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  THE
  RIGHT TO BE LAZY

  AND OTHER STUDIES

  BY
  PAUL LAFARGUE

  Translated by CHARLES H. KERR


  CHICAGO
  CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY




  Copyright, 1907

  BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

[Illustration: Printer's stamp.]




PREFACE


M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education
of 1849, said: "I wish to make the influence of the clergy all-powerful
because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches
man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy
which on the contrary bids man to enjoy." M. Thiers was stating
the ethics of the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow
intelligence he incarnated.

The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained
by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once
triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion
to support its economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and
glorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our
days, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of
its thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the
wage-workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics,
strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to
reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his
joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine
turning out work without respite and without thanks.

The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by
the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march
up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism;
they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action
the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in
the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall
cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer; that in the communist
society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may,
forcibly if we must," the impulses of men will be given a free rein,
for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid
but their misuse and their excesses,[1]" and they will not be avoided
except by their mutual counter-balancing, balancing, by the harmonious
development of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, "It is
only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it
arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigor.[2]" Such was
also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.[3]

This refutation of the "Right to Work" which I am republishing with
some additional notes appeared in the weekly "Egalité", 1880, second
series.

                                        P. L.

  _Sainte-Pélagie Prison_, 1883.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Descartes. "Les Passions de l'âme."

[2] Doctor Beddoe. "Memoirs of the Anthropological Society."

[3] Charles Darwin. "Descent of Man."




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                                   Page

  THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY—

      I. A Disastrous Dogma                                           9

     II. Blessings of Work                                           14

    III. The Consequences of Over-Production                         30

     IV. New Songs to New Music                                      48

     Appendix                                                        57

  SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS                                    63

  THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM                                      105

  THE WOMAN QUESTION                                                111

  THE SOCIALIST IDEAL                                               139

  THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN                     157




THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

  Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except
  in being lazy.
                                        —Lessing.




I.

A DISASTROUS DOGMA.


A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where
capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its
train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have
tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious
passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force
of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental
aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a
sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be
wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed
to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be
a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement
to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics
or free-thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in
capitalist society.

In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy,
of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's
stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the
Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops.
Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders
of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the
dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.[4]

When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native
beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic
prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which,
alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories
than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his
admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts,
straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing
the beggar, superbly draped in his ragged _capa_, parleying on terms
of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the
primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of
slavery.[5] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for
work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew
only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that
men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the
people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed
the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers
of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free
man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:

O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.[6]

Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: "Consider the
lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they
spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these." Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his
worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of
work, he rests for all eternity.

On the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic
necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the
British Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the
Pomeranians, those Auvergnians of Germany; the Chinese, those
Auvergnians of Asia. In our society, which are the classes that love
work for work's sake? The peasant proprietors, the little shop-keepers;
the former bent double over their fields, the latter crouched in their
shops, burrow like the mole in his subterranean passage and never stand
up to look at nature leisurely.

And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the
producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will
free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a
free being,—the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its
historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.
Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and
social woes are born of its passion for work.


FOOTNOTES:

[4] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and
the proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what
Paeppig calls "the poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking of
the aborigines of the Oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell writes:
"There is not a people in the world which strikes one more favorably
at first sight. Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair
golden and curly, their beautiful and happy faces. In a word, their
whole person formed a new and splendid specimen of the 'genus <DW25>';
their physical appearance gave the impression of a race superior to
ours." The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and Tacitus,
regarded with the same admiration the Germans of the communist tribes
which invaded the Roman empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the priest
of the fifth century who received the surname of master of the Bishops,
held up the barbarians as an example to civilized Christians: "We are
immodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even
more the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do
not permit debauchees of their own nation to remain among them; alone
in the midst of them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and
their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was
then the height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The
oppressed fly to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (De
Gubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising Christianity
corrupted the barbarians of the ancient world, as the old Christianity
and the modern capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of
the new world.

M. F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized, even
if we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with philanthropic
and Christian pharisaism, says in his book "Les Ouvriers Européens"
(1885): "The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are
semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic <DW72> of the Ural mountains);
the leisure of nomadic life, the habit of meditation which this
engenders in the best endowed individuals.—all this often gives them a
distinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence and judgement which
is rarely to be observed on the same social level in a more developed
civilization.... The thing most repugnant to them is agricultural
labor: they will do anything rather than accept the trade of a farmer."
Agriculture is in fact the first example of servile labor in the
history of man. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal,
Cain, is a farmer.

[5] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.)

[6] O Melibaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. Virgil's Bucolics.
(See appendix.)




II.

BLESSINGS OF WORK.


In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title,
"An Essay on Trade and Commerce". It made some stir in its time.
The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that "the factory
population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in
their quality of Englishmen all the individuals composing it have
by right of birth the privilege of being freer and more independent
than the laborers of any country in Europa. This idea may have its
usefulness for soldiers, since it stimulates their valor, but the
less the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves
and the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves as
independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage
such infatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps
seven-eighths of the population have little or no property. The cure
will not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to
work six days for the same sum which they now earn in four." Thus,
nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as
a curb to the noble passions of man. "The more my people work, the
less vices they will have", wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from
Osterod. "I am the authority ... and I should be disposed to order
that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened
and the laborers return to their work." To root out laziness and curb
the sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the
author of the "Essay on Trade" proposed to imprison the poor in ideal
"work-houses", which should become "houses of terror, where they should
work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was
deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete".

Twelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal of the philanthropists
and moralists of the eighteenth century. How have we outdone this _nec
plus ultra_! Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in
which the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned
to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but
also women and children.[7] And to think that the sons of the heroes
of the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded by the religion
of work, to the point of accepting, since 1848, as a revolutionary
conquest, the law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They proclaim
as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French
proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness.
A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of
capitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.

And if the miseries of compulsory work and the tortures of hunger have
descended upon the proletariat more in number than the locusts of the
Bible, it is because the proletariat itself invited them. This work,
which in June 1848 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands,
this they have imposed on their families; they have delivered up to
the barons of industry their wives and children. With their own hands
they have demolished their domestic hearths. With their own hands they
have dried up the milk of their wives. The unhappy women carrying
and nursing their babes have been obliged to go into the mines and
factories to bend their backs and exhaust their nerves. With their own
hands they have broken the life and the vigor of their children. Shame
on the proletarians! Where are those neighborly housewives told of
in our fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of speech, lovers
of Bacchus? Where are those buxom girls, always on the move, always
cooking, always singing, always spreading life, engendering life's joy,
giving painless birth to healthy and vigorous children?... Today we
have factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers, with impoverished
blood, with disordered stomachs, with languid limbs.... They have never
known the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable
of telling of it merrily! And the children? Twelve hours of work
for children! O, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy
of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germinys of jesuitism
could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the
children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their
organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the
century of pain, misery and corruption.

And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists—from
the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear
Leroy-Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature—from the quackishly
romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock,—all have
intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son
of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon
to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived. They
rummaged in the dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miseries
to serve as a sombre contrast to the delights of the present times.
Have they wearied us, these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at
the table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the capitalist class
and fatly paid? Have they reckoned us weary of the peasant, such as
La Bruyère described him? Well, here is the brilliant picture of
proletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840, penned by
one of their own men, Dr. Villermé, member of the Institute, the same
who in 1848 was a member of that scientific society (Thiers, Cousin,
Passy, Blanqui, the academician, were in it), which disseminated among
the masses the nonsense of bourgeois economics and ethics.

It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Villermé speaks,—the Alsace
of Kestner and Dollfus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and
republicanism. But before the doctor raises up before us his picture of
proletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr.
Th. Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., depicting the condition
of the old-time artisan: "At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when
modern mechanical industry was just arising) the laborers were all
children of the soil, inhabiting the town and the surrounding villages,
and almost all owning a house and often a little field."[8] It was
the golden age of the laborer. But at that time Alsatian industry did
not deluge the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires out of
its Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five years after, when Villermé
visited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had
conquered the country; in its insatiable appetite for human labor it
had dragged the workmen from their hearths, the better to wring them
and press out the labor which they contained. It was by thousands
that the workers flocked together at the signal of the steam whistle.
"A great number," says Villermé, "five thousand out of seventeen
thousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring villages.
Some of them lived three or four miles from the factory where they
worked.[9]

"At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five o'clock in the morning and
ended at eight o'clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a
sight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each
evening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walking
bare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the
rain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their
heads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally
dirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil
which drops on them while they work. They were better protected from
the rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just
mentioned, they did not carry their day's provisions in a basket, but
they carryed in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they
might, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for
them to return home.

Thus to the strain of an insufferably long day—at least fifteen
hours—is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily
journeys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed by the need of
sleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in
order to reach the factory by the opening time."

Now, look at the holes in which were packed those who lodge in the
town: "I saw at Mulhouse in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, some
of those miserable lodgings where two families slept each in its corner
on straw thrown on the floor and kept in its place by two planks....
This wretchedness among the laborers of the cotton industry in the
department of the upper Rhine is so extreme that it produces this sad
result, that while in the families of the manufacturers, merchants,
shop-keepers or factory superintendents, half of the children reach
their twenty-first year, this same half ceases to exist before the
lapse of two years in the families of weavers and cotton spinners."

Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Villermé adds: "It is not a
work, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six
to eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes
away the laborers in the cotton spinning factories". And as to the
duration of the work Villermé observes, that the convicts in prisons
work but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours,
while there existed in France after its Revolution of 1789, which had
proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man "factories where the day was
sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and
a half for meals."[10]

What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of
the bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The
philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done
nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to
scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist
factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work,
and farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life
beautiful and worth living.[11]

And the economists go on repeating to the laborers, "Work, to increase
social wealth", and nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy,
answers: "It is in poor nations that people are comfortable, in
rich nations they are ordinarily poor"; and his disciple Cherbuliez
continues: "The laborers themselves in co-operating toward the
accumulation of productive capital contribute to the event which sooner
or later must deprive them of a part of their wages". But deafened and
stupified by their own howlings, the economists answer: "Work, always
work, to create your prosperity", and in the name of Christian meekness
a priest of the Anglican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, intones: Work,
work, night and day. By working you make your poverty increase and your
poverty releases us from imposing work upon you by force of law. The
legal imposition of work "gives too much trouble, requires too much
violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only
a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the
most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the
most powerful efforts." Work, work, proletarians, to increase social
wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming
poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is
the inexorable law of capitalist production.

Because, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the
proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of
work, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial
crises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then
because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers,
the shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its
whip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of
work, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted
upon themselves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of
their present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: "We
are hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as
we are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested the wheat and gathered
the grapes." They do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux,
the inventor of industrial convents, and cry out: "M. Bonnet, here
are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are
shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they
who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all
Christendom. The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no
time to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time
to rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk
teeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in
abstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the
fruits of their labor. Come, M. Bonnet, give them your silks, M. Harmel
shall furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his
boots for their dear little feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe
and gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, no evasions,
you are a friend of humanity, are you not, and a Christian into the
bargain? Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they
have built up for you out of their flesh; you want to help business,
get your goods into circulation,—here are consumers ready at hand.
Give them unlimited credit. You are simply compelled to give credit
to merchants whom you do not know from Adam or Eve, who have given
you nothing, not even a glass of water. Your working women will pay
the debt the best they can. If at maturity they let their notes go to
protest, and if they have nothing to attach, you can demand that they
pay you in prayers. They will send you to paradise better than your
black-gowned priests steeped in tobacco."

Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general
distribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers,
perishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the
workshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they
assail the manufacturers: "Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us
work, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us".
And these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright,
sell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had
bread on the table. And the philanthropists of industry profit by their
lockouts to manufacture at lower cost.

If industrial crises follow periods of over-work as inevitably as night
follows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end,
they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer
has credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and
borrows again, to furnish raw material to his laborers, and goes on
producing without considering that the market is becoming satiated
and that if his goods don't happen to be sold, his notes will still
come due. At his wits' end, he implores the banker, he throws himself
at his feet, offering his blood, his honor. "A little gold will do my
business better", answers the Rothschild. "You have 20,000 pairs of
hose in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c."
The banker gets possession of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c,
and pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing to anybody: but
the manufacturer has stepped back for a better leap. At last the crash
comes and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much merchandise is thrown
out of the window that you cannot imagine how it came in by the door.
Hundreds of millions are required to figure the value of the goods that
are destroyed. In the last century they were burned or thrown into the
water.[12]

But before reaching this decision, the manufacturers travel the world
over in search of markets for the goods which are heaping up. They
force their government to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to batter
down the Chinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their
cotton goods. In previous centuries it was a duel to the death between
France and England as to which should have the exclusive privilege of
selling to America and the Indies. Thousands of young and vigorous men
reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no
longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who
are loafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads,
erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of
French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications. In
Egypt, for example, France, England and Germany were on the point of
hairpulling to decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends
with wars like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play
the part of constables to collect bad debts.[13]

These individual and social miseries, however great and innumerable
they may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas
and jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall
say "I will". But to arrive at the realization of its strength the
proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics,
economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural
instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times
more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by
the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom
itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day
and night for leisure and feasting.

Thus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils
well known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that
the ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to
which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most
terrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become
a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to
the human organism, a passion useful to the social organism only when
wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this
is an arduous task beyond my strength. Only communist physiologists,
hygienists and economists could undertake it. In the following pages
I shall merely try to show that given the modern means of production
and their unlimited reproductive power it is necessary to curb the
extravagant passion of the laborers for work and to oblige them to
consume the goods which they produce.


FOOTNOTES:

[7] At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels in 1857 one
of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrive, to
the plaudits of the members of the congress declared with the noble
satisfaction of a duty performed: "We have introduced certain methods
of diversion for the children. We teach them to sing during their work,
also to count while working. That distracts them and makes them accept
bravely "those twelve hours of labor which are necessary to procure
their means of existence." Twelve hours of labor, and such labor,
imposed on children less than twelve years old! The materialists will
always regret that there is no hell in which to confine these Christian
philanthropic murderers of childhood.

[8] Speech delivered before the International Society of Practical
Studies in Social Economics, at Paris in May 1863, and published in the
French "Economist" of the same epoch.

[9] Note that this was before the era of railroads and street cars.
(Translator.)

[10] L. R. Villermé. Tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers
dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie (1840). It is not
because Dollfus, Koechlin and other Alsatian manufacturers were
republicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that they treated
their laborers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician, Reybaud, the
prototype of Jerome Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same
amenities for the working class among the very catholic and monarchical
manufacturers of Lille and Lyons. These are capitalist virtues which
harmonize delightfully with all political and religious convictions.

[11] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their invalids
and old people; they show their affection for them by putting an end
to a life which is no longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances.
All primitive peoples have given these proofs of affection to their
relatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea (Herodotus), as well as
the Wens of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden
even lately they preserved clubs called family clubs which served to
deliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate are the
modern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of
factory labor!

[12] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 21, 1879, the
losses in the iron industry of Germany during the last crisis were
estimated at $109,056,000.

[13] M. Clemenceau's "Justice" said on April 6, 1880, in its financial
department: "We have heard this opinion maintained, that even without
pressure the billions of the war of 1870 would have been equally lost
for France, that is under the form of loans periodically put out to
balance the budgets of foreign countries; this is also our opinion."
The loss of English capital on loans of South American Republics is
estimated at a billion dollars. The French laborers not only produced
the billion dollars paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay interest
on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine and other income
drawers, who brought on the war and the rout. Nevertheless they still
have one shred of consolation: these billions will not bring on a war
of reprisal.




III.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION.


A Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention
of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave
women and bring back the Golden Age: "Spare the arm which turns the
mill, O, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain
that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor
of the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and
behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its spokes and making the
heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and
let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants
us." Alas!, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come.
The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the
liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men.
Its productiveness impoverishes them.

A good workingwoman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute,
while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time.
Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of
the workingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's
labor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the
knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed
by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine
is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity
and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest
times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O,
absurd and murderous competition!

That the competition of man and the machine might have free course,
the proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor
of the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the
holidays.[14] Because the producers of that time worked but five
days out of seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying
economists, that they lived on nothing but air and fresh water? Not
so, they had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to make love and to
frolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial god of idleness.
Gloomy England, immersed in protestantism, was then called "Merrie
England." Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the unknown authors of the
romances make our mouths water with their pictures of those monumental
feasts[15] with which the men of that time regaled themselves between
two battles and two devastations, in which everything "went by the
barrel". Jordaens and the Flemish School have told the story of these
feasts in their delightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the sublime
gargantuan stomachs of those days; where are the sublime brains
encircling all human thought? We have indeed grown puny and degenerate.
Embalmed beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prussian schnaps,
judiciously combined with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and
narrowed our minds. And the times when man cramps his stomach and the
machine enlarges its output are the very times when the economists
preach to us the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence and the
dogma of work. Really it would be better to pluck out such tongues and
throw them to the dogs.

Because the working class, with its simple good faith, has allowed
itself to be thus indoctrinated, because with its native impetuosity
it has blindly hurled itself into work and abstinence, the capitalist
class has found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to
unproductiveness and over-consumption. But if the over-work of the
laborer bruises his flesh and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile
in griefs for the capitalist.

The abstinence to which the productive class condemns itself obliges
the capitalists to devote themselves to the over-consumption of the
products turned out so riotously by the laborers. At the beginning
of capitalist production a century or two ago, the capitalist was a
steady man of reasonable and peaceable habits. He contented himself
with one wife or thereabouts. He drank only when he was thirsty and
ate only when he was hungry. He left to the lords and ladies of the
court the noble virtues of debauchery. Today every son of the newly
rich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the disease for which
quicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed upon
the workmen in quicksilver mines; every capitalist crams himself with
capons stuffed with truffles and with the choicest brands of wine in
order to encourage the breeders of blooded poultry and the growers of
Bordelais. In this occupation the organism rapidly becomes shattered,
the hair falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, the body
becomes deformed, the stomach obtrudes abnormally, respiration becomes
difficult, the motions become labored, the joints become stiff, the
fingers knotted. Others, too feeble in body to endure the fatigues of
debauchery, but endowed with the bump of philanthropic discrimination,
dry up their brains over political economy, or juridical philosophy
in elaborating thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours
of compositors and pressmen. The women of fashion live a life of
martyrdom, in trying on and showing off the fairy-like toilets
which the seamstresses die in making. They shift like shuttles from
morning until night from one gown into another. For hours together
they give up their hollow heads to the artists in hair, who at any
cost insist on assuaging their passion for the construction of false
chignons. Bound in their corsets, pinched in their boots, décolletté
to make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the whole night through
at their charity balls in order to pick up a few cents for poor
people,—sanctified souls!

To fulfill his double social function of non-producer and
over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his
modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to
give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic
debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass
of men in order to enlist them as his assistants.

Here are a few figures to prove how colossal is this waste of
productive forces. According to the census of 1861, the population of
England and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259 male and
10,289,965 female. If we deduct those too old or too young to work, the
unproductive women, boys and girls, then the "ideological professions",
such as governors, policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers,
prostitutes, artists, scientists, etc., next the people exclusively
occupied with eating the labor of others under the form of land-rent,
interest, dividends, etc. ... there remains a total of eight million
individuals of both sexes and of every age, including the capitalists
who function in production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of these eight
millions the figures run:

  Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, servants
    and farmers' daughters living at home               1,098,261
  Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp,
    linen silk, knitting                                  642,607
  Mine Workers                                            565,835
  Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.)     396,998
  Domestics                                             1,208,648

"If we add together the textile workers and the miners, we obtain
the figures of 1,208,442; if to the former we add the metal workers,
we have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in each case a
number below that of the modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent
result of the capitalist exploitation of machines."[16] To this class
of domestics, the size of which indicates the stage attained by
capitalist civilization, must still be added the enormous class of
unfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying the vain and expensive
tastes of the rich classes: diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroiderers,
binders of luxurious books, seamstresses employed on expensive gowns,
decorators of villas, etc.[17]

Once settled down into absolute laziness and demoralized by enforced
enjoyment, the capitalist class in spite of the injury involved in
its new kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to look
upon any change with horror. The sight of the miserable conditions
of life resignedly accepted by the working class and the sight of
the organic degradation engendered by the depraved passion for work
increased its aversion for all compulsory labor and all restrictions
of its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, without taking
into account the demoralization which the capitalist class had imposed
upon itself as a social duty, the proletarians took it into their
heads to inflict work on the capitalists. Artless as they were, they
took seriously the theories of work proclaimed by the economists and
moralists, and girded up their loins to inflict the practice of these
theories upon the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, "He
who will not work Neither shall he Eat". Lyons in 1831 rose up for
bullets or work. The federated laborers of March 1871 called their
uprising "The Revolution of Work". To these outbreaks of barbarous fury
destructive of all capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had
no other answer than ferocious repression, but they know that if they
have been able to repress these revolutionary explosions, they have
not drowned in the blood of these gigantic massacres the absurd idea
of the proletariat wishing to inflict work upon the idle and reputable
classes, and it is to avert this misfortune that they surround
themselves with guards, policemen, magistrates and jailors, supported
in laborious unproductiveness. There is no more room for illusion as
to the function of modern armies. They are permanently maintained only
to suppress the "enemy within". Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons
have not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to
crush it in case of revolt. And if an unanswerable example be called
for, we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism. Its
neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and nevertheless its
army is one of the strongest in proportion to its population. The
glorious battlefields of the brave Belgian army are the plains of the
Borinage and of Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed miners and
laborers that the Belgian officers temper their swords and win their
epaulets. The nations of Europe have not national armies but mercenary
armies. They protect the capitalists against the popular fury which
would condemn them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, while
compressing its own stomach the working class has developed abnormally
the stomach of the capitalist class, condemned to over-consumption.

For alleviation of its painful labor the capitalist class has withdrawn
from the working class a mass of men far superior to those still
devoted to useful production and has condemned them in their turn to
unproductiveness and over-consumption. But this troop of useless mouths
in spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice to consume all
the goods which the laborers, brutalized by the dogma of work, produce
like madmen, without wishing to consume them and without even thinking
whether people will be found to consume them.

Confronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves
with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of
capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply
their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and
create in them fictitious needs. Since the European laborers, shivering
with cold and hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to drink
the wines from the vineyards they tend, the poor manufacturers in
their goodness of heart must run to the ends of the earth to find
people to wear the clothes and drink the wines: Europe exports every
year goods amounting to billions of dollars to the four corners of
the earth, to nations that have no need of them.[18] But the explored
continents are no longer vast enough. Virgin countries are needed.
European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the
Saharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the
progress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu; they listen open-mouthed
to the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. What unknown wonders
are contained in the "dark continent"! Fields are sown with elephants'
teeth, rivers of cocoa-nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of
backsides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting
cotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles
from which they may learn the virtues of civilization.

But all to no purpose: the over-fed capitalist, the servant class
greater in numbers than the productive class, the foreign and barbarous
nations, gorged with European goods; nothing, nothing can melt away
the mountains of products heaped up higher and more enormous than the
pyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of European laborers defies all
consumption, all waste.

The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to
turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless
depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts
dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain
cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same
durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving
the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded
down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it
friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid
in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the
"Age of adulteration" just as the first epochs of humanity received
the names of "The Age of Stone", "The Age of Bronze", from the
character of their production. Certain ignorant people accuse our pious
manufacturers of fraud, while in reality the thought which animates
them is to furnish work to their laborers, who cannot resign themselves
to living with their arms folded. These adulterations, whose sole
motive is a humanitarian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits
to the manufacturers who practice them, if they are disastrous for
the quality of the goods, if they are an inexhaustible source of
waste in human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous philanthropy
of the capitalists, and the horrible perversion of the laborers, who
to gratify their vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle the
cries of their conscience and to violate even the laws of commercial
honesty.

And nevertheless, in spite of the over-production of goods, in spite of
the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market
in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought
to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries
it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself,
thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut
their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out
on the pavement with no more food for their vice. Every year in
all industries lockouts occur with the regularity of the seasons.
Over-work, destructive of the organism, is succeeded by absolute rest
during two or four months, and when work ceases the pittance ceases.
Since the vice of work is diabolically attached to the heart of the
laborers, since its requirements stifle all the other instincts of
nature, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily
limited by consumption and by the supply of raw materials, why devour
in six months the work of a whole year; why not distribute it uniformly
over the twelve months and force every workingman to content himself
with six or five hours a day throughout the year instead of getting
indigestion from twelve hours during six months? Once assured of their
daily portion of work, the laborers will no longer be jealous of each
other, no longer fight to snatch away work from each other's hands and
bread from each other's mouths, and then, not exhausted in body and
mind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness.

Brutalized by their vice, the laborers have been unable to rise to the
conception of this fact, that to have work for all it is necessary
to apportion it like water on a ship in distress. Meanwhile certain
manufacturers in the name of capitalist exploitation have for a long
time demanded a legal limitation of the work day. Before the commission
of 1860 on professional education, one of the greatest manufacturers of
Alsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwiller, declared: "The day of twelve hours
is excessive and ought to be reduced to eleven, while work ought to
be stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption of this
measure, although it may appear onerous at first sight. We have tried
it in our industrial establishments for four years and find ourselves
the better for it, while the average production, far from having
diminished, has increased." In his study of machines M. F. Passy quotes
the following letter from a great Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere:
"Our machines, although the same as those of the English spinning
mills, do not produce what they ought to produce or what those same
machines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two
hours a day less. We all work two good hours too much. I am convinced
that if we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen we should have
the same product and we should consequently produce more economically."
Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a remark of a great Belgian
manufacturer that the weeks in which a holiday falls result in a
product not less than ordinary weeks.[19]

An aristocratic government has dared to do what a people, duped in
their simplicity by the moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and
moral industrial considerations of the economists, who like the birds
of ill omen, croaked that to reduce by one hour the work in factories
was to decree the ruin of English industry, the government of England
has forbidden by a law strictly enforced to work more than ten hours a
day, and as before England remains the first industrial nation of the
world.[20]

The experiment tried on so great a scale is on record; the experience
of certain intelligent capitalists is on record. They prove beyond a
doubt that to strengthen human production it is necessary to reduce
the hours of labor and multiply the pay days and feast days, yet the
French nation is not convinced. But if the miserable reduction of two
hours has increased English production by almost one-third in ten
years, what breathless speed would be given to French production
by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours. Cannot the
laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust
their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up
and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all,
that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer
men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful
faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious
madness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of
the economist: "Let us work, let us work to increase the national
wealth.' O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial
equipment develops slowly. Stop braying and listen to an economist,
no other than M. L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a
few months ago. "It is in general by the conditions of hand-work that
the revolution in methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand-work
furnishes its services at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts
are made to economize it when its services become more costly."[21]

To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron
it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of
the machines of flesh and blood. Do you ask for proofs? They can
be furnished by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was
invented and applied at Manchester because the spinners refused to
work such long hours as before. In America the machine is invading all
branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding
of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a
thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so
painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in
the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in
a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.


FOOTNOTES:

[14] Under the old regime, the laws of the church guaranteed the
laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays,
during which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great
crime of catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once
it was in the saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced the week
of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer
have more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers
from the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them under
the yoke of work.

The hatred against the holidays does not appear until the modern
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie takes definite form, between the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that they
be reduced. He refused because "one of the current heresies of the
day is regarding feasts" (Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666
Perefixus, archbishop of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his
diocese. protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapted to
the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less
solicitous for the people's rest. It dethroned the saints in heaven in
order to abolish their feast days on earth.

Religious reform and philosophical free thought were but pretexts which
permitted the jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast
days of the people.

[15] These gigantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara wins
his bride by expelling the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Romancero
relates the story:

  Les bodas fueron en Burgos
  Las tornabodas en Salas:
  En bodas y tornabodas
  Pasaron siete semanas
  Tantas vienen de las gentes
  Que no caben por las plazas

(The wedding was at Bourges, the infaring at Salas. In the wedding and
the infaring seven weeks were spent. So many people came that the town
could not hold them...).

The men of these seven-weeks weddings were the heroic soldiers of the
wars of independence.

[16] Karl Marx's "Capital".

[17] "The proportion in which the population of the country is employed
as domestics in the service of the wealthy class indicates its progress
in national wealth and civilization." (R. M. Martin, "Ireland Before
and After the Union," 1818). Gambetta, who has denied that there was
a social question ever since he ceased to be the poverty stricken
lawyer of the Café Procope, undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing
domestic class when he announced the advent of new social strata.

[18] Two examples: The English government to satisfy the peasants of
India, who in spite of the periodical famines desolating their country
insist on cultivating poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been
obliged to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the Chinese
Government the free entry of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia,
in spite of the mortality resulting from it are obliged to clothe
themselves in the English fashion in order to consume the products of
the Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cotton mills.

[19] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question Ouvrière au XIX siècle, 1872.

[20] It should be observed that this was written in 1883, since which
time the United States has taken the first rank. The soundness of
Lafargue's reasoning is confirmed by the fact that in this country the
hours of labor in the most important industries are even less than in
England. (Translator.)

[21] Louis Reybaud. Le coton, son regime, ses problèmes (1863).




IV.

NEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC.


We have seen that by diminishing the hours of labor new mechanical
forces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by
obliging the laborers to consume their products the army of workers
will be immensely increased. The capitalist class once relieved from
its function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of
soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn
from useful labor to help it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor
market will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit
on work. It will be impossible to find employment for that swarm of
former unproductives, more numerous than insect parasites, and after
them must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their
vain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals
to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with
laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will
be need of severe laws to compel the working women and workingmen who
have been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to
take the hygienic and calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish
their health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume
European products at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will
be necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down
and learn to twirl their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love
as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of
European moralists.

And that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers
of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial
equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will
be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste
for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities.
Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it
eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of
drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the
pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy
without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.

The proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the
capitalists ten hours of forge and factory; that is their great
mistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be
forbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should
be allowed to bring testimony to the fact that throughout their whole
lives they have been perfect vagabonds, and if they swear they wish to
continue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the general mania
for work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning
at the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money.
Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first
to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing
them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labor of
over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since
their birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their
title to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their
instincts. There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place
them. Dufaure might be set at cleaning public closets, Gallifet[22]
might perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The
members of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stock yards to
pick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators might
play the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for
the others, occupations could be found for them on a level with their
intelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, only
they would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxication.
Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the bugs and vermin in the
departments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be
necessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists
out of due regard for their acquired habits.

But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be heaped upon the moralists
who have perverted nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites,
"and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskers
to deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to
understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and
devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality,—and that only
to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity,—it is so
far otherwise that on the contrary, God knows, what cheer they make;
et _Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt_.[23] You may read it
in great letters, in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching
bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with
sulphur."[24] On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead
of swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under
capitalism, the communists and collectivists will eat, drink and dance
to their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and
political sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the
economic, catholic, protestant, jewish, positivist and free-thought
church; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian,
altruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall
be compelled to hold a candle until it burns their fingers, shall
starve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and
shall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a
year with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife
grinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten
hours.

The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the
regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second,
there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And
here we have the very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall
organize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages,
giving legislative exhibitions. The generals in riding boots, their
breasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through
the streets and courts levying recruits among the good people. Gambetta
and his comrade Cassagnac shall tend door. Cassagnac, in full duelist
costume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out
burning tow, shall threaten every one with his father's pistol[25] and
sink into a hole as soon as they show him Lullier's portrait. Gambetta
will discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a
doctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great
Russia that stultifies him with the mincemeat she promises to make of
Prussia and who would fain see mischief brewing in the west of Europe
so as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home;
on Mr. Bismark who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on
the amnesty ... then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with
red and white and blue, the three national colors, he will beat the
tattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles
and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to
encourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good
spirits.

In the barracks the entertainment will open with the "Electoral Farce".

In the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses' ears, the
bourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of
political liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely
promising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes
of the miseries of the people and with copper in their voices of the
glories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in
chorus, hi han! hi han!

Then will start the great play, "The Theft of the Nation's Goods."

Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy-faced and bald-headed,
fat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning,
is stretching herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial
Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is
mechanically devouring men, women and children, whose thrilling and
heart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten's muzzle,
a hyena's body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his
pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted
by gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with
whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps
of merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his
nether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and
the book of the national budget between his teeth, is encamped at the
head of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When
the laborers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayonets, have
laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened
to the manufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell
mell upon the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of
gold, emptying casks of wine. When they have devoured all they can,
they sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and
vomitings. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens,
Historic Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the heads of
the capitalists, hiccoughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With
her broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating
with fear.

       *       *       *       *       *

If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades
its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength,
not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist
exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right
to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more
than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with
joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we
ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly
resolution....

Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men,
the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing
painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century
compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured
their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their
brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of
the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!


FOOTNOTES:

[22] Gallifet was the general who was directly responsible for the
massacre of thousands of French workingmen at the closing days of the
Paris Commune.

[23] They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. (Juvenal.)

[24] Rabelais "Pantagruel," Book II. Chapter XXXIV. Translation of
Urquhart and Motteux.

[25] Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Granier, was prominent as a
conservative politician, journalist and duelist.




APPENDIX


Our moralists are very modest people. If they invented the dogma of
work, they still have doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the
soul, rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper functioning of
the entrails and other organs. They wish to try its workings on the
populace, _in anima vili_, before turning it against the capitalists,
to excuse and authorize whose vices is their peculiar mission.

But, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why thus cudgel your brains to
work out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your
masters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish
to see it scoffed at, dishonored? Let us open the history of ancient
peoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. "I could
not affirm," says the father of history, Herodotus, "whether the Greeks
derived from the Egyptians the contempt which they have for work,
because I find the same contempt established among the Thracians, the
Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in a word, because among most
barbarians, those who learn mechanical arts and even their children are
regarded as the meanest of their citizens. All the Greeks have been
nurtured in this principle, particularly the Lacedaemonians."[26]

"At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles who had to concern
themselves but with the defense and the administration of the
community, like the savage warriors from whom they descended. Since
they must thus have all their time free to watch over the interests
of the republic, with their mental and bodily strength, they laid all
labor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedaemon, even the women were
not allowed to spin or weave that they might not detract from their
nobility."[27]

The Romans recognized but two noble and free professions, agriculture
and arms. All the citizens by right lived at the expense of the
treasury without being constrained to provide for their living by any
of the sordid arts (thus, they designated the trades), which rightfully
belonged to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the people, accused
Tarquin, the tyrant, of the special outrage of having converted free
citizens into artisans and masons.[28]

The ancient philosophers had their disputes upon the origin of ideas
but they agreed when it came to the abhorrence of work. "Nature,"
said Plato in his social utopia, his model republic, "Nature has
made no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who
exercise them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who are by their
very condition excluded from political rights. As for the merchants
accustomed to lying and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city
only as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have degraded himself
by the commerce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he
is convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; the punishment
shall be doubled for each repeated offense."[29]

In his "Economics," Xenophon writes, "The people who give themselves
up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good
reason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day
long, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot
fail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind
be affected." "What honorable thing can come out of a shop?" asks
Cicero. "What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything
called shop is unworthy of an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit
without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must
regard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their
toil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself
and puts himself in the rank of slaves."[30]

Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of
these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous
care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the
rank of slaves, he commits a crime which deserves years of imprisonment.

Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism had not perverted
these philosophers of the ancient republics. Speaking for free
men, they expressed their thought naively. Plato, Aristotle, those
intellectual giants, beside whom our latter day philosophers are but
pygmies, wish the citizens of their ideal republics to live in the
most complete leisure, for as Xenophon observed, "Work takes all the
time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends."
According to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus, wisest of men, to
the admiration of posterity, was that he had granted leisure to the
citizens of Sparta by forbidding to them any trade whatever. But our
moralists of Christianity and capitalism will answer, "These thinkers
and philosophers praised the institution of slavery." Perfectly true,
but could it have been otherwise, granted the economic and political
conditions of their epoch? War was the normal state of ancient
societies. The free man was obliged to devote his time to discussing
the affairs of state and watching over its defense. The trades were
then too primitive and clumsy for those practicing them to exercise
their birth-right of soldier and citizen; thus the philosophers and
law-givers, if they wished to have warriors and citizens in their
heroic republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves. But do not the
moralists and economists of capitalism praise wage labor, the modern
slavery; and to what men does the capitalist slavery give leisure?
To people like Rothschild, Schneider, and Madame Boucicaut, useless
and harmful slaves of their vices and of their domestic servants.
"The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and
Aristotle,"—this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle
foresaw: "that if every tool could by itself execute its proper
function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the
tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work;
if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the
foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the
master of slaves."

Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of
fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful
inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred
labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of
capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system,
worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the
saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae
artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and
liberty.


FOOTNOTES:

[26] Herodotus, Book II.

[27] Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.

[28] Livy, Book I.

[29] Plato's "Republic," Book V.

[30] Cicero's "De Officiis," I, 42.




SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT PARIS MARCH 23, 1900, AT A MEETING CALLED BY THE
GROUP OF COLLECTIVIST STUDENTS ATTACHED TO THE PARTI OUVRIER FRANÇAIS.


Ladies and Gentlemen:—I am happy to deliver this address under the
presidency of Vaillant, because it is a pledge of the close and lasting
union between our two organizations, and because Vaillant is one of the
intellectuals of the socialist party; he is acknowledged to be the most
learned of French socialists and perhaps of European socialists, now
that Marx, Engels and Lavroff are no longer with us.

The group of collectivist students which has organized this conference,
has been led to choose this subject, because French socialism has just
passed through a crisis which is not exactly one of growth, though
such it has been called, but which has been caused by the arrival
of a certain number of bourgeois intellectuals within the ranks of
the party. It is therefore interesting to examine the situation of
the intellectuals in capitalist society, their historic role since
the revolution of 1789, and the manner in which the bourgeoisie has
kept the promises it made them when it was struggling against the
aristocracy.

The eighteenth century was the century of reason—everything, religion,
philosophy, science, politics, privileges of classes, of the state,
of municipalities, was submitted to its pitiless criticism. Never
in history has there been such a fermentation of ideas and such a
revolutionary preparation of men's minds. Mirabeau, who himself
played a great role in the ideological agitation, might well say in
the national assembly: "We have no time to think, but happily, we
have a supply of ideas." All that was needed was to realize them.
Capitalism, to reward the intellectuals who had labored with so much
enthusiasm for the coming of its revolution, promised them honors and
favors; intelligence and wisdom, as well as virtue, should be the
sole privileges of the society it was founding upon the ruins of the
old order. Promises cost it little; it announced to all men that it
brought them joy and happiness, with liberty, equality and fraternity,
which, although eternal principles, were now born for the first time.
Its social world was to be so new that even before the Republic was
proclaimed, Camille Desmoulins demanded that they begin a new era which
should date from the taking of the Bastile.

I need not teach you what application capitalism has made of these
eternal principles which by way of cynical raillery, the Republic
carves on the lintels of her prisons, her penitentiaries, her barracks
and her halls of state.[31] I will only remind you that savage and
barbarous tribes, uncorrupted by civilization, living under the
regime of common property, without inscribing anywhere these eternal
principles, without even formulating them, practice them in a manner
more perfect than ever was dreamed of by the capitalists who discovered
them in 1789.

It did not take long to determine the value of the promises of
capitalism; the very day it opened its political shop, it commenced
proceedings in bankruptcy. The constituent assembly, which formulated
the Rights of man and of the citizen and proclaimed equality before the
law, discussed and voted, in 1790, an electoral act which established
inequality before the law; no one was to be a voter but the "active
citizen," paying in money a direct tax equal to three days' labor, and
no one was to be eligible to office but the citizen paying a direct
tax of a "silver mark," about 55 francs. "But under the law of the
silver mark," clamored Loustallot, Desmoulins and the intellectualists
without real estate, "Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose 'Social Contract is
the bible of the revolution, would be capable neither of voting nor
of holding office." The electoral law deprived so many citizens of
political rights, that in the municipal elections of 1790, at Paris,
a city which counted about half a million inhabitants, there were but
12,000 voters, Bailly was chosen mayor by 10,000 votes.

If the eternal principles were not new, it is also true that the
flattering promises made by the intellectuals had already begun to be
realized before the advent of capitalism to power. The church, which
is a theocratic democracy, opens her bosom to all. That they may
enter, all lay aside their titles and privileges, and all can aspire
to the highest positions; popes have risen from the lower ranks of
society. Sixtus Fifth had in his youth tended swine. The church of the
middle ages jealously attracted to herself the thinkers and men of
learning, although she respected the preference of those who wished to
remain laymen, but extended over them her protection and her favors;
she allowed them all boldness of thought, on the single condition of
keeping up the appearance of faith, and never leaving her enclosure
to lavish themselves upon the vulgar. Thus Copernicus might write and
dedicate to the pope his "treatise on the revolutions of the celestial
bodies," in which, contrary to the teaching of the Bible, he proves
that the earth turns around the sun. But Copernicus was a canon at
Frannbourg and he wrote in Latin. When a century later Galileo, who
was not identified with the clergy and who on the contrary sought the
protection of the secular authorities, professed publicly, at Venice
and Florence, the theories of Copernicus, the Vatican stretched out
its terrible hand over him and forced the illustrious old man to deny
his scientific belief. Even after the crisis of protestantism, the
church preserved its liberality toward the scientists who belonged
to it. Mersenne, a monk of the order of the Minimes, one of the
great geometers of the seventeenth century, a precursor and friend
of Descartes, corresponded freely with Hobbes, the father of modern
materialism; the notes of the French edition of "De Cive" contain
fragments of this correspondence.

The church, in keeping up this liberal conduct, may have been animated
by a disinterested love of pure science, but what chiefly concerned
her was the interest of her dominancy; she wished to monopolize the
intellectuals and science, just as in the old theocratic Egypt the
priests had done to whom the Greek thinkers resorted in search of the
first elements of science and philosophy.

It would be insulting capitalism to attribute to it a disinterested
love of science, which from its point of view has but one reason for
existence, that of utilizing natural forces to the enhancement of
its wealth. It cares nothing for pure speculation and it is by way
of self-defence that it allows its scientists to devote their mental
energy to theoretic researches instead of exhausting it on practical
applications. This contempt for pure speculation is shown under a
philosophic form in the positivism of Auguste Comte, who embodies so
well the narrowness of the groveling spirit of capitalism.

But if science apart from its industrial applications does not interest
the bourgeoisie their solicitude for the intellectuals takes on none
of the forms which we saw in that of the church, and nowhere is their
indifference to them better shown than in the relative position of
material property and of intellectual property before the law.

Material property, whatever its origin, is by capitalist law a thing
eternal; it is forever assured to its possessor; it is handed down from
father to son to the end of the centuries, and no civil or political
power may lay upon it a sacrilegious hand. We have lately seen a
characteristic example of this inviolability of material property.

The keeper of the signal station at Durban transmitted to the Boers
heliographic dispatches informing them regarding the ships which
entered the harbor, the men, the horses and the munitions of war which
they transported. His treason brought him 125,000 francs, which, like
an intelligent capitalist, he deposited in the bank. The English
military authorities seized the traitor, condemned him and shot him,
but they respected his property so honorably acquired, and his widow
and son are now its legitimate possessors. The law, apart from certain
variations, being the same in all capitalist countries, things go on in
France as in England. No authority could lay hand on the property of
Bazaine, nor make De Lesseps, Cottu and their families disgorge the
millions artfully extracted from the "lambs" on Panama canal stock.

This legal sanctity of property is a new thing, in France it dates
from the revolution of 1789. The old regime, which had small respect
for this sort of property, authorized the confiscation of the property
of those legally condemned, and the abolition of confiscation is one
of the first reforms demanded in the petitions of Paris and several
provincial cities to the states general. Capitalism, by forbidding the
confiscation of property obtained by fraudulent and infamous means,
proclaims that the source of its fortune is quite as fraudulent and
infamous as that of criminals and traitors.

Capitalist law has none of these amenities for intellectual property.
Literary and artistic property such as the law protects at all has but
a precarious life, limited to the life of the author and a certain time
after his death—fifty years according to the latest legislation; that
time passed, it lapses into common property; for example, beginning
with March of this year, any publisher has the right to bring out for
his own profit the works of Balzac, the genius of romantic literature.

Literary property, though a matter of interest to publishers, who
are certainly few in number, brings no benefit to the mass of the
capitalist class, but not so with property in inventions, which is of
prime importance to all the manufacturing and mercantile capitalists.
Consequently over it the law extends no protection. The inventor, if he
wishes to defend his intellectual property against capitalist pirates,
must begin by buying that right, taking out a patent, which he must
renew every year; on the day he misses a payment, his intellectual
property becomes the lawful prey of the robbers of capitalism. Even if
he pays, he can secure that right only for a time; in France, fourteen
years. And during these few years, not long enough generally to get
his invention fully introduced into practical industry, it is he, the
inventor, who at his own expense has to set in motion the machinery of
the law against the capitalist pirates who rob him.

The trade-mark, which is a capitalistic property that never required
any intellectual effort, is on the contrary indefinitely protected by
law like material property.

It is with reluctance that the capitalist class has granted the
inventor the right of defending his intellectual property, for by
virtue of its position as the ruling class it regards itself as
entitled to the fruits of intellectual labor as well as of manual
labor; just as the feudal lord asserted his right of possession over
the property of his serfs. The history of the inventors of our century
is the monstrous story of their spoliation by the capitalists; it is a
long and melancholy roll of martyrs. The inventor, by the very fact of
his genius, is condemned with his family to ruin and suffering.

It is not only inventions requiring long and laborious study, heavy
outlay for their completion and long time for their introduction, that
plunge the inventor into the inferno of poverty; this is equally true
of inventions that are most simple, most immediately applicable and
most fertile in rich results. I will mention but one example: there
lately died at Paris in extreme poverty a man whose invention saves
millions of francs a year to the railroads and mining companies;
he had discovered a way to utilize the mountains of coal dust that
encumbered the neighborhood of wharfs and mines by converting it into
"briquettes," such as are today in common use for fuel.

The capitalist bourgeoisie, the most revolutionary class that ever
oppressed human societies, cannot increase its wealth without
continuously revolutionizing the means of production, continuously
incorporating into its industrial equipment new applications of
mechanics, chemistry and physics. Its thirst for inventions is so
insatiable that it creates factories for inventions. Certain American
capitalists united in constructing for Edison at Menlo Park the most
wonderful laboratory in the world, and in putting at his disposal
trained scientists, chosen workmen, and the ordinary materials
necessary to make and keep on making inventions which the capitalists
patent, exploit or sell. Edison, who is himself a shrewd business man,
has taken care to secure for himself a part of the benefits brought by
the Menlo Park inventions.

But not all inventors are able like Edison to dictate terms to the
capitalists who equip invention factories. The Thompson-Houston Company
at Paris and Siemens at London and Berlin,[32] in connection with
their plants for turning out electrical machinery, have laboratories
where ingenious men are kept busy searching out new applications of
electricity. At Frankfort the manufactory of aniline dyes, the largest
in the world, where anti-pyrine, that mineral quinine, was discovered,
keeps on its pay roll more than a hundred chemists to discover new
products of coal-tar. Each discovery is at once patented by the house,
which, by way of encouragement, gives a reward to the inventor.

We may up to a certain point regard all factories and workshops
as laboratories for inventions, since a considerable number of
improvements in machinery have been devised by workmen in the course
of their work. The inventor having no money to patent and apply his
discovery, the employer takes out the patent in his own name, and in
accordance with the spirit of capitalist justice, it is he who reaps
all the benefit. When the government takes it into its head to rewards
talent, it is the employer who receives the decoration; the inventive
workman, who is not an intellectual, continues to revolve like the
other machines under the black and greasy number which distinguishes
him, and as in this capitalist world he must be content with little, he
consoles himself for his poverty by the reflection that his invention
is bringing wealth and honor to his employer.

The capitalist class, which to increase its wealth is in pressing need
of inventions, is in even more imperative need of intellectuals to
supervise their application and to direct its industrial machinery. The
capitalists, before they equipped invention factories, had organized
factories to turn out intellectuals. Dollfus, Scherer-Kestner and
other employes of Alsace, the most intelligent, most philanthropic
and consequently the heaviest exploiters in France before the war,
had founded with their spare pennies at Mulhouse, schools of design,
of chemistry and of physics, where the brightest children of their
workmen were instructed gratis, in order that they might always have
at hand and at reasonable figure the intellectual capacities required
for carrying on their industries. Twenty years ago the directors of the
Mulhouse school persuaded the municipal council of Paris to establish
the city school of chemistry and physics. At the beginning, whether
it is still the case I do not know, the pupils were recruited in the
common schools, they received a higher education, gratis, a dinner at
noon at the school, and fifty francs a month to indemnify the parents
for the loss from the fact that their sons were not in the workshop.

On the platform of the constituent assembly of 1790 the Marquis of
Foucault could declare that to be a laborer it was not necessary to
know how to read and write. The necessities of industrial production
compel the capitalist of today to speak in language altogether
different; his economic interests and not his love of humanity and
of science force him to encourage and to develop both elementary and
higher education.

But the slave merchants of ancient Rome were, by the same title,
patrons of education. To the more intelligent of their human
merchandise they gave instruction in medicine, philosophy, Greek
literature, music, science, etc. The education of the slave enhanced
his market value. The slave who was an expert cook brought a better
figure than the slave doctor, philosopher or literator. In our days it
is still so; the big capitalists pay their chief cooks better than the
state pays the professors of liberal arts, even though they be members
of the Institute. But contrary to the practice of the Roman slave
merchants, our capitalist class lavishes instruction only in order to
depress the selling price of intellectual capacity.

Greek mythology tells how Midas had the gift of turning everything
into gold; the capitalist class has a similar property, it transforms
everything that it touches into merchandise; it has done this for
intellectual capacities; chemists, engineers and Latin scholars are
bought like she-asses and guano.

A voice: "And they buy deputies, too!"

People who have no tallow nor veal nor socks to sell have their
conscience and their votes; when they are deputies, they are bought.

When intellectual capacities become merchandise they have to be treated
like other merchandise, and they are. When there are many oysters in
the market the price of oysters goes down, but when the arrivals are
scarce the price goes up. When chemists and engineers are plenty on the
labor market, the price of inventors and of chemists goes down. Now
that the Central School and the School of Physics and Chemistry turn
out yearly upon the pavements of Paris chemists by the dozen, their
price has considerably gone down. Twenty years ago the capitalist paid
a chemist reasonably, he gave him $100 to $120 a month and engaged him
by the year. The employers whose regard for an employee is measured by
what they have to pay him, were full of politeness and consideration
for their chemists who cost so dear. But since they have been abundant,
their price has fallen to $40 and $30 a month; in the north they are
not engaged by the year but for the sugar season, which lasts three or
four months, at the end of which they are discharged with the workmen.
Go and shift for yourself, says the employer. Next fall when the beets
come I know I shall find chemists to superintend making them into
sugar.

The chemists are not exceptional; you know only too well that in all
branches there is an over-production of intellectuals, and that when
a place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer themselves to fill it; and
it is this pressure which permits the capitalists to lower the price
of the intellectuals and to put it even below the wage of the manual
laborer.

Poverty is harder for the intellectual than for the workingman; it
bruises him morally and physically. The workingman, enduring hardships
from childhood and knocking about the street and the shops, is
accustomed to enduring the troubles of life; the intellectual, brought
up in a hot-house, has the life bleached out of him by the shadow of
the college walls, his nervous system is over-developed and takes on an
unhealthy impressionability. What the workingman endures thoughtlessly
is to him a painful shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths
of his moral being by the exigencies of a wage-worker's life. With the
same or even a higher wage the intellectual is in a worse economic
condition than the laborer, for the latter may dress as cheaply as he
likes, but the former, if only not to offend the eye of his employer
and his chiefs with whom he is brought in contact is obliged to dress
expensively and even elegantly. He must save on his food what he has
to spend on his clothing.

The capitalists have degraded the intellectuals below the economic
level of the manual laborers. This is their reward for having so
magnificently prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution of the
eighteenth century.

Jaures in his preface to the Socialist History of France says that
"the intellectual bourgeoisie, offended by a brutal and commercial
society and disenchanted with the bourgeois power, is rallying to the
support of socialism." Unfortunately nothing could be less exact. This
transformation of the intellectual faculties into merchandise, which
ought to have filled the intellectuals with wrath and indignation,
leaves them indifferent. Never would the free citizen of the ancient
republics of Athens and Rome have submitted to such degradation. The
free man who sells his work, says Cicero, lowers himself to the rank
of the slaves. Socrates and Plato were indignant against the Sophists
who required pay for their philosophic teaching, for to Socrates and
Plato thought was too noble a thing to be bought and sold like carrots
and shoes. Even the French clergy of 1789 resented as a mortal insult
the proposition to pay a salary for worship. But our intellectuals are
accustoming themselves to such degradation.

Spurred on by the mercantile passion, they are never better satisfied
with themselves or with society than when they succeed in selling
their intellectual merchandise at a good price; they have even come
to the point of making its selling price the measure of its value.
Zola, who is one of the most distinguished representatives of literary
intellectualism, estimates the artistic value of a novel by the number
of editions sold. To sell their intellectual merchandise has become
in them such an all-absorbing principle that if one speaks to them of
socialism, before they inquire into its theories, they ask whether in
the socialistic society intellectual labor will be paid for and whether
it will be rewarded equally with manual labor.

Imbeciles! they have eyes but they see not that it is the capitalist
bourgeoisie which establishes that degrading equality: and to increase
its wealth degrades intellectual labor to the point of paying it at a
lower rate than manual labor.

We should have to put off the triumph of socialism not to the year
2,000 but to the end of the world if we had to wait upon the delicate,
shrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the intellectuals. The
history of the century is at hand to teach us just how much we have a
right to expect from these gentlemen.

Since 1789 governments of the most diverse and opposed character have
succeeded each other in France; and always, without hesitation, the
intellectuals have hastened to offer their devoted services. I am not
merely speaking of those two-for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up
the newspapers, the parliaments and the economic associations; but I
mean the scientists, the university professors, the members of the
Institute; the higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow the
knee.

Princes of science, who ought to have conversed on equal terms with
kings and emperors, have marketed their glory to buy offices and favors
from ephemeral ministers. Cuvier, one of the mightiest geniuses of the
modern era, whom the revolution took from the household of a nobleman
to make of him at twenty-five years one of the Museum professors,
Cuvier took the oath of allegiance and served with fidelity the
Republic, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis Philippe, the last
of whom created him a peer of France to reward him for his career of
servility.

To devote one's self to all governments without distinction is not
enough. Pasteur placed his glorious name at the service of the
financiers, who placed him in the administrative council of the Credit
Foncier, side by side with Jules Simon, with dukes and counts, with
senators, deputies and ex-ministers, in order to entrap the "lambs."
When De Lesseps was equipping his colossal swindle of the Panama canal,
he enrolled the intellectuals of the Institute, of the French Academy,
of literature, of the clergy, of all the circles of higher life.

It is not in the circle of the intellectuals, degraded by centuries
of capitalist oppression, that we must seek examples of civic courage
and moral dignity. They have not even the sense of professional
class-consciousness. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, a certain
minister discharged, as if he had been a mere prison guard, one of the
professors of chemistry in the Polytechnic school who had had the rare
courage to give public expression to his opinion. When in a factory the
employer dismisses a workman in too arbitrary a fashion, his comrades
grumble, and sometimes quit work, even though misery and hunger await
them in the street.

All his colleagues in the Polytechnic school bowed their heads in
silence; each one crouched in self-regarding fear, and what is still
more characteristic, not a single partisan of Dreyfus in the Society
of the Rights of Man or in the ranks of the press raised a voice to
remind them of the idea of professional solidarity. The intellectuals,
who on all occasions display their transcendental ethics, have still a
long road to travel before they reach the moral plane of the working
class and of the socialist party.

The scientists have not only sold themselves to the governments
and the financiers; they have also sold science itself to the
capitalist-bourgeoisie. When in the eighteenth century there was
need to prepare the minds of men for the revolution, by sapping the
ideologic foundations of aristocratic society, then science fulfilled
its sublime mission of freedom; it was revolutionary; it furiously
attacked Christianity and the intuitional philosophy. But when the
victorious bourgeoisie decided to base its new power on religion, it
commanded its scientists, its philosophers and its men of letters to
raise up what they had overthrown; they responded to the need with
enthusiasm. They reconstructed what they had demolished; they proved
by scientific, sentimental and romantic argument the existence of God
the father, of Jesus the son and of Mary the virgin mother. I do not
believe history offers a spectacle equal to that presented in the first
years of the nineteenth century by the philosophers, the scientists
and the literary men, who from revolutionaries and materialists
suddenly transformed themselves into reactionaries, intuitionalists and
catholics.

This backward movement still continues; when Darwin published his
Origin of Species, which took away from God his role of creator in the
organic world, as Franklin had despoiled him of his thunderbolt, we
saw the scientists, big and little, university professors and members
of the Institute, enrolling themselves under the orders of Flourens,
who for his own part had at least his eighty years for an excuse,
that they might demolish the Darwinian theory, which was displeasing
to the government and hurtful to religious beliefs. The intellectuals
exhibited that painful spectacle in the fatherland of Lamark and of
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the creators of the evolution theory, which
Darwin completed and made proof against criticism.

Today, now that the clerical anxiety is somewhat appeased, the
scientists venture to profess the evolution theory, which they never
opposed without a protest from their scientific conscience, but they
turn it against socialism so as to keep in the good graces of the
capitalists. Herbert Spencer, Haeckel and the greatest men in the
school of Darwinism demonstrate that the classification of individuals
into rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners,
is the necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature, instead of
being the fulfillment of the will and the justice of God. Natural
selection, they say, which has differentiated the organs of the human
body, has forever fixed the ranks and the functions of the social body.
They have, through servility, even lost the logical spirit. They are
indignant against Aristotle because he, being unable to conceive of the
abolition of slavery, declared that the slave was marked off by nature;
but they fail to see that they are saying something equally monstrous
when they affirm that natural selection assigns to each one his place
in society.

Thus it is no longer God or religion which condemn the workers to
wretchedness—it is science. Never was there an intellectual bankruptcy
more fraudulent.

M. Brunetières, one of those intellectuals who do not feel their
degradation and who joyfully fulfill their servile task, was right when
he proclaimed the failure of science. He does not suspect how colossal
this bankruptcy is.

Science, the great emancipator, that has tamed the powers of nature,
and might in so doing have freed man from toil to allow him to develop
freely his faculties of mind and body; science, become the slave of
capital, has done nothing but supply means for capitalists to increase
their wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the working class.
Its most wonderful applications to industrial technique have brought to
the children, the women and the men of the working class nothing but
over-work and misery!

The middle-class revolutionary party of 1789 cried out in horror and
indignation against the lords, who through the long summer nights
compelled their serfs to beat the ponds near their castles in order
to keep the frogs from croaking. What would they say if they saw what
we see? Improvements in lighting date from the capitalist period. At
the end of the last century Argant and Carcel invented the lamp with
a double current of air, at the beginning of this Chevreul invented
the stearic candle, then gas was discovered, then petroleum, then
the electric light, turning night into day. What benefits have these
scientific improvements in lighting brought to the workers? They have
enabled employers to impose night work upon millions of proletarians,
not in the midsummer nights and in the balmy air of the fields, but
through nights of summer and winter in the poisonous air of the
workshops and factories. The industrial applications of mechanics
and chemistry have transformed the happy and stimulating work of the
artisan into a torture which exhausts and kills the proletarian.

When science subdued the forces of nature to the service of man, ought
she not to have given leisure to the workers that they might develop
themselves physically and intellectually; ought she not to have changed
the "vale of tears" into a dwelling place of peace and joy? I ask you,
has not science failed in her mission of emancipation?

The obtuse capitalist himself is conscious of this failure; so he
directs his economists and his other intellectual domestics to prove to
the working class that it has never been so happy and that its lot goes
on improving.

The economists, considering that to deserve the good graces of
the capitalists it was not enough to falsify economic facts, are
suppressing economic science, which is becoming dangerous for the
domination of capital. Ever since Adam Smith and Ricardo they go on
repeating the same errors regarding value, regarding the productivity
of the predatory and idle capitalist, compiling facts and arranging
statistics which guide the capitalists in their speculations; but they
dare not draw conclusions and build systems with the materials that
they have accumulated. When Ricardo wrote, the phenomena of modern
production were beginning their evolution, their communist tendencies
could not be perceived, one could then study them without taking sides
and could build up a science without fear of wounding the interests
of capital. But now that they have arrived at their full development
and show clearly their communal tendencies, the economists shut their
eyes that they may not see, and they wage war against the principles
established by Ricardo, which after having served as a basis for the
old bourgeois economy, have become the points of departure of the
Marxian economy. To take a whack at the socialist theories and put
themselves at the service of the financiers, like barkers and fakirs of
their bogus goods, are the intellectual functions of the economists.
Latterly the owners of silver mines have enlisted them to sing the
praises of bimetallism, while Cecil Rhodes, Barnato, Beit, Robbers &
Company called them in to boom the Transvaal gold mines.

The intellectuals of art and literature, like the jesters of the old
feudal courts, are the entertainers of the class which pays them. To
satisfy the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their leisure—this
is their sole artistic aim. The men of letters are so well broken to
this servile duty that they do not understand the spirit of Molière,
their great ancestor, all the while that they adore the letter of his
works. Molière is the writer most written about in France; learned
men have devoted themselves to gathering up the scattered fragments
of his erratic and careless youth, to fixing the date and the hour
of the representations of his comedies; if they had unearthed an
authentic piece of excrement from him they would have set it in gold
and would kiss it devotedly, but the spirit of Molière escapes them.
You have read, as I have, many critical analyses of his dramas. Did
you ever find one of them which brought out in clear light the role of
this militant playwright, who more than a century before Beaumarchais
and before revolution, at Versailles, in the very court of the great
monarch, thrust at the nobility of the court and of the provinces,
attacked the church before which Descartes and the rest trembled,
hurled his jests at Aristotle, the unquestioned authority of La
Sorbonne, that secular church; who ridiculed the Pyrrhonism which the
neo-Kantians of our own days oppose to the materialist philosophy of
Marxian socialism, but which then was the weapon of the catholics, of
Pascal, of Huet, the bishop of Avranches, to strike and to overthrow
human reason, with its impudent desire or reaching knowledge by its
own strength. Pitiful, wretched reason, clamored these Kantians before
Kant, you can know nothing without the aid of faith! Molière is unique
in European literature, you must go back to the epoch of glorious
Athens to find his counterpart in Aristophanes.

If the bourgeois critics timidly and unintelligently mention this side
of Molière, there is another of which their ignorance is complete.
Molière was the man of his class, the champion of the bourgeois class.
Like the socialists who say to the workers, "Break with the liberal
bourgeoisie, which deceives you when it does not slaughter you;" he
cried to the Georges Dandins and to the "bourgeois noblemen," "Avoid
the nobles like pests; they deceive you, mock you and rob you."

The great capitalist bourgeoisie does not choose to work, either
with its hands or its brain; it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to
practice lewdness and to look dignified in its beastly and cumbersome
luxury; it does not even deign to occupy itself with politics; men like
Rothschild, De Lesseps, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, do not run
for office; they find it more economical to buy the deputies than the
voters, and more convenient to put their clerks into the ministries
than to take part in parliamentary struggles. The big capitalists
interest themselves only in the operations of the stock exchange, which
afford the delights of gambling; they dignify these by the pompous name
of "speculations,"—a word formerly reserved for the highest processes
of philosophical or mathematical thought. The capitalists are getting
themselves replaced in the supervision and management of the great
industrial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, who carry
them on, and usually are well paid for doing so. These intellectuals
of industry and politics, the privileged portion of the wage class,
imagine that they are an integral part of the capitalist class, while
they are only its servants; on every occasion they take up its defense
against the working class, which finds in them its worst enemies.

Intellectuals of this description can never be led into socialism;
their interests are too closely bound up with those of the capitalist
class for them to detach themselves and turn against it. But below
these favored few there is a swarming and famishing throng of
intellectuals whose lot grows worse in proportion to the increase of
their numbers. These intellectuals belong to socialism. They ought
to be already in our ranks. Their education ought to have given
them the necessary intelligence to deal with social problems, but it
is this very education which obstructs their hearing and keeps them
away from socialism. They think their education confers on them a
social privilege, that it will permit them to get through the world
by themselves, each making his own way in life by crowding out his
neighbor or standing on the shoulders of everyone else. They imagine
that their poverty is transitory and that they only need a stroke of
good luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think,
is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them
the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them
by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or
intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance,
that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more
capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual
raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.

And while they build castles in Spain, capital crushes them, as it has
crushed the small merchants and the small manufacturers, who thought
they, too, with free credit and a little luck, might become first-class
capitalists, whose names should be written in the Great Book of the
Public Debt.

The intellectuals, in all that has to do with the understanding of
the social movement, do not rise above the intellectual level of
those little bourgeois who scoffed so fiercely at the bunglers of
1830 and who, after being ruined and merged in the proletariat, none
the less continue to detest socialism; to such a degree were their
heads perverted by the religion of property. The intellectuals, whose
brains are stuffed with all the prejudices of the bourgeois class, are
inferior to those little bourgeois of 1830 and 1848 who at least were
not afraid of gunpowder; they have not their spirit of combativeness,
they are true imbeciles,—if we restore to this word its original Latin
meaning of unsuited for war. Without resistance they endure rebuffs and
wrongs and they do not think of uniting, of organizing themselves to
defend their interests and give battle to capital on the economic field.

The intellectual proletariat as we know it is a recent growth, it has
especially developed in the last forty years. When after the amnesty of
the condemned of the Commune, we began again the socialist propaganda,
believing that it would be easy to draw the intellectuals into the
movement we took up our dwelling in their cultured Latin quarter,
Guesde taking up his residence in the Rue de la Pitie, Vaillant in the
Rue Monge and I in the Boulevard de Port Royal. We became acquainted
with hundreds of young men, students of law, of medicines, of the
sciences, but you can count on your fingers those whom we brought into
the socialist camp. Our ideas attracted them one day, but the next day
the wind blew from another quarter and turned their heads.

An honorable merchant of Bordeaux, a prominent member of the municipal
council, said in the time of the empire to my father, who was disturbed
over my socialism:

"Friend Lafargue, you must let youth take its course; I was a socialist
when I studied at Paris, I was connected with the secret societies
and I took part in the movement for demanding of Louis Philippe the
pardon of Barbes." The young men of our age turn quickly, let them get
back to their homes and they develop prominent abdomens and become
reactionaries.

We welcomed joyfully the entrance of Jaures into socialism; we thought
that the new form which he brought to our propaganda would make it
penetrate into circles that we had not been able to touch. He has
in fact made a decided impression on the university circle, and we
owe it in part to him that the nurslings of the Ecole Normale have
ideas regarding the social movement which are a little less absurd
and formless than those with which their learning and intelligence
have hitherto been contented. Lately, joining forces with the radical
politicians who had lost their working-class following, they have
invaded the socialist party. Their souls overflow with the purest
intentions; if their peaceful habits prevent them from throwing
themselves into the conflict, and if their lofty culture forbids them
to take their place in the ranks of the comrades, they nevertheless
condescend to instruct us in ethics, to polish off our ignorance, to
teach us how to think, to offer us such crumbs of science as we may be
able to digest, and to direct us; they modestly offer themselves to us
as leaders and schoolmasters.

These intellectuals who have spent their youth in the university
that they might become experts on exercises, polishers of phrases,
philosophers or doctors, imagine one can improvise himself into a
master of the socialist theory by attending a single lecture or by the
careless reading of a single pamphlet. Naturalists who had felt the
need of painful research to learn the habits of mollusks or of the
polyps who live in a community on the coral banks, think that they know
enough to regulate human societies, and that by keeping their stand
on the first steps of the ascending ladder of animal life they can
the better discern the human ideal. The philosophers, the moralists,
the historians and the politicians have aims equally lofty; they bring
an abundant supply of ideas and a new method of action to replace the
imperfect theory and tactics which in all capitalist countries have
served to build up socialist parties strong in numbers, unity and
discipline.

The class struggle is out of fashion, declare these professors of
socialism. Can a line of demarcation be drawn between classes? Do not
the working people have savings bank accounts of $20, $40 and $100,
bringing them 50 cents, $1.50 and $3.00 of interest yearly? Is it not
true that the directors and managers of mines, railroads and financial
houses are wage-workers, having their functions and duties in the
enterprises which they manage for the account of capitalists? The
argument is unanswerable, but by the same token there is no vegetable
kingdom nor animal kingdom because we can not separate them "with
an ax," as it were, for the reason that at their points of contact,
vegetables and animals merge into each other. There is no longer any
day or any night because the sun does not appear on the horizon at the
same moment all over the earth, and because it is day at the antipodes
while it is night here.

The concentration of capital? A worn-out tune of 1850. The corporations
by their stocks and bonds parcel out property and distribute it among
all the citizens. How blinded we were by our sectarianism when we
thought that this new form of property, essentially capitalistic,
was enabling the financiers to plunge their thieving hands into the
smallest purses, to extract the last pieces of silver.

The poverty of the working class! But it is diminishing and soon will
disappear through the constant increase of wages, while interest
on money is constantly diminishing; some fine day it will descend
to zero and the bourgeois will be overjoyed to offer their beloved
capital on the altar of socialism. That to-morrow or the day after
the capitalist will be forced to work, is the prediction of Mr.
Waldeck-Rousseau. And there are intellectuals whose condition grows
worse in proportion as capitalism develops, who are stultified by the
utterances of the employers to a point where they affirm that the
position of wage-workers is improving, and there are intellectuals
who assume to possess some knowledge of political economy, who affirm
that interest on money is rapidly diminishing. Could these reformers
of socialism perchance be ignorant that Adam Smith calculated at the
end of the eighteenth century that 3 per cent was the normal interest
of capital running no risk, and that the financiers of our own epoch
consider that it is still around 3 per cent that the interest rate
must fluctuate. If a few years ago this rate seemed to fall below 2½
per cent, it has risen today above 3 per cent. Capital is merchandise,
like intellectual capacities and carrots; as such it is subject to
the fluctuations of supply and demand. It was then more offered than
demanded, whereas since the development of the industrial plant of
Russia, since the opening of China to European exploitation, etc., the
over-supply of capital has been absorbed and its price rises with its
scarcity. But the intellectuals have too many trifles to think of and
too many harmonious phrases to construct for giving any thought to
economic phenomena. They take for sterling truths all the lies of the
capitalists, and repeat with pious conviction the old litanies of the
orthodox economic church: "There are no classes, wealth is coming to be
distributed more and more equitably, the workers are growing richer and
those living on incomes are growing poorer, and the capitalist society
is the best of all possible societies; these truths shine forth like
suns and none but partisans and mystics can deny them."

These intellectuals propose to modify the tactics as well as the
theories of the socialist party; they wish to impose upon it a new
method of action. It must no longer strive to conquer the public powers
by a great struggle, legal or revolutionary as need may be, but let
itself be conquered by every ministry of a republican coalition; it is
no longer to oppose the socialist party to all the bourgeois parties;
what is needed is to put it at the service of the liberal party; we
must no longer organize it for the class struggle, but keep it ready
for all the compromises of politicians. And to further the triumph of
the new method of action, they propose to disorganize the socialist
party, to break up its old systems and to demolish the organizations
which for twenty years have labored to give the workers a sense of
their class interests and to group them in a party of economic and
political struggle.

But the intellectuals will lose their labors; thus far they have only
succeeded in drawing closer the ties uniting the socialists of the
different organizations, and in making themselves ridiculous.

The intellectuals ought to have been the first of all the various
groups to revolt against capitalist society, in which they occupy
a subordinate position so little in keeping with their hopes and
their talents, but they do not even understand it; they have such a
confused idea of it that Auguste Comte, Renan, and others more or less
distinguished have cherished the dream of reviving for their benefit an
aristocracy copied after the model of the Chinese mandarin system. Such
an idea is a reflection of past ages in their heads, for nothing is
in more absolute opposition with the modern social movement than such
pretensions. The intellectuals in previous states of society formed
a world outside and above that of production, having charge only of
education, of the direction of religious worship, and of the political
administration.

The mechanic industry of these societies combine in the same producer,
manual labor and intellectual labor; it was for example the same
cabinetmaker who designed and executed the piece of furniture, who
bought its first material and who even undertook its sale. Capitalist
production has divorced two functions which once were indissolubly
united; on the one side it puts the manual workers, who become more
and more servants of the machine, and on the other the intellectual
workers, engineers, chemists, managers, etc. But these two categories
of workers, however different and contrary they may be in their
education and habits, are welded together, to the point that a
capitalist industry can not be carried on without manual laborers any
more than without intellectual wage-workers.

United in production, united under the yoke of capitalist exploitation,
united they should be also in revolt against the common enemy. The
intellectuals, if they understood their own real interests would come
in crowds to socialism, not through philanthropy, not through pity for
the miseries of the workers, not through affectation and snobbery,
but to save themselves, to assure the future welfare of their wives
and children, to fulfill their duty to their class. They ought to be
ashamed of being left behind in the social battle by their comrades in
the manual category. They have many things to teach them, but they have
still much to learn from them; the workingmen have a practical sense
superior to theirs, and have given proof of an instinctive intuition
of the communist tendencies of modern capitalism which is lacking to
the intellectuals, who have only been able by a conscious mental effort
to arrive at this conception. If only they had understood their own
interests, they would long since have turned against the capitalist
class the education which it has generously distributed in order
better to exploit them; they would have utilized their intellectual
capacities, which are enriching their masters, as so many improved
weapons to fight capitalism and to conquer the freedom of their class,
the wage-working class.

Capitalist production, which has overthrown the old conditions of life
and of work, has elaborated new forms, which already can be discerned
without supernatural vision, but which to the intellectuals remain
sealed under seven seals. One of the leading lights of intellectualism,
M. Durkheim, in his book, "The Division of Labor," which made some
noise in university circles, can not conceive of society except on
the social pattern of ancient Egypt, each laborer remaining, his life
through, penned up in one single trade. However, unless one is so
unfortunate as to be affected by the hopeless near-sightedness of the
Ecole Normale, one can not help seeing that the machine is suppressing
trades, one after the other, in a way to let only one survive, that
of the machinist, and that when it has finished its revolutionary
work which the socialists will complete by revolutionizing capitalist
society, the producer of the communist society will plow and sow with
the machine today, will spin, will turn wood or polish steel to-morrow,
and will exercise in turn all the trades to the greater profit of his
health and his intelligence.

The industrial applications of mechanics, chemistry and physics,
which, monopolized by capital, oppress the worker, will, when they
shall be common property, emancipate man from toil and give him leisure
and liberty.

Mechanical production, which under capitalist direction can only buffet
the worker back and forth from periods of over-work to periods of
enforced idleness, will when developed and regulated by a communist
administration, require from the producer, to provide for the normal
needs of society, only a maximum day of two or three hours in the
workshop, and when this time of necessary social labor is fulfilled he
will be able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual pleasures of
life.

The artist then will paint, will sing, will dance, the writer will
write, the musician will compose operas, the philosopher will build
systems, the chemist will analyze substances not to gain money, to
receive a salary, but to deserve applause, to win laurel wreaths, like
the conquerors at the Olympic games, but to satisfy their artistic and
scientific passion; for one does not drink a glass of champagne or kiss
the woman he loves for the benefit of the gallery. The artist and the
scientist may then repeat the enthusiastic words of Kepler, that hero
of science: "The elector of Saxony with all his wealth can not equal
the pleasure I have felt in composing the Mysterium Cosmographicum."

Will not the intellectuals end by hearing the voice of the socialist
calling them to the rescue, to emancipate science and art from the
capitalist yoke, to liberate thought from the slavery of commercialism?


FOOTNOTES:

[31] Ever since the French Revolution the law has required the words
"Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité." to be placed over the door of every
public building in France.—Translator.

[32] It is a well-known fact that in the American establishments of
these and similar companies each workman before receiving employment
must sign papers transferring to the corporation the title to all
inventions made by him while in its service.—Translator.




THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM


The nineteenth century was the century of capitalism. Capitalism
filled that century to overflowing with its commerce, its industry,
its manners, its fashions, its literature, its art, its science,
its philosophy, its religion, its politics and its civil code, more
universal than the laws imposed by Rome upon the nations of the ancient
world. The capitalist movement, starting from England, the United
States and France, has shaken the foundations of Europe and of the
world. It has forced the old feudal monarchies of Austria and Germany
and the barbaric despotism of Russia to put themselves in line; and in
these last days it has gone into the extreme East, into Japan, where
it has overthrown the feudal system and implanted the industry and the
politics of capitalism.

Capitalism has taken possession of our planet; its fleets bring
together the continents which oceans had separated; its railroads,
spanning mountains and deserts, furrow the earth; the electric wires,
the nervous system of the globe, bind all nations together, and their
palpitations reverberate in the great centers of population. Now for
the first time there is a contemporary history of the world. Events in
Australia, the Transvaal, China, are known in London, Paris, New York,
at the moment they are brought about, precisely as if they happened in
the outskirts of the city where the news is published.

Civilized nations live off the products of the whole earth. Egypt,
India, Louisiana, furnish the cotton, Australia the wool, Japan the
silk, China the tea, Brazil the coffee, New Zealand and the United
States the meat and grain. The capitalist carries in his stomach and on
his back the spoils of the universe.

The study of natural phenomena has undergone an unprecedented, an
unheard-of, development. New sciences, geology, chemistry, physics,
etc., have arisen. The industrial application of the forces of nature
and of the discoveries of science has taken on a still more startling
development; some of the geometrical discoveries of the scientists
of Alexandria, two thousand years old, have for the first time been
utilized.

The production of machine industry can provide for all demand and more.
The mechanical application of the forces of nature has increased man's
productive forces tenfold, a hundredfold. A few hours' daily labor,
furnished by the able-bodied members of the nation, would produce
enough to satisfy the material and intellectual needs of all.

But what has come of the colossal and wonderful development of science,
industry and commerce in the nineteenth century? Has it made humanity
stronger, healthier, happier? Has it given leisure to the producers?
Has it brought comfort and contentment to the people?

Never has work been so prolonged, so exhausting, so injurious to man's
body and so fatal to his intelligence. Never has the industrial labor
which undermines health, shortens life and starves the intellect been
so general, been imposed on such ever-growing masses of laborers. The
men, women and children of the proletariat are bent under the iron yoke
of machine industry. Poverty is their reward when they work, starvation
when they lose their jobs.

In former stages of society, famine appeared only when the earth
refused her harvests. In capitalist society, famine sits at the hearth
of the working class when granaries and cellars burst with the fruits
of the earth, and when the market is gorged with the products of
industry.

All the toil, all the production, all the suffering of the working
class has but served to heighten its physical and mental destitution,
to drag it down from poverty into wretchedness.

Capitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the
social and political life of a century of science and industry, has
become bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like
the owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to
provide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they
dared demand the right to work—a slave's right.[33]

The capitalist class has also made a failure of itself. It has seized
upon the social wealth to enjoy it, and never was the ruling class more
incapable of enjoyment. The newly rich, those who have built up their
fortunes by accumulating the filchings from labor, live like strangers
in the midst of luxury and artistic treasures, with which they surround
themselves through a foolish vanity, to pay homage to their millions.

The leading capitalists, the millionaires and billionaires, are
sad specimens of the human race, useless and hurtful. The mark of
degeneracy is upon them. Their sickly offspring are old at birth. Their
organs are sapped with diseases. Exquisite meats and wines load down
their tables, but the stomach refuses to digest them; women expert in
love perfume their couches with youth and beauty, but their senses are
be-numbed. They own palatial dwellings in enchanting sites, and they
have no eyes, no feeling for joyful nature, with its eternal youth
and change. Sated and disgusted with everything, they are followed
everywhere by ennui as by their shadows. They yawn at rising and when
they go to bed; they yawn at their fests and at their orgies. They
began yawning in their mother's womb.

The pessimism which, in the wake of capitalist property, made its
appearance in ancient Greece six centuries before Jesus Christ, and
which has since formed the foundation of the moral and religious
philosophy of the capitalist class, became the leading characteristic
of the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century. The
pessimism of Theognis sprang from the uncertainties and vicissitudes of
life in the Greek cities, torn by the perpetual wars between rich and
poor; the pessimism of the capitalist is the bitter fruit of satiety,
ennui and the impoverishment of the blood.

The capitalist class is falling into its second childhood; its
decreptitude appears in its literature, now returning to its
starting point. Romantic literature, the literary form proper to the
capitalist class, which started out with the romantic Christianity
of Chateaubriand, is returning to the same point, after passing
through the historical novel and the character novel. (Witness in this
country the immense sale of "Ben Hur" and its imitators.—Translator.)
Capitalism, which in its virile and combative youth in the eighteenth
century had wished to emancipate itself from Christianity, resigns
itself in its old age to practices of the grossest superstition.

The capitalist class, bankrupt, old, useless and hurtful, has finished
its historic mission; it persists as ruling class only through its
acquired momentum. The proletariat of the twentieth century will
execute the decree of history; will drive it from its position of
social control. Then the stupendous work in science and industry
accomplished by civilized humanity, at the price of such toil and
suffering, will engender peace and happiness; then will this vale of
tears be transformed into an earthly paradise.


FOOTNOTE:

[33] I allude to the Days of June, 1848. The Insurgents demanded the
"Right to Work."




THE WOMAN QUESTION


The bourgeois has thought and still thinks that woman ought to
remain at home and devote her activity to supervising and directing
the housekeeping, caring for her husband, and manufacturing and
nourishing children. Even Xenophon, at the time when the bourgeoisie
was newly born and was taking its shape in ancient society, traced
the main outlines of this ideal of woman. But if through the course
of centuries, this ideal may have appeared reasonable, because it
corresponded to economic conditions which prevailed, it is no longer
anything more than an ideological survival, since these conditions have
ceased to exist.

The domestication of woman presupposes that she fulfills in the
household certain numerous functions which absorb all her energy; now,
the most important and the most exacting of these domestic labors—the
spinning of wool and linen, the cutting and making up of clothing,
laundry work, baking, etc.,—are carried on by capitalistic industry.
It furthermore presupposes that man by his contribution to the family
capital and his earnings provides for the material needs of the
family; now, among the comfortable bourgeoisie, marriage is as much an
association of capitals[34] as a union of persons and often the capital
contributed by the wife exceeds that of the husband, and in the small
bourgeoisie the gains of the father of the family have fallen so low
that the children,—girls as well as boys,—are compelled to earn their
living in business, railroad offices, banks, teaching, civil service
positions, etc., while it often happens that the young wife continues
to work outside in order to help out the resources of the housekeeping,
when the earnings of the husband do not suffice to cover the expenses.

The daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, as well as those
of the working class, thus enter into competition with their father,
brothers and husband. This economic antagonism, which the bourgeoisie
had prevented from developing by confining the wife to the family
dwelling, is becoming general and is intensified in proportion as
capitalistic production develops; it invades the fields of the liberal
professions—medicine, law, literature, journalism, the sciences,
etc.,—where man had reserved for himself a monopoly, which he imagined
was to be eternal. The laborers, as is always the case, have been the
first to draw the logical consequences of the participation of woman
in social production; they have replaced the ideal of the artisan,—the
wife who is nothing but a housekeeper,—by a new ideal,—woman as a
companion in their economic and political struggles for the raising of
wages and the emancipation of labor.

The bourgeois has not yet succeeded in understanding that his ideal
is already long since out of date and that it must be remodeled
to correspond to the new conditions of the social environment;
nevertheless since the first half of the nineteenth century the ladies
of the bourgeoisie have begun to protest against their inferior
position in the family, so much the more intolerable in that their
dowry placed them on a footing of equality with the husband; they
rebelled against the domestic slavery and the parsimonious life to
which they were condemned, as well as the deprivation of intellectual
and material enjoyments which was imposed upon them; the bolder ones
went so far as to demand free love and to ally themselves with the
utopian sects which preached the emancipation of woman.[35] The
philosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they
would stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest
of the family, which they declared could not survive without the
subjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on
of shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote
herself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man
might freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties.
These same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the
cult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which,
by forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child's
cradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the
working-class family.

The bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, equally imbecile and
ethical, of these solemn philosophers; they kept on their way and
attained the end they set for themselves; like the patrician lady of
ancient Rome and the countess of the eighteenth century, they threw
off the cares of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child upon
mercenaries, that they might devote themselves wholly to the toilet,
that they might be the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capitalist
world and in order to make business move. The daughters and wives of
American plutocracy have attained the extreme limits of this sort of
emancipation; they are transforming their fathers and husbands into
accumulators of millions, which they squander madly. Since the toilet
does not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of capitalism, they
find amusement in breaking the marriage contract in order to assert
their independence and improve the race. The Communist Manifesto
remarks that the innumerable divorce suits in which adultery is alleged
are indisputable proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois of
both sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage which the "licentious
socialists" talk of loosening.

When the daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, obliged to
earn their living and to increase the resources of the family, began
to invade the stores, the offices, the civil service and the liberal
professions, the bourgeois were seized with anxiety for their means
of existence already so reduced; feminine competition would reduce
them still further. The intellectuals who took up the defense of the
males, thought it prudent not to start afresh with the ethical sermons
which had miscarried so piteously in the case of the wealthy bourgeois
ladies;—they appealed to science; they demonstrated by reasons which
were irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman cannot emerge from
the occupations of housekeeping without violating the laws of nature
and history. They proved to their complete satisfaction that woman
is an inferior being, incapable of receiving a higher intellectual
education and of furnishing the combination of attention, energy and
agility demanded by the professions in which she was entering into
competition with man. Her brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less
complex than that of man, is a "child's brain." Her less developed
muscles have not the strength for attack and for resistance; the
bones of her forearm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her
osseous, muscular and nervous system do not permit her to undertake
more than the routine of the household. Nature designed her in all her
organization to be the servant of man, just as the odious god of the
Jews and Christians marked out the race of Ham for slavery.

History contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra
scientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that
always and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had been
shut up in the house, in the woman's apartments; if such had been her
lot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the
positive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois
philosophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better:
he seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority
of woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male
criminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the
statistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferiority. Thus we see
that ethics, anatomy, physiology, social statistics and history riveted
forever upon woman the chains of domestic servitude.


II.

Bachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropologists have revised the
opinion of the historians and philosophers upon the role played by
woman in the past. They have shown that everywhere the paternal
family, which subordinated woman to man, had been preceded by the
maternal family, which gave the first place to woman. The Greek
language contains the record of her two conditions: while the Spartans,
among whom matriarchal customs persisted, still continued to call
her _despoina_, the mistress of the house, the sovereign, the other
Greeks gave to the wife the name _damar_, the subdued, the vanquished.
The Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that she is _parthenos
admes_, the girl not subdued, that is to say, without a husband,
without a master. The modern expression "yoke of marriage" preserves
the ancient idea.

Hesiod, in opposition to Homer, who tells only of patriarchal customs,
preserves precious recollections of the matriarchal family; he tells
us that when it existed man, even if he were a hundred years old,
lived with his prudent mother,—he was fed in her house like a great
child. (Works and Days, V. 129-130.) It was not the woman who then had
the "child's brain", but the man; everything seems in fact to prove
that her intelligence was the first to develop. This intellectual
superiority caused her to be deified before man in the primitive
religions of Egypt, the Indies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first
inventions of the arts and trades, with the exception of metal working,
to be attributed to goddesses and not to gods. The Muses, originally
three in number, were in Greece, even in preference to Apollo, the
goddesses of poetry, music and the dance. Isis, "mother of corn ears
and lady of bread," and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the Egyptians and
Greeks the tillage of barley and wheat and made them renounce their
anthropophagic repasts. The woman appeared to the pre-patriarchal man,
like the Germans whom Tacitus knew, as having within herself something
holy and providential, _aliquid sanctum et providum_ (Germania VIII).
Her prudence and foresight gave her this divine character. Must we
conclude that this intellectual superiority, which manifested itself
when the economic environment is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon?

But, in any case, it may be asserted that the vitality of woman is
superior to that of man. The life insurance companies of the United
States, England and Holland, which do not base their calculation upon
scientific fairy tales of the intellectuals but upon mortality tables,
pay woman an annuity below that which they give man, because her
probabilities of death are less. Here for example is the annuity paid
for a capital of $1,000 by American and Dutch companies:[36]

                     New York.        Holland.
    Age.          Men.    Women.    Men.    Women.
  50 years      $ 76.47  $ 69.57  $ 76.80  $ 73.60
  60 years        97.24    88.03    98.50    93.50
  70 years       134.31   122.48   142.00   136.70
  80 years       183.95   168.00   222.70   211.70

It may be objected that man, leading a more active life, is more
subject to accidents, diseases, and other causes of death, and that
consequently the prolonged life of woman does not prove the higher
vitality of her organism, but the advantages of a life less subject to
accident.

The answer to this objection is found in the statistics of the various
nations. There is in no country a perfect equilibrium between the
number of women and that of men; for 1,000 men there are in Belgium
1,005 women, in France 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and
in Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these countries with the feminine
preponderance there is an excess of masculine births: of the whole
of Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are born from 1,040 to
1,060 boys. If, in spite of this excess of masculine births, more
girls survive, it is because the greater mortality of the boys shows
the balance in favor of the girls; and this higher mortality cannot
be explained by the life of man being more subject to accident, since
it is observed at an early age, notably during the first two years.
All the diseases of childhood, with the exception of diphtheria and
whooping cough, are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys than
among girls; from zero to five years the male sex is particularly
frail; at all ages, except between ten and fifteen years, the male
mortality is in excess of the female.

The superior vitality of the female sex is also noticeable in
the greater ease with which it builds up its organism. M. Iribe,
superintendent of the sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Parisian
children from three to fourteen years of age, who are afflicted with
anaemia, incipient tuberculosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at
the time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, the progress in
weight, girth and chest development is incomparably higher in the girls
than in the boys, the increase in weight is double and often more.

The same statement has been made by other superintendents of
sanitariums. (Bulletin Medical, No. 81, 1903.)

Woman undeniably possesses a greater vitality than man. M. Gustav
Loisel has made inquiry "as to whether this difference existed in
embryonic life, and what may be its cause?" He has communicated the
results of his inquiries to the Biological Society of Paris, which
published them in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903.

M. Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and measurements made upon 72
foetuses at the Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou;[37] from
the following weights of the foetuses at three, four, five and six
months he obtains the following figures:

                      Males.   Females.   Differences.
                          Grammes.       Grammes.
  Total weight       1908.18   1708.11   200.07 in favor of males
  Kidneys              16.87     17.19     2.67 in favor of males
  Superrenal glands     5.15      6.43     0.32 in favor of females
  Liver                88.35     96.31     1.28 in favor of females
  Spleen                2.59      2.38     7.90 in favor of females
  Thymus                3.89      3.97     0.21 in favor of males
  Heart                10.97     12.60     0.08 in favor of females
  Lungs                47.29     44.62     1.63 in favor of females
  Brain               236.94    235.17     1.17 in favor of males

"These figures thus show us," says M. Loisel, "a preponderance already
existing in favor of the females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal
glands, the liver, the thymus and the heart; this predominance is the
more noticeable since the total weight of the body is larger in the
male than in the female."

If now we take the relation between the total weight and the weight of
the organs which are heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion
is still in favor of the female:


PROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT.

             Males.       Females.
  Spleen   1 to 736       1 to 718
  Lungs    1 to  40       1 to  38
  Brain    1 to   8       1 to   7

The organs here examined, brain included, are thus absolutely or
relatively heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus.

M. Loisel has also examined into the proportion of the weights of
the different organs to the total weight according to the age of the
foetus. He has prepared a table, from which I take only the figures
concerning the brain:

                                Proportion of
  AGE         TOTAL WEIGHT     weight of brain
                               to total weight.
             Males   Females    Males   Females
            Grammes  Grammes
  3 Months    58.33   65.96     1/6.5   1/7
  4 Months   167.25  182.58     1/7.3   1/6.6
  5 Months   336.33  295.00     1/7.6   1/7.5
  6 Months   732.58  636.00     1/8.3   1/7.3

The weight of the male foetus, which is below that of the female
foetus, at three months, when the sex has just been determined, grows
more rapidly and the proportion between the weight is always to the
advantage of the females from the fourth month on.

"To sum up," says M. Loisel, "all the organs are heavier in the female
foetus than in the male foetus up to about the fourth month. The
predominance then passes over to the male, but only for the lungs
and the organs for sex-union, thus the cardiac muscle always remains
heavier in the female. The organs which are of real service to the
individual during the embryonic life always remain more developed in
the female sex.

If now we consider that the differences in favor of the females are
especially in the liver, the heart, the superrenal glands and the
kidneys, we shall come to the conclusion that the greater vitality of
the female organisms corresponds to their being better nourished and
better purified."[38]


III.

The superior organization possessed by woman at birth, assuring her
throughout her life a much greater vitality, is probably demanded
by the part she plays in the production of the species, a part
altogether more prolonged and exhausting than that of the man who,
when fertilization is accomplished, has no more to do, while then
the travail of woman begins, to continue during long months, through
pregnancy and after birth. The women of savage tribes suckle their
children for two years and more. It sometimes happens that the male
pays dear for his inutility; after union, the bees kill the males,
and the male spider must hastily take himself off that he may not be
devoured by the larger and stronger female. Among the Sakawas, at
the annual feast of Mylitta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the
handsome slave who had just united with the priestess who incarnated
the Assyrian goddess. This bloody religious ceremonial must have been a
reproduction of an Amazonian custom.

The life of savagery and barbarism permits woman to develop her
superiority from birth; each sex there has its special function; it
is the division of labor in embryo. The man, whose muscular system is
more developed, "fights, hunts, fishes and sits down," according to the
Australian native, he regards all the rest as under the jurisdiction
of woman, whose function puts brain activity into play at an earlier
epoch. She has charge of the communal house, which often shelters a
clan of more than one hundred individuals; she prepares clothing from
skins and other raw materials; she charges herself with the cultivation
of the garden, the rearing of domestic animals and the manufacture
of household utensils; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes
the provisions, vegetable and animal, which have been gathered during
the course of the year; and like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians
and the Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accompanies the warrior
on the field battle, aids in the fray, raises him up if he is wounded
and cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated that, according to
Tacitus, the barbarians who under the leadership of Civilis revolted
against Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman soldiers because
their wives did not accompany them when they marched to combat.
Plato likewise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the Eleusinian
Mysteries, was more informed regarding ancient customs than is
supposed, makes the women to be present in the battles of the warriors
of his Republic.

These multiple and diverse functions, which obliged woman to reflect,
to calculate, to think of the morrow and to look ahead at long range,
must necessarily have developed her intellectual faculties; thus the
craniologists say that only a slight difference exists between the
cranial capacity of the two sexes in the <DW64>s, the Australians,
and the red skins, while they find that it goes on increasing among
civilized people. Woman is for the careless and improvident savage, a
providence; she is the prudent and prescient being who presides over
his destinies from birth to death. Man, making his religions with
the events and the intellectual acquisitions of his daily life, was
thus obliged to begin by deifying woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and
Romans had placed their destinies under the control of goddesses,
the Fates—Moirai, Parcae—whose name signifies in the Latin language
"sparing," "economic," and in the Greek the part which falls to each
one in the distribution of food or of booty.

If we relieve the rich and poetical Greek mythology of the symbolical,
allegorical and mystical lucubrations with which the philosophers
and the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexandrine period have
overloaded and complicated it, and which the German mythologists,
servilely copied by those of France and England, have carried on to
their own more perfect confusion, it becomes an inestimable storehouse
of prehistoric customs which preserves the memory of the manners
which travelers and anthropologists now observe living again among
the savages and barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. The
mythological legend furnishes us with information of the relative value
of feminine and masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before they
had entered upon the patriarchal period.

Jupiter, the "father of the gods", as Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylos
call him, after having driven the feminine divinities from Olympus,
enthroned there the patriarchate, which for some generations had
been established upon earth; the religious heaven always reflects
terrestrial manners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. But
Jupiter, who like every barbarian, knew how to use his fists (Iliad
XV. 228), who boasted that he was the strongest of the gods, and who
to dominate the others kept next his throne two servants, Force and
Violence, always ready to obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by
his intellectual qualities to replace woman in the government of the
Olympian family; in order to supply the capacities which were lacking
to him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, "the wisest among
mortals and gods." The savage and the barbarian, that he may take into
himself the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throbbing heart;
Jupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence
and her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse
meanings; these qualities were considered as belonging to woman.

But the process of assimilation took some time, if we may judge from
the rascally farce played upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed
and butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed the flesh which
he covered with the skin upon which he deposited the entrails; in
another pile he put the bare bones which he adroitly concealed under
heaps of fat. "You have divided the parts very badly," said the father
of gods and men. "Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of living gods,
take the part that your wisdom counsels you to choose," replied the
astute Prometheus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only to his
gluttony, laid both hands upon the heap of fat amid the laughter of
the Olympians; his wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones.
(Theogony 435 _et seq._) Such a farce would hardly have been played in
the Olympian heaven had it not been that on the earth similar tests had
been required to prove to the Father that his intellectual faculties
did not justify him in taking the place of the Mother in the leadership
of the family and the management of its property.

The higher position in the family and society, which man conquered
by brute force, while it compelled him to a mental activity to which
he was little accustomed, at the same time put at his disposal
opportunities for reflection and development which constantly
increased. Woman, "subdued," as the Greek expression has it, shut up in
the narrow circle of the family, the leadership of which had been taken
from her, and having little or no contact with the outside world, saw
on the contrary a great reduction of the means of development which
she had enjoyed, and to complete her subjection she was forbidden the
intellectual culture which was given to man. If in spite of these
fetters and these disadvantages, the disastrous effects of which cannot
be exaggerated, the brain of woman continued to evolve, it was because
woman's intelligence profited through the progress realized by the
masculine brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which
it has acquired; thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs
which are highly developed among the cocks, while in other varieties
they transmit to the males their exaggerated crests. "It is fortunate,"
says Darwin upon this point, "that the equal transmission of the
characteristics of both sexes has been a general rule in the whole
series of mammals, otherwise, it is probable that man would have become
as superior to woman in intellectual power as the peacock is to the
female in ornamental plumage." (Descent of Man—Sexual Selection, VIII
and XIX.)

But defects as well as valuable qualities are transmitted from one sex
to the other: if woman has profited by the brain-growth of man, he
has in his turn been retarded in his development by the sluggishness
in the development of woman's brain, produced by the reduction to the
smallest minimum of intellectual activity to which he has condemned
her. The breeders who seek the choicest results are as careful to
have irreproachable females as males; amateur cockfighters attach as
much importance to the selection of the pullets as to the cocks, they
produce only from those which are armed with spurs and which have the
fighting spirit. It may be said that humanity, since it emerged from
communism of the clan to live under the system of private property, has
been developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution
has been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex.
Man by systematically depriving woman of the means of development,
material and intellectual, has made of her a force retarding human
progress.

In fact if we study and compare the different periods of savagery
and barbarism, we cannot but observe the continuous and remarkable
progress in human mind, because women and men, exercising freely their
physical and mental faculties, contribute equally to the evolution of
the species; this has been retarded ever since humanity entered into
the period of civilization and private property, because then woman,
constrained and confined in her development, cannot contribute to
it in so effective a way. The senile stagnation in which China has
vegetated for more than a thousand years can only be attributed to
the degradation of woman, which has gone to the point of the cruel
mutilation of her feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely
in the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers from the degradation of
woman, since in spite of the extraordinary material progress of these
last two thousand years and the increasing and no less extraordinary
accumulation of human knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the
brain of the civilized modern exceeds in power and capacity that of
the Greeks of the classic epoch, which extends from the seventh to
the fourth century before the Christian era. It is certain that a
Victor Hugo, a Zola, or any university graduate or doctor has stored
in his brain an abundance of positive and diversified conceptions not
possessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Protagoras and Aristotle, but that
does not prove that his imagination and his intelligence, or that of
his contemporaries is more rich, more varied and more vast than that of
the generations of Ionia and Attica, who were the artificers of that
incomparable budding and blossoming of science, philosophy, literature
and art at which history marvels and who reveled in that subtle and
paradoxical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of which has not
again been seen. The sophists—Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato,
etc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of the spiritualistic
philosophy and many others besides: yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and
of Greece had emerged from barbarism only a few centuries before. Many
reasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but
the principal one is the subjection of woman.


IV.

Capitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to
which woman devoted herself in the gentile house, has levied into its
army of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the
wives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie,
in order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual
capacities has set aside the venerable and venerated axiom of masculine
ethics: "to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's
knowledge;" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the
rudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not
be forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine
brain, which the intellectuals had declared a "child's brain," was as
capable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction.
The abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the
first whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in
which they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities;
they are now attacking the experimental sciences (physiology, physics,
chemistry, applied mechanics, etc.), in America and Europe there arises
a throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the
inferiority of the conditions of development in which they have lived
since their first infancy.

As Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and
launched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit
her more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow
the economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised
to seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital,
endures the miseries of the free laborer and bears in addition her
chains of the past. Her economic misery is aggravated; instead of being
supported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still submits,
she is obliged to earn her living; and under the pretext that she has
fewer necessities than man, her labor is paid less; and when her
daily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in
the household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social
functions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery,
economic and physiologic. The social and economic condition of woman is
a danger for the reproduction of the species.

But this crushing and pitiful condition announces the end of her
servitude, which begins with the establishment of private property and
which can end only with its abolition. Civilized humanity, oppressed
by the mechanical mode of production, turns its face toward a society,
based on common property, in which woman, delivered from the economic,
legal and moral chains which bind her, may develop freely her physical
and intellectual faculties, as in the time of the communism of the
savages.

The savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity and successfully restrain
the circle of sexual relations, found no other means than to separate
the sexes; there are reasons for believing that the women took the
initiative in this separation, which the specialization of their
functions consolidated and emphasized. This was manifested socially by
religious ceremonials and secret languages peculiar to each set and
even by struggles;[39] and after having taken the character of violent
antagonism, it ended in the brutal subjection of woman, which still
survives although it is progressively attenuated in proportion as the
competition of the two sexes becomes more general and intense upon
the economic field. But the modern antagonism will not end with the
victory of one sex over the other, for it is one of the phenomena of
the struggle of labor against capital, which will find its solution in
the emancipation of the working class in which women as well as men are
incorporated.

The technique of production which tends to suppress the specialization
of trades and functions and to replace muscular effort by attention
and intellectual skill and which, the more it is perfected, mingles
and confounds man and woman the more in social labor, will prevent the
return of the conditions which in savage and barbarous nations had
maintained the separation of the sexes. Common property will put an end
to the economic antagonism of specialization.

But if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the end of female servitude
and of the antagonism of the sexes and to conceive for the human
species an era of incomparable bodily and mental progress, brought
about by women and men of a high development in muscle and brain, it is
impossible to foresee the sexual relations of free and equal women and
men who will not be united nor separated by sordid material interests
and by the gross ethics engendered by such interests. But if we may
judge by the present and the past, men, in whom the genetic passion
is more violent and more continuous than in women—the same phenomenon
is observed in the males and females of the whole animal series—will
be obliged to exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to
win their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, as Darwin has shown,
fulfilled an important role in the development of the animal species
and which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play this part in the
Indo-European races for about three thousand years, will again become
one of the most active factors in the perfecting of the human race.

Motherhood and love will permit women to regain the higher position
which she occupied in primitive societies, the memory of which has been
preserved by the legends and myths of the ancient religions.


FOOTNOTES:

[34] The dowry has played an important role in the history of woman:
at the beginning of the patriarchal period the husband buys her from
her father, who has to refund her purchase price if for any cause
whatever he repudiates her and sends her back to her family; later this
purchase price is returned to him and constitutes her dowry, which
her relatives are accustomed to double. From the moment when the wife
enters into her husband's house with a dowry, she ceases to be a slave
whom he may dismiss, sell and kill. The dowry, which in Rome and Athens
became a legal charge upon the property of the husband, was, in case
of her repudiation or divorce, to be restored to her in preference to
any creditor. "No pleasure is derived from the riches which a woman
brings into the household," says a fragment of Euripides, "they only
serve to render divorce difficult." The comic authors ridiculed the
husbands, who in fear of a suit over the dowry, fell into dependence
upon the wife. A character in Plautus says to a husband who is talking
against his wife, "You accepted the money of her dowry, you sold your
authority—imperium." The wealthy Roman matrons carried their insolence
to such a point that they did not trust the management of their dowry
to their husbands, they gave it over to the stewards, who sometimes
fulfilled with them another service, as the evil-speaking Martial
states.

Adultery on the part of the wife involved a legal divorce and the
restitution of the dowry, but rather than come to this painful
extremity, the husbands preferred to close their eyes to the foibles
of their wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike at them
in order to recall them to their marital dignity; in China a certain
number of bamboo strokes were applied to the soles of their feet. The
penalties not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to repudiate
their adulterous wives, the law, in order to prop up masculine virtue,
permitted those who denounced the infidelity of the wife to retain a
part of the dowry; there were then men who married only in prospect
of the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded the law by having
themselves enrolled in the censor's book on the list of prostitutes,
to whom it did not apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so
considerable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a decree forbidding
"women who had a patrician for a grandfather, husband or father to
traffic in their bodies." (Tacitus, Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the
part of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, as well as
in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, had become so
general that it had so to speak entered into the social customs. It was
looked upon lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of marriage.

[35] The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that the religion of
Saint Simon had come "to put an end to that shameful traffic, that
legal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses
the monstrous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and of
ignorance, of youth and decrepitude."

[36] The French companies make no differences between the sexes because
they pay very small annuities. La Génerale, the most important one in
France, gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of $64.20;
at 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 years $134.70. Thus
it realizes immense profits: its shares which in 1819 were worth 750
francs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs.

[37] E. Legou. "Some Considerations on the Development of the Foetus."
Paris. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for
official use.

[38] The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the
fertilized eggs would give birth to females and to workers; and the
nonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from eggs that
are less complex.

[39] A. W. Howit, who observed among the Australians a species of
sexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of
one and the same clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem
for one sex is killed by the other sex.




THE SOCIALIST IDEAL


Our comrades in Germany were discussing some time since the question
whether Socialism is a science. Socialism is not and cannot be a
science for the simple reason that it is a political party and must
disappear when its work is accomplished after the abolition of the
classes which gave birth to it; but the end which it pursues is
scientific.

Guizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of the class
struggle—himself a product of the Revolution, which was a dramatic
struggle between classes—said with good reason that a class cannot
emancipate itself until it possesses the qualities requisite for taking
the leadership of society; now one of these qualities is to have a
more or less definite conception of the social order which it proposes
to substitute for that which is oppressing it. This conception cannot
but be a social ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social
hypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the natural sciences as in
social science, may be utopian or scientific.

Socialism, because it is a political party of the oppressed class,
has therefore an ideal. It groups and organizes the efforts of the
individuals who wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, based
upon individual property, an ideal or hypothetical society based upon
common property in the means of production.

Only through the class struggle can modern socialism realize its
social ideal, which possesses the qualities demanded of any hypothesis
that claims a scientific character. The fact of choosing a scientific
goal, and of trying to reach it only through the class struggle,
distinguishes it from the Socialism of 1848, which was pursuing through
the reconciliation of classes a social ideal which could not but be
utopian considering the historic moment in which it was conceived.
Socialism has thus evolved from Utopia into science. Engels has traced
the main lines of this evolution in his memorable pamphlet, "Socialism,
Utopian and Scientific." It is the same with all sciences, which begin
with Utopia to arrive at positive knowledge; this course is imposed by
the very nature of the human mind.

Man progresses in social life as in intellectual life, only by starting
from the known and traveling toward the unknown, and that unknown must
be represented by the imagination; that imaginary conception of the
unknown, which cannot but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful
incentives to action, it is the very condition of every forward
step. It is natural that men like Bernstein in Germany and Jaurès in
France should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put it in tow of
liberalism, accusing it of hypnotising its soldiers with an ideal of
the year 3000, which makes them live in the expectation of a Messianic
"catastrophe" and reject the immediate advantages of an understanding
and co-operation with bourgeois parties, and which blinds them to
their shocking errors regarding the concentration of wealth, the
disappearance of small industry and the middle class, the increase of
class antagonisms, the spreading and intensification of the misery of
the working class, etc. These errors may have been plausible hypotheses
before 1848, but since then events have shown their falsity. This
unfortunate ideal prevents them from descending from the revolutionary
heights to accept the responsibilities of power and of setting aside
the cause of labor to devote themselves entirely tongue and pen, to
the rehabilitation of a millionaire leader; it obliges them to oppose
all exterior policies and acts, to vote not a cent nor a soldier for
colonial expeditions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis and the
alcoholism of civilization to the barbaric tribes. The neo-methodists
of the ancient and outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes advise
the socialists to suppress their ideal, or, since it unfortunately
captivates the masses of the people, to speak of it without caring
for it, as Jaurès does, that they may consecrate themselves to
practical necessities, to the vast plans of agricultural and industrial
co-operation, to popular universities, etc.

The dilettantes of politics, these practical groundlings of
opportunism, nevertheless hold themselves up for transcendent idealists
and march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, because they substitute
for ideas a brilliant orchestra of sonorous words and eternal
principles.

These bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the
Revolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses
and their theories; according to them science should have stopped with
the study of facts in themselves without dreaming of uniting them into
a general system. "What is the use of cutting stones without putting
up a building," replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple
of Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his theory on the
continuity of species, which, only thirty years after his death, was
to take on a new birth with Darwin. They are still reproaching the
physiologists for wasting their time in elaborating hypotheses which
last on an average only three years and which cannot explain what
takes place in a muscle which contracts and in a brain which thinks.
They grumble against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do not know
the real nature of elasticity, of electrical conductivity, or even
what happens when a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like
to prohibit scientists from any speculation because it is disastrous
and may lead into error. But the latter protest and declare that
imagination is one of the first and most indispensable faculties of
the scientist, and that the hypotheses to which they give birth, even
though they be erroneous and able to survive only three years, are
nevertheless the necessary condition of all scientific progress.

If the communist ideal were an hypothesis undemonstrable and false it
would still be a propelling force of social progress, but such is not
the case.

The hypothesis in science, as in the social field, is the more
undemonstrable and susceptible of error in proportion as the data
contributing to its elaboration are less numerous and more uncertain.
Greek science, which had to furnish a conception of the world when the
data regarding the phenomena of nature were of the most rudimentary,
was obliged to resort to hypotheses which for boldness and intuitive
accuracy are marvels of history and of thought; after having admitted,
according to the vulgar opinion, that the earth was flat, and that
the temple of Delphi was situated at its center, they put forth the
hypothesis of its spherical form, then undemonstrable.

Socialism, which dates from the first years of the nineteenth century,
started, like Greek science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, and
from ideal the more utopian, in that the social world which it proposed
to transform was less known; and at that epoch could not be known for
the excellent reason that it was in course of formation.

The machine operated by steam was beginning to edge into industry
where the tool, managed by the artisan, was moved by human power,
and in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or waterfalls. The
Socialist thinkers, as Engels observes, were then obliged to draw from
their own brain the social ideal which they could not extract from the
tumultuous economic environment in full course of transformation.
They grasped again, infusing new life into it, the communist ideal
which has slumbered in the mind of man since he emerged from the
communism of primitive society which the poetic Greek mythology calls
the golden age and which has awakened to shine here and there with a
glorious splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. They sought,
then, to establish communism, not because the economic environment
was ready for its introduction, but because men were miserable,
because the laws of justice and equality were violated, because the
precepts of the Christ could not be followed in their purity. The
communistic ideal, not springing from economic reality, was then but
an unconscious reminiscence of a prehistoric past, and came only
from idealistic notions upon a justice, an equality and a gospel law
no less idealistic; it is then idealistic in the second degree, and
consequently utopian.

The Socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, who
rekindled the communist ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a
consistency less idealistic. They spoke little of the Christian
religion, of justice and of equality; Robert Owen laid the
responsibilities of social evils upon the family, property and
religion; Charles Fourier criticises the ideas of justice and morality
introduced by the bourgeois Revolution of '89 with incomparable
animation and irony. They did not weep over the misery of the poor,
but left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans of romanticism. They
preached the social problem from its realistic side, the only side
from which it can be solved. They used their talents to prove that
a social organization of production would succeed in satisfying the
desires of all without reducing the share of any, not even that of the
privileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the recent application of steam
and machinery demanded also a new organization of labor, and this was
the constant concern of the industrial bourgeoisie. The socialists were
thus pursuing the same end as the industrials; bourgeois and socialists
might consequently come to an understanding. We therefore find in the
socialist sects of that epoch industrials, engineers and financiers
who in the second half of the century cast away their sympathy for the
workers and occupied an important place in capitalist society.

The socialism of that epoch could not under these conditions be
anything else than pacific; instead of entering on the struggle with
the capitalists, the socialists thought only of converting them to
their system of social reform from which they were to be the first to
benefit. They proclaimed the association of capital, intelligence and
labor, the interests of which, according to them, were identical! they
preached a mutual understanding between the employer and the employed,
between the exploiter and the exploited; they know no class struggle;
they condemned strikes and all political agitation, especially if it
were revolutionary; they desired order in the street and harmony in the
workshop. They demanded, finally, nothing more than was desired by the
new industrial bourgeoisie.

They foresaw that industry, strengthened by the motive power of steam,
machinery and the concentration of the instruments of labor, would have
a colossal producing power, and they had the simplicity to believe that
the capitalists would content themselves with taking only a reasonable
part of the wealth thus created, and would leave to their co-operators,
the manual and intellectual laborers, a portion sufficient to enable
them to live in comfort. This socialism was marvellously agreeable
to capital, since it promised an increase of wealth and advised an
understanding between the laborer and the employer. It recruited
the great majority of its adepts in the educational hotbeds of the
bourgeoisie. It was utopian, therefore it was the socialism of the
intellectuals.

But precisely because it was utopian, the laborers, in constant
antagonism with their employers on questions of labor and hours,
looked on it with suspicion. They could understand nothing of this
socialism which condemned strikes and political action and which
assumed to harmonize the interests of capital and labor, of the
exploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from the socialists and gave
all their sympathies to the bourgeois republicans, because they were
revolutionary. They joined their secret societies and climbed with them
upon the barricades to make riots and political revolutions.

Marx and Engels took socialism at the point to which the great utopians
had brought it, but instead of torturing their brains to improvise the
organization of labor and of production, they studied that which was
already created by the very necessities of the new mechanical industry
which had arrived at a degree of development sufficient to permit
its power and its tendency to be apparent. Its productivity was so
enormous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, that it was capable
of providing abundantly for the normal needs of all the members of
society. This was the first time in history that such a productive
power had been observed, and it was because capitalist production could
satisfy all needs, and for that reason alone, that it is possible to
reintroduce communism, that is to say the equal participation of all in
social wealth, and the free and complete development of the physical,
intellectual and moral faculties. Communism is no longer a utopia but a
possibility.

Machinery replaces the individualistic production of the small
industry, by the communistic production of the capitalistic factory,
but property in the means of labor has remained individual, as in the
time of the small industry. There is then a contradiction between the
individualistic mode of possession and the communist mode of production
and this contradiction translates itself into the antagonism between
the laborer and the capitalist employer. The producers, who form the
immense majority of the nation, no longer possess the instruments
of labor, the possession of which is centralized in the idle hands
of a decreasing minority. The social problem imposed by mechanical
production will be solved, as the social problems imposed by preceding
modes of production have been solved, by precipitating the evolution
begun by economic force, by finishing the expropriation of the
individual in the means of production, by giving to the communistic
mode of production the communistic mode of possession which it demands.

The communism of contemporary socialists no longer proceeds, like that
of former times, from the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it
proceeds from economic reality, it is the final goal of the economic
forces which, without attracting the attention of the capitalists and
their intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic mold of a new
society, the coming of which we only have to hasten. Communism, then,
is no longer a utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific ideal. It may be
added that never has the economic structure of any society been better
and more completely analyzed than capitalist society, and that never
was a social ideal conceived with such numerous and positive data as
the communist idea of modern socialism.

Although it is the economic forces which fashion men at the pleasure
and spur them to action, and although these constitute the mysterious
force determining the great currents of history which the Christians
attribute to God, and the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress,
to Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and other similar manitous,
worthy of savage tribes, they are nevertheless the product of human
activity. Man, who created them and brought them into the world, has
thus far let himself be guided by them; yet now that he has understood
their nature and grasped their tendency, he can act upon their
evolution. The socialists who are accused of being stricken by Oriental
fatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to
bring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms
like the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee before
its fundamental dogma, _laissez faire_, _laissez passer_, propose on
the contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been
subdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to
work misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their
ideal to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for the grace of
God, and the capitalists for wealth; they prepare, on the contrary,
to realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capitalist
class and to its sentiments of justice and humanity, but by fighting
it, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its
economic despotism.

Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence
a criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its
enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition
with that of the ruling class. The struggle is waged at first in
the ideological world before the physical shock of the revolutionary
battle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which
must be revolted against, for "the ideas of the ruling class are the
ideas of society," or these ideas are the intellectual reflection of
its material interests.

Thus, the wealth of the ruling class is produced by slave labor;
religion, ethics, philosophy and literature agree in authorizing
slavery. The ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes with his
curse the progeny of Ham, that it may furnish slaves. Aristotle, the
encyclopedic thinker of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are
predestined by nature and that no rights exist for them, for there
can be no rights except between equals. Euripides in his tragedies
preaches the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. Augustine and
the Church teach slaves submission to their earthly masters that they
may deserve the favor of their heavenly master; Christian civilization
introduced slavery into America and maintains it there until economic
phenomena prove that slave labor is a method of exploitation more
costly and less profitable than free labor.

At the epoch when the Greco-Roman civilization was dissolving, when the
labor of artisans and free workers began to be substituted for slave
labor, pagan religion, philosophy and literature decided to accord them
certain rights. The same Euripides who advised the slave to lose his
personality in that of the master does not wish him to be despised.
"There is nothing shameful in slavery but the name," says the pedagogue
in Ion, "the slave, moreover, is not inferior to the free man when
he has a noble heart." The mysteries of Eleusis and of Orphism, like
Christianity, which continues their work, admit slaves among their
initiated and promise them liberty, equality and happiness after death.

The dominating class of the Middle Ages being military, the Christian
religion and social ethics condemned lending money at interest, and
covered the lender with infamy; to take interest for money loaned
was then something so ignominious that the Jewish race, obliged to
specialize itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame of it.
But today, now that the Christians have become Jews, and the ruling
class lives on the interest of its capital, the trade of the lender at
interest is the most honorable, the most desirable, the most exclusive.

The oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class
is imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and
political ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and
secret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the
oppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness
of its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its
emancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society
opposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.

The economic conditions in which the bourgeois moves and evolves make
of it a class essentially religious. Christianity is its work and will
last as long as this class shall rule society. Seven or eight centuries
before Christ, when the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial
and industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, we may observe the
elaboration of a new religion; the gods of paganism created by warrior
tribes could not be suited to a class consecrated to the production
and sale of merchandise. Mysterious cults (the mysteries of the
Cabiri, of Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religious traditions
of the prehistoric matriarchical period; the idea of a soul and its
existence after death revive; the idea of posthumous punishments and
rewards to compensate for acts of social injustice are introduced,
etc. These religious elements, combined with the intellectual data of
Greek philosophy, contribute to form Christianity, the religion, _par
excellence_, of societies which have for their foundation property
belonging to the individual and the class which enrich themselves by
the exploitation of wage labor. For fifteen centuries all the movements
of the bourgeoisie, either for organization, or for self-emancipation,
or for the acquisition of power have been accompanied and complicated
by religious crises; but always Christianity more or less modified
remains the religion of society. The revolutionists of 1789, who in the
ardor of the struggle promised themselves to de-Christianize France,
were eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious to raise again the
altars they had overthrown and to reintroduce the cult that they had
proscribed.

The economic environment which produces the proletariat relieves
it on the contrary from every idea of sentiment. There is not seen
either in Europe nor in America among the laboring masses of the great
industries any anxiety to elaborate a religion to replace Christianity,
nor any desire to reform it. The economic and political organizations
of the working class are completely uninterested as to any doctrinal
discussion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although they combat the
priests of all cults because they are the lackeys of the capitalist
class.

The victory of the proletariat will deliver humanity from the nightmare
of religion. The belief in superior beings to explain the natural
world and the social inequality, and to prolong the dominion of the
ruling class, and the belief in the posthumous existence of the soul
to recompense the inequality of fate will have no more justification
once man, who has already grasped the general causes of the phenomena
of nature, shall live in a communist society from whence shall have
disappeared the inequality and the injustice of capitalistic society.

The militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists
of the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the
economic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious
ideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres
of thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat
introduces into the world.




THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN


Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the
metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely
and more firmly to his economic duty.

"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to
earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free
to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you
ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till
you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough
strength left to gulp down your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You
have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the
right to pay taxes."

Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity, but
they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds
call "lower."

Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too
great a task to go through the long list of its benefactions; I will
name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the
passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.

Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys
so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes
which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were
not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they
would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub
down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their
excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.

Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they
exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a
coupon-clipper's contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed
the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover,
timothy and other succulent plants.

These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social
influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their
brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with
their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid
perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords
consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand
men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the
broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their
feats of running and leaping. They respect none of the social dignities
before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence.
At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize
launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the
looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an
apology and withdrew.

It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic
ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been
corrupted by their high social station: had they taken it into their
heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate
luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and
drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more
overwhelming drudgery would be impending over the class of wage-workers.

Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine
aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh,
like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India
to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been
man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have
built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out
and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their
anthropophagic tastes.

The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their
peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the
aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights
that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of
Man."

The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society
will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.

The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins
to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has
scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country
to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to
suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow,
in which he gambols until he is grown.

The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would
be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest
in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before
and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means
to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics
of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable
abomination—to demand for babies the rights of colts.

As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little
toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of
capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is
taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work, and
their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.

This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their
lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois
press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and
tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the
unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of
the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies
for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be
excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the
bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross
egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without
his heart being torn by it.

This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen
to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to
seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate
from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the
entertainment of a quadruped than for paying the wages of a biped. It
has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of
the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to
assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his
death.

The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten
rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the
consciousness of all men.

The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights,
with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that
he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of
lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality,
to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about
as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.

Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself
indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons,
pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in
the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by
wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when
the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on
the tender grass of the mountains.

The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not
again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents
Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a
weary lamb.

True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only
the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of
the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since
our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation
in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at
least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the
sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop
and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.

Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty
in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the
buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand
for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.




THE END.




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  │ Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.      │
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End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Right to be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue

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