Socialisme et collectivisme

Emile Vandeevelde

CITIZENNESSES, CITIZENS,

A few years ago, in the House of Commons of England, one of the Queen’s ministers exclaimed: “We are all socialists.” One could take up this phrase again, applying it to present-day France, where everyone, for some time now, seems to want to adopt the socialist label, beginning with M. the Marquis de Galliffet!… (Laughter)

In these conditions, it may be useful to mark what differentiates people of more or less good will who claim socialism, without knowing too well the meaning of this word, from socialists truly worthy of this name, who know where they are going, who are marching toward a well-defined goal, who consider collectivism as logically inseparable from the socialist idea itself. Thus the first condition for the solid nucleus of a unified socialist party to be constituted, in the nebula of sentimental socialism, is to characterize clearly the fundamental principles of collectivism, that is to say of the doctrine that pursues the social appropriation of the means of production and exchange…

To this end, I would like to take a point of departure that would put us all in agreement — partisans or adversaries of socialism — that would be admitted by the theoreticians of all schools, from the most ardent collectivists to the most determined conservatives, that would be found as well in Karl Marx, for example, as in Pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical “Rerum novarum.” This point of departure, common to all, is the principle that property must be founded on labor. The socialists say nothing else, when they demand for every worker the full right to the product of his labor, and the pope expresses himself in roughly the same terms, when reproducing the lesson of the liberal economists, he maintains that individual property is legitimate because “it is just that the fruit of labor should belong to the laborer.”

But disagreement begins when it is a matter of judging whether, in the present state of things, individual property can be considered as the fruit, or the accessory, of labor. To maintain it, the defenders of the capitalist regime proceed rather like those Prussians who, during the Franco-Prussian war, made, it is said, the French prisoners march in the front line to shelter themselves behind them. To protect capitalist property, one puts forward personal property, the property of the artisan, the property of the peasant, one tries to make people believe that in attacking capitalism one wants to strip the independent worker of his means of work.

And, first of all, with regard to agricultural operations: their number is indeed very considerable, but how many of them are so divided, fragmented, reduced to dust, that they no longer suffice to make live, with an independent human life, the peasant families who still possess them. Need I remind you that nearly fifty years ago now, Karl Marx, writing the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, brought to full light the grave inconveniences, political and social, of parceled property, limiting the intellectual horizon of the cultivator to the boundaries of his field, and instituting a formidable obstacle to the progress of rational agriculture.

Besides, everywhere where the development of industry reacts upon the development of cultivation, these peasant properties, worked under direct management, tend to give way to indirect management by tenant farmers. In Belgium for example, where there exist, according to the last census, more than eight hundred thousand agricultural operations, most of them are not peasant properties belonging to the peasant himself, but indeed capitalist properties, leased to farmers. In certain parts of the country, and notably in Flanders, these properties are very fragmented. Consequently, to establish that the number of agricultural operations is increasing is not at all to prove that peasant property is making progress; most often, on the contrary, in over-populated regions, one observes a double movement: on one hand, the number of operations increases, but, on the other hand, and more and more, they escape direct management, they are worked by small tenant farmers.

And now, if we pass to that other form of personal property, that of the artisan, welded, according to Karl Marx’s expression, to his means of production like the snail to its shell. I beg you, ask M. du Maroussem, who has devoted interesting monographs to the craft industries of the Parisian agglomeration, how many independent workers remain who preserve personal property of their means of work: “As a general rule, he will answer us, one can establish that when the outlets are restricted, limited to the neighborhood, or to a very small category of the population (bakery, very high luxury cabinet-making), small employers’ workshops remain the majority.”

But in all the industries which, without having already taken the definitive capitalist form, already produce for a more extended market, it is no longer the craft industry, the artisan working on his own account, the former guild master — such as Hans Sachs in the Meistersinger — that we find as the dominant form, but indeed the room-worker, the worker at home, the disguised proletarian, even more harshly exploited than the factory worker; for as a liberal deputy said only a few months ago in the Austrian Reichstag, it is in the home industry that one encounters the summit of misery, of the most hideous physical and moral degradation.

There remains finally the third form of personal property, that of the small merchant. If you take up the statistics again, you will observe that their number increases, from year to year, that the small retailer is proliferating more and more. Only, look more closely, and you will not be long in seeing that these small merchants form three categories: those who, despite the Department Stores whose development Zola describes in Au Bonheur des Dames, preserve a certain independence; those who are depositaries, branch managers depending absolutely on capitalism; and those finally — the most numerous category — who derive from their commerce only accessory resources, like those workers whose wife opens a little tavern to balance the budget.

You know, in London, those economical restaurants, the Aerated Bread, where tea and cakes are sold: it seems that each of them constitutes a distinct enterprise, and yet they belong to one or two firms. It is the same for most pharmacies and tobacco shops: a few capitalist magnates have seized these retailers, as they have seized the workers at home.

In reality, the working population is divided into three groups: the first, whose importance is declining, are the truly independent producers; the second forms the immense multitude of those who are in the shadow of capitalism; the third, finally, those who work in the factory, who are proletarians in the full sense of the term, the great revolutionary army.

Table of the distribution of persons living from their industry in the German Empire (Percentage):

Sector	Heads of operation (1882)	Heads of operation (1895)	Wage-earners (1882)	Wage-earners (1895)
Agriculture	23.78	30.98	72.22	69.02
Industry	34.41	24.90	65.59	75.10
Commerce	44.67	36.07	55.33	63.93
Total	32.03	28.94	67.97	71.06

Thus then, in 1882, the percentage of independent producers was 32%; it falls to 28% in 1895. On the other hand the number of workers and employees rises from 67% in 1882 to 71% in 1895.

In short, he who dominates is not the autonomous producer whose property is married to labor, but the capitalist whose property is divorced from labor! Saint Paul exclaimed: “He who does not work, must not eat.” But after eighteen centuries of Christianity, those who do not work eat too much, while those who work do not eat enough. (Applause)

There are found in reality two species of the workless: those who would like to work and cannot; those who should work and do not want to… On one hand, the industrial reserve army; on the other, the rentiers who have given themselves the trouble of being born. Which is the more worthy of commiseration? The involuntary unemployed. And yet, see the lot accorded to one and the other. To him who does not want to work, Mediterranean retreats; to him who has no work, internment in the begging depots.

Let us suppose that a rich man’s fortune is founded on labor. These workers are not eternal: “Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede Pauperum tabernas regumque turres.” What will become of their fortune? It will pass to heirs. A child who is born at the very hour when his father dies has not worked — he has not yet suckled at his mother’s breast — and yet he becomes a proprietor. There will therefore be the share of the poor, the share of labor, that which will give a pension to the old man and will serve to enlarge the collective domain. (Applause)

Then come the objections: attacks on liberty, destruction of art, invasion of new barbarians. Richter describes this defeat flatly in “After the Victory of Socialism”; Paul Adam describes it wittily in the “Letters from Malaysia.” But where is liberty in present society for a proletariat bowed under capitalist domination?

See with what soft nonchalance the upholsterer or painter worker pushes his brush while singing a romance: he proves to you that he has no desire to “kill himself” for his boss. But go to the Bakery of the Maison du Peuple of Brussels or to the Vooruit of Ghent: you will see there workers who work for the common cause. They no longer sing the insipid romance, but the revolutionary hymn, the hymn of joy of free men. (Applause)

I am told: “Who then will eat the partridges, who will drink the champagne in the collectivist society?” Individual luxury, the luxury of vanity, will be restricted, but collective luxury will develop. In Greece, life was simple, but the works of art were radiant. Our houses of the people, our cathedrals of the future will be wide open to everyone. (Applause)

I remember a foreigner who once said to revolutionary France: “France, cure yourself of individuals!” (Lively applause). Socialist unity must prevail so that international unity may be the resultant of national unities. Thirty years ago, a few thousand proletarians defended the red flag on the barricades; today, it is the best of France that gathers around it. I think of the poem from the Legend of the Ages: the Satyr whom Hercules leads before Jupiter. He sings the miseries of man and he grows, he becomes Pan and he cries: “Make way for All! I am Pan; Jupiter! on your knees.”

Socialism is like this Satyr. It emerges from the muddy alleys, it seizes the lyre and it says to the Gods: “Make way for All! I am Pan; Jupiter! on your knees.”

(Lively applause and acclamations. Cries of: Long live Vandervelde!)