieri; [77] imperialism — and the military States of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the reign of the bourgeoisie — and
representative government, are not all these forms going hand in hand
striking evidence [of this]?
In order to develop itself as it has developed today and to maintain its
power, despite all the progress of science and the democratic spirit,
the bourgeoisie developed with much shrewdness representative government
during the course of the nineteenth century.
And the spokespersons of the modern proletariat are so timid that they
do not even dare to tackle the problem raised by the 1848 revolution—
the problem of knowing what new political form the modern proletariat
must and can develop to achieve its emancipation? How will it seek to
organise the two essential functions of any society: the social
production of everything necessary to live and the social consumption of
these products? How will it guarantee to everyone, not in words but in
reality, the entire product of his labour by guaranteeing him well-being
in exchange for his work? What form will “the organisation of labour”
take as it cannot be accomplished by the State and must be the work of
the workers themselves?
That is what the French proletarian, educated in the past by 1793 and
1848, asked their intellectual leaders.
But did they [their leaders] know how to answer them? They only knew how
to keep on repeating this old formula, which said nothing, which evaded
the answer: “Seize power in the bourgeois State, use this power to widen
the functions of the modern State — and the problem of your emancipation
will be solved!”
Once again the proletarian received lead instead of bread! This time
from those to whom it had given its trust — and its blood!
To ask an institution which represents a historical growth that it
serves to destroy the privileges that it strove to develop is to
acknowledge you are incapable of understanding what a historical growth
is in the life of societies. It is to ignore this general rule of all
organic nature, that new functions require new organs, and that they
need to develop them themselves. It is to acknowledge that you are too
lazy and too timid in spirit to think in a new direction, imposed by a
new evolution.
The whole of history is there to prove this truth, that each time that
new social strata started to demonstrate an activity and an intelligence
which met their own needs, each time that they attempted to display a
creative force in the domain of an economic production which furthered
their interests and those of society in general — they knew how to find
new forms of political organisation; and these new political forms
allowed the new strata to imprint their individuality on the era they
were inaugurating. Can a social revolution be an exception to the rule?
Can it do without this creative activity?
Thus the revolt of the communes in the twelfth century (in the eleventh
century in Italy) and the abolition of serfdom in these communes which
freed themselves from the bishop, the feudal baron, and the king mark
the advent in history of a new class. And this class — as we saw in our
previous study —while working towards its emancipation, soon created a
whole new civilisation at the same time as the institutions which
allowed it to develop.
The artisan takes the place of the villein. [78] He becomes a free man
and, under the protection of the walls of his commune, he gives an
invigorating impetus to the technical “arts” and science which soon,
with Galileo, opens a new era for the emancipated human spirit. Helped
by thinkers and artists who were only too pleased to display their
intellectuality in the new paths of intellectual freedom, man
rediscovers the exact sciences and the philosophy of Ancient Greece,
forgotten in the darkness of the Roman Empire and of the barbarian era
which finished the work of breaking up this Empire. It creates the
magnificent architecture that we do not know how to equal; it discovers
the means and acquires the necessary audacity to develop distant
navigation. It opens the Renaissance era, with its humanist programme.
Well, could our ancestors ever have accomplished all these wonders if
they had timidly clung to the institutions that existed in Europe from
the fifth to the twelfth century? Remnants of Caesarist forms from the
Roman Empire, mixed with theocratic forms imported from the East, these
dying institutions from a slave past choked the invigorating federative
and respectful of individuality spirit that the so-called Scandinavian,
Gaul, Saxon and Slavic “barbarians” had brought with them. Was it to
this rottenness that the man who was trying to emancipate himself had to
cling to, like the spokespersons of the working masses do today? [79]
Obviously not! — Likewise the citizens of the liberated cities
immediately tried, from the first day, to create by their
“conspiracies,” that is to say by their mutual oaths, new institutions
within their fortified cities. It is to the parish, recognised as an
independent unit, sovereign; to the street and to the “neighbourhood,”
or to the “section” (federations of streets), and on the other hand to
the guild, just as independent; and finally to the organised and
sovereign “arts” (each consequently having its “justice,” its banner and
its militia) and finally to the forum, to the popular assembly
representing the federation of parishes and guilds, that they looked to
for the organisation of the various elements of the city. A series of
institutions, absolutely contrary to the spirit of the Roman State and
to the theocratic State of the East, were thus developed during the
course of the three or four centuries that followed.
Who then — unless he prefers to ignore the life of the free Communes of
this era, as do our statists (worthy pupils of the mind-numbing schools
of the State) — who could therefore doubt for a moment that it was these
new institutions, derived from the federative principle and respectful
of individuality, which allowed the Communes of the Middle ages to
develop, in the midst of the darkness of that era, the rich
civilisation, the arts and science that we find in the fifteenth
century?
It was the same for the industrial and merchant bourgeoisie. In
accordance with the causes that we indicated in the study on the
historical role of the State (Moorish, Turkish and Mongol invasions, and
causes of the internal decadence in the Communes), the royal military
State had managed to develop in Europe in the course of the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the ruins of the free Communes.
But after over two centuries of this regime, the industrial and
intellectual bourgeoisie, in England first at the onset of 1648 and one
hundred and forty years later in France, made a new step forward. It
understood that it would be absolutely impossible to achieve
intellectual, commercial, industrial development — its overall [mondial]
development that it already foresaw — if the human herds remained under
the rule of a bureaucracy grown up around the palace where a Louis XIV
could say “The State, it is me!” Since Montesquieu, the thinkers of the
bourgeoisie — and there were some distinguished ones — understood that
industry, commerce, education, science, technology, arts, social
morality never could achieve the development they were capable of, and
that the masses would never get out of the dreadful poverty in which
they had been left engulfed, as long as the fate of the people remained
in the hands of a clique and of the clergy: as long as the State —
master of past and future privileges — remained in the hands of the
Church and of the Court, with its favourites and its preferences.
Also, as soon as their forces allowed it, what did the English and
French bourgeoisies do? Did they limit themselves to a simple change of
dynasty, of rulers? Were they content to replace the king in a State of
royal creation? Obviously not!
Their men of action preferred to lead the masses into profound economic
revolutions than to stay forever in the stagnant swamp of an absolute
royalty. And the political institutions which had developed under the
royal absolution were changed from top to bottom by these revolutions.
They believed at first that it would suffice to reduce royalty and its
entourage to zero and to transfer power from the hands of individuals
from the royal palace and the Church into those of the representatives
of what they called the Third Estate. [80] But they soon realised that
this would not be enough to completely demolish the old regime: to
change the structure of society from top to bottom [was needed]. And
when they saw the huge forces of the royalty stand before them, which
did not by any means acknowledge itself deposed, they did not hesitate
to unleash the passion, the fury of the destitute against the nobles and
priests, and to take their properties, the main source of their power.
“And yet,” we will doubtless be told, “they did not seek to demolish the
State. They opposed this with all their vigour when they realised that
the people wanted to go further and destroy the State, to put in its
place federated Communes and Sections and a whole new economic
organisation!”
That is true. But the English bourgeoisie and the French bourgeoisie
were in no way seeking to destroy institutions that would allow them to
create privileges in their favour. They only wanted to substitute
themselves for the nobility and the clergy and enjoy the privileges.
Consequently the bourgeois certainly could not aim at the destruction of
the State. The institution which had served to enrich the Church and
nobility had to remain. It now had to allow the bourgeoisie to enrich
themselves in turn — by opening, it is true, new channels of enrichment
by the development of industries and sciences, by spreading knowledge,
by introducing free labour [81] — but still using the nation’s labour
[la travail national] to enrich, above all, themselves as the noblemen
and the Church had enriched themselves until then.
Becoming heir to the established privileges, the bourgeoisie obviously
did not seek to demolish the State. On the contrary, they worked to
increase its power, to augment its functions, knowing that it could be
they and their children who would above all furnish the functionaries
and henceforth benefit from the privileges.
It was only the people, or rather a part of the popular masses — those
that Desmoulins called “the beyond Marat” — who wanted emancipation
without trying to subject any strata of society to its exploitation or
its rule. These started in fact to lay the foundations of a new
political organisation, which had to substitute itself to that of the
State. It was the Commune. And as this decentralisation was still not
sufficient, even in the big towns, it was pushed further, to the
Section.
We see, in fact, a striking phenomenon taking place during the
revolution, from 1789. Since the National Assembly was inevitably
composed of representatives of the past, opposed to the Revolution
becoming deeper and, above all, that the popular masses could really
gain their freedom — it was the Communes which pushed forward. A
municipal revolution, as Michelet and Aulard pointed out so well, was
achieved from 1789. And since a revolution is not made by decrees, since
it is on the ground that the balance of power in society must be
overturned, it was the thousands of urban and village “municipalities”
which undertook to carry out in the localities the abolition of feudal
rights. Before the Assembly decided to proclaim it in principle on 4
August 1789 and well before proclaiming it de facto four years later,
after having expelled the Girondins, the municipalities in some parts of
France were already acting in this manner.
But the municipalities, and especially the advanced sections of large
towns, did not limit themselves to this. When the National Assembly
decided to proclaim the confiscation of the property of the clergy and
the sale of these assets, the
State had no mechanism to carry this decision out. Well, it was the
Communes, and in the large towns — the Sections, which volunteered to
carry out the immense revolutionary transfer of fortunes. They alone
were capable of doing it, and they accomplished it de facto.
But where we can see even better the constructive spirit of the people,
outside the State, is when the war started in 1792. When the armed
struggle became a matter of life or death for the Revolution, when
France was invaded by foreigners invited by royalty and it had to do the
impossible: with neither army nor republican officers, it had to drive
these foreigners from the land — it was the sections and the Communes
which undertook to accomplish this huge task for which the State did not
even have the necessary mechanism: to enlist volunteers, that is to say,
to choose men, to decide who amongst those who presented themselves to
give shoes, bread, rifle, lead and powder — because at the moment of
reckoning the republican was lacking everything: bread as much as lead,
musket as much as shoes and clothes.
In fact, who will know how to sort the men who volunteer? Who will
ensure that the volunteer, after having received “sword, lead, bread,”
will not throw away the rifle at the first opportunity or will not join
the royalist packs? Who will find leathers and cloth? Sow clothes,
scrape caves to get saltpetre? [82] Who, finally, will tell the
volunteer, when he is at the border, the truth about the progress of the
Revolution in his native town and about the intrigues of the
counter-revolutionaries? Who will inspire in him the burning zeal
without which the impossible cannot be done, nor victories won? It was
the sections and the communes who accomplished all this immense work.
The statist historians could ignore it but the French people preserved
the memory of it: it is they who taught it to us!
Would the Bastille and the Tuileries have ever been taken without this
effort of the people — the unknowns? [83] Would the republicans have
driven out the enemy and abolished royalty and feudalism if they had not
understood — without perhaps expressing it in these words that come from
our pen — that for a new phase of social life we need an organisation
which will help make it blossom? And if they had not found this
organisation in the Commune, in their devotion, in the activity of their
revolutionary Sections, almost independent of the Commune and linked to
each other by temporary Committees, created whenever events indicated
the need for it?
It is therefore essential that to free themselves the masses who produce
everything without being allowed to control the consumption of what they
produce, find the means which enable them to display their creative
forces and to develop themselves new, egalitarian, forms of consumption
and of production.
The State and national representation cannot find these forms. It is the
very life of the consumer and of the producer, his intellect, his
organising spirit which must find them and improve them by applying them
to the daily needs of life.
It is the same for forms of political organisation. In order to free
themselves from the exploitation they are subjected to under the
supervision of the State, the masses cannot remain under the domination
of the forms which prevent the blossoming of popular initiative. These
were developed by governments to perpetuate the servitude of the people,
to prevent it from letting its creative force blossom and to develop
institutions of egalitarian mutual aid. New forms must be found to serve
the opposite goal.
But if we recognise that in order to be able to reshape the forms of
consumption and production the class of producers will have to reshape
the political forms of the organisation of society, we see at once how
wrong it is to arm the current bourgeois State with the immense force
which the management of economic monopolies — industrial and commercial
exchange — gives it in addition to the political monopolies it already
possesses.
Let us not talk about an imaginary State in which a government, composed
of angels descended from the heavens for the needs of the discussion,
would be the enemy of the powers we would have armed it with. To
entertain such utopias is to lead the revolution to rocks where it will
inevitably flounder. We must take the current bourgeois State as it is —
and wonder if it is sensible to arm this institution with a more and
more formidable power?
Is it sensible to give the institution which currently exists to hold
the worker in servitude — because who would doubt that such is today the
main function of the State? — is it sensible to strengthen it by giving
it the ownership of a vast railway network? To give it the monopoly of
alcoholic beverages, tobacco, sugar, etc., as well as that of credit and
banking — in addition to that of justice, public education, territorial
defence, and colonial banditry?
To hope that the oppressive mechanism, thus reinforced, becomes an
instrument of revolution, is that not to ignore what history teaches us
about what a creature of habit [l’esprit routinier] all bureaucracy is
and about the strength of resistance of institutions? Is it not to make
precisely the mistake we reproach [other] revolutionaries for — that of
imagining that it is enough to expel a king to have a republic or name a
socialist dictator to have collectivism?
Besides, did we not notice very recently — in 1905 and 1906 in Russia —
the danger of arming a reactionary State with the power that railways
and all sorts of monopolies gives it?
Whereas the government of Louis XVI, seeing itself facing bankruptcy,
had to capitulate before the bourgeoisie who wanted the constitution;
whereas the Manchu dynasty was forced to abdicate, [84] unable to borrow
millions to fight republicans — the Romanov dynasty, beleaguered by the
revolution which had triumphed in 1905, found it easy to borrow 1,200
million from France in 1906. And when members of the Russian Duma issued
a manifesto to tell foreign financiers “Do not lend anything, the
Russian State is going bankrupt!” — these financiers, better informed,
replied: “But since you handed over 60,000 kilometres of railway tracks,
bought-out the companies that built them, since you gave it the huge
monopoly on drinks, we do not fear bankruptcy. It is not a Louis XVI
monarchy which owned nothing!”
And they lent the twelve hundred million.
Well, it is to increase the capital owned by the modern bourgeois States
that the radicals and socialists are working today. They did not even
bother to discuss — like English co-operators asked me one day — if
there were no way to hand over the railways directly to the
railway-workers’ trade-unions, to free the enterprise from the yoke of
the capitalist, instead of creating a new capitalist, even more
dangerous than the bourgeois companies, the State. [85]
But no! The so-called statist intellectuals learned nothing in school
other than faith in a saviour State, the omnipotent State; and they
never even wanted to listen to those who were shouting at them
“reckless-people” as they marched onwards, hypnotised by the
State-capitalist and Vidal’s statist-collectivism, that they had
resurrected under the name of “scientific socialism”!
The result we can see, not only in moments of crisis as in Russia, but
in Europe every day. There, where railways are a public service of the
State, all the government has to do if it feels threatened by a strike
is to issue a two-line decree to “mobilise” all the railway workers.
[86] As a result striking becomes an act of rebellion. To shoot the
striking railway workers is no longer an act of deference towards the
plutocracy; it becomes an act of devotion to the motherland. [87]
It is the same thing for coalmines, large munitions factories, steel
refineries, and even for food. And in this way a whole new mentality is
in the process of being formed in society — not only amongst the
bourgeois, but also amongst the workers. The exploitation of labour, far
from being restricted, is placed under the permanent protection of the
law. It becomes an institution, just like the State itself. It becomes a
part of the Constitution, just like serfdom was in France until the
Great Revolution or the division into classes of peasants, artisans,
merchants with their established duties towards the two classes—that of
the nobles and of clergy—that we still see in Russia.
“The duty to be exploited!”—That is where we are heading with this
State-capitalist idea.
We clearly see, from the above, how wrong it is to see in the State
[only] a hierarchical organisation of functionaries, elected or
appointed to administer the various branches of social life and
harmonise their action, and think it will be enough to change their
personnel to make the machine go in any direction.
If the historical function — social and political — of the State had
been limited to that, it would not have destroyed, as it did, every
freedom of local institutions; it would not have centralised everything,
justice, education, religions, arts, sciences, army, etc., in its
ministries; it would not have wielded tax, as it has done, in the
interest of the rich and to always hold the poor below “the poverty
line,” as the young English economists say; it would not have wielded,
as it has done, monopoly, to allow the rich to absorb the entire
increase of wealth due to the progress of technology and science.
It is because the State is much more than the organisation of an
administration with a view to establishing “harmony” in society, as they
say in the universities. It is an organisation, developed and slowly
perfected over the course of three centuries, to uphold the rights
acquired by certain classes to benefit from the labour of the working
masses; to expand these rights and create new ones, which lead to new
subjugations [inféodations] of the citizens, impoverished by
legislation, towards groups of individuals showered with favours from
the governmental hierarchy. Such is the true essence of the State. All
the rest are only words that the State itself taught to the people and
which is repeated by apathy without closer analysis of them: words just
as deceitful as those taught by the Church to cover its thirst for
power, enrichment and more power!
It is high time, however, to submit these words to a serious criticism
and to wonder where the infatuation of the radicals of the nineteenth
century and their socialist continuators for an omnipotent State came
from? We would then see that it above all came from the misconception
that is usually made about the Jacobins of the Great [French] Revolution
— of the legend that is created, or rather was created, around the
Jacobin club. Because it is to this Club and its branches in the
provinces that bourgeois historians of the Revolution (except Michelet)
attributed all the glory of the great principles expressed by the
Revolution and the terrible struggles that it had to sustain against
royalty and royalists.
It is time to classify this legend in its true place, amongst the other
legends of the Church and the State. We are already gradually beginning
to know the truth about the Revolution and we start to notice that the
Jacobin club was the club — not of the people but of the bourgeoisie
which had come into power and wealth; not of the Revolution, but of
those who knew how to take advantage of it. At none of the great moments
of upheaval was it at the forefront of the Revolution: it always limited
itself to channelling the threatening upsurges, to make them return to
the frameworks of the State and — to smother them by killing the bold
elements which were going beyond the views of the bourgeoisie that it
represented.
Nursery for functionaries, which it provided in [large] numbers after
each new step forward made by the Revolution (10 August, 31 May), [88]
the Jacobin club was the bulwark of the bourgeoisie coming to power
against the egalitarian tendencies of the people. It is precisely for
that — for having known how to prevent the people from taking the
communist and egalitarian path — it is so glorified by most historians.
It must be said that this Club had a well-defined ideal: it was the
omnipotent State, which did not tolerate within itself any local power,
such as a sovereign Commune, any professional power, such as trade
unions, no will except that of the Jacobins of the Convention — which
necessarily, inevitably, led to the dictatorship of the police of the
Committee of General Security, and necessarily again to the consular
dictatorship, [then] to the Empire. [89] That is why the Jacobins broke
the strength of the Communes and especially the Paris Commune and its
sections (after having transformed them into simple policing bodies
[bureaux de police], placed under the orders of the Committee of
Security). That is why they waged war on the Church — while seeking to
maintain a clergy and a religion; that is why they did not accept the
slightest provincial independence, nor the slightest functional
independence in the organisation of the crafts, in education, in
scientific researches, in Art.
“The State, it is I!” of Louis XIV was only a child’s toy in relation to
the “State, it is us” of the Jacobins. It was the absorption of the
whole national life, concentrated into a pyramid of functionaries. And
this whole was to be used to enrich a certain class of citizens and at
the same time maintain all the rest — that is to say, the whole nation
except the privileged — in poverty. A poverty that would not be absolute
destitution, begging, as it was the case under the old regime — starving
beggars are not the workers needed by the bourgeois — but a poverty that
forces man to sell his working strength to whoever wants to exploit it,
and sell it at a price that only allows man by exception to get out of
this state of wage-earning proletarian.
There is the ideal of the Jacobin State. Read all the literature of the
time — except the writings of those called the Enraged, the Anarchists,
and who were guillotined or otherwise eliminated for that reason — and
you will see that this is precisely the Jacobin ideal. [90]
But then, we are led to wonder, how it is possible that the socialists
of the second half of the nineteenth century adopted the ideal of the
Jacobin State when this ideal had been designed from the viewpoint of
the bourgeois, in direct opposition to the egalitarian and communist
tendencies of the people which had arisen during the Revolution? [91]
Here is the explanation to which my studies of this subject led me and
that I believe to be true.
The link between the Jacobin Club of 1793 and the statist socialist
militants — Louis Blanc, Vidal, Lassalle, the Marxists — is, in my
opinion, the conspiracy of Babeuf. It is not in vain that it is, so to
speak, canonised by the State socialists.
Now Babeuf — direct and pure descendant of the Jacobin Club of 1793 —
had conceived this idea that a revolutionary surprise attack, prepared
by a conspiracy, could create a communist dictatorship in France. But
once — true Jacobin — he had conceived the communist revolution as
something which could be done by decrees, he came to two other
conclusions: democracy first would prepare communism; and then a single
individual, a dictator, provided that he had the strength of will to
save the world, will introduce communism! [92]
In this conception, passed on like a tradition by secret societies
during the entire nineteenth century, lies the key to the riddle which
allows to this day socialists to work towards creating an omnipotent
State. The belief — because it is, after all, only an article of
messianic faith — that one day a man will appear who will have “the
strength of will to save the world” by communism and who, attaining “the
dictatorship of the proletariat,” will achieve communism by his decrees,
silently persisted during the entire nineteenth century. Indeed, we can
see, twenty-five years apart, the faith in the “caesarism” of Napoleon
III in France, and the leader of the German revolutionary socialists,
Lassalle, after his conversations with Bismarck on a unified Germany
writing that socialism will be introduced in Germany by a royal dynasty,
but probably not by that of the Hohenzollern.
Faith in the Messiah, always! The faith which made Louis Napoleon
popular after the massacres of June 1848 [93] — that same faith in the
omnipotence of a dictatorship, combined with the fear of great popular
uprisings [94] — here, is the explanation of this tragic contradiction
that the modern developments of statist-socialism offer us. If the
representatives of this doctrine ask, on one hand, emancipation of the
worker from bourgeois exploitation, and if, on the other hand, they work
to strength the State that represents the true creator and defender of
the bourgeoisie — it is obviously that they still have faith in finding
their Napoleon, their Bismarck, their Lord Beaconsfield who one day will
use the unified strength of the State to work against its mission,
against its entire machinery and all its traditions.
Those who want to meditate on the ideas outlined in these two studies on
the historic State and the modern State will understand one of the
essential elements of Anarchy. He will understand why anarchists refuse
to support the State in any way and [refuse to] become part of the
machinery of State. He will see why, taking advantage of the marked
tendency of the time to establish thousands of groups which seek to
substitute themselves for the State in all the functions that the State
had monopolised — anarchists work so that the masses of the workers of
the soil and of factory endeavour to form organisations full of vitality
in this direction, rather than applying their strengths and intelligence
to strengthen the bourgeois State.
He will also understand why and how anarchists aim at the destruction of
the State by undermining wherever they can the idea of territorial
centralisation and centralisation of functions, by opposing to it the
independence of each locality and of each grouping formed for a social
function; and why they seek union in action: not in pyramidal hierarchy,
not in the orders of the central Committee of a secret organisation, but
in the free group, federative, from the simple to the complex.
And he will understand that the seeds of the new life will be found in
these free groups, respectful of human individuality, when the spirit of
voluntary servitude and messianic faith will have given way to the
spirit of independence, voluntary solidarity and the analysis of
historical and social facts, finally freed from authoritarian and
semi-religious prejudices that school and bourgeois statist literature
instil in us.
He will also see, in the mists of a not very far future, what man will
be able to reach one day when weary of his servitude he will seek his
liberation in the free action of free men who act in solidarity for a
common aim: to mutually guarantee by their collective labour a certain
minimum of well-being in order to allow the individual to work on the
complete development of his faculties, his individuality, and thereby
achieve his individuation, of which we have heard so much about
recently.
And he will finally understand, that individuation, that is to say, the
fullest possible development of individuality, does not consist — as
taught by the bourgeois and their mediocrities — in removing from the
creative activity of man his social tendencies and his instincts of
solidarity, to keep only the narrow and absurd individualism of the
bourgeoisie which recommends that society be forgotten and the worship
of the individual isolated from society. He will understand, on the
contrary, that it is precisely social inclinations and collective
creation, when they are given their free rein, which allow the
individual to reach his full development and to soar to [great] heights,
where, so far, only the great geniuses knew how to rise in a few
beautiful creations of Art.
[1] The word rente (rent) in French includes all forms of property
income as well as the economic rent associated with land use. Also, the
version published in Freedom in 1914 added “profit” to this list of
property-income exploited from the worker. (Editor)
[2] See, for example, Kropotkin’s pamphlet L’Organisation de la Vindicte
appelée Justice (Paris: Au Bureau des “Temps Nouveaux,” 1901),
translated as Organised Vengeance called ‘Justice’ (London: Freedom
Press, 1902). (Editor)
[3] In a letter dated 12 October 1678: “The prodigious morality amongst
the workers, whose bodies are carried away every night in carts, as if
from a charity-hospital. One hides the grim convoys so as not to terrify
the worksite” (Lettres de Madame de Sévigné de sa famille et de ses
amis, Volume II [Lavigne/Chamerot: Paris 1836], 31). (Editor)
[4] These are the main royal palaces and associated gardens of the
royalty of England, France, and Russia, respectively. (Editor)
[5] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “(in Russia it has already been done,
in 1906, while a new law treats as felony all strikes in ‘establishments
of public utility’).” (Editor)
[6] A reference to the torturing of suspects following the wholesale
arrest of hundreds of anarchists after a bomb was thrown into the
procession on Corpus Christi Day in Barcelona in 1896, avoiding various
members of the ruling class at the front but killing seven working class
people and a soldier at its rear (so suggesting the act of an agent
provocateur). Those arrested were subjected to terrible treatment in the
prison of Montjuich, from which several died, while five anarchists were
officially executed (eighteen were condemned to long imprisonment and
acquitted prisoners were deported to a Spanish prison colony in the
western Sahara). The actual bomb thrower was never found. Kropotkin
dates this 1901 (when prisoners were released) and this has been
corrected. (Editor)
[7] Kropotkin clarifies his meaning in the 1914 Freedom version by
immediately adding: “organised, not by the nation itself in each town
and village, but by its chosen so-called representatives.” (Editor)
[8] A reference to the pre-modern Kazakhstan (the Kazakh khanate) in
which the Kazakh aristocracy (called the white bone — ak suiuk) traced
their descent from Genghis Khan and had special rights and privileges.
The general population of Kazakh was known as black bone (kara suiuk).
(Editor)
[9] The gabelle was originally imposed in the fourteenth century and
denoted any tax on the sale of agricultural and industrial commodities.
In the fifteenth century the gabelle began to mean specifically the salt
tax, that is, a tax on consumption of salt and the nobility, the clergy,
and certain other privileged persons were exempt. It was one of the most
hated and grossly unequal forms of indirect taxation and was forcefully
expressed in the lists of grievances drawn up for the Estates-General of
1789 on the eve of the revolution. It was abolished in March 1790.
(Editor)
[10] The tailles was a direct land tax on the French peasantry and
non-nobles, imposed on each household and based on how much land it
held. Originally an “exceptional” tax (i.e., imposed and collected in
times of need, as the king was expected to survive on the revenues of
the “domaine royal,” or lands that belonged to him directly), it became
permanent in 1439. The total amount of the taille was set by the French
king from year to year, and this amount was then apportioned among the
various provinces for collection. The clergy, nobles, officers of the
crown, and magistrates were exempt from the tax. (Editor)
[11] The sums levied by the English on the capital they have lent to
other nations are variously estimated. It is only known that more than
two and a half billions (100 million pounds sterling) represents the
English revenue on the sums they have lent only to various States and
railway companies. If we add to this the interest levied each year on
the sums which the English lent to foreign cities, then to the various
maritime and other shipping companies (everywhere, but especially in
America), lighthouses, underwater cables, telegraphs, banks in Asia,
Africa, America and Australia (this revenue is immense) and, finally,
what was placed in a thousand industries of all the countries of the
world, the English statisticians reach the minimum figure of seven and a
half billion francs a year. The net profit which England makes on all
her experts (less than a billion and a half) is so small in comparison
with the income obtained by cutting share coupons with a pair of
scissors that we can say that the principal industry of England is the
trading of capital. It has become what Holland was at the beginning of
the seventeenth century — the principal moneylender of the world. France
follows it closely; Belgium in proportion to its population. Indeed,
according to the assessment of Alfred Neymarck, France holds 25 to 30
billion foreign securities, which would already give an annual income of
one billion to a billion and a half only on the securities officially
listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.
[12] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “derived from the exploitation of
foreign workers by means of interest on foreign loans.” (Editor)
[13] A reference to the 1896 Agricultural Relief Bill introduced under
the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, which halved the local
tax burden of landowners. Ostensibly aiming to offset the effects of the
depression in farming by reducing local taxation on the agrarian
economy, it granted assistance directly to landowners, so failing the
tenant farmers who were bearing the brunt of the decline in agricultural
prices. It was denounced by opponents as a “dole” to the landlords.
(Editor)
[14] Adam Smith discusses taxation in Volume II, Book V, Chapter II of
The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976). (Editor)
[15] The 1914 version in Freedom immediately adds the following
paragraph: “But who has profited chiefly by that growth? Owing to
taxation as it exists in this country, it was the landlord! Not the
workers who built the Arsenal and for years were putting its machinery
into action — but the local landlords!” (Editor)
[16] Frederick Verinder, “Taxation of Land Values,” Part II, Comradeship
No. 11 (February 1900), 16. Kropotkin paraphrases this passage to
clarify for his French readers: “These sell back in detail to the
taxpayers the profits they have pocketed from the sanitary improvements,
paid for by these same taxpayers.” The journal subsequently published a
letter from Kropotkin (No 13, April 1900) entitled “Prince Kropotkin on
Land Monopoly and Co-Operation” which covers many of the points he
raises here. (Editor)
[17] The 1914 Freedom version expands slightly: “Or, speaking still of
Woolwich, one day a steam ferry was running across the Thames, in order
to connect Woolwich with London. Of course, the Government, to begin
with, made of the ferry a monopoly in favour of a railway company. Later
on, as the company charged too much for the crossing, and the “dear
citizen” grumbled, the municipality bought the ferry right back from the
company, the whole costing the town about £220,000 in eight years. But
then it appeared that a free ferry was a new handsome gift made to the
landlords. The value of land in Woolwich went up by leaps. A tiny bit of
land situated close by the ferry rose at once in value fully £3,000,
which, of course, was a gift of the town to the owner of that piece of
the land. And as the land in Woolwich will continue to rise in value
(every war scare contributing toraise the value of land round the big
Arsenal), we have here a new monopoly, and numbers of new capitalists
added to the legions of others by the State, with the aid of the working
people’s money.” It then adds this paragraph: “You see now for what the
State exists, and why it is so dear to all those who are capitalists or
expect to become either capitalists or members of the capitalist-making
machinery.” (Editor)
[18] The 1914 Freedom version has: “But lo! thanks to our laws, they who
profit most from both the Union and the Co-operative are again — the
landlords?” (Editor)
[19] The 1914 Freedom version has: In other words, this means: “You can
pay, gentlemen builders, a high price for this land. It is most suitable
for workers’ houses. With the higher wages obtained by the workers, and
their economies, you will be able to get higher rents.” And the
“gentleman builder” pays the landlord a higher price — and extorts
higher rents from the worker. Don’t you admire that mechanism? If not —
never talk of Aesthetics!” (Editor)
[20] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “True, the scheme was not exactly
what they intended it to be at the outset: their Communist tendencies
were lost amidst mercantile considerations.” (Editor)
[21] The 1914 Freedom version adds this paragraph: “Keep them up — and
remain their slave!” (Editor)
[22]
J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London:
James Hisbet & Co., 1900). Kropotkin’s paraphrased translation
has been replaced with the original quote. (Editor)
[23] Kropotkin’s emphasis and, again, the original text of the book has
been reproduced. (Editor)
[24] This footnote was added to the 1914 Freedom version: “These lines
were written two years ago; the figures have increased since. As to how
the imported Hindus, and the British workers too, are treated — we saw
it lately. Slavery breeds slavery.” (Editor)
[25] A reference to Thomas Malthus and his “law of population” and the
related “iron law of wages.” Malthus blamed the poverty of his time on
the tendency of population (that is to say, numbers of working class
people) to exceed food supplies rather than an unjust economic system as
the radicals he attacked (like William Godwin) were arguing. His
assertions were well received — for obvious reasons — by the ruling
class of his and subsequent times while radicals and socialists viewed
them as apologetics. Proudhon wrote against Malthus on many occasions,
most famously in his article “The Malthusians” (included in Property is
Theft!) as did Kropotkin (see, for example Anarchist Communism: Its
Basis and Principles (London: Freedom Press, 1891) and Fields, Factories
and Workshops; or, Industry combined with agriculture and brain work
with manual work (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1912). (Editor)
[26] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “And the workmen will not even
notice that: they will have learned that they are ‘the Unfit.’” (Editor)
[27] The 1914 Freedom version has a different paragraph: “We need not
talk about the taxation for military purposes. By this time every one
ought to understand what armies and navies are kept for. Evidently not
for the defence of the country, but for the conquest of new markets and
new territory, to exploit them in the interest of the few.” (Editor)
[28] We have for England the work of Professor Hermann Levy, Monopole,
Kartelle und Trusts, published in 1909, and translated into English as
Monopoly and Competition (London, 1911). It has this advantage that the
author does not even deal with the role of the State: it is the economic
causes of monopolies that concerns him. Therefore there is no bias
against the State.
[29] See G. Unwin’s Industrial Organisation [in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries] (Oxford, 1904), H. Price’s English Patents of
Monopolies (Boston, 1906), W. Cunningham’s The Growth of English
Industry [and Commerce in Modern Times: The Mercantile System (1882)],
and especially the works of Hermann Levy and Macrosty.
[30] The 1914 Freedom version immediately adds: “for their services
(against the nation).” (Editor)
[31] The French edition has “James II” but this must be a typographical
error as shown by the 1914 Freedom version having James I. (Editor)
[32] The term patent originates from the Latin patere (“to lay open”)
but, in this context, it is a shortened version of the term letters
patent. This was a royal decree granting exclusive rights to a person or
corporation. By the sixteenth century, the English Crown would
habitually abuse the granting of letters patent for monopolies. After
public outcry, King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) was forced
to revoke all existing monopolies and declare that they were only to be
used for “projects of new invention.” This was incorporated into the
Statute of Monopolies (1624) in which Parliament restricted the Crown’s
power so that the King could only issue letters patent to the inventors
or introducers of original inventions for a fixed number of years. The
Statute became the foundation for later developments in patent law in
England and elsewhere. (Editor)
[33] A reference to the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in which
a few English parliamentarians appealed to the Dutch William III, Prince
of Orange, to invade the United Kingdom to replace the Catholic King
James II (James VII of Scotland) who was asserting his divine right to
rule. William and his wife Anne (daughter of James) became joint
monarchs but subject to Parliament (albeit one elected by only the
wealthiest). This ended absolute monarchy in the United Kingdom and its
replacement by a constitutional one. Compared to the civil wars of two
decades previously, the invasion was relatively bloodless — at least in
England. In the 1914 Freedom version Kropotkin dates the revolution as
being from 1648 to 1688. (Editor)
[34] A camarilla is a group of courtiers or favourites who surround a
monarch and influence from behind the scenes. The term derives from the
Spanish word camarilla meaning “little chamber” or private cabinet of
the king and was first used to describe the circle of cronies around
King Ferdinand VII who reigned Spain from 1814 to 1833. (Editor)
[35] The East India Company was an English joint-stock company formed to
pursue trade with the East Indies but ended up trading mainly with the
Indian subcontinent and China. The company eventually accounted for half
of the world’s trade, particularly in basic commodities. It received a
Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 and wealthy merchants and
aristocrats owned its shares. It eventually came to rule large areas of
India with its own private armies, exercising military power and
assuming administrative functions. Following the Indian Rebellion of
1857, the British Crown assumed direct control of India in the form of
the new British Raj. (Editor)
[36] The Hudson’s Bay Company was incorporated by English royal charter
in 1670 controlled the fur trade throughout much of the English
controlled North America for several centuries and it functioned as the
de facto government in parts of North America. In the late nineteenth
century, with its signing of the Deed of Surrender, its vast territory
became the largest portion of the newly formed Dominion of Canada, in
which the company was the largest private landowner. (Editor)
[37] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “the British Parliament had other
ways to exploit the nation than to favour a few factory-owners at the
expense of the others. It had all the rural population to re-enslave. So
it did it.” (Editor)
[38] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “Parliament robbed the peasants […]
Historically, he [the lord] had not the slightest shadow of right to
these lands: they belonged to the village community. All that he might
have claimed was the right of pasture on an equal footing with all the
commoners, whenever that right was granted him by the community. He was
the magistrate of the locality and the head of the militias but not the
owner of the land. And yet Parliament, by an act of sheer robbery, gave
him the communal land.” (Editor)
[39] On the evils caused by demarcation, excellent information can be
found, with supporting maps, in a recent work on this subject by Dr.
Gilbert Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields
(London, 1907). On the agrarian question in general and the plunder of
the nation by legislators, see the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the
follower of Darwin, Land Nationalisation; its Necessity and its Aims
[1906].
[40] The 1914 Freedom version adds the following paragraph: “And in the
meantime new branches of monopolies, far more profitable than the old
ones, began to be created by the same legislators.” (Editor)
[41] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “New sources of enrichment, for the
privileged ones were soon discovered.” (Editor)
[42] The 1914 Freedom version has a different paragraph here: “All these
new perfected instruments of robbery were now brought into the
monopolies market and sold by the minions of the State. Hordes of
millionaires and multi-millionaires were created.” (Editor)
[43] Kropotkin’s emphasis; Henry George, Poverty and Progress (William
Reeves: London, 1884), 145. Kropotkin’s translation has been replaced
with the original text. (Editor)
[44] The 1914 Freedom version has the following slightly different
paragraph: “The worse is, that once these big companies had been formed,
their power over human agglomerations became such that it could only be
compared with the power exercised in the medieval age by feudal barons,
who levied a tribute upon everyone who passed on the high road in the
vicinity of their castles. And while millionaires were thus created by
the State, millions and millions flowed into the pockets of the
functionaries in the Ministries.” (Editor)
[45] Henry George, in Protection and Free Trade, gave the following
example of an iron mine in the State of Michigan. The owners had bought
it by paying for the land 15 fr. per hectare. They assigned the right to
extract the ore to a certain Colby for the payment of 2 fr. per tonne of
ore mined. Colby assigned this right to Morse and Co. for 2 francs 62 c.
per tonne, which Morse sold to Sellwood for 4 fr. 37 [c.] per tonne.
Sellwood did not extract it himself but had it done by an entrepreneur
that he paid 0 fr 62 ½ c. per tonne and for which extraction by the
tonne was all-inclusive (wages, machinery, supervision administration, 0
fr 50 c.); which gave a net profit of 0 fr. 12 ½ c. As it was possible
to extract 1,200 tonnes a day, this gave a net revenue: 150 fr per day
to the entrepreneur who had the extraction done; 450 fr. for Sellwood;
8,400 fr. for Morse and Co.; 750 [fr.] for Colby and 2,400 fr. for the
owners; or a net income of 12,150 fr. per day in addition to the cost of
labour and the profits realised by the work entrepreneur. It was the
price of the monopoly, guaranteed by the State — the surcharge paid by
the consumer for leaving to the State the right to establish monopolies.
This example is a small picture of what has been done on a large scale
in all concessions: for railways, canals, ships, rolling stock,
armaments, etc.
[46] The 1914 Freedom version adds: “in addition to all the profits they
would draw from the railway.” (Editor)
[47] Added in the 1914 Freedom version. (Editor)
[48] The 1914 Freedom version states: By the side of these colossal
legal robberies, the fortunes that are ascribed by the economists to the
moral virtues of the capitalists are a mere trifle. When the economists
tell us that at the origin of Capital the worker would find the pence
and shillings carefully put aside, at the cost of hard privation, by the
masters of the factories — these economists are either ignoramuses who
repeat parrot-like the fables they were taught at the University, or
they consciously tell what they themselves know to be lies. (Editor)
[49] References to various imperialist acts: the annexation of the
Touat-Gourara-Tidikelt regions in Morocco by France in 1901; the
annexation of Tropoli in Libya by Italy in 1911; the annexation of
Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910) by Japan; the division of Persia
(modern-day Iran) between Britain and Russia (1907). (Editor)
[50] A fellah is a farmer or agricultural labourer in the Middle East
and North Africa (the word derives from the Arabic word for “ploughman”
or “tiller”). The 1914 Freedom versions adds “the Hottentots, the
Somalis” to the list of tribal peoples being colonised by Western
Imperial Powers. (Editor)
[51] Given how often Adam Smith’s name is used to bolster the position
of those with economic power, it is useful to quote The Wealth of
Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976): “The workmen desire to
get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are
disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the
wages of labour […] The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much
more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not
prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.
[…] We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters,
though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this
account that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of
the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but
constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above
their actual rate […] We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination,
because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things.”
(Volume I, 74–75) “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even
for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy
against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” (Volume I,
144) “Merchants and master manufacturers are [...] the two classes of
people who commonly employ the largest capitals [...] The interest of
the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures,
is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of
the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always
the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be
agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the
competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the
dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to
levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their
fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce
which comes from this order [...] comes from an order of men whose
interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have
generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who
accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”
(Volume I, 278) These, and others like them, are the passages Kropotkin
had in mind. (Editor)
[52] Presumably a reference to Henry Macrosty’s book The Trust Movement
in British Industry: A Study of Business Organisation (London: Longman,
Green & Co.: 1907). (Editor)
[53] We even import food for the little livestock we raise in England:
oil-cakes, hay, various meal; and as for meat, English peasants only
started eating beef and mutton when we started, in the sixties, to
import meat from America, and later from Australia and New Zealand.
Until then, meat was an unattainable luxury for the peasants.
[54] These syndicates, which include in addition to English
manufacturers, the main manufacturers of sewing thread, glass, cement,
etc. in the protectionist nations prevent foreign competition from
lowering prices in England. Previously, German or Russian manufacturers
of these same products, after having sold a certain quantity of them at
home at a high price (thanks to the customs tariff), could send a part
to England once the main English manufacturers of these products had
come to an agreement amongst themselves and had formed a syndicate to
raise prices. Today, entering into an international bosses syndicate,
the big German and Russian manufacturers commit not to do that.
[55] Concerning this modern growth of international cartels, let me
summarise what Mr. André Morizet has related in the Guerre Sociale
[Social War] of 6 February 1912 on the international agreement that
exists for the supply of armour-plating. It originally contained ten
participants, including Krupp, Schneider, Maxim, Carnegie, etc., divided
into four groups: English, German, French and American. These ten
participants made arrangements amongst themselves to distribute
government orders without competing. The participant to which the order
was entrusted tendered a certain agreed price and the other members of
the cartel bid slightly higher prices. Furthermore there was a pool — a
fund consisting of payments of so much percent on each order which was
used to equalise the profits of the various orders. Since 1899, three
more large companies were admitted to this cartel in order to avoid
competition. We can understand the immense strength this syndicate has.
Not only does it offer the means to plunder the coffers of the State and
to realise immense profits but it has every interest in urging all
States, large and small, to build battleships. That is why we see, at
this moment, a real fever to build Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts.
Bankers, interested in this syndicate, ask no better than to lend the
necessary money to States, whatever their public debts already are—“Long
live the State!”
[56] The National Telephone Company (NTC) was a British telephone
company from 1881 until 1911 that brought together smaller local
companies in the early years of the telephone. As it had become a
monopoly, it was nationalised by the coalition Liberal and Labour
government under the Telephone Transfer Act 1911 and taken over by the
General Post Office (GPO) in 1912. It remained nationalised until it was
re-privatised in 1984 (then called British Telecommunications). Perhaps
needless to say, shares were priced lower than the market rate (by the
end of the day it was floated on the stock-market, shares had risen by a
third) meaning that the government had sold off public assets too
cheaply and so giving investors millions in profits. (Editor)
[57] A reference to the 1902 Brussels Sugar Convention. in which Britain
and nine other nations attempted to stabilise world sugar prices by
setting up a commission to investigate export bounties and decide on
penalties. It created intergovernmental regulation of the sugar trade in
the name of eliminating anti-competitive practices. Member States agreed
to liberalise trade by levying countervailing duties against the
state-subsidised beet sugar that has been responsible for a spiral of
over-production. It is seen as one of the influences in modern
multilateral trade agreements and institutions. (Editor)
[58] Delaisi gave an excellent example of a syndicate — that of
Saint-Aubin — born under Louis XV which has always managed to prosper by
seeking its shareholders in the high spheres of the rulers. Picking its
shareholders and protectors firstly in the Court of the King, then in
the imperial nobility of Napoleon I, then in the high aristocracy of the
Restoration and finally in the republican bourgeoisie and changing its
sphere of exploitation according to the times, this syndicate prospers
still under the protection of the Legitimists, Bonapartists and
Republicans associated for exploitation. The form of the State changes;
but since its substance is the same the monopoly and the trust remain
always there and the exploitation of the poor for the profit of the rich
continues.
[59] A reference to the Entente Cordiale, a series of agreements signed
on 8 April 1904 between the United Kingdom and the French Third
Republic. Beyond the immediate concerns of colonial expansion addressed
by the agreement (such as granting freedom of action to the UK in Egypt
and to France in Morocco), the agreement marked the end of almost a
thousand years of intermittent conflict between the two States and their
predecessors. It also strengthened both powers against various rivals
(most obviously, Germany) and was invoked when war finally broke out in
1914. (Editor)
[60] A reference to the Spanish–American War of 1898 when an internal
explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in Cuba lead the United
States to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). After
a short war, Spain was defeated and lost its empire. The U.S. annexed
the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam,
while in Cuba American forces did not allow armed rebels to enter the
capital city of Santiago and left the old Spanish civil authorities in
charge of the municipal offices. U.S. military occupation of Cuba lasted
until 1902, while its new constitution saw the U.S. retain the right to
intervene in Cuban affairs and to supervise its finances and foreign
relations. During the occupation, Americans began taking over railroad,
mine, sugar properties (for example, United Fruit moving into the Cuban
sugar industry, buying 1,900,000 acres of land for about twenty cents an
acre) and the American Tobacco Company arrived. By 1901, an estimated 80
percent (at least) of the export of Cuba’s minerals were in American
hands, mostly Bethlehem Steel (see chapter 12 of Howard Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States [Essex: Longman, 1996] for more
details). (Editor)
[61] The book references 1883 but the original article has 1882 (“La
Guerre,” Les Temps Nouveaux, 2 March 1912). In 1882 Kropotkin wrote the
pamphlet La Guerre (Geneva: Le Révolté, 1882) which was later included
in Words of a Rebel (1885). Moreover, in 1883 he was a prisoner in
France and so did not contribute to the anarchist press until he was
freed in 1886. So while he may be referring to an article published in
Le Révolté written by another anarchist, it seems far more likely that
this is a typographical error by the printer. As such, the date has been
changed to 1882. (Editor)
[62] Kropotkin is undoubtedly referring to Proudhon’s chapter on “Free
Trade” in his 1846 work System of Economic Contradictions. Sadly, as
with most of its second volume, this discussion has not been translated
into English. (Editor)
[63] The British Boy Scouts organised strike-breaking during the 1926
General Strike, for example. For further discussion of its imperialist
and militarist origins, see Brain Morris, “The Truth about Baden-Powell
and the Boy Scouts,” Ecology and Anarchism: Essays and Reviews on
Contemporary Thought (Malvern Wells: Images Publishing Ltd, 1996). For
its founder’s praise for fascism, see Christopher Hitchens, “Young Men
in Shorts,” The Atlantic Magazine, June 2004. (Editor)
[64] A reference to the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Japanese
war (1904–1905), respectively. During the latter conflict, Kropotkin
refused to take sides. See “La Guerre Russo-Japonaise,” Les Temps
Nouveaux, 5th March 1904. (Editor)
[65] The final words of Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris. This work
has been translated at least three times under different titles: Fat and
Thin (188), Savage Paris (1955) and The Belly of Paris (2007). (Editor)
[66] The term Khedive is a title equivalent to viceroy. It was first
used by Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769–1849), vassal of the Ottoman Empire and
governor of Egypt and Sudan. In 1882, a rebellion saw Egypt in the hands
of nationalists opposed to European domination of the country, leading
to a British naval bombardment of Alexandria and then to the landing of
a British expeditionary force. British troops defeated the Egyptian
Army, restoring the government of the Khedive and international controls
which had been in place to streamline Egyptian financing. The first
period of British rule (1882–1914) is often called the “veiled
protectorate.”
[67] The Xinhai Revolution, also known as the Revolution of 1911,
overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty (the Qing dynasty) and
established the Republic of China. It consisted of many revolts and
uprisings and its success in 1912 marked the end of two thousand years
of imperial rule. (Editor)
[68] That is, someone who solicits people to invest money in a company
or corporation (usually when it is being formed). (Editor)
[69] Zola’s L’Agrent (Money) was published as a novel in 1891 and
focuses on the financial world of the Second French Empire as embodied
in the Paris Bourse (Stock Exchange). He aimed to show the terrible
effects of speculation and fraud in company promotion on society as well
as the impotency of contemporary regulation and laws. (Editor)
[70] In 1891 the British government granted a royal charter to the
British South Africa Company (BSAC) over Matabeleland and Mashonaland
(in modern Zimbabwe), so becoming British protectorates and ruled by the
company. This lead to mass colonisation with the British controlling
labour as well as mineral resources. The First Matabele War (1893–1894)
pitted the BSAC against the Ndebele Kingdom. While the Ndebele did have
riflemen alongside spearmen, they were no match for the company’s Maxim
machine guns which, according to one eyewitness, “mow[ed] them down
literally like grass.” Defeat lead to increased colonisation with the
company officially naming the land Rhodesia — after its founder and
head, Cecil Rhodes — in 1895. The Second Matabele War or Matabeleland
Rebellion (1896–1897) saw the Ndebele unsuccessfully revolt against the
authority of the BSAC. The company ruled until the 1920s. (Editor)
[71] The Battle of Gravelotte on 18 August 1870 was the largest battle
during the Franco-Prussian War; there were numerous battles during the
American Civil War (1861–1865) in and around the Potomac River and its
tributaries; The Battle of Borodino (near Moscow) was fought on 7
September 1812 during the French invasion of Russia. (Editor)
[72] Two major land battles of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905.
(Editor)
[73] A highly flammable nitrocellulose (a pulpy or cotton-like polymer
derived from cellulose treated with nitric and sulphuric acids) used in
making plastics, lacquers and explosives. (Editor)
[74] Some figures will better indicate these shocks. Between 1900 and
1904 English exports were normal. For products of English origin, they
stood at between seven and seven-and-a-half thousand million francs. In
1904 they began to talk of a great war; the United States pushed its
production, and English exports rose in four years from 7,525 to 10,650
million. This lasted two years. But the much-desired war did not come
and there was a sudden halt: the crisis of which we have spoken broke
out in the United States, and exports of English produce fell to 9,495
million. However, 1910 arrived and the predictions of a great European
war were set to come true. And in 1911 English exports rose to an
absolutely unexpected height which they had never even remotely
approached before and which nobody could explain. They were 11,350
million! Coal, steel, good fast ships, battleships, cartridges, cloth,
linen, footwear — everything was in demanded, exported in bulk. Fortunes
were visibly amassed. We are going to slaughter each other — what a
godsend!
[75] A reference to the famous 1884 work by Engels, Origins of the
Family, Private Property, and the State, which argues: “The state, then,
has not existed from eternity. There have been societies that managed
without it, that had no idea of the state and state authority. At a
certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up
with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity
owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the
development of production at which the existence of these classes not
only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive
hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at
an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall.
Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and
equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of
state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the
side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe” (Marx-Engels Collected
Works, Volume 26 [London: Lawrence & Wishat, 1990], 272). (Editor)
[76] A reference to, for example, Engels’s arguments from 1883 that
while he and Marx saw the State’s “gradual dissolution and ultimate
disappearance,” the proletariat “will first have to possess itself of
the organised political force of the State and with its aid stamp out
the resistance of the Capitalist class and re-organise society.” The
anarchists “reverse the matter” by advocating revolution “has to begin
by abolishing the political organisation of the State.” For Marxists
“the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for
use, is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new
functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the
only organism by means of which the working class can exert its newly
conquered power” (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47 [London:
Lawrence & Wishat, 1993], 10). (Editor)
[77] Podesta were high officials (usually chief magistrate of a city
state) in many Italian cities beginning in the later Middle Ages;
Condottieri were the leaders of the professional military free companies
(or mercenaries) contracted by the Italian city-states and the Papacy
from the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance. (Editor)
[78] A villein in the feudal era denoted a peasant (tenant farmer) who
was legally tied to a lord of the manor. A villein could not leave the
land without the landowner’s consent. In the medieval social hierarchy,
villeins were below a free peasant (or “freeman”) and above a slave. The
majority of medieval European peasants were villeins. (Editor)
[79] Asked about Marx’s comments in The Civil War in France on the need
of smashing the state-machine, Engels explained: “It is simply a
question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first reshape
the old, bureaucratic, administratively centralised state machine before
they can use it for their own purposes; whereas, since 1848, all
bourgeois republicans, so long as they were in opposition, have heaped
abuse on that machine but, no sooner in office, have taken it over
intact and made use of it, partly against reaction but to an even
greater extent against the proletariat” (Marx-Engels Collected Works,
Volume 47, 74). Later he reiterated this position: “A republic, in
relation to the proletariat, differs from a monarchy only in that it is
the ready-made political form for the future rule of the proletariat.
You [in France] have the advantage of us in that it is already in being”
(Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 50, 276). (Editor)
[80] A reference to the estates of the realm which existed in
pre-revolutionary France and other Christian European nations from the
medieval period to early modern Europe. The social hierarchy under the
Ancien Régime was based on a three-estate system under the monarchy:
clergy (the First Estate), nobles (the Second Estate), and everyone else
(the Third Estate). It is estimated that ninety-eight per cent of the
population made up this last category and it included bourgeoisie,
wage-workers, and peasants. (Editor)
[81] The term free labour [le travail affranchi] refers to the abolition
of the unfree labour associated with serfdom such as the certain number
of days corvée labour provided to landlords or the monarchical State by
their subjects. (Editor)
[82] Saltpetre is a chemical compound (potassium nitrate) and one of the
major components of gunpowder. A major natural source of it is deposits
crystallising on cave walls. (Editor)
[83] Kropotkin is referring to two popular insurrections in Paris during
the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille (a medieval fortress
and prison) on 14 July 1789 began the French Revolution with the
destruction of a symbol of the power and abuses of the monarchy by the
mass action of the people. The storming of the Tuileries Palace on the
10 August 1792 resulted in the fall of the French monarchy six weeks
later and the increase of sans-culotte influence in Paris. See chapters
XII and XXXIII of Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution. (Editor)
[84] The Manchu, or Qing, was the last imperial dynasty of China and
ruled from 1644 until overthrown in 1912 by the Chinese revolution that
started in 1911. (Editor)
[85] Kropotkin mentioned this letter in his article “Syndicalisme et
parlementairisme” [“Trade Unionism and Parliamentarism”], Les Temps
Nouveaux (13 October 1906), which argued “all the workers, engineers,
stokers, etc., managing that industry themselves […] This is the future.
For it is not going to be the ministers but rather the workers
themselves who will see to the honest management of industry.” The task
was “to build up a force capable of imposing better working conditions
on the bosses, but also �� indeed primarily — to create among the working
classes the union structures that might some day replace the bosses and
take into their own hands the production and management of every
industry.” This article is included in Direct Struggle Against Capital.
(Editor)
[86] Kropotkin discusses this with regards to Holland in “Le Gréve
Générale en Hollande” [“The General Strike in Holland”], Les Temps
Nouveaux, 11 April 1903. (Editor)
[87] Kropotkin is referring to, amongst other events, the 1910 French
railway strike. This started on 10 October 1910 on the Paris-Nord
system. The following day, the strike committee called for a general
railway strike and on the 12th, the Western division came out. The Prime
Minister, Aristide Briand (a former socialist and advocate of the
general strike), arrested the strike committee and conscripted the
railway workers into the army. Martial law was thereby established for
any striker who refused to work would be immediately court-martialled
like any solider who refused to follow orders (an act which could result
in being shot). The strike ended on 18 October. (Editor)
[88] Kropotkin is referring to two popular insurrections in Paris which
are defining events in the history of the French Revolution. The
storming of the Tuileries Palace and the Insurrection of 31 May to 2
June 1793 resulted in the fall of the Girondinists in the National
Convention under pressure of the Parisian sans-culottes. Both mass
uprisings pushed the revolution in a more radical direction. See
chapters XXXIII and XLVI of Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution for
details. (Editor)
[89] The Committee of General Security was a French parliamentary
committee that acted as police agency during the French Revolution.
Along with the Committee of Public Safety, it oversaw the Reign of
Terror as well as supervising the local police committees in charge of
investigating reports of treason and had the authority to refer suspects
to the Revolutionary Tribunal and so execution by guillotine. By 1794
the Committee became part of the opposition to Robespierre and was
involved in the Thermidor coup which saw a five-member committee called
the Directory become the government of France. This, in turn, was
overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in the Coup of 18 Brumaire (8–9
November 1799) and was replaced by the Consulate headed by Napoleon as
First Consul. Napoleon did not declare himself head of state until May
1804 when the Senate passed a bill introducing the French Empire, with
Napoleon as Emperor. The coronation ceremony took place on 2 December
1804, when Napoleon crowned himself as Emperor of the French,
establishing the Empire. (Editor)
[90] Kropotkin discusses both “les Enragés” and “les Anarchistes” of
this time (and their fate) in his Great French Revolution — see, for
example, chapters LX and CLI. (Editor)
[91] Compare with Lenin: “A Jacobin who wholly identifies himself with
the organisation of the proletariat — a proletariat conscious of its
class interests — is a revolutionary Social Democrat.” (Collected Works
[Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961]7: 383) (Editor)
[92] Cf. my work, The Great French Revolution, ch. LVIII.
[93] The June Days uprising (les journées de Juin) occurred between
23–26 June 1848 in response to plans to close the National Workshops,
created by the Second Republic in order to provide work for the
unemployed. The National Guard, led by General Louis Eugène Cavaignac,
quelled the protests with over 10,000 people killed or injured and 4,000
later deported to Algeria. It marked the end of the hopes of a
“Democratic and Social Republic” (République démocratique et sociale)
and the victory of the liberals over the Radical Republicans and
Socialists. (Editor)
[94] The need for popular uprisings was the major theme of Kropotkin’s
article “Insurrections et revolution” [“Insurrections and Revolution”],
Les Temps Nouveaux (6 August 1910). “If the Revolution is ever to be
feasible,” Kropotkin argued, “local insurrections are called for.
Indeed, huge numbers of them. […] The whole of history is there for
proof. And if the careerist leaders of the proletarian movement today —
be they intellectuals or workers — preach the opposite, it is because
they want no truck with revolution at all. They fear it.” This article
is included in Direct Struggle Against Capital. (Editor)