BAFS - RISE UP, DAMN AND DAMNED SHEEPLE OF TH EARTH!
October 2012 - Living in Judeo-Freemasonic hell!
IDIOTS, it is useless to hack my Blog everytime I write about Judaic-Masonic criminality!
Those damn sheeple are wide awake for everything else except for the fight for FREEDOM, TRUTH, JUSTICE and the MORAL WAY - because they are hypocrites, cowards, and damn selfish materialsts!
LET US BE SELF-SUFFICIENT
AND INDEPENDENT OF THE JEWISH MONOPOLISTS! THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD! LET US, CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS, UNITE! LET US, ALL FREEDOM AND JUSTICE LOVERS, UNITE NOW, AND NOT TOMORROW! ALL STATES LIE, OPPRESS AND CHEAT! STATES MAKE LAWS FOR THE RICH AND AGAINST THE SUBJUGATED AND IMPOVERISHED! STATES LEVY TAXES TO BLEED THE IMPOVERISHED! THE IMPOVERISHED ALWAYS HAVE FEWER RIGHTS! WE DO NOT WANT EQUALITY, BUT EQUITY, JUSTICE!
RISE UP, DAMNED SLAVES OF THE JEWISH KOSHER NOSTRA! ENSLAVED MASSES OF THE WORLD RISE UP! THE JEWS HAVE HIJACKED AND CORRUPTED OUR WORLD! SHALL WE REMAIN THEIR SLAVES FOREVER?
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD! SHALL WE NOT GROUP WHEN THE DEVILS ARE UNITED? THE JEWS WILL NOT SUCCEED IF WE ARE UNITED! THERE IS GOD, DO NOT LISTEN TO SATAN! DAVID ICKE ASKS US TO GET OFF OUR KNEES, THAT IS, STOP WORSHIPPING GOD! LIKE PR RICHARD DAWKINS, HE TOO IS DELUDED! THERE IS INDEED A SUPREME SAVIOUR
EVEN IF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS DISAGREE ABOUT HIM! SALVATION IS THROUGH RIGHTEOUS DEEDS EVEN IF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS DISAGREE ABOUT IT! DO NOT LISTEN TO VAIN PREACHERS! IT IS NOW OR NEVER!
WE MUST STRIKE THE METAL WHEN IT IS STILL HOT! WE REFUSE ALL LAWS MADE BY JEWS & FREMASONS! WE REFUSE ALL PRISONS AND MIND CONTROL!
WE WANT TO BE FREE! FREE! FREE!
LET US UNITE NOW, NOT TOMORROW!
OBAMA, SARKOZY AND ALL CAESARS ARE ABOMINATIONS! TO PLEASE THE JEWS, THEY MADE SLAVES OF US ALL! CAESAR GAVE THEM ALL OUR WEALTH INCLUDING OUR DRINKING WATER AND EVEN OUR VERY RIGHT TO LIVE AND TO BE DECENTLY BURIED! HAVE THEY EVER DONE ANYTHING ELSE THAN PLUNDER OUR WAGES TO FINANCE ISRAEL AND FILL THE VAULTS OF THE JEWISH BANK GANGSTERS? WE WANT WHAT IS LEGITIMATELY OURS, WHAT GOD GAVE US OUT OF HIS BOUNTY AND MERCY! THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD! DO NOT LET OURSELVES BE DRUGGED BY THEIR LIQUORS, BY THEIR MEDIA, SPORTS, NICOTINE, MERCURY AND ASPERTAME!
SALAAM, SHANTI, SHALOM, PEACE AMONGST US!
WAR ON THE TYRANTS! LET US REFUSE TO KILL! TO KILL DEFENCELESS NON COMBATTANTS! DEFENCELESS MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN AND BABIES! LET US AIM OUR WEAPONS ELSEWHERE AND BREAK THE RANKS IF WE ARE NOT DEFENDING THE HOMELAND! IF THEY PERSIST, THOSE CANNIBALS, IN MAKING KILLER HEROES, RAPISTS AND THIEVES OF US, LET THEM KNOW THAT OUR BULLETS ARE FOR OUR OWN GENERALS! THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD! LET US ALL UNITE, NOW, NOT TOMORROW! WORKERS, PEASANTS, ALL MEN AND WOMEN, THIS LAND IS OURS! GOD GAVE THIS LAND AND LIFE TO ALL OF US, NOT ONLY TO THE JEWS!
LET THE JEWS GO ELSEWHERE, ANYWHERE
IF THEY WANT APARTHEID AND HUMAN FLESH FOR FOOD! OUR CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR THEM TO MURDER AND SACRIFICE! NOT FOR THEM TO STEAL THEIR ORGANS! OUR WOMEN ARE NOT FOR THEM TO PROSTITUTE! OUR CORPSES ARE NOT FOR THEM TO DEVOUR ANYMORE! WHEN THEY ARE GONE, THE SUN WILL SHINE AGAIN! THE BIRDS WILL NO MORE FALL DEAD AND OUR FISH, FAUNA AND FLORA WILL BE SAFE FROM THEM AND THEIR POLLUTED WAYS! RISE UP, NOW, YOU DAMNED OF THE EARTH! RISE UP NOW, NOT TOMORROW! OR NEVER! THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD! BAFS Second adaptation (I lost the first one!) from L’Internationale, (composed in 1871 by Eugène Pottier (1816–1887)
Dedicated also to the SIX MILLION MUSLIM SHEEP OF FRANCE
( Mafioso Charles Pasqua’s figure of Six Million some two decades ago!)
WE HAVE SIX MILLION REASONS FOR REVOLUTION IN 2012
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)
There was Sufficient Reason for Revolution in the Nineteenth Century? Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
A revolution is an act of sovereign justice,
in the order of moral facts, springing out of the necessity of things,
and in consequence carrying with it its own justification; and which it
is a crime for the statesman to oppose it. That is the proposition which
we have established in our first study.
Now the question is to discover whether the idea which
stands out as the formula of the revolution is not chimerical; whether
its object is real; whether a fancy or popular exaggeration is not
mistaken for a serious and just protest. The second proposition
therefore which we have to examine is the following:
Is there today sufficient reason in society for revolution?
For if this reason does not exist, if we are fighting for
an imaginary cause, if the people are complaining because, as they say,
they are too well off, the duty of the magistrate would be simply to
undeceive the multitude, whom we have often seen aroused without cause,
as the echo responds to one who calls.
In a word, is the occasion for revolution presented at the
moment, by the nature of things, by the connection of facts, by the
working of institutions, by the advance in needs, by the order of
Providence?
It should be possible to determine this at a glance. If a
long philosophical dissertation were necessary, a cause might exist, but
it would be only in the germ, only potentially. To weigh arguments in
such a cause would be prophecy, not practical history.
To solve this question I will take a rule, as simple as it
is decisive, with which the occurrences in past revolutions furnish me.
It is that the motive behind revolutions is not so much the distress
felt by the people at a given moment, as the prolongation of this
distress, which tends to neutralize and extinguish the good.
Thus the trial which is instituted by a revolution, and the judgment which later it puts into execution, are related to tendencies rather than to mere facts: society, as it were, paying little attention to principles, and directing its course solely toward ends…
Usually good and evil, pleasure and pain, are inextricably
entangled in human dealing. Nevertheless, despite continual
oscillations, the good seems to prevail over the evil, and, taking it
altogether, there is marked progress toward the better, as far as we can
see.
The reasoning of the masses is built upon this idea. The
people is neither optimistic nor pessimistic; it admits the absolute not
at all. Let is stay as it believes.
Always at each reform, each abuse to be destroyed, each
vice to be combatted, it confines itself to seeking for something
better, something less evil, and works for its own sanctification by
labor, by study, by good behavior. Its rule of conduct is therefore: A tendency toward comfort and virtue; it does not revolt until it can see nothing for it but A tendency toward poverty and corruption.
Thus there was no revolution in the seventeenth century,
although the retrograde feeling which was manifested in 1614 was already
the principle of royal policy, and although the poverty was frightful,
according to the witness of La Bruyere, Racine, Fénélon, Vauban and Boisguilbert.
Among other reasons for resignation was that it had not been proved
that poverty was anything more than the accidental effect of some
temporary cause: the people remembered having been much more wretched
not very long ago. The absolute monarchy under Louis XIV could not have appeared to them worse than feudalism.
Nor was there any revolution under Louis XV, except
in the intellectual realm. The corruption of principles, visible to
philosophers, remained hidden from the masses, whose logic never
distinguishes an idea from a fact. Popular experience, under Louis XV,
was far from being at the level of philosophical criticism. The nation
still supposed that with a well-behaved and honest prince, its ills
might have an end. Louis XVI too, was welcomed with fervor; while Turgot,
the unbending reformer, was received without sympathy. The support of
public opinion was lacking to this great man. In 1776, one might have
said that a worthy man, who wanted to bring about reforms peacefully,
had been betrayed by the people. It was not within his power to
accomplish the Revolution by action from above without disturbance, I
had almost said, without revolutionaries.
Fifteen years more of chaos were needed, under a monarch
personally irreproachable, to prove to the most thoughtless that the
trouble was not accidental but constitutional, that the disorganization
was systematic, not fortuitous, and that the situation, instead of
improving, was according to the usual fate of institutions, daily
growing worse and worse. The publication of the Red Book in 1790, demonstrated this truth by figures. Then it was that the Revolution became popularized and inevitable.
The question which we have taken for the text of this study:—Is there sufficient reason for a revolution in the nineteenth century?—resolves itself into the following:—What is the tendency of society in our day?
Hence, but a few pages will suffice to support the answer
which I do not hesitate to point out now. Society, as far as it has been
able to develop freely for half a century, under the distractions of
’89–’93, the paternalism of the Empire and the guaranties of 1814, 1830,
and 1848, is on a road radically and increasingly wrong.
Let us take our point of view at the very beginning of present society, in 1789.
In 1798 the task of the Revolution was to destroy and
rebuild at the same time. It had the old rule to abolish but only by
producing a new organization, of which the plan and character should be
exactly the opposite of the former, according to the revolutionary rule:
Every negation implies a subsequent contradictory affirmation.
Of these, the Revolution, with great difficulty,
accomplished only the first; the other was entirely forgotten. Hence
this impossibility of living, which has oppressed French society for 60
years.
The feudal order having been abolished on the night of the 4th of August,
and the principles of liberty and civil equality proclaimed, the
consequence was that in future society must be organized, not for
politics and war, but for work. What in fact was the feudal
organization? It was one entirely military. What is work? The negation
of fighting. To abolish feudalism, then, meant to commit ourselves to a
perpetual peace, not only foreign but domestic. By this single act, all
the old politics between State and State, all the systems of European
equilibrium, were abrogated: the same equality, the same independence
which the Revolution promised to bring about among individuals, must
exist between nation and nation, province and province, city and city …
What was to be organized after the 4th of August was not
the Government, inasmuch as in restoring government nothing but the
ancient landmarks would be restored; it was the national economy and the
balance of interests. It was evident that the problems of the
Revolution lay in erecting everywhere the reign of equality and
industry, in place of the feudal order which had been abolished;
inasmuch as, by the new principles, birth no longer counted in
determining the condition of the citizen, work was all, even property
itself was subordinate: inasmuch as, in foreign affairs, the relations
of nations among themselves had to be reformed upon the same principles,
since civil law, public law and the law of nations are one in principle
and sufficient. The progress in agriculture which was exhibited after
the division of the national treasure, the industrial impulse which the
nation experienced after the fall of the Empire, the growing interest in
all countries since 1830 in economic questions, all these go to prove
that it was really in the field of political economy that the efforts of
the Revolution should be exerted.
This so manifest, so inevitable conclusion from the act of the 4th of August, 1789, was not understood by those who made themselves its interpreters, even up to 1814.
All their ideas were of politics only. The
counter-revolutionary forces aiding, the revolutionary party forced for
the moment to place itself on the defensive and to organize itself for
war, the nation was again delivered into the hands of the warriors and
lawyers. One might say that nobility, clergy and monarchy had
disappeared, only to make way for another governing set of Anglomaniac
constitutionaries, classic republicans, militaristic democrats, all
infatuated with the Romans and the Spartans, and above all, very much so
with themselves; on the other hand, caring but very little for the real
needs of the country; which, understanding nothing of what was going
on, permitted itself to be half destroyed at their leisure, and finally
attached itself to the fortune of a soldier.
To put my thought in one word, however little edifying it may seem, the revolutionaries failed in their mission after the fall of the Bastille, as they have falied since the abdication of Louis Philippe,
and for the same reasons: the total lack of economic ideas, their
prejudice in favor of government, and the distrust of the lower classes
which they harbored. In ’93, the necessity of resistance to invasion
demanding an enormous concentration of forces, the error was
consummated. The principle of centralization, widely applied by the Committee of Public Safety, passed into dogma with the Jacobins,
who transmitted it to the Empire, and to the governments that followed
it. This is the unfortunate tradition which, in 1848, determined the
retrograde movement of the Provisory Government, and which still
constitutes the whole of the science which nourishes the politics of the
republican party.
Thus the economic organization called for as a necessary
consequence of the complete abolition of feudalism, left without
guidance from the first day, politics taking the place of industry in
the minds of everybody, Quesnay and Adam Smith giving way to Rousseau and Montesquieu;
it necessarily followed that the new society, scarcely conceived,
should remain in embryo; that, instead of developing according to
economic laws, it should languish in constitutionalism, that in place of
the orderly condition which is characteristic of it, it should exhibit
everywhere systematic corruption and legal inefficiency; finally, that
the power which is the expression of this society, reproducing with the
most scrupulous fidelity the antinomy of its principles, should find
itself continually in the position of fighting with the people and the
people in continual need of attacking power.
To sum up: the society which the Revolution of ’89 should
have created, does not yet exist. That which for sixty years we have
had, is but a superficial, factitious order, hardly concealing the most
frightful chaos and demoralization.
We are not in the habit of looking so long beforehand for
the causes of social disturbances and revolutions. Above all, economic
questions are repugnant to us. The people, after the great struggle of
’93, has been so distracted from its real interests, men of brains so
thrown off by the discussions of the legislative chamber, of public
meetings and of the press, that one may be almost sure, in leaving
politics for economics, to be in turn immediately abandoned by readers,
and to have only the paper for a confidant. Nevertheless we must
understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it
is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our
destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms whose forms
capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy,
which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of
society. Will the reader deign to follow me for a quarter of an hour
among the broad considerations into which I am obliged to enter? That
done, I promise to come back to politics.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
I call certain principles of action economic forces,
such as the Division of Labor, Competition, Collective Force, Exchange,
Credit, Property, &c., which are to Labor and to Wealth what the
distinction of classes, the representative system, monarchical heredity,
administrative centralization, the judicial hierarchy, &c., are to
the State.
If these forces are held in equilibrium, subject to the
laws which are proper to them, and which do not depend in any way upon
the arbitrary will of man, Labor can be organized, and comfort for all
guaranteed. If, on the other hand, they are left without direction and
without counterpoise, Labor is in a condition of chaos; the useful
effects of the economic forces is mingled with an equal quantity of
injurious effects; the deficit balances the profit; Society, in so far
as it is the theatre, the agent, or the subject of production,
circulation, and consumption, is in a condition of increasing suffering.
Up to now, it does not appear that order in a society can
be conceived except under one of these two forms, the political and the
industrial; between which, moreover, there is fundamental contradiction.
The chaos of industrial forces, the struggle which they
maintain with the government system, which is the only obstacle to their
organization, and which they cannot reconcile themselves with nor merge
themselves in, is the real, profound cause of the unrest which disturbs
French society, and which was aggravated during the second half of the
reign of Louis Philippe.
Seven years ago, I filled two octavo volumes
with the story of these disturbances, and of the terrible conflicts
which spring from them. This work, which remained unanswered by the
economists, was received no more favorably by the Social-Democracy. I
permit myself to make this remark, merely to show by my own experience
how little favor researches in political economy obtain, how little
revolutionary therefore is our epoch.
I shall limit myself to recalling very briefly some of the
most general facts, in order to give the reader a glimpse of this order
of forces and phenomena, which has been hidden from all eyes until now,
and which alone can put an end to the governmental drama.
Everybody has heard of the division of labor.
It consists of the distribution of the hand work of a given
industry in such a manner that each person performs always the same
operation, or a small number of operations, so that the product, instead
of being the integral product of one workman, is the joint product of a
large number.
According to Adam Smith, who first demonstrated this
law scientifically, and all the other economists, the division of labor
is the most powerful lever of modern industry. To it principally must
be attributed the superiority of civilized peoples to savage peoples.
Without division of labor, the use of machines would not have gone
beyond the most ancient and most common utensils: the miracles of
machinery and of steam would never have been revealed to us; progress
would have been closed to society; the French Revolution itself, lacking
an outlet, would have been but a sterile revolt; it could have
accomplished nothing. But, on the other hand, by division of labor, the
product of labor mounts to tenfold, a hundredfold, political economy
rises to the height of a philosophy, the intellectual level of nations
is continually raised. The first thing that should attract the attention
of the legislator is the separation of industrial functions—the
division of labor—in a society founded upon hatred of the feudal and
warlike order, and destined in consequence to organize itself for work
and peace.
It was not done thus. This economic force was left to all
the overturns caused by chance and by interest. The division of labor,
becoming always more minute, and remaining without counterpoise, the
workman has been given [over] to a more and more degrading subjection to
machinery. That is the effect of the division of labor when it is
applied as practised in our days, not only to make industry incomparably
more productive, but at the same time to deprive the worker, in mind
and body, of all the wealth which it creates for the capitalist and the
speculator. Here is how an observer, who is not suspected of sympathy
with labor, M. de Tocqueville, sums up on this grave subject:
In proportion to the more complete application
of the principle of the division of albor, the workman becomes weaker,
more limited and more dependent.
A man who all his life has performed but one
operation certainly learns to execute it more quickly and more skilfully
than another; but at the same time he becomes less capable of every
other operation, whether physical or intellectual; his other faculties
are extinguished, and degeneration results in him, considered as an
individual. It is a sad account to offer of himself that he has never
made more than the twenty-sixth part of a pin… In result it may be said
that the division of labor is a skilful mode of employing the power of a
man; that it adds prodigiously to the products of a society; but that
it subtracts something from the capacity of each man taken individually.
All the economists are in accord as to this fact, one of
the most serious which the science has to announce; and, if they do not
insist upon it with the vehemence which they habitually use in their
polemics, it must be said, to the shame of the human mind, that it is
because they cannot believe that this perversion of the greatest of
economic forces can be avoided.
So the greater the division of labor and the power of
machines, the less the intelligence and skill of hand of the worker. But
the more the value of the worker falls and the demand for labor
diminishes, the lower are wages and the greater is poverty. And it is
not a few hundreds of men but millions, who are the victims of this
economic perturbation.
In England, through the division of labor and the power of
machinery, the number of workmen has been observed to diminish by a
third ,by a half, by three-quarters, by five-sixths; and the wages
decreasing in like proportion, fall from 60 cents a day to 10 cents and 6
cents. Throughout entire provinces the proprietors have driven out
useless mouths. Everywhere first women, then children, have taken the
place of men in manufacture. Consumption being unable to keep pace with
production among an impoverished people, the latter is obliged to wait;
and regular out-of-work periods are the result; of six weeks, three
months and six months out of each year. Statistics of these periods of
idleness by Parisian workmen have recently been published by one of
them, Pierre Vincard; the details are heartrending. The smallness
of the wages being in proportion to the time of idleness, the
conclusion is reached that certain workwomen who earn 20 cents a day,
must live on 10, because they are idle for six months. This is the rule
to which a population of 320,000 in Paris must submit. And the situation
of the class of working women everywhere throughout the Republic may be
judged from this sample.
Philanthropic conservatives, admirers of ancient customs,
charge the industrial system with this anomaly. They want to go back to
the feudal-farming period. I say that it is not industry that is at
fault, but economic chaos: I maintain that the principle has been
distorted, that there is disorganization of forces, and that to this we
must attribute the fatal tendency with which society is carried away.
Another example.
Competition, next to the division of labor, is
one of the most powerful factors of industry; and at the same time one
of the most valuable guaranties. Partly for the sake of it, the first
revolution was brought about. The workmen’s unions, established at Paris
some years since, have recently given it a new sanction by establishing
among themselves piece work, and abandoning, after their experience of
it, the absurd idea of the equality of wages. Competition is moreover
the law of the market, the spice of the trade, the salt of labor. To
suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself; it is to begin the
restoration of the old order from below, in replacing labor by the rule
of favoritism and abuse, of which ’89 rid us.
Yet competition, lacking legal forms and superior
regulating intelligence, has been perverted in turn, like the division
of labor. In it, as in the latter, there is perversion of principle,
chaos and a tendency toward evil. This will appear beyond doubt if we
remember that of the thirty-six million souls who compose the French
nation, at least ten millions are wage workers, to whom competition is
forbidden, for whom there is nothing but to struggle among themselves
for their meagre stipend.
Thus that competition, which, as thought in ’89, should be
a general right, is today a matter of exceptional privilege: only they
whose capital permits them to become heads of business concerns may
exercise their competitive rights.
The result is that competition, as Rossi, Blanqui,
and a host of others have recognized, instead of democratizing
industry, aiding the workman, guaranteeing the honesty of trade, has
ended in building up a mercentile and land aristocracy, a thousand times
more rapacious than the old aristocracy of the nobility. Through
competition all the profits of production go to capital; the consumer,
without suspecting the frauds of commerce, is fleeced by the speculator,
and the condition of the workers is made more and more precarious.
Speaking of this, Eugene Buret says: I assert that the working class is turned over, body and soul, to the sweet will of industry. And elsewhere he says:The
most trifling speculation may change the price of bread one cent a
pound, which means $124,100,000 for thirty-six million people.
It was recently seen how little free competition could do
for the people, and how illusory it is as a guaranty with us at present,
when the Prefect of Police, yielding to the general demand, authorized
the sale of meat at auction. Nothing less than all the energy the people
could muster, aided by governmental power, could overcome the monopoly
of the butchers.
Accuse human nature, say the economists, do not accuse
competition. Very well, I will not accuse competition: I will only
remark that human nature does not remedy one evil by another, and ask
how it has mistaken its path. What? Competition ought to make us more
and more equal and free; and instead it subordinates us one to the
other, and makes the worker more and more a slave! This is a perversion
of the principle, a forgetfulness of the law. These are not mere
accidents; they are a whole system of misfortunes.
Pity is expressed for those who work in dangerous or
unwholesome occupations: it is desired that civilization should do
without their services, out of compassion for their lot. These sad
occurrences, inherent in certain occupations, are nothing in comparison
with the scourge of economic chaos.
Let us cite one more example.
Of all economic forces, the most vital, in a society reconstructed for industry by revolution, is credit.
The proprietary, industrial, trading business world knows this well:
all its efforts since ’89 have tended, at the bottom, toward only these
two things, peace and credit, all through the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, the Convention, the Directory, the Empire, the Restoration, the monarchy of July. What did it not do to win over the unmanageable Louis XVI? What did it not pardon in Louis Philippe?
The peasant also knows it: of the whole of politics, he,
like the business man, understands only these two things, taxes and
interest. As for the working class, so marvellously fitted for progress,
such is the ignorance in which it has been kept as to the true cause of
its sufferings, that it is hardly since February that it has begun to
stammer the word, credit; and to see in this principle the most powerful
of revolutionary forces. In the matter of credit, the workingman knows
but two things, his account with the baker and the pawnbroker’s shop.
In a nation devoted to labor, credit is what blood is to
an animal, the means of nutrition, life itself. It cannot be interrupted
without danger to the social body. If there is a single institution
which should have appealed before all others to our legislators, after
the abolition of feudal privileges and the levelling of classes,
assuredly it is credit. Yet not one of our pompous declarations of
right, not one of our constitutions, so long drawn out, not one of these
has mentioned it at all. Credit, like the division of labor, the use of
machinery and competition, has been left to itself; even the financial
power, far greater than that of the executive, legislative and
judicial, has never had the honor of mention in our various charters.
Handed over by a decree of the Empire of the 23rd of April, 1803,
to a company of revenue farmers, it has remained until now in the
condition of a hidden power: hardly anything can be found relating to
it, except a law of 1807, fixing the rate of interest at five per cent.
After the Revolution as before it, credit got along as best it could; or
rather, as it pleased the largest holders of coin. It is only fair to
say that the Government, while sacrificing the Country, did not spare
itself; it treated itself as it treated others: we have nothing against
it on this score.
What has been the result of this incredible negligence?
In the first place, forestalling and usury being practised
upon coin by preference, coin being at the same time the tool of
industrial transactions and the rarest of merchandise, and consequently
the safest and most profitable, dealing in money was rapidly
concentrated in the hands of a few monopolists, whose fortress is the
Bank.
Thereupon the Country and the State were made the vassals of a coalition of capitalists.
Thanks to the tax imposed by this bankocracy upon all
industrial and agricultural industry, property has already been
mortgaged for two billion dollars, and the State for more than one
billion.
The interest paid by the nation for this double
indebtedness, with costs, renewals, commissions and discounts on loans
included, amounts to at least 240 million dollars.
This enormous sum of 240 millions does not yet express all
that the producers have to pay to the financial exploitation: we should
add from 140 to 160 million for discounts, advances, delays in
payments, dividends, obligations under private seal, court expenses,
&c.
Property, fleeced by the Bank, has been obliged to follow
the same course in its relations with industry, to become a usurer in
turn toward labor; thus farm rent and house rent have reached a
prohibitive rate, which drives the cultivator from the field and the
workman from his home.
So much so that today they whose labor has created
everything cannot buy their own products, nor obtain furniture, nor own a
habitation, nor ever say: This house, this garden, this vine, this
field, are mine.
On the contrary, it is an economic necessity, in the
present system of credit, and with the growing disorganization of
industrial forces, that the poor man, working harder and harder, should
be always poorer, and that the rich man, without working, always richer,
as one may easily convince himself by the following.
If we may believe the estimate of a skilled economist, M. Chevé,
out of two billions of value produced every year, one and one-fifth
billions are taken away by parasites; that is to say, by finance, by
predaceous property, and by the budget and its satellites: the balance,
perhaps four-fifths of a billion, remains for the producers. Another
able economist, M. Chevalier, divided the estimated product of
the country by its thirty-six million inhabitants, has found that the
income per head per day was an average of 13 cents; and, as from this
figure must be deducted enough to pay interest, rent, taxes, and the
expenses which they involve, M. de Morogues, yet another learned
economist, has concluded that for a large part of the population daily
consumption was less than 5 cents. But since rents, the same as taxes,
continually increase, while through economic disorganization work and
wages diminish, it follows that, according to the aforesaid economists,
the material comfort of the working classes follows a decreasing
progression, which may be represented by this series of numbers: 65, 60,
55, 50, 45, 40, 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 0, −5, −10, −15, &c.
This law of impoverishment is the corollary of the Malthusian law; its fundamental fact may be found in every book of statistics.
Some utopians attack competition; others refuse to accept
the division of labor and the whole industrial order; the workingmen, in
their crass ignorance, blame machinery. No one, to this day, has
thought of denying the utility and legitimacy of credit; nevertheless it
is incontestable that the perversion of credit is the most active cause
of the poverty of the masses. Were it not for this, the deplorable
effects of the division of labor, of the employment of machinery, of
competition, would scarcely be felt at all, would not even exist. Is it
not evident that the tendency of society is towards poverty, not through
the depravity of men, but through the disorder of its own elementary
principles?
It may be said that this is a misuse of logic, that
capital, land, houses, cannot be let for nothing, that every service
should be paid for, &c. Possibly. I will admit that lending wealth,
as much as creating it, is a service that merits recompense. When it is a
question of the advantage of others, I would rather exceed justice than
stop short of it; but that does not alter the facts. I maintain that
credit is too dear; that it is with money as it is with meat, which the
prefect of police supplies us with today from 3 to 5 cents cheaper than
the market stall keepers; as it is with transportation, which would cost
80 per cent less than present rates, if the railroads would permit the
country to use their immense resources. I say that it would be possible,
yes, easy, to lower the price of credit from 75 to 90 per cent, without
wronging the lenders, and that it depends upon the nation and the State
that this should be done. Let there be no argument as to a pretended
legal impossibility. It is with the seignorial rights of capitalists as
it was with those of the nobles and monasteries, nothing easier than to
abolish them; and, I repeat, that for the safety of property itself they
must be abolished.
Can it be believed that the revolutionaries of ’89, ’92,
’93, ’94, who swung the axe with such ardor against the feudal tree,
would not have uprooted it to its last fibres, if they had forseen that,
in the shadow of their half-way governmentalism, such sprouts would
grow?
Can it be believed that, instead of reestablishing the
seignorial courts and the parliaments under other names and other forms,
of re-erecting abolutism after baptising it with the name of the
Constitution, of enslaving the provinces as before, under the pretext of
unity and centralization, of sacrificing all liberties, by giving them
for an inseparable companion a pretended public order, which is
but confusion, corruption and brute force—can it be believed, I say,
that they would not have welcomed the new order, and completed the
Revolution, if their sight had penetrated the organism which their
instinct sought, but the state of knowledge and the distractions of the
moment did not permit them to conceive? ….
It is not only that our present society, though having
forsaken its principles, tends continually to impoverish the producer,
to subordinate labor to capital—a contradiction in itself—but that it
tends also to make of workingmen a race of helots, inferior to the caste
of free men as of old; and it tends to erect into a political and
social dogma the enslavement of the working class and the necessity of
its poverty.
A few facts, selected from among millions, will exemplify this fatal tendency.
From 1806 to 1811, according to Chevalier, the
annual consumption of wine in Paris was 170 quarts per head: it is now
only 95 quarts. Abolish the duties, which with the accessory expenses,
amount to at least 6 to 7 cents a quart with the retailer, and the
consumption will increase from 95 to 200; moreover the vine grower, who
does not know what to do with his products, will be able to sell them.
But in order to do this, it would be necessary either to
reduce the amount of the budget, or to place the taxes upon the rich;
and, as neither the one nor the other seems practicable, and besides as
it is not well that the workingman should drink too much, seeing that
the use of wine is incompatible with the modesty which is becoming in
men of that class, the duties will not be lowered, neither will they be
raised.
According to Raudot, a writer whose conservative
opinions relieve him from any charge of exaggeration, France is reduced
to buying annually in foreign markets nine million head of sheep and
cattle for the slaughter house, despite the high tariff. Notwithstanding
this importation, the quantity of meat offered for sale does not exceed
an average of 40 lbs. per head per annum, a
trifle less than 2 ounces a day. But if we recall that 85 cities, towns
and capitals of provinces, with a total population of not more than 3
millions, absorb a quarter of this, the conclusion is reached that he
majority of Frenchmen never eat meat; which is in fact true.
It is by virtue of this policy that wine and meat are
today excluded from the list of articles of first necessity, and that so
many people, in France as in Ireland, eat only potatoes, chestnuts,
buckwheat or oatmeal.
The effects of this state of affairs are such as might be
expected from theory. Everywhere in Europe the constitution of the
laborer is weakened. In France, the Council of Revision has
established that within fifty years the average stature has diminished
by half an inch, and this reduction bears chiefly upon suffering
humanity, the working class. Before ’89, the required minimum height for
the army was 5 feet 1 inch. Afterwards followin the diminution of
stature and the weakening of health, as well as the excessive
destruction of life, this was reduced to 4 feet 10 inches. As for
exemptions from service for deficient height and health, they were, from
1830 to 1839, 45½ per cent, and from 1839 to 1848, 50½ per cent.
The average length of life, it is true, has increased, but
at the expense of the same laboring class, as is proved, among other
proofs, by the tables of mortality of Paris, in which the death rate for
the 12th precinct is 1 in 26, while for the 1st precinct it is only 1
in 52.
Can it be doubted that there is a tendency toward ill in
existing society, at least among the working people? Does it not seem
that society has been made, as Saint Simon says, not for the
amelioration of the people, physically, morally and intellectually, but
for their impoverishment depravity, and ignorance?
The average number of students received each year by the Polytechnic School is, I believe, 176. According to Chevalier,
it would not be exaggeration to say that twenty times as many might be
received. But what would our capitalist society do with the 3520
graduates which the School would turn out at the end of each school
year? I insist upon this question: What would it do?
When the management ordered that only 176 scholars should
be received in place of the 3520 who could be received, it was because
it was not possible for the government, with its still feudal-industrial
system, to make proper provision for more than 176 of these young
people.
Science is not cultivated for the sake of science: one
does not study chemistry, integral calculus, analytical geometry,
mechanics, in order to become a mechanic or a laborer. Superabundance of
ability, far from being of service to the country and the State, is an
inconvenience to them. In order to avoid dangerous upsetting of classes,
it is necessary that instruction should be given in proportion to
fortune; that is should be slight or none at all for the most numerous
and lowest class, moderate for the middle class, superior only for a
small number of the well-to-do, destined to represent by their talents
the aristocracy whence they sprang…. That is what the Catholic clergy,
faithful to its principles, faithful to its feudal traditions, has
always understood: the law placing the University and the schools in
their hands was only an act of justice.
Thus, instruction cannot be universal, and, most of all,
it cannot be free, in a still feudal society: that would be nonsense. It
is necessary, in order to maintain the subordination of the masses, to
restrain the flowering-forth of ability, to reduce the too numerous and
too unmanageable attendance at colleges, to keep in systematic ignorance
the millions of workers doomed to repugnant and painful labor, to make
use of the instruction by not making use of it, that is to say, by
turning it toward the brutalization and exploitation of the lower
classes.
And, as if the evil as well as the good must have its
sanction, pauperism, thus foreseen, provided for, organized, by the
economic chaos, has found its own; it is included in the criminal
statistics. Here is the progression for 25 years past, of the number of
arrests and of cases prosecuted at the request of the public prosecutor:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1827
47,443
34,908
1846
101,443
80,891
1847
124,159
95,914
In the district courts the progression has increased in the same way:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1829
159,740
108,390
1845
197,913
152,923
1847
239,291
184,922
When the workingman has been brutalized by the division of
labor, by attending machines, by teaching that does not teach; when he
has been discouraged by small wages, demoralized by being out of work,
famished by monopoly; when he has neither bread nor dough, neither cash
nor credit, neither fire nor hearth; then he lies, he thieves, he robs,
he assassinates. After having passed through the hands of the
plunderers, he passes through those of the dealers in justice. Is that
clear?
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
It is by contrast with error that truth impresses itself
upon the understanding. In place of liberty and industrial equality, the
Revolution has left us a legacy of authority and political
subordination. The State, growing more powerful every day, and endowed
with prerogatives and privileges without end, has undertaken to do for
our happiness what we might have expected from a very different source.
How has it acquitted itself of its task? What part has the government
played during the last fifty years, regardless of the particular form of
its organization? What has been its tendency? That is now the question.
Up to 1848, statesmen, whether belonging to the ministry or
the opposition, whose influence directed public sentiment and
governmental action, did not seem to have been aware of the mistaken
course of society in what especially concerns the laboring classes. Most
of them indeed made it a merit and a duty to busy themselves in the
amelioration of the workers’ lot. One would cry out for teachers;
another would talk against the premature and immoral employment of
children in manufactories. This one would demand the lowering of duties
upon salt, beverages and meat; that one called out for the complete
abolition of town and custom house tariffs. In the lofty regions of
power there was a general impulse toward economic and social questions.
Not a soul saw that, in the present state of our institutions, such
reforms were but innocent chimaeras; that, in order to bring them about,
nothing less than a new creation was necessary; in other words, a
revolution.
Since the abdication of Louis Philippe, on the 24th
of February, the governmental set, participants in privilege, have
changed their opinion. The policy of oppression and impoverishment which
they formerly followed without knowing it, I had almost said in spite
of themselves, has been accepted by many of them, this time with full
knowledge.
The government is the organ of society.
That which goes on in the social body most secretly, most
metaphysically, shows itself in government with a quite military
frankness, a fiscal crudity. A long time ago a statesman said that a
government could not exist without a public debt and a large budget.
This aphorism, to which the opposition was wrong in taking exception, is
the financial expression of the retrograde and subversive tendency of
Power: we may now measure the depth of it. It means that Government,
instituted for the guidance of society, is but the reflection.
April 1st 1814, the interest on the public debt was $12,661,523.
July 31st 1830, the interest on the public debt was $39,883,541.
Jan. 1st 1847, the interest on the public debt was $47,422,671.
Jan. 1st 1851, the interest on the public debt was $54,200,000.
The public debt, for both the State and the towns, which
it is fair to regard here as parts of the central authority, is about
half of the sum total of mortgages and notes of hand, which weigh down
the country: both of these, under the same impulse, have grown along
with each other. The tendency is unmistakeable. Whither is it leading
us? To bankruptcy.
The first regular budget since the Directory is
that of 1802. Dating from this time, the expenses have continually
grown, in the same progression as the debt of the country and of the
State.
1802
$117,000,000.
1819
172,770,622.
1829
201,982,886.
1840
259,702,889.
1848
338,436,222.
In fifty years, the budget of expenses has almost tripled;
the mean annual increase is about five millions. It would be too
foolish to attribute this increase to the incapacity of ministers, to
their more or less intelligent and liberal policy, as has been done
under each successive change: the Restoration and the monarchy of July,
the dynastic opposition and the republican conspiracy. To explain a
phenomenon as constant and regular as is the growth of the budget by the
inefficiency of men, especially when it has its correllative in the
increase of mortgages and of notes of hand, is as absurd as it would be
to explain the Oriental plague and the yellow fever by the incapacity of
physicians. It is the hygiene that must be attacked; it is your
economic order that calls for reform.
Thus the Government, which is called the instrument of
order and the guaranty of our liberties, keeps step with society, falls
more and more into difficulties, incurs indebtedness, and tends toward
bankruptcy. We are about to see how, as society, given over to the
disorganization of its elements, tends to reestablish the former castes;
the Government, on its side, tends to unite its efforts with this new
aristocracy and to complete the oppression of the lower classes.
Solely because the powers of society were left unorganized
by the Revolution, there results an inequality of conditions, of which
the cause is not, as formerly, the natural inequality of ability; but
which finds a new pretext in the accidents of society, and adds, among
the claims, the injustices of fortune to the caprices of nature.
Privilege, abolished by law, is born again through lack of equilibrium:
it is no longer a mere result of divine predestination: it has become a
necessity of civilization.
Once justified as in the order of nature and of
Providence, what does privilege lack in order to assure its triumph
definitely? It has only to make laws, institutions, the Government, in
harmony with itself: toward this end it is about to direct all its
forces.
In the first place, as no law forbids, so far at least as
it flows from one of these two sources, nature or accident, privilege
may call itself perfectly legal: in this regard it may already claim the
respect of citizens and the protection of Government.
What is the principle which rules existing society? Each by himself, each for himself. God and LUCK for all.
Privilege, resulting from luck, from a commercial turn, from any of the
gambling methods which the chaotic condition of industry furnishes, is
then a providential thing, which everybody must respect.
On the other hand, what is the function of Government? To
protect and defend each one in his person, his industry, his property.
But if by the necessity of things, property, riches, comfort, all go on
one side, poverty on the other, it is clear that Government is made for
the defence of the rich against the poor. For the perfecting of this
state of affairs, it is necessary that what exists should be defined and
consecrated by law: that is precisely what Power wants, and what demonstrates from beginning to end our analysis of the budget.
I am talking at random.
The Provisory Government has made known that the increases
of salary of Government functionaries from 1830 to 1848 amounted to the
sum of 13 million dollars. Supposing that only half of this were used
for the salaries of newly created offices, the average salary being
assumed at $200, it follows that the Government added 32,500 employees
during the reign of Louis Philippe. Today the total number of functionaries, according to Raudot,
is 568,365: in every nine men there is one who lives on the Government,
either of the Country or of the towns. Whatever outcry there may be
made against waste, I shall never believe that the creation of 32,500
offices was anything but plunder.
What interest had the king or the ministers, or any of the
individuals who already held office, in adding to their number? Is it
not true that, the agitation of the working classes becoming more
threatening with time, and consequently the danger greater for the
privileged class, Power, the force that represses and protects, had to
fortify itself in proportion, on pain of being overthrown at the first
opportunity?
Examination of the budgets for the army and navy confirms this opinion.
From 1830 to 1848,—I borrow this detail from the periodical Europe and America—the
united budgets of the navy and of war were gradually raised from
$64,796,000 to $107,167,400. The average annual amount was $84,000,000;
the average increase $2,400,000. The grand total for eighteen years,
$1,501,000,000.
In the same period the budget for public instruction
increased from $451,600 to $3,859,600. The grand total was $46,560,400.
Difference between this and the warmaking budget, $1,454,439,000.
Thus while the Government spent an average of 2½ millions
for fostering popular ignorance, under the name of public instruction,
it spent 84 millions, thirty-two times as much, to restrain this
ignorance by steel and fire, if the frenzy of poverty should cause it to
burst forth. This is what the politicians of the day have called an armed peace.
The same tendency is shown in the other budgets: I mean to say that the
budgets have always increased in direct proportion to their services to
the cause of privilege, and inversely to those which they could render
to the producers. But when it is admitted that the lofty financial and
administrative capacities which governed France during those eighteen
years had no such intentions as are indicated by these comparisons of
the budgets, which, after all, matter little, it would remain not that
not the less true that the system of impoverishment and repression by
the State developed with a spontaneity and certainty that might well
dispense with any complicity on the part of statesmen.
Once again, there is here no question of persons.
Above the spirit of men there is the spirit of things; it
is with this latter that the philosopher concerns himself, always well
disposed towards his fellows.
If the composition of the budget of expenses is curious,
that of the account of receipts is no less instructive. I will not enter
into details; the general character will suffice. It is in
generalization that truth is discovered.
Since 1848 it has been proved by figures that if the
existing system of duties were replaced by a single tax on capital of
say, one per cent., the tax would be distributed with an almost ideal
equality, uniting the advantages of proportionality and progression,
without any of their drawbacks. By this sysstem labor would be little if
at all affected; capital, on the contrary, would be scientifically
reached. Where capital was not protected by the labor of the capitalist,
it would be exposed to levy; while the workingman, whose possessions
did not exceed a taxable amount, would pay nothing. Justice in taxation
would be the ne plus ultra
of fiscal science. But that would be the reverse of government. The
proposition, scouted by the practical politicians, served only to
discredit and almost discourage its authors.
The system of taxation actually followed is just the
opposite of that. It is planned in such a way that the producer pays
all, the capitalist nothing. In fact, whenever the latter is put down on
the books of the assessor for any amount whatever, or pays the duties
established by the fiscal authority on objects of consumption, it is
clear that, as his income is composed solely of the interest upon his
capital, and not by the exchange of his products, his income remains
free from taxation; inasmuch as it is only the producer that pays.
That injustice had to be; and Government was in this in
perfect accord with Society. If the inequality of conditions which
results from the economic disorganization be taken as an indication of
the will of Providence, the Government cannot do better than to follow
his will; for that reason, not content with defending privilege,
Government comes to its assistance by asking nothing from it. Grant the
time, and Government will make privilege an Institution, under the
titles of Nobility, Burghers, or otherwise.
There is therefore a compact between Capital and Power to
make the worker exclusively pay the taxes; and the secret of this
compact is simply, as I have said, to place the taxes on products,
instead of on capital.
Through this disguise the capitalist seems to pay on his
land, on his house, on his furniture, on his securities, on his
travelling, on his food, like the rest of the citizens. Also he says
that his income, which without tax would be 600, 1200, 2000 or 4000
dollars, is no more, thanks to the tax, than 500, 900, 1600, or 3000
dollars. And he complains against the amount of the budget with more
indignation than his tenants.
A complete mistake. The capitalist pays nothing: the
Government divides up with him; that is all. They make common cause.
What one of the workers would not esteem himelf lucky if he were granted
$400 income, upon the sole condition that he should give up a quarter
of it in redemption?
There is one chapter in the accounts of receipts that has
always seemed to me like a reminiscence of the old system, that of
assessment.
It is not enough that the producer pays for the liberty to
manufacture, cultivate, sell, buy or transport that the fiscal
authority grants him; the assessments forbid him to hold property as far
as possible. So much for an inheritance from a father, so much from an
uncle, so much for a rental, so much for a purchase. It is as if the
legislator of ’89 had had the intention of reenacting the inalienability
of real estate, in exact correspondence with feudal rights! As if he
had wanted to remind the wretch who had been freed by the night of the 4th of August
that he was still of servile condition, that he had no right to own the
soil, that every cultivator is only a tenant and distrainable by law,
unless he has permission from the sovereign! We must take care: there
are people who hold these ideas religiously: those people are our
masters and the friends of all those who lend to us on mortgage.
The partisans of governmental rule repel, with all the
force of conviction, criticism which, instead of finding fault with men,
attacks institutions, and endangers and threatens what they consider
their hereditary rights.
Is it the fault, they cry, of our representative
institutions? Is it the fault of the constitutional principle, or that
of incapable, corrupt, wasteful ministers, if a portion of those
millions, taken from property, from agriculture and from industry, at
the price of so great sacrifices, have served only to support sinecures
and to salve consciences? Is it the fault of this magnificent
centralization, if the taxes, having become exorbitant, weigh more
heavily upon the worker than on the proprietor; if, with a subsidy of 84
millions, our ports are bare of ships, our shops of materials; if, in
1848, after the revolution of February, the army was without provisions,
the cavalry without horses, the fortifications in bad condition; if we
could not put upon a war footing more than sixty thousand men? On the
contrary, is it not a case in which not the system but the mode of
carrying it out should be blamed? And then what becomes of your
denunciations of the tendencies of society and of government?
Indeed! We may then add corruption to the intrinsic vices
and feudal inclinations of the political order. Far from weakening my
argument, it strengthens it. Corruption allies itself well with the
general tendencies of Power; it forms a part of its methods; it is one
of its elements.
What does the system demand?
That the capitalistic feudalism shall be maintained in the
enjoyment of its rights; that the preponderance of capital over labor
shall be increased; that the parasite class shall be reinforced, if
possible, by providing for it everywhere hangers-on, through the aid of
public functions, and as recruits if necessary, and that large
properties shall be gradually reestablished, and the proprietors
ennobled;—did not Louis Philippe, toward the end of his reign,
devote himself to conferring titles of nobility?—that thus, by indirect
ways, certain services, which the official list of offices cannot
satisfy, shall be recompensed; finally, that everything shall be
attached to the surpeme patronage of the State—charities, recompenses,
pensions, awards, concessions, exploitations, authorizations, positions,
titles, privileges, ministerial offices, stock companies, municipal
administrations, etc., etc.
This is the reason for that venality whereof the scandals
under the last reign so surprised us; but at which the public conscience
would have been less astonished, if the mystery had been explained.
This too is the ulterior aim of that centralization which, under pretext
of the general interest, exerts pressure upon local interests, by
selling to the last and highest bidder the justice which they claim.
Understand clearly that corruption is the soul of
centralization. There is not a monarchy nor a democracy that is free
from it. Government is unchangeable in its spirit and essence; if it
takes a hand in public economy, it is to establish, by favor or by
force, what accident tends to bring about. Let us take the custom house
for an example.
Custom house duties, both import and export, but not
including those on salt, produce 32 millions for the State. 32 millions
to protect national industry! Do you perceive the jugglery? Suppose that
the customs did not exist; that Belgian, English, German, American
competition surrounded our markets on every side, and that then the
State should make the following proposition to French industry: In order
to protect your interests, which would you prefer to do, to pay me 32
millions or to receive them yourselves? Do you think that the industries
would elect to pay them? That is just what the Government requires them
to do. To the regular charges which foreign products and those which we
send abroad cost us, the Government adds 32 millions, which serve it as
drink-money; that is what the custom house amounts to. And the question
today is so entangled, that there is not one person in the whole
Republic who would dare to propose to abolish at one blow this absurd
tribute.
Moreover this sum of 32 millions, said to be levied for
the protection of national industry, is far from expressing all the
advantage which the Government draws from the custom house.
The Department of Var is not well supplied with
livestock; it lacks meat, and would ask nothing better than to import
cattle from the Piedmont, a frontier province. The Government, the
protector of the school-boy nation, will not permit it. What does this
mean? That the lobbyists of the Camargue have more influence with the ministry than the would-be purchasers of Var: ask for no other reason.
The story of the Department of Var is that of the
eighty-five remaining Departments. All have their special interests; are
in consequence antagonists, and seek an arbitrator. It is these
interests, far more than the army, which form the strength of the
Government. Also, observe, the Government has made itself the grantor of
mines, of canals, or railroads, in just the same way that the Court,
before ’89, sold the ranks of colonel and captain, as well as clerical
benefices.
I can believe that all the personages who have taken
charge of affairs since 1830 remained pure, except one; but it is not
evident that if, through the remarkable integrity of French character, peculators are rare, nevertheless peculation is organized: it exists.
Toulon, situated on the sea, has lost its right to fish; do you know how? The city of Marseilles
desiring the monopoly of the lucrative industry, the Government
pretended that the nets of the Toulon fishermen hampered the movements
of national vessels! That is why the inhabitants of Toulon import their
fish from Marseilles.
For a long time the shipping trade has asked for the
abolition of transportation duties on the canals, which yield an
insignificant amount for the customs, but are a disastrous fetter on
commerce. The Government objects that it is not free, that it needs a
law of redemption, that, moreover, it is engaged upon a project of
farming out the duties. The gist of it is that there exist franchises
which hope to sell out at a high price; moreover, if the duties on
navigation were abolished, the canals would compete with the railroads,
and the holders of the railroad franchises, very often members of the
ministry, have no interest in reducing the railroad charges. Do you
suspect that Messrs. Leon Faucher, Fould, Magne, even the President of the Republic, make money out of their position? I do not. I only say that, if the man in power wants to peculate,
he can do so; and that, sooner or later, he will. What am I talking
about? Venality will soon be made noe of the prerogatives of government.
The tiger devours because he is built to devour, and you expect that a
government built for corruption will not be corrupt?
Even charitable institutions serve the ends of those in authority marvellously well.
Charity is the strongest chain by which privilege and the
Government, bound to protect them, holds down the lower classes. With
charity, sweeter to the heart of men, more intelligible to the poor man
than the abstruse laws of political economy, one may dispense with
justice. Benefactors abound in the catalogue of saints; not one law
dispenser is found there. The Government, like the Church, places
fraternity far above justice. A good friend of the poor as much as you
like, but it hates calculators. In connection with the discussion on
pawnbrokers, the Journal des Debats
recalled that there would in time be hospitals everywhere. Loan offices,
it added, showed the same progress; each town wanted one for itself,
and would soon obtain it. I cannot conceive the indignation of the whole
list of bourgeois delegates against the two honorable socialists who
proposed to establish a loan office in each county immediately. Never
was there a proposition more worthy of the favor of the Debats.
The establishment for loans upon wages, even if the loan were
gratuitous, is the antechamber of the hospital. And what is the
hospital? The temple of Poverty.
Through these three ministries, that of agriculture and
commerce, that of public works, and that of the interior, through the
taxes of consumption and through the custom house, the Government keeps
its hand on all that comes and goes, all that is produced and consumed,
on all the business of individuals, towns and provinces; it maintains
the tendency of society toward the impoverishment of the masses, the
subordinating of the laborers, and the always growing preponderance of
parasite offices. Through the police, it watches the enemies of the
system; through the courts, it condemns and represses them; through the
army it crushes them; through public institutions it distributes, in
such proportions as suit it, knowledge and ignorance; through the Church
it puts to sleep any protest in the hearts of men; through the finances
it defrays the cost of this vast conspiracy at the expense of workers.
Under the monarchy of July, I repeat, the men in power did not understand the thought which ruled them, any more than did the masses. Louis Philippe, Guizot
and their associates did things with a simplicity of corruption which
was natural to them, making use of ways and means marvellously well, but
not perceiving the end directly. After the lower classes had made their
formidable voice heard in the revolution of February, the system began to be understood; it was propounded with the effrontery of dogmatism, it was called by its surname Malthus, and by its given name, Loyola. At bottom, nothing was changed by the event of February, any more than by those of 1830, 1814, 1793, from the order of pretended constitutional things that had been founded in 1791. Louis Bonaparte, whether he knows it or not, continues the rule of Louis Philippe, the Bourbons, Napoleon, and Robespierre.
Thus, in 1851 as in 1788, and from analogous causes, there
is in society a pronounced tendency towards poverty. Now, as then, the
wrong of which the laboring class complains is not the effect of a
temporary or accidental cause, it is that of a systematic diversion of
the social forces.
This diversion dates from far back, even before ’89. It
has its principle in the profundities of general economy. The first
revolution, struggling against the most manifest abuses, could act only
on the surface. After having destroyed tyranny, it did not know how to
establish order; whereof the principles were hidden under the feudal
ruins that covered the country. Moreover, that revolution of which the
history seems so complete to us, was only a negation, and will appear to
posterity as only the first act, the dawn of the great Revolution,
which must occupy the nineteenth century.
The crash of ’89–’91 left no organic principle, no working
structure, after having abolished, together with the monarchy, the last
remains of feudalism, proclaimed equality before the law and for
taxation, freedom of the press and of worship, and interested the
people, as much as it could, by the sale of national property. It has
not redeemed one of its promises. When the Revolution proclaimed liberty
of the people, the subordination of power to the country, it set up two
incompatible things, society and government; and it is this
incompatibility which has been the cause or the pretext of this
overwhelming, liberty-destroying concentration, called Centralization, which the parliamentary democracy admires and praises, because it is its nature to tend toward despotism.
We have seen the old society perish, and with
it a swarm of democratic institutions and of independent magistracies,
which it bore within its bosom, a strong combination of private rights,
veritable republics within the monarchy. These institutions, these
magistracies, did not share the sovereignty, it is true, but everywhere
they placed limits to it, which honor defended obstinately. Not one has
survived, and none other has been erected in their place; the Revolution
has left only individuals. In this respect, the dictatorship
in which it culminated, completed its work. From this society reduced to
dust, sprang centralization; its origin need not be sought elsewhere.
Centralization did not come like other doctrines, head erect and with
the authority of principle. It crept in modestly, as a necessary
consequence. In fact, where there are only individuals, all businss
which is not theirs is public business, business of the State. Where
there are no independent magistrates, there are only delegates of the
central power. Thus we have become a bureau-ruled people, under the hand
of responsible functionaries, themselves centralized in the power of
which they are the ministers. In this condition, society was bequeathed
to the Restoration.
The charter then had to reestablish Government and Society
at the same time. Society was not forgotten nor neglected, indeed, but
left out. The Charter reestablished only the Government; and did so by
the division of sovereignty and the multiplicity of powers. But in order
that a nation may be free, it is not enough that it be governed by
several powers. The division of sovereignty brought about by the
Charter, is, no doubt, an important accomplishment, and one which has
mighty consequences, relatively to the royal power which it modifies;
but the Government which results from it, although separated into its
elements, is one in practice; and, if it meets no outside obstacle which
it must respect, it is absolute: the nation and the nation’s rights are
its property. It was only when it established liberty of thep ress,
that the Charter restored Society to its own.
What M. Royer-Collard said of the royalty of 1814, is even more true of the Republic of 1848.
The Republic had Society to establish: it thought only of
establishing Government. Centralization continually fortifying itself,
while Society had no institution to oppose to it, through the
exaggeration of political ideas and the total absence of social ideas,
matters reached a point where Society and Government could not live
together, the condition of existence of the latter being to subordinate
and subjugate the former.
Therefore, while the problem propounded in ’89 seemed to
be officially solved, at the bottom there was change only in the
governmental metaphysics—what Napoleon called ideology.
Liberty, equality, progress, with all their oratorical consequences, are
written in the text of the constitutions and the laws; there is no
vestige of them in the institutions. The ancient hierarchy of classes
has been replaced by an ignoble feudalism, based on mercantile and
industrial usury; by a chaos of interests, an antagonism of principles, a
degradation of law: the abuses have changed the face which they bore
before ’89, to assume a different form of organization; they have
diminished neither in number nor gravity. On account of our being
engrossed with politics, we have lost sight of social economy. It was in
this way that the democratic party itself, the heir of the first
Revolution, came to attempting to reform Society by establishing the
initiative of the State, to create institutions by the prolific virtue
of Power, in a word, to correct an abuse by an abuse.
All minds being bewitched with politics, Society turns in a
circle of mistakes, driving capital to a still more crushing
agglomeration, the State to an extension of its prerogatives that is
more and more tyrannical, the laboring class to an irreparable decline,
physically, morally and intellectually.
For many people it is to advance a scandalous and
paradoxical proposition, filled with difficulty and disaster, to say
that the Revolution of ’89, having established nothing, has freed us not
at all, but only changed our sad lot; to say that, in consequence, a
new revolution to organize and reconstruct is necessary, to fill the
void left by the former. The more or less pledged partisans of the
constitutional monarchy will not agree; the democrats attached to the
letter of ’93, who are frightened at such a task, are opposed. According
to one or the other, nothing is left but accidental grievances, due
chiefly to the incapacity of the depositaries of power, which a vigorous
democracy could cure. Thence the disturbance, not to say antipathy,
with which the Revolution inspires them; and thence too this reactionary
policy in which they have engaged since February.
Nevertheless, such is the evidence of facts, so greatly
have statistics and investigations elucidated the matter, that it is
more than folly or bad faith to argue in favor of a better policy, when
everything shows the contradiction and the weakness of Government.
In place of this governmental, feudal and military rule,
imitated from that of the former kings, the new edifice of industrial
institutions must be built; in place of this materialist centralization
which absorbs all the political power, we must create the intellectual
and liberal centralization of economic forces. Labor, commerce, credit,
education, property, public morals, philosophy, art, everything in fact
require it of us.
I conclude:
There is sufficient cause for a revolution in the nineteenth century.
A MUST READ
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
A revolution is an act of sovereign justice,
in the order of moral facts, springing out of the necessity of things,
and in consequence carrying with it its own justification; and which it
is a crime for the statesman to oppose it. That is the proposition which
we have established in our first study.
Now the question is to discover whether the idea which
stands out as the formula of the revolution is not chimerical; whether
its object is real; whether a fancy or popular exaggeration is not
mistaken for a serious and just protest. The second proposition
therefore which we have to examine is the following:
Is there today sufficient reason in society for revolution?
For if this reason does not exist, if we are fighting for
an imaginary cause, if the people are complaining because, as they say,
they are too well off, the duty of the magistrate would be simply to
undeceive the multitude, whom we have often seen aroused without cause,
as the echo responds to one who calls.
In a word, is the occasion for revolution presented at the
moment, by the nature of things, by the connection of facts, by the
working of institutions, by the advance in needs, by the order of
Providence?
It should be possible to determine this at a glance. If a
long philosophical dissertation were necessary, a cause might exist, but
it would be only in the germ, only potentially. To weigh arguments in
such a cause would be prophecy, not practical history.
To solve this question I will take a rule, as simple as it
is decisive, with which the occurrences in past revolutions furnish me.
It is that the motive behind revolutions is not so much the distress
felt by the people at a given moment, as the prolongation of this
distress, which tends to neutralize and extinguish the good.
Thus the trial which is instituted by a revolution, and the judgment which later it puts into execution, are related to tendencies rather than to mere facts: society, as it were, paying little attention to principles, and directing its course solely toward ends…
Usually good and evil, pleasure and pain, are inextricably
entangled in human dealing. Nevertheless, despite continual
oscillations, the good seems to prevail over the evil, and, taking it
altogether, there is marked progress toward the better, as far as we can
see.
The reasoning of the masses is built upon this idea. The
people is neither optimistic nor pessimistic; it admits the absolute not
at all. Let is stay as it believes.
Always at each reform, each abuse to be destroyed, each
vice to be combatted, it confines itself to seeking for something
better, something less evil, and works for its own sanctification by
labor, by study, by good behavior. Its rule of conduct is therefore: A tendency toward comfort and virtue; it does not revolt until it can see nothing for it but A tendency toward poverty and corruption.
Thus there was no revolution in the seventeenth century,
although the retrograde feeling which was manifested in 1614 was already
the principle of royal policy, and although the poverty was frightful,
according to the witness of La Bruyere, Racine, Fénélon, Vauban and Boisguilbert.
Among other reasons for resignation was that it had not been proved
that poverty was anything more than the accidental effect of some
temporary cause: the people remembered having been much more wretched
not very long ago. The absolute monarchy under Louis XIV could not have appeared to them worse than feudalism.
Nor was there any revolution under Louis XV, except
in the intellectual realm. The corruption of principles, visible to
philosophers, remained hidden from the masses, whose logic never
distinguishes an idea from a fact. Popular experience, under Louis XV,
was far from being at the level of philosophical criticism. The nation
still supposed that with a well-behaved and honest prince, its ills
might have an end. Louis XVI too, was welcomed with fervor; while Turgot,
the unbending reformer, was received without sympathy. The support of
public opinion was lacking to this great man. In 1776, one might have
said that a worthy man, who wanted to bring about reforms peacefully,
had been betrayed by the people. It was not within his power to
accomplish the Revolution by action from above without disturbance, I
had almost said, without revolutionaries.
Fifteen years more of chaos were needed, under a monarch
personally irreproachable, to prove to the most thoughtless that the
trouble was not accidental but constitutional, that the disorganization
was systematic, not fortuitous, and that the situation, instead of
improving, was according to the usual fate of institutions, daily
growing worse and worse. The publication of the Red Book in 1790, demonstrated this truth by figures. Then it was that the Revolution became popularized and inevitable.
The question which we have taken for the text of this study:—Is there sufficient reason for a revolution in the nineteenth century?—resolves itself into the following:—What is the tendency of society in our day?
Hence, but a few pages will suffice to support the answer
which I do not hesitate to point out now. Society, as far as it has been
able to develop freely for half a century, under the distractions of
’89–’93, the paternalism of the Empire and the guaranties of 1814, 1830,
and 1848, is on a road radically and increasingly wrong.
Let us take our point of view at the very beginning of present society, in 1789.
In 1798 the task of the Revolution was to destroy and
rebuild at the same time. It had the old rule to abolish but only by
producing a new organization, of which the plan and character should be
exactly the opposite of the former, according to the revolutionary rule:
Every negation implies a subsequent contradictory affirmation.
Of these, the Revolution, with great difficulty,
accomplished only the first; the other was entirely forgotten. Hence
this impossibility of living, which has oppressed French society for 60
years.
The feudal order having been abolished on the night of the 4th of August,
and the principles of liberty and civil equality proclaimed, the
consequence was that in future society must be organized, not for
politics and war, but for work. What in fact was the feudal
organization? It was one entirely military. What is work? The negation
of fighting. To abolish feudalism, then, meant to commit ourselves to a
perpetual peace, not only foreign but domestic. By this single act, all
the old politics between State and State, all the systems of European
equilibrium, were abrogated: the same equality, the same independence
which the Revolution promised to bring about among individuals, must
exist between nation and nation, province and province, city and city …
What was to be organized after the 4th of August was not
the Government, inasmuch as in restoring government nothing but the
ancient landmarks would be restored; it was the national economy and the
balance of interests. It was evident that the problems of the
Revolution lay in erecting everywhere the reign of equality and
industry, in place of the feudal order which had been abolished;
inasmuch as, by the new principles, birth no longer counted in
determining the condition of the citizen, work was all, even property
itself was subordinate: inasmuch as, in foreign affairs, the relations
of nations among themselves had to be reformed upon the same principles,
since civil law, public law and the law of nations are one in principle
and sufficient. The progress in agriculture which was exhibited after
the division of the national treasure, the industrial impulse which the
nation experienced after the fall of the Empire, the growing interest in
all countries since 1830 in economic questions, all these go to prove
that it was really in the field of political economy that the efforts of
the Revolution should be exerted.
This so manifest, so inevitable conclusion from the act of the 4th of August, 1789, was not understood by those who made themselves its interpreters, even up to 1814.
All their ideas were of politics only. The
counter-revolutionary forces aiding, the revolutionary party forced for
the moment to place itself on the defensive and to organize itself for
war, the nation was again delivered into the hands of the warriors and
lawyers. One might say that nobility, clergy and monarchy had
disappeared, only to make way for another governing set of Anglomaniac
constitutionaries, classic republicans, militaristic democrats, all
infatuated with the Romans and the Spartans, and above all, very much so
with themselves; on the other hand, caring but very little for the real
needs of the country; which, understanding nothing of what was going
on, permitted itself to be half destroyed at their leisure, and finally
attached itself to the fortune of a soldier.
To put my thought in one word, however little edifying it may seem, the revolutionaries failed in their mission after the fall of the Bastille, as they have falied since the abdication of Louis Philippe,
and for the same reasons: the total lack of economic ideas, their
prejudice in favor of government, and the distrust of the lower classes
which they harbored. In ’93, the necessity of resistance to invasion
demanding an enormous concentration of forces, the error was
consummated. The principle of centralization, widely applied by the Committee of Public Safety, passed into dogma with the Jacobins,
who transmitted it to the Empire, and to the governments that followed
it. This is the unfortunate tradition which, in 1848, determined the
retrograde movement of the Provisory Government, and which still
constitutes the whole of the science which nourishes the politics of the
republican party.
Thus the economic organization called for as a necessary
consequence of the complete abolition of feudalism, left without
guidance from the first day, politics taking the place of industry in
the minds of everybody, Quesnay and Adam Smith giving way to Rousseau and Montesquieu;
it necessarily followed that the new society, scarcely conceived,
should remain in embryo; that, instead of developing according to
economic laws, it should languish in constitutionalism, that in place of
the orderly condition which is characteristic of it, it should exhibit
everywhere systematic corruption and legal inefficiency; finally, that
the power which is the expression of this society, reproducing with the
most scrupulous fidelity the antinomy of its principles, should find
itself continually in the position of fighting with the people and the
people in continual need of attacking power.
To sum up: the society which the Revolution of ’89 should
have created, does not yet exist. That which for sixty years we have
had, is but a superficial, factitious order, hardly concealing the most
frightful chaos and demoralization.
We are not in the habit of looking so long beforehand for
the causes of social disturbances and revolutions. Above all, economic
questions are repugnant to us. The people, after the great struggle of
’93, has been so distracted from its real interests, men of brains so
thrown off by the discussions of the legislative chamber, of public
meetings and of the press, that one may be almost sure, in leaving
politics for economics, to be in turn immediately abandoned by readers,
and to have only the paper for a confidant. Nevertheless we must
understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it
is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our
destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms whose forms
capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy,
which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of
society. Will the reader deign to follow me for a quarter of an hour
among the broad considerations into which I am obliged to enter? That
done, I promise to come back to politics.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
I call certain principles of action economic forces,
such as the Division of Labor, Competition, Collective Force, Exchange,
Credit, Property, &c., which are to Labor and to Wealth what the
distinction of classes, the representative system, monarchical heredity,
administrative centralization, the judicial hierarchy, &c., are to
the State.
If these forces are held in equilibrium, subject to the
laws which are proper to them, and which do not depend in any way upon
the arbitrary will of man, Labor can be organized, and comfort for all
guaranteed. If, on the other hand, they are left without direction and
without counterpoise, Labor is in a condition of chaos; the useful
effects of the economic forces is mingled with an equal quantity of
injurious effects; the deficit balances the profit; Society, in so far
as it is the theatre, the agent, or the subject of production,
circulation, and consumption, is in a condition of increasing suffering.
Up to now, it does not appear that order in a society can
be conceived except under one of these two forms, the political and the
industrial; between which, moreover, there is fundamental contradiction.
The chaos of industrial forces, the struggle which they
maintain with the government system, which is the only obstacle to their
organization, and which they cannot reconcile themselves with nor merge
themselves in, is the real, profound cause of the unrest which disturbs
French society, and which was aggravated during the second half of the
reign of Louis Philippe.
Seven years ago, I filled two octavo volumes
with the story of these disturbances, and of the terrible conflicts
which spring from them. This work, which remained unanswered by the
economists, was received no more favorably by the Social-Democracy. I
permit myself to make this remark, merely to show by my own experience
how little favor researches in political economy obtain, how little
revolutionary therefore is our epoch.
I shall limit myself to recalling very briefly some of the
most general facts, in order to give the reader a glimpse of this order
of forces and phenomena, which has been hidden from all eyes until now,
and which alone can put an end to the governmental drama.
Everybody has heard of the division of labor.
It consists of the distribution of the hand work of a given
industry in such a manner that each person performs always the same
operation, or a small number of operations, so that the product, instead
of being the integral product of one workman, is the joint product of a
large number.
According to Adam Smith, who first demonstrated this
law scientifically, and all the other economists, the division of labor
is the most powerful lever of modern industry. To it principally must
be attributed the superiority of civilized peoples to savage peoples.
Without division of labor, the use of machines would not have gone
beyond the most ancient and most common utensils: the miracles of
machinery and of steam would never have been revealed to us; progress
would have been closed to society; the French Revolution itself, lacking
an outlet, would have been but a sterile revolt; it could have
accomplished nothing. But, on the other hand, by division of labor, the
product of labor mounts to tenfold, a hundredfold, political economy
rises to the height of a philosophy, the intellectual level of nations
is continually raised. The first thing that should attract the attention
of the legislator is the separation of industrial functions—the
division of labor—in a society founded upon hatred of the feudal and
warlike order, and destined in consequence to organize itself for work
and peace.
It was not done thus. This economic force was left to all
the overturns caused by chance and by interest. The division of labor,
becoming always more minute, and remaining without counterpoise, the
workman has been given [over] to a more and more degrading subjection to
machinery. That is the effect of the division of labor when it is
applied as practised in our days, not only to make industry incomparably
more productive, but at the same time to deprive the worker, in mind
and body, of all the wealth which it creates for the capitalist and the
speculator. Here is how an observer, who is not suspected of sympathy
with labor, M. de Tocqueville, sums up on this grave subject:
In proportion to the more complete application
of the principle of the division of albor, the workman becomes weaker,
more limited and more dependent.
A man who all his life has performed but one
operation certainly learns to execute it more quickly and more skilfully
than another; but at the same time he becomes less capable of every
other operation, whether physical or intellectual; his other faculties
are extinguished, and degeneration results in him, considered as an
individual. It is a sad account to offer of himself that he has never
made more than the twenty-sixth part of a pin… In result it may be said
that the division of labor is a skilful mode of employing the power of a
man; that it adds prodigiously to the products of a society; but that
it subtracts something from the capacity of each man taken individually.
All the economists are in accord as to this fact, one of
the most serious which the science has to announce; and, if they do not
insist upon it with the vehemence which they habitually use in their
polemics, it must be said, to the shame of the human mind, that it is
because they cannot believe that this perversion of the greatest of
economic forces can be avoided.
So the greater the division of labor and the power of
machines, the less the intelligence and skill of hand of the worker. But
the more the value of the worker falls and the demand for labor
diminishes, the lower are wages and the greater is poverty. And it is
not a few hundreds of men but millions, who are the victims of this
economic perturbation.
In England, through the division of labor and the power of
machinery, the number of workmen has been observed to diminish by a
third ,by a half, by three-quarters, by five-sixths; and the wages
decreasing in like proportion, fall from 60 cents a day to 10 cents and 6
cents. Throughout entire provinces the proprietors have driven out
useless mouths. Everywhere first women, then children, have taken the
place of men in manufacture. Consumption being unable to keep pace with
production among an impoverished people, the latter is obliged to wait;
and regular out-of-work periods are the result; of six weeks, three
months and six months out of each year. Statistics of these periods of
idleness by Parisian workmen have recently been published by one of
them, Pierre Vincard; the details are heartrending. The smallness
of the wages being in proportion to the time of idleness, the
conclusion is reached that certain workwomen who earn 20 cents a day,
must live on 10, because they are idle for six months. This is the rule
to which a population of 320,000 in Paris must submit. And the situation
of the class of working women everywhere throughout the Republic may be
judged from this sample.
Philanthropic conservatives, admirers of ancient customs,
charge the industrial system with this anomaly. They want to go back to
the feudal-farming period. I say that it is not industry that is at
fault, but economic chaos: I maintain that the principle has been
distorted, that there is disorganization of forces, and that to this we
must attribute the fatal tendency with which society is carried away.
Another example.
Competition, next to the division of labor, is
one of the most powerful factors of industry; and at the same time one
of the most valuable guaranties. Partly for the sake of it, the first
revolution was brought about. The workmen’s unions, established at Paris
some years since, have recently given it a new sanction by establishing
among themselves piece work, and abandoning, after their experience of
it, the absurd idea of the equality of wages. Competition is moreover
the law of the market, the spice of the trade, the salt of labor. To
suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself; it is to begin the
restoration of the old order from below, in replacing labor by the rule
of favoritism and abuse, of which ’89 rid us.
Yet competition, lacking legal forms and superior
regulating intelligence, has been perverted in turn, like the division
of labor. In it, as in the latter, there is perversion of principle,
chaos and a tendency toward evil. This will appear beyond doubt if we
remember that of the thirty-six million souls who compose the French
nation, at least ten millions are wage workers, to whom competition is
forbidden, for whom there is nothing but to struggle among themselves
for their meagre stipend.
Thus that competition, which, as thought in ’89, should be
a general right, is today a matter of exceptional privilege: only they
whose capital permits them to become heads of business concerns may
exercise their competitive rights.
The result is that competition, as Rossi, Blanqui,
and a host of others have recognized, instead of democratizing
industry, aiding the workman, guaranteeing the honesty of trade, has
ended in building up a mercentile and land aristocracy, a thousand times
more rapacious than the old aristocracy of the nobility. Through
competition all the profits of production go to capital; the consumer,
without suspecting the frauds of commerce, is fleeced by the speculator,
and the condition of the workers is made more and more precarious.
Speaking of this, Eugene Buret says: I assert that the working class is turned over, body and soul, to the sweet will of industry. And elsewhere he says:The
most trifling speculation may change the price of bread one cent a
pound, which means $124,100,000 for thirty-six million people.
It was recently seen how little free competition could do
for the people, and how illusory it is as a guaranty with us at present,
when the Prefect of Police, yielding to the general demand, authorized
the sale of meat at auction. Nothing less than all the energy the people
could muster, aided by governmental power, could overcome the monopoly
of the butchers.
Accuse human nature, say the economists, do not accuse
competition. Very well, I will not accuse competition: I will only
remark that human nature does not remedy one evil by another, and ask
how it has mistaken its path. What? Competition ought to make us more
and more equal and free; and instead it subordinates us one to the
other, and makes the worker more and more a slave! This is a perversion
of the principle, a forgetfulness of the law. These are not mere
accidents; they are a whole system of misfortunes.
Pity is expressed for those who work in dangerous or
unwholesome occupations: it is desired that civilization should do
without their services, out of compassion for their lot. These sad
occurrences, inherent in certain occupations, are nothing in comparison
with the scourge of economic chaos.
Let us cite one more example.
Of all economic forces, the most vital, in a society reconstructed for industry by revolution, is credit.
The proprietary, industrial, trading business world knows this well:
all its efforts since ’89 have tended, at the bottom, toward only these
two things, peace and credit, all through the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, the Convention, the Directory, the Empire, the Restoration, the monarchy of July. What did it not do to win over the unmanageable Louis XVI? What did it not pardon in Louis Philippe?
The peasant also knows it: of the whole of politics, he,
like the business man, understands only these two things, taxes and
interest. As for the working class, so marvellously fitted for progress,
such is the ignorance in which it has been kept as to the true cause of
its sufferings, that it is hardly since February that it has begun to
stammer the word, credit; and to see in this principle the most powerful
of revolutionary forces. In the matter of credit, the workingman knows
but two things, his account with the baker and the pawnbroker’s shop.
In a nation devoted to labor, credit is what blood is to
an animal, the means of nutrition, life itself. It cannot be interrupted
without danger to the social body. If there is a single institution
which should have appealed before all others to our legislators, after
the abolition of feudal privileges and the levelling of classes,
assuredly it is credit. Yet not one of our pompous declarations of
right, not one of our constitutions, so long drawn out, not one of these
has mentioned it at all. Credit, like the division of labor, the use of
machinery and competition, has been left to itself; even the financial
power, far greater than that of the executive, legislative and
judicial, has never had the honor of mention in our various charters.
Handed over by a decree of the Empire of the 23rd of April, 1803,
to a company of revenue farmers, it has remained until now in the
condition of a hidden power: hardly anything can be found relating to
it, except a law of 1807, fixing the rate of interest at five per cent.
After the Revolution as before it, credit got along as best it could; or
rather, as it pleased the largest holders of coin. It is only fair to
say that the Government, while sacrificing the Country, did not spare
itself; it treated itself as it treated others: we have nothing against
it on this score.
What has been the result of this incredible negligence?
In the first place, forestalling and usury being practised
upon coin by preference, coin being at the same time the tool of
industrial transactions and the rarest of merchandise, and consequently
the safest and most profitable, dealing in money was rapidly
concentrated in the hands of a few monopolists, whose fortress is the
Bank.
Thereupon the Country and the State were made the vassals of a coalition of capitalists.
Thanks to the tax imposed by this bankocracy upon all
industrial and agricultural industry, property has already been
mortgaged for two billion dollars, and the State for more than one
billion.
The interest paid by the nation for this double
indebtedness, with costs, renewals, commissions and discounts on loans
included, amounts to at least 240 million dollars.
This enormous sum of 240 millions does not yet express all
that the producers have to pay to the financial exploitation: we should
add from 140 to 160 million for discounts, advances, delays in
payments, dividends, obligations under private seal, court expenses,
&c.
Property, fleeced by the Bank, has been obliged to follow
the same course in its relations with industry, to become a usurer in
turn toward labor; thus farm rent and house rent have reached a
prohibitive rate, which drives the cultivator from the field and the
workman from his home.
So much so that today they whose labor has created
everything cannot buy their own products, nor obtain furniture, nor own a
habitation, nor ever say: This house, this garden, this vine, this
field, are mine.
On the contrary, it is an economic necessity, in the
present system of credit, and with the growing disorganization of
industrial forces, that the poor man, working harder and harder, should
be always poorer, and that the rich man, without working, always richer,
as one may easily convince himself by the following.
If we may believe the estimate of a skilled economist, M. Chevé,
out of two billions of value produced every year, one and one-fifth
billions are taken away by parasites; that is to say, by finance, by
predaceous property, and by the budget and its satellites: the balance,
perhaps four-fifths of a billion, remains for the producers. Another
able economist, M. Chevalier, divided the estimated product of
the country by its thirty-six million inhabitants, has found that the
income per head per day was an average of 13 cents; and, as from this
figure must be deducted enough to pay interest, rent, taxes, and the
expenses which they involve, M. de Morogues, yet another learned
economist, has concluded that for a large part of the population daily
consumption was less than 5 cents. But since rents, the same as taxes,
continually increase, while through economic disorganization work and
wages diminish, it follows that, according to the aforesaid economists,
the material comfort of the working classes follows a decreasing
progression, which may be represented by this series of numbers: 65, 60,
55, 50, 45, 40, 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 0, −5, −10, −15, &c.
This law of impoverishment is the corollary of the Malthusian law; its fundamental fact may be found in every book of statistics.
Some utopians attack competition; others refuse to accept
the division of labor and the whole industrial order; the workingmen, in
their crass ignorance, blame machinery. No one, to this day, has
thought of denying the utility and legitimacy of credit; nevertheless it
is incontestable that the perversion of credit is the most active cause
of the poverty of the masses. Were it not for this, the deplorable
effects of the division of labor, of the employment of machinery, of
competition, would scarcely be felt at all, would not even exist. Is it
not evident that the tendency of society is towards poverty, not through
the depravity of men, but through the disorder of its own elementary
principles?
It may be said that this is a misuse of logic, that
capital, land, houses, cannot be let for nothing, that every service
should be paid for, &c. Possibly. I will admit that lending wealth,
as much as creating it, is a service that merits recompense. When it is a
question of the advantage of others, I would rather exceed justice than
stop short of it; but that does not alter the facts. I maintain that
credit is too dear; that it is with money as it is with meat, which the
prefect of police supplies us with today from 3 to 5 cents cheaper than
the market stall keepers; as it is with transportation, which would cost
80 per cent less than present rates, if the railroads would permit the
country to use their immense resources. I say that it would be possible,
yes, easy, to lower the price of credit from 75 to 90 per cent, without
wronging the lenders, and that it depends upon the nation and the State
that this should be done. Let there be no argument as to a pretended
legal impossibility. It is with the seignorial rights of capitalists as
it was with those of the nobles and monasteries, nothing easier than to
abolish them; and, I repeat, that for the safety of property itself they
must be abolished.
Can it be believed that the revolutionaries of ’89, ’92,
’93, ’94, who swung the axe with such ardor against the feudal tree,
would not have uprooted it to its last fibres, if they had forseen that,
in the shadow of their half-way governmentalism, such sprouts would
grow?
Can it be believed that, instead of reestablishing the
seignorial courts and the parliaments under other names and other forms,
of re-erecting abolutism after baptising it with the name of the
Constitution, of enslaving the provinces as before, under the pretext of
unity and centralization, of sacrificing all liberties, by giving them
for an inseparable companion a pretended public order, which is
but confusion, corruption and brute force—can it be believed, I say,
that they would not have welcomed the new order, and completed the
Revolution, if their sight had penetrated the organism which their
instinct sought, but the state of knowledge and the distractions of the
moment did not permit them to conceive? ….
It is not only that our present society, though having
forsaken its principles, tends continually to impoverish the producer,
to subordinate labor to capital—a contradiction in itself—but that it
tends also to make of workingmen a race of helots, inferior to the caste
of free men as of old; and it tends to erect into a political and
social dogma the enslavement of the working class and the necessity of
its poverty.
A few facts, selected from among millions, will exemplify this fatal tendency.
From 1806 to 1811, according to Chevalier, the
annual consumption of wine in Paris was 170 quarts per head: it is now
only 95 quarts. Abolish the duties, which with the accessory expenses,
amount to at least 6 to 7 cents a quart with the retailer, and the
consumption will increase from 95 to 200; moreover the vine grower, who
does not know what to do with his products, will be able to sell them.
But in order to do this, it would be necessary either to
reduce the amount of the budget, or to place the taxes upon the rich;
and, as neither the one nor the other seems practicable, and besides as
it is not well that the workingman should drink too much, seeing that
the use of wine is incompatible with the modesty which is becoming in
men of that class, the duties will not be lowered, neither will they be
raised.
According to Raudot, a writer whose conservative
opinions relieve him from any charge of exaggeration, France is reduced
to buying annually in foreign markets nine million head of sheep and
cattle for the slaughter house, despite the high tariff. Notwithstanding
this importation, the quantity of meat offered for sale does not exceed
an average of 40 lbs. per head per annum, a
trifle less than 2 ounces a day. But if we recall that 85 cities, towns
and capitals of provinces, with a total population of not more than 3
millions, absorb a quarter of this, the conclusion is reached that he
majority of Frenchmen never eat meat; which is in fact true.
It is by virtue of this policy that wine and meat are
today excluded from the list of articles of first necessity, and that so
many people, in France as in Ireland, eat only potatoes, chestnuts,
buckwheat or oatmeal.
The effects of this state of affairs are such as might be
expected from theory. Everywhere in Europe the constitution of the
laborer is weakened. In France, the Council of Revision has
established that within fifty years the average stature has diminished
by half an inch, and this reduction bears chiefly upon suffering
humanity, the working class. Before ’89, the required minimum height for
the army was 5 feet 1 inch. Afterwards followin the diminution of
stature and the weakening of health, as well as the excessive
destruction of life, this was reduced to 4 feet 10 inches. As for
exemptions from service for deficient height and health, they were, from
1830 to 1839, 45½ per cent, and from 1839 to 1848, 50½ per cent.
The average length of life, it is true, has increased, but
at the expense of the same laboring class, as is proved, among other
proofs, by the tables of mortality of Paris, in which the death rate for
the 12th precinct is 1 in 26, while for the 1st precinct it is only 1
in 52.
Can it be doubted that there is a tendency toward ill in
existing society, at least among the working people? Does it not seem
that society has been made, as Saint Simon says, not for the
amelioration of the people, physically, morally and intellectually, but
for their impoverishment depravity, and ignorance?
The average number of students received each year by the Polytechnic School is, I believe, 176. According to Chevalier,
it would not be exaggeration to say that twenty times as many might be
received. But what would our capitalist society do with the 3520
graduates which the School would turn out at the end of each school
year? I insist upon this question: What would it do?
When the management ordered that only 176 scholars should
be received in place of the 3520 who could be received, it was because
it was not possible for the government, with its still feudal-industrial
system, to make proper provision for more than 176 of these young
people.
Science is not cultivated for the sake of science: one
does not study chemistry, integral calculus, analytical geometry,
mechanics, in order to become a mechanic or a laborer. Superabundance of
ability, far from being of service to the country and the State, is an
inconvenience to them. In order to avoid dangerous upsetting of classes,
it is necessary that instruction should be given in proportion to
fortune; that is should be slight or none at all for the most numerous
and lowest class, moderate for the middle class, superior only for a
small number of the well-to-do, destined to represent by their talents
the aristocracy whence they sprang…. That is what the Catholic clergy,
faithful to its principles, faithful to its feudal traditions, has
always understood: the law placing the University and the schools in
their hands was only an act of justice.
Thus, instruction cannot be universal, and, most of all,
it cannot be free, in a still feudal society: that would be nonsense. It
is necessary, in order to maintain the subordination of the masses, to
restrain the flowering-forth of ability, to reduce the too numerous and
too unmanageable attendance at colleges, to keep in systematic ignorance
the millions of workers doomed to repugnant and painful labor, to make
use of the instruction by not making use of it, that is to say, by
turning it toward the brutalization and exploitation of the lower
classes.
And, as if the evil as well as the good must have its
sanction, pauperism, thus foreseen, provided for, organized, by the
economic chaos, has found its own; it is included in the criminal
statistics. Here is the progression for 25 years past, of the number of
arrests and of cases prosecuted at the request of the public prosecutor:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1827
47,443
34,908
1846
101,443
80,891
1847
124,159
95,914
In the district courts the progression has increased in the same way:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1829
159,740
108,390
1845
197,913
152,923
1847
239,291
184,922
When the workingman has been brutalized by the division of
labor, by attending machines, by teaching that does not teach; when he
has been discouraged by small wages, demoralized by being out of work,
famished by monopoly; when he has neither bread nor dough, neither cash
nor credit, neither fire nor hearth; then he lies, he thieves, he robs,
he assassinates. After having passed through the hands of the
plunderers, he passes through those of the dealers in justice. Is that
clear?
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
It is by contrast with error that truth impresses itself
upon the understanding. In place of liberty and industrial equality, the
Revolution has left us a legacy of authority and political
subordination. The State, growing more powerful every day, and endowed
with prerogatives and privileges without end, has undertaken to do for
our happiness what we might have expected from a very different source.
How has it acquitted itself of its task? What part has the government
played during the last fifty years, regardless of the particular form of
its organization? What has been its tendency? That is now the question.
Up to 1848, statesmen, whether belonging to the ministry or
the opposition, whose influence directed public sentiment and
governmental action, did not seem to have been aware of the mistaken
course of society in what especially concerns the laboring classes. Most
of them indeed made it a merit and a duty to busy themselves in the
amelioration of the workers’ lot. One would cry out for teachers;
another would talk against the premature and immoral employment of
children in manufactories. This one would demand the lowering of duties
upon salt, beverages and meat; that one called out for the complete
abolition of town and custom house tariffs. In the lofty regions of
power there was a general impulse toward economic and social questions.
Not a soul saw that, in the present state of our institutions, such
reforms were but innocent chimaeras; that, in order to bring them about,
nothing less than a new creation was necessary; in other words, a
revolution.
Since the abdication of Louis Philippe, on the 24th
of February, the governmental set, participants in privilege, have
changed their opinion. The policy of oppression and impoverishment which
they formerly followed without knowing it, I had almost said in spite
of themselves, has been accepted by many of them, this time with full
knowledge.
The government is the organ of society.
That which goes on in the social body most secretly, most
metaphysically, shows itself in government with a quite military
frankness, a fiscal crudity. A long time ago a statesman said that a
government could not exist without a public debt and a large budget.
This aphorism, to which the opposition was wrong in taking exception, is
the financial expression of the retrograde and subversive tendency of
Power: we may now measure the depth of it. It means that Government,
instituted for the guidance of society, is but the reflection.
April 1st 1814, the interest on the public debt was $12,661,523.
July 31st 1830, the interest on the public debt was $39,883,541.
Jan. 1st 1847, the interest on the public debt was $47,422,671.
Jan. 1st 1851, the interest on the public debt was $54,200,000.
The public debt, for both the State and the towns, which
it is fair to regard here as parts of the central authority, is about
half of the sum total of mortgages and notes of hand, which weigh down
the country: both of these, under the same impulse, have grown along
with each other. The tendency is unmistakeable. Whither is it leading
us? To bankruptcy.
The first regular budget since the Directory is
that of 1802. Dating from this time, the expenses have continually
grown, in the same progression as the debt of the country and of the
State.
1802
$117,000,000.
1819
172,770,622.
1829
201,982,886.
1840
259,702,889.
1848
338,436,222.
In fifty years, the budget of expenses has almost tripled;
the mean annual increase is about five millions. It would be too
foolish to attribute this increase to the incapacity of ministers, to
their more or less intelligent and liberal policy, as has been done
under each successive change: the Restoration and the monarchy of July,
the dynastic opposition and the republican conspiracy. To explain a
phenomenon as constant and regular as is the growth of the budget by the
inefficiency of men, especially when it has its correllative in the
increase of mortgages and of notes of hand, is as absurd as it would be
to explain the Oriental plague and the yellow fever by the incapacity of
physicians. It is the hygiene that must be attacked; it is your
economic order that calls for reform.
Thus the Government, which is called the instrument of
order and the guaranty of our liberties, keeps step with society, falls
more and more into difficulties, incurs indebtedness, and tends toward
bankruptcy. We are about to see how, as society, given over to the
disorganization of its elements, tends to reestablish the former castes;
the Government, on its side, tends to unite its efforts with this new
aristocracy and to complete the oppression of the lower classes.
Solely because the powers of society were left unorganized
by the Revolution, there results an inequality of conditions, of which
the cause is not, as formerly, the natural inequality of ability; but
which finds a new pretext in the accidents of society, and adds, among
the claims, the injustices of fortune to the caprices of nature.
Privilege, abolished by law, is born again through lack of equilibrium:
it is no longer a mere result of divine predestination: it has become a
necessity of civilization.
Once justified as in the order of nature and of
Providence, what does privilege lack in order to assure its triumph
definitely? It has only to make laws, institutions, the Government, in
harmony with itself: toward this end it is about to direct all its
forces.
In the first place, as no law forbids, so far at least as
it flows from one of these two sources, nature or accident, privilege
may call itself perfectly legal: in this regard it may already claim the
respect of citizens and the protection of Government.
What is the principle which rules existing society? Each by himself, each for himself. God and LUCK for all.
Privilege, resulting from luck, from a commercial turn, from any of the
gambling methods which the chaotic condition of industry furnishes, is
then a providential thing, which everybody must respect.
On the other hand, what is the function of Government? To
protect and defend each one in his person, his industry, his property.
But if by the necessity of things, property, riches, comfort, all go on
one side, poverty on the other, it is clear that Government is made for
the defence of the rich against the poor. For the perfecting of this
state of affairs, it is necessary that what exists should be defined and
consecrated by law: that is precisely what Power wants, and what demonstrates from beginning to end our analysis of the budget.
I am talking at random.
The Provisory Government has made known that the increases
of salary of Government functionaries from 1830 to 1848 amounted to the
sum of 13 million dollars. Supposing that only half of this were used
for the salaries of newly created offices, the average salary being
assumed at $200, it follows that the Government added 32,500 employees
during the reign of Louis Philippe. Today the total number of functionaries, according to Raudot,
is 568,365: in every nine men there is one who lives on the Government,
either of the Country or of the towns. Whatever outcry there may be
made against waste, I shall never believe that the creation of 32,500
offices was anything but plunder.
What interest had the king or the ministers, or any of the
individuals who already held office, in adding to their number? Is it
not true that, the agitation of the working classes becoming more
threatening with time, and consequently the danger greater for the
privileged class, Power, the force that represses and protects, had to
fortify itself in proportion, on pain of being overthrown at the first
opportunity?
Examination of the budgets for the army and navy confirms this opinion.
From 1830 to 1848,—I borrow this detail from the periodical Europe and America—the
united budgets of the navy and of war were gradually raised from
$64,796,000 to $107,167,400. The average annual amount was $84,000,000;
the average increase $2,400,000. The grand total for eighteen years,
$1,501,000,000.
In the same period the budget for public instruction
increased from $451,600 to $3,859,600. The grand total was $46,560,400.
Difference between this and the warmaking budget, $1,454,439,000.
Thus while the Government spent an average of 2½ millions
for fostering popular ignorance, under the name of public instruction,
it spent 84 millions, thirty-two times as much, to restrain this
ignorance by steel and fire, if the frenzy of poverty should cause it to
burst forth. This is what the politicians of the day have called an armed peace.
The same tendency is shown in the other budgets: I mean to say that the
budgets have always increased in direct proportion to their services to
the cause of privilege, and inversely to those which they could render
to the producers. But when it is admitted that the lofty financial and
administrative capacities which governed France during those eighteen
years had no such intentions as are indicated by these comparisons of
the budgets, which, after all, matter little, it would remain not that
not the less true that the system of impoverishment and repression by
the State developed with a spontaneity and certainty that might well
dispense with any complicity on the part of statesmen.
Once again, there is here no question of persons.
Above the spirit of men there is the spirit of things; it
is with this latter that the philosopher concerns himself, always well
disposed towards his fellows.
If the composition of the budget of expenses is curious,
that of the account of receipts is no less instructive. I will not enter
into details; the general character will suffice. It is in
generalization that truth is discovered.
Since 1848 it has been proved by figures that if the
existing system of duties were replaced by a single tax on capital of
say, one per cent., the tax would be distributed with an almost ideal
equality, uniting the advantages of proportionality and progression,
without any of their drawbacks. By this sysstem labor would be little if
at all affected; capital, on the contrary, would be scientifically
reached. Where capital was not protected by the labor of the capitalist,
it would be exposed to levy; while the workingman, whose possessions
did not exceed a taxable amount, would pay nothing. Justice in taxation
would be the ne plus ultra
of fiscal science. But that would be the reverse of government. The
proposition, scouted by the practical politicians, served only to
discredit and almost discourage its authors.
The system of taxation actually followed is just the
opposite of that. It is planned in such a way that the producer pays
all, the capitalist nothing. In fact, whenever the latter is put down on
the books of the assessor for any amount whatever, or pays the duties
established by the fiscal authority on objects of consumption, it is
clear that, as his income is composed solely of the interest upon his
capital, and not by the exchange of his products, his income remains
free from taxation; inasmuch as it is only the producer that pays.
That injustice had to be; and Government was in this in
perfect accord with Society. If the inequality of conditions which
results from the economic disorganization be taken as an indication of
the will of Providence, the Government cannot do better than to follow
his will; for that reason, not content with defending privilege,
Government comes to its assistance by asking nothing from it. Grant the
time, and Government will make privilege an Institution, under the
titles of Nobility, Burghers, or otherwise.
There is therefore a compact between Capital and Power to
make the worker exclusively pay the taxes; and the secret of this
compact is simply, as I have said, to place the taxes on products,
instead of on capital.
Through this disguise the capitalist seems to pay on his
land, on his house, on his furniture, on his securities, on his
travelling, on his food, like the rest of the citizens. Also he says
that his income, which without tax would be 600, 1200, 2000 or 4000
dollars, is no more, thanks to the tax, than 500, 900, 1600, or 3000
dollars. And he complains against the amount of the budget with more
indignation than his tenants.
A complete mistake. The capitalist pays nothing: the
Government divides up with him; that is all. They make common cause.
What one of the workers would not esteem himelf lucky if he were granted
$400 income, upon the sole condition that he should give up a quarter
of it in redemption?
There is one chapter in the accounts of receipts that has
always seemed to me like a reminiscence of the old system, that of
assessment.
It is not enough that the producer pays for the liberty to
manufacture, cultivate, sell, buy or transport that the fiscal
authority grants him; the assessments forbid him to hold property as far
as possible. So much for an inheritance from a father, so much from an
uncle, so much for a rental, so much for a purchase. It is as if the
legislator of ’89 had had the intention of reenacting the inalienability
of real estate, in exact correspondence with feudal rights! As if he
had wanted to remind the wretch who had been freed by the night of the 4th of August
that he was still of servile condition, that he had no right to own the
soil, that every cultivator is only a tenant and distrainable by law,
unless he has permission from the sovereign! We must take care: there
are people who hold these ideas religiously: those people are our
masters and the friends of all those who lend to us on mortgage.
The partisans of governmental rule repel, with all the
force of conviction, criticism which, instead of finding fault with men,
attacks institutions, and endangers and threatens what they consider
their hereditary rights.
Is it the fault, they cry, of our representative
institutions? Is it the fault of the constitutional principle, or that
of incapable, corrupt, wasteful ministers, if a portion of those
millions, taken from property, from agriculture and from industry, at
the price of so great sacrifices, have served only to support sinecures
and to salve consciences? Is it the fault of this magnificent
centralization, if the taxes, having become exorbitant, weigh more
heavily upon the worker than on the proprietor; if, with a subsidy of 84
millions, our ports are bare of ships, our shops of materials; if, in
1848, after the revolution of February, the army was without provisions,
the cavalry without horses, the fortifications in bad condition; if we
could not put upon a war footing more than sixty thousand men? On the
contrary, is it not a case in which not the system but the mode of
carrying it out should be blamed? And then what becomes of your
denunciations of the tendencies of society and of government?
Indeed! We may then add corruption to the intrinsic vices
and feudal inclinations of the political order. Far from weakening my
argument, it strengthens it. Corruption allies itself well with the
general tendencies of Power; it forms a part of its methods; it is one
of its elements.
What does the system demand?
That the capitalistic feudalism shall be maintained in the
enjoyment of its rights; that the preponderance of capital over labor
shall be increased; that the parasite class shall be reinforced, if
possible, by providing for it everywhere hangers-on, through the aid of
public functions, and as recruits if necessary, and that large
properties shall be gradually reestablished, and the proprietors
ennobled;—did not Louis Philippe, toward the end of his reign,
devote himself to conferring titles of nobility?—that thus, by indirect
ways, certain services, which the official list of offices cannot
satisfy, shall be recompensed; finally, that everything shall be
attached to the surpeme patronage of the State—charities, recompenses,
pensions, awards, concessions, exploitations, authorizations, positions,
titles, privileges, ministerial offices, stock companies, municipal
administrations, etc., etc.
This is the reason for that venality whereof the scandals
under the last reign so surprised us; but at which the public conscience
would have been less astonished, if the mystery had been explained.
This too is the ulterior aim of that centralization which, under pretext
of the general interest, exerts pressure upon local interests, by
selling to the last and highest bidder the justice which they claim.
Understand clearly that corruption is the soul of
centralization. There is not a monarchy nor a democracy that is free
from it. Government is unchangeable in its spirit and essence; if it
takes a hand in public economy, it is to establish, by favor or by
force, what accident tends to bring about. Let us take the custom house
for an example.
Custom house duties, both import and export, but not
including those on salt, produce 32 millions for the State. 32 millions
to protect national industry! Do you perceive the jugglery? Suppose that
the customs did not exist; that Belgian, English, German, American
competition surrounded our markets on every side, and that then the
State should make the following proposition to French industry: In order
to protect your interests, which would you prefer to do, to pay me 32
millions or to receive them yourselves? Do you think that the industries
would elect to pay them? That is just what the Government requires them
to do. To the regular charges which foreign products and those which we
send abroad cost us, the Government adds 32 millions, which serve it as
drink-money; that is what the custom house amounts to. And the question
today is so entangled, that there is not one person in the whole
Republic who would dare to propose to abolish at one blow this absurd
tribute.
Moreover this sum of 32 millions, said to be levied for
the protection of national industry, is far from expressing all the
advantage which the Government draws from the custom house.
The Department of Var is not well supplied with
livestock; it lacks meat, and would ask nothing better than to import
cattle from the Piedmont, a frontier province. The Government, the
protector of the school-boy nation, will not permit it. What does this
mean? That the lobbyists of the Camargue have more influence with the ministry than the would-be purchasers of Var: ask for no other reason.
The story of the Department of Var is that of the
eighty-five remaining Departments. All have their special interests; are
in consequence antagonists, and seek an arbitrator. It is these
interests, far more than the army, which form the strength of the
Government. Also, observe, the Government has made itself the grantor of
mines, of canals, or railroads, in just the same way that the Court,
before ’89, sold the ranks of colonel and captain, as well as clerical
benefices.
I can believe that all the personages who have taken
charge of affairs since 1830 remained pure, except one; but it is not
evident that if, through the remarkable integrity of French character, peculators are rare, nevertheless peculation is organized: it exists.
Toulon, situated on the sea, has lost its right to fish; do you know how? The city of Marseilles
desiring the monopoly of the lucrative industry, the Government
pretended that the nets of the Toulon fishermen hampered the movements
of national vessels! That is why the inhabitants of Toulon import their
fish from Marseilles.
For a long time the shipping trade has asked for the
abolition of transportation duties on the canals, which yield an
insignificant amount for the customs, but are a disastrous fetter on
commerce. The Government objects that it is not free, that it needs a
law of redemption, that, moreover, it is engaged upon a project of
farming out the duties. The gist of it is that there exist franchises
which hope to sell out at a high price; moreover, if the duties on
navigation were abolished, the canals would compete with the railroads,
and the holders of the railroad franchises, very often members of the
ministry, have no interest in reducing the railroad charges. Do you
suspect that Messrs. Leon Faucher, Fould, Magne, even the President of the Republic, make money out of their position? I do not. I only say that, if the man in power wants to peculate,
he can do so; and that, sooner or later, he will. What am I talking
about? Venality will soon be made noe of the prerogatives of government.
The tiger devours because he is built to devour, and you expect that a
government built for corruption will not be corrupt?
Even charitable institutions serve the ends of those in authority marvellously well.
Charity is the strongest chain by which privilege and the
Government, bound to protect them, holds down the lower classes. With
charity, sweeter to the heart of men, more intelligible to the poor man
than the abstruse laws of political economy, one may dispense with
justice. Benefactors abound in the catalogue of saints; not one law
dispenser is found there. The Government, like the Church, places
fraternity far above justice. A good friend of the poor as much as you
like, but it hates calculators. In connection with the discussion on
pawnbrokers, the Journal des Debats
recalled that there would in time be hospitals everywhere. Loan offices,
it added, showed the same progress; each town wanted one for itself,
and would soon obtain it. I cannot conceive the indignation of the whole
list of bourgeois delegates against the two honorable socialists who
proposed to establish a loan office in each county immediately. Never
was there a proposition more worthy of the favor of the Debats.
The establishment for loans upon wages, even if the loan were
gratuitous, is the antechamber of the hospital. And what is the
hospital? The temple of Poverty.
Through these three ministries, that of agriculture and
commerce, that of public works, and that of the interior, through the
taxes of consumption and through the custom house, the Government keeps
its hand on all that comes and goes, all that is produced and consumed,
on all the business of individuals, towns and provinces; it maintains
the tendency of society toward the impoverishment of the masses, the
subordinating of the laborers, and the always growing preponderance of
parasite offices. Through the police, it watches the enemies of the
system; through the courts, it condemns and represses them; through the
army it crushes them; through public institutions it distributes, in
such proportions as suit it, knowledge and ignorance; through the Church
it puts to sleep any protest in the hearts of men; through the finances
it defrays the cost of this vast conspiracy at the expense of workers.
Under the monarchy of July, I repeat, the men in power did not understand the thought which ruled them, any more than did the masses. Louis Philippe, Guizot
and their associates did things with a simplicity of corruption which
was natural to them, making use of ways and means marvellously well, but
not perceiving the end directly. After the lower classes had made their
formidable voice heard in the revolution of February, the system began to be understood; it was propounded with the effrontery of dogmatism, it was called by its surname Malthus, and by its given name, Loyola. At bottom, nothing was changed by the event of February, any more than by those of 1830, 1814, 1793, from the order of pretended constitutional things that had been founded in 1791. Louis Bonaparte, whether he knows it or not, continues the rule of Louis Philippe, the Bourbons, Napoleon, and Robespierre.
Thus, in 1851 as in 1788, and from analogous causes, there
is in society a pronounced tendency towards poverty. Now, as then, the
wrong of which the laboring class complains is not the effect of a
temporary or accidental cause, it is that of a systematic diversion of
the social forces.
This diversion dates from far back, even before ’89. It
has its principle in the profundities of general economy. The first
revolution, struggling against the most manifest abuses, could act only
on the surface. After having destroyed tyranny, it did not know how to
establish order; whereof the principles were hidden under the feudal
ruins that covered the country. Moreover, that revolution of which the
history seems so complete to us, was only a negation, and will appear to
posterity as only the first act, the dawn of the great Revolution,
which must occupy the nineteenth century.
The crash of ’89–’91 left no organic principle, no working
structure, after having abolished, together with the monarchy, the last
remains of feudalism, proclaimed equality before the law and for
taxation, freedom of the press and of worship, and interested the
people, as much as it could, by the sale of national property. It has
not redeemed one of its promises. When the Revolution proclaimed liberty
of the people, the subordination of power to the country, it set up two
incompatible things, society and government; and it is this
incompatibility which has been the cause or the pretext of this
overwhelming, liberty-destroying concentration, called Centralization, which the parliamentary democracy admires and praises, because it is its nature to tend toward despotism.
We have seen the old society perish, and with
it a swarm of democratic institutions and of independent magistracies,
which it bore within its bosom, a strong combination of private rights,
veritable republics within the monarchy. These institutions, these
magistracies, did not share the sovereignty, it is true, but everywhere
they placed limits to it, which honor defended obstinately. Not one has
survived, and none other has been erected in their place; the Revolution
has left only individuals. In this respect, the dictatorship
in which it culminated, completed its work. From this society reduced to
dust, sprang centralization; its origin need not be sought elsewhere.
Centralization did not come like other doctrines, head erect and with
the authority of principle. It crept in modestly, as a necessary
consequence. In fact, where there are only individuals, all businss
which is not theirs is public business, business of the State. Where
there are no independent magistrates, there are only delegates of the
central power. Thus we have become a bureau-ruled people, under the hand
of responsible functionaries, themselves centralized in the power of
which they are the ministers. In this condition, society was bequeathed
to the Restoration.
The charter then had to reestablish Government and Society
at the same time. Society was not forgotten nor neglected, indeed, but
left out. The Charter reestablished only the Government; and did so by
the division of sovereignty and the multiplicity of powers. But in order
that a nation may be free, it is not enough that it be governed by
several powers. The division of sovereignty brought about by the
Charter, is, no doubt, an important accomplishment, and one which has
mighty consequences, relatively to the royal power which it modifies;
but the Government which results from it, although separated into its
elements, is one in practice; and, if it meets no outside obstacle which
it must respect, it is absolute: the nation and the nation’s rights are
its property. It was only when it established liberty of thep ress,
that the Charter restored Society to its own.
What M. Royer-Collard said of the royalty of 1814, is even more true of the Republic of 1848.
The Republic had Society to establish: it thought only of
establishing Government. Centralization continually fortifying itself,
while Society had no institution to oppose to it, through the
exaggeration of political ideas and the total absence of social ideas,
matters reached a point where Society and Government could not live
together, the condition of existence of the latter being to subordinate
and subjugate the former.
Therefore, while the problem propounded in ’89 seemed to
be officially solved, at the bottom there was change only in the
governmental metaphysics—what Napoleon called ideology.
Liberty, equality, progress, with all their oratorical consequences, are
written in the text of the constitutions and the laws; there is no
vestige of them in the institutions. The ancient hierarchy of classes
has been replaced by an ignoble feudalism, based on mercantile and
industrial usury; by a chaos of interests, an antagonism of principles, a
degradation of law: the abuses have changed the face which they bore
before ’89, to assume a different form of organization; they have
diminished neither in number nor gravity. On account of our being
engrossed with politics, we have lost sight of social economy. It was in
this way that the democratic party itself, the heir of the first
Revolution, came to attempting to reform Society by establishing the
initiative of the State, to create institutions by the prolific virtue
of Power, in a word, to correct an abuse by an abuse.
All minds being bewitched with politics, Society turns in a
circle of mistakes, driving capital to a still more crushing
agglomeration, the State to an extension of its prerogatives that is
more and more tyrannical, the laboring class to an irreparable decline,
physically, morally and intellectually.
For many people it is to advance a scandalous and
paradoxical proposition, filled with difficulty and disaster, to say
that the Revolution of ’89, having established nothing, has freed us not
at all, but only changed our sad lot; to say that, in consequence, a
new revolution to organize and reconstruct is necessary, to fill the
void left by the former. The more or less pledged partisans of the
constitutional monarchy will not agree; the democrats attached to the
letter of ’93, who are frightened at such a task, are opposed. According
to one or the other, nothing is left but accidental grievances, due
chiefly to the incapacity of the depositaries of power, which a vigorous
democracy could cure. Thence the disturbance, not to say antipathy,
with which the Revolution inspires them; and thence too this reactionary
policy in which they have engaged since February.
Nevertheless, such is the evidence of facts, so greatly
have statistics and investigations elucidated the matter, that it is
more than folly or bad faith to argue in favor of a better policy, when
everything shows the contradiction and the weakness of Government.
In place of this governmental, feudal and military rule,
imitated from that of the former kings, the new edifice of industrial
institutions must be built; in place of this materialist centralization
which absorbs all the political power, we must create the intellectual
and liberal centralization of economic forces. Labor, commerce, credit,
education, property, public morals, philosophy, art, everything in fact
require it of us.
I conclude:
There is sufficient cause for a revolution in the nineteenth century.
There is sufficient cause for a revolution in the nineteenth century.
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
A revolution is an act of sovereign justice,
in the order of moral facts, springing out of the necessity of things,
and in consequence carrying with it its own justification; and which it
is a crime for the statesman to oppose it. That is the proposition which
we have established in our first study.
Now the question is to discover whether the idea which
stands out as the formula of the revolution is not chimerical; whether
its object is real; whether a fancy or popular exaggeration is not
mistaken for a serious and just protest. The second proposition
therefore which we have to examine is the following:
Is there today sufficient reason in society for revolution?
For if this reason does not exist, if we are fighting for
an imaginary cause, if the people are complaining because, as they say,
they are too well off, the duty of the magistrate would be simply to
undeceive the multitude, whom we have often seen aroused without cause,
as the echo responds to one who calls.
In a word, is the occasion for revolution presented at the
moment, by the nature of things, by the connection of facts, by the
working of institutions, by the advance in needs, by the order of
Providence?
It should be possible to determine this at a glance. If a
long philosophical dissertation were necessary, a cause might exist, but
it would be only in the germ, only potentially. To weigh arguments in
such a cause would be prophecy, not practical history.
To solve this question I will take a rule, as simple as it
is decisive, with which the occurrences in past revolutions furnish me.
It is that the motive behind revolutions is not so much the distress
felt by the people at a given moment, as the prolongation of this
distress, which tends to neutralize and extinguish the good.
Thus the trial which is instituted by a revolution, and the judgment which later it puts into execution, are related to tendencies rather than to mere facts: society, as it were, paying little attention to principles, and directing its course solely toward ends…
Usually good and evil, pleasure and pain, are inextricably
entangled in human dealing. Nevertheless, despite continual
oscillations, the good seems to prevail over the evil, and, taking it
altogether, there is marked progress toward the better, as far as we can
see.
The reasoning of the masses is built upon this idea. The
people is neither optimistic nor pessimistic; it admits the absolute not
at all. Let is stay as it believes.
Always at each reform, each abuse to be destroyed, each
vice to be combatted, it confines itself to seeking for something
better, something less evil, and works for its own sanctification by
labor, by study, by good behavior. Its rule of conduct is therefore: A tendency toward comfort and virtue; it does not revolt until it can see nothing for it but A tendency toward poverty and corruption.
Thus there was no revolution in the seventeenth century,
although the retrograde feeling which was manifested in 1614 was already
the principle of royal policy, and although the poverty was frightful,
according to the witness of La Bruyere, Racine, Fénélon, Vauban and Boisguilbert.
Among other reasons for resignation was that it had not been proved
that poverty was anything more than the accidental effect of some
temporary cause: the people remembered having been much more wretched
not very long ago. The absolute monarchy under Louis XIV could not have appeared to them worse than feudalism.
Nor was there any revolution under Louis XV, except
in the intellectual realm. The corruption of principles, visible to
philosophers, remained hidden from the masses, whose logic never
distinguishes an idea from a fact. Popular experience, under Louis XV,
was far from being at the level of philosophical criticism. The nation
still supposed that with a well-behaved and honest prince, its ills
might have an end. Louis XVI too, was welcomed with fervor; while Turgot,
the unbending reformer, was received without sympathy. The support of
public opinion was lacking to this great man. In 1776, one might have
said that a worthy man, who wanted to bring about reforms peacefully,
had been betrayed by the people. It was not within his power to
accomplish the Revolution by action from above without disturbance, I
had almost said, without revolutionaries.
Fifteen years more of chaos were needed, under a monarch
personally irreproachable, to prove to the most thoughtless that the
trouble was not accidental but constitutional, that the disorganization
was systematic, not fortuitous, and that the situation, instead of
improving, was according to the usual fate of institutions, daily
growing worse and worse. The publication of the Red Book in 1790, demonstrated this truth by figures. Then it was that the Revolution became popularized and inevitable.
The question which we have taken for the text of this study:—Is there sufficient reason for a revolution in the nineteenth century?—resolves itself into the following:—What is the tendency of society in our day?
Hence, but a few pages will suffice to support the answer
which I do not hesitate to point out now. Society, as far as it has been
able to develop freely for half a century, under the distractions of
’89–’93, the paternalism of the Empire and the guaranties of 1814, 1830,
and 1848, is on a road radically and increasingly wrong.
Let us take our point of view at the very beginning of present society, in 1789.
In 1798 the task of the Revolution was to destroy and
rebuild at the same time. It had the old rule to abolish but only by
producing a new organization, of which the plan and character should be
exactly the opposite of the former, according to the revolutionary rule:
Every negation implies a subsequent contradictory affirmation.
Of these, the Revolution, with great difficulty,
accomplished only the first; the other was entirely forgotten. Hence
this impossibility of living, which has oppressed French society for 60
years.
The feudal order having been abolished on the night of the 4th of August,
and the principles of liberty and civil equality proclaimed, the
consequence was that in future society must be organized, not for
politics and war, but for work. What in fact was the feudal
organization? It was one entirely military. What is work? The negation
of fighting. To abolish feudalism, then, meant to commit ourselves to a
perpetual peace, not only foreign but domestic. By this single act, all
the old politics between State and State, all the systems of European
equilibrium, were abrogated: the same equality, the same independence
which the Revolution promised to bring about among individuals, must
exist between nation and nation, province and province, city and city …
What was to be organized after the 4th of August was not
the Government, inasmuch as in restoring government nothing but the
ancient landmarks would be restored; it was the national economy and the
balance of interests. It was evident that the problems of the
Revolution lay in erecting everywhere the reign of equality and
industry, in place of the feudal order which had been abolished;
inasmuch as, by the new principles, birth no longer counted in
determining the condition of the citizen, work was all, even property
itself was subordinate: inasmuch as, in foreign affairs, the relations
of nations among themselves had to be reformed upon the same principles,
since civil law, public law and the law of nations are one in principle
and sufficient. The progress in agriculture which was exhibited after
the division of the national treasure, the industrial impulse which the
nation experienced after the fall of the Empire, the growing interest in
all countries since 1830 in economic questions, all these go to prove
that it was really in the field of political economy that the efforts of
the Revolution should be exerted.
This so manifest, so inevitable conclusion from the act of the 4th of August, 1789, was not understood by those who made themselves its interpreters, even up to 1814.
All their ideas were of politics only. The
counter-revolutionary forces aiding, the revolutionary party forced for
the moment to place itself on the defensive and to organize itself for
war, the nation was again delivered into the hands of the warriors and
lawyers. One might say that nobility, clergy and monarchy had
disappeared, only to make way for another governing set of Anglomaniac
constitutionaries, classic republicans, militaristic democrats, all
infatuated with the Romans and the Spartans, and above all, very much so
with themselves; on the other hand, caring but very little for the real
needs of the country; which, understanding nothing of what was going
on, permitted itself to be half destroyed at their leisure, and finally
attached itself to the fortune of a soldier.
To put my thought in one word, however little edifying it may seem, the revolutionaries failed in their mission after the fall of the Bastille, as they have falied since the abdication of Louis Philippe,
and for the same reasons: the total lack of economic ideas, their
prejudice in favor of government, and the distrust of the lower classes
which they harbored. In ’93, the necessity of resistance to invasion
demanding an enormous concentration of forces, the error was
consummated. The principle of centralization, widely applied by the Committee of Public Safety, passed into dogma with the Jacobins,
who transmitted it to the Empire, and to the governments that followed
it. This is the unfortunate tradition which, in 1848, determined the
retrograde movement of the Provisory Government, and which still
constitutes the whole of the science which nourishes the politics of the
republican party.
Thus the economic organization called for as a necessary
consequence of the complete abolition of feudalism, left without
guidance from the first day, politics taking the place of industry in
the minds of everybody, Quesnay and Adam Smith giving way to Rousseau and Montesquieu;
it necessarily followed that the new society, scarcely conceived,
should remain in embryo; that, instead of developing according to
economic laws, it should languish in constitutionalism, that in place of
the orderly condition which is characteristic of it, it should exhibit
everywhere systematic corruption and legal inefficiency; finally, that
the power which is the expression of this society, reproducing with the
most scrupulous fidelity the antinomy of its principles, should find
itself continually in the position of fighting with the people and the
people in continual need of attacking power.
To sum up: the society which the Revolution of ’89 should
have created, does not yet exist. That which for sixty years we have
had, is but a superficial, factitious order, hardly concealing the most
frightful chaos and demoralization.
We are not in the habit of looking so long beforehand for
the causes of social disturbances and revolutions. Above all, economic
questions are repugnant to us. The people, after the great struggle of
’93, has been so distracted from its real interests, men of brains so
thrown off by the discussions of the legislative chamber, of public
meetings and of the press, that one may be almost sure, in leaving
politics for economics, to be in turn immediately abandoned by readers,
and to have only the paper for a confidant. Nevertheless we must
understand that outside the sphere of parliamentarism, as sterile as it
is absorbing, there is another field incomparably vaster, in which our
destiny is worked out; that beyond these political phantoms whose forms
capture our imagination, there are the phenomena of social economy,
which, by their harmony or discord, produce all the good and ill of
society. Will the reader deign to follow me for a quarter of an hour
among the broad considerations into which I am obliged to enter? That
done, I promise to come back to politics.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
I call certain principles of action economic forces,
such as the Division of Labor, Competition, Collective Force, Exchange,
Credit, Property, &c., which are to Labor and to Wealth what the
distinction of classes, the representative system, monarchical heredity,
administrative centralization, the judicial hierarchy, &c., are to
the State.
If these forces are held in equilibrium, subject to the
laws which are proper to them, and which do not depend in any way upon
the arbitrary will of man, Labor can be organized, and comfort for all
guaranteed. If, on the other hand, they are left without direction and
without counterpoise, Labor is in a condition of chaos; the useful
effects of the economic forces is mingled with an equal quantity of
injurious effects; the deficit balances the profit; Society, in so far
as it is the theatre, the agent, or the subject of production,
circulation, and consumption, is in a condition of increasing suffering.
Up to now, it does not appear that order in a society can
be conceived except under one of these two forms, the political and the
industrial; between which, moreover, there is fundamental contradiction.
The chaos of industrial forces, the struggle which they
maintain with the government system, which is the only obstacle to their
organization, and which they cannot reconcile themselves with nor merge
themselves in, is the real, profound cause of the unrest which disturbs
French society, and which was aggravated during the second half of the
reign of Louis Philippe.
Seven years ago, I filled two octavo volumes
with the story of these disturbances, and of the terrible conflicts
which spring from them. This work, which remained unanswered by the
economists, was received no more favorably by the Social-Democracy. I
permit myself to make this remark, merely to show by my own experience
how little favor researches in political economy obtain, how little
revolutionary therefore is our epoch.
I shall limit myself to recalling very briefly some of the
most general facts, in order to give the reader a glimpse of this order
of forces and phenomena, which has been hidden from all eyes until now,
and which alone can put an end to the governmental drama.
Everybody has heard of the division of labor.
It consists of the distribution of the hand work of a given
industry in such a manner that each person performs always the same
operation, or a small number of operations, so that the product, instead
of being the integral product of one workman, is the joint product of a
large number.
According to Adam Smith, who first demonstrated this
law scientifically, and all the other economists, the division of labor
is the most powerful lever of modern industry. To it principally must
be attributed the superiority of civilized peoples to savage peoples.
Without division of labor, the use of machines would not have gone
beyond the most ancient and most common utensils: the miracles of
machinery and of steam would never have been revealed to us; progress
would have been closed to society; the French Revolution itself, lacking
an outlet, would have been but a sterile revolt; it could have
accomplished nothing. But, on the other hand, by division of labor, the
product of labor mounts to tenfold, a hundredfold, political economy
rises to the height of a philosophy, the intellectual level of nations
is continually raised. The first thing that should attract the attention
of the legislator is the separation of industrial functions—the
division of labor—in a society founded upon hatred of the feudal and
warlike order, and destined in consequence to organize itself for work
and peace.
It was not done thus. This economic force was left to all
the overturns caused by chance and by interest. The division of labor,
becoming always more minute, and remaining without counterpoise, the
workman has been given [over] to a more and more degrading subjection to
machinery. That is the effect of the division of labor when it is
applied as practised in our days, not only to make industry incomparably
more productive, but at the same time to deprive the worker, in mind
and body, of all the wealth which it creates for the capitalist and the
speculator. Here is how an observer, who is not suspected of sympathy
with labor, M. de Tocqueville, sums up on this grave subject:
In proportion to the more complete application
of the principle of the division of albor, the workman becomes weaker,
more limited and more dependent.
A man who all his life has performed but one
operation certainly learns to execute it more quickly and more skilfully
than another; but at the same time he becomes less capable of every
other operation, whether physical or intellectual; his other faculties
are extinguished, and degeneration results in him, considered as an
individual. It is a sad account to offer of himself that he has never
made more than the twenty-sixth part of a pin… In result it may be said
that the division of labor is a skilful mode of employing the power of a
man; that it adds prodigiously to the products of a society; but that
it subtracts something from the capacity of each man taken individually.
All the economists are in accord as to this fact, one of
the most serious which the science has to announce; and, if they do not
insist upon it with the vehemence which they habitually use in their
polemics, it must be said, to the shame of the human mind, that it is
because they cannot believe that this perversion of the greatest of
economic forces can be avoided.
So the greater the division of labor and the power of
machines, the less the intelligence and skill of hand of the worker. But
the more the value of the worker falls and the demand for labor
diminishes, the lower are wages and the greater is poverty. And it is
not a few hundreds of men but millions, who are the victims of this
economic perturbation.
In England, through the division of labor and the power of
machinery, the number of workmen has been observed to diminish by a
third ,by a half, by three-quarters, by five-sixths; and the wages
decreasing in like proportion, fall from 60 cents a day to 10 cents and 6
cents. Throughout entire provinces the proprietors have driven out
useless mouths. Everywhere first women, then children, have taken the
place of men in manufacture. Consumption being unable to keep pace with
production among an impoverished people, the latter is obliged to wait;
and regular out-of-work periods are the result; of six weeks, three
months and six months out of each year. Statistics of these periods of
idleness by Parisian workmen have recently been published by one of
them, Pierre Vincard; the details are heartrending. The smallness
of the wages being in proportion to the time of idleness, the
conclusion is reached that certain workwomen who earn 20 cents a day,
must live on 10, because they are idle for six months. This is the rule
to which a population of 320,000 in Paris must submit. And the situation
of the class of working women everywhere throughout the Republic may be
judged from this sample.
Philanthropic conservatives, admirers of ancient customs,
charge the industrial system with this anomaly. They want to go back to
the feudal-farming period. I say that it is not industry that is at
fault, but economic chaos: I maintain that the principle has been
distorted, that there is disorganization of forces, and that to this we
must attribute the fatal tendency with which society is carried away.
Another example.
Competition, next to the division of labor, is
one of the most powerful factors of industry; and at the same time one
of the most valuable guaranties. Partly for the sake of it, the first
revolution was brought about. The workmen’s unions, established at Paris
some years since, have recently given it a new sanction by establishing
among themselves piece work, and abandoning, after their experience of
it, the absurd idea of the equality of wages. Competition is moreover
the law of the market, the spice of the trade, the salt of labor. To
suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself; it is to begin the
restoration of the old order from below, in replacing labor by the rule
of favoritism and abuse, of which ’89 rid us.
Yet competition, lacking legal forms and superior
regulating intelligence, has been perverted in turn, like the division
of labor. In it, as in the latter, there is perversion of principle,
chaos and a tendency toward evil. This will appear beyond doubt if we
remember that of the thirty-six million souls who compose the French
nation, at least ten millions are wage workers, to whom competition is
forbidden, for whom there is nothing but to struggle among themselves
for their meagre stipend.
Thus that competition, which, as thought in ’89, should be
a general right, is today a matter of exceptional privilege: only they
whose capital permits them to become heads of business concerns may
exercise their competitive rights.
The result is that competition, as Rossi, Blanqui,
and a host of others have recognized, instead of democratizing
industry, aiding the workman, guaranteeing the honesty of trade, has
ended in building up a mercentile and land aristocracy, a thousand times
more rapacious than the old aristocracy of the nobility. Through
competition all the profits of production go to capital; the consumer,
without suspecting the frauds of commerce, is fleeced by the speculator,
and the condition of the workers is made more and more precarious.
Speaking of this, Eugene Buret says: I assert that the working class is turned over, body and soul, to the sweet will of industry. And elsewhere he says:The
most trifling speculation may change the price of bread one cent a
pound, which means $124,100,000 for thirty-six million people.
It was recently seen how little free competition could do
for the people, and how illusory it is as a guaranty with us at present,
when the Prefect of Police, yielding to the general demand, authorized
the sale of meat at auction. Nothing less than all the energy the people
could muster, aided by governmental power, could overcome the monopoly
of the butchers.
Accuse human nature, say the economists, do not accuse
competition. Very well, I will not accuse competition: I will only
remark that human nature does not remedy one evil by another, and ask
how it has mistaken its path. What? Competition ought to make us more
and more equal and free; and instead it subordinates us one to the
other, and makes the worker more and more a slave! This is a perversion
of the principle, a forgetfulness of the law. These are not mere
accidents; they are a whole system of misfortunes.
Pity is expressed for those who work in dangerous or
unwholesome occupations: it is desired that civilization should do
without their services, out of compassion for their lot. These sad
occurrences, inherent in certain occupations, are nothing in comparison
with the scourge of economic chaos.
Let us cite one more example.
Of all economic forces, the most vital, in a society reconstructed for industry by revolution, is credit.
The proprietary, industrial, trading business world knows this well:
all its efforts since ’89 have tended, at the bottom, toward only these
two things, peace and credit, all through the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, the Convention, the Directory, the Empire, the Restoration, the monarchy of July. What did it not do to win over the unmanageable Louis XVI? What did it not pardon in Louis Philippe?
The peasant also knows it: of the whole of politics, he,
like the business man, understands only these two things, taxes and
interest. As for the working class, so marvellously fitted for progress,
such is the ignorance in which it has been kept as to the true cause of
its sufferings, that it is hardly since February that it has begun to
stammer the word, credit; and to see in this principle the most powerful
of revolutionary forces. In the matter of credit, the workingman knows
but two things, his account with the baker and the pawnbroker’s shop.
In a nation devoted to labor, credit is what blood is to
an animal, the means of nutrition, life itself. It cannot be interrupted
without danger to the social body. If there is a single institution
which should have appealed before all others to our legislators, after
the abolition of feudal privileges and the levelling of classes,
assuredly it is credit. Yet not one of our pompous declarations of
right, not one of our constitutions, so long drawn out, not one of these
has mentioned it at all. Credit, like the division of labor, the use of
machinery and competition, has been left to itself; even the financial
power, far greater than that of the executive, legislative and
judicial, has never had the honor of mention in our various charters.
Handed over by a decree of the Empire of the 23rd of April, 1803,
to a company of revenue farmers, it has remained until now in the
condition of a hidden power: hardly anything can be found relating to
it, except a law of 1807, fixing the rate of interest at five per cent.
After the Revolution as before it, credit got along as best it could; or
rather, as it pleased the largest holders of coin. It is only fair to
say that the Government, while sacrificing the Country, did not spare
itself; it treated itself as it treated others: we have nothing against
it on this score.
What has been the result of this incredible negligence?
In the first place, forestalling and usury being practised
upon coin by preference, coin being at the same time the tool of
industrial transactions and the rarest of merchandise, and consequently
the safest and most profitable, dealing in money was rapidly
concentrated in the hands of a few monopolists, whose fortress is the
Bank.
Thereupon the Country and the State were made the vassals of a coalition of capitalists.
Thanks to the tax imposed by this bankocracy upon all
industrial and agricultural industry, property has already been
mortgaged for two billion dollars, and the State for more than one
billion.
The interest paid by the nation for this double
indebtedness, with costs, renewals, commissions and discounts on loans
included, amounts to at least 240 million dollars.
This enormous sum of 240 millions does not yet express all
that the producers have to pay to the financial exploitation: we should
add from 140 to 160 million for discounts, advances, delays in
payments, dividends, obligations under private seal, court expenses,
&c.
Property, fleeced by the Bank, has been obliged to follow
the same course in its relations with industry, to become a usurer in
turn toward labor; thus farm rent and house rent have reached a
prohibitive rate, which drives the cultivator from the field and the
workman from his home.
So much so that today they whose labor has created
everything cannot buy their own products, nor obtain furniture, nor own a
habitation, nor ever say: This house, this garden, this vine, this
field, are mine.
On the contrary, it is an economic necessity, in the
present system of credit, and with the growing disorganization of
industrial forces, that the poor man, working harder and harder, should
be always poorer, and that the rich man, without working, always richer,
as one may easily convince himself by the following.
If we may believe the estimate of a skilled economist, M. Chevé,
out of two billions of value produced every year, one and one-fifth
billions are taken away by parasites; that is to say, by finance, by
predaceous property, and by the budget and its satellites: the balance,
perhaps four-fifths of a billion, remains for the producers. Another
able economist, M. Chevalier, divided the estimated product of
the country by its thirty-six million inhabitants, has found that the
income per head per day was an average of 13 cents; and, as from this
figure must be deducted enough to pay interest, rent, taxes, and the
expenses which they involve, M. de Morogues, yet another learned
economist, has concluded that for a large part of the population daily
consumption was less than 5 cents. But since rents, the same as taxes,
continually increase, while through economic disorganization work and
wages diminish, it follows that, according to the aforesaid economists,
the material comfort of the working classes follows a decreasing
progression, which may be represented by this series of numbers: 65, 60,
55, 50, 45, 40, 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 0, −5, −10, −15, &c.
This law of impoverishment is the corollary of the Malthusian law; its fundamental fact may be found in every book of statistics.
Some utopians attack competition; others refuse to accept
the division of labor and the whole industrial order; the workingmen, in
their crass ignorance, blame machinery. No one, to this day, has
thought of denying the utility and legitimacy of credit; nevertheless it
is incontestable that the perversion of credit is the most active cause
of the poverty of the masses. Were it not for this, the deplorable
effects of the division of labor, of the employment of machinery, of
competition, would scarcely be felt at all, would not even exist. Is it
not evident that the tendency of society is towards poverty, not through
the depravity of men, but through the disorder of its own elementary
principles?
It may be said that this is a misuse of logic, that
capital, land, houses, cannot be let for nothing, that every service
should be paid for, &c. Possibly. I will admit that lending wealth,
as much as creating it, is a service that merits recompense. When it is a
question of the advantage of others, I would rather exceed justice than
stop short of it; but that does not alter the facts. I maintain that
credit is too dear; that it is with money as it is with meat, which the
prefect of police supplies us with today from 3 to 5 cents cheaper than
the market stall keepers; as it is with transportation, which would cost
80 per cent less than present rates, if the railroads would permit the
country to use their immense resources. I say that it would be possible,
yes, easy, to lower the price of credit from 75 to 90 per cent, without
wronging the lenders, and that it depends upon the nation and the State
that this should be done. Let there be no argument as to a pretended
legal impossibility. It is with the seignorial rights of capitalists as
it was with those of the nobles and monasteries, nothing easier than to
abolish them; and, I repeat, that for the safety of property itself they
must be abolished.
Can it be believed that the revolutionaries of ’89, ’92,
’93, ’94, who swung the axe with such ardor against the feudal tree,
would not have uprooted it to its last fibres, if they had forseen that,
in the shadow of their half-way governmentalism, such sprouts would
grow?
Can it be believed that, instead of reestablishing the
seignorial courts and the parliaments under other names and other forms,
of re-erecting abolutism after baptising it with the name of the
Constitution, of enslaving the provinces as before, under the pretext of
unity and centralization, of sacrificing all liberties, by giving them
for an inseparable companion a pretended public order, which is
but confusion, corruption and brute force—can it be believed, I say,
that they would not have welcomed the new order, and completed the
Revolution, if their sight had penetrated the organism which their
instinct sought, but the state of knowledge and the distractions of the
moment did not permit them to conceive? ….
It is not only that our present society, though having
forsaken its principles, tends continually to impoverish the producer,
to subordinate labor to capital—a contradiction in itself—but that it
tends also to make of workingmen a race of helots, inferior to the caste
of free men as of old; and it tends to erect into a political and
social dogma the enslavement of the working class and the necessity of
its poverty.
A few facts, selected from among millions, will exemplify this fatal tendency.
From 1806 to 1811, according to Chevalier, the
annual consumption of wine in Paris was 170 quarts per head: it is now
only 95 quarts. Abolish the duties, which with the accessory expenses,
amount to at least 6 to 7 cents a quart with the retailer, and the
consumption will increase from 95 to 200; moreover the vine grower, who
does not know what to do with his products, will be able to sell them.
But in order to do this, it would be necessary either to
reduce the amount of the budget, or to place the taxes upon the rich;
and, as neither the one nor the other seems practicable, and besides as
it is not well that the workingman should drink too much, seeing that
the use of wine is incompatible with the modesty which is becoming in
men of that class, the duties will not be lowered, neither will they be
raised.
According to Raudot, a writer whose conservative
opinions relieve him from any charge of exaggeration, France is reduced
to buying annually in foreign markets nine million head of sheep and
cattle for the slaughter house, despite the high tariff. Notwithstanding
this importation, the quantity of meat offered for sale does not exceed
an average of 40 lbs. per head per annum, a
trifle less than 2 ounces a day. But if we recall that 85 cities, towns
and capitals of provinces, with a total population of not more than 3
millions, absorb a quarter of this, the conclusion is reached that he
majority of Frenchmen never eat meat; which is in fact true.
It is by virtue of this policy that wine and meat are
today excluded from the list of articles of first necessity, and that so
many people, in France as in Ireland, eat only potatoes, chestnuts,
buckwheat or oatmeal.
The effects of this state of affairs are such as might be
expected from theory. Everywhere in Europe the constitution of the
laborer is weakened. In France, the Council of Revision has
established that within fifty years the average stature has diminished
by half an inch, and this reduction bears chiefly upon suffering
humanity, the working class. Before ’89, the required minimum height for
the army was 5 feet 1 inch. Afterwards followin the diminution of
stature and the weakening of health, as well as the excessive
destruction of life, this was reduced to 4 feet 10 inches. As for
exemptions from service for deficient height and health, they were, from
1830 to 1839, 45½ per cent, and from 1839 to 1848, 50½ per cent.
The average length of life, it is true, has increased, but
at the expense of the same laboring class, as is proved, among other
proofs, by the tables of mortality of Paris, in which the death rate for
the 12th precinct is 1 in 26, while for the 1st precinct it is only 1
in 52.
Can it be doubted that there is a tendency toward ill in
existing society, at least among the working people? Does it not seem
that society has been made, as Saint Simon says, not for the
amelioration of the people, physically, morally and intellectually, but
for their impoverishment depravity, and ignorance?
The average number of students received each year by the Polytechnic School is, I believe, 176. According to Chevalier,
it would not be exaggeration to say that twenty times as many might be
received. But what would our capitalist society do with the 3520
graduates which the School would turn out at the end of each school
year? I insist upon this question: What would it do?
When the management ordered that only 176 scholars should
be received in place of the 3520 who could be received, it was because
it was not possible for the government, with its still feudal-industrial
system, to make proper provision for more than 176 of these young
people.
Science is not cultivated for the sake of science: one
does not study chemistry, integral calculus, analytical geometry,
mechanics, in order to become a mechanic or a laborer. Superabundance of
ability, far from being of service to the country and the State, is an
inconvenience to them. In order to avoid dangerous upsetting of classes,
it is necessary that instruction should be given in proportion to
fortune; that is should be slight or none at all for the most numerous
and lowest class, moderate for the middle class, superior only for a
small number of the well-to-do, destined to represent by their talents
the aristocracy whence they sprang…. That is what the Catholic clergy,
faithful to its principles, faithful to its feudal traditions, has
always understood: the law placing the University and the schools in
their hands was only an act of justice.
Thus, instruction cannot be universal, and, most of all,
it cannot be free, in a still feudal society: that would be nonsense. It
is necessary, in order to maintain the subordination of the masses, to
restrain the flowering-forth of ability, to reduce the too numerous and
too unmanageable attendance at colleges, to keep in systematic ignorance
the millions of workers doomed to repugnant and painful labor, to make
use of the instruction by not making use of it, that is to say, by
turning it toward the brutalization and exploitation of the lower
classes.
And, as if the evil as well as the good must have its
sanction, pauperism, thus foreseen, provided for, organized, by the
economic chaos, has found its own; it is included in the criminal
statistics. Here is the progression for 25 years past, of the number of
arrests and of cases prosecuted at the request of the public prosecutor:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1827
47,443
34,908
1846
101,443
80,891
1847
124,159
95,914
In the district courts the progression has increased in the same way:
Years
Arrests
Cases
1829
159,740
108,390
1845
197,913
152,923
1847
239,291
184,922
When the workingman has been brutalized by the division of
labor, by attending machines, by teaching that does not teach; when he
has been discouraged by small wages, demoralized by being out of work,
famished by monopoly; when he has neither bread nor dough, neither cash
nor credit, neither fire nor hearth; then he lies, he thieves, he robs,
he assassinates. After having passed through the hands of the
plunderers, he passes through those of the dealers in justice. Is that
clear?
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
It is by contrast with error that truth impresses itself
upon the understanding. In place of liberty and industrial equality, the
Revolution has left us a legacy of authority and political
subordination. The State, growing more powerful every day, and endowed
with prerogatives and privileges without end, has undertaken to do for
our happiness what we might have expected from a very different source.
How has it acquitted itself of its task? What part has the government
played during the last fifty years, regardless of the particular form of
its organization? What has been its tendency? That is now the question.
Up to 1848, statesmen, whether belonging to the ministry or
the opposition, whose influence directed public sentiment and
governmental action, did not seem to have been aware of the mistaken
course of society in what especially concerns the laboring classes. Most
of them indeed made it a merit and a duty to busy themselves in the
amelioration of the workers’ lot. One would cry out for teachers;
another would talk against the premature and immoral employment of
children in manufactories. This one would demand the lowering of duties
upon salt, beverages and meat; that one called out for the complete
abolition of town and custom house tariffs. In the lofty regions of
power there was a general impulse toward economic and social questions.
Not a soul saw that, in the present state of our institutions, such
reforms were but innocent chimaeras; that, in order to bring them about,
nothing less than a new creation was necessary; in other words, a
revolution.
Since the abdication of Louis Philippe, on the 24th
of February, the governmental set, participants in privilege, have
changed their opinion. The policy of oppression and impoverishment which
they formerly followed without knowing it, I had almost said in spite
of themselves, has been accepted by many of them, this time with full
knowledge.
The government is the organ of society.
That which goes on in the social body most secretly, most
metaphysically, shows itself in government with a quite military
frankness, a fiscal crudity. A long time ago a statesman said that a
government could not exist without a public debt and a large budget.
This aphorism, to which the opposition was wrong in taking exception, is
the financial expression of the retrograde and subversive tendency of
Power: we may now measure the depth of it. It means that Government,
instituted for the guidance of society, is but the reflection.
April 1st 1814, the interest on the public debt was $12,661,523.
July 31st 1830, the interest on the public debt was $39,883,541.
Jan. 1st 1847, the interest on the public debt was $47,422,671.
Jan. 1st 1851, the interest on the public debt was $54,200,000.
The public debt, for both the State and the towns, which
it is fair to regard here as parts of the central authority, is about
half of the sum total of mortgages and notes of hand, which weigh down
the country: both of these, under the same impulse, have grown along
with each other. The tendency is unmistakeable. Whither is it leading
us? To bankruptcy.
The first regular budget since the Directory is
that of 1802. Dating from this time, the expenses have continually
grown, in the same progression as the debt of the country and of the
State.
1802
$117,000,000.
1819
172,770,622.
1829
201,982,886.
1840
259,702,889.
1848
338,436,222.
In fifty years, the budget of expenses has almost tripled;
the mean annual increase is about five millions. It would be too
foolish to attribute this increase to the incapacity of ministers, to
their more or less intelligent and liberal policy, as has been done
under each successive change: the Restoration and the monarchy of July,
the dynastic opposition and the republican conspiracy. To explain a
phenomenon as constant and regular as is the growth of the budget by the
inefficiency of men, especially when it has its correllative in the
increase of mortgages and of notes of hand, is as absurd as it would be
to explain the Oriental plague and the yellow fever by the incapacity of
physicians. It is the hygiene that must be attacked; it is your
economic order that calls for reform.
Thus the Government, which is called the instrument of
order and the guaranty of our liberties, keeps step with society, falls
more and more into difficulties, incurs indebtedness, and tends toward
bankruptcy. We are about to see how, as society, given over to the
disorganization of its elements, tends to reestablish the former castes;
the Government, on its side, tends to unite its efforts with this new
aristocracy and to complete the oppression of the lower classes.
Solely because the powers of society were left unorganized
by the Revolution, there results an inequality of conditions, of which
the cause is not, as formerly, the natural inequality of ability; but
which finds a new pretext in the accidents of society, and adds, among
the claims, the injustices of fortune to the caprices of nature.
Privilege, abolished by law, is born again through lack of equilibrium:
it is no longer a mere result of divine predestination: it has become a
necessity of civilization.
Once justified as in the order of nature and of
Providence, what does privilege lack in order to assure its triumph
definitely? It has only to make laws, institutions, the Government, in
harmony with itself: toward this end it is about to direct all its
forces.
In the first place, as no law forbids, so far at least as
it flows from one of these two sources, nature or accident, privilege
may call itself perfectly legal: in this regard it may already claim the
respect of citizens and the protection of Government.
What is the principle which rules existing society? Each by himself, each for himself. God and LUCK for all.
Privilege, resulting from luck, from a commercial turn, from any of the
gambling methods which the chaotic condition of industry furnishes, is
then a providential thing, which everybody must respect.
On the other hand, what is the function of Government? To
protect and defend each one in his person, his industry, his property.
But if by the necessity of things, property, riches, comfort, all go on
one side, poverty on the other, it is clear that Government is made for
the defence of the rich against the poor. For the perfecting of this
state of affairs, it is necessary that what exists should be defined and
consecrated by law: that is precisely what Power wants, and what demonstrates from beginning to end our analysis of the budget.
I am talking at random.
The Provisory Government has made known that the increases
of salary of Government functionaries from 1830 to 1848 amounted to the
sum of 13 million dollars. Supposing that only half of this were used
for the salaries of newly created offices, the average salary being
assumed at $200, it follows that the Government added 32,500 employees
during the reign of Louis Philippe. Today the total number of functionaries, according to Raudot,
is 568,365: in every nine men there is one who lives on the Government,
either of the Country or of the towns. Whatever outcry there may be
made against waste, I shall never believe that the creation of 32,500
offices was anything but plunder.
What interest had the king or the ministers, or any of the
individuals who already held office, in adding to their number? Is it
not true that, the agitation of the working classes becoming more
threatening with time, and consequently the danger greater for the
privileged class, Power, the force that represses and protects, had to
fortify itself in proportion, on pain of being overthrown at the first
opportunity?
Examination of the budgets for the army and navy confirms this opinion.
From 1830 to 1848,—I borrow this detail from the periodical Europe and America—the
united budgets of the navy and of war were gradually raised from
$64,796,000 to $107,167,400. The average annual amount was $84,000,000;
the average increase $2,400,000. The grand total for eighteen years,
$1,501,000,000.
In the same period the budget for public instruction
increased from $451,600 to $3,859,600. The grand total was $46,560,400.
Difference between this and the warmaking budget, $1,454,439,000.
Thus while the Government spent an average of 2½ millions
for fostering popular ignorance, under the name of public instruction,
it spent 84 millions, thirty-two times as much, to restrain this
ignorance by steel and fire, if the frenzy of poverty should cause it to
burst forth. This is what the politicians of the day have called an armed peace.
The same tendency is shown in the other budgets: I mean to say that the
budgets have always increased in direct proportion to their services to
the cause of privilege, and inversely to those which they could render
to the producers. But when it is admitted that the lofty financial and
administrative capacities which governed France during those eighteen
years had no such intentions as are indicated by these comparisons of
the budgets, which, after all, matter little, it would remain not that
not the less true that the system of impoverishment and repression by
the State developed with a spontaneity and certainty that might well
dispense with any complicity on the part of statesmen.
Once again, there is here no question of persons.
Above the spirit of men there is the spirit of things; it
is with this latter that the philosopher concerns himself, always well
disposed towards his fellows.
If the composition of the budget of expenses is curious,
that of the account of receipts is no less instructive. I will not enter
into details; the general character will suffice. It is in
generalization that truth is discovered.
Since 1848 it has been proved by figures that if the
existing system of duties were replaced by a single tax on capital of
say, one per cent., the tax would be distributed with an almost ideal
equality, uniting the advantages of proportionality and progression,
without any of their drawbacks. By this sysstem labor would be little if
at all affected; capital, on the contrary, would be scientifically
reached. Where capital was not protected by the labor of the capitalist,
it would be exposed to levy; while the workingman, whose possessions
did not exceed a taxable amount, would pay nothing. Justice in taxation
would be the ne plus ultra
of fiscal science. But that would be the reverse of government. The
proposition, scouted by the practical politicians, served only to
discredit and almost discourage its authors.
The system of taxation actually followed is just the
opposite of that. It is planned in such a way that the producer pays
all, the capitalist nothing. In fact, whenever the latter is put down on
the books of the assessor for any amount whatever, or pays the duties
established by the fiscal authority on objects of consumption, it is
clear that, as his income is composed solely of the interest upon his
capital, and not by the exchange of his products, his income remains
free from taxation; inasmuch as it is only the producer that pays.
That injustice had to be; and Government was in this in
perfect accord with Society. If the inequality of conditions which
results from the economic disorganization be taken as an indication of
the will of Providence, the Government cannot do better than to follow
his will; for that reason, not content with defending privilege,
Government comes to its assistance by asking nothing from it. Grant the
time, and Government will make privilege an Institution, under the
titles of Nobility, Burghers, or otherwise.
There is therefore a compact between Capital and Power to
make the worker exclusively pay the taxes; and the secret of this
compact is simply, as I have said, to place the taxes on products,
instead of on capital.
Through this disguise the capitalist seems to pay on his
land, on his house, on his furniture, on his securities, on his
travelling, on his food, like the rest of the citizens. Also he says
that his income, which without tax would be 600, 1200, 2000 or 4000
dollars, is no more, thanks to the tax, than 500, 900, 1600, or 3000
dollars. And he complains against the amount of the budget with more
indignation than his tenants.
A complete mistake. The capitalist pays nothing: the
Government divides up with him; that is all. They make common cause.
What one of the workers would not esteem himelf lucky if he were granted
$400 income, upon the sole condition that he should give up a quarter
of it in redemption?
There is one chapter in the accounts of receipts that has
always seemed to me like a reminiscence of the old system, that of
assessment.
It is not enough that the producer pays for the liberty to
manufacture, cultivate, sell, buy or transport that the fiscal
authority grants him; the assessments forbid him to hold property as far
as possible. So much for an inheritance from a father, so much from an
uncle, so much for a rental, so much for a purchase. It is as if the
legislator of ’89 had had the intention of reenacting the inalienability
of real estate, in exact correspondence with feudal rights! As if he
had wanted to remind the wretch who had been freed by the night of the 4th of August
that he was still of servile condition, that he had no right to own the
soil, that every cultivator is only a tenant and distrainable by law,
unless he has permission from the sovereign! We must take care: there
are people who hold these ideas religiously: those people are our
masters and the friends of all those who lend to us on mortgage.
The partisans of governmental rule repel, with all the
force of conviction, criticism which, instead of finding fault with men,
attacks institutions, and endangers and threatens what they consider
their hereditary rights.
Is it the fault, they cry, of our representative
institutions? Is it the fault of the constitutional principle, or that
of incapable, corrupt, wasteful ministers, if a portion of those
millions, taken from property, from agriculture and from industry, at
the price of so great sacrifices, have served only to support sinecures
and to salve consciences? Is it the fault of this magnificent
centralization, if the taxes, having become exorbitant, weigh more
heavily upon the worker than on the proprietor; if, with a subsidy of 84
millions, our ports are bare of ships, our shops of materials; if, in
1848, after the revolution of February, the army was without provisions,
the cavalry without horses, the fortifications in bad condition; if we
could not put upon a war footing more than sixty thousand men? On the
contrary, is it not a case in which not the system but the mode of
carrying it out should be blamed? And then what becomes of your
denunciations of the tendencies of society and of government?
Indeed! We may then add corruption to the intrinsic vices
and feudal inclinations of the political order. Far from weakening my
argument, it strengthens it. Corruption allies itself well with the
general tendencies of Power; it forms a part of its methods; it is one
of its elements.
What does the system demand?
That the capitalistic feudalism shall be maintained in the
enjoyment of its rights; that the preponderance of capital over labor
shall be increased; that the parasite class shall be reinforced, if
possible, by providing for it everywhere hangers-on, through the aid of
public functions, and as recruits if necessary, and that large
properties shall be gradually reestablished, and the proprietors
ennobled;—did not Louis Philippe, toward the end of his reign,
devote himself to conferring titles of nobility?—that thus, by indirect
ways, certain services, which the official list of offices cannot
satisfy, shall be recompensed; finally, that everything shall be
attached to the surpeme patronage of the State—charities, recompenses,
pensions, awards, concessions, exploitations, authorizations, positions,
titles, privileges, ministerial offices, stock companies, municipal
administrations, etc., etc.
This is the reason for that venality whereof the scandals
under the last reign so surprised us; but at which the public conscience
would have been less astonished, if the mystery had been explained.
This too is the ulterior aim of that centralization which, under pretext
of the general interest, exerts pressure upon local interests, by
selling to the last and highest bidder the justice which they claim.
Understand clearly that corruption is the soul of
centralization. There is not a monarchy nor a democracy that is free
from it. Government is unchangeable in its spirit and essence; if it
takes a hand in public economy, it is to establish, by favor or by
force, what accident tends to bring about. Let us take the custom house
for an example.
Custom house duties, both import and export, but not
including those on salt, produce 32 millions for the State. 32 millions
to protect national industry! Do you perceive the jugglery? Suppose that
the customs did not exist; that Belgian, English, German, American
competition surrounded our markets on every side, and that then the
State should make the following proposition to French industry: In order
to protect your interests, which would you prefer to do, to pay me 32
millions or to receive them yourselves? Do you think that the industries
would elect to pay them? That is just what the Government requires them
to do. To the regular charges which foreign products and those which we
send abroad cost us, the Government adds 32 millions, which serve it as
drink-money; that is what the custom house amounts to. And the question
today is so entangled, that there is not one person in the whole
Republic who would dare to propose to abolish at one blow this absurd
tribute.
Moreover this sum of 32 millions, said to be levied for
the protection of national industry, is far from expressing all the
advantage which the Government draws from the custom house.
The Department of Var is not well supplied with
livestock; it lacks meat, and would ask nothing better than to import
cattle from the Piedmont, a frontier province. The Government, the
protector of the school-boy nation, will not permit it. What does this
mean? That the lobbyists of the Camargue have more influence with the ministry than the would-be purchasers of Var: ask for no other reason.
The story of the Department of Var is that of the
eighty-five remaining Departments. All have their special interests; are
in consequence antagonists, and seek an arbitrator. It is these
interests, far more than the army, which form the strength of the
Government. Also, observe, the Government has made itself the grantor of
mines, of canals, or railroads, in just the same way that the Court,
before ’89, sold the ranks of colonel and captain, as well as clerical
benefices.
I can believe that all the personages who have taken
charge of affairs since 1830 remained pure, except one; but it is not
evident that if, through the remarkable integrity of French character, peculators are rare, nevertheless peculation is organized: it exists.
Toulon, situated on the sea, has lost its right to fish; do you know how? The city of Marseilles
desiring the monopoly of the lucrative industry, the Government
pretended that the nets of the Toulon fishermen hampered the movements
of national vessels! That is why the inhabitants of Toulon import their
fish from Marseilles.
For a long time the shipping trade has asked for the
abolition of transportation duties on the canals, which yield an
insignificant amount for the customs, but are a disastrous fetter on
commerce. The Government objects that it is not free, that it needs a
law of redemption, that, moreover, it is engaged upon a project of
farming out the duties. The gist of it is that there exist franchises
which hope to sell out at a high price; moreover, if the duties on
navigation were abolished, the canals would compete with the railroads,
and the holders of the railroad franchises, very often members of the
ministry, have no interest in reducing the railroad charges. Do you
suspect that Messrs. Leon Faucher, Fould, Magne, even the President of the Republic, make money out of their position? I do not. I only say that, if the man in power wants to peculate,
he can do so; and that, sooner or later, he will. What am I talking
about? Venality will soon be made noe of the prerogatives of government.
The tiger devours because he is built to devour, and you expect that a
government built for corruption will not be corrupt?
Even charitable institutions serve the ends of those in authority marvellously well.
Charity is the strongest chain by which privilege and the
Government, bound to protect them, holds down the lower classes. With
charity, sweeter to the heart of men, more intelligible to the poor man
than the abstruse laws of political economy, one may dispense with
justice. Benefactors abound in the catalogue of saints; not one law
dispenser is found there. The Government, like the Church, places
fraternity far above justice. A good friend of the poor as much as you
like, but it hates calculators. In connection with the discussion on
pawnbrokers, the Journal des Debats
recalled that there would in time be hospitals everywhere. Loan offices,
it added, showed the same progress; each town wanted one for itself,
and would soon obtain it. I cannot conceive the indignation of the whole
list of bourgeois delegates against the two honorable socialists who
proposed to establish a loan office in each county immediately. Never
was there a proposition more worthy of the favor of the Debats.
The establishment for loans upon wages, even if the loan were
gratuitous, is the antechamber of the hospital. And what is the
hospital? The temple of Poverty.
Through these three ministries, that of agriculture and
commerce, that of public works, and that of the interior, through the
taxes of consumption and through the custom house, the Government keeps
its hand on all that comes and goes, all that is produced and consumed,
on all the business of individuals, towns and provinces; it maintains
the tendency of society toward the impoverishment of the masses, the
subordinating of the laborers, and the always growing preponderance of
parasite offices. Through the police, it watches the enemies of the
system; through the courts, it condemns and represses them; through the
army it crushes them; through public institutions it distributes, in
such proportions as suit it, knowledge and ignorance; through the Church
it puts to sleep any protest in the hearts of men; through the finances
it defrays the cost of this vast conspiracy at the expense of workers.
Under the monarchy of July, I repeat, the men in power did not understand the thought which ruled them, any more than did the masses. Louis Philippe, Guizot
and their associates did things with a simplicity of corruption which
was natural to them, making use of ways and means marvellously well, but
not perceiving the end directly. After the lower classes had made their
formidable voice heard in the revolution of February, the system began to be understood; it was propounded with the effrontery of dogmatism, it was called by its surname Malthus, and by its given name, Loyola. At bottom, nothing was changed by the event of February, any more than by those of 1830, 1814, 1793, from the order of pretended constitutional things that had been founded in 1791. Louis Bonaparte, whether he knows it or not, continues the rule of Louis Philippe, the Bourbons, Napoleon, and Robespierre.
Thus, in 1851 as in 1788, and from analogous causes, there
is in society a pronounced tendency towards poverty. Now, as then, the
wrong of which the laboring class complains is not the effect of a
temporary or accidental cause, it is that of a systematic diversion of
the social forces.
This diversion dates from far back, even before ’89. It
has its principle in the profundities of general economy. The first
revolution, struggling against the most manifest abuses, could act only
on the surface. After having destroyed tyranny, it did not know how to
establish order; whereof the principles were hidden under the feudal
ruins that covered the country. Moreover, that revolution of which the
history seems so complete to us, was only a negation, and will appear to
posterity as only the first act, the dawn of the great Revolution,
which must occupy the nineteenth century.
The crash of ’89–’91 left no organic principle, no working
structure, after having abolished, together with the monarchy, the last
remains of feudalism, proclaimed equality before the law and for
taxation, freedom of the press and of worship, and interested the
people, as much as it could, by the sale of national property. It has
not redeemed one of its promises. When the Revolution proclaimed liberty
of the people, the subordination of power to the country, it set up two
incompatible things, society and government; and it is this
incompatibility which has been the cause or the pretext of this
overwhelming, liberty-destroying concentration, called Centralization, which the parliamentary democracy admires and praises, because it is its nature to tend toward despotism.
We have seen the old society perish, and with
it a swarm of democratic institutions and of independent magistracies,
which it bore within its bosom, a strong combination of private rights,
veritable republics within the monarchy. These institutions, these
magistracies, did not share the sovereignty, it is true, but everywhere
they placed limits to it, which honor defended obstinately. Not one has
survived, and none other has been erected in their place; the Revolution
has left only individuals. In this respect, the dictatorship
in which it culminated, completed its work. From this society reduced to
dust, sprang centralization; its origin need not be sought elsewhere.
Centralization did not come like other doctrines, head erect and with
the authority of principle. It crept in modestly, as a necessary
consequence. In fact, where there are only individuals, all businss
which is not theirs is public business, business of the State. Where
there are no independent magistrates, there are only delegates of the
central power. Thus we have become a bureau-ruled people, under the hand
of responsible functionaries, themselves centralized in the power of
which they are the ministers. In this condition, society was bequeathed
to the Restoration.
The charter then had to reestablish Government and Society
at the same time. Society was not forgotten nor neglected, indeed, but
left out. The Charter reestablished only the Government; and did so by
the division of sovereignty and the multiplicity of powers. But in order
that a nation may be free, it is not enough that it be governed by
several powers. The division of sovereignty brought about by the
Charter, is, no doubt, an important accomplishment, and one which has
mighty consequences, relatively to the royal power which it modifies;
but the Government which results from it, although separated into its
elements, is one in practice; and, if it meets no outside obstacle which
it must respect, it is absolute: the nation and the nation’s rights are
its property. It was only when it established liberty of thep ress,
that the Charter restored Society to its own.
What M. Royer-Collard said of the royalty of 1814, is even more true of the Republic of 1848.
The Republic had Society to establish: it thought only of
establishing Government. Centralization continually fortifying itself,
while Society had no institution to oppose to it, through the
exaggeration of political ideas and the total absence of social ideas,
matters reached a point where Society and Government could not live
together, the condition of existence of the latter being to subordinate
and subjugate the former.
Therefore, while the problem propounded in ’89 seemed to
be officially solved, at the bottom there was change only in the
governmental metaphysics—what Napoleon called ideology.
Liberty, equality, progress, with all their oratorical consequences, are
written in the text of the constitutions and the laws; there is no
vestige of them in the institutions. The ancient hierarchy of classes
has been replaced by an ignoble feudalism, based on mercantile and
industrial usury; by a chaos of interests, an antagonism of principles, a
degradation of law: the abuses have changed the face which they bore
before ’89, to assume a different form of organization; they have
diminished neither in number nor gravity. On account of our being
engrossed with politics, we have lost sight of social economy. It was in
this way that the democratic party itself, the heir of the first
Revolution, came to attempting to reform Society by establishing the
initiative of the State, to create institutions by the prolific virtue
of Power, in a word, to correct an abuse by an abuse.
All minds being bewitched with politics, Society turns in a
circle of mistakes, driving capital to a still more crushing
agglomeration, the State to an extension of its prerogatives that is
more and more tyrannical, the laboring class to an irreparable decline,
physically, morally and intellectually.
For many people it is to advance a scandalous and
paradoxical proposition, filled with difficulty and disaster, to say
that the Revolution of ’89, having established nothing, has freed us not
at all, but only changed our sad lot; to say that, in consequence, a
new revolution to organize and reconstruct is necessary, to fill the
void left by the former. The more or less pledged partisans of the
constitutional monarchy will not agree; the democrats attached to the
letter of ’93, who are frightened at such a task, are opposed. According
to one or the other, nothing is left but accidental grievances, due
chiefly to the incapacity of the depositaries of power, which a vigorous
democracy could cure. Thence the disturbance, not to say antipathy,
with which the Revolution inspires them; and thence too this reactionary
policy in which they have engaged since February.
Nevertheless, such is the evidence of facts, so greatly
have statistics and investigations elucidated the matter, that it is
more than folly or bad faith to argue in favor of a better policy, when
everything shows the contradiction and the weakness of Government.
In place of this governmental, feudal and military rule,
imitated from that of the former kings, the new edifice of industrial
institutions must be built; in place of this materialist centralization
which absorbs all the political power, we must create the intellectual
and liberal centralization of economic forces. Labor, commerce, credit,
education, property, public morals, philosophy, art, everything in fact
require it of us.
I conclude:
There is sufficient cause for a revolution in the nineteenth century.
P.-J. Proudhon
Portrait by F. T. Stuart. Boston. Scanned from ISBN 0-486-43397-8.
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was first published in French as Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle.
This is an electronic transcription of John Beverly Robinson's 1923
English translation, originally published in 1923 by Freedom Press,
London. The text is based on Dover Publications' 2003 unabridged
reproduction of Robinson's translation (ISBN 0-486-43397-8), with
occasional typographical errors corrected.
Proudhon was from humble origins but had become a well-known French social theorist during the 1840s. A
printer by trade, he was an exponent of mutualist socialism, a sociopolitical creed that may also be
called anarchism. His most famous book was his second one, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?
(1840) (he polemically responded that "it is theft"), but before 1848 he also had published
De la célébration du Dimanche (1839), De la création
de l'ordre dans l'humanité (1843) and Système des contradictions
économiques, ou philosophie de la misère, (in 2 volumes, 1846). A persistent critic
of the French July Monarchy, he was nonetheless surprised by the outbreak of hostilities in Paris in
February 1848. In his correspondence, he recounted his participation in the February uprising and the
composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. The same correspondence
indicates, however, that Proudhon had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform
at the expense of socioeconomic reform, which Proudhon considered basic.
Determined to set the new republic on the correct course, Proudhon published his own perspective for reform,
Solution du problème social, in which he articulated a program of mutual financial
cooperation among workers that he believed would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and
financiers to workers. Pivotal here was his pan to establish a bank which would provide credit at a very
low rate of interest and issue "exchange notes" that would circulate in lieu of money based on gold.
Proudhon made his biggest impact on the public during the Second Republic through his journalism. He was
connected with four different newspapers: La Représentant du Peuple (February 1848 -
August 1848); Le Peuple (September 1848 - June 1849); La Voix du Peuple (September
1849 - May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June 1850 - October 1850). His polemical writing
style, combined with his perception of himself as a political outsider, produced a cynical, combative
journalism which alienated some, but appealed to many French workers. In his numerous articles he criticized
the policies of the government and continued to propose the reform of credit and exchange. To realize his plan,
he attempted to establish a popular bank (Bank du Peuple) early in 1849, but despite numerous
adherents (perhaps as many as 13,267--mostly workers), receipts were meager (about 17,993F) and the whole
enterprise was essentially stillborn.
Proudhon failed to get elected to the constituent assembly in April 1848, though his name appeared on the ballots
in Paris, Lyon, Besançon, and Lille. He was successful, however, in the complementary elections held on
June 4, and was therefore a deputy during the debates over the National Workshops. Proudhon had never advocated
such workshops, accurately perceiving them as essentially charity institutions which did not directly attack
the problems of the economic system, but he opposed their elimination unless some economic assurances could be
given to the workers who relied on them for subsistence.
Proudhon was shocked by the violence of the June Days. He visited the barricades personally to acquaint himself
with the events that were unfolding and reflected in 1855 that his presence at the Bastille at this time was "one
of the most honorable acts of my life." But in general during the tumultuous events of 1848, Proudhon
opposed insurrection and preached peaceful conciliation, a stance that was in accord with his lifelong stance
against violence. He never fully approved of the revolts and demonstrations of February, May, or June, 1848,
though he sympathetically portrayed the social and psychological injustices that the insurrectionaries had been
forced to endure, and argued that the forces of reaction were the responsible parties for the occurrence of these
tragic events.
Following the June Days, Proudhon faced the
criticism of conservatives within the national assembly, especially for the economic reforms that he continued
to advance. Following a heated exchange within the committee of finance of the national assembly (of which
Proudhon was a member), Proudhon's proposals were condemned on the floor of the assembly by Adophpe Thiers.
Proudhon responded with a three-and-a-half-hour speech on July 31 in which he argued that the abrogation of
property was the essential economic meaning of the 1848 revolution and insisted that the country should
"proceed with the social liquidation." The speech was frequently interrupted by pointed rejoinders from
the floor of the Assembly and was followed by a motion of censure that was supported even by Louis Blanc
and Pierre Leroux.
As this vote indicated, Proudhon's relationship with the démoc-socs of the mountain
was strained. Though there was a brief attempt to form a new left-wing coalition in the fall of 1848,
this failed because, in Proudhon's opinion, the mountain remained attached to political revolution
rather than social revolution. Proudhon and the mountain could put aside their differences long
enough to vote together on November 4 against the new constitution (though for different reasons),
but by the end of the month they were again at each others throats.
Proudhon also had a run-in with the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, which led
to his prosecution and imprisonment. Proudhon had opposed Bonaparte throughout 1848: he had criticized him
in two articles in Le Représentant du Peuple in June 1848; he voted against allowing him
to take a seat in the constituent assembly; he opposed the creation of a strong executive elected directly by
the people; he opposed Napoleon in the presidential elections of December 1848. Proudhon's attacks became more
aggressive in January 1849, and the government responded by getting the assembly to lift Proudhon's immunity
from prosecution and, in March 1849, had Proudhon sentenced to three years in prison and fined 3000F. Proudhon
went into hiding for two months, although he continued to write articles for Le Peuple, but on the
night of June 5 he was arrested and transferred to Sainte-Pélagie.
During his three years in prison, Proudhon married and fathered a son (an indication of the leniency accorded
political prisoners during this era), and he also wrote and published four books. The first, Confession
d'un révolutionnaire (November 1849) was Proudhon's personal account of the 1848 revolutions.
The second, Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle
(July 1851), discussed the specific the specific reform proposals that Proudhon had articulated in
Solution du problème sociale, but placed them in the context of the inevitable
historical progression toward greater liberty and equality that Proudhon termed "revolution." It has
always been considered one of Proudhon's most important writings. The third book, La Révolution
sociale demontrée par le coup d'état du 2 decembre 1851 (July 1852), was an appeal to
Louis-Napoleon to work for the revolution by implementing social reforms. The fourth book, Philosophie
du progrès (September 1853), was more philosophical in nature and had little to do with the
Revolutions of 1848.
Proudhon's actions and writings during this period have always been controversial. Though clearly on the
political left, his opposition to the provisional government and his public quarrels with prominent socialists
like Louis Blanc made him unpopular with the mountain. His attacks of Bonaparte, followed by his book urging
him to embrace a progressive and "revolutionary" program, have caused confusion and led to criticism. His
stances concerning politics--opposition to universal suffrage followed by election to the constituent assembly
and insistence that Bonaparte institute reforms "from above"--has made it easy to dismiss Proudhon as
hopelessly inconsistent. However, Proudhon did pursue a consistent social program, one that he hoped
to see implemented by different parties at different phases of the revolution. His general goal was to
return the control of the productive process back over to workers, a transformation that he believed
could be furthered by the implementation of his proposed reforms of credit and exchange. The masthead
slogan of his paper in 1848, Le Représentant du Peuple, stated it clearly: "What is
the producer in actual society?--Nothing. What should he be?-- Everything."
Thrust into the public sphere by tumultuous events of 1848, Proudhon desired to influence national
socioeconomic policy, but he proved to be an ineffective political actor. As he himself perceptively
noted in 1850, he was basically a "man of polemics, not of the barricades."
K. Steven Vincent
Bibliography
Carnets de P.-J.
Proudhon, t. 3, 1848-1850 (Paris: Rivière, 1968).
Correspondance de P.-J. Proudhon, 14 vols. (Paris: Lacroix, 1875).
Dolléans, Edouard, and Puech, J. L., Proudhon et la révolution de 1848 (Paris: PUF, 1948).
Halévy, Daniel, Le Mariage de Proudhon (Paris: Stock, 1955).
Haubtmann, Pierre, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, sa vie et sa pensée (1809-1049) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982).
Hoffman, Robert L., Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972)
.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, Les Confessions d'un révolutionaire pour servire à l'histoire
de la Révolution de Févier [1849] (Paris: Rivière, 1929).
_______. Idée générale de la révolution [1851] (Paris: Rivière, 1923).
_______. La Révolution sociale demontrée par le coup d'état du 2 décembre
1851 [1852] (Paris: Rivière, 1936).
_______. Solution du problème social [1848], in Oeuvres complètes de P.-J.
Proudhon, t. 6 (Paris: Lacroix, 1866-1876).
Spear, Lois, "Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Revolution of 1848" (Ph.D. dissertation, Loyola University of
Chicago, 1971).
Vincent, K. Steven, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of the French Republican Socialism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Il n’y a que deux
personnes qui aient réuni des politiques, des chefs d’entreprise, des acteurs
majeurs de l’internet, des journalistes, des lobbyistes et artistes au
Fouquet’s : Nicolas Sarkozy et moi.
Pour les même raisons, mais en miroir, en symétrie, lui pour l’asservissement
du web et la promesse du contrôle des internautes devant la création artistique
avec Hadopi, et moi pour l’assurance de la liberté sur internet et de
l’ouverture à l’accès pour tous à la création artistique sur internet en lutant
contre Hadopi.
C’était le 29 octobre 2009 pour la sortie du livre « la bataille Hadopi », le
seul livre traitant sérieusement du sujet jamais sorti en France. Cela n’a pas
empêché nos députés godillots de voter la loi Hadopi et de créer la Haute
Autorité. On connaît aujourd’hui son échec et son inutilité. Ce qu’on avait
prédit ce jour là et écrit dans le livre.
Parmi mes invités du Fouquet’s, il y avait Francis Lalanne qui, lors de cette
soirée là, après avoir exprimé son émotion de voir la culture et la
connaissance tomber dans les mains de quelques puissants et nous direqu’« un
artiste existe pour produire de la conscience », fit une promesse. Celle de
faire un jour un livre libre. Tant sur la forme que sur le fond.
C’est aujourd’hui chose faite. La promesse est tenue.
Le livre que vous avez entre les mains est libre. Libre dans son expression
parce qu’il aborde tous les sujets, sans fards et sans peurs ; libre de support
parce qu’il est copyleft. Vous pouvez le partager, l’échanger et le copier.
C’est le coeur de mon travail d’éditeur depuis 2005 avec InLibroVeritas :
l’accès, l’échange et le partage universel, démocratique et fraternel au savoir
et à la culture.
Francis l’a bien compris, et il le montre ici. Le copyleft en contre-pouvoir du
copyright, tout un symbole. Mais pas seulement, vous le verrez dans les lignes
qui suivent. Car l’heure est venue de nous révolter.
Restez libres et ne renoncez jamais...
Mathieu Pasquini
Gérant & Fondateur de InLibroVeritas
Vote électronique : les boîtes noires de la démocratie
Perline, Thierry Noisette
14.00 €
Nous sommes nombreux à constater que la « vraie » vie est
bien différente de la lettre de nos lois. Le citoyen français se sent, à
juste titre, dépossédé de tout pouvoir d’influencer son destin et celui
de ses enfants. Ce constat – qui concerne le citoyen – est le même pour
l’individu. Combien de personnes, d’associations, de communes, de
petites entreprises n’ai-je rencontrées, qui toutes, menaient la lutte
du pot de terre contre le pot de fer, dans un système qui prétend être
fondé sur l’égalité et le droit.
Nous sommes nombreux à constater que la « vraie » vie est bien
différente de la lettre de nos lois. Le citoyen français se sent, à
juste titre, dépossédé de tout pouvoir d’influencer son destin et celui
de ses enfants. Ce constat – qui concerne le citoyen – est le même pour
l’individu. Combien de personnes, d’associations, de communes, de
petites entreprises n’ai-je rencontrées, qui toutes, menaient la lutte
du pot de terre contre le pot de fer, dans un système qui prétend être
fondé sur l’égalité et le droit. L’impossibilité d’avoir accès à
l’information, la cécité des autorités, par manque de moyens ou
connivences, les menaces de toute nature, l’immense faiblesse de notre
justice pour les forts explique pour partie, cette situation. Mais le
mal est plus global. C’est le fonctionnement de la démocratie française
qui est en cause.Non, tous les politiques et plus généralement toutes
les élites ne sont pas « pourris ». En revanche, oui, les conflits
d’intérêt, les réseaux, le maintien des mêmes personnes aux mêmes postes
durant des décennies, l’impunité, l’irresponsabilité sont des fléaux
que nous pouvons combattre… à condition de le vouloir. Dans mes
différentes vies d’avocate, députée européenne, élues locale, militante
associative contre la corruption, pour le droit de mourir dans la
dignité, j’ai acquis une expérience de la réalité. Juriste, enseignante
durant 30 ans du droit, j’ai aussi réfléchi sur les solutions. Je
souhaite donc ouvrir le débat sur 10 propositions de modifications de
notre Constitution qui pourraient changer la vie de nos
concitoyens. Elles s’inscrivent dans une refonte globale de notre
système puisque le temps est venu de passer à une Sixième République.
Mais, ces 10 propositions concernent plus directement les citoyens et
sont destinées à leur permettre de s’assurer que les principes qui
figurent dans le Préambule de la Constitution ne sont pas virtuels. En
interdisant le cumul des mandats, en assurant l’égalité d’accès dans la
représentation, le respect du pluralisme, l’accès à l’information,
l’indépendance du Pouvoir Judiciaire enfin reconnu, ces propositions
nous feraient sortir de la république bananière dans laquelle nous
sommes enferrés pour devenir une démocratie digne de ce nom. Ainsi,
collectivement, peut-être redonnerons nous à nos concitoyens le goût,
non pas de la politique, qu’ils n’ont jamais perdu, mais du désir d’y
participer.
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the
strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of
teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how
bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered
body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar,
who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the
British human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal
murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said
to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the
Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the
CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered
further testimony which has yet to be filed.
‘We have statements from a further 82 victims’ families relating to
more than 30 drone strikes,’ he said. ‘This is their only hope of
justice.’
In the first case, which has already been heard by a court in
Islamabad, judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr
Akbar’s petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via
Interpol against the two Americans.
The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr
Akbar and the families of drone victims who are civilians are seeking a
ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as
‘acts of war’.
They argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down
the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations
with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.
According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New
York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since
the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.
The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176
children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as
‘high-value’ terrorist targets.
Getting at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along
the frontier are closed to journalists. US security officials continue
to claim that almost all those killed are militants who use bases in
Pakistan to launch attacks on Western forces across the border in
Afghanistan.
In his only acknowledgement that the US has ever launched such
attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in January: ‘This is a
targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active
terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.’
But behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the
most detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been
carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.
The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist
and translator with two masters’ degrees, whose family comes from the
village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan.
His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were
killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck
the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.
Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal,
Pakistan’s national poet, and Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family.
My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in
professions such as teaching.
‘We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.’
Mr Khan said: ‘Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had
returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a
part-time job as a school caretaker.
‘He was a quiet boy and studious – always in the top group of his
class.’ Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges.
Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years
taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in
work.
Mr Khan said: ‘He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell
jokes.’ His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.
Included in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and
Zahinulla’s educational and employment records, as well as their death
certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was
staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.
Mr Khan, who had been working for a TV station in Islamabad, said he
was given the news of their deaths in a 2am phone call from a cousin.
‘I called a friend who had a car and we started driving through the
night to get back to the village,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible journey. I
was shocked, grieving, angry, like anyone who had lost their loved
ones.’
He got home soon after dawn and describes his return ‘like entering a
village of the dead – it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered
outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms
had been destroyed’.
Zahinullah, Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but
despite his horrific injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken
to a nearby hospital. However, he died during the night.
‘We always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at
three o’clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,’ Mr Khan
said. ‘Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was
crushed and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire
the missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”.
‘It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and
compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human
beings.’
Mr Khan found Mr Akbar through a friend who had attended lectures he
gave at an Islamabad university. In 2010, he filed a criminal complaint –
known as a first information report – to police naming Mr Banks.
However, they took no action, therefore triggering the lawsuit – a
judicial review of that failure to act.
If the judge finds in favour of Mr Khan, his decision cannot be
appealed, thus making the full criminal inquiry and Interpol warrants
inevitable.
According to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network
led by Mr Banks – who left Pakistan in 2010 – targeted the Khan family
and guided the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into
their compound.
Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter
after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted
that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s
enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.
He added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list . . . The Predator is the
weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your
head.’
Last night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the
condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan’s own intelligence agency,
the ISI, has always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone
targets.
‘They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,’ said the official.
He claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously
flawed. As a result, ‘they are causing the loss of innocent lives’.
But even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called
‘signature strikes’ – when a drone operator, sitting at a computer
screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he
thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.
He said: ‘It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards
the border, and the operator thinks, “Let’s get them before they get
there,” without any idea of who they are.
‘It could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier
region, every male is armed but it doesn’t mean they are militants.’
One such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in
North Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar’s dossier
makes clear, had gathered for a jirga – a tribal meeting – in order to
discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a
chromite mine.
Some of the most horrifying testimony comes from Khalil Khan, the son
of Malik Haji Babat, a tribal leader and police officer. ‘My father was
not a terrorist. He was not an enemy of the United States,’ Khalil’s
legal statement says. ‘He was a hard-working and upstanding citizen, the
type of person others looked up to and aspired to be like.’
Khalil, 32, last saw his father three hours before his death, when he
left for a business meeting in a nearby town. Informed his father had
been killed, Khalil hurried to the scene.
‘What I saw when I got off the bus at Datta Khel was horrible,’ he
said. ‘I immediately saw flames and women and children were saying there
had been a drone strike. The fires spread after the strike.
‘I went to the location where the jirga had been held. The situation
was really very bad. There were still people lying around injured.
‘The tribal elders who had been killed could not be identified
because there were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful. I just
collected the pieces that I believed belonged to my father and placed
them in a small coffin.’
Khalil said that as a police officer, his father had earned a good
salary, on which he supported his family. Khalil has considered
returning to the Gulf, where he worked for 14 years, but ‘because of the
frequency of drones I am concerned to leave my family’.
He added that schools in the area were empty because ‘parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile’.
In another statement – one of 13 taken by Mr Akbar concerning the
Datta Khel strike – driver Ahmed Jan, 52, describes the moment the
missile hit: ‘We were in the middle of our discussion and I was thrown
about 24ft from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious. When I
awoke, I saw many individuals who were injured or dead.
‘I have lost the use of one of my feet and have a rod inserted
because of the injuries. It is so painful for me to walk. There are
scars on my face because I had to have an operation on my nose when it
would not stop bleeding.’
Mr Jan says he has spent £3,600 on medical treatment but ‘I have
never been offered compensation of any kind . . . I do not know why
this jirga was targeted. I am a malik [elder] of my tribe and therefore a
government servant. We were not doing anything wrong or illegal.’
Another survivor was Mohammed Noor, 27, a stonemason, who attended
the jirga with his uncle and his cousin, both of whom were killed. ‘The
parts of their bodies had to be collected first. These parts were all we
had of them,’ he said.
Mr Akbar said that fighting back through the courts was the only way
‘to solve the larger problem’ of the ongoing terrorist conflict.
‘It is the only way to break the cycle of violence,’ he said. ‘If we
want to change the people of Waziristan, we first have to show them that
we respect the rule of law.’
A senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or
allegations against specific individuals.’ A White House source last
night declined to comment.
21 NOVEMBER 2019 7 DAMN YEARS LATER, THE WORLD IS WORSE THAN EVER! IT IS ALL ADOLPH HITLER'S FAULT...
... AND OURS, OF COURSE, DAMN EARTHLINGS!
Isn't it nice to live in A REAL JUDEO-MASONIC HELL ON EARTH?
OY VEY!
While those damn Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others still pray for and hope for AN INEXISTENT HEAVENLY PARADISE!
Those damn sheeple are wide awake for everything else except for the fight for FREEDOM, TRUTH, JUSTICE and the MORAL WAY - because they are hypocrites, cowards, and damn selfish materialsts!
LET US BE SELF-SUFFICIENT
AND INDEPENDENT OF THE JEWISH MONOPOLISTS!
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD!
LET US, CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS, UNITE!
LET US, ALL FREEDOM AND JUSTICE LOVERS,
UNITE NOW, AND NOT TOMORROW!
ALL STATES LIE, OPPRESS AND CHEAT!
STATES MAKE LAWS FOR THE RICH
AND AGAINST THE SUBJUGATED AND IMPOVERISHED!
STATES LEVY TAXES TO BLEED THE IMPOVERISHED!
THE IMPOVERISHED ALWAYS HAVE FEWER RIGHTS!
WE DO NOT WANT EQUALITY, BUT EQUITY, JUSTICE!
RISE UP, DAMNED SLAVES OF THE JEWISH KOSHER NOSTRA!
ENSLAVED MASSES OF THE WORLD RISE UP!
THE JEWS HAVE HIJACKED AND CORRUPTED OUR WORLD!
SHALL WE REMAIN THEIR SLAVES FOREVER?
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD!
SHALL WE NOT GROUP WHEN THE DEVILS ARE UNITED?
THE JEWS WILL NOT SUCCEED IF WE ARE UNITED!
THERE IS GOD, DO NOT LISTEN TO SATAN!
DAVID ICKE ASKS US TO GET OFF OUR KNEES,
THAT IS, STOP WORSHIPPING GOD!
LIKE PR RICHARD DAWKINS, HE TOO IS DELUDED!
THERE IS INDEED A SUPREME SAVIOUR
EVEN IF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS DISAGREE ABOUT HIM!
SALVATION IS THROUGH RIGHTEOUS DEEDS
EVEN IF CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS DISAGREE
ABOUT IT!
DO NOT LISTEN TO VAIN PREACHERS! IT IS NOW OR NEVER!
WE MUST STRIKE THE METAL WHEN IT IS STILL HOT!
WE REFUSE ALL LAWS MADE BY JEWS & FREMASONS!
WE REFUSE ALL PRISONS AND MIND CONTROL!
WE WANT TO BE FREE! FREE! FREE!
LET US UNITE NOW, NOT TOMORROW!
OBAMA, SARKOZY AND ALL CAESARS ARE ABOMINATIONS!
TO PLEASE THE JEWS, THEY MADE SLAVES OF US ALL!
CAESAR GAVE THEM ALL OUR WEALTH
INCLUDING OUR DRINKING WATER AND EVEN
OUR VERY RIGHT TO LIVE AND TO BE DECENTLY BURIED!
HAVE THEY EVER DONE ANYTHING ELSE
THAN PLUNDER OUR WAGES TO FINANCE ISRAEL
AND FILL THE VAULTS OF THE JEWISH BANK GANGSTERS?
WE WANT WHAT IS LEGITIMATELY OURS,
WHAT GOD GAVE US OUT OF HIS BOUNTY AND MERCY!
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD!
DO NOT LET OURSELVES BE DRUGGED BY THEIR LIQUORS,
BY THEIR MEDIA, SPORTS, NICOTINE, MERCURY AND ASPERTAME!
SALAAM, SHANTI, SHALOM, PEACE AMONGST US!
WAR ON THE TYRANTS! LET US REFUSE TO KILL!
TO KILL DEFENCELESS NON COMBATTANTS!
DEFENCELESS MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN AND BABIES!
LET US AIM OUR WEAPONS ELSEWHERE
AND BREAK THE RANKS IF WE ARE NOT DEFENDING THE HOMELAND!
IF THEY PERSIST, THOSE CANNIBALS,
IN MAKING KILLER HEROES, RAPISTS AND THIEVES OF US,
LET THEM KNOW THAT OUR BULLETS
ARE FOR OUR OWN GENERALS!
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD!
LET US ALL UNITE, NOW, NOT TOMORROW!
WORKERS, PEASANTS, ALL MEN AND WOMEN,
THIS LAND IS OURS! GOD GAVE THIS LAND AND LIFE
TO ALL OF US, NOT ONLY TO THE JEWS!
LET THE JEWS GO ELSEWHERE, ANYWHERE
IF THEY WANT APARTHEID AND HUMAN FLESH FOR FOOD!
OUR CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR THEM TO MURDER AND SACRIFICE!
NOT FOR THEM TO STEAL THEIR ORGANS!
OUR WOMEN ARE NOT FOR THEM TO PROSTITUTE!
OUR CORPSES ARE NOT FOR THEM TO DEVOUR ANYMORE!
WHEN THEY ARE GONE, THE SUN WILL SHINE AGAIN!
THE BIRDS WILL NO MORE FALL DEAD AND
OUR FISH, FAUNA AND FLORA WILL BE SAFE FROM THEM
AND THEIR POLLUTED WAYS!
RISE UP, NOW, YOU DAMNED OF THE EARTH!
RISE UP NOW, NOT TOMORROW! OR NEVER!
THIS IS THE LONG DUE STRUGGLE IN THE NAME OF GOD!
BAFS
Second adaptation (I lost the first one!) from L’Internationale, (composed in 1871 by Eugène Pottier (1816–1887)
Responses to The Being Which We Have Become
(MANTIQ AL TAYR)
( Mafioso Charles Pasqua’s figure of Six Million some two decades ago!)
WE HAVE SIX MILLION REASONS FOR REVOLUTION IN 2012
There was Sufficient Reason for Revolution in the Nineteenth Century?
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
A MUST READ
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
1. Law of Tendency in Society. — The Revolution of 1789 has done only half its work.
2. Chaos of economic forces. Tendency of society toward poverty.
3. Anomaly of Government. Tendency toward Tyranny and Corruption.
Table of Contents
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)
Proudhon was from humble origins but had become a well-known French social theorist during the 1840s. A printer by trade, he was an exponent of mutualist socialism, a sociopolitical creed that may also be called anarchism. His most famous book was his second one, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840) (he polemically responded that "it is theft"), but before 1848 he also had published De la célébration du Dimanche (1839), De la création de l'ordre dans l'humanité (1843) and Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère, (in 2 volumes, 1846). A persistent critic of the French July Monarchy, he was nonetheless surprised by the outbreak of hostilities in Paris in February 1848. In his correspondence, he recounted his participation in the February uprising and the composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. The same correspondence indicates, however, that Proudhon had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of socioeconomic reform, which Proudhon considered basic.
Determined to set the new republic on the correct course, Proudhon published his own perspective for reform, Solution du problème social, in which he articulated a program of mutual financial cooperation among workers that he believed would transfer control of economic relations from capitalists and financiers to workers. Pivotal here was his pan to establish a bank which would provide credit at a very low rate of interest and issue "exchange notes" that would circulate in lieu of money based on gold.
Proudhon made his biggest impact on the public during the Second Republic through his journalism. He was connected with four different newspapers: La Représentant du Peuple (February 1848 - August 1848); Le Peuple (September 1848 - June 1849); La Voix du Peuple (September 1849 - May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June 1850 - October 1850). His polemical writing style, combined with his perception of himself as a political outsider, produced a cynical, combative journalism which alienated some, but appealed to many French workers. In his numerous articles he criticized the policies of the government and continued to propose the reform of credit and exchange. To realize his plan, he attempted to establish a popular bank (Bank du Peuple) early in 1849, but despite numerous adherents (perhaps as many as 13,267--mostly workers), receipts were meager (about 17,993F) and the whole enterprise was essentially stillborn.
Proudhon failed to get elected to the constituent assembly in April 1848, though his name appeared on the ballots in Paris, Lyon, Besançon, and Lille. He was successful, however, in the complementary elections held on June 4, and was therefore a deputy during the debates over the National Workshops. Proudhon had never advocated such workshops, accurately perceiving them as essentially charity institutions which did not directly attack the problems of the economic system, but he opposed their elimination unless some economic assurances could be given to the workers who relied on them for subsistence.
Proudhon was shocked by the violence of the June Days. He visited the barricades personally to acquaint himself with the events that were unfolding and reflected in 1855 that his presence at the Bastille at this time was "one of the most honorable acts of my life." But in general during the tumultuous events of 1848, Proudhon opposed insurrection and preached peaceful conciliation, a stance that was in accord with his lifelong stance against violence. He never fully approved of the revolts and demonstrations of February, May, or June, 1848, though he sympathetically portrayed the social and psychological injustices that the insurrectionaries had been forced to endure, and argued that the forces of reaction were the responsible parties for the occurrence of these tragic events.
Following the June Days, Proudhon faced the criticism of conservatives within the national assembly, especially for the economic reforms that he continued to advance. Following a heated exchange within the committee of finance of the national assembly (of which Proudhon was a member), Proudhon's proposals were condemned on the floor of the assembly by Adophpe Thiers. Proudhon responded with a three-and-a-half-hour speech on July 31 in which he argued that the abrogation of property was the essential economic meaning of the 1848 revolution and insisted that the country should "proceed with the social liquidation." The speech was frequently interrupted by pointed rejoinders from the floor of the Assembly and was followed by a motion of censure that was supported even by Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux.
As this vote indicated, Proudhon's relationship with the démoc-socs of the mountain was strained. Though there was a brief attempt to form a new left-wing coalition in the fall of 1848, this failed because, in Proudhon's opinion, the mountain remained attached to political revolution rather than social revolution. Proudhon and the mountain could put aside their differences long enough to vote together on November 4 against the new constitution (though for different reasons), but by the end of the month they were again at each others throats.
Proudhon also had a run-in with the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, which led to his prosecution and imprisonment. Proudhon had opposed Bonaparte throughout 1848: he had criticized him in two articles in Le Représentant du Peuple in June 1848; he voted against allowing him to take a seat in the constituent assembly; he opposed the creation of a strong executive elected directly by the people; he opposed Napoleon in the presidential elections of December 1848. Proudhon's attacks became more aggressive in January 1849, and the government responded by getting the assembly to lift Proudhon's immunity from prosecution and, in March 1849, had Proudhon sentenced to three years in prison and fined 3000F. Proudhon went into hiding for two months, although he continued to write articles for Le Peuple, but on the night of June 5 he was arrested and transferred to Sainte-Pélagie.
During his three years in prison, Proudhon married and fathered a son (an indication of the leniency accorded political prisoners during this era), and he also wrote and published four books. The first, Confession d'un révolutionnaire (November 1849) was Proudhon's personal account of the 1848 revolutions. The second, Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle (July 1851), discussed the specific the specific reform proposals that Proudhon had articulated in Solution du problème sociale, but placed them in the context of the inevitable historical progression toward greater liberty and equality that Proudhon termed "revolution." It has always been considered one of Proudhon's most important writings. The third book, La Révolution sociale demontrée par le coup d'état du 2 decembre 1851 (July 1852), was an appeal to Louis-Napoleon to work for the revolution by implementing social reforms. The fourth book, Philosophie du progrès (September 1853), was more philosophical in nature and had little to do with the Revolutions of 1848.
Proudhon's actions and writings during this period have always been controversial. Though clearly on the political left, his opposition to the provisional government and his public quarrels with prominent socialists like Louis Blanc made him unpopular with the mountain. His attacks of Bonaparte, followed by his book urging him to embrace a progressive and "revolutionary" program, have caused confusion and led to criticism. His stances concerning politics--opposition to universal suffrage followed by election to the constituent assembly and insistence that Bonaparte institute reforms "from above"--has made it easy to dismiss Proudhon as hopelessly inconsistent. However, Proudhon did pursue a consistent social program, one that he hoped to see implemented by different parties at different phases of the revolution. His general goal was to return the control of the productive process back over to workers, a transformation that he believed could be furthered by the implementation of his proposed reforms of credit and exchange. The masthead slogan of his paper in 1848, Le Représentant du Peuple, stated it clearly: "What is the producer in actual society?--Nothing. What should he be?-- Everything."
Thrust into the public sphere by tumultuous events of 1848, Proudhon desired to influence national socioeconomic policy, but he proved to be an ineffective political actor. As he himself perceptively noted in 1850, he was basically a "man of polemics, not of the barricades."
K. Steven Vincent
Bibliography
Carnets de P.-J. Proudhon, t. 3, 1848-1850 (Paris: Rivière, 1968).Correspondance de P.-J. Proudhon, 14 vols. (Paris: Lacroix, 1875).
Dolléans, Edouard, and Puech, J. L., Proudhon et la révolution de 1848 (Paris: PUF, 1948).
Halévy, Daniel, Le Mariage de Proudhon (Paris: Stock, 1955).
Haubtmann, Pierre, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, sa vie et sa pensée (1809-1049) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982).
Hoffman, Robert L., Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972) .
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, Les Confessions d'un révolutionaire pour servire à l'histoire de la Révolution de Févier [1849] (Paris: Rivière, 1929).
_______. Idée générale de la révolution [1851] (Paris: Rivière, 1923).
_______. La Révolution sociale demontrée par le coup d'état du 2 décembre 1851 [1852] (Paris: Rivière, 1936).
_______. Solution du problème social [1848], in Oeuvres complètes de P.-J. Proudhon, t. 6 (Paris: Lacroix, 1866-1876).
Spear, Lois, "Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Revolution of 1848" (Ph.D. dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago, 1971).
Vincent, K. Steven, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of the French Republican Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
jgc revised this file (http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~chastain/ip/proudhon.htm) on October 25, 2004.
Please E-mail comments or suggestions to chastain@www.cats.ohiou.edu
© 1997, 2004 James Chastain.
Pour les même raisons, mais en miroir, en symétrie, lui pour l’asservissement du web et la promesse du contrôle des internautes devant la création artistique avec Hadopi, et moi pour l’assurance de la liberté sur internet et de l’ouverture à l’accès pour tous à la création artistique sur internet en lutant contre Hadopi.
C’était le 29 octobre 2009 pour la sortie du livre « la bataille Hadopi », le seul livre traitant sérieusement du sujet jamais sorti en France. Cela n’a pas empêché nos députés godillots de voter la loi Hadopi et de créer la Haute Autorité. On connaît aujourd’hui son échec et son inutilité. Ce qu’on avait prédit ce jour là et écrit dans le livre.
Parmi mes invités du Fouquet’s, il y avait Francis Lalanne qui, lors de cette soirée là, après avoir exprimé son émotion de voir la culture et la connaissance tomber dans les mains de quelques puissants et nous direqu’« un artiste existe pour produire de la conscience », fit une promesse. Celle de faire un jour un livre libre. Tant sur la forme que sur le fond.
C’est aujourd’hui chose faite. La promesse est tenue.
Le livre que vous avez entre les mains est libre. Libre dans son expression parce qu’il aborde tous les sujets, sans fards et sans peurs ; libre de support parce qu’il est copyleft. Vous pouvez le partager, l’échanger et le copier. C’est le coeur de mon travail d’éditeur depuis 2005 avec InLibroVeritas : l’accès, l’échange et le partage universel, démocratique et fraternel au savoir et à la culture.
Francis l’a bien compris, et il le montre ici. Le copyleft en contre-pouvoir du copyright, tout un symbole. Mais pas seulement, vous le verrez dans les lignes qui suivent. Car l’heure est venue de nous révolter.
Mathieu Pasquini
Gérant & Fondateur de InLibroVeritas
Catalogue > Catalogue complet > Essais / Critiques
À voir également :
Francis Lalanne
Francis Lalanne
Perline, Thierry Noisette
Retrouvez nous sur aVosDroitsCitoyens.fr
3.50 €
le livre
gratuit
Présentation du livre
Nous sommes nombreux à constater que la « vraie » vie est bien différente de la lettre de nos lois. Le citoyen français se sent, à juste titre, dépossédé de tout pouvoir d’influencer son destin et celui de ses enfants. Ce constat – qui concerne le citoyen – est le même pour l’individu. Combien de personnes, d’associations, de communes, de petites entreprises n’ai-je rencontrées, qui toutes, menaient la lutte du pot de terre contre le pot de fer, dans un système qui prétend être fondé sur l’égalité et le droit. L’impossibilité d’avoir accès à l’information, la cécité des autorités, par manque de moyens ou connivences, les menaces de toute nature, l’immense faiblesse de notre justice pour les forts explique pour partie, cette situation. Mais le mal est plus global. C’est le fonctionnement de la démocratie française qui est en cause.Non, tous les politiques et plus généralement toutes les élites ne sont pas « pourris ». En revanche, oui, les conflits d’intérêt, les réseaux, le maintien des mêmes personnes aux mêmes postes durant des décennies, l’impunité, l’irresponsabilité sont des fléaux que nous pouvons combattre… à condition de le vouloir. Dans mes différentes vies d’avocate, députée européenne, élues locale, militante associative contre la corruption, pour le droit de mourir dans la dignité, j’ai acquis une expérience de la réalité. Juriste, enseignante durant 30 ans du droit, j’ai aussi réfléchi sur les solutions. Je souhaite donc ouvrir le débat sur 10 propositions de modifications de notre Constitution qui pourraient changer la vie de nos concitoyens. Elles s’inscrivent dans une refonte globale de notre système puisque le temps est venu de passer à une Sixième République. Mais, ces 10 propositions concernent plus directement les citoyens et sont destinées à leur permettre de s’assurer que les principes qui figurent dans le Préambule de la Constitution ne sont pas virtuels. En interdisant le cumul des mandats, en assurant l’égalité d’accès dans la représentation, le respect du pluralisme, l’accès à l’information, l’indépendance du Pouvoir Judiciaire enfin reconnu, ces propositions nous feraient sortir de la république bananière dans laquelle nous sommes enferrés pour devenir une démocratie digne de ce nom. Ainsi, collectivement, peut-être redonnerons nous à nos concitoyens le goût, non pas de la politique, qu’ils n’ont jamais perdu, mais du désir d’y participer.Retrouvez nous sur aVosDroitsCitoyens.fr
CIA Chiefs Face Arrest Over Horrific Evidence of Bloody ‘Video-Game’ Sorties by Drone Pilots
The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.
The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.
Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.
‘We have statements from a further 82 victims’ families relating to more than 30 drone strikes,’ he said. ‘This is their only hope of justice.’
In the first case, which has already been heard by a court in Islamabad, judgment is expected imminently. If the judge grants Mr Akbar’s petition, an international arrest warrant will be issued via Interpol against the two Americans.
The second case is being heard in the city of Peshawar. In it, Mr Akbar and the families of drone victims who are civilians are seeking a ruling that further strikes in Pakistani airspace should be viewed as ‘acts of war’.
They argue that means the Pakistan Air Force should try to shoot down the drones and that the government should sever diplomatic relations with the US and launch murder inquiries against those responsible.
According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.
The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.
Getting at the truth is difficult because the tribal regions along the frontier are closed to journalists. US security officials continue to claim that almost all those killed are militants who use bases in Pakistan to launch attacks on Western forces across the border in Afghanistan.
In his only acknowledgement that the US has ever launched such attacks at all, President Barack Obama said in January: ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans.’
But behind the dry legal papers seen by The Mail on Sunday lies the most detailed investigation into individual strikes that has yet been carried out. It suggests that the US President was mistaken.
The plaintiff in the Islamabad case is Karim Khan, 45, a journalist and translator with two masters’ degrees, whose family comes from the village of Machi Khel in the tribal region of North Waziristan.
His eldest son, Zahinullah, 18, and his brother, Asif Iqbal, 35, were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone that struck the family’s guest dining room at about 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve, 2009.
Asif had changed his surname because he loved to recite Iqbal, Pakistan’s national poet, and Mr Khan said: ‘We are an educated family. My uncle is a hospital doctor in Islamabad, and we all work in professions such as teaching.
‘We have never had anything to do with militants or terrorists, and for that reason I always assumed we would be safe.’
Mr Khan said: ‘Zahinullah, who had been studying in Islamabad, had returned to the village to work his way through college, taking a part-time job as a school caretaker.
‘He was a quiet boy and studious – always in the top group of his class.’ Zahinullah also liked football, cricket and hunting partridges.
Asif, he added, was an English teacher and had spent several years taking further courses to improve his qualifications while already in work.
Mr Khan said: ‘He was my kid brother. We used to have a laugh, tell jokes.’ His first child was less than a year old when Asif was killed.
Included in the legal dossier are documents that corroborate Asif and Zahinulla’s educational and employment records, as well as their death certificates. Killed alongside them was Khaliq Dad, a stonemason who was staying with the family while he worked on a local mosque.
Mr Khan, who had been working for a TV station in Islamabad, said he was given the news of their deaths in a 2am phone call from a cousin.
‘I called a friend who had a car and we started driving through the night to get back to the village,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible journey. I was shocked, grieving, angry, like anyone who had lost their loved ones.’
He got home soon after dawn and describes his return ‘like entering a village of the dead – it was so quiet. There was a crowd gathered outside the compound but nowhere for them to sit because the guest rooms had been destroyed’.
Zahinullah, Mr Khan discovered, had been killed instantly, but despite his horrific injuries, Asif had survived long enough to be taken to a nearby hospital. However, he died during the night.
‘We always bury people quickly in our culture. The funeral was at three o’clock that afternoon, and more than 1,000 people came,’ Mr Khan said. ‘Zahinullah had a wound on the side of his face and his body was crushed and charred. I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”.
‘It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.’
Mr Khan found Mr Akbar through a friend who had attended lectures he gave at an Islamabad university. In 2010, he filed a criminal complaint – known as a first information report – to police naming Mr Banks. However, they took no action, therefore triggering the lawsuit – a judicial review of that failure to act.
If the judge finds in favour of Mr Khan, his decision cannot be appealed, thus making the full criminal inquiry and Interpol warrants inevitable.
According to the legal claim, someone from the Pakistan CIA network led by Mr Banks – who left Pakistan in 2010 – targeted the Khan family and guided the Hellfire missile by throwing a GPS homing device into their compound.
Mr Rizzo is named because of an interview he gave to a US reporter after he retired as CIA General Counsel last year. In it, he boasted that he had personally authorised every drone strike in which America’s enemies were ‘hunted down and blown to bits’.
He added: ‘It’s basically a hit-list . . . The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.’
Last night a senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Pakistan’s own intelligence agency, the ISI, has always been excluded by the CIA from choosing drone targets.
‘They insist on using their own networks, paying their own informants. Dollars can be very persuasive,’ said the official.
He claimed the intelligence behind drone strikes was often seriously flawed. As a result, ‘they are causing the loss of innocent lives’.
But even this, he added, was not as objectionable as the so-called ‘signature strikes’ – when a drone operator, sitting at a computer screen thousands of miles away in Nevada, selects a target because he thinks the drone camera has spotted something suspicious.
He said: ‘It could be a vehicle containing armed men heading towards the border, and the operator thinks, “Let’s get them before they get there,” without any idea of who they are.
‘It could also just be people sitting together. In the frontier region, every male is armed but it doesn’t mean they are militants.’
One such signature strike killed more than 40 people in Datta Khel in North Waziristan on March 17 last year. The victims, Mr Akbar’s dossier makes clear, had gathered for a jirga – a tribal meeting – in order to discuss a dispute between two clans over the division of royalties from a chromite mine.
Some of the most horrifying testimony comes from Khalil Khan, the son of Malik Haji Babat, a tribal leader and police officer. ‘My father was not a terrorist. He was not an enemy of the United States,’ Khalil’s legal statement says. ‘He was a hard-working and upstanding citizen, the type of person others looked up to and aspired to be like.’
Khalil, 32, last saw his father three hours before his death, when he left for a business meeting in a nearby town. Informed his father had been killed, Khalil hurried to the scene.
‘What I saw when I got off the bus at Datta Khel was horrible,’ he said. ‘I immediately saw flames and women and children were saying there had been a drone strike. The fires spread after the strike.
‘I went to the location where the jirga had been held. The situation was really very bad. There were still people lying around injured.
‘The tribal elders who had been killed could not be identified because there were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful. I just collected the pieces that I believed belonged to my father and placed them in a small coffin.’
Khalil said that as a police officer, his father had earned a good salary, on which he supported his family. Khalil has considered returning to the Gulf, where he worked for 14 years, but ‘because of the frequency of drones I am concerned to leave my family’.
He added that schools in the area were empty because ‘parents are afraid their children will be hit by a missile’.
In another statement – one of 13 taken by Mr Akbar concerning the Datta Khel strike – driver Ahmed Jan, 52, describes the moment the missile hit: ‘We were in the middle of our discussion and I was thrown about 24ft from where I was sitting. I was knocked unconscious. When I awoke, I saw many individuals who were injured or dead.
‘I have lost the use of one of my feet and have a rod inserted because of the injuries. It is so painful for me to walk. There are scars on my face because I had to have an operation on my nose when it would not stop bleeding.’
Mr Jan says he has spent £3,600 on medical treatment but ‘I have never been offered compensation of any kind . . . I do not know why this jirga was targeted. I am a malik [elder] of my tribe and therefore a government servant. We were not doing anything wrong or illegal.’
Another survivor was Mohammed Noor, 27, a stonemason, who attended the jirga with his uncle and his cousin, both of whom were killed. ‘The parts of their bodies had to be collected first. These parts were all we had of them,’ he said.
Mr Akbar said that fighting back through the courts was the only way ‘to solve the larger problem’ of the ongoing terrorist conflict.
‘It is the only way to break the cycle of violence,’ he said. ‘If we want to change the people of Waziristan, we first have to show them that we respect the rule of law.’
A senior CIA officer said: ‘We do not discuss active operations or allegations against specific individuals.’ A White House source last night declined to comment.
21 NOVEMBER 2019
7 DAMN YEARS LATER, THE WORLD IS WORSE THAN EVER!
IT IS ALL ADOLPH HITLER'S FAULT...
... AND OURS, OF COURSE, DAMN EARTHLINGS!