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Title: The Conquest of Bread

Author: kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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Most recently updated: December 21, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
CONQUEST OF BREAD ***

THE

Conquest of Bread

By PETER KROPOTKIN
Author of "Fields, Factories, and Workshops"
"The Memoirs of a Revolutionist," Etc.

New York
VANGUARD PRESS
MCMXXVI

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE MAN (1842-1921):
Prince Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin, revolutionary and scientist, was
descended from the old Russian nobility, but decided, at the age of thirty, to
throw in his lot with the social rebels not only of his own country, but of the
entire world. He became the intellectual leader of Anarchist-Communism;
took part in the labor movement; wrote many books and pamphlets;
established Le Révolté in Geneva and Freedom in London; contributed to
the Encyclopedia Britannica; was twice imprisoned because of his radical
activities; and twice visited America. After the Bolshevist revolution he
returned to Russia, kept himself apart from Soviet activities, and died true
to his ideals.

THE BOOK:
The Conquest of Bread is a revolutionary idyl, a beautiful outline sketch of
a future society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. It is, in Kropotkin's
own words, "a study of the needs of humanity, and of the economic means
to satisfy them." Read in conjunction with the same author's "Fields,
Factories and Workshops," it meets all the difficulties of the social inquirer
who says: "The Anarchist ideal is alluring, but how could you work it out?"

CONTENTS
THE MAN (1842-1921)
THE BOOK
PREFACE
I. Our Riches
II. Well-Being for All
III. Anarchist Communism
IV. Expropriation
V. Food
VI. Dwellings
VII. Clothing
VIII. Ways and Means
IX. The Need for Luxury
X. Agreeable Work
XI. Free Agreement
XII. Objections
XIII. The Collectivist Wages System
XIV. Consumption and Production
XV. The Division of Labour
XVI. The Decentralization of Industry
XVII. Agriculture
Notes

PREFACE
One of the current objections to Communism, and Socialism altogether, is
that the idea is so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal
States haunted the thinkers of Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians
joined in communist groups; centuries later, large communist brotherhoods
came into existence during the Reform movement. Then, the same ideals
were revived during the great English and French Revolutions; and finally,
quite lately, in 1848, a revolution, inspired to a great extent with Socialist
ideals, took place in France. "And yet, you see," we are told, "how far away
is still the realization of your schemes. Don't you think that there is some
fundamental error in your understanding of human nature and its needs?"
At first sight this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we
consider human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first,
that hundreds of millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst
themselves, in their village communities, for many hundreds of years, one
of the main elements of Socialism—the common ownership of the chief
instrument of production, the land, and the apportionment of the same
according to the labour capacities of the different families; and we learn that
if the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western
Europe, it was not from within, but from without, by the governments
which created a land monopoly in favour of the nobility and the middle
classes. We learn, moreover, that the medieval cities succeeded in
maintaining in their midst, for several centuries in succession, a certain
socialized organization of production and trade; that these centuries were
periods of a rapid intellectual, industrial, and artistic progress; while the
decay of these communal institutions came mainly from the incapacity of
men of combining the village with the city, the peasant with the citizen, so
as jointly to oppose the growth of the military states, which destroyed the
free cities.
The history of mankind, thus understood, does not offer, then, an argument
against Communism. It appears, on the contrary, as a succession of
endeavours to realize some sort of communist organization, endeavours

which were crowned here and there with a partial success of a certain
duration; and all we are authorized to conclude is, that mankind has not yet
found the proper form for combining, on communistic principles,
agriculture with a suddenly developed industry and a rapidly growing
international trade. The latter appears especially as a disturbing element,
since it is no longer individuals only, or cities, that enrich themselves by
distant commerce and export; but whole nations grow rich at the cost of
those nations which lag behind in their industrial development.
These conditions, which began to appear by the end of the eighteenth
century, took, however, their full development in the nineteenth century
only, after the Napoleonic wars came to an end. And modern Communism
has to take them into account.
It is now known that the French Revolution, apart from its political
significance, was an attempt made by the French people, in 1793 and 1794,
in three different directions more or less akin to Socialism. It was, first, the
equalization of fortunes, by means of an income tax and succession duties,
both heavily progressive, as also by a direct confiscation of the land in
order to sub-divide it, and by heavy war taxes levied upon the rich only. The
second attempt was a sort of Municipal Communism as regards the
consumption of some objects of first necessity, bought by the
municipalities, and sold by them at cost price. And the third attempt was to
introduce a wide national system of rationally established prices of all
commodities, for which the real cost of production and moderate trade
profits had to be taken into account. The Convention worked hard at this
scheme, and had nearly completed its work, when reaction took the upper
hand.
It was during this remarkable movement, which has never yet been properly
studied, that modern Socialism was born—Fourierism with L'Ange, at
Lyons, and authoritarian Communism with Buonarroti, Babeuf, and their
comrades. And it was immediately after the Great Revolution that the three
great theoretical founders of modern Socialism—Fourier, Saint Simon, and
Robert Owen, as well as Godwin (the No-State Socialism)—came forward;
while the secret communist societies, originated from those of Buonarroti
and Babeuf, gave their stamp to militant, authoritarian Communism for the
next fifty years.

To be correct, then, we must say that modern Socialism is not yet a hundred
years old, and that, for the first half of these hundred years, two nations
only, which stood at the head of the industrial movement, i.e., Britain and
France, took part in its elaboration. Both—bleeding at that time from the
terrible wounds inflicted upon them by fifteen years of Napoleonic wars,
and both enveloped in the great European reaction that had come from the
East.
In fact, it was only after the Revolution of July, 1830, in France, and the
Reform movement of 1830-1832 in this country, had begun to shake off that
terrible reaction, that the discussion of Socialism became possible for a few
years before the revolution of 1848. And it was during those years that the
aspirations of Fourier, St. Simon, and Robert Owen, worked out by their
followers, took a definite shape, and the different schools of Socialism
which exist nowadays were defined.
In Britain, Robert Owen and his followers worked out their schemes of
communist villages, agricultural and industrial at the same time; immense
co-operative associations were started for creating with their dividends
more communist colonies; and the Great Consolidated Trades' Union was
founded—the forerunner of both the Labour Parties of our days and the
International Working-men's Association.
In France, the Fourierist Considérant issued his remarkable manifesto,
which contains, beautifully developed, all the theoretical considerations
upon the growth of Capitalism, which are now described as "Scientific
Socialism." Proudhon worked out his idea of Anarchism and Mutualism,
without State interference. Louis Blanc published his Organization of
Labour, which became later on the programme of Lassalle. Vidal in France
and Lorenz Stein in Germany further developed, in two remarkable works,
published in 1846 and 1847 respectively, the theoretical conceptions of
Considérant; and finally Vidal, and especially Pecqueur, developed in detail
the system of Collectivism, which the former wanted the National
Assembly of 1848 to vote in the shape of laws.
However, there is one feature, common to all Socialist schemes of that
period, which must be noted. The three great founders of Socialism who
wrote at the dawn of the nineteenth century were so entranced by the wide

horizons which it opened before them, that they looked upon it as a new
revelation, and upon themselves as upon the founders of a new religion.
Socialism had to be a religion, and they had to regulate its march, as the
heads of a new church. Besides, writing during the period of reaction which
had followed the French Revolution, and seeing more its failures than its
successes, they did not trust the masses, and they did not appeal to them for
bringing about the changes which they thought necessary. They put their
faith, on the contrary, into some great ruler, some Socialist Napoleon. He
would understand the new revelation; he would be convinced of its
desirability by the successful experiments of their phalansteries, or
associations; and he would peacefully accomplish by his own authority the
revolution which would bring well-being and happiness to mankind. A
military genius, Napoleon, had just been ruling Europe. Why should not a
social genius come forward, carry Europe with him and translate the new
Gospel into life? That faith was rooted very deep, and it stood for a long
time in the way of Socialism; its traces are even seen amongst us, down to
the present day.
It was only during the years 1840-48, when the approach of the Revolution
was felt everywhere, and the proletarians were beginning to plant the
banner of Socialism on the barricades, that faith in the people began to enter
once more the hearts of the social schemers: faith, on the one side, in
Republican Democracy, and on the other side in free association, in the
organizing powers of the working-men themselves.
But then came the Revolution of February, 1848, the middle-class Republic,
and—with it, shattered hopes. Four months only after the proclamation of
the Republic, the June insurrection of the Paris proletarians broke out, and it
was crushed in blood. The wholesale shooting of the working-men, the
mass deportations to New Guinea, and finally the Napoleonian coup d'êtat
followed. The Socialists were prosecuted with fury, and the weeding out
was so terrible and so thorough that for the next twelve or fifteen years the
very traces of Socialism disappeared; its literature vanished so completely
that even names, once so familiar before 1848, were entirely forgotten;
ideas which were then current—the stock ideas of the Socialists before
1848—were so wiped out as to be taken, later on, by our generation, for
new discoveries.

However, when a new revival began, about 1866, when Communism and
Collectivism once more came forward, it appeared that the conception as to
the means of their realization had undergone a deep change. The old faith in
Political Democracy was dying out, and the first principles upon which the
Paris working-men agreed with the British trade-unionists and Owenites,
when they met in 1862 and 1864, at London, was that "the emancipation of
the working-men must be accomplished by the working-men themselves."
Upon another point they also were agreed. It was that the labour unions
themselves would have to get hold of the instruments of production, and
organize production themselves. The French idea of the Fourierist and
Mutualist "Association" thus joined hands with Robert Owen's idea of "The
Great Consolidated Trades' Union," which was extended now, so as to
become an International Working-men's Association.
Again this new revival of Socialism lasted but a few years. Soon came the
war of 1870-71, the uprising of the Paris Commune—and again the free
development of Socialism was rendered impossible in France. But while
Germany accepted now from the hands of its German teachers, Marx and
Engels, the Socialism of the French "forty-eighters" that is, the Socialism of
Considérant and Louis Blanc, and the Collectivism of Pecqueur,—France
made a further step forward.
In March, 1871, Paris had proclaimed that henceforward it would not wait
for the retardatory portions of France: that it intended to start within its
Commune its own social development.
The movement was too short-lived to give any positive result. It remained
communalist only; it merely asserted the rights of the Commune to its full
autonomy. But the working-classes of the old International saw at once its
historical significance. They understood that the free commune would be
henceforth the medium in which the ideas of modern Socialism may come
to realization. The free agro-industrial communes, of which so much was
spoken in England and France before 1848, need not be small phalansteries,
or small communities of 2000 persons. They must be vast agglomerations,
like Paris, or, still better, small territories. These communes would federate
to constitute nations in some cases, even irrespectively of the present
national frontiers (like the Cinque Ports, or the Hansa). At the same time

large labour associations would come into existence for the inter-communal
service of the railways, the docks, and so on.
Such were the ideas which began vaguely to circulate after 1871 amongst
the thinking working-men, especially in the Latin countries. In some such
organization, the details of which life itself would settle, the labour circles
saw the medium through which Socialist forms of life could find a much
easier realization than through the seizure of all industrial property by the
State, and the State organization of agriculture and industry.
These are the ideas to which I have endeavoured to give a more or less
definite expression in this book.
Looking back now at the years that have passed since this book was written,
I can say in full conscience that its leading ideas must have been correct.
State Socialism has certainly made considerable progress. State railways,
State banking, and State trade in spirits have been introduced here and
there. But every step made in this direction, even though it resulted in the
cheapening of a given commodity, was found to be a new obstacle in the
struggle of the working-men for their emancipation. So that we find
growing amongst the working-men, especially in Western Europe, the idea
that even the working of such a vast national property as a railway-net
could be much better handled by a Federated Union of railway employés,
than by a State organization.
On the other side, we see that countless attempts have been made all over
Europe and America, the leading idea of which is, on the one side, to get
into the hands of the working-men themselves wide branches of production,
and, on the other side, to always widen in the cities the circles of the
functions which the city performs in the interest of its inhabitants. Trade-
unionism, with a growing tendency towards organizing the different trades
internationally, and of being not only an instrument for the improvement of
the conditions of labour, but also of becoming an organization which might,
at a given moment, take into its hands the management of production; Co-
operation, both for production and for distribution, both in industry and
agriculture, and attempts at combining both sorts of co-operation in
experimental colonies; and finally, the immensely varied field of the so-

called Municipal Socialism—these are the three directions in which the
greatest amount of creative power has been developed lately.
Of course, none of these may, in any degree, be taken as a substitute for
Communism, or even for Socialism, both of which imply the common
possession of the instruments of production. But we certainly must look at
all these attempts as upon experiments—like those which Owen, Fourier,
and Saint Simon tried in their colonies—experiments which prepare human
thought to conceive some of the practical forms in which a communist
society might find its expression. The synthesis of all these partial
experiments will have to be made some day by the constructive genius of
some one of the civilized nations. But samples of the bricks out of which
the great synthetic building will have to be built, and even samples of some
of its rooms, are being prepared by the immense effort of the constructive
genius of man.
Brighton.

January, 1913.

THE CONQUEST OF BREAD

CHAPTER I
OUR RICHES

I

The human race has travelled a long way, since those remote ages when
men fashioned their rude implements of flint and lived on the precarious
spoils of hunting, leaving to their children for their only heritage a shelter
beneath the rocks, some poor utensils—and Nature, vast, unknown, and
terrific, with whom they had to fight for their wretched existence.
During the long succession of agitated ages which have elapsed since,
mankind has nevertheless amassed untold treasures. It has cleared the land,
dried the marshes, hewn down forests, made roads, pierced mountains; it
has been building, inventing, observing, reasoning; it has created a complex
machinery, wrested her secrets from Nature, and finally it pressed steam
and electricity into its service. And the result is, that now the child of the
civilized man finds at its birth, ready for its use, an immense capital
accumulated by those who have gone before him. And this capital enables
man to acquire, merely by his own labour combined with the labour of
others, riches surpassing the dreams of the fairy tales of the Thousand and
One Nights.
The soil is cleared to a great extent, fit for the reception of the best seeds,
ready to give a rich return for the skill and labour spent upon it—a return
more than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The methods of rational
cultivation are known.
On the wide prairies of America each hundred men, with the aid of
powerful machinery, can produce in a few months enough wheat to
maintain ten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to
double his produce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he makes the
soil, gives to each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous
returns. While the hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square miles to

find food for his family, the civilized man supports his household, with far
less pains, and far more certainty, on a thousandth part of that space.
Climate is no longer an obstacle. When the sun fails, man replaces it by
artificial heat; and we see the coming of a time when artificial light also
will be used to stimulate vegetation. Meanwhile, by the use of glass and hot
water pipes, man renders a given space ten and fifty times more productive
than it was in its natural state.
The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With the co-
operation of those intelligent beings, modern machines—themselves the
fruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown—a hundred
men manufacture now the stuff to provide ten thousand persons with
clothing for two years. In well-managed coal mines the labour of a hundred
miners furnishes each year enough fuel to warm ten thousand families
under an inclement sky. And we have lately witnessed the spectacle of
wonderful cities springing up in a few months for international exhibitions,
without interrupting in the slightest degree the regular work of the nations.
And if in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our whole
social system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of our
ancestors profit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that mankind in
general, aided by the creatures of steel and iron which it already possesses,
could already procure an existence of wealth and ease for every one of its
members.
Truly, we are rich—far richer than we think; rich in what we already
possess, richer still in the possibilities of production of our actual
mechanical outfit; richest of all in what we might win from our soil, from
our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge, were
they but applied to bringing about the well-being of all.

II

In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why
this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman,
this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from
the past, and in spite of the powerful means of production, which could
ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily toil?

The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearyingly. Daily they reiterate
it, demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because
all that is necessary for production—the land, the mines, the highways,
machinery, food, shelter, education, knowledge—all have been seized by
the few in the course of that long story of robbery, enforced migration and
wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the life of the human
race before it had learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because,
taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few
appropriate to-day two-thirds of the products of human labour, and then
squander them in the most stupid and shameful way. It is because, having
reduced the masses to a point at which they have not the means of
subsistence for a month, or even for a week in advance, the few can allow
the many to work, only on the condition of themselves receiving the lion's
share. It is because these few prevent the remainder of men from producing
the things they need, and force them to produce, not the necessaries of life
for all, but whatever offers the greatest profits to the monopolists. In this is
the substance of all Socialism.
Take, indeed, a civilized country. The forests which once covered it have
been cleared, the marshes drained, the climate improved. It has been made
habitable. The soil, which bore formerly only a coarse vegetation, is
covered to-day with rich harvests. The rock-walls in the valleys are laid out
in terraces and covered with vines. The wild plants, which yielded nought
but acrid berries, or uneatable roots, have been transformed by generations
of culture into succulent vegetables or trees covered with delicious fruits.
Thousands of highways and railroads furrow the earth, and pierce the
mountains. The shriek of the engine is heard in the wild gorges of the Alps,
the Caucasus, and the Himalayas. The rivers have been made navigable; the
coasts, carefully surveyed, are easy of access; artificial harbours,
laboriously dug out and protected against the fury of the sea, afford shelter
to the ships. Deep shafts have been sunk in the rocks; labyrinths of
underground galleries have been dug out where coal may be raised or
minerals extracted. At the crossings of the highways great cities have
sprung up, and within their borders all the treasures of industry, science, and
art have been accumulated.
Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated
by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense

inheritance to our century.
For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to
drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood
of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several
races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil,
of the people's sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has
received its share of human blood.
The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the
pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each
prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's grave; and
who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in
unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage
of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?
The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which
have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one above
another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of public
buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the civilization of
the town, its industry, its special characteristics, have slowly grown and
ripened through the co-operation of generations of its inhabitants before it
could become what it is to-day. And even to-day, the value of each
dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the
accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is
only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men who
now inhabit that special corner of the globe. Each of the atoms composing
what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its value to the fact that it is a part
of the great whole. What would a London dockyard or a great Paris
warehouse be if they were not situated in these great centres of international
commerce? What would become of our mines, our factories, our
workshops, and our railways, without the immense quantities of
merchandise transported every day by sea and land?
Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which
we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the globe,
labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but
ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property,
born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and
unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of
each of these machines which embody the genius of man.
Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase
knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific
thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have
appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of
inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries.
They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and
mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn
their motive force from the environment.
The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to
launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But
men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science.
Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all
eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into
sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the
mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children
of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now
how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way.
The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea
remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up
like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that
might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has
revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled
workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine
to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered
more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the
very soul of modern industry.
Every machine has had the same history—a long record of sleepless nights
and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements
discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to
the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile
idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a

synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in
the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical
realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of
mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each
increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and
mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this
immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?

III

It has come about, however, in the course of the ages traversed by the
human race, that all that enables man to produce and to increase his power
of production has been seized by the few. Some time, perhaps, we will
relate how this came to pass. For the present let it suffice to state the fact
and analyze its consequences.
To-day the soil, which actually owes its value to the needs of an ever-
increasing population, belongs to a minority who prevent the people from
cultivating it—or do not allow them to cultivate it according to modern
methods.
The mines, though they represent the labour of several generations, and
derive their sole value from the requirements of the industry of a nation and
the density of the population—the mines also belong to the few; and these
few restrict the output of coal, or prevent it entirely, if they find more
profitable investments for their capital. Machinery, too, has become the
exclusive property of the few, and even when a machine incontestably
represents the improvements added to the original rough invention by three
or four generations of workers, it none the less belongs to a few owners.
And if the descendants of the very inventor who constructed the first
machine for lace-making, a century ago, were to present themselves to-day
in a lace factory at Bâle or Nottingham, and claim their rights, they would
be told: "Hands off! this machine is not yours," and they would be shot
down if they attempted to take possession of it.

The railways, which would be useless as so much old iron without the
teeming population of Europe, its industry, its commerce, and its marts,
belong to a few shareholders, ignorant perhaps of the whereabouts of the
lines of rails which yield them revenues greater than those of medieval
kings. And if the children of those who perished by thousands while
excavating the railway cuttings and tunnels were to assemble one day,
crowding in their rags and hunger, to demand bread from the shareholders,
they would be met with bayonets and grapeshot, to disperse them and
safeguard "vested interests."
In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life,
finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in
which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will
produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage.
His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this
mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of
their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the
world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it
is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and
another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied
upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the
middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve
his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work—though
not always even that—only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of
the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.
We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of
earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those
the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have
remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free
contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find
no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must
accept, or die of hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong
direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its
only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant

fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws
scores of thousands of workers on the streets.
The working people cannot purchase with their wages the wealth which
they have produced, and industry seeks foreign markets among the monied
classes of other nations. In the East, in Africa, everywhere, in Egypt, Tonkin
or the Congo, the European is thus bound to promote the growth of
serfdom. And so he does. But soon he finds that everywhere there are
similar competitors. All the nations evolve on the same lines, and wars,
perpetual wars, break out for the right of precedence in the market. Wars for
the possession of the East, wars for the empire of the sea, wars to impose
duties on imports and to dictate conditions to neighbouring states; wars
against those "blacks" who revolt! The roar of the cannon never ceases in
the world, whole races are massacred, the states of Europe spend a third of
their budgets in armaments; and we know how heavily these taxes fall on
the workers.
Education still remains the privilege of a small minority, for it is idle to talk
of education when the workman's child is forced, at the age of thirteen, to
go down into the mine or to help his father on the farm. It is idle to talk of
studying to the worker, who comes home in the evening wearied by
excessive toil, and its brutalizing atmosphere. Society is thus bound to
remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a
vain word. The Radical begins by demanding a greater extension of
political rights, but he soon sees that the breath of liberty leads to the
uplifting of the proletariat, and then he turns round, changes his opinions,
and reverts to repressive legislation and government by the sword.
A vast array of courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers is
needed to uphold these privileges; and this array gives rise in its turn to a
whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats and
corruption.
The system under which we live checks in its turn the growth of the social
sentiment. We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect,
without sympathy and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the
few races of animals living by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such

ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a
whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary.
Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should
share with those who have not, but he who would carry out this principle
would be speedily informed that these beautiful sentiments are all very well
in poetry, but not in practice. "To lie is to degrade and besmirch oneself,"
we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie. We accustom
ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced
morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves
with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the
civilized man.
But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth, or cease to exist.
Thus the consequences which spring from the original act of monopoly
spread through the whole of social life. Under pain of death, human
societies are forced to return to first principles: the means of production
being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective
property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable.
All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of
them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce
them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the
production of the world's wealth.
All things for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here
are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin
and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to
produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single
one of these machines and say: "This is mine; if you want to use it you must
pay me a tax on each of your products," any more than the feudal lord of
medieval times had the right to say to the peasant: "This hill, this meadow
belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap,
on every brick you build."
All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they
have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is
enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The

right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we
proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

CHAPTER II
WELL-BEING FOR ALL

I

Well-being for all is not a dream. It is possible, realizable, owing to all that
our ancestors have done to increase our powers of production.
We know, indeed, that the producers, although they constitute hardly one-
third of the inhabitants of civilized countries, even now produce such
quantities of goods that a certain degree of comfort could be brought to
every hearth. We know further that if all those who squander to-day the
fruits of others' toil were forced to employ their leisure in useful work, our
wealth would increase in proportion to the number of producers, and more.
Finally, we know that contrary to the theory enunciated by Malthus—that
Oracle of middle-class Economics—the productive powers of the human
race increase at a much more rapid ratio than its powers of reproduction.
The more thickly men are crowded on the soil, the more rapid is the growth
of their wealth-creating power.
Thus, although the population of England has only increased from 1844 to
1890 by 62 per cent., its production has grown, even at the lowest estimate,
at double that rate—to wit, by 130 per cent. In France, where the population
has grown more slowly, the increase in production is nevertheless very
rapid. Notwithstanding the crises through which agriculture is frequently
passing, notwithstanding State interference, the blood-tax (conscription),
and speculative commerce and finance, the production of wheat in France
has increased four-fold, and industrial production more than tenfold, in the
course of the last eighty years. In the United States this progress is still
more striking. In spite of immigration, or rather precisely because of the
influx of surplus European labour, the United States have multiplied their
wealth tenfold.

However, these figures give but a very faint idea of what our wealth might
become under better conditions. For alongside of the rapid development of
our wealth-producing powers we have an overwhelming increase in the
ranks of the idlers and middlemen. Instead of capital gradually
concentrating itself in a few hands, so that it would only be necessary for
the community to dispossess a few millionaires and enter upon its lawful
heritage—instead of this Socialist forecast proving true, the exact reverse is
coming to pass: the swarm of parasites is ever increasing.
In France there are not ten actual producers to every thirty inhabitants. The
whole agricultural wealth of the country is the work of less than seven
millions of men, and in the two great industries, mining and the textile
trades, you will find that the workers number less than two and one-half
millions. But the exploiters of labour, how many are they? In the United
Kingdom a little over one million workers—men, women, and children, are
employed in all the textile trades; less than nine hundred thousand work the
mines; much less than two million till the ground, and it appeared from the
last industrial census that only a little over four million men, women and
children were employed in all the industries.[1] So that the statisticians
have to exaggerate all the figures in order to establish a maximum of eight
million producers to forty-five million inhabitants. Strictly speaking the
creators of the goods exported from Britain to all the ends of the earth
comprise only from six to seven million workers. And what is the number
of the shareholders and middlemen who levy the first fruits of labour from
far and near, and heap up unearned gains by thrusting themselves between
the producer and the consumer?
Nor is this all. The owners of capital constantly reduce the output by
restraining production. We need not speak of the cartloads of oysters thrown
into the sea to prevent a dainty, hitherto reserved for the rich, from
becoming a food for the people. We need not speak of the thousand and one
luxuries—stuffs, foods, etc., etc.—treated after the same fashion as the
oysters. It is enough to remember the way in which the production of the
most necessary things is limited. Legions of miners are ready and willing to
dig out coal every day, and send it to those who are shivering with cold; but
too often a third, or even one-half, of their number are forbidden to work
more than three days a week, because, forsooth, the price of coal must be
kept up! Thousands of weavers are forbidden to work the looms, although

their wives and children go in rags, and although three-quarters of the
population of Europe have no clothing worthy the name.
Hundreds of blast-furnaces, thousands of factories periodically stand idle,
others only work half-time—and in every civilized nation there is a
permanent population of about two million individuals who ask only for
work, but to whom work is denied.
How gladly would these millions of men set to work to reclaim waste lands,
or to transform ill-cultivated land into fertile fields, rich in harvests! A year
of well-directed toil would suffice to multiply fivefold the produce of those
millions of acres in this country which lie idle now as "permanent pasture,"
or of those dry lands in the south of France which now yield only about
eight bushels of wheat per acre. But men, who would be happy to become
hardy pioneers in so many branches of wealth-producing activity, must
remain idle because the owners of the soil, the mines and the factories
prefer to invest their capital—taken in the first place from the community—
in Turkish or Egyptian bonds, or in Patagonian gold mines, and so make
Egyptian fellahs, Italian emigrants, and Chinese coolies their wage-slaves.
This is the direct and deliberate limitation of production; but there is also a
limitation indirect and not of set purpose, which consists in spending human
toil on objects absolutely useless, or destined only to satisfy the dull vanity
of the rich.
It is impossible to reckon in figures the extent to which wealth is restricted
indirectly, the extent to which energy is squandered, while it might have
served to produce, and above all to prepare the machinery necessary to
production. It is enough to cite the immense sums spent by Europe in
armaments, for the sole purpose of acquiring control of markets, and so
forcing her own goods on neighbouring territories, and making exploitation
easier at home; the millions paid every year to officials of all sorts, whose
function it is to maintain the "rights" of minorities—the right, that is, of a
few rich men—to manipulate the economic activities of the nation; the
millions spent on judges, prisons, policemen, and all the paraphernalia of
so-called justice—spent to no purpose, because we know that every
alleviation, however slight, of the wretchedness of our great cities is always
followed by a considerable diminution of crime; lastly, the millions spent

on propagating pernicious doctrines by means of the press, and news
"cooked" in the interest of this or that party, of this politician or of that
group of speculators.
But over and above this we must take into account all the labour that goes
to sheer waste,—here, in keeping up the stables, the kennels, and the retinue
of the rich; there, in pandering to the caprices of society and the depraved
tastes of the fashionable mob; there again, in forcing the consumer to buy
what he does not need, or foisting an inferior article upon him by means of
puffery, and in producing on the other hand wares which are absolutely
injurious, but profitable to the manufacturer. What is squandered in this
manner would be enough to double the production of useful things, or so to
plenish our mills and factories with machinery that they would soon flood
the shops with all that is now lacking to two-thirds of the nation. Under our
present system a full quarter of the producers in every nation are forced to
be idle for three or four months in the year, and the labour of another
quarter, if not of the half, has no better results than the amusement of the
rich or the exploitation of the public.
Thus, if we consider on the one hand the rapidity with which civilized
nations augment their powers of production, and on the other hand the
limits set to that production, be it directly or indirectly, by existing
conditions, we cannot but conclude that an economic system a trifle more
reasonable would permit them to heap up in a few years so many useful
products that they would be constrained to say—"Enough! We have enough
coal and bread and raiment! Let us rest and consider how best to use our
powers, how best to employ our leisure."
No, plenty for all is not a dream—though it was a dream indeed in those
days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat
from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the implements he used
in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a dream, because man has
invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few sacks of coal, gives him
the mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of setting
the most complicated machinery in motion.
But, if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital—cities,
houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education—must cease

to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his
pleasure.
This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our
ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of
men may gain from it the greatest good for all.
There must be Expropriation. The well-being of all—the end; expropriation
—the means.

II

Expropriation, such then is the problem which History has put before the
men of the twentieth century: the return to Communism in all that ministers
to the well-being of man.
But this problem cannot be solved by means of legislation. No one imagines
that. The poor, as well as the rich, understand that neither the existing
Governments, nor any which might arise out of possible political changes,
would be capable of finding such a solution. They feel the necessity of a
social revolution; and both rich and poor recognize that this revolution is
imminent, that it may break out in a few years.
A great change in thought has taken place during the last half of the
nineteenth century; but suppressed, as it was, by the propertied classes, and
denied its natural development, this new spirit must now break its bonds by
violence and realize itself in a revolution.
Whence will the revolution come? how will it announce its coming? No one
can answer these questions. The future is hidden. But those who watch and
think do not misinterpret the signs: workers and exploiters, Revolutionists
and Conservatives, thinkers and men of action, all feel that a revolution is at
our doors.
Well, then,—What are we going to do when the thunderbolt has fallen?
We have all been bent on studying the dramatic side of revolutions so much,
and the practical work of revolutions so little, that we are apt to see only the
stage effects, so to speak, of these great movements; the fight of the first

days; the barricades. But this fight, this first skirmish, is soon ended, and it
only after the breakdown of the old system that the real work of revolution
can be said to begin.
Effete and powerless, attacked on all sides, the old rulers are soon swept
away by the breath of insurrection. In a few days the middle-class
monarchy of 1848 was no more, and while Louis Philippe was making good
his escape in a cab, Paris had already forgotten her "citizen king." The
government of Thiers disappeared, on the 18th of March, 1871, in a few
hours, leaving Paris mistress of her destinies. Yet 1848 and 1871 were only
insurrections. Before a popular revolution the masters of "the old order"
disappear with a surprising rapidity. Its upholders fly the country, to plot in
safety elsewhere and to devise measures for their return.
The former Government having disappeared, the army, hesitating before the
tide of popular opinion, no longer obeys its commanders, who have also
prudently decamped. The troops stand by without interfering, or join the
rebels. The police, standing at ease, are uncertain whether to belabour the
crowd, or to cry: "Long live the Commune!" while some retire to their
quarters to "await the pleasure of the new Government." Wealthy citizens
pack their trunks and betake themselves to places of safety. The people
remain. This is how a revolution is ushered in.
In several large towns the Commune is proclaimed. In the streets wander
scores of thousands of men, and in the evening they crowd into improvised
clubs, asking: "What shall we do?" and ardently discuss public affairs. All
take an interest in them; those who yesterday were quite indifferent are
perhaps the most zealous. Everywhere there is plenty of good-will and a
keen desire to make victory certain. It is a time when acts of supreme
devotion are occurring. The masses of the people are full of the desire of
going forward.
All this is splendid, sublime; but still, it is not a revolution. Nay, it is only
now that the work of the revolutionist begins.
Doubtless there will be acts of vengeance. The Watrins and the Thomases
will pay the penalty of their unpopularity; but these are mere incidents of
the struggle—not the revolution.

Socialist politicians, radicals, neglected geniuses of journalism, stump
orators—both middle-class people and workmen—will hurry to the Town
Hall, to the Government offices, to take possession of the vacant seats.
Some will decorate themselves with gold and silver lace to their hearts'
content, admire themselves in ministerial mirrors, and study to give orders
with an air of importance appropriate to their new position. How could they
impress their comrades of the office or the workshop without having a red
sash, an embroidered cap, and magisterial gestures! Others will bury
themselves in official papers, trying, with the best of wills, to make head or
tail of them. They will indite laws and issue high-flown worded decrees that
nobody will take the trouble to carry out—because revolution has come.
To give themselves an authority which they have not they will seek the
sanction of old forms of Government. They will take the names of
"Provisional Government," "Committee of Public Safety," "Mayor,"
"Governor of the Town Hall," "Commissioner of Public Safety," and what
not. Elected or acclaimed, they will assemble in Boards or in Communal
Councils, where men of ten or twenty different schools will come together,
representing—not as many "private chapels," as it is often said, but as many
different conceptions regarding the scope, the bearing, and the goal of the
revolution. Possibilists, Collectivists, Radicals, Jacobins, Blanquists, will be
thrust together, and waste time in wordy warfare. Honest men will be
huddled together with the ambitious ones, whose only dream is power and
who spurn the crowd whence they are sprung. All coming together with
diametrically opposed views, all—forced to enter into ephemeral alliances,
in order to create majorities that can but last a day. Wrangling, calling each
other reactionaries, authoritarians, and rascals, incapable of coming to an
understanding on any serious measure, dragged into discussions about
trifles, producing nothing better than bombastic proclamations; all giving
themselves an awful importance while the real strength of the movement is
in the streets.
All this may please those who like the stage, but it is not revolution.
Nothing has been accomplished as yet.
And meanwhile the people suffer. The factories are idle, the workshops
closed; trade is at a standstill. The worker does not even earn the meagre
wage which was his before. Food goes up in price. With that heroic

devotion which has always characterized them, and which in great crises
reaches the sublime, the people will wait patiently. "We place these three
months of want at the service of the Republic," they said in 1848, while
"their representatives" and the gentlemen of the new Government, down to
the meanest Jack-in-office received their salary regularly.
The people suffer. With the childlike faith, with the good humour of the
masses who believe in their leaders, they think that "yonder," in the House,
in the Town Hall, in the Committee of Public Safety, their welfare is being
considered. But "yonder" they are discussing everything under the sun
except the welfare of the people. In 1793, while famine ravaged France and
crippled the Revolution; whilst the people were reduced to the depths of
misery, although the Champs Elysées were lined with luxurious carriages
where women displayed their jewels and splendour, Robespierre was urging
the Jacobins to discuss his treatise on the English Constitution. While the
worker was suffering in 1848 from the general stoppage of trade, the
Provisional Government and the National Assembly were wrangling over
military pensions and prison labour, without troubling how the people
managed to live during the terrible crisis. And could one cast a reproach at
the Paris Commune, which was born beneath the Prussian cannon, and
lasted only seventy days, it would be for this same error—this failure to
understand that the Revolution could not triumph unless those who fought
on its side were fed: that on fifteen pence a day a man cannot fight on the
ramparts and at the same time support a family.
The people will suffer and say: "How is a way out of these difficulties to be
found?"

III

It seems to us that there is only one answer to this question: We must
recognize, and loudly proclaim, that every one, whatever his grade in the
old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable, has, before
everything, THE RIGHT TO LIVE, and that society is bound to share amongst
all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal. We must
acknowledge this, and proclaim it aloud, and act up to it.

Affairs must be managed in such a way that from the first day of the
revolution the worker shall know that a new era is opening before him; that
henceforward none need crouch under the bridges, while palaces are hard
by, none need fast in the midst of plenty, none need perish with cold near
shops full of furs; that all is for all, in practice as well as in theory, and that
at last, for the first time in history, a revolution has been accomplished
which considers the NEEDS of the people before schooling them in their
DUTIES.

This cannot be brought about by Acts of Parliament, but only by taking
immediate and effective possession of all that is necessary to ensure the
well-being of all; this is the only really scientific way of going to work, the
only way which can be understood and desired by the mass of the people.
We must take possession, in the name of the people, of the granaries, the
shops full of clothing and the dwelling houses. Nothing must be wasted. We
must organize without delay a way to feed the hungry, to satisfy all wants,
to meet all needs, to produce not for the special benefit of this one or that
one, but so as to ensure to society as a whole its life and further
development.
Enough of ambiguous words like "the right to work," with which the people
were misled in 1848, and which are still resorted to with the hope of
misleading them. Let us have the courage to recognise that Well-being for
all, henceforward possible, must be realized.
When the workers claimed the right to work in 1848, national and
municipal workshops were organized, and workmen were sent to drudge
there at the rate of 1s. 8d. a day! When they asked the "Organization of
Labour," the reply was: "Patience, friends, the Government will see to it;
meantime here is your 1s. 8d. Rest now, brave toiler, after your life-long
struggle for food!" And in the meantime the cannons were overhauled, the
reserves called out, and the workers themselves disorganized by the many
methods well known to the middle classes, till one fine day, in June, 1848,
four months after the overthrow of the previous Government, they were told
to go and colonize Africa, or be shot down.
Very different will be the result if the workers claim the Right To Well-
being! In claiming that right they claim the right to take possession of the

wealth of the community—to take houses to dwell in according to the needs
of each family; to socialize the stores of food and learn the meaning of
plenty, after having known famine too well. They proclaim their right to all
social wealth—fruit of the labour of past and present generations—and
learn by its means to enjoy those higher pleasures of art and science which
have too long been monopolized by the rich.
And while asserting their right to live in comfort, they assert, what is still
more important, their right to decide for themselves what this comfort shall
be, what must be produced to ensure it, and what discarded as no longer of
value.
The "right to well-being" means the possibility of living like human beings,
and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours,
whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a
drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right
to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but
the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his
right to the common inheritance, and to enter into possession of it.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] 4,013,711 now employed in all the 53 branches of different industries,
including the State Ordnance Works, and 241,530 workers engaged in the
Construction and Maintenance of Railways, their aggregate production
reaching the value of £1,041,037,000, and the net output being
£406,799,000.

CHAPTER III
ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

I

Every society, on abolishing private property will be forced, we maintain, to
organize itself on the lines of Communistic Anarchy. Anarchy leads to
Communism, and Communism to Anarchy, both alike being expressions of
the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality.
Time was when a peasant family could consider the corn it sowed and
reaped, or the woolen garments woven in the cottage, as the products of its
own soil. But even then this way of looking at things was not quite correct.
There were the roads and the bridges made in common, the swamps drained
by common toil, the communal pastures enclosed by hedges which were
kept in repair by each and all. If the looms for weaving or the dyes for
colouring fabrics were improved by somebody, all profited; and even in
those days a peasant family could not live alone, but was dependent in a
thousand ways on the village or the commune.
But nowadays, in the present state of industry, when everything is
interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest,
the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of industry is
absolutely untenable. The astonishing perfection attained by the textile or
mining industries in civilized countries is due to the simultaneous
development of a thousand other industries, great and small, to the
extension of the railroad system, to inter-oceanic navigation, to the manual
skill of thousands of workers, to a certain standard of culture reached by the
working class as a whole—to the labours, in short, of men in every corner
of the globe.
The Italians who died of cholera while making the Suez Canal, or of
anchylosis in the St. Gothard Tunnel, and the Americans mowed down by
shot and shell while fighting for the abolition of slavery, have helped to

develop the cotton industry of France and England, as well as the work-girls
who languish in the factories of Manchester and Rouen, and the inventor
who (following the suggestion of some worker) succeeds in improving the
looms.
How then, shall we estimate the share of each in the riches which ALL
contribute to amass?
Looking at production from this general, synthetic point of view, we cannot
hold with the Collectivists that payment proportionate to the hours of labour
rendered by each would be an ideal arrangement, or even a step in the right
direction.
Without discussing whether exchange value of goods is really measured in
existing societies by the amount of work necessary to produce it—
according to the teaching of Adam Smith and Ricardo, in whose footsteps
Marx has followed—suffice it to say here, leaving ourselves free to return
to the subject later, that the Collectivist ideal appears to us untenable in a
society which considers the instruments of labour as a common inheritance.
Starting from this principle, such a society would find itself forced from the
very outset to abandon all forms of wages.
The migrated individualism of the Collectivist system certainly could not
maintain itself alongside a partial communism—the socialization of land
and the instruments of production. A new form of property requires a new
form of remuneration. A new method of production cannot exist side by
side with the old forms of consumption, any more than it can adapt itself to
the old forms of political organization.
The wage system arises out of the individual ownership of the land and the
instruments of labour. It was the necessary condition for the development of
capitalist production, and will perish with it, in spite of the attempt to
disguise it as "profit-sharing." The common possession of the instruments
of labour must necessarily bring with it the enjoyment in common of the
fruits of common labour.
We hold further that Communism is not only desirable, but that existing
societies, founded on Individualism, are inevitably impelled in the direction
of Communism. The development of Individualism during the last three

centuries is explained by the efforts of the individual to protect himself
from the tyranny of Capital and of the State. For a time he imagined, and
those who expressed his thought for him declared, that he could free
himself entirely from the State and from society. "By means of money," he
said, "I can buy all that I need." But the individual was on a wrong track,
and modern history has taught him to recognize that, without the help of all,
he can do nothing, although his strong-boxes are full of gold.
In fact, along this current of Individualism, we find in all modern history a
tendency, on the one hand to retain all that remains of the partial
Communism of antiquity, and, on the other, to establish the Communist
principle in the thousand developments of modern life.
As soon as the communes of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries had
succeeded in emancipating themselves from their lords, ecclesiastical or lay,
their communal labour and communal consumption began to extend and
develop rapidly. The township—and not private persons—freighted ships
and equipped expeditions, for the export of their manufacture, and the
benefit arising from the foreign trade did not accrue to individuals, but was
shared by all. At the outset, the townships also bought provisions for all
their citizens. Traces of these institutions have lingered on into the
nineteenth century, and the people piously cherish the memory of them in
their legends.
All that has disappeared. But the rural township still struggles to preserve
the last traces of this Communism, and it succeeds—except when the State
throws its heavy sword into the balance.
Meanwhile new organizations, based on the same principle—to every man
according to his needs—spring up under a thousand different forms; for
without a certain leaven of Communism the present societies could not
exist. In spite of the narrowly egoistic turn given to men's minds by the
commercial system, the tendency towards Communism is constantly
appearing, and it influences our activities in a variety of ways.
The bridges, for the use of which a toll was levied in the old days, have
become public property and are free to all; so are the high roads, except in
the East, where a toll is still exacted from the traveller for every mile of his
journey. Museums, free libraries, free schools, free meals for children; parks

and gardens open to all; streets paved and lighted, free to all; water supplied
to every house without measure or stint—all such arrangements are founded
on the principle: "Take what you need."
The tramways and railways have already introduced monthly and annual
season tickets, without limiting the number of journeys taken; and two
nations, Hungary and Russia, have introduced on their railways the zone
system, which permits the holder to travel five hundred or eight hundred
miles for the same price. It is but a short step from that to a uniform charge,
such as already prevails in the postal service. In all these innovations, and in
a thousand others, the tendency is not to measure the individual
consumption. One man wants to travel eight hundred miles, another five
hundred. These are personal requirements. There is no sufficient reason
why one should pay twice as much as the other because his need is twice as
great. Such are the signs which appear even now in our individualist
societies.
Moreover, there is a tendency, though still a feeble one, to consider the
needs of the individual, irrespective of his past or possible services to the
community. We are beginning to think of society as a whole, each part of
which is so intimately bound up with the others that a service rendered to
one is a service rendered to all.
When you go to a public library—not indeed the National Library of Paris,
but, say, into the British Museum or the Berlin Library—the librarian does
not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the
book, or the fifty books, which you require; he even comes to your
assistance if you do not know how to manage the catalogue. By means of
uniform credentials—and very often a contribution of work is preferred—
the scientific society opens its museums, its gardens, its library, its
laboratories, and its annual conversaziones to each of its members, whether
he be a Darwin, or a simple amateur.
At St. Petersburg, if you are elaborating an invention, you go into a special
laboratory, where you are given a place, a carpenter's bench, a turning lathe,
all the necessary tools and scientific instruments, provided only you know
how to use them; and you are allowed to work there as long as you please.
There are the tools; interest others in your idea; join with fellow workers

skilled in various crafts, or work alone if you prefer it. Invent a flying
machine, or invent nothing—that is your own affair. You are pursuing an
idea—that is enough.
In the same way, those who man the lifeboat do not ask credentials from the
crew of a sinking ship; they launch their boat, risk their lives in the raging
waves, and sometimes perish, all to save men whom they do not even know.
And what need to know them? "They are human beings, and they need our
aid—that is enough, that establishes their right—— To the rescue!"
Thus we find a tendency, eminently communistic, springing up on all sides,
and in various guises, in the very heart of theoretically individualist
societies.
Suppose that one of our great cities, so egotistic in ordinary times, were
visited to-morrow by some calamity—a siege, for instance—that same
selfish city would decide that the first needs to satisfy were those of the
children and the aged. Without asking what services they had rendered, or
were likely to render to society, it would first of all feed them. Then the
combatants would be cared for, irrespective of the courage or the
intelligence which each had displayed, and thousands of men and women
would outvie each other in unselfish devotion to the wounded.
This tendency exists, and is felt as soon as the most pressing needs of each
are satisfied, and in proportion as the productive power of the race
increases. It becomes an active force every time a great idea comes to oust
the mean preoccupations of everyday life.
How can we doubt, then, that when the instruments of production are
placed at the service of all, when business is conducted on Communist
principles, when labour, having recovered its place of honour in society,
produces much more than is necessary to all—how can we doubt that this
force (already so powerful), will enlarge its sphere of action till it becomes
the ruling principle of social life?
Following these indications, and considering further the practical side of
expropriation, of which we shall speak in the following chapters, we are
convinced that our first obligation, when the revolution shall have broken

the power upholding the present system, will be to realize Communism
without delay.
But ours is neither the Communism of Fourier and the Phalansteriens, nor
of the German State Socialists. It is Anarchist Communism, Communism
without government—the Communism of the Free. It is the synthesis of the
two ideals pursued by humanity throughout the ages—Economic and
Political Liberty.

II

In taking "Anarchy" for our ideal of political organization we are only
giving expression to another marked tendency of human progress.
Whenever European societies have developed up to a certain point, they
have shaken off the yoke of authority and substituted a system founded
more or less on the principles of individual liberty. And history shows us
that these periods of partial or general revolution, when the old
governments were overthrown, were also periods of sudden, progress both
in the economic and the intellectual field. So it was after the
enfranchisement of the communes, whose monuments, produced by the free
labour of the guilds, have never been surpassed; so it was after the great
peasant uprising which brought about the Reformation and imperilled the
papacy; and so it was again with the society, free for a brief space, which
was created on the other side of the Atlantic by the malcontents from the
Old world.
And, if we observe the present development of civilized nations, we see,
most unmistakably, a movement ever more and more marked tending to
limit the sphere of action of the Government, and to allow more and more
liberty to the individual. This evolution is going on before our eyes, though
cumbered by the ruins and rubbish of old institutions and old superstitions.
Like all evolutions, it only waits a revolution to overthrow the old obstacles
which block the way, that it may find free scope in a regenerated society.
After having striven long in vain to solve the insoluble problem—the
problem of constructing a government "which will constrain the individual
to obedience without itself ceasing to be the servant of society," men at last
attempt to free themselves from every form of government and to satisfy

their need for organization by free contacts between individuals and groups
pursuing the same aim. The independence of each small territorial unit
becomes a pressing need; mutual agreement replaces law in order to
regulate individual interests in view of a common object—very often
disregarding the frontiers of the present States.
All that was once looked on as a function of the Government is to-day
called in question. Things are arranged more easily and more satisfactorily
without the intervention of the State. And in studying the progress made in
this direction, we are led to conclude that the tendency of the human race is
to reduce Government interference to zero; in fact, to abolish the State, the
personification of injustice, oppression, and monopoly.
We can already catch glimpses of a world in which the bonds which bind
the individual are no longer laws, but social habits—the result of the need
felt by each one of us to seek the support, the co-operation, the sympathy of
his neighbours.
Assuredly the idea of a society without a State will give rise to at least as
many objections as the political economy of a society without private
capital. We have all been brought up from our childhood to regard the State
as a sort of Providence; all our education, the Roman history we learned at
school, the Byzantine code which we studied later under the name of
Roman law, and the various sciences taught at the universities, accustom us
to believe in Government and in the virtues of the State providential.
To maintain this superstition whole systems of philosophy have been
elaborated and taught; all politics are based on this principle; and each
politician, whatever his colours, comes forward and says to the people,
"Give my party the power; we can and we will free you from the miseries
which press so heavily upon you."
From the cradle to the grave all our actions are guided by this principle.
Open any book on sociology or jurisprudence, and you will find there the
Government, its organization, its acts, filling so large a place that we come
to believe that there is nothing outside the Government and the world of
statesmen.

The Press teaches us the same in every conceivable way. Whole columns
are devoted to parliamentary debates and to political intrigues; while the
vast everyday life of a nation appears only in the columns given to
economic subjects, or in the pages devoted to reports of police and law
cases. And when you read the newspapers, your hardly think of the
incalculable number of beings—all humanity, so to say—who grow up and
die, who know sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the
few encumbering personages who have been so magnified that humanity is
hidden by their shadows, enlarged by our ignorance.
And yet as soon as we pass from printed matter to life itself, as soon as we
throw a glance at society, we are struck by the infinitesimal part played by
the Government. Balzac already has remarked how millions of peasants
spend the whole of their lives without knowing anything about the State,
save the heavy taxes they are compelled to pay. Every day millions of
transactions are made without Government intervention, and the greatest of
them—those of commerce and of the Exchange—are carried on in such a
way that the Government could not be appealed to if one of the contracting
parties had the intention of not fulfilling his agreement. Should you speak to
a man who understands commerce, he will tell you that the everyday
business transacted by merchants would be absolutely impossible were it
not based on mutual confidence. The habit of keeping his word, the desire
not to lose his credit, amply suffice to maintain this relative honesty. The
man who does not feel the slightest remorse when poisoning his customers
with noxious drugs covered with pompous labels, thinks he is in honour
bound to keep his engagements. But if this relative morality has developed
under present conditions, when enrichment is the only incentive and the
only aim, can we doubt its rapid progress when appropriation of the fruits
of others' labour will no longer be the basis of society?
Another striking fact, which especially characterizes our generation, speaks
still more in favour of our ideas. It is the continual extension of the field of
enterprise due to private initiative, and the prodigious development of free
organizations of all kinds. We shall discuss this more at length in the
chapter devoted to Free Agreement. Suffice it to mention that the facts are
so numerous and so customary that they are the essence of the second half
of the nineteenth century, even though political and socialist writers ignore
them, always preferring to talk to us about the functions of the Government.

These organizations, free and infinitely varied, are so natural an outcome of
our civilization; they expand so rapidly and federate with so much ease;
they are so necessary a result of the continual growth of the needs of
civilized man; and lastly, they so advantageously replace governmental
interference, that we must recognize in them a factor of growing importance
in the life of societies. If they do not yet spread over the whole of the
manifestations of life, it is that they find an insurmountable obstacle in the
poverty of the worker, in the divisions of present society, in the private
appropriation of capital, and in the State. Abolish these obstacles, and you
will see them covering the immense field of civilized man's activity.
The history of the last fifty years furnishes a living proof that
Representative Government is impotent to discharge all the functions we
have sought to assign to it. In days to come the nineteenth century will be
quoted as having witnessed the failure of parliamentarianism.
This impotence is becoming so evident to all; the faults of
parliamentarianism, and the inherent vices of the representative principle,
are so self-evident, that the few thinkers who have made a critical study of
them (J. S. Mill, Leverdays), did but give literary form to the popular
dissatisfaction. It is not difficult, indeed, to see the absurdity of naming a
few men and saying to them, "Make laws regulating all our spheres of
activity, although not one of you knows anything about them!"
We are beginning to see that government by majorities means abandoning
all the affairs of the country to the tide-waiters who make up the majorities
in the House and in election committees; to those, in a word, who have no
opinion of their own.
Mankind is seeking and already finding new issues. The International Postal
Union, the railway unions, and the learned societies give us examples of
solutions based on free agreement in place and stead of law.
To-day, when groups scattered far and wide wish to organize themselves for
some object or other, they no longer elect an international parliament of
Jacks-of-all-trades. They proceed in a different way. Where it is not possible
to meet directly or come to an agreement by correspondence, delegates
versed in the question at issue are sent, and they are told: "Endeavour to
come to an agreement on such or such a question, and then return, not with

a law in your pocket, but with a proposition of agreement which we may or
may not accept."
Such is the method of the great industrial companies, the learned societies,
and numerous associations of every description, which already cover
Europe and the United States. And such will be the method of a free society.
A society founded on serfdom is in keeping with absolute monarchy; a
society based on the wage system and the exploitation of the masses by the
capitalists finds its political expression in parliamentarianism. But a free
society, regaining possession of the common inheritance, must seek in free
groups and free federations of groups, a new organization, in harmony with
the new economic phase of history.
Every economic phase has a political phase corresponding to it, and it
would be impossible to touch private property unless a new mode of
political life be found at the same time.

CHAPTER IV
EXPROPRIATION

I

It is told of Rothschild that, seeing his fortune threatened by the Revolution
of 1848, he hit upon the following stratagem: "I am quite willing to admit,"
said he, "that my fortune has been accumulated at the expense of others; but
if it were divided to-morrow among the millions of Europe, the share of
each would only amount to four shillings. Very well, then, I undertake to
render to each his four shillings if he asks me for it."
Having given due publicity to his promise, our millionaire proceeded as
usual to stroll quietly through the streets of Frankfort. Three or four passers-
by asked for their four shillings, which he disbursed with a sardonic smile.
His stratagem succeeded, and the family of the millionaire is still in
possession of its wealth.
It is in much the same fashion that the shrewed heads among the middle
classes reason when they say, "Ah, Expropriation! I know what that means.
You take all the overcoats and lay them in a heap, and every one is free to
help himself and fight for the best."
But such jests are irrelevant as well as flippant. What we want is not a
redistribution of overcoats, although it must be said that even in such a case,
the shivering folk would see advantage in it. Nor do we want to divide up
the wealth of the Rothschilds. What we do want is so to arrange things that
every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity, in
the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming
skilled in it; and next, that he shall be free to work at his trade without
asking leave of master or owner, and without handing over to landlord or
capitalist the lion's share of what he produces. As to the wealth held by the
Rothschilds or the Vanderbilts, it will serve us to organize our system of
communal production.

The day when the labourer may till the ground without paying away half of
what he produces, the day when the machines necessary to prepare the soil
for rich harvests are at the free disposal of the cultivators, the day when the
worker in the factory produces for the community and not the monopolist—
that day will see the workers clothed and fed, and there will be no more
Rothschilds or other exploiters.
No one will then have to sell his working power for a wage that only
represents a fraction of what he produces.
"So far, so good," say our critics, "but you will have Rothschilds coming in
from the outside. How are you to prevent a person from amassing millions
in China, and then settling amongst you? How are you going to prevent
such a one from surrounding himself with lackeys and wage-slaves—from
exploiting them and enriching himself at their expense?
"You cannot bring about a revolution all over the world at the same time.
Well, then—are you going to establish custom-houses on your frontiers to
search all who enter your country and confiscate the money they bring with
them?—Anarchist policemen firing on travellers would be a fine
spectacle!"
But at the root of this argument there is a great error. Those who propound
it have never paused to inquire whence come the fortunes of the rich. A
little thought would, however, suffice to show them that these fortunes have
their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any
destitute, there will no longer be any rich to exploit them.
Let us glance for a moment at the Middle Ages, when great fortunes began
to spring up.
A feudal baron seizes on a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is
empty of folk our baron is not rich. His land brings him in nothing; he
might as well possess a property in the moon.
What does our baron do to enrich himself? He looks out for peasants—for
poor peasants!
If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, if he
had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour—Who

would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after his own.
But there are thousands of destitute persons ruined by wars, or drought, or
pestilence. They have neither horse nor plough. (Iron was very costly in the
Middle Ages, and a draught-horse still more so.)
All these destitute creatures are trying to better their condition. One day
they see on the road at the confines of our baron's estate a notice-board
indicating by certain signs adapted to their comprehension that the labourer
who is willing to settle on his estate will receive the tools and materials to
build his cottage and sow his fields, and a portion of land rent free for a
certain number of years. The number of years is represented by so many
crosses on the sign-board, and the peasant understands the meaning of these
crosses.
So the poor wretches come to settle on the baron's lands. They make roads,
drain the marshes, build villages. In nine or ten years the baron begins to
tax them. Five years later he increases the rent. Then he doubles it, and the
peasant accepts these new conditions because he cannot find better ones
elsewhere. Little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the
poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord's wealth. And it is
not only the lord of the manor who preys upon him. A whole host of usurers
swoop down upon the villages, multiplying as the wretchedness of the
peasants increases. That is how these things happened in the Middle Ages.
And to-day is it not still the same thing? If there were free lands which the
peasant could cultivate if he pleased, would he pay £50 to some "shabble of
a Duke"[2] for condescending to sell him a scrap? Would he burden himself
with a lease which absorbed a third of the produce? Would he—on the
métayer system—consent to give half of his harvest to the landowner?
But he has nothing. So he will accept any conditions, if only he can keep
body and soul together, while he tills the soil and enriches the landlord.
So in the nineteenth century, just as in the Middle Ages, the poverty of the
peasant is a source of wealth to the landed proprietor.

II

The landlord owes his riches to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth
of the capitalist comes from the same source.
Take the case of a citizen of the middle class, who somehow or other finds
himself in possession of £20,000. He could, of course, spend his money at
the rate of £2,000 a year, a mere bagatelle in these days of fantastic,
senseless luxury. But then he would have nothing left at the end of ten
years. So, being a "practical person," he prefers to keep his fortune intact,
and win for himself a snug little annual income as well.
This is very easy in our society, for the good reason that the towns and
villages swarm with workers who have not the wherewithal to live for a
month, or even a fortnight. So our worthy citizen starts a factory. The banks
hasten to lend him another £20,000, especially if he has a reputation for
"business ability"; and with this round sum he can command the labour of
five hundred hands.
If all the men and women in the countryside had their daily bread assured,
and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at
a wage of half a crown a day, while the commodities one produces in a day
sell in the market for a crown or more?
Unhappily—we know it all too well—the poor quarters of our towns and
the neighbouring villages are full of needy wretches, whose children
clamour for bread. So, before the factory is well finished, the workers
hasten to offer themselves. Where a hundred are required three hundred
besiege the doors, and from the time his mill is started, the owner, if he only
has average business capacities, will clear £40 a year out of each mill-hand
he employs.
He is thus able to lay by a snug little fortune; and if he chooses a lucrative
trade, and has "business talents," he will soon increase his income by
doubling the number of men he exploits.
So he becomes a personage of importance. He can afford to give dinners to
other personages—to the local magnates, the civic, legal, and political
dignitaries. With his money he can "marry money"; by and by he may pick
and choose places for his children, and later on perhaps get something good
from the Government—a contract for the army or for the police. His gold

breeds gold; till at last a war, or even a rumour of war, or a speculation on
the Stock Exchange, gives him his great opportunity.
Nine-tenths of the great fortunes made in the United States are (as Henry
George has shown in his "Social Problems") the result of knavery on a large
scale, assisted by the State. In Europe, nine-tenths of the fortunes made in
our monarchies and republics have the same origin. There are not two ways
of becoming a millionaire.
This is the secret of wealth: find the starving and destitute, pay them half a
crown, and make them produce five shillings worth in the day, amass a
fortune by these means, and then increase it by some lucky speculation,
made with the help of the State.
Need we go on to speak of small fortunes attributed by the economists to
forethought and frugality, when we know that mere saving in itself brings in
nothing, so long as the pence saved are not used to exploit the famishing?
Take a shoemaker, for instance. Grant that his work is well paid, that he has
plenty of custom, and that by dint of strict frugality he contrives to lay by
from eighteen pence to two shillings a day, perhaps two pounds a month.
Grant that our shoemaker is never ill, that he does not half starve himself, in
spite of his passion for economy; that he does not marry or that he has no
children; that he does not die of consumption; suppose anything and
everything you please!
Well, at the age of fifty he will not have scraped together £800; and he will
not have enough to live on during his old age, when he is past work.
Assuredly this is not how fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker, as
soon as he has laid by a few pence, thriftily conveys them to the savings
bank and that the savings bank lends them to the capitalist who is just about
to "employ labour," i.e., to exploit the poor. Then our shoemaker takes an
apprentice, the child of some poor wretch, who will think himself lucky if
in five years' time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living.
Meanwhile our shoemaker does not lose by him, and if trade is brisk he
soon takes a second, and then a third apprentice. By and by he will take two
or three working men—poor wretches, thankful to receive half a crown a
day for work that is worth five shillings, and if our shoemaker is "in luck,"

that is to say, if he is keen enough and mean enough, his working men and
apprentices will bring him in nearly one pound a day, over and above the
product of his own toil. He can then enlarge his business. He will gradually
become rich, and no longer have any need to stint himself in the necessaries
of life. He will leave a snug little fortune to his son.
That is what people call "being economical and having frugal, temperate
habits." At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the
poor.
Commerce seems an exception to this rule. "Such a man," we are told,
"buys tea in China, brings it to France, and realizes a profit of thirty per
cent. on his original outlay. He has exploited nobody."
Nevertheless the case is quite similar. If our merchant had carried his bales
on his back, well and good! In early medieval times that was exactly how
foreign trade was conducted, and so no one reached such giddy heights of
fortune as in our days. Very few and very hardly earned were the gold coins
which the medieval merchant gained from a long and dangerous voyage. It
was less the love of money than the thirst of travel and adventure that
inspired his undertakings.
Nowadays the method is simpler. A merchant who has some capital need
not stir from his desk to become wealthy. He telegraphs to an agent telling
him to buy a hundred tons of tea; he freights a ship, and in a few weeks, in
three months if it is a sailing ship, the vessels brings him his cargo. He does
not even take the risks of the voyage, for his tea and his vessel are insured,
and if he has expended four thousand pounds he will receive more than five
or six thousand; that is to say, if he has not attempted to speculate in some
novel commodities, in which case he runs a chance of either doubling his
fortune or losing it altogether.
Now, how could he find men willing to cross the sea, to travel to China and
back, to endure hardship and slavish toil and to risk their lives for a
miserable pittance? How could he find dock labourers willing to load and
unload his ships for "starvation wages"? How? Because they are needy and
starving. Go to the seaports, visit the cook-shops and taverns on the quays,
and look at these men who have come to hire themselves, crowding round
the dock-gates, which they besiege from early dawn, hoping to be allowed

to work on the vessels. Look at these sailors, happy to be hired for a long
voyage, after weeks and months of waiting. All their lives long they have
gone to the sea in ships, and they will sail in others still, until they have
perished in the waves.
Enter their homes, look at their wives and children in rags, living one
knows not how till the father's return, and you will have the answer to the
question.
Multiply examples, choose them where you will, consider the origin of all
fortunes, large or small, whether arising out of commerce, finance,
manufacturers, or the land. Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the
wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor. This is why an anarchist
society need not fear the advent of a Rothschild who would settle in its
midst. If every member of the community knows that after a few hours of
productive toil he will have a right to all the pleasures that civilization
procures, and to those deeper sources of enjoyment which art and science
offer to all who seek them, he will not sell his strength for a starvation
wage. No one will volunteer to work for the enrichment of your Rothschild.
His golden guineas will be only so many pieces of metal—useful for
various purposes, but incapable of breeding more.
In answering the above objection we have at the same time indicated the
scope of Expropriation. It must apply to everything that enables any man—
be he financier, mill-owner, or landlord—to appropriate the product of
others' toil. Our formula is simple and comprehensive.
We do not want to rob any one of his coat, but we wish to give to the
workers all those things the lack of which makes them fall an easy prey to
the exploiter, and we will do our utmost that none shall lack aught, that not
a single man shall be forced to sell the strength of his right arm to obtain a
bare subsistence for himself and his babes. This is what we mean when we
talk of Expropriation; this will be our duty during the Revolution, for whose
coming we look, not two hundred years hence, but soon, very soon.

III

The ideas of Anarchism in general and of Expropriation in particular find
much more sympathy than we are apt to imagine among men of
independent character, and those for whom idleness is not the supreme
ideal. "Still," our friends often warn us, "take care you do not go too far!
Humanity cannot be changed in a day, so do not be in to great a hurry with
your schemes of Expropriation and Anarchy, or you will be in danger of
achieving no permanent result."
Now, what we fear with regard to Expropriation is exactly the contrary. We
are afraid of not going far enough, of carrying out Expropriation on too
small a scale to be lasting. We would not have the revolutionary impulse
arrested in mid-career, to exhaust itself in half measures, which would
content no one, and while producing a tremendous confusion in society, and
stopping its customary activities, would have no vital power—would
merely spread general discontent and inevitably prepare the way for the
triumph of reaction.
There are, in fact, in a modern State established relations which it is
practically impossible to modify if one attacks them only in detail. There
are wheels within wheels in our economic organization—the machinery is
so complex and interdependent that no one part can be modified without
disturbing the whole. This becomes clear as soon as an attempt is made to
expropriate anything.
Let us suppose that in a certain country a limited form of expropriation is
effected. For example, that, as it has been suggested more than once, only
the property of the great landlords is socialized, whilst the factories are left
untouched; or that, in a certain city, house property is taken over by the
Commune, but everything else is left to private ownership; or that, in some
manufacturing centre, the factories are communalized, but the land is not
interfered with.
The same result would follow in each case—a terrible shattering of the
industrial system, without the means of reorganizing it on new lines.
Industry and finance would be at a deadlock, yet a return to the first
principles of justice would not have been achieved, and society would find
itself powerless to construct a harmonious whole.

If agriculture were freed from great landowners, while industry still
remained the bond-slave of the capitalist, the merchant, and the banker,
nothing would be accomplished. The peasant suffers to-day not only in
having to pay rent to the landlord; he is oppressed on all hands by existing
conditions. He is exploited by the tradesman, who makes him pay half a
crown for a spade which, measured by the labour spent on it, is not worth
more than sixpence. He is taxed by the State, which cannot do without its
formidable hierarchy of officials, and finds it necessary to maintain an
expensive army, because the traders of all nations are perpetually fighting
for the markets, and any day a little quarrel arising from the exploitation of
some part of Asia or Africa may result in war.
Then again the peasant suffers from the depopulation of country places: the
young people are attracted to the large manufacturing towns by the bait of
high wages paid temporarily by the producers of articles of luxury, or by the
attractions of a more stirring life. The artificial protection of industry, the
industrial exploitation of foreign countries, the prevalence of stock-jobbing,
the difficulty of improving the soil and the machinery of production—all
these agencies combine nowadays to work against agriculture, which is
burdened not only by rent, but by the whole complex of conditions in a
society based on exploitation. Thus, even if the expropriation of land were
accomplished, and every one were free to till the soil and cultivate it to the
best advantage, without paying rent, agriculture, even though it should
enjoy—which can by no means be taken for granted—a momentary
prosperity, would soon fall back into the slough in which it finds itself to-
day. The whole thing would have to be begun over again, with increased
difficulties.
The same holds true of industry. Take the converse case: instead of turning
the agricultural labourers into peasant-proprietors, make over the factories
to those who work in them. Abolish the master-manufacturers, but leave the
landlord his land, the banker his money, the merchant his Exchange;
maintain the swarm of idlers who live on the toil of the workmen, the
thousand and one middlemen, the State with its numberless officials,—and
industry would come to a standstill. Finding no purchasers in the mass of
peasants who would remain poor; not possessing the raw material, and
unable to export their produce, partly on account of the stoppage of trade,
and still more so because industries spread all over the world, the

manufacturers would feel unable to struggle, and thousands of workers
would be thrown upon the streets. These starving crowds would be ready
and willing to submit to the first schemer who came to exploit them; they
would even consent to return to the old slavery, under promise of
guaranteed work.
Or, finally, suppose you oust the landowners, and hand over the mills and
factories to the worker, without interfering with the swarm of middlemen
who drain the product of our manufacturers, and speculate in corn and flour,
meat and groceries, in our great centres of commerce. Then, as soon as the
exchange of produce is slackened; as soon as the great cities are left without
bread, while the great manufacturing centres find no buyers for the articles
of luxury they produce,—the counter-revolution is bound to take place, and
it would come, treading upon the slain, sweeping the towns and villages
with shot and shell; indulging in orgies of proscriptions and deportations,
such as were seen in France in 1815, 1848, and 1871.
All is interdependent in a civilized society; it is impossible to reform any
one thing without altering the whole. Therefore, on the day a nation will
strike at private property, under any one of its forms, territorial or industrial,
it will be obliged to attack them all. The very success of the Revolution will
impose it.
Besides, even if it were desired, it would be impossible to confine the
change to a partial expropriation. Once the principle of the "Divine Right of
Property" is shaken, no amount of theorizing will prevent its overthrow,
here by the slaves of the field, there by the slaves of the machine.
If a great town, Paris for example, were to confine itself to taking
possession of the dwelling houses of the factories, it would be forced also to
deny the right of the bankers to levy upon the Commune a tax amounting to
£2,000,000, in the form of interest for former loans. The great city would be
obliged to put itself in touch with the rural districts, and its influence would
inevitably urge the peasants to free themselves from the landowner. It
would be necessary to communalize the railways, that the citizens might get
food and work, and lastly, to prevent the waste of supplies; and to guard
against the trusts of corn-speculators, like those to whom the Paris
Commune of 1793 fell a prey, it would have to place in the hands of the

City the work of stocking its warehouses with commodities, and
apportioning the produce.
Some Socialists still seek, however, to establish a distinction. "Of course,"
they say, "the soil, the mines, the mills, and manufacturers must be
expropriated, these are the instruments of production, and it is right we
should consider them public property. But articles of consumption—food,
clothes, and dwellings—should remain private property."
Popular common sense has got the better of this subtle distinction. We are
not savages who can live in the woods, without other shelter than the
branches. The civilized man needs a roof, a room, a hearth, and a bed. It is
true that the bed, the room, and the house is a home of idleness for the non-
producer. But for the worker, a room, properly heated and lighted, is as
much an instrument of production as the tool or the machine. It is the place
where the nerves and sinews gather strength for the work of the morrow.
The rest of the workman is the daily repairing of the machine.
The same argument applies even more obviously to food. The so-called
economists, who make the just-mentioned distinction, would hardly deny
that the coal burnt in a machine is as necessary to production as the raw
material itself. How then can food, without which the human machine could
do no work, be excluded from the list of things indispensable to the
producer? Can this be a relic of religious metaphysics? The rich man's feast
is indeed a matter of luxury, but the food of the worker is just as much a
part of production as the fuel burnt by the steam-engine.
The same with clothing. We are not New Guinea savages. And if the dainty
gowns of our ladies must rank as objects of luxury, there is nevertheless a
certain quantity of linen, cotton, and woolen stuff which is a necessity of
life to the producer. The shirt and trousers in which he goes to his work, the
jacket he slips on after the day's toil is over, are as necessary to him as the
hammer to the anvil.
Whether we like it or not, this is what the people mean by a revolution. As
soon as they have made a clean sweep of the Government, they will seek
first of all to ensure to themselves decent dwellings and sufficient food and
clothes—free of capitalist rent.

And the people will be right. The methods of the people will be much more
in accordance with science than those of the economists who draw so many
distinctions between instruments of production and articles of consumption.
The people understand that this is just the point where the Revolution ought
to begin; and they will lay the foundations of the only economic science
worthy the name—a science which might be called: "The Study of the
Needs of Humanity, and of the Economic Means to satisfy them."

FOOTNOTE:

[2] "Shabble of a Duke" is an expression coined by Carlyle; it is a
somewhat free rendering of Kropotkine's "Monsieur le Vicomte," but I
think it expresses his meaning.—Trans.

CHAPTER V
FOOD

I

If the coming Revolution is to be a Social Revolution, it will be
distinguished from all former uprisings not only by its aim, but also by its
methods. To attain a new end, new means are required.
The three great popular movements which we have seen in France during
the last hundred years differ from each other in many ways, but they have
one common feature.
In each case the people strove to overturn the old regime, and spent their
heart's blood for the cause. Then, after having borne the brunt of the battle,
they sank again into obscurity. A Government, composed of men more or
less honest, was formed and undertook to organize a new regime: the
Republic in 1793, Labour in 1848, the Free Commune in 1871. Imbued
with Jacobin ideas, this Government occupied itself first of all with political
questions, such as the reorganization of the machinery of government, the
purifying of the administration, the separation of Church and State, civic
liberty, and such matters. It is true the workmen's clubs kept an eye on the
members of the new Government, and often imposed their ideas on them.
But even in these clubs, whether the leaders belonged to the middle or the
working classes, it was always middle-class ideas which prevailed. They
discussed various political questions at great length, but forgot to discuss
the question of bread.
Great ideas sprang up at such times, ideas that have moved the world;
words were spoken which still stir our hearts, at the interval of more than a
century. But the people were starving in the slums.
From the very Commencement of the Revolution industry inevitably came
to a stop—the circulation of produce was checked, and capital concealed

itself. The master—the employer—had nothing to fear at such times, he
fattened on his dividends, if indeed he did not speculate on the
wretchedness around; but the wage-earner was reduced to live from hand to
mouth. Want knocked at the door.
Famine was abroad in the land—such famine as had hardly been seen under
the old regime.
"The Girondists are starving us!" was the cry in the workmen's quarters in
1793, and thereupon the Girondists were guillotined, and full powers were
given to "the Mountain" and to the Commune. The Commune indeed
concerned itself with the question of bread, and made heroic efforts to feed
Paris. At Lyons, Fouché and Collot d'Herbois established city granaries, but
the sums spent on filling them were woefully insufficient. The town
councils made great efforts to procure corn; the bakers who hoarded flour
were hanged—and still the people lacked bread.
Then they turned on the royalist conspirators and laid the blame at their
door. They guillotined a dozen or fifteen a day—servants and duchesses
alike, especially servants, for the duchesses had gone to Coblentz. But if
they had guillotined a hundred dukes and viscounts every day, it would
have been equally hopeless.
The want only grew. For the wage-earner cannot live without his wage, and
the wage was not forthcoming. What difference could a thousand corpses
more or less make to him?
Then the people began to grow weary. "So much for your vaunted
Revolution! You are more wretched than ever before," whispered the
reactionary in the ears of the worker. And little by little the rich took
courage, emerged from their hiding-places, and flaunted their luxury in the
face of the starving multitude. They dressed up like scented fops and said to
the workers: "Come, enough of this foolery! What have you gained by your
Revolution?"
And, sick at heart, his patience at an end, the revolutionary had at last to
admit to himself that the cause was lost once more. He retreated into his
hovel and awaited the worst.

Then reaction proudly asserted itself, and accomplished a counter-
revolutionary stroke. The Revolution dead, nothing remained but to trample
its corpse under foot.
The White Terror began. Blood flowed like water, the guillotine was never
idle, the prisons were crowded, while the pageant of rank and fashion
resumed its old course, and went on as merrily as before.
This picture is typical of all our revolutions. In 1848 the workers of Paris
placed "three months of starvation" at the service of the Republic, and then,
having reached the limit of their powers, they made, in June, one last
desperate effort—an effort which was drowned in blood. In 1871 the
Commune perished for lack of combatants. It had taken measures for the
separation of Church and State, but it neglected, alas, until too late, to take
measures for providing the people with bread. And so it came to pass in
Paris that élégantes and fine gentlemen could spurn the confederates, and
bid them go sell their lives for a miserable pittance, and leave their "betters"
to feast at their ease in fashionable restaurants.
At last the Commune saw its mistake, and opened communal kitchens. But
it was too late. Its days were already numbered, and the troops of Versailles
were on the ramparts.

"Bread, it is bread that the Revolution needs!"
Let others spend their time in issuing pompous proclamations, in decorating
themselves lavishly with official gold lace, and in talking about political
liberty!...
Be it ours to see, from the first day of the Revolution to the last, in all the
provinces fighting for freedom, that there is not a single man who lacks
bread, not a single woman compelled to stand with the wearied crowd
outside the bakehouse-door, that haply a coarse loaf may be thrown to her
in charity, not a single child pining for want of food.

It has always been the middle-class idea to harangue about "great
principles"—great lies rather!
The idea of the people will be to provide bread for all. And while middle-
class citizens, and workmen infested with middle-class ideas admire their
own rhetoric in the "Talking Shops," and "practical people" are engaged in
endless discussions on forms of government, we, the "Utopian dreamers"—
we shall have to consider the question of daily bread.
We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is
bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All the
Revolution will triumph.

II

That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the
length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter,
food, and clothes to all—an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class
citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that
it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.
All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the
people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of
all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people, the
Revolution will be on the right road; for in solving the question of Bread we
must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the
exclusion of every other solution.
It is certain that the coming Revolution—like in that respect to the
Revolution of 1848—will burst upon us in the middle of a great industrial
crisis. Things have been seething for half a century now, and can only go
from bad to worse. Everything tends that way—new nations entering the
lists of international trade and fighting for possession of the world's
markets, wars, taxes ever increasing. National debts, the insecurity of the
morrow, and huge colonial undertakings in every corner of the globe.
There are millions of unemployed workers in Europe at this moment. It will
be still worse when Revolution has burst upon us and spread like fire laid to
a train of gunpowder. The number of the out-of-works will be doubled as

soon as the barricades are erected in Europe and the United States. What is
to be done to provide these multitudes with bread?
We do not know whether the folk who call themselves "practical people"
have ever asked themselves this question in all its nakedness. But we do
know that they wish to maintain the wage system, and we must therefore
expect to have "national workshops" and "public works" vaunted as a
means of giving food to the unemployed.
Because national workshops were opened in 1789 and 1793; because the
same means were resorted to in 1848; because Napoleon III. succeeded in
contenting the Parisian proletariat for eighteen years by giving them public
works—which cost Paris to-day its debt of £80,000,000 and its municipal
tax of three or four pounds a-head;[3] because this excellent method of
"taming the beast" was customary in Rome, and even in Egypt four
thousand years ago; and lastly, because despots, kings, and emperors have
always employed the ruse of throwing a scrap of food to the people to gain
time to snatch up the whip—it is natural that "practical" men should extol
this method of perpetuating the wage system. What need to rack our brains
when we have the time-honoured method of the Pharaohs at our disposal?
Yet should the Revolution be so misguided as to start on this path, it would
be lost.
In 1848, when the national workshops were opened on February 27, the
unemployed of Paris numbered only 8,000; a fortnight later they had
already increased to 49,000. They would soon have been 100,000, without
counting those who crowded in from the provinces.
Yet at that time trade and manufacturers in France employed half as many
hands as to-day. And we know that in time of Revolution exchange and
industry suffer most from the general upheaval. We have only to think,
indeed, of the number of workmen whose labour depends directly or
indirectly upon export trade, or of the number of hands employed in
producing luxuries, whose consumers are the middle-class minority.
A revolution in Europe means, then, the unavoidable stoppage of at least
half the factories and workshops. It means millions of workers and their
families thrown on the streets. And our "practical men" would seek to avert

this truly terrible situation by means of national relief works; that is to say,
by means of new industries created on the spot to give work to the
unemployed!
It is evident, as Proudhon had already pointed out more than fifty years ago,
that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete
disorganization of the system based upon private enterprise and wage
labour. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand, in its
entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of the whole people. But this
cannot be accomplished in a day, or even in a month; it must take a certain
time to reorganize the system of production, and during this time millions
of men will be deprived of the means of subsistence. What then is to be
done?
There is only one really practical solution of the problem—boldly to face
the great task which awaits us, and instead of trying to patch up a situation
which we ourselves have made untenable, to proceed to reorganize
production on a new basis.
Thus the really practical course of action, in our view, would be that the
people should take immediate possession of all the food of the insurgent
communes, keeping strict account of it all, that none might be wasted, and
that by the aid of these accumulated resources every one might be able to
tide over the crisis. During that time an agreement would have to be made
with the factory workers, the necessary raw material given them, and the
means of subsistence assured to them, while they worked to supply the
needs of the agricultural population. For we must not forget that while
France weaves silks and satins to deck the wives of German financiers, the
Empress of Russia, and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and while Paris
fashions wonderful trinkets and playthings for rich folk all the world over,
two-thirds of the French peasantry have not proper lamps to give them light,
or the implements necessary for modern agriculture. Lastly, unproductive
land, of which there is plenty, would have to be turned to the best
advantage, poor soils enriched, and rich soils, which yet, under the present
system, do not yield a quarter, no, nor a tenth of what they might produce,
would be submitted to intensive culture, and tilled with as much care as a
market garden or a flower pot. It is impossible to imagine any other

practical solution of the problem; and, whether we like it or not, sheer force
of circumstances will bring it to pass.

III

The most prominent characteristic of our present capitalism is the wage
system, which in brief amounts to this:—
A man, or a group of men, possessing the necessary capital, starts some
industrial enterprise; he undertakes to supply the factory or workshops with
raw material, to organize production, to pay the employes a fixed wage, and
lastly, to pocket the surplus value or profits, under pretext of recouping
himself for managing the concern, for running the risks it may involve, and
for the fluctuations of price in the market value of the wares.
To preserve this system, those who now monopolize capital would be ready
to make certain concessions; to share, for example, a part of the profits with
the workers, or rather to establish a "sliding scale," which would oblige
them to raise wages when prices were high; in brief they would consent to
certain sacrifices on condition that they were still allowed to direct industry
and to take its first fruits.
Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish the wage system, though it
introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things. It
only substitutes the State, that is to say, some form of Representative
Government, national or local, for the individual employer of labour. Under
Collectivism it is the representatives of the nation, or of the Commune, and
their deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they
who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of production
—in the interests of all. Moreover, Collectivism draws a very subtle but
very far-reaching distinction between the work of the labourer and of the
man who has learned a craft. Unskilled labour in the eyes of the collectivist
is simple labour, while the work of the craftsman, the mechanic, the
engineer, the man of science, etc., is what Marx calls complex labour, and is
entitled to a higher wage. But labourers and craftsmen, weavers and men of
science, are all wage-servants of the State—"all officials," as was said
lately, to gild the pill.

Well, then, the coming Revolution could render no greater service to
humanity than by making the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility,
and by rendering Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the
only possible solution.
For even admitting that the Collectivist modification of the present system
is possible, if introduced gradually during a period of prosperity and peace
—though for my part I question its practicability even under such
conditions—it would become impossible in a period of Revolution, when
the need of feeding hungry millions would spring up with the first call to
arms. A political revolution can be accomplished without shaking the
foundations of industry, but a revolution where the people lay hands upon
property will inevitably paralyse exchange and production. The millions of
public money flowing into the Treasury would not suffice for paying wages
to the millions of out-of-works.
This point cannot be too much insisted upon; the reorganization of industry
on a new basis (and we shall presently show how tremendous this problem
is) cannot be accomplished in a few days; nor, on the other hand, will the
people submit to be half starved for years in order to oblige the theorists
who uphold the wage system. To tide over the period of stress they will
demand what they have always demanded in such cases—communization
of supplies—the giving of rations.
It will be in vain to preach patience. The people will be patient no longer,
and if food is not forthcoming they will plunder the bakeries.
Then, if the people are not strong enough to carry all before them, they will
be shot down, to give Collectivism a fair field for experiment. To this end
"order" must be maintained at any price—order, discipline, obedience! And
as the capitalists will soon realize that when the people are shot down by
those who call themselves Revolutionists, the Revolution itself will become
hateful in the eyes of the masses, they will certainly lend their support to the
champions of order—even though they are collectivists. In such a line of
conduct, the capitalists will see a means of hereafter crushing the
collectivists in their turn. And if "order is established" in this fashion, the
consequences are easy to foresee. Not content with shooting down the
"marauders," the faction of "order" will search out the "ringleaders of the

mob." They will set up again the law courts and reinstate the hangman. The
most ardent revolutionists will be sent to the scaffold. It will be 1793 over
again.
Do not let us forget how reaction triumphed in the last century. First the
"Hébertists" and "the madmen," were guillotined—those whom Mignet,
with the memory of the struggle fresh upon him, still called "Anarchists."
The Dantonists soon followed them; and when the party of Robespierre had
guillotined these revolutionaries, they in their turn had to mount the
scaffold; whereupon the people, sick of bloodshed, and seeing the
revolution lost, threw up the sponge, and let the reactionaries do their worst.
If "order is restored," we say, the social democrats will hang the anarchists;
the Fabians will hang the social democrats, and will in their turn be hanged
by the reactionaries; and the Revolution will come to an end.
But everything confirms us in the belief that the energy of the people will
carry them far enough, and that, when the Revolution takes place, the idea
of anarchist Communism will have gained ground. It is not an artificial
idea. The people themselves have breathed it in our ear, and the number of
communists is ever increasing, as the impossibility of any other solution
becomes more and more evident.
And if the impetus of the people is strong enough, affairs will take a very
different turn. Instead of plundering the bakers' shops one day, and starving
the next, the people of the insurgent cities will take possession of the
warehouses, the cattle markets,—in fact of all the provision stores and of all
the food to be had. The well-intentioned citizens, men and women both,
will form themselves into bands of volunteers and address themselves to the
task of making a rough general inventory of the contents of each shop and
warehouse.
If such a revolution breaks out in France, namely in Paris, then in twenty-
four hours the Commune will know what Paris has not found out yet, in
spite of its statistical committees, and what it never did find out during the
siege of 1871—the quantity of provisions it contains. In forty-eight hours
millions of copies will be printed of the tables giving a sufficiently exact
account of the available food, the places where it is stored, and the means of
distribution.

In every block of houses, in every street, in every town ward, groups of
volunteers will have been organized, and these commissariat volunteers will
find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other. If only the
Jacobin bayonets do not get in the way; if only the self-styled "scientific"
theorists do not thrust themselves in to darken counsel! Or rather let them
expound their muddle-headed theories as much as they like, provided they
have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organization
inherent in the people, above all in every social grade of the French nation,
but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, even
in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a Revolution, an immense
guild of free workers, ready to furnish to each and all the necessary food.
Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be
conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the
people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among
the documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organizing genius of the "Great
Misunderstood," the people, to those who have seen it in Paris in the days
of the barricades, or in London during the great dockers' strike, when half a
million of starving folk had to be fed, and they will tell you how superior it
is to the official ineptness of Bumbledom.
And even supposing we had to endure a certain amount of discomfort and
confusion for a fortnight or a month, surely that would not matter very
much. For the mass of the people it would still be an improvement on their
former condition; and, besides, in times of Revolution one can dine
contentedly enough on a bit of bread and cheese while eagerly discussing
events.
In any case, a system which springs up spontaneously, under stress of
immediate need, will be infinitely preferable to anything invented between
four walls by hide-bound theorists sitting on any number of committees.

IV

The people of the great towns will be driven by force of circumstances to
take possession of all the provisions, beginning with the barest necessaries,
and gradually extending Communism to other things, in order to satisfy the

needs of all the citizens. The sooner it is done the better; the sooner it is
done the less misery there will be and the less strife.
But upon what basis must society be organized in order that all may have
their due share of food produce? This is the question that meets us at the
outset.
We answer that there are no two ways of it. There is only one way in which
Communism can be established equitably, only one way which satisfies our
instincts of justice and is at the same time practical; namely, the system
already adopted by the agrarian communes of Europe.
Take for example a peasant commune, no matter where, even in France,
where the Jacobins have done their best to destroy all communal usage. If
the commune possesses woods and copses, then, so long as there is plenty
of wood for all, every one can take as much as he wants, without other let
or hindrance than the public opinion of his neighbours. As to the timber-
trees, which are always scarce, they have to be carefully apportioned.
The same with the communal pasture land; while there is enough and to
spare, no limit is put to what the cattle of each homestead may consume,
nor to the number of beasts grazing upon the pastures. Grazing grounds are
not divided, nor is fodder doled out, unless there is scarcity. All the Swiss
communes, and scores of thousands in France and Germany, wherever there
is communal pasture land, practise this system.
And in the countries of Eastern Europe, where there are great forests and no
scarcity of land, you will find the peasants felling the trees as they need
them, and cultivating as much of the soil as they require, without any
thought of limiting each man's share of timber or of land. But the timber
will be allowanced, and the land parcelled out, to each household according
to its needs, as soon as either becomes scarce, as is already the case in
Russia.
In a word, the system is this: no stint or limit to what the community
possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those
commodities which are scarce or apt to run short. Of the 350 millions who
inhabit Europe, 200 millions still follow this system of natural
Communism.

It is a fact worth remarking that the same system prevails in the great towns
in the distribution of one commodity at least, which is found in abundance,
the water supplied to each house.
As long as there is no fear of the supply running short, no water company
thinks of checking the consumption of water in each house. Take what you
please! But during the great droughts, if there is any fear of the supply
failing, the water companies know that all they have to do is to make known
the fact, by means of a short advertisement in the papers, and the citizens
will reduce their consumption of water and not let it run to waste.
But if water were actually scarce, what would be done? Recourse would be
had to a system of rations. Such a measure is so natural, so inherent in
common sense, that Paris twice asked to be put on rations during the two
sieges which it underwent in 1871.
Is it necessary to go into details, to prepare tables, showing how the
distribution of rations may work, to prove that it is just and equitable,
infinitely more just and equitable than the existing state of things? All these
tables and details will not serve to convince those of the middle classes, nor,
alas, those of the workers tainted with middle-class prejudices, who regard
the people as a mob of savages ready to fall upon and devour each other, as
soon as the Government ceases to direct affairs. But those only who have
never seen the people resolve and act on their own initiative could doubt for
a moment that if the masses were masters of the situation, they would
distribute rations to each and all in strictest accordance with justice and
equity.
If you were to give utterance, in any gathering of people, to the opinion that
delicacies—game and such-like—should be reserved for the fastidious
palates of aristocratic idlers, and black bread given to the sick in the
hospitals, you would be hissed. But say at the same gathering, preach at the
street corners and in the market places, that the most tempting delicacies
ought to be kept for the sick and feeble—especially for the sick. Say that if
there are only five brace of partridge in the entire city, and only one case of
sherry, they should go to sick people and convalescents. Say that after the
sick come the children. For them the milk of the cows and goats should be
reserved if there is not enough for all. To the children and the aged the last

piece of meat, and to the strong man dry bread, if the community be
reduced to that extremity.
Say, in a word, that if this or that article of consumption runs short, and has
to be doled out, to those who have most need most should be given. Say
that and see if you do not meet with universal agreement.
The man who is full-fed does not understand this, but the people do
understand, and have always understood it; and even the child of luxury, if
he is thrown on the street and comes into contact with the masses, even he
will learn to understand.
The theorists—for whom the soldier's uniform and the barrack mess table
are civilization's last word—would like no doubt to start a regime of
National Kitchens and "Spartan Broth." They would point out the
advantages thereby gained, the economy in fuel and food, if such huge
kitchens were established, where every one could come for their rations of
soup and bread and vegetables.
We do not question these advantages. We are well aware that important
economies have already been achieved in this direction—as, for instance,
when the handmill, or quern, and the baker's oven attached to each house
were abandoned. We can see perfectly well that it would be more
economical to cook broth for a hundred families at once, instead of lighting
a hundred separate fires. We know, besides, that there are a thousand ways
of preparing potatoes, but that cooked in one huge pot for a hundred
families they would be just as good.
We know, in fact, that variety in cooking being a matter of the seasoning
introduced by each cook or housewife, the cooking together of a
hundredweight of potatoes would not prevent each cook or housewife from
dressing and serving them in any way she pleased. And we know that stock
made from meat can be converted into a hundred different soups to suit a
hundred different tastes.
But though we are quite aware of all these facts, we still maintain that no
one has a right to force a housewife to take her potatoes from the communal
kitchen ready cooked if she prefers to cook them herself in her own pot on
her own fire. And, above all, we should wish each one to be free to take his

meals with his family, or with his friends, or even in a restaurant, if it
seemed good to him.
Naturally large public kitchens will spring up to take the place of the
restaurants, where people are poisoned nowadays. Already the Parisian
housewife gets the stock for her soup from the butcher, and transforms it
into whatever soup she likes, and London housekeepers know that they can
have a joint roasted, or an apple or rhubarb tart baked at the baker's for a
trifling sum, thus economizing time and fuel. And when the communal
kitchen—the common bakehouse of the future—is established, and people
can get their food cooked without the risk of being cheated or poisoned, the
custom will no doubt become general of going to the communal kitchen for
the fundamental parts of the meal, leaving the last touches to be added as
individual taste shall suggest.
But to make a hard and fast rule of this, to make a duty of taking home our
food ready cooked, that would be as repugnant to our modern minds as the
ideas of the convent or the barrack—morbid ideas born in brains warped by
tyranny or superstition.
Who will have a right to the food of the commune? will assuredly be the
first question which we shall have to ask ourselves. Every township will
answer for itself, and we are convinced that the answers will all be dictated
by the sentiment of justice. Until labour is reorganized, as long as the
disturbed period lasts, and while it is impossible to distinguish between
inveterate idlers and genuine workers thrown out of work, the available
food ought to be shared by all without exception. Those who have been
enemies to the new order will hasten of their own accord to rid the
commune of their presence. But it seems to us that the masses of the people,
which have always been magnanimous, and have nothing of vindictiveness
in their disposition, will be ready to share their bread with all who remain
with them, conquered and conquerers alike. It will be no loss to the
Revolution to be inspired by such an idea, and, when work is set agoing
again, the antagonists of yesterday will stand side by side in the same
workshops. A society where work is free will have nothing to fear from
idlers.
"But provisions will run short in a month!" our critics at once exclaim.

"So much the better," say we. It will prove that for the first time on record
the people have had enough to eat. As to the question of obtaining fresh
supplies, we shall discuss the means in our next chapter.

V

By what means could a city in a state of revolution be supplied with food?
We shall answer this question, but it is obvious that the means resorted to
will depend on the character of the Revolution in the provinces, and in
neighbouring countries. If the entire nation, or, better still, if all Europe
should accomplish the Social Revolution simultaneously, and start with
thorough-going Communism, our procedure would be simplified; but if
only a few communities in Europe make the attempt, other means will have
to be chosen. The circumstances will dictate the measures.
We are thus led, before we proceed further, to glance at the State of Europe,
and, without pretending to prophesy, we may try to foresee what course the
Revolution will take, or at least what will be its essential features.
Certainly it would be very desirable that all Europe should rise at once, that
expropriation should be general, and that communistic principles should
inspire all and sundry. Such a universal rising would do much to simplify
the task of our century.
But all the signs lead us to believe that it will not take place. That the
Revolution will embrace Europe we do not doubt. If one of the four great
continental capitals—Paris, Vienna, Brussels, or Berlin—rises in revolution
and overturns its Government, it is almost certain that the three others will
follow its example within a few weeks' time. It is, moreover, highly
probable that the Peninsulas and even London and St. Petersburg would not
be long in following suit. But whether the Revolution would everywhere
exhibit the same characteristics is highly doubtful.
It is more than probable that expropriation will be everywhere carried into
effect on a larger scale, and that this policy carried out by any one of the
great nations of Europe will influence all the rest; yet the beginnings of the
Revolution will exhibit great local differences, and its course will vary in
different countries. In 1789-93, the French peasantry took four years to

finally rid themselves of the redemption of feudal rights, and the bourgeois
to overthrow royalty. Let us keep that in mind, and therefore be prepared to
see the Revolution develop itself somewhat gradually. Let us not be
disheartened if here and there its steps should move less rapidly. Whether it
would take an avowedly socialist character in all European nations, at any
rate at the beginning, is doubtful. Germany, be it remembered, is still
realizing its dream of a United Empire. Its advanced parties see visions of a
Jacobin Republic like that of 1848, and of the organization of labour
according to Louis Blanc; while the French people, on the other hand, want
above all things a free Commune, whether it be a communist Commune or
not.
There is every reason to believe that, when the coming Revolution takes
place, Germany will go further than France went in 1793. The eighteenth-
century Revolution in France was an advance on the English Revolution of
the seventeenth, abolishing as it did at one stroke the power of the throne
and the landed aristocracy, whose influence still survives in England. But, if
Germany goes further and does greater things than France did in 1793, there
can be no doubt that the ideas which will foster the birth of her Revolution
will be those of 1848; while the ideas which will inspire the Revolution in
Russia will probably be a combination of those of 1789 with those of 1848.
Without, however, attaching to these forecasts a greater importance than
they merit, we may safely conclude this much: the Revolution will take a
different character in each of the different European nations; the point
attained in the socialization of wealth will not be everywhere the same.
Will it therefore be necessary, as is sometimes suggested, that the nations in
the vanguard of the movement should adapt their pace to those who lag
behind? Must we wait till the Communist Revolution is ripe in all civilized
countries? Clearly not! Even if it were a thing to be desired, it is not
possible. History does not wait for the laggards.
Besides, we do not believe that in any one country the Revolution will be
accomplished at a stroke, in the twinkling of an eye, as some socialists
dream.[4] It is highly probable that if one of the five or six large towns of
France—Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Lille, Saint-Etienne, Bordeaux—were to
proclaim the Commune, the others would follow its example, and that many

smaller towns would do the same. Probably also various mining districts
and industrial centres would hasten to rid themselves of "owners" and
"masters," and form themselves into free groups.
But many country places have not advanced to that point. Side by side with
the revolutionized communes such places would remain in an expectant
attitude, and would go on living on the Individualist system. Undisturbed by
visits of the bailiff or the tax-collector, the peasants would not be hostile to
the revolutionaries, and thus, while profiting by the new state of affairs,
they would defer the settlement of accounts with the local exploiters. But
with that practical enthusiasm which always characterizes agrarian
uprisings (witness the passionate toil of 1792) they would throw themselves
into the task of cultivating the land, which, freed from taxes and mortgages,
would become so much dearer to them.
As to other countries, revolution would break out everywhere, but
revolution under divers aspects; in one country State Socialism, in another
Federation; everywhere more or less Socialism, not conforming to any
particular rule.

VI

Let us now return to our city in revolt, and consider how its citizens can
provide foodstuffs for themselves. How are the necessary provisions to be
obtained if the nation as a whole has not accepted Communism? This is the
question to be solved. Take, for example, one of the large French towns—
take the capital itself, for that matter. Paris consumes every year thousands
of tons of grain, 400,000 head of oxen, 300,000 calves, 400,000 swine, and
more than two millions of sheep, besides great quantities of game. This
huge city devours, besides, more than 20 million pounds of butter, 200
million eggs, and other produce in like proportion.
It imports flour and grain from the United States and from Russia, Hungary,
Italy, Egypt, and the Indies; live stock from Germany, Italy, Spain—even
Roumania and Russia; and as for groceries, there is not a country in the
world that it does not lay under contribution.

Now, let us see how Paris or any other great town could be revictualled by
home-grown produce, supplies of which could be readily and willingly sent
in from the provinces.
To those who put their trust in "authority" the question will appear quite
simple. They would begin by establishing a strongly centralized
Government, furnished with all the machinery of coercion—the police, the
army, the guillotine. This Government would draw up a statement of all the
produce contained in France. It would divide the country into districts of
supply, and then command that a prescribed quantity of some particular
foodstuff be sent to such a place on such a day, and delivered at such a
station, to be there received on a given day by a specified official and stored
in particular warehouses.
Now, we declare with the fullest conviction, not merely that such a solution
is undesirable, but that it never could by any possibility be put into practice.
It is wildly Utopian!
Pen in hand, one may dream such a dream in the study, but in contact with
reality it comes to nothing,—this was proved in 1793; for, like all such
theories, it leaves out of account the spirit of independence that is in man.
The attempt would lead to a universal uprising, to three or four Vendées, to
the villages rising against the towns, all the country up in arms defying the
city for its arrogance in attempting to impose such a system upon the
country.
We have already had too much of Jacobin Utopias! Let us see if some other
form of organization will meet the case.
During the great French Revolution, the provinces starved the large towns,
and killed the Revolution. And yet it is a known fact that the production of
grain in France during 1792-3 had not diminished; indeed, the evidence
goes to show that it had increased. But after having taken possession of the
manorial lands, after having reaped a harvest from them, the peasants would
not part with their grain for paper-money. They withheld their produce,
waiting for a rise in the price, or the introduction of gold. The most rigorous
measures of the National Convention were without avail, and her
executions failed to break up the ring, or force the farmers to sell their corn.
For it is a matter of history that the commissaries of the Convention did not

scruple to guillotine those who withheld their grain from the market, and
pitilessly executed those who speculated in foodstuffs. All the same, the
corn was not forthcoming, and the townsfolk suffered from famine.
But what was offered to the husbandman in exchange for his hard toil?
Assignats, scraps of paper decreasing in value every day, promises of
payment, which could not be kept. A forty-pound note would not purchase a
pair of boots, and the peasant, very naturally, was not anxious to barter a
year's toil for a piece of paper with which he could not even buy a shirt.
As long as worthless paper-money—whether called assignats or labour
notes—is offered to the peasant-producer it will always be the same. The
country will withhold its produce, and the towns will suffer want, even if
the recalcitrant peasants are guillotined as before.
We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-
money, but the manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need.
He lacks the proper implements to till the land, clothes to protect him from
the inclemencies of the weather, lamps and oil to replace his miserable
rushlight or tallow dip, spades, rakes, ploughs. All these things, under
present conditions, the peasant is forced to do without, not because he does
not feel the need of them, but because, in his life of struggle and privation, a
thousand useful things are beyond his reach; because he has not money to
buy them.
Let the town apply itself, without loss of time, to manufacturing all that the
peasant needs, instead of fashioning geegaws for the wives of rich citizens.
Let the sewing machines of Paris be set to work on clothes for the country
folk workaday clothes and clothes for Sunday too, instead of costly evening
dresses for the English and Russian landlords and the African gold-
magnates' wives. Let the factories and foundries turn out agricultural
implements, spades, rakes, and such-like, instead of waiting till the English
send them to France, in exchange for French wines!
Let the towns send no more inspectors to the villages, wearing red, blue, or
rainbow-coloured scarves, to convey to the peasant orders to take his
produce to this place or that, but let them send friendly embassies to the
countryfolk and bid them in brotherly fashion: "Bring us your produce, and
take from our stores and shops all the manufactured articles you please."—

Then provisions would pour in on every side. The peasant would only
withhold what he needed for his own use, and would send the rest into the
cities, feeling for the first time in the course of history that these toiling
townsfolk were his comrades—his brethren, and not his exploiters.
We shall be told, perhaps, that this would necessitate a complete
transformation of industry. Well, yes, that is true of certain departments; but
there are other branches which could be rapidly modified in such a way as
to furnish the peasant with clothes, watches, furniture, and the simple
implements for which the towns make him pay such exorbitant prices at the
present time. Weavers, tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, cabinet-makers, and
many other trades and crafts could easily direct their energies to the
manufacture of useful and necessary articles, and abstain from producing
mere luxuries. All that is needed is that the public mind should be
thoroughly convinced of the necessity of this transformation, and should
come to look upon it as an act of justice and of progress, and that it should
no longer allow itself to be cheated by that dream, so dear to the theorists—
the dream of a revolution which confines itself to taking possession of the
profits of industry, and leaves production and commerce just as they are
now.
This, then, is our view of the whole question. Cheat the peasant no longer
with scraps of paper—be the sums inscribed upon them ever so large; but
offer him in exchange for his produce the very things of which he, the tiller
of the soil, stands in need. Then the fruits of the land will be poured into the
towns. If this is not done there will be famine in our cities, and reaction and
despair will follow in its train.

VII

All the great towns, we have said, buy their grain, their flour, and their
meat, not only from the provinces, but also from abroad. Foreign countries
send Paris not only spices, fish, and various dainties, but also immense
quantities of corn and meat.
But when the Revolution comes these cities will have to depend on foreign
countries as little as possible. If Russian wheat, Italian or Indian rice, and
Spanish or Hungarian wines abound in the markets of western Europe, it is

not that the countries which export them have a superabundance, or that
such a produce grows there of itself, like the dandelion in the meadows. In
Russia for instance, the peasant works sixteen hours a day, and half starves
from three to six months every year, in order to export the grain with which
he pays the landlord and the State. To-day the police appears in the Russian
village as soon as the harvest is gathered in, and sells the peasant's last
horse and last cow for arrears of taxes and rent due to the landlord, unless
the victim immolates himself of his own accord by selling the grain to the
exporters. Usually, rather than part with his livestock at a disadvantage, he
keeps only a nine-months' supply of grain, and sells the rest. Then, in order
to sustain life until the next harvest, he mixes birch-bark and tares with his
flour for three months, if it has been a good year, and for six months if it
has been bad, while in London they are eating biscuits made of his wheat.
But as soon as the Revolution comes, the Russian peasant will keep bread
enough for himself and his children; the Italian and Hungarian peasants will
do the same; the Hindoo, let us hope, will profit by these good examples;
and the farmers of America will hardly be able to cover all the deficit in
grain which Europe will experience. So it will not do to count on their
contributions of wheat and maize satisfying all the wants.
Since all our middle-class civilization is based on the exploitation of
inferior races and countries with less advanced industrial systems, the
Revolution will confer a boon at the very outset, by menacing that
"civilization," and allowing the so-called inferior races to free themselves.
But this great benefit will manifest itself by a steady and marked diminution
of the food supplies pouring into the great cities of western Europe.
It is difficult to predict the course of affairs in the provinces. On the one
hand the slave of the soil will take advantage of the Revolution to straighten
his bowed back. Instead of working fourteen or fifteen hours a day, as he
does at present, he will be at liberty to work only half that time, which of
course would have the effect of decreasing the production of the principal
articles of consumption—grain and meat.
But, on the other hand, there will be an increase of production as soon as
the peasant realizes that he is no longer forced to support the idle rich by his

toil. New tracts of land will be cleared, new and improved machines set a-
going.
"Never was the land so energetically cultivated as in 1792, when the
peasant had taken back from the landlord the soil which he had coveted so
long," Michelet tells us speaking of the Great Revolution.
Of course, before long, intensive culture would be within the reach of all.
Improved machinery, chemical manures, and all such matters would soon
be supplied by the Commune. But everything tends to indicate that at the
outset there would be a falling off in agricultural products, in France and
elsewhere.
In any case it would be wisest to count upon such a falling off of
contributions from the provinces as well as from abroad.—How is this
falling off to be made good?
Why! by setting to work ourselves! No need to rack our brains for far-
fetched panaceas when the remedy lies close at hand.
The large towns, as well as the villages, must undertake to till the soil. We
must return to what biology calls "the integration of functions"—after the
division of labour, the taking up of it as a whole—this is the course
followed throughout Nature.
Besides, philosophy apart, the force of circumstances would bring about
this result. Let Paris see that at the end of eight months it will be running
short of bread, and Paris will set to work to grow wheat.
Land will not be wanting, for it is round the great towns, and round Paris
especially, that the parks and pleasure grounds of the landed gentry are to be
found. These thousands of acres only await the skilled labour of the
husbandman to surround Paris with fields infinitely more fertile and
productive than the steppes of southern Russia, where the soil is dried up by
the sun. Nor will labour be lacking. To what should the two million citizens
of Paris turn their attention, when they would be no longer catering for the
luxurious fads and amusements of Russian princes, Roumanian grandees,
and wives of Berlin financiers?

With all the mechanical inventions of the century; with all the intelligence
and technical skill of the worker accustomed to deal with complicated
machinery; with inventors, chemists, professors of botany, practical
botanists like the market gardeners of Gennevilliers; with all the plant that
they could use for multiplying and improving machinery; and, finally, with
the organizing spirit of the Parisian people, their pluck and energy—with all
these at its command, the agriculture of the anarchist Commune of Paris
would be a very different thing from the rude husbandry of the Ardennes.
Steam, electricity, the heat of the sun, and the breath of the wind, will ere
long be pressed into service. The steam plough and the steam harrow will
quickly do the rough work of preparation, and the soil, thus cleaned and
enriched, will only need the intelligent care of man, and of woman even
more than man, to be clothed with luxuriant vegetation—not once but three
or four times in the year.
Thus, learning the art of horticulture from experts, and trying experiments
in different methods on small patches of soil reserved for the purpose, vying
with each other to obtain the best returns, finding in physical exercise,
without exhaustion or overwork, the health and strength which so often
flags in cities,—men, women and children will gladly turn to the labour of
the fields, when it is no longer a slavish drudgery, but has become a
pleasure, a festival, a renewal of health and joy.
"There are no barren lands; the earth is worth what man is worth"—that is
the last word of modern agriculture. Ask of the earth, and she will give you
bread, provided that you ask aright.
A district, though it were as small as the two departments of the Seine and
the Seine-et-Oise, and with so great a city as Paris to feed, would be
practically sufficient to grow upon it all the food supplies, which otherwise
might fail to reach it.
The combination of agriculture and industry, the husbandman and the
mechanic in the same individual—this is what anarchist communism will
inevitably lead us to, if it starts fair with expropriation.
Let the Revolution only get so far, and famine is not the enemy it will have
to fear. No, the danger which will menace it lies in timidity, prejudice, and

half-measures. The danger is where Danton saw it when he cried to France:
"De l'audace, de l'audace, et encore de l'audace." The bold thought first, and
the bold deed will not fail to follow.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The municipal debt of Paris amounted in 1904 to 2,266,579,100 francs,
and the charges for it were 121,000,000 francs.
[4] No fallacy more harmful has ever been spread than the fallacy of a
"One-day Revolution," which is propagated in superficial Socialist
pamphlets speaking of the Revolution of the 18th of March at Berlin,
supposed (which is absolutely wrong) to have given Prussia its
representative Government. We saw well the harm made by such fallacies
in Russia in 1905-1907. The truth is that up to 1871 Prussia, like Russia of
the present day, had a scrap of paper which could be described as a
"Constitution," but it had no representative Government. The Ministry
imposed upon the nation, up till 1870, the budget it chose to propose.

CHAPTER VI
DWELLINGS

I

Those who have closely watched the growth of Socialist ideas among the
workers must have noticed that on one momentous question—the housing
of the people—a definite conclusion is being imperceptibly arrived at. It is a
fact that in the large towns of France, and in many of the smaller ones, the
workers are coming gradually to the conclusion that dwelling-houses are in
no sense the property of those whom the State recognizes as their owners.
This idea has evolved naturally in the minds of the people, and nothing will
ever convince them again that the "rights of property" ought to extend to
houses.
The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated and
furnished by innumerable workers in the timber yard, the brick field, and
the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.
The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was
amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a
half of what was their due.
Moreover—and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding
becomes most glaring—the house owes its actual value to the profit which
the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his
house is built in a town—that is, in an agglomeration of thousands of other
houses, possessing paved streets, bridges, quays, and fine public buildings,
well lighted, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and
conveniences unknown in villages; a town in regular communication with
other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a
town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has made habitable,
healthy, and beautiful.

A house in certain parts of Paris is valued at many thousands of pounds
sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been
expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for
centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have
contributed to make Paris what it is to-day—a centre of industry,
commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because,
thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign
countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of
toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the
meanest building in such a city, without committing a flagrant injustice?
Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the
common heritage?
On that point, as we have said, the workers begin to be agreed. The idea of
free dwellings showed its existence very plainly during the siege of Paris,
when the cry was for an abatement pure and simple of the terms demanded
by the landlords. It appeared again during the Commune of 1871, when the
Paris workmen expected the Council of the Commune to decide boldly on
the abolition of rent. And when the New Revolution comes, it will be the
first question with which the poor will concern themselves.
Whether in time of revolution or in time of peace, the worker must be
housed somehow or other; he must have some sort of roof over his head.
But, however tumble-down and squalid his dwelling may be, there is
always a landlord who can evict him. True, during the Revolution the
landlord cannot find bailiffs and police-sergeants to throw the workman's
rags and chattels into the street, but who knows what the new Government
will do to-morrow? Who can say that it will not call coercion to its aid
again, and set the police pack upon the tenant to hound him out of his
hovels? Have we not seen the commune of Paris proclaim the remission of
rents due up to the first of April only![5] After that, rent had to be paid,
though Paris was in a state of chaos, and industry at a standstill; so that the
"federate" who had taken arms to defend the independence of Paris had
absolutely nothing to depend upon—he and his family—but an allowance
of fifteen pence a day!

Now the worker must be made to see clearly that in refusing to pay rent to a
landlord or owner he is not simply profiting by the disorganization of
authority. He must understand that the abolition of rent is a recognized
principle, sanctioned, so to speak, by popular assent; that to be housed rent-
free is a right proclaimed aloud by the people.
Are we going to wait till this measure, which is in harmony with every
honest man's sense of justice, is taken up by the few socialists scattered
among the middle class elements, of which the Provisionary Government
will be composed? If it were so, the people should have to wait long—till
the return of reaction, in fact!
This is why, refusing uniforms and badges—those outward signs of
authority and servitude—and remaining people among the people, the
earnest revolutionists will work side by side with the masses, that the
abolition of rent, the expropriation of houses, may become an accomplished
fact. They will prepare the ground and encourage ideas to grow in this
direction; and when the fruit of their labours is ripe, the people will proceed
to expropriate the houses without giving heed to the theories which will
certainly be thrust in their way—theories about paying compensation to
landlords, and finding first the necessary funds.
On the day that the expropriation of houses takes place, on that day, the
exploited workers will have realized that new times have come, that Labour
will no longer have to bear the yoke of the rich and powerful, that Equality
has been openly proclaimed, that this Revolution is a real fact, and not a
theatrical make-believe, like so many others preceding it.

II

If the idea of expropriation be adopted by the people it will be carried into
effect in spite of all the "insurmountable" obstacles with which we are
menaced.
Of course, the good folk in new uniforms, seated in the official arm-chairs
of the Hôtel de Ville, will be sure to busy themselves in heaping up
obstacles. They will talk of giving compensation to the landlords, of
preparing statistics, and drawing up long reports. Yes, they would be

capable of drawing up reports long enough to outlast the hopes of the
people, who, after waiting and starving in enforced idleness, and seeing
nothing come of all these official researches, would lose heart and faith in
the Revolution and abandon the field to the reactionaries. The new
bureaucracy would end by making expropriation hateful in the eyes of all.
Here, indeed, is a rock which might shipwreck our hopes. But if the people
turn a deaf ear to the specious arguments used to dazzle them, and realize
that new life needs new conditions, and if they undertake the task
themselves, then expropriation can be effected without any great difficulty.
"But how? How can it be done?" you ask us. We shall try to reply to this
question, but with a reservation. We have no intention of tracing out the
plans of expropriation in their smallest details. We know beforehand that all
that any man, or group of men, could suggest to-day would be far surpassed
by the reality when it comes. Man will accomplish greater things, and
accomplish them better and by simpler methods than those dictated to him
beforehand. Thus we shall merely indicate the manner by which
expropriation might be accomplished without the intervention of
Government. We do not propose to go out of our way to answer those who
declare that the thing is impossible. We confine ourselves to replying that
we are not the upholders of any particular method of organization. We are
only concerned to demonstrate that expropriation could be effected by
popular initiative, and could not be effected by any other means whatever.
It seems very likely that, as soon as expropriation is fairly started, groups of
volunteers will spring up in every district, street, and block of houses, and
undertake to inquire into the number of flats and houses which are empty
and of those which are overcrowded, the unwholesome slums, and the
houses which are too spacious for their occupants and might well be used to
house those who are stifled in swarming tenements. In a few days these
volunteers would have drawn up complete lists for the street and the district
of all the flats, tenements, family mansions and villa residences, all the
rooms and suites of rooms, healthy and unhealthy, small and large, fœtid
dens and homes of luxury.
Freely communicating with each other, these volunteers would soon have
their statistics complete. False statistics can be manufactured in board

rooms and offices, but true and exact statistics must begin with the
individual and mount up from the simple to the complex.
Then, without waiting for anyone's leave, those citizens will probably go
and find their comrades who were living in miserable garrets and hovels
and will say to them simply: "It is a real Revolution this time, comrades,
and no mistake about it. Come to such a place this evening; all the
neighbourhood will be there; we are going to redistribute the dwelling-
houses. If you are tired of your slum-garret, come and choose one of the
flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once
moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who
would venture to evict you will have to answer to them."
"But every one will want a fine house or a spacious flat!" we are told.—No,
you are quite mistaken. It is not the people's way to clamour for the moon.
On the contrary, every time we have seen them set about repairing a wrong
we have been struck by the good sense and instinct for justice which
animates the masses. Have we ever known them demand the impossible?
Have we ever seen the people of Paris fighting among themselves while
waiting for their rations of bread or firewood during the two sieges or
during the terrible years of 1792-1794? The patience and resignation which
prevailed among them in 1871 was constantly presented for admiration by
the foreign Press correspondents; and yet these patient waiters knew full
well that the last comers would have to pass the day without food or fire.
We do not deny that there are plenty of egotistic instincts in isolated
individuals. We are quite aware of it. But we contend that the very way to
revive and nourish these instincts would be to confine such questions as the
housing of the people to any board or committee, in fact, to the tender
mercies of officialism in any shape or form. Then indeed all the evil
passions spring up, and it becomes a case of who is the most influential
person on the board. The least inequality causes wranglings and
recriminations. If the smallest advantage is given to any one, a tremendous
hue and cry is raised—and not without reason.
But if the people themselves, organized by streets, districts, and parishes,
undertake to move the inhabitants of the slums into the half-empty
dwellings of the middle classes, the trifling inconveniences, the little

inequalities will be easily tided over. Rarely has appeal been made to the
good instincts of the masses—only as a last resort, to save the sinking ship
in times of revolution—but never has such an appeal been made in vain; the
heroism, the self-devotion of the toiler has never failed to respond to it. And
thus it will be in the coming Revolution.
But, when all is said and done, some inequalities, some inevitable
injustices, undoubtedly will remain. There are individuals in our societies
whom no great crisis can lift out of the deep mire of egoism in which they
are sunk. The question, however, is not whether there will be injustices or
no, but rather how to limit the number of them.
Now all history, all the experience of the human race, and all social
psychology, unite in showing that the best and fairest way is to trust the
decision to those whom it concerns most nearly. It is they alone who can
consider and allow for the hundred and one details which must necessarily
be overlooked in any merely official redistribution.

III

Moreover, it is by no means necessary to make straightway an absolutely
equal redistribution of all the dwellings. There will no doubt be some
inconveniences at first, but matters will soon be righted in a society which
has adopted expropriation.
When the masons, and carpenters, and all who are concerned in house
building, know that their daily bread is secured to them, they will ask
nothing better than to work at their old trades a few hours a day. They will
adapt the fine houses, which absorbed the time of a whole staff of servants,
for giving shelter to several families, and in a few months homes will have
sprung up, infinitely healthier and more conveniently arranged than those of
to-day. And to those who are not yet comfortably housed the anarchist
Commune will be able to say: "Patience, comrades! Palaces fairer and finer
than any the capitalists built for themselves will spring from the ground of
our enfranchised city. They will belong to those who have most need of
them. The anarchist Commune does not build with an eye to revenues.
These monuments erected to its citizens, products of the collective spirit,
will serve as models to all humanity; they will be yours."

If the people of the Revolution expropriate the houses and proclaim free
lodgings—the communalizing of houses and the right of each family to a
decent dwelling—then the Revolution will have assumed a communistic
character from the first, and started on a course from which it will be by no
means easy to turn it. It will have struck a fatal blow at individual property.
For the expropriation of dwellings contains in germ the whole social
revolution. On the manner of its accomplishment depends the character of
all that follows. Either we shall start on a good road leading straight to
anarchist communism, or we shall remain sticking in the mud of despotic
individualism.
It is easy to see the numerous objections—theoretic on the one hand,
practical on the other—with which we are sure to be met. As it will be a
question of maintaining iniquity at any price, our opponents will of course
protest "in the name of justice." "Is it not a crying shame," they will
exclaim, "that the people of Paris should take possession of all these fine
houses, while the peasants in the country have only tumble-down huts to
live in?" But do not let us make a mistake. These enthusiasts for justice
forget, by a lapse of memory to which they are subject, the "crying shame"
which they themselves are tacitly defending. They forget that in this same
city the worker, with his wife and children, suffocates in a noisome garret,
while from his window he sees the rich man's palace. They forget that
whole generations perish in crowded slums, starving for air and sunlight,
and that to redress this injustice ought to be the first task of the Revolution.
Do not let these disingenuous protests hold us back. We know that any
inequality which may exist between town and country in the early days of
the Revolution will be transitory and of a nature that will right itself from
day to day; for the village will not fail to improve its dwellings as soon as
the peasant has ceased to be the beast of burden of the farmer, the merchant,
the money-lender, and the State. In order to avoid an accidental and
transitory inequality, shall we stay our hand from righting an ancient
wrong?
The so-called practical objections are not very formidable either. We are
bidden to consider the hard case of some poor fellow who by dint of
privation has contrived to buy a house just large enough to hold his family.

And we are going to deprive him of his hard-earned happiness, to turn him
into the street! Certainly not. If his house is only just large enough for his
family, by all means let him stay there. Let him work in his little garden,
too; our "boys" will not hinder him—nay, they will lend him a helping hand
if need be. But suppose he lets lodgings, suppose he has empty rooms in his
house; then the people will make the lodger understand that he need not pay
his former landlord any more rent. Stay where you are, but rent free. No
more duns and collectors; Socialism has abolished all that!
Or again, suppose that the landlord has a score of rooms all to himself, and
some poor woman lives near by with five children in one room. In that case
the people would see whether, with some alterations, these empty rooms
could not be converted into a suitable home for the poor woman and her
five children. Would not that be more just and fair than to leave the mother
and her five little ones languishing in a garret, while Sir Gorgeous Midas sat
at his ease in an empty mansion? Besides, good Sir Gorgeous would
probably hasten to do it of his own accord; his wife will be delighted to be
freed from half her big, unwieldy house when there is no longer a staff of
servants to keep it in order.
"So you are going to turn everything upside down," say the defenders of
law and order. "There will be no end to the evictions and removals. Would it
not be better to start fresh by turning everybody out of doors and
redistributing the houses by lot?" Thus our critics; but we are firmly
persuaded that if no Government interferes in the matter, if all the changes
are entrusted to these free groups which have sprung up to undertake the
work, the evictions and removals will be less numerous than those which
take place in one year under the present system, owing to the rapacity of
landlords.
In the first place, there are in all large towns almost enough empty houses
and flats to lodge all the inhabitants of the slums. As to the palaces and
suites of fine apartments, many working people would not live in them if
they could. One could not "keep up" such houses without a large staff of
servants. Their occupants would soon find themselves forced to seek less
luxurious dwellings. The fine ladies would find that palaces were not well
adapted to self-help in the kitchen. Gradually people would shake down.
There would be no need to conduct Dives to a garret at the bayonet's point,

or install Lazarus in Dives's palace by the help of an armed escort. People
would shake down amicably into the available dwellings with the least
possible friction and disturbance. Have we not the example of the village
communes redistributing fields and disturbing the owners of the allotments
so little that one can only praise the intelligence and good sense of the
methods they employ? Fewer fields change hands under the management of
the Russian Commune than where personal property holds sway, and is for
ever carrying its quarrels into courts of law. And are we to believe that the
inhabitants of a great European city would be less intelligent and less
capable of organization than Russian or Hindoo peasants?
Moreover, we must not blink at the fact that every revolution means a
certain disturbance to everyday life, and those who expect this tremendous
climb out of the old grooves to be accomplished without so much as jarring
the dishes on their dinner tables will find themselves mistaken. It is true that
Governments can change without disturbing worthy citizens at dinner, but
the crimes of society towards those who have nourished and supported it
are not to be redressed by any such political sleight of parties.
Undoubtedly there will be a disturbance, but it must not be one of pure loss;
it must be minimized. And again—it is impossible to lay too much stress on
this maxim—it will be by addressing ourselves to the interested parties, and
not to boards and committees, that we shall best succeed in reducing the
sum of inconveniences for everybody.
The people commit blunder on blunder when they have to choose by ballot
some hare-brained candidate who solicits the honour of representing them,
and takes upon himself to know all, to do all, and to organize all. But when
they take upon themselves to organize what they know, what touches them
directly, they do it better than all the "talking-shops" put together. Is not the
Paris Commune an instance in point? and the great dockers' strike? and
have we not constant evidence of this fact in every village commune?

FOOTNOTE:

[5] The decree of the 30 March: by this decree rents due up to the terms of
October, 1870, and January and April, 1871, were annulled.

CHAPTER VII
CLOTHING

When the houses have become the common heritage of the citizens, and
when each man has his daily supply of food, another forward step will have
to be taken. The question of clothing will of course demand consideration
next, and again the only possible solution will be to take possession, in the
name of the people, of all the shops and warehouses where clothing is sold
or stored, and to throw open the doors to all, so that each can take what he
needs. The communalization of clothing—the right of each to take what he
needs from the communal stores, or to have it made for him at the tailors
and outfitters—is a necessary corollary of the communalization of houses
and food.
Obviously we shall not need for that to despoil all citizens of their coats, to
put all the garments in a heap and draw lots for them, as our critics, with
equal wit and ingenuity, suggest. Let him who has a coat keep it still—nay,
if he have ten coats it is highly improbable that any one will want to deprive
him of them, for most folk would prefer a new coat to one that has already
graced the shoulders of some fat bourgeois; and there will be enough new
garments, and to spare, without having recourse to second-hand wardrobes.
If we were to take an inventory of all the clothes and stuff for clothing
accumulated in the shops and stores of the large towns, we should find
probably that in Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, there was enough
to enable the commune to offer garments to all the citizens, of both sexes;
and if all were not suited at once, the communal outfitters would soon make
good these shortcomings. We know how rapidly our great tailoring and
dressmaking establishments work nowadays, provided as they are with
machinery specially adapted for production on a large scale.
"But every one will want a sable-lined coat or a velvet gown!" exclaim our
adversaries.

Frankly, we do not believe it. Every woman does not dote on velvet nor
does every man dream of sable linings. Even now, if we were to ask each
woman to choose her gown, we should find some to prefer a simple,
practical garment to all the fantastic trimmings the fashionable world
affects.
Tastes change with the times, and the fashion in vogue at the time of the
Revolution will certainly make for simplicity. Societies, like individuals,
have their hours of cowardice, but also their heroic moments; and though
the society of to-day cuts a very poor figure sunk in the pursuit of narrow
personal interests and second-rate ideas, it wears a different air when great
crises come. It has its moments of greatness and enthusiasm. Men of
generous nature will gain the power which to-day is in the hand of jobbers.
Self-devotion will spring up, and noble deeds beget their like; even the
egotists will be ashamed of hanging back, and will be drawn in spite of
themselves to admire, if not to imitate, the generous and brave.
The great Revolution of 1793 abounds in examples of this kind, and it is
always during such times of spiritual revival—as natural to societies as to
individuals—that the spring-tide of enthusiasm sweeps humanity onwards.
We do not wish to exaggerate the part played by such noble passions, nor is
it upon them that we would found our ideal of society. But we are not
asking too much if we expect their aid in tiding over the first and most
difficult moments. We cannot hope that our daily life will be continuously
inspired by such exalted enthusiasms, but we may expect their aid at the
first, and that is all we need.
It is just to wash the earth clean, to sweep away the shards and refuse,
accumulated by centuries of slavery and oppression, that the new anarchist
society will have need of this wave of brotherly love. Later on it can exist
without appealing to the spirit of self-sacrifice, because it will have
eliminated oppression, and thus created a new world instinct with all the
feelings of solidarity.
Besides, should the character of the Revolution be such as we have
sketched here, the free initiative of individuals would find an extensive field
of action in thwarting the efforts of the egotists. Groups would spring up in
every street and quarter to undertake the charge of the clothing. They would

make inventories of all that the city possessed, and would find out
approximately what were the resources at their disposal. It is more than
likely that in the matter of clothing the citizens would adopt the same
principle as in the matter of provisions—that is to say, they would offer
freely from the common store everything which was to be found in
abundance, and dole out whatever was limited in quantity.
Not being able to offer to each man a sable-lined coat and to every woman a
velvet gown, society would probably distinguish between the superfluous
and the necessary, and, provisionally at least class sable and velvet among
the superfluities of life, ready to let time prove whether what is a luxury to-
day may not become common to all to-morrow. While the necessary
clothing would be guaranteed to each inhabitant of the anarchist city, it
would be left to private activity to provide for the sick and feeble those
things, provisionally considered as luxuries, and to procure for the less
robust such special articles, as would not enter into the daily consumption
of ordinary citizens.
"But," it may be urged, "this means grey uniformity and the end of
everything beautiful in life and art."
"Certainly not," we reply. And, still basing our reasonings on what already
exists, we are going to show how an Anarchist society could satisfy the
most artistic tastes of its citizens without allowing them to amass the
fortunes of millionaires.

CHAPTER VIII
WAYS AND MEANS

I

If a society, a city or a territory were to guarantee the necessaries of life to
its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the necessaries of
life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would be compelled to
take possession of what is absolutely needed for production; that is to say—
land, machinery, factories, means of transport, etc. Capital in the hands of
private owners would be expropriated, to be returned to the community.
The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is
not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial
and commercial enterprise, thus enabling themselves to live without
working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not
carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. There is the reason why
it must be condemned.
It is absolutely impossible that mercantile production should be carried on
in the interest of all. To desire it would be to expect the capitalist to go
beyond his province and to fulfil duties that he cannot fulfil without ceasing
to be what he is—a private manufacturer seeking his own enrichment.
Capitalist organization, based on the personal interest of each individual
employer of labour, has given to society all that could be expected of it: it
has increased the productive force of Labour. The capitalist, profiting by the
revolution effected in industry by steam, by the sudden development of
chemistry and machinery, and by other inventions of our century, has
worked in his own interest to increase the yield of human labour, and in a
great measure he has succeeded so far. But to attribute other duties to him
would be unreasonable. For example, to expect that he should use this
superior yield of labour in the interest of society as a whole, would be to
ask philanthropy and charity of him, and a capitalist enterprise cannot be
based on charity.

It now remains for society, first, to extend this greater productivity, which is
limited to certain industries, and to apply it to the general good. But it is
evident that to utilize this high productivity of labour, so as to guarantee
well-being to all, Society must itself take possession of all means of
production.
Economists, as is their wont, will not fail to remind us of the comparative
well-being of a certain category of young robust workmen, skilled in certain
special branches of industry which has been obtained under the present
system. It is always this minority that is pointed out to us with pride. But
even this well-being, which is the exclusive right of a few, is it secure? To-
morrow, maybe, negligence, improvidence, or the greed of their employers,
will deprive these privileged men of their work, and they will pay for the
period of comfort they have enjoyed with months and years of poverty or
destitution. How many important industries—the textiles, iron, sugar, etc.—
without mentioning all sorts of short-lived trades, have we not seen decline
or come to a standstill on account of speculations, or in consequence of
natural displacement of work, or from the effects of competition amongst
the capitalists themselves! If the chief textile and mechanical industries had
to pass through such a crisis as they have passed through in 1886, we hardly
need mention the small trades, all of which have their periods of standstill.
What, too, shall we say to the price which is paid for the relative well-being
of certain categories of workmen? Unfortunately, it is paid for by the ruin of
agriculture, the shameless exploitation of the peasants, the misery of the
masses. In comparison with the feeble minority of workers who enjoy a
certain comfort, how many millions of human beings live from hand to
mouth, without a secure wage, ready to go wherever they are wanted; how
many peasants work fourteen hours a day for a poor pittance! Capital
depopulates the country, exploits the colonies and the countries where
industries are but little developed, dooms the immense majority of
workmen to remain without technical education, to remain mediocre even
in their own trade.
This is not merely accidental, it is a necessity of the capitalist system. In
order well to remunerate certain classes of workmen, peasants must become
the beasts of burden of society; the country must be deserted for the town;
small trades must agglomerate in the foul suburbs of large cities, and

manufacture a thousand little things for next to nothing, so as to bring the
goods of the greater industries within reach of buyers with small salaries.
That bad cloth may be sold to ill-paid workers, garments are made by
tailors who are satisfied with a starvation wage! Eastern lands in a
backward state are exploited by the West, in order that, under the capitalist
system, workers in a few privileged industries may obtain certain limited
comforts of life.
The evil of the present system is therefore not that the "surplus-value" of
production goes to the capitalist, as Rodbertus and Marx said, thus
narrowing the Socialist conception and the general view of the capitalist
system; the surplus-value itself is but a consequence of deeper causes. The
evil lies in the possibility of a surplus-value existing, instead of a simple
surplus not consumed by each generation; for, that a surplus-value should
exist, means that men, women and children are compelled by hunger to sell
their labour for a small part of what this labour produces, and still more so,
of what their labour is capable of producing: But this evil will last as long
as the instruments of production belong to the few. As long as men are
compelled to pay a heavy tribute to property holders for the right of
cultivating land or putting machinery into action, and the owners of the land
and the machine are free to produce what bids fair to bring them in the
largest profits—rather than the greatest amount of useful commodities—
well-being can only be temporarily guaranteed to a very few; it is only to be
bought by the poverty of a large section of society. It is not sufficient to
distribute the profits realized by a trade in equal parts, if at the same time
thousands of other workers are exploited. It is a case of PRODUCING THE
GREATEST AMOUNT OF GOODS NECESSARY TO THE WELL-BEING OF ALL, WITH THE
LEAST POSSIBLE WASTE OF HUMAN ENERGY.

This generalized aim cannot be the aim of a private owner; and this is why
society as a whole, if it takes this view of production as its ideal, will be
compelled to expropriate all that enhances well-being while producing
wealth. It will have to take possession of land, factories, mines, means of
communication, etc., and besides, it will have to study what products will
promote general well-being, as well as the ways and means of an adequate
production.

II

How many hours a day will man have to work to produce nourishing food,
a comfortable home, and necessary clothing for his family? This question
has often preoccupied Socialists, and they generally came to the conclusion
that four or five hours a day would suffice, on condition, be it well
understood, that all men work. At the end of last century, Benjamin Franklin
fixed the limit at five hours; and if the need of comfort is greater now, the
power of production has augmented too, and far more rapidly.
In speaking of agriculture further on, we shall see what the earth can be
made to yield to man when he cultivates it in a reasonable way, instead of
throwing seed haphazard in a badly ploughed soil as he mostly does to-day.
In the great farms of Western America, some of which cover 30 square
miles, but have a poorer soil than the manured soil of civilized countries,
only 10 to 15 English bushels per English acre are obtained; that is to say,
half the yield of European farms or of American farms in the Eastern States.
And nevertheless, thanks to machines which enable 2 men to plough 4
English acres a day, 100 men can produce in a year all that is necessary to
deliver the bread of 10,000 people at their homes during a whole year.
Thus it would suffice for a man to work under the same conditions for 30
hours, say 6 half-days of five hours each, to have bread for a whole year;
and to work 30 half-days to guarantee the same to a family of 5 people.
We shall also prove by results obtained nowadays, that if we took recourse
to intensive agriculture, less than 6 half-days' work could procure bread,
meat, vegetables, and even luxurious fruit for a whole family.
Again, if we study the cost of workmen's dwellings, built in large towns to-
day, we can ascertain that to obtain, in a large English city, a semi-detached
little house, as they are built for workmen for £250, from 1400 to 1800 half-
days' work of 5 hours would be sufficient. And as a house of that kind lasts
50 years at least, it follows that 28 to 36 half-days' work a year would
provide well-furnished, healthy quarters, with all necessary comfort for a
family. Whereas when hiring the same apartment from an employer, a
workman pays from 75 to 100 days' work per year.
Mark that these figures represent the maximum of what a house costs in
England to-day, being given the defective organization of our societies. In
Belgium, workmen's houses in the cités ouvrières have been built at a much

smaller cost. So that, taking everything into consideration, we are justified
in affirming that in a well-organized society 30 or 40 half-days' work a year
will suffice to guarantee a perfectly comfortable home.
There now remains clothing, the exact value of which is almost impossible
to fix, because the profits realized by a swarm of middlemen cannot be
estimated. Let us take cloth, for example, and add up all the tribute levied
on every yard of it by the landowners, the sheep owners, the wool
merchants, and all their intermediate agents, then by the railway companies,
mill-owners, weavers, dealers in ready-made clothes, sellers and
commission agents, and we shall get then an idea of what we pay to a whole
swarm of capitalists for each article of clothing. That is why it is perfectly
impossible to say how many days' work an overcoat that you pay £3 or £4
for in a large London shop represents.
What is certain is that with present machinery it is possible to manufacture
an incredible amount of goods both cheaply and quickly.
A few examples will suffice. Thus in the United States, in 751 cotton mills
(for spinning and weaving), 175,000 men and women produce
2,033,000,000 yards of cotton goods, besides a great quantity of thread. On
the average, more than 12,000 yards of cotton goods alone are obtained by a
300 days' work of nine and one-half hours each, say 40 yards of cotton in
10 hours. Admitting that a family needs 200 yards a year at most, this
would be equivalent to 50 hours' work, say 10 half-days of 5 hours each.
And we should have thread besides; that is to say, cotton to sew with, and
thread to weave cloth with, so as to manufacture woolen stuffs mixed with
cotton.
As to the results obtained by weaving alone, the official statistics of the
United States teach us that in 1870, if workmen worked 13 or 14 hours a
day, they made 10,000 yards of white cotton goods in a year; sixteen years
later (1886) they wove 30,000 yards by working only 55 hours a week.
Even in printed cotton goods they obtained, weaving and printing included,
32,000 yards in 2670 hours of work a year—say about 12 yards an hour.
Thus to have your 200 yards of white and printed cotton goods 17 hours'
work a year would suffice. It is necessary to remark that raw material
reaches these factories in about the same state as it comes from the fields,

and that the transformations gone through by the piece before it is
converted into goods are completed in the course of these 17 hours. But to
buy these 200 yards from the tradesman, a well-paid workman must give at
the very least 10 to 15 days' work of 10 hours each, say 100 to 150 hours.
And as to the English peasant, he would have to toil for a month, or a little
more, to obtain this luxury.
By this example we already see that by working 50 half-days per year in a
well-organized society we could dress better than the lower middle classes
do to-day.
But with all this we have only required 60 half-days' work of 5 hours each
to obtain the fruits of the earth, 40 for housing, and 50 for clothing, which
only makes half a year's work, as the year consists of 300 working-days if
we deduct holidays.
There remain still 150 half-days' work which could be made use of for other
necessaries of life—wine, sugar, coffee, tea, furniture, transport, etc., etc.
It is evident that these calculations are only approximative, but they can
also be proved in another way. When we take into account how many, in the
so-called civilized nations, produce nothing, how many work at harmful
trades, doomed to disappear, and lastly, how many are only useless
middlemen, we see that in each nation the number of real producers could
be doubled. And if, instead of every 10 men, 20 were occupied in producing
useful commodities, and if society took the trouble to economize human
energy, those 20 people would only have to work 5 hours a day without
production decreasing. And it would suffice to reduce the waste of human
energy which is going on in the rich families with the scores of useless
servants, or in the administrations which occupy one official to every ten or
even six inhabitants, and to utilize those forces, to augment immensely the
productivity of a nation. In fact, work could be reduced to four or even
three hours a day, to produce all the goods that are produced now.
After studying all these facts together, we may arrive, then, at the following
conclusion: Imagine a society, comprising a few million inhabitants,
engaged in agriculture and a great variety of industries—Paris, for example,
with the Department of Seine-et-Oise. Suppose that in this society all
children learn to work with their hands as well as with their brains. Admit

that all adults, save women, engaged in the education of their children, bind
themselves to work 5 hours a day from the age of twenty or twenty-two to
forty-five or fifty, and that they follow occupations they have chosen
themselves in any one of those branches of human work which in this city
are considered necessary. Such a society could in return guarantee well-
being to all its members, a well-being more substantial than that enjoyed to-
day by the middle classes. And, moreover, each worker belonging to this
society would have at his disposal at least 5 hours a day which he could
devote to science, art, and individual needs which do not come under the
category of necessities, but will probably do so later on, when man's
productivity will have augmented, and those objects will no longer appear
luxurious or inaccessible.

CHAPTER IX
THE NEED FOR LUXURY

I

Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and
providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are satisfied,
other needs, which, generally speaking, may be described as of an artistic
character, will thrust themselves forward. These needs are of the greatest
variety; they vary with each and every individual; and the more society is
civilized, the more will individuality be developed, and the more will
desires be varied.
Even to-day we see men and women denying themselves necessaries to
acquire mere trifles, to obtain some particular gratification, or some
intellectual or material enjoyment. A Christian or an ascetic may disapprove
of these desires for luxury; but it is precisely these trifles that break the
monotony of existence and make it agreeable. Would life, with all its
inevitable drudge and sorrows, be worth living, if, besides daily work, man
could never obtain a single pleasure according to his individual tastes?
If we wish for a Social Revolution, it is no doubt, first of all, to give bread
to everyone; to transform this execrable society, in which we can every day
see capable workmen dangling their arms for want of an employer who will
exploit them; women and children wandering shelterless at night; whole
families reduced to dry bread; men, women, and children dying for want of
care and even for want of food. It is to put an end to these iniquities that we
rebel.
But we expect more from the Revolution. We see that the worker,
compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to ignore the
higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science, and especially of
scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order
to obtain for all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give

leisure and the possibility of developing everyone's intellectual capacities,
that the social revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has
been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.
No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in
need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to satisfy it, the
worker's child must go without bread! But in a society in which all have the
necessary food and shelter, the needs which we consider luxuries to-day
will be the more keenly felt. And as all men do not and cannot resemble one
another (the variety of tastes and needs is the chief guarantee of human
progress) there will always be, and it is desirable that there should always
be, men and women whose desire will go beyond those of ordinary
individuals in some particular direction.
Everybody does not need a telescope, because, even if learning were
general, there are people who prefer to examine things through a
microscope to studying the starry heavens. Some like statues, some like
pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess a
good piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes vary, but
the artistic needs exist in all. In our present, poor capitalistic society, the
man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them unless he is heir to a large
fortune, or by dint of hard work appropriates to himself an intellectual
capital which will enable him to take up a liberal profession. Still he
cherishes the hope of some day satisfying his tastes more or less, and for
this reason he reproaches the idealist Communist societies with having the
material life of each individual as their sole aim. "In your communal stores
you may perhaps have bread for all," he says to us, "but you will not have
beautiful pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry
—in short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human
tastes. And you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides the
bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the drab linen in
which all your lady citizens will be dressed."
These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider, and
which the founders of new societies, established in American deserts, never
understood. They believed that if the community could procure sufficient
cloth to dress all its members, a music-room in which the "brothers" could
strum a piece of music, or act a play from time to time, it was enough. They

forgot that the feeling for art existed in the agriculturist as well as in the
burgher, and, notwithstanding that the expression of artistic feeling varies
according to the difference in culture, in the main it remains the same. In
vain did the community guarantee the common necessaries of life, in vain
did it suppress all education that would tend to develop individuality, in
vain did it eliminate all reading save the Bible. Individual tastes broke forth,
and caused general discontent; quarrels arose when somebody proposed to
buy a piano or scientific instruments; and the elements of progress flagged.
The society could only exist on condition that it crushed all individual
feeling, all artistic tendency, and all development.
Will the anarchist Commune be impelled by the same direction?—
Evidently not, if it understands that while it produces all that is necessary to
material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human
mind.

II

We frankly confess that when we think of the abyss of poverty and suffering
that surrounds us, when we hear the heartrending cry of the worker walking
the streets begging for work, we are loth to discuss the question: How will
men act in a society, whose members are properly fed, to satisfy certain
individuals desirous of possessing a piece of Sèvres china or a velvet dress?
We are tempted to answer: Let us make sure of bread to begin with, we
shall see to china and velvet later on.
But as we must recognize that man has other needs besides food, and as the
strength of Anarchy lies precisely in that that it understands all human
faculties and all passions, and ignores none, we shall, in a few words,
explain how man can contrive to satisfy all his intellectual and artistic
needs.
We have already mentioned that by working 4 or 5 hours a day till the age
of forty-five or fifty, man could easily produce all that is necessary to
guarantee comfort to society.
But the day's work of a man accustomed to toil does not consist of 5 hours;
it is a 10 hours' day for 300 days a year, and lasts all his life. Of course,

when a man is harnessed to a machine, his health is soon undermined and
his intelligence is blunted; but when man has the possibility of varying
occupations, and especially of alternating manual with intellectual work, he
can remain occupied without fatigue, and even with pleasure, for 10 or 12
hours a day. Consequently, the man who will have done the 4 or 5 hours of
manual work that are necessary for his existence, will have before him 5 or
6 hours which he will seek to employ according to his tastes. And these 5 or
6 hours a day will fully enable him to procure for himself, if he associates
with others, all he wishes for, in addition to the necessaries guaranteed to
all.
He will discharge first his task in the field, the factory, and so on, which he
owes to society as his contribution to the general production. And he will
employ the second half of his day, his week, or his year, to satisfy his
artistic or scientific needs, or his hobbies.
Thousands of societies will spring up to gratify every taste and every
possible fancy.
Some, for example, will give their hours of leisure to literature. They will
then form groups comprising authors, compositors, printers, engravers,
draughtsmen, all pursuing a common aim—the propagation of ideas that are
dear to them.
Nowadays an author knows that there is a beast of burden, the worker, to
whom, for the sum of a few shillings a day, he can entrust the printing of his
books; but he hardly cares to know what a printing office is like. If the
compositor suffers from lead-poisoning, and if the child who sees to the
machine dies of anæmia, are there not other poor wretches to replace them?
But when there will be no more starvelings ready to sell their work for a
pittance, when the exploited worker of to-day will be educated, and will
have his own ideas to put down in black and white and to communicate to
others, then the authors and scientific men will be compelled to combine
among themselves and with the printers, in order to bring out their prose
and their poetry.
So long as men consider fustian and manual labour a mark of inferiority, it
will appear amazing to them to see an author setting up his own book in

type, for has he not a gymnasium or games by way of diversion? But when
the opprobrium connected with manual labor has disappeared, when all will
have to work with their hands, there being no one to do it for them, then the
authors as well as their admirers will soon learn the art of handling
composing-sticks and type; they will know the pleasure of coming together
—all admirers of the work to be printed—to set up the type, to shape it into
pages, to take it in its virginal purity from the press. These beautiful
machines, instruments of torture to the child who attends on them from
morn till night, will be a source of enjoyment for those who will make use
of them in order to give voice to the thoughts of their favourite author.
Will literature lose by it? Will the poet be less a poet after having worked
out of doors or helped with his hands to multiply his work? Will the
novelist lose his knowledge of human nature after having rubbed shoulders
with other men in the forest or the factory, in the laying out of a road or on a
railway line? Can there be two answers to these questions?
Maybe some books will be less voluminous; but then, more will be said on
fewer pages. Maybe fewer waste-sheets will be published; but the matter
printed will be more attentively read and more appreciated. The book will
appeal to a larger circle of better educated readers, who will be more
competent to judge.
Moreover, the art of printing, that has so little progressed since Gutenberg,
is still in its infancy. It takes two hours to compose in type what is written in
ten minutes, but more expeditious methods of multiplying thought are being
sought after and will be discovered.[6]
What a pity every author does not have to take his share in the printing of
his works! What progress printing would have already made! We should no
longer be using movable letters, as in the seventeenth century.

III

Is it a dream to conceive a society in which—all having become producers,
all having received an education that enables them to cultivate science or
art, and all having leisure to do so—men would combine to publish the
works of their choice, by contributing each his share of manual work? We

have already hundreds of learned, literary, and other societies; and these
societies are nothing but voluntary groups of men, interested in certain
branches of learning, and associated for the purpose of publishing their
works. The authors who write for the periodicals of these societies are not
paid, and the periodicals, apart from a limited number of copies, are not for
sale; they are sent gratis to all quarters of the globe, to other societies,
cultivating the same branches of learning. This member of the Society may
insert in its review a one-page note summarizing his observations; another
may publish therein an extensive work, the results of long years of study;
while others will confine themselves to consulting the review as a starting-
point for further research. It does not matter: all these authors and readers
are associated for the production of works in which all of them take an
interest.
It is true that a learned society, like the individual author, goes to a printing
office where workmen are engaged to do the printing. Nowadays, those
who belong to the learned societies despise manual labour which indeed is
carried on under very bad conditions; but a community which would give a
generous philosophic and scientific education to all its members, would
know how to organize manual labour in such a way that it would be the
pride of humanity. Its learned societies would become associations of
explorers, lovers of science, and workers—all knowing a manual trade and
all interested in science.
If, for example, the Society is studying geology, all will contribute to the
exploration of the earth's strata; each member will take his share in
research, and ten thousand observers, where we have now only a hundred,
will do more in a year than we can do in twenty years. And when their
works are to be published, ten thousand men and women, skilled in
different trades, will be ready to draw maps, engrave designs, compose, and
print the books. With gladness will they give their leisure—in summer to
exploration, in winter to indoor work. And when their works appear, they
will find not only a hundred, but ten thousand readers interested in their
common work.
This is the direction in which progress is already moving. Even to-day,
when England felt the need of a complete dictionary of the English
language, the birth of a Littré, who would devote his life to this work, was

not waited for. Volunteers were appealed to, and a thousand men offered
their services, spontaneously and gratuitously, to ransack the libraries, to
take notes, and to accomplish in a few years a work which one man could
not complete in his lifetime. In all branches of human intelligence the same
spirit is breaking forth, and we should have a very limited knowledge of
humanity could we not guess that the future is announcing itself in such
tentative co-operation, which is gradually taking the place of individual
work.
For this dictionary to be a really collective work, it would have been
necessary that many volunteer authors, printers, and printers' readers should
have worked in common; but something in this direction is done already in
the Socialist Press, which offers us examples of manual and intellectual
work combined. It happens in our newspapers that a Socialist author
composes in lead his own article. True, such attempts are rare, but they
indicate in which direction evolution is going.
They show the road of liberty. In future, when a man will have something
useful to say—a word that goes beyond the thoughts of his century, he will
not have to look for an editor who might advance the necessary capital. He
will look for collaborators among those who know the printing trade, and
who approve the idea of his new work. Together they will publish the new
book or journal.
Literature and journalism will cease to be a means of money-making and
living at the cost of others. But is there any one who knows literature and
journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that literature
should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly protected it, and
who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which, with rare exceptions,
pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to the ease with which it adapts
itself to the bad taste o£ the greater number?
Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of human
development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be
exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love
them.

IV

Literature, science, and art must be cultivated by free men. Only on this
condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the yoke of
the State, of Capital, and of the bourgeois mediocrity which stifles them.
What means has the scientist of to-day to make researches that interest him?
Should he ask help of the State, which can only be given to one candidate in
a hundred, and which only he may obtain who promises ostensibly to keep
to the beaten track? Let us remember how the Academy of Sciences of
France repudiated Darwin, how the Academy of St. Petersburg treated
Mendeléeff with contempt, and how the Royal Society of London refused to
publish Joule's paper, in which he determined the mechanical equivalent of
heat, finding it "unscientific."[7]
It was why all great researches, all discoveries revolutionizing science, have
been made outside academies and universities, either by men rich enough to
remain independent, like Darwin and Lyell, or by men who undermined
their health by working in poverty, and often in great straits, losing endless
time for want of a laboratory, and unable to procure the instruments or
books necessary to continue their researches, but persevering against hope,
and often dying before they had reached the end in view. Their name is
legion.
Altogether, the system of help granted by the State is so bad that science has
always endeavoured to emancipate itself from it. For this very reason there
are thousands of learned societies organized and maintained by volunteers
in Europe and America,—some having developed to such a degree that all
the resources of subventioned societies, and all the wealth of millionaires,
would not buy their treasures. No governmental institution is as rich as the
Zoological Society of London, which is supported by voluntary
contributions.
It does not buy the animals which in thousands people its gardens: they are
sent by other societies and by collectors of the entire world. The Zoological
Society of Bombay will send an elephant as a gift; another time a
hippopotamus or a rhinoceros is offered by Egyptian naturalists. And these
magnificent presents are pouring in every day, arriving from all quarters of
the globe—birds, reptiles, collections of insects, etc. Such consignments
often comprise animals that could not be bought for all the gold in the

world; thus a traveller who has captured an animal at life's peril, and now
loves it as he would love a child, will give it to the Society because he is
sure it will be cared for. The entrance fee paid by visitors, and they are
numberless, suffices for the maintenance of that immense institution.
What is defective in the Zoological Society of London, and in other kindred
societies, is that the member's fee cannot be paid in work; that the keepers
and numerous employes of this large institution are not recognized as
members of the Society, while many have no other incentive to joining the
society than to put the cabalistic letters F.Z.S (Fellow of the Zoological
Society) on their cards. In a word, what is needed is a more perfect co-
operation.
We may say the same about inventors, that we have said of scientists. Who
does not know what sufferings nearly all great inventions have cost?
Sleepless nights, families deprived of bread, want of tools and materials for
experiments, this is the history of nearly all those who have enriched
industry with inventions which are the truly legitimate pride of our
civilization.
But what are we to do to alter the conditions that everybody is convinced
are bad? Patents have been tried, and we know with what results. The
inventor sells his patent for a few pounds, and the man who has only lent
the capital pockets the enormous profits often resulting from the invention.
Besides, patents isolate the inventor. They compel him to keep secret his
researches which therefore end in failure; whereas the simplest suggestion,
coming from a brain less absorbed in the fundamental idea, sometimes
suffices to fertilize the invention and make it practical. Like all State
control, patents hamper the progress of industry. Thought being incapable
of being patented, patents are a crying injustice in theory, and in practice
they result in one of the great obstacles to the rapid development of
invention.
What is needed to promote the spirit of invention is, first of all, the
awakening of thought, the boldness of conception, which our entire
education causes to languish; it is the spreading of a scientific education,
which would increase the number of inquirers a hundredfold; it is faith that
humanity is going to take a step forward, because it is enthusiasm, the hope

of doing good, that has inspired all the great inventors. The Social
Revolution alone can give this impulse to thought, this boldness, this
knowledge, this conviction of working for all.
Then we shall have vast institutes supplied with motor-power and tools of
all sorts, immense industrial laboratories open to all inquirers, where men
will be able to work out their dreams, after having acquitted themselves of
their duty towards society; machinery palaces where they will spend their
five or six hours of leisure; where they will make their experiments; where
they will find other comrades, experts in other branches of industry,
likewise coming to study some difficult problem, and therefore able to help
and enlighten each other,—the encounter of their ideas and experience
causing the longed-for solution to be found. And yet again, this is no dream.
Solanóy Gorodók, in Petersburg, has already partially realized it as regards
technical matters. It is a factory well furnished with tools and free to all;
tools and motor-power are supplied gratis, only metals and wood are
charged for at cost price. Unfortunately workmen only go there at night
when worn out by ten hours' labour in the workshop. Moreover, they
carefully hide their inventions from each other, as they are hampered by
patents and Capitalism—that bane of present society, that stumbling-block
in the path of intellectual and moral progress.

V

And what about art? From all sides we hear lamentations about the
decadence of art. We are, indeed, far behind the great masters of the
Renaissance. The technicalities of art have recently made great progress;
thousands of people gifted with a certain amount of talent cultivate every
branch, but art seems to fly from civilization! Technicalities make headway,
but inspiration frequents artists' studios less than ever.
Where, indeed, should it come from? Only a grand idea can inspire art. Art
is in our ideal synonymous with creation, it must look ahead; but save a few
rare, very rare exceptions, the professional artist remains too philistine to
perceive new horizons.
Moreover, this inspiration cannot come from books; it must be drawn from
life, and present society cannot arouse it.

Raphael and Murillo painted at a time when the search of a new ideal could
be pursued while retaining the old religious traditions. They painted to
decorate churches which themselves represented the pious work of several
generations of a given city. The basilic with its mysterious aspect, its
grandeur, was connected with the life itself of the city, and could inspire a
painter. He worked for a popular monument; he spoke to his fellow-citizens,
and in return he received inspiration; he appealed to the multitude in the
same way as did the nave, the pillars, the stained windows, the statues, and
the carved doors. Nowadays the greatest honour a painter can aspire to is to
see his canvas, framed in gilded wood, hung in a museum, a sort of old
curiosity shop, where you see, as in the Prado, Murillo's Ascension next to a
beggar of Velasquez and the dogs of Philip II. Poor Velasquez and poor
Murillo! Poor Greek statues which lived in the Acropolis of their cities, and
are now stifled beneath the red cloth hangings of the Louvre!
When a Greek sculptor chiseled his marble he endeavored to express the
spirit and heart of the city. All its passions, all its traditions of glory, were to
live again in the work. But to-day the united city has ceased to exist; there
is no more communion of ideas. The town is a chance agglomeration of
people who do not know one another, who have no common interest, save
that of enriching themselves at the expense of one another. The fatherland
does not exist.... What fatherland can the international banker and the rag-
picker have in common? Only when cities, territories, nations, or groups of
nations, will have renewed their harmonious life, will art be able to draw its
inspiration from ideals held in common. Then will the architect conceive the
city's monument which will no longer be a temple, a prison, or a fortress;
then will the painter, the sculptor, the carver, the ornament-worker know
where to put their canvases, their statues, and their decoration; deriving
their power of execution from the same vital source, and gloriously
marching all together towards the future.
But till then art can only vegetate. The best canvases of modern artists are
those that represent nature, villages, valleys, the sea with its dangers, the
mountain with its splendours. But how can the painter express the poetry of
work in the fields if he has only contemplated it, imagined it, if he has never
delighted in it himself? If he only knows it as a bird of passage knows the
country he soars over in his migrations? If, in the vigour of early youth, he
has not followed the plough at dawn, and enjoyed mowing grass with a

large sweep of the scythe next to hardy haymakers vying in energy with
lively young girls who fill the air with their songs? The love of the soil and
of what grows on it is not acquired by sketching with a paint-brush—it is
only in its service; and without loving it, how paint it? This is why all that
the best painters have produced in this direction is still so imperfect, not
true to life, nearly always merely sentimental. There is no strength in it.
You must have seen a sunset when returning from work. You must have
been a peasant among peasants to keep the splendour of it in your eye. You
must have been at sea with fishermen at all hours of the day and night, have
fished yourself, struggled with the waves, faced the storm, and after rough
work experienced the joy of hauling a heavy net, or the disappointment of
seeing it empty, to understand the poetry of fishing. You must have spent
time in a factory, known the fatigues and the joys of creative work, forged
metals by the vivid light of a blast furnace, have felt the life in a machine,
to understand the power of man and to express it in a work of art. You must,
in fact, be permeated with popular feelings, to describe them.
Besides, the works of future artists who will have lived the life of the
people, like the great artists of the past, will not be destined for sale. They
will be an integral part of a living whole that would not be complete
without them, any more than they would be complete without it. Men will
go to the artist's own city to gaze at his work, and the spirited and serene
beauty of such creations will produce its beneficial effect on heart and
mind.
Art, in order to develop, must be bound up with industry by a thousand
intermediate degrees, blended, so to say, as Ruskin and the great Socialist
poet Morris have proved so often and so well. Everything that surrounds
man, in the street, in the interior and exterior of public monuments, must be
of a pure artistic form.
But this can only be realized in a society in which all enjoy comfort and
leisure. Then only shall we see art associations, of which each member will
find room for his capacity; for art cannot dispense with an infinity of purely
manual and technical supplementary works. These artistic associations will
undertake to embellish the houses of their members, as those kind

volunteers, the young painters of Edinburgh, did in decorating the walls and
ceilings of the great hospital for the poor in their city.
A painter or sculptor who has produced a work of personal feeling will offer
it to the woman he loves, or to a friend. Executed for love's sake,—will his
work, inspired by love, be inferior to the art that to-day satisfies the vanity
of the philistine, because it has cost much money?
The same will be done as regards all pleasures not comprised in the
necessaries of life. He who wishes for a grand piano will enter the
association of musical instrument makers. And by giving the association
part of his half-days' leisure, he will soon possess the piano of his dreams. If
he is fond of astronomical studies he will join the association of
astronomers, with its philosophers, its observers, its calculators, with its
artists in astronomical instruments, its scientists and amateurs, and he will
have the telescope he desires by taking his share of the associated work, for
it is especially the rough work that is needed in an astronomical observatory
—bricklayer's, carpenter's, founder's, mechanic's work, the last touch being
given to the instrument of precision by the artist.
In short, the five or seven hours a day which each will have at his disposal,
after having consecrated several hours to the production of necessities,
would amply suffice to satisfy all longings for luxury, however varied.
Thousands of associations would undertake to supply them. What is now
the privilege of an insignificant minority would be accessible to all. Luxury,
ceasing to be a foolish and ostentatious display of the bourgeois class,
would become an artistic pleasure.
Everyone would be the happier for it. In collective work, performed with a
light heart to attain a desired end, a book, a work of art, or an object of
luxury, each will find an incentive and the necessary relaxation that makes
life pleasant.
In working to put an end to the division between master and slave, we work
for the happiness of both, for the happiness of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] They have already been discovered since the above lines were written.

[7] We know this from Playfair, who mentioned it at Joule's death.

CHAPTER X
AGREEABLE WORK

I

When Socialists maintain that a society, freed from the rule of the
capitalists, would make work agreeable, and would suppress all repugnant
and unhealthy drudgery, they are laughed at. And yet even to-day we can
see the striking progress that is being made in this direction; and wherever
this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate themselves on the
economy of energy obtained thereby.
It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a
scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous
to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory the work is better; it
is easy to introduce many small ameliorations, of which each represents an
economy of time or of manual labour. And if most of the workshops we
know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in
the organization of factories, and because the most absurd waste of human
energy is the distinctive feature of the present industrial organization.
Nevertheless, now and again, we already find, even now, some factories so
well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work,
be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day,
and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes.
There are immense works, which I know, in one of the Midland counties,
unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. They are perfect as regards
sanitary and intelligent organization. They occupy fifty English acres of
land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof
bricks is as clean as that of a miner's cottage, and the glass roof is carefully
cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In these works are
forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when
you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a

temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence
save when its great doors open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is
handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a
tap causing immense cranes to move one way or another by the pressure of
water.
You enter these works expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers,
and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns and
the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure,
and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of
steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without crack or flaw,
of the blooms, whatever be their thickness.
I expected an infernal grating, and I saw machines which cut blocks of steel
thirty feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese. And when I
expressed my admiration to the engineer who showed us round, he
answered—
"A mere question of economy! This machine, that planes steel, has been in
use for forty-two years. It would not have lasted ten years if its parts, badly
adjusted, 'interfered' and creaked at each movement of the plane!
"And the blast-furnaces? It would be a waste to let heat escape instead of
utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation represents
tons of coal?
"The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also waste.
Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it costs less—there
is less loss.
"In these works, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench, are but
a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can see what
you do, and have elbow-room.
"It is true," he said, "we were very cramped before coming here. Land is so
expensive in the vicinity of large towns—landlords are so grasping!"
It is even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's
descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be
well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library;

there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth: underground traction
will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put into motion at the
pit's mouth. Ventilators will be always working, and there will never be
explosions. This is no dream, such a mine is already to be seen in England;
I went down it. Here again the excellent organization is simply a question of
economy. The mine of which I speak, in spite of its immense depth (466
yards), has an output of a thousand tons of coal a day, with only two
hundred miners—five tons a day per each worker, whereas the average for
the two thousand pits in England at the time I visited this mine in the early
'nineties, was hardly three hundred tons a year per man.
If necessary, it would be easy to multiply examples proving that as regards
the material organization Fourier's dream was not a Utopia.
This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in Socialist
newspapers that public opinion should already be educated on this point.
Factory, forge and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest
laboratories in modern universities, and the better the organization the more
will man's labour produce.
If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation
in a society of equals, in which "hands" will not be compelled to sell
themselves to toil, and to accept work under any conditions? Repugnant
tasks will disappear, because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions
are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them, but free men
will create new conditions, and their work will be pleasant and infinitely
more productive. The exceptions of to-day will be the rule of to-morrow.
The same will come to pass as regards domestic work, which to-day society
lays on the shoulders of that drudge of humanity—woman.

II

A society regenerated by the Revolution will make domestic slavery
disappear—this last form of slavery, perhaps the most tenacious, because it
is also the most ancient. Only it will not come about in the way dreamt of
by Phalansterians, nor in the manner often imagined by authoritarian
Communists.

Phalansteries are repugnant to millions of human beings. The most reserved
man certainly feels the necessity of meeting his fellows for the purpose of
common work, which becomes the more attractive the more he feels
himself a part of an immense whole. But it is not so for the hours of leisure,
reserved for rest and intimacy. The phalanstery and the familystery do not
take this into account, or else they endeavour to supply this need by
artificial groupings.
A phalanstery, which is in fact nothing but an immense hotel, can please
some, and even all at a certain period of their life, but the great mass prefers
family life (family life of the future, be it understood). They prefer isolated
apartments, Anglo-Saxons even going as far as to prefer houses of from six
to eight rooms, in which the family, or an agglomeration of friends, can live
apart. Sometimes a phalanstery is a necessity, but it would be hateful, were
it the general rule. Isolation, alternating with time spent in society, is the
normal desire of human nature. This is why one of the greatest tortures in
prison is the impossibility of isolation, much as solitary confinement
becomes torture in its turn, when not alternated with hours of social life.
As to considerations of economy, which are sometimes laid stress on in
favour of phalansteries, they are those of a petty tradesman. The most
important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for all,
because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than
the man who curses his surroundings.[8]
Other Socialists reject the phalanstery. But when you ask them how
domestic work can be organized, they answer: "Each can do 'his own work.'
My wife manages the house; the wives of bourgeois will do as much." And
if it is a bourgeois playing at Socialism who speaks, he will add, with a
gracious smile to his wife: "Is it not true, darling, that you would do without
a servant in the Socialist society? You would work like the wife of our good
comrade Paul or the wife of John the carpenter?"
Servant or wife, man always reckons on woman to do the house-work.
But woman, too, at last claims her share in the emancipation of humanity.
She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it
sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children.
She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house!

And, owing to American women taking the lead in obtaining their claims,
there is a general complaint of the dearth of women who will condescend to
domestic work in the United States. My lady prefers art, politics, literature,
or the gaming tables; as to the work-girls, they are few, those who consent
to submit to apron-slavery, and servants are only found with difficulty in the
States. Consequently, the solution, a very simple one, is pointed out by life
itself. Machinery undertakes three-quarters of the household cares.
You black your boots, and you know how ridiculous this work is. What can
be more stupid than rubbing a boot twenty or thirty times with a brush? A
tenth of the European population must be compelled to sell itself in
exchange for a miserable shelter and insufficient food, and woman must
consider herself a slave, in order that millions of her sex should go through
this performance every morning.
But hairdressers have already machines for brushing glossy or woolly heads
of hair. Why should we not apply, then, the same principle to the other
extremity? So it has been done, and nowadays the machine for blacking
boots is in general use in big American and European hotels. Its use is
spreading outside hotels. In large English schools, where the pupils are
boarding in the houses of the teachers, it has been found easier to have one
single establishment which undertakes to brush a thousand pairs of boots
every morning.
As to washing up! Where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of
this long and dirty work, that is usually done by hand, solely because the
work of the domestic slave is of no account.
In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which hot
water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under these
conditions the problem was a simple one, and a woman—Mrs. Cochrane—
solved it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates or dishes, wipes them
and dries them, in less than three minutes. A factory in Illinois manufactures
these machines and sells them at a price within reach of the average middle-
class purse. And why should not small households send their crockery to an
establishment as well as their boots? It is even probable that the two
functions, brushing and washing up, will be undertaken by the same
association.

Cleaning, rubbing the skin off your hands when washing and wringing
linen; sweeping floors and brushing carpets, thereby raising clouds of dust
which afterwards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places where
they have settled down, all this work is still done because woman remains a
slave, but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely better done by
machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into households, and
the distribution of motor-power in private houses will enable people to
work them without muscular effort.
Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for
them, it is because they are not in general use, and chiefly because an
exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to
live in grand style and who have speculated on land, raw material,
manufacture, sale, patents, and duties.
But emancipation from domestic toil will not be brought about by small
machines only. Households are emerging from their present state of
isolation; they begin to associate with other households to do in common
what they did separately.
In fact, in the future we shall not have a brushing machine, a machine for
washing up plates, a third for washing linen, and so on, in each house. To
the future, on the contrary, belongs the common heating apparatus that
sends heat into each room of a whole district and spares the lighting of fires.
It is already so in a few American cities. A great central furnace supplies all
houses and all rooms with hot water, which circulates in pipes; and to
regulate the temperature you need only turn a tap. And should you care to
have a blazing fire in any particular room you can light the gas specially
supplied for heating purposes from a central reservoir. All the immense
work of cleaning chimneys and keeping up fires—and woman knows what
time it takes—is disappearing.
Candles, lamps, and even gas have had their day. There are entire cities in
which it is sufficient to press a button for light to burst forth, and, indeed, it
is a simple question of economy and of knowledge to give yourself the
luxury of electric light. And lastly, also in America, they speak of forming
societies for the almost complete suppression of household work. It would
only be necessary to create a department for every block of houses. A cart

would come to each door and take the boots to be blacked, the crockery to
be washed up, the linen to be washed, the small things to be mended (if it
were worth while), the carpets to be brushed, and the next morning would
bring back the things entrusted to it, all well cleaned. A few hours later your
hot coffee and your eggs done to a nicety would appear on your table. It is a
fact that between twelve and two o'clock there are more than twenty million
Americans and as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton, boiled
pork, potatoes and a seasonable vegetable. And at the lowest figure eight
million fires burn during two or three hours to roast this meat and cook
these vegetables; eight million women spend their time preparing a meal
which, taking all households, represents at most a dozen different dishes.
"Fifty fires burn," wrote an American woman the other day, "where one
would suffice!" Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if you
like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste their
whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal! Why
fifty fires, when two people and one single fire would suffice to cook all
these pieces of meat and all these vegetables? Choose your own beef or
mutton to be roasted if you are particular. Season the vegetables to your
taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a single kitchen with a single
fire and organize it as beautifully as you are able to.
Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family
are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at
what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind
have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it
beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen
arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—
woman.
To emancipate woman, is not only to open the gates of the university, the
law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the "emancipated" woman will
always throw her domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate
woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it
is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her
children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take
her share of social life.

It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us
fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words,
Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained
slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would
still have to rebel against the other half.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] It seems that the Communists of Young Icaria had understood the
importance of a free choice in their daily relations apart from work. The
ideal of religious Communists has always been to have meals in common; it
is by meals in common that early Christians manifested their adhesion to
Christianity. Communion is still a vestige of it. Young Icarians had given up
this religious tradition. They dined in a common dining room, but at small
separate tables, at which they sat according to the attractions of the
moment. The Communists of Anama have each their house and dine at
home, while taking their provisions at will at the communal stores.

CHAPTER XI
FREE AGREEMENT

I

Accustomed as we are by heredity prejudices and our unsound education
and training to represent ourselves the beneficial hand of Government,
legislation and magistracy everywhere, we have come to believe that man
would tear his fellow-man to pieces like a wild beast the day the police took
his eye off him; that absolute chaos would come about if authority were
overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by
thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves
freely, without any intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely
superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage.
If you open a daily paper you find that its pages are entirely devoted to
Government transactions and to political jobbery. A man from another
world, reading it, would believe that, with the exception of the Stock
Exchange transactions, nothing gets done in Europe save by order of some
master. You find nothing in the paper about institutions that spring up, grow
up, and develop without ministerial prescription! Nothing—or almost
nothing! Even where there is a heading, "Sundry Events" (Faits divers, a
favorite column in the French papers), it is because they are connected with
the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will only be mentioned if the
police have appeared on the scene.
Three hundred and fifty million Europeans love or hate one another, work,
or live on their incomes; but, apart from literature, theatre, or sport, their
lives remain ignored by newspapers if Governments have not intervened in
it in some way or other. It is even so with history. We know the least details
of the life of a king or of a parliament; all good and bad speeches
pronounced by the politicians have been preserved: "speeches that have
never had the least influence on the vote of a single member," as an old
parliamentarian said. Royal visits, the good or bad humour of politicians,

their jokes and intrigues, are all carefully recorded for posterity. But we
have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to
understand the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried on
between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city of Rouen built its
cathedral. If a scholar spends his life in studying these questions, his works
remain unknown, and parliamentary histories—that is to say, the defective
ones, as they only treat of one side of social life—multiply; they are
circulated, they are taught in schools.
In this way we do not even perceive the prodigious work, accomplished
every day by spontaneous groups of men, which constitutes the chief work
of our century.
We therefore propose to point out some of these most striking
manifestations, and to show how men, as soon as their interests do not
absolutely clash, act in concert, harmoniously, and perform collective work
of a very complex nature.
It is evident that in present society, based on individual property—that is to
say, on plunder, and on a narrow-minded, and therefore foolish
individualism—facts of this kind are necessarily limited; agreements are not
always perfectly free, and often they have a mean, if not execrable aim.
But what concerns us is not to give examples which might be blindly
followed, and which, moreover, present society could not possibly give us.
What we have to do is to show that, in spite of the authoritarian
individualism which stifles us, there remains in our life, taken as a whole, a
very great part in which we only act by free agreement; and that therefore it
would be much easier than is usually thought, to dispense with
Government.
In support of our view we have already mentioned railways, and we will
now return to them.
We know that Europe has a system of railways, over 175,000 miles long,
and that on this network you can nowadays travel from north to south, from
east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from Calais to Constantinople,
without delays, without even changing carriages (when you travel by
express). More than that: a parcel deposited at a station will find its

addressee anywhere, in Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality
needed for sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper.
This result might have been obtained in two ways. A Napoleon, a Bismarck,
or some potentate having conquered Europe, would from Paris, Berlin, or
Rome, draw a railway map and regulate the hours of the trains. The Russian
Tsar Nicholas I. dreamt of such a power. When he was shown rough drafts
of railways between Moscow and Petersburg, he seized a ruler and drew on
the map of Russia a straight line between these two capitals, saying, "Here
is the plan." And the road was built in a straight line, filling in deep ravines,
building bridges of a giddy height, which had to be abandoned a few years
later, after the railway had cost about £120,000 to £150,000 per English
mile.
This is one way, but happily things were managed differently. Railways
were constructed piece by piece, the pieces were joined together, and the
hundred different companies, to whom these pieces belonged, gradually
came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure of their
trains, and the running of carriages on their rails, from all countries, without
unloading merchandise as it passes from one network to another.
All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of letters and proposals,
and by congresses at which delegates met to discuss well specified special
points, and to come to an agreement about them, but not to make laws.
After the congress was over, the delegates returned to their respective
companies, not with a law, but with the draft of a contract to be accepted or
rejected.
Of course difficulties were met in the way. There were obstinate men who
would not be convinced. But a common interest compelled them to agree in
the end, without invoking the help of armies against the refractory
members.
This immense network of railways connected together, and the enormous
traffic it has given rise to, no doubt constitutes the most striking trait of the
nineteenth century; and it is the result of free agreement. If somebody had
foretold it eighty years ago, our grandfathers would have thought him
idiotic or mad. They would have said: "Never will you be able to make the

shareholders of a hundred companies listen to reason! It is a Utopia, a fairy
tale. A central Government, with an 'iron' dictator, can alone enforce it."
And the most interesting thing in this organization is, that there is no
European Central Government of Railways! Nothing! No minister of
railways, no dictator, not even a continental parliament, not even a directing
committee! Everything is done by free agreement.
So we ask the believers in the State, who pretend that "we can never do
without a central Government, were it only for regulating the traffic," we
ask them: "But how do European railways manage without them? How do
they continue to convey millions of travellers and mountains of luggage
across a continent? If companies owning railways have been able to agree,
why should railway workers, who would take possession of railways, not
agree likewise? And if the Petersburg-Warsaw Company and that of Paris-
Belfort can act in harmony, without giving themselves the luxury of a
common commander, why, in the midst of our societies, consisting of
groups of free workers, should we need a Government?"

II

When we endeavour to prove by examples that even to-day, in spite of the
iniquitous organization of society as a whole, men, provided their interests
be not diametrically opposed, agree without the intervention of authority,
we do not ignore the objections that will be put forth.
All such examples have their defective side, because it is impossible to
quote a single organization exempt from the exploitation of the weak by the
strong, the poor by the rich. This is why the Statists will not fail to tell us
with their wonted logic: "You see that the intervention of the State is
necessary to put an end to this exploitation!"
Only they forget the lessons of history; they do not tell us to what extent the
State itself has contributed towards the existing order by creating
proletarians and delivering them up to exploiters. They forget to prove us
that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primal causes—
private capital and poverty, two-thirds of which are artificially created by
the State—continue to exist.

When we speak of the accord established among the railway companies, we
expect them, the worshippers of the bourgeois State, to say to us: "Do you
not see how the railway companies oppress and ill-use their employees and
the travellers! The only way is, that the State should intervene to protect the
workers and the public!"
But have we not said and repeated over and over again, that as long as there
are capitalists, these abuses of power will be perpetuated? It is precisely the
State, the would-be benefactor, that has given to the companies that
monopoly and those rights upon us which they possess to-day. Has it not
created concessions, guarantees? Has it not sent its soldiers against
railwaymen on strike? And during the first trials (quite lately we saw it still
in Russia), has it not extended the privilege of the railway magnates as far
as to forbid the Press to mention railway accidents, so as not to depreciate
the shares it guaranteed? Has it not favoured the monopoly which has
anointed the Vanderbilts and the Polyakoffs, the directors of the P.L.M., the
C.P.R., the St. Gothard, "the kings of our days"?
Therefore, if we give as an example the tacit agreement come to between
railway companies, it is by no means as an ideal of economical
management, nor even an ideal of technical organization. It is to show that
if capitalists, without any other aim than that of augmenting their dividends
at other people's expense, can exploit railways successfully without
establishing an International Department,—societies of working men will
be able to do it just as well, and even better, without nominating a Ministry
of European railways.
Another objection is raised that is more serious at first sight. We may be
told that the agreement we speak of is not perfectly free, that the large
companies lay down the law to the small ones. It might be mentioned, for
example, that a certain rich German company, supported by the State,
compel travellers who go from Berlin to Bâle to pass via Cologne and
Frankfort, instead of taking the Leipzig route; or that such a company
carries goods a hundred and thirty miles in a roundabout way (on a long
distance) to favour its influential shareholders, and thus ruins the secondary
lines. In the United States travellers and goods are sometimes compelled to
travel impossibly circuitous routes so that dollars may flow into the pocket
of a Vanderbilt.

Our answer will be the same: As long as Capital exists, the Greater Capital
will oppress the lesser. But oppression does not result from Capital only. It
is also owing to the support given them by the State, to monopoly created
by the State in their favour, that the large companies oppress the small ones.
The early English and French Socialists have shown long since how English
legislation did all in its power to ruin the small industries, drive the peasant
to poverty, and deliver over to wealthy industrial employers battalions of
men, compelled to work for no matter what salary. Railway legislation did
exactly the same. Strategic lines, subsidized lines, companies which
received the International Mail monopoly, everything was brought into play
to forward the interests of wealthy financiers. When Rothschild, creditor to
all European States, puts capital in a railway, his faithful subjects, the
ministers, will do their best to make him earn more.
In the United States, in the Democracy that authoritarians hold up to us as
an ideal, the most scandalous fraudulency has crept into everything that
concerns railroads. Thus, if a company ruins its competitors by cheap fares,
it is often enabled to do so because it is reimbursed by land given to it by
the State for a gratuity. Documents recently published concerning the
American wheat trade have fully shown up the part played by the State in
the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Here, too, the power of
accumulated capital has increased tenfold and a hundredfold by means of
State help. So that, when we see syndicates of railway companies (a product
of free agreement) succeeding in protecting their small companies against
big ones, we are astonished at the intrinsic force of free agreement that can
hold its own against all-powerful Capital favoured by the State.
It is a fact that little companies exist, in spite of the State's partiality. If in
France, land of centralization, we only see five or six large companies, there
are more than a hundred and ten in Great Britain who agree remarkably
well, and who are certainly better organized for the rapid transit of
travellers and goods than the French and German companies.
Moreover, that is not the question. Large Capital, favoured by the State, can
always, if it be to its advantage, crush the lesser one. What is of importance
to us is this: The agreement between hundreds of capitalist companies to
whom the railways of Europe belong, was established without intervention

of a central government to lay down the law to the divers societies; it has
subsisted by means of congresses composed of delegates, who discuss
among themselves, and submit proposals, not laws, to their constituents. It
is a new principle that differs completely from all governmental principle,
monarchical or republican, absolute or parliamentarian. It is an innovation
that has been timidly introduced into the customs of Europe, but has come
to stay.

III

How often have we not read in the writings of State-loving Socialists:
"Who, then, will undertake the regulation of canal traffic in the future
society? Should it enter the mind of one of your Anarchist 'comrades' to put
his barge across a canal and obstruct thousands of boats, who will force him
to reason?"
Let us confess the supposition to be somewhat fanciful. Still, it might be
said, for instance: "Should a certain commune, or a group of communes,
want to make their barges pass before others, they might perhaps block the
canal in order to carry stones, while wheat, needed in another commune,
would have to stand by. Who, then, would regulate the traffic if not the
Government?"
But real life has again demonstrated that Government can be very well
dispensed with here as elsewhere. Free agreement, free organization,
replace that noxious and costly system, and do better.
We know what canals mean to Holland. They are its highways. We also
know how much traffic there is on the canals. What is carried along our
highroads and railroads is transported on canal-boats in Holland. There you
could find cause to fight, in order to make your boats pass before others.
There the Government might really interfere to keep the traffic in order.
Yet it is not so. The Dutch settled matters in a more practical way, long ago,
by founding guilds, or syndicates of boatmen. These were free associations
sprung from the very needs of navigation. The right of way for the boats
was adjusted by the order of inscription in a navigation register; they had to
follow one another in turn. Nobody was allowed to get ahead of the others

under pain of being excluded from the guild. None could station more than
a certain number of days along the quay; and if the owner found no goods
to carry during that time, so much the worse for him; he had to depart with
his empty barge to leave room for newcomers. Obstruction was thus
avoided, even though the competition between the private owners of the
boats continued to exist. Were the latter suppressed, the agreement would
have been only the more cordial.
It is unnecessary to add that the shipowners could adhere or not to the
syndicate. That was their business, but most of them elected to join it.
Moreover, these syndicates offered such great advantages that they spread
also along the Rhine, the Weser, the Oder, and as far as Berlin. The boatmen
did not wait for a great Bismarck to annex Holland to Germany, and to
appoint an Ober Haupt General Staats Canal Navigation's Rath (Supreme
Head Councillor of the General States Canal Navigation), with a number of
gold stripes on his sleeves, corresponding to the length of the title. They
preferred coming to an international understanding. Besides, a number of
shipowners, whose sailing-vessels ply between Germany and Scandinavia,
as well as Russia, have also joined these syndicates, in order to regulate
traffic in the Baltic, and to bring about a certain harmony in the chassé-
croisé of vessels. These associations have sprung up freely, recruiting
volunteer adherents, and have nought in common with governments.
It is, however, more than probable that here too greater capital oppresses
lesser. Maybe the syndicate has also a tendency to become a monopoly,
especially where it receives the precious patronage of the State that surely
did not fail to interfere with it. Let us not forget either, that these syndicates
represent associations whose members have only private interests at stake,
and that if at the same time each shipowner were compelled—by the
socializing of production, consumption, and exchange—to belong to
federated Communes, or to a hundred other associations for the satisfying
of his needs, things would have a different aspect. A group of shipowners,
powerful on sea, would feel weak on land, and they would be obliged to
lessen their claims in order to come to terms with railways, factories, and
other groups.
At any rate, without discussing the future, here is another spontaneous
association that has dispensed with Government. Let us quote more

examples.
As we are talking of ships and boats, let us mention one of the most
splendid organizations that the nineteenth century has brought forth, one of
those we may with right be proud of—the English Lifeboat Association.
It is known that every year more than a thousand ships are wrecked on the
shores of England. At sea a good ship seldom fears a storm. It is near the
coasts that danger threatens—rough seas that shatter her stern-post, squalls
that carry off her masts and sails, currents that render her unmanageable,
reefs and sand banks on which she runs aground.
Even in olden times, when it was a custom among inhabitants of the coasts
to light fires in order to attract vessels on to reefs, in order to plunder their
cargoes, they always strove to save the crew. Seeing a ship in distress, they
launched their boats and went to the rescue of shipwrecked sailors, only too
often finding a watery grave themselves. Every hamlet along the sea shore
has its legends of heroism, displayed by woman as well as by man, to save
crews in distress.
No doubt the State and men of science have done something to diminish the
number of casualties. Lighthouses, signals, charts, meteorological warnings
have diminished them greatly, but there remains a thousand ships and
several thousand human lives to be saved every year.
To this end a few men of goodwill put their shoulders to the wheel. Being
good sailors and navigators themselves, they invented a lifeboat that could
weather a storm without being torn to pieces or capsizing, and they set to
work to interest the public in their venture, to collect the necessary funds
for constructing boats, and for stationing them along the coasts, wherever
they could be of use.
These men, not being Jacobins, did not turn to the Government. They
understood that to bring their enterprise to a successful issue they must have
the co-operation, the enthusiasm, the local knowledge, and especially the
self-sacrifice of the local sailors. They also understood that to find men who
at the first signal would launch their boat at night, in a chaos of waves, not
suffering themselves to be deterred by darkness or breakers, and struggling
five, six, ten hours against the tide before reaching a vessel in distress—

men ready to risk their lives to save those of others—there must be a feeling
of solidarity, a spirit of sacrifice not to be bought with galloon. It was
therefore a perfectly spontaneous movement, sprung from agreement and
individual initiative. Hundreds of local groups arose along the coasts. The
initiators had the common senses not to pose as masters. They looked for
sagacity in the fishermen's hamlets, and when a rich man sent £1,000 to a
village on the coast to erect a lifeboat station, and his offer was accepted, he
left the choice of a site to the local fishermen and sailors.
Models of new boats were not submitted to the Admiralty. We read in a
Report of the Association: "As it is of importance that life-boatmen should
have full confidence in the vessel they man, the Committee will make a
point of constructing and equipping the boats according to the life-
boatmen's expressed wish." In consequence every year brings with it new
improvements.
The work is wholly conducted by volunteers organizing in committees and
local groups; by mutual aid and agreement!—Oh, Anarchists! Moreover,
they ask nothing of the ratepayers, and in a year they may receive £40,000
in spontaneous subscriptions.
As to the results, here they are: In 1891 the Association possessed 293
lifeboats. The same year it saved 601 shipwrecked sailors and 33 vessels.
Since its foundation it has saved 32,671 human beings.
In 1886, three lifeboats with all their men having perished at sea, hundreds
of new volunteers entered their names, organized themselves into local
groups, and the agitation resulted in the construction of twenty additional
boats. As we proceed, let us note that every year the Association sends to
the fishermen and sailors excellent barometers at a price three times less
than their sale price in private shops. It propagates meteorological
knowledge, and warns the parties concerned of the sudden changes of
weather predicted by men of science.
Let us repeat that these hundreds of committees and local groups are not
organized hierarchically, and are composed exclusively of volunteers,
lifeboatmen, and people interested in the work. The Central Committee,
which is more of a centre for correspondence, in no wise interferes.

It is true that when a voting on some question of education or local taxation
takes place in a district, these committees of the National Lifeboat
Association do not, as such, take part in the deliberations—a modesty,
which unfortunately the members of elected bodies do not imitate. But, on
the other hand, these brave men do not allow those who have never faced a
storm to legislate for them about saving life. At the first signal of distress
they rush to their boats, and go ahead. There are no embroidered uniforms,
but much goodwill.
Let us take another society of the same kind, that of the Red Cross. The
name matters little; let us examine it.
Imagine somebody saying fifty years ago: "The State, capable as it is of
massacring twenty thousand men in a day, and of wounding fifty thousand
more, is incapable of helping its own victims; consequently, as long as war
exists private initiative must intervene, and men of goodwill must organize
internationally for this humane work!" What mockery would not have met
the man who would have dared to speak thus! To begin with, he would have
been called a Utopian, and if that did not silence him he would have been
told: "What nonsense! Your volunteers will be found wanting precisely
where they are most needed, your volunteer hospitals will be centralized in
a safe place, while everything will be wanting in the ambulances. Utopians
like you forget the national rivalries which will cause the poor soldiers to
die without any help." Such disheartening remarks would have only been
equalled by the number of speakers. Who of us has not heard men hold
forth in this strain?
Now we know what happened. Red Cross societies organized themselves
freely, everywhere, in all countries, in thousands of localities; and when the
war of 1870-1 broke out, the volunteers set to work. Men and women
offered their services. Thousands of hospitals and ambulances were
organized; trains were started carrying ambulances, provisions, linen, and
medicaments for the wounded. The English committees sent entire convoys
of food, clothing, tools, grain to sow, beasts of draught, even steam-ploughs
with their attendants to help in the tillage of departments devastated by the
war! Only consult La Croix Rouge, by Gustave Moynier, and you will be
really struck by the immensity of the work performed.

As to the prophets ever ready to deny other men's courage, good sense, and
intelligence, and believing themselves to be the only ones capable of ruling
the world with a rod, none of their predictions were realized. The devotion
of the Red Cross volunteers was beyond all praise. They were only too
eager to occupy the most dangerous posts; and whereas the salaried doctors
of the Napoleonic State fled with their staff when the Prussians approached,
the Red Cross volunteers continued their work under fire, enduring the
brutalities of Bismarck's and Napoleon's officers, lavishing their care on the
wounded of all nationalities. Dutch, Italians, Swedes, Belgians, even
Japanese and Chinese agreed remarkably well. They distributed their
hospitals and their ambulances according to the needs of the occasion. They
vied with one another especially in the hygiene of their hospitals. And there
is many a Frenchman who still speaks with deep gratitude of the tender care
he received from the Dutch or German volunteers in the Red Cross
ambulances. But what is this to an authoritarian? His ideal is the regiment
doctor, salaried by the State. What does he care for the Red Cross and its
hygienic hospitals, if the nurses be not functionaries!
Here is then an organization, sprung up but yesterday, and which reckons its
members by hundreds of thousands; possesses ambulances, hospital trains,
elaborates new processes for treating wounds, and so on, and is due to the
spontaneous initiative of a few devoted men.
Perhaps we shall be told that the State has something to do with this
organization. Yes, States have laid hands on it to seize it. The directing
committees are presided over by those whom flunkeys call princes of the
blood. Emperors and queens lavishly patronize the national committees. But
it is not to this patronage that the success of the organization is due. It is to
the thousand local committees of each nation; to the activity of individuals,
to the devotion of all those who try to help the victims of war. And this
devotion would be far greater if the State did not meddle with it.
In any case, it was not by the order of an International Directing Committee
that Englishmen and Japanese, Swedes and Chinamen, bestirred themselves
to send help to the wounded in 1871. It was not by order of an international
ministry that hospitals rose on the invaded territory and that ambulances
were carried on to the battlefield. It was by the initiative of volunteers from
each country. Once on the spot, they did not get hold of one another by the

hair as was foreseen by the Jacobinists of all nations; they all set to work
without distinction of nationality.
We may regret that such great efforts should be put to the service of so bad
a cause, and we may ask ourselves like the poet's child: "Why inflict
wounds if you are to heal them afterwards?" In striving to destroy the
power of capitalist and middle-class authority, we work to put an end to the
massacres called wars, and we would far rather see the Red Cross
volunteers put forth their activity to bring about (with us) the suppression of
war; but we had to mention this immense organization as another
illustration of results produced by free agreement and free aid.
If we wished to multiply examples taken from the art of exterminating men
we should never end. Suffice to quote the numerous societies to which the
German army owes its force, that does not only depend on discipline, as is
generally believed. I mean the societies whose aim is to propagate military
knowledge.
At one of the last congresses of the Military Alliance (Kriegerbund),
delegates from 2,452 federated societies, comprising 151,712 members,
were present. But there are besides very numerous Shooting, Military
Games, Strategical Games, Topographical Studies Societies—these are the
workshops in which the technical knowledge of the German army is
developed, not in regimental schools. It is a formidable network of all kinds
of societies, including military men and civilians, geographers and
gymnasts, sportsmen and technologists, which rise up spontaneously,
organize, federate, discuss, and explore the country. It is these voluntary
and free associations that go to make the real backbone of the German
army.
Their aim is execrable. It is the maintenance of the Empire. But what
concerns us, is to point out that, in spite of military organization being the
"Great Mission of the State," success in this branch is the more certain the
more it is left to the free agreement of groups and to the free initiative of
individuals.
Even in matters pertaining to war, free agreement is thus appealed to; and to
further prove our assertion let us mention the Volunteer Topographers'
Corps of Switzerland who study in detail the mountain passages, the

Aeroplane Corps of France, the three hundred thousand British volunteers,
the British National Artillery Association, and the Society, now in course of
organization, for the defence of England's coasts, as well as the appeals
made to the commercial fleet, the Bicyclists' Corps, and the new
organizations of private motorcars and steam launches.
Everywhere the State is abdicating and abandoning its holy functions to
private individuals. Everywhere free organization trespasses on its domain.
And yet, the facts we have quoted give us only a glimpse of what free
government has in store for us in the future when there will be no more
State.

CHAPTER XII
OBJECTIONS

I

Let us now examine the principal objections put forth against Communism.
Most of them are evidently caused by a simple misunderstanding, yet they
raise important questions and merit our attention.
It is not for us to answer the objections raised by authoritarian Communism
—we ourselves hold with them. Civilized nations have suffered too much in
the long, hard struggle for the emancipation of the individual, to disown
their past work and to tolerate a Government that would make itself felt in
the smallest details of a citizen's life, even if that Government had no other
aim than the good of the community. Should an authoritarian Socialist
society ever succeed in establishing itself, it could not last; general
discontent would soon force it to break up, or to reorganize itself on
principles of liberty.
It is of an Anarchist-Communist society we are about to speak, a society
that recognizes the absolute liberty of the individual, that does not admit of
any authority, and makes use of no compulsion to drive men to work.
Limiting our studies to the economic side of the question, let us see if such
a society, composed of men as they are to-day, neither better nor worse,
neither more nor less industrious, would have a chance of successful
development.
The objection is known. "If the existence of each is guaranteed, and if the
necessity of earning wages does not compel men to work, nobody will
work. Every man will lay the burden of his work on another if he is not
forced to do it himself." Let us first note the incredible levity with which
this objection is raised, without even realizing that the real question raised
by this objection is merely to know, on the one hand, whether you
effectively obtain by wage-work, the results that are said to be obtained,

and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not already now more
productive than work stimulated by wages. A question which, to be dealt
with properly, would require a serious study. But whereas in exact sciences
men give their opinion on subjects infinitely less important and less
complicated after serious research, after carefully collecting and analyzing
facts—on this question they will pronounce judgment without appeal,
resting satisfied with any one particular event, such as, for example, the
want of success of some communist association in America. They act like
the barrister who does not see in the counsel for the opposite side a
representative of a cause, or an opinion contrary to his own, but a simple
nuisance,—an adversary in an oratorical debate; and if he be lucky enough
to find a repartee, does not otherwise care to justify his cause. Therefore the
study of this essential basis of all Political Economy, the study of the most
favourable conditions for giving society the greatest amount of useful
products with the least waste of human energy, does not advance. People
either limit themselves to repeating commonplace assertions, or else they
pretend ignorance of our assertions.
What is most striking in this levity is that even in capitalist Political
Economy you already find a few writers compelled by facts to doubt the
axiom put forth by the founders of their science, that the threat of hunger is
man's best stimulant for productive work. They begin to perceive that in
production a certain collective element is introduced, which has been too
much neglected up till now, and which might be more important than
personal gain. The inferior quality of wage-work, the terrible waste of
human energy in modern agricultural and industrial labour, the ever-
growing quantity of pleasure-seekers, who shift their burden on to others'
shoulders, the absence of a certain animation in production that is becoming
more and more apparent; all this is beginning to preoccupy the economists
of the "classical" school. Some of them ask themselves if they have not got
on the wrong track: if the imaginary evil being, that was supposed to be
tempted exclusively by a bait of lucre or wages, really exists. This heresy
penetrates even into universities; it is found in books of orthodox economy.
But this does not prevent a great many Socialist reformers from remaining
partisans of individual remuneration, and defending the old citadel of
wagedom, notwithstanding that it is being delivered over stone by stone to
the assailants by its former defenders.

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.
But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed
twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation
of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the
liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro will not work," said the
anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave
the fields uncultivated," said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of
the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as
old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of
sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The
liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his
ancestors; the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the
Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation
by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an
eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where
the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-
abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves
themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.
Moreover, who but the economists themselves taught us that while a wage-
earner's work is very often indifferent, an intense and productive work is
only obtained from a man who sees his wealth increase in proportion to his
efforts? All hymns sung in honour of private property can be reduced to this
axiom.
For it is remarkable that when economists, wishing to celebrate the
blessings of property, show us how an unproductive, marshy, or stony soil is
clothed with rich harvests when cultivated by the peasant proprietor, they in
nowise prove their thesis in favour of private property. By admitting that the
only guarantee not to be robbed of the fruits of your labour is to possess the
instruments of labour—which is true—the economists only prove that man
really produces most when he works in freedom, when he has a certain
choice in his occupations, when he has no overseer to impede him, and
lastly, when he sees his work bringing in a profit to him and to others who
work like him, but bringing in little to idlers. Nothing else can be deducted
from their argumentation, and this is what we maintain ourselves.

As to the form of possession of the instruments of labour, the economists
only mention it indirectly in their demonstration, as a guarantee to the
cultivator that he shall not be robbed of the profits of his yield nor of his
improvements. Besides, in support of their thesis in favour of private
property against all other forms of possession, should not the economists
demonstrate that under the form of communal property land never produces
such rich harvests as when the possession is private? But this they could not
prove; in fact, it is the contrary that has been observed.
Take for example a commune in the canton of Vaud, in the winter time,
when all the men of the village go to fell wood in the forest, which belongs
to them all. It is precisely during these festivals of labour that the greatest
ardour for work and the most considerable display of human energy are
apparent. No salaried labour, no effort of a private owner can bear
comparison with it.
Or let us take a Russian village, when all its inhabitants mow a field
belonging to the commune, or farmed by it. There you will see what man
can produce when he works in common for communal production.
Comrades vie with one another in cutting the widest swathe, women bestir
themselves in their wake so as not to be distanced by the mowers. It is a
festival of labour, in which a hundred people accomplish in a few hours a
work that would not have been finished in a few days had they worked
separately. What a miserable contrast compared to them is offered by the
work of the isolated owner!
In fact, we might quote scores of examples among the pioneers of America,
in Swiss, German, Russian, and in certain French villages; or the work done
in Russia by gangs (artels) of masons, carpenters, boatmen, fishermen, etc.,
who undertake a task and divide the produce or the remuneration among
themselves without it passing through an intermediary of middlemen; or
else the amount of work I saw performed in English ship-yards when the
remuneration was paid on the same principle. We could also mention the
great communal hunts of nomadic tribes, and an infinite number of
successful collective enterprises. And in every case we could show the
unquestionable superiority of communal work compared to that of the
wage-earner or the isolated private owner.

Well-being—that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and moral
needs, has always been the most powerful stimulant to work. And where a
hireling hardly succeeds to produce the bare necessities with difficulty, a
free worker, who sees ease and luxury increasing for him and for others in
proportion to his efforts, spends infinitely far more energy and intelligence,
and obtains products in a far greater abundance. The one feels riveted to
misery, the other hopes for ease and luxury in the future. In this lies the
whole secret. Therefore a society aiming at the well-being of all, and at the
possibility of all enjoying life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary
work, which will be infinitely superior and yield far more than work has
produced up till now under the goad of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.

II

Nowadays, whoever can load on others his share of labour indispensable to
existence does so, and it is believed that it will always be so.
Now, work indispensable to existence is essentially manual. We may be
artists or scientists; but none of us can do without things obtained by
manual work—bread, clothes, roads, ships, light, heat, etc. And, moreover,
however highly artistic or however subtly metaphysical are our pleasures,
they all depend on manual labour. And it is precisely this labour—the basis
of life—that everyone tries to avoid.
We understand perfectly well that it must be so nowadays.
Because, to do manual work now, means in reality to shut yourself up for
ten or twelve hours a day in an unhealthy workshop, and to remain chained
to the same task for twenty or thirty years, and maybe for your whole life.
It means to be doomed to a paltry wage, to the uncertainty of the morrow, to
want of work, often to destitution, more often than not to death in a
hospital, after having worked forty years to feed, clothe, amuse, and instruct
others than yourself and your children.
It means to bear the stamp of inferiority all your life; because, whatever the
politicians tell us, the manual worker is always considered inferior to the
brain worker, and the one who has toiled ten hours in a workshop has not
the time, and still less the means, to give himself the high delights of

science and art, nor even to prepare himself to appreciate them; he must be
content with the crumbs from the table of privileged persons.
We understand that under these conditions manual labour is considered a
curse of fate.
We understand that all men have but one dream—that of emerging from, or
enabling their children to emerge from this inferior state; to create for
themselves an "independent" position, which means what?—To also live by
other men's work!
As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of "brain"
workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus.
What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when
he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to
live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when
we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every
morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at
the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus
given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without
foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will
be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the
enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to
a few privileged favourites.
It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain
work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution.
Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it
should be—the free exercise of all the faculties of man.
Moreover, it is time to submit to a serious analysis this legend about
superior work, supposed to be obtained under the lash of wagedom.
It would be sufficient to visit, not the model factory and workshop that we
find now and again, but a number of the ordinary factories, to conceive the
immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern industry. For
one factory more or less rationally organized, there are a hundred or more
which waste man's labour, without any more substantial motive than that of
perhaps bringing in a few pounds more per day to the employer.

Here you see youths from twenty to twenty-five years of age, sitting all day
long on a bench, their chests sunken in, feverishly shaking their heads and
bodies, to tie, with the speed of conjurers, the two ends of worthless scraps
of cotton, the refuse of the lace-looms. What progeny will these trembling
and rickety bodies bequeath to their country? "But they occupy so little
room in the factory, and each of them brings me in sixpence net every day,"
will say the employer.
In an immense London factory we saw girls, bald at seventeen from
carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another, when
the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables. But "It costs
so little, the work of women who have no special trade! Why should we use
a machine? When these can do no more, they will be easily replaced, there
are so many of them in the street!"
On the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a bare-footed child
asleep, with its bundle of papers in its arms ... child-labour costs so little
that it may be well employed, every evening, to sell tenpenny-worth of
papers, of which the poor boy will receive a penny, or a penny halfpenny.
And continually in all big cities you may see robust men tramping about
who have been out of work for months, while their daughters grow pale in
the overheated vapours of the workshops for dressing stuffs, and their sons
are filling blacking-pots by hand, or spend those years during which they
ought to have learned a trade, in carrying about baskets for a greengrocer,
and at the age of eighteen or twenty become regular unemployed.
And so it is everywhere, from San Francisco to Moscow, and from Naples
to Stockholm. The waste of human energy is the distinguishing and
predominant trait of our industry, not to mention trade where it attains still
more colossal proportions.
What a sad satire is that name, Political Economy, given to the science of
waste and energy under the system of wagedom!
This is not all. If you speak to the director of a well-organized factory, he
will naively explain to you that it is difficult nowadays to find a skilful,
vigorous, and energetic workman, who works with a will. "Should such a
man present himself among the twenty or thirty who call every Monday
asking us for work, he is sure to be received, even if we are reducing the

number of our hands. We recognize him at the first glance, and he is always
accepted, even though we have to get rid of an older and less active worker
the next day." And the one who has just received notice to quit, and all those
who will receive it to-morrow, go to reinforce that immense reserve-army of
capital—workmen out of work—who are only called to the loom or the
bench when there is pressure of work, or to oppose strikers. And those
others—the average workers who are sent away by the better-class factories
as soon as business is slackened? They also join the formidable army of
aged and indifferent workers who continually circulate among the second-
class factories—those which barely cover their expenses and make their
way in the world by trickery and snares laid for the buyer, and especially for
the consumer in distant countries.
And if you talk to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the rule
in such factories is—never to do your best. "Shoddy pay—shoddy work!"
this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon
entering such a factory.
For the workers know that if in a moment of generosity they give way to the
entreaties of an employer and consent to intensify the work in order to carry
out a pressing order, this nervous work will be exacted in the future as a
rule in the scale of wages. Therefore in all such factories they prefer never
to produce as much as they can. In certain industries production is limited
so as to keep up high prices, and sometimes the pass-word, "Go-canny," is
given, which signifies, "Bad work for bad pay!"
Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could
produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents
wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays
brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it
is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards
the end of last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, but in
spite of that organization.

III

Those who have seriously studied the question do not deny any of the
advantages of Communism, on condition, be it well understood, that

Communism be perfectly free, that is to say, Anarchist. They recognize that
work paid with money, even disguised under the name of "labour cheques,"
to Workers' associations governed by the State, would keep up the
characteristics of wagedom and would retain its disadvantages. They agree
that the whole system would soon suffer from it, even if Society came into
possession of the instruments of production. And they admit that, thanks to
an "integral" complete education given to all children, to the laborious
habits of civilized societies, with the liberty of choosing and varying their
occupations and the attractions of work done by equals for the well-being of
all, a Communist society would not be wanting in producers who would
soon make the fertility of the soil triple and tenfold, and give a new impulse
to industry.
This our opponents agree to. "But the danger," they say, "will come from
that minority of loafers who will not work, and will not have regular habits,
in spite of the excellent conditions that would make work pleasant. To-day
the prospect of hunger compels the most refractory to move along with the
others. The one who does not arrive in time is dismissed. But one black
sheep suffices to contaminate the whole flock, and two or three sluggish or
refractory workmen would lead the others astray and bring a spirit of
disorder and rebellion into the workshop that would make work impossible;
so that in the end we should have to return to a system of compulsion that
would force such ringleaders back into the ranks. And then,—Is not the
system of wages, paid in proportion to work performed, the only one that
enables compulsion to be employed, without hurting the feelings of
independence of the worker? All other means would imply the continual
intervention of an authority that would be repugnant to free men." This, we
believe, is the objection fairly stated.
To begin with, such an objection belongs to the category of arguments
which try to justify the State, the Penal Law, the Judge, and the Gaoler.
"As there are people, a feeble minority, who will not submit to social
customs," the authoritarians say, "we must maintain magistrates, tribunals
and prisons, although these institutions become a source of new evils of all
kinds."

Therefore we can only repeat what we have so often said concerning
authority in general: "To avoid a possible evil you have recourse to means
which in themselves are a greater evil, and become the source of those same
abuses that you wish to remedy. For, do not forget that it is wagedom, the
impossibility of living otherwise than by selling your labour, which has
created the present Capitalist system, whose vices you begin to recognize."
Besides, this way of reasoning is merely a sophistical justification of the
evils of the present system. Wagedom was not instituted to remove the
disadvantages of Communism; its origin, like that of the State and private
ownership, is to be found elsewhere. It is born of slavery and serfdom
imposed by force, and only wears a more modern garb. Thus the argument
in favour of wagedom is as valueless as those by which they seek to
apologize for private property and the State.
We are, nevertheless, going to examine the objection, and see if there is any
truth in it.
First of all,—Is it not evident that if a society, founded on the principle of
free work, were really menaced by loafers, it could protect itself without the
authoritarian organization we have nowadays, and without having recourse
to wagedom?
Let us take a group of volunteers, combining for some particular enterprise.
Having its success at heart, they all work with a will, save one of the
associates, who is frequently absent from his post. Must they on his account
dissolve the group, elect a president to impose fines, and work out a code of
penalties? It is evident that neither the one nor the other will be done, but
that some day the comrade who imperils their enterprise will be told:
"Friend, we should like to work with you; but as you are often absent from
your post, and you do your work negligently, we must part. Go and find
other comrades who will put up with your indifference!"
This way is so natural that it is practiced everywhere, even nowadays, in all
industries, in competition with all possible systems of fines, docking of
wages, supervision, etc.; a workman may enter the factory at the appointed
time, but if he does his work badly, if he hinders his comrades by his
laziness or other defects, if he is quarrelsome, there is an end of it; he is
compelled to leave the workshop.

Authoritarians pretend that it is the almighty employer and his overseers
who maintain regularity and quality of work in factories. In reality, in every
somewhat complicated enterprise, in which the goods produced pass
through many hands before being finished, it is the factory itself, the
workmen as a unity, who see to the good quality of the work. Therefore the
best factories of British private industry have few overseers, far less on an
average than the French factories, and less than the British State factories.
A certain standard of public morals is maintained in the same way.
Authoritarians say it is due to rural guards, judges, and policemen, whereas
in reality it is maintained in spite of judges, policemen, and rural guards.
"Many are the laws producing criminals!" was said long ago.
Not only in industrial workshops do things go on in this way; it happens
everywhere, every day, on a scale that only bookworms have as yet no
notion of. When a railway company, federated with other companies, fails
to fulfil its engagements, when its trains are late and goods lie neglected at
the stations, the other companies threaten to cancel the contract, and that
threat usually suffices.
It is generally believed, at any rate it is taught in State-approved schools,
that commerce only keeps to its engagements from fear of lawsuits.
Nothing of the sort; nine times in ten the trader who has not kept his word
will not appear before a judge. There, where trade is very active, as in
London, the sole fact of having driven a creditor to bring a lawsuit suffices
for the immense majority of merchants to refuse for good to have any
dealings with a man who has compelled one of them to go to law.
This being so, why should means that are used to-day among workers in the
workshop, traders in the trade, and railway companies in the organization of
transport, not be made use of in a society based on voluntary work?
Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members
should carry out the following contract: "We undertake to give you the use
of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools, museums, etc., on
condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty years of age, you
consecrate four or five hours a day to some work recognized as necessary to
existence. Choose yourself the producing groups which you wish to join, or
organize a new group, provided that it will undertake to produce

necessaries. And as for the remainder of your time, combine together with
whomsoever you like, for recreation, art, or science, according to the bent
of your taste.
"Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups
producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation,
transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work we
guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will
produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation, will
receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely incapable of
producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then live like an isolated
man or like an invalid. If we are rich enough to give you the necessaries of
life we shall be delighted to give them to you. You are a man, and you have
the right to live. But as you wish to live under special conditions, and leave
the ranks, it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily
relations with other citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of
bourgeois society, unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a
talent, kindly free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing
all the necessary work for you.
"And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other conditions
elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and organize with them
on novel principles. We prefer our own."
This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away
sluggards if they became too numerous.

IV

We very much doubt that we need fear this contingency in a society really
based on the entire freedom of the individual.
In fact, in spite of the premium on idleness offered by the private ownership
of capital, the really lazy man is comparatively rare, unless his laziness be
due to illness.
Among workmen it is often said that the bourgeois are idlers. There are
certainly enough of them, but they, too, are the exception. On the contrary,
in every industrial enterprise, you are sure to find one or more bourgeois

who work very hard. It is true that the majority of bourgeois profit by their
privileged position to award themselves the least unpleasant tasks, and that
they work under hygienic conditions of air, food, etc., which permits them
to do their business without too much fatigue. But these are precisely the
conditions which we claim for all workers, without exception.
It must also be said that if, thanks to their privileged position, rich people
often perform absolutely useless or even harmful work in society,
nevertheless the Ministers, Heads of Departments, factory owners, traders,
bankers, etc., subject themselves for a number of hours every day to work
which they find more or less tiresome, all preferring their hours of leisure to
this obligatory work. And if in nine cases out of ten this work is a harmful
work, they find it none the less tiring for that. But it is precisely because the
middle class put forth a great energy, even in doing harm (knowingly or
not) and defending their privileged position, that they have succeeded in
defeating the landed nobility, and that they continue to rule the masses. If
they were idlers, they would long since have ceased to exist, and would
have disappeared like the aristocracy. In a society that would expect only
four or five hours a day of useful, pleasant, and hygienic work, these same
middle-class people would perform their task perfectly well, and they
certainly would not put up with the horrible conditions in which men toil
nowadays without reforming them. If a Huxley spent only five hours in the
sewers of London, rest assured that he would have found the means of
making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory.
As to the laziness of the great majority of workers, only philistine
economists and philanthropists can utter such nonsense.
If you ask an intelligent manufacturer, he will tell you that if workmen only
put it into their heads to be lazy, all factories would have to be closed, for
no measure of severity, no system of spying would be of any use. You
should have seen the terror caused in 1887 among British employers when a
few agitators started preaching the "go-canny" theory—"Bad pay, bad
work"; "Take it easy, do not overwork yourselves, and waste all you
can."—"They demoralize the worker, they want to kill our industry!" cried
those same people who the day before inveighed against the immorality of
the worker and the bad quality of his work. But if the workers were what
they are represented to be—namely, the idler whom the employer is

supposed continually to threaten with dismissal from the workshop—what
would the word "demoralization" signify?
So when we speak of possible idlers, we must well understand that it is a
question of a small minority in society; and before legislating for that
minority, would it not be wise to study the origin of that idleness? Whoever
observes with an intelligent eye, sees well enough that the child reputed
lazy at school is often the one which simply does not understand, because
he is being badly taught. Very often, too, it is suffering from cerebral
anæmia, caused by poverty and an anti-hygienic education. A boy who is
lazy at Greek or Latin would work admirably were he taught science,
especially if he were taught with the aid of manual labour. A girl who is
stupid at mathematics becomes the first mathematician of her class if she by
chance meets somebody who can explain to her the elements of arithmetic
which she did not understand. And a workman, lazy in the workshop,
cultivates his garden at dawn, while gazing at the rising sun, and will be at
work again at nightfall, when all nature goes to its rest.
Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same
definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone
astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their
capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the
number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as they had not
found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin,
Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers.
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all his life
making the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while
he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expend elsewhere.
Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all his life to a
work-bench in order to procure a thousand pleasures for his employer,
while knowing himself to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing his
only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into
the world in a castle.
Lastly, an immense number of "idlers" are idlers because they do not know
well enough the trade by which they are compelled to earn their living.
Seeing the imperfect thing they make with their own hands, striving vainly

to do better, and perceiving that they never will succeed on account of the
bad habits of work already acquired, they begin to hate their trade, and, not
knowing any other, hate work in general. Thousands of workmen and artists
who are failures suffer from this cause.
On the other hand, he who since his youth has learned to play the piano
well, to handle the plane well, the chisel, the brush, or the file, so that he
feels that what he does is beautiful, will never give up the piano, the chisel,
or the file. He will find pleasure in his work which does not tire him, so
long as he is not overdriven.
Under the one name, idleness, a series of results due to different causes
have been grouped, of which each one could be a source of good, instead of
being a source of evil to society. Like all questions concerning criminality
and related to human faculties, facts have been collected having nothing in
common with one another. People speak of laziness or crime, without
giving themselves the trouble to analyze the cause. They are in a hurry to
punish these faults without inquiring if the punishment itself does not
contain a premium on "laziness" or "crime."[9]
This is why a free society, if it saw the number of idlers increasing in its
midst, would no doubt think of looking first for the cause of laziness, in
order to suppress it, before having recourse to punishment. When it is a
case, as we have already mentioned, of simple bloodlessness, then before
stuffing the brain of a child with science, nourish his system so as to
produce blood, strengthen him, and, that he shall not waste his time, take
him to the country or to the seaside; there, teach him in the open air, not in
books—geometry, by measuring the distance to a spire, or the height of a
tree; natural sciences, while picking flowers and fishing in the sea; physical
science, while building the boat he will go to fish in. But for mercy's sake
do not fill his brain with classical sentences and dead languages. Do not
make an idler of him!...
Or, here is a child which has neither order nor regular habits. Let the
children first inculcate order among themselves, and later on, the laboratory,
the workshop, the work that will have to be done in a limited space, with
many tools about, under the guidance of an intelligent teacher, will teach
them method. But do not make disorderly beings out of them by your

school, whose only order is the symmetry of its benches, and which—true
image of the chaos in its teachings—will never inspire anybody with the
love of harmony, of consistency, and method in work.
Do not you see that by your methods of teaching, framed by a Ministry for
eight million scholars, who represent eight million different capacities, you
only impose a system good for mediocrities, conceived by an average of
mediocrities? Your school becomes a University of laziness, as your prison
is a University of crime. Make the school free, abolish your University
grades, appeal to the volunteers of teaching; begin that way, instead of
making laws against laziness which only serve to increase it.
Give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a
minute particle of some object, who is stifled at his little tapping machine,
which he ends by loathing, give him the chance of tilling the soil, of felling
trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth of a storm, dashing through
space on an engine, but do not make an idler of him by forcing him all his
life to attend to a small machine, to plough the head of a screw, or to drill
the eye of a needle.
Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few
individuals will really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that there
will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Kropotkin: In Russian and French Prisons. London, 1887.

CHAPTER XIII
THE COLLECTIVIST WAGES SYSTEM

I

In their plans for the reconstruction of society the collectivists commit, in
our opinion, a twofold error. While speaking of abolishing capitalist rule,
they intend nevertheless to retain two institutions which are the very basis
of this rule—Representative Government and the Wages' System.
As regards so-called representative government, we have often spoken
about it. It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men—and
such are not wanting in the collectivist party—can remain partisans of
national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons history has given
them—in France, in England, in Germany, or in the United States.
While we see parliamentary rule breaking up, and from all sides criticism of
this rule growing louder—not only of its results, but also of its principles—
how is it that the revolutionary socialists defend a system already
condemned to die?
Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty,
sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the
workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The
upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a parliament
or a municipal council represent a nation or a city. The most intelligent
among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes have simply
used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier against the
pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty. But gradually, as
the people become conscious of their real interests, and the variety of their
interests is growing, the system can no longer work. Therefore democrats of
all countries vainly imagine various palliatives. The Referendum is tried and
found to be a failure; proportional representation is spoken of, the
representation of minorities, and other parliamentary Utopias. In a word,

they strive to find what is not to be found, and after each new experiment
they are bound to recognize that it was a failure; so that confidence in
Representative Government vanishes more and more.
It is the same with the Wages' system; because, once the abolition of private
property is proclaimed, and the possession in common of all means of
production is introduced,—how can the wages' system be maintained in any
form? This is, nevertheless, what collectivists are doing when they
recommend the use of the labour-cheques as a mode of remuneration for
labour accomplished for the great Collectivist employer—the State.
It is easy to understand why the early English socialists, since the time of
Robert Owen, came to the system of labour-cheques. They simply tried to
make Capital and Labour agree. They repudiated the idea of laying hands
on capitalist property by means of revolutionary measures.
It is also easy to understand why Proudhon took up later on the same idea.
In his Mutualist system he tried to make Capital less offensive,
notwithstanding the retaining of private property, which he detested from
the bottom of his heart, but which he believed to be necessary to guarantee
individuals against the State.
Neither is it astonishing that certain economists, more or less bourgeois,
admit labour-cheques. They care little whether the worker is paid in labour-
notes or in coin stamped with the effigy of the Republic or the Empire.
They only care to save from destruction the individual ownership of
dwelling-houses, of land, of factories; in any case—that, at least, of
dwelling-houses and the capital that is necessary for manufacturing. And
labour-notes would just answer the purpose of upholding this private
property.
As long as labour-notes can be exchanged for jewels or carriages, the owner
of the house will willingly accept them for rent. And as long as dwelling
houses, fields, and factories belong to isolated owners, men will have to pay
these owners, in one way or another, for being allowed to work in the fields
or factories, or for living in the houses. The owners will agree to be paid by
the workers in gold, in paper-money, or in cheques exchangeable for all
sorts of commodities, once that toll upon labour is maintained, and the right
to levy it is left with them. But how can we defend labour-notes, this new

form of wagedom, when we admit that the houses, the fields, and the
factories will no longer be private property,—that they will belong to the
commune or the nation?

II

Let us closely examine this system of remuneration for work done,
preached by the French, German, English, and Italian collectivists (the
Spanish anarchists, who still call themselves collectivists, imply by
Collectivism the possession in common of all instruments of production,
and the "liberty of each group to divide the produce, as they think fit,
according to communist or any other principles").
It amounts to this: Everybody works in field, factory, school, hospital, etc.
The working-day is fixed by the State, which owns the land, the factories,
the roads, etc. Every work-day is paid for with a labour-note, which is
inscribed with these words: Eight hours' work. With this cheque the worker
can procure all sorts of merchandise in the stores owned by the State or by
divers corporations. The cheque is divisible, so that you can buy an hour's-
work worth of meat, ten minutes' worth of matches, or half an hour of
tobacco. After the Collectivist Revolution, instead of saying "twopence
worth of soap," we shall say "five minutes' worth of soap."
Most collectivists, true to the distinction laid down by middle-class
economists (and by Marx as well) between qualified work and simple work,
tell us, moreover, that qualified or professional work must be paid a certain
quantity more than simple work. Thus one hour's work of a doctor will have
to be considered as equivalent to two or three hours' work of a hospital
nurse, or to three or five hours' work of a navvy. "Professional, or qualified
work, will be a multiple of simple work," says the collectivist Grönlund,
"because this kind of work needs a more or less long apprenticeship."
Some other collectivists, such as the French Marxist, Guesde, do not make
this distinction. They proclaim the "Equality of Wages." The doctor, the
schoolmaster, and the professor will be paid (in labour-cheques) at the same
rate as the navvy. Eight hours visiting the sick in a hospital will be worth
the same as eight hours spent in earthworks or else in mines or factories.

Some make a greater concession; they admit that disagreeable or unhealthy
work—such as sewerage—could be paid for at a higher rate than agreeable
work. One hour's work of a sewerman would be worth, they say, two hours
of a professor's work.
Let us add that certain collectivists admit of corporations being paid a lump
sum for work done. Thus a corporation would say: "Here are a hundred tons
of steel. A hundred workmen were required to produce them, and it took
them ten days. Their work-day being an eight-hours day, it has taken them
eight thousand working hours to produce a hundred tons of steel—eight
hours a ton." For this the State would pay them eight thousand labour-notes
of one hour each, and these eight thousand cheques would be divided
among the members of the iron-works as they themselves thought proper.
On the other hand, a hundred miners having taken twenty days to extract
eight thousand tons of coal, coal would be worth two hours a ton, and the
sixteen thousand cheques of one hour each, received by the Guild of
Miners, would be divided among their members according to their own
appreciation.
If the miners protested and said that a ton of steel should only cost six
hours' work instead of eight; if the professor wished to have his day paid
four times more than the nurse, then the State would interfere and would
settle their differences.
Such is, in a few words, the organization the collectivists wish to see arise
out of the Social Revolution. As we see, their principles are: Collective
property of the instruments of production, and remuneration to each
according to the time spent in producing, while taking into account the
productivity of his labour. As to the political system, it would be the
Parliamentary system, modified by positive instructions given to those
elected, and by the Referendum—a vote, taken by noes or ayes by the
nation.
Let us own that this system appears to us simply unrealizable.
Collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle—the abolition
of private property—and then they deny it, no sooner than proclaimed, by

upholding an organization of production and consumption which originated
in private property.
They proclaim a revolutionary principle, and ignore the consequences that
this principle will inevitably bring about. They forget that the very fact of
abolishing individual property in the instruments of work—land, factories,
road, capital—must launch society into absolutely new channels; must
completely overthrow the present system of production, both in its aim as
well as in its means; must modify daily relations between individuals, as
soon as land, machinery, and all other instruments of production are
considered common property.
They say, "No private property," and immediately after strive to maintain
private property in its daily manifestations. "You shall be a Commune as far
as regards production: fields, tools, machinery, all that has been invented up
till now—factories, railways, harbours, mines, etc., all are yours. Not the
slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each in this
collective property.
"But from to-morrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to
take in the creation of new machinery, in the digging of new mines. You
will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you. You will
count your minutes of work, and you will take care that a minute of your
neighbours should not buy more than yours.
"And as an hour measures nothing, as in some factories a worker can see to
six power-looms at a time, while in another he only tends two, you will
weigh the muscular force, the brain energy, and the nervous energy you
have expended. You will accurately calculate the years of apprenticeship in
order to appraise the amount each will contribute to future production. And
this—after having declared that you do not take into account his share in
past production."
Well, for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two absolutely
opposed principles, two principles that contradict one another continually.
And a nation or a commune which would have such an organization would
be compelled to revert to private property in the instruments of production,
or to transform itself into a communist society.

III

We have said that certain collectivist writers desire that a distinction should
be made between qualified or professional work and simple work. They
pretend that an hour's work of an engineer, an architect, or a doctor, must be
considered as two or three hours' work of a blacksmith, a mason, or a
hospital nurse. And the same distinction must be made between all sorts of
trades necessitating apprenticeship, and the simple toil of day labourers.
Well, to establish this distinction would be to maintain all the inequalities of
present society. It would mean fixing a dividing line, from the beginning,
between the workers and those who pretend to govern them. It would mean
dividing society into two very distinct classes—the aristocracy of
knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders—the one doomed
to serve the other; the one working with its hands to feed and clothe those
who, profiting by their leisure, study how to govern their fosterers.
It would mean reviving one of the distinct peculiarities of present society
and giving it the sanction of the Social Revolution. It would mean setting
up as a principle an abuse already condemned in our ancient crumbling
society.
We know the answer we shall get. They will speak of "Scientific
Socialism"; they will quote bourgeois economists, and Marx too, to prove
that a scale of wages has its raison d'être, as "the labour force" of the
engineer will have cost more to society than the "labour-force" of the navvy.
In fact—have not economists tried to prove to us that if an engineer is paid
twenty times more than a navvy it is because the "necessary" outlay to
make an engineer is greater than that necessary to make a navvy? And has
not Marx asserted that the same distinction is equally logical between two
branches of manual labour? He could not conclude otherwise, having taken
up on his own account Ricardo's theory of value, and upheld that goods are
exchanged in proportion to the quantity of work socially necessary for their
production.
But we know what to think of this. We know that if engineers, scientists, or
doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a labourer, and if a
weaver earns three times more than an agricultural labourer, and ten times

more than a girl in a match factory, it is not by reason of their "cost of
production," but by reason of a monopoly of education, or a monopoly of
industry. Engineers, scientists, and doctors merely exploit their capital—
their diplomas—as middle-class employers exploit a factory, or as nobles
used to exploit their titles of nobility.
As to the employer who pays an engineer twenty times more than a
labourer, it is simply due to personal interest; if the engineer can economize
£4,000 a year on the cost of production, the employer pays him £800. And
if the employer has a foreman who saves £400 on the work by cleverly
sweating workmen, he gladly gives him £80 or £120 a year. He parts with
an extra £40 when he expects to gain £400 by it; and this is the essence of
the Capitalist system. The same differences obtain among different manual
trades.
Let them, therefore, not talk to us of "the cost of production" which raises
the cost of skilled labour, and tell us that a student who has gaily spent his
youth in a university has a right to a wage ten times greater than the son of
a miner who has grown pale in a mine since the age of eleven; or that a
weaver has a right to a wage three or four times greater than that of an
agricultural labourer. The cost of teaching a weaver his work is not four
times greater than the cost of teaching a peasant his. The weaver simply
benefits by the advantages his industry reaps in international trade, from
countries that have as yet no industries, and in consequence of the
privileges accorded by all States to industries in preference to the tilling of
the soil.
Nobody has ever calculated the cost of production of a producer; and if a
noble loafer costs far more to society than a worker, it remains to be seen
whether a robust day-labourer does not cost more to society than a skilled
artisan, when we have taken into account infant-mortality among the poor,
the ravages of anæmia, and premature deaths.
Could they, for example, make us believe that the 1s. 3d. paid to a Paris
workwoman, the 3d. paid to an Auvergne peasant girl who grows blind at
lace-making, or the 1s. 8d. paid to the peasant represent their "cost of
production." We know full well that people work for less, but we also know

that they do so exclusively because, thanks to our wonderful organization,
they would die of hunger did they not accept these mock wages.
For us the scale of remuneration is a complex result of taxes, of
governmental tutelage, of Capitalist monopoly. In a word, of State and
Capital. Therefore, we say that all wages' theories have been invented after
the event to justify injustices at present existing, and that we need not take
them into consideration.
Neither will they fail to tell us that the Collectivist scale of wages would be
an improvement. "It would be better," so they say, "to see certain artisans
receiving a wage two or three times higher than common labourers, than to
see a minister receiving in a day what a workman cannot earn in a year. It
would be a great step towards equality."
For us this step would be the reverse of progress. To make a distinction
between simple and professional work in a new society would result in the
Revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact we
submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust. It would mean
imitating those gentlemen of the French Assembly who proclaimed on
August 4th, 1789, the abolition of feudal rights, but who on August 8th
sanctioned these same rights by imposing dues on the peasants to
compensate the noblemen, placing these dues under the protection of the
Revolution. It would mean imitating the Russian Government, which
proclaimed, at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, that certain lands
should henceforth belong to the nobility, while formerly these lands were
considered as belonging to the serfs.
Or else, to take a better known example, when the Commune of 1871
decided to pay members of the Commune Council 12s. 6d. a day, while the
Federates on the ramparts received only 1s. 3d., this decision was hailed as
an act of superior democratic equality. In reality, the Commune only ratified
the former inequality between functionary and soldier, Government and
governed. Coming from an Opportunist Chamber of Deputies, such a
decision would have appeared admirable, but the Commune doomed her
own revolutionary principles when she failed to put them into practice.
Under our existing social system, when a minister gets paid £4,000 a year,
while a workman must content himself with £40 or less; when a foreman is

paid two or three times more than a workman, and among workmen there is
every gradation, from 8s. a day down to the peasant girl's 3d., we
disapprove of the high salary of the minister as well as of the difference
between the 8s. of the workman and the 3d. of the poor woman. And we
say, '"Down with the privileges of education, as well as with those of birth!"
We are anarchists precisely because these privileges revolt us.
They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure them
in a society that began by proclaiming equality?
This is why some collectivists, understanding the impossibility of
maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the breath of the
Revolution, hasten to proclaim equality of wage. But they meet with new
difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes the same unrealizable
Utopia as the scale of wages of other collectivists.
A society having taken possession of all social wealth, having boldly
proclaimed the right of all to this wealth—whatever share they may have
taken in producing it—will be compelled to abandon any system of wages,
whether in currency or labour-notes.

IV

The collectivists say, "To each according to his deeds"; or, in other terms,
according to his share of services rendered to society. They think it
expedient to put this principle into practice, as soon as the Social
Revolution will have made all instruments of production common property.
But we think that if the Social Revolution had the misfortune of
proclaiming such a principle, it would mean its necessary failure; it would
mean leaving the social problem, which past centuries have burdened us
with, unsolved.
Of course, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works the less he
is remunerated, this principle, at first sight, may appear to be a yearning for
justice. But in reality it is only the perpetuation of injustice. It was by
proclaiming this principle that wagedom began, to end in the glaring
inequalities and all the abominations of present society; because, from the
moment work done began to be appraised in currency, or in any other form

of wage, the day it was agreed upon that man would only receive the wage
he should be able to secure to himself, the whole history of a State-aided
Capitalist Society was as good as written; it was contained in germ in this
principle.
Shall we, then, return to our starting-point, and go through the same
evolution again? Our theorists desire it, but fortunately it is impossible. The
Revolution, we maintain, must be communist; if not, it will be drowned in
blood, and have to be begun over again.
Services rendered to society, be they work in factory or field, or mental
services, cannot be valued in money. There can be no exact measure of
value (of what has been wrongly termed exchange value), nor of use value,
in terms of production. If two individuals work for the community five
hours a day, year in year out, at different work which is equally agreeable to
them, we may say that on the whole their labour is approximately
equivalent. But we cannot divide their work, and say that the result of any
particular day, hour, or minute of work of the one is worth the result of one
day, one hour, or one minute of the other.
We may roughly say that the man, who during his lifetime has deprived
himself of leisure during ten hours a day has given far more to society than
the one who has only deprived himself of leisure during five hours a day, or
who has not deprived himself at all. But we cannot take what he has done
during two hours, and say that the yield of his two hours' work is worth
twice as much as the yield of another individual, who has worked only one
hour, and remunerate the two in proportion. It would be disregarding all that
is complex in industry, in agriculture, in the whole life of present society; it
would be ignoring to what extent all individual work is the result of the past
and the present labour of society as a whole. It would mean believing
ourselves to be living in the Stone Age, whereas we are living in an age of
steel.
If you enter a modern coal-mine you will see a man in charge of a huge
machine that raises and lowers a cage. In his hand he holds a lever that
stops and reverses the course of the machine; he lowers it and the cage
reverses its course in the twinkling of an eye; he sends it upwards or
downwards into the depths of the shaft with a giddy swiftness. All attention,

he follows with his eyes fixed on an indicator which shows him, on a small
scale, at which point of the shaft the cage is at each second of its progress;
and as soon as the indicator has reached a certain level, he suddenly stops
the course of the cage, not a yard higher nor lower than the required spot.
And no sooner have the colliers unloaded their coal-wagonettes, and pushed
empty ones instead, than he reverses the lever and again sends the cage
back into space.
During eight or ten consecutive hours every day he must keep the same
strain of attention. Should his brain relax for a moment, the cage would
inevitably strike against the gear, break its wheels, snap the rope, crush
men, and put a stop to all work in the mine. Should he waste three seconds
at each touch of the lever,—the extraction, in our modern, perfected mines,
would be reduced from twenty to fifty tons a day.
Is it he who is the most necessary man in the mine? Or, is it perhaps the boy
who signals to him from below to raise the cage? Is it the miner at the
bottom of the shaft, who risks his life every instant, and who will some day
be killed by fire-damp? Or is it the engineer, who would lose the layer of
coal, and would cause the miners to dig on rock by a simple mistake in his
calculations? Or is it the mine owner who has put his capital into the mine,
and who has perhaps, contrary to expert advice, asserted that excellent coal
would be found there?
All those who are engaged in the mine contribute to the extraction of coal in
proportion to their strength, their energy, their knowledge, their intelligence,
and their skill. And we may say that all have the right to live, to satisfy their
needs, and even their whims, when the necessaries of life have been secured
for all. But how can we appraise the work of each one of them?
And, moreover, Is the coal they have extracted entirely their work? Is it not
also the work of the men who have built the railway leading to the mine and
the roads that radiate from all the railway stations? Is it not also the work of
those that have tilled and sown the fields, extracted iron, cut wood in the
forests, built the machines that burn coal, slowly developed the mining
industry altogether, and so on?
It is utterly impossible to draw a distinction between the work of each of
those men. To measure the work by its results leads us to an absurdity; to

divide the total work, and to measure its fractions by the number of hours
spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing remains: to put the
needs above the works, and first of all to recognize the right to live, and
later on the right to well-being for all those who took their share in
production.
But take any other branch of human activity—take the manifestations of life
as a whole. Which one of us can claim the higher remuneration for his
work? Is it the doctor who has found out the illness, or the nurse who has
brought about recovery by her hygienic care? Is it the inventor of the first
steam-engine, or the boy, who, one day getting tired of pulling the rope that
formerly opened the valve to let steam under the piston, tied the rope to the
lever of the machine, without suspecting that he had invented the essential
mechanical part of all modern machinery—the automatic valve?
Is it the inventor of the locomotive, or the workman of Newcastle, who
suggested replacing the stones formerly laid under the rails by wooden
sleepers, as the stones, for want of elasticity, caused the trains to derail? Is it
the engineer on the locomotive? The signalman who stops the trains, or lets
them pass by? The switchman who transfers a train from one line to
another?
Again, to whom do we owe the transatlantic cable? Is it to the electrical
engineer who obstinately affirmed that the cable would transmit messages
while learned men of science declared it to be impossible? Is it to Maury,
the learned physical geographer, who advised that thick cables should be set
aside for others as thin as a walking cane? Or else to those volunteers, come
from nobody knows where, who spent their days and nights on deck
minutely examining every yard of the cable, and removed the nails that the
shareholders of steamship companies stupidly caused to be driven into the
non-conducting wrapper of the cable, so as to make it unserviceable?
And in a wider sphere, the true sphere of life, with its joys, its sufferings,
and its accidents, cannot each one of us recall someone who has rendered
him so great a service that we should be indignant if its equivalent in coin
were mentioned? The service may have been but a word, nothing but a
word spoken at the right time, or else it may have been months and years of

devotion, and we are going to appraise these "incalculable" services in
"labour-notes"?
"The works of each!" But human society would not exist for more than two
consecutive generations if everyone did not give infinitely more than that
for which he is paid in coin, in "cheques," or in civic rewards. The race
would soon become extinct if mothers did not sacrifice their lives to take
care of their children, if men did not give continually, without demanding
an equivalent reward, if men did not give most precisely when they expect
no reward.
If middle-class society is decaying, if we have got into a blind alley from
which we cannot emerge without attacking past institutions with torch and
hatchet, it is precisely because we have given too much to counting. It is
because we have let ourselves be influenced into giving only to receive. It is
because we have aimed at turning society into a commercial company based
on debit and credit.
After all, the Collectivists know this themselves. They vaguely understand
that a society could not exist if it carried out the principle of "Each
according to his deeds." They have a notion that necessaries—we do not
speak of whims—the needs of the individual, do not always correspond to
his works. Thus De Paepe tells us: "The principle—the eminently
Individualist principle—would, however, be tempered by social
intervention for the education of children and young persons (including
maintenance and lodging), and by the social organization for assisting the
infirm and the sick, for retreats for aged workers, etc." They understand that
a man of forty, father of three children, has other needs than a young man of
twenty. They know that the woman who suckles her infant and spends
sleepless nights at its bedside, cannot do as much work as the man who has
slept peacefully. They seem to take in that men and women, worn out
maybe by dint of overwork for society, may be incapable of doing as much
work as those who have spent their time leisurely and pocketed their
"labour-notes" in the privileged career of State functionaries.
They are eager to temper their principle. They say: "Society will not fail to
maintain and bring up its children; to help both aged and infirm. Without

doubt needs will be the measure of the cost that society will burden itself
with, to temper the principle of deeds."
Charity, charity, always Christian charity, organized by the State this time.
They believe in improving the asylums for foundlings, in effecting old-age
and sick insurances—so as to temper their principle. But they cannot yet
throw aside the idea of "wounding first and healing afterwards"!
Thus, after having denied Communism, after having laughed at their ease at
the formula—"To each according to his needs"—these great economists
discover that they have forgotten something, the needs of the producers,
which they now admit. Only it is for the State to estimate them, for the State
to verify if the needs are not disproportionate to the work.
The State will dole out charity. Thence to the English poor-law and the
workhouse is but a step.
There is but a slight difference, because even this stepmother of a society
against whom we are in revolt has also been compelled to temper her
individualist principles; she, too, has had to make concessions in a
communist direction and under the same form of charity.
She, too, distributes halfpenny dinners to prevent the pillaging of her shops;
builds hospitals—often very bad ones, but sometimes splendid ones—to
prevent the ravages of contagious diseases. She, too, after having paid the
hours of labour, shelters the children of those she has wrecked. She takes
their needs into consideration and doles out charity.
Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was
poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating
"surplus value," of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently
destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was
poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of the poor increased so
rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that
followed the founding of States, and to the increase of riches resulting from
the exploitation of the East. These two causes tore asunder the bonds that
kept men together in the agrarian and urban communities, and taught them
to proclaim the principle of wages, so dear to the exploiters, instead of the
solidarity they formerly practiced in their tribal life.

And it is this principle that is to spring from a revolution which men dare to
call by the name of Social Revolution,—a name so dear to the starved, the
oppressed, and the sufferers!
It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under the
proletarian axe, voices will cry out: "Bread, shelter, ease for all!" And those
voices will be listened to; the people will say: "Let us begin by allaying our
thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And
when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the
last vestiges of middle-class rule: its morality drawn from account books,
its 'debit and credit' philosophy, its 'mine and yours' institutions. 'In
demolishing we shall build,' as Proudhon said; and we shall build in the
name of Communism and Anarchy."

CHAPTER XIV
CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION

I

Looking at society and its political organization from a different standpoint
than that of all the authoritarian schools—for we start from a free individual
to reach a free society, instead of beginning by the State to come down to
the individual—we follow the same method in economic questions. We
study the needs of the individuals, and the means by which they satisfy
them, before discussing Production, Exchange, Taxation, Government, and
so on. At first sight the difference may appear trifling, but in reality it upsets
all the canons of official Political Economy.
If you open the works of any economist you will find that he begins with
PRODUCTION, i. e., by the analysis of the means employed nowadays for the
creation of wealth: division of labour, the factory, its machinery, the
accumulation of capital. From Adam Smith to Marx, all have proceeded
along these lines. Only in the latter parts of their books do they treat of
CONSUMPTION, that is to say, of the means resorted to in our present Society
to satisfy the needs of the individuals; and even there they confine
themselves to explaining how riches are divided among those who vie with
one another for their possession.
Perhaps you will say this is logical. Before satisfying needs you must create
the wherewithal to satisfy them. But, before producing anything, must you
not feel the need of it? Was it not necessity that first drove man to hunt, to
raise cattle, to cultivate land, to make implements, and later on to invent
machinery? Is it not the study of the needs that should govern production?
To say the least, it would therefore be quite as logical to begin by
considering the needs, and afterwards to discuss how production is, and
ought to be, organized, in order to satisfy these needs.
This is precisely what we mean to do.

But as soon as we look at Political Economy from this point of view, it
entirely changes its aspect. It ceases to be a simple description of facts, and
becomes a science, and we may define this science as: "The study of the
needs of mankind, and the means of satisfying them with the least possible
waste of human energy". Its true name should be, Physiology of Society. It
constitutes a parallel science to the physiology of plants and animals, which
is the study of the needs of plants and animals, and of the most
advantageous ways of satisfying them. In the series of sociological
sciences, the economy of human societies takes the place, occupied in the
series of biological sciences by the physiology of organic bodies.
We say, here are human beings, united in a society. All of them feel the need
of living in healthy houses. The savage's hut no longer satisfies them; they
require a more or less comfortable solid shelter. The question is, then:
whether, taking the present capacity of men for production, every man can
have a house of his own? and what is hindering him from having it?
And as soon as we ask this question, we see that every family in Europe
could perfectly well have a comfortable house, such as are built in England,
in Belgium, or in Pullman City, or else an equivalent set of rooms. A certain
number of days' work would suffice to build a pretty little airy house, well
fitted up and lighted by electricity.
But nine-tenths of Europeans have never possessed a healthy house,
because at all times common people have had to work day after day to
satisfy the needs of their rulers, and have never had the necessary leisure or
money to build, or to have built, the home of their dreams. And they can
have no houses, and will inhabit hovels as long as present conditions remain
unchanged.
It is thus seen that our method is quite contrary to that of the economists,
who immortalize the so-called laws of production, and, reckoning up the
number of houses built every year, demonstrate by statistics, that as the
number of the new-built houses is too small to meet all demands, nine-
tenths of Europeans must live in hovels.
Let us pass on to food. After having enumerated the benefits accruing from
the division of labour, economists tell us the division of labour requires that
some men should work at agriculture and others at manufacture. Farmers

producing so much, factories so much, exchange being carried on in such a
way, they analyze the sale, the profit, the net gain or the surplus value, the
wages, the taxes, banking, and so on.
But after having followed them so far, we are none the wiser, and if we ask
them: "How is it that millions of human beings are in want of bread, when
every family could grow sufficient wheat to feed ten, twenty, and even a
hundred people annually?" they answer us by droning the same anthem—
division of labour, wages, surplus value, capital, etc.—arriving at the same
conclusion, that production is insufficient to satisfy all needs; a conclusion
which, if true, does not answer the question: "Can or cannot man by his
labour produce the bread he needs? And if he cannot, what is it that hinders
him?"
Here are 350 million Europeans. They need so much bread, so much meat,
wine, milk, eggs, and butter every year. They need so many houses, so
much clothing. This is the minimum of their needs. Can they produce all
this? and if they can, will sufficient leisure be left them for art, science, and
amusement?—in a word, for everything that is not comprised in the
category of absolute necessities? If the answer is in the affirmative,—What
hinders them going ahead? What must they do to remove the obstacles? Is it
time that is needed to achieve such a result? Let them take it! But let us not
lose sight of the aim of production—the satisfaction of the needs of all.
If the most imperious needs of man remain unsatisfied now,—What must
we do to increase the productivity of our work? But is there no other cause?
Might it not be that production, having lost sight of the needs of man, has
strayed in an absolutely wrong direction, and that its organization is at
fault? And as we can prove that such is the case, let us see how to
reorganize production so as to really satisfy all needs.
This seems to us the only right way of facing things. The only way that
would allow of Political Economy becoming a science—the Science of
Social Physiology.
It is evident that so long as science treats of production, as it is carried on at
present by civilized nations, by Hindoo communes, or by savages, it can
hardly state facts otherwise than the economists state them now; that is to
say, as a simple descriptive chapter, analogous to the descriptive chapters of

Zoology and Botany. But if this chapter were written so as to throw some
light on the economy of the energy that is necessary to satisfy human needs,
the chapter would gain in precision, as well as in descriptive value. It would
clearly show the frightful waste of human energy under the present system,
and it would prove that as long as this system exists, the needs of humanity
will never be satisfied.
The point of view, we see, would be entirely changed. Behind the loom that
weaves so many yards of cloth, behind the steel-plate perforator, and behind
the safe in which dividends are hoarded, we should see man, the artisan of
production, more often than not excluded from the feast he has prepared for
others. We should also understand that the standpoint being wrong, the so-
called "laws" of value and exchange are but a very false explanation of
events, as they happen nowadays; and that things will come to pass very
differently when production is organized in such a manner as to meet all
needs of society.

II

There is not one single principle of Political Economy that does not change
its aspect if you look at it from our point of view.
Take, for instance, over-production, a word which every day re-echoes in
our ears. Is there a single economist, academician, or candidate for
academical honours, who has not supported arguments, proving that
economic crises are due to over-production—that at a given moment more
cotton, more cloth, more watches are produced than are needed! Have we
not, all of us, thundered against the rapacity of the capitalists who are
obstinately bent on producing more than can possibly be consumed!
However, on careful examination all these reasonings prove unsound. In
fact, Is there one single commodity among those in universal use which is
produced in greater quantity than need be. Examine one by one all
commodities sent out by countries exporting on a large scale, and you will
see that nearly all are produced in insufficient quantities for the inhabitants
of the countries exporting them.

It is not a surplus of wheat that the Russian peasant sends to Europe. The
most plentiful harvests of wheat and rye in European Russia only yield
enough for the population. And as a rule, the peasant deprives himself of
what he actually needs when he sells his wheat or rye to pay rent and taxes.
It is not a surplus of coal that England sends to the four corners of the
globe, because only three-quarters of a ton, per head of population,
annually, remains for home domestic consumption, and millions of
Englishmen are deprived of fire in the winter, or have only just enough to
boil a few vegetables. In fact, setting aside useless luxuries, there is in
England, which exports more than any other country, one single commodity
in universal use—cottons—whose production is sufficiently great to
perhaps exceed the needs of the community. Yet when we look upon the
rags that pass for wearing apparel worn by over a third of the inhabitants of
the United Kingdom, we are led to ask ourselves whether the cottons
exported would not, on the whole, suit the real needs of the population?
As a rule it is not a surplus that is exported, though it may have been so
originally. The fable of the barefooted shoemaker is as true of nations as it
was formerly of individual artisans. We export the necessary commodities.
And we do so, because the workmen cannot buy with their wages what they
have produced, and pay besides the rent and interest to the capitalist and
the banker.
Not only does the ever-growing need of comfort remain unsatisfied, but the
strict necessities of life are often wanting. Therefore, "surplus production"
does not exist, at least not in the sense given to it by the theorists of
Political Economy.
Taking another point—all economists tell us that there is a well-proved law:
"Man produces more than he consumes." After he has lived on the proceeds
of his toil, there remains a surplus. Thus, a family of cultivators produces
enough to feed several families, and so forth.
For us, this oft-repeated sentence has no sense. If it meant that each
generation leaves something to future generations, it would be true; thus,
for example, a farmer plants a tree that will live, maybe, for thirty, forty, or
a hundred years, and whose fruits will still be gathered by the farmer's
grandchildren. Or he clears a few acres of virgin soil, and we say that the

heritage of future generations has been increased by that much. Roads,
bridges, canals, his house and his furniture are so much wealth bequeathed
to succeeding generations.
But this is not what is meant. We are told that the cultivator produces more
than he need consume. Rather should they say that, the State having always
taken from him a large share of his produce for taxes, the priest for tithe,
and the landlord for rent, a whole class of men has been created, who
formerly consumed what they produced—save what was set aside for
unforeseen accidents, or expenses incurred in afforestation, roads, etc.—but
who to-day are compelled to live very poorly, from hand to mouth, the
remainder having been taken from them by the State, the landlord, the
priest, and the usurer.
Therefore we prefer to say: The agricultural labourer, the industrial worker
and so on consume less than they produce,—because they are compelled to
sell most of the produce of their labour and to be satisfied with but a small
portion of it.
Let us also observe that if the needs of the individual are taken as the
starting-point of our political economy, we cannot fail to reach
Communism, an organization which enables us to satisfy all needs in the
most thorough and economical way. While if we start from our present
method of production, and aim at gain and surplus value, without asking
whether our production corresponds to the satisfaction of needs, we
necessarily arrive at Capitalism, or at most at Collectivism—both being but
two different forms of the present wages' system.
In fact, when we consider the needs of the individual and of society, and the
means which man has resorted to in order to satisfy them during his varied
phases of development, we see at once the necessity of systematizing our
efforts, instead of producing haphazard as we do nowadays. It becomes
evident that the appropriation by a few of all riches not consumed, and
transmitted from one generation to another, is not in the general interest.
And we see as a fact that owing to these methods the needs of three-
quarters of society are not satisfied, so that the present waste of human
strength in useless things is only the more criminal.

We discover, moreover, that the most advantageous use of all commodities
would be, for each of them, to go, first, for satisfying those needs which are
the most pressing: that, in other words, the so-called "value in use" of a
commodity does not depend on a simple whim, as has often been affirmed,
but on the satisfaction it brings to real needs.
Communism—that is to say, an organization which would correspond to a
view of Consumption, Production, and Exchange, taken as a whole—
therefore becomes the logical consequence of such a comprehension of
things—the only one, in our opinion, that is really scientific.
A society that will satisfy the needs of all, and which will know how to
organize production to answer to this aim will also have to make a clean
sweep of several prejudices concerning industry, and first of all the theory
often preached by economists—The Division of Labour theory—which we
are going to discuss in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XV
THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

Political Economy has always confined itself to stating facts occurring in
society, and justifying them in the interest of the dominant class. Therefore,
it pronounces itself in favour of the division of labour in industry. Having
found it profitable to capitalists, it has set it up as a principle.
Look at the village smith, said Adam Smith, the father of modern Political
Economy. If he has never been accustomed to making nails he will only
succeed by hard toil in forging two or three hundred a day, and even then
they will be bad. But if this same smith has never made anything but nails,
he will easily supply as many as two thousand three hundred in the course
of a day. And Smith hastened to the conclusion—"Divide labour, specialize,
go on specializing; let us have smiths who only know how to make heads or
points of nails, and by this means we shall produce more. We shall grow
rich."
That a smith condemned for life to make the heads of nails would lose all
interest in his work, that he would be entirely at the mercy of his employer
with his limited handicraft, that he would be out of work four months out of
twelve, and that his wages would fall very low down, when it would be
easy to replace him by an apprentice, Smith did not think of all this when he
exclaimed—"Long live the division of labour. This is the real gold-mine
that will enrich the nation!" And all joined him in this cry.
And later on, when a Sismondi or a J. B. Say began to understand that the
division of labour, instead of enriching the whole nation, only enriches the
rich, and that the worker, who is doomed for life to making the eighteenth
part of a pin, grows stupid and sinks into poverty—what did official
economists propose? Nothing! They did not say to themselves that by a
lifelong grind at one and the same mechanical toil the worker would lose
his intelligence and his spirit of invention, and that, on the contrary, a

variety of occupations would result in considerably augmenting the
productivity of a nation. But this is the very issue we have now to consider.
If, however, learned economists were the only ones to preach the permanent
and often hereditary division of labour, we might allow them to preach it as
much as they pleased. But the ideas taught by doctors of science filter into
men's minds and pervert them; and from repeatedly hearing the division of
labour, profits, interest, credit, etc., spoken of as problems long since
solved, all middle-class people, and workers too, end by arguing like
economists; they venerate the same fetishes.
Thus we see most socialists, even those who have not feared to point out the
mistakes of economical science, justifying the division of labour. Talk to
them about the organization of work during the Revolution, and they
answer that the division of labour must be maintained; that if you sharpened
pins before the Revolution you must go on sharpening them after. True, you
will not have to work more than five hours a day, but you will have to
sharpen pins all your life, while others will make designs for machines that
will enable you to sharpen hundreds of millions of pins during your life-
time; and others again will be specialists in the higher branches of literature,
science, and art, etc. You were born to sharpen pins while Pasteur was born
to invent the inoculation against anthrax, and the Revolution will leave you
both to your respective employments. Well, it is this horrible principle, so
noxious to society, so brutalizing to the individual, source of so much harm,
that we propose to discuss in its divers manifestations.
We know the consequences of the division of labour full well. It is evident
that, first of all, we are divided into two classes: on the one hand, producers,
who consume very little and are exempt from thinking because they only do
physical work, and who work badly because their brains remain inactive;
and on the other hand, the consumers, who, producing little or hardly
anything, have the privilege of thinking for the others, and who think badly
because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to
them. Then, we have the labourers of the soil who know nothing of
machinery, while those who work at machinery ignore everything about
agriculture. The idea of modern industry is a child tending a machine that
he cannot and must not understand, and a foreman who fines him if his
attention flags for a moment. The ideal of industrial agriculture is to do

away with the agricultural labourer altogether and to set a man who does
odd jobs to tend a steam-plough or a threshing-machine. The division of
labour means labelling and stamping men for life—some to splice ropes in
factories, some to be foremen in a business, others to shove huge coal-
baskets in a particular part of a mine; but none of them to have any idea of
machinery as a whole, nor of business, nor of mines. And thereby they
destroy the love of work and the capacity for invention that, at the
beginning of modern industry, created the machinery on which we pride
ourselves so much.
What they have done for individuals, they also wanted to do for nations.
Humanity was to be divided into national workshops, having each its
speciality. Russia, we were taught, was destined by nature to grow corn;
England to spin cotton; Belgium to weave cloth; while Switzerland was to
train nurses and governesses. Moreover, each separate city was to establish
a specialty. Lyons was to weave silk, Auvergne to make lace, and Paris
fancy articles. In this way, economists said, an immense field was opened
for production and consumption, and in this way an era of limitless wealth
for mankind was at hand.
However, these great hopes vanished as fast as technical knowledge spread
abroad. As long as England stood alone as a weaver of cotton and as a
metal-worker on a large scale; as long as only Paris made artistic fancy
articles, etc., all went well, economists could preach the so-called division
of labour without being refuted.
But a new current of thought induced bye and bye all civilized nations to
manufacture for themselves. They found it advantageous to produce what
they formerly received from other countries, or from their colonies, which
in their turn aimed at emancipating themselves from the mother-country.
Scientific discoveries universalized the methods of production, and
henceforth it was useless to pay an exorbitant price abroad for what could
easily be produced at home. And now we see already that this industrial
revolution strikes a crushing blow at the theory of the division of labour
which for a long time was supposed to be so sound.

CHAPTER XVI
THE DECENTRALIZATION OF INDUSTRY[10]

I

After the Napoleonic wars Britain had nearly succeeded in ruining the main
industries which had sprung up in France at the end of the preceding
century. She also became mistress of the seas and had no rivals of
importance. She took in the situation, and knew how to turn its privileges
and advantages to account. She established an industrial monopoly, and,
imposing upon her neighbours her prices for the goods she alone could
manufacture, accumulated riches upon riches.
But as the middle-class Revolution of the eighteenth century had abolished
serfdom and created a proletariat in France, French industry, hampered for a
time in its flight, soared again, and from the second half of the nineteenth
century France ceased to be a tributary of England for manufactured goods.
To-day she too has grown into a nation with an export trade. She sells far
more than sixty million pounds' worth of manufactured goods, and two-
thirds of these goods are fabrics. The number of Frenchmen working for
export or living by their foreign trade, is estimated at three millions.
France is therefore no longer England's tributary. In her turn she has striven
to monopolize certain branches of foreign industry, such as silks and ready-
made clothes, and has reaped immense profits therefrom; but she is on the
point of losing this monopoly for ever, just as England is on the point of
losing the monopoly of cotton goods.
Travelling eastwards, industry has reached Germany. Fifty years ago
Germany was a tributary of England and France for most manufactured
commodities in the higher branches of industry. It is no longer so. In the
course of the last fifty years, and especially since the Franco-German war,
Germany has completely reorganized her industry. The new factories are
stocked with the best machinery; the latest creations of industrial art in

cotton goods from Manchester, or in silks from Lyons, etc., are now
realized in new German factories. It took two or three generations of
workers, at Lyons and Manchester, to construct the modern machinery; but
Germany adopted it in its perfected state. Technical schools, adapted to the
needs of industry, supply the factories with an army of intelligent workmen
—practical engineers, who can work with both hand and brain. German
industry starts at the point which was only reached by Manchester and
Lyons after fifty years of groping in the dark, of exertion and experiments.
It follows that since Germany manufactures so well at home, she diminishes
her imports from France and England year by year. She has not only
become their rival in manufactured goods in Asia and in Africa, but also in
London and in Paris. Shortsighted people in France may cry out against the
Frankfort Treaty; English manufacturers may explain German competition
by little differences in railway tariffs; they may linger on the petty side of
questions, and neglect great historical facts. But it is none the less certain
that the main industries, formerly in the hands of England and France, have
progressed eastward, and in Germany they have found a country, young,
full of energy, possessing an intelligent middle class, and eager in its turn to
enrich itself by foreign trade.
While Germany has freed herself from subjection to France and England,
has manufactured her own cotton-cloth, and constructed her own machines
—in fact, manufactured all commodities—the main industries have also
taken root in Russia, where the development of manufacture is the more
instructive as it sprang up but yesterday.
At the time of the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Russia had hardly any
factories. Everything needed in the way of machines, rails, railway-engines,
fine dress materials, came from the West. Twenty years later she possessed
already 85,000 factories, and the value of the goods manufactured in Russia
had increased fourfold.
The old machinery was superseded, and now nearly all the steel in use in
Russia, three-quarters of the iron, two-thirds of the coal, all railway-
engines, railway-carriages, rails, nearly all steamers, are made in Russia.
Russia, destined—so wrote economists—to remain an agricultural territory,
has rapidly developed into a manufacturing country. She orders hardly

anything from England, and very little from Germany.
Economists hold the customs responsible for these facts, and yet cottons
manufactured in Russia are sold at the same price as in London. Capital
taking no cognizance of father-lands, German and English capitalists,
accompanied by engineers and foremen of their own nationalities, have
introduced in Russia and in Poland manufactories whose goods compete in
excellence with the best from England. If customs were abolished to-
morrow, manufacture would only gain by it. Not long ago the British
manufacturers delivered another hard blow to the import of cloth and
woolens from the West. They set up in southern and middle Russia
immense wool factories, stocked with the most perfect machinery from
Bradford, and already now Russia imports only the highest sorts of cloth
and woolen fabrics from England, France and Austria. The remainder is
fabricated at home, both in factories and as domestic industries.
The main industries not only move eastward, they are spreading also to the
southern peninsulas. The Turin Exhibition of 1884 already demonstrated the
progress made in Italian manufactured produce; and, let us not make any
mistake about it, the mutual hatred of the French and Italian middle classes
has no other origin than their industrial rivalry. Spain is also becoming an
industrial country; while in the East, Bohemia has suddenly sprung into
importance as a new centre of manufactures, provided with perfected
machinery and applying the best scientific methods.
We might also mention Hungary's rapid progress in the main industries, but
let us rather take Brazil as an example. Economists sentenced Brazil to
cultivate cotton forever, to export it in its raw state, and to receive cotton-
cloth from Europe in exchange. In fact, forty years ago Brazil had only nine
wretched little cotton factories with 385 spindles. To-day there are 160
cotton-mills, possessing 1,500,000 spindles and 50,000 looms, which throw
500 million yards of textiles on the market annually.
Even Mexico is now very successful in manufacturing cotton-cloth, instead
of importing it from Europe. As to the United States they have quite freed
themselves from European tutelage, and have triumphantly developed their
manufacturing powers to an enormous extent.

But it was India which gave the most striking proof against the
specialization of national industry.
We all know the theory: the great European nations need colonies, for
colonies send raw material—cotton fibre, unwashed wool, spices, etc., to
the mother-land. And the mother-land, under pretense of sending them
manufactured wares, gets rid of her damaged stuffs, her machine scrap-iron
and everything which she no longer has any use for. It costs her little or
nothing, and none the less the articles are sold at exorbitant prices.
Such was the theory—such was the practice for a long time. In London and
Manchester fortunes were made, while India was being ruined. In the India
Museum in London unheard of riches, collected in Calcutta and Bombay by
English merchants, are to be seen.
But other English merchants and capitalists conceived the very simple idea
that it would be more expedient to exploit the natives of India by making
cotton-cloth in India itself, than to import from twenty to twenty-four
million pounds' worth of goods annually.
At first a series of experiments ended in failure. Indian weavers—artists and
experts in their own craft—could not inure themselves to factory life; the
machinery sent from Liverpool was bad; the climate had to be taken into
account; and merchants had to adapt themselves to new conditions, now
fully mastered, before British India could become the menacing rival of the
Mother-land she is to-day.
She now possesses more than 200 cotton-mills which employ about
230,000 workmen, and contain more than 6,000,000 spindles and 80,000
looms, and 40 jute-mills, with 400,000 spindles. She exports annually to
China, to the Dutch Indies, and to Africa, nearly eight million pounds'
worth of the same white cotton-cloth, said to be England's specialty. And
while English workmen are often unemployed and in great want, Indian
women weave cotton by machinery, for the Far East at wages of six-pence a
day. In short, the intelligent manufacturers are fully aware that the day is
not far off when they will not know what to do with the "factory hands"
who formerly wove cotton-cloth for export from England. Besides which it
is becoming more and more evident that India will no import a single ton of
iron from England. The initial difficulties in using the coal and the iron-ore

obtained in India have been overcome; and foundries, rivalling those in
England, have been built on the shores of the Indian Ocean.
Colonies competing with the mother-land in its production of manufactured
goods, such is the factor which will regulate economy in the twentieth
century.
And why should India not manufacture? What should be the hindrance?
Capital?—But capital goes wherever there are men, poor enough to be
exploited. Knowledge? But knowledge recognizes no national barriers.
Technical skill of the worker?—No. Are, then, Hindoo workmen inferior to
the hundreds of thousands of boys and girls, not eighteen years old, at
present working in the English textile factories?

II

After having glanced at national industries it would be very interesting to
turn to some special branches.
Let us take silk, for example, an eminently French produce in the first half
of the nineteenth century. We all know how Lyons became the emporium of
the silk trade. At first raw silk was gathered in southern France, till little by
little they ordered it from Italy, from Spain, from Austria, from the
Caucasus, and from Japan, for the manufacture of their silk fabrics. In 1875,
out of five million kilos of raw silk converted into stuffs in the vicinity of
Lyons, there were only four hundred thousand kilos of French silk. But if
Lyons manufactured imported silk, why should not Switzerland, Germany,
Russia, do as much? Consequently, silk-weaving began to develop in the
villages round Zurich. Bâle became a great centre of the silk trade. The
Caucasian Administration engaged women from Marseilles and workmen
from Lyons to teach Georgians the perfected rearing of silk-worms, and the
art of converting silk into fabrics to the Caucasian peasants. Austria
followed. Then Germany, with the help of Lyons workmen, built great silk
factories. The United States did likewise at Paterson.
And to-day the silk trade is no longer a French monopoly. Silks are made in
Germany, in Austria, in the United States, and in England, and it is now
reckoned that one-third of the silk stuffs used in France are imported. In

winter, Caucasian peasants weave silk handkerchiefs at a wage that would
mean starvation to the silk-weavers of Lyons. Italy and Germany send silks
to France; and Lyons, which in 1870-4 exported 460 million francs' worth
of silk fabrics, exports now only one-half of that amount. In fact, the time is
not far off when Lyons will only send higher class goods and a few
novelties as patterns to Germany, Russia and Japan.
And so it is in all industries. Belgium has no longer the cloth monopoly;
cloth is made in Germany, in Russia, in Austria, in the United States.
Switzerland and the French Jura have no longer a clockwork monopoly;
watches are made everywhere. Scotland no longer refines sugar for Russia:
refined Russian sugar is imported into England. Italy, although neither
possessing coal nor iron, makes her own iron-clads and engines for her
steamers. Chemical industry is no longer an English monopoly; sulphuric
acid and soda are made even in the Urals. Steam-engines, made at
Winterthur, have acquired everywhere a wide reputation, and at the present
moment, Switzerland, which has neither coal nor iron, and no sea-ports to
import them—nothing but excellent technical schools—makes machinery
better and cheaper than England. So ends the theory of Exchange.
The tendency of trade, as for all else, is toward decentralization.
Every nation finds it advantageous to combine agriculture with the greatest
possible variety of factories. The specialization, of which economists spoke
so highly, certainly has enriched a number of capitalists, but is now no
longer of any use. On the contrary, it is to the advantage of every region,
every nation, to grow their own wheat, their own vegetables, and to
manufacture at home most of the produce they consume. This diversity is
the surest pledge of the complete development of production by mutual co-
operation, and the moving cause of progress, while specialization is now a
hindrance to progress.
Agriculture can only prosper in proximity to factories. And no sooner does
a single factory appear than an infinite variety of other factories must spring
up around, so that, mutually supporting and stimulating one another by their
inventions, they increase their productivity.

III

It is foolish indeed to export wheat and to import flour, to export wool and
import cloth, to export iron and import machinery; not only because
transportation is a waste of time and money, but, above all, because a
country with no developed industry inevitably remains behind the times in
agriculture; because a country with no large factories to bring steel to a
finished condition is doomed to be backward in all other industries; and
lastly, because the industrial and technical capacities of the nation remain
undeveloped, if they are not exercised in a variety of industries.
Nowadays everything holds together in the world of production. Cultivation
of the soil is no longer possible without machinery, without great irrigation
works, without railways, without manure factories. And to adapt this
machinery, these railways, these irrigation engines, etc., to local conditions,
a certain spirit of invention, and a certain amount of technical skill must be
developed, while they necessarily lie dormant so long as spades and
ploughshares are the only implements of cultivation.
If fields are to be properly cultivated, if they are to yield the abundant
harvests that man has the right to expect, it is essential that workshops,
foundries, and factories develop within the reach of the fields. A variety of
occupations, and a variety of skill arising therefrom, both working together
for a common aim—these are the true forces of progress.
And now let us imagine the inhabitants of a city or a territory—whether
vast or small—stepping for the first time on to the path of the Social
Revolution.
We are sometimes told that "nothing will have changed": that the mines, the
factories, etc., will be expropriated, and proclaimed national or communal
property, that every man will go back to his usual work, and that the
Revolution will then be accomplished.
But this is a mere dream: the Social Revolution cannot take place so simply.
We have already mentioned that should the Revolution break out to-morrow
in Paris, Lyons, or any other city—should the workers lay hands on
factories, houses, and banks, present production would be completely
revolutionized by this simple fact.

International commerce will come to a standstill; so also will the
importation of foreign bread-stuffs; the circulation of commodities and of
provisions will be paralyzed. And then, the city or territory in revolt will be
compelled to provide for itself, and to reorganize its production, so as to
satisfy its own needs. If it fails to do so, it is death. If it succeeds, it will
revolutionize the economic life of the country.
The quantity of imported provisions having decreased, consumption having
increased, one million Parisians working for exportation purposes having
been thrown out of work, a great number of things imported to-day from
distant or neighbouring countries not reaching their destination, fancy-trade
being temporarily at a standstill,—What will the inhabitants have to eat six
months after the Revolution?
We think that when the stores containing food-stuffs are empty, the masses
will seek to obtain their food from the land. They will see the necessity of
cultivating the soil, of combining agricultural production with industrial
production in the suburbs of Paris itself and its environs. They will have to
abandon the merely ornamental trades and consider their most urgent need
—bread.
A great number of the inhabitants of the cities will have to become
agriculturists. Not in the same manner as the present peasants who wear
themselves out, ploughing for a wage that barely provides them with
sufficient food for the year, but by following the principles of the intensive
agriculture, of the market gardeners, applied on a large scale by means of
the best machinery that man has invented or can invent. They will till the
land—not, however, like the country beast of burden: a Paris jeweller would
object to that. They will organize cultivation on better principles; and not in
the future, but at once, during the revolutionary struggles, from fear of
being worsted by the enemy.
Agriculture will have to be carried out on intelligent lines, by men and
women availing themselves of the experience of the present time,
organizing themselves in joyous gangs for pleasant work, like those who, a
hundred years ago, worked in the Champ de Mars for the Feast of the
Federation—a work of delight, when not carried to excess, when

scientifically organized, when man invents and improves his tools and is
conscious of being a useful member of the community.
Of course, they will not only cultivate wheat and oats—they will also
produce those things which they formerly used to order from foreign parts.
And let us not forget that for the inhabitants of a revolted territory, "foreign
parts" may include all districts that have not joined in the revolutionary
movement. During the Revolutions of 1793 and 1871 Paris was made to
feel that "foreign parts" meant even the country district at her very gates.
The speculator in grains at Troyes starved in 1793 and 1794 the sansculottes
of Paris as badly, and even worse, than the German armies brought on to
French soil by the Versailles conspirators. The revolted city will be
compelled to do without these "foreigners," and why not? France invented
beet-root sugar when sugar-cane ran short during the continental blockade.
Parisians discovered saltpetre in their cellars when they no longer received
any from abroad. Shall we be inferior to our grandfathers, who hardly
lisped the first words of science?
A revolution is more than a mere change of the prevailing political system.
It implies the awakening of human intelligence, the increasing of the
inventive spirit tenfold, a hundredfold; it is the dawn of a new science—the
science of men like Laplace, Lamarck, Lavoisier. It is a revolution in the
minds of men, as deep, and deeper still, than in their institutions.
And there are still economists, who tell us that once the "revolution is
made," everyone will return to his workshop, as if passing through a
revolution were going home after a walk in the Epping forest!
To begin with, the sole fact of having laid hands on middle-class property
will imply the necessity of completely reorganizing the whole of economic
life in the workshops, the dockyards, the factories.
And the revolution surely will not fail to act in this direction. Should Paris,
during the social revolution, be cut off from the world for a year or two by
the supporters of middle-class rule, its millions of intellects, not yet
depressed by factory life—that City of little trades which stimulate the spirit
of invention—will show the world what man's brain can accomplish
without asking for help from without, but the motor force of the sun that

gives light, the power of the wind that sweeps away impurities, and the
silent life-forces at work in the earth we tread on.
We shall see then what a variety of trades, mutually cooperating on a spot
of the globe and animated by a revolution, can do to feed, clothe, house,
and supply with all manner of luxuries millions of intelligent men.
We need write no fiction to prove this. What we are sure of, what has
already been experimented upon, and recognized as practical, would suffice
to carry it into effect, if the attempt were fertilized, vivified by the daring
inspiration of the Revolution and the spontaneous impulse of the masses.

FOOTNOTE:

[10] A fuller development of these ideas will be found in my book, Fields,
Factories, and Workshops, published by Messrs. Thomas Nelson and Sons
in their popular series in 1912.

CHAPTER XVII
AGRICULTURE

I

Political Economy has often been reproached with drawing all its
deductions from the decidedly false principle, that the only incentive
capable of forcing a man to augment his power of production is personal
interest in its narrowest sense.
The reproach is perfectly true; so true that epochs of great industrial
discoveries and true progress in industry are precisely those in which the
happiness of all was inspiring men, and in which personal enrichment was
least thought of. The great investigators in science and the great inventors
aimed, above all, at giving greater freedom of mankind. And if Watt,
Stephenson, Jacquard, etc., could have only foreseen what a state of misery
their sleepless nights would bring to the workers, they certainly would have
burned their designs and broken their models.
Another principle that pervades Political Economy is just as false. It is the
tacit admission, common to all economists, that if there is often over-
production in certain branches, a society will nevertheless never have
sufficient products to satisfy the wants of all, and that consequently the day
will never come when nobody will be forced to sell his labour in exchange
for wages. This tacit admission is found at the basis of all theories and all
the so-called "laws" taught by economists.
And yet it is certain that the day when any civilized association of
individuals would ask itself, what are the needs of all, and the means of
satisfying them, it would see that, in industry, as in agriculture, it already
possesses sufficient to provide abundantly for all needs, on condition that it
knows how to apply these means to satisfy real needs.

That this is true as regards industry no one can contest. Indeed, it suffices to
study the processes already in use to extract coals and ore, to obtain steel
and work it, to manufacture on a great scale what is used for clothing, etc.,
in order to perceive that we could already increase our production fourfold
or more, and yet use for that less work than we are using now.
We go further. We assert that agriculture is in the same position: those who
cultivate the soil, like the manufacturers, already could increase their
production, not only fourfold but tenfold, and they can put it into practice as
soon as they feel the need of it,—as soon as a socialist organization of work
will be established instead of the present capitalistic one.
Each time agriculture is spoken of, men imagine a peasant bending over the
plough, throwing badly assorted corn haphazard into the ground and
waiting anxiously for what the good or bad season will bring forth; they
think of a family working from morn to night and reaping as reward a rude
bed, dry bread, and coarse beverage. In a word, they picture "the savages"
of La Bruyère.
And for these men, ground down to such a misery, the utmost relief that
society proposes, is to reduce their taxes or their rent. But even most social
reformers do not care to imagine a cultivator standing erect, taking leisure,
and producing by a few hours' work per day sufficient food to nourish, not
only his own family, but a hundred men more at the least. In their most
glowing dreams of the future Socialists do not go beyond American
extensive culture, which, after all, is but the infancy of agricultural art.
But the thinking agriculturist has broader ideas to-day—his conceptions are
on a far grander scale. He only asks for a fraction of an acre in order to
produce sufficient vegetables for a family; and to feed twenty-five horned
beasts he needs no more space than he formerly required to feed one; his
aim is to make his own soil, to defy seasons and climate, to warm both air
and earth around the young plant; to produce, in a word, on one acre what
he used to gather from fifty acres, and that without any excessive fatigue—
by greatly reducing, on the contrary, the total of former labour. He knows
that we will be able to feed everybody by giving to the culture of the fields
no more time than what each can give with pleasure and joy.
This is the present tendency of agriculture.

While scientific men, led by Liebig, the creator of the chemical theory of
agriculture, often got on the wrong tack in their love of mere theories,
unlettered agriculturists opened up new roads to prosperity. Market-
gardeners of Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Scotch and English gardeners, Flemish
and Lombardian farmers, peasants of Jersey, Guernsey, and farmers on the
Scilly Isles have opened up such large horizons that the mind hesitates to
grasp them. While up till lately a family of peasants needed at least
seventeen to twenty acres to live on the produce of the soil—and we know
how peasants live—we can now no longer say what is the minimum area on
which all that is necessary to a family can be grown, even including articles
of luxury, if the soil is worked by means of intensive culture.
Twenty years ago it could already be asserted that a population of thirty
million individuals could live very well, without importing anything, on
what could be grown in Great Britain. But now, when we see the progress
recently made in France, in Germany, in England, and when we
contemplate the new horizons which open before us, we can say that in
cultivating the earth as it is already cultivated in many places, even on poor
soils, fifty or sixty million inhabitants to the territory of Great Britain would
still be a very feeble proportion to what man could extract from the soil.
In any case (as we are about to demonstrate) we may consider it as
absolutely proved that if to-morrow Paris and the two departments of Seine
and of Seine-et-Oise organized themselves as an Anarchist commune, in
which all worked with their hands, and if the entire universe refused to send
them a single bushel of wheat, a single head of cattle, a single basket of
fruit, and left them only the territory of the two departments, they could not
only produce all the corn, meat, and vegetables necessary for themselves,
but also vegetables and fruit which are now articles of luxury, in sufficient
quantities for all.
And, in addition, we affirm that the sum total of this labour would be far
less than that expended at present to feed these people with corn harvested
in Auvergne and Russia, with vegetables produced a little everywhere by
extensive agriculture, and with fruit grown in the South.
It is self-evident that we in nowise desire all exchange to be suppressed, nor
that each region should strive to produce that which will only grow in its

climate by a more or less artificial culture. But we care to draw attention to
the fact that the theory of exchange, such as is understood to-day, is
strangely exaggerated—that exchange is often useless and even harmful.
We assert, moreover, that people have never had a right conception of the
immense labour of Southern wine growers, nor that of Russian and
Hungarian corn growers, whose excessive labour could also be very much
reduced if they adopted intensive culture, instead of their present system of
extensive agriculture.

II

It would be impossible to quote here the mass of facts on which we base our
assertions. We are therefore obliged to refer our readers who want further
information to another book, "Fields, Factories, and Workshops."[11]
Above all we earnestly invite those who are interested in the question to
read several excellent works published in France and elsewhere, and of
which we give a list at the close of this book[12]. As to the inhabitants of
large towns, who have as yet no real notion of what agriculture can be, we
advise them to explore the surrounding market-gardens. They need but
observe and question the market-gardeners, and a new world will be open to
them. They will then be able to see what European agriculture may be in the
twentieth century; and they will understand with what force the social
revolution will be armed when we know the secret of taking everything we
need from the soil.
A few facts will suffice to show that our assertions are in no way
exaggerated. We only wish them to be preceded by a few general remarks.
We know in what a wretched condition European agriculture is. If the
cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner, he is robbed by the
State. If the State taxes him moderately, the money-lender enslaves him by
means of promissory notes, and soon turns him into the simple tenant of
soil belonging in reality to a financial company. The landlord, the State, and
the banker thus plunders the cultivator by means of rent, taxes, and interest.
The sum varies in each country, but it never falls below the quarter, very
often the half of the raw produce. In France and in Italy agriculturists paid
the State quite recently as much as 44 per cent. of the gross produce.

Moreover, the share of the owner and of State always goes on increasing.
As soon as the cultivator has obtained more plentiful crops by prodigies of
labour, invention, or initiative, the tribute he will owe to the landowner, the
State, and the banker will augment in proportion. If he doubles the number
of bushels reaped per acre, rent will be doubled, and taxes too, and the State
will take care to raise them still more if the prices go up. And so on. In
short, everywhere the cultivator of the soil works twelve to sixteen hours a
day; these three vultures take from him everything he might lay by; they rob
him everywhere of what would enable him to improve his culture. This is
why agriculture progresses so slowly.
The cultivator can only occasionally make some progress, in some
exceptional regions, under quite exceptional circumstances, following upon
a quarrel between the three vampires. And yet we have said nothing about
the tribute every cultivator pays to the manufacturer. Every machine, every
spade, every barrel of chemical manure, is sold to him at three or four times
its real cost. Nor let us forget the middleman, who levies the lion's share of
the earth's produce.
This is why, during all this century of invention and progress, agriculture
has only improved from time to time on very limited areas.
Happily there have always been small oases, neglected for some time by the
vulture; and here we learn what intensive agriculture can produce for
mankind. Let us mention a few examples.
In the American prairies (which, however, only yield meagre spring wheat
crops, from 7 to 15 bushels acre, and even these are often marred by
periodical droughts), 500 men, working only during eight months, produce
the annual food of 50,000 people. With all the improvements of the last
three years, one man's yearly labour (300 days) yields, delivered in Chicago
as flour, the yearly food of 250 men. Here the result is obtained by a great
economy in manual labour: on those vast plains, ploughing, harvesting,
thrashing, are organized in almost military fashion. There is no useless
running to and fro, no loss of time—all is done with parade-like precision.
This is agriculture on a large scale—extensive agriculture, which takes the
soil from nature without seeking to improve it. When the earth has yielded
all it can, they leave it; they seek elsewhere for a virgin soil, to be exhausted

in its turn. But here is also "intensive" agriculture, which is already worked,
and will be more and more so, by machinery. Its object is to cultivate a
limited space well, to manure, to improve, to concentrate work, and to
obtain the largest crop possible. This kind of culture spreads every year, and
whereas agriculturists in the south of France and on the fertile plains of
western America are content with an average crop of 11 to 15 bushels per
acre by extensive culture, they reap regularly 39, even 55, and sometimes
60 bushels per acre in the north of France. The annual consumption of a
man is thus obtained from less than a quarter of an acre.
And the more intense the culture is, the less work is expended to obtain a
bushel of wheat. Machinery replaces man at the preliminary work and for
the improvements needed by the land—such as draining, clearing of stones
—which will double the crops in future, once and for ever. Sometimes
nothing but keeping the soil free of weeds, without manuring, allows an
average soil to yield excellent crops from year to year. It has been done for
forty years in succession at Rothamstead, in Hertfordshire.
However, let us not write an agricultural romance, but be satisfied with a
crop of 44 bushels per acre. That needs no exceptional soil, but merely a
rational culture; and let us see what it means.
The 3,600,000 individuals who inhabit the two departments of Seine and
Seine-et-Oise consume yearly for their food a little less than 22 million
bushels of cereals, chiefly wheat; and in our hypothesis they would have to
cultivate, in order to obtain this crop, 494,200 acres out of the 1,507,300
acres which they possess. It is evident they would not cultivate them with
spades. That would need too much time—96 work-days of 5 hours per acre.
It would be preferable to improve the soil once for all—to drain what
needed draining, to level what needed levelling, to clear the soil of stones,
were it even necessary to spend 5 million days of 5 hours in this preparatory
work—an average of 10 work-days to each acre.
Then they would plough with the steam-digger, which would take one and
three-fifths of a day per acre, and they would give another one and three-
fifths of a day for working with the double plough. Seeds would be sorted
by steam instead of taken haphazard, and they would be carefully sown in
rows instead of being thrown to the four winds. Now all this work would

not take 10 days of 5 hours per acre if the work were done under good
conditions. But if 10 million work-days are given to good culture during 3
or 4 years, the result will be that later on crops of 44 to 55 bushels per acre
will be obtained by only working half the time.
Fifteen million work-days will thus have been spent to give bread to a
population of 3,600,000 inhabitants. And the work would be such that
everyone could do it without having muscles of steel, or without having
even worked the ground before. The initiative and the general distribution
of work would come from those who know the soil. As to the work itself,
there is no townsman of either sex so enfeebled as to be incapable of
looking after machines and of contributing his share to agrarian work after a
few hours' apprenticeship.
Well, when we consider that in the present chaos there are, in a city like
Paris, without counting the unemployed of the upper classes, there are
always about 100,000 workmen out of work in their several trades, we see
that the power lost in our present organization would alone suffice to give,
with a rational culture, all the bread that is necessary for the three or four
million inhabitants of the two departments.
We repeat, this is no fancy dream, and we have not yet spoken of the truly
intensive agriculture. We have not depended upon the wheat (obtained in
three years by Mr. Hallett) of which one grain, replanted, produced 5,000 or
6,000, and occasionally 10,000 grains, which would give the wheat
necessary for a family of five individuals on an area of 120 square yards.
On the contrary, we have only mentioned what is being already achieved by
numerous farmers in France, England, Belgium, etc., and what might be
done to-morrow with the experience and knowledge acquired already by
practice on a large scale.
But without a revolution, neither to-morrow, nor after to-morrow will see it
done, because it is not to the interest of landowners and capitalists; and
because peasants who would find their profit in it have neither the
knowledge nor the money, nor the time to obtain what is necessary to go
ahead.
The society of to-day has not yet reached this stage. But let Parisians
proclaim an Anarchist Commune, and they will of necessity come to it,

because they will not be foolish enough to continue making luxurious toys
(which Vienna, Warsaw, and Berlin make as well already), and to run the
risk of being left without bread.
Moreover, agricultural work, by the help of machinery, would soon become
the most attractive and the most joyful of all occupations.
"We have had enough jewelery and enough dolls' clothes," they would say;
"it is high time for the workers to recruit their strength in agriculture, to go
in search of vigour, of impressions of nature, of the joy of life, that they
have forgotten in the dark factories of the suburbs."
In the Middle Ages it was Alpine pasture lands, rather than guns, which
allowed the Swiss to shake off lords and kings. Modern agriculture will
allow a city in revolt to free itself from the combined bourgeois forces.

III

We have seen how the three and one-half million inhabitants of the two
departments round Paris could find ample bread by cultivating only a third
of their territory. Let us now pass on to cattle.
Englishmen, who eat much meat, consume on an average a little less than
220 pounds a year per adult. Supposing all meats consumed were oxen, that
makes a little less than the third of an ox. An ox a year for five individuals
(including children) is already a sufficient ration. For three and one-half
million inhabitants this would make an annual consumption of 700,000
head of cattle.
To-day, with the pasture system, we need at least five million acres to
nourish 660,000 head of cattle. This makes nine acres per each head of
horned cattle. Nevertheless, with prairies moderately watered by spring
water (as recently done on thousands of acres in the southwest of France),
one and one-fourth million acres already suffice. But if intensive culture is
practiced, and beet-root is grown for fodder, you only need a quarter of that
area, that is to say, about 310,000 acres. And if we have recourse to maize
and practice ensilage (the compression of fodder while green) like Arabs,
we obtain fodder on an area of 217,500 acres.

In the environs of Milan, where sewer water is used to irrigate the fields,
fodder for two to three horned cattle per each acre is obtained on an area of
22,000 acres; and on a few favoured fields, up to 177 tons of hay to the 10
acres have been cropped, the yearly provender of 36 milch cows. Nearly
nine acres per head of cattle are needed under the pasture system, and only
two and one-half acres for nine oxen or cows under the new system. These
are the opposite extremes in modern agriculture.
In Guernsey, on a total of 9,884 acres utilized, nearly half (4,695 acres) are
covered with cereals and kitchen-gardens; only 5,189 acres remain as
meadows. On these 5,189 acres, 1,480 horses, 7,260 head of cattle, 900
sheep, and 4,200 pigs are fed, which makes more than three head of cattle
per two acres, without reckoning the sheep or the pigs. It is needless to add
that the fertility of the soil is made by seaweed and chemical manures.
Returning to our three and one-half million inhabitants belonging to Paris
and its environs, we see that the land necessary for the rearing of cattle
comes down from five million acres to 197,000. Well, then, let us not stop
at the lowest figures, let us take those of ordinary intensive culture; let us
liberally add to the land necessary for smaller cattle which must replace
some of the horned beasts and allow 395,000 acres for the rearing of cattle
—494,000 if you like, on the 1,013,000 acres remaining after bread has
been provided for the people.
Let us be generous and give five million work-days to put this land into a
productive state.
After having therefore employed in the course of a year twenty million
work-days, half of which are for permanent improvements, we shall have
bread and meat assured to us, without including all the extra meat
obtainable in the shape of fowls, pigs, rabbits, etc.; without taking into
consideration that a population provided with excellent vegetables and fruit
consumes less meat than Englishmen, who supplement their poor supply of
vegetables by animal food. Now, how much do twenty million work-days of
five hours make per inhabitant? Very little indeed. A population of three and
one-half millions must have at least 1,200,000 adult men, and as many
women capable of work. Well, then, to give bread and meat to all, it would
need only seventeen half-days of work a year per man. Add three million

work-days, or double that number if you like, in order to obtain milk. That
will make twenty-five work-days of five hours in all—nothing more than a
little pleasureable country exercise—to obtain the three principal products:
bread, meat, and milk. The three products which, after housing, cause daily
anxiety to nine-tenths of mankind.
And yet—let us not tire of repeating—these are not fancy dreams. We have
only told what is, what been, obtained by experience on a large scale.
Agriculture could be reorganized in this way to-morrow if property laws
and general ignorance did not offer opposition.
The day Paris has understood that to know what you eat and how it is
produced, is a question of public interest; the day when everybody will have
understood that this question is infinitely more important than all the
parliamentary debates of the present times—on that day the Revolution will
be an accomplished fact. Paris will take possession of the two departments
and cultivate them. And then the Parisian worker, after having laboured a
third of his existence in order to buy bad and insufficient food, will produce
it himself, under his walls, within the enclosure of his forts (if they still
exist), and in a few hours of healthy and attractive work.
And now we pass on to fruit and vegetables. Let us go outside Paris and
visit the establishment of a market-gardener who accomplishes wonders
(ignored by learned economists) at a few miles from the academies.
Let us visit, suppose, M. Ponce, the author of a work on market-gardening,
who makes no secret of what the earth yields him, and who has published it
all along.
M. Ponce, and especially his workmen, work like niggers. It takes eight
men to cultivate a plot a little less than three acres (2.7). They work twelve
and even fifteen hours a day, that is to say, three times more than is needed.
Twenty-four of them would not be too many. To which M. Ponce will
probably answer that as he pays the terrible sum of £100 rent a year for his
2.7 acres of land, and £100 for manure bought in the barracks, he is obliged
to exploit. He would no doubt answer, "Being exploited, I exploit in my
turn." His installation has also cost him £1,200, of which certainly more
than half went as tribute to the idle barons of industry. In reality, this
establishment represents at most 3,000 work-days, probably much less.

But let us examine his crops: nearly ten tons of carrots, nearly ten tons of
onions, radishes, and small vegetables, 6,000 heads of cabbage, 3,000 heads
of cauliflower, 5,000 baskets of tomatoes, 5,000 dozen of choice fruit,
154,000 salads; in short, a total of 123 tons of vegetables and fruit to 2.7
acres—120 yards long by 109 yards broad, which makes more than forty-
four tons of vegetables to the acre.
But a man does not eat more than 660 pounds of vegetables and fruit a year,
and two and one-half acres of a market-garden yield enough vegetables and
fruit to richly supply the table of 350 adults during the year. Thus twenty-
four persons employed a whole year in cultivating 2.7 acres of land, and
only five working hours a day, would produce sufficient vegetables and
fruit for 350 adults, which is equivalent at least to 500 individuals.
To put it another way: in cultivating like M. Ponce—and his results have
already been surpassed—350 adults should each give a little more than 100
hours a year (103) to produce vegetables and fruit necessary for 500 people.
Let us mention that such a production is not the exception. It takes place,
under the walls of Paris, on an area of 2,220 acres, by 5,000 market-
gardeners. Only these market-gardeners are reduced nowadays to a state of
beasts of burden, in order to pay an average rent of £32 per acre.
But do not these facts, which can be verified by every one, prove that
17,300 acres (of the 519,000 remaining to us) would suffice to give all
necessary vegetables, as well as a liberal amount of fruit to the three and
one-half million inhabitants of our two departments?
As to the quantity of work necessary to produce these fruits and vegetables,
it would amount to fifty million work-days of five hours (50 days per adult
male), if we measure by the market-gardeners' standard of work. But we
could reduce this quantity if we had recourse to the process in vogue in
Jersey and Guernsey. We must also remember that the Paris market-
gardener is forced to work so hard because he mostly produces early season
fruits, the high prices of which have to pay for fabulous rents, and that this
system of culture entails more work than is necessary for growing the
ordinary staple-food vegetables and fruit. Besides, the market-gardeners of
Paris, not having the means to make a great outlay on their gardens, and
being obliged to pay heavily for glass, wood, iron, and coal, obtain their

artificial heat out of manure, while it can be had at much less cost in
hothouses.

IV

The market-gardeners, we say, are forced to become machines and to
renounce all joys of life in order to obtain their marvellous crops. But these
hard grinders have rendered a great service to humanity in teaching us that
the soil can be "made." They make it with old hot-beds of manure, which
have already served to give the necessary warmth to young plants and to
early fruit; and they make it in such great quantity that they are compelled
to sell it in part, otherwise it would raise the level of their gardens by one
inch every year. They do it so well (so Barral teaches us, in his "Dictionary
of Agriculture," in an article on market-gardeners) that in recent contracts,
the market-gardener stipulates that he will carry away his soil with him
when he leaves the bit of ground he is cultivating. Loam carried away on
carts, with furniture and glass frames—that is the answer of practical
cultivators to the learned treatises of a Ricardo, who represented rent as a
means of equalizing the natural advantages of the soil. "The soil is worth
what the man is worth," that is the gardeners' motto.
And yet the market-gardeners of Paris and Rouen labour three times as hard
to obtain the same results as their fellow-workers in Guernsey or in
England. Applying industry to agriculture, these last make their climate in
addition to their soil, by means of the greenhouse.
Fifty years ago the greenhouse was the luxury of the rich. It was kept to
grow exotic plants for pleasure. But nowadays its use begins to be
generalized. A tremendous industry has grown up lately in Guernsey and
Jersey, where hundreds of acres are already covered with glass—to say
nothing of the countless small greenhouses kept in every little farm garden.
Acres and acres of greenhouses have lately been built also at Worthing (103
acres in 1912), in the suburbs of London, and in several other parts of
England and Scotland.
They are built of all qualities, beginning with those which have granite
walls, down to those which represent mere shelters made in planks and
glass frames, which cost, even now, with all the tribute paid to capitalists

and middlemen, less than 3s. 6d. per square yard under glass. Most of them
are heated for at least three of four months every year; but even the cool
greenhouses, which are not heated at all, give excellent results—of course,
not for growing grapes and tropical plants, but for potatoes, carrots, peas,
tomatoes, and so on.
In this way man emancipates himself from climate, and at the same time he
avoids also the heavy work with the hot-beds, and he saves both in buying
much less manure and in work. Three men to the acre, each of them
working less than sixty hours a week, produce on very small spaces what
formerly required acres and acres of land.
The result of all these recent conquests of culture is, that if one-half only of
the adults of a city gave each about fifty half-days for the culture of the
finest fruit and vegetables out of season, they would have all the year round
an unlimited supply of that sort of fruit and vegetables for the whole
population.
But there is a still more important fact to notice. The greenhouse has
nowadays a tendency to become a mere kitchen garden under glass. And
when it is used to such a purpose, the simplest plank-and-glass unheated
shelters already give fabulous crops—such as, for instance, 500 bushels of
potatoes per acre as a first crop, ready by the end of April; after which a
second and a third crop are obtained in the extremely high temperature
which prevails in the summer under glass.
I gave in my "Fields, Factories, and Workshops," most striking facts in this
direction. Sufficient to say here, that at Jersey, thirty-four men, with one
trained gardener only, cultivate thirteen acres under glass, from which they
obtain 143 tons of fruit and early vegetables, using for this extraordinary
culture less than 1,000 tons of coal.
And this is done now in Guernsey and Jersey on a very large scale, quite a
number of steamers constantly plying between Guernsey and London, only
to export the crops of the greenhouses.
Nowadays, in order to obtain that same crop of 500 bushels of potatoes, we
must plough every year a surface of four acres, plant it, cultivate it, weed, it,
and so on; whereas with the glass, even if we shall have to give perhaps, to

start with, half a day's work per square yard in order to build the greenhouse
—we shall save afterwards at least one-half, and probably three-quarters of
the yearly labour required formerly.
These are facts, results which every one can verify himself. And these facts
are already a hint as to what man could obtain from the earth if he treated it
with intelligence.

V

In all the above we have reasoned upon what already withstood the test of
experience. Intensive culture of the fields, irrigated meadows, the hot-
house, and finally the kitchen garden under glass are realities. Moreover,
the tendency is to extend and to generalize these methods of culture,
because they allow of obtaining more produce with less work and with
more certainty.
In fact, after having studied the most simple glass shelters of Guernsey, we
affirm that, taking all in all, far less work is expended for obtaining potatoes
under glass in April, than in growing them in the open air, which requires
digging a space four times as large, watering it, weeding it, etc. Work is
likewise economized in employing a perfected tool or machine, even when
an initial expense had to be incurred to buy the tool.
Complete figures concerning the culture of common vegetables under glass
are still wanting. This culture is of recent origin, and is only carried out on
small areas. But we have already figures concerning the fifty years old
culture of early season grapes, and these figures are conclusive.
In the north of England, on the Scotch frontier, where coal only costs 3s. a
ton at the pit's mouth, they have long since taken to growing hot-house
grapes. Thirty years ago these grapes, ripe in January, were sold by the
grower at 20s. per pound and resold at 40s. per pound for Napoleon III.'s
table. To-day the same grower sells them at only 2s. 6d. per pound. He tells
us so himself in a horticultural journal. The fall in the prices is caused by
the tons and tons of grapes arriving in January to London and Paris.
Thanks to the cheapness of coal and an intelligent culture, grapes from the
north travel now southwards, in a contrary direction to ordinary fruit. They

cost so little that in May, English and Jersey grapes are sold at 1s. 8d. per
pound by the gardeners, and yet this price, like that of 40s. thirty years ago,
is only kept up by slack production.
In March, Belgium grapes are sold at from 6d. to 8d., while in October,
grapes cultivated in immense quantities—under glass, and with a little
artificial heating in the environs of London—are sold at the same price as
grapes bought by the pound in the vineyards of Switzerland and the Rhine,
that is to say, for a few halfpence. Yet they still cost two-thirds too much, by
reason of the excessive rent of the soil and the cost of installation and
heating, on which the gardener pays a formidable tribute to the
manufacturer and the middleman. This being understood, we may say that it
costs "next to nothing" to have delicious grapes under the latitude of, and in
our misty London in autumn. In one of the suburbs, for instance, a wretched
glass and plaster shelter, nine feet ten inches long by six and one-half feet
wide, resting against our cottage, gave us about fifty pounds of grapes of an
exquisite flavour in October, for nine consecutive years. The crop came
from a Hamburg vine-stalk, six year old. And the shelter was so bad that the
rain came through. At night the temperature was always that of outside. It
was evidently not heated, for it would have been as useless as heating the
street! And the care which was given was: pruning the vine, half an hour
every year; and bringing a wheel-barrowful of manure, which was thrown
over the stalk of the vine, planted in red clay outside the shelter.
On the other hand, if we estimate the amount of care given to the vine on
the borders of the Rhine of Lake Leman, the terraces constructed stone
upon stone on the slopes of the hills, the transport of manure and also of
earth to a height of two or three hundred feet, we come to the conclusion
that on the whole the expenditure of work necessary to cultivate vines is
more considerable in Switzerland or on the banks of the Rhine than it is
under glass in London suburbs.
This may seem paradoxical, because it is generally believed that vines grow
of themselves in the south of Europe, and that the vine-grower's work costs
nothing. But gardeners and horticulturists, far from contradicting us,
confirm our assertions. "The most advantageous culture in England is vine
culture," wrote a practical gardener, editor of the "English Journal of

Horticulture" in the Nineteenth Century. Prices speak eloquently for
themselves, as we know.
Translating these facts into communist language, we may assert that the
man or woman who takes twenty hours a year from his leisure time to give
some little care—very pleasant in the main—to two or three vine-stalks
sheltered by simple glass under any European climate, will gather as many
grapes as their family and friends can eat. And that applies not only to
vines, but to all fruit trees.
The Commune that will put the processes of intensive culture into practice
on a large scale will have all possible vegetables, indigenous or exotic, and
all desirable fruits, without employing more than about ten hours a year per
inhabitant.
In fact, nothing would be easier than to verify the above statements by
direct experiment. Suppose 100 acres of a light loam (such as we have at
Worthing) are transformed into a number of market gardens, each one with
its glass houses for the rearing of the seedlings and young plants. Suppose
also that fifty more acres are covered with glass houses, and the
organization of the whole is left to practical experienced French
maraîchers, and Guernsey or Worthing greenhouse gardeners.
In basing the maintenance of these 150 acres on the Jersey average,
requiring the work of three men per acre under glass—which makes less
than 8,600 hours of work a year—it would need about 1,300,000 hours for
the 150 acres. Fifty competent gardeners could give five hours a day to this
work, and the rest would be simply done by people who, without being
gardeners by profession, would soon learn how to use a spade, and to
handle the plants. But this work would yield at least—we have seen it in a
preceding chapter—all necessaries and articles of luxury in the way of fruit
and vegetables for at least 40,000 or 50,000 people. Let us admit that
among this number there are 13,500 adults, willing to work at the kitchen
garden; then, each one would have to give 100 hours a year distributed over
the whole year. These hours of work would become hours of recreation
spent among friends and children in beautiful gardens, more beautiful
probably than those of the legendary Semiramis.

This is the balance sheet of the labour to be spent in order to be able to eat
to satiety fruit which we are deprived of to-day, and to have vegetables in
abundance, now so scrupulously rationed out by the housewife, when she
has to reckon each half-penny which must go to enrich capitalists and
landowners[13].
If only humanity had the consciousness of what it CAN, and if that
consciousness only gave it the power to WILL!
If it only knew that cowardice of the spirit is the rock on which all
revolutions have stranded until now.

VI

We can easily perceive the new horizons opening before the social
revolution.
Each time we speak of revolution, the face of the worker who has seen
children wanting food darkens and he asks—"What of bread? Will there be
sufficient, if everyone eats according to his appetite? What if the peasants,
ignorant tools of reaction, starve our towns as the black bands did in France
in 1793—what shall we do?"
Let them do their worst. The large cities will have to do without them.
At what, then, should the hundreds of thousands of workers, who are
asphyxiated to-day in small workshops and factories, be employed on the
day they regain their liberty? Will they continue to shut themselves up in
factories after the Revolution? Will they continue to make luxurious toys
for export when they see their stock or corn getting exhausted, meat
becoming scarce, and vegetables disappearing without being replaced?
Evidently not! They will leave the town and go into the fields! Aided by a
machinery which will enable the weakest of us to put a shoulder to the
wheel, they will carry revolution into previously enslaved culture as they
will have carried it into institutions and ideas.
Hundreds of acres will be covered with glass, and men, and women with
delicate fingers, will foster the growth of young plants. Hundreds of other

acres will be ploughed by steam, improved by manures, or enriched by
artificial soil obtained by the pulverization of rocks. Happy crowds of
occasional labourers will cover these acres with crops, guided in the work
and experiments partly by those who know agriculture, but especially by
the great and practical spirit of a people roused from long slumber and
illumined by that bright beacon—the happiness of all.
And in two or three months the early crops will receive the most pressing
wants, and provide food for a people who, after so many centuries of
expectation, will at least be able to appease their hunger and eat according
to their appetite.
In the meanwhile, popular genius, the genius of a nation which revolts and
knows its wants, will work at experimenting with new processes of culture
that we already catch a glimpse of, and that only need the baptism of
experience to become universal. Light will be experimented with—that
unknown agent of culture which makes barley ripen in forty-five days under
the latitude of Yakutsk; light, concentrated or artificial, will rival heat in
hastening the growth of plants. A Mouchot of the future will invent a
machine to guide the rays of the sun and make them work, so that we shall
no longer seek sun-heat stored in coal in the depths of the earth. They will
experiment the watering of the soil with cultures of micro-organisms—a
rational idea, conceived but yesterday, which will permit us to give to the
soil those little living beings, necessary to feed the rootlets, to decompose
and assimilate the component parts of the soil.
They will experiment.... But let us stop here, or we shall enter into the realm
of fancy. Let us remain in the reality of acquired facts. With the processes of
culture in use, applied on a large scale, and already victorious in the
struggle against industrial competition, we can give ourselves ease and
luxury in return for agreeable work. The near future will show what is
practical in the processes that recent scientific discoveries give us a glimpse
of. Let us limit ourselves at present to opening up the new path that consists
in the study of the needs of man, and the means of satisfying them.
The only thing that may be wanting to the Revolution is the boldness of
initiative.

With our minds already narrowed in our youth and enslaved by the past in
our mature age, we hardly dare to think. If a new idea is mentioned—before
venturing on an opinion of our own, we consult musty books a hundred
years old, to know what ancient masters thought on the subject.
It is not food that will fail, if boldness of thought and initiative are not
wanting to the revolution.
Of all the great days of the French Revolution, the most beautiful, the
greatest, was the one on which delegates who had come from all parts of
France to Paris, worked all with the spade to plane the ground of the Champ
de Mars, preparing it for the fête of the Federation.
That day France was united: animated by the new spirit, she had a vision of
the future in the working in common of the soil.
And it will again be by the working in common of the soil that the
enfranchised societies will find their unity and will obliterate the hatred and
oppression which has hitherto divided them.
Henceforth, able to conceive solidarity—that immense power which
increases man's energy and creative forces a hundredfold—the new society
will march to the conquest of the future with all the vigour of youth.
Ceasing to produce for unknown buyers, and looking in its midst for needs
and tastes to be satisfied, society will liberally assure the life and ease of
each of its members, as well as that moral satisfaction which work gives
when freely chosen and freely accomplished, and the joy of living without
encroaching on the life of others.
Inspired by a new daring—born of the feeling of solidarity—all will march
together to the conquest of the high joys of knowledge and artistic creation.
A society thus inspired will fear neither dissensions within nor enemies
without. To the coalitions of the past it will oppose a new harmony, the
initiative of each and all, the daring which springs from the awakening of a
people's genius.
Before such an irresistible force "conspiring kings" will be powerless.
Nothing will remain for them but to bow before it, and to harness

themselves to the chariot of humanity, rolling towards new horizons opened
up by the Social Revolution.

FOOTNOTE:

[11] A new enlarged edition of it has been published by Thomas Nelson and
Sons in their "Shilling Library."

NOTES
[12] Consult "La Répartition métrique des impôts," by A. Toubeau, two
vols., published by Guillaumin in 1880. (We do not in the least agree with
Toubeau's conclusions, but it is a real encyclopædia, indicating the sources
which prove what can be obtained from the soil.) "La Culture maraîchere,"
by M. Ponce, Paris, 1869. "Le Potager Gressent," Paris, 1885, an excellent
practical work. "Physiologie et culture du blé," by Risler, Paris, 1881. "Le
blé, sa culture intensive et extensive," by Lecouteux, Paris, 1883. "La Cité
Chinoise," by Eugène Simon. "Le dictionnaire d'agriculture," by Barral
(Hachette, editor). "The Rothamstead Experiments," by Wm. Fream,
London, 1888—culture without manure, etc. (the "Field" office, editor).
"Fields, Factories, and Workshops," by the author. (Thomas Nelson &
Sons.)
[13] Summing up the figures given on agriculture, figures proving that the
inhabitants of the two departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise can live
perfectly well on their own territory by employing very little time annually
to obtain food, we have:—

Departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise

Number of inhabitants in 1889 3,900,000
Area in acres 1,507,300
Average number of inhabitants per acre 2.6
Areas to be cultivated to feed the inhabitants (in
acres):—
Corn and Cereals 494,000
Natural and artificial meadows 494,000
from 17,300 to
Vegetables and fruit
25,000
Leaving a balance for houses, roads, parks, forests 494,000

Quantity of annual work necessary to improve and
cultivate
the above surfaces in five-hour workdays:—
Cereals (culture and crop) 15,000,000
Meadows, milk, rearing of cattle 10,000,000
Market-gardening culture, high-class fruit 33,000,000
Extras 12,000,000
——————
Total 70,000,000

If we suppose that only half of the able-bodied adults (men and women) are
willing to work at agriculture, we see that 70 million work-days must be
divided among 1,200,000 individuals, which gives us fifty-eight work-days
of 5 hours for each of these workers. With that the population of the two
departments would have all necessary bread, meat, milk, vegetables, and
fruit, both for ordinary and even luxurious consumption. To-day a workman
spends for the necessary food of his family (generally less than what is
necessary) at least one-third of his 300 work-days a year, about 1,000 hours
be it, instead of 290. That is, he thus gives about 700 hours too much to
fatten the idle and the would-be administrators, because he does not
produce his own food, but buys it of middlemen, who in their turn buy it of
peasants who exhaust themselves by working with bad tools, because, being
robbed by the landowners and the State, they cannot procure better ones.

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