 Chapter 10 of the Conquest of Bread This is a Library of Works recording. All Library of Works recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit libraryofworks.org. Recording by Enkel, the Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin. Agreeable Work, Part 1. When socialists maintained that a society freed from the rule of a capitalist would make work agreeable and would suppress all repugnant and unhealthy registries, they all laughed at. And yet, even today, we can see the striking progress that is being made in this direction. And wherever this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate themselves on the economy of energy obtained thereby. It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be advantageous to make it so. In a special and well-ventilated factory, the work is better. It is easy to introduce many small ameliorations of which each represents an economy of time or of manual labor. And if most of the workshops we know are found and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organization of factories. And because the most absurd way of human energy is the distinctive feature of the present industrial organization. Nevertheless, now and again, we already find even now some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them. If the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day. And if everyone had the possibility of varying it according to his taste. There are immense works, which I know, in one of the Midland Counties. Unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. They are perfect as regards scientific and intelligent organizations. They occupy 50 English acres of land, 15 of which are roofed with gloss. The pavement of fireproof bricks is as clean as that of a miners' cottage. And the gloss roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In these works of forge, still ingots or blooms weighing as much as 20 tons. And when you stand 30 feet from the immense furnace whose flames have a temperature of more than 1000 degrees, you do not guess its presence. Save when its great doors open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen. Now here, now there, open a tap causing immense cranes to move one way or another by the pressure of water. You enter these works expecting to hear the differing noise of stampers. And you find that there are no stampers, the immense hundred tonne guns and the crank shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure. And the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the immense mass of steel, which makes a formal homogeneous meter, without crack or flow of the blooms, whatever be their thickness. I expected an internal greeting, and I saw machines which cut blocks of steel 30 feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese. And when I expressed my admiration to the engineer who showed us from, he answered, a mere question of economy. This machine, that plane steel, has been in use for 42 years. It would not have lost 10 years if its parts badly adjusted, interfered, and creaked at each movement of the plane. And the blast furnaces, it would be a waste to let heat escape instead of utilizing it. The noise the founders, when heat lost by radiation, represents tons of cold. The stampers that make buildings shake five leagues of were also waste. Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact? And it costs less. There is less loss. In these works, like cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench are but a simple question of economy. Work is better than when you can see what you do and have elbow room. It is true, he said, we were very cramped before coming here. Len is so expensive in the vicinity of large towns. Land loads are so grasping. It is even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a library. There will be no host doomed to die below the earth. And the ground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable put into motion at the pit mark. Ventilators will be always working, and there will never be explosions. This is no dream. Such a mine is already to be seen in England. I went down it. Here again, the excellent organization is simply a question of economy. The mine of which I speak, inspired of its immense depth, open bracket 466 yards, post bracket, has an output of 1000 tons of coal a day, with only 200 miners. 5 tons a day per each worker. Whereas the average for 2000 pits in England at the time I visited this mine in the early 90s was hardly 300 tons a year per man. If necessary, it would be easy to multiply examples proving that as regards the material organization, 4 years dream was not a utopia. This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in socialist newspapers that public opinion should already be educated on this point. Factory, forge and mine can be as healthy and magnificent as the finest laboratories in modern universities. And the better the organization, the more will man's labor produce. If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a relaxation in a society equals? In which hands will not be compelled to sell themselves to toy and to accept work under any conditions? Repugnant thoughts will disappear because it is evident that these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can submit to them. But free men will create new conditions and their work will be pleasantly and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of today will be the rule of tomorrow. The same will come to pass as regards domestic work which today society lays on the shoulders of that drudge of humanity. Woman, Part 2 A society regenerated by the revolution will make domestic slavery disappear. This lost form of slavery, perhaps the most tenacious because it is also the most ancient. Only it will not come about in the way dream of by Phalansterians. No in the matter often imagined by authoritarian communists. Phalansterians are repugnant to millions of human beings. The most reserved man certainly feels the necessity of meeting his fellows for the purpose of common work which becomes the more attractive the more he feels himself a part of an immense soul. But it is not so for the hours of leisure reserved for rest and intimacy. The Phalansteria and the family's theory do not take this into account or else we end the effort to supply this need by artificial groupings. A Phalansteria which is in fact nothing but an immense hotel can please some and even all at a certain period of a life but the great mass prefers family life open bracket, family life of a future be it understood, close bracket, be prefer isolated apartments, Anglo-Saxons even going as far as to prefer houses of from 6 to 8 rooms in which the family or an agglomeration of friends can live apart sometimes a Phalansteria is a necessity but it would be hateful wait the general rule. Isolation alternating with times spent in society is the normal desire of human nature. This is why one of the greatest tortures in prison is the impossibility of isolation much as solitary confinement becomes torture in his turn when not alternated with hours of social life. As to considerations of economy which are sometimes lead stress on in favor of Phalansteries, there are those of a petty trade spend. The most important economy, the only reasonable one is to make life pleasant for all because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings. Open foot note, it seems that the communists of young Icarians had understood the importance of a free choice in their daily relations apart from what the ideal of religious communists has always been to have meals in common. It is by meals in common that early Christians manifested their adhesion to Christianity. Communion is still a vestige of it. Young Icarians had given up this religious tradition. They dine in a common dining room but are small separate tables at which they sat according to the attractions of the moment. The communists of Anama have each their house and dine at home while taking the provisions at will at the communal stores. Close foot note, other socialists reject the Phalansteries but when you ask them how domestic work can be organized they answer each can do his own work. My wife manages the house, the wife of Boudra will do as much and if it is a Boudra playing a socialism who speaks he will add with a gracious smile to his wife. Is it not true darling that you would do without a servant in the socialist society? You would work like the wife of our good comrade Paul or the wife of John Carcopenter. Servant or wife, men always reckon on women to do the housework but women too at least claim their share in the emancipation of humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house and owing to American women taking the lead in updating their claims. There is a general complaint of the death of women who will condescend to domestic work in the United States. My lady prefers odd politics literature over gaming tables as to the work girls, they are few. Those who consent to submit to apron slavery and servants are only found with difficulty in the States. Currently the solution, a very simple one, is pointed out by life itself. Machinery undertakes three quarters of the household cares. You black your boots and you know how ridiculous this work is. What can be most stupid than rubbing a boot 20 or 30 times with a brush? A tenth of the European population will be compelled to sell itself in exchange for a miserable shelter and insufficient food. And women must consider herself a slave in order that millions of her sex should go through this performance every morning. But hairdressers have already machines for brushing glossy or wooly heads of hair. What should be not apply then the same principle to the over extremity? So it has been done and nowadays the machine for blacking boots is in general used in big American and European hotels. Its use is spreading outside hotels. In large English schools, where the pupils are boarding in the houses of their teachers. It has been found easier to have one single establishment which undertakes to brush a thousand pairs of boots every morning. As to washing up, where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of this long and dirty work that is usually done by hand solely because the work of a domestic slave is of no account. In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which hot water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under these conditions, the problem was a simple one. Any woman, Mrs. Cochrane, sold it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates of dishes, warps them and dries them in less than three minutes. A factory in Illinois manufactures these machines and sells them at a price within reach of the average middle class person. And why should not small households send their crockery to an establishment as well as their boots? It is even probable that the two functions brushing and washing up will be undertaken by the same association. Cleaning, rubbing the skin of your hands when washing and wriggling linen. Sweeping floors and brushing corpets. By raising clouds of dust which off towards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places where they have settled down. All this work is still done because woman remains a slave but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely better than by machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into households and the distribution of motor power in private houses will enable people to work them without muscular effort. Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for them it is because they are not in general use and chiefly because an exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to live in grand style and who have speculated on land, raw material, manufactured sale, patents and duties. But emancipation from domestic toil will not be bought about by small machines only. Households are emerging from their present state of isolation they begin to associate with other households to do in common what they did separately. In fact in the future we shall not have a brushing machine a machine for washing up plates a third for washing linen and so on in each house. To the future on the contrary belongs the common heating apparatus that sends heat into each room of the whole district and spears the lighting of fires. It is already so in a few American cities a great center furnace supplies all houses and all rooms with hot water which circulates in pipes and to regulate the temperature you need only to any tap and you should care to have a blazing fire in any particular room you can light the gas this supplies for heating purposes from a central reservoir. All the immense work of cleaning chimneys and keeping up fires and women knows what time it takes is disappearing. Candles, lamps and even gas have had their day there are entire cities in which it is sufficient to press a button for light to burst forth and indeed it is a simple question of economy and of knowledge to give yourself a luxury of electric light and lastly also in America. They speak of forming societies for the almost complete suppression of household work it would only be necessary to create a department for every block of houses a court would come to each door and take the boots to be blacked the concrete to be washed up the linen to be washed the small things to be mended open bracket if it were worthwhile close bracket the corpus to be brushed and the next morning would bring back the things entrusted to it all well clean. A few hours later your hot coffee and your eggs done to a nasty would appear on your table it is a fact that between 12 and 2 o'clock there are more than 20 million Americans and as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton boiled pork, potatoes and a seasonable vegetable and at the lowest figure 8 million fires burn during 2 or 3 hours to roast this meat and these vegetables 8 million women spend their time preparing a meal which taking all households represents at most a dozen different dishes 50 fires burn wrote an American woman the other day where one would suffice dine at home at your own table with your children if you like but only think yourself why should these 50 women waste their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal why 50 fires when 2 people and 1 single fire would suffice to cook all these pieces of meat and all these vegetables use your own beef or mutton to be roasted if you are particular season the vegetables to your taste but have a single kitchen with a single fire and organize it as beautifully as you are able to why has women's work never been of any account why in every family or the mother and 3 or 4 servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included women in their dream of emancipation and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think of those kitchen arrangements which they have put on the shoulders of that dredge woman the emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university the law courts or the polyamorous to her or the emancipated woman will always throw her domestic towel onto another woman the emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing towel of kitchen and wash house it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children if she be so minded while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life it will come, as we have said things are already improving only let us fully understand that a revolution intoxicated with the beautiful words liberty, equality, solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home half humanity subjected to the slavery of the half would still have to rebel against the over half and of agreeable work recording by Enklu Chapter 11 of the Conquest of Bread this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org Recording by Enklu The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin Free Agreement Chapter 1, Accustomed as we are by Heredity prejudices and our unsound education and training to represent ourselves by beneficial hand of government, legislation and magistracy everywhere we believe that men would tear his fellow men to pieces like a wild beast that the devil police took his eye of him that absolute chaos would come about if authority were over-thrown during a revolution and with our eyes shut we post by thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely without any intervention of the law and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under governmental tutelage if you open a daily paper you find that its pages are entirely devoted to government transactions and to political jubbery a man from another world reading it would believe that with the exception of stock exchange transactions nothing gets done in Europe saved by order of some master you find nothing in the paper about institutions that spring up, grew up and develop without ministerial prescription nothing or almost nothing even where there is a heading sundry events open bracket, fettivere in the french papers it is because they are connected with the police a family drama and act of rebellion will only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene 350 million europeans love or hate one another or could live on their incomes but apart from literature, theater or sport their lives remain ignored by newspapers if government must have not intervened in some way or other it is even so with history we know the least details of the life of the king or of the parliament, all good and bad speeches pronounced by the politicians have been preserved speeches that have never had the least influence on the vote of a single member as an old parliamentarian said while visits, the good or bad humor of politicians, their jokes and intrigues are all carefully recorded for posterity but we have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute a city of the middle ages to understand the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried on between the hands of the attic cities or to know how the city of Rouen built its cathedral if a scholar spends his life in studying these questions his works remain unknown and parliamentary histories that is to say the defective ones as they are only treated of one side of social life multiply, they are circulated they are taught in schools in this way we did not even perceive the prodigious work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups of men which constitutes the chief work of our century we therefore propose to point out some of these most striking manifestations and to show how men as soon as their interests do not absolutely clash act in concert harmoniously and perform collective work of a very complex nature it is evident that in present society based on individual property that is to say on plunder and on a narrow minded and therefore foolish individualism facts of this kind are necessarily limited agreements are not always perfectly free and often they have a mean if not but what concern us is not to give examples which might be blindly followed and which more of a present society could not possibly give us what we have to do is to show that in spite of the authoritarian individualism which stifles us there remains in our life taken as a whole a very great part in which we only act by free agreement and that therefore it would be much easier than is usually thought to dispense with government in support of our view we have already mentioned railways and we will now return to them we know that Europe has a system of railways over 175,000 miles long and that on this network you can now just travel from north to south from east to west from Madrid to Petersburg and from Cali to Constantinople without delays, without even changing carriage's open bracket when you travel by express cross bracket more than that a porceled depositor will find its address anywhere in Turkey or in Central Asia without more formalities needed for sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper this result might have been obtained in two ways a Napoleon, a Bismarck or some potentate having conquered Europe would from Paris, Berlin or Rome draw a railway map and regulate the hours of the trains the Russian Tsar Nicholas I dreamt of such a power when he was shown rough drafts of the railways between Moscow and Petersburg he says the ruler and drew on the top of Russia a straight line between these two capitals saying here is the plan and the road was built in a straight line filling in deep ravines building beaches of a giddy height which had to be abandoned a few years later after the railway had cost about £120,000 to £150,000 per English mile this is one way but happily things were managed differently railways were constructed piece by piece the pieces were joined together and the 100 different companies to whom these pieces belong gradually came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure of their trains and the running of courages on their rails from all countries without unloading merchandise as it passes from one network to another all this was done by free agreement by exchange of letters and proposals and by congresses at which delegates met to discuss well specified special points and to come to an agreement about them but not to make laws after the congress was over the delegates returned to their respective companies not with a law but with a draft of a contract to be accepted or rejected of course difficulties were met in the way they were obstinate men who would not be convinced but a common interest compelled them to agree in the end without invoking the help of armies against the refractory members this immense network of railways connected together and the enormous traffic it has given rise to no doubt constitutes the most striking trait of the 19th century and it is the result of free agreement if somebody had foretold it 80 years ago our grandfathers would have fought him idiotic or mad they would have said never will you be able to make the shareholders of a hundred companies listen to reason it is a utopia a fair retail a central government with an iron dictator can alone enforce it and the most interesting thing in this organization is that there is no European Central Government of railways, nothing no minister of railway, no dictator not even a continental parliament not even a directing committee everything is done by free agreement so we also believers in the state who pretend that we can never do without a central government we are it only for regulating the traffic we ask them but how do European railways manage without them how do they continue to convey millions of travellers and mountains of luggage across the continent if companies owing railways have been able to agree why should railways workers who would take possession of railways not agree likewise and if a Petersburg Warsaw company and that of Paris Belfour can work in harmony without giving themselves the luxury of a common commander why in the midst of our societies consisting of groups of free workers should we need a government but when we end the effort to prove by examples that even today in spite of the iniquitous organization of society as a whole men provided their interests be not diametrically opposed agree without the intervention of authority we do not ignore the objections that will be put forth all such examples have their defective side because it is impossible to put a single organization except from the exploitation of the weak by the strong, the poor by the rich this is why the status will not fail to tell us with their wanted logic you see that the intervention of the state is necessary to put an end to this exploitation only they forget the lessons of history they do not tell us to what extent the state itself has contributed towards the existing order by creating political audience and delivering them up to exploiters to prove us that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primary cruisers private capital and poverty to threats of which are artificially created by the state continue to exist when we speak of the accord established among the railway companies we expect them the worshippers of the bourgeois state to say to us do you not see how the railway companies oppress and ill use their employees and their travelers the only way is that the state should intervene to protect the workers and the public we not said and repeated over and over again that as long as they are capitalists these abusers of power will be perpetuated it is precisely the state the would-be benefactor that has given to the companies that monopoly and those rights upon us which we possess today has it not created concessions, guarantees has it not sent its soldiers against railway men and strike and during the first trials open bracket quite lately we saw it still in Russia closed bracket has it not extended the privilege of the railway magnets as for us to forbid the press to mention railway accidents so as not to depreciate the shares it guaranteed has it not favored the monopoly which has annihilated the Vanderbilt and the Poliakovs the directors of the PLM the CPO, the Saigudar the Kings of our days therefore if we give as an example the taxid agreement come to between railway companies it is by no means has an ideal of economical management no even an ideal of technical organization it is to show that if capitalists without any over-aim than that of augmenting their dividends at other people's expense and exploratory railways successfully without establishing an international department societies of working men will be able to do it just as well and even better without nominating a ministry of European railways another objection is rail that is more serious at first sight we may be told that the agreement we speak of is not perfectly free but the large companies lay down the low to the small ones it might be mentioned for example that is certain rich German company supported by the state compelled travelers who go from Berlin to Bale to post via Coloane and Frankfurt instead of taking the Leipzig route or that such a company carries goods of 130 miles in a roundabout way open bracket on a long distance closed bracket to favor its influential shareholders and thus ruins the secondary lines in the United States travelers and goods are sometimes compelled to travel impossibly circuitous routes so that the laws may flow into the pocket of the vendor belts our answer will be the same as long as capital exists the greater capital will oppress the lesser but oppression does not result from capital only it is also owing to the support given them by the state to monopoly created by the state in their favor that the large companies oppress the small ones the early English and French socialists have shown long since our English legislation did all in its power to ruin the small industries drive a peasant to poverty and deliver over to wealthy industrial employers battalions of men compelled to work for no matter what salary railway legislation did exactly the same strategic lines, subsidized lines companies which receive international mail monopoly everything was brought into play to forward the interests of wealthy financiers when Rothschild credited to all european states puts capital in a railway his faithful subjects the ministers will do their best to make him and more in the united states in the democracy that all the historians hold up to us as an ideal the most scandalous fraudulency has crept into everything that concerns royals thus if a company ruins its competitors by cheap fairs it is often unable to do so because it is reimbursed by land given to it by the state for a gratuity documents recently published concerning the American wheat trade have fully shown up the poor play by the state in the exploitation of a wheat by the strong the power of accumulated capital has increased tenfold and a hundredfold by means of state help so what when we see syndicates of railway companies open bracket a product of free agreement close bracket succeeding in protecting the small companies against big ones we are astonished at the intrinsic force of free agreement that can hold its own against all powerful capital favored by the state it is a fact that little companies exist in spite of the state's partiality if in France land of centralization we only see 5 or 6 large companies they are more than 110 in Great Britain who are remarkably well and who are certainly better organized for the rapid transit of travelers and goods than the French and German companies moreover that is not the question large capital favored by the state can always if it be to its advantage crush the lesser one what is of importance to us is this the agreement between hundreds of capitalist companies to whom the railways of Europe belong was established without intervention of the central government to lay down the law to the diverse societies it has subsisted by means of congresses composed of delegates who discuss among themselves and submit proposals not lost to their constituents it is a new principle that differs completely from all governmental principle monarchical or republican absolute or parliamentarian it is an innovation that has been timidly introduced into the customs of Europe it has come to stay part 3 how often have we not read in the writings of state loving socialists who then will undertake the regulation of canal traffic in the future society should it enter the mind of one of your anarchist comrades to put his porch across a canal and obstruct thousands of boats who will force him to reason let us confess the supposition to be somewhat fanciful still it might be said for instance should a certain commune or a group of communes want to make their borders paused before others it might perhaps blow the canal in order to carry stones while wheat needed in our commune would have to stand by who then would regulate the traffic if not the government but real life has again demonstrated that government can be very well dispensed with here as elsewhere free agreement, free organization replace that noxious and costly system and do better we know what canals mean to Holland they are always highways we also know how much traffic there is on the canals now high roads and railroads is transported on canal boats in Holland there you could find cause to fight in order to make your boats paused before others there the government might really interfere to curb the traffic in order yet it is not so the Dutch settled matters in a more practical way long ago by founding guilds or syndicates of boatmen these were free associations sprung from the very needs of navigation the right of way for the boats was adjusted by the order of inscription navigation register they had to follow one another in turn nobody was allowed to get ahead of the others and the pain of being excluded from the guild none could station more than a certain number of days along the key and if the owner found no goods to carry during that time so much for worse for him he had to depart with his empty boat to leave room for newcomers obstruction was thus avoided even though the competition between the private owners of the boats continued to exist with the latter suppressed could have been only the more cordial it is unnecessary to add that the ship owners could adhere or not to the syndicate that was their business but most of them elected to join it moreover these syndicates offered such great advantages that they spread also along the Rhine the Wazir, the Odir and as far as Berlin the boatmen did not wait for a great bespoke to annex Holland to Germany and to appoint an Oberhoof general stats canal navigation staff open brackets supreme head counselor general stats canal navigation close bracket with a number of gold straps on his sleeves corresponding to the length of the title the preferred coming to an international understanding besides a number of ship owners who selling vessels supply between Germany and Scandinavia as well as Russia have also joined in syndicates in order to regulate traffic in the Baltic and to bring about a certain harmony in the Chasse Croisi of vessels these associations have sprung up freely recruiting volunteer adherents and have not in common with governments it is however more than probable that here to greater capital oppressors lesser maybe that syndicate has also a tendency to become a monopoly especially where it receives a precious patronage of a state that surely did not fail to interfere with it let us not forget either that these syndicates represent associations whose members have only private interests at stake and that if at the same time each ship owner were compelled by the socializing of production consumption and exchange to belong to federated communes or to a hundred other associations for the satisfying of his needs things would have a different aspect a group of ship owners powerful on sea would feel weak on land and we would be obliged to lessen their claims in order to come to terms with railways factories and other groups at any rate without discussing the future here is another spontaneous association that has dispense with government let us go to more examples talking of ships and boats let us mention one of the most splendid organizations that the 19th century has brought forth one of those we may with right be proud of the English Laugh Boat Association it is known that every year more than a thousand ships are wrecked on the shores of England at sea a good ship seldom fears a storm it is near the coast that danger threatens rough seas that shatter her stern pose squatters that carry off her moths and sails currents that render her unmanageable reefs and sandbags on which she runs aground even in olden times when it was a custom among inhabitants of the coast to light fires in order to attract the selves onto reefs in order to plunder their corgos they always drove to save the crew seeing a ship in distress they launched their boats and went to the rescue of shipwrecked sailors that need to often finding a water regrave themselves every helmet along the sea shore has its legends of heroism displayed by women as well as by men to save crews in distress load up the state and men of science have done something to diminish the number of casualties that houses signals, charts, meteorological warnings have diminished them greatly but there remains a thousand ships and several thousand human lives to be saved every year to this end a few men of good will put their shoulders to the wheel being good sailors and navigators themselves they invented a lifeboat that could weather a storm without being torn to pieces or capsizing and they set to work to interest the public in their venture to collect the necessary funds for constructing boats and for stationing them along the coast wherever they could be of use these men not being Jacobins did not turn to the government they understood that to bring the enterprise to a successful issue they must have the cooperation, the enthusiasm the local knowledge and especially the self-sacrifice of the local sailors they also understood that to find men who had the first signal would launch their boat in a chaos of waves, not suffering themselves to be deterred by darkness or breakers and struggling five, six, ten hours against the tide before reaching a vessel in distress, men ready to risk their lives to save those of others there must be a feeling of solidarity a spirit of sacrifice, not to be bought with galloon it was therefore a perfectly spontaneous movement sprung from agreement and individual initiative, hundreds of local groups arose along the coast the initiators had the common sense those as masters, they look for sagacity in the fisherman's hamlets and when a rich man sent 1,000 pounds to a village on the coast to irregular boat station and his offer was accepted, he left the choice of his sight to the local fisherman and sailors models of new boats were not submitted to the admiralty, we read in a report of the association as it is of importance that life boatmen should have full confidence in the vessel the committee will make a point of constructing and equipping the boats to the life boatmen's express wish in consequence, every year brings with it new improvements, the work is wholly conducted by volunteers organizing committees and local groups, by mutual aid and agreement, who are no kiss, however they owe us nothing over the rate payers and in a year they may receive 40,000 pounds in spontaneous subgroup stations as to the results here they are in 1891 the association possessed 293 life boats the same year it saved 601 shipwreck sailors and 33 vessels, since its foundation it has saved 32,671 human beings in 1886 three life boats with all their men having perished at sea hundreds of new volunteers entered their names, organized themselves into local groups and the agitation resulted in the construction of 20 additional boats as we proceed let us note that every year the association sends to the fisherman and sailors excellent barometers at a price 3 times less than their sale price in private shops it propagates meteorological knowledge and warns the parties concerned of the sudden changes of weather predicted by men of science let us repeat that these hundreds of committees and local groups are not organized heroically and are composed exclusively of volunteers, life boat men and people interested in the work the central committee which is more of a center for correspondence and no wise interferes it is true that when a voting on some question or local taxation takes place in a district these committees of the national life boat association do not as such take part in the deliberations a modesty which unfortunately the members of the elected bodies do not imitate but on the other hand these brave men do not allow those who have never faced a storm to legislate for them about saving life at the first signal of distress they rush to their boats and go hide there are no embroidered uniforms but much goodwill let us take another society of the same kind better the red cross the name matters little let us examine it imagine somebody saying 50 years ago the state capable as it is of massacring 20,000 men in a day and of wounding 50,000 more is incapable of helping its own victims consequently as long as war exists private initiative must intervene and men of goodwill must organize internationally for this human work what McCree would not have met the men who would have dared to speak thus to begin with he would have been called a utopian and if that did not silence him he would have been told what nonsense your volunteers will be found wanting precisely where they are most needed your volunteer hospitals will be centralized in a safe place while everything will be wanting in the ambulances with tokens like you forget the national rivalries which will cause the poor soldiers to die without any help such disheartening remarks would have only been equal by the number of speakers who of us has not heard men hold forth in this train now we know what happened that host societies organize themselves freely everywhere in all countries in thousands of localities and when the war of 1870 to one broke out the volunteers said to work men and women offered their services thousands of hospitals and ambulances were organized trains were started carrying ambulances provisions linen and medicaments were wounded the english committees sent entire convoys of food, clothing, tools grain to soot, beasts of drought even steamploth with the attendance to help in the tillage of deportments devastated by the war only consult La Croix Rouge by Gustave Marnier and you will be really struck by the immensity of the work performed as to the prophets ever ready to deny other men's courage good sense and intelligence and believing themselves to be the only ones capable of ruling the world with the rod none of their predictions were realized the devotion of the Red Cross volunteers was beyond all praise they were only to eager to occupy the most dangerous post and where are the salaried doctors of the Napoleonic state fled with their staff when the Prussians approached the Red Cross volunteers continued their work under fire and during the brutalities of bismocks and Napoleon's officers lavishing their care on the wounded of all nationalities Dutch, Italians, Swedes, Belgians even Japanese and Chinese agreed remarkably well they distributed the ambulances according to the needs of the occasion they vied with one another especially in the hygiene of their hospitals and there is many French men who still speaks with deep gratitude of the tender care he received from the Dutch or German volunteers in the Red Cross ambulances but what is this to an authoritarian his ideal is the regiment doctor salaried by the state what does he care for the Red Cross and its hygienic hospitals if the nurses be not functionaries here is then an organization sprung up but yesterday and which records its members by hundreds of thousands possessors, ambulances, hospital trains, elaborates new processes for tracing wounds and so on and is due to the spontaneous initiative of a few devoted men perhaps we should be told that the state has something to do with this organization yes states have laid hands on it to say the directing committees are presided over by those whom Frankies called princes of the blood emperors and queens patronize the national committees but it is not to this patronage that the success of the organization is due it is to the thousand local committees of each nation, to the activity of individuals, to the devotion of all those who try to help the victims of war and this devotion would be far greater if the state did not meddle with it in any case it was not by the order of an international directing committee that Englishmen and Japanese, Swedes and Chinaman bestigate themselves to send help to the wounded in 1871 to deliver an international ministry that hospitals rose on the invaded territory and that ambulances were carried onto the battlefield, it was by the initiative of volunteers from each country once on the spot they did not get hold of one another by the hair as was forcing by the Jacobinese of all nations we all set to work with our distinction of nationality, we may regret that such great efforts should be put to the service of sub-body crews then we may ask ourselves like the poorest child why inflict wounds if you were to heal them afterwards in striving to destroy the power of capitalists and middle class authority we worked to put an end to the massacres called wars and we would further rather see the Red Cross volunteers put full their activity to bring about open bracket with us close bracket the suppression of war that we had to mention this immense organization as another illustration of results produced by free agreement and free aid if we wish to multiply examples taken from the order of exterminating we should never end, so far as to good the numerous societies to which the German army owes its force that does not only depend on discipline as it generally believe I mean the societies whose aim is to propagate military knowledge at one of the lost congresses of a military alliance open bracket Kragebund close bracket delegates from 2,452 federated societies comprising 151,712 members represent but they are besides very numerous shooting military games satirical games topographical studies societies these are the workshops in which the technical knowledge of the German army is developed not in regimental schools it is a formidable network of all kinds of societies including military men and civilians geographers and gymnasts sportsmen and technologists which rise up spontaneously organize, federate, discuss and explore the country it is these voluntary and free associations but good to make the real backbone of the German army their aim is executable it is the maintenance of the empire but what concerns us is to point out that in spite of military organization being the great mission of the state success in this branch is the more certain the more it is left to the free agreement of groups and to the free initiative of individuals even in matters pertaining to war free agreement is thus appeal to and to further prove our assertion let us mention the volunteer topographers corpse of Switzerland who study in detail the mountain passages the aeroplane corpse of France the 300,000 British volunteers the British National Outlier Re-Association and the society now in course of organization for the defense of England's course as well as the appeals made to the commercial fleet the bicyclists corpse and the new organizations of private motor cars and steam launchers everywhere the state is abdicating and abandoning its holy functions to private individuals everywhere free organization trespassers on its domain and yet the fact we have quoted give us a near glimpse of what free government has in store for us in the future when there will be no more state and a free agreement recording by anchor chapter 12 of the conquest of bread this is the library of ox recording all library of ox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit library of ox.org recording by anchor the conquest of bread by Peter Propodkin objections part 1 let us now examine the principal objections put forth against communism most of them are evidently caused by a simple misunderstanding yet we raise important questions and merit our attention it is not for us to answer the objections raised by authoritarian communism we ourselves hold with them civilized nations have suffered too much in the long hard struggle for the emancipation of the individual to disown their post work and to tolerate a government that would make itself felt in the smallest details of citizens life even if that government had no other aim than the good of the community should an authoritarian socialist society ever succeed in establishing itself it could not last general discontent would soon force it to break up or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty it is of an anarchist communist society we are about to speak a society that recognizes the absolute liberty of the individual that does not admit of any authority and makes use of no compulsion to drive men to work limiting our studies to the economic side of the question let us see if such a society composes of men as we all today neither better nor worse neither more nor less industrious would have a chance of successful development the objection is known if the existence of each is guaranteed and if the necessity of earning wages does not compel men to work nobody will work at the end of his work on another if he is not forced to do it himself let us first note the incredible levity with which this objection is raised without even realizing that the real question raised by this objection is merely to know on the one hand whether you effectively obtain by which work the results that are said to be obtained and on the other hand whether voluntary work is not already now more productive than works stimulated by wages a question which to be dealt with properly would require a serious study but whereas in exact sciences men give their opinion on subjects infinitely less important and less complicated of the serious research of the carefully collecting and analyzing facts on this question we will pronounce judgment without appeal resting satisfied with any one particular event such as for example the want of success of some communist association in America they act like the barista who does not see in the council for the opposite side a representative of a cause or an opinion contrary to his own but a simple nuisance an adversary in an oratorical debate and if he be lucky enough to find a re-party does not over-waskia to justify his cause therefore the study of this essential basis of all political economy the study of the most favorable conditions for giving society the greatest amount of useful products with the least waste of human energy does not advance people either limit themselves to repeating commonplace assertions or else they pretend ignorance of our assertions what is most striking in this levity is that even in capitalist political economy we already find a few writers compelled by facts to doubt the action put forth by the founders of their science that the threat of hunger is men's best commitment for productive work they begin to perceive that in production a certain collective element is introduced being too much neglected up till now and which might be more important than personal gain the inferior quality of wage work the terrible waste of human energy in modern agricultural and industrial labor the ever-growing quantity of pleasure seekers who shift their burden onto other shoulders the absence of a certain animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent all this is beginning to preoccupy the economies of the classical school some of them are themselves if they have not got the wrong track if the imaginary evil being that was supposed to be tempted exclusively by a bit of luck or wages really exist this heresy penetrates even into universities it is found in books of orthodox economy but this does not prevent a great many socialist reformers from remaining partisans of individual remuneration and defending the old citadel of wisdom notwithstanding that it is being delivered over stone by stone to the assayers by its other defenders the fear that without comparison the masses will not work but during our own lifetime I will not hurt the same fears expressed twice once by the anti abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the negroes and for a second time by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs without the whip the negro will not work said the anti abolitionists free from their masters supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated said the nations of owners it was the refrain of a french nobleman in 1789 the refrain of the middle ages a refrain as old as the world and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice and each time actual facts give it the lie the liberated peasant of 1792 left with an eager energy unknown to his ancestors the emancipated negro works more than his father's and the Russian peasant after having the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation there where the soil is his he works desperately that is the exact word for it the anti abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave owners as to the slaves themselves they know what it is worth as they know its motive moreover who but the economists themselves thought as that while wage earner's work is very often indifferent and intense and productive work is only obtained from a man who sees his wealth increase in proportion to his efforts all him sang in honor of private property can be reduced to this action for it is remarkable that when economists wishing to celebrate the blessings of property show us how an unproductive more shio stony soil is clothed with rich harvest when cultivated by the peasant proprietor they know as prove their thesis in favor of private property by admitting that the only guarantee not to be robbed of the fruits of your labor is to possess the instruments of labor which is true the economists only prove that men really produces most when he works in freedom when he has a certain choice in his occupations when he has no other seer to impede him and lastly when he sees his work bringing in a profit to him and to others who work like him but bringing in little to idlers nothing else can be deducted from their argumentation and this is what we maintain ourselves as to the form of possession of the instruments of labor the economists only mention it indirectly in their demonstration as a guarantee to the cultivator that he shall not be robbed of the profits of his yield nor of his improvements besides in support of their thesis in favor of private property against all other forms of possession should not the economists demonstrate that under the form of communal property men never produces such rich harvest as when the possession is private but this they could not prove in fact it is the contrary that has been observed take for example a commune in the canton on wood in the wintertime when all the men of the village go to fell wood in the forest which belongs to them all it is precisely during these festivals of labor that the greatest order for work and the most considerable display of human energy or apparent no salaryed labor no effort of a private owner can be a comparison with it or let us take a Russian village when all its inhabitants move a field belonging to the commune or formed by it there you will see what men can produce when he works in command for communal production comrades via with one another in cutting the widest wave women bestow themselves in their wake so as not to be distanced by the movers it is a festival of labor in which a hundred people accomplish in a few hours a work that would not have been finished in a few days had they worked separately what a miserable contrast compared to them is a third by the work of an isolated owner in fact we might quote scores of examples among the pioneers of America in Swiss, German, Russian and in certain French villages overworked done in Russia by gangs, open brackets, hotels, closed brackets of masons, carpenters, boatmen, fishermen etc who undertake it all and divide the produce of a remuneration among themselves without it passing through an intermediary of middlemen or as the amount of work I saw performing English shipyards when the remuneration was paid on the same principle we could also mention the great communal house of nomadic tribes and an infinite number of successful collective enterprises and in every case we could show the unquestionable superiority of communal work compared to that of a wage owner over isolated private owner well being that is to say the satisfaction of physical, artistic and moral needs has always been the most powerful stimulus to work and where a higher link hardly succeeds to produce the bare necessities with difficulty a free worker who sees ease and luxury increasing for him and for others in proportion to his efforts spends infinitely far more energy and intelligence and obtains products in a far greater abundance but one feels riveted to misery the other hopes for ease and luxury in the future in this lies the whole secret therefore a society aiming at the well-being of all the possibility of all enjoying life in all his manifestations will give voluntary work which will be infinitely superior and he'll far more than work has produced up till now under the good of slavery, serve them or wage them part 2, nowadays whoever can load an overseas share of labour indispensable to existence does so and it is believed that it will always be so now work indispensable to existence is essentially manual we may be artists or scientists but none of us can do without things obtained by manual work bread, clovers roads, roads, ships light, heat etc and moreover however highly artistic or however subtly metaphysical or our pleasures they all depend on manual labour and it is precisely this labour the basis of life that everyone tries to avoid we understand perfectly well that it must be so nowadays because to do manual work now means in reality to shut yourself up for 10 or 12 hours a day in an unhealthy workshop and to remain chained to the same task for 20 or 30 years and maybe for your whole life, it means to be doomed to pollute your wage to the uncertainty of the moral to want of work often to destitution more often than not to death in a hospital after having worked 40 years to feed, clothe, amuse and instruct others than yourself and your children, it means to bear the stamp of inferiority all your life because whatever politicians tells us the manual worker is always considered inferior to the brain worker and the one who has toiled 10 hours in a workshop has done the time and still less the means to give himself a high delight of science and art, no even to prepare himself to appreciate them, he must be content with the crumbs from the table of privileged persons we understand that under these conditions, manual labour is considered a curse of fate we understand that all men have but one dream that of emerging from or enabling their children to emerge from this inferior state to create for themselves an independent position which means what to also live by other men's work as long as there will be a class of manual workers any class of brain workers black hands and white hands it will be the what interest in fact can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate avoiding him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity and insecurity of the moral therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their rush thoughts every morning we feel surprised at their perseverance and their zeal for work at the habit that enables them like machines blindly obeying an impetus given to lead this life of misery without hope for the moral, without forcing ever so vaguely that someday they or at least their children will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature in all the enjoyments of knowledge scientific and artistic creation reserved to date with few privileged favorites it is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wage done that we want the social revolution then work will no longer appear a curse of fate it will become what it should be the free exercise of all the faculties of men moreover, it is time to submit to a serious analysis this legend about superior work supposed to be obtained under the lash of wage done it would be sufficient to visit not the model factory and workshop that we find now and again but a number of ordinary factories to conceive an immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern industry for one factory more or less rationally organized there are a hundred or more which waste men's labor without any more substantial motive than that of perhaps bringing in a few pounds more per day to the employer here you see youths from 20 to 25 years of age sitting all day long on a bench their chests sunken in favoritists shaking their heads and bodies to tie with the speed of conjurers the two ends of worthless scraps of cotton the refuse of the lace looms what progeny will this trembling and rickety bodies bequeath to their country but they occupy so little room in the factory and each of them brings me in six pence net every day we'll see the employer an immense London factory we saw girls balled at 17 from carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another when the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables but it cost so little the work of women who have no special trade why should we use a machine when this can do no more they will be easily replaced there are so many of them in the street on the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a barefooted child asleep with his bundle of papers in its arms child labor cost so little that it may be well employed every evening to sell 10 penny worth of papers of which the poor boy will receive a penny or a penny half penny and continually in all big cities you may see robustment ramping about who have been out of work for months while their daughters grew pale in the overheated vapors of the workshops for dressing stuffs and their sons of feeling blacking pots by hand or spend those years during which they ought to have learned a trade in carrying about baskets for a green grocer and at the age of 18 or 20 become regular and employed and so it is everywhere from San Francisco to Moscow and from Naples to Stockholm the waste of human energy is the distinguishing and predominant trait of our industry not to mention trade where it attains still more closer proportions what is sad satire is that name political economy given to the science of waste and energy under the system of wisdom this is not all, if you speak to the director he will naively explain to you that it is difficult nowadays to find a skillful vigorous and energetic workman who works with the will should such a man present himself among the 20 or 30 who call every Monday asking us for work he is sure to be received even if we are reducing the number of our hands we recognize him at the first glance and he is always accepted even though we have to get rid of an older and less active worker the next day and the one who has just received notice to quit and all those who will receive it tomorrow go to reinforce that immense reserve army of capital who are men out of work who are unequal to the loom over bench when there is pressure of work or to oppose trackers and those of us the average workers who are sat away by the better cloth factories as soon as businesses slacken they also join the formidable army of age and indifferent workers who continually circulate among the second cloth factories those which barely cover their expenses and make their way in the world about trickery and snares laid for the buyer and especially for the consumer in distant countries and if you talk to the workmen themselves you will soon learn that the rule in such factories is never to do your best should he pay, should he work this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon entering such a factory the workers know that if in a moment of generosity they give way to the treaties of an employer and consent to intensify the work in order to carry out a pressing order this nervous work will be exacted in the future as they rule in the scale of wages, therefore in all such factories they prefer never to produce as much as they can, in certain industries production is limited so as to keep up high prices and sometimes the post word gucchini is given which signifies bad work for bad pay wage work is self work cannot, it must not produce all that it could produce and it is high time to disbelieve a legend which represents wage them as the best incentive to productive work if industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than indeed in the days of overgrown fathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences that was the end of lost century, not to the capitalist organization of wage them but in spite of that organization those who have seriously studied the question do not deny any other advantages of communism and condition be it well understood that communism be perfectly free, that is to say anarchists they recognize that work paid with money, even these guys under the name of labor checks to workers associations governed by the state would keep up the characteristics of wage them and would retain its disadvantages, they agree that the whole system would soon suffer from it, even if society came into possession of the instruments of production that would integrate complete education given to all children to the laborious habits of civilized societies with the liberty of choosing and varying their occupations and the attractions of work done by equals for the well-being of all, a communist society would not be wanting in producers who would soon make the fertility of a third triple and tenfold and give a new impulse to industry, this our opponents agree to but the danger they see will come from that minority of loafers who will not work will not have regular habits in spite of the excellent conditions that would make work pleasant, today the prospect of hunger compares the most refractory to move along with the others, the one who does not arrive in time is dismissed but one black sheep suffices to contaminate the whole flock and two or three sluggish or refractory workmen would lead the others astray and bring a spirit of disordering rebellion into the workshop that would make work impossible so that in the end we should have to return to a system of compulsion that would force such ringleaders back into the ranks and then is not the system of wages paid in proportion to work performed the only one that enables compulsion to be employed without hurting the feelings of independence of a worker all other means would imply the continual intervention of an authority that would be repugnant to three men, this we believe is the objection fairly stated, to begin with such an objection belongs to the category of arguments which try to justify the state, the penal law, the judge and the ruler, as they are people a feeble minority who will not submit to social customs the authoritarian say, we must maintain magistrates, tribunals and prisons although these institutions become a source of new evils of all kinds, therefore we can only repeat what we have so often said concerning authority in general, to avoid a possible evil you have recourse to means which in themselves are greater evil and become the source of those same abusers that you wish to remedy, but do not forget that it is wage done, the impossibility of living otherwise than by selling your labor which has created the present capitalist system whose vices you begin to recognize, besides this way of reasoning is merely a sophisticated justification of the evils of the present system, wage done was not instituted to remove the disadvantages of communism, its origin like that of a state and private ownership is to be found elsewhere it is born of slavery and served them imposed by force and only wears a more modern gob, thus the argument in favor of wage done is as valueless as those by which they seek to apologize for private property and the state we are nevertheless going to examine the objection and see if there is any truth in it, first of all is it not evident that if a society founded on the principle of free work where really many is by loophers it could protect itself without the authoritarian organization we have and without having records to wage done let us take a group of volunteers combining for some particular enterprise having its success at heart they all work they will save one of the associates who is frequently absent from his posts, must they on his account dissolve the group like a president to impose fines and work out a code of penalties it is evident that neither one nor the other will be done but that someday the comrade who imperialize their enterprise will be told that we should like to work with you but as you are often absent from your posts and you do your work negligently you must put, go and find other comrades who will put up with your indifference this way is so natural that it is practiced everywhere even nowadays in all industries in competition with all possible systems of fines, the king of wages supervision etc a workman may enter the factory at the appointed time but if he does his work badly if he hinders his comrades by his laziness or other defects if he is correlsome there is an end of it he is compelled to leave the workshop autoritarians pretend that it is the almighty employer and his overseas who maintain regularity and quality of working factories in reality in every somewhat complicated enterprise in which the goods produced posts through many hands before being finished it is the factory itself the workman as a unity who see to the good quality of the work therefore the best factories of British private industry have few overseers for less than an average than the french factories and less than the british state factories a certain standard of public morals is maintained in the same way authoritarians say it is due to rural gods judges and policemen whereas in reality it is maintained in spite of judges, policemen and rural gods many of the laws producing criminals was said long ago not only in industrial workshops the things go on this way it happens everywhere everyday on a scale that only bookworms have as yet no notion of when a railway company federated with other companies fails to fulfill its engagements when its trains are late and goods lie neglected at the stations but other companies threaten to cancel the contract and that pretty usually suffices it is generally believed at any rate it is taught in state approved schools that commerce only keeps to its engagements from fear of lawsuits nothing of the sort 9 times in 10 the trader who has not kept his word will not appear before a judge where trade is very active as in london the sole fact of having driven a creditor to bring a lawsuit suffices for immense majority of merchants to refuse for good to have any dealings with the men who has compelled one of them to go to law this being so why should means that are used today among workers in the workshop traders in the trade and railway companies in the organization of transport not be made use of in a society based on voluntary work take for example an association stipulating that each of its members should carry out the following contract we undertake to give you the use of our houses stores, streets means of transport, schools museums etc and condition that from 20 to 45 or 50 years of age you consecrate 4 or 5 hours a day to some work recognize as necessary to existence choose yourself a producing groups which you wish to join or organizing your group provided that it will undertake to produce necessaries and as for the remainder of your time combine together with whomever you like for recreation or auto science according to the bed of your taste 12 or 1500 hours of work a year in one of the groups producing food clovers or houses or employed in public sanitation, transport and so on is all we ask of you for this amount of work we guarantee to you a free use of all that these groups produce or will produce but if not one of the thousands of groups of our work federation will receive you whatever be the motive if you are absolutely incapable of producing anything useful or if you refuse to do it then live like an isolated man or like an invalid if you are rich enough to give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to you you are a man and you have the right to live but as you wish to live under special conditions and live the ranks it is more than probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other citizens you will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society unless some fan of yours discovering you to be a talent can lift free you from all moral obligations of our society by doing all the necessary work for you and finally if it doesn't please you go and look for other conditions elsewhere in the wide world or else seek adherence and organize with them on novel principles we prefer our own this is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn a waste of goods if they became too numerous but for we very much doubt that we need fear this contingency in a society really based on the entire freedom of the individual in fact in spite of the premium an island is offered by the private ownership of capital the really lazy man is comparatively rare unless his laziness be due to illness among workmen it is often said that the bourgeois or idlers they are certainly enough of them but they too are the exception on the contrary in every industrial enterprise you are sure to find one or more bourgeois who work very hard it is true that the majority of bourgeois profit by their privileged position to award themselves the least unpleasant thoughts and that they work under high-genic conditions of air food etc which permits them to do their business without too much fatigue but these are precisely the conditions which we claim for all workers without exception it must also be said that if thanks to their privileged position which people often perform absolutely useless or even harmful work in society nevertheless ministers heads of departments factory owners traders bankers etc subject themselves for a number of hours every day to work which we find more less tiresome or preferring the hours of leisure to this obligatory work and if in nine cases out of ten this work is a harmful work we find it non less tiring for it but it is precisely because the middle class put forth a great energy even in doing home and bracket knowingly or not close bracket and defending their privileged position but they have succeeded in defeating the landed nobility and that they continue to rule the masses. If they were idlers they would long since have ceased to exist and would have disappeared like the aristocracy in a society that would expect only four or five hours a day of useful pleasant and hygienic work these same middle class people would perform their task perfectly well and they certainly would not put up with the horrible conditions in which men toil nowadays without reforming them if they actually spent only five hours in the stewards of London rest assured that he would have found the means of making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory. As to the laziness of a great majority of workers, only Philistine economists and philanthropists can utter such nonsense if you ask an intelligent manufacturer he will tell you that if workmen only put it into their heads to be lazy all factories would have to be closed for no measure of severity, no system of spying would be of any use you should have seen that terror caused in 1887 among British employers when a few agitators started preaching the Gookini theory. Bad pay, bad work take it easy, do not overwork yourselves and waste all you can they demoralize the worker they want to kill our industry, cry those same people who they did before invade against the immorality of the worker and the bad quality of his work but if the workers were what they all represented to be namely the Adler whom the employer is supposed continually to threaten with dismissal from the workshop what would the word demoralization signify so when we speak of possible Adlers we must well understand that it is a question of a small minority in society and before legislating for that minority would it not be wise to study the origin of that Adleness whoever observes with an intelligent eye sees well enough that the child reputed lazy at schools is often the one which simply does not understand because he is being badly taught very often too it is suffering from cerebral anemia caused by poverty and an anti-hygienic education a boy who is lazy at greek or latin would work admirably where he taught science especially if he were taught with the aid of manual labour a girl who is stupid at mathematics becomes the first mathematician of her class if she by chance meets somebody who can explain to her the elements of arithmetic which she did not understand and a workman lasing the workshop cultivates his golden adorn chasing at the rising sun and will be at work again at nightfall when all nature goes to its rest somebody has said that thus is matter in the wrong place the same definition apply to nine-tenths of those called lazy they are people good astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities in reading the biography of great men we are struck the number of Adlers among them they were lazy so long as they had not found the right path afterwards they became laborious to excess Darwin, Stephenson and many others belonged to this category of Adlers very often the Adler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all his life making the eighteenth part of a pin of the hundred fourth of a watch while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to expand elsewhere often too he is a rebel who cannot submit to being fixed all his life to a workbench in order to procure a thousand pleasures for his employer while knowing himself to be four blessed to Pw2 and knowing his only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle lastly an immense number of Adlers are Adlers because they do not know well enough the trade by which they are compelled to earn their living seeing the imperfect thing they make with their own hands striving vainly to do better and perceiving that they never will succeed on account of the bad habits of work already acquired they begin to hate their trade without knowing any other hate work in general thousands of workmen and artists who are failures suffer from this cause on the other hand he who since his youth has learned to play the piano well to handle the playing well but he does the brush over file so that he feels that what he does is beautiful will never give up the piano but he does over file he will find pleasure in his work which does not tire him so long as he is not over driven in the world due to different causes of which each one could be a source of good instead of being a source of evil to society like all questions concerning criminality and related to human faculties facts have been collected having nothing in common with one another people speak of laziness or crime without giving themselves the trouble to analyze the cause they are in a hurry to punish these faults without inquiring if the punishment is in a premium on laziness or crime open footnote in russian and french prisons in london 1887 this is why free society if it saw the number of idlers increasing would no doubt think of looking first for the cause of laziness in order to suppress it before having recourse to punishment when it is the case as we have already mentioned of simple bloodlessness then before stuffing the brain of a child with science nourish his system let the blood strengthen him and that he shall not waste his time take him to the country or to the seaside there teach him in the open air not in books geometry by measuring the distance to aspire or the height of a tree natural sciences while picking flowers and fishing in the sea physical science while bidding the boot he will go to fish in but for mercy's sake do not fill his brain with classical centered says and dead languages do not make an eye blow of him or here is a child which has never ordered let the children first inculcate order among themselves and later on the laboratory the workshop the work that will have to be done in a limited space with many tools about under the guidance of an intelligent teacher will teach them method but do not make these orderly beings out of them by your school whose only order is the symmetry of its benches and which true image of a cow is in its teachings will never inspire anybody with the love of harmony of consistency and method in web do not you see that by your methods of teaching framed by a ministry for 8 million scholars who represent 8 billion different capacities you only impose a system good for mediocrities conceived by an average of mediocrities your school becomes a university of laziness as your prison is a university of crime make the school free abolish your university grades appeal to the volunteers of teaching begin that way instead of making laws against laziness which only serve to increase it give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a minute particle of some object with stifle at his little tipping machine which he ends by loathing give him the chance of tilling the soil or felling trees in the forest selling the seas in the teeth of the storm dashing through space on an engine but do not make an idle love him by forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine to plough the head of a screw or to drill the eye of a needle suppress the cause of albleness and you may take it for granted that few individuals will really hate work especially voluntary work and that there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account end of objections recording by enko chapter 13 of a conquest of bread this is a labravox recording all labravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit labravox.org recording by enko the conquest of bread by pete kropotkin the collectivist wages system part 1 in their plans for the reconstruction of society the collectivist commit in our opinion a twofold error while speaking of abolishing capitalist rule they intend nevertheless to retain two institutions which are the very basis of this rule representative government and the wages system as regards so-called representative government we have often spoken about it it is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men and such or not wanting in the collectivist party can remain partisans of national or municipal polyamists after all the lessons history have given them in France, in England, in Germany or in the united states while we see parliamentary rule breaking up and from all sides criticism of this rule growing louder not only of its results but also of its principles how is it that the revolutionary socialist define a system already condemned to die built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty sanctioning and at the same time stravening their sway over the workers parliamentary rule is preeminently a middle class rule the upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that the polyamate or a municipal council represent a nation or a city the most intelligent among them know that this is impossible the middle classes have simply used the parliamentary system to raise the protecting barrier against the pretentions of royalty without giving the people liberty but gradually as the people become conscious of their real interest and the variety of their interest is growing the system can no longer work therefore democrats of all countries they only imagine various palliatives the referendum is tried and found to be a failure proportional representation is spoken of the representation of minorities and other parliamentary utopias in a word, they strive to find what is not to be found and after each new experiment they are bound to recognize that it was a failure so that confidence in representative government vanishes more and more it is the same with the wages system because once the abolition of private property is proclaimed and the possession in common of all means of production is introduced how can the wages system be maintained in a form this is nevertheless what the great collectivists are doing when they recommend the use of the labor checks as a mode of remuneration for labor accomplished by the great collectivist employer, the state it is easy to understand why the early English socialists since the time of Robert Owen came to the system of labor checks they simply tried to make capital and labor agree they repudiated the idea of laying hands on capitalist property by means of revolutionary measures it is also easy to understand why Proudhon took up later on the same idea in his mutualist system he tried to make capital less offensive notwithstanding the retaining of private property which he digested from the bottom of his heart but which he believed to be necessary to guarantee individuals against the state neither is it astonishing that certain economists more or less bourgeois admit labor checks they care little whether the worker is paid in labor notes or in coins stamp with the effigy of the republic or the empire they only care to save from destruction the individual ownership of dwelling houses of land or factories in any case but at least of dwelling houses and the capital that is necessary for manufacturing and labor notes would just answer the purpose of upholding this private property as long as labor notes can be exchanged for jewels or carriages the owner of the house will willingly accept them for rent and as long as dwelling houses fields and factories belong to isolated owners men will have to pay these owners in one way or another for being allowed to work in the fields of factories or for living in the houses owners will have to be paid by the workers in gold in paper, money or in checks exchangeable for all sorts of commodities once that all urban labor is maintained and the right to live it is left with them but how can we define labor notes this new form of regime when we admit that the houses, the fields and the factories will no longer be private property that they will belong to the commune of the nation, port 2 let us closely examine this system of remuneration for work done preached by the French, German, English and Italian collectivists the Spanish anarchists who still call themselves collectivists implied by collectivism the possession in command of all instruments of production and the liberty of each group to divide the produce as they think fit according to communists or any of the principles close bracket it amounts to this everybody works in fields, factories, schools, hospitals etc the working day is fixed by the state which owns the land the factories, the roads etc every work day is paid for with a labor note inscribed with these words 8 hours work with this check the worker can procure all sorts of merchandise in the stores owned by the state or by diverse corporations the check is divisible so that you can buy an hour's work worth of meat 10 minutes worth of matches or half an hour of tobacco after the collectivist revolution instead of saying 2 pence worth of soup we shall say 5 units worth of soup most collectivists true to the distinction laid down by middle class economists the common bracket and by mox as well close bracket between qualified work and simple work there is more of that qualified or professional work must be paid a certain quantity more than simple work thus 1 hours work of a doctor will have to be considered as equivalent to 2 or 3 hours work of a hospital nurse or to 3 or 5 hours work of a navy professional or qualified work will be a multiple of simple work since the collectivist grown alone because this kind of work needs a more or less long apprenticeship some other collectivists such as the french moxists west do not make this distinction they proclaim the equality of wages the doctor, the schoolmaster and the professor will be paid open bracket in labor checks, close bracket at the same rate as the navy 8 hours visiting the sick in a hospital will be worth the same as 8 hours spent in earthworks or else in mines or factories some make a greater concession they admit that disagreeable or unhealthy work such as sugar age will be paid for at a higher rate than agreeable work 1 hours work of a sewer man would be worth the same 2 hours of a professor's work let us add that certain collectivists admit of corporations being paid a lump sum for work done thus a corporation would say here are 100 tons of steel 100 workmen were required to produce them and it took them 10 days their work day began 8 hours day it has taken them 8,000 working hours to produce 100 tons of steel for this the state would be them 8,000 labor notes of 1 hour each and these 8,000 chicks would be divided among the members of the ironworks as they themselves fought proper on the other hand 100 miners having taken 20 days to extract 8,000 tons of coal coal would be worth 2 hours a ton and the 16,000 chicks of 1 hour each received by the guilds of miners would be divided among them members according to their own appreciation if the miners protested and said that a ton of steel should only cost 6 hours work instead of 8 if the professor wished to have his day paid 4 times more than the nurse then the state would interfere and would settle the differences such is in a few words the organization the collectivists wish to see a rise out of the social revolution as we see their principles are collective property of the instruments of production and remuneration to each according to the times spent in producing while taking into account the productivity as to the political system it would be the parliamentary system modified by positive instructions given to those elected and by the referendum evoked taken by those or is by the nation let us own that this system appears to us simply unrealizable collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle the abolition of private property and then they deny it no sooner than proclaimed by upholding an organization of production and consumption which originated in private property they proclaim a revolutionary principle and ignore the consequences that this principle will inevitably bring about they forget that the very fact of abolishing individual property in the instruments of work, land, factories, road, capital must launch society into absolutely new channels must completely overthrow the present system of production both in its aim as well as in its means must modify daily relations between individuals as soon as land, machinery and all other instruments of production must be considered common property they say no private property and immediately after strife to maintain private property in its daily manifestations you shall be a commune as per as regards production, fields, tools, machinery all that has been invented up till now factories, railways, harbors, mines etc all are yours not the slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each in this collective property but from tomorrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to take in the creation of new machinery you will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you you will count your minutes of work and you will take care that a minute of your neighbors should not buy more than yours and as in our measures nothing as in some factories a worker can sit to six power looms at a time while in another he only tends to you will waive the muscular force, the brain energy and the nervous energy you have expanded you will accurately calculate the years of apprenticeship in order to appraise the amount each will contribute to future production and this, after having declared that you do not take into account his share in post production while for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two absolutely opposite principles two principles that contradict one another continually and a nation or a commune which would have such an organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the instruments of production or to transform itself into a communist society part 3 we have said that certain collectivist writers desire that a distinction should be made between qualified or professional work and simple work they pretend that an hours work of an engineer an architect or a doctor must be considered as two or three hours work of a blacksmith a mason or a hospital nurse and the same distinction must be made between all sorts of trades and the simple toil of deliberers well to establish this distinction would be to maintain all the inequalities of present society it would mean fixing a dividing line from the beginning between the workers and those who pretend to govern them it would mean dividing society into two very distinct classes the aristocracy of knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders the one doomed to serve the other the one working with its sense to feed and clothe those who profiting by their leisure study how to govern their first terrors it would mean reviving one of the distinct peculiarities of present society and giving it the sanction of a social revolution it would mean setting up as a principle and abuse already condemned in our ancient crumbling society we know the answer we shall get we will speak of scientific socialism we will code bourgeois economists and mocks to prove that the scale of wages has its raison d'etre as the labour force of an engineer will have cost more to society than the labour force of a navy in fact, how not economists try to prove to us that if an engineer is paid 20 times more than a navy it is because the necessary outlet to make an engineer is greater than that necessary to make a navy and has not mocks asserted that the same distinction is equally logical between two branches of manual labour he could not conclude otherwise having taken up on his own account recorders' theory of value and upheld that goods are exchanged in proportion to a quantity of work socially necessary for their production but we know what to think of this we know that if engineers, scientists or doctors are paid 10 or 100 times more than a labourer and if a weaver has 3 times more than an agricultural labourer and 10 times more than a girl in a march factory it is not by reason of their cost of production but by reason of the monopoly of education or a monopoly of industry engineers, scientists and doctors merely exploit their capital their diplomas as middle-class employers exploit a factory who has nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility as to the employer who pays an engineer 20 times more than a labourer it is simply due to personal interests if the engineer can economise 1,000 pounds a year on the cost of production the employer pays him 800 pounds and if the employer has a foreman who saves 400 pounds on the work by cleverly sweating workmen he gladly gives him 80 pounds or 120 pounds a year he pots with an extra 40 pounds when he expects to gain 400 pounds by it and this is the essence of the capitalist system the same differences obtained among different manual trades let them therefore not talk to us of the cost of production which raises the cost of skill labour and tell us that a student who has gaily spent his youth in a university has a right to wage 10 times greater than the son of a minor who has grown pale in his mind since the age of 11 or that a weaver has a right to wage 3 or 4 times greater than that of an agricultural labourer the cost of teaching a weaver his work is not 4 times greater than the cost of teaching a peasant his the weaver simply benefits by the advantages his industry rips in international trade from countries that have yet no industries and in consequence of the privileges accorded by all states to industries in preference to the tilling of the soil nobody has ever calculated the cost of production of a producer and if a noble loofer costs 4 more to society than a worker it remains to be seen whether a robust day labourer does not cost more to society than a skill autism when you have taken into account infant mortality among the poor the ravages of animal and premature deaths could they for example make us believe that the 1s3d paid to a paris workman the 3d paid to an ovean peasant girl who grows blind at this making over 1s8d paid to the peasant represent their cost of production we know full well that people work for less but we also know that they do so exclusively because thanks to our wonderful organization they would die of hunger did they not accept these mock wages for us the scale of remuneration is a complex result of taxes of governmental tutelage of capitalist monopoly in a world of state and capital therefore we say that all wages theories have been invented after the event to justify injustices that present existing and that we did not take them into consideration neither will they fail to tell us that the collective scale of wages would be an improvement it would be better so they say to see certain autism receiving a wage 2 or 3 times higher than common labourers than to see a minister receiving in a day the workmen cannot earn in a year it would be a great step towards equality for us this step would be the reverse of progress to make a distinction between simple and professional work in a new society would result in the revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact would submit to nowadays but that we nevertheless find unjust it would mean imitating those gentlemen of a French assembly who proclaim on August 4th 1789 the abolition of feudal rights but who on August 8th sanctioned these same rights by imposing Jews on the peasants to compensate the noblemen placing these Jews under the protection of the revolution it would mean imitating the Russian government who proclaim at the time of emancipation of the serfs that certain lands should henceforth belong to the nobility while formally these lands were considered as belonging to the serfs or else to take a better known example when the commune of 1871 decided to pay members of the commune council 12 s 6 d a day while the federates on the ramparts received only 1 s 3 d this decision was hailed as an act of superior democratic equality in reality the commune unirratified the former inequality between functionary and soldier government and government coming from an opportunist chamber of deputies such a decision would have appeared admirable but the commune doomed her own revolutionary principles when she failed to put them into practice and our existing social system when a minister gets paid 4,000 pounds a year while a workman must contain himself with 40 pounds or less when a foreman is paid 2 or 3 times more than a workman and among workmen there is every gradation from 8 s a day down to the peasant girls 3d with disapprove of the high salary of a minister as well as of the difference between the 8 s of the workmen and the 3d of the poor woman and we say down with the privileges of education as well as with those of birth we are on our case precisely because these privileges revolt us already in this authoritarian society could we enjoy them in a society that began by proclaiming equality this is why some collectivists understanding the impossibility of maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the breath of a revolution are often to proclaim equality of wage but they meet with new difficulties and the equality of wages becomes the same unrealizable utopia of the scale of wages of other collectivists a society having taking possession of all social wealth having broadly claimed the right of all to this wealth whatever share they may have taken in producing it will be compelled to abandon any system of wages whether in currency or labor notes part 4 the collectivists say to each according to his deeds or in other terms according to his share of services rendered to society they think it expedient to put this principle into practice as soon as the social revolution will have made all instruments of production common property but we think that if the social revolution had the misfortune of proclaiming such a principle it would mean its necessary failure it would mean leaving the social problem which post-centuries have burdened us with unsolved of course in a society like ours in which the more a man works the less he is remunerated this principle at first sight may appear to be a yearning for justice but in reality it is only the perpetuation of the injustice it was by proclaiming this principle that wage done began to end in the glaring inequalities and all the abominations of prison society because from the moment work done began to be appraised in currency or in any other form of wage the deed was agreed upon that man would only receive a wage he should be able to secure to himself the whole history of a state-aided capitalist society was as good as written it was contained in germ in this principle shall we then return to our starting point and go through the same evolution again our theories desire it but fortunately it is impossible the revolution we maintain must be communist if not it will be drowned in blood and have to be begun over again services rendered to society be they work in factory or field or mental services cannot be valued in money there can be no exact measure of value open bracket of what has been wrongly termed exchange value cause bracket no of use value in terms of production if two individuals work for the community five hours a day year in year out at different work which is equally agreeable to them we may say that in the whole their labor is approximately equivalent but we cannot divide their work and see that the result of any particular day hour or minute of work the one is worth the result of one day one hour or one minute over over we may roughly say that the man who during his lifetime has deprived himself of leisure during ten hours a day has given four more to society than the one who has only deprived himself of leisure during five hours a day or who has not deprived himself at all but we cannot take what he has done during two hours and see that the yield of his two hours work is worth twice as much as the yield of another individual who has worked only one hour and remunerate the twin proportion it would be disregarding all that is complex in industry, in agriculture in the whole life of prison society it would be ignoring to what extent all individual work is the result of the post and the present labor of society as a whole it would mean believing ourselves to be living in the stone age whereas we are living in an age of steel if you enter a modern coal mine you will see a man in charge of a huge machine that raises and lowers the cage in his hand he holds a lever that stops and reverses the course of the machine he lowers it and the cage reverses its course in the twinkling of an eye he sends its upwards or downwards into the depths of a shaft with a giddy stiffness all attention he follows with his eyes fix on an indicator which shows him on a small scale at which point of the shaft the cage is at each second of its progress and as soon as the indicator has reached a certain level he suddenly stops the course of the cage not a yard higher no lower than the required spot and no sooner have the colliers unloaded their coal wagonets and push empty ones instead than he reverses the lever and again sends the cage back into space during 8 or 10 consecutive hours every day he must keep the same strain of attention should his brain relax for a moment the cage would inevitably strike against the gear break its wheels snap the rope crush man and put a stop to all work in the mine should he waste 3 seconds at each touch of the lever the extraction in our modern perfected minds would be reduced from 20 to 50 turns a day is it he who is the most necessary man in the mine or is it perhaps the boy who signals to him from below to raise the cage is it the minor at the bottom of the shaft who risks his life every instant and who will someday be killed by fire death or is it the engineer who would lose the layer of coal and would cause the minors to dig unrocked by a simple mistake in his calculation or is it the mine owner who has put his capital into the mine and who has perhaps contrary to expert advice asserted that excellent coal would be found there all those who engage in the mine contribute to the extraction of coal in proportion to the strength, their energy, their knowledge their intelligence and their skill and we may see that all have the right to live to satisfy their needs and even their whims when the necessaries of life have been secured for all but how can we appraise the work of each one of them and moreover have extracted entirely their work is it not also the work of the men who have built the railway leading to the mine and the roads that radiate from all the railway stations is it not also the work of those who have tilled and sown their fields extracted iron cut wood in the forest build the machines that burn coal slowly develop the mining industry altogether and so on it is utterly impossible to draw a distinction between the work of each of those men to measure the work by its results lead us to an absurdity to divide the total work and to measure its fractions by the number of hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity one thing remains to put their needs above the works and first of all to recognize the right to live and later on the right to well-being for all those who took the share in production but take a new overbranch of human activity take the manifestations of life as a whole which one of us can claim the higher remuneration for his work is it the doctor who has found out the illness of a nurse who has bought about recovery by her hygienic care is it the inventor of the first steam engine of a boy who one day getting tired of pulling the rope that formally opened the valve to less steam under the piston tied the rope to the leather of the machine without suspecting that he had invented the essential mechanical part of all modern machinery, the automatic valve is it the inventor of the locomotive of the workmen of Newcastle who suggested replacing the stones formally laid under the rails where wooden slippers as the stones for water of elasticity caused the trains to derail is it the engineer of the locomotive the signalman who stops the train or lets them pass by the switchman who transfers a train from one line to another again, to whom do we owe the transatlantic cable is it the electrical engineer who obstinately affirmed that the cable would transmit messages while learn men of science declared it to be impossible is it to Maury, the learned physical geographer who advised that thick cables should be set aside for others as thin as they walking can who else to those volunteers come from nobody knows where who spend their days and nights on deck manually examining every yard of the cable and remove the nails but the shareholders of steamship companies stupid decos to be driven into the non-conducting wrapper of the cable so as to make it unserviceable and in a wider sphere the true sphere of life with its joys, with its sufferings or accidents cannot each one of us recall someone who has rendered him so great a service that we should be indignant if its equivalent in coin were mentioned the service may have been but a word nothing but a word spoken at the right time or else it may have been months and years of devotion and we are going to appraise these incalculable services in lebanote the works of each but human society would not exist for more than 2 consecutive generations if everyone did not give infinitely more than that for which he is paid in coin in cheques or in civic rewards the ways would soon become extinct if mothers did not sacrifice their lives to take care of their children if men did not give continually without demanding an equivalent reward if men did not give most precisely when they expect no reward if middle-class society is decaying if we have got into a blind alley from which we cannot emerge without attacking post-institutions with torsion hatchet it is precisely because we have given too much to counting it is because we have let ourselves be influenced into giving only to receive it is because we have aim at turning society into a commercial company based on debit and credit after all the collectivist know this themselves they vaguely understand that a society could not exist if it carried out the principle of each according to his deeds they have a notion that necessaries we do not speak of whims the needs of the individual do not always correspond to his works the principle the eminently individualist principle would however be tampered by social intervention for the education of children and young persons open bracket including maintenance and lodging close bracket and by the social organization for assisting the infirm and the sick for retreats for age workers etc they understand that a man of 40 father of three children has other needs than a young man of 20 they knew that the woman who circles her infant and spends sleepless nights bedside cannot do as much work as the man who has slept peacefully they seem to take in that men and women worn out maybe by need of overwork for society maybe incapable of doing as much work as those who have spent their time leisurely and pocketed their labor notes in the privileged career of state functionaries they are eager to temper their principle they see society will not fail to maintain and bring up its children to help both age and infirm without doubt needs will be the measure of the cause that society will burden itself with to temper the principle of deeds charity, charity, always Christian charity organized by the state this time they believe in improving the asylums for found links in effecting all age and sick insurances so as to temper their principle but they cannot yet throw aside the idea of wounding first and healing afterwards thus after having denied communism after having loved that there is at the formula to each according to his needs this great economist discovered the need of the producers which they now admit and it is for the state to estimate them for the state to verify even needs or not disproportionate to the work the state will deal out charity thanks to the English poor law and the work house is but a step there is but a slight difference because even the step mother of the society against whom we are in revolt has also been compelled to temper her individualist principles she too has had to make concessions of charity, she too distributes half penny dinners to prevent the pillaging of her shops, bills hospitals, often very bad ones but sometimes splendid ones to prevent the ravages of contagious diseases she too after having paid the hours of labor shelters that she drain of those she has racked, she takes their needs into consideration and those are charity poverty we have said elsewhere was the primary cause of wealth it was poverty that created the first capitalist because before accumulating surplus value of which we hear so much men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labor so as not to die of hunger it was poverty that made capitalists and if the number of the poor increased so rapidly during the middle ages it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of states and to the increase of riches resulting from the exploitation of the East these two causes to ascend other bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban communities and told them to claim the principle of riches so dear to the exploiters instead of the solidarity they formally practiced in their tribal life and it is this principle that is to spring from a revolution which meant dear to call by the name of social revolution a name so dear to the stopped the oppressed and the sufferers it can never be for the dear in which all institutions will fall under the proletarian axe voices will cry out bread, shelter, ease for all and those voices will be listened to the people will say let us begin by allying our first for life, for happiness for liberty that we have never quenched and when we shall have tasted of this joy we'll set to work to demolish the lost vestiges of middle class rule it's morality drawn from account books it's debit and credit philosophy it's mine and yours institutions in demolishing we shall build as Proudhon said and we shall build in the name of communism and anarchy and other collectivist wages system recording by anchor