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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right to be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
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-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: The Right to be Lazy
-       and Other Studies
-
-Author: Paul Lafargue
-
-Translator: Charles H. Kerr
-
-Release Date: September 5, 2016 [EBook #52984]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Turgut Dincer, Christian Boissonnas and the
-Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
-(This file was produced from images generously made
-available by The Internet Archive)
-
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-  THE
-  RIGHT TO BE LAZY
-
-  AND OTHER STUDIES
-
-  BY
-  PAUL LAFARGUE
-
-  Translated by CHARLES H. KERR
-
-
-  CHICAGO
-  CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
-
-
-
-
-  Copyright, 1907
-
-  BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
-
-[Illustration: Printer's stamp.]
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education
-of 1849, said: "I wish to make the influence of the clergy all-powerful
-because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches
-man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy
-which on the contrary bids man to enjoy." M. Thiers was stating
-the ethics of the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow
-intelligence he incarnated.
-
-The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained
-by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once
-triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion
-to support its economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and
-sixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and
-glorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our
-days, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of
-its thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the
-wage-workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics,
-strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to
-reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his
-joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine
-turning out work without respite and without thanks.
-
-The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by
-the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march
-up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism;
-they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action
-the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in
-the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall
-cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer; that in the communist
-society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may,
-forcibly if we must," the impulses of men will be given a free rein,
-for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid
-but their misuse and their excesses,[1]" and they will not be avoided
-except by their mutual counter-balancing, balancing, by the harmonious
-development of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, "It is
-only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it
-arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigor.[2]" Such was
-also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.[3]
-
-This refutation of the "Right to Work" which I am republishing with
-some additional notes appeared in the weekly "Egalité", 1880, second
-series.
-
-                                        P. L.
-
-  _Sainte-Pélagie Prison_, 1883.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] Descartes. "Les Passions de l'âme."
-
-[2] Doctor Beddoe. "Memoirs of the Anthropological Society."
-
-[3] Charles Darwin. "Descent of Man."
-
-
-
-
-TABLE OF CONTENTS
-
-
-                                                                   Page
-
-  THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY—
-
-      I. A Disastrous Dogma                                           9
-
-     II. Blessings of Work                                           14
-
-    III. The Consequences of Over-Production                         30
-
-     IV. New Songs to New Music                                      48
-
-     Appendix                                                        57
-
-  SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS                                    63
-
-  THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM                                      105
-
-  THE WOMAN QUESTION                                                111
-
-  THE SOCIALIST IDEAL                                               139
-
-  THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN                     157
-
-
-
-
-THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
-
-  Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except
-  in being lazy.
-                                        —Lessing.
-
-
-
-
-I.
-
-A DISASTROUS DOGMA.
-
-
-A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where
-capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its
-train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have
-tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious
-passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force
-of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental
-aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a
-sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be
-wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed
-to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be
-a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement
-to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics
-or free-thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in
-capitalist society.
-
-In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy,
-of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's
-stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the
-Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops.
-Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders
-of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the
-dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.[4]
-
-When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native
-beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic
-prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which,
-alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories
-than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his
-admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts,
-straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing
-the beggar, superbly draped in his ragged _capa_, parleying on terms
-of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the
-primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of
-slavery.[5] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for
-work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew
-only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that
-men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the
-people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed
-the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers
-of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free
-man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:
-
-O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.[6]
-
-Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: "Consider the
-lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they
-spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not
-arrayed like one of these." Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his
-worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of
-work, he rests for all eternity.
-
-On the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic
-necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the
-British Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the
-Pomeranians, those Auvergnians of Germany; the Chinese, those
-Auvergnians of Asia. In our society, which are the classes that love
-work for work's sake? The peasant proprietors, the little shop-keepers;
-the former bent double over their fields, the latter crouched in their
-shops, burrow like the mole in his subterranean passage and never stand
-up to look at nature leisurely.
-
-And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the
-producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will
-free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a
-free being,—the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its
-historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.
-Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and
-social woes are born of its passion for work.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[4] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and
-the proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what
-Paeppig calls "the poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking of
-the aborigines of the Oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell writes:
-"There is not a people in the world which strikes one more favorably
-at first sight. Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair
-golden and curly, their beautiful and happy faces. In a word, their
-whole person formed a new and splendid specimen of the 'genus homo';
-their physical appearance gave the impression of a race superior to
-ours." The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and Tacitus,
-regarded with the same admiration the Germans of the communist tribes
-which invaded the Roman empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the priest
-of the fifth century who received the surname of master of the Bishops,
-held up the barbarians as an example to civilized Christians: "We are
-immodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even
-more the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do
-not permit debauchees of their own nation to remain among them; alone
-in the midst of them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and
-their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was
-then the height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The
-oppressed fly to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (De
-Gubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising Christianity
-corrupted the barbarians of the ancient world, as the old Christianity
-and the modern capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of
-the new world.
-
-M. F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized, even
-if we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with philanthropic
-and Christian pharisaism, says in his book "Les Ouvriers Européens"
-(1885): "The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are
-semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic slope of the Ural mountains);
-the leisure of nomadic life, the habit of meditation which this
-engenders in the best endowed individuals.—all this often gives them a
-distinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence and judgement which
-is rarely to be observed on the same social level in a more developed
-civilization.... The thing most repugnant to them is agricultural
-labor: they will do anything rather than accept the trade of a farmer."
-Agriculture is in fact the first example of servile labor in the
-history of man. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal,
-Cain, is a farmer.
-
-[5] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.)
-
-[6] O Melibaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. Virgil's Bucolics.
-(See appendix.)
-
-
-
-
-II.
-
-BLESSINGS OF WORK.
-
-
-In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title,
-"An Essay on Trade and Commerce". It made some stir in its time.
-The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that "the factory
-population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in
-their quality of Englishmen all the individuals composing it have
-by right of birth the privilege of being freer and more independent
-than the laborers of any country in Europa. This idea may have its
-usefulness for soldiers, since it stimulates their valor, but the
-less the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves
-and the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves as
-independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage
-such infatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps
-seven-eighths of the population have little or no property. The cure
-will not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to
-work six days for the same sum which they now earn in four." Thus,
-nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as
-a curb to the noble passions of man. "The more my people work, the
-less vices they will have", wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from
-Osterod. "I am the authority ... and I should be disposed to order
-that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened
-and the laborers return to their work." To root out laziness and curb
-the sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the
-author of the "Essay on Trade" proposed to imprison the poor in ideal
-"work-houses", which should become "houses of terror, where they should
-work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was
-deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete".
-
-Twelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal of the philanthropists
-and moralists of the eighteenth century. How have we outdone this _nec
-plus ultra_! Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in
-which the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned
-to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but
-also women and children.[7] And to think that the sons of the heroes
-of the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded by the religion
-of work, to the point of accepting, since 1848, as a revolutionary
-conquest, the law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They proclaim
-as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French
-proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness.
-A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of
-capitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.
-
-And if the miseries of compulsory work and the tortures of hunger have
-descended upon the proletariat more in number than the locusts of the
-Bible, it is because the proletariat itself invited them. This work,
-which in June 1848 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands,
-this they have imposed on their families; they have delivered up to
-the barons of industry their wives and children. With their own hands
-they have demolished their domestic hearths. With their own hands they
-have dried up the milk of their wives. The unhappy women carrying
-and nursing their babes have been obliged to go into the mines and
-factories to bend their backs and exhaust their nerves. With their own
-hands they have broken the life and the vigor of their children. Shame
-on the proletarians! Where are those neighborly housewives told of
-in our fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of speech, lovers
-of Bacchus? Where are those buxom girls, always on the move, always
-cooking, always singing, always spreading life, engendering life's joy,
-giving painless birth to healthy and vigorous children?... Today we
-have factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers, with impoverished
-blood, with disordered stomachs, with languid limbs.... They have never
-known the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable
-of telling of it merrily! And the children? Twelve hours of work
-for children! O, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy
-of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germinys of jesuitism
-could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the
-children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their
-organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory.
-
-Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the
-century of pain, misery and corruption.
-
-And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists—from
-the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear
-Leroy-Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature—from the quackishly
-romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock,—all have
-intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son
-of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon
-to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived. They
-rummaged in the dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miseries
-to serve as a sombre contrast to the delights of the present times.
-Have they wearied us, these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at
-the table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the capitalist class
-and fatly paid? Have they reckoned us weary of the peasant, such as
-La Bruyère described him? Well, here is the brilliant picture of
-proletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840, penned by
-one of their own men, Dr. Villermé, member of the Institute, the same
-who in 1848 was a member of that scientific society (Thiers, Cousin,
-Passy, Blanqui, the academician, were in it), which disseminated among
-the masses the nonsense of bourgeois economics and ethics.
-
-It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Villermé speaks,—the Alsace
-of Kestner and Dollfus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and
-republicanism. But before the doctor raises up before us his picture of
-proletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr.
-Th. Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., depicting the condition
-of the old-time artisan: "At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when
-modern mechanical industry was just arising) the laborers were all
-children of the soil, inhabiting the town and the surrounding villages,
-and almost all owning a house and often a little field."[8] It was
-the golden age of the laborer. But at that time Alsatian industry did
-not deluge the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires out of
-its Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five years after, when Villermé
-visited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had
-conquered the country; in its insatiable appetite for human labor it
-had dragged the workmen from their hearths, the better to wring them
-and press out the labor which they contained. It was by thousands
-that the workers flocked together at the signal of the steam whistle.
-"A great number," says Villermé, "five thousand out of seventeen
-thousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring villages.
-Some of them lived three or four miles from the factory where they
-worked.[9]
-
-"At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five o'clock in the morning and
-ended at eight o'clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a
-sight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each
-evening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walking
-bare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the
-rain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their
-heads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally
-dirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil
-which drops on them while they work. They were better protected from
-the rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just
-mentioned, they did not carry their day's provisions in a basket, but
-they carryed in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they
-might, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for
-them to return home.
-
-Thus to the strain of an insufferably long day—at least fifteen
-hours—is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily
-journeys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed by the need of
-sleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in
-order to reach the factory by the opening time."
-
-Now, look at the holes in which were packed those who lodge in the
-town: "I saw at Mulhouse in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, some
-of those miserable lodgings where two families slept each in its corner
-on straw thrown on the floor and kept in its place by two planks....
-This wretchedness among the laborers of the cotton industry in the
-department of the upper Rhine is so extreme that it produces this sad
-result, that while in the families of the manufacturers, merchants,
-shop-keepers or factory superintendents, half of the children reach
-their twenty-first year, this same half ceases to exist before the
-lapse of two years in the families of weavers and cotton spinners."
-
-Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Villermé adds: "It is not a
-work, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six
-to eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes
-away the laborers in the cotton spinning factories". And as to the
-duration of the work Villermé observes, that the convicts in prisons
-work but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours,
-while there existed in France after its Revolution of 1789, which had
-proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man "factories where the day was
-sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and
-a half for meals."[10]
-
-What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of
-the bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The
-philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done
-nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to
-scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist
-factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work,
-and farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life
-beautiful and worth living.[11]
-
-And the economists go on repeating to the laborers, "Work, to increase
-social wealth", and nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy,
-answers: "It is in poor nations that people are comfortable, in
-rich nations they are ordinarily poor"; and his disciple Cherbuliez
-continues: "The laborers themselves in co-operating toward the
-accumulation of productive capital contribute to the event which sooner
-or later must deprive them of a part of their wages". But deafened and
-stupified by their own howlings, the economists answer: "Work, always
-work, to create your prosperity", and in the name of Christian meekness
-a priest of the Anglican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, intones: Work,
-work, night and day. By working you make your poverty increase and your
-poverty releases us from imposing work upon you by force of law. The
-legal imposition of work "gives too much trouble, requires too much
-violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only
-a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the
-most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the
-most powerful efforts." Work, work, proletarians, to increase social
-wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming
-poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is
-the inexorable law of capitalist production.
-
-Because, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the
-proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of
-work, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial
-crises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then
-because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers,
-the shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its
-whip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of
-work, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted
-upon themselves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of
-their present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: "We
-are hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as
-we are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested the wheat and gathered
-the grapes." They do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux,
-the inventor of industrial convents, and cry out: "M. Bonnet, here
-are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are
-shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they
-who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all
-Christendom. The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no
-time to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time
-to rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk
-teeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in
-abstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the
-fruits of their labor. Come, M. Bonnet, give them your silks, M. Harmel
-shall furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his
-boots for their dear little feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe
-and gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, no evasions,
-you are a friend of humanity, are you not, and a Christian into the
-bargain? Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they
-have built up for you out of their flesh; you want to help business,
-get your goods into circulation,—here are consumers ready at hand.
-Give them unlimited credit. You are simply compelled to give credit
-to merchants whom you do not know from Adam or Eve, who have given
-you nothing, not even a glass of water. Your working women will pay
-the debt the best they can. If at maturity they let their notes go to
-protest, and if they have nothing to attach, you can demand that they
-pay you in prayers. They will send you to paradise better than your
-black-gowned priests steeped in tobacco."
-
-Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general
-distribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers,
-perishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the
-workshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they
-assail the manufacturers: "Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us
-work, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us".
-And these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright,
-sell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had
-bread on the table. And the philanthropists of industry profit by their
-lockouts to manufacture at lower cost.
-
-If industrial crises follow periods of over-work as inevitably as night
-follows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end,
-they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer
-has credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and
-borrows again, to furnish raw material to his laborers, and goes on
-producing without considering that the market is becoming satiated
-and that if his goods don't happen to be sold, his notes will still
-come due. At his wits' end, he implores the banker, he throws himself
-at his feet, offering his blood, his honor. "A little gold will do my
-business better", answers the Rothschild. "You have 20,000 pairs of
-hose in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c."
-The banker gets possession of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c,
-and pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing to anybody: but
-the manufacturer has stepped back for a better leap. At last the crash
-comes and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much merchandise is thrown
-out of the window that you cannot imagine how it came in by the door.
-Hundreds of millions are required to figure the value of the goods that
-are destroyed. In the last century they were burned or thrown into the
-water.[12]
-
-But before reaching this decision, the manufacturers travel the world
-over in search of markets for the goods which are heaping up. They
-force their government to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to batter
-down the Chinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their
-cotton goods. In previous centuries it was a duel to the death between
-France and England as to which should have the exclusive privilege of
-selling to America and the Indies. Thousands of young and vigorous men
-reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the
-sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-
-There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no
-longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who
-are loafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads,
-erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of
-French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications. In
-Egypt, for example, France, England and Germany were on the point of
-hairpulling to decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends
-with wars like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play
-the part of constables to collect bad debts.[13]
-
-These individual and social miseries, however great and innumerable
-they may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas
-and jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall
-say "I will". But to arrive at the realization of its strength the
-proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics,
-economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural
-instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times
-more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by
-the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom
-itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day
-and night for leisure and feasting.
-
-Thus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils
-well known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that
-the ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to
-which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most
-terrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become
-a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to
-the human organism, a passion useful to the social organism only when
-wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this
-is an arduous task beyond my strength. Only communist physiologists,
-hygienists and economists could undertake it. In the following pages
-I shall merely try to show that given the modern means of production
-and their unlimited reproductive power it is necessary to curb the
-extravagant passion of the laborers for work and to oblige them to
-consume the goods which they produce.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[7] At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels in 1857 one
-of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrive, to
-the plaudits of the members of the congress declared with the noble
-satisfaction of a duty performed: "We have introduced certain methods
-of diversion for the children. We teach them to sing during their work,
-also to count while working. That distracts them and makes them accept
-bravely "those twelve hours of labor which are necessary to procure
-their means of existence." Twelve hours of labor, and such labor,
-imposed on children less than twelve years old! The materialists will
-always regret that there is no hell in which to confine these Christian
-philanthropic murderers of childhood.
-
-[8] Speech delivered before the International Society of Practical
-Studies in Social Economics, at Paris in May 1863, and published in the
-French "Economist" of the same epoch.
-
-[9] Note that this was before the era of railroads and street cars.
-(Translator.)
-
-[10] L. R. Villermé. Tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers
-dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie (1840). It is not
-because Dollfus, Koechlin and other Alsatian manufacturers were
-republicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that they treated
-their laborers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician, Reybaud, the
-prototype of Jerome Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same
-amenities for the working class among the very catholic and monarchical
-manufacturers of Lille and Lyons. These are capitalist virtues which
-harmonize delightfully with all political and religious convictions.
-
-[11] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their invalids
-and old people; they show their affection for them by putting an end
-to a life which is no longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances.
-All primitive peoples have given these proofs of affection to their
-relatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea (Herodotus), as well as
-the Wens of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden
-even lately they preserved clubs called family clubs which served to
-deliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate are the
-modern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of
-factory labor!
-
-[12] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 21, 1879, the
-losses in the iron industry of Germany during the last crisis were
-estimated at $109,056,000.
-
-[13] M. Clemenceau's "Justice" said on April 6, 1880, in its financial
-department: "We have heard this opinion maintained, that even without
-pressure the billions of the war of 1870 would have been equally lost
-for France, that is under the form of loans periodically put out to
-balance the budgets of foreign countries; this is also our opinion."
-The loss of English capital on loans of South American Republics is
-estimated at a billion dollars. The French laborers not only produced
-the billion dollars paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay interest
-on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine and other income
-drawers, who brought on the war and the rout. Nevertheless they still
-have one shred of consolation: these billions will not bring on a war
-of reprisal.
-
-
-
-
-III.
-
-THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION.
-
-
-A Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention
-of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave
-women and bring back the Golden Age: "Spare the arm which turns the
-mill, O, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain
-that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor
-of the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and
-behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its spokes and making the
-heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and
-let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants
-us." Alas!, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come.
-The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the
-liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men.
-Its productiveness impoverishes them.
-
-A good workingwoman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute,
-while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time.
-Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of
-the workingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's
-labor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the
-knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed
-by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine
-is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity
-and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest
-times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O,
-absurd and murderous competition!
-
-That the competition of man and the machine might have free course,
-the proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor
-of the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the
-holidays.[14] Because the producers of that time worked but five
-days out of seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying
-economists, that they lived on nothing but air and fresh water? Not
-so, they had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to make love and to
-frolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial god of idleness.
-Gloomy England, immersed in protestantism, was then called "Merrie
-England." Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the unknown authors of the
-romances make our mouths water with their pictures of those monumental
-feasts[15] with which the men of that time regaled themselves between
-two battles and two devastations, in which everything "went by the
-barrel". Jordaens and the Flemish School have told the story of these
-feasts in their delightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the sublime
-gargantuan stomachs of those days; where are the sublime brains
-encircling all human thought? We have indeed grown puny and degenerate.
-Embalmed beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prussian schnaps,
-judiciously combined with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and
-narrowed our minds. And the times when man cramps his stomach and the
-machine enlarges its output are the very times when the economists
-preach to us the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence and the
-dogma of work. Really it would be better to pluck out such tongues and
-throw them to the dogs.
-
-Because the working class, with its simple good faith, has allowed
-itself to be thus indoctrinated, because with its native impetuosity
-it has blindly hurled itself into work and abstinence, the capitalist
-class has found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to
-unproductiveness and over-consumption. But if the over-work of the
-laborer bruises his flesh and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile
-in griefs for the capitalist.
-
-The abstinence to which the productive class condemns itself obliges
-the capitalists to devote themselves to the over-consumption of the
-products turned out so riotously by the laborers. At the beginning
-of capitalist production a century or two ago, the capitalist was a
-steady man of reasonable and peaceable habits. He contented himself
-with one wife or thereabouts. He drank only when he was thirsty and
-ate only when he was hungry. He left to the lords and ladies of the
-court the noble virtues of debauchery. Today every son of the newly
-rich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the disease for which
-quicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed upon
-the workmen in quicksilver mines; every capitalist crams himself with
-capons stuffed with truffles and with the choicest brands of wine in
-order to encourage the breeders of blooded poultry and the growers of
-Bordelais. In this occupation the organism rapidly becomes shattered,
-the hair falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, the body
-becomes deformed, the stomach obtrudes abnormally, respiration becomes
-difficult, the motions become labored, the joints become stiff, the
-fingers knotted. Others, too feeble in body to endure the fatigues of
-debauchery, but endowed with the bump of philanthropic discrimination,
-dry up their brains over political economy, or juridical philosophy
-in elaborating thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours
-of compositors and pressmen. The women of fashion live a life of
-martyrdom, in trying on and showing off the fairy-like toilets
-which the seamstresses die in making. They shift like shuttles from
-morning until night from one gown into another. For hours together
-they give up their hollow heads to the artists in hair, who at any
-cost insist on assuaging their passion for the construction of false
-chignons. Bound in their corsets, pinched in their boots, décolletté
-to make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the whole night through
-at their charity balls in order to pick up a few cents for poor
-people,—sanctified souls!
-
-To fulfill his double social function of non-producer and
-over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his
-modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to
-give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic
-debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass
-of men in order to enlist them as his assistants.
-
-Here are a few figures to prove how colossal is this waste of
-productive forces. According to the census of 1861, the population of
-England and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259 male and
-10,289,965 female. If we deduct those too old or too young to work, the
-unproductive women, boys and girls, then the "ideological professions",
-such as governors, policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers,
-prostitutes, artists, scientists, etc., next the people exclusively
-occupied with eating the labor of others under the form of land-rent,
-interest, dividends, etc. ... there remains a total of eight million
-individuals of both sexes and of every age, including the capitalists
-who function in production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of these eight
-millions the figures run:
-
-  Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, servants
-    and farmers' daughters living at home               1,098,261
-  Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp,
-    linen silk, knitting                                  642,607
-  Mine Workers                                            565,835
-  Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.)     396,998
-  Domestics                                             1,208,648
-
-"If we add together the textile workers and the miners, we obtain
-the figures of 1,208,442; if to the former we add the metal workers,
-we have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in each case a
-number below that of the modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent
-result of the capitalist exploitation of machines."[16] To this class
-of domestics, the size of which indicates the stage attained by
-capitalist civilization, must still be added the enormous class of
-unfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying the vain and expensive
-tastes of the rich classes: diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroiderers,
-binders of luxurious books, seamstresses employed on expensive gowns,
-decorators of villas, etc.[17]
-
-Once settled down into absolute laziness and demoralized by enforced
-enjoyment, the capitalist class in spite of the injury involved in
-its new kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to look
-upon any change with horror. The sight of the miserable conditions
-of life resignedly accepted by the working class and the sight of
-the organic degradation engendered by the depraved passion for work
-increased its aversion for all compulsory labor and all restrictions
-of its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, without taking
-into account the demoralization which the capitalist class had imposed
-upon itself as a social duty, the proletarians took it into their
-heads to inflict work on the capitalists. Artless as they were, they
-took seriously the theories of work proclaimed by the economists and
-moralists, and girded up their loins to inflict the practice of these
-theories upon the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, "He
-who will not work Neither shall he Eat". Lyons in 1831 rose up for
-bullets or work. The federated laborers of March 1871 called their
-uprising "The Revolution of Work". To these outbreaks of barbarous fury
-destructive of all capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had
-no other answer than ferocious repression, but they know that if they
-have been able to repress these revolutionary explosions, they have
-not drowned in the blood of these gigantic massacres the absurd idea
-of the proletariat wishing to inflict work upon the idle and reputable
-classes, and it is to avert this misfortune that they surround
-themselves with guards, policemen, magistrates and jailors, supported
-in laborious unproductiveness. There is no more room for illusion as
-to the function of modern armies. They are permanently maintained only
-to suppress the "enemy within". Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons
-have not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to
-crush it in case of revolt. And if an unanswerable example be called
-for, we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism. Its
-neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and nevertheless its
-army is one of the strongest in proportion to its population. The
-glorious battlefields of the brave Belgian army are the plains of the
-Borinage and of Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed miners and
-laborers that the Belgian officers temper their swords and win their
-epaulets. The nations of Europe have not national armies but mercenary
-armies. They protect the capitalists against the popular fury which
-would condemn them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, while
-compressing its own stomach the working class has developed abnormally
-the stomach of the capitalist class, condemned to over-consumption.
-
-For alleviation of its painful labor the capitalist class has withdrawn
-from the working class a mass of men far superior to those still
-devoted to useful production and has condemned them in their turn to
-unproductiveness and over-consumption. But this troop of useless mouths
-in spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice to consume all
-the goods which the laborers, brutalized by the dogma of work, produce
-like madmen, without wishing to consume them and without even thinking
-whether people will be found to consume them.
-
-Confronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves
-with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of
-capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply
-their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and
-create in them fictitious needs. Since the European laborers, shivering
-with cold and hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to drink
-the wines from the vineyards they tend, the poor manufacturers in
-their goodness of heart must run to the ends of the earth to find
-people to wear the clothes and drink the wines: Europe exports every
-year goods amounting to billions of dollars to the four corners of
-the earth, to nations that have no need of them.[18] But the explored
-continents are no longer vast enough. Virgin countries are needed.
-European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the
-Saharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the
-progress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu; they listen open-mouthed
-to the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. What unknown wonders
-are contained in the "dark continent"! Fields are sown with elephants'
-teeth, rivers of cocoa-nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of
-backsides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting
-cotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles
-from which they may learn the virtues of civilization.
-
-But all to no purpose: the over-fed capitalist, the servant class
-greater in numbers than the productive class, the foreign and barbarous
-nations, gorged with European goods; nothing, nothing can melt away
-the mountains of products heaped up higher and more enormous than the
-pyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of European laborers defies all
-consumption, all waste.
-
-The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to
-turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless
-depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts
-dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain
-cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same
-durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving
-the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded
-down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it
-friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid
-in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the
-"Age of adulteration" just as the first epochs of humanity received
-the names of "The Age of Stone", "The Age of Bronze", from the
-character of their production. Certain ignorant people accuse our pious
-manufacturers of fraud, while in reality the thought which animates
-them is to furnish work to their laborers, who cannot resign themselves
-to living with their arms folded. These adulterations, whose sole
-motive is a humanitarian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits
-to the manufacturers who practice them, if they are disastrous for
-the quality of the goods, if they are an inexhaustible source of
-waste in human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous philanthropy
-of the capitalists, and the horrible perversion of the laborers, who
-to gratify their vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle the
-cries of their conscience and to violate even the laws of commercial
-honesty.
-
-And nevertheless, in spite of the over-production of goods, in spite of
-the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market
-in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought
-to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries
-it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself,
-thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut
-their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out
-on the pavement with no more food for their vice. Every year in
-all industries lockouts occur with the regularity of the seasons.
-Over-work, destructive of the organism, is succeeded by absolute rest
-during two or four months, and when work ceases the pittance ceases.
-Since the vice of work is diabolically attached to the heart of the
-laborers, since its requirements stifle all the other instincts of
-nature, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily
-limited by consumption and by the supply of raw materials, why devour
-in six months the work of a whole year; why not distribute it uniformly
-over the twelve months and force every workingman to content himself
-with six or five hours a day throughout the year instead of getting
-indigestion from twelve hours during six months? Once assured of their
-daily portion of work, the laborers will no longer be jealous of each
-other, no longer fight to snatch away work from each other's hands and
-bread from each other's mouths, and then, not exhausted in body and
-mind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness.
-
-Brutalized by their vice, the laborers have been unable to rise to the
-conception of this fact, that to have work for all it is necessary
-to apportion it like water on a ship in distress. Meanwhile certain
-manufacturers in the name of capitalist exploitation have for a long
-time demanded a legal limitation of the work day. Before the commission
-of 1860 on professional education, one of the greatest manufacturers of
-Alsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwiller, declared: "The day of twelve hours
-is excessive and ought to be reduced to eleven, while work ought to
-be stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption of this
-measure, although it may appear onerous at first sight. We have tried
-it in our industrial establishments for four years and find ourselves
-the better for it, while the average production, far from having
-diminished, has increased." In his study of machines M. F. Passy quotes
-the following letter from a great Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere:
-"Our machines, although the same as those of the English spinning
-mills, do not produce what they ought to produce or what those same
-machines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two
-hours a day less. We all work two good hours too much. I am convinced
-that if we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen we should have
-the same product and we should consequently produce more economically."
-Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a remark of a great Belgian
-manufacturer that the weeks in which a holiday falls result in a
-product not less than ordinary weeks.[19]
-
-An aristocratic government has dared to do what a people, duped in
-their simplicity by the moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and
-moral industrial considerations of the economists, who like the birds
-of ill omen, croaked that to reduce by one hour the work in factories
-was to decree the ruin of English industry, the government of England
-has forbidden by a law strictly enforced to work more than ten hours a
-day, and as before England remains the first industrial nation of the
-world.[20]
-
-The experiment tried on so great a scale is on record; the experience
-of certain intelligent capitalists is on record. They prove beyond a
-doubt that to strengthen human production it is necessary to reduce
-the hours of labor and multiply the pay days and feast days, yet the
-French nation is not convinced. But if the miserable reduction of two
-hours has increased English production by almost one-third in ten
-years, what breathless speed would be given to French production
-by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours. Cannot the
-laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust
-their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up
-and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all,
-that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer
-men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful
-faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious
-madness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of
-the economist: "Let us work, let us work to increase the national
-wealth.' O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial
-equipment develops slowly. Stop braying and listen to an economist,
-no other than M. L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a
-few months ago. "It is in general by the conditions of hand-work that
-the revolution in methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand-work
-furnishes its services at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts
-are made to economize it when its services become more costly."[21]
-
-To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron
-it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of
-the machines of flesh and blood. Do you ask for proofs? They can
-be furnished by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was
-invented and applied at Manchester because the spinners refused to
-work such long hours as before. In America the machine is invading all
-branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding
-of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a
-thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so
-painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in
-the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in
-a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[14] Under the old regime, the laws of the church guaranteed the
-laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays,
-during which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great
-crime of catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the
-industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once
-it was in the saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced the week
-of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer
-have more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers
-from the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them under
-the yoke of work.
-
-The hatred against the holidays does not appear until the modern
-industrial and commercial bourgeoisie takes definite form, between the
-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that they
-be reduced. He refused because "one of the current heresies of the
-day is regarding feasts" (Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666
-Perefixus, archbishop of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his
-diocese. protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapted to
-the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less
-solicitous for the people's rest. It dethroned the saints in heaven in
-order to abolish their feast days on earth.
-
-Religious reform and philosophical free thought were but pretexts which
-permitted the jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast
-days of the people.
-
-[15] These gigantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara wins
-his bride by expelling the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Romancero
-relates the story:
-
-  Les bodas fueron en Burgos
-  Las tornabodas en Salas:
-  En bodas y tornabodas
-  Pasaron siete semanas
-  Tantas vienen de las gentes
-  Que no caben por las plazas
-
-(The wedding was at Bourges, the infaring at Salas. In the wedding and
-the infaring seven weeks were spent. So many people came that the town
-could not hold them...).
-
-The men of these seven-weeks weddings were the heroic soldiers of the
-wars of independence.
-
-[16] Karl Marx's "Capital".
-
-[17] "The proportion in which the population of the country is employed
-as domestics in the service of the wealthy class indicates its progress
-in national wealth and civilization." (R. M. Martin, "Ireland Before
-and After the Union," 1818). Gambetta, who has denied that there was
-a social question ever since he ceased to be the poverty stricken
-lawyer of the Café Procope, undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing
-domestic class when he announced the advent of new social strata.
-
-[18] Two examples: The English government to satisfy the peasants of
-India, who in spite of the periodical famines desolating their country
-insist on cultivating poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been
-obliged to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the Chinese
-Government the free entry of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia,
-in spite of the mortality resulting from it are obliged to clothe
-themselves in the English fashion in order to consume the products of
-the Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cotton mills.
-
-[19] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question Ouvrière au XIX siècle, 1872.
-
-[20] It should be observed that this was written in 1883, since which
-time the United States has taken the first rank. The soundness of
-Lafargue's reasoning is confirmed by the fact that in this country the
-hours of labor in the most important industries are even less than in
-England. (Translator.)
-
-[21] Louis Reybaud. Le coton, son regime, ses problèmes (1863).
-
-
-
-
-IV.
-
-NEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC.
-
-
-We have seen that by diminishing the hours of labor new mechanical
-forces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by
-obliging the laborers to consume their products the army of workers
-will be immensely increased. The capitalist class once relieved from
-its function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of
-soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn
-from useful labor to help it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor
-market will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit
-on work. It will be impossible to find employment for that swarm of
-former unproductives, more numerous than insect parasites, and after
-them must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their
-vain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals
-to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with
-laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will
-be need of severe laws to compel the working women and workingmen who
-have been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to
-take the hygienic and calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish
-their health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume
-European products at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will
-be necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down
-and learn to twirl their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love
-as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of
-European moralists.
-
-And that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers
-of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial
-equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will
-be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste
-for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities.
-Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it
-eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of
-drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the
-pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy
-without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.
-
-The proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the
-capitalists ten hours of forge and factory; that is their great
-mistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be
-forbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should
-be allowed to bring testimony to the fact that throughout their whole
-lives they have been perfect vagabonds, and if they swear they wish to
-continue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the general mania
-for work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning
-at the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money.
-Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first
-to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing
-them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labor of
-over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since
-their birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their
-title to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their
-instincts. There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place
-them. Dufaure might be set at cleaning public closets, Gallifet[22]
-might perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The
-members of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stock yards to
-pick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators might
-play the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for
-the others, occupations could be found for them on a level with their
-intelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, only
-they would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxication.
-Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the bugs and vermin in the
-departments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be
-necessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists
-out of due regard for their acquired habits.
-
-But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be heaped upon the moralists
-who have perverted nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites,
-"and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskers
-to deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to
-understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and
-devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality,—and that only
-to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity,—it is so
-far otherwise that on the contrary, God knows, what cheer they make;
-et _Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt_.[23] You may read it
-in great letters, in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching
-bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with
-sulphur."[24] On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead
-of swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under
-capitalism, the communists and collectivists will eat, drink and dance
-to their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and
-political sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the
-economic, catholic, protestant, jewish, positivist and free-thought
-church; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian,
-altruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall
-be compelled to hold a candle until it burns their fingers, shall
-starve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and
-shall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a
-year with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife
-grinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten
-hours.
-
-The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the
-regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second,
-there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And
-here we have the very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall
-organize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages,
-giving legislative exhibitions. The generals in riding boots, their
-breasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through
-the streets and courts levying recruits among the good people. Gambetta
-and his comrade Cassagnac shall tend door. Cassagnac, in full duelist
-costume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out
-burning tow, shall threaten every one with his father's pistol[25] and
-sink into a hole as soon as they show him Lullier's portrait. Gambetta
-will discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a
-doctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great
-Russia that stultifies him with the mincemeat she promises to make of
-Prussia and who would fain see mischief brewing in the west of Europe
-so as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home;
-on Mr. Bismark who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on
-the amnesty ... then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with
-red and white and blue, the three national colors, he will beat the
-tattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles
-and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to
-encourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good
-spirits.
-
-In the barracks the entertainment will open with the "Electoral Farce".
-
-In the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses' ears, the
-bourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of
-political liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely
-promising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes
-of the miseries of the people and with copper in their voices of the
-glories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in
-chorus, hi han! hi han!
-
-Then will start the great play, "The Theft of the Nation's Goods."
-
-Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy-faced and bald-headed,
-fat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning,
-is stretching herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial
-Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is
-mechanically devouring men, women and children, whose thrilling and
-heart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten's muzzle,
-a hyena's body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his
-pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted
-by gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with
-whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps
-of merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his
-nether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and
-the book of the national budget between his teeth, is encamped at the
-head of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When
-the laborers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayonets, have
-laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened
-to the manufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell
-mell upon the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of
-gold, emptying casks of wine. When they have devoured all they can,
-they sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and
-vomitings. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens,
-Historic Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the heads of
-the capitalists, hiccoughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With
-her broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating
-with fear.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades
-its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength,
-not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist
-exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right
-to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more
-than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with
-joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we
-ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly
-resolution....
-
-Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men,
-the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing
-painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century
-compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured
-their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their
-brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of
-the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[22] Gallifet was the general who was directly responsible for the
-massacre of thousands of French workingmen at the closing days of the
-Paris Commune.
-
-[23] They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. (Juvenal.)
-
-[24] Rabelais "Pantagruel," Book II. Chapter XXXIV. Translation of
-Urquhart and Motteux.
-
-[25] Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Granier, was prominent as a
-conservative politician, journalist and duelist.
-
-
-
-
-APPENDIX
-
-
-Our moralists are very modest people. If they invented the dogma of
-work, they still have doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the
-soul, rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper functioning of
-the entrails and other organs. They wish to try its workings on the
-populace, _in anima vili_, before turning it against the capitalists,
-to excuse and authorize whose vices is their peculiar mission.
-
-But, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why thus cudgel your brains to
-work out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your
-masters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish
-to see it scoffed at, dishonored? Let us open the history of ancient
-peoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. "I could
-not affirm," says the father of history, Herodotus, "whether the Greeks
-derived from the Egyptians the contempt which they have for work,
-because I find the same contempt established among the Thracians, the
-Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in a word, because among most
-barbarians, those who learn mechanical arts and even their children are
-regarded as the meanest of their citizens. All the Greeks have been
-nurtured in this principle, particularly the Lacedaemonians."[26]
-
-"At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles who had to concern
-themselves but with the defense and the administration of the
-community, like the savage warriors from whom they descended. Since
-they must thus have all their time free to watch over the interests
-of the republic, with their mental and bodily strength, they laid all
-labor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedaemon, even the women were
-not allowed to spin or weave that they might not detract from their
-nobility."[27]
-
-The Romans recognized but two noble and free professions, agriculture
-and arms. All the citizens by right lived at the expense of the
-treasury without being constrained to provide for their living by any
-of the sordid arts (thus, they designated the trades), which rightfully
-belonged to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the people, accused
-Tarquin, the tyrant, of the special outrage of having converted free
-citizens into artisans and masons.[28]
-
-The ancient philosophers had their disputes upon the origin of ideas
-but they agreed when it came to the abhorrence of work. "Nature,"
-said Plato in his social utopia, his model republic, "Nature has
-made no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who
-exercise them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who are by their
-very condition excluded from political rights. As for the merchants
-accustomed to lying and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city
-only as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have degraded himself
-by the commerce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he
-is convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; the punishment
-shall be doubled for each repeated offense."[29]
-
-In his "Economics," Xenophon writes, "The people who give themselves
-up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good
-reason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day
-long, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot
-fail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind
-be affected." "What honorable thing can come out of a shop?" asks
-Cicero. "What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything
-called shop is unworthy of an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit
-without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must
-regard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their
-toil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself
-and puts himself in the rank of slaves."[30]
-
-Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of
-these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous
-care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the
-rank of slaves, he commits a crime which deserves years of imprisonment.
-
-Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism had not perverted
-these philosophers of the ancient republics. Speaking for free
-men, they expressed their thought naively. Plato, Aristotle, those
-intellectual giants, beside whom our latter day philosophers are but
-pygmies, wish the citizens of their ideal republics to live in the
-most complete leisure, for as Xenophon observed, "Work takes all the
-time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends."
-According to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus, wisest of men, to
-the admiration of posterity, was that he had granted leisure to the
-citizens of Sparta by forbidding to them any trade whatever. But our
-moralists of Christianity and capitalism will answer, "These thinkers
-and philosophers praised the institution of slavery." Perfectly true,
-but could it have been otherwise, granted the economic and political
-conditions of their epoch? War was the normal state of ancient
-societies. The free man was obliged to devote his time to discussing
-the affairs of state and watching over its defense. The trades were
-then too primitive and clumsy for those practicing them to exercise
-their birth-right of soldier and citizen; thus the philosophers and
-law-givers, if they wished to have warriors and citizens in their
-heroic republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves. But do not the
-moralists and economists of capitalism praise wage labor, the modern
-slavery; and to what men does the capitalist slavery give leisure?
-To people like Rothschild, Schneider, and Madame Boucicaut, useless
-and harmful slaves of their vices and of their domestic servants.
-"The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and
-Aristotle,"—this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle
-foresaw: "that if every tool could by itself execute its proper
-function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the
-tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work;
-if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the
-foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the
-master of slaves."
-
-Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of
-fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful
-inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred
-labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of
-capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system,
-worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the
-saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae
-artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and
-liberty.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[26] Herodotus, Book II.
-
-[27] Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.
-
-[28] Livy, Book I.
-
-[29] Plato's "Republic," Book V.
-
-[30] Cicero's "De Officiis," I, 42.
-
-
-
-
-SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS
-
-ADDRESS DELIVERED AT PARIS MARCH 23, 1900, AT A MEETING CALLED BY THE
-GROUP OF COLLECTIVIST STUDENTS ATTACHED TO THE PARTI OUVRIER FRANÇAIS.
-
-
-Ladies and Gentlemen:—I am happy to deliver this address under the
-presidency of Vaillant, because it is a pledge of the close and lasting
-union between our two organizations, and because Vaillant is one of the
-intellectuals of the socialist party; he is acknowledged to be the most
-learned of French socialists and perhaps of European socialists, now
-that Marx, Engels and Lavroff are no longer with us.
-
-The group of collectivist students which has organized this conference,
-has been led to choose this subject, because French socialism has just
-passed through a crisis which is not exactly one of growth, though
-such it has been called, but which has been caused by the arrival
-of a certain number of bourgeois intellectuals within the ranks of
-the party. It is therefore interesting to examine the situation of
-the intellectuals in capitalist society, their historic role since
-the revolution of 1789, and the manner in which the bourgeoisie has
-kept the promises it made them when it was struggling against the
-aristocracy.
-
-The eighteenth century was the century of reason—everything, religion,
-philosophy, science, politics, privileges of classes, of the state,
-of municipalities, was submitted to its pitiless criticism. Never
-in history has there been such a fermentation of ideas and such a
-revolutionary preparation of men's minds. Mirabeau, who himself
-played a great role in the ideological agitation, might well say in
-the national assembly: "We have no time to think, but happily, we
-have a supply of ideas." All that was needed was to realize them.
-Capitalism, to reward the intellectuals who had labored with so much
-enthusiasm for the coming of its revolution, promised them honors and
-favors; intelligence and wisdom, as well as virtue, should be the
-sole privileges of the society it was founding upon the ruins of the
-old order. Promises cost it little; it announced to all men that it
-brought them joy and happiness, with liberty, equality and fraternity,
-which, although eternal principles, were now born for the first time.
-Its social world was to be so new that even before the Republic was
-proclaimed, Camille Desmoulins demanded that they begin a new era which
-should date from the taking of the Bastile.
-
-I need not teach you what application capitalism has made of these
-eternal principles which by way of cynical raillery, the Republic
-carves on the lintels of her prisons, her penitentiaries, her barracks
-and her halls of state.[31] I will only remind you that savage and
-barbarous tribes, uncorrupted by civilization, living under the
-regime of common property, without inscribing anywhere these eternal
-principles, without even formulating them, practice them in a manner
-more perfect than ever was dreamed of by the capitalists who discovered
-them in 1789.
-
-It did not take long to determine the value of the promises of
-capitalism; the very day it opened its political shop, it commenced
-proceedings in bankruptcy. The constituent assembly, which formulated
-the Rights of man and of the citizen and proclaimed equality before the
-law, discussed and voted, in 1790, an electoral act which established
-inequality before the law; no one was to be a voter but the "active
-citizen," paying in money a direct tax equal to three days' labor, and
-no one was to be eligible to office but the citizen paying a direct
-tax of a "silver mark," about 55 francs. "But under the law of the
-silver mark," clamored Loustallot, Desmoulins and the intellectualists
-without real estate, "Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose 'Social Contract is
-the bible of the revolution, would be capable neither of voting nor
-of holding office." The electoral law deprived so many citizens of
-political rights, that in the municipal elections of 1790, at Paris,
-a city which counted about half a million inhabitants, there were but
-12,000 voters, Bailly was chosen mayor by 10,000 votes.
-
-If the eternal principles were not new, it is also true that the
-flattering promises made by the intellectuals had already begun to be
-realized before the advent of capitalism to power. The church, which
-is a theocratic democracy, opens her bosom to all. That they may
-enter, all lay aside their titles and privileges, and all can aspire
-to the highest positions; popes have risen from the lower ranks of
-society. Sixtus Fifth had in his youth tended swine. The church of the
-middle ages jealously attracted to herself the thinkers and men of
-learning, although she respected the preference of those who wished to
-remain laymen, but extended over them her protection and her favors;
-she allowed them all boldness of thought, on the single condition of
-keeping up the appearance of faith, and never leaving her enclosure
-to lavish themselves upon the vulgar. Thus Copernicus might write and
-dedicate to the pope his "treatise on the revolutions of the celestial
-bodies," in which, contrary to the teaching of the Bible, he proves
-that the earth turns around the sun. But Copernicus was a canon at
-Frannbourg and he wrote in Latin. When a century later Galileo, who
-was not identified with the clergy and who on the contrary sought the
-protection of the secular authorities, professed publicly, at Venice
-and Florence, the theories of Copernicus, the Vatican stretched out
-its terrible hand over him and forced the illustrious old man to deny
-his scientific belief. Even after the crisis of protestantism, the
-church preserved its liberality toward the scientists who belonged
-to it. Mersenne, a monk of the order of the Minimes, one of the
-great geometers of the seventeenth century, a precursor and friend
-of Descartes, corresponded freely with Hobbes, the father of modern
-materialism; the notes of the French edition of "De Cive" contain
-fragments of this correspondence.
-
-The church, in keeping up this liberal conduct, may have been animated
-by a disinterested love of pure science, but what chiefly concerned
-her was the interest of her dominancy; she wished to monopolize the
-intellectuals and science, just as in the old theocratic Egypt the
-priests had done to whom the Greek thinkers resorted in search of the
-first elements of science and philosophy.
-
-It would be insulting capitalism to attribute to it a disinterested
-love of science, which from its point of view has but one reason for
-existence, that of utilizing natural forces to the enhancement of
-its wealth. It cares nothing for pure speculation and it is by way
-of self-defence that it allows its scientists to devote their mental
-energy to theoretic researches instead of exhausting it on practical
-applications. This contempt for pure speculation is shown under a
-philosophic form in the positivism of Auguste Comte, who embodies so
-well the narrowness of the groveling spirit of capitalism.
-
-But if science apart from its industrial applications does not interest
-the bourgeoisie their solicitude for the intellectuals takes on none
-of the forms which we saw in that of the church, and nowhere is their
-indifference to them better shown than in the relative position of
-material property and of intellectual property before the law.
-
-Material property, whatever its origin, is by capitalist law a thing
-eternal; it is forever assured to its possessor; it is handed down from
-father to son to the end of the centuries, and no civil or political
-power may lay upon it a sacrilegious hand. We have lately seen a
-characteristic example of this inviolability of material property.
-
-The keeper of the signal station at Durban transmitted to the Boers
-heliographic dispatches informing them regarding the ships which
-entered the harbor, the men, the horses and the munitions of war which
-they transported. His treason brought him 125,000 francs, which, like
-an intelligent capitalist, he deposited in the bank. The English
-military authorities seized the traitor, condemned him and shot him,
-but they respected his property so honorably acquired, and his widow
-and son are now its legitimate possessors. The law, apart from certain
-variations, being the same in all capitalist countries, things go on in
-France as in England. No authority could lay hand on the property of
-Bazaine, nor make De Lesseps, Cottu and their families disgorge the
-millions artfully extracted from the "lambs" on Panama canal stock.
-
-This legal sanctity of property is a new thing, in France it dates
-from the revolution of 1789. The old regime, which had small respect
-for this sort of property, authorized the confiscation of the property
-of those legally condemned, and the abolition of confiscation is one
-of the first reforms demanded in the petitions of Paris and several
-provincial cities to the states general. Capitalism, by forbidding the
-confiscation of property obtained by fraudulent and infamous means,
-proclaims that the source of its fortune is quite as fraudulent and
-infamous as that of criminals and traitors.
-
-Capitalist law has none of these amenities for intellectual property.
-Literary and artistic property such as the law protects at all has but
-a precarious life, limited to the life of the author and a certain time
-after his death—fifty years according to the latest legislation; that
-time passed, it lapses into common property; for example, beginning
-with March of this year, any publisher has the right to bring out for
-his own profit the works of Balzac, the genius of romantic literature.
-
-Literary property, though a matter of interest to publishers, who
-are certainly few in number, brings no benefit to the mass of the
-capitalist class, but not so with property in inventions, which is of
-prime importance to all the manufacturing and mercantile capitalists.
-Consequently over it the law extends no protection. The inventor, if he
-wishes to defend his intellectual property against capitalist pirates,
-must begin by buying that right, taking out a patent, which he must
-renew every year; on the day he misses a payment, his intellectual
-property becomes the lawful prey of the robbers of capitalism. Even if
-he pays, he can secure that right only for a time; in France, fourteen
-years. And during these few years, not long enough generally to get
-his invention fully introduced into practical industry, it is he, the
-inventor, who at his own expense has to set in motion the machinery of
-the law against the capitalist pirates who rob him.
-
-The trade-mark, which is a capitalistic property that never required
-any intellectual effort, is on the contrary indefinitely protected by
-law like material property.
-
-It is with reluctance that the capitalist class has granted the
-inventor the right of defending his intellectual property, for by
-virtue of its position as the ruling class it regards itself as
-entitled to the fruits of intellectual labor as well as of manual
-labor; just as the feudal lord asserted his right of possession over
-the property of his serfs. The history of the inventors of our century
-is the monstrous story of their spoliation by the capitalists; it is a
-long and melancholy roll of martyrs. The inventor, by the very fact of
-his genius, is condemned with his family to ruin and suffering.
-
-It is not only inventions requiring long and laborious study, heavy
-outlay for their completion and long time for their introduction, that
-plunge the inventor into the inferno of poverty; this is equally true
-of inventions that are most simple, most immediately applicable and
-most fertile in rich results. I will mention but one example: there
-lately died at Paris in extreme poverty a man whose invention saves
-millions of francs a year to the railroads and mining companies;
-he had discovered a way to utilize the mountains of coal dust that
-encumbered the neighborhood of wharfs and mines by converting it into
-"briquettes," such as are today in common use for fuel.
-
-The capitalist bourgeoisie, the most revolutionary class that ever
-oppressed human societies, cannot increase its wealth without
-continuously revolutionizing the means of production, continuously
-incorporating into its industrial equipment new applications of
-mechanics, chemistry and physics. Its thirst for inventions is so
-insatiable that it creates factories for inventions. Certain American
-capitalists united in constructing for Edison at Menlo Park the most
-wonderful laboratory in the world, and in putting at his disposal
-trained scientists, chosen workmen, and the ordinary materials
-necessary to make and keep on making inventions which the capitalists
-patent, exploit or sell. Edison, who is himself a shrewd business man,
-has taken care to secure for himself a part of the benefits brought by
-the Menlo Park inventions.
-
-But not all inventors are able like Edison to dictate terms to the
-capitalists who equip invention factories. The Thompson-Houston Company
-at Paris and Siemens at London and Berlin,[32] in connection with
-their plants for turning out electrical machinery, have laboratories
-where ingenious men are kept busy searching out new applications of
-electricity. At Frankfort the manufactory of aniline dyes, the largest
-in the world, where anti-pyrine, that mineral quinine, was discovered,
-keeps on its pay roll more than a hundred chemists to discover new
-products of coal-tar. Each discovery is at once patented by the house,
-which, by way of encouragement, gives a reward to the inventor.
-
-We may up to a certain point regard all factories and workshops
-as laboratories for inventions, since a considerable number of
-improvements in machinery have been devised by workmen in the course
-of their work. The inventor having no money to patent and apply his
-discovery, the employer takes out the patent in his own name, and in
-accordance with the spirit of capitalist justice, it is he who reaps
-all the benefit. When the government takes it into its head to rewards
-talent, it is the employer who receives the decoration; the inventive
-workman, who is not an intellectual, continues to revolve like the
-other machines under the black and greasy number which distinguishes
-him, and as in this capitalist world he must be content with little, he
-consoles himself for his poverty by the reflection that his invention
-is bringing wealth and honor to his employer.
-
-The capitalist class, which to increase its wealth is in pressing need
-of inventions, is in even more imperative need of intellectuals to
-supervise their application and to direct its industrial machinery. The
-capitalists, before they equipped invention factories, had organized
-factories to turn out intellectuals. Dollfus, Scherer-Kestner and
-other employes of Alsace, the most intelligent, most philanthropic
-and consequently the heaviest exploiters in France before the war,
-had founded with their spare pennies at Mulhouse, schools of design,
-of chemistry and of physics, where the brightest children of their
-workmen were instructed gratis, in order that they might always have
-at hand and at reasonable figure the intellectual capacities required
-for carrying on their industries. Twenty years ago the directors of the
-Mulhouse school persuaded the municipal council of Paris to establish
-the city school of chemistry and physics. At the beginning, whether
-it is still the case I do not know, the pupils were recruited in the
-common schools, they received a higher education, gratis, a dinner at
-noon at the school, and fifty francs a month to indemnify the parents
-for the loss from the fact that their sons were not in the workshop.
-
-On the platform of the constituent assembly of 1790 the Marquis of
-Foucault could declare that to be a laborer it was not necessary to
-know how to read and write. The necessities of industrial production
-compel the capitalist of today to speak in language altogether
-different; his economic interests and not his love of humanity and
-of science force him to encourage and to develop both elementary and
-higher education.
-
-But the slave merchants of ancient Rome were, by the same title,
-patrons of education. To the more intelligent of their human
-merchandise they gave instruction in medicine, philosophy, Greek
-literature, music, science, etc. The education of the slave enhanced
-his market value. The slave who was an expert cook brought a better
-figure than the slave doctor, philosopher or literator. In our days it
-is still so; the big capitalists pay their chief cooks better than the
-state pays the professors of liberal arts, even though they be members
-of the Institute. But contrary to the practice of the Roman slave
-merchants, our capitalist class lavishes instruction only in order to
-depress the selling price of intellectual capacity.
-
-Greek mythology tells how Midas had the gift of turning everything
-into gold; the capitalist class has a similar property, it transforms
-everything that it touches into merchandise; it has done this for
-intellectual capacities; chemists, engineers and Latin scholars are
-bought like she-asses and guano.
-
-A voice: "And they buy deputies, too!"
-
-People who have no tallow nor veal nor socks to sell have their
-conscience and their votes; when they are deputies, they are bought.
-
-When intellectual capacities become merchandise they have to be treated
-like other merchandise, and they are. When there are many oysters in
-the market the price of oysters goes down, but when the arrivals are
-scarce the price goes up. When chemists and engineers are plenty on the
-labor market, the price of inventors and of chemists goes down. Now
-that the Central School and the School of Physics and Chemistry turn
-out yearly upon the pavements of Paris chemists by the dozen, their
-price has considerably gone down. Twenty years ago the capitalist paid
-a chemist reasonably, he gave him $100 to $120 a month and engaged him
-by the year. The employers whose regard for an employee is measured by
-what they have to pay him, were full of politeness and consideration
-for their chemists who cost so dear. But since they have been abundant,
-their price has fallen to $40 and $30 a month; in the north they are
-not engaged by the year but for the sugar season, which lasts three or
-four months, at the end of which they are discharged with the workmen.
-Go and shift for yourself, says the employer. Next fall when the beets
-come I know I shall find chemists to superintend making them into
-sugar.
-
-The chemists are not exceptional; you know only too well that in all
-branches there is an over-production of intellectuals, and that when
-a place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer themselves to fill it; and
-it is this pressure which permits the capitalists to lower the price
-of the intellectuals and to put it even below the wage of the manual
-laborer.
-
-Poverty is harder for the intellectual than for the workingman; it
-bruises him morally and physically. The workingman, enduring hardships
-from childhood and knocking about the street and the shops, is
-accustomed to enduring the troubles of life; the intellectual, brought
-up in a hot-house, has the life bleached out of him by the shadow of
-the college walls, his nervous system is over-developed and takes on an
-unhealthy impressionability. What the workingman endures thoughtlessly
-is to him a painful shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths
-of his moral being by the exigencies of a wage-worker's life. With the
-same or even a higher wage the intellectual is in a worse economic
-condition than the laborer, for the latter may dress as cheaply as he
-likes, but the former, if only not to offend the eye of his employer
-and his chiefs with whom he is brought in contact is obliged to dress
-expensively and even elegantly. He must save on his food what he has
-to spend on his clothing.
-
-The capitalists have degraded the intellectuals below the economic
-level of the manual laborers. This is their reward for having so
-magnificently prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution of the
-eighteenth century.
-
-Jaures in his preface to the Socialist History of France says that
-"the intellectual bourgeoisie, offended by a brutal and commercial
-society and disenchanted with the bourgeois power, is rallying to the
-support of socialism." Unfortunately nothing could be less exact. This
-transformation of the intellectual faculties into merchandise, which
-ought to have filled the intellectuals with wrath and indignation,
-leaves them indifferent. Never would the free citizen of the ancient
-republics of Athens and Rome have submitted to such degradation. The
-free man who sells his work, says Cicero, lowers himself to the rank
-of the slaves. Socrates and Plato were indignant against the Sophists
-who required pay for their philosophic teaching, for to Socrates and
-Plato thought was too noble a thing to be bought and sold like carrots
-and shoes. Even the French clergy of 1789 resented as a mortal insult
-the proposition to pay a salary for worship. But our intellectuals are
-accustoming themselves to such degradation.
-
-Spurred on by the mercantile passion, they are never better satisfied
-with themselves or with society than when they succeed in selling
-their intellectual merchandise at a good price; they have even come
-to the point of making its selling price the measure of its value.
-Zola, who is one of the most distinguished representatives of literary
-intellectualism, estimates the artistic value of a novel by the number
-of editions sold. To sell their intellectual merchandise has become
-in them such an all-absorbing principle that if one speaks to them of
-socialism, before they inquire into its theories, they ask whether in
-the socialistic society intellectual labor will be paid for and whether
-it will be rewarded equally with manual labor.
-
-Imbeciles! they have eyes but they see not that it is the capitalist
-bourgeoisie which establishes that degrading equality: and to increase
-its wealth degrades intellectual labor to the point of paying it at a
-lower rate than manual labor.
-
-We should have to put off the triumph of socialism not to the year
-2,000 but to the end of the world if we had to wait upon the delicate,
-shrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the intellectuals. The
-history of the century is at hand to teach us just how much we have a
-right to expect from these gentlemen.
-
-Since 1789 governments of the most diverse and opposed character have
-succeeded each other in France; and always, without hesitation, the
-intellectuals have hastened to offer their devoted services. I am not
-merely speaking of those two-for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up
-the newspapers, the parliaments and the economic associations; but I
-mean the scientists, the university professors, the members of the
-Institute; the higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow the
-knee.
-
-Princes of science, who ought to have conversed on equal terms with
-kings and emperors, have marketed their glory to buy offices and favors
-from ephemeral ministers. Cuvier, one of the mightiest geniuses of the
-modern era, whom the revolution took from the household of a nobleman
-to make of him at twenty-five years one of the Museum professors,
-Cuvier took the oath of allegiance and served with fidelity the
-Republic, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis Philippe, the last
-of whom created him a peer of France to reward him for his career of
-servility.
-
-To devote one's self to all governments without distinction is not
-enough. Pasteur placed his glorious name at the service of the
-financiers, who placed him in the administrative council of the Credit
-Foncier, side by side with Jules Simon, with dukes and counts, with
-senators, deputies and ex-ministers, in order to entrap the "lambs."
-When De Lesseps was equipping his colossal swindle of the Panama canal,
-he enrolled the intellectuals of the Institute, of the French Academy,
-of literature, of the clergy, of all the circles of higher life.
-
-It is not in the circle of the intellectuals, degraded by centuries
-of capitalist oppression, that we must seek examples of civic courage
-and moral dignity. They have not even the sense of professional
-class-consciousness. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, a certain
-minister discharged, as if he had been a mere prison guard, one of the
-professors of chemistry in the Polytechnic school who had had the rare
-courage to give public expression to his opinion. When in a factory the
-employer dismisses a workman in too arbitrary a fashion, his comrades
-grumble, and sometimes quit work, even though misery and hunger await
-them in the street.
-
-All his colleagues in the Polytechnic school bowed their heads in
-silence; each one crouched in self-regarding fear, and what is still
-more characteristic, not a single partisan of Dreyfus in the Society
-of the Rights of Man or in the ranks of the press raised a voice to
-remind them of the idea of professional solidarity. The intellectuals,
-who on all occasions display their transcendental ethics, have still a
-long road to travel before they reach the moral plane of the working
-class and of the socialist party.
-
-The scientists have not only sold themselves to the governments
-and the financiers; they have also sold science itself to the
-capitalist-bourgeoisie. When in the eighteenth century there was
-need to prepare the minds of men for the revolution, by sapping the
-ideologic foundations of aristocratic society, then science fulfilled
-its sublime mission of freedom; it was revolutionary; it furiously
-attacked Christianity and the intuitional philosophy. But when the
-victorious bourgeoisie decided to base its new power on religion, it
-commanded its scientists, its philosophers and its men of letters to
-raise up what they had overthrown; they responded to the need with
-enthusiasm. They reconstructed what they had demolished; they proved
-by scientific, sentimental and romantic argument the existence of God
-the father, of Jesus the son and of Mary the virgin mother. I do not
-believe history offers a spectacle equal to that presented in the first
-years of the nineteenth century by the philosophers, the scientists
-and the literary men, who from revolutionaries and materialists
-suddenly transformed themselves into reactionaries, intuitionalists and
-catholics.
-
-This backward movement still continues; when Darwin published his
-Origin of Species, which took away from God his role of creator in the
-organic world, as Franklin had despoiled him of his thunderbolt, we
-saw the scientists, big and little, university professors and members
-of the Institute, enrolling themselves under the orders of Flourens,
-who for his own part had at least his eighty years for an excuse,
-that they might demolish the Darwinian theory, which was displeasing
-to the government and hurtful to religious beliefs. The intellectuals
-exhibited that painful spectacle in the fatherland of Lamark and of
-Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the creators of the evolution theory, which
-Darwin completed and made proof against criticism.
-
-Today, now that the clerical anxiety is somewhat appeased, the
-scientists venture to profess the evolution theory, which they never
-opposed without a protest from their scientific conscience, but they
-turn it against socialism so as to keep in the good graces of the
-capitalists. Herbert Spencer, Haeckel and the greatest men in the
-school of Darwinism demonstrate that the classification of individuals
-into rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners,
-is the necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature, instead of
-being the fulfillment of the will and the justice of God. Natural
-selection, they say, which has differentiated the organs of the human
-body, has forever fixed the ranks and the functions of the social body.
-They have, through servility, even lost the logical spirit. They are
-indignant against Aristotle because he, being unable to conceive of the
-abolition of slavery, declared that the slave was marked off by nature;
-but they fail to see that they are saying something equally monstrous
-when they affirm that natural selection assigns to each one his place
-in society.
-
-Thus it is no longer God or religion which condemn the workers to
-wretchedness—it is science. Never was there an intellectual bankruptcy
-more fraudulent.
-
-M. Brunetières, one of those intellectuals who do not feel their
-degradation and who joyfully fulfill their servile task, was right when
-he proclaimed the failure of science. He does not suspect how colossal
-this bankruptcy is.
-
-Science, the great emancipator, that has tamed the powers of nature,
-and might in so doing have freed man from toil to allow him to develop
-freely his faculties of mind and body; science, become the slave of
-capital, has done nothing but supply means for capitalists to increase
-their wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the working class.
-Its most wonderful applications to industrial technique have brought to
-the children, the women and the men of the working class nothing but
-over-work and misery!
-
-The middle-class revolutionary party of 1789 cried out in horror and
-indignation against the lords, who through the long summer nights
-compelled their serfs to beat the ponds near their castles in order
-to keep the frogs from croaking. What would they say if they saw what
-we see? Improvements in lighting date from the capitalist period. At
-the end of the last century Argant and Carcel invented the lamp with
-a double current of air, at the beginning of this Chevreul invented
-the stearic candle, then gas was discovered, then petroleum, then
-the electric light, turning night into day. What benefits have these
-scientific improvements in lighting brought to the workers? They have
-enabled employers to impose night work upon millions of proletarians,
-not in the midsummer nights and in the balmy air of the fields, but
-through nights of summer and winter in the poisonous air of the
-workshops and factories. The industrial applications of mechanics
-and chemistry have transformed the happy and stimulating work of the
-artisan into a torture which exhausts and kills the proletarian.
-
-When science subdued the forces of nature to the service of man, ought
-she not to have given leisure to the workers that they might develop
-themselves physically and intellectually; ought she not to have changed
-the "vale of tears" into a dwelling place of peace and joy? I ask you,
-has not science failed in her mission of emancipation?
-
-The obtuse capitalist himself is conscious of this failure; so he
-directs his economists and his other intellectual domestics to prove to
-the working class that it has never been so happy and that its lot goes
-on improving.
-
-The economists, considering that to deserve the good graces of
-the capitalists it was not enough to falsify economic facts, are
-suppressing economic science, which is becoming dangerous for the
-domination of capital. Ever since Adam Smith and Ricardo they go on
-repeating the same errors regarding value, regarding the productivity
-of the predatory and idle capitalist, compiling facts and arranging
-statistics which guide the capitalists in their speculations; but they
-dare not draw conclusions and build systems with the materials that
-they have accumulated. When Ricardo wrote, the phenomena of modern
-production were beginning their evolution, their communist tendencies
-could not be perceived, one could then study them without taking sides
-and could build up a science without fear of wounding the interests
-of capital. But now that they have arrived at their full development
-and show clearly their communal tendencies, the economists shut their
-eyes that they may not see, and they wage war against the principles
-established by Ricardo, which after having served as a basis for the
-old bourgeois economy, have become the points of departure of the
-Marxian economy. To take a whack at the socialist theories and put
-themselves at the service of the financiers, like barkers and fakirs of
-their bogus goods, are the intellectual functions of the economists.
-Latterly the owners of silver mines have enlisted them to sing the
-praises of bimetallism, while Cecil Rhodes, Barnato, Beit, Robbers &
-Company called them in to boom the Transvaal gold mines.
-
-The intellectuals of art and literature, like the jesters of the old
-feudal courts, are the entertainers of the class which pays them. To
-satisfy the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their leisure—this
-is their sole artistic aim. The men of letters are so well broken to
-this servile duty that they do not understand the spirit of Molière,
-their great ancestor, all the while that they adore the letter of his
-works. Molière is the writer most written about in France; learned
-men have devoted themselves to gathering up the scattered fragments
-of his erratic and careless youth, to fixing the date and the hour
-of the representations of his comedies; if they had unearthed an
-authentic piece of excrement from him they would have set it in gold
-and would kiss it devotedly, but the spirit of Molière escapes them.
-You have read, as I have, many critical analyses of his dramas. Did
-you ever find one of them which brought out in clear light the role of
-this militant playwright, who more than a century before Beaumarchais
-and before revolution, at Versailles, in the very court of the great
-monarch, thrust at the nobility of the court and of the provinces,
-attacked the church before which Descartes and the rest trembled,
-hurled his jests at Aristotle, the unquestioned authority of La
-Sorbonne, that secular church; who ridiculed the Pyrrhonism which the
-neo-Kantians of our own days oppose to the materialist philosophy of
-Marxian socialism, but which then was the weapon of the catholics, of
-Pascal, of Huet, the bishop of Avranches, to strike and to overthrow
-human reason, with its impudent desire or reaching knowledge by its
-own strength. Pitiful, wretched reason, clamored these Kantians before
-Kant, you can know nothing without the aid of faith! Molière is unique
-in European literature, you must go back to the epoch of glorious
-Athens to find his counterpart in Aristophanes.
-
-If the bourgeois critics timidly and unintelligently mention this side
-of Molière, there is another of which their ignorance is complete.
-Molière was the man of his class, the champion of the bourgeois class.
-Like the socialists who say to the workers, "Break with the liberal
-bourgeoisie, which deceives you when it does not slaughter you;" he
-cried to the Georges Dandins and to the "bourgeois noblemen," "Avoid
-the nobles like pests; they deceive you, mock you and rob you."
-
-The great capitalist bourgeoisie does not choose to work, either
-with its hands or its brain; it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to
-practice lewdness and to look dignified in its beastly and cumbersome
-luxury; it does not even deign to occupy itself with politics; men like
-Rothschild, De Lesseps, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, do not run
-for office; they find it more economical to buy the deputies than the
-voters, and more convenient to put their clerks into the ministries
-than to take part in parliamentary struggles. The big capitalists
-interest themselves only in the operations of the stock exchange, which
-afford the delights of gambling; they dignify these by the pompous name
-of "speculations,"—a word formerly reserved for the highest processes
-of philosophical or mathematical thought. The capitalists are getting
-themselves replaced in the supervision and management of the great
-industrial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, who carry
-them on, and usually are well paid for doing so. These intellectuals
-of industry and politics, the privileged portion of the wage class,
-imagine that they are an integral part of the capitalist class, while
-they are only its servants; on every occasion they take up its defense
-against the working class, which finds in them its worst enemies.
-
-Intellectuals of this description can never be led into socialism;
-their interests are too closely bound up with those of the capitalist
-class for them to detach themselves and turn against it. But below
-these favored few there is a swarming and famishing throng of
-intellectuals whose lot grows worse in proportion to the increase of
-their numbers. These intellectuals belong to socialism. They ought
-to be already in our ranks. Their education ought to have given
-them the necessary intelligence to deal with social problems, but it
-is this very education which obstructs their hearing and keeps them
-away from socialism. They think their education confers on them a
-social privilege, that it will permit them to get through the world
-by themselves, each making his own way in life by crowding out his
-neighbor or standing on the shoulders of everyone else. They imagine
-that their poverty is transitory and that they only need a stroke of
-good luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think,
-is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them
-the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them
-by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or
-intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance,
-that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more
-capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual
-raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.
-
-And while they build castles in Spain, capital crushes them, as it has
-crushed the small merchants and the small manufacturers, who thought
-they, too, with free credit and a little luck, might become first-class
-capitalists, whose names should be written in the Great Book of the
-Public Debt.
-
-The intellectuals, in all that has to do with the understanding of
-the social movement, do not rise above the intellectual level of
-those little bourgeois who scoffed so fiercely at the bunglers of
-1830 and who, after being ruined and merged in the proletariat, none
-the less continue to detest socialism; to such a degree were their
-heads perverted by the religion of property. The intellectuals, whose
-brains are stuffed with all the prejudices of the bourgeois class, are
-inferior to those little bourgeois of 1830 and 1848 who at least were
-not afraid of gunpowder; they have not their spirit of combativeness,
-they are true imbeciles,—if we restore to this word its original Latin
-meaning of unsuited for war. Without resistance they endure rebuffs and
-wrongs and they do not think of uniting, of organizing themselves to
-defend their interests and give battle to capital on the economic field.
-
-The intellectual proletariat as we know it is a recent growth, it has
-especially developed in the last forty years. When after the amnesty of
-the condemned of the Commune, we began again the socialist propaganda,
-believing that it would be easy to draw the intellectuals into the
-movement we took up our dwelling in their cultured Latin quarter,
-Guesde taking up his residence in the Rue de la Pitie, Vaillant in the
-Rue Monge and I in the Boulevard de Port Royal. We became acquainted
-with hundreds of young men, students of law, of medicines, of the
-sciences, but you can count on your fingers those whom we brought into
-the socialist camp. Our ideas attracted them one day, but the next day
-the wind blew from another quarter and turned their heads.
-
-An honorable merchant of Bordeaux, a prominent member of the municipal
-council, said in the time of the empire to my father, who was disturbed
-over my socialism:
-
-"Friend Lafargue, you must let youth take its course; I was a socialist
-when I studied at Paris, I was connected with the secret societies
-and I took part in the movement for demanding of Louis Philippe the
-pardon of Barbes." The young men of our age turn quickly, let them get
-back to their homes and they develop prominent abdomens and become
-reactionaries.
-
-We welcomed joyfully the entrance of Jaures into socialism; we thought
-that the new form which he brought to our propaganda would make it
-penetrate into circles that we had not been able to touch. He has
-in fact made a decided impression on the university circle, and we
-owe it in part to him that the nurslings of the Ecole Normale have
-ideas regarding the social movement which are a little less absurd
-and formless than those with which their learning and intelligence
-have hitherto been contented. Lately, joining forces with the radical
-politicians who had lost their working-class following, they have
-invaded the socialist party. Their souls overflow with the purest
-intentions; if their peaceful habits prevent them from throwing
-themselves into the conflict, and if their lofty culture forbids them
-to take their place in the ranks of the comrades, they nevertheless
-condescend to instruct us in ethics, to polish off our ignorance, to
-teach us how to think, to offer us such crumbs of science as we may be
-able to digest, and to direct us; they modestly offer themselves to us
-as leaders and schoolmasters.
-
-These intellectuals who have spent their youth in the university
-that they might become experts on exercises, polishers of phrases,
-philosophers or doctors, imagine one can improvise himself into a
-master of the socialist theory by attending a single lecture or by the
-careless reading of a single pamphlet. Naturalists who had felt the
-need of painful research to learn the habits of mollusks or of the
-polyps who live in a community on the coral banks, think that they know
-enough to regulate human societies, and that by keeping their stand
-on the first steps of the ascending ladder of animal life they can
-the better discern the human ideal. The philosophers, the moralists,
-the historians and the politicians have aims equally lofty; they bring
-an abundant supply of ideas and a new method of action to replace the
-imperfect theory and tactics which in all capitalist countries have
-served to build up socialist parties strong in numbers, unity and
-discipline.
-
-The class struggle is out of fashion, declare these professors of
-socialism. Can a line of demarcation be drawn between classes? Do not
-the working people have savings bank accounts of $20, $40 and $100,
-bringing them 50 cents, $1.50 and $3.00 of interest yearly? Is it not
-true that the directors and managers of mines, railroads and financial
-houses are wage-workers, having their functions and duties in the
-enterprises which they manage for the account of capitalists? The
-argument is unanswerable, but by the same token there is no vegetable
-kingdom nor animal kingdom because we can not separate them "with
-an ax," as it were, for the reason that at their points of contact,
-vegetables and animals merge into each other. There is no longer any
-day or any night because the sun does not appear on the horizon at the
-same moment all over the earth, and because it is day at the antipodes
-while it is night here.
-
-The concentration of capital? A worn-out tune of 1850. The corporations
-by their stocks and bonds parcel out property and distribute it among
-all the citizens. How blinded we were by our sectarianism when we
-thought that this new form of property, essentially capitalistic,
-was enabling the financiers to plunge their thieving hands into the
-smallest purses, to extract the last pieces of silver.
-
-The poverty of the working class! But it is diminishing and soon will
-disappear through the constant increase of wages, while interest
-on money is constantly diminishing; some fine day it will descend
-to zero and the bourgeois will be overjoyed to offer their beloved
-capital on the altar of socialism. That to-morrow or the day after
-the capitalist will be forced to work, is the prediction of Mr.
-Waldeck-Rousseau. And there are intellectuals whose condition grows
-worse in proportion as capitalism develops, who are stultified by the
-utterances of the employers to a point where they affirm that the
-position of wage-workers is improving, and there are intellectuals
-who assume to possess some knowledge of political economy, who affirm
-that interest on money is rapidly diminishing. Could these reformers
-of socialism perchance be ignorant that Adam Smith calculated at the
-end of the eighteenth century that 3 per cent was the normal interest
-of capital running no risk, and that the financiers of our own epoch
-consider that it is still around 3 per cent that the interest rate
-must fluctuate. If a few years ago this rate seemed to fall below 2½
-per cent, it has risen today above 3 per cent. Capital is merchandise,
-like intellectual capacities and carrots; as such it is subject to
-the fluctuations of supply and demand. It was then more offered than
-demanded, whereas since the development of the industrial plant of
-Russia, since the opening of China to European exploitation, etc., the
-over-supply of capital has been absorbed and its price rises with its
-scarcity. But the intellectuals have too many trifles to think of and
-too many harmonious phrases to construct for giving any thought to
-economic phenomena. They take for sterling truths all the lies of the
-capitalists, and repeat with pious conviction the old litanies of the
-orthodox economic church: "There are no classes, wealth is coming to be
-distributed more and more equitably, the workers are growing richer and
-those living on incomes are growing poorer, and the capitalist society
-is the best of all possible societies; these truths shine forth like
-suns and none but partisans and mystics can deny them."
-
-These intellectuals propose to modify the tactics as well as the
-theories of the socialist party; they wish to impose upon it a new
-method of action. It must no longer strive to conquer the public powers
-by a great struggle, legal or revolutionary as need may be, but let
-itself be conquered by every ministry of a republican coalition; it is
-no longer to oppose the socialist party to all the bourgeois parties;
-what is needed is to put it at the service of the liberal party; we
-must no longer organize it for the class struggle, but keep it ready
-for all the compromises of politicians. And to further the triumph of
-the new method of action, they propose to disorganize the socialist
-party, to break up its old systems and to demolish the organizations
-which for twenty years have labored to give the workers a sense of
-their class interests and to group them in a party of economic and
-political struggle.
-
-But the intellectuals will lose their labors; thus far they have only
-succeeded in drawing closer the ties uniting the socialists of the
-different organizations, and in making themselves ridiculous.
-
-The intellectuals ought to have been the first of all the various
-groups to revolt against capitalist society, in which they occupy
-a subordinate position so little in keeping with their hopes and
-their talents, but they do not even understand it; they have such a
-confused idea of it that Auguste Comte, Renan, and others more or less
-distinguished have cherished the dream of reviving for their benefit an
-aristocracy copied after the model of the Chinese mandarin system. Such
-an idea is a reflection of past ages in their heads, for nothing is
-in more absolute opposition with the modern social movement than such
-pretensions. The intellectuals in previous states of society formed
-a world outside and above that of production, having charge only of
-education, of the direction of religious worship, and of the political
-administration.
-
-The mechanic industry of these societies combine in the same producer,
-manual labor and intellectual labor; it was for example the same
-cabinetmaker who designed and executed the piece of furniture, who
-bought its first material and who even undertook its sale. Capitalist
-production has divorced two functions which once were indissolubly
-united; on the one side it puts the manual workers, who become more
-and more servants of the machine, and on the other the intellectual
-workers, engineers, chemists, managers, etc. But these two categories
-of workers, however different and contrary they may be in their
-education and habits, are welded together, to the point that a
-capitalist industry can not be carried on without manual laborers any
-more than without intellectual wage-workers.
-
-United in production, united under the yoke of capitalist exploitation,
-united they should be also in revolt against the common enemy. The
-intellectuals, if they understood their own real interests would come
-in crowds to socialism, not through philanthropy, not through pity for
-the miseries of the workers, not through affectation and snobbery,
-but to save themselves, to assure the future welfare of their wives
-and children, to fulfill their duty to their class. They ought to be
-ashamed of being left behind in the social battle by their comrades in
-the manual category. They have many things to teach them, but they have
-still much to learn from them; the workingmen have a practical sense
-superior to theirs, and have given proof of an instinctive intuition
-of the communist tendencies of modern capitalism which is lacking to
-the intellectuals, who have only been able by a conscious mental effort
-to arrive at this conception. If only they had understood their own
-interests, they would long since have turned against the capitalist
-class the education which it has generously distributed in order
-better to exploit them; they would have utilized their intellectual
-capacities, which are enriching their masters, as so many improved
-weapons to fight capitalism and to conquer the freedom of their class,
-the wage-working class.
-
-Capitalist production, which has overthrown the old conditions of life
-and of work, has elaborated new forms, which already can be discerned
-without supernatural vision, but which to the intellectuals remain
-sealed under seven seals. One of the leading lights of intellectualism,
-M. Durkheim, in his book, "The Division of Labor," which made some
-noise in university circles, can not conceive of society except on
-the social pattern of ancient Egypt, each laborer remaining, his life
-through, penned up in one single trade. However, unless one is so
-unfortunate as to be affected by the hopeless near-sightedness of the
-Ecole Normale, one can not help seeing that the machine is suppressing
-trades, one after the other, in a way to let only one survive, that
-of the machinist, and that when it has finished its revolutionary
-work which the socialists will complete by revolutionizing capitalist
-society, the producer of the communist society will plow and sow with
-the machine today, will spin, will turn wood or polish steel to-morrow,
-and will exercise in turn all the trades to the greater profit of his
-health and his intelligence.
-
-The industrial applications of mechanics, chemistry and physics,
-which, monopolized by capital, oppress the worker, will, when they
-shall be common property, emancipate man from toil and give him leisure
-and liberty.
-
-Mechanical production, which under capitalist direction can only buffet
-the worker back and forth from periods of over-work to periods of
-enforced idleness, will when developed and regulated by a communist
-administration, require from the producer, to provide for the normal
-needs of society, only a maximum day of two or three hours in the
-workshop, and when this time of necessary social labor is fulfilled he
-will be able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual pleasures of
-life.
-
-The artist then will paint, will sing, will dance, the writer will
-write, the musician will compose operas, the philosopher will build
-systems, the chemist will analyze substances not to gain money, to
-receive a salary, but to deserve applause, to win laurel wreaths, like
-the conquerors at the Olympic games, but to satisfy their artistic and
-scientific passion; for one does not drink a glass of champagne or kiss
-the woman he loves for the benefit of the gallery. The artist and the
-scientist may then repeat the enthusiastic words of Kepler, that hero
-of science: "The elector of Saxony with all his wealth can not equal
-the pleasure I have felt in composing the Mysterium Cosmographicum."
-
-Will not the intellectuals end by hearing the voice of the socialist
-calling them to the rescue, to emancipate science and art from the
-capitalist yoke, to liberate thought from the slavery of commercialism?
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[31] Ever since the French Revolution the law has required the words
-"Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité." to be placed over the door of every
-public building in France.—Translator.
-
-[32] It is a well-known fact that in the American establishments of
-these and similar companies each workman before receiving employment
-must sign papers transferring to the corporation the title to all
-inventions made by him while in its service.—Translator.
-
-
-
-
-THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM
-
-
-The nineteenth century was the century of capitalism. Capitalism
-filled that century to overflowing with its commerce, its industry,
-its manners, its fashions, its literature, its art, its science,
-its philosophy, its religion, its politics and its civil code, more
-universal than the laws imposed by Rome upon the nations of the ancient
-world. The capitalist movement, starting from England, the United
-States and France, has shaken the foundations of Europe and of the
-world. It has forced the old feudal monarchies of Austria and Germany
-and the barbaric despotism of Russia to put themselves in line; and in
-these last days it has gone into the extreme East, into Japan, where
-it has overthrown the feudal system and implanted the industry and the
-politics of capitalism.
-
-Capitalism has taken possession of our planet; its fleets bring
-together the continents which oceans had separated; its railroads,
-spanning mountains and deserts, furrow the earth; the electric wires,
-the nervous system of the globe, bind all nations together, and their
-palpitations reverberate in the great centers of population. Now for
-the first time there is a contemporary history of the world. Events in
-Australia, the Transvaal, China, are known in London, Paris, New York,
-at the moment they are brought about, precisely as if they happened in
-the outskirts of the city where the news is published.
-
-Civilized nations live off the products of the whole earth. Egypt,
-India, Louisiana, furnish the cotton, Australia the wool, Japan the
-silk, China the tea, Brazil the coffee, New Zealand and the United
-States the meat and grain. The capitalist carries in his stomach and on
-his back the spoils of the universe.
-
-The study of natural phenomena has undergone an unprecedented, an
-unheard-of, development. New sciences, geology, chemistry, physics,
-etc., have arisen. The industrial application of the forces of nature
-and of the discoveries of science has taken on a still more startling
-development; some of the geometrical discoveries of the scientists
-of Alexandria, two thousand years old, have for the first time been
-utilized.
-
-The production of machine industry can provide for all demand and more.
-The mechanical application of the forces of nature has increased man's
-productive forces tenfold, a hundredfold. A few hours' daily labor,
-furnished by the able-bodied members of the nation, would produce
-enough to satisfy the material and intellectual needs of all.
-
-But what has come of the colossal and wonderful development of science,
-industry and commerce in the nineteenth century? Has it made humanity
-stronger, healthier, happier? Has it given leisure to the producers?
-Has it brought comfort and contentment to the people?
-
-Never has work been so prolonged, so exhausting, so injurious to man's
-body and so fatal to his intelligence. Never has the industrial labor
-which undermines health, shortens life and starves the intellect been
-so general, been imposed on such ever-growing masses of laborers. The
-men, women and children of the proletariat are bent under the iron yoke
-of machine industry. Poverty is their reward when they work, starvation
-when they lose their jobs.
-
-In former stages of society, famine appeared only when the earth
-refused her harvests. In capitalist society, famine sits at the hearth
-of the working class when granaries and cellars burst with the fruits
-of the earth, and when the market is gorged with the products of
-industry.
-
-All the toil, all the production, all the suffering of the working
-class has but served to heighten its physical and mental destitution,
-to drag it down from poverty into wretchedness.
-
-Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the
-social and political life of a century of science and industry, has
-become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like
-the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to
-provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they
-dared demand the right to work—a slave's right.[33]
-
-The capitalist class has also made a failure of itself. It has seized
-upon the social wealth to enjoy it, and never was the ruling class more
-incapable of enjoyment. The newly rich, those who have built up their
-fortunes by accumulating the filchings from labor, live like strangers
-in the midst of luxury and artistic treasures, with which they surround
-themselves through a foolish vanity, to pay homage to their millions.
-
-The leading capitalists, the millionaires and billionaires, are
-sad specimens of the human race, useless and hurtful. The mark of
-degeneracy is upon them. Their sickly offspring are old at birth. Their
-organs are sapped with diseases. Exquisite meats and wines load down
-their tables, but the stomach refuses to digest them; women expert in
-love perfume their couches with youth and beauty, but their senses are
-be-numbed. They own palatial dwellings in enchanting sites, and they
-have no eyes, no feeling for joyful nature, with its eternal youth
-and change. Sated and disgusted with everything, they are followed
-everywhere by ennui as by their shadows. They yawn at rising and when
-they go to bed; they yawn at their fests and at their orgies. They
-began yawning in their mother's womb.
-
-The pessimism which, in the wake of capitalist property, made its
-appearance in ancient Greece six centuries before Jesus Christ, and
-which has since formed the foundation of the moral and religious
-philosophy of the capitalist class, became the leading characteristic
-of the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century. The
-pessimism of Theognis sprang from the uncertainties and vicissitudes of
-life in the Greek cities, torn by the perpetual wars between rich and
-poor; the pessimism of the capitalist is the bitter fruit of satiety,
-ennui and the impoverishment of the blood.
-
-The capitalist class is falling into its second childhood; its
-decreptitude appears in its literature, now returning to its
-starting point. Romantic literature, the literary form proper to the
-capitalist class, which started out with the romantic Christianity
-of Chateaubriand, is returning to the same point, after passing
-through the historical novel and the character novel. (Witness in this
-country the immense sale of "Ben Hur" and its imitators.—Translator.)
-Capitalism, which in its virile and combative youth in the eighteenth
-century had wished to emancipate itself from Christianity, resigns
-itself in its old age to practices of the grossest superstition.
-
-The capitalist class, bankrupt, old, useless and hurtful, has finished
-its historic mission; it persists as ruling class only through its
-acquired momentum. The proletariat of the twentieth century will
-execute the decree of history; will drive it from its position of
-social control. Then the stupendous work in science and industry
-accomplished by civilized humanity, at the price of such toil and
-suffering, will engender peace and happiness; then will this vale of
-tears be transformed into an earthly paradise.
-
-
-FOOTNOTE:
-
-[33] I allude to the Days of June, 1848. The Insurgents demanded the
-"Right to Work."
-
-
-
-
-THE WOMAN QUESTION
-
-
-The bourgeois has thought and still thinks that woman ought to
-remain at home and devote her activity to supervising and directing
-the housekeeping, caring for her husband, and manufacturing and
-nourishing children. Even Xenophon, at the time when the bourgeoisie
-was newly born and was taking its shape in ancient society, traced
-the main outlines of this ideal of woman. But if through the course
-of centuries, this ideal may have appeared reasonable, because it
-corresponded to economic conditions which prevailed, it is no longer
-anything more than an ideological survival, since these conditions have
-ceased to exist.
-
-The domestication of woman presupposes that she fulfills in the
-household certain numerous functions which absorb all her energy; now,
-the most important and the most exacting of these domestic labors—the
-spinning of wool and linen, the cutting and making up of clothing,
-laundry work, baking, etc.,—are carried on by capitalistic industry.
-It furthermore presupposes that man by his contribution to the family
-capital and his earnings provides for the material needs of the
-family; now, among the comfortable bourgeoisie, marriage is as much an
-association of capitals[34] as a union of persons and often the capital
-contributed by the wife exceeds that of the husband, and in the small
-bourgeoisie the gains of the father of the family have fallen so low
-that the children,—girls as well as boys,—are compelled to earn their
-living in business, railroad offices, banks, teaching, civil service
-positions, etc., while it often happens that the young wife continues
-to work outside in order to help out the resources of the housekeeping,
-when the earnings of the husband do not suffice to cover the expenses.
-
-The daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, as well as those
-of the working class, thus enter into competition with their father,
-brothers and husband. This economic antagonism, which the bourgeoisie
-had prevented from developing by confining the wife to the family
-dwelling, is becoming general and is intensified in proportion as
-capitalistic production develops; it invades the fields of the liberal
-professions—medicine, law, literature, journalism, the sciences,
-etc.,—where man had reserved for himself a monopoly, which he imagined
-was to be eternal. The laborers, as is always the case, have been the
-first to draw the logical consequences of the participation of woman
-in social production; they have replaced the ideal of the artisan,—the
-wife who is nothing but a housekeeper,—by a new ideal,—woman as a
-companion in their economic and political struggles for the raising of
-wages and the emancipation of labor.
-
-The bourgeois has not yet succeeded in understanding that his ideal
-is already long since out of date and that it must be remodeled
-to correspond to the new conditions of the social environment;
-nevertheless since the first half of the nineteenth century the ladies
-of the bourgeoisie have begun to protest against their inferior
-position in the family, so much the more intolerable in that their
-dowry placed them on a footing of equality with the husband; they
-rebelled against the domestic slavery and the parsimonious life to
-which they were condemned, as well as the deprivation of intellectual
-and material enjoyments which was imposed upon them; the bolder ones
-went so far as to demand free love and to ally themselves with the
-utopian sects which preached the emancipation of woman.[35] The
-philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they
-would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest
-of the family, which they declared could not survive without the
-subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on
-of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote
-herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man
-might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties.
-These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the
-cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which,
-by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child's
-cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the
-working-class family.
-
-The bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, equally imbecile and
-ethical, of these solemn philosophers; they kept on their way and
-attained the end they set for themselves; like the patrician lady of
-ancient Rome and the countess of the eighteenth century, they threw
-off the cares of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child upon
-mercenaries, that they might devote themselves wholly to the toilet,
-that they might be the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capitalist
-world and in order to make business move. The daughters and wives of
-American plutocracy have attained the extreme limits of this sort of
-emancipation; they are transforming their fathers and husbands into
-accumulators of millions, which they squander madly. Since the toilet
-does not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of capitalism, they
-find amusement in breaking the marriage contract in order to assert
-their independence and improve the race. The Communist Manifesto
-remarks that the innumerable divorce suits in which adultery is alleged
-are indisputable proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois of
-both sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage which the "licentious
-socialists" talk of loosening.
-
-When the daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, obliged to
-earn their living and to increase the resources of the family, began
-to invade the stores, the offices, the civil service and the liberal
-professions, the bourgeois were seized with anxiety for their means
-of existence already so reduced; feminine competition would reduce
-them still further. The intellectuals who took up the defense of the
-males, thought it prudent not to start afresh with the ethical sermons
-which had miscarried so piteously in the case of the wealthy bourgeois
-ladies;—they appealed to science; they demonstrated by reasons which
-were irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman cannot emerge from
-the occupations of housekeeping without violating the laws of nature
-and history. They proved to their complete satisfaction that woman
-is an inferior being, incapable of receiving a higher intellectual
-education and of furnishing the combination of attention, energy and
-agility demanded by the professions in which she was entering into
-competition with man. Her brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less
-complex than that of man, is a "child's brain." Her less developed
-muscles have not the strength for attack and for resistance; the
-bones of her forearm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her
-osseous, muscular and nervous system do not permit her to undertake
-more than the routine of the household. Nature designed her in all her
-organization to be the servant of man, just as the odious god of the
-Jews and Christians marked out the race of Ham for slavery.
-
-History contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra
-scientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that
-always and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had been
-shut up in the house, in the woman's apartments; if such had been her
-lot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the
-positive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois
-philosophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better:
-he seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority
-of woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male
-criminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the
-statistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferiority. Thus we see
-that ethics, anatomy, physiology, social statistics and history riveted
-forever upon woman the chains of domestic servitude.
-
-
-II.
-
-Bachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropologists have revised the
-opinion of the historians and philosophers upon the role played by
-woman in the past. They have shown that everywhere the paternal
-family, which subordinated woman to man, had been preceded by the
-maternal family, which gave the first place to woman. The Greek
-language contains the record of her two conditions: while the Spartans,
-among whom matriarchal customs persisted, still continued to call
-her _despoina_, the mistress of the house, the sovereign, the other
-Greeks gave to the wife the name _damar_, the subdued, the vanquished.
-The Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that she is _parthenos
-admes_, the girl not subdued, that is to say, without a husband,
-without a master. The modern expression "yoke of marriage" preserves
-the ancient idea.
-
-Hesiod, in opposition to Homer, who tells only of patriarchal customs,
-preserves precious recollections of the matriarchal family; he tells
-us that when it existed man, even if he were a hundred years old,
-lived with his prudent mother,—he was fed in her house like a great
-child. (Works and Days, V. 129-130.) It was not the woman who then had
-the "child's brain", but the man; everything seems in fact to prove
-that her intelligence was the first to develop. This intellectual
-superiority caused her to be deified before man in the primitive
-religions of Egypt, the Indies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first
-inventions of the arts and trades, with the exception of metal working,
-to be attributed to goddesses and not to gods. The Muses, originally
-three in number, were in Greece, even in preference to Apollo, the
-goddesses of poetry, music and the dance. Isis, "mother of corn ears
-and lady of bread," and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the Egyptians and
-Greeks the tillage of barley and wheat and made them renounce their
-anthropophagic repasts. The woman appeared to the pre-patriarchal man,
-like the Germans whom Tacitus knew, as having within herself something
-holy and providential, _aliquid sanctum et providum_ (Germania VIII).
-Her prudence and foresight gave her this divine character. Must we
-conclude that this intellectual superiority, which manifested itself
-when the economic environment is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon?
-
-But, in any case, it may be asserted that the vitality of woman is
-superior to that of man. The life insurance companies of the United
-States, England and Holland, which do not base their calculation upon
-scientific fairy tales of the intellectuals but upon mortality tables,
-pay woman an annuity below that which they give man, because her
-probabilities of death are less. Here for example is the annuity paid
-for a capital of $1,000 by American and Dutch companies:[36]
-
-                     New York.        Holland.
-    Age.          Men.    Women.    Men.    Women.
-  50 years      $ 76.47  $ 69.57  $ 76.80  $ 73.60
-  60 years        97.24    88.03    98.50    93.50
-  70 years       134.31   122.48   142.00   136.70
-  80 years       183.95   168.00   222.70   211.70
-
-It may be objected that man, leading a more active life, is more
-subject to accidents, diseases, and other causes of death, and that
-consequently the prolonged life of woman does not prove the higher
-vitality of her organism, but the advantages of a life less subject to
-accident.
-
-The answer to this objection is found in the statistics of the various
-nations. There is in no country a perfect equilibrium between the
-number of women and that of men; for 1,000 men there are in Belgium
-1,005 women, in France 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and
-in Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these countries with the feminine
-preponderance there is an excess of masculine births: of the whole
-of Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are born from 1,040 to
-1,060 boys. If, in spite of this excess of masculine births, more
-girls survive, it is because the greater mortality of the boys shows
-the balance in favor of the girls; and this higher mortality cannot
-be explained by the life of man being more subject to accident, since
-it is observed at an early age, notably during the first two years.
-All the diseases of childhood, with the exception of diphtheria and
-whooping cough, are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys than
-among girls; from zero to five years the male sex is particularly
-frail; at all ages, except between ten and fifteen years, the male
-mortality is in excess of the female.
-
-The superior vitality of the female sex is also noticeable in
-the greater ease with which it builds up its organism. M. Iribe,
-superintendent of the sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Parisian
-children from three to fourteen years of age, who are afflicted with
-anaemia, incipient tuberculosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at
-the time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, the progress in
-weight, girth and chest development is incomparably higher in the girls
-than in the boys, the increase in weight is double and often more.
-
-The same statement has been made by other superintendents of
-sanitariums. (Bulletin Medical, No. 81, 1903.)
-
-Woman undeniably possesses a greater vitality than man. M. Gustav
-Loisel has made inquiry "as to whether this difference existed in
-embryonic life, and what may be its cause?" He has communicated the
-results of his inquiries to the Biological Society of Paris, which
-published them in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903.
-
-M. Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and measurements made upon 72
-foetuses at the Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou;[37] from
-the following weights of the foetuses at three, four, five and six
-months he obtains the following figures:
-
-                      Males.   Females.   Differences.
-                          Grammes.       Grammes.
-  Total weight       1908.18   1708.11   200.07 in favor of males
-  Kidneys              16.87     17.19     2.67 in favor of males
-  Superrenal glands     5.15      6.43     0.32 in favor of females
-  Liver                88.35     96.31     1.28 in favor of females
-  Spleen                2.59      2.38     7.90 in favor of females
-  Thymus                3.89      3.97     0.21 in favor of males
-  Heart                10.97     12.60     0.08 in favor of females
-  Lungs                47.29     44.62     1.63 in favor of females
-  Brain               236.94    235.17     1.17 in favor of males
-
-"These figures thus show us," says M. Loisel, "a preponderance already
-existing in favor of the females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal
-glands, the liver, the thymus and the heart; this predominance is the
-more noticeable since the total weight of the body is larger in the
-male than in the female."
-
-If now we take the relation between the total weight and the weight of
-the organs which are heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion
-is still in favor of the female:
-
-
-PROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT.
-
-             Males.       Females.
-  Spleen   1 to 736       1 to 718
-  Lungs    1 to  40       1 to  38
-  Brain    1 to   8       1 to   7
-
-The organs here examined, brain included, are thus absolutely or
-relatively heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus.
-
-M. Loisel has also examined into the proportion of the weights of
-the different organs to the total weight according to the age of the
-foetus. He has prepared a table, from which I take only the figures
-concerning the brain:
-
-                                Proportion of
-  AGE         TOTAL WEIGHT     weight of brain
-                               to total weight.
-             Males   Females    Males   Females
-            Grammes  Grammes
-  3 Months    58.33   65.96     1/6.5   1/7
-  4 Months   167.25  182.58     1/7.3   1/6.6
-  5 Months   336.33  295.00     1/7.6   1/7.5
-  6 Months   732.58  636.00     1/8.3   1/7.3
-
-The weight of the male foetus, which is below that of the female
-foetus, at three months, when the sex has just been determined, grows
-more rapidly and the proportion between the weight is always to the
-advantage of the females from the fourth month on.
-
-"To sum up," says M. Loisel, "all the organs are heavier in the female
-foetus than in the male foetus up to about the fourth month. The
-predominance then passes over to the male, but only for the lungs
-and the organs for sex-union, thus the cardiac muscle always remains
-heavier in the female. The organs which are of real service to the
-individual during the embryonic life always remain more developed in
-the female sex.
-
-If now we consider that the differences in favor of the females are
-especially in the liver, the heart, the superrenal glands and the
-kidneys, we shall come to the conclusion that the greater vitality of
-the female organisms corresponds to their being better nourished and
-better purified."[38]
-
-
-III.
-
-The superior organization possessed by woman at birth, assuring her
-throughout her life a much greater vitality, is probably demanded
-by the part she plays in the production of the species, a part
-altogether more prolonged and exhausting than that of the man who,
-when fertilization is accomplished, has no more to do, while then
-the travail of woman begins, to continue during long months, through
-pregnancy and after birth. The women of savage tribes suckle their
-children for two years and more. It sometimes happens that the male
-pays dear for his inutility; after union, the bees kill the males,
-and the male spider must hastily take himself off that he may not be
-devoured by the larger and stronger female. Among the Sakawas, at
-the annual feast of Mylitta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the
-handsome slave who had just united with the priestess who incarnated
-the Assyrian goddess. This bloody religious ceremonial must have been a
-reproduction of an Amazonian custom.
-
-The life of savagery and barbarism permits woman to develop her
-superiority from birth; each sex there has its special function; it
-is the division of labor in embryo. The man, whose muscular system is
-more developed, "fights, hunts, fishes and sits down," according to the
-Australian native, he regards all the rest as under the jurisdiction
-of woman, whose function puts brain activity into play at an earlier
-epoch. She has charge of the communal house, which often shelters a
-clan of more than one hundred individuals; she prepares clothing from
-skins and other raw materials; she charges herself with the cultivation
-of the garden, the rearing of domestic animals and the manufacture
-of household utensils; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes
-the provisions, vegetable and animal, which have been gathered during
-the course of the year; and like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians
-and the Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accompanies the warrior
-on the field battle, aids in the fray, raises him up if he is wounded
-and cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated that, according to
-Tacitus, the barbarians who under the leadership of Civilis revolted
-against Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman soldiers because
-their wives did not accompany them when they marched to combat.
-Plato likewise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the Eleusinian
-Mysteries, was more informed regarding ancient customs than is
-supposed, makes the women to be present in the battles of the warriors
-of his Republic.
-
-These multiple and diverse functions, which obliged woman to reflect,
-to calculate, to think of the morrow and to look ahead at long range,
-must necessarily have developed her intellectual faculties; thus the
-craniologists say that only a slight difference exists between the
-cranial capacity of the two sexes in the negroes, the Australians,
-and the red skins, while they find that it goes on increasing among
-civilized people. Woman is for the careless and improvident savage, a
-providence; she is the prudent and prescient being who presides over
-his destinies from birth to death. Man, making his religions with
-the events and the intellectual acquisitions of his daily life, was
-thus obliged to begin by deifying woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and
-Romans had placed their destinies under the control of goddesses,
-the Fates—Moirai, Parcae—whose name signifies in the Latin language
-"sparing," "economic," and in the Greek the part which falls to each
-one in the distribution of food or of booty.
-
-If we relieve the rich and poetical Greek mythology of the symbolical,
-allegorical and mystical lucubrations with which the philosophers
-and the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexandrine period have
-overloaded and complicated it, and which the German mythologists,
-servilely copied by those of France and England, have carried on to
-their own more perfect confusion, it becomes an inestimable storehouse
-of prehistoric customs which preserves the memory of the manners
-which travelers and anthropologists now observe living again among
-the savages and barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. The
-mythological legend furnishes us with information of the relative value
-of feminine and masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before they
-had entered upon the patriarchal period.
-
-Jupiter, the "father of the gods", as Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylos
-call him, after having driven the feminine divinities from Olympus,
-enthroned there the patriarchate, which for some generations had
-been established upon earth; the religious heaven always reflects
-terrestrial manners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. But
-Jupiter, who like every barbarian, knew how to use his fists (Iliad
-XV. 228), who boasted that he was the strongest of the gods, and who
-to dominate the others kept next his throne two servants, Force and
-Violence, always ready to obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by
-his intellectual qualities to replace woman in the government of the
-Olympian family; in order to supply the capacities which were lacking
-to him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, "the wisest among
-mortals and gods." The savage and the barbarian, that he may take into
-himself the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throbbing heart;
-Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence
-and her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse
-meanings; these qualities were considered as belonging to woman.
-
-But the process of assimilation took some time, if we may judge from
-the rascally farce played upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed
-and butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed the flesh which
-he covered with the skin upon which he deposited the entrails; in
-another pile he put the bare bones which he adroitly concealed under
-heaps of fat. "You have divided the parts very badly," said the father
-of gods and men. "Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of living gods,
-take the part that your wisdom counsels you to choose," replied the
-astute Prometheus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only to his
-gluttony, laid both hands upon the heap of fat amid the laughter of
-the Olympians; his wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones.
-(Theogony 435 _et seq._) Such a farce would hardly have been played in
-the Olympian heaven had it not been that on the earth similar tests had
-been required to prove to the Father that his intellectual faculties
-did not justify him in taking the place of the Mother in the leadership
-of the family and the management of its property.
-
-The higher position in the family and society, which man conquered
-by brute force, while it compelled him to a mental activity to which
-he was little accustomed, at the same time put at his disposal
-opportunities for reflection and development which constantly
-increased. Woman, "subdued," as the Greek expression has it, shut up in
-the narrow circle of the family, the leadership of which had been taken
-from her, and having little or no contact with the outside world, saw
-on the contrary a great reduction of the means of development which
-she had enjoyed, and to complete her subjection she was forbidden the
-intellectual culture which was given to man. If in spite of these
-fetters and these disadvantages, the disastrous effects of which cannot
-be exaggerated, the brain of woman continued to evolve, it was because
-woman's intelligence profited through the progress realized by the
-masculine brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which
-it has acquired; thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs
-which are highly developed among the cocks, while in other varieties
-they transmit to the males their exaggerated crests. "It is fortunate,"
-says Darwin upon this point, "that the equal transmission of the
-characteristics of both sexes has been a general rule in the whole
-series of mammals, otherwise, it is probable that man would have become
-as superior to woman in intellectual power as the peacock is to the
-female in ornamental plumage." (Descent of Man—Sexual Selection, VIII
-and XIX.)
-
-But defects as well as valuable qualities are transmitted from one sex
-to the other: if woman has profited by the brain-growth of man, he
-has in his turn been retarded in his development by the sluggishness
-in the development of woman's brain, produced by the reduction to the
-smallest minimum of intellectual activity to which he has condemned
-her. The breeders who seek the choicest results are as careful to
-have irreproachable females as males; amateur cockfighters attach as
-much importance to the selection of the pullets as to the cocks, they
-produce only from those which are armed with spurs and which have the
-fighting spirit. It may be said that humanity, since it emerged from
-communism of the clan to live under the system of private property, has
-been developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution
-has been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex.
-Man by systematically depriving woman of the means of development,
-material and intellectual, has made of her a force retarding human
-progress.
-
-In fact if we study and compare the different periods of savagery
-and barbarism, we cannot but observe the continuous and remarkable
-progress in human mind, because women and men, exercising freely their
-physical and mental faculties, contribute equally to the evolution of
-the species; this has been retarded ever since humanity entered into
-the period of civilization and private property, because then woman,
-constrained and confined in her development, cannot contribute to
-it in so effective a way. The senile stagnation in which China has
-vegetated for more than a thousand years can only be attributed to
-the degradation of woman, which has gone to the point of the cruel
-mutilation of her feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely
-in the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers from the degradation of
-woman, since in spite of the extraordinary material progress of these
-last two thousand years and the increasing and no less extraordinary
-accumulation of human knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the
-brain of the civilized modern exceeds in power and capacity that of
-the Greeks of the classic epoch, which extends from the seventh to
-the fourth century before the Christian era. It is certain that a
-Victor Hugo, a Zola, or any university graduate or doctor has stored
-in his brain an abundance of positive and diversified conceptions not
-possessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Protagoras and Aristotle, but that
-does not prove that his imagination and his intelligence, or that of
-his contemporaries is more rich, more varied and more vast than that of
-the generations of Ionia and Attica, who were the artificers of that
-incomparable budding and blossoming of science, philosophy, literature
-and art at which history marvels and who reveled in that subtle and
-paradoxical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of which has not
-again been seen. The sophists—Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato,
-etc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of the spiritualistic
-philosophy and many others besides: yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and
-of Greece had emerged from barbarism only a few centuries before. Many
-reasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but
-the principal one is the subjection of woman.
-
-
-IV.
-
-Capitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to
-which woman devoted herself in the gentile house, has levied into its
-army of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the
-wives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie,
-in order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual
-capacities has set aside the venerable and venerated axiom of masculine
-ethics: "to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's
-knowledge;" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the
-rudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not
-be forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine
-brain, which the intellectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as
-capable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction.
-The abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the
-first whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in
-which they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities;
-they are now attacking the experimental sciences (physiology, physics,
-chemistry, applied mechanics, etc.), in America and Europe there arises
-a throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the
-inferiority of the conditions of development in which they have lived
-since their first infancy.
-
-As Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and
-launched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit
-her more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow
-the economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised
-to seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital,
-endures the miseries of the free laborer and bears in addition her
-chains of the past. Her economic misery is aggravated; instead of being
-supported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still submits,
-she is obliged to earn her living; and under the pretext that she has
-fewer necessities than man, her labor is paid less; and when her
-daily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in
-the household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social
-functions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery,
-economic and physiologic. The social and economic condition of woman is
-a danger for the reproduction of the species.
-
-But this crushing and pitiful condition announces the end of her
-servitude, which begins with the establishment of private property and
-which can end only with its abolition. Civilized humanity, oppressed
-by the mechanical mode of production, turns its face toward a society,
-based on common property, in which woman, delivered from the economic,
-legal and moral chains which bind her, may develop freely her physical
-and intellectual faculties, as in the time of the communism of the
-savages.
-
-The savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity and successfully restrain
-the circle of sexual relations, found no other means than to separate
-the sexes; there are reasons for believing that the women took the
-initiative in this separation, which the specialization of their
-functions consolidated and emphasized. This was manifested socially by
-religious ceremonials and secret languages peculiar to each set and
-even by struggles;[39] and after having taken the character of violent
-antagonism, it ended in the brutal subjection of woman, which still
-survives although it is progressively attenuated in proportion as the
-competition of the two sexes becomes more general and intense upon
-the economic field. But the modern antagonism will not end with the
-victory of one sex over the other, for it is one of the phenomena of
-the struggle of labor against capital, which will find its solution in
-the emancipation of the working class in which women as well as men are
-incorporated.
-
-The technique of production which tends to suppress the specialization
-of trades and functions and to replace muscular effort by attention
-and intellectual skill and which, the more it is perfected, mingles
-and confounds man and woman the more in social labor, will prevent the
-return of the conditions which in savage and barbarous nations had
-maintained the separation of the sexes. Common property will put an end
-to the economic antagonism of specialization.
-
-But if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the end of female servitude
-and of the antagonism of the sexes and to conceive for the human
-species an era of incomparable bodily and mental progress, brought
-about by women and men of a high development in muscle and brain, it is
-impossible to foresee the sexual relations of free and equal women and
-men who will not be united nor separated by sordid material interests
-and by the gross ethics engendered by such interests. But if we may
-judge by the present and the past, men, in whom the genetic passion
-is more violent and more continuous than in women—the same phenomenon
-is observed in the males and females of the whole animal series—will
-be obliged to exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to
-win their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, as Darwin has shown,
-fulfilled an important role in the development of the animal species
-and which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play this part in the
-Indo-European races for about three thousand years, will again become
-one of the most active factors in the perfecting of the human race.
-
-Motherhood and love will permit women to regain the higher position
-which she occupied in primitive societies, the memory of which has been
-preserved by the legends and myths of the ancient religions.
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[34] The dowry has played an important role in the history of woman:
-at the beginning of the patriarchal period the husband buys her from
-her father, who has to refund her purchase price if for any cause
-whatever he repudiates her and sends her back to her family; later this
-purchase price is returned to him and constitutes her dowry, which
-her relatives are accustomed to double. From the moment when the wife
-enters into her husband's house with a dowry, she ceases to be a slave
-whom he may dismiss, sell and kill. The dowry, which in Rome and Athens
-became a legal charge upon the property of the husband, was, in case
-of her repudiation or divorce, to be restored to her in preference to
-any creditor. "No pleasure is derived from the riches which a woman
-brings into the household," says a fragment of Euripides, "they only
-serve to render divorce difficult." The comic authors ridiculed the
-husbands, who in fear of a suit over the dowry, fell into dependence
-upon the wife. A character in Plautus says to a husband who is talking
-against his wife, "You accepted the money of her dowry, you sold your
-authority—imperium." The wealthy Roman matrons carried their insolence
-to such a point that they did not trust the management of their dowry
-to their husbands, they gave it over to the stewards, who sometimes
-fulfilled with them another service, as the evil-speaking Martial
-states.
-
-Adultery on the part of the wife involved a legal divorce and the
-restitution of the dowry, but rather than come to this painful
-extremity, the husbands preferred to close their eyes to the foibles
-of their wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike at them
-in order to recall them to their marital dignity; in China a certain
-number of bamboo strokes were applied to the soles of their feet. The
-penalties not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to repudiate
-their adulterous wives, the law, in order to prop up masculine virtue,
-permitted those who denounced the infidelity of the wife to retain a
-part of the dowry; there were then men who married only in prospect
-of the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded the law by having
-themselves enrolled in the censor's book on the list of prostitutes,
-to whom it did not apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so
-considerable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a decree forbidding
-"women who had a patrician for a grandfather, husband or father to
-traffic in their bodies." (Tacitus, Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the
-part of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, as well as
-in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, had become so
-general that it had so to speak entered into the social customs. It was
-looked upon lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of marriage.
-
-[35] The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that the religion of
-Saint Simon had come "to put an end to that shameful traffic, that
-legal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses
-the monstrous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and of
-ignorance, of youth and decrepitude."
-
-[36] The French companies make no differences between the sexes because
-they pay very small annuities. La Génerale, the most important one in
-France, gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of $64.20;
-at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 years $134.70. Thus
-it realizes immense profits: its shares which in 1819 were worth 750
-francs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs.
-
-[37] E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Development of the Foetus."
-Paris. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for
-official use.
-
-[38] The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the
-fertilized eggs would give birth to females and to workers; and the
-nonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from eggs that
-are less complex.
-
-[39] A. W. Howit, who observed among the Australians a species of
-sexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of
-one and the same clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem
-for one sex is killed by the other sex.
-
-
-
-
-THE SOCIALIST IDEAL
-
-
-Our comrades in Germany were discussing some time since the question
-whether Socialism is a science. Socialism is not and cannot be a
-science for the simple reason that it is a political party and must
-disappear when its work is accomplished after the abolition of the
-classes which gave birth to it; but the end which it pursues is
-scientific.
-
-Guizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of the class
-struggle—himself a product of the Revolution, which was a dramatic
-struggle between classes—said with good reason that a class cannot
-emancipate itself until it possesses the qualities requisite for taking
-the leadership of society; now one of these qualities is to have a
-more or less definite conception of the social order which it proposes
-to substitute for that which is oppressing it. This conception cannot
-but be a social ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social
-hypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the natural sciences as in
-social science, may be utopian or scientific.
-
-Socialism, because it is a political party of the oppressed class,
-has therefore an ideal. It groups and organizes the efforts of the
-individuals who wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, based
-upon individual property, an ideal or hypothetical society based upon
-common property in the means of production.
-
-Only through the class struggle can modern socialism realize its
-social ideal, which possesses the qualities demanded of any hypothesis
-that claims a scientific character. The fact of choosing a scientific
-goal, and of trying to reach it only through the class struggle,
-distinguishes it from the Socialism of 1848, which was pursuing through
-the reconciliation of classes a social ideal which could not but be
-utopian considering the historic moment in which it was conceived.
-Socialism has thus evolved from Utopia into science. Engels has traced
-the main lines of this evolution in his memorable pamphlet, "Socialism,
-Utopian and Scientific." It is the same with all sciences, which begin
-with Utopia to arrive at positive knowledge; this course is imposed by
-the very nature of the human mind.
-
-Man progresses in social life as in intellectual life, only by starting
-from the known and traveling toward the unknown, and that unknown must
-be represented by the imagination; that imaginary conception of the
-unknown, which cannot but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful
-incentives to action, it is the very condition of every forward
-step. It is natural that men like Bernstein in Germany and Jaurès in
-France should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put it in tow of
-liberalism, accusing it of hypnotising its soldiers with an ideal of
-the year 3000, which makes them live in the expectation of a Messianic
-"catastrophe" and reject the immediate advantages of an understanding
-and co-operation with bourgeois parties, and which blinds them to
-their shocking errors regarding the concentration of wealth, the
-disappearance of small industry and the middle class, the increase of
-class antagonisms, the spreading and intensification of the misery of
-the working class, etc. These errors may have been plausible hypotheses
-before 1848, but since then events have shown their falsity. This
-unfortunate ideal prevents them from descending from the revolutionary
-heights to accept the responsibilities of power and of setting aside
-the cause of labor to devote themselves entirely tongue and pen, to
-the rehabilitation of a millionaire leader; it obliges them to oppose
-all exterior policies and acts, to vote not a cent nor a soldier for
-colonial expeditions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis and the
-alcoholism of civilization to the barbaric tribes. The neo-methodists
-of the ancient and outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes advise
-the socialists to suppress their ideal, or, since it unfortunately
-captivates the masses of the people, to speak of it without caring
-for it, as Jaurès does, that they may consecrate themselves to
-practical necessities, to the vast plans of agricultural and industrial
-co-operation, to popular universities, etc.
-
-The dilettantes of politics, these practical groundlings of
-opportunism, nevertheless hold themselves up for transcendent idealists
-and march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, because they substitute
-for ideas a brilliant orchestra of sonorous words and eternal
-principles.
-
-These bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the
-Revolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses
-and their theories; according to them science should have stopped with
-the study of facts in themselves without dreaming of uniting them into
-a general system. "What is the use of cutting stones without putting
-up a building," replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple
-of Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his theory on the
-continuity of species, which, only thirty years after his death, was
-to take on a new birth with Darwin. They are still reproaching the
-physiologists for wasting their time in elaborating hypotheses which
-last on an average only three years and which cannot explain what
-takes place in a muscle which contracts and in a brain which thinks.
-They grumble against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do not know
-the real nature of elasticity, of electrical conductivity, or even
-what happens when a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like
-to prohibit scientists from any speculation because it is disastrous
-and may lead into error. But the latter protest and declare that
-imagination is one of the first and most indispensable faculties of
-the scientist, and that the hypotheses to which they give birth, even
-though they be erroneous and able to survive only three years, are
-nevertheless the necessary condition of all scientific progress.
-
-If the communist ideal were an hypothesis undemonstrable and false it
-would still be a propelling force of social progress, but such is not
-the case.
-
-The hypothesis in science, as in the social field, is the more
-undemonstrable and susceptible of error in proportion as the data
-contributing to its elaboration are less numerous and more uncertain.
-Greek science, which had to furnish a conception of the world when the
-data regarding the phenomena of nature were of the most rudimentary,
-was obliged to resort to hypotheses which for boldness and intuitive
-accuracy are marvels of history and of thought; after having admitted,
-according to the vulgar opinion, that the earth was flat, and that
-the temple of Delphi was situated at its center, they put forth the
-hypothesis of its spherical form, then undemonstrable.
-
-Socialism, which dates from the first years of the nineteenth century,
-started, like Greek science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, and
-from ideal the more utopian, in that the social world which it proposed
-to transform was less known; and at that epoch could not be known for
-the excellent reason that it was in course of formation.
-
-The machine operated by steam was beginning to edge into industry
-where the tool, managed by the artisan, was moved by human power,
-and in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or waterfalls. The
-Socialist thinkers, as Engels observes, were then obliged to draw from
-their own brain the social ideal which they could not extract from the
-tumultuous economic environment in full course of transformation.
-They grasped again, infusing new life into it, the communist ideal
-which has slumbered in the mind of man since he emerged from the
-communism of primitive society which the poetic Greek mythology calls
-the golden age and which has awakened to shine here and there with a
-glorious splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. They sought,
-then, to establish communism, not because the economic environment
-was ready for its introduction, but because men were miserable,
-because the laws of justice and equality were violated, because the
-precepts of the Christ could not be followed in their purity. The
-communistic ideal, not springing from economic reality, was then but
-an unconscious reminiscence of a prehistoric past, and came only
-from idealistic notions upon a justice, an equality and a gospel law
-no less idealistic; it is then idealistic in the second degree, and
-consequently utopian.
-
-The Socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, who
-rekindled the communist ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a
-consistency less idealistic. They spoke little of the Christian
-religion, of justice and of equality; Robert Owen laid the
-responsibilities of social evils upon the family, property and
-religion; Charles Fourier criticises the ideas of justice and morality
-introduced by the bourgeois Revolution of '89 with incomparable
-animation and irony. They did not weep over the misery of the poor,
-but left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans of romanticism. They
-preached the social problem from its realistic side, the only side
-from which it can be solved. They used their talents to prove that
-a social organization of production would succeed in satisfying the
-desires of all without reducing the share of any, not even that of the
-privileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the recent application of steam
-and machinery demanded also a new organization of labor, and this was
-the constant concern of the industrial bourgeoisie. The socialists were
-thus pursuing the same end as the industrials; bourgeois and socialists
-might consequently come to an understanding. We therefore find in the
-socialist sects of that epoch industrials, engineers and financiers
-who in the second half of the century cast away their sympathy for the
-workers and occupied an important place in capitalist society.
-
-The socialism of that epoch could not under these conditions be
-anything else than pacific; instead of entering on the struggle with
-the capitalists, the socialists thought only of converting them to
-their system of social reform from which they were to be the first to
-benefit. They proclaimed the association of capital, intelligence and
-labor, the interests of which, according to them, were identical! they
-preached a mutual understanding between the employer and the employed,
-between the exploiter and the exploited; they know no class struggle;
-they condemned strikes and all political agitation, especially if it
-were revolutionary; they desired order in the street and harmony in the
-workshop. They demanded, finally, nothing more than was desired by the
-new industrial bourgeoisie.
-
-They foresaw that industry, strengthened by the motive power of steam,
-machinery and the concentration of the instruments of labor, would have
-a colossal producing power, and they had the simplicity to believe that
-the capitalists would content themselves with taking only a reasonable
-part of the wealth thus created, and would leave to their co-operators,
-the manual and intellectual laborers, a portion sufficient to enable
-them to live in comfort. This socialism was marvellously agreeable
-to capital, since it promised an increase of wealth and advised an
-understanding between the laborer and the employer. It recruited
-the great majority of its adepts in the educational hotbeds of the
-bourgeoisie. It was utopian, therefore it was the socialism of the
-intellectuals.
-
-But precisely because it was utopian, the laborers, in constant
-antagonism with their employers on questions of labor and hours,
-looked on it with suspicion. They could understand nothing of this
-socialism which condemned strikes and political action and which
-assumed to harmonize the interests of capital and labor, of the
-exploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from the socialists and gave
-all their sympathies to the bourgeois republicans, because they were
-revolutionary. They joined their secret societies and climbed with them
-upon the barricades to make riots and political revolutions.
-
-Marx and Engels took socialism at the point to which the great utopians
-had brought it, but instead of torturing their brains to improvise the
-organization of labor and of production, they studied that which was
-already created by the very necessities of the new mechanical industry
-which had arrived at a degree of development sufficient to permit
-its power and its tendency to be apparent. Its productivity was so
-enormous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, that it was capable
-of providing abundantly for the normal needs of all the members of
-society. This was the first time in history that such a productive
-power had been observed, and it was because capitalist production could
-satisfy all needs, and for that reason alone, that it is possible to
-reintroduce communism, that is to say the equal participation of all in
-social wealth, and the free and complete development of the physical,
-intellectual and moral faculties. Communism is no longer a utopia but a
-possibility.
-
-Machinery replaces the individualistic production of the small
-industry, by the communistic production of the capitalistic factory,
-but property in the means of labor has remained individual, as in the
-time of the small industry. There is then a contradiction between the
-individualistic mode of possession and the communist mode of production
-and this contradiction translates itself into the antagonism between
-the laborer and the capitalist employer. The producers, who form the
-immense majority of the nation, no longer possess the instruments
-of labor, the possession of which is centralized in the idle hands
-of a decreasing minority. The social problem imposed by mechanical
-production will be solved, as the social problems imposed by preceding
-modes of production have been solved, by precipitating the evolution
-begun by economic force, by finishing the expropriation of the
-individual in the means of production, by giving to the communistic
-mode of production the communistic mode of possession which it demands.
-
-The communism of contemporary socialists no longer proceeds, like that
-of former times, from the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it
-proceeds from economic reality, it is the final goal of the economic
-forces which, without attracting the attention of the capitalists and
-their intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic mold of a new
-society, the coming of which we only have to hasten. Communism, then,
-is no longer a utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific ideal. It may be
-added that never has the economic structure of any society been better
-and more completely analyzed than capitalist society, and that never
-was a social ideal conceived with such numerous and positive data as
-the communist idea of modern socialism.
-
-Although it is the economic forces which fashion men at the pleasure
-and spur them to action, and although these constitute the mysterious
-force determining the great currents of history which the Christians
-attribute to God, and the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress,
-to Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and other similar manitous,
-worthy of savage tribes, they are nevertheless the product of human
-activity. Man, who created them and brought them into the world, has
-thus far let himself be guided by them; yet now that he has understood
-their nature and grasped their tendency, he can act upon their
-evolution. The socialists who are accused of being stricken by Oriental
-fatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to
-bring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms
-like the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee before
-its fundamental dogma, _laissez faire_, _laissez passer_, propose on
-the contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been
-subdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to
-work misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their
-ideal to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for the grace of
-God, and the capitalists for wealth; they prepare, on the contrary,
-to realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capitalist
-class and to its sentiments of justice and humanity, but by fighting
-it, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its
-economic despotism.
-
-Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence
-a criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its
-enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition
-with that of the ruling class. The struggle is waged at first in
-the ideological world before the physical shock of the revolutionary
-battle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which
-must be revolted against, for "the ideas of the ruling class are the
-ideas of society," or these ideas are the intellectual reflection of
-its material interests.
-
-Thus, the wealth of the ruling class is produced by slave labor;
-religion, ethics, philosophy and literature agree in authorizing
-slavery. The ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes with his
-curse the progeny of Ham, that it may furnish slaves. Aristotle, the
-encyclopedic thinker of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are
-predestined by nature and that no rights exist for them, for there
-can be no rights except between equals. Euripides in his tragedies
-preaches the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. Augustine and
-the Church teach slaves submission to their earthly masters that they
-may deserve the favor of their heavenly master; Christian civilization
-introduced slavery into America and maintains it there until economic
-phenomena prove that slave labor is a method of exploitation more
-costly and less profitable than free labor.
-
-At the epoch when the Greco-Roman civilization was dissolving, when the
-labor of artisans and free workers began to be substituted for slave
-labor, pagan religion, philosophy and literature decided to accord them
-certain rights. The same Euripides who advised the slave to lose his
-personality in that of the master does not wish him to be despised.
-"There is nothing shameful in slavery but the name," says the pedagogue
-in Ion, "the slave, moreover, is not inferior to the free man when
-he has a noble heart." The mysteries of Eleusis and of Orphism, like
-Christianity, which continues their work, admit slaves among their
-initiated and promise them liberty, equality and happiness after death.
-
-The dominating class of the Middle Ages being military, the Christian
-religion and social ethics condemned lending money at interest, and
-covered the lender with infamy; to take interest for money loaned
-was then something so ignominious that the Jewish race, obliged to
-specialize itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame of it.
-But today, now that the Christians have become Jews, and the ruling
-class lives on the interest of its capital, the trade of the lender at
-interest is the most honorable, the most desirable, the most exclusive.
-
-The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class
-is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and
-political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and
-secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the
-oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness
-of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its
-emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society
-opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.
-
-The economic conditions in which the bourgeois moves and evolves make
-of it a class essentially religious. Christianity is its work and will
-last as long as this class shall rule society. Seven or eight centuries
-before Christ, when the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial
-and industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, we may observe the
-elaboration of a new religion; the gods of paganism created by warrior
-tribes could not be suited to a class consecrated to the production
-and sale of merchandise. Mysterious cults (the mysteries of the
-Cabiri, of Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religious traditions
-of the prehistoric matriarchical period; the idea of a soul and its
-existence after death revive; the idea of posthumous punishments and
-rewards to compensate for acts of social injustice are introduced,
-etc. These religious elements, combined with the intellectual data of
-Greek philosophy, contribute to form Christianity, the religion, _par
-excellence_, of societies which have for their foundation property
-belonging to the individual and the class which enrich themselves by
-the exploitation of wage labor. For fifteen centuries all the movements
-of the bourgeoisie, either for organization, or for self-emancipation,
-or for the acquisition of power have been accompanied and complicated
-by religious crises; but always Christianity more or less modified
-remains the religion of society. The revolutionists of 1789, who in the
-ardor of the struggle promised themselves to de-Christianize France,
-were eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious to raise again the
-altars they had overthrown and to reintroduce the cult that they had
-proscribed.
-
-The economic environment which produces the proletariat relieves
-it on the contrary from every idea of sentiment. There is not seen
-either in Europe nor in America among the laboring masses of the great
-industries any anxiety to elaborate a religion to replace Christianity,
-nor any desire to reform it. The economic and political organizations
-of the working class are completely uninterested as to any doctrinal
-discussion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although they combat the
-priests of all cults because they are the lackeys of the capitalist
-class.
-
-The victory of the proletariat will deliver humanity from the nightmare
-of religion. The belief in superior beings to explain the natural
-world and the social inequality, and to prolong the dominion of the
-ruling class, and the belief in the posthumous existence of the soul
-to recompense the inequality of fate will have no more justification
-once man, who has already grasped the general causes of the phenomena
-of nature, shall live in a communist society from whence shall have
-disappeared the inequality and the injustice of capitalistic society.
-
-The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists
-of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the
-economic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious
-ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres
-of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat
-introduces into the world.
-
-
-
-
-THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN
-
-
-Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the
-metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely
-and more firmly to his economic duty.
-
-"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to
-earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free
-to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you
-ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till
-you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough
-strength left to gulp down your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You
-have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the
-right to pay taxes."
-
-Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity, but
-they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds
-call "lower."
-
-Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too
-great a task to go through the long list of its benefactions; I will
-name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the
-passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.
-
-Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys
-so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes
-which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were
-not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they
-would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub
-down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their
-excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.
-
-Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they
-exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a
-coupon-clipper's contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed
-the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover,
-timothy and other succulent plants.
-
-These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social
-influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their
-brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with
-their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid
-perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords
-consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand
-men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the
-broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their
-feats of running and leaping. They respect none of the social dignities
-before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence.
-At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize
-launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the
-looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an
-apology and withdrew.
-
-It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic
-ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been
-corrupted by their high social station: had they taken it into their
-heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate
-luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and
-drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more
-overwhelming drudgery would be impending over the class of wage-workers.
-
-Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine
-aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh,
-like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India
-to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been
-man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have
-built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out
-and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their
-anthropophagic tastes.
-
-The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their
-peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the
-aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights
-that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of
-Man."
-
-The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society
-will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.
-
-The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins
-to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has
-scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country
-to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to
-suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow,
-in which he gambols until he is grown.
-
-The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would
-be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest
-in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before
-and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means
-to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics
-of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable
-abomination—to demand for babies the rights of colts.
-
-As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little
-toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of
-capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is
-taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work, and
-their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.
-
-This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their
-lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois
-press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and
-tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the
-unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of
-the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies
-for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be
-excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the
-bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross
-egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without
-his heart being torn by it.
-
-This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen
-to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to
-seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate
-from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the
-entertainment of a quadruped than for paying the wages of a biped. It
-has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of
-the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to
-assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his
-death.
-
-The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten
-rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the
-consciousness of all men.
-
-The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights,
-with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that
-he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of
-lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality,
-to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about
-as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.
-
-Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself
-indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons,
-pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in
-the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by
-wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when
-the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on
-the tender grass of the mountains.
-
-The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not
-again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents
-Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a
-weary lamb.
-
-True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only
-the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of
-the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since
-our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation
-in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at
-least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the
-sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop
-and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.
-
-Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty
-in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the
-buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand
-for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.
-
-
-
-
-THE END.
-
-
-
-
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