💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › petr-kropotkin-the-wage-system.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:24:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Wage System Author: PĂ«tr Kropotkin Date: 1920 Language: en Topics: economics Source: Retrieved on March 1st, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm Notes: First Published: Freedom Pamphlets No. 1., New Edition. 1920. Transcribed by EndPage.com
In their plan for the reconstruction of society, the Collectivists
commit, in our opinion, a double error. Whilst speaking of the abolition
of the rule of capital, they wish, nevertheless, to maintain two
institutions which form the very basis of that rule, namely,
representative government and the wage system.
As for representative government, it remains absolutely incomprehensible
to us how intelligent men (and they are not wanting amongst the
Collectivists) can continue to be the partisans of national and
municipal parliaments, after all the lessons on this subject bestowed on
us by history, whether in England or in France, in Germany, Switzerland
or the United States. Whilst parliamentary rule is seen to be everywhere
falling to pieces; whilst its principles in themselves — and no longer
merely their applications — are being criticized in every direction, how
can intelligent men calling themselves Revolutionary Socialists, seek to
maintain a system already condemned to death?
Representative government is a system which was elaborated by the middle
class to make head against royalty and, at the same time, to maintain
and augment their domination of the workers. It is the characteristic
form of middle-class rule. But even its most ardent admirers have never
seriously contended that a parliament or municipal body does actually
represent a nation or a city; the more intelligent are aware that this
is impossible. By upholding parliamentary rule the middle class have
been simply seeking to oppose a dam between themselves and royalty, or
between themselves and the territorial aristocracy, without giving
liberty to the people. It is moreover plain that, as the people become
conscious of their interests, and as the variety of those interests
increases, the system becomes unworkable. And this is why the democrats
of all countries are seeking for different palliatives or correctives
and cannot find them. They are trying the Referendum, and discovering
that it is worthless; they prate of proportional representation, of the
representation of minorities, and other parliamentary utopias. In a
word, they are striving to discover the undiscoverable; that is to say,
a method of delegation which shall represent the myriad varied interests
of the nation; but they are being forced to recognize that they are upon
a false track, and confidence in government by delegation is passing
away.
It is only the Social Democrats and Collectivists who are not losing
this confidence, who are attempting to maintain so-called national
representation; and this is what we cannot understand.
If our Anarchist principles do not suit them, if they think them
inapplicable, they ought, at least, as it seems to us, to try to
discover what other system of organization could well correspond to a
society without capitalists or landlords. But to take the middle class
system — a system already in its decadence, a vicious system if ever
there was one — and to proclaim this system (with a few innocent
corrections, such as the imperative mandate, or the Referendum the
uselessness of which has been demonstrated already) good for a society
that has passed through the Social Revolution, is what seems to us
absolutely incomprehensible, unless under the name of Social Revolution
they understand something very different from Revolution, some petty
botching of existing, middle-class rule.
The same with regard to the wage system. After having pro-claimed the
abolition of private property and the possession in common of the
instruments of production, how can they sanction the maintenance of the
wage system under any form? And yet this is what the Collectivists are
doing when they praise the efficiency of labor notes.
That the English Socialists of the early part of this century should
invent labor notes is comprehensible. They were simply trying to
reconcile Capital and Labor. They repudiated all idea of laying violent
hands upon the property of the capitalists. They were so little of
revolutionaries that they declared themselves ready to submit even to
imperial rule, if that rule would favor their co-operative societies.
They remained middle class men at bottom, if charitable ones; and this
is why (Engels has said so in his preface to the Communist Manifesto of
1848) the Socialists of that period were to be found amongst the middle
class, whilst the advanced workmen were Communists.
If later Proudhon took up this same idea, that again is easy to
understand. What was he seeking in his Mutualist system, if not to
render capital less offensive, despite the maintenance of private
property, which he detested to the bottom of his heart, but which he
believed necessary to guarantee the individual against the state?
Further, if economists, belonging more or less to the middle class, also
admit labor notes, it is not surprising. It matters little to them
whether the worker be paid in labor notes or in coin stamped with the
effigy of king or republic. They want to save, in the coming overthrow,
private property in inhabited houses, the soil, the mills; or, at least,
in inhabited houses and the capital necessary for the production of
manufactures. And to maintain this property, labor notes will answer
very well.
If the labor note can be exchanged for jewels and carriages, the owner
of house property will willingly accept it as rent. And as long as the
inhabited house, the field and the mill belong to individual owners, so
long will it be requisite to pay them in some way before they will allow
you to work in their fields or their mills, or to lodge in their houses.
And it will also be requisite to pay wages to the worker, either in gold
or in paper money or in labor notes exchangeable for all sorts of
commodities.
But how can this new form of wages, the labor note, be sanctioned by
those who admit that houses, fields, mills are no longer private
property, that they belong to the commune or the nation?
Let us examine more closely this system for the remuneration of labor,
as set forth by the English, French, German and Italian
Collectivists.[1]
It comes very much to this: Every one works, be it in fields, in
factories, in schools, in hospitals or what not. The working day is
regulated by the state, to which belong the soil, factories, means of
communication and all the rest. Each worker, having done a day’s work,
receives a labor note, stamped, let us say, with these words: eight
hours of labor. With this note he can procure any sort of goods in the
shops of the state or the various corporations. The note is divisible in
such a way that one hour’s worth of meat, ten minutes’ worth of matches,
or half-an-hour’s worth of tobacco can be purchased. Instead of saying:
“two pennyworth of soap,” after the Collectivist Revolution they will
say: “five minutes’ worth of soap.”
Most Collectivists, faithful to the distinction established by the
middle-class economists (and Marx also) between qualified (skilled) and
simple (unskilled) labor, tell us that qualified or professional toil
should be paid a certain number of times more than simple toil. Thus,
one hour of the doctor’s work should be considered as equivalent to two
or three hours of the work of the nurse, or three hours of that of the
navvy. “Professional or qualified labor will be a multiple of simple
labor,” says the Collectivist Grönlund, because this sort of labor
demands a longer or shorter apprenticeship.
Other Collectivists, the French Marxists for example, do not make this
distinction. They proclaim “equality of wages.” The doctor, the
schoolmaster and the professor will be paid (in labor notes) at the same
rate as the navvy. Eight hours spent in walking the hospitals will be
worth the same as eight hours spent in navvies’ work or in the mine or
the factory.
Some make a further concession; they admit that disagreeable, or
unhealthy labor, such as that in the sewers, should be paid at a higher
rate than work which is agreeable. One hour of service in the sewers may
count, they say, for two hours of the labor of the professor. Let us add
that certain Collectivists advocate the wholesale remuneration of trade
societies. Thus, one society may say: “Here are a hundred tons of steel.
To produce them one hundred workers of our society have taken ten days;
as our day consisted of eight hours, that makes eight thousand hours of
labor for one hundred tons of steel; eighty hours a ton.” Upon which the
State will pay them eight thousand labor notes of one hour each, and
these eight thousand notes will be distributed amongst the
fellow-workers in the foundry as seems best to themselves.
Or again, if one hundred miners have spent twenty days in hewing eight
thousand tons of coal, the coal will be worth two hours a ton, and the
sixteen thousand labor notes for one hour each received by the miners’
union will be divided amongst them as they think fair.
If there be disputes: if the miners protest and say that a ton of steel
ought to cost six hours of labor instead of eight; or if the professor
rate his day twice as high as the nurse; then the State must step in and
regulate their differences.
Such, in a few words, is the organization which the Collectivists desire
to see arising from the Social Revolution. As we have seen, their
principles are: collective property in the instruments of labor and
remuneration of each worker according to the time spent in productive
toil, taking into account the productiveness of his work. As for their
political system, it would be parliamentary rule, ameliorated by the
change of men in power, the imperative mandate, and the referendum —
i.e., the general vote of Yes or No upon questions submitted to the
popular decision.
Now, we must at once say that this system seems to us absolutely
incapable of realization.
The Collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle — the
abolition of private property — and, as soon as proclaimed, they deny
it, by maintaining an organization of production and consumption
springing from private property.
They proclaim a revolutionary principle and ignore the consequences it
must necessarily bring about. They forget that the very fact of
abolishing individual property in the instruments of production (land,
factories, means of communication, capital) must cause society to set
out in a new direction; that it must change production from top to
bottom, change not only its methods but its ends; that all the everyday
relations between individuals must be modified as soon as land,
machinery and the rest are considered as common possessions.
They say: “No private property”; and immediately they hasten to maintain
private property in its everyday forms. “For productive purposes you are
a commune,” they say; “the fields, the tools, the machinery, all that
has been made up to this day — manufactures, railways, wharves, mines to
all of you in common. Not the slightest distinction will be made
concerning the share of each one in this collective property.
“But from tomorrow you are minutely to discuss the part that each one of
you is to take in making the new machines, digging the new mines. From
tomorrow you are to endeavor to weigh exactly the portion which will
accrue to each one from the new produce. You are to count your minutes
of work, you are to be on the watch lest one moment of your neighbor’s
toil may purchase more than yours.
“You are to calculate your hours and your minutes of labor, and since
the hour measures nothing, — since in one factory a workman can watch
four looms at once, whilst in another he only watches two, you are to
weigh the muscular force, the energy of brain, the energy of nerve
expended. You are scrupulously to count up the years of apprenticeship,
that you may value precisely the share of each one amongst you in the
production of the future. And all this, after you have declared that you
leave entirely out of your reckoning the share he has taken in the
past.”
Well, it is evident to us that a society cannot organize itself upon two
absolutely opposing principles, two principles which contradict one
another at every step. And the nation or the commune which should give
to itself such an organization would be forced either to return to
private property or else to transform itself immediately into a
communist society.
We have said that most Collectivist writers demand that in Socialist
society remuneration should be based upon a distinction between
qualified or professional labor and simple labor. They assert that an
hour of the engineer’s, the architect’s or the doctor’s work should be
counted as two or three hours’ work from the blacksmith, the mason or
the nurse. And the same distinction, say they, ought to be established
between workers whose trades require a longer or shorter apprenticeship
and those who are mere day laborers.
Yes, but to establish this distinction is to maintain all the in-
equalities of our existing society. It is to trace out beforehand a
demarcation between the worker and those who claim to rule him. It is
still to divide society into two clearly defined classes: an aristocracy
of knowledge above, a horny-handed democracy below; one class devoted to
the service of the other; one class toiling with its hands to nourish
and clothe the other, whilst that other profits by its leisure to learn
how to dominate those who toil for it.
This is to take the distinctive features of middle-class society and
sanction them by a social revolution. It is to erect into a principle an
abuse which to-day is condemned in the society that is breaking up.
We know very well what will be said in answer. We shall be told about
“Scientific Socialism.” The middle-class economists, and Marx: too, will
be cited to prove that there a good reason for a scale of wages, for the
“labor force” of the engineer costs society more than the “labor force”
of the navvy. And, indeed, have not the economists striven to prove
that, if the engineer is paid twenty times more than the navvy, it is
because the cost necessary to produce an engineer is more considerable
than that necessary to produce a navvy? And has not Marx maintained that
the like distinction between various sorts of manual labor is of equal
logical necessity? He could come to no other conclusion, since he took
up Ricardo’s theory of value and insisted that products exchange in
proportion to the quantity of the work socially necessary to produce
them.
But we know also how much of all this to believe. We know that if the
engineer, the scientist and the doctor are paid today ten or a hundred
times more than the laborer, and the weaver earns three times as much as
the toiler in the fields and ten times as much as a match girl, it is
not because what they receive is in proportion to their various costs of
production. Rather it is in proportion to the extent of monopoly in
education and in industry. The engineer, the scientist and the doctor
simply draw their profits from their own sort of capital — their degree,
their certificates — just as the manufacturer draws a profit from a
mill, or as a nobleman used to do from his birth and title.
When the employer pays the engineer twenty times more than the workman,
he makes this very simple calculation: if an engineer can save him
ÂŁ4,000 a year in cost of production, he will pay him ÂŁ800 a year to do
it. And if he sees a foreman is a clever sweater and can save him ÂŁ400
in handicraft, he at once offers him ÂŁ80 or ÂŁ90 a year. He expends ÂŁ100
where he counts upon gaining ÂŁ1,000; that is the essence of the
capitalist system. And the like holds good of the differences in various
trades.
Where then is the sense of talking of the cost of production of labor
force, and saying that a student who passes a merry youth at the
University, has a right to ten times higher wages than the son of a
miner who has pined in a pit since he was eleven? Or that a weaver has a
right to wages three or four times higher than those of an agricultural
laborer? The expenditure needed to produce a weaver is not four times as
great as the necessary cost of producing a field worker. The weaver
simply benefits by the advantageous position which industry enjoys in
Europe as compared with parts of the world where at present there is no
industrial development.
No one has ever estimated the real cost of production of labor force.
And if an idler costs society much more than an honest workman, it still
remains to be known if, when all is told (infant mortality amongst the
workers, the ravages of anaemia the premature deaths) a sturdy day
laborer does not cost society more than an artisan.
Are we to be told that, for example, the 1s. a day of a London workwoman
and the 3d. a day of the Auvergne peasant who blinds herself over
lace-making, represent the cost of production of these women? We are
perfectly aware that they often work for even less, but we know also
that they do it entirely because, thanks to our splendid social
organization, they would die of hunger without these ridiculous wages.
The existing scale of wages seems to us a highly complex product of
taxation, government interference, monopoly and capitalistic greed — in
a word, of the State and the capitalist system. In our opinion all the
theories made by economists about the scale of wages have been invented
after the event to justify existing injustices. It is needless to regard
them.
We are, however, certain to be informed that the Collectivist wage scale
will, at all events, be an improvement. “You must admit,” we shall be
told, “that it will, at least, be better to have a class of workers paid
at twice or three times the ordinary rate than to have Rothschilds, who
put into their pockets in one day more than a workman can in a year. It
will be a step towards equality.”
To us it seems a step away from it. To introduce into a Socialist
society the distinction between ordinary and professional labor would be
to sanction by the Revolution and erect into a principle a brutal fact,
to which we merely submit today, considering it all the while as unjust.
It would be acting after the manner of those gentlemen of the Fourth of
August, 1789, who proclaimed, in high sounding phraseology, the
abolition of feudal rights, and on the Eight of August sanctioned those
very rights by imposing upon the peasants the dues by which they were to
be redeemed from the nobles. Or again, like the Russian government at
the time of the emancipation of the serfs when it proclaimed that the
land henceforth belonged to the nobility, whereas previously it was
considered an abuse that the land which belonged to the peasants should
be bought and sold by private persons.
Or, to take a better known example, when the Commune of 1871 decided to
pay the members of the Communa1 Council 12s. 6d. a day, whilst the
National Guards on the rampart a had only 1s. 3d., certain persons
applauded this decision as an act of grand democratic equality. But, in
reality, the Commune did nothing thereby but sanction the ancient
inequality between officials and soldiers, governors and governed. For
an Opportunist parliament such a decision might have seemed splendid,
but for the Commune it was a negation of its own principles. The Commune
was false to its own revolutionary principle, and by that very fact
condemned it.
In the present state of society when we see Cabinet Ministers paying
themselves thousands a year, whilst the workman has to content himself
with less than a hundred; when we see the foreman paid twice or three
times as much as the ordinary hand, and when amongst workers themselves
there are all sorts of gradations from 7s. or 8s. a day down to the 3d.
of the sempstress, we disapprove the large salary of the minister, and
also the difference between the artisans eight-shillings and the
sempstress’ three-pence. And we say, “Let us have done with privileges
of education as well as of birth.” We are Anarchists just because such
privileges disgust us.
How can we then raise these privileges into a principle? How can we
proclaim that privileges of education are to be the basis of an equal
society, without striking a blow at that very Society. What is submitted
today, will be submitted to no longer in society based on equality. The
general above the soldier, the rich engineer above the workman, the
doctor above the nurse, already disgust us. Can we suffer them in a
society which starts by proclaiming equality?
Evidently not. The popular conscience, inspired by the idea of equality,
will revolt against such an injustice, it will not tolerate it. It is
not worth while to make the attempt.
That is why certain Collectivists, understanding the impossibility of
maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the influences the
Revolution, zealously advocate equality in wages. But they only stumble
against fresh difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes a Utopia
as incapable of realization as the wage scale of the others. A society
that has seized upon all social wealth, and has plainly announced that
all have a right to this wealth, whatever may be the part they have
taken in creating it in the past, will be obliged to give up all idea of
wages, either in money or in labor notes.
“To each according to his deeds,” say the Collectivists, or rather
according to his share of service rendered to society. And this is the
principle they recommend as the basis of economic organization, after
the Revolution shall have made all the instruments of labor and all that
is necessary for production common property!
Well, if the Social Revolution should be so unfortunate as to proclaim
this principle, it would be stemming the tide of human progress, it
would be leaving unsolved the huge social problem cast by past centuries
upon our shoulders.
It is true that in such a society as ours, where the more a man works
the less he is paid, this principle may seem, at first sight, all
aspiration towards justice. But at bottom it is but the consecration of
past injustice. It is with this principle that the wage system started,
to end where it is today, in crying inequalities and all the
abominations of the present state of things. And it has ended thus
because, from the day on which society began to value services in the
money or any other sort of wages, from the day on which it was said that
each should have only what he could succeed in getting paid for his
work, the whole history of Capitalism (the State aiding therein) was
written beforehand; its germ was enclosed in this principle.
Must we then return to our point of departure and pass once more through
the same process of capitalist evolution? These theorists seem to desire
it; but happily it is impossible; the Revolution will be Communistic; or
it will be drowned in blood, and must be begun all over again.
Service rendered to society, be it labor in factory or field, or moral
service, cannot be valued in monetary units. There cannot be an exact
measure of its value, either of what has been improperly called its
“value in exchange” or of its value in use. If we see two individuals,
both working for years, for five hours daily, for the community, at two
different occupations equally pleasing to them, we can say that, taken
all in all, their labors are roughly equivalent. But their work could
not be broken up into fractions, so that the product of each day, each
hour or each minute of the labor of one should be worth the produce of
each minute and each hour of that of the other.
Broadly speaking, we can say that a man who during his whole life
deprives himself of leisure for ten hours daily has given much more to
society than he who has deprived himself of but five hours a day, or has
not deprived himself of any leisure at all. But we cannot take what one
man has done during any two hours and say that this produce is worth
exactly twice as much as the produce of one hour’s work from another
individual, and reward each proportionately. To do this would be to
ignore all that is complex in the industry, the agriculture, the entire
life of society as it is; it would be to ignore the extent to which all
individual work is the outcome of the former and present labors of
society as a whole. It would be to fancy oneself in the Stone Age, when
we are living in the Age of Steel.
Go into a coal mine and see that man stationed at the huge machine that
hoists and lowers the cage. In his hand he holds a lever whereby to
check or reverse the action of the machinery. He lowers the handle, and
in a second the cage changes the direction of its giddy rush up or down
the shaft. His eyes are attentively fixed upon an indicator in front of
him which shows exactly the point the cage has reached; no sooner does
it touch the given level than at his gentlest pressure it stops dead
short, not a foot above or below the required place. And scarcely are
the full trucks discharged or the empties loaded before, at a touch to
the handle, the cage is again swinging up or down the shaft.
For eight or ten hours at a time he thus concentrates his attention. Let
his brain relax but for an instant, and the cage would fly up and
shatter the wheels, break the rope, crush the men, bring all the work of
the mine to a stand-still. Let him lose three seconds upon each reverse
of the lever and, in a mine with all the modern improvements, the output
will be reduced by from twenty to fifty tons a day.
Well, is it he who renders the greatest service in the mine? Or is it,
perhaps, that boy who rings from below the signal for the mounting of
the cage? Or is it the miner who risks his life every moment in the
depths of the mine and will end one day by being killed by fire-damp?
Or, again, the engineer who would lose the coal seam and set men hewing
bare rock, if he merely made a mistake in the addition of his
calculations? Or, finally, is it the owner, who has put all his
patrimony into the concern, and who perhaps has said, in opposition to
all previous anticipations: “Dig there, you will find excellent coal”?
All the workers engaged in the mine contribute to the raising of coal in
proportion to their strength, their energy, their knowledge their
intelligence and their skill. And we can say that all have the right to
live, to satisfy their needs, and even gratify their whims, after the
more imperious needs of every one are satisfied. But how can we exactly
value what they have each done?
Further, is the coal that they have extracted entirely the result of
their work? Is it not also the outcome of the work of the men who
constructed the railway leading to the mine, and the roads branching off
on all sides from the stations? And what of the work of those who have
tilled and sown the fields which supply the miners with food, smelted
the iron, cut the wood in the forest, made the machines which will
consume the coal, and so on?
No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work
of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide
them into fractions and measure them by hours of labor leads to
absurdity also. One course remains: not to measure them at all, but to
recognize the right of all who take part in productive labor first of
all to live, and then to enjoy the comforts of life.
Take any other branch of human activity, take our existence as a whole,
and say which of us can claim the highest reward for his deeds?
The doctor who has divined the disease or the nurse who has assured its
cure by her sanitary cares? The inventor of the first steam engine or
the boy who one day, tired of pulling the cord which formerly served to
open the valve admitting the steam beneath the piston, tied his cord to
the lever of the machine, and went to play with his companions, without
imagining that he had invented the mechanism essential to all modern
machinery — the automatic valve? The inventor of the locomotive or that
Newcastle workman who suggested that wooden sleepers should take the
place of the stones which were formerly put under the rails and threw
trains off the line by their want of elasticity? The driver of the
locomotive or the signalman who stops the train or opens the way for it?
To whom do we owe the trans-Atlantic cable? To the engineer who
persisted in declaring that the cable would transmit telegrams, whilst
the learned electricians declared that it was impossible? To Maury, the
scientist, who advised the disuse of thick cables and the substitution
of one no bigger than a walking stick? Or, after all, is it to those
volunteers, from no one knows where, who spent day and night on the deck
of the Great Eastern, minutely examining every yard of cable and taking
out the nails that the shareholders of the maritime companies had
stupidly caused to be driven through the isolating coat of the cable to
render it useless?
And, in a still wider field, the vast tract of human life, with its
joys, its sorrows, and its varied incidents, cannot each of us mention
some one who during his life has rendered him some service so great, so
important, that if it were proposed to value it in money he would be
filled with indignation? This service may have been a word, nothing but
a word in season, or it may have been months or years of devotion. Are
you going to estimate these, the most important of all services, in
labor notes? “The deeds of each”! But human societies could not live for
two successive generations, they would disappear in fifty years, if each
one did not give infinitely more than will be returned to him in money,
in “notes” or in civic rewards. It would be the extinction of the race
if the mother did not expend her life to preserve her children, if every
man did not give some things without counting the cost, if human beings
did not give most where they look for no reward.
If middle-class society is going to ruin; if we are today in a blind
alley from which there is no escape without applying axe and torch to
the institutions of the past, that is just because we have calculated
too much. It is just because we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into
giving that we may receive; because we have desired to make society into
a commercial company based upon debit and credit.
Moreover, the Collectivists know it. They vaguely comprehend that a
society cannot exist if it logically carries out the principle, “To each
according to his deeds.” They suspect that the needs (we are not
speaking of the whims) of the individual do not always correspond to his
deeds. Accordingly, De Paepe tells us:
“This eminently individualistic principle will be tempered by social
intervention for the purpose of the education of children and young
people (including their maintenance and nurture) and by social
organizations for the assistance of the sick and infirm, asylums for
aged workers, etc.”
Even Collectivists suspect that a man of forty, the father of three
children, has greater needs than a youth of twenty. They suspect that a
woman who is suckling her child and spends sleepless nights by its cot,
cannot get through so much work as a man who has enjoyed tranquil
slumber.
They seem to understand that a man or woman worn out by having perhaps,
worked over hard for society in general may find themselves incapable of
performing so many “deeds” as those who take their hours of labor
quietly and pocket their “notes” in the privileged offices of State
statisticians.
And they hasten to temper their principle. Oh, certainly, they say,
society will feed and bring up its children. Oh, certainly it will
assist the old and infirm. Oh, certainly needs not deeds will be the
measure of the cost which society will impose on itself to temper the
principle of deeds.
What, Charity? Yes, our old friend, “Christian Charity,” organized by
the State.
Improve the foundling hospital, organize insurance against age and
sickness, and the principle of deeds will be “tempered.” “Wound that
they may heal,” they can get no further.
Thus, then, after having forsworn Communism, after having sneered at
their ease at the formula, “To each according to his needs,” is it not
obvious that they, the great economists, also perceive that they have
forgotten something, i.e., the needs of the producers? And thereupon
they hasten to recognize these needs. Only it is to be the State by
which they are to be estimated, it is to be the State which will
undertake to find out if needs are disproportionate to deeds.
It is to be the State that will give alms to him who is willing to
recognize his inferiority. From thence to the Poor Law and the Workhouse
is but a stone’s throw.
There is but a stone’s throw for even this step-mother of a society
against which we are in revolt, has found it necessary to temper its
individualistic principle. It too has had to make concessions in a
Communistic sense, and in this same form of charity.
It also distributes halfpenny dinners to prevent the pillage of its
shops. It also builds hospitals, often bad enough, but sometimes
splendid, to prevent the ravages of contagious disease. It also after
having paid for nothing but the hours of labor, receives the children of
those whom it has itself reduced to the extremity of distress. It also
takes account of needs — as a charity.
Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches. This
it was which created the earliest capitalist. For, before the surplus
value, about which people are so fond of talking, could begin to be
accumulated it was necessary that there should be poverty-stricken
wretches who would consent to sell their labor force rather than die of
hunger. It is poverty that has made the rich. And if poverty had
advanced by such rapid strides by the end of the Middle Ages, it was
chiefly because the invasions and wars, the creation of States and the
development of their authority, the wealth gained by exploitation in the
East and many other causes of a like nature, broke the bonds which once
united agrarian and urban communities, and led them, in place of the
solidarity which they once practised, to adopt the principle of the
wage-system. Is this principle to be the outcome of the Revolution? Dare
we dignify by the name of a Social Revolution that name so dear to the
hungry, the suffering and the oppressed — the triumph of such a
principle as this?
It cannot be so. For, on the day when ancient institutions splinter into
fragments before the axe of the proletariat, voices will be heard
shouting: Bread for all! Lodging for all! Right for all to the comforts
of life!
And these voices will be heeded. The people will say to themselves: Let
us begin by satisfying our thirst for the life, the joy the liberty we
have never known. And when all have tasted happiness, we will set to
work; the work of demolishing the last vestiges of middle-class rule,
with its account-book morality, its philosophy of debit and credit, its
institutions of mine and shine. “While we throw down we shall be
building,” as Proudhon said; we shall build in the name of Communism and
of Anarchy.
Â
[1] The Spanish Anarchists, who continue to call themselves
Collectivists, understand by this term common possession of the
instruments of labor and “liberty for each group to share the produce of
labor as they think fit”; on Communist principles or in any other way.