De la raison
JEAN JAURÈS
The Rural Movement A Necessary Revision Revolutionary Evolution The Goal Socialism and Life On Individual Property
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE appearing twenty times a year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
The fourth cahier will be Jaurès’s Socialist Studies. We are assembling and arranging under this title the articles recently published by the Petite République. These articles will fill at least one cahier of 216 pages. So that the copies of such a substantial cahier do not go astray, we ask our subscribers to please notify us without any delay of changes of address that follow the start of term.
I must confess that for the preparation of this fourth cahier, and because I wanted to and am free to do so, I saw Jaurès quite recently. I spoke with him for several hours. I realized that his action was much more firmly established, much more consistent, much more sustained than I had believed. I also realized that it was thereby even more contrary to what I imagine it to be.
Jaurès having included in his defense of the Petite République a reference to the cahiers, our collaborator Mademoiselle Louise Lévi sent us this protest: You must feel how painful such an assimilation is for us, your collaborators. How can one compare the bookshop service organized by the cahiers, which consists of reselling at the lowest possible bookshop percentage products purchased in the trade, with the trafficking of the Petite République.
Several of our friends came to tell us as much. We take our lunch and dinner at the cooperative restaurant in the Latin Quarter, rue du Sommerard, at the corner of rue Thénard.
We ask those of our subscribers who might find on the quais old copies, even isolated ones, of our first two series, to be so kind as to buy them back for a few sous and send them to us. We shall try in this way to reconstitute some collections.
JEAN JAURÈS
The Rural Movement A Necessary Revision Revolutionary Evolution The Goal Socialism and Life On Individual Property
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE appearing twenty times a year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
The quotations from the Communist Manifesto to be found in this cahier have been taken from the translation by M. Charles Andler:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. — The Communist Manifesto, I, new translation by Charles Andler, with Friedrich Engels’s articles in the Réforme (1843–1845), a thick pamphlet of 100 pages, 0 franc 50, delivered to your door 0 franc 75.
Just published:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. — The Communist Manifesto, II, historical introduction and commentary by Charles Andler, a very thick pamphlet of 212 pages, 1 franc, delivered 1 franc 25.
On sale at the bookshop of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne.
SOCIALIST ACTION FIRST SERIES One thick 18mo volume of 560 pages, 3 francs 50
Instruction — War Education — Culture — Alliances — Peace
The school law; the education budget; primary education; secondary education; the crisis in secondary education; the baccalauréat question; higher education; the question of the Universities; university extension;
The religious question; Leo XIII and Catholicism; the freedoms of teaching staff; the Thierry Cazes interpellation; secular and clerical teaching; reply to M. d’Hulst; Science and socialism; the role of socialism and of socialists in bourgeois education;
Military schools; the military law; the war budget; the military burden; the republican army;
Peace and revenge; the Alsace-Lorraine question; France and Germany;
The Eastern question; the Armenian massacres; the Cretan war of independence; the Greco-Turkish war;
The Spanish-American war;
The Fashoda affair.
8, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris
SOCIALIST HISTORY 1789–1900 Published under the direction of JEAN JAURÈS
THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY 1789–1791 By JEAN JAURÈS
One thick quarto volume of 768 pages, 115 engravings of the period from original documents, 25 facsimiles of autographs. Published by Jules Rouff and Company, Cloître-Saint-Honoré. 40 francs.
The table of chapters is arranged as follows: Introduction. Municipal life. Causes of the Revolution. The national properties. The elections and the cahiers. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Revolutionary days (June 26, July 14, October 5 and 6). The Federation. Laws of organization. The parties and the classes in 1791. The flight to Varennes.
8, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris
JEAN JAURÈS
The Rural Movement A Necessary Revision Revolutionary Evolution The Goal Socialism and Life On Individual Property
ÉDITIONS DES CAHIERS PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor
ON REASON
Before one studies in their turn these studies, before one is even introduced to them by the author, it is indispensable that one be warned that the author appeals in them only to reason. This is indispensable in a time when reason has almost as many enemies as ever, who are dangerous, when it has more false friends than ever, who are more dangerous still. One must call enemies of reason the madmen who direct their madness against reason. And one must call the false friends of reason the madmen who would have reason proceed by the ways of unreason.
Reason does not proceed by way of authority. As it admits from the one who teaches no intimidation, blackmail, or threat, as it accepts no exercise of force, no abuse of power, no power, commandment, abuse, or coup d’état, it presupposes in the one who is taught no cowardice. It is therefore to betray reason, to make reason unreasonable, to wish to secure the triumph of reason by the means of authority.
Reason does not proceed from governmental authority. It is therefore to betray reason to wish to secure the triumph of reason by governmental means. It is to fail reason to wish to establish a government of reason. There can be, there must be neither ministry, nor prefecture, nor sub-prefecture of reason, neither consulate nor proconsulate of reason. Reason cannot, reason must not command in the name of a government. To carry out or let a prefect carry out searches in the room of a schoolmistress, even though the prefect might be a republican prefect, even though the schoolmistress might not be a republican schoolmistress, is not merely to attack liberty; it is to attack reason. Reason does not ask, reason does not wish, reason does not accept that anyone defend it or support it or act in its name by the means of governmental authority. In no sense is reason reason of State. Every reason of State is a disloyal usurpation by authority over reason, a counterfeit, a botched piece of work.
In particular, reason does not proceed from military authority. It utterly ignores passive obedience. It is to betray reason to wish to secure the victory of reason through the discipline that is the principal strength of armies. It is to make reason unreasonable to teach it by military means. Reason does not demand, does not accept obedience. One does not command in the name of reason as one commands on the parade ground. There is no army of reason, no soldiers of reason, and above all there are no chiefs of reason. There is not even, properly speaking, any war of reason, any campaign, any expedition. Reason does not wage war on unreason. It reduces unreason as far as it can by means that are not the means of war, since they are the means of reason. Reason does not launch assaults; it does not form columns of attack; it does not take positions; it does not force passages; it does not make solemn entries; nor does it, like the military conqueror, sleep on the field of battle.
Reason does not proceed from religious authority. It took an unheard-of insanity to dare to institute the cult of the goddess Reason. And if one can excuse an insanity in a time of frenzy, let us declare it aloud: the cold political repetition of that insanity, the concerted commemoration of that insanity, constitutes a grave sign of incoherence or of madness, of unreason. No, reason does not proceed by way of worship. No, reason does not want altars. No, reason does not want prayers. No, reason does not want priests. It is to betray reason most gravely, to make reason unreasonable most gravely, to disguise it as a goddess, in play-acting and music; it is to betray it to fabricate religious festivals for it, imitations in sham-worship, complete with everything required. And even the admirable prayer that Renan offered on the Acropolis after he had come to understand its perfect beauty no longer has any meaning, read or declaimed on the stage before the inexhaustibly deceived crowd.
Let us declare it without fear. And let us make whatever enemies we must. Reason wants no Church. There can be, there must be no Church of reason. Ceremonial, cultic, and ritual practices are utterly foreign to the honesty of reason. Superhuman practices, whether religious, infernal or divine, inhuman, are utterly foreign to the humanity of reason. Reason is an honest man. There is no clergy of reason. We have not renounced, we have not denounced the religions of yesterday in order to announce the religion of tomorrow, in order to preach some new religion. We are irreligious toward all religions. We are atheists of all gods. In the painful debate between reason and faith, we did not leave faith for faith in reason, but for the reason of reason. Reason admits neither prophecies, nor declamations, nor proclamations — neither dogmas, nor decrees of councils, nor papal briefs. And it is to lamentably deceive the perpetual people to present to them the truths of reason in the same tone and as one used to announce to them the so-called revealed truths.
Reason does not proceed from parliamentary authority. It derives nothing from those long assemblies that we call parliaments, nor from those short assemblies that we call congresses. Reason has neither president, nor assessors, nor secretary, nor any bureau. It often lacks stenographers. It does not always have minutes, an official record. It does not constitute any steering committee. It does not proceed by voting. It is not subject to the law of majority. It is not proportional to number. Many may be wrong. It may be that one alone is right. It may even be that not a single one is right. Reason does not vary with number. It flatters crowds no more than it flattered the great. It flatters peoples no more than it flattered kings. It flatters democracies no more than it flattered monarchies or oligarchies. We know that in the past there were long periods and vast regions where reason resided only in minorities, in individuals. There were even nations where reason did not reside. It can absent itself today as well.
Reason does not proceed from demagogic authority. To rouse the masses, to unleash crowds is an exercise of authority no less foreign to reason than to amass some majority, to launch some regiment. We are today under the government of demagogy much more than under the government of democracy. The tribunes, the lawyers, and the journalists govern us heavily. Free of monarchy, of oligarchy, and of democracy, those regular governments, reason is also free of demagogy, that government of fact. It is no more subject to the new courtiers than it was subject to the old. Neither the demonstrations of the street nor the demonstrations of meetings have any standing in the eyes of reason. Reason mounts no platforms. The movements of the masses weigh no more than palace revolutions. The deceived people cannot make reason cease to be reason, nor make unreason become reason. The deceived crowd has no more power than the deceived monarch had. The people is not sovereign over reason.
Reason does not proceed from manual authority. As much as it is true that reason exercises no authority, as much as it is true that a government of intellectuals would be the most insufferable of governments — so much is it reciprocally true that reason, which accepts no authority, which submits to no government, does not accept a manual authority, does not submit to a manual government. It is to distort reason to imagine, as Renan dreamed, a spiritual government of the inhabited earth, a government of omnipotent intellectuals. A republic of pedants would be no less uninhabitable than a republic of monks. If it were allowed to form, an intellectual caste would be more irritating and weigh more heavily on the world than any other caste. But it is also to fail reason to rouse against serious intellectuals the crude authorities of ill-informed manual workers. Justice, reason, the proper administration of work demand that intellectuals be neither governors nor governed. Let them be modestly free, like everyone else.
In the present society, where the play of specialization has been automatically pushed to excess, intellectual functions and manual functions are almost never assigned to the same workers; intellectual workers neglect nearly all manual labor; manual workers neglect nearly all work of the mind, nearly all exercise of reason. In the harmonious city, whose birth and life we are preparing, intellectual functions and manual functions will be harmoniously shared among the same men. And the relation between the intellectual and the manual, instead of establishing itself painfully from one individual to the other, will establish itself freely within the heart of the same man. The problem will be transposed. For we have never said that we would suppress the problems of humanity. We only wish, and we hope, to transport them from bourgeois ground, where they can receive only ungrateful solutions, onto human ground, finally free of economic servitudes. We leave miracles to the practitioners of old and new Churches. We do not promise a Paradise. We are preparing a liberated humanity.
The bold chiefs and the jaded crowds, the manipulated manipulators, the candidates and the voters will doubtless find this program insufficient. But we know from the history of humanity, from the history of the sciences, the arts, and philosophy, that a change of plane is an event, a considerable operation. In all kinds of work, two types of progress are open. First, one can advance by evolution, continuing in the same direction. But there almost always comes a moment when the worker has the impression that the direction is exhausted: no amount of application, no amount of insistence can any longer draw from reality what reality no longer has to give in the direction begun. Entire lives consumed in ungrateful work would no longer yield what they cost. Then revolution intervenes. Seen from elsewhere, attacked from elsewhere, reality suddenly begins to flow in full again. And yet reality is the same as it was. But it is no longer seen from the same vantage; it is no longer seen in the same way; it is no longer known in the same way. That is how we are revolutionaries. We want the same humanity to give itself a new freedom.
We do not scorn past humanities; we have neither that pride, nor that vanity, nor that insolence, nor that imbecility, that weakness. We do not scorn what is human in the present humanity. On the contrary, we wish to conserve what was human in the old humanities. We wish to save what is human in the present humanity. Above all, we avoid inflicting on the present humanity the gravest insult, which is to wish to train it. We do not have the presumption to imagine, invent, manufacture a new humanity. We have neither plan nor blueprint. We wish to free humanity from economic servitudes. Freed, free, humanity will live freely. Free of us and of all those who will have freed it. To commit the maximal misappropriation, the gravest diversion, would be to use liberation in order to enslave the liberated under the mentality of the liberators. It would be to lay for humanity something like a universal ambush to present liberation in order to lure it into a philosophy, even if that philosophy were labeled the philosophy of reason.
To attach a system to socialism, to bind to socialism, even in the name of reason, a system of science, or of art, or of philosophy, is literally to commit a breach of trust against humanity. To lure humanity toward its liberation in order to plunge it into a system is to commit in the name of reason the malfeasance that the Church committed in the name of faith. It is to sell to humanity what we owe it as a gift. It is to sell an object that we must not let fall into economic commerce. Through a liberation it is to introduce an enslavement. Let us say more: to sell to humanity its economic liberation in exchange for the establishment of a system is not only to deceive and rob humanity, it is not only to betray humanity, it is not only to sell the unsellable, it is not only to secularize the malfeasance of the Church, to repeat as laymen the misfeasance of the Church, which sells the poor their bread in exchange for confession slips, for the respectable prayer and for holy communion — it is to commit the gravest crime for a socialist: it is to profit from economic servitude itself.
To attach to liberating socialism an increase of system so that it may pass along with it is not merely an inelegant, ugly, boorish operation, of bad tone, bad bearing, bad culture, bad taste, bad deportment; it is not merely an immoral, unjust, perverse, inverse operation, and one of bad administration; it is an operation properly and particularly contrary to socialism. The idealist or the materialist, the determinist or the libertarian who would engage in socialism with the more or less confused ulterior motive that their system might benefit from it would not only be playing a game that is uglily disloyal, but their game would be a perpetual denial of socialism; they would not only be playing false, they would be playing bourgeois. Using for their interested ends the desire, the need, the passion for economic liberation, they would in effect be utilizing, at the second degree, the preceding enslavement, the very servitude from which one seeks to escape. They would not merely be exercising a form of blackmail, but they would be exercising precisely economic blackmail, the vice proper to bourgeois society, to the bourgeois regime.
We have no more right to sell the earth than the Christians had to sell heaven. We have no right to secularize the bargaining of the clerics. Far from socialism resting officially on a system of art or of science or of philosophy, far from it tending toward the establishment, the glorification of a system, far from it being materialist or idealist, atheist or theist, on the contrary, socialism is what will leave liberated humanity at last free to work, to study, to think freely. It is the effect of a singular lack of understanding to imagine that the social revolution would be a conclusion, a closing off of humanity into the insipid beatitude of dead tranquilities. It is the effect of a naive and wicked ambition, idiotic and sly, to wish to enclose humanity through the social revolution. To make a cloister of humanity would be the effect of the most formidable religious survival. Far from socialism being definitive, it is preliminary, prior, necessary, indispensable but not sufficient. It is before the threshold. It is not the end of humanity; it is not even its beginning. It is, in our view, before the beginning. Before the beginning shall be the Word.
Ideas must not be careerists, nor must they be smuggled in. They must not be parasitical, attaching themselves to socialism the way unfortunate young men become secretaries to influential men. The disgust we feel toward the petty ambitious who push themselves into the positions of ministerial socialism and into the identical positions of anti-ministerial socialism, we shall feel it toward the systems that would like to advance through socialism and within socialism. Finally, it is an insufferable abuse of paternal authority to wish to impose on fresh generations the dotings of the tired, old generations that we are. Precisely because we will have freed them, they will know much better than we what they will have to think.
Reason does not proceed from paternal authority. Let us not, in the name of reason, take perpetual vows for ourselves. And let us not take them for the perpetual generations. Let us leave humanity in peace. A revolution that proposes to rid us of interests must be absolutely disinterested.
Reciprocally, it is to betray reason, as one was betraying socialism, to introduce additional weights into the debates of reason. In the debate among rational systems, to add to certain systems — to materialism, to atheism — the additional weight of socialist wills, to infuse into them the sap and blood of revolutionary passions, is to distort the play of action by interventions foreign to action; but reciprocally it is to distort the play of reason by interventions foreign to reason. It is to procure for certain systems an undue importance in the history of thought. Reason does not proceed from socialist authority, assuming there is such a thing as a socialist authority. Reason does not proceed from revolutionary authority, assuming that the Jacobins truly established a revolutionary authority.
Reason depends no more on revolutionary masses than on reactionary masses or on inert masses. It depends on no forces. It depends no more on revolutionary armies than on military armies. It does not depend on the popular masses. It does not depend on manual authority.
It is to betray reason and to betray the people to wish to establish over the people a government, a commandment, an authority of reason. But it is also to betray reason and to betray the people to wish to establish over reason, through demagogy or through pedagogy, a government, a commandment, an authority of manual workers. Let us be clear: manual workers, because they are men, and because they have their share of common reason, have the right and the duty to think within the measure of their competence. But it is one of the most dangerous modes of demagogy to conceal from the people their inevitable, provisional, but provisionally inevitable, incompetences. To denounce to the people of manual workers a work of philosophy because it sells for seven francs fifty at Alcan, to denounce to the people a work of metaphysics because the word God appears fifteen times on page 28 and ninety-two times on page 31, to denounce to the people this work as tainted with clericalism — I say that this is Jesuitism, and I say that this is Inquisition.
It is Jesuitism and it is duplicity, for the newspaper has two clienteles, two regions. If the newspaper were read only by intellectuals, an accusation of clericalism brought against a philosophical thesis — built upon the appearance of the word God — would not be dangerous, because the reader, being well-informed, would recognize it as a jest. A jest of doubtful taste, rather perverse, but a jest after all. If the newspaper were read only by manual workers, if the author of the accusation were himself a manual worker, that accusation would be dangerous, but it would be sincere. What constitutes the duplicity is that an intellectual author deliberately casts this accusation before a double public. The author, an intellectual, knows what metaphysics and theodicy are. The author cannot believe that his accusation has any substance. And because he has talent, the insidious accusation is stated in carefully violent terms. The intellectuals will see well enough that it is a good joke and will not despise the journalist as ignorant. The manual workers will take it at face value. The literary reputation will be safe with the former, the moral reputation with the latter.
I do not believe that anything is as dangerous for the people and for reason as these misunderstandings with a double meaning. The Marquis de Rochefort excelled at them. He admirably knew how to invent the calumny that would make the clever smile and arouse the emotion of the people. To make the calumny big enough that its very bigness would alert the alert that one is alert oneself; and to use that same bigness to arouse a great emotion among the people: it was at this double game that M. de Rochefort was a player one thought inimitable. Of all the solutions one can imagine to the intellectual-manual problem, this one is the most insulting at once to intellectuals and to manual workers, for it supposes that intellectuals are so susceptible to the dubious pleasures of a perverse amusement that they forget the simplest elements of common morality, and it supposes that manual workers are so eager for crude indignation that they never inquire into the grounds, the truth, the justice of the indictments that compliant prosecutors, that attorneys-general of journalism fling at them.
It is not this insulting, dubious, double solution that we accept. While waiting for the preliminary change of plane that seems to us capital in the future, in the coming history of humanity, when the health of manual labor along with the health of intellectual labor shall be granted to all men — while waiting for the relation of the manual to the intellectual to establish itself freely in every man — since in the present society the distributions are made between individuals and not between elaborations of the same individual, the same person, the same man, since manual labor and intellectual labor are distributed to different individuals, without normal communication, since, with few exceptions, some work scarcely with anything but their hands, and the others with reason — our solution will be the simple solution of professional liberty. For the same reason that bakers do not build houses and that ploughmen do not make clothes, for the same reason manual workers — bakers and masons, reapers, weavers, and tailors — have neither to make nor to unmake philosophical theses.
Exactly as one does not admit the professional authority of the manual worker over the manual worker in different trades, exactly so one must not admit any professional authority of the manual worker over the intellectual worker. As bakers are ignorant of building and reapers of cutting and weaving, exactly so bakers and masons, reapers and weavers, as such, are ignorant of theodicy. One can teach it to them, if there are reasons for teaching it to them. One can refrain from teaching it to them, if there are impediments or contrary reasons. But it is to flatter them basely to denounce to them through political accusations a work in which they have not yet acquired competence. Let us declare it loudly: a professor of philosophy can and must do theodicy when and as reason demands. And he is responsible and accountable for his theodicy only before reason, before reasoning reason, before reason at work, before critical reason.
Let us not found, let us not allow to be founded a religion of reason. We renounced a religion that commanded us to abstain from meat on Good Friday; let us not found a religion that would force us to eat meat on that same day. We renounced a religion that commanded us to believe in a personal God, in three persons, supremely good, supremely lovable, all-powerful, creator of heaven and earth, and sovereign lord of all things; let us not found a religion that would forbid us even to pronounce a name of which the least one can say is that it has had some fortune in the history of humanity. Reason does not proceed from presbyteral authority. A religion of reason would accumulate all the vices of religion together with all the obverses of rational virtues. It would be a rare, singular, culminating, unique accumulation of vices that are commonly irreconcilable, usually separate, logically contradictory. It would be like a wager of accumulation. A catechism is insufferable. But a catechism of reason would contain in its pages the most appalling tyranny. At once parody and text.
Reason proceeds no more from unofficial authorities than from official authorities. Neither the publicist, nor the journalist, nor the tribune, nor the orator, nor the lecturer is today a simple citizen. The journalist who has thirty or fifty or eighty thousand readers, the lecturer who regularly has twelve or fifteen hundred spectators, exercises in effect, like the minister, like the deputy, a governmental authority. Today one leads readers as one has not ceased to lead voters. The press constitutes a fourth power. Many journalists, who rightly blame the weakness of parliamentary mores, would do well to look back upon themselves and consider that newsrooms conduct themselves like Parliaments. There is at least as much parliamentary demagogy in newspapers as in assemblies. As much authority is spent in an editorial board as in a council of ministers; and as much demagogic weakness. Journalists write as deputies speak. An editor-in-chief is a prime minister, just as authoritarian, just as weak. There are fewer liberals among journalists than among senators.
It is the ordinary game of journalists to rouse all liberties, all licenses, all revolts, and in effect all authorities, most often contradictory, against official governmental authorities. — We are simple citizens, they keep repeating. They thus wish to accumulate all the privileges of authority together with all the rights of liberty. But the true libertarian knows how to perceive authority wherever it holds sway; and nowhere is it as dangerous as where it assumes the aspects of liberty. The true libertarian knows that there truly is a government of newspapers and meetings, an authority of journalists and popular orators, just as there is a government of bureaus and assemblies, an authority of ministers and parliamentary orators. The true libertarian guards against unofficial governments as much as official ones. For popularity too is a form of government, and not one of the least dangerous. Reason does not build a clientele. A journalist who plays games with ministries and claims to be a simple citizen is not admissible. That too is double, and that is too convenient.
When a journalist exercises in his domain a government of fact, when he has an army of faithful readers, when he leads those readers by vehemence, audacity, ascendancy — military means, by talent — a vulgar means, by lying — a political means, and thus when the journalist has truly become a power in the State, when he has readers exactly as a deputy has voters, when a journalist has a reading constituency, often much vaster and much more solid, he cannot then come and play us the double game; he cannot come whimpering. In the great battle of the powers of this world, he cannot deliver formidable blows in the name of his power and when the contrary powers return his blows, at the same time he cannot claim to be a simple citizen. He who renounces reason for the offensive cannot invoke reason for the defensive. There would be an insufferable disloyalty in that, and yet again duplicity.
Reason does not proceed from terror, which is the acute form of force. Reason does not proceed from suspicion, which is the sly form of terror. The regime of terror, whether governmental terror or popular terror no less governmental, even if that regime erected altars to reason, and especially if that regime erected altars to reason, is not a regime of reason. The regime of suspects, where the exercise of applied force is mysteriously amplified by the fear of applicable force, even if the suspects were the enemies of reason, and especially if the suspects were the enemies of reason — the regime of suspects is the most contrary to reason. But it is not only an official regime of suspects, amplifying some official terror, that one must dread for reason. More fearsome still, more odious, more inimical to reason, more hateful, is an unofficial regime of suspects, like the one to which the government of the press subjects us. Neither slanderous denunciations nor allegations without proof belong to reason. Reason is not a police force. It is no more a press police than a state police.
Reason does not even proceed from that finer and more rarefied popularity that is obtained in the regions of culture. Neither state decorations, nor corporate distinctions, nor co-optations, nor professional degrees, nor academies, nor scientific celebrations, nor fiftieth anniversaries, nor centennials, nor statues, nor busts, nor names inscribed on street plaques, nor banquets — even when they are called dinners — nor renown, nor glory properly belong to reason. All that presupposes some emulation. Now reason does not proceed by emulation. All that presupposes applying to the works of reason magnitudes that are not of the same order. Reason does not admit rivalry, but only collaboration, cooperation. Every idea of rewards or punishments, of sanctions, even elegant, spiritual, and psychological ones, is foreign to reason. In the sciences themselves it is often difficult to proportion the ceremonies to the works they consecrate. In letters, in the arts, and in philosophy, this is literally impossible. On the contrary, the strongest works are also the most unexpected, the least surrounded, or the most envied. In short, secular ceremonies always resemble religious ceremonies.
Reason does not proceed from historical authority. No more than the contemporary majorities can the historical majorities of dead generations command reason. No more than it is always and properly revolutionary is reason always and properly traditional. But it is properly rational, and reasonable. It is to misunderstand it to assimilate or identify it with revolution; it is also to misunderstand it to assimilate or identify it with tradition. It is reason. And obeying neither revolution nor tradition, it obeys no more the coincidence of the two, the revolutionary tradition. For by a singular coupling, by an unexpected turn, we see more and more how revolutionary impulses crystallize into traditional forms. More and more the revolution, which is the rupture of tradition, tends to constitute for itself a traditional apparatus. And in the face of these new revolutionary traditions, doubly new — as being traditions, since they are revolutionary, and as being revolutionary, since they are traditions — reason has no more than its own two liberties: the liberty it knows how to keep in the face of tradition, the liberty it knows how to keep in the face of revolution.
In all times revolutionary movements, ruptures of tradition, essentially free in origin, have tended to fall back into the old automatism. Thus conservation recommenced; tradition was reborn with the very material furnished to it by the revolution. But never as today has the revolutionary movement been dampened into such traditional, such conservatory forms. By a strange inconsistency, or by a strange insufficiency of thought, the precedent constituted by the French Revolution, by the great bourgeois revolution, has fascinated the socialist revolutionaries, and fascinates them today more than ever. The days of 1830, the double days of 1848, the months of the Commune contributed to forming, completed as it were a revolutionary code. Never as today have revolutionary parties, committees, commissions, congresses, councils been bound, bound themselves, frozen, bound their constituents and their officers by so much ceremonial, so much etiquette, so much habit, so much protocol, so much tradition, so much conservation.
By a singular mental ingratitude, revolutionary governments, socialist authorities, oppose to reason, to freedom, from which they were born, supplementary traditions, cumbersome conservations. Reason must not submit to these onerous traditions either because they are traditional or because they are revolutionary. To imitate the old revolutionaries, the old rebels, does not consist in thinking, in the face of the world we know, identically the thoughts they had in the face of the world that was theirs. But it is to imitate them well to have, in the face of the world we know, the same attitude, the same feeling of liberty, of reason, that they had in the face of their world. To imitate servilely, punctually their ideas, as one would accept a dead, inert inheritance, to have in the face of the present world the ideas they had in the face of the past world, to recommence our forebears, who were precisely revolutionaries because they did not recommence their forebears, to copy their ideas — that would be to imitate neither their conduct, nor their method, nor their action, nor their life. It would be not to imitate the use they made of reason.
To imitate the old revolutionaries well is to place ourselves freely in the face of the world as they placed themselves freely in the face of the world. It is not to place ourselves servilely in the face of their world. It is to use reason as they used it, without any school artifice or factitious delay. No more than we must attach to the social revolution and impose upon future humanities our systems, must we impose upon them inherited systems, even if inherited from revolutionaries. We must not impose upon them, communicate to them in passing through us, old systems. We must no more transmit authorities than we must institute them. The operation would be the same. Whether the system imposed later in the name of the revolution was born among us or whether we ourselves received it from our elders, the result would be the same. It would always be to brand humanity instead of freeing it. It would always be to haggle over and distort emancipation. It would always be to oppress reason, to weigh upon free reason with the old maneuvers of a less free reason. It would always be to profit from economic servitude in order to disloyally advantage the revolutionary personnel.
We bring with us, we bring neither as an invention nor as an inheritance, unprecedented sentiments, manufactured expressly for us, bearing the mark of that manufacture. We do not intend to replace, to supplement, to put back in the warehouse the old sentiments that have made the joy or the consolation, the happiness and the beauty of the world. We do not have new sentiments that would replace ancient love, friendship, the affections, the sentiments and passions of love, the sentiments and passions of art, of the sciences, of philosophy. We are not gods who create worlds. We wish to become useful stewards, prudent managers, diligent householders. We do not ask to create animal natures or humanities, but modestly we ask that the economic goods of the present humanity be administered for the best, so that economic servitude being lifted from necks, free heads may straighten up, bodies may live in health, souls too. We are above all modest. A proud socialism would be an aberration. A metaphysician would be criminal or mad.
Reason does not proceed from pedagogy. We touch here upon the gravest danger of the present time. Despite the complicity of the words themselves, pedagogy must not be demagogy. It is pedagogy that must draw its inspiration from reason, guide itself by reason, model itself on reason. After having suffered from our negligence, the people must not today be deformed by our complaisance. After having suffered from the ignorance in which it was left, it must not today be deformed by a half-knowledge, which is always a false knowledge. This is the immense danger of primary education, with its indigestible encyclopedic curricula; it is even more the immense danger of higher primary education; it is to the highest degree the immense danger and the immense difficulty of the popular universities. Admirably devoted individuals, perfectly wise, understanding persons, forestall, avoid the danger, circumvent, surmount the difficulty, but they are also the first to have taken its measure. Those who love the primary level, the schoolteachers and the people, instead of exploiting them, are rightly concerned about them.
It would be to irreparably distort the mind of the people, and thus to betray the most numerous reason, to make the most numerous reason unreasonable, to encourage general insanity, to cultivate madness and to sow unreason with full hands, to make or let the people of manual workers believe, at the various levels of primary education, that the work of reason obtains its results without trouble, without effort, and without apprenticeship. All the more so because the people know full well, the people accept full well, better than the bourgeois, the people know from their professional experience that in no order of manual work does one obtain free, gratuitous results. In all manual trades everyone knows that one must work and one must have learned. By what unjust inferiority, or by what fundamentally demagogic complaisance, by what flattery would one make or let the people believe that science, that art, and that philosophy, that intellectual labors, that the labors of reason are not equally serious?
It would be to render democracy the worst of disservices to vulgarize, to extend to the working people the old aristocratic prejudice. The people too must not wish to know everything without ever having learned anything. The people too must not have taken no more trouble than being born the people. One would never dream of making bread without having learned baking, nor of plowing without knowing plowmanship. Why does one wish to treat the great problems without having done the indispensable apprenticeship? One grants more or less to science that it demands an apprenticeship; but one too often denies it to letters, to the arts, to philosophy. One would thus introduce the most dangerous presumption; one would prepare for oneself the gravest, the most deserved disappointments. What one must teach the people is neither a vanity, nor a pride, but intellectual modesty, and that rightness which is the justice of reason. Instead of launching the people at the existence, or, what amounts to the same, the nonexistence of God, at the immortality of the soul or its survival or its mortality, at determinism or indeterminism, at materialism or the philosophy of history, let us teach them modestly subjects more ready at hand. That alone will be honest. And it is only in this way that we shall respect them.
Not that we wish to forbid the people access to reason. We on the contrary are the ones who do not want them to go and break their noses against false doors. We ask that they advance reasonably, wisely, rationally in the ways of reason, as far as they can, but in all probity. Reason does not use falsehood, even when the false route would be shorter. If one is before an audience that does not understand the demonstration of the theorem concerning the square of the hypotenuse, one must not fabricate a false but graspable demonstration arriving at the same proposition and present it to the people with the quiet assurance that it does not matter since the true demonstration provides an eternally valid guarantee, a certitude. No: one says honestly to those who are not geometers: Geometers demonstrate that the square constructed on the hypotenuse is equivalent to the sum of the squares constructed on the sides of the right angle. — One must not forget that most of the great problems are more difficult and demand more preparation than the theorem of the square of the hypotenuse.
Not that, in order to secure the independence, the full freedom of reason, we wish to institute for it some kingdom outside and above humanity. It is within humanity itself and for humanity that we intend reason to function. It is the common interest of reason and of humanity that humanity hear the voice of reason. The two interests are here inseparable. But the functioning, the work of reason has this particular quality: that in this work nothing must be sacrificed to outward success. Reason must penetrate humanity more and more; reason must insert itself more and more into action, but on this condition: that through this penetration, through this insertion, reason never be impaired. The advantages that reason draws from its own proper work and the advantages that reason and humanity draw from its propagation are not advantages of the same order that balance each other and can be equivalent. Rather, the proper advantages of reason at work are rigorously conditional; they constitute the indispensable condition without which the outward advantage is annulled.
One must work as best one can to advance reason in its own proper work; one must work as best one can to bring reason into the action of humanity, but these two efforts are not of the same order; the second is rigorously conditioned by the first. The first is absolutely free of the second.
Reason is not the whole world. We know, by reason itself, that force is not negligible, that many passions and sentiments are venerable or respectable, powerful, deep. We know that reason does not exhaust life and even the best of life; we know that instincts and the unconscious belong to a being more profoundly existing, no doubt. We value at their worth confused thoughts, impressions, obscure thoughts, sentiments, and even sensations. But we ask that one not forget that reason is for humanity the rigorously indispensable condition. Without reason we cannot estimate at its just value all that is not of reason. And the very question of knowing what belongs to reason and what does not belong to reason — it is only through the work of reason that we can pose it to ourselves.
What we ask — only this, but we ask it without any reservation, without any limitation — is not that reason become and be everything, but that there be no misunderstanding in the use of reason. We do not defend reason against other manifestations of life. We defend it against manifestations that, being other, wish to pass themselves off as reason and thereby degenerate into unreasons. We do not defend it against passions, against instincts, against sentiments as such, but against madnesses, against insanities. We ask that one not make the people believe that one speaks in the name of reason when one employs means that are not the means of reason. Reason has its own proper means, which it employs in the arts, in letters, in the sciences, and in philosophy. These means are in no way disqualified for the study that we must make of social phenomena. It is not when the subject matter of study is particularly complex, shifting, free, and difficult that we can strip ourselves of an important tool, or that we must distort it.
CHARLES PÉGUY
QUESTION OF METHOD
Paris, November 17, 1901
My dear Péguy,
You asked me to collect for the Cahiers de la Quinzaine the socialist studies that I have published these last months in the Petite République; you propose to send a copy of this volume to each of your subscribers. I am glad to enter thus into direct communication with free minds, accustomed to independent and honest criticism. Although these articles were not originally intended to appear in volume form, I have no scruple in reproducing them in this form: for I have never regarded the newspaper article as a hasty and superficial piece of work; and I put into it, out of respect for the proletariat that reads the socialist newspapers, all my conscience as a writer.
I need not warn that they do not claim to exhaust the subjects they treat. They are, evidently, only a fragment, or rather a preparation for a vaster, more dogmatic, and more documented work, in which I would like to define exactly what socialism is, at the beginning of the twentieth century — its conception, its method, and its program.
But already the studies here assembled touch, with sufficient precision and sufficient breadth, upon problems of the highest importance that press upon our party. It is greatly divided at the present hour, and you would accuse me, no doubt, of harboring the madness of “mystical unity” if I said that these divisions are superficial. I do not think them irreducible, but they arise from grave disagreements, or at least from grave misunderstandings about methods. It is the very growth of our party, it is the growing power of our idea — forgive me this relapse of optimism — that have created the disagreement, by posing to all of us the question of method. How will socialism be realized? There is a problem we cannot evade: and to evade it is to give it uncertain and vague answers. Or again, it is to deceive oneself to repeat, in 1901, the answers that our elders and our masters gave half a century ago.
There is an incontestable fact, and one that dominates everything. It is that the proletariat is growing in number, in cohesion, and in consciousness. The workers, the wage-earners, more numerous, more closely grouped, now have an ideal. They do not merely wish to remedy the worst defects of the present society: they wish to realize a social order founded on another principle. For individual and capitalist property, which assures the domination of one part of mankind over the other, they wish to substitute the communism of production, a system of universal social cooperation that would make every man, by right, an associate. They have thus freed their thought from bourgeois thought: they have also freed their action from bourgeois action. In the service of their communist ideal, they deploy an organization of their own, a class organization, the growing power of workers’ trade unions, of workers’ cooperatives, and the growing share of political power that they are conquering over the State or within the State. On this general and primary idea, all socialists are agreed. They may assign different causes to this growth of the proletariat; or at least they may give the same causes different weights. They may give a larger or smaller role to the force of economic organization or of political action. But all of them observe that by the very necessity of capitalist evolution, which develops large-scale industry, and by the corresponding action of the proletarians, the latter are the indefinitely growing force that is called upon to transform the very system of property. Socialists also debate the extent and form of the class action that the proletariat must exercise. Some want it to involve itself as little as possible in the conflicts of the society it must destroy, and to reserve all its energies for the decisive, liberating action. Others believe that it must, from now on, exercise its great human function.
Kautsky recently recalled, at the socialist congress in Vienna, Lassalle’s famous saying: “The proletariat is the rock upon which the Church of the future shall be built.” And he added: “The proletariat is not only that: it is also the rock against which, even today, the forces of reaction are broken.” And I would say that it is not precisely a rock, a compact and immobile power. It is a great coherent force, but an active one, that mingles, without losing itself, in all vast movements and grows from universal life. But all of us, whatever the height and extent of the class action we assign to the proletariat, conceive of it as an autonomous force, which can cooperate with other forces but which never merges or is absorbed into them, and which always preserves, for its distinct and superior work, its distinct resilience. It is the decisive merit of Marx — perhaps the only one that fully withstands the test of criticism and the deep attritions of time — to have brought together and fused the socialist idea and the workers’ movement. In the first third of the nineteenth century, the working-class force was being exerted, was deploying itself, was fighting against the crushing power of capital: but it had no consciousness of the goal toward which it was tending; it did not know that in the communist form of property lay the fulfillment of its effort, the accomplishment of its tendency.
And, on the other hand, socialism did not know that in the movement of the working class lay its living realization, its concrete and historical force. The glory of Marx is to have been the clearest, the most powerful of those who put an end to what was empirical in the workers’ movement, to what was utopian in socialist thought. By a sovereign application of the Hegelian method, he unified the idea and the fact, thought and history. He put the idea into the movement and the movement into the idea, socialist thought into proletarian life, proletarian life into socialist thought. Henceforth, socialism and the proletariat are inseparable: socialism will realize its whole idea only through the victory of the proletariat; and the proletariat will realize its whole being only through the victory of socialism.
To the ever more imperious question — how will socialism be realized? — it is fitting therefore to answer first: through the very growth of the proletariat, which is one with it. This is the first, essential answer: and whoever does not accept it in its true sense and in its full sense places himself necessarily outside socialist thought and socialist life. This answer, however general it may be, is not empty, for it implies the obligation for each of us ceaselessly to add to the power of thought, of organization, of action, and of life of the proletariat. It is, moreover, in a sense, the only certain one. It is impossible for us to know with certainty by what precise means, in what determined mode, and at what moment political and social evolution will culminate in communism. But what is certain is that everything that increases the intellectual, economic, and political power of the proletarian class accelerates that evolution, animates, widens, and deepens the movement.
But this first answer, however strong and substantial it may be, does not suffice. Precisely because the proletariat has already grown, because it is beginning to lay its hands on the political and economic mechanism, the question becomes more precise: what will be the mechanism of victory? As proletarian power is being realized, it incorporates itself into precise forms — in universal suffrage, in the trade union, in the cooperative, in the various forms of public power and of the democratic State. And we cannot consider proletarian force independently of the forms in which it has already been partly organized, and of the mechanisms it has partly made its own. There is therefore no utopianism today in seeking with precision what the method of socialist realization will be, and what the mode of accomplishment will be. It is not to return to utopia and to separate oneself from the life of the proletariat; it is on the contrary to remain in that life, to progress and to determine oneself with it. It is no longer “the spirit floating upon the waters”: it has already been incorporated into institutions — economic institutions and political institutions; these institutions — universal suffrage, democracy, the trade union, the cooperative — have an established degree of development, an acquired force and direction: and one must know whether proletarian communism will be able to realize itself through them, to accomplish itself through them, or whether on the contrary it will accomplish itself only through a supreme rupture.
In truth, socialists have always sought to foresee and determine in what form, by what historical processes, the proletariat would triumph. And if we suffer today, if there is in our party uncertainty and malaise, it is because it combines in confused mixtures the partly outmoded methods that our masters bequeathed to us, and the still ill-formulated necessities of the new times.
Marx and Blanqui both believed in a revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat. But Marx’s thought was much more complex. His method of Revolution had multiple aspects. It is therefore in Marx above all that I wish to discuss it. Now, taken as a whole and in whatever sense, it is outdated. It proceeds either from exhausted historical hypotheses or from inexact economic hypotheses. First, the memories of the French Revolution and of the successive revolutions that were, in France and in Europe, its prolongation, dominated Marx’s mind. The common trait of all the revolutionary movements, from 1789 to 1796, from 1830 to 1848, is that they were bourgeois revolutionary movements in which the working class mingled in order to surpass them. Throughout that long period, the working class was not strong enough to attempt a revolution on its own behalf: it was not strong enough either to take little by little, and according to the new legality, the direction of the revolution. But it could do and did two things. First, it mingled with all the bourgeois revolutionary movements in order to exercise and increase its force therein; it took advantage of the perils threatening the new order from all the forces of counter-revolution to become a necessary power. And secondly, when its force had thus grown, when hope and ambition had awakened in the hearts of the proletarians, when the various revolutionary fractions of the bourgeoisie had worn themselves out or discredited themselves through their reciprocal struggles, the working class attempted, by a sort of surprise attack, to seize the revolution and make it its own. Thus it was that under the French Revolution in 1793, the Parisian proletariat weighed, through the Commune, upon the Convention and sometimes exercised a kind of dictatorship. Thus it was that a little later Babeuf and his friends attempted to seize, by a coup de main and on behalf of the working class, the revolutionary power. Likewise, after 1830, the French proletariat, having played in the July Revolution the great role noted by Armand Carrel, tried to carry along the victorious bourgeoisie, and soon to surpass it. It is this rhythm of revolution that first imposes itself on Marx’s thought.
Certainly in November 1847, at the moment when with Engels he writes the Communist Manifesto, he knows full well that the proletariat has grown: it is the proletariat that he considers the true revolutionary force; and it is against the bourgeoisie that the Revolution will be made. He writes: “The progress of industry, of which the bourgeoisie, without premeditation and without resistance, has become the agent, instead of maintaining the isolation of the workers through competition, has brought about their revolutionary union through association. Thus the very development of large-scale industry destroys in its foundations the regime of production and appropriation of products on which the bourgeoisie relied. Above all the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. The ruin of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
And again: “The immediate aim for the communists is the same as for all other proletarian parties: the constitution of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of bourgeois domination, the conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Here is still more precise: “We have followed the more or less latent civil war in present society up to the point where it erupts in an open revolution, and where, through the evident collapse of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat will found its domination.” Thus, it is through a violent Revolution against the bourgeois class that the proletariat will seize power and realize communism.
But, at the same time, it appears to Marx that it is the bourgeoisie itself which, having to complete its own revolutionary movement, will give the signal for the upheaval. Against absolutism or what remains of it, against feudalism or what remains of it, the bourgeoisie will rise up, and when it has unleashed the events, when it has opened the crisis, the proletariat, more powerful today than were the Levellers of Lilburne under the English Revolution in 1648 or the proletarians of Chaumette in 1793, will seize the bourgeois Revolution by revolutionary means. It will begin by fighting alongside the bourgeoisie, and as soon as it is victorious, it will expropriate the bourgeoisie of its victory. “In Germany,” Marx and Engels wrote in 1847, “the communist party will fight alongside the bourgeoisie in all cases where the bourgeoisie takes up its revolutionary role again; with it, it will combat absolute monarchy, feudal landed property, the petty bourgeoisie. But not for a moment will it neglect to awaken among the workers the clearest possible consciousness of the opposition that exists between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and that makes them enemies. The social and political conditions that will accompany the triumph of the bourgeoisie must be turned against the bourgeoisie itself as so many weapons that the German workers will immediately know how to use. After the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the struggle against the bourgeoisie must begin without delay.
“It is Germany above all that will attract the attention of the communists. Germany is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution. This revolution it will accomplish in the presence of a general development of European civilization and of a development of the proletariat that neither England in the seventeenth century nor France in the eighteenth knew. The bourgeois revolution will therefore, and of all necessity, be the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution.”
Thus, it is upon a victorious bourgeois Revolution that the proletarian Revolution will be grafted. Marx’s mind, in its lofty and somewhat sarcastic irony, took pleasure in these games of thought. That history should mystify the bourgeoisie by wresting from its hands its still-warm victory was for him a bitter joy. But it was a plan of proletarian revolution too complicated and contradictory. First, if the proletariat does not have the strength to give itself the signal for the Revolution, if it is obliged to count on the fortunate surprises of the bourgeois Revolution, how can one be assured that it will have against the victorious bourgeoisie the strength it did not have before the bourgeois movement? Either, in its attempt at revolution against the old absolutist and feudal world, the bourgeoisie will be defeated: and under its defeat the proletariat will be crushed long before having fought for itself. Or it will prevail; it will break the arbitrariness of kings, the power of nobles and priests, absorb feudal property, abolish corporate constraints: and it will rush forward with so lively, so enthusiastic a movement into the career it has opened, that the proletariat will be powerless to suddenly create a new and contrary movement. And it will do no good to proceed by surprise and violence, to attempt to organize “its dictatorship,” and to “conquer democracy” by force — its actual power cannot be artificially raised above the level at which it stood before the bourgeois Revolution. Miquel was not lacking in clear-sightedness when he wrote to Marx in his famous letter of 1850, in anticipation of a resumption of Revolution: “The workers’ party may prevail over the upper bourgeoisie and the remnants of the upper feudality, but it will be shot in the flanks by the democrats. We can perhaps give the Revolution an anti-bourgeois direction for some time; we can destroy the essential conditions of bourgeois production: but it is impossible for us to bring down the petty bourgeoisie. To obtain as much as possible — that is my motto. We must prevent as long as possible after the first victory any organization of the petty bourgeois, and especially oppose in serried phalanx any constituent assembly. Particular terrorism, local anarchy, must replace for us what we lack in the large scale.” But one does not thus replace “what is lacking in the large scale.”
It is certain that when a class is not yet historically ready, when it is obliged to await the signal and the means of its own action from the very ones it claims to replace, when its Revolution, borrowing its force from the enemy movement, is still only a parasitic Revolution, it can promise itself some success only if it keeps the Revolution open and “in permanence,” if it prolongs the agitation of all social elements. But in this game it scarcely does more than buy time or increase the chances of a reaction that sweeps away both proletariat and bourgeoisie. It is the tactic to which the working class is condemned when it is still in a period of insufficient preparation. And if one of the characteristics of utopian socialism is not to have counted on the proper force of the working class, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels still belongs to the period of utopia. Robert Owen and Fourier counted on the goodwill of the upper classes. Marx and Engels await, for the proletariat, the favor of a bourgeois Revolution.
What the Manifesto proposes is not the method of Revolution of a class sure of itself and whose hour has finally come: it is the expedient of Revolution of an impatient and weak class that wishes to force by artifice the march of things. Indeed, at the end of this paradoxical effort, after this sort of proletarian hijacking of the bourgeois Revolution, it is not a full victory of the proletariat and of communism that Marx foresees: it is a regime singularly mixed of capitalist property and communism, of violence against property and organization of credit. A singular thing! After having observed that it is the evolution of industry and the growth of the industrial proletariat that create a revolutionary force, the Manifesto at first foresees in the immediate program of the victorious communist Revolution only the expropriation of ground rent. It falls back behind Babeuf, whose glory it is to have brought industrial production as well as agricultural production into the communist plan. It retreats almost to Saint-Just, who seems to have foreseen the possibility for the nation to absorb rents. “We have seen above,” says Marx, “that the first step of the workers’ revolution would be to constitute the proletariat as the ruling class, to conquer the democratic regime.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest little by little from the bourgeoisie all capital, to centralize in the hands of the State — that is to say, of the proletariat constituted as the ruling class — the instruments of production, and to increase as quickly as possible the available mass of productive forces.
“It goes without saying that this will imply, in the initial period, despotic infractions of the right of property and of the bourgeois conditions of production. Measures will have to be taken that will no doubt seem insufficient and that cannot be maintained permanently, but that, once the movement has begun, will lead to new measures and will be indispensable as means for revolutionizing the entire regime of production. These measures, obviously, will be different in different countries. However, the following measures will be fairly generally applicable, at least in the most advanced countries:
“1. Expropriation of landed property; application of ground rent to State expenditures. “2. A heavily progressive tax. “3. Abolition of inheritance. “4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. “5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State by means of a national bank constituted with State capital and with an exclusive monopoly. “6. Centralization of the transport industries in the hands of the State. “7. Multiplication of national manufactures, of national instruments of production, clearing and improvement of cultivable lands according to an overall plan. “8. Obligatory labor for all: organization of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. “9. Combination of agriculture and industrial labor: preparation of all measures capable of progressively abolishing the difference between town and country. “10. Free public education for all children. Abolition of the forms currently in use of child labor in factories. Combination of education and material production, etc.”
A strange program, in which the agrarian communism of the eighteenth century and some elements of what we today call the Saint-Mandé program are placed side by side: Marx and Engels, in the industrial order, content themselves at first with the nationalization of the railways: there is not even the nationalization of the mines accepted today by the radical-socialists. But what strikes me is not the chaos of the program, the coexistence of agricultural communism and industrial capitalism. It is not the contradiction between the article that abolishes inheritance and thereby withdraws from new generations industrial capital, and the body of articles that leave individual property intact. History demonstrates that diverse and even contradictory forms have often coexisted: for a long time corporate production and capitalist production functioned side by side: all of the seventeenth and all of the eighteenth centuries are made of the mixture of the two, and for a long time too free agricultural labor and serfdom had coexisted. And I am convinced that in the revolutionary evolution that will lead us to communism, collectivist property and individual property, communism and capitalism will long be juxtaposed. It is the very law of great transformations. Marx and Engels had every right, without disavowing themselves, to say in 1872 that they set rather little store by their program of 1847. “This passage should today be modified in several of its terms. The immense progress accomplished by large-scale industry in the last twenty-five years, the parallel progress accomplished by the working class organized as a party… make more than one passage of this program appear outdated.” At most one might be surprised that they did not, as early as 1847, give a larger share to industrial communism.
But what is astonishing is that they could have believed the proletariat capable of confiscating bourgeois revolutions for its own benefit and of conquering, by an act of authority, democracy, while they supposed it incapable, on the morrow of its victory and even in the most advanced countries, of broadly instituting industrial communism.
What is above all striking in the Manifesto is not the chaos of the program, which might sort itself out, but the chaos of methods. It is by a coup de force that the proletariat first installed itself in power: it is by a coup de force that it wrested power from the bourgeois revolutionaries. It “conquers democracy” — that is to say, it actually suspends it, since it substitutes for the will of the majority of freely consulted citizens the dictatorial will of a class. It is again by force, by dictatorial power, that it commits those first “despotic infractions” of property that the Manifesto foresees. But afterward, for the entire development of the revolution, for the elaboration and organization of the new order, does the dictatorship of the proletariat persist, or has it returned under the law of democracy, of universal suffrage and of transactions? It is impossible to suppose that Marx and Engels contemplated suspending for a long time, for the benefit of the proletarian dictatorship, democracy. How could they, when the proletarian revolution itself had sprung from a vast movement toward democracy? How could they still, since they leave intact the economic power of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist form of industry? To leave to the employers, at least in a provisional period whose end they do not even attempt to indicate, the direction of workshops, manufactures, and factories, and to keep those same employers outside of political rights, outside the city, is an impossibility. It is contradictory to make of the bourgeois passive citizens and to leave them still, in large measure, masters of production. It is contradictory to organize State credit and not to submit the functioning of that credit to the control of the entire nation. A class, born of democracy, which, instead of submitting to the law of democracy, prolonged its dictatorship beyond the first days of the Revolution, would soon be no more than a band encamped upon the territory and abusing the resources of the country. Therefore, either Marx and Engels lead the proletariat toward a chaos of barbarism and impotence, or they foresee that after the first political and economic acts that will have given the working class a great impetus and stamped democracy with a socialist seal, it will merge again into national life and into the legality of universal suffrage. But what does this mean? And if democracy is not prepared for the communist movement, will it not thwart, instead of extending, the effects of the proletariat’s first dictatorial measures? And if on the contrary democracy is prepared for it, if the proletariat can, by legal force alone, obtain from it that it develop in the communist direction the first revolutionary institutions, then it is in reality the legal conquest of democracy that becomes the sovereign method of Revolution. All the rest, I repeat, is only the expedient, perhaps necessary for a time, of a class still feeble and ill-prepared. But those among today’s socialists who still speak of the “impersonal dictatorship of the proletariat” or who foresee the sudden seizure of power and violence done to democracy, they are falling back to the time when the proletariat was still weak, and when it was reduced to artificial means of victory.
In fact, the tactic of the Manifesto, which consists for the proletariat in diverting toward itself movements it could not have started on its own — this tactic of growing and bold force but still subordinate — the working class employed it by instinct in all the crises of democratic and bourgeois society. Marx had received the idea from the French Revolution and from Babeuf. After 1830, the workers’ movements of Paris and Lyon prolonged in a confused proletarian affirmation the Revolution of the bourgeoisie. In 1848, the proletarians of Paris, Vienna, Berlin attempted, in audacious days, to divert the movement of the Revolution toward socialism. Blanqui’s famous saying — “One does not create a movement, one diverts it” — is the very expression of this politics. It is the active formula of the Communist Manifesto of Marx; it is the watchword of a class that feels itself still a minor but called to high destinies. In 1870, the October 31 following the September 4 is a resumption of the Marxist and Blanquist method. In the Commune itself, the growing action of the socialist proletariat substituting itself for the petty-bourgeois democracy is yet another application of the tactic of the Manifesto: to graft the proletarian Revolution onto the democratic and bourgeois Revolution.
Lassalle had harbored a bolder ambition. He did not wish to let the Revolution, even a bourgeois one, first take a bourgeois form. He wished to capture it, so to speak, at its very source, and to divert it at once toward the proletariat. Thus, when in 1863 the conflict broke out between the Prussian legislature and the Prussian ministry, when the progressive and liberal bourgeoisie of Germany stirred to defend the threatened constitutional right against Bismarck, one could wonder whether the conflict would not lead to a revolution. In that revolution, it would not have been the social question, the question of property, that would have been posed. It would not have been of communist and proletarian origin, but on the contrary of bourgeois and parliamentary origin. It would have been like a resumption of the German bourgeois Revolution that Marx had announced in November 1847, and which aborted in 1848 and 1849. But this German Revolution, however bourgeois it might be in its origins, Lassalle did not want it to be bourgeois, even for a moment, in its manifestation and its course. It was, according to him, the organized German proletariat that was to call forth the Revolution from the bourgeois conflict and take at once into its own hands the new force of events. He proclaimed that the bourgeoisie was without audacity, that it would at most try to return to the German federation of 1848, and that on the contrary entire German democratic unity had to be instituted. “Miserably mediocre aims,” he exclaimed, “can only arouse miserably mediocre conduct; only a great idea, only enthusiasm for powerful aims create devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, valor!” And by what right would the German bourgeoisie, which had let liberty perish in 1848, now present itself as the guardian of liberty? Moreover — and Lassalle noted it triumphantly — the leaders of the liberal bourgeoisie declared in advance that they refused any revolution. It would therefore be the proletariat that would immediately pass to the foreground if the crisis became revolutionary. “I find M. de Benningsen very clumsy,” Lassalle said, “for reminding us that he and his party do not want any revolution! Since he reminds us of this ceaselessly, let us give him this pleasure and not forget it. Let us raise our hands and commit ourselves, if under one form or another the great upheaval occurs, to remind the national-liberals that until the last moment they declared they did not want a revolution.”
It was thus to the proletariat that the Revolution would be, so to speak, awarded from the very first hour. Lassalle, conscious of the growth of the working class, and impatient too to harvest all the fruits of life, did not accept, as Marx had in 1847, an initial period of bourgeois revolution. Although born of a conflict between the liberal bourgeoisie and royal absolutism, the Revolution would pass from its very first day into workers’ hands. It was still the application of the Marxist method, but in a sort of limiting case where the duration of the bourgeois period is reduced to zero. Of this suddenly conquered revolutionary power, Lassalle intended, it is true, to make a very moderate use. He would have confined himself to establishing universal suffrage, to suppressing indirect taxes, to freeing the press from the yoke of capital, and to liberally subsidizing from State resources workers’ production associations: no expropriation; no extended application of a communist plan.
Thus, for a hundred and twenty years, the method of workers’ revolution of which Babeuf gave the first application, of which Marx and Blanqui gave the formula, and which consists of profiting from bourgeois Revolutions to slip into them proletarian communism, has been tried or proposed many times, and in many forms. It has certainly produced great results. It is through this method that in great historical days the working class became conscious of its force and its destiny. It is through this method that indirectly still and obliquely, the proletariat tried its hand at power. It is through this method that the question of property and communism has constantly been on the order of the day of Europe, as the Manifesto counseled: “In all these movements, the question that the communists will put to the foreground, the question for them essential, is that of property, even if the debate on this question has not yet been engaged very deeply.” It is through this method, finally, that the proletariat acted long before possessing the decisive force. But it was a chimera to hope that proletarian communism could be grafted onto the bourgeois revolution. It was a chimera to believe that the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary agitations would give the proletariat the occasion for a successful coup de force. In fact, this tactic has never succeeded. Sometimes the revolutionary bourgeoisie sank, carrying the proletariat with it. Sometimes the victorious revolutionary bourgeoisie had the strength to contain, to push back the proletarian movement. And moreover, even if by surprise a proletarian movement had suddenly imposed itself upon agitations of a different order and a different origin, what would it have achieved? It would have rapidly weakened into a purely democratic movement through a series of compromises. From a victorious Commune, at most a radical Republic would have emerged.
Today, the determinate mode under which Marx, Engels, and Blanqui conceived the proletarian Revolution is eliminated by history. First, the proletariat, now stronger, no longer counts on the favor of a bourgeois revolution. It is by its own force and in the name of its own idea that it wishes to act upon democracy. It does not lie in wait for a bourgeois revolution in order to throw the bourgeoisie off its revolution like unseating a rider in order to seize his mount. It has its own organization, its own power. It has, through the trade unions and the cooperatives, a growing economic power. It has, through universal suffrage and democracy, a legal force indefinitely extensible. It is not reduced to being the adventurous and violent parasite of bourgeois revolutions. It methodically prepares, or better, it methodically begins its own Revolution through the gradual and legal conquest of the power of production and of the power of the State. Indeed, it would wait in vain, for a coup de force and a class dictatorship, for the occasion of a bourgeois revolution. The revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie is closed. It may be that to safeguard its economic interests and under the action of the working class, the bourgeoisie of Italy, Germany, and Belgium may be led to extend the constitutional rights of the people, to claim the fullness of universal suffrage, the reality of the parliamentary regime, the responsibility of ministers before Parliament. It may be that the combined action of bourgeois democracy and the proletariat will push back everywhere royal prerogative or imperial autocracy to the point where the monarchy has only a nominal existence. It is certain that the struggle for complete democracy is not over in Europe: but, in this struggle, the bourgeoisie will play scarcely more than a supporting role, as is visible at this moment in Belgium. And moreover, there are already, in all the Constitutions of central and western Europe, enough elements of democracy for the passage to full democracy to be accomplished without revolutionary crisis. Thus the proletariat can no longer, as Marx and Blanqui had thought, shelter its Revolution behind bourgeois revolutions: it can no longer seize and turn to its profit the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary agitations, which are exhausted. Now it is openly, on the broad terrain of democratic legality and universal suffrage, that the socialist proletariat prepares, extends, and organizes its Revolution. It is to this methodical, direct, and legal revolutionary action that Engels, in the last part of his life, invited the European proletariat in famous words that cast, in effect, the Communist Manifesto into the past. Henceforth, the revolutionary action of the bourgeoisie being closed, any means of violence employed by the proletariat would only coalesce against it all non-proletarian forces. And that is why I have always interpreted the general strike not as a means of violence, but as one of the vastest mechanisms of legal pressure that the educated and organized proletariat could wield, for defined and great objectives.
But if the historical hypothesis from which the revolutionary conception of the Communist Manifesto proceeds is indeed exhausted, if the proletariat can no longer count on the revolutionary movements of the bourgeoisie to deploy its own force of Revolution, if it can no longer make its class dictatorship emerge from a period of chaotic and violent democracy, can it at least expect its sudden advent from a sudden economic collapse of the bourgeoisie, from a cataclysm of the capitalist system driven at last to the impossibility of living and depositing its bankruptcy? That was yet another perspective of proletarian Revolution opened by Marx. He counted at once, to bring about the class dictatorship of the proletariat, on the revolutionary political advent of the bourgeoisie and on its economic fall. Of itself, one day, under the ever more intense and more frequent action of the crises it had unleashed, and through the exhaustion of misery to which it had reduced the exploited, capitalism was destined to succumb. It is not possible to seriously contest that this was, in the Manifesto, the thought of Marx and Engels. “All societies until now have rested, as we have seen, on the antagonism of oppressing classes and oppressed classes. But to be able to oppress a class, at least one must assure it conditions of existence that allow it to drag out its life of slavery. The serf, despite his serfdom, had risen to the rank of member of the commune; the petit bourgeois had become a bourgeois despite the yoke of feudal absolutism. The modern worker, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, descends more and more below the condition of his own class. The worker becomes a pauper, and pauperism grows even faster than population and wealth. It thus becomes manifest that the bourgeoisie is incapable of remaining henceforth the ruling class of society and of imposing on society, as an imperative law, the conditions of its existence as a class. It has become incapable of ruling, for it can no longer assure its slaves the subsistence that allows them to endure slavery. It is reduced to letting them fall to a condition where it must feed them instead of being fed by them. Society can no longer live under the reign of this bourgeoisie; that is to say, the existence of this bourgeoisie is no longer compatible with social life.”
And it is at this moment that, bourgeois and capitalist exploitation having reached, so to speak, the limit of vital tolerance of the exploited classes, there occurs an inevitable commotion, an irresistible uprising, and the latent civil war between the classes is at last resolved by “the violent collapse of the bourgeoisie.”
Such indeed is the thought of Marx and Engels at that date. I know that people now seek to cast a veil over the brutality of these texts. I know that subtle Marxist interpreters say that Marx and Engels meant to speak only of a “relative” pauperization. Just as, when theologians wish to reconcile the texts of the Bible with scientifically established reality, they say that in Genesis the word “day” designates a geological period of several million years. I do not object. These are elegances and charities of exegesis that allow one to pass painlessly from the long-professed dogma to the better-known truth. And since “revolutionary” minds need these accommodations, who would think to oppose them? Yet if Marx had wished to speak only of a relative pauperization, how could he have concluded that capitalism would make its slaves fall below even the vital minimum and thereby compel them, through a series of irresistible reflexes, to bring about the violent collapse of the bourgeoisie?
It has also been said that Marx and Engels had wished only to define the abstract tendency of capitalism — what bourgeois society would become by its own law if workers’ organization did not counteract, by an inverse effort, this tendency of oppression and depression. And certainly, how could Marx, who made the proletariat the very essence and living form of socialism, have failed to recognize this proletarian action? But it seems that in Marx’s thought this action, while in effect securing for the proletariat some partial economic advantages, is summed up above all in increasing its class consciousness, in developing in it the sense of its ills and of its strength. “But the development of industry does not merely increase the proletariat in numbers. It agglomerates the proletariat in denser masses, and its force grows with the consciousness it has of it. The differences in interests and in ways of life level out between the various categories of the proletariat itself, as the mechanical equipment destroys the differences in types of work and reduces wages almost everywhere to a level of equal modesty. But the wages of the workers undergo oscillations ever more frequent, owing to the growing competition among the bourgeois themselves, which leads to commercial crises. The entire condition of the worker is more and more called into question as the development and unceasing improvement of machinery accelerate. More and more then the collisions between the individual worker and the individual bourgeois take on the character of collisions between two classes. The beginning is that the workers start to form coalitions against the bourgeois. The object of their union is the defense of their wages. They go so far as to found lasting associations for the purpose of accumulating munitions for eventual uprisings. In places, the struggle breaks out in riots.
“Sometimes the workers carry off a victory, but a transient one. The true benefit of these struggles is not that which gives immediate success. It consists in the union that spreads more and more among the workers. This union is facilitated by the multiplied means of communication that large-scale industry creates and that allow workers in different localities to enter into mutual relations. Now, as soon as this union is achieved, the multiplicity of local struggles of the same kind is transformed into a single national struggle, centrally directed, into a class struggle. But every class struggle is a political struggle. The union that the medieval bourgeois, when they had only country roads, took centuries to achieve, the modern proletarians, thanks to the railways, achieve in a few years.
“This organization, however, which creates a proletarian class and, consequently, a proletarian political party, is at every moment broken anew by the competition among the workers themselves. But always too it rises up again stronger, firmer, more powerful. By taking advantage of the bourgeoisie’s internal dissensions, it manages to wrest recognition, by force and by law, of some of the workers’ interests. Thus, for the ten-hours law in England.”
If I have reproduced this brilliant picture of the modern workers’ movement, it is not to discuss each of its features: there would be, on several points, especially on the leveling of wages, many reservations to make. But I wanted the reader to be able to usefully pose the question that I pose to myself: To what extent did Marx admit that the economic and political organization of the proletarians checked the tendency of pauperization which is, according to him, the very law of capitalism? I believe one can answer: to a very slight extent. No doubt, the workers thus grouped in class and in party win, above all thanks to the divisions of the possessing class, some partial advantages: but it seems that their union in combat is the only substantial benefit they draw from the combat itself. Therefore the force of cohesion and protest of the workers grows with a view to a general uprising; their chances grow of carrying through the revolutionary movement and precipitating the collapse of the bourgeoisie. But in fact, and in the very depth of their present life, they undergo, opposing to it only too feeble counterweights, the law of proletarian pauperization. It is no doubt even this contradiction between the growing pauperization suffered by the proletariat and the growing force of protest and action that organizes itself within it, that appears to Marx as the mainspring of the great coming upheavals, as the immediate force of Revolution. The concrete improvements obtained through workers’ effort only imperfectly compensate for the concrete depreciation that working-class life suffers through the law of bourgeois production. In the conflict of the tendencies that contend for the proletariat, the depressive tendency has the primacy in the present; it above all acts upon the actual condition of the working class.
And since we speak of tendencies, it is in this direction that the entire thought of Marx and Engels visibly inclined. I would almost say that Marx needed an infinitely impoverished and destitute proletariat in his dialectical conception of modern history. The proletariat, in order to be in Marx’s Hegelian dialectic the human moment, in order truly to be the very idea of humanity, had to be stripped to such a point of all social rights that humanity alone, infinite in distress and in right, should subsist in it. And how could one flatter oneself that one understands Marx without descending to the dialectical origins, to the deep sources of his thought? His Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844 in the Franco-German Annals, is in this regard a decisive document. “Where then,” he says, “is the positive possibility of German emancipation? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, of a class of bourgeois society that is not a class of bourgeois society, of a state that is the dissolution of all states, of a sphere that has a universal character through its universal suffering and that claims no particular right, because it is not a particular injustice but total injustice that is visited upon it, that can appeal to no historical title but only to the title of humanity, that stands not in a particular opposition to such or such a consequence but in general opposition to all the principles of the German state, of a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and without thereby emancipating all the other spheres of society — which, in a word, is the total loss of man, and which can therefore recover itself only through the total restitution of man.”
I well understand that it is Germany that Marx speaks of here, and the particular conditions of its emancipation. I know that he recognizes in the social classes of France a higher historical idealism, that they have, according to him, the habit of regarding themselves as the guardians of the universal interest, and that it will suffice in France, for complete emancipation to be accomplished, that this idealist action pass from the bourgeoisie, in which the human mission is limited and opposed by property concerns, to the French proletariat, in which the human mission can develop its universality without obstacle.
Yes, it is Germany and the German proletariat that are at issue. But who does not see that, despite the ethnic and historical differences, it is for Marx a figure of the proletariat and even, by its absolute destitution, the supreme figure? It is therefore under a Hegelian transposition of Christianity that Marx represents to himself the modern movement of emancipation. Just as the Christian God lowered Himself to the lowest depths of suffering humanity to raise up all humanity, just as the Savior, to truly save all men, had to reduce Himself to that degree of destitution bordering on animality beneath which no man could be found, just as this infinite abasement of God was the condition of the infinite elevation of man, so in Marx’s dialectic, the proletariat, the modern Savior, had to be stripped of every guarantee, divested of every right, lowered to the profoundest depths of historical and social nothingness, in order to raise, in raising itself, all of humanity. And as the god-man, to remain in his mission, had to remain poor, suffering, and humiliated until the triumphal day of the resurrection, until that particular victory over death that freed all humanity from death, so the proletariat remains all the more in its dialectical mission the more it bears, until the final uprising, until the revolutionary resurrection of humanity, like an ever-heavier cross, the essential law of oppression and depression of capitalism. Hence obviously, in Marx, an original tendency to receive with difficulty the idea of a partial elevation of the proletariat. Hence a sort of joy, in which there enters some dialectical mysticism, at noting the crushing forces that weigh upon the proletarians.
Marx was mistaken. It was not from absolute destitution that absolute liberation could come. However poor the German proletarian might be, he was not supreme poverty. First, in the modern worker there is already the entire portion of humanity conquered by the abolition of primordial savageries and barbarisms, by the abolition of slavery and serfdom. Then, however mediocre in effect the proper historical titles of the German proletarians might be at that time, they were not entirely destitute of them. Their history, since the French Revolution, was not entirely empty. And above all, through their sympathy for the emancipatory action of the French proletarians — the workers of July 14, of October 5 and 6, of August 10, of the Parisian sections — they had a share in the historical titles of the French proletariat, which had become universal titles, just as the Declaration of the Rights of Man had been a universal symbol, just as the fall of the Bastille had been a universal deliverance. At the very moment when Marx was writing for the German proletariat these words of mystical abasement and mystical resurrection, the German proletarians, like Marx himself moreover, were turning their hearts and their eyes toward France, toward the great fatherland of the proletariat’s historical titles. But what is surprising if Marx, with this original dialectical conception, gave primacy in capitalist evolution to the tendency of depression? What is astonishing if in Capital he still wrote that “oppression, slavery, exploitation, misery were growing,” but also “the resistance of the working class, ceaselessly swelling and more and more disciplined, united, and organized by the very mechanism of capitalist production” — placing here again in balance a force of depression that acts immediately and a force of resistance and organization that seems above all to prepare the future?
Engels, for his part, formed so rigid and strict an idea of the inflexibility of the capitalist system, of its impotence to adapt to the slightest reform, that he commits in interpreting social movements the gravest and most decisive errors. It is difficult to imagine heavier blunders than those he commits at every step in his famous book on The Condition of the Working Classes in England. He saw everywhere incompatibilities, impossibilities, insoluble contradictions that could be resolved only by Revolution. He announces in 1845, as imminent and absolutely inevitable in England, a workers’ and communist Revolution that will be the bloodiest history has ever seen. The poor will slaughter the rich and burn the chateaux. There is no possible doubt in this regard. “Nowhere is it so easy to prophesy as in England, because here all social developments are of an extreme clarity and acuteness. The Revolution must come, and it is already too late to introduce a peaceful solution.” A strange view of that country of England, always so skillful in evolutions and compromises! He pushes his social intransigence so far that he arrives at holding, on the great precise questions that are posed at that time, the language of the most stubborn conservatives. As for them, all political and social progress seems to him impossible within the present system. The Chartists are driving England either to the abyss or to complete communist Revolution. They demand universal suffrage: but it is irreconcilable with the monarchy; they demand the ten-hour day: but it is irreconcilable, in the capitalist system, with the demands of production; and its effect, truly excellent, will be to oblige England to enter, on pain of ruin, upon entirely new paths. “The economic arguments of the manufacturers,” writes Engels, “that the ten-hours bill will increase the costs of production, that English industry will thereby be rendered incapable of competing against foreign competition, that the wages of labor will necessarily fall, are half true: but they prove only one thing — that the industrial greatness of England can be maintained only by the barbarous treatment inflicted on the workers, by the destruction of health, by the social, physical, and intellectual deterioration of entire generations. Naturally, if the ten-hour day became a definitive legal measure, England would be ruined by it; but because this law would necessarily bring in its train other measures that would oblige England to enter upon an entirely different path from the one followed hitherto, this law would be a step forward.”
What a spirit of distrust toward partial reforms! What narrow limits assigned to the faculties of transformation of the industrial regime! And when in 1892, fifty years later, Engels reissues this book, he does not for a moment think of asking himself by what vice of thought, by what systematic error, he had been led to ideas so false about the political and social movement of England. He prefers to take pleasure in a work that history has almost entirely refuted. It is therefore entirely natural to suppose that Engels, with this original way of understanding things, always inclined, like Marx, to give to the forces of depression that lower the working class under the capitalist regime the primacy over the forces of elevation.
But, whatever the interpretation given on this point to the uncertain and obscure thought of Marx and Engels, it matters little. The essential thing is that none of the socialists today accepts the theory of the absolute pauperization of the proletariat. Some openly, others with infinite precautions, some with a mischievous Viennese bonhomie, all declare that it is false that on the whole the material economic condition of the proletarians is growing worse. Of the depressive tendencies and the tendencies of elevation, it is not, in the sum and in the immediate reality of life, the depressive tendencies that prevail. From that point on, it is no longer permissible to repeat after Marx and Engels that the capitalist system will perish because it does not even assure to those it exploits the minimum necessary for life. From that point on as well, it becomes puerile to expect that an economic cataclysm threatening the proletariat in its very life will provoke, under the revolt of the vital instinct, “the violent collapse of the bourgeoisie.” Thus, the two hypotheses, one historical, the other economic, from which was to emerge, in the thought of the Communist Manifesto, the sudden proletarian Revolution, the Revolution of workers’ dictatorship, are equally ruined.
Neither will there be, in the political order, a bourgeois revolution that the revolutionary proletariat can suddenly ride; nor will there be, in the economic order, a cataclysm, a catastrophe that, upon the ruins of collapsed capitalism, will call forth in a single day the class domination of the communist proletariat and a new system of production. These hypotheses have not been in vain. Though the proletariat was unable to seize any of the bourgeois revolutions, it has nonetheless pushed itself forward over the past hundred and twenty years through the agitations of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and it will continue, under the new forms that democracy develops, to take advantage of the inevitable internal conflicts of the bourgeoisie. Though there has not been a total and revolutionary reaction of the vital instinct of the proletariat under a total cataclysm of capitalism, there have been innumerable crises which, in attesting to the intimate disorder of capitalist production,
Capitalist production has naturally roused proletarians to prepare a new order. But the error begins when one expects the sudden collapse of capitalism and the sudden advent of the proletariat from some great political upheaval of bourgeois society or some great economic upheaval of bourgeois production.
It is not through the unforeseen repercussions of political agitations that the proletariat will come to power, but through the methodical and legal organization of its own forces under the law of democracy and universal suffrage. It is not through the collapse of the capitalist bourgeoisie but through the growth of the proletariat that the communist order will gradually establish itself in our society. To anyone who accepts these henceforth necessary truths, precise and reliable methods of social transformation and progressive organization are not slow to appear. Those who do not accept them clearly, those who do not truly take seriously the decisive results of the proletarian movement over the past century, those who retreat all the way back to the Communist Manifesto so visibly surpassed by events, or who mix with the direct and true thoughts that present reality suggests to them remnants of old ideas from which truth has fled, condemn themselves to live in chaos.
But I could justify this general assertion in detail only through a minute analysis of all the present tendencies of French socialism and international socialism. I could also fully legitimate the method I have outlined only through precise applications and through the exposition of a program of “revolutionary evolution.” This will be the object of a more systematic and more connected work than the fragmentary studies which, at your request, my dear Peguy, I now submit to readers of good faith who are curious, in these difficult questions, even of a modest beginning of clarity.
I wish, in this introduction, to add but one word, which bears directly on the subject of the volume. Some of our critics readily say that this method of evolution subject to the law of democracy risks weakening and obscuring the socialist ideal. It is exactly the opposite. It is the declamatory appeals to violence, it is the quasi-mystical expectation of a liberating catastrophe that dispense men from specifying their thought, from determining their ideal. But those who propose to lead democracy, by broad and sure paths, toward complete communism, those who cannot count on the enthusiasm of an hour and the illusions of an excited people, are obliged to say with the most decisive clarity toward what form of society they wish to direct men and things, and by what sequence of institutions and laws they hope to arrive at the communist order. The more the socialist party merges with the nation through the definitive acceptance of democracy and legality, the more it will be bound to mark its own conception: and through the less agitated atmosphere the final goal will be more clearly outlined. On pain of losing itself in the most vulgar empiricism and dissolving into an opportunism without rule or purpose, it will have to order all its thoughts, all its action in view of the communist ideal. Or rather, this ideal must be always present and always discernible in each of its acts, in each of its words.
I do not know whether Bernstein has not been led, by the necessities of polemics, to illuminate above all the critical side of his work. It would in any case be a great error and a great fault to appear to dissolve in the mists of the future the final goal of socialism. Communism must be the directing and visible idea of the whole movement. “Critical” socialism must be, more than any other, active and constructive. And one of the primary forms of action is to dispel the equivocations with which the extreme parties of bourgeois democracy still delude minds. To disentangle the sophisms and denounce the contradictions of bourgeois radicalism is perhaps the first duty of those who wish to win democracy legally to the whole of the socialist and communist idea. It was quite naturally that I was led, after having sketched in broad strokes the method of revolutionary evolution, to ask the radical party what it means by its famous formula of “individual property.” This is, of course, only a very small part of the critical examination to which radical equivocations and contradictions must be subjected by our party.
M. Maxime Leroy, in La revue blanche, has raised some objections against me. He tells me that usufruct, usage, habitation, mortgages, the co-ownership of main walls and staircases, etc., are ancient rights that in no way imply a new social right.
But there is a misunderstanding. I have never said that these were new forms, still less sketches of social co-ownership. On the contrary, I have always recalled that it was for the benefit of other individuals that the right of the individual was limited. But it remains true that property, even individual property, is extremely complex, that it is composed of very diverse rights, sometimes united in the hands of a single individual, sometimes dispersed in the hands of several; that it is far from being an indecomposable block and a simple quantity; that there is consequently something childish about posing, in abstracto, as the defender of individual property; and that one is furthermore ill-founded in reproaching us for the extreme complication of the concept of communist property, which will encompass the right of the nation, the right of intermediate groups, and the right of individuals. This, on this point, is all I wished to demonstrate.
M. Leroy says: “What must be noted is that all legislations have imposed restrictions on the right of individual property as on all individual rights… Absolute juridical individualism can only be a metaphysical entity.” No doubt: but what I note is, first, that the French Revolution itself, despite its individualist preoccupation, struck at individual property, in the order of inheritance, a blow without precedent. M. Leroy tells me that “the principle of equal partition was a customary principle already applied in Germania and in Greece before Solon.” There would doubtless be much to say on this subject: but what a distance between those ancient customs and the vigorous legislation of the Convention! And above all, how has M. Leroy failed to see that what makes the revolutionary legislation interesting is its apparent antinomy? It is in the name of the rights of individuals, and to safeguard them, that the Revolution is obliged to constitute a common and intangible family estate. Concrete individualism translates here into a familial communism; in the same way, when society takes care of all individuals, when it sees and protects in them against all usurpations, not the designated heirs of this or that family patrimony, but the heirs of the human patrimony, it is social communism that will be the supreme form and the supreme guarantee of this high universal individualism. That it should be the individualist logic that led to familial collectivism — that is something new in the world, and I am astonished that M. Leroy recalls me to the forests of Germania.
In the second place, what I have noted is that in this individualist society, individual property undergoes an incessant repression and an incessant denaturalization. M. Leroy agrees as regards a whole category of laws: “Thus,” he says, “it is less in the Civil Code of 1804, which is only the recent past revised, that one must seek the new law, than in the subsequent social laws which, as M. Jaures observes, constitute genuine dispossessions in a collectivist sense: the right to strike, labor inspection, etc.” This is very important and would suffice to show the frivolity and the doctrinal inconsistency of the radicals, who proclaim themselves against us the saviors of individual property and who do not seem to realize that the social laws to which they consent under the pressure of the working class are a perpetual restriction upon it. But if it would be puerile to seek in the Napoleonic Code the traits of the new law, there is interest in showing that, even in the Civil Code, even outside the social legislation that the working class has gradually imposed, individual property has almost unlimited faculties of decomposition, that it lends itself to all sorts of dismemberments, and that the very relations between individual properties are marked by reciprocal partial expropriations.
Indeed, M. Leroy makes far too little of the revolutionary and latent communist meaning of the right of expropriation for public utility: “The superior right that society arrogates over private properties is merely the resumption, in a democratic sense, of the king’s eminent right of property over all the goods of the kingdom.” Perhaps, although the Revolution assigned other origins to this right. But what is important, precisely, is the resumption of this right in a democratic sense. For this democratic resumption can be continued and enlarged in the socialist sense. And how can it seem indifferent to M. Leroy that bourgeois society, driven by the power of capitalist interests, has little by little given to this right of expropriation, before the eyes of the proletariat which meditates and waits, a growing extension? While the radicals say: “Individual property,” capitalism itself strengthens and makes supple the juridical tool of expropriation of which the proletariat will make use against the entire bourgeois system. That is what I had the right to point out: and it seems to me that, if my whole demonstration is taken in its true sense, it fully resists the objections of M. Leroy, whom I thank moreover for the courteous and almost friendly form he has given them.
I stop here, my dear Peguy, congratulating myself once more, whatever our divergences may be on many questions, or by reason of these very divergences, on being in direct communication of thought with the free minds that your initiative and your ever-wakeful criticism have gathered around the Cahiers de la Quinzaine.
JEAN JAURES
13 October 1901
REPUBLIC AND SOCIALISM
Eleven years ago, at the time when German Social Democracy was elaborating its program, the draft program that was soon to be adopted at Erfurt was submitted to Engels, the surviving friend of Marx. Engels raised grave objections to the political part of this program. He found it timid, inconsistent, and ineffective. One speaks, he said, of direct universal suffrage, of the referendum and popular initiative. But of what use can this be so long as the very Constitution of Germany is absolutist, and so long as Germany, fragmented into small states where the will of the princes dominates, does not offer a free and unified field to the will of the nation? How can one, with such a political Constitution, hope for a regular and peaceful passage from capitalism to socialism?
Here I quote verbatim, from the letter of Engels which has just been found among Liebknecht’s papers and which is published by Kautsky’s review, the Neue Zeit:
“One says to oneself and to the party that the society of today is moving toward socialism through an internal evolution, and one does not ask whether, through this very evolution, it will not break the forms, the envelopes of the present Constitution.
“One speaks as if Germany had no need to escape from the chains of an absolutist and chaotic political order. It is permissible to imagine that the old society might transform itself peacefully into the new in countries where the representation of the people concentrates in itself all powers, where one can do constitutionally what one wishes as soon as one has the majority of the people behind one — in democratic republics such as France and America, in monarchies such as England where the dynasty is powerless against the people. But in Germany, where the government is almost all-powerful and where the Reichstag and the other representative bodies are destitute of real power, to hold such language is to bind oneself to naked absolutism.
“If one thing is certain, it is that our party and the working class can come to power only in the form of the democratic republic. This is the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French Revolution has already shown. One cannot imagine that our best militants should become ministers under an emperor, like Miquel.”
From these remarkable words of Engels, I wish to retain today only two points. The first is that, for the illustrious friend of Marx, the democratic republic is not, as so-called doctrinaires of Marxism so often say among us, a purely bourgeois form, which matters as little to the proletariat as any other form of government. Rather, the republic is, according to Engels, the political form of socialism: it announces it, prepares it, even already contains it in some measure, since it alone can lead to it through a legal evolution, without rupture of continuity.
It is therefore we who were faithful to the true Marxist thought, when in the crisis of French liberties we defended the Republic against all its enemies. And those who, under the pretext of revolution and doctrinal purity, sadly took refuge in political abstention, deserted socialist thought. They also deserted the revolutionary tradition of the French proletariat. Engels speaks of the Republic of 1793, of that Revolution which some French socialists declare exclusively bourgeois, and which at one moment was, according to Engels, the appropriate instrument of proletarian dictatorship. Now, the day before yesterday, while searching in the Archives with Gabriel Deville for documents on the Revolution, I read there with a thrill of joy this fragment of a journal of Babeuf. Babeuf congratulates himself on having defended the Revolution and the Republic, even when they were in the hands of persecutors of the people. He congratulates himself on having saved the Republic at the risk of saving at the same time the unworthy men who represented it: “Yes,” he says, “if the royalists did not triumph on 13 Vendemiaire, it is because, in this great danger to public liberty, the democrats felt that, for so sacred an interest, they must, at the peril of their lives, save those of their persecutors who had so betrayed it, but could not perish themselves without its succumbing.”
Admirable words, and which cry out against citizen Vaillant. They leave nothing standing of the pretexts by which he tried to cover his abstention and his policy of balance in the days of republican peril, in the Boulangist crisis and the Nationalist crisis. It is by a usurpation of title that he claims to attach himself to Babouvism; it is we who have been, in those troubled days, faithful to the revolutionary communism of France.
But the words of Engels reveal to us still further to what extent the German socialists were preoccupied with the means of realizing communism. Engels passionately regrets that there is no German republic. And he lets it be glimpsed that, much as it would repel him to see socialists as ministers under an emperor, it would seem to him quite natural for them to take part in the governmental direction of a democratic republic evolving toward socialism. Liebknecht, as will be seen from the fragments cited, went further, since he foresaw the participation of socialists in government even under the imperial Constitution; but whatever may be the case with the ministerial question, which is entirely secondary, the problem that obsessed them all was this: How to pass from bourgeois society to communist society? By what paths? Through what evolution? This is, I dare say, the problem that is always present to our thought. It is to the theoretical and practical solution of this problem that we have given, without reserve and without retreat, all our effort of mind, all our effort of action.
For a moment, in the dazzlement of the great socialist victory of 1893, in the just pride of the growing action exercised by our party, I believed the total and final triumph closer to us than it was. How often then citizen Vaillant warned me not to let myself be carried away by this dangerous illusion! How often then did he put us on guard against the short-term prophecies of Guesde and the mystical expectation of liberating catastrophes! But even in this period of hope both near and ablaze, I never neglected the work of reform, and I always endeavored to give our reform proposals a socialist orientation. I did not see in them merely palliatives for present miseries, but a beginning of socialist organization, seeds of communism sown in capitalist soil. When I took up again the revolutionary peasants’ cahiers of 1789 and demanded that the State should inaugurate, through a monopoly on the importation of wheat, the institution of a public provisioning service that workers’ and peasants’ unions would have managed along with the nation itself; when I demanded, in the great and long debate on sugar, the socialization of refineries and sugar factories, which would have been administered, under the control of the nation, by the organized working class contracting with syndicates of peasant producers and with agricultural workers assured of a minimum wage; when I demanded the expropriation of the mines, whose direction would have been entrusted to a labor council comprising representatives of the State, representatives of the entire working class, and of the miners — I was not merely concerned with limiting capitalist power and raising the condition of the proletarians; I was above all concerned with introducing into the very society of today new forms of property, at once national and syndical, communist and proletarian, which would gradually burst the framework of capitalism. It was in this spirit that when the Workers’ Glass Factory was founded, I deliberately took the side against the friends of Guesde, who, in the preparatory meetings held in Paris, wanted to reduce it to being nothing but a glassworks for the glassmakers, a mere worker imitation of the capitalist factory. I upheld with all my strength those who wanted to make it, and who did make it, the common property of all workers’ organizations, thus creating the type of property that comes closest, in the society of today, to proletarian communism. I was therefore always guided by what Marx has magnificently called revolutionary evolution.
It consists, in my view, in introducing into the society of today forms of property that contradict it and surpass it, that announce and prepare the new society, and through their organic force hasten the dissolution of the old world. Reforms are not merely, in my eyes, palliatives: they are, they must be, preparations. That is the thought that has animated me from the beginning of the battle. That is the method of socialist realization that I have practiced in five years of parliamentary life that were nothing but a long labor and a long combat. And since at last I am forced to speak of myself, since I am forced to defend that share of the people’s trust that I had won and wish to keep only for the benefit of the Revolution, I say aloud that to this method and to this thought, I have remained fully faithful.
Four years ago, I saw through the odious uprising of ignorance and barbarism, through the sad weakening of wills and consciences, that it was not enough to push and press toward socialism, that it was still necessary to strengthen republican liberty, which had been shaken. When the miner, driving his pick into the coal and detaching it block by block, suddenly perceives that the gallery is shaking, that the supports are giving way, and that the ceiling is lowering, he sets down his pick for a moment and strengthens the supports. Will it be said that he has stopped in his march and that he has abandoned the vigorous offensive tool? No, he has on the contrary ensured the continuation and the progress of his work.
I also saw, through Lille, Roubaix, Paris, Carmaux, Rive-de-Gier, that capitalist power was still great, greater and more resistant than Guesde had told us. And I understood that we would need a long and immense effort, a long succession of works, to disarm the most violent prejudices and to penetrate consciences. And it did not seem to me indifferent, in order to dispel a part of hostile prejudices, that bourgeois society should itself be obliged, in an hour of crisis, to call a socialist to a share of power. I believe that, whatever may happen and even if the experiment were never repeated, this event, in the near future, will serve the propaganda of all. I believed, even through difficult circumstances, that it was worth letting this combination take on, through its duration, a historical importance. I still think it would be disastrous to put a feverish end to it.
But it is not merely to obey the decisions of principle of our congresses; it is through the effect of a very considered personal conviction that I say very clearly that it would seem to me bad to bring the Socialist Party into the governmental combinations that will follow. The Socialist Party must first give itself time to judge at a distance the good and bad effects of participation. It must be able to situate events in a just perspective. And it must also first devote all its effort to deploying before Parliament and before the country its enlarged and renewed program of action. It will do so with the more pressing authority that it now possesses through the decisive role it has played in great crises of liberty and of the nation. It will do so before minds less brutally biased, more open to new liberties. It will do so without for a moment losing interest in the parcels of reform it may obtain from the republican government, without sterilizing through a systematic opposition the ministry in which it will not be represented, but with the concern of always giving the full measure of its thought.
The hour has come indeed when the very problem of property can and must be brought before Parliament, no longer through simple theoretical declarations, but through vast, precise, and practical projects in which the necessary and rapid socialization of a great part of capitalist property, industrial and landed, will take a defined juridical and economic form. The hour has come to confront the bourgeois political parties no longer with general formulas, but with a profound and vast program of action that truly poses the question of property and that scientifically represents the full extent of socialist thought.
It is my just pride to have, for my part as a militant, prepared myself without respite for this great task, today as yesterday. I have worked under insults as under acclamations. And I have the assurance that the fruit of this labor will not be lost to the proletariat.
13 October 1901
THE RURAL MOVEMENT
The economic movement does not have the same form in the countryside as in the city. First, the rural population is declining, while the urban population is growing. Second, and this is very important, it is above all the rural proletariat that is affected by the decline. It is clear that it is especially the non-possessors, the day laborers, the sons of sharecroppers who are drawn toward the city. Small proprietors are more firmly fixed to the soil.
Finally, the effect of the machine is exactly the opposite, in the countryside, of what it is in the city. In industry, the machine sometimes eliminates hands, but this is only momentary; it creates new forms of activity, and thus as mechanization develops, the number of the working population also grows. And as small artisans are transformed into proletarians, the effect of the machine is to increase the industrial proletariat. On the contrary, in agriculture, the machine — sower, reaper, harvester, binder, thresher — purely and simply eliminates hands. And it is the proletarians whom it eliminates. Small proprietors are not suppressed by mechanization as artisans are. The agricultural machine adapts itself more and more to small property, and far from destroying the small proprietor, it relieves him of the labor costs he had to bear, for example, for the harvest.
As the rural proletariat becomes rarer and rarer, the growth of large property finds itself naturally arrested. And this explains the roughly stagnant state of agricultural property in France. In the remarkable study he made of rural property, Gabriel Deville concluded that there was a movement of concentration, but slow and slight. Many causes would seem to push toward large property. It is natural, for example, that urban capitalists should be tempted to consolidate in land a small part of their growing fortune. Moreover, there are branches of agricultural production that are becoming increasingly industrialized, such as beet cultivation, and that would seem bound to submit to the law of concentration of industry itself.
But in many regions, the rarefaction of labor, the decline of the rural proletariat, neutralize all these forces of development of large property. Large property naturally needs a labor force that is always available. Now, there are entire regions from which day laborers have disappeared, where families of sharecroppers are just numerous enough to suffice for the exploitation of the bourgeois estates currently constituted, and where small proprietors, having only one child, never work outside their small holding. This is literally true of the Albigeois plateau. And in the vineyard around Gaillac, large property tends to diminish. The number of small proprietor wine-growers possessing enough vines to find employment for all their labor is increasing. About one third of the population possesses nothing. These are either proletarians who have nothing, or proletarians who possess only a tiny strip of vine insufficient to occupy their hands and keep them alive. But this third of non-possessors tends rather to decrease, and as, by their relatively small and almost always declining numbers, these rural workers are better able to defend their wages, as they have obtained in recent years a higher wage, large property does not dare expand further, for fear of having to reckon with a labor force too scarce and therefore too powerful.
Let me note that I do not claim these features apply to all agricultural regions of France. But they are true over a fairly wide extent.
Now, here are the social consequences of this economic state.
First, quite naturally, it seems difficult to institute a powerful proletarian movement in regions where the very substance of that movement, that is to say the proletariat itself, tends to decrease. I know well that in the Midi, sharecroppers are still numerous. And certainly, they are beginning to have a class feeling. They are beginning to understand that a social organization is possible in which they would not be reduced to receiving half the fruits of the soil. But this class instinct is often uncertain and mixed. They are not pure proletarians: they possess a part of the agricultural capital — livestock, machines, fertilizer, fodder. They often have a fairly great freedom in the conduct of the farm. Finally, as they bring to market the portion of their products they do not consume, they have, on this point, the same interest as landed proprietors in seeing that the prices of livestock, wheat, and wine be sufficiently high. Thus, their immediate interest is not in opposition to the interest of the propertied landed class, and many sharecroppers have been easily drawn into the protectionist movement. In any case, a region where there are almost no day laborers, no agricultural wage-earners properly speaking, and where almost the entire rural population is composed either of sharecroppers or small proprietors, is unfavorable to a purely and exclusively proletarian movement. The same is true of regions like that of Gaillac, where there are two-thirds of possessors and only one-third of non-possessors, where this third is above all preoccupied with becoming possessors in their turn, and where this aspiration is not absolutely chimerical.
But if strong proletarian movements are more difficult to arouse or organize there than elsewhere, one can say that they would be of extraordinary effectiveness. Precisely because labor is becoming scarce there, it could easily become sovereign. There is no reserve army to which bourgeois property can appeal. In certain vineyards, it is at the mercy of the coalition of a fairly small number of wage-earners. And if a few families of well-known and respected sharecroppers, who it would be impossible to replace all at once, came to an understanding in this or that region, it would be difficult for bourgeois property not to accept certain labor conditions more favorable to the sharecroppers.
It is true that many bourgeois proprietors would rather give up cultivation and leave their estates fallow for a year than give up a share of their often quite meager land revenues. But this would create an acute economic and social crisis, from which a long upheaval would emerge. So that the reduction of the proletariat constitutes a threat to bourgeois landed property, just as the growth and agglomeration of the industrial proletariat constitute a threat to industrial capitalist property. On both sides there is no way out except toward a new form of property and society.
Marx said that the social Revolution would be at the least possible cost if it could indemnify the present holders of capital. He meant by this that it was in the interest of revolutionary socialism to avoid the supreme exasperation of the old expropriated society and the long convulsions destructive of wealth. It is still time, for the transformation of rural property, to resort to amicable procedures. The State, the communes, the cooperatives could, whether through bonds fairly rapidly amortized or through assignations on agricultural products concentrated in communal, cooperative, and social warehouses, begin the transformation of large landed property into social property, with a triple character: national, communal, and syndical.
Small proprietors would not at all be frightened by this gradual transformation, which would not threaten them and which would take juridical forms. And they would soon be attached by voluntary bonds to the great center of action formed by communal or cooperative property. Slow, scarcely perceptible modifications are taking place at this moment in their minds, the effects of which will eventually be decisive. First, they have much more faith in science than before. Here they now are, resorting to agricultural chemistry and to machinery. They have the very clear sense that they will not stop in this path. They have been able to reconcile their ancient passion for the land and for individual property with the concern for technical progress, since these advances are applicable within the limits of small property. But it is quite clear that, committed to this path, they can no longer turn back, and that if, in the future, the perfect application of machinery required from them a certain renunciation of the rigor of individual right, of the narrow habits of parcellary cultivation, they would be, so to speak, carried beyond their closed individualism by the very power of the scientific movement to which they have already surrendered.
The peasant proprietor is becoming, almost without his knowing it, a collectivist for the purpose of sales. He is more and more subject to formidable price crises. For years this was so with wheat. And now the happy and admirable renaissance of the vine has this terrible and paradoxical effect of ruining the wine-growers. Obviously, a great fall in prices was made necessary by the productivity of the grafted American vine stock and by the excellence of two successive harvests. This fall in prices, had it stayed within just limits, would have been good for all. But our economic and social system is so disordered that the fall, suddenly precipitated to an incredible degree, has overwhelmed the wine producers, ruined by the very abundance of the product. So the peasant producers aspire to be delivered from these ruinous disorders of the market. And if wheat and wine were acquired by federations of cooperatives and by federations of communes, if the price were determined according to the abundance of the harvest, the costs of scientific exploitation and improvement, and the normal wage of workers employed in cultivation, the peasant proprietors, freed from speculation, from mercantile parasitism, from the anarchy of the market, would work with the cheerful certainty of equitable remuneration. This collectivism of exchange does not frighten them in the least.
Thus the present system of landed property is worked upon by deep causes of revolution. Let the socialists develop consumer cooperatives; let them propose as one of their most important goals the acquisition of vast rural estates where they will obtain part of their supplies; let them organize the syndicates of rural proletarians; let them spread in the countryside the idea of a public provisioning service which, through the communes and the cooperatives, would replace wheat speculation, the great milling industry, the great wine trade; let them give the peasants, the wage-earners, the sharecroppers, the small proprietors, an exact notion of the immense role that the commune should play in economic life; let them thus link the needs of the new times to the persistent memory of the communal property of old, primitive and rudimentary; let them gradually imbue the rural municipalities with a socialist communal spirit, and agricultural France will evolve with a powerful movement toward a living and free communism, where labor will be sovereign, where all individual energies will unfold without hindrance and without conflict in harmonious justice.
SLOW BEGINNINGS
In the immense social transformation that is being prepared, the proletariat now knows with certainty the direction it must follow; it knows distinctly enough the great features of the new regime it wishes and must institute. It knows that the power of organized labor will replace the power of capital, that every levy of capital upon labor will be abolished, and that the disorder of capitalist and mercantile production will give way to an order of production governed by science itself, according to the needs of all and of each. The proletariat knows that in order for the organization of emancipated and sovereign labor to become possible, it is necessary that the social collectivity, the community, substitute its right for the present right of private property. So long as private individuals, classes, hold the means of production, it is clear that authority over a great number of individuals will be held and exploited by a few. The intervention of the community itself in property is therefore necessary in order that the right of all individuals be respected. Hence the great collectivist or communist idea of social property, which is the light of the socialist proletariat in its multiple and tormented effort.
But this general idea, however clear and determined it may be, does not suffice to decide the modes of application, the innumerable and variable combinations according to which socialism will be accomplished. It is certain that it is the very course of economic evolution that will determine the infinitely complex relations according to which the new society will be organized. A few general formulas will not suffice to transform society. It will still be necessary to constantly observe the movement of reality in order to seize the points of contact between the society of today and the new idea. Our effort would be sterile, and our action would disturb the march of things instead of assisting it, if we did not discern the slope of facts and of minds, the inclinations and the customs.
I return to the same precise example. I have shown the hidden evolution of peasant property, the imperceptible and secret change which, if I may say so, little by little renews its soul. There is in the year a period of nearly a month and a half, and a particularly active period, when peasant proprietors associate in fairly large groups and work on one another’s land, for one another. Scarcely has the harvester — which is not yet everywhere supplemented by a binding apparatus — laid the ears of grain in small bundles on the burning ground, than the neighboring proprietors come running to help bind these ears into sheaves, to form stacks of ten sheaves, then to load these stacks onto the great carts and to build the stack. Between sharecroppers and small peasant proprietors, there is the same exchange of services. And there is not only mutual lending of the labor of hands; there is lending of livestock. The harvesting machine having rapidly cut the wheat, it must, for fear of storms, be bound quickly and quickly piled into stacks. To hasten this urgent work, the peasants lend one another carts and oxen. And, I repeat, there is no account kept. It would be impossible to evaluate the services of one and those of the other. It is a free and friendly exchange. Thus, a particle of communist spirit penetrates into peasant labor, into peasant consciousness. And this lasts until the thresher has, in the area where these groups have spontaneously formed, devoured the last stack.
Certainly, socialists have never claimed to force peasant property into the communist framework. Our elders, our masters have always said that only the example of large-scale agricultural production would draw peasant proprietors to abandon parcellary cultivation, fragmented property. But even this is insufficient, and we imagine the evolution of rural life in too dry, too mechanical a manner. Not only is it not through an act of authority, but it is not even through the wholly external action of example; it is neither through compression nor merely through attraction that peasant property will enter the communist movement: it is, at least in part, through the internal evolution of its own life. One of the essential tasks of socialism will be to give peasant proprietors the vivid sense, the clear consciousness, of the change that is obscurely taking place within them. When one points it out to them, they are astonished for a moment; then they recognize the extent of the change that is gradually occurring in their habits and thoughts. And it is by prolonging, by systematizing these new tendencies that socialism will make contact with life and borrow its force from it.
This cooperation, still superficial and limited, will have to extend, become more supple, organize itself. In many regions, great works of agricultural improvement would be necessary: deep plowing, drainage, leveling or softening of slopes, hauling of fertilizers, contributions of earth, management of water. It may be that the nation will be called upon to encourage, to subsidize these works, for it is prodigious that there should be public works of communication and not public works of production. But it is quite clear that the active, intelligent collaboration of the producers themselves will be needed. Now, this collaboration, this cooperation is beginning to appear possible, since communist habits are insinuating themselves into peasant labor.
I could cite many more traits, still slight, but which sketch the future forms of life. I spoke earlier of the vineyard around Gaillac. There, for some years now, since the simple agricultural wage-earners have found again the hope of acquiring some strips of the reconstituted vineyards, they have little by little imposed a curious custom. The working day, which begins, it is true, very early, almost at daybreak, ends in the evening at four o’clock. This is because many of these proletarians, these wage-earners, possess a tiny piece of vine, and wanting to work it after the day’s work done at the bourgeois proprietor’s, they must be free at four o’clock. Thus, these men have the habit of two forms of labor: the collective labor they accomplish on a large estate in the company of numerous wage-earners, and the individual labor they accomplish on their minuscule property.
I hardly need to say that this work they accomplish for themselves is, even after the fatigue of wage labor, a sweetness and a joy. But I am convinced that this duality of soul will continue within them even after great social transformations. I suppose that the great estates of the vineyard have become the property of the commune. I suppose that the workers, who yesterday were the wage-earners of the noble or bourgeois proprietor, have formed into an association and receive from the commune the great estates to exploit. Obviously they will enjoy a much happier condition than today. Whatever share of products is retained for great works of social interest and solidarity by the commune and the nation, the remuneration of the associated workers, who will no longer have to endure the proprietor’s levy, will be larger than at present. And they will have guarantees that they lack today. Without being proprietors in the narrow and jealous sense of the word, they will not be wage-earners. They will choose their work foremen; they will intervene in the conduct of the enterprise; they will have a right defined by precise contracts; they will be protected by those elevated forms of contract which, in communist society, will guarantee all individual rights, even against the arbitrariness of the association of which they form a part. They will therefore be attached to the great vineyard cultivated by their hands by a more vivid and stronger bond, by a more joyful and fuller sensation than the wage-earner of today. And yet, it is very probable that they would feel something like a want and a vital diminution if they no longer found, in watching the grapes turn golden on a few vines of their own, nothing but their own, that closed joy in which there is more intimacy than selfishness.
And why would communist society, skilled at cultivating every variety of joys, abolish that one? Let our conscious effort direct more and more toward communism the vast social movement that inclines toward it by so many slopes; but once set in this direction, it is the varied forces of life that will determine for themselves, freely, sovereignly, their shifting equilibrium.
NECESSARY REVISION
I do not know what conclusion the working class of the Nord will draw from the recent elections, and in particular from the elections at Lille. It has certainly made a great effort of propaganda and combat, and it has shown, throughout the department, an energy that will be found again in the next battles. Certainly too, the radicals of Lille are inexcusable, despite the violent attacks directed against them in the first round, for having favored or permitted in the second round the victory of clerical reaction. Finally, everywhere the struggle is difficult for the socialists. Everywhere they meet the persistent traditions of the past, the selfish forces of the present. For all fractions of the Socialist Party, for all its methods, there have been victories and defeats.
But it remains true that at Lille and in the Nord region there burst forth in a deplorable manner the contradiction of thought that will ruin the French Workers’ Party. It has two rigorously opposed conceptions of the social movement. From these two opposed conceptions derive two contrary tactics. The French Workers’ Party at Lille resorts successively, and within a very short space of time, to these two tactics: and as they are irreconcilable, it is clear that they paralyze each other and that they paralyze it.
On one side, the French Workers’ Party interprets the class struggle in the narrowest sense, so clearly repudiated by Marx. It readily declares that outside the proletariat properly speaking, all social forces form but a single reactionary bloc. It affects not to distinguish between the various categories of the possessing classes and between the various parties. It places on the same level, it stuffs into the same sack the reactionaries, the moderates, the radical socialists. It affirms that between the clericals and the democrats, even those of the extreme left, the working people have no difference to make. And even, as the radical democrats could more easily deceive popular confidence through some formulas of social progress, it is they who are denounced with the greatest virulence. That is one aspect of the thought of the French Workers’ Party, one of its tactics. This is the one that played at Lille in the first round of voting.
But there is another aspect, and there is another tactic. Fundamentally, despite the affectation of class intransigence, the socialist workers of the Nord, members of the French Workers’ Party, are republicans, democrats, and anticlericals. They know that the Republic is, at least in France, a popular force, a condition of progress; and they feel too that it is a beginning of socialism, and the political form of collectivism. They are democrats: they hold passionately to the equality of political rights, to universal suffrage, to the portion of sovereignty that the people can win in municipalities, in general councils, in Parliament. Finally, they want to tear from the Church its political power, its social privileges, its budgetary endowment. They want to exclude it from all public services, from education, from public assistance, and to reduce it to being a private association, until the progress of enlightenment, the influence of secular public education, and the social elevation of the oppressed have gradually dried up habits and beliefs that still have tenacious roots in the proletariat as in the bourgeoisie.
Because they are republicans, democrats, anticlericals, they have great common interests with the non-socialist parties that wish to maintain the Republic, develop democracy, combat the privilege of the Church. They therefore necessarily make a difference between the parties that support and the parties that combat the Republic, democracy, free inquiry. And that is the second social conception of the Workers’ Party. This conception it has affirmed by its acts, when it won the municipality of Lille with the support of the radicals. It affirmed it again in the second round of voting when it appealed, in the name of the Republic, to the votes of the radicals who had been put in the minority in the first round. At Bordeaux, the French Workers’ Party speaks of “republican solidarity.” At Lille, it appeals in the second round to true republicans. But what does this solidarity mean? And by what right is this appeal made?
If the class struggle has the meaning sometimes given it by the French Workers’ Party, if it is true that outside the socialist proletariat everything is reaction and darkness to the same degree, what bond can subsist between the socialists and the bourgeois republican democrats? You were saying just now that between the proletarian class and all other parties indistinctly, there is an absolute and uniform opposition. What then does the “solidarity” suddenly affirmed mean? Solidarity supposes that there are common interests to defend. “Republican solidarity” supposes that the Republic is worth being defended by the democrats of the two classes, the working class and the bourgeois class. Thus, now you dig an infinite and vertiginous abyss; now you throw a bridge over this abyss. In these contradictory maneuvers, all the living force of a party is gradually lost.
I have asked by what principle the French Workers’ Party appeals, in the second round, to the radical republicans. How does it suddenly discern them in the fray, after having declared that they are indiscernible, merged in the same enemy army? And what title can it invoke before them to call them to it? It says to them: “You are republicans and democrats; we are republicans and democrats: you must vote for us.” But the radical and bourgeois republicans can vote for socialists only by abstracting from class antagonisms. They can do so only by detaching themselves from the reactionary bloc. They can do so only by proclaiming that there is more interest for them, bourgeois republicans, in voting for republicans, even socialist ones, than for non-republicans, even bourgeois ones. The socialists who call upon them therefore assume that the bourgeois mass can be dissociated. They therefore assume that in at least a part of the bourgeois republicans, class antagonism, however powerful it may be, can be overcome by forces of union, by republican and democratic solidarity. Either the second-round appeal launched by the French Workers’ Party has no meaning, or it has that one. And it is absolutely contrary to the intransigent formulas of the first round.
Once again, these contradictions do not excuse the attitude of the Lille radicals, who for their part committed the supreme contradiction: that of affirming the Republic and then delivering it up, in resentment of some electoral insults, the vainest of all.
But I say that the disconcerting effects of these contradictory conceptions of the French Workers’ Party will keep worsening. I say that the working class will go from defeat to defeat if it does not put more unity in its tactics, if within the space of a fortnight and by virtue of absolutely irreconcilable theories, it proclaims that between bourgeois democrats and clericals there is no difference, only to immediately appeal to the democrats against the clericals, and if now it tightens the class struggle to the most sectarian intransigence, and now loosens and broadens it to the benevolent and welcoming concept of republican solidarity.
But there is another contradiction of method that would arrest all growth, all action of the proletariat.
The working class wants reforms — I mean near, immediate reforms. It needs them to live, not to buckle under the burden, to walk with a firmer step toward the future. It needs laws of assistance; it needs its labor power to be protected; it needs the law to reduce the daily duration of toil to human proportions. It needs the age of admission of children into factories to be raised, so that they may receive a sufficiently high education. It needs labor inspection to be more seriously submitted to the action of the proletariat itself. It needs the social and legal power of trade unions to be reinforced, so that they become more and more the rightful representatives of the working class. It needs social institutions of insurance against sickness, old age, disability, and unemployment to be established. It needs to be introduced little by little, as a class, into economic power, into property. And it will have a great interest if capitalist services — mines, railways — are nationalized, in obtaining that the workers’ unions of these great corporations be associated with the State in the management and control of the new public services. It will have a great interest in being represented by right, through its unions, on the boards of directors of the six thousand anonymous, civil, or commercial companies that hold the great commerce and the great industry. It will have an interest in demanding, in obtaining, that a share of the stock be reserved by right, in every enterprise, for workers’ organizations, so that thus, little by little, the proletariat may penetrate the very center of capitalist power, and so that the new society may emerge from the old with that irresistible force of “revolutionary evolution” of which Marx spoke.
In every direction, reforms open which the working class can and must win, paths where it must and can march. And the French Workers’ Party does not fail to recognize this. It recognizes it so well that it has accepted, in the immediate interest of the proletariat, administering municipal interests, that is to say a parcel of the society of today. In the recent electoral campaign, when the Party’s elected representatives recalled their activity, which was indeed admirable, at once minute and enthusiastic, how many titles did they invoke where the “class struggle” gave way before administrative necessities! There were streets opened, meaning at once more air and health for all citizens, bourgeois and proprietors alike — and increased value for property owners. There were contracts with the owners of private streets transformed into municipal roads, contracts useful to the city whose domain they enlarged, and useful also to the proprietors relieved of the care of lighting, maintenance, and cleanliness. There were also moving words about “our dear city,” no longer the doleful and harsh city of labor colliding, within the walls, with the pleasure-seeking and superb city of capital, but the total city, enveloping in its solidary growth the antagonistic classes.
So the French Workers’ Party has a concern for reforms: it wants the proletariat to act, it wants socialism to create, even in the society of today, even at the price of all the confused solidarities, all the indeterminable responsibilities that action today entails.
But this entire program of reforms — how will it be realized? It can be realized only through the growing influence of the Socialist Party and the working class on the nation as a whole. And how will this influence be marked? By the more or less spontaneous adherence of the majority of the nation to the reforms successively proposed by the socialist minority. But to declare in advance that outside of socialism the entire nation will be nothing but a refractory and hostile bloc, to reject in the same way and condemn to the same degree the bourgeois categories that always resist reforms and those that are gradually susceptible of adopting them, is to kill every reform in the bud, is to proclaim that before the hour of total Revolution, the useful seeds will not be gathered by the earth but all devoured by the plundering birds; it is to break the hope of the proletariat; it is to weigh upon it, until the problematic spasm of sudden deliverance, the burden of present days. It is to proclaim oneself the impossibility of the reforms one announces and demands.
And there is yet another terrible contradiction.
REVOLUTIONARY EVOLUTION IN FIFTY YEARS
When the revolution of 1848 had been crushed everywhere — in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Austria, in Hungary — when the proletariat had been defeated by the bourgeoisie, and the liberal bourgeoisie by reaction, the communist and proletarian party, having lost freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, that is to say all legal means of conquest, was reduced to going underground and organizing itself into secret societies.
Thus a German communist society had been formed, whose central committee, in 1850, was in London. Quite naturally, in these small societies, obscure and exalted, embittered by defeat, impatient for revenge, and maddened by the very absence of the counterbalance of life, puerile conspiracy plans abounded. Marx, who was a member of this central committee, had preserved in defeat all his lucidity, his broad sense of life, its complications, and its evolutions. He resisted the childish projects, calmed the effervescences. But a day came when he had to break. And on 15 September 1850 he withdrew from the central committee of London. He took care to justify this schism by a written declaration, inserted in the committee’s minutes, which said this:
“In place of the critical conception, the minority substitutes a dogmatic one; in place of the materialist interpretation, the idealist. Instead of actual relations, it is the simple will that becomes the motive force of revolution. While we say to the workers: You must go through fifteen, twenty, and fifty years of civil wars and wars between peoples, not only to change existing relations but to change yourselves and make yourselves capable of political power, you say on the contrary: We must arrive at power at once, or else go to bed. While we draw the attention of the German workers to the unformed state of the proletariat of Germany, you flatter in the crudest way the national sentiment and the guild prejudice of the German artisans, which, without any doubt, is more popular. Just as the democrats had made of the word ‘people’ a sacred being, you do the same with the word ‘proletariat.’ Like the democrats, you substitute for revolutionary evolution the revolutionary phrase.”
I repeat: it is Marx who speaks. Fifty years! — the term that Marx assigned to the workers, not to establish communism, but to make themselves capable of political power — has just expired. What foreign and civil wars was Marx thinking of in 1850? Through what trials did he think the proletariat and Europe must pass before the working class would reach political maturity? He was no doubt counting among the necessary foreign wars the struggle of Western Europe against Russia. It was Russia that had just been in Europe the great instrument of reaction, and it seemed to Marx that all revolution would be impossible in Western Europe as long as tsarism was not broken. Thus, as soon as the Crimean War broke out, he hailed it with joy: in his letters on the Eastern Question, he rebukes, he presses the liberal English ministry, too slow, in his view, to engage the battle. Russia was not crushed, and the European social revolution did not spring from the Crimean War, as Marx had for a moment hoped, caught up in his turn by the fever of impatience and illusion which in 1850 he had reproached in his colleagues of the London committee. And yet, the Crimean War shook the old system in Russia. On this side, the formidable obstacle that Marx dreaded has been, if not destroyed, at least diminished. It seems to me doubtful that, if a socialist revolution were to break out throughout Western Europe, if the proletariat were for a moment master of power in Paris, in Vienna, in Rome, in Berlin, in Brussels, as democracy was master in 1848, Russia could intervene to crush the movement as effectively as it intervened in 1848 and 1849. I do not know whether the combined force of Russian socialist students and workers will suffice, for a long time yet, to impose upon tsarism a liberal Constitution. But tsarism, hampered by many internal resistances and no doubt preoccupied with securing itself at home, could not deploy in Europe the external action it deployed half a century ago. In any case, everything that tsarism wished to prevent in 1848 has been accomplished, or at least is very close to being accomplished. Russia had wished to maintain Italy fragmented under the yoke of the foreigner: it is freed from Austria and freed from the Pope. And the working class is becoming one of the principal life forces of the resurrected nation. Russia had wished to prevent the establishment of democracy in France, even in Napoleonic form. Now it is republican democracy that is installed in France and is henceforth invincible. The economic and political action of the organized working class grows there slowly but surely. In Belgium, the Constitution is increasingly inclined toward democracy, and the proletariat is reaching its hand toward universal suffrage. In Germany, by one of those marvelous ironies of history that attest to the invincible force of democracy, one can say that Russia has served, without wishing it, the advent of universal suffrage and of socialism. Because Bismarck was unifying Germany for the benefit of monarchist and absolutist Prussia, tsarism twice seconded Bismarck’s designs through a compliant neutrality: once in 1866, against Austria; once in 1870, against France. Now Bismarck, despite everything, could bind Germany only by the bond of universal suffrage, and he had to make it, as it were, the golden ring of the new empire. Moreover, the German working class, which could not take full consciousness of its unity, and consequently of its existence as a class, in a particularist and fragmented Germany, has developed its broad political action on the broad terrain of a unified Germany.
In sum, the mode of growth of democracy in the states of Western Europe has disconcerted and disconcerts all violent intervention of the powers of oppression. It is not through sudden explosion that democracy takes possession of states and that socialism takes possession of democracy. The laws by which, from 1860 to 1885, England won roughly universal suffrage are as profound as revolutions, and yet, apart from scholars, no one knows their precise date. It is like a silent flowering. The new role of the working and peasant classes in Italian national and governmental life is also the peaceful equivalent of a revolution: it is another risorgimento. And likewise the multiple thrust of the French proletariat. Tsarism can hamper and dampen all these movements. It can, through its diplomacy at once subtle and heavy, envelop governments; but it can no longer halt the irresistible movement of nations toward full democracy, and the irresistible growth of the working class in the democracies.
Thus, the obstacle which, according to Marx, had to disappear before the working class would be truly capable in Europe of political power has not been broken, but it has been diminished or outflanked. It was diminished by the Crimean War, which immobilized Russian autocracy for many years and which permitted, four years later, in 1859, the resurrection of the Italian nation. It was outflanked by the subtlety of history, which disarmed the suspicions of tsarism by fostering a beginning of German democracy under the auspices of Prussian absolutism. It is being undermined on the spot by the growing strength of the Russian working class and liberalism. Finally, it is evaded and as if reduced to nothing by the very continuity of democratic and socialist growth that everywhere in Europe asserts itself without a crisis of war.
What other foreign or civil wars was Marx thinking of? No doubt the wars that would liberate Italy and unify Germany, which the feeble liberal bourgeoisie of the Frankfurt Parliament had not known how to bind through liberty. Perhaps he had also accepted the thought of Engels, who, traveling in France after the June days of 1848, wrote in his travel notes that socialism in France would triumph only through a civil war of the workers against the peasants. Fortunately, it has not been, it will not be so. The Commune of 1871 was a heroic struggle of the republican and partly socialist workers of Paris against the rurals. But these rurals were not the small peasant proprietors; they were the squires emerging from their manor houses. The democracy of small peasant proprietors was not slow to accept, to acclaim the Republic. It was not engaged in the battle. There is no blood between worker socialism and the peasants. There will be none. And it depends on us that there be no misunderstandings, that rural democracy come little by little to socialism as it came to the Republic. In any case, in this half century that has elapsed, through the trials of great foreign and civil wars, and still more through the slow and continuous action of things, through that magnificent revolutionary evolution that Marx foretold, the primary condition of working-class political action has been realized. This primordial condition was the constitution, throughout all of Europe, of great autonomous nations, freed from Muscovite oppression, and having reached or energetically tending toward democracy and universal suffrage.
Now that this condition is realized, the working class of Europe, and particularly the working class of France, has the worksite and the tool. From there to the completion of the work, there is a long way. Today, as half a century ago, one must guard against the revolutionary phrase and profoundly understand the laws of revolutionary evolution in the new times.
REVOLUTIONARY MAJORITIES
These great social changes called revolutions cannot, or can no longer, be the work of a minority. A revolutionary minority, however intelligent, however energetic it may be, does not suffice, at least in modern societies, to accomplish the Revolution. What is needed is the support, the adhesion of the majority, of the immense majority.
It may be — it is a difficult problem of history to solve — that there have been periods and countries where the human multitude was so passive, so inconsistent, that the strong wills of a few individuals or a few groups shaped it. But since the constitution of modern nations, since the Reformation and the Renaissance, there is scarcely a single individual who is not a distinct force. There is scarcely an individual who does not have his own interests, his attachments to the present, his views of the future, his passions, his ideas. All human individuals have therefore been for centuries, in modern Europe, centers of energy, consciousness, action. And since, in periods of transformation when ancient social bonds are loosened, all human energies are equivalent, it is necessarily the law of the majority that decides. A society enters a new form only when the immense majority of the individuals who compose it demands or accepts a great change.
This is evident for the Revolution of 1789. It broke out, it succeeded, only because the immense majority — one may say the near totality — of the country wanted it. What were the privileged, the high clergy and the nobility, in the face of the Third Estate of the towns and the countryside? An atom: two hundred thousand against twenty-four million; one hundredth. And even the clergy and the nobility were divided, uncertain. There are privileges that the privileged give up defending. They themselves doubted their rights, their forces, and seemed to surrender to the current. The monarchy itself, driven to the wall, had had to convene the Estates-General, even while dreading them.
As for the Third Estate, the immense people of laborers, peasants, industrial bourgeois, merchants, rentiers, workers, it was nearly unanimous. It did not limit itself to protesting against royal arbitrariness or noble parasitism. It knew how to put an end to them. The cahiers agree in proclaiming that man and citizen have rights, and that no prescription can be invoked against these immortal titles. And they specify the necessary guarantees: the King shall continue to be the head of the executive power, but it is the national will that shall make the law. This sovereign will of the nation shall be expressed by permanent national assemblies periodically elected. Taxes shall be exacted only if the assemblies of the nation have voted them. They shall fall equally on all citizens. All caste privileges shall be abolished. No one shall be exempted from taxes. No one shall have an exclusive right of hunting. No one shall be subject to special courts. Same law for all, same tax for all, same justice for all. Feudal rights contrary to the dignity of man, those that are the sign of an ancient serfdom, shall be abolished without indemnity. Those that burden and immobilize rural property shall be eliminated through redemption. All employments shall be accessible to all, and the highest ranks of the army shall be open to the bourgeois and the peasant as to the noble. All forms of economic activity shall be equally open to all. To undertake this or that trade, to create this or that industry, to open this or that shop, there shall no longer be need of either a corporate permission or a governmental authorization. The corporations themselves shall cease to exist; and consequently the Church, maintained as a public service, shall cease to have a corporate existence.
It shall consequently cease to have corporate property. And the Church’s estate, the billions in landed property that it holds, no longer having owners since the possessing corporation is dissolved, shall by right revert to the nation, on the condition that the latter ensure worship, teaching, and public assistance.
It is quite true that the Revolution had to resort to force: 14 July, 10 August: the taking of the Bastille, the storming of the Tuileries. But, let it be noted, force was not employed to impose on the nation the will of a minority. Force was on the contrary employed to secure against the factious attempts of a minority the nearly unanimous will of the nation. On 14 July, it is against the royal coup d’etat; on 10 August, it is against royal treason that the people of Paris marched; and they carried within them the right, the will of the nation. It was not through stupid submission to the accomplished fact that all of France acclaimed 14 July, that nearly all of France ratified 10 August. It is solely because the force of a part of the people had placed itself at the service of the general will betrayed by a handful of privileged, courtiers, and traitors. Thus the recourse to force was in no way a daring coup of minorities, but the vigorous safeguard of majorities.
It is true again that the Revolution was carried beyond its initial claims and its initial program. None of the revolutionaries, in 1789, foresaw, none wished, the fall of the monarchy. The very word Republic was almost unknown, and even on 21 September 1792, even when the Convention abolished the monarchy, the idea of a Republic had not entirely ceased to inspire fear. But it was not under the blows of a passionate minority, it was not under formulas of republican philosophy that the monarchy fell. It was lost only when it became evident to nearly the whole nation, after repeated trials, after the royal coup d’etat of 20 June 1789, after 14 July, after the flight to Varennes, after the invasion, that the monarchy was betraying both the Constitution and the fatherland. The monarchy fell only when the contradiction appeared, violent and insoluble, between the monarchy and the general will of the nation. Thus it is the very logic of the general will, and not a minority coup, that eliminated the monarchy.
It is quite true indeed that the men of the Revolution had not foreseen all the economic and social consequences that would issue from it. Mirabeau believed, for example, that the suppression of royal monopolies and corporate privileges would arouse, in the new world, a legion of small producers, independent artisans. He does not seem to have sufficiently foreseen the great capitalist evolution of industry. But others were more clear-sighted, and the Gironde, notably, had foreseen, following an expression of the time, that wealth and production would form great rivers that one would try in vain to disseminate into multiple streams.
In any case, if the Revolution did not know exactly what the mediate, distant consequences of the economic and social regime it instituted would be, if it did not clearly foresee either capitalism with its combinations, its audacities, and its crises, or the antagonistic growth of the proletariat, it knew what regime it wished to institute.
What helped revolutionary France of 1789 to conceive clearly and to will strongly was that the boldest innovations it demanded had either precedents or precise models in reality.
No doubt the economic growth of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the great human philosophy of the eighteenth century, had given minds an audacity and an elan hitherto unknown. Yet the memory of the Estates-General of 1614, despite the long interval of two centuries of despotism, was for the men of 1789 a light and a strength. The nation was not going entirely toward the unknown; it was resuming, while enlarging it, while adapting it to modern conditions, a national tradition.
And from the economic, agricultural, and industrial point of view, it was not creating unknown types of property and labor. It was abolishing the masterships, the guilds, the corporations. But already there were entire regions, there were particularly progressive industries that were free from the corporate regime. In the faubourgs of Paris, notably, so animated, so industrial, the corporate regime did not exist. For several generations, nascent capitalist production, with its almost unlimited competition, with its multiple combinations of limited partnerships and joint-stock companies, had been asserting itself and growing alongside corporate production. Likewise, in the agricultural order, peasant properties free of feudal levies were numerous. The type of the peasant proprietor free of dues and independent, except perhaps for the seigneurial right of hunting, had already emerged under the old regime. It is therefore by the enlargement, by the multiplication of precise and known examples that the Revolution proceeded.
For the transformation of the Church, the Revolution was served by very strong analogies and very vigorous precedents. The army, the judiciary, after having been feudal institutions, had become, in large part, state institutions. Why should the Church not have ceased to be a corporate caste to become a state institution? Moreover, already under the old regime, Church property was considered to be property of a special order and subject to the State. The Revolution invoked with sovereign authority the famous royal ordinance of 1749, which prohibited the increase of Church mortmain by testamentary liberality. Thus subject to the State, Church property was as if ready for nationalization. Here again, the Revolution had precise and resistant points of support.
It is therefore not in confused aspirations that in 1789 minds met, but on the contrary in the most clear, the most precise affirmations. It was in the full light, in the sovereign precision of the French mind formed by the eighteenth century, that the accord of wills was made. And the Revolution of 1789 was the work of an immense and conscious majority.
Likewise, and more certainly still, it is not through the effort or the surprise of an audacious minority, it is through the clear and concordant will of the immense majority of citizens that the socialist Revolution will be accomplished. Whoever would count on the favor of events or the hazards of force, and would renounce bringing the immense majority of citizens to our ideas, would by that very fact renounce transforming the social order.
WORDS OF LIEBKNECHT
On 7 August, the first anniversary of Liebknecht’s death, the Vorwaerts published some fragments by him of high interest.
Like most journalists and militants, Liebknecht was forced to scatter his thought, to respond blow by blow to the events of the day. But like many of them, he had the ambition of fixing in a meditated and lasting work the essence of his thought. His friends found in his papers an incomplete manuscript, in which he had begun, in 1881, to answer the great question: How will socialism be realized? This work attests to an admirable valor, for it was at the very moment when the state of siege law and Bismarck’s still intact power weighed most heavily on the socialist party that Liebknecht asked himself not whether socialism would triumph, but how it would triumph. And this work attests at the same time to a keen and clear sense of the difficulties, the transitions, and the necessary evolutions.
Here is a fragment of primary importance: Realization of socialism; what measures should the Socialist Party take if, in the near future, it wins sufficient influence over legislation?
“This,” writes Liebknecht, “is a question that is posed and to which I wish to respond. But to answer a question well, one must first pose it well. Now, the preceding question is not well posed; it is at least not precise enough. It goes without saying, in fact, that the measures to be taken depend essentially on the circumstances in which the socialist party wins an appreciable influence over legislation. It is possible, and even very likely, that Prince Bismarck, if he remains alive and in power for some time yet, will meet the same end as his model and master Louis-Napoleon of France. Some catastrophe brought about by him may shatter the machinery of the State and call our party to government or at the very least into the government.”
I translate as literally as possible. This means that Liebknecht foresees, after a great national catastrophe, the total or partial seizure of power by the Socialist Party.
“This catastrophe may be the consequence of an unfortunate war or of an explosion of discontent that the dominant system can no longer compress. If one or the other of these alternatives occurs, our party will naturally take other measures and follow another tactic than if it wins an appreciable influence without such a catastrophe.
“It is permissible to think, though one should hardly count on it, that in the higher spheres they will understand the danger and that they will try, by introducing intelligent reforms, to prevent an otherwise inevitable catastrophe.”
“In this case our party would necessarily be called to participate in the government and particularly charged with improving the conditions of labor. We shall not go further into possibilities; those we have anticipated suffice to show that the mode of our action would depend on the circumstances in which we would have won ‘an appreciable influence.’
“But what is meant by appreciable or sufficient influence? Is it a question of exclusive influence? Of the possibility for us to apply our principles without other limitations than those that the economic situation itself would impose? Does this mean in other terms that we shall have governmental power in hand?
“Or does this simply mean that we shall have influence over a government formed entirely or in very large part by other parties?
“In the latter case, we should, this goes without saying, act otherwise than in the former.
“And within each of the possibilities we have sketched, there are degrees without number, nuances each of which determines a different mode of action.”
Thus, according to Liebknecht, writing in 1881, there are two great hypotheses to be made about the coming to power of the German socialist party.
Either it will be called to it by a great crisis, by a national cataclysm, by an unfortunate war, by an explosion of misery — in short by a storm that will sweep away the old powers and necessarily make room for the new. In this case, it is certain that the action of the socialist party will be particularly energetic. On the ruins of the imperial institution and the parties of the Empire, it will rise with its force full of elan. And no doubt, taking advantage of this great upheaval, it will do at once, for the people and the proletariat, more than it could do at first if it is called to a share of power by the slow evolution of imperial institutions toward a policy of reforms.
But even then, even if a great internal or external storm uproots the conservative powers and calls forth the force of the people, it is by no means certain for Liebknecht that the Socialist Party will have all the power. Events, he says, will call it either to government or to the sharing of government. It may take possession of all power. It may, even in the aftermath of a revolutionary crisis, be obliged to share it with other democratic parties. After the German 4 September, the socialist party will have in Germany a much larger share of power than it had in France after the French 4 September. But Liebknecht does not assert that it will have all the power, all the government. It is possible that it will be bound to reserve a part for bourgeois democracy. What then becomes of class government?
But there is a second hypothesis: that in which the ruling powers of Germany, sensing the danger, will forestall catastrophe through a policy of reforms.
“In this case,” says Liebknecht, “our party should be called to take part in the government, and specifically charged with improving the conditions of labor.”
Thus, for Liebknecht, in this political and social evolution, it is not a matter of the complete seizure of power by the socialist party. Liebknecht cannot imagine, and does not in fact imagine, that under the Empire, under a Wilhelm I, or a Wilhelm II, or a Wilhelm III, the socialist party will receive outright all the power that, perhaps, even on the morrow of the violent fall of the Empire, it could not seize entirely. No, it is only a share of power, a share of government, that the higher regions will entrust to the Socialist Party. And in Liebknecht’s eyes, this is an absolute necessity. For the policy of reforms to be possible, for it to be effective, for it to inspire confidence in the German people, the Socialist Party will have to help direct it. It will have to be represented in the government and act there. Liebknecht goes so far as to designate, or nearly so, the ministry it should occupy: and this closely resembles the ministry of labor proposed by citizen Vaillant or the ministry of commerce occupied by citizen Millerand. And Liebknecht says with reason that there will be degrees, nuances, and modalities without number in this participation of socialism in power. According to whether the Socialist Party is more or less powerful and organized, according to whether it exercises a deeper influence or inspires a keener fear, its participation in power will be more or less extended and more or less effective. Its action upon the whole of the non-socialist government with which it will be associated for a work of reform will be more or less decisive, and the reforms themselves will have a more or less great socialist scope, a more or less marked proletarian character.
Never was a broader view cast upon the future; and I consider the publication of these posthumous pages of Liebknecht as a capital event in the political and social life of Germany, in the life of universal socialism.
Note well that this participation in power — it is under imperial institutions that Liebknecht foresees it for the socialist party. In 1887, under the state of siege instituted by Bismarck, under the coalition of nearly all parties bent against socialism, Liebknecht, in his bold and serene thought, foresees that the socialists will be called to power, that even the emperors will be constrained to call them: and the socialists will not refuse this partial revenge; they will not refuse this partial work. Ready to draw the largest benefit from the Revolution if it is unleashed by some national cataclysm, they are also ready to enter into evolution if it is in the form of evolution that destinies are accomplished. They are ready, in the interest of the nation and in the interest of the proletariat, to be ministers of the kaiser.
By what extraordinary phenomenon, by what inexplicable contradiction, did the man who, in 1881, in the full fervor of revolutionary combat, had thought, meditated, written these strongly worked pages — by what prodigious reversal of ideas did this same man condemn so harshly the entry of a French socialist into a bourgeois government?
I will only venture to conjecture that his error in the Dreyfus Affair had distorted his view of the events that were its consequence. Almost alone in German Social Democracy, he had misjudged the very substance of the affair, and he had failed to see its political and social meaning. Once he was committed to a thought, a path, he persevered in it with an inflexibility that his very isolation aggravated. The more alone he was, the more he insisted on being right; it was the inevitable reverse of his sovereign qualities of firmness, elan, and confidence. So everything that was connected by a historical link to an agitation he had disapproved was suspect or unwelcome to him. Thus, the application of his method of 1881 occurring in France, under circumstances that irritated him, he did not recognize, in the march of things, his own thought.
Will one try to diminish its value by saying that he had not published his work? Caught up in the whirlwind of action, overburdened with daily tasks, he had not finished it. But he neither destroyed nor disavowed it. Perhaps he had judged it imprudent to reveal to the enemy the secret of his thought, of the tactic envisioned for the future. Perhaps he was also somewhat disconcerted by the events that followed the fall of Bismarck. This great enemy of the chancellor always exaggerated and, so to speak, satanized his role. He believed that Bismarck would drag the Empire into the abyss, that he would hurl it into some national catastrophe. Bismarck was dismissed in extreme old age without having compromised through a single imprudence the peace of Europe and the solidity of the Empire. Liebknecht imagined that in Bismarck resided, along with all the peril, all the strength of the Empire. With Bismarck fallen, the imperial institution no longer had a point of support and was bound to collapse into a regime of compromise in which socialist and popular forces would deploy until they penetrated power itself. But Wilhelm II, after dismissing Bismarck, was able to maintain the Empire with its autocratic and conservative character, and the socialist party remained in a state of violent and irreducible opposition. What then was the use of tracing this program of action, of realization, in a time that remained one of combat to the utmost, defensive and offensive? This doubtless explains why Liebknecht did not bring to light this important work, which reveals a whole great aspect of his thought. I confess that, reading these lines so clear, so strong, I found myself regretting that they had not been known to the International Congress of Paris of 1900. It acclaimed with a sort of piety the great memory of Liebknecht; perhaps some harsh words would have been softened had it been known that they struck Liebknecht himself.
LIEBKNECHT AND TACTICS
Moreover, it is the whole tactic of the party that Liebknecht considers as necessarily contingent and variable. Never has what has been called for some time, with a hurtful intention, socialist opportunism been more energetically formulated. I translate:
“We have now arrived at the end of the general considerations. Before entering into the points of detail, let us briefly summarize what has been said.
“We have seen that it is impossible to trace in advance for our party a tactic valid for all cases. Tactics are determined by circumstances. The interest of the Party forms the sole law, the sole rule.
“We have seen that the goals of the Party must be entirely distinguished from the means that must be employed to attain these goals.
“The goals of the Party stand immutable — apart, of course, from a scientific broadening, a correction, and a perfecting of the program. On the contrary, the means of combat and the use made of them can change and must change.
“We have seen that the Party, to be capable of the highest possible degree of effective organization and action, must above all have a clear notion of the essence of our movement, and that it can never neglect the essential for the inessential.
“The essential, for us, is that the unaltered principles of socialism be realized as rapidly as possible in the State and in society.
“The inessential is how they will be realized. Not that we claim to diminish the value of tactics. But tactics are only a means toward an end, and while the end stands firm and immutable, one may discuss tactics. Questions of tactics are practical questions, and they must be absolutely distinguished from questions of principle.
“We have seen in particular that it is absolutely unjustified to hold the tactic of force to be the only revolutionary tactic, and to declare a bad revolutionary whoever does not approve this tactic unconditionally. We have shown that force in itself is not revolutionary, that it is rather counter-revolutionary.
“We have demonstrated the necessity of emancipating ourselves from the phrase, and of seeking the strength of the Party in clear thought, in methodical and intrepid action, not in phrases of revolutionary violence, which too often merely conceal the lack of clarity and of force of action.”
These are great teachings. But if questions of tactics are to this degree secondary, what obstacle stands in the way of the broad unity of socialism?
On the goal, on the realization of socialism, on the necessity of a social organization of property in order to suppress every levy upon labor and to ensure the full development of every human individuality, all socialists agree. They differ on means, on tactics. Some have believed, following Liebknecht’s thought, that in the period of slow dissolution of the capitalist regime and of slow elaboration of the socialist regime, the socialists would necessarily be called one day to a share of governmental power. Others have believed the contrary. This is a question of tactics, and not an essential question. Some, eager to multiply barriers, have proclaimed that the constant, systematic, unconditional refusal of the budget was an authentic and necessary sign of socialism. Others have said quietly that the Party should not be bound, and that if a budget contained great reforms, if it were on that account opposed and rejected by the reaction, the socialists, in refusing it too, would be committing an act of deception and counter-revolution. This is again a question of tactics, which will be resolved by the very necessities of life and by political and social evolution, and which is not worth hurling anathemas and separating over.
Just as tactics are variable, the program, which is after all a part of tactics, can be modified, revised, completed. I believe, for my part, that it is quite incomplete and strangely ineffective, that it no longer corresponds to the state of growth of the proletariat, and that it must be supplemented by a whole series of measures gradually introducing the working class into economic power and sketching a semi-communism in peasant production. Others, on the contrary, are averse to any program of action that would risk, in their view, by making the proletariat penetrate the economic organization of today, dulling its class instinct. On this point, when we are willing, all of us, to think clearly, there will be very extensive controversies. But here again it is a question of tactics, that is to say, as Liebknecht says, a naturally debatable question that is at stake.
Therefore all schism is artificial and harmful.
If Liebknecht speaks truly, if recourse to force risks being counter-revolutionary, if we can and must prevail through propaganda, organization, clear thought, and the vigorous use of legality, it is not enough to repeat Liebknecht’s words: we must apply them with method, with constancy. Those who speak alternately of the ballot and the rifle, those who, according to the momentary favor or disfavor of universal suffrage, extend it credit or reject it, disturb by the incoherence of their impressions the march of the Party.
Here, I do not accuse others more than myself. All or nearly all of us have great disorder in our tactical ideas, and our action is thereby hampered and weakened. Through our frequent appeals to republican legality, through our constant practice of universal suffrage, we weaken the instinct of revolt and the tradition of the coup de main of classic revolutionism. Through our intermittent and purely rhetorical appeals to force, “to the rifle,” we weaken our hold on universal suffrage. It will doubtless be necessary to take a stand and to ask ourselves whether it is useful to mark with a few grains of powder, which moreover do not ignite, the ballots that we legally place and call into the urn.
Do we need the majority, and can we win it? That is the problem. If yes, the appeal to force becomes, in effect, as Liebknecht says, counter-revolutionary.
Now, Liebknecht says: Yes.
I translate once more:
“We have pointed out finally that the Party, in order to be able to realize socialist ideas, must conquer the power indispensable for that purpose, and that it must do so above all by the path of propaganda.
“We have shown that the number of those who are driven by their interests into the ranks of our enemies is so small as to be almost negligible, and that the immense majority of those who have toward us a hostile or at least unfriendly attitude do so only from ignorance of their own situation and of our efforts, and that we must employ all our energy to enlighten this majority and to win it over to us.”
Thus, Liebknecht has posed the problem exactly, literally, as I pose it: the means of winning the immense majority of the nation to the entire socialist ideal through propaganda and legal action.
Liebknecht is so preoccupied with finding a broad terrain on which he can first assemble nearly the whole nation in order then to raise it, degree by degree, to complete socialism, that he considers even the insurance laws proposed by Bismarck as a preparation for socialism. Although the accident law is in his eyes but a trifle, a cardboard bauble, he sees in it a first recognition of the socialist principle:
“It contains in a decisive way,” he says, “the principle of the regulation of production by the State as against the laissez-faire system of the Manchester school. The right for the State to regulate production contains the duty for the State to take an interest in labor, and the control of social labor by the State leads straight to the organization of social labor by the State.”
That is what Liebknecht said of the accident law, which of all the insurance laws is the most superficial, the most external to labor. But how much truer is this still of the old-age and disability pension insurance law, which creates a new right of the working class, which constitutes for the proletariat a patrimony at once collective and individual; and above all how true this will be of unemployment insurance, which is necessary and possible, and which will introduce the organized working class into the very heart of production.
Liebknecht notes as one of the most decisive signs of the growth of socialism in Germany that nearly all parties are obliged to adhere to these projects of legislation.
“All parties,” he says, “with the exception of the most antiquated Manchester anarchists, who wish to dissolve the State into atoms and deliver society to the free exploitation of the possessing classes, rival one another in solicitude for ‘the poor man’ and for the working class; and it is beyond doubt that Prince Bismarck, if he wishes, can find in the present Reichstag a majority for his State socialism. That the Protestant and Catholic clergy, the squires and great landowners should accommodate themselves to State socialism — the priests call it Christian socialism — is nothing to wonder at. But it is a striking phenomenon without parallel in the history of modern times to see the National Liberal party, which, however diminished and puny it may be, is always an essential part of the German bourgeoisie, and which is even the bourgeoisie par excellence, reconciled with State socialism.”
What does this mean? And since the force of things, the growing organization of the Socialist Party and of the proletariat, are bringing the very classes and parties most averse to it to finally accept projects of social legislation “which lead straight to socialism,” since the immense majority of the nation has thus been able to be drawn into socialist paths and as it were raised to a first degree of social organization, it is therefore possible for the immense majority of the nation to be raised, degree by degree, through propaganda ever more active and more clear, through a proletarian influence ever more energetic, and through a mechanism of reform ever more compelling, to the very level of our entire ideal.
This is the firm and strong conclusion of Liebknecht. Through propaganda and legal action, the great majority of the nation can be won by us and brought to complete socialism. Along the paths that ascend from bourgeois individualism to State socialism, and from State socialism to communist, proletarian, and human socialism, the whole nation will climb, if we truly will it, with the exception of a very small number of refractory and impotent elements.
The majorities can and must be legally ours.
“BROADEN, NOT NARROW”
There are many contradictions in Liebknecht’s thought. I imagine that in his mind, as in the minds of many socialists of the first hour, there was a struggle between the intransigent formulas of the beginning and the new necessities of the enlarged Party, and that in this struggle he did not always manage to settle.
Liebknecht had begun as an anti-parliamentary revolutionary. He had said and written that Parliament was a swamp in which socialist energies would sink. He had written that even for propaganda, the parliamentary tribune was useless, for propaganda was done much better in the country itself. When the force of things and the growth of the Party compelled Liebknecht to shed these formulas, when he and his friends entered Parliament, he nevertheless retained some memory of his initial intransigence. He recalls, in the fragments cited by the Vorwaerts, that he opposed having the socialist group represented by a delegate in the “commission of deans,” which regulates parliamentary business. His colleagues did not listen to him, and they were quite right; for what is the use of entering Parliament if, under the pretext of not compromising oneself, one refuses, in detail, everything that can make parliamentary action effective?
I note this minor detail only because it characterizes a state of mind. Embarrassed by his trenchant words of old, Liebknecht for a time affected to be in Parliament as if he were not there. When he reflected on the conditions of realization of socialism, when in the sincerity of his thought he questioned the future, he arrived at a wholly broad conception: he saw socialism gradually penetrating democracy and imposing itself, through partial and successive conquests of power, even on the government of bourgeois society in transformation. Then he would be troubled and seized again by the early habits of intransigence. It is from this contradiction between old formulas that have ceased to be true, but that one dare not clearly reject, and new necessities that one begins to recognize, but that one dare not fully avow, that come the malaise, the chaotic movements of socialism at the present hour. It is through a contradiction of this sort that Liebknecht, in the very manuscript where he foresees the governmental collaboration of socialism with other fractions of democracy, nevertheless repeats and seems to accept the simplistic phrase so vigorously condemned by Marx: “All parties form, vis-a-vis socialism, but a single reactionary mass.” This is absolutely contrary to the actual practice of the German socialists, who do not fear, against the squires, against the survivals of agrarian feudalism, to support the liberal bourgeois. But through the absoluteness of this narrow formula, Liebknecht won pardon for the general, vast, and supple conception that he brought.
He defined the working class, in fact, very broadly:
“The concept of the working class must not be understood too narrowly. As we have set forth in the press, in propaganda writings, and at the tribune, we include in the working class all those who live exclusively or principally from the product of their labor and who do not enrich themselves through the labor of others.
“Thus, in the working class must be included, besides the salaried workers, the class of peasants and that petite bourgeoisie which is falling more and more into the proletariat — that is to say all those who suffer from the present system of large-scale production.
“Some claim, it is true, that the proletariat of wage-earners is the only truly revolutionary class and that it alone forms the army of socialism — that everything coming from other estates or other classes must be regarded with suspicion. Fortunately, conceptions so devoid of meaning have never been accepted by German Social Democracy.
“The class of wage-earners is the one most directly subject to exploitation; it directly faces the exploiters, and it has above all the advantage that through its concentration in factories and workshops, it is incited to active thought and quite naturally organized into ‘battalions of workers.’ This communicates to it a revolutionary character that no part of society has to the same degree. This must be recognized without reserve.
“Every wage-earner is either a socialist or on the way to becoming one. The wage-earners of the French national workshops, whom the bourgeois government of the February Republic wanted to use against the socialist proletariat, were at the decisive moment protagonists of the proletariat; and similarly, we see how the trade unions, which had been founded by agents of the German bourgeoisie to combat the socialist workers, either have only a semblance of existence or enter into the current of socialist ideas. The wage-earner is led to socialism by his whole milieu, by all the conditions in which he finds himself. The very conditions of his existence oblige him to think, and as soon as he thinks, he is a socialist.
“But if it is the wage-earner who suffers most directly and most visibly from the system of capitalist exploitation, the petite bourgeoisie and the peasants are no less gravely affected by it, though in a less direct and less visible manner.
“The sad situation of the small cultivators in almost all of Germany is as well known as the decline of the artisanry… The petite bourgeoisie and the small peasant proprietors, because they do not well know the deep causes of their sad situation, are still in the camp of our adversaries; but it is of the highest importance for our party to enlighten them and to bring them over to us. THIS IS A VITAL QUESTION FOR OUR PARTY, BECAUSE IT IS A VITAL QUESTION FOR THE NATION.
“It would doubtless be naive and even mad to demand that, in order to realize our principles in practice, we should have in our pocket a majority all ready and sealed. BUT IT WOULD BE STILL MORE NAIVE TO BELIEVE THAT WE COULD REALIZE OUR PRINCIPLES AGAINST THE WILL OF THE ENORMOUS MAJORITY OF THE NATION.
“This is a fatal error that the French socialists have paid for dearly.
“Can one fight more heroically than the workers of Paris and Lyon? And did not each combat end in a bloody defeat, in the most horrible reprisals of the victors, and in the long exhaustion of the proletariat? The French proletariat has not yet sufficiently recognized the necessity of organization and propaganda, and that is why until now it has been regularly defeated.
“The lesson of the Commune seems happily to have served the education of the proletariat. Our French comrades work with zeal at organization and apply themselves to propaganda, particularly in the countryside.
“The German socialists have long understood the importance of propaganda and the necessity of winning over to us the petite bourgeoisie and the small peasant proprietors.
“Only an infinitesimal minority has demanded that the socialist movement be limited to the class of wage-earners.
“The foaming and theatrical phrases of these fanatics ‘of the class struggle’ concealed a core of feudal and police machiavellianism.”
Only a tiny minority demanded that the socialist movement be limited to the class of wage-earners.
The foaming and theatrical phrases of these fanatics “of the class struggle” concealed a foundation of feudal and police-like Machiavellianism.
The hyper-revolutionary parade socialism which appeals “only to calloused hands” has two advantages for reaction: first, it limits the socialist movement to a class which in Germany is too few in number to accomplish a revolution; and second, it provides an excellent means of frightening the great mass of the people, who are half-indifferent, especially the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie, who have not yet arrived at an autonomous political activity.
And Liebknecht concludes this entire order of thought with these strong words:
One must not ask: Are you a wage-earner? but: Are you a socialist?
Reduced to wage-earners, socialism is incapable of winning. Understood by the whole of the working people and by the moral and intellectual elite of the nation, its victory is certain.
Why must we now endure the persecution inflicted upon our friends? Why are we subjected to the most indecent brutalities?
Because we are still weak.
And why are we weak?
Because only a small part of the people knows the socialist doctrine.
And we who are weak should further increase our weakness by pushing away from us thousands of men, on the pretext that chance has not made them members of a particular social group? Such foolishness would here be treason against the Party.
Not to narrow — to broaden, that must be our watchword. More and more the circle of socialism must widen, until we have converted the majority of our adversaries into our friends, or at the very least have disarmed them.
And the indifferent mass, which in peaceful times carries no weight in the political balance, but which in times of agitation is the decisive force, must be so broadly enlightened about the aims and the very essence of our party that it ceases to fear it and can no longer be launched against us like the witch’s pack of hounds.
All legislative measures which, if the occasion is offered to us, we shall have to support, must have as their aim common interests, and to destroy the prevailing prejudices against us.
Thus Liebknecht conceives an entire period of legislative action, in which socialism will give proof, so to speak, of its broad comprehension, in which it will appear to the most blind as a party of the general interest, and in which it will thus accustom all the lofty minds, all the noble consciences, all the petite bourgeoisie and the peasants, to follow it to the very end of its doctrine and its ideal, without repugnance and without fear. It will be, as it were, propaganda by action completing the propaganda of the word.
Certainly, the Socialist Party must not be the confused echo of discordant interests; it must not surrender its thought to the disorder of the present world. It must submit to the whole of the people a definite plan, precise means of evolution toward a clearly defined goal. But in this plan, in this program, it must take the greatest account of the diversity of elements, passions, interests, and prejudices.
Here are the exact words of Liebknecht:
However necessary it may be to leave all interest groups as much latitude as possible so that they may express their views and their needs, and to admit the people to the largest possible extent to collaboration in legislation, it would be folly for the government and for socialism to abandon to the initiative of the people all legislation.
Socialism must have a definite plan, easy to understand, and submit it to the representation of the people, to the diverse representations of interests.
Social democracy distinguishes itself from all other parties in that its activity is not limited to a few aspects of the life of the State and of social life, but that it equally embraces all aspects and strives, through the reconciliation of antagonisms in the State and in society, to achieve order, peace, and harmony.
It is not a party of the great landowners and the feudal lords, and consequently it has no need to serve the interests of the great landowners and the junkers, as the conservative party does.
It is not a party of the bourgeoisie in its various branches, and consequently it is not in the service of the particular interests and the taste for domination of the bourgeoisie, as the national-liberal party and the progressive party are.
It is not a party of the priestly caste, and consequently it is not in the service of the particular interests and the taste for domination of the caste of priests, as the Catholic Centre and the Protestant faction of social Christianity in the manner of Stoecker are.
It is the party of the whole people, with the exception of two hundred thousand great landowners, junkers, bourgeois, and priests.
It is therefore toward the whole people that it must turn, and as soon as the occasion is offered, furnish it, by means of practical proposals and bills of general interest, with the factual proof that the good of the people is its sole aim, and the will of the people its sole rule.
Without ever coercing anyone, but with firm purpose and an immutable goal, it must travel the path of legislation.
Even he who today enjoys privileges and monopolies must know that we contemplate no violent or sudden measures against situations sanctioned by law, and that we are resolved, in the interest of a tranquil and peaceful evolution, to carry out the transition from legal injustice to legal justice with the greatest possible consideration for the persons and the condition of the privileged and the monopolists.
We recognize that it would be unjust to hold those who have created a privileged position for themselves, with the support of bad legislation, personally responsible for that bad legislation, and to punish them for it.
We declare expressly that it is in our view a duty of the State to give those who may be injured in their interests by the necessary abolition of laws harmful to the common interest, an indemnity, insofar as this is possible and compatible with the interest of the whole.
We have a higher idea than our adversaries of the duties of the State toward individuals, and we shall not deviate from it, even if it is adversaries whom we face.
I do not cite these magnificent words to cover with revolutionary authority the socialist policy I have in mind. The Socialist Party would be a wretched and cowardly thing if each of us did not speak his whole mind within it, with no recourse other than reason.
No, we have no need of anyone’s authority, anyone’s protection, to seek aloud, together with the proletariat itself, which is the road that best suits us, which is the broadest, the most luminous, the gentlest, and the swiftest path.
And to tell the truth, I believe that in Liebknecht’s own mind, these great ideas, so noble and so practical all at once, were thwarted and obscured by too many different or even opposing ideas for them to have been able to act usefully and profoundly. I believe the hour has come to meditate upon them and to make of them no longer the happy and brilliant accessory, but the very foundation and substance of our policy and our thought. I believe that if the socialist party did not leave these great thoughts in the state of a general formula, if it realized them in a precise program of equitable and broad evolution toward a well-defined communism, if it gave the impression that it is at once generous and practical, ardent in combat and a friend of peace, very firm against iniquitous institutions and determined to bring them down methodically, very conciliatory as well toward persons, it would advance the true Social Revolution by half a century — that Revolution which would reside in things, in laws, and in hearts, not in formulas and in words — and it would spare the great work of the proletarian Revolution the sickening and cruel odor of blood, murder, and hatred that has remained attached to the bourgeois Revolution.
But I wish to cite still more, before taking my leave of Liebknecht, a few fragments in which the same concern for noble culture, broad humanity, equitable and peaceful evolution bursts forth:
For propaganda, as for legislative action, we must never lose sight of the universality of the socialist conception.
One person grasps above all the economic side of socialism; another, its moral and human side; a third, its political side.
In propaganda and in legislation, these three sides must be equally valued.
The people must feel that socialism is not merely the regulation of the conditions of labor and production, that it does not merely propose to intervene in the economic functions of the State and of the social organism, but that it has in view the fullest possible development of the individual and of individuality, that it considers education as one of the essential duties of the State, and that it makes the civil and social ideal consist in realizing in every man, as far as possible, the ideal of humanity.
It is in the union and fusion of the most sublime objects that the high significance of socialism resides.
Without the economic side, the human ideal would be suspended in mid-air.
Without the human side, the economic aim would lack moral consecration.
The two are linked.
There have been at all times dreamers who have grown heated over the happiness of all mankind. These were either fantasies or deceptions, because the substantial and material means of realization were lacking. The regulation of economic relations, which socialism aims to achieve, and which must ensure, along with the increase in production, a more just distribution, creates the economic foundation for a truly human existence, for a harmonious development of the individual.
Even the benefits of common property and associated labor were understood in earlier ages, and the very principle of community, of communism, was realized there; but the human ideal that characterizes socialism was lacking, and this communism is rightly regarded as a level of civilization inferior to our bourgeois society of today.
Socialism presupposes our modern civilization. On no point is it in contradiction with modern civilization. Far from being its enemy, it wishes to extend it to all humanity, whereas today it is the monopoly of a privileged minority.
Thus socialism, encompassing within its domain all of life, all the feelings, all the thoughts of man, guards itself against narrowness and exclusivity; it moreover has, by that very fact, the immense advantage of being able to exercise throughout the entire extent of civil and political life an action as salutary as it is harmonious.
One last quotation, in which the concern for practical action is evident. Liebknecht, having devoted several pages to the study of tax reforms, adds:
Perhaps it will be thought surprising that we attach such importance to questions of taxation, since in the State organized on socialist lines there will be no more question of taxes.
It is true that if we could leap at a single bound into the socialist State, the question of taxation would not need to concern us. For the resources necessary for public expenditures would then come from the product of social labor, or else, in a still more developed order where all economic functions were matters of State, there would no longer be any difference between public expenditures and private expenditures.
But we shall not leap into socialism all at once. The transition is accomplished continuously, and the question for us, in the present discussion, is not to paint a picture of the future — that would in any case be a useless labor — but to determine a practical program for the period of transition, to formulate and to justify measures that are immediately applicable and that serve, so to speak, as midwives to the socialist world.
I have shown, and this is self-evident, that the Revolution of 1789 succeeded only through the will of the immense majority of the nation. And I have said that with all the more reason, for the accomplishment of the socialist Revolution, the immense majority of the nation will be needed. I fully hope, in noting the magnitude of the necessary effort, not to discourage but on the contrary to animate energies and consciences. Moreover, if the work to be accomplished is immense and presupposes the cooperation of innumerable wills, I shall also demonstrate that the resources and forces are immense, and that it depends upon us to advance toward the goal with a sure and victorious march.
But I say that the vehement effort of a socialist minority would not suffice and that we must rally to our cause the near-unanimity of the citizens. Here is why.
First of all, it is not in the face of an inert and passive mass that the revolutionary socialist minority would find itself. For a hundred and twenty years, since the Revolution, the human energies, already excited by the Reformation and the Renaissance, have been prodigiously animated. In all classes, in all conditions, there are active wills, forces in motion. Everywhere individuals have become conscious of themselves. Everywhere they redouble their effort. The working class has emerged from its half-slumber and passivity. But the petite bourgeoisie, too, is active. Despite the weight of the economic system that so often crushes it, it has not entirely buckled: it attempts to stand up again. And even though it very often seeks its salvation in the most retrograde conceptions, the most detestable politics, and the most sterile and debasing nationalism, it is no less an active and passionate force. It forms leagues, and in Paris it holds the socialist and republican democracy in check. Which is to say that it would oppose a resistance perhaps decisive to a social movement to which it had not been won over little by little, at least partially.
Likewise, the small peasant proprietors have played, throughout our history since the Revolution, a great role, sometimes one of reaction, sometimes one of liberty. With a few glorious and fairly broad exceptions, they took fright in 1851 at the red specter, and they contributed to the success of the coup d’État and of the Empire. Since then, they have been little by little won over to the Republic, and they are one of its living forces. They have a very clear sense of their political power. They have entered the municipal councils; they know that they make the deputies, the general councillors, and the senators, and they would not at all tolerate a great social movement that took place without them.
I believe it is imprudent to say that the neutrality of the peasants would suffice, that socialism would ask them only to let it proceed. No great social force remains neutral in great movements. If they are not with us, they will be against us.
Moreover, since the collectivist order requires the cooperation of the peasants, since it will be necessary, for example, that they consent to sell their products to the social stores, their passive resistance alone would suffice to starve and ruin the Revolution. They know their power and they will not let it fall from their hands. Even the economic initiative they have shown for several years, the spirit of progress that animates them, all testifies that they would not stand by inert and passive before great social events whose effects would not be slow to reverberate upon their own lives. Either they will support them, or they will push them back.
I add that the privileged classes of today have infinitely more authority, and consequently more power, than the privileged classes before 1789. The industrial bourgeoisie has remained vital. It follows the laws of scientific progress. It ceaselessly adopts new methods of production; it renews its equipment. And even from the standpoint of the social struggle, the class struggle, it renews its method of combat: the invention of yellow unions attests that it has resources of suppleness and audacity. What a difference in activity between a great prelate of the old regime and a great capitalist of today! There are some, like certain American billionaires, who have inherited the energy of Napoleon. And in France itself, in more modest proportions, the capitalist class is always alert. It is not against nonchalant and drowsy classes, but against active, far-sighted, bold classes that the proletariat must wrest away their privilege. How could it do so if it did not have the whole of the nation with it? If the mass of the nation is hostile to it, it will be crushed. And if that mass is merely distrustful, the maneuvers of the capitalist class will not be slow to change that distrust into hostility.
Thus, the universal vibration of modern life, the universal excitement of energies, no longer permit the decisive action of minorities. There is no sleeping mass that a vigorous impulse could set in motion. Everywhere there are centers of force which would quickly become centers of resistance, points of reaction, if little by little their own momentum were not directed toward the new society.
In the second place, the transformation of property that socialism wills and must accomplish is far vaster, far deeper, and far more subtle than that which was accomplished a hundred and ten years ago by the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
In 1789, it was a narrowly defined form of property that the Revolution struck. When it nationalized the property of the clergy, it was a well-defined corporate property that it absorbed. Outside the Church, outside the regular or secular clergy, no citizen, no property-holder could fear that the measure of expropriation decreed against the Church would rebound upon himself. The abbé Maury tried in vain to spread panic: the bourgeois and peasant proprietors knew too well that the property of the Church was well defined and that the expropriation could not extend beyond its limits.
Likewise, when the Revolution abolished feudal rights, that too was a precise measure, with effects known in advance and limited. No doubt there were feudal rights entangled in non-feudal properties. But on the whole, it was the lords who were affected. The very nature of the feudal due, which presupposed a bond of personal dependence, reserved its benefit to a category of persons.
On the contrary, capitalist property is essentially diffuse. It has no certain and known limits. It is not concentrated in the hands of a corporation like the Church, or of a caste like the nobility. The securities that represent it are assuredly far from being spread as widely as the commanded optimism of bourgeois economists claims. But after all, they are not reserved for any particular category of holders, and they are rather broadly scattered. There are small holders even in the villages. And if a minority coup were to abolish capitalist property for a moment, unforeseen pockets of resistance would flare up everywhere. It is only by nuanced and precise transactions, in which their interest will be fully safeguarded, that the medium and small holders will be brought to consent to a transformation of capitalist property into social property. Now, these transactions can be arranged, these guarantees can be established, only through the calm deliberation and the legal will of the majority of the nation.
Likewise, the transformation of agrarian property and its evolution toward a broadly communist system will be impossible as long as the peasant proprietors are not fully reassured. The adhesion of the peasant proprietors is all the more necessary because, relative to their number, the number of rural proprietors is declining. But this adhesion they will not give to a sudden movement whose effects they will not have been able to calculate. They will give it only to a movement deliberated together with them, and which, by increasing their productive power and their well-being every day, will fully reassure them about the aim and the endpoint of socialist action.
That is not all. In 1789, the Revolution had, in the domain of property, only a negative work to accomplish. It suppressed; it did not create. It abolished Church property; but that Church domain it put up for sale. It immediately converted it into private properties of an already known type. Likewise, when it suppressed feudal rights, it freed peasant property from a burden. It did not alter its substance. The peasant became more fully the proprietor of what he already possessed. But the Revolution brought forth no new form of property. It imagined no new social type. Its liberating work amounted to breaking chains. It did not have to create; it did not have to organize: society asked of it only destructions; once these destructions were accomplished, it was society itself that cheerfully continued, of its own accord, the march already begun.
On the contrary, it is not enough for the socialist Revolution to abolish capitalism: it must create the new type according to which production will be carried out and the relations of property will be regulated.
Suppose that tomorrow the entire capitalist system were suppressed. Suppose that all capitalist extraction were to cease, that the ledger of the public debt were annihilated, that tenants no longer paid rents, that farmers no longer paid land-rents, that sharecroppers no longer handed over to the bourgeois proprietor half the fruits of the earth, that all ground-rent, all commercial profit, all dividends and industrial profit were abolished; if to this destruction of capitalism there were not immediately added a socialist organization, if society did not know at once how, by whom, work would be directed, what the action of the State would be, that of the commune, that of the trade union, how and according to what principles the producers would be remunerated — if it were not, in a word, capable of ensuring the functioning of a new social system, it would fall into an abyss of disorder and misery, and the Revolution would be lost in a single day.
But this new social system cannot be created and inspired by a minority. It can function only with the consent of the immense majority of citizens. And it is the majority of citizens who will gradually multiply its sketches and its seeds. It is they who, out of capitalist chaos, will gradually bring forth varied types of social, cooperative, communal, and corporative property, and they will not bring down the last walls of the capitalist system until the foundations of the socialist order are secure, until the new edifice can shelter humanity. For this immense work of social construction, it is the immense majority of citizens who must participate.
Let it not be forgotten that the socialist Revolution has a new and grandiose character. It will be made for all. For the first time since the origin of human history, a great social change will have as its object not the substitution of one class for another, but the destruction of classes, the advent of common humanity.
In the socialist order, it is not the authority of one class over another that will maintain discipline, the coordination of efforts: it is the free will of the associated producers.
How could a system that presupposes the free collaboration of all be instituted against the will, or even without the will, of the greatest number? All these forces, whether refractory or inert, would so weigh down socialist production, would use up in innumerable shocks and frictions so much energy and so many springs, that the system would fail. It can succeed only through the general and nearly unanimous will.
Destined for all, it must be prepared and accepted by nearly all, and even, practically speaking, by all; for there comes an hour when the force of an immense majority discourages the last pockets of resistance. What makes the nobility of socialism is that it will not be a regime of the minority. It cannot be; it must not therefore be imposed by a minority.
I add that the long exercise of universal suffrage has made the enterprises of minorities increasingly difficult and nearly impossible. Universal suffrage, in effect, incessantly sheds light on the respective forces of the parties. It perpetually takes and publishes their measure. Now, it is very difficult for a minority to attempt a movement when the entire country knows and when it knows itself that it is a minority.
In 1830, in 1848, the revolutionary minority that had risen could believe, say, and make others believe that it represented the thought of the majority. For that majority, under the regime of restricted suffrage, remained unexpressed. I do not speak of the fall of the Empire, which collapsed in defeat far more than under revolution. But the great weakness of the Commune was assuredly that of having faced an assembly which, however reactionary it may have been, emanated or appeared to emanate from universal suffrage and the general will.
The minority which, having participated in the ballot, having accepted its measure, were to attempt to do violence to the majority would be in a false position. And it would find facing it a majority which, informed of its own strength by the authentic figures of the ballot, would not yield and would probably rally to itself many elements of the insurgent minority.
Now, the Socialist Party does not merely demand universal suffrage everywhere. It demands it with proportional representation. Liebknecht, in the fragments published by the Vorwaerts, demands proportional representation. The Belgian socialists have supported it. Citizen Vaillant, in a recent article, adhered in principle to the list ballot, on the absolute condition that proportional representation be established. This is also the view of Citizen Guesde. But to demand proportional representation is to demand that each of the forces, each of the tendencies of the country and of society constantly give its exact measure. It is to insist that the share of electoral and parliamentary influence of each party be calculated exactly upon its real strength in the country. It is therefore to proclaim that all legislation is arbitrary which does not proceed from the true majority.
Therefore, by the admission of all, the socialist Revolution will be accomplished by the general will, by the force of a majority. Only the partisans of the general strike with a revolutionary character believe that the action of the industrial proletariat alone, or even of the most active and most conscious portion of that proletariat, will suffice to bring about the advent of communism, the social Revolution.
When one speaks of the general strike, one must begin by clearly defining the meaning of the words. It is not a question, of course, of the general strike of a single trade. For example, when the miners of all France decide, by majority vote, that there is cause for them to go on strike to obtain the eight-hour day, a higher retirement pension, and a minimum wage, that is a very important strike, and one may call it the general strike of the miners. But that is not at all what is meant by the general strike by those who see in it the decisive instrument of emancipation. It is not a question, in their thinking, of a movement restricted to a single trade, however vast it may be. On the other hand, it would be puerile to say that there will be a general strike only if the totality of wage-earners, in all categories of production, simultaneously cease work. The working class is too dispersed for such unanimity of strike to be possible or even conceivable.
But the term general strike has another meaning, at once very precise and very broad. It signifies that the most important trades, those that dominate the entire system of production, will simultaneously stop work. If, for example, the railway workers, the miners, the dock and port workers, the metalworkers, the workers of the great weaving mills and the great spinning mills, the building trades workers in the great cities were to stop work simultaneously, there would truly be a general strike. For in order for there to be a general strike, it is not necessary that the totality of trades enter the field; it is not even necessary that in the trades that participate in the movement, the totality of workers go on strike. It suffices that the trades in which capitalist power is most concentrated, in which working-class power is best organized, and which are, as it were, the nerve center of the economic system, decide upon the suspension of work, and it suffices that they be heeded by a number of workers such that, in practice, the work of the trade is suspended.
Against the general strike thus understood, one cannot object that it is chimerical or that it would be ineffective. As working-class organization expands, such collective movements become possible. And if they occur, they can exert a profound effect upon the ruling classes. It is no longer a single trade, however powerful, that refuses to work: it is an entire ensemble of trades. It is therefore no longer a trade movement: it is a class movement. And how could a general movement of the essentially productive class, the class that nothing can replace, be without effect?
But here there must be no equivocation. One must not imagine that the term general strike has a magical virtue and that the general strike itself has an absolute and unconditional efficacy. The general strike is practical or chimerical, useful or disastrous, depending upon the conditions under which it occurs, the method it employs, and the aim it sets for itself.
There are, in my view, three indispensable conditions for a general strike to be useful. First, the object for which it is declared must genuinely and deeply stir the working class. Second, a large part of public opinion must be prepared to recognize the legitimacy of that object. Third, the general strike must not appear as a disguise for violence, and it must simply be the exercise of the legal right to strike, but more systematic and vaster, and with a more marked class character.
And first of all, it is necessary that the organized workers as a whole attach very great importance to the object for which the strike is declared. Neither the decisions of trade congresses nor the orders of workers’ committees would suffice to draw the working class into a struggle that is always formidable. To face privations and misery, even to escape the influences of the environment in which one is enveloped, requires great energy. Now, this energy can be aroused throughout an entire class only by a great passion. And passion, in turn, is excited in souls to that degree where it becomes active and combative only by an interest that is at once very great and very near at hand, by an object that is very important and of immediate realization.
For example, one can well understand that the best-organized, the most conscious trades, under the action of a broad and precise propaganda, come to feel passionate about the eight-hour day, about old-age and disability pensions, about serious and certain insurance against unemployment. One understands that, if the public authorities resist or evade, the working class, in the depths of its consciousness, might accumulate enough energy and passion to declare a great and persevering strike. Then it is for vast and precise objects, for broad, clear, and immediately realizable reforms that it fights. Then the signal given by the workers’ organizations will be followed; if not, it will not.
But it is not enough that the proletariat be genuinely animated and passionate. It is not enough that it obey its own interior impulse and not an external command. It is further necessary that it have demonstrated to a notable fraction of public opinion that its demands are legitimate and immediately realizable. Every general strike will necessarily bring a disturbance to economic relations; it will thwart many habits or even harm many interests. The opinion of the country as a whole — and even of that very important portion of wage-earners of every kind who will not have entered the movement — will therefore pronounce itself strongly against those who are held responsible for the prolongation of the conflict. Now, opinion will hold the capitalist class responsible and will turn vigorously against it only if, through an ardent and substantial propaganda, the equity of the workers’ demands and the practical possibility of satisfying them immediately have been demonstrated to it. Then it is against the selfishness of the great possessors, against the routine or selfishness of the public authorities, that it will pronounce itself, and the general strike will result in a notable success. On the contrary, if the indifferent mass had not been forewarned and in part won over, it is against the strikers that it would pronounce itself. And since no force, even a revolutionary one, prevails against the opinion of the country as a whole, the working class would suffer a very extensive disaster.
Finally, I say that if the general strike is presented and conceived not as the broader and more coherent exercise of the legal right to strike, but as the prelude and the launching of an action of revolutionary violence, it will provoke at once a movement of terror and reaction that the militant fraction of the proletariat will not suffice to resist.
Yet it is to this conception that some of the theorists of the general strike have come. They believe that the general strike of the most important trades will suffice to bring about the social Revolution — that is, the fall of the entire capitalist system and the advent of democratic and proletarian communism. The economic life of the country will be suspended; the railways will be deserted; the coal necessary for industry will remain buried underground; the ships will not even be able to dock at quays where no worker will unload the merchandise. Everywhere, a halt in circulation and production. Naturally, there will be great hardship. The working masses, by halting production and exchange, will have starved themselves; they will thus be driven to violence, to seize food and provisions wherever they can be found. They will be driven too to strike terror into the privileged, threatened in their persons and their property by the inevitable anger of a proletariat whose age-old sufferings will be, as it were, exacerbated by the crisis of misery and by hunger. Hence inevitable conflicts between the working class and the panicked guardians of the capitalist system. Hence, consequently, after a few days, the revolutionary character of the general strike. And since the capitalist force will be dispersed by the very necessity of surveilling the most extensive and diverse of movements — since, notably, the army of repression will be scattered, drowned in the vast flood — the proletariat will have dissolved the obstacle against which it had hitherto broken itself, and, master at last of the social system, it will install sovereign labor.
Such is the conception. I do not say that it has this degree of clarity in all the theorists of the general strike. I do not say that all those who acclaim it attach this meaning to it. But I do say that for those who see in it the decisive instrument of liberation, it necessarily means this or nothing.
Now, in this revolutionary sense, I believe it is a false idea. First of all, a tactic is singularly dangerous when it cannot fail once without entailing immense disasters for the working class.
The partisans of the general strike thus understood are obliged — let this be well noted — TO SUCCEED THE FIRST TIME. If a general strike, after having turned to revolutionary violence, fails, it will have left the capitalist system standing, but it will have armed it with an implacable fury. The fear of the rulers and even of a large part of the masses will run its course in a long series of years of reaction. And the proletariat will be for a long time disarmed, crushed, bound.
But are there any chances of success? I do not believe so. First, the working class will not rise up for a general formula, such as the advent of communism. The idea of social Revolution will not suffice to carry it along. The socialist idea, the communist idea, is powerful enough to guide and order the successive efforts of the proletariat. It is to draw closer to it every day, to realize it gradually, that it organizes and fights. But the idea of social Revolution must take shape in precise demands in order to arouse a great movement.
To persuade the working class to leave the great factories en masse and to undertake against all the forces of the social system a struggle to the finish, full of the unknown and of peril, it is not enough to say: Communism! For immediately the proletarians ask: “Which one? And what form will it take tomorrow if we are victorious?” And it is not for an object too general and of too uncertain an outline that great movements occur. They need a solid point of support, a precise point of attachment.
The most astute theorists of the revolutionary general strike know this well. Accordingly, it is first by precise, substantial demands that they wish to set the working class in motion. And they hope that this movement, becoming necessarily revolutionary, will of itself expand into complete communism.
But therein lies precisely the essential vice of the tactic. IT PLAYS A TRICK ON THE WORKING CLASS. It proposes to carry it along, as if by the irresistible effect of a mechanism, beyond the point originally indicated to it. It is by the attraction of a few concrete, precise, immediate reforms that the working class is brought to undertake the great operation of the general strike, and it is imagined that once caught in the gears it will be led, almost automatically, to the communist Revolution.
Now, I say that in a democracy, this is contrary to the very idea of Revolution. I say that there is and can be Revolution only where there is consciousness, and that those who construct a mechanism to convey the proletariat to Revolution almost without its knowledge, those who claim to lead it there as if by surprise, are going against the true revolutionary movement.
If the working class is not clearly warned from the outset that it is for the entire communist Revolution that it is going on strike; if it does not know, upon leaving the mines, the stations, the factories, the construction sites, that it must not return until it has accomplished the entire social Revolution; if it is not prepared and resolved for this from the very first hour, and to the depths of its consciousness, it will be disconcerted in the course of the movement by the belated revelation of a plan that had not been submitted to it before the action. And no artifice, no sleight of hand will substitute the hidden aim, suddenly revealed, for the avowed aim of the first hour.
To imagine that a social Revolution can be the result of a misunderstanding, and that the proletariat can be carried beyond itself, is — if I may say so — childishness. The transformation of all social relations cannot be the effect of a maneuver.
And conversely, if the working class is warned, if it is told plainly that it must leave the workshops not to return until it has abolished all of capitalism, its instinct and its thought will also warn it that it is not by an uprising of a few days, but by an immense effort of continuous organization and continuous transformation, that one renews a society as complicated as ours. Then it will recoil from an enterprise so indeterminate and so hollow, as one recoils from the void.
There is yet another artifice in the revolutionary tactic of the general strike. Some of these theorists say:
“It would perhaps be difficult to draw the proletariat into a deliberate action of force. It has grown unaccustomed to such action for many years, and perhaps it would not throw itself into it at once, at the mere signal of the militant organizations. On the contrary, the strike has entered the practice of the working class, and strikes are becoming more and more extensive. It will therefore not be difficult to get the working class to enter a general strike movement. It will be, at the outset, merely an enlargement of its habits of combat. And moreover — and this is a matter of great importance — it will be a legal movement. The law permits the strike; it sets no limit upon it and cannot do so. Consequently, the proletariat, in opening the general strike, knows that it is exercising a legal right; it is therefore with all the power of legality that it enters the movement, and many workers who would have been reluctant to use premeditated force and deliberately revolutionary action will not hesitate to express their anger against social injustices by a menacing step that does not, from the very first hour and in cold blood, cast them outside legality.
“Moreover, what one might call the preventive repression of capitalist power is prevented by the initially legal form of the movement. But little by little, this general strike, this class strike, will necessarily assert itself as a great social battle, as a revolutionary combat. Through suffering, through misery, through the inevitable conflicts that will bring working-class force and capitalist force into collision at many points, spirits will be aroused, just angers will be kindled, and even that part of the proletariat which would have drawn back before the opening of the strike from the systematic use of force will gradually, in the fire of events, of struggle and suffering, be brought to the revolutionary temperature. Then the old world will explode.”
That is indeed, if one goes to the heart of the matter, the conception and the hope of a certain number of those who see in the general strike a means of revolution. In their thought, it is a method of revolutionary training, applied to a proletariat too many of whose forces would remain inert without the brutal stimulation of events.
One no longer says to the proletarians: Take up your rifle. But it is believed that the general strike, at first legal, will soon be led to arm itself with the rifle or with every other apparatus of force. Thus, one counts upon the revolutionary force of events to supplement or to complete the insufficient revolutionary force of men.
I have every right to say that there is an artifice of revolution in this. And like every mechanism that one has been unable to test by repeated experiments before making a decisive use of it, this one exposes the men of good faith who expect everything from it to many disappointments. To create by a factitious means a revolutionary excitement that the sole action of sufferings, miseries, and the usual injustices would not have sufficed to produce is a highly uncertain enterprise.
It has been said that Revolution does not decree itself. With all the more reason one may say that it does not fabricate itself, and that no mechanism of conflict, however vast and ingenious, can substitute for the revolutionary preparation of things and minds. It will not suffice to set the general strike in motion first in order then to make the Revolution succeed. It may well be that the proletarians, if they need at the outset, to enter the great action, a pretext and even an illusion of legality, will recoil from the use of force at the very moment when that pretext crumbles and that illusion dissipates. The die that has been tossed in the air may well come down on a face of violence; it may also come down on a face of inertia. And one will not be able to keep the cup in hand for long and replay the game indefinitely. In any case, in this movement whose leaders have counted on the unconscious and obscure force of things more than on the deliberate force of consciousness, there may be much drift, mixture, and incoherence. At one point, the conflict will indeed lead to revolutionary action; at another, it will retain its legal form and die out in immobility. The revolutionary movement, having neither its principle nor its point of support in the reflective will of men, will be delivered over to the hazard of local incidents, and the mechanism of revolution will not have the same purchase everywhere. Hence discordance, discouragement, and defeat. It is very true that often, in history, events at first seemingly small and innocuous lead to vast unforeseen conclusions.
But it is impossible to count on this expansion, and there is no method — be it that of the general strike — which from an initial movement of legality can with certainty bring forth Revolution.
Moreover, and it is here above all that the illusion of a great number of militants lies, it is not at all demonstrated that the general strike, even if it does in fact take on a revolutionary character, will make the capitalist system capitulate. Bourgeois society will oppose a resistance proportioned to the magnitude of the interests at stake. Which is to say that to the general strike of revolution, which will demand the complete sacrifice of its very principle, it will oppose a total resistance.
Now, neither the halt of production and circulation, nor even extensive violence against property and persons, suffices to bring down a society. However powerful one supposes the effects of the revolutionary general strike to be, they will not be greater than those of great wars and great invasions. Great wars also halt or disturb production, suspend or hinder circulation, and cast into economic life a trouble one might suppose fatal. And yet, societies resist with extraordinary elasticity crises that one might have believed fatal, ills that seemed overwhelming.
I do not speak of the Hundred Years’ War in France, of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. Through unheard-of trials — the brigandage, the sieges, the ravages, the fires, the perpetual combats, the famines — social life survived. But in more modern societies, in bourgeois society itself, what prodigious upheavals! From the second half of 1793, the society born of the Revolution undergoes, or even inflicts upon itself in self-defense, ordeals to which no general strike will surely ever be equivalent. A considerable portion of the able-bodied population — fifteen hundred thousand men out of a population of twenty-five million — is torn from the fields and the workshops and hurled to the frontiers. Civil war rages at the same time as foreign war. The Vendée, Brittany, the Midi, Lyon are in revolt and in flames. Half of France is armed against the other half. The dry and scorching summer has impoverished the harvests. Grain circulates with difficulty, each department, each district wishing to reserve for itself as much grain as possible. Although Paris is not besieged, it is subjected to a veritable state of siege: one must queue at the door of the bakers; rationing is established; bread is scarce. The depreciation of the assignats throws an extreme disorder into all transactions. And through all these difficulties, France retains enough vital power, the revolutionary society retains enough resilience, to defend itself at first and soon to resume the offensive. One may take by famine and by force a city; one does not thus take an entire society. It must surrender itself. In 1870-1871, a third of France is occupied, Paris is besieged; civil war succeeds foreign war; a formidable ransom is imposed upon the nation, and despite all, the deep sources of life are not dried up, and they spring forth anew with a marvelous abundance from the earliest days of peace.
Even supposing that a revolutionary general strike managed to obstruct the ports, to immobilize the locomotives, to destroy the railways, to occupy as sovereign a few particularly working-class regions, to threaten and to reduce the provisioning of a few great cities and of the capital, the ingenious force of necessity would reveal innumerable hidden resources. If need be, social life, consumption would shrink in enormous proportions, and human nature would accommodate itself to these tragic privations, just as at the end of a long siege it accommodates itself to a regime the very idea of which, a few months earlier, would have made the bravest shudder. And if bourgeois society and individual property do not wish to capitulate, if the great majority of citizens is opposed to the new social order that the general strike wishes to install by a stroke of surprise, bourgeois society and individual property will find the means to live, to defend themselves, to rally little by little, in the very disorder and disarray of a disrupted economic life, the forces of conservation and reaction.
Some imagine, it is true, that the general strike, erupting at many points simultaneously, would oblige the capitalist and property-holding government to scatter the armed force over such an expanse that it would be as though absorbed by the Revolution. This is a conception of extreme naivety. The bourgeois government would concern itself above all with protecting the public powers, the assemblies, in which, by the very will of the majorities, legal force would reside. If need be, if it could not at first see to everything, it would abandon the railways and the regions where the Revolution was most strongly organized; it would concern itself, on the contrary, with concentrating its forces, and with the enormous power given to it by the will of the legal representatives of the nation, it would not be long in striking a few great blows, in reoccupying the regions it had at first abandoned, and in restoring communications, as they are restored in a few days in a country the enemy has just evacuated after blowing up the railways and the bridges.
Even if the public powers were to lose Paris for a moment, as in 1871 — and with the social elements of which Paris is composed, this is not at all certain — it would suffice for them to have a meeting place and to wait in a safe location, as the King of France at Bourges, as M. Thiers at Versailles, for the conservative forces to bestir themselves. And they would not be long in doing so of their own accord. Let it not be forgotten that today, with the shooting clubs and gymnastic societies in which so many reactionary influences prevail, with the sporting habits of the upper and middle bourgeoisie, with the military training of the possessing classes, the privileged, the bourgeois, the great and small capitalists, the exasperated shopkeepers would be capable of very vigorous physical action.
And during this time, what would the Revolution do? In the regions where it had at first appeared victorious, it could only devour itself on the spot and exhaust itself in futile violence. The liberal or democratic revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had a very precise aim: to overthrow the central power and replace it. The revolutionary coups of Blanqui were always calculated to strike at the head and the heart. He did not scatter his forces; on the contrary, he concentrated them to bring them to bear on a few vital points of the political and governmental system.
The revolutionary method of the general strike is entirely the opposite. Precisely because it initially gives combat an economic form, it assigns to the working-class forces no single and central objective toward which they could converge. They will remain in place, at the approaches to the deserted mine-shaft, on the threshold of the abandoned factories. Or if the proletarians take possession of the mine, the factory, it will be a wholly fictitious seizure. It is a corpse that the workers will embrace; for the mine, the factory are mere dead bodies when economic circulation is suspended, when production is halted. So long as the whole of the social apparatus is not possessed and governed by a class, it may seize a few factories and construction sites materially, but it possesses nothing: to hold in one’s hands a few pebbles of a deserted road is not to be master of the traffic.
There would therefore remain to the working-class forces, astonished at their impotence amid their apparent victory, only the resort of destruction. But what would these acts of destruction serve, except to mark the uprising of the proletariat with a character of savagery? Let it be well observed that the revolutionary tactic of the general strike has the object and the effect of decomposing economic and social life, of fragmenting it. To halt the locomotives, to immobilize the ships, to deny the machines of industry their coal, is to substitute for the general and unified life of the nation the dispersed life of innumerable local groups. Now, this fragmentation of life IS PRECISELY THE CONTRARY OF REVOLUTION.
The bourgeois Revolution was made by federations that came from near and far to converge upon Paris. Every great revolution presupposes an exaltation of life, and this exaltation is possible only through the consciousness of a vast unity, through the ardent communication of forces and enthusiasms. It is through the organization of a strong class representation and action, both economic and political, penetrating everything and linking everything, that the proletariat will accomplish its revolution. Fragmentation is a return to the feudal state. In the isolated groups, fallen back by the halt of circulation to an inferior civilization, it is the possessing oligarchies who, disposing of accumulated means of subsistence and thereby attaching to themselves a whole passive clientele, will become sovereign. It is the rich who will be, in many cantons and communes, the momentary kings, the social chiefs, the masters of the fief. And little by little, all these little sovereignties, all these little oligarchies, will coordinate their efforts to crush and envelop the Revolution, immobile and sheepish, which, in believing it was depriving the government of every means of communication, will have isolated and crumbled itself.
Thus, it is absolutely chimerical to hope that the revolutionary tactic of the general strike will allow a bold, conscious, active proletarian minority to force events. No artifice, no mechanism of surprise, dispenses socialism from winning, by propaganda and by law, the majority of the nation.
Does this mean that the idea of the general strike is vain, that it is a negligible element in the vast social movement? Not in the least. First, I have shown how, under what conditions and in what form, it could accelerate social evolution and working-class progress. In the second place, it is already, for a society, a terrible sign and a decisive warning that such an idea can appear to a class as a means of liberation. What! It is the working class that bears the social order; it is the working class that produces and creates. If it stops, everything stops. And one may say of it the magnificent word that Mirabeau, the first herald of the general strike, said of the whole of the Third Estate, still united, workers and bourgeois alike:
“Beware!” he cried to the privileged. “Do not irritate this people who produce everything, and who, to be formidable, need only be immobile.”
Now, to this proletariat that has this formidable negative power, and which may at least be tempted to use it, the possessing and ruling classes have granted until now only too slight a share of positive power. They have given or they have left to the working class so little confidence in the efficacy of legal evolution that it is increasingly fascinated by the idea of refusing all labor. Labor thinking of refusing itself, the heart meditating upon stopping: that is the profound inner crisis to which the selfishness and blindness of the privileged, the absence of any plan of action, have led us. It is toward the abyss of the revolutionary general strike that the proletariat feels itself increasingly drawn, at the risk of shattering itself in the fall, but carrying down with it for years either the wealth or the security of life.
The general strike, powerless as a revolutionary method, is no less, by its very idea, a revolutionary indicator of the highest importance. It is a prodigious warning for the privileged classes, more than it is a means of liberation for the exploited classes. It is, in the heart of capitalist society, like a muffled threat which, even if it finally resolves into impotent outbursts, attests an organic disorder that only a great transformation can heal.
Finally, if the rulers were to commit the folly of touching the poor liberties already won, the paltry means of action of the proletarians, if they were to threaten or violate universal suffrage, if through employer and police persecution they were to render truly illusory the right to organize and the right to strike, the violent general strike would certainly be the spontaneous form of working-class revolt, a kind of supreme and desperate resource, and a means of striking the enemy more than of saving oneself.
But the working class would be the dupe of a disastrous illusion and a sort of morbid obsession if it were to take what can only be a tactic of despair for a method of revolution. Outside the convulsive starts that escape all foresight and all rule, and that are sometimes the supreme resource of history at bay, there is today for socialism only one sovereign method: to win the majority legally.
The first condition of success for socialism is to explain clearly to all its aim and its essence; it is to dispel many misunderstandings created by our adversaries, and a few misunderstandings created by ourselves.
The socialist idea is clear and noble. We observe that the present form of property divides the society of today into two great classes, and that one of these classes, that of the proletarians, is obliged, in order to live, in order to exercise its faculties to some degree, to pay a kind of tithe to the capitalist class. Here is a multitude of human beings, of citizens: they own nothing. They can live only by their labor, and since, in order to work, they would need costly equipment they do not have, raw materials and advances they do not have, they are obliged to place themselves at the disposal of another class that possesses the means of production — the land, the factories, the machines, the raw materials, and accumulated monetary resources. And naturally, the capitalist and property-holding class, using its power, makes the proletarian class pay a heavy tribute. It does not content itself with recovering the advances it has made and with amortizing its equipment. From the product of the labor of workers and peasants, it takes every year and indefinitely a notable share: rent from the land, ground-rent, rent from urban buildings, interest on government bonds, revenue from stocks and bonds, industrial profit, commercial profit.
Thus, in the society of today, the labor of the proletarians does not entirely belong to them. And since, in our society founded upon intensive production, economic activity is an essential function of every human person, since labor is an integral part of the personality, the person of the proletarians does not entirely belong to them. They alienate a part of their activity, that is to say a part of their very being, to the profit of another class. The human right in them is therefore incomplete and mutilated. They can no longer perform an act of life without suffering this restriction of right, this alienation of the person. Scarcely have they left the factory, the mine, the construction site, where they have surrendered a part of their effort to create the dividend and the profit, scarcely have they returned to the wretched apartment where their family is crowded together, than a new tax, a new tribute, to create the landlord’s rent. At the same time, the state tax in all its forms, direct and indirect, chips away at their salary already twice diminished — not to provide solely for expenditures of civilization and the common interest, but to ensure the crushing service of the public debt for the benefit of the same capitalist class, or to maintain formidable and useless armies. Finally, when with the residue of his salary thus eroded, the proletarian goes to buy the daily necessities of life, either, for lack of sufficient means and time, he goes to the retailer, and thereby bears the burden of a whole superfluous organization of intermediaries; or he goes to the department store, the great bazaar, and he must cover, over and above the direct costs of handling and distributing the merchandise, the ten or twelve percent profit of the great commercial capital. Like the feudal road, cluttered and cut at nearly every step by toll charges, the road of life is cut, for the proletarian, by the feudal dues of every kind imposed upon him by capital. He can neither work nor feed himself, nor clothe himself, nor shelter himself, without paying to the capitalist and property-holding class a kind of ransom.
And not only is he injured in his very life, but he is injured in his liberty. For labor to be truly free, all workers must be called upon to take part in directing it; they must participate in the economic government of the workshop, just as they participate through universal suffrage in the political government of the city. Now, the proletarians play, in the capitalist organization of labor, a passive role. They do not decide; they do not contribute to deciding what work will be done, what employment will be given to the available energies. It is without consulting them, often without their knowledge, that the capital created by them calls into being or abandons this or that enterprise. They are the laborers of the capitalist system, charged only with executing the plans that capital alone determines. And these enterprises, conceived and willed by capital, it is under the direction of leaders chosen by capital that the proletarians carry them out.
Thus, the workers contribute neither to determining the aim of labor nor to regulating the mechanism of authority under which labor is performed. Which is to say that labor is doubly servile, since it goes toward ends it has not willed, by means it has not chosen. Thus, the same capitalist system that exploits the labor power of the worker assaults the liberty of the laborer. And the personality of the proletarian is diminished, just as his subsistence is.
But that is not all. The capitalist and property-holding class forms a class only in relation to the wage-earners. In itself, it is divided, torn by the bitterest competition. It has not managed to organize itself, and consequently to discipline production, to regulate it according to the variable needs of societies. And in this anarchic disorder, it is warned of its errors only by crises whose terrible consequences the proletariat often bears. Thus, by a supreme iniquity, the proletarians are socially responsible for the course of production, which they in no way determine. Not to be free and to be responsible, not even to be consulted and to be punished — such is the paradoxical destiny of the proletariat in capitalist disorder. And if capitalism were to organize itself, if it were to succeed through vast trusts in regulating production, it could regulate it only to its own profit; it would abuse this power of unity to impose upon the community of buyers usurious prices; and the workers would escape the consequences of economic disorder only to fall under the blow of monopoly.
All these miseries, all these injustices, and all these disorders come from the fact that in practice a class monopolizes the means of production and of life, and imposes its law upon another class and upon the whole of society. It is therefore necessary to break this supremacy of a class. It is necessary to emancipate the oppressed class, and thereby the whole of society. It is necessary to abolish all class difference by transferring to the whole body of citizens, to the organized community, the ownership of the means of production and of life which are today, in the hands of a class, a force of exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to substitute for the disordered and abusive domination of a minority the universal cooperation of citizens associated in the common ownership of the means of labor and of liberty. This is the only way to emancipate human persons. And that is why the essential object of socialism, whether collectivist or communist, is to transform capitalist property into social property.
In the present state of humanity, where there exist only national organisms, social property will take the form of national property. The action of the proletarians will be exercised more and more internationally. The various nations evolving toward socialism will regulate their reciprocal relations more and more according to justice and peace. But it is the nation which, for a long time yet, will furnish the historical framework of socialism, the mold of unity in which the new justice will be cast.
And let no one be surprised that, having first claimed the liberty of the human person, we now invoke the national community. Only the nation can emancipate all individuals. Only the nation can furnish all with the means of free development. Particular, restricted, temporary associations can protect limited groups of individuals for a time. But only a general and permanent association can secure the rights of all individuals without exception — and not only of the individuals now living, but of all those who are to be born, in the succession of generations.
Now, this universal, imperishable association, which comprises, upon a determinate portion of the planet, all individuals, and which extends its action and its thought to successive generations, is the nation. And if we invoke the nation, it is to ensure the fullness and universality of individual right. No human person, at any moment in the course of time, must be left outside the sphere of right. No one must be exposed to being the prey or the instrument of another person. No one must be deprived of the positive means of working freely, without servile dependence upon anyone whatsoever.
It is therefore in the nation that the rights of all individuals — today, tomorrow, and always — find their guarantee. And if we transfer to the national community what was the class property of the capitalists, it is not to make the nation an idol; it is not to sacrifice to it the liberty of individuals. It is, on the contrary, so that it may furnish a common foundation for all individual activities and all individual rights. Social right, national right, is for us only the geometric locus of the rights of all persons. Social property is only the instrument of action placed within the reach of all.
The domination of a class is an outrage against humanity. Socialism, which will abolish all class primacy and all classes, is therefore a restitution of humanity. Consequently, it is for all a duty of justice to be socialists.
Let no one object, as do a few socialists and a few positivists, that it is puerile and vain to invoke justice, that it is an entirely metaphysical idea, pliable in every direction, and that in this commonplace purple every tyranny has cut itself a cloak. No, in modern society the word justice takes on a meaning at once increasingly precise and vast. It signifies that in every man, in every individual, humanity must be fully respected and raised to its highest. Now, there is truly humanity only where there is independence, active will, free and joyful adaptation of the individual to the whole. Where men are under the dependence and at the mercy of other men, where wills do not freely cooperate in the social task, where the individual is subjected to the law of the whole by force and by habit, and not by reason alone, humanity is base and mutilated. It is therefore only by the abolition of capitalism and the advent of socialism that humanity will be fulfilled.
I am well aware that in the Declaration of the Rights of Man the revolutionary bourgeoisie slipped in an oligarchic meaning, a class spirit. I know that it attempted to consecrate forever the bourgeois form of property, and that even in the political order it began by refusing the right of suffrage to millions of the poor, who became passive citizens. But I also know that from the start the democrats used the right of man, of all men, to demand and win the right of suffrage for all. I know that from the start the proletarians relied upon the Rights of Man to support even their economic demands. I know that the working class, although in 1789 it had still only a rudimentary existence, was not slow to apply and to expand the Rights of Man in a proletarian direction. It proclaimed, as early as 1792, that the property of life was the first of all properties, and that the law of this sovereign property must impose itself upon all others. Now, enlarge, embolden the meaning of the word life. Include in it not merely subsistence but all of life, the full development of the human faculties, and it is communism itself that the proletariat grafts upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Thus, from the outset, the human right proclaimed by the Revolution had a deeper and vaster meaning than that which the revolutionary bourgeoisie gave it. The bourgeoisie, with its still oligarchic and cramped right, did not suffice to fill the whole extent of human right; the riverbed was wider than the river, and a new flood will be needed — the great proletarian and human flood — for the idea of justice at last to be filled.
It is socialism alone that will give the Declaration of the Rights of Man its full meaning, and that will realize the whole of human right. Bourgeois revolutionary right has freed the human personality from many shackles; but by obliging the new generations to pay a tribute to the capital accumulated by the preceding generations, and by leaving to a minority the privilege of collecting that tribute, it encumbers every human personality with a kind of mortgage for the benefit of the past and for the benefit of a class.
We, on the contrary, maintain that the means of production and wealth accumulated by humanity must be at the disposal of all human activities and must liberate them. According to us, every man has from this moment a right to the means of development that humanity has created.
It is therefore not a human person, utterly feeble and utterly naked, exposed to every oppression and every exploitation, who comes into the world. It is a person invested with a right, who may claim, for his or her full development, the free use of the means of labor accumulated by human effort. Every human individual has the right to complete growth. He therefore has the right to demand of humanity everything that can assist his effort. He has the right to work, to produce, to create, without any category of men subjecting his labor to usury and to a yoke. And since the community can secure the right of the individual only by placing at his disposal the means of production, it is necessary that the community itself be invested, over these means of production, with a sovereign right of property.
Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, magnificently marked the primacy of life, which is the very essence of communism:
In bourgeois society, living labor is only a means of increasing the labor accumulated in capital. In communist society, accumulated labor will be only a means of broadening, enriching, and stimulating the life of the workers.
In bourgeois society, the past rules over the present. In communist society, the present will rule over the past.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man had also been an affirmation of life, an appeal to life. It was the rights of living man that the Revolution proclaimed. It did not recognize in past humanity the right to bind present humanity. It did not recognize in the past services of kings and nobles the right to weigh upon present and living humanity and to arrest its flight. On the contrary, living humanity seized, to turn to its own use, all that the past had bequeathed of living forces. French unity, prepared by the monarchy, became, against the monarchy itself, the decisive instrument of revolution. Likewise, the great forces of production accumulated by the bourgeoisie will become, against capitalist privilege, the decisive instrument of human liberation.
Life does not abolish the past: it subjects the past to itself. Revolution is not a rupture; it is a conquest. And when the proletariat will have made this conquest, when communism will have been established, all the human effort accumulated over centuries will form, as it were, a benevolent and rich nature, welcoming from their birth all human persons and assuring them their full development.
Thus, even in bourgeois revolutionary right, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the rights of life, there is a root of communism. But this internal logic of the idea of right and of humanity would have remained ineffective and dormant without the vigorous external action of the proletariat.
From the earliest days of the Revolution, it intervenes. It does not listen to the absurd counsels of class from those who, like Marat, say to it: “What are you doing? Why do you go to take the Bastille, which has never held proletarians within its walls?” It marches; it delivers the assault; it decides the success of the great journeys; it rushes to the frontiers; it saves the Revolution abroad and at home; it becomes a necessary force and it gathers along the way the reward of its unceasing action. From a semi-democratic and semi-bourgeois regime, in three years, from 1789 to 1792, it makes a pure democracy, in which at times the action of the proletarians is dominant. In deploying its strength, it gains confidence in itself, and it ends by saying, with Babeuf, that having created a common power — that of the nation — it must use it to found the common happiness.
Thus, through the action of the proletarians, communism ceases to be a vague philosophical speculation and becomes a party, a living force. Thus, socialism springs from the French Revolution under the combined action of two forces: the force of the idea of right, and the force of the nascent proletarian action. It is therefore not an abstract utopia. It springs up at the most seething, the most effervescent point of the hot springs of modern life.
But after many trials, partial victories and falls, through the diversity of political regimes, the new bourgeois order created by the Revolution develops. Under the Empire, under the Restoration, the economic system of the bourgeoisie, founded upon unlimited competition, begins to produce its effects: an unquestionable increase of wealth, but immorality, cunning, perpetual combat, disorder and oppression. The stroke of genius of Fourier was to conceive that it was possible to remedy the disorder, to purify and order the social system without hindering the production of wealth — but, on the contrary, by increasing it. No ascetic ideal: free play of all faculties, all instincts. The very association that would suppress crises would multiply wealth by ordering and combining efforts. Thus, the shade of asceticism with which the Revolution might have darkened socialism vanishes. Thus, socialism, after having participated, with the proletarians of the Revolution and with Babeuf, in all of revolutionary life, now enters the great current of wealth and modern production. Through Fourier, through Saint-Simon, it appears as a force capable not of pushing back capitalism, but of surpassing it.
In the new order that these great geniuses glimpse, justice will not be purchased at the price of the joys of life. On the contrary, the just organization of human forces will add to their productive power. The splendor of wealth will manifest the victory of right, and joy will be the radiance of justice. Babouvism had not been the negation of the Revolution, but on the contrary its most daring pulsation. Fourierism and Saint-Simonism are not the negation, the restriction of modern life, but on the contrary its passionate enlargement. Everywhere, then, and always, socialism is a living force in the meaning and ardent current of life.
But to the great dreams of harmony and wealth for all, to the great constructive conceptions of Fourier and Saint-Simon, the bourgeoisie of Louis-Philippe responds with a redoubling of class exploitation, by the intensive and exhausting utilization of working-class forces, by an orgy of state concessions, monopolies, dividends, and premiums. It would have been at least naive to oppose idyllic dreams any longer to this audacious exploitation. It was by the bitter critique of property, of rent, of land-rent, of profit that Proudhon replied: and here again the word that had to be spoken was spoken under the very dictation and bitter inspiration of life.
But how to complete the work of critique by a work of organization? How to gather into a vast unity of combat all the social elements that the power of banking, monopoly, and capital threatened or oppressed? Proudhon perceived very quickly that the army of social democracy was disparate, that it was a mixture of a factory proletariat still insufficient in number and in strength, and a petite bourgeoisie of industry and trade, an artisan class that capitalist concentration and absorption were watching but had not yet abolished. Hence, in the positive part of Proudhon’s work, the waverings and contradictions; hence a singular mixture of reaction and revolution, depending on whether he applies himself to saving, through factitious combinations of credit, the petite bourgeoisie of industry, or whether he senses the advent of the working class as a force of revolution. He would have wished to suspend events, to postpone the revolutionary crisis of 1848, to give economic evolution time to draw its line more clearly and to better orient minds. But here again, whence come these hesitations, these scruples, or even these contradictory efforts, if not from the contact of the sincere socialist thought with the complex and still uncertain reality? It is the life of the century that ceaselessly reverberates within it.
And now, since 1848, the great decisive and substantial force manifests itself and organizes. The growth of great industry calls forth a working-class proletariat, ever more numerous, ever more cohesive, ever more conscious. Those who with Marx hailed the advent of this decisive power, those who understood that through it the world would be transformed, may have exaggerated the rapidity of the economic movement. They may have, less prudent than Proudhon, less alert than he to the forces of resistance and the resources of transformation of small industry, oversimplified the problem and exaggerated the absorptive power of concentrated capital.
Even with all the reservations and qualifications that the study of a reality always complicated and manifold brings us, it remains true that the purely proletarian class grows in number, that it represents an ever-increasing fraction of human societies, that it is gathered in ever-vaster centers of production; it remains true that it is entirely prepared to conceive, through large-scale production, large-scale ownership, the limit of which is social property.
Thus, socialism, which with Babeuf was the most ardent tremor of the democratic Revolution, which with Fourier and Saint-Simon was the most magnificent enlargement of the promises of wealth and power that bold capitalism lavished upon the world, which with Proudhon was the sharpest warning given to societies that bourgeois oligarchy was devouring, is now, with the proletariat and within it, the strongest of social powers — that which grows unceasingly and which will end by shifting to its own advantage, that is, to the advantage of humanity, of which it is now the highest expression, the equilibrium of the social world.
No, socialism is not an arbitrary and utopian conception; it moves and develops in the midst of full reality; it is a great force of life, mingled with all of life and soon capable of assuming its direction. To the incomplete application of justice and human right that the democratic and bourgeois Revolution made, it has opposed the full and decisive interpretation of the Rights of Man. To the incomplete, narrow, and chaotic organization of wealth that capitalism attempted, it has opposed a magnificent conception of harmonious wealth in which the effort of each is magnified by the solidary effort of all. To the dryness of bourgeois pride and selfishness, diminished into censitary and monopolizing exploitation, it has opposed revolutionary bitterness, the provocative and avenging irony, the murderous analysis that dissolves falsehood. And now, to the social primacy of capital, it opposes the class organization, stronger every day, of the growing proletariat.
How could the regime of classes subsist when the oppressed and exploited class grows every day in number, in cohesion, in consciousness, and when it forms the design, ever more distinct, of putting an end to class property?
Now, at the same time as the real, substantial forces of socialism grow, the technical means of socialist realization also become more precise. It is the nation that constitutes itself more and more in its unity and its sovereignty and that is obliged to assume more and more economic functions — a rough prelude to social property. It is the great urban and industrial communes where, through questions of hygiene, housing, lighting, education, and food supply, democracy will enter more and more into the heart of the problem of property and into the administration of collective domains. It is the cooperatives of every kind — cooperatives of consumption and cooperatives of production — that multiply. It is the trade-union and professional organizations that expand, become more flexible, diversify: unions, federations of unions, labor exchanges, craft federations, industry federations.
And thus, it is certain from now on that it is not through the heavy monotony of a central bureaucracy that the new order will be administered. Rather, the nation, invested with the social and sovereign right of property, will have organs without number — communes, cooperatives, unions — which will give to social property the most supple and the most free movement, which will harmonize it with the infinite mobility and variety of individual forces. There is therefore a technical preparation of socialism, just as there is an intellectual and social preparation. Those who are children are they who, inflaming themselves over the work already accomplished, believe it would suffice them now to issue a decree, a proletarian Fiat lux, to call forth at once the socialist world. But those who are fools are they who do not see the irresistible force of evolution that condemns the primacy of the bourgeoisie and the regime of classes.
It will be the intellectual shame of the radical party to have responded to the immense problem pressing upon us all with nothing but an equivocal electoral formula: “Maintenance of individual property.” The formula may doubtless serve for some time to excite against socialism the ignorance, the fears, and the selfishness of some. But it will kill the party that is reduced to making use of it.
Either it means nothing, or it expresses the narrowest social conservatism. It will not long be able to stand, either before science or before democracy.
Individual property, as used in this general and abstract manner, means nothing. In the course of human evolution, individual property has changed its form and substance, its meaning and content many times. Individual property was, in the societies that preceded ours, the form of oppressions now definitively abolished. Slavery was one of the modes of individual property. In Athens and Rome there were public slaves, slaves of the city or the State. But most slaves were part of the individual patrimony of citizens. The ownership of slaves was a part of individual property. Either they worked the landed estate of the Greek or Roman master, or they worked for his profit in urban workshops. It was individuals who owned them, who disposed of them, who subjected them to forced labor, who gave them, sold them, transferred them. And likewise when, after the collapse of ancient society and of the Roman regime founded upon conquest, slavery was mitigated into serfdom, the serfs too were, upon the soil, objects of a kind of individual property. Under the Merovingians, under the Carolingians, there were serfs of the king attached to the land of the royal domain, serfs of the Church attached to the land of the abbeys. But the vast majority of serfs belonged to lords who were in the end more or less great landowners possessing increasingly on an individual basis. During the Middle Ages, from the tenth to the fourteenth century, serfdom constituted itself as a mode of what we call individual property. It was the lord who disposed of the labor of the serfs. Agricultural serfs, scattered over the immense domain; industrial serfs — bakers, wheelwrights, goldsmiths, spinners, weavers — gathered in the outbuildings of the seigneurial manor: all were under the law of an individual; they were included in his property; they were sold by him along with the estate. They were, like the land itself, like the meadow, like the vineyard, like the oxen, one of the objects upon which individual property was exercised.
I understand well that slavery and serfdom have been eliminated from individual property. But can the radicals be sure that every element of servitude, oppression, and injustice has disappeared from it? And by what right do they pronounce, in a general and abstract way, the words “individual property,” when the meaning of those words varies with the very movement of history? Such formulas are the very negation of historical evolution. They condemn the party that makes use of them to understand nothing and to see nothing. They place it outside of science and of life.
Just as in antiquity individual property admitted slavery, just as in the Middle Ages it encompassed serfdom, it today encompasses the wage system. Certainly, I will not indulge in the sorry reactionary paradox of the few socialists who say that the slave and the serf were happier than the wage-earner. The material and moral condition of the modern worker is on the whole superior to that of the slave and the serf. But that is not the point at issue. I simply say that today individual property takes the capitalist form, that it allows a minority of privileged individuals to dispose of the labor, the strength, the health of the proletarians, and to levy upon them a perpetual tribute. And I say that when the radicals declare outright that they wish to maintain individual property, either it means nothing, or it means that they wish to maintain capitalist property.
Whoever, in Greece or in Rome, had simply declared that he intended to maintain private property, would thereby have declared that he maintained slavery. Whoever, in the Middle Ages, had simply declared that he intended to maintain individual or personal property, would thereby have maintained serfdom and feudalism. And today, when the radicals, in a wholly general formula, announce to the world that they wish to maintain individual property against us, they thereby constitute themselves the guardians of capitalist property.
And what poverty in these abstract formulas! They do not merely immobilize the meaning of individual property, which is always in movement. They arbitrarily simplify it. Now, not only does individual property change its signification from epoch to epoch, but it has a quite variable degree of complication. Sometimes it applies to very complex social relations; sometimes it seems to simplify itself. And there are hours when the progress of humanity requires that the notion of property grow more complex; there are hours when it requires that it simplify itself.
When slavery was mitigated into serfdom, there was a complication of property. The relations of master to slave were of a brutal simplicity. Then, in the Middle Ages, when the serf has a family, a patrimony, the master no longer disposes of him so easily. The individual property of the master over the serf is less easy to define, less simple than the individual property of the master over the slave. The human personality, which was often nonexistent in the slave, and which manifests itself more clearly in the serf, complicates the relations of property; it introduces into the notion of individual property multiple and shifting elements. And here, this complication of property is a certain progress.
On the contrary, at the end of the eighteenth century, when the hour had come for the bourgeois and peasants to strike down the feudal system, it was in the direction of a simplification of property that the Revolution acted. It freed industrial property from all the servitudes and complications of the corporate regime. It freed rural property from the enormous tangle of feudal and ecclesiastical rights. The bourgeois, the peasant became more clearly, more absolutely proprietors than they had been under the feudal regime, and at that moment, in the passage from feudalism to capitalism, the simplification — at least apparent — of property was a human progress, just as twelve centuries earlier, in the passage from slavery to serfdom, the complication of property had been a human progress.
I have read with passion the fine book, just recently published by Giard et Brière, in which M. Henri Sée traces the history of the rural classes and the domanial regime in France during the Middle Ages. He has marked with force the changing complication and the perpetual transformation of property.
“It appears clearly too,” he says in his conclusion, “that in the Middle Ages one had a conception of property sensibly different from the one familiar to us. Does one not see, at the same time, the suzerain, the vassal, and the tenant exercising, by different titles, rights over the land? The peasant, hereditary usufructuary of his tenancy, may be, in a sense, considered a proprietor; let the domanial rights disappear, and the land he cultivates will belong to him without restriction. The rights of use, enjoyed collectively by the inhabitants of the same estate, also constitute, in certain respects, a true property. Which is to say that property, in the Middle Ages, has a more complex character, much less abstract and clear-cut than in our own day. Far from being immutable, the concept of property has therefore been modified in the course of centuries; there is no doubt that it will be modified further in the future, and that it will follow in their evolution the economic and social phenomena.”
There is the great and broad conclusion to which the French historical school is arriving more and more. What do the scholastic and childish formulas of the radicals signify, in the face of these sovereign findings of history and of this living evolution of the concept of property? Just as it has already been modified, the concept of property will be modified further: and it is certain that now it is in the direction of a greater complication, of a richer complexity, that it will evolve. A new force has appeared, which will complicate and transform all social relations, the entire system of property. This new force is the human individual.
For the first time since the origin of history, man claims his right as man, his full right. The worker, the proletarian, the propertyless, affirms himself fully as a person. He claims all that belongs to man: the right to life, the right to work, the right to the full development of his faculties, to the continuous exercise of his free will and his reason. It is under the double action of democratic life, which has awakened or strengthened in him the pride of being human, and of great industry, which has given to the grouped proletarians consciousness of their strength, that the laborer becomes a person and wishes to be, everywhere and always, treated as such. Now, society cannot assure him the right to work, the right to life; it cannot raise him from passive wage-earning to autonomous cooperation, without itself entering into the domain of property. Social property must be created to guarantee true individual property — the property that the human individual has and must have over himself.
Thus a social right of property necessarily constitutes itself for the benefit of the workers; and this social right communicates itself to the various associations — communes, cooperatives, unions — which can, more closely than the nation and with greater flexibility, guarantee the right of individuals, their activity at last emancipated. Thus, to capitalist property, relatively simple and brutal, there will be substituted an infinitely complex property, in which the social right of the nation will serve to ensure, through the intermediary of multiple groupings, local or professional, the essential right of every human person, the free rise of every activity. Every capitalist element will have disappeared; no man will be able to use other men to create for himself dividends, profits, rents, or land-rents.
But the new property, in its vast complexity — national, communal, corporative, cooperative — will at the same time be individual: for no individual will be delivered over either to the exploitation of other individuals, or to the tyranny of groups, or to the despotism of the nation; and the right of each will be guaranteed by precise and flexible contracts that will be, even within common property, the purified form of individual property.
Thus will be verified the conclusion of the historian, that the concept of property must be modified further. And in this regard, there is not a researcher, not a scholar, who does not work to demonstrate the absurdity, the puerility of the radical formula. I observed, in M. Sée’s volume, the long list of men of science — archivists, historians, specialists in charters — who have either collected or organized or already interpreted the documents he uses. And certainly, among these men, there are many who belong or believe they belong to the parties of conservatism, some even to the parties of reaction. But all of them, whatever their personal system, whatever their belief, all serve the cause of evolution — that is, at this moment, the cause of socialism — because they do not stop at the surface of history but penetrate its depths and reveal to men the eternal movement that decomposes and recomposes, according to new forms and new laws, the institution of property. And it is impossible that, from one link to the next, these studies of the masters should not penetrate even to the bourgeois youth.
Thus, when the radicals, in order to halt or slow the emancipation movement of the proletariat, speak of the necessary maintenance of what they call, in scholastic jargon, individual property, they will be caught between the anger of the working-class democracy, which will justly reproach them for defending, under that ambiguous word, capitalist property, and the disdain of science, which will oppose to their abstract and immobile conception of property the reality of historical movement.
The hour approaches when no one will be able to speak before the country of the maintenance of individual property without covering himself in ridicule and marking himself with a sign of inferiority. What reigns today under the name of individual property is a class property, and it is not to the maintenance of this class property but to its abolition that those must work, with a continuous effort, who wish for the advent of democracy in the economic order as in the political order.
But let the radicals take heed. If their social formula — maintenance of individual property — is reduced to nothing, if it is destitute of all meaning, this is not only because of the example of the past; it is not only because of the invincible tendency of new forces to shatter the capitalist framework. In bourgeois society itself, in the bourgeois code, individual property takes on so many incomplete forms, undergoes so many dismemberments and restrictions, that even from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie it is childishness or anachronism to speak purely and simply of the maintenance of individual property.
We socialists, in order to gradually dismember or absorb capitalist property, in order to direct the social movement in the direction of collective property, need often do no more than broaden certain practices of bourgeois society, apply on a grand scale a few articles of its code, and accelerate, along the paths on which it is already engaged, the march of our legislation. Those who set themselves up as guardians of individual property do not merely deny the society of tomorrow; they fail to recognize the society of today.
It is in three ways that individual property is limited and driven back. First, it has been impossible for the bourgeois code to regulate the relations of the various individual proprietors without enshrining restricted, incomplete forms of individual property. Second, taxation, whose role is growing in the social economy, the French laws on inheritance and the law on expropriation for public utility, are so many forces that invest, limit, and drive back individual property. Third, all labor legislation — all that is applied, all that is demanded — is a conquest of collective right, of collective power, over individual property. There is not a single democratic reform, not a single law of worker protection and social solidarity, that does not restrict the right of the holders of capital, that is to say, bourgeois individual property.
Article 537 of the Civil Code states: “Individuals have the free disposition of the goods belonging to them, subject to the modifications established by law.” Article 544 of the same Civil Code states: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided that one does not make a use of them prohibited by law or by regulations.” It is clear that the entire social system is modified according to whether it realizes the principal affirmation of these two articles — that is, the free disposition of goods, and the right to enjoy and dispose of things — or according to whether it multiplies the modifications, restrictions, and reservations that these articles provide for in their second part.
Now, even in the functioning of bourgeois property, even in the relations among possessing individuals, numerous are the forms of property in which the individual does not have the free disposition of goods, the full right to enjoy and dispose of things.
What is usufruct if not a dismemberment of individual property? Usufruct, as defined by Article 578 of the Code, “is the right to enjoy the things of which another has the ownership, as the owner himself, but subject to the obligation of preserving their substance.” Thus the usufructuary of an estate receives, throughout the duration of the usufruct, the natural or industrial fruits of the land — those it produces spontaneously and those obtained by cultivation — but he can neither alienate nor divide that estate, nor diminish its permanent values, such as the timber of high forest. Thus, throughout the entire duration of the usufruct, there is no individual who exercises over the estate subject to it the full right of property; neither can the usufructuary dispose of the capital, nor can the bare owner dispose of the fruits.
I understand well that in this dismemberment, property remains individual, since it is still individuals who hold these fragments of the decomposed right of property. But it remains true that bourgeois society itself is led to place a part of wealth, a part of the landed or movable capital, outside the full right of individual property. It remains true that even in bourgeois relations, even in the sphere of bourgeois interests, individual property does not form an absolute, an indivisible block, but on the contrary dissociates and dissolves.
What is true of usufruct is also true of the rights of use and habitation, but with remarkable peculiarities. In usufruct, the usufructuary substitutes himself for the bare owner for the collection of all the fruits of the estate or capital subject to this doubling of property. On the contrary, the individual who has a right of use over a thing that does not belong to him, a right of habitation in a building that does not belong to him, does not necessarily have the right to the exclusive use of the thing, or to the entire occupation of the building. His right of use or of habitation is regulated by the most variable conditions, which create the most complex and unstable relations of property.
“The rights of use and habitation,” says Article 628 of the Civil Code, “are regulated by the title that established them, and receive, according to its provisions, more or less extent.”
And the following articles (629-635) specify:
“If the title does not explain the extent of these rights, they are regulated as follows: He who has the use of the fruits of an estate may demand only as much as he needs for himself and his family. He may demand enough for the needs even of the children born to him since the grant of the right of use. The user may neither assign nor lease his right to another. He who has a right of habitation in a house may reside there with his family, even if he was not married at the time the right was given to him. The right of habitation is restricted to what is necessary for the habitation of the person to whom the right is granted, and of his family. The right of habitation may be neither assigned nor leased. If the user absorbs all the fruits of the estate, or if he occupies the entire house, he is subject to the costs of cultivation, to the repairs of maintenance, and to the payment of taxes, like the usufructuary. If he takes only a part of the fruits, or if he occupies only a part of the house, he contributes in proportion to what he enjoys.”
What, then, has become, in these combinations, of the rigor of the individual right of property? Of the thing over which a right of use is exercised, of the building over which a right of habitation is exercised, no one can dispose fully — neither the user, nor the proprietor. And what complicated and shifting relations! This right of use and habitation grows with the very family of the person who has received title to it. And it may be that this right of use or habitation, being only partial, allows to coexist, for the same building, the right of use that restricts property and the full right of property. What combinations, what entanglement of rights, and what dispersion of the right of property!
Certainly, when the great jurists of the social revolution, when the great organizers of socialist law, apply themselves, as collective property develops, to establishing the juridical formulas that will reconcile the sovereign right of the community, the action of local and professional groups, the right of communes, the right of individuals, they will find in usufruct and in the right of use and habitation, in the very combinations of the bourgeois code, many precedents and inspirations.
Great is the place that “easements or land services” hold in the current functioning of property. Now, what are these easements but yet another dismemberment of property, a diminution of the right that the possessing individual has over the rural or urban building of which he is the proprietor?
“An easement,” says Article 637 of the Civil Code, “is a charge imposed on an estate for the use and benefit of an estate belonging to another proprietor.”
It is so clearly a dismemberment and a restriction of the right of property that the drafters of the Civil Code feared that the easement might appear to create, from one estate to another, a kind of dependence analogous to the ancient vassalage. And Article 638 specifies:
“The easement establishes no preeminence of one estate over another.”
These easements are very diverse. Sometimes they have as their object to make possible for an individual the exercise of his right, which would be suppressed by the full exercise of the right of property of those who surround him. Thus the right of way:
Article 682: “The proprietor whose lands are enclosed and who has no access to the public road, or only insufficient access for the agricultural or industrial exploitation of his property, may claim a passage over the lands of his neighbors, subject to an indemnity proportionate to the damage he may cause.”
Sometimes they have as their object to prevent a proprietor from diverting to his exclusive profit a natural force that should be common to several: “He whose estate is traversed by a running stream may use it within the interval it crosses, but subject to the obligation of restoring it, at the exit from his estate, to its ordinary course; if a dispute arises among the proprietors to whom these waters may be useful, the courts, in rendering judgment, must reconcile the interest of agriculture with the respect due to property.” (Articles 644 and 645)
Sometimes an easement has as its object to ensure, by the forced cooperation of various proprietors, what is the common condition of their property. Thus, by virtue of
Article 664 states: “When the different floors of a house belong to various owners, if the titles of ownership do not regulate the manner of repairs and reconstructions, they shall be carried out as follows:
“The main walls and roof shall be at the expense of all the owners, each in proportion to the value of the floor belonging to him.
“The owner of each floor shall make the flooring on which he walks.
“The owner of the first floor shall make the staircase leading to it; the owner of the second floor shall make, from the first floor upward, the staircase leading to his; and so on.”
Here indeed are rather complicated relations of property. In this house there are portions of individual property: each floor. Then a sort of common organism: the roof, the main walls, which must be maintained by all according to special rules laid down by law.
How the bourgeois would mock the socialist utopians if, to describe in advance the supposed mechanism of social property in a given category of objects, we imagined an entanglement of obligations and rights analogous to what Article 664 creates for the bourgeois ownership of a house!
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND THE BOURGEOIS CODE
Likewise, when little by little the small peasant proprietors, without yet renouncing the individuality of their domains, come to understand the necessity of associating their efforts at least partially and for specific purposes; when they form, with the cooperation of the national community, associations for drainage, leveling, and irrigation, the association thus formed will have to exercise over the ensemble of partially united domains precise rights, which will be like an extension of those easements that the code of individual property already imposes on present-day owners in the interest of agriculture. But this easement will be a liberation. It will free the peasant from isolation, routine, and poverty.
Let there be no misunderstanding of my thought. I do not have the puerility of claiming that socialist law will emerge, by interpretation and evolution of texts, from bourgeois law. Great social transformations do not occur through procedural cleverness, and the socialist code will not be the unforeseen flowering of some ambiguous seeds hidden in the bourgeois code. It is the class action of the proletariat, exercising itself with growing force over the whole of social life, that will give rise to new relations of property and new juridical formulas.
But at the moment when all parties rise up against us as the guardians of individual property, it is not without use, in order to note the emptiness of the formula and the equivocation of their thinking, to observe that bourgeois society itself has been unable to ensure its own functioning without subjecting individual property to dismemberments, restrictions, and rules that seem to herald a new social law.
What I have said of usufruct, of the rights of use and habitation, and of easements, applies also to the mortgage. Through the mortgage, the debt of one individual to another is incorporated into an estate. It becomes one with the estate; it follows it and weighs upon it, whoever the purchaser may be. This is truly yet another dismemberment of property.
Once again, I recall, so that my thought is not misunderstood and so that forced and artificial conclusions are not attributed to me, that these dismemberments and restrictions of property do not yet carry us beyond the sphere of individual and bourgeois property. It is by virtue of the bourgeois mode of acquisition that usufruct, mortgage, and easement function. And I do not deny that these are modes of individual property. But I say that, already, through the diversity of its modes, through the limitations it undergoes, individual property shows that it is not an absolute. Even in its own sphere of action, even within bourgeois society and the bourgeois code, individual property has degrees. Even before any state intervention and before any pressure from the organized proletariat, bourgeois individual property is obliged to dismember itself, to abandon a part of its force, to assume forms in which its legal definition — the full right to dispose — is no longer to be found. In usufruct, the right of use, the right of habitation, the easement, and the mortgage, several bourgeois individual rights converge upon a single property, and coexist in it only by dismembering it.
Bourgeois individual property is therefore not a homogeneous block: it has itself, many times over, been able to subsist only by decomposing itself. There are cracks in the bourgeois code. And even from the standpoint of the Civil Code, the parties that present themselves, in a general formula, as the defenders of individual property utter words that do not have their full meaning.
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND TAXATION
I do not have the foolishness of regarding taxation, in today’s society, as a communist institution. I know that taxation receives its character from the very society in which it functions and for whose benefit it functions. It is intended above all to ensure the maintenance and exercise of the dominant social powers. In feudal society, the levies of every kind exercised by the lord have the aim of securing the lord’s power. When royal power begins to grow, it is by the kings that a part of the tax is levied; it is to secure and develop their power that the tax is dedicated. Likewise, in a society such as ours, where the power of the possessing, bourgeois, and capitalist class is still dominant, it is above all in the service of this class that taxation operates. It is for this class a means of conservation, of government, and of profit. It enables it to ensure, through its courts, the maintenance of bourgeois law, the respect for bourgeois property. It enables it to pay annually formidable arrears to bourgeois rentiers and thus to stabilize, through the constant ballast of the budget, the fortune of the bourgeoisie, which is exposed to all the currents of economic disorder. It enables it to maintain a formidable and costly army, which, in the present state of class antagonism and conflicting interests, is intended as much to protect capital against the proletarians as the nation against the foreigner. It further enables it to grant to industries, whose profits it absorbs, premiums, subsidies, and interest guarantees.
At the point we have reached in the development of modern states, one may say that at least two-thirds of the budget constitutes a class budget. The truly common and humane expenditures — expenditures for public works, for education at all its levels, for social assistance and insurance — still represent only a small fraction of state budgets. And it is not only by the allocation of resources, but by the manner of procuring them, that the budget of the bourgeois state has a class character. Through consumption taxes, a disproportionate share of public resources is demanded from the poor, from the proletarians. I hope, therefore, that I shall not be suspected of regarding taxation, at the point we have reached in political and social evolution, as a first form of communism.
It remains true, however, that taxation, given the development it has taken on in modern states, is a broad restriction of individual property. The draft budget of the Minister of Finance for the year 1902 foresees a revenue of 3 billion 597 million — that is, in round figures, a revenue of 3 billion 600 million. The revenues of the departments and communes exceed 400 million. Thus the total figure of taxation rises to more than 4 billion per year. Now, according to the most serious statistics, the capital of France amounts to 200 or 220 billion; and the total annual income of France — income from capital, income from labor — amounts to 20 or 25 billion.
This means that taxation takes every year a sixth, perhaps a fifth of the total income of the citizens. Now, although these billions are still allocated chiefly to the service of a class, although numerous private individuals — holders of government bonds, recipients of pensions — have individual claims upon a portion of the state’s resources, it is certain that it is not individuals who dispose of these enormous sums. It is the nation that, through the intermediary of its representatives, regulates their use.
Thus a fifth of the total income of the nation is withdrawn from individual right, from individual will. It is still, for a large part, a class property, but this class property, instead of taking the form of individual property, takes the form of state property. Now, through this, if it is not yet common property, it can become so. The state, in a democracy, is not exclusively a class state, and it will be so less and less. Already now, the state is principally, but not exclusively, a bourgeois state. Just as in present-day society the influence of the possessing and capitalist bourgeoisie, though dominant, does not exclude all influence of democracy and the proletariat, so too the state, as the expression and organ of this society, is a compound of bourgeois and capitalist oligarchy, of democracy, and of proletarian power. And the proportion of the diverse or even contrary forces that express themselves through the state is ceaselessly variable. It can vary, and it will necessarily vary in a democracy, to the advantage of the working class, which by a continuous movement grows in number, in organization, in consciousness.
Now, as democracy and the proletariat increase their influence over the modern state, they will thereby increase their influence and their hold over the budget of the transformed modern state. They will reduce as much as possible its class expenditures, in order to develop expenditures of common interest and to turn a growing share of public resources toward the emancipation of the working class. The principal effort will obviously be to relieve the budget of the weight of the debt with which it is burdened for the benefit of the rentier bourgeoisie, and of the terrible weight of military expenditures.
Thus it is bourgeois society itself that withdraws a fifth of the total income of the nation — income from capital and income from labor — from the direct action of individuals. It is bourgeois society itself that has placed every year four billion, that is to say the representation of a capital of one hundred billion, outside of individual property, defined as the right to dispose. It is bourgeois society that has created, halfway between individual property and communism, a collective state property, a collective substance of property, which democracy will be able little by little to assimilate into communist property.
If the formula of the Radicals — maintenance of individual property — has any meaning for their minds, they must desire that the collective state property constituted by taxation remain as close as possible to individual property, as far as possible from social and common property. Now I take, by way of example, the scheme proposed by the Minister of Finance for workers’ pensions. Today, in the state budget, the most bourgeois part, assuredly, the part most permeated with individual property, is that which is devoted to the service of the debt, to the payment of government bonds; for in the first place, this is one of the most constant and most certain resources of the bourgeoisie, and secondly, the holders of government bonds have individual titles, individual claims upon the state.
Suppose, on the contrary, that the law institutes a compulsory pension system for all wage-earners; that through a compulsory contribution from wage-earners and employers and through a contribution from the state, it constitutes a pension fund; that the monies of this fund are capitalized, and that the capital thus accumulated is used to purchase French government bonds. Suppose that thus the whole or nearly the whole, or if one prefers, a very large part of the French government bonds has become the property of the general pension fund, and through it of all the workers. What will have happened? In appearance the budget will not have been modified; that part of the budget — arrears on the various bonds — will not have changed in outward form. But in reality, will that part of the budget devoted to the service of the government bonds have moved closer to or further from individual property?
I put the question to the Radicals, who cannot think my hypothesis idle, since it corresponds to the plan that most of them support. I put it to the distinguished rapporteur M. Guieysse, who is certainly one of the most vigorous minds of the Radical party. And I challenge them to deny that through the law they support — and it is their honor to support it — an important part of the budget is diverted from individual property.
I understand well that each wage-earner, each participant in the fund, will have, in the plan, his individual account, his individual title, his individual right. I know this and I rejoice in it, for communism is not confusion. But compare this property of the wage-earners with the property of the bourgeois rentier who the day before possessed the bonds, and say whether the latter did not have a much more marked character of individual property.
First, it was according to bourgeois modes of acquisition that the rentier had accumulated the funds placed by him in government bonds; then it was by an act of his individual will that he had specifically invested in government bonds the funds he had acquired and possessed. Finally, he could sell at his pleasure, at the moment chosen by him, and give his funds whatever new destination pleased him.
Therefore, at no moment did he cease to “dispose,” and never was what is called individual property weakened in his hands. On the contrary, it is a social act, a social will that creates the property of the wage-earners participating in the pension. It is not the individual action of the wage-earner, operating under the conditions of bourgeois and capitalist society, or at least it is not this action alone that gathers each year the resources paid on his behalf into the fund. The law obliges the employers and the state to contribute, and one can scarcely say that the wage-earner’s own contribution is individual, since it is imposed by law, since it is carried out without the individual consent of the wage-earner, if need be even despite his resistance.
At the origin, then, of this property constituted for the wage-earner, none of the characteristics of individual property as defined by the Civil Code are present. And scarcely is it constituted in the name and to the account of the wage-earner — but by a social act — than it escapes the wage-earner.
He will be able, through his comrades delegated to the boards of management, to manage the funds of the pension fund; but what will this participation of the individual in the immense collective management be, compared with the unceasing power to dispose that the bourgeois rentier had just moments before? And if the boards of management of the fund use the monies to buy government bonds, who does not see that these bonds, having become the collective and relatively immobile property of all wage-earners, are much less akin to the type of individual property than they were in the busy hands of their bourgeois holders?
Moreover, the property thus created for each wage-earner derives from none of the modes of acquisition of bourgeois individual property. It is neither by purchase, nor by donation, nor by inheritance, nor by commercial gain that the wage-earners receive the resources paid on their behalf into the fund. It is their status as workers, it is their sole title as human beings that society recognizes as generating the right to a pension; it is by virtue of a human right, a social right, common to every person as a person; it is by virtue of a right that is both personal and universal — in which we recognize the juridical and moral foundation of all communism — that the right to a pension for every wage-earner and the vast property that serves as guarantee for this right are instituted.
This is, with an inevitable mixture of heterogeneous elements, a sketch of communist law; it is a first fragment of the right to life, whose entire realization, in the full and noble sense of the word life, would be full communism.
And when government bonds, redeemed from the hands of the bourgeois rentiers, serve to guarantee this first human property, I have the right to say that this part of the budget, under the combined impulse of the Radicals and the socialists, moves away from individual property; and I have the right also to ask the Radicals: What does this formula mean, against which you yourselves are working?
But once again, and whatever may become of a scheme I have cited only by way of example, it seems to me certain that taxation constitutes a collective state property; it is certain that this state property, still marked today by the decisive imprint of bourgeois property and by a deep class character, will necessarily evolve, under the action of democracy and the proletarians, toward social and common property.
And let no one tell me that there has always been, in various forms, what is called taxation, and that if taxation could be regarded as a sort of collective property, or even as a germ of that property, there would have been at all times germs of communism.
What is new is that this collective state property called taxation has taken on so enormous an extension in a society that has inscribed in its codes the sovereign right of individual property. What is new is that bourgeois and bourgeoisly individualist society has been led, in order to ensure its own functioning, to create this state property, which represents a fifth of national activity, and which, despite its primary class destination, is, at least in its collective form, in opposition with the individual form of property. What is new and important is that this collective state property grows and evolves in a democratic society where the proletariat grows in number and in strength; it is, consequently, that a democracy wholly penetrated by proletarian thought can little by little arrange, for the good of the proletariat and according to communist law, this immense collective property whose habit bourgeois society itself has little by little created and enlarged.
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND THE LAW OF SUCCESSION
It is not for the benefit of the great community of workers and citizens, but for the benefit of the small community of the family, that French law on successions regulates and limits the power of individuals to dispose of their property. But our laws on successions are no less a grave and profound encroachment upon individual right, upon individual property.
It is through the free disposition of property that the Civil Code defines ownership. An individual who does not dispose of his property in complete freedom, in complete sovereignty, is not fully its owner. Another power limits his power; another right limits his right.
Now, French citizens cannot freely dispose of their property. They cannot transfer it by gifts or bequests to absolutely whomever they please: the law of the state intervenes to tell them in part to whom to transmit it, and in what proportion. Individuals are required to reserve their property for the heirs the law designates, in the order in which it designates them. Article 731 of the Civil Code says: “Successions are conferred upon the children and descendants of the deceased, upon his ascendants, and upon his collateral relatives, in the order and according to the rules hereinafter determined.”
Thus it is not the individual will of the owner that chooses all those to whom his property shall go. The state chooses for him. The law of the state decides for him. And since property is defined, in the very terms of the Civil Code, by the power to dispose, the state itself has a kind of ownership over all the property of its citizens, since it substitutes itself for them in the very disposition of their property. It does not retain it for itself; it transmits it to individuals. But it is the state, and not the owner, that governs this transmission. It is therefore the state that performs, in this regard, an act of ownership.
And by no means, by no device, can the individual owner evade the sovereign will of the state. Not only does the state, in the absence of a precise disposition by the owner, decide to which heirs the succession shall fall. But the individual owner, in full life, in full activity, in full strength, can dispose of his property only to a small degree. He can lease it, he can sell it, for a sale is in essence only a change in the form of property, and in exchange for the object sold the seller receives an equal value. Leasing and selling modify the manner of collecting the fruits of property, or the form of property. They do not touch its substance; they do not diminish its value; and consequently they do not injure the interests of heirs designated in advance by the state.
But what is forbidden to the individual is to make over his property to persons other than those whom the state has in advance instituted as heirs by succession. Or at least, he can freely give away only a rather small portion, narrowly limited by law.
Article 913 of the Civil Code says: “Liberalities, whether by acts inter vivos or by testament, may not exceed one-half of the property of the donor, if he leaves at his death only one legitimate child; one-third, if he leaves two children; one-quarter, if he leaves three or more.”
Thus the individual right of the French citizen over his property is narrowly limited. In vain will the peasant proprietor allege that he has toiled prodigiously to acquire a small estate; that this estate cannot, without perishing or losing much of its value, be decomposed and broken up into fragments; that he would wish to reserve it for a single heir, the most thrifty, the most valiant, the most shrewd of all. The law, for higher reasons of social equilibrium and equality, obliges him to distribute roughly equally among all his children the small estate created by him, and by him alone. In vain did the peasant proprietors of Normandy represent to the Constituent Assembly, to the Legislative Assembly, and to the Convention that customarily they married off their daughters, with a small dowry, outside the family estate; that they kept their sons beside them to cultivate it; that often, through the prolonged effort of those sons, the value of the estate had been increased; and that it was unjust to admit the daughters, at the father’s death, to a share in this surplus of value. The Convention refused to admit any exception, and the Civil Code admitted almost no exception to the law of domestic equality by which it decomposed the property of citizens. In vain today will the bold industrialist who by his initiative has created a great industry wish to leave it entirely or almost entirely to the sole heir capable, in his judgment, of sustaining and expanding it. It is not he who decides; it is not his will that is law; it is not he, the creator of this wealth, who disposes of it at his pleasure. The state intervenes and distributes this property called individual according to the sovereign rules it has laid down.
How often we are told, we socialists: “So you wish, by your system of equality, to treat the lazy man and the industrious man alike? Your socialism is nothing but a premium on laziness.”
This is absurd; for in calling all citizens, all workers, to the collective ownership of the instruments of labor, we free the workers from the tithe of the parasites, from the tribute levied by the idleness of the shareholder upon the toil of the proletarian. But it is the bourgeois law of successions, it is the law instituted by the revolutionary bourgeoisie, that could be accused of favoring laziness, since it assures to all children, even the most indolent, even those who will abuse their share of the paternal inheritance to live a life of idleness, an equal and irreducible portion of that inheritance. It does not leave to the father, to him who created the property, who has tested day by day the character and faculties of his sons, the right to treat entirely differently the one who will make the inheritance an instrument of labor and the one who will make it an instrument of laziness. It permits him to do so only to a rather small degree.
The Revolution, wishing to realize the highest possible degree of equality within the family, overrode the difficulties and the objections. It bound individual wills. It encroached upon individual property in a social interest, with a view to a broader diffusion of wealth.
Note that among the goods possessed by the individual, the law of the state makes no distinction of form or origin; it withdraws them all, without distinction, from individual will, from individual right; it subjects them all to the same rules of devolution and succession.
One could understand, at a stretch, from the standpoint of individual property, that the law of the state should oblige the father to transmit to all his children the portion of his property that he himself received from his forebears. This would be a sort of hereditary reserve, a family patrimony that the father would pass on as he received it. But for that part of the property that the father himself has acquired, which is his own work, the price of his personal effort, perhaps the ransom of a life worn out by care and toil — how is it possible, without violating individual property to its core, not to leave him, and him alone, its full disposal?
Yet the law takes no account of this. It expropriates every French citizen of the power to dispose of his property, whatever it may be, even of those goods that bear the vivid mark, the warm imprint of his individual effort. Article 732 of the Civil Code, with a kind of impassibility and indifference that is the very negation of individual right, says this: “The law considers neither the nature nor the origin of property in regulating succession.”
And how narrow, in our code, is the subordination of individual right to family right, of individual property to the family property constituted by the will of the state! It is not only toward his living children that the citizen is bound. It is not to them alone that he must reserve his property, which in advance is theirs. It is toward the whole succession of generations that he is bound: the descendants of deceased children, to whatever degree, are called, by representation, to succeed by right, as if they were the child himself. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren inherit by right, if death has carried away the generations that separate them from the first ascendant. Even if the great-grandchildren were already wealthy through the inheritance received from their father and grandfather, the great-grandfather is bound to reserve their share. Thus individual property is burdened with decisive obligations for the benefit of the family across the entire succession of generations; it is mortgaged, for the benefit of the most distant future, with an eternal mortgage.
The Civil Code takes the most meticulous precautions to defend family property, created by the law of the state, against the will of the individual owner. It goes so far as to annul, by a retroactive effect, all transactions that would be contrary to the right of family property, superior to the right of individual property.
Thus an individual, in the course of his life, makes a gift of a portion of his property by a disposition inter vivos. It may be that at that moment the portion of property he gives does not exceed that of which he may legally dispose. For example, if he has three children, he may dispose of one-quarter of his fortune, and he does indeed dispose of it: the donee enters into possession of the portion of property given to him. But then the fortune of the donor diminishes, and when he dies, the gift he made many years before turns out to represent more than the quarter of which he may legally dispose. That gift shall be reduced until it is brought back to its legal proportions.
Or again, the donor disposed of one-third of his fortune at a time when he had only two children. He could then legally dispose of one-third. A third child arrives: he can now dispose of only one-quarter. The act of donation is now valid only up to the proportion of one-quarter; and even if the donee entered years ago into possession of what was given to him, he must submit to the reduction.
Or again, a citizen made a gift of his fortune at a time when, having neither ascendant nor child, he could dispose of it fully. Children arrive: the donation is revoked by operation of law; the right of family property reaches back retroactively over the acts of the individual even before the creation of the family. Even if the donee, having thus received in good faith movable or immovable property, has disposed of it; even if he has sold the immovable he received; even if he has used these goods to secure and guarantee his wife’s dowry — even then the donation is revoked; all the acts related to it fall; third-party purchasers of the immovable are obliged to return it to the succession; and the dowry of the donee’s wife remains without guarantee. Everything yields, everything is effaced before the power of family right, of family property established by the Revolution above individual property, above individual wills and individual transactions, above individual rights.
One must read and ponder these articles of the Civil Code to see with what rigor, with what disdain for acquired positions and arrangements already of long standing, it has protected against individuals a form of property that surpasses them. The individual owner, the father, is bound, watched, as though he were the usurper of his own property. He is almost suspect, and every act of donation by which he alienates or believes he alienates a portion of his property is of an extreme fragility, always liable to be rendered void. All the agreements connected with the act of will by which he believed he had disposed of a portion of his property are subject, however far they may extend, to the same voidability.
Article 920 of the Civil Code says: “Dispositions, whether inter vivos or by reason of death, that exceed the disposable portion shall be reducible to that portion at the opening of the succession.”
Article 921: “The reduction of dispositions inter vivos may be demanded only by those for whose benefit the law creates the reserve, by their heirs or assigns. Donees, legatees, and creditors of the deceased may not demand this reduction nor benefit from it.”
Article 922: “The reduction is determined by forming a mass of all property existing at the death of the donor or testator. To this mass is fictitiously added all property of which he has disposed by donation inter vivos, according to its condition at the time of the donations and its value at the time of the donor’s death. On all this property, after deducting the debts, one calculates, having regard to the status of the heirs he leaves, the portion of which he could have disposed.”
Thus, even if what was given long ago did not exceed, at the moment the donation was made, the portion of which the donor may dispose at his death, but if since the donation the value of what was given — whether immovable property or a movable security — has increased, there must be a reduction: it is on the value that the donated property has not at the moment of the donation, but at the moment of death, that the calculation is made. Every act of donation is thus struck with absolute uncertainty.
Article 929 says: “Immovable property to be recovered by the effect of the reduction shall be recovered free of any debts or mortgages created by the donee.”
I commend Article 930 to those who have a superstition of individual property: “The action for reduction or recovery may be exercised by the heirs against third-party holders of immovable property forming part of the donations and alienated by the donees, in the same manner and in the same order as against the donees themselves.”
And what a power of retroactive effects in Article 960, which reads as follows:
“All donations inter vivos made by persons who had no children or descendants actually living at the time of the donation, of whatever value these donations may be, and under whatever title they may have been made, and even though they were mutual and remunerative, even those that were made in favor of marriage by persons other than ascendants to the spouses, or by the spouses to one another, shall be revoked by operation of law by the arrival of a legitimate child of the donor, even a posthumous child, or by the legitimation of a natural child by subsequent marriage, if he was born since the donation.”
This is the great bourgeois proclamation of the right of the child, prelude to the magnificent communist proclamation. Before being born, before even being conceived, before even the marriage from which the child is to issue has been contracted, the child has a preexisting right superior to all others. The child has a right over the property of the one from whom he is one day to be born; and all the acts by which, well before his birth, that property was given away — all those acts are null. Individual property is committed in advance to unknown generations, and when the child arrives, he shatters, in the past, all the combinations of property contrary to the sovereign right with which society invests him. He shatters even the will of the one who was not yet his father, who is suddenly reduced to the strange role of a disavowed steward of a fortune whose true owner had not yet even been conceived.
But as for us, it is not to the child of the bourgeois family that we recognize a preexisting right over bourgeois property. In the great and broad communist and human thought, every child, every son of man, has from now on a preexisting right over the whole of the means of work and of life of which the national community can dispose. And the social patrimony that we wish to create for the nation, the common property that we wish to constitute for it, is the guarantee of this preexisting right of every child of the human race, just as family property, so jealously defended by the law of the bourgeois Revolution against individual encroachments, is the guarantee of the preexisting right of the child of the possessing classes.
And with what meticulousness the law forestalls every possibility of fraud! The grandfather might be tempted to favor one of his grandchildren, or one of his nephews, at the expense of the others. And for this purpose he might give the portion of property at his disposal either to one of his children or to one of his brothers and sisters, with the condition that they transmit this portion of property preferentially to such or such of his grandchildren or nephews.
The law forbids these preferential dispositions. The disposable portion given by the grandfather to his immediate descendants must then be distributed equally among all the grandchildren.
Articles 1048, 1049, and 1050 of the Civil Code are explicit: “The property of which fathers and mothers have the power to dispose may be given by them, in whole or in part, to one or several of their children, by acts inter vivos or by testament, with the condition of rendering these goods to the children born or to be born, to the first degree only, of said donees. — In the event of death without children, the disposition that the deceased shall have made, by act inter vivos or by testament, in favor of one or several of his brothers or sisters, of all or part of the property not reserved by law in his succession, with the condition of rendering these goods to the children born or to be born, to the first degree only, of said brothers or sisters donees, shall be valid. — The dispositions permitted by the two preceding articles shall be valid only insofar as the condition of restitution shall be for the benefit of all the children born or to be born of the person so charged, without exception of age or sex.”
Here again is a most curious combination of property, devised to secure family property against any individual seizure and against any distribution of privilege. The father may, according to the law, dispose of one-quarter or one-third of his fortune, depending on the number of his children. This disposable portion, if he fears the dissipation of his children, he may give to them, but on the condition that they transmit it intact to their own children. Thus this disposable portion traverses a first generation, without being lost in it or spent by it, to arrive whole at the second. Only, the entire generation must be called to share in it. All the grandchildren or nephews must be assured an equal share. The law agrees to convoy to its destination, as far as the second generation, the disposable portion given by the ascendant, only on the condition that it shall be delivered, in equal portions, to all the heirs of the same order, that there shall be neither preference nor privilege. Thus, even the disposable portion, which in the first generation was withdrawn from the law of equal sharing, falls back under it at the second. The grandfather has the right to think of his grandchildren; he has the right to convey to them, through the intermediary of his children, a portion of his property over which his children shall have no claim. But he has the right to think of his grandchildren, born or to be born, only on the condition that he think equally of all of them — firstborn or younger, daughters or sons. On this condition, the law sees to it that the disposable portion reaches the grandchildren. It obliges the parents charged with this trust to invest the property they must transmit in sound securities or in immovable property.
Article 1062: “The person charged with restitution shall be required to arrange for the sale, by public notice and auction, of all movable property and effects included in the disposition…” — Article 1065: “There shall be made by the person so charged, within six months from the day of the closing of the inventory, an investment of the cash, of the proceeds of the movable property and effects that shall have been sold, and of what shall have been received from active debts.” — Article 1066: “The person so charged shall likewise be required to invest the proceeds of active debts that shall be recovered and of bond redemptions.” — Article 1067: “This investment shall be made in accordance with what shall have been ordered by the author of the disposition, if he has designated the nature of the securities in which the investment is to be made; otherwise, it may be made only in immovable property, or with a lien on immovable property.”
Thus, when the grandfather, after having left, as the law obliges him, three-quarters of his property to his children, wishes to convey to his grandchildren the quarter of which he may dispose, he entrusts this quarter as a deposit in the hands of his children, and they are required to constitute this deposit in defined, durable, and unalterable securities. They may collect the income; but they may not touch the capital. And this unalterable, inalienable deposit, as soon as it reaches the grandchildren, shall be equally shared among them. The effort of the law is immense and subtle to preserve from any individual encroachment the family property founded and protected by the state.
Where then, in all these arrangements, is that power to dispose which, according to the Civil Code, is the very essence of property? To tell the truth, and to take things broadly and from above, full individual property does not exist in France. No individual has the entire right to dispose of his property. Under the discipline of the law of succession, every owner is less an owner than a depositary. He holds on deposit a class property, familial in form and capitalist in foundation. It is to the indefinite succession of generations, whose right the state represents and defends — it is not to the individual himself — that what is called his property belongs.
Capitalist property exists, for these depositaries can use the family property they hold on deposit to exploit men who have no property. There is therefore capitalist property, and class property. But, I repeat, one can scarcely say that individual property exists, since no one freely disposes of what he possesses, and the state substitutes itself for individuals to regulate, without them or even against them, the use of their property.
But by what reasons, by what principles did the French Revolution justify the prodigious encroachment that its laws of succession imposed upon individual property?
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE LAW OF SUCCESSION
M. Sagnac writes in his truly magisterial book on the Civil Legislation of the French Revolution:
After having fortified the right of property, the revolutionaries weaken it. The individual certainly has the power to use and abuse his property; but it is an essentially life-long right that must never harm the family or society. Above the individual are a natural group and an artificial one — the family and the state — which must not be sacrificed, and in whose interest the legislator must establish the rules for the transmission of property.
The Civil Code, as it was fixed under the Consulate, gives us but a very faint idea of the audacities of the Revolution in matters of succession. The Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly debated the problem, and the boldest views were put forward by Mirabeau, Petion, and Tronchet, but they came to nothing. It was the Convention that legislated. This is why, in the Socialist History, I have reserved for the Convention the detailed exposition and critical analysis of this most important part of revolutionary thought and action. But the Convention did no more than formulate into laws the principles affirmed in all the assemblies of the Revolution. These laws, with respect to the transmission of property, did not merely restrict the right of individual property: they virtually suppressed it.
Whereas today the father may dispose of half his property if he has one child, of a third if he has two, and of a quarter if he has three, and whereas he may dispose of it in favor of one of his children, who will thus receive a larger share than the others, the Convention decreed, on March 7, 1793, that “the power to dispose of one’s property, whether by reason of death, or inter vivos, or by contractual donation in the direct line, is abolished, and that consequently all descendants shall have an equal portion of the property of their ascendants.” The father may not favor any of his sons; the grandfather may not favor any of his grandchildren. All shall receive absolutely, mathematically, an equal share. This is the complete suppression of the right to make a will, of the right to dispose, in the direct line. With regard to sons or grandsons, the individual will of the ascendant counts for nothing; he is not truly an owner; he is merely the manager of a property over which all descendants of the same degree have, by the law of the state, an equal and sovereign right. And not only can the ascendant not favor any of his descendants, not only can he not increase the share of any of them by giving them the disposable portion, but this disposable portion is reduced to almost nothing. It is not of a half, or a third, or a quarter of his fortune that the father may dispose. The Convention’s laws of 1793 permit the ascendant, if he has descendants — children or grandchildren — to dispose of only a tenth.
Thus the man who has descendants can exercise his will over only a tenth of his property. And even this tenth he cannot use with complete freedom, since he cannot use it to increase the share of one of his heirs, children or grandchildren. He can give it only to persons other than his heirs. In no case can this small disposable portion of a tenth serve to break the absolute equality, the mathematical equality, willed by the law between descendants, and to reestablish a kind of right of primogeniture or privilege in favor of one of them. If the father wishes to dispose of the tenth left to him by law, he must carry it beyond the circle of his heirs; he must give it either to more distant relatives or to strangers.
And thus the law works doubly toward the dispersion, the fragmentation of the father’s fortune: first, by instituting among all the children the rigorously equal sharing of nine-tenths of the fortune; and then by obliging the father, if he does not wish to subject the last tenth to the law of equal sharing, to carry it outside the immediate family.
Furthermore, whereas today Article 915 of the Civil Code allows the citizen who has no descendants to dispose of half his property if he leaves one or more ascendants in each of the paternal and maternal lines, and of three-quarters if he leaves ascendants only in one line, the Convention’s law permits the citizen, if he leaves ascendants, whatever their number, to dispose of only a sixth.
Truly, from the standpoint of the all-important right to dispose of property by donation or testament, individual property, in revolutionary law, no longer exists.
The Committee on Legislation of the Convention wished to go even further along the path of equal and obligatory fragmentation of fortunes, in the substitution of indefinite family property for individual property. It considered admitting simultaneously all members of the family — brothers and sisters as well as children — to the sharing of the succession. It did not, however, decide to do so, despite the urgings of Durand-Maillane. But as it stands, the Convention’s Civil Code fundamentally destroys an entire essential part of the rights whose totality constitutes individual property.
The power to dispose, which is the very essence of individual property, is not simple: it can be exercised in various forms and in various directions. The Convention eliminates one of these forms, closes one of these directions; and M. Sagnac, summarizing on this point the revolutionary achievement, was able to write without any systematic bias:
The fortune belongs less to the individual than to the family, that is, to all relatives, however distant they may be.
The individual truly has in full ownership, with the absolute right to use, to abuse, to dispose, only the sixth or the tenth of his possessions, and he cannot even use this disposable portion to destroy “sacred equality” among the successors; so that if he does not leave it to his heirs, which would be preferable, he will necessarily give it to other persons, which will always divide wealth.
And these laws so bold, so forceful, which dismembered the right of individual property and substituted for it a family property founded on the will of the state — the Convention decided, by an incomparable stroke of revolutionary audacity, that they would have retroactive effect going back to July 14, 1789. It proclaimed that since July 14, 1789, the nation had virtually re-entered into possession of all its rights, that all the privileges and abuses of the past were abolished in fact as in law from that date, and that the inevitable delays taken by the Revolution to formulate the new law into statutes could not be a prolongation of the old iniquity. It decreed as a consequence that all successions opened from July 1789 to November 1793 would be settled by the new law. All donations, all testaments by which citizens had disposed of more than a sixth or a tenth of their property were annulled; all inequality of partition among children was retroactively abolished. The firstborn or those who had received more than their share were required to return the excess immediately to the common pool, and a new partition was made, in which the younger children, the disinherited, the less favored received their equal and just share. Thus the whole of social life for four years was overturned and renewed to its very foundations; all domestic relations were modified; all relations of property were changed; all the roots of individual will were torn up, and it was a new social law that, in the form of family property and the enforced equality of partition, drove out, so to speak, the absolute right of individual property.
Will it be objected that these most vigorous provisions of revolutionary law have since been weakened and attenuated? Yes, they were, by the Consulate, under the influence of Bonaparte, who wished to reestablish paternal despotism as a buttress for imperial despotism, and to reconstitute the family as a monarchy, whereas the Revolution had made of it, in the order of property, an egalitarian republic. But whatever the revisions the Consulate imposed upon the law of the Revolution, that law still survives, despite everything, in the Civil Code. The consular reaction weakened it: it could not abolish it. And even today, in the matter of successions, individual property does not function.
The Revolution, while declaring that it did not intend to touch the sacred right of property, was well aware that through its laws of succession it was limiting and dismembering that right. And to authorize itself in so doing, it formulated a wholly social theory of property. If property is an extension of the human person, if it proceeds from the individual, by what right does one remove from individuals the power to dispose of their property by donation or testament? By what right does one substitute oneself for them in the decisive use of their fortune, in the choice of those who are to continue its use and develop its seeds?
The Revolution answers clearly, boldly, through all its great men — through Mirabeau as through Robespierre, through its great economists and its great jurists, through Dupont de Nemours as through Tronchet — that property is a social fact, that it derives from society, that it exists and can exist only through society; that society, no doubt, in its own interest and in the interest of liberty, has given to this social fact the individual form; but that individuals, possessing only by virtue of society, must, in the use they make of their property, be subject to the laws and conditions that society imposes. The Revolution adds that it is already quite enough for the individual to have, during his lifetime, and by acts that do not engage the very substance of property, freely administered the particular estate he has built up within social activity. He cannot claim to extend his right, his will beyond the grave, and to command in death. It is the living society, the imperishable society that commands in his place, and that, even throughout the life of the individual, forbids him arbitrary dispositions whose effect would extend beyond his life.
This is the principle in whose name the state intervenes to regulate, in the individual’s place, without him, or even against him, the transmission of his property. I scarcely need say that it is not in order to create a social property, common to all men, that the bourgeois Revolution proclaims the social character of property: it is only to create a family property, common to all members of the family. But now that the time has come to create, for the benefit of all men, of all workers, this common property, we may invoke, for a vaster work, the social definition of property to which the revolutionary bourgeoisie was driven — unable to combat the right of primogeniture, entailed estates, and the whole survival of feudal law prolonged by the freedom to make wills, without limiting the right of individual wills and subordinating individual property to social right.
For what reasons did the Revolution, after having proclaimed the right of society to regulate the transmission of property, use that right to subject all successions to the law of equal partition, to bind so closely the will of the ascendant? It gave three reasons: one a reason of combat, but of eternal combat; the other two, essential.
It declared first that in great human movements, in great revolutionary crises, fathers were too often attached to the past; that on the contrary, the new generations understood the new times. It was therefore imprudent to leave to fathers the right to punish, by disinheriting them, those of their children who supported the new order and devoted themselves to the progress of humanity. To leave to fathers the entire disposal of their property was to permit them to reward and strengthen those of their children who flattered their prejudices; it was to increase, consequently, the heavy power of the past and to prolong it over the new society. The only way to open the road to the future was to assure to all children, even to those whose boldness disturbed the natural conservatism of fathers, an equal share of the inheritance, an equal means of action.
Better still, as we have seen, the Revolution shatters all testamentary acts that for four years may have violated equality, and it does not hesitate, in the words of a passionate member of the Convention, “to pursue aristocracy even into the tomb.”
Thus it is in the name of revolutionary movement, in the name of human movement and the indefinite progress of societies, that the Revolution suppresses, in everything that might bind the future, the individual right to dispose — that is to say, one of the essential elements of individual property. The revolutionary force of events thus proclaims, through the Convention, that a first and decisive restriction of individual property is the very condition of the progress of humanity, of the free movement of societies and minds.
But the Revolution, in order to institute the enforced equal partition among all children, among all relatives of the same degree, also invokes nature. Nature demands that all children be treated equally by the father. Nature demands that no arbitrary preference, no legal privilege break the equality of brothers and sisters who, living together, can fully love one another only under an equal discipline. To expose disinherited children to cruel suffering by suddenly establishing a disproportion of fortune, a social inequality between them and their more favored brothers, with whom it had seemed that everything should be held in common — and when this suffering comes to children through the will of the father — is an act against nature.
It is therefore in the name of the right of nature that the Revolution ensures equality in the division of property among children. But let one take heed: this equitable and good nature that intervenes in the social life of each family does not reside in the individual, does not express itself through the individual. The law does not leave to the sensibility of each citizen, to the natural affections of the father, the task of carrying out among all the members of the family a just and good distribution of the family property. It may be that the father yields to unjust preferences, to caprices of tenderness, to blind prejudices, to the pride of caste that delights in concentrating upon a single head all the rays of the family fortune, or to that sort of posthumous avarice that loves to survive in the integrity of the patrimony handed over wholly or nearly wholly to one of the children. Then, in the heart of the father, in the consciousness of the individual, nature is falsified; and it is the law that becomes the faithful guardian, the true interpreter of nature. It is the law that becomes nature itself. It is the state that is the great paternal heart, always sure, always equal to itself, always animated, toward the members of a single family, by a single tenderness. It is the state that substitutes the inflexible equality of its impartial tenderness for the often disordered, partial, selfish affection of the father or the mother. It is a high and firm collective sensibility that intervenes to prevent all the lapses of individual sensibilities, all the failings or all the partialities of particular affections.
Thus the natural affections are in a way transported to another sphere, the sphere of the state. This is not the socialization of property, since the state withdraws its disposal from the individual only to ensure it better for the family. But it is the socialization of family duties, of family affections, since the state substitutes itself for the father in fulfilling toward the children, through the equal division of the fortune, the duty of equal tenderness that the father — prejudiced, proud, or strangely miserly — might not fulfill. To proclaim the right of nature and to transfer to society the exercise of that right is one of the boldest transpositions of human nature into social law, of individual sensibility into social sensibility, that can be imagined.
But in truth, it is within very narrow limits that bourgeois society and the bourgeois Revolution confine this social right and this social sensibility. Let us enlarge the sphere of collective sensibility and collective duty as the demands of human nature itself grow. Now, nature does not demand only that the children of a single family be treated with equal tenderness. Now that the nation becomes more and more a reality, now that the relations of men become entangled, now that a growing solidarity links all portions of the unified country, now that the equality of political rights and a beginning of universal culture, by bringing the proletarian class closer in certain respects to the capitalist and bourgeois class, make proletarians feel more keenly and more cruelly all that they lack in guarantees, well-being, and rights — just as younger children in the family suffered all the more from family inequality when they were constantly jostled against the privileged child through the ironic familiarity of life in common — now, then, the cry of nature widens, and it is no longer family equality, but social equality that it demands for all the children of the same nation, which has become a great family.
The question is not, in order to respond to this broader appeal of nature, to this wider cry of humanity, to proceed to an equal partition of estates and fortunes among all the children of the nation, as the Revolution partitioned equally each fortune among all the children of the family.
No: to a new right correspond new means. The state will satisfy a more exacting human nature; it will fulfill its social duty by assuring to all citizens without any exception the full right to life through labor — that is, the right to work and to the full product of labor. Now the state has for this but one means: to assure to every citizen co-ownership of the means of labor, which have become collective property. It is no longer the right of primogeniture of an individual that must be abolished within the family; it is the right of primogeniture of a class that must be abolished within the nation. And just as the revolutionary nation, some hundred and twenty years ago, abolished from individual property everything that opposed the right of the children of a single family, the revolutionary nation, under the growing inspiration of the proletariat, will abolish from individual property everything that opposes the right of all citizens. Just as the Revolution, some hundred and twenty years ago, in order to secure the right of the members of the family, created at the expense of individual property the family property, so too the new Revolution, proletarian and human, in order to secure the right of the members of society, will create at the expense of individual and bourgeois property the social property, the common property.
Finally, if the Revolution decreed the equal partition of property, within each family, among all descendants of the same degree; if it called as broadly as possible the descendants of various degrees to the partition — it was in order to realize as far as possible the equality of fortunes; it was in order to bring down, through obligatory division, the great fortunes and to bring them closer to the medium ones; it was in order to bring down as far as possible the medium fortunes and to bring them closer to the small ones.
The Convention hoped, by disseminating and crumbling at each generation the fortunes that had been acquired, to prevent too great a disproportion of wealth. It hoped, through the intermediary of family equality, to realize the highest possible degree of social equality. To tell the truth, it could not imagine any other path. The universal and equal partition of all property among all citizens is an absurd, barbarous, paralyzing, and untenable system. And moreover, neither were minds prepared for the common ownership of the means of production, nor did the technique of industry — which was scarcely attempting the manufactory and was still close to the small workshop — permit conceiving, through large-scale production, communist production, and as its condition, communist property. The Convention could therefore seek social equality only by an indirect method: by the equal and periodic fragmentation of family property among the members of the family, by the restriction and virtual abolition of the individual right to dispose.
The revolutionary bourgeoisie, of which the Convention was the boldest expression, was spurred along the path of equal partition by two pressing reasons. First, it wished to be done with the feudal and noble regime. It wished to uproot it so thoroughly that no shoot of it could ever spring up again as if by surprise. It wished to pursue it so relentlessly through all its disguises, metamorphoses, counterfeits, and substitutes that never, in any form, more modern and bourgeois, could it reappear. Now, if the father could freely dispose of his property, what would prevent him from establishing, in favor of his eldest son, a veritable right of primogeniture, a bourgeois continuation of the old-regime right of primogeniture? What would even prevent him, if his testamentary will were sovereign, from specifying that the property he bequeathed to his eldest son should be bequeathed by the latter to his own eldest son, and so on for several generations?
This was what was called the right of substitution, which constituted an untouchable property whose transmission across time, creating through the testator’s will a whole series of privileged persons, was determined in advance for several generations. This was a remnant of the feudal regime, a prolongation of the spirit of caste, which perpetuated upon the heads of privileged children and grandchildren the pride of fortune and name. Thus, by a curious paradox, or rather by a natural consequence, the sovereignly free exercise of individual will led to the bourgeois restoration of the noble caste. The plenitude of individual property, exercising its right beyond the grave itself, reconstituted, at least in part, the feudal regime. And it was impossible for the revolutionary bourgeoisie to prevent its rebirth without limiting, and virtually suppressing, even in the transmission of bourgeois properties, the power to dispose — the individual right.
This is plain in the brief and curious report by which Laplaigne asked the Convention — which immediately issued a decree to that effect — for the abolition and prohibition of all substitutions. (Session of October 19, 1792, Volume 52 of the Parliamentary Archives.) Plainly, Laplaigne cannot combat the regime of substitutions without at the same time combating all inequality of partition. I can cite here only a few lines, but they are most characteristic:
Under a truly republican regime and in a country that abhors every species of aristocracy and despotism, in a social organization, in a word, absolutely founded on equality — it is Laplaigne who underlined the word — the use of such dispositions would be a political monstrosity, in that it would perpetuate, along with the inequality of partitions within families, the aristocracy of properties, and would accumulate for several generations upon privileged heads fortunes capable of alarming public liberty… All dispositions of this kind, having as their principal object to prevent the division of inheritances, so favorable, so necessary even to liberty, and thus to perpetuate, from degree to degree, the despotism of properties and consequently of persons, must be enveloped in the same proscription.
As one can see, the Convention cannot proscribe substitutions — “an impure remnant of feudal laws,” as Laplaigne puts it — without proscribing all inequality of partition: it cannot defend itself against the feudal regime without suppressing, in the matter of the transmission of property, the right to dispose — the supreme form of the right of property.
The Convention did not content itself with forbidding substitutions for the future. It suppressed, without indemnity, all those whose designated beneficiaries, born or yet to be born, had not yet entered into possession; and this will be a striking example with which Lassalle, in one of the most vigorous chapters of his book on “Acquired Rights,” will illustrate his revolutionary theory of law.
The Convention was driven further along this path by the demands of the proletarians, who were beginning to serve notice on the Revolution that they did not intend to be duped. The Revolution answered: “No agrarian law; no anarchy; no violent leveling of fortunes; but gradual leveling through the equal partition of the property of families among all relatives of the same degree.” I could multiply the citations and proofs.
What became of this promise and this hope is well known. But what I retain is that the Convention believed, through family equality, it was preparing social equality: it therefore did not shrink from touching, in the interest of social equality, an essential part of the right of individual property.
And it is in the name of the right of property, in the name of individual property, that the counter-revolutionaries, the defenders of the old regime, demanded the maintenance of the power to dispose and of inequality of partitions.
When the Radicals, in order to oppose the ever more extensive constitution of a collective and social property of the means of production — capable of assuring the independence of all workers and of absorbing all capitalist privilege — invoke individual property, they take up again, in new times and on new questions, the theory of the counter-revolutionaries: they repeat the speech of Cazales.
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND THE BOURGEOIS LAWS OF EXPROPRIATION
The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed that no one could be deprived of his property except by law and on the condition of a just and prior indemnity. Assuredly, this is a guarantee given to property. It is no less true that bourgeois society is obliged to provide, in the very charter of its rights, for legal expropriation on grounds of public utility. The substance of property is not affected thereby, since the expropriated individual receives the equivalent of what society takes from him. But society recognizes the right to change, in the individual’s hands, the form of his property. He had a field, a house, a garden, a factory: the law takes from him his field, his house, his garden, his factory, and it gives him a value of a wholly different order — a sum of money or a government bond. In vain the owner protests that he is more attached to the particular form of his property than to the very value of that property. The law, in the interest of society, expropriates him of his habits; it does violence to his will. And here again, in the bourgeois code itself and in the interest of bourgeois society, social right limits or overrides the absolute right of individual property.
I understand well that the bourgeois law of expropriation does not go beyond the sphere of individual property. It is the individual who continues to possess. Only, what he possessed in one form, he now possesses in another. From that to socialist expropriation, which will change the system of property, which will transfer ownership of the means of production from individuals to the national community, there is an abyss. And that abyss, only the class movement of the organized proletariat can cross. I have the right to note, however, that already today, and in bourgeois law itself, the form of individual property is at the mercy of social power. And this is a juridical fact whose social consequences may be great.
At once, this article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was invoked by the revolutionaries themselves in order to limit the right of property. As early as the end of 1792, when the high price of grain and bread aroused the people in many regions, when the most ardent democrats proposed to the Convention that the law fix the price of foodstuffs, the Convention was at first seized with scruples. The majority said that after fixing by law the price of grain, it would be necessary also to fix the price of all the products of the soil; but to fix by law the price of the products of the soil — is that not an attack on the right of property? If the owner can no longer sell his goods at the price determined solely by the play of supply and demand, if he can alienate them only at a price fixed by society itself, then it is society that becomes the true owner of the products of the soil: it disposes of them in the place of the individual owner, and the individual loses that power to dispose which characterizes individual property. Thus the Convention, at its beginnings, was reluctant, out of respect for property, to enter into the system of taxing grain prices that was soon to lead it to the establishment of the maximum for all goods.
But what did the most ardent revolutionaries reply? Yes, in fixing the price of goods, the state substitutes itself, in the ownership of those goods, for the individual owner; but it indemnifies him through the very price it has fixed, and since the law permits the expropriation of the land itself upon payment of an indemnity, why should it not likewise permit the expropriation of the products of the land? Beffroy, in the session of December 8, 1792, gave the argument a striking form: “We complain that the ownership of grain is regarded as more sacred than any other. Indeed, does the state need my house, my garden, my field? It seizes them. And can I ever be compensated for my habits, the comforts of my dwelling, the very eccentricities of its layout? Can I ever be compensated for the way my garden was arranged to suit my tastes, my character, my fortune? And if it is true that society does not violate property by legally seizing the material that produces, because it pays the value, will not the same be true of the products?”
Thus, by a sudden extension of the right of expropriation for public utility, the state substitutes itself for individuals in the disposal of all products of the soil. It is in application of the article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man providing for legal expropriation with indemnity that the Convention will finally decree, through the maximum, the legal seizure by society of all products of the earth and of industry. At a stroke, we are warned, by the bourgeois revolutionaries themselves, of the great consequences that may flow from this principle, of the vast legal expropriations that may spring from this germ of expropriation.
Individual property resisted; the habits violated by the law of expropriation struggled and schemed. The clause in the Declaration of Rights requiring the indemnity to be prior favored this resistance of the owners. They haggled over the amount of the indemnity; they raised suit upon suit, and by dint of procedural artifice, they often succeeded in wearing down the state.
But in 1831 a first breach was opened in the principle of prior indemnity. The July Revolution feared for a moment a general assault by counter-revolutionary Europe. It was necessary to create means of defense in haste, to raise fortifications without delay. What would have happened if property owners, by a solicitor’s tricks, had delayed the necessary expropriations? The law of 1831 decided that for works concerning the national defense, the state would not wait for the disputes raised by property owners over the amount of the indemnity to be settled. It could proclaim urgency and take possession of the land it needed; the indemnity would be settled later; it would therefore have ceased to be prior.
Thus the individual property owner suddenly finds himself faced with a fait accompli: he is expropriated of his property before knowing what indemnity he will be granted. National defense, to be sure; and no doubt this great excuse was necessary to violate an essential guarantee given to property by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and inscribed anew in the Charter of 1830. But through the breach opened in the name of the fatherland, the great capitalist companies would pass.
Under Louis-Philippe there was a great surge of public works. The financial, industrial, and propertied bourgeoisie multiplied canals; it undertook, with heavy state subsidies, premia, and interest guarantees, the construction of railways. But what! All these projected canals, all these railways that were to crisscross the territory, would overturn individual properties! How many gardens carried away or pierced through! How many dwellings demolished! How many estates, small or large, traversed and cut in two! And if the property owners resisted, if they exhausted all the delays of procedure over the amount of the indemnity — how much time wasted! The railway lines that had been granted concessions would not be able to begin construction until ten or twelve years after their concession; the obstinacy of a few owners along the projected route would suffice to drag everything out, to waste capital in unproductive waiting, or to force the line into absurd and ruinous detours.
The great capitalist bourgeoisie of Louis-Philippe would not hear of it. And in May 1841 it obtained a law of expropriation that placed individual properties at its mercy. Not only did the law provide that canals and railways should benefit from the right of expropriation for public utility, but it decided that in cases of urgency, the capitalist companies could take possession of unbuilt land before the definitive settlement of the indemnity. Let the peasant owner grumble, rage, and litigate. His field would be seized, and the triumphal way laid out by the great companies would press its iron sinews upon it before the dispute over the indemnity was resolved.
Proudhon, with a kind of exalted and triumphant irony, noted, in connection with this law of 1841, the contradictions of bourgeois property, which was thus obliged, for its own development, to deny itself. In vain, even in Parliament, protests were raised and anxieties expressed. In vain did Villemain and many others cry out that the Charter, guardian of property, was being violated, that property itself was threatened. The combined demands of civilization and capitalism carried everything before them.
Oh! I know well that here again we have not left the system of individual property. The value of the property subsists in the hands of individuals; only its form is changed. But when this change of form occurs on such a scale; when for the works of communes, of the state, of departments, of the great concessionary companies, expropriation for public utility operates; when millions of owners are forced to surrender their property to the social power, even in return for indemnity; when all the bonds of habit and affection by which property clings to the heart of man are broken; when capitalism itself, taking no account of conveniences, or memories, or even interests, substitutes an abstract and indifferent value for real, substantial, particular property that often was one with the individual — I have the right to say that bourgeois society itself has created, under its own legality, formidable precedents of expropriation.
What will the social Revolution, already begun, do? What will the communist Revolution do when it has reached the end of its development? No doubt it will create an entirely new system of property; it will substitute the common ownership of the means of production for capitalist and bourgeois property. But as regards the expropriated individuals, it may very well be that there is a simple change in the form of property. I do not wish today, after Marx, after Liebknecht, after Vandervelde, to touch the question of indemnity; but nothing prevents one from conceiving that the present holders of property should receive, for example, for a certain period, an assignation upon the products of collectivist production. This would be the socialist indemnity, the revolutionary indemnity. What juridical objection could bourgeois society raise, after the legal precedents it has itself created? The notion of public utility, introduced into the bourgeois code to limit the absolute right of individual property, is being transformed and enlarged as society itself is transformed. The bourgeois revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly would have revolted, in 1789, if they had been told that the article they inserted in the Declaration of Rights would be invoked three years later by the bourgeois revolutionaries of the Convention to justify the establishment of the maximum, the universal taxation of goods — that is, the universal expropriation of exchange, that essential part of individual property. And the members of the Convention in their turn would have been indignant if they had been told that fifty years later, under the reign of the propertied bourgeoisie, the social right of expropriation would be exercised for the benefit of the great capitalist companies, which would even be exempted from prior payment of the indemnity. And yet the force of events willed it so. It has transformed, extended, made supple the concept of public utility — the rule and measure of the right of expropriation.
Now, do we not have the right to say that public utility demands the general expropriation of the capitalist class for the benefit of the organized community? Yes, it is of public utility that the proletariat be called to full independence and to the great life of social cooperation. It is of public utility that the contradiction between the political sovereignty of the citizen and the economic subjection of the wage-earner come to an end. It is of public, and even of national, necessity that the class struggle, which today is the very condition of progress but which is for humanity a sadness and a shame, have an end; and it can end only with the disappearance of classes itself, with the transformation of class property into common and human property. It is therefore the general expropriation of the capitalist class for the benefit of the community that is today of public utility, and by the force of events the bourgeois code itself takes on a revolutionary meaning. It is by invoking the article of the bourgeois code that the jurists of the social Revolution will be able to manage the passage from bourgeois legality to communist legality.
The great English minister, Mr. Gladstone, while head of government, had proposed a vast plan of expropriation that partook at once of legal expropriation and of revolutionary expropriation. It is, I believe, the boldest project that any government has conceived since the French Revolution seized the entire domain of the Church and four billion in the property of the emigrants. Mr. Gladstone proposed to expropriate all the landlords, all the great English proprietors who hold the largest part of the land of Ireland. Having tried in vain, whether by repression or by palliatives, to restore social peace to Ireland, having tried in vain to protect Irish tenants without displeasing English landlords, Mr. Gladstone had arrived at the conviction that social order would be secured in Ireland only if the Irish land belonged to the Irish. He did not wish, and he could not, simply to dispossess the landlords. He therefore imagined buying, by means of the English budget, all the Irish estates of the landlords, and turning them over to Ireland itself. It was Ireland, as a relatively autonomous state, that would have managed this domain, that would have either leased it or sold it in parcels to the Irish people.
But who would bear the costs of the operation? It was out of the question to charge them to England; the English taxpayer would never have consented to pay the landlords, on behalf of the Irish and for their benefit, for the land of Ireland. And on the other hand, if Ireland were required to reimburse England, it would be obliged to impose very heavy rents on its tenants, and poverty would continue to crush the Irish people. Mr. Gladstone devised a bold scheme, which consisted in indemnifying the landlords in capital, and not in income. He calculated, or claimed, that the Irish estates yielded their landlords five percent. Thus, to obtain the capital value of an estate, one had to multiply its income by twenty. An estate that the landlord leased for five thousand francs — to reckon in French money — was therefore assumed to have a value of one hundred thousand francs. Mr. Gladstone, in expropriating the landlords, decided to give them not the equivalent of the income they received, but the equivalent of the capital they possessed. He thus gave them, in the example I have taken, not an income of five thousand francs, but a capital of one hundred thousand francs. And this capital of one hundred thousand francs he gave them in English Consols, in English government bonds.
Now, in England, a capital of one hundred thousand francs placed in government bonds yields only two and a half percent. Thus, to a landlord who possessed a landed capital of one hundred thousand francs, yielding five thousand francs, Mr. Gladstone handed over, in the form of government securities, an equal capital of one hundred thousand francs, but one that yielded only two thousand five hundred francs. At a stroke, Ireland, in order to reimburse England, needed to pay it, with respect to this estate, only an annual sum of two thousand five hundred francs. It could therefore ask the tenant not the five thousand francs of rent that the landlord had demanded, but only half that rent — two thousand five hundred francs. The Irish tenant was thus freed of half his burden. The English taxpayer was not charged a penny. And as for the landlord, legally expropriated — had he not received in capital the equivalent of his property? Mr. Gladstone made the Irish people the beneficiaries of the difference between the rate of capitalization of landed income in Ireland and the rate of capitalization of investment income in England. He halved the landlords’ income by the simple substitution of one form of property for another, of the movable form for the landed form.
This is the extreme limit of bourgeois law — a scheme intermediate between legal expropriation with indemnity and expropriation without indemnity. And it is a striking example of the effects of real dispossession that the mere change in the form of property can produce. There is therefore in the bourgeois right of expropriation a latent revolutionary virtue, which events will gradually bring to light and which will be formulated as communist and proletarian law.
Already, many reform proposals are being debated that presuppose an entirely new interpretation, an entirely socialist orientation, of the bourgeois right of expropriation. For example, to indicate at once a very important point: when one reads the municipal program drawn up by the Progressives of the London County Council, when one reads the resolutions on the question of private housing adopted in Germany by the Socialist Party and by some groups of bourgeois social reformers, one notes a growing tendency to give communes the right and the mandate to build healthy and affordable housing. The communes are urged to buy as much vacant land and suburban terrain as possible, so that speculation does not drive up the price of this land and burden the rents of the buildings that will be constructed upon it. But this role of builder, the communes can fulfill for the greatest good of the working class only by legally expropriating land and buildings. Thus is announced a forthcoming socialist extension, a forthcoming communist interpretation, of the right of expropriation for public utility inscribed in bourgeois law.
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND COMMERCIAL SOCIETIES
The immense economic and social movement that substitutes anonymous property and joint-stock companies for personal industrial property has its juridical expression in the title of the Code relating to companies. From the wholly personal form of property to its anonymous form, the distance is immense: entirely new characteristics appear with the latter.
When a man personally possesses a landed estate, or when he personally possesses and manages an industry, there is a close relationship, a tight bond between the owner and his property. If it is a matter of the land and the owner cultivates it himself, one can say almost physically that the owner is one with his property. Between the peasant proprietor and the land he works there is an exchange of substance and of strength. The wheat germinated from the peasant’s effort nourishes the peasant’s strength. The man makes the land, and the land makes the man. Even when the owner of the estate does not cultivate it himself, it is rare that he is not attached to it by deep fibers: this estate, which to an indifferent observer no doubt resembles all other estates, has for the one who has long possessed it a particular physiognomy and a secret language. It is there that he played, grew up, dreamed, loved; and his memories have taken the shape of that horizon.
Between the industrial or merchant owner and his property the relationship seems less material, less close. Machines, factories, always in vibration and transformation, do not capture the heart through the slow and penetrating action of the land. And yet, when an industrialist is truly a captain of industry, when a merchant is truly a leader of commerce, when they themselves oversee the functioning of that complicated and often terrible mechanism in which their fortune, their life, their very honor are engaged, the industrial or commercial capital they put to work is permeated by their thought and their effort: it bears the mark of their person. Thus, even under this form, there is a close relationship between the individual owner and the object of his property. It is clear that the relationship loosens as this property extends; and there comes a point of growth in large-scale industry where it exceeds the owner’s capacities of action and control; he is obliged to establish a kind of industrial administration through which he manages his capital from on high. But at last, the contact between the owner and his property is not entirely abolished, and in peasant property, in small and medium industrial and commercial property, there is more than contact — there is an intimate union of the individual owner and his property.
This union is often difficult to break. No doubt the individual owner can sell. The landed proprietor can cede his estate. The industrial or commercial owner can cede his industry or his business. But this sale is not always easy, and many years often pass before it becomes possible. Since the estate represents a unity that cannot always be broken up, since an industrial or commercial organism cannot be dismembered, a buyer must be found who will purchase the whole; the seller must find another person who will fully and exactly take his place. And this is often very difficult. Hence a great slowness of real-estate and landed transactions. Hence, for industries and businesses that have not yet taken the form of the joint-stock company, the difficulty of selling or realizing. The owner is thus tied to his property, subject to it: he cannot disengage himself at will and at the hour of his choosing from the mechanism of property he has set in motion; he cannot recall, withdraw his energy from the use to which he first assigned it. He is, in some measure, the man of this or that particular property; he is the property of his property. He adheres to his shell of property.
But if, despite the power of exchange and sale which for him often remains theoretical, the personal owner is tied to his property, in return he directs it by his will alone. In the mode of cultivation that the owner adopts for his estate, in the direction that the small and medium industrialist, the small and medium merchant give to their affairs, they have only themselves and economic necessities to consult. They are not bound by the vote of a majority of shareholders: it is their personal will that decides; it is their personal action that is exercised.
Finally — and this is the last feature of truly personal property — the civil and commercial liability of the individual owner is always fully engaged. The man who has a landed estate cannot divide his liabilities. He cannot say: “Here are expenses I incur for my vineyard. Here is a loan I take out to replant it, to graft it. If I do not succeed, my vineyard alone shall answer for my debt; I reserve the integrity of my fields, my meadows, my woods.” No: he cannot say that. It is all his property that answers for his debt. Likewise the industrialist, the merchant, cannot draw divisions or barriers within their fortune. They may mortgage to a particular creditor a particular piece of real estate; but as long as debts remain, it is their entire fortune that answers for them.
In the event of bankruptcy, the industrialist, the merchant cannot say: “It is for my industry, for my business that I contracted the obligations I cannot meet: let all my industrial and commercial capital be taken — my factories, my machines, my raw materials; but I have my landed property which was in no way mixed up in my commercial and industrial operations; I have securities in the gold mines of the Transvaal that have no connection with the operations for which I have gone bankrupt. I reserve my landed estates and my South African securities.”
No, the merchant and the industrialist cannot say that. In the event of bankruptcy, it is not the special balance sheet of their enterprise but the general balance sheet of their fortune that they must file. Article 439 of the Commercial Code says: “The declaration of the bankrupt must be accompanied by the filing of the balance sheet… The balance sheet shall contain the enumeration and valuation of all movable and immovable property of the debtor, the statement of active and passive debts, the table of profits and losses, the table of expenses.” And Article 443 says: “The judgment declaring bankruptcy entails by operation of law, from its date, the divestiture of the bankrupt from the administration of all his property, even that which may fall to him while he is in a state of bankruptcy.”
Thus it is on all his property — on his furniture and real estate, on his clothing, on his books, on his bric-a-brac, as well as on his lands and factories or shops — that the industrialist or merchant answers for his debt. His fortune is not like a ship with watertight compartments: he cannot expose one part of it while safeguarding the rest. It is engaged in its entirety; in its entirety it can founder. As long as property remains truly and fully personal, as long as it is not transformed through a partnership agreement, as long as it is not depersonalized through the anonymous company, it is the individual in his entirety who is at stake. Not long ago, before the abolition of imprisonment for debt, he had to answer in his own physical person for the whole of his debt. Property and the proprietor were so inseparable that the bankruptcy of property entailed the bankruptcy of liberty, and the individual was behind bars at the same time as his property was under seal.
There, then, before the extension of the regime of companies and of anonymity, are the essential characteristics of personal property: first, there is a close bond between the owner and his property; second, this bond is so strong that, despite the legal and theoretical power of sale and exchange, the property is often immobilized in the owner’s hands; third, the property is under the discipline of the individual and isolated will of the owner; fourth, it is the whole of the individual’s property, his entire economic individuality, that answers for his commitments.
Now, with the partnership agreement, these characteristics begin to weaken; and with the anonymous company, all these characteristics are abolished.
The partnership agreement takes several forms: and it is by degrees that we shall pass from personal property to anonymous property.
Article 19 of the Commercial Code says: “The law recognizes three kinds of commercial companies: the general partnership; the limited partnership; the anonymous company.”
Here is the definition given by the Code of the general partnership:
Article 20: “The general partnership is that which is contracted by two persons or a greater number, and whose object is to carry on trade under a firm name.”
Here we are still as close as possible to personal property. Nearly all the characteristics I have noted subsist. First, there is a close bond between these persons and their property: it is the associated persons themselves who attend to the deployment of their capital. And it would be as difficult for them to sell as it would have been for a single owner. Finally, the individual liability of each of the partners remains unlimited. They shall be liable for the obligations of the company not only on the assets of the company itself, but on the full extent of their personal fortune.
Article 22: “The partners in a general partnership named in the articles of partnership are jointly and severally liable for all the obligations of the company, even though only one of the partners may have signed, provided it was under the firm name.”
There is therefore here only one new fact — the fact of association itself, which binds the will of each partner to that of the others and creates between them a joint and several liability — and the general partnership does not suppress the personal character of property: it merely gives it the form of association.
With the limited partnership, we take a step further. Article 23 defines it thus: “The limited partnership is contracted between one or more partners who are liable and jointly bound, and one or more partners who are simple providers of funds, called limited partners or sleeping partners. It is governed under a firm name, which must necessarily be that of one or more of the liable and jointly bound partners.”
Thus, whereas in the general partnership all the partners are equal and on the same plane, here there are two categories of partners. Some are directors, jointly and severally liable. It is they who give their name to the enterprise and who alone have the right to give it. It is they who are liable, on all their property and jointly, for the obligations of the company. But beside them there are partners of another order — the limited partners. They do not direct; they do not manage; they are, as the law says, simple providers of funds. They are not shareholders, since shareholders choose the administrators of the enterprise, whereas in the limited partnership it is by the very articles of partnership that the responsible heads of the company are appointed. But the limited partner prefigures and announces the shareholder in two respects: the absence of personal management and the limitation of pecuniary liability.
Obviously, the limited partners, as providers of funds, have, or may have, an important role in the enterprise; they watch its operations closely — and more closely than the shareholder. But the law strictly defines their legal role and their legal liability.
Article 25: “The name of a limited partner may not form part of the firm name.”
Article 26: “The limited partner is liable for losses only up to the amount of the funds he has contributed or was bound to contribute to the company.”
Article 27: “The limited partner may perform no act of management, even by virtue of a power of attorney.”
Article 28: “In the event of a violation of the prohibition mentioned in the preceding article, the limited partner shall be liable jointly and severally with the general partners for the debts and obligations of the company arising from the acts of management he has performed, and he may, according to the number or gravity of those acts, be declared jointly liable for all the obligations of the company or for some only. — Opinions and advice, acts of oversight and supervision, do not render the limited partner liable.”
How the earlier characteristics of personal property are fading here! How the bond between the owner and his property is loosening! The limited partner may at no degree intervene in the management of the enterprise in which he has engaged a portion of his fortune. If he goes beyond oversight or simple advice, he is held jointly liable and forfeits his immunity. But if he remains in this discreet, effaced, and somewhat distant role of simple adviser, his pecuniary liability is limited to the sum he has engaged in the limited partnership. If he has contributed only a hundred thousand francs, even if the liabilities of the enterprise amount to more than a million, he is liable to the creditors only up to the amount of that hundred thousand francs: the rest of his fortune is beyond reach and, so to speak, out of the game. That part of his fortune which he has engaged in the limited partnership is in a way detached from the whole, and detached from his very person. It is no longer his entire individuality that is at stake. The person is no longer engaged and, as it were, caught in the property.
M. Leon Bourgeois often says that individual property is like an extension of the human person. But human individuality is an organic and indivisible whole. It is impossible to wound or remove an organ without reaching and wounding the entire organism. And each act of the individual engages the liability of the indivisible person.
Now, the possessing classes apply themselves more and more to introducing into their fortune, into their property, divisions, partitions that are like the negation of organic individuality, where everything interpenetrates and holds together. When the industrialist in bankruptcy is obliged to surrender all his property — to which was formerly added his very person — when in each of his commercial acts his entire personality is engaged, one can say, in one sense and with the reservation of the violence done by capital to the proletarians, that the property of this industrialist is the expression and extension of his person.
But what precise meaning can M. Leon Bourgeois give to this expression once we enter into partnership agreements and limited partnerships, since here the individual’s effort is to cut off all communication between a particular portion of his fortune and his total personality?
I do not claim — let us note it well — that through these arrangements the individual diminishes himself. In a sense he frees himself, since he is no longer entirely committed to a hazardous enterprise, since he is no longer entirely trapped in a compact form of property. By thus distributing his fortune among diverse uses that are independent of one another, the individual is no longer enslaved to a particular enterprise, to a particular property. He dominates in some fashion his own fortune; he frees himself from his property, while retaining its benefit. It is a most significant development that, in order to free themselves, the bourgeois property owners themselves begin to detach their fortune from their own individuality. And if individual property is that in which the individual commits himself, the whole effort of modern capitalism and its arrangements is directed against individual property.
Fourniere saw this clearly and said it superbly in his Essay on Individualism, an ingenious and profound book, the most concentrated and the most savory he ever wrote.
But it is in the anonymous joint-stock company that this internal revolution of individual property reaches its culmination.
INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY AND ANONYMOUS COMPANIES
With anonymous joint-stock companies, all personal bonds between the owner and the object of his property disappear. Or at least, this bond becomes infinitely loose. It is only in an indirect and distant way that the shareholders, the owners of the enterprise, intervene in its operations. They appoint, or at least they can appoint, the administrators who direct it; but even if they participate, once a year, in the general meetings of shareholders, what a distance between this periodic and remote oversight and the permanent act of ownership that the peasant proprietor or the industrialist who possesses and directs a factory performs!
In fact, very often the shareholders have not the slightest knowledge of the actual operation of the enterprise they own. They have never seen it operate. They are ignorant of its technical and economic mechanism. They know or ask only one thing about it: What does it yield? What is its dividend? What is its trend on the securities market? It is through the dead paper of the administrative report that they catch a glimpse of it. Often they are very far away; they have never with their own eyes seen the horizon blackened by the smoke of their factories.
The peasant’s property is a piece of his life: it bore his cradle; it is near the cemetery where his forebears sleep, where he too will sleep; and from the fig tree that shades his door, he can see the cypress that will shelter his last slumber. His property is a fragment of the immediate fatherland, the local fatherland, an epitome of the great fatherland.
Between the shareholder and his unknown property, all these bonds are broken. He does not know at what point of the fatherland the spring of dividends gushes forth for him, and often it is from foreign soil that this spring flows. How many foreign securities are mixed in the capitalist’s portfolio with national ones, without any flavor of local soil to tell them apart.
I open the statistical yearbook that the Labor Office has just published for the year 1900; I look at the tables of securities included in 1899 in donations and successions: French government bonds and other French Treasury securities appear in donations for 41 million; foreign government bonds and public notes appear in donations for 11 million; securities of French companies are listed for 24 million; foreign securities for 2 million 400,000 francs. In successions, French government bonds and other French Treasury securities count for 480 million; foreign government bonds and public notes count for 214 million. Shares of French companies, commercial or industrial, appear in the successions of the year 1899 for 446 million. Shares of foreign companies appear for a sum of 132 million. For bonds, the proportion of foreign securities is even greater. Negotiable and non-negotiable bonds of French companies, departments, communes, public establishments, and establishments of public utility appear in successions for 577 million. Bonds of foreign companies, cities, provinces, and corporations appear for 229 million — more than a third of the French securities.
Thus there is already a third of the securities dispersed in the hands of French shareholders or bondholders that bear fruit abroad. I am in no way indignant about this. I leave it to anti-Semitic and nationalist demagoguery to denounce an inevitable movement. I even rejoice in certain respects at this expansion of capitalism, which helps in the reciprocal penetration of peoples and races. I note only how all personal connection has ceased between anonymous property and the owner: they are not even of the same fatherland. And in any case, when a capitalist from Toulon holds shares in the mines of the Pas-de-Calais, there are almost as few personal connections between the owner and his property as if the capitalist held a foreign security.
It is precisely because within the nation itself property has begun to become foreign to the owner that between all securities, whether called foreign or called national, there is no longer any difference for the capitalist. A curious and most significant innovation! Formerly, before the extension of commercial companies and notably of anonymous companies, men turned to newspapers only to learn about what was not their own life. They did not buy the newspaper to find out what their fortune was or what their income would be. At most, those who held government bonds — and this was already a first form of anonymous property — bought the newspapers to find out what repercussions the course of public affairs would have on their private fortune. Now there is scarcely a bourgeois owner who is not obliged to read special newspapers, financial newspapers, to find out where his own fortune stands. Property has become so foreign to the owner that it is through the newspaper that the owner gets news of his property.
But it is not enough for capitalism to have created the anonymous joint-stock company. The share still gives the one who holds it, or at least the one who holds a certain number of them, the right to participate in the general meetings of shareholders that appoint and oversee the responsible managers of the enterprise. This is a remnant of individual authority, of personal intervention. Capitalism effaces it, and after having created the share, it creates the bond.
The bondholder is not, for his part, an owner of the enterprise: he is simply its creditor. He has lent the enterprise a certain sum, for which a fixed interest, stipulated in advance, is paid to him. If the enterprise were to fail, he would have as security for his claim the assets — that is, the value of the shares themselves. Thus his security is greater than that of the shareholder. In the event of disaster, the shareholder will receive nothing until the bondholders — that is, the creditors — are reimbursed. The bondholder is still exposed to many hazards; but he will succumb only after the shareholder. Only, he has no share of influence: he is not even represented on the boards of the enterprise; he is the passive rentier, without any personal connection to the very source of his income. Here we touch a form of property so abstract, so neutral, so indifferent, so detached from the individual, that one must remember that the individual does in fact receive interest on the bond to still call it individual.
Now, the share of bonds in anonymous capital is considerable, and it is growing. Anonymous companies, founded initially by shareholders, most often expand through borrowing — that is, by creating bonds. Out of the 36 billion in securities of industrial and commercial companies, more than half is in bonds. In 1899, the four-percent tax applied to the entire income from movable securities — with the exception of government bonds. The taxed income of shares was 727 million. The taxed income of bonds and loans was 877 million. Thus the share of capital that is entirely passive, that no longer bears within it the slightest individual energy, exceeds by a sixth that share capital which itself represents so feeble a bond between the individual and his property.
Finally, the individual does not even take the trouble to keep the scrap of paper that represents his property right over the mines of the Transvaal or Siberia, over the English railways, or over the Spanish textile mills. More and more now, it is in the vaults of the banking and credit houses that the titles of property, the bond certificates, the shares, the debentures are entrusted. It is the credit company that collects, at maturity, the arrears or the coupons; it is the credit company that reinvests them; and the whole movement of individual property comes down to this: having one’s account open in the immense register of an immense anonymous credit company.
Not only in anonymous companies does the direct relationship between owner and property no longer exist, but whereas the landed proprietor alone disposes of his estate, and the factory owner alone of his factory, the owner of one share or of several shares can do nothing by himself. Individually, he cannot impress upon the enterprise this or that direction. It is the majority of shares that decides. It is the general meeting of shareholders that is sovereign; and here individual property, ceasing to be the instrument of the individual’s will, falls under the law of the majority. If the shareholder is in the minority, his property is directed against his will. The separation of the individual from his property is such that it is impossible to presume the will of the individual owner from the course of his property. It may very well be that individual property goes against the individual. And it is at least strange to hear the Radicals rise up against socialism, which will be the regime of democracy and majority rule applied to production, when already capitalist property itself, in its supreme expression — the anonymous company — is obliged to accept the form of democracy and the law of majorities.
A curious thing, which clearly shows the prodigious gap between the immediate form of individual property and its supreme anonymous form: when an individual, when a patron truly owns a factory, when he is personally its owner and its head, it is only if he goes bankrupt that his property falls under the law of democracy. There is formed, immediately after the bankruptcy, a democracy of creditors. Article 507 of the Commercial Code — I pass over the recent legislation on judicial liquidation, where the same principle is affirmed even more clearly — says this:
No agreement may be made between the deliberating creditors and the bankrupt debtor except after the completion of the formalities prescribed above. This agreement shall be established only by the concurrence of a number of creditors forming the majority, and representing moreover three-quarters of the total of claims, verified and affirmed, or admitted provisionally.
And Article 529 stipulates:
If no composition is reached, the creditors shall be by operation of law in a state of union.
From that moment on, it is the majority of creditors that decides. The social assets are placed under the regime of the union. And the majority of creditors may give the trustees of the bankruptcy a mandate to continue the exploitation of the assets — for example, to keep the factory running, the industry going. Thus the law of the majority, which in anonymous companies is normal life, intervenes in truly personal property only at the hour of disaster. It is when personal property founders that the mode of management applied to it recalls, at least in one respect, the regular mode of management of anonymous property. What a distance, what an opposition between the various forms of individual property!
In truly personal property, the liability of the owner is fully committed. In anonymous companies, the liability of the owner is reduced to a minimum. Article 33 of the Commercial Code says, with regard to anonymous companies:
The partners are liable only for the loss of the amount of their interest in the company.
The shareholder does not answer for the obligations of the enterprise on his entire fortune; he answers for them only on the shares he possesses in that very enterprise. It is a parcel of property that no longer communicates with the totality of the shareholder’s individual property. Even if the shareholder has committed the gravest faults, even if through his negligence or incompetence he has allowed inept or dishonest administrators to seize the direction of the enterprise and compromise the interests of third parties, the shareholder is liable only to the extent of the shares he possesses. All the rest of his fortune, all the rest of his economic personality is, with regard to the enterprise, as if it did not exist.
Better still: the liability of the administrators themselves, of those who have received and accepted from the general meeting of shareholders the mandate to conduct the enterprise, is narrowly limited. Article 32 of the Code says:
The administrators are liable only for the amount they have received. They contract, by reason of their management, no personal or joint and several obligation with respect to the obligations of the company.
I truly admire those who tell us that the regime of democratic communism and universal cooperation applied to industry will diminish liabilities to the point of making them illusory, when the very evolution of individual property leads it to abolish the full, decisive liability of owners and managers, and to substitute for it the fragmentary and attenuated liabilities of the anonymous company.
And in this supreme form of individual property, what mobility, what almost indefinite power of metamorphosis! Compare the difficulties of every kind — juridical and economic — that make the transfer of landed property or of personal industrial property difficult and slow, with the provisions that facilitate, under the regime of anonymous companies, the movement of securities, the transmission and transformation of property.
Article 34 says:
The capital of the anonymous company is divided into shares and even into fractional shares of equal value.
Article 35 says:
The share may be established in the form of a bearer certificate. In that case, transfer is effected by delivery of the certificate.
By the simple handing over of a certificate from hand to hand, the transfer of property is validly accomplished.
But above all, since there is no personal and direct bond between the owner and his property, between the shareholder and his share, what does it matter to him whether his property takes the form of a railway share, a mining share, or any kind of security in any kind of industry, if only he can hope for an equivalent dividend?
Thus, at every moment, each form of anonymous property is ready to change into all other forms. It is this almost infinite mobility that gives rise to speculation. One need only step into the Stock Exchange for a moment to see how securities are traded for securities and what varied forms a single property can assume from the opening to the close of the market. As the autumn wind mixes in vast whirlwinds the leaves torn from all the species of the forest, so speculation mixes the golden leaves torn from all the varieties of human labor.
Through this unlimited power of exchange, through this infinite mobility, the security of a particular enterprise ceases in effect to be attached to that particular enterprise: it becomes a kind of quantitatively determined but qualitatively undetermined delegation upon the whole of social wealth. The shareholder, whatever the particular designation of his security, is at bottom a shareholder in a single and immense social enterprise, of which the various anonymous companies are only sections communicating with one another, of which the various capitalist enterprises are only mutable forms, indefinitely convertible into one another. Thus is created, through the extreme evolution of individual property, a social capitalist domain, a capitalist collectivism that functions for the profit of a class, but that is the bourgeois sketch of the communism toward which we tend.
Just as the shareholder, instead of being the prisoner of a particular form of property, virtually possesses a share of social property, so too he acts upon the social whole of production — or at least it is often in his power to act upon that whole. Very often capitalists, for greater security, so as not to commit their entire fortune to a single enterprise, distribute their funds among several anonymous companies. They hold in their portfolios railway shares, mining shares, shares in steelworks and textile mills. They thereby have the right to participate in the general meetings of a great number of industries: they thus participate in the direction of production in its various forms and over nearly its entire extent.
Whereas in truly personal property the action of the owner is limited to one form of property and is sovereign within it, in the system of anonymous companies the action of the owner extends or may extend over an extremely vast field of production, over a very great number of enterprises; but in each of them it is limited and enveloped by the right of the other shareholders, the other owners. The very movement of bourgeois and capitalist property thus tends to universalize the right of the owner, while removing from him, at each point of his enlarged domain, his decisive force. His power is exercised everywhere, but everywhere it is only a tiny fraction of the total power: everywhere associated, nowhere sovereign.
Now, if one supposes democratic communism to be realized, if one pictures the whole of industry as a universal cooperation, each citizen, each producer will be invested with a right over the whole of social property. But at whatever point of the cooperative domain he practically exercises that right, he will exercise it only under the very law of cooperation and democracy, which, by making the agreement of wills the condition of action, both founds and limits the right of each individual will.
When therefore the Radicals, with a tiresome and abstract monotony, present themselves as the guardians of individual property, one is entitled to ask them: Do you accept, within individual and capitalist property, the movement by which it tends to surpass itself? Do you accept the law of evolution that creates, even within capitalist property, a kind of oligarchic communism, and do you forbid the proletariat to intervene in order to convert it into a universal democratic communism?