Translation by Paul Sharkey
This article on the interwoven nature of oppression and exploitation appeared in Les Temps Nouveaux (No. 11) in July 1895. It summarises a theme that Kropotkin stressed, namely that economic and political issues need to be viewed as a whole and that combating just one form is impossible.
Before running an eye over the various economic expedients by means of which partial improvements to the workers’ lot are sought today, we will do well to return to their origins—the beginning of this century.
When the communists of the first half of this century—Fourier, Saint-Simon, Robert Owen—launched their great ideas out into the world, they reckoned that the sheer fairness of their ideas and the grandeur of them would be enough to convert humanity. Capitalist and worker alike would appreciate the benefits of communism, would turn communist and would reorganise society in accordance with the new principles.
That was, as we know, the age of unrestrained, shameless exploitation of labour. Men, women and children driven from the village by law and taxation, stranded in the big towns, were delivered up to the mercy of exploiters. The bourgeoisie, victorious all down the line since the great [French] Revolution, held political power as well as capital in its hands. Hiding behind grand pronouncements on the freedom of labour, it forced the worker to accept the conditions dictated by the greed of the capitalist—on pain of imprisonment for vagrancy; every attempt by workers to organise was savagely punished; the master had become, in the real sense of the term, the feudal lord of “his” male and female workers. And the worker, ground into squalor, sank ever deeper into intellectual and religious serfdom, no longer daring to revolt.
At that time, inspiring revolt against those two allies, capital and the State, might have been the only practical means of progressing towards implementation of the great ideas proclaimed by the communists of the day. Only acts of revolt could prepare the liberation of the masses.
A double revolt, let it be understood, for, contrary to the wrong-headed interpretation of history in vogue these days, it was not just in the 16th century and for the purposes of the “primitive accumulation of capital” that the State acted as strong arm for the capitalist. It was actually in the 19th century—and still to this very day—that, armed with all its powerful machinery, the State helped capital to establish itself, placed entire populations in thrall to it and, by a series of legal measures, starting with the National Assembly and continuing through every parliament right up until our own day, represented, by law, the formidable might of capital which the people seek today to overthrow. For a multiplicity of reasons we might be well advised to bear in mind, however, the communists of the beginning of this century [i.e., the nineteenth] took quite a different path.
The acts of the great Revolution that had the greatest resonance were its political deeds. True, the peasant had freed himself from the feudal regime and claimed back much of the land from the seigneurs. But he had done so wordlessly; so much so that it is only today that historians are discovering the scale of the agrarian revolution mounted by the peasant jacqueries, despite the attempts of the National Assembly or the Convention orators to repress the victorious march of the jacqueries. In the great gatherings of the Revolution, the spoken word was always the politician’s province. And behind all his grand speeches, the bourgeois politician had forged the chains that still hold the workers of both worlds in thrall to capital’s yoke.
Living on memories of the great Revolution, the revolutionaries of France and England back in the [eighteen-]twenties and thirties still dreamt of a return to the political forms of the first Jacobin republic, as the great goal for them to aim at as the century progressed. Political freedom and political equality were to be the grand cure for all evils.
It was obviously necessary to react against this outlook. Above all, the communist ideal which had been lost sight of and forgotten amid political struggles had to be revived. Every eye had to be opened to the ideal of economic equality, and it had to be demonstrated that, even under the most advanced republican forms, the slave to the soil and to the factory would always remain a slave unless private ownership of the soil and of the instruments of labour was abolished.
Hence the tendency of the first communists—a tendency still found today—to dwell exclusively on economic servitude and to attach a completely secondary significance to the political forms of popular life. “Economic conditions are everything. He who is a slave to the soil or to the machine cannot be a free citizen. For as long as economic slavery endures, there can never be any political freedom.”
An idea that is perfectly correct. An idea that needed spreading all the more at that time, since the initiative in progressive movements was then coming from the bourgeoisie, while the worker and peasant masses, subjected to twelve- and fifteen-hour working days, sunken in poverty, reading little or not at all, scarcely dared ponder the whole of society and let themselves be led by bourgeois rebels, and while the latter, by dint of their education, were inclined to neglect economic questions and dream only about freedoms of the press, assembly, and association—of the “democratic regime,” in short, as the remedy for all suffering.
In that respect, the first communists of our century have done the cause of civilisation a great service. To them are we indebted for a whole generation of pre-1848 socialists, together with their descendants—Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin—who highlighted the social and economic question and launched this idea, so often formulated prior to 1848 and taken up later by the International: the idea of economic struggle, of economic liberation over and above political struggles.
But in order to encapsulate the whole truth rather than just one facet of the truth, its essential complement needed setting alongside that formula. And this was not done at the time.
Without doubt, economic conditions make for slavery. Without doubt, the serf to the soil or to the machine will never be a free citizen. Without doubt, political slavery will last as long as economic slavery exists.
But of those two forms of subjection, the economic and the political, neither can be regarded as mother to the other. The two go hand in hand, and each one in turn gives rise to the other. In the primitive tribe and even in the village community which came after it in history, such-and-such a person might be impoverished as the result of accident. But the tribe and the community have a whole series of arrangements for overcoming this adversity and restoring equality. It is only once the first seeds of the State appear in the tribe or community that a body of customs arises, later followed by laws, aimed at preserving inequality so as to make poverty and wealth alike permanent and to exploit the former to the advantage of the latter.
And as the State develops and grows, it develops a whole vast mechanism for maintaining and exaggerating inequalities of fortune and generating the rich man’s lordship over the poor man.
Serfdom was one of its historic forms, but with its passing, fresh, new forms of the same domination have been devised within and by the State. Today, these have found their most scandalous development in the American republics, where billions are made with the aid and through the good offices of the State, while every attempt at revolt by the poor is repressed with the same fury with which the revolt of the Parisian proletariat was crushed during the bloody week of May 1871. To the formula regarding economic subjection, then, this additional formula must henceforth be added:
“The State being the political form by means of which economic subjection is established and perpetuated, economic liberation is an impossibility with a parallel demolition of the machinery of government by which economic subjection will remain for as long as the State shall exist.”
This double character of the “law of progress,” if we choose it call it that, is located within a mass of other human and organic phenomena in general. Without dwelling upon examples lifted from biology, the fact of the matter is that, for as long as man remains mired in poverty, he is not going to be released from religious and intellectual (clerical and academic) slavery either. But it would be utterly wrong to conclude that liberation from religious and intellectual servitude will come automatically once man is freed from poverty. Rather, since various nations are on the march at differing rates towards well-being, we might cite the fact that the conquest of well-being in America and England goes hand in hand with the increase in intellectual servitude in the two realms of superstition and servitude before that of scientific authority.
And since those two enslavements inevitably bring back political and economic servitude, we are forced to acknowledge that if there will be no end to religious and intellectual servitude as long as economic and political enslavement last, the latter are not going to disappear as long as the human intellect remains immersed in submission to religious and intellectual authority. The man who swears upon the Bible, or upon some other book, will always be a slave and an authoritarian by nature and will gradually reconstitute all forms of slavery—if ever he managed to make some disappear.
The credit for having grasped this twofold or rather threefold character of the law of progress belongs to Proudhon. Whilst, like so many others, he paid a heavy tribute to German metaphysics’ fondness for jargon, he nevertheless understood and spelled out in very clear terms that the formula of progress was, so to speak, two-sided, and that if one wanted economic emancipation, one also had to want political emancipation—the abolition of the State.
For anybody with the capacity for thought, he proved that, unless one wishes to see an effort come to naught, it is, from here on, impossible to trace the history of Capital without simultaneously tracing the history of Authority: that, from the infancy of humanity through to our own times, both—Capital and Authority—represent the two forms through which minorities have always worked and still work to establish and maintain Domination.
It has to be said that the earliest communists had all more or less guessed as much. But guided by the needs of the moment (the need to draw public attention to economic questions), faced with powerful enemies and not daring to attack them, anxious to embark upon a few attempts at practical implementation of their ideas in society as it was, and, lastly, all imbued with the Christian notion of reforming characters rather than institutions, they followed a different trail.
Overstating the necessities of the moment, the better to push their economic ideas, they broke with the revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the political domination of the bourgeoisie. They ended up accommodating themselves to any sort of government, even looking to potentates for succour, in order to put their ideas into practice—a tack which persists right into the present and which prompts some socialists to pay no heed to anti-statist propaganda—indeed, to despise it—and to preach that the reactionaries, as champions of strong government, are more likely to be allies of theirs than allies of State-hating radicals.
In addition, in their schemes for rebuilding society, the first communists based their calculations on the establishment of a formidable authority—a tradition maintained right into our own day by the authoritarian socialists.
And finally, they poured some of their energy into [creating] institutions of partial communism that were to help regenerate society, since they would provide the evidence that communism better meets everyone’s interests than the current individualism.
And even as the working masses were forming their secret societies for the war against capital, it was under the influence of communists that an entire series of institutions were founded such as communes in America, co-operatives for distribution and production, workers’ settlements, etc., which were to be used to prove the feasibility of communism. We will examine these attempts in a forthcoming article, so as to see what lesson the revolution might one day draw from them.