ECONOMIC EVOLUTIONS.--FIRST PERIOD.--THE DIVISION OF LABOR.
The fundamental idea, the dominant category, of political economy
is VALUE.
Value reaches its positive determination by a series of
oscillations between SUPPLY and DEMAND.
Consequently, value appears successively under three aspects:
useful value, exchangeable value, and synthetic, or social,
value, which is true value. The first term gives birth to the
second in contradiction to it, and the two together, absorbing
each other in reciprocal penetration, produce the third: so that
the contradiction or antagonism of ideas appears as the point of
departure of all economic science, allowing us to say of it,
parodying the sentence of Tertullian in relation to the Gospel,
Credo quia absurdum: There is, in social economy, a latent truth
wherever there is an apparent contradiction, Credo quia
contrarium.
From the point of view of political economy, then, social
progress consists in a continuous solution of the problem of the
constitution of values, or of the proportionality and solidarity
of products.
But while in Nature the synthesis of opposites is contemporary
with their opposition, in society the antithetic elements seem to
appear at long intervals, and to reach solution only`after long
and tumultuous agitation. Thus there is no example--the idea
even is inconceivable--of a valley without a hill, a left without
a right, a north pole without a south pole, a stick with but one
end, or two ends without a middle, etc. The human body, with its
so perfectly antithetic dichotomy, is formed integrally at the
very moment of conception; it refuses to be put together and
arranged piece by piece, like the garment patterned after it
which, later, is to cover it.[10]
[10] A subtle philologist, M. Paul Ackermann, has shown, using
the French language as an illustration, that, since every word in
a language has its opposite, or, as the author calls it, its
antonym, the entire vocabulary might be arranged in couples,
forming a vast dualistic system. (See Dictionary of Antonyms.
By Paul Ackermann. Paris: Brockhaus & Avenarius. 1842)
In society, on the contrary, as well as in the mind, so far from
the idea reaching its complete realization at a single bound, a
sort of abyss separates, so to speak, the two antinomical
positions, and even when these are recognized at last, we still
do not see what the synthesis will be. The primitive concepts
must be fertilized, so to speak, by burning controversy and
passionate struggle; bloody battles will be the preliminaries of
peace. At the present moment, Europe, weary of war and
discussion, awaits a reconciling principle; and it is the vague
perception of this situation which induces the Academy of Moral
and Political Sciences to ask, "What are the general facts which
govern the relations of profits to wages and determine their
oscillations?" in other words, what are the most salient episodes
and the most remarkable phases of the war between labor and
capital?
If, then, I demonstrate that political economy, with all its
contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing
but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved
thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an
organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said,
every systematic contradiction is the announcement of a
composition; further, I shall have fixed the bases of this
composition. Then, indeed, to unfold the system of economical
contradictions is to lay the foundations of universal
association; to show how the products of collective labor COME
OUT of society is to explain how it will be possible to make them
RETURN to it; to exhibit the genesis of the problems of
production and distribution is to prepare the way for their
solution. All these propositions are identical and equally
evident.
% 1.--Antagonistic effects of the principle of division.
All men are equal in the state of primitive communism, equal in
their nakedness and ignorance, equal in the indefinite power of
their faculties. The economists generally look at only the first
of these aspects; they neglect or overlook the second.
Nevertheless, according to the profoundest philosophers of modern
times, La Rochefoucault, Helvetius, Kant, Fichte, Hegel,
Jacotot, intelligence differs in individuals only QUALITATIVELY,
each having thereby his own specialty or genius; in its
essence,--namely, judgment,--it is QUANTITATIVELY equal in all.
Hence it follows that, a little sooner or a little later,
according as circumstances shall be more or less favorable,
general progress must lead all men from original and negative
equality to a positive equivalence of talents and acquirements.
I insist upon this precious datum of psychology, the necessary
consequence of which is that the HIERARCHY OF CAPACITIES
henceforth cannot be allowed as a principle and law of
organization: equality alone is our rule, as it is also our
ideal. Then, just as the equality of misery must change
gradually into equality of well-being, as we have proved by the
theory of value, so the equality of minds, negative in the
beginning, since it represents only emptiness, must reappear in a
positive form at the completion of humanity's education. The
intellectual movement proceeds parallelly with the economic
movement; they are the expression, the translation, of each
other; psychology and social economy are in accord, or rather,
they but unroll the same history, each from a different point of
view. This appears especially in Smith's great law, the DIVISION
OF LABOR.
Considered in its essence, the division of labor is the way in
which equality of condition and intelligence is realized.
Through diversity of function, it gives rise to proportionality
of products and equilibrium in exchange, and consequently opens
for us the road to wealth; as also, in showing us infinity
everywhere in art and Nature, it leads us to idealize our acts,
and makes the creative mind--that is, divinity itself, mentem
diviniorem--immanent and perceptible in all laborers.
Division of labor, then, is the first phase of economic evolution
as well as of intellectual development: our point of departure is
true as regards both man and things, and the progress of our
exposition is in no wise arbitrary.
But, at this solemn hour of the division of labor, tempestuous
winds begin to blow upon humanity. Progress does not improve the
condition of all equally and uniformly, although in the end it
must include and transfigure every intelligent and industrious
being. It commences by taking possession of a small number of
privileged persons, who thus compose the elite of nations, while
the mass continues, or even buries itself deeper, in
barbarism. It is this exception of persons on the part of
progress which has perpetuated the belief in the natural and
providential inequality of conditions, engendered caste, and
given an hierarchical form to all societies. It has not been
understood that all inequality, never being more than a negation,
carries in itself the proof of its illegitimacy and the
announcement of its downfall: much less still has it been
imagined that this same inequality proceeds accidentally from a
cause the ulterior effect of which must be its entire
disappearance.
Thus, the antinomy of value reappearing in the law of division,
it is found that the first and most potent instrument of
knowledge and wealth which Providence has placed in our hands has
become for us an instrument of misery and imbecility. Here is
the formula of this new law of antagonism, to which we owe the
two oldest maladies of civilization, aristocracy and the
proletariat: Labor, in dividing itself according to the law
which is peculiar to it, and which is the primary condition of
its productivity, ends in the frustration of its own objects, and
destroys itself, in other words: Division, in the absence of
which there is no progress, no wealth, no equality, subordinates
the workingman, and renders intelligence useless, wealth harmful,
and equality impossible. All the economists, since Adam Smith,
have pointed out the ADVANTAGES and the INCONVENIENCES of the law
of division, but at the same time insisting much more strenuously
upon the first than the second, because such a course was more in
harmony with their optimistic views, and not one of them ever
asking how a LAW can have INCONVENIENCES. This is the way in
which J. B. Say summed up the question:--
"A man who during his whole life performs but one operation,
certainly acquires the power to execute it better and more
readily than another; but at the same time he becomes less
capable of any other occupation, whether physical or moral;
his other faculties become extinct, and there results a
degeneracy in the individual man. That one has made only the
eighteenth part of a pin is a sad account to give of one's self:
but let no one imagine that it is the workingman who spends his
life in handling a file or a hammer that alone degenerates in
this way from the dignity of his nature; it is the same with the
man whose position leads him to exercise the most subtle
faculties of his mind. . . On the whole, it may be said that the
separation of tasks is an advantageous use of human forces; that
it increases enormously the products of society; but that it
takes something from the capacity of each man taken
individually."[11]
[11] "Treatise on Political Economy."
What, then, after labor, is the primary cause of the
multiplication of wealth and the skill of laborers? Division.
What is the primary cause of intellectual degeneracy and, as we
shall show continually, civilized misery? Division.
How does the same principle, rigorously followed to its
conclusions, lead to effects diametrically opposite? There is
not an economist, either before or since Adam Smith, who has even
perceived that here is a problem to be solved. Say goes so far
as to recognize that in the division of labor the same cause
which produces the good engenders the evil; then, after a few
words of pity for the victims of the separation of industries,
content with having given an impartial and faithful exhibition of
the facts, he leaves the matter there. "You know," he seems to
say, "that the more we divide the workmen's tasks, the more we
increase the productive power of labor; but at the same time the
more does labor, gradually reducing itself to a mechanical
operation, stupefy intelligence."
In vain do we express our indignation against a theory which,
creating by labor itself an aristocracy of capacities, leads
inevitably to political inequality; in vain do we protest in the
name of democracy and progress that in the future there will be
no nobility, no bourgeoisie no pariahs. The economist replies,
with the impassibility of destiny: You are condemned to produce
much, and to produce cheaply; otherwise your industry will be
always insignificant, your commerce will amount to nothing, and
you will drag in the rear of civilization instead of taking the
lead.--What! among us, generous men, there are some predestined
to brutishness; and the more perfect our industry becomes, the
larger will grow the number of our accursed brothers! . . . . .
--Alas! . . . . . That is the last word of the economist.
We cannot fail to recognize in the division of labor, as a
general fact and as a cause, all the characteristics of a LAW;
but as this law governs two orders of phenomena radically
opposite and destructive of each other, it must be confessed also
that this law is of a sort unknown in the exact sciences,--that
it is, strange to say, a contradictory law, a counter-law an
antinomy. Let us add, in anticipation, that such appears to be
the identifying feature of social economy, and consequently of
philosophy.
Now, without a RECOMPOSITION of labor which shall obviate the
inconveniences of division while preserving its useful effects,
the contradiction inherent in the principle is irremediable. It
is necessary,--following the style of the Jewish priests,
plotting the death of Christ,--it is necessary that the poor
should perish to secure the proprietor his for tune, expedit unum
hominem pro populo mori. I am going to demonstrate the necessity
of this decree; after which, if the parcellaire laborer still
retains a glimmer of intelligence, he will console himself with
the thought that he dies according to the rules of political
economy.
Labor, which ought to give scope to the conscience and render it
more and more worthy of happiness, leading through parcellaire
division to prostration of mind, dwarfs man in his noblest part,
minorat capitis, and throws him back into animality. Thenceforth
the fallen man labors as a brute, and consequently must be
treated as a brute. This sentence of Nature and necessity
society will execute.
The first effect of parcellaire labor, after the depravation of
the mind, is the lengthening of the hours of labor, which
increase in inverse proportion to the amount of intelligence
expended. For, the product increasing in quantity and quality at
once, if, by any industrial improvement whatever, labor is
lightened in one way, it must pay for it in another. But as the
length of the working-day cannot exceed from sixteen to eighteen
hours, when compensation no longer can be made in time, it will
be taken from the price, and wages will decrease. And this
decrease will take place, not, as has been foolishly imagined,
because value is essentially arbitrary, but because it is
essentially determinable. Little matters it that the struggle
between supply and demand ends, now to the advantage of the
employer, now to the benefit of the employee; such oscillations
may vary in amplitude, this depending on well-known accessory
circumstances which have been estimated a thousand times. The
certain point, and the only one for us to notice now, is that the
universal conscience does not set the same price upon the labor
of an overseer and the work of a hod-carrier. A reduction in the
price of the day's work, then, is necessary: so that the laborer,
after having been afflicted in mind by a degrading function,
cannot fail to be struck also in his body by the meagreness of
his reward. This is the literal application of the words of the
Gospel: HE THAT HATH NOT, FROM HIM SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT
WHICH HE HATH.
There is in economic accidents a pitiless reason which laughs at
religion and equity as political aphorisms, and which renders man
happy or unhappy according as he obeys or escapes the
prescriptions of destiny. Certainly this is far from that
Christian charity with which so many honorable writers today are
inspired, and which, penetrating to the heart of the bourgeoisie,
endeavors to temper the rigors of the law by numerous religious
institutions. Political economy knows only justice, justice as
inflexible and unyielding as the miser's purse; and it is because
political economy is the effect of social spontaneity and the
expression of the divine will that I have been able to say: God
is man's adversary, and Providence a misanthrope. God makes us
pay, in weight of blood and measure of tears, for each of our
lessons; and to complete the evil, we, in our relations with our
fellows, all act like him. Where, then, is this love of the
celestial father for his creatures? Where is human fraternity?
Can he do otherwise? say the theists. Man falling, the animal
remains: how could the Creator recognize in him his own image?
And what plainer than that he treats him then as a beast of
burden? But the trial will not last for ever, and sooner or
later labor, having been PARTICULARIZED, will be synthetized.
Such is the ordinary argument of all those who seek to justify
Providence, but generally succeed only in lending new weapons to
atheism. That is to say, then, that God would have envied us,
for six thousand years, an idea which would have saved millions
of victims, a distribution of labor at once special and
synthetic! In return, he has given us, through his servants
Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mahomet, etc., those insipid writings,
the disgrace of our reason, which have killed more men than they
contain letters! Further, if we must believe primitive
revelation, social economy was the cursed science, the fruit of
the tree reserved for God, which man was forbidden to touch! Why
this religious depreciation of labor, if it is true, as economic
science already shows, that labor is the father of love and the
organ of happiness? Why this jealousy of our advancement? But
if, as now sufficiently appears, our progress depends upon
ourselves alone, of what use is it to adore this phantom of
divinity, and what does he still ask of us through the multitude
of inspired persons who pursue us with their sermons? All of
you, Christians, protestant and orthodox, neo-revelators,
charlatans and dupes, listen to the first verse of the
humanitarian hymn upon God's mercy: "In proportion as the
principle of division of labor receives complete application, the
worker becomes weaker, narrower, and more dependent. Art
advances: the artisan recedes!"[12]
[12] Tocqueville, "Democracy in America."
Then let us guard against anticipating conclusions and prejudging
the latest revelation of experience. At present God seems less
favorable than hostile: let us confine ourselves to establishing
the fact.
Just as political economy, then, at its point of departure, has
made us understand these mysterious and dismal words: IN
PROPORTION AS THE PRODUCTION OF UTILITY INCREASES, VENALITY
DECREASES; so arrived at its first station, it warns us in a
terrible voice: IN PROPORTION AS ART ADVANCES, THE ARTISAN
RECEDES. To fix the ideas better, let us cite a few examples.
In all the branches of metal-working, who are the least
industrious of the wage-laborers? Precisely those who are called
MACHINISTS. Since tools have been so admirably perfected, a
machinist is simply a man who knows how to handle a file or
a plane: as for mechanics, that is the business of engineers and
foremen. A country blacksmith often unites in his own person, by
the very necessity of his position, the various talents of the
locksmith, the edge-tool maker, the gunsmith, the machinist, the
wheel-wright, and the horse-doctor: the world of thought would be
astonished at the knowledge that is under the hammer of this man,
whom the people, always inclined to jest, nickname brule-fer. A
workingman of Creuzot, who for ten years has seen the grandest
and finest that his profession can offer, on leaving his shop,
finds himself unable to render the slightest service or to earn
his living. The incapacity of the subject is directly
proportional to the perfection of the art; and this is as true of
all the trades as of metal-working.
The wages of machinists are maintained as yet at a high rate:
sooner or later their pay must decrease, the poor quality of the
labor being unable to maintain it.
I have just cited a mechanical art; let us now cite a liberal
industry.
Would Gutenburg and his industrious companions, Faust and
Schoffer, ever have believed that, by the division of labor,
their sublime invention would fall into the domain of
ignorance--I had almost said idiocy? There are few men so
weak-minded, so UNLETTERED, as the mass of workers who follow
the various branches of the typographic industry,-- compositors,
pressmen, type-founders, book-binders, and paper-makers. The
printer, as he existed even in the days of the Estiennes, has
become almost an abstraction. The employment of women in
type-setting has struck this noble industry to the heart, and
consummated its degradation. I have seen a female
compositor--and she was one of the best--who did not know how to
read, and was acquainted only with the forms of the letters.
The whole art has been withdrawn into the hands of foremen and
proof-readers, modest men of learning whom the impertinence of
authors and patrons still humiliates, and a few workmen who are
real artists. The press, in a word, fallen into mere mechanism,
is no longer, in its PERSONNEL, at the level of civilization:
soon there will be left of it but a few souvenirs.
I am told that the printers of Paris are endeavoring by
association to rise again from their degradation: may their
efforts not be exhausted in vain empiricism or misled into barren
utopias!
After private industries, let us look at public administration.
In the public service, the effects of parcellaire labor are no
less frightful, no less intense: in all the departments of
administration, in proportion as the art develops, most of the
employees see their salaries diminish. A letter-carrier receives
from four hundred to six hundred francs per annum, of which the
administration retains about a tenth for the retiring pension.
After thirty years of labor, the pension, or rather the
restitution, is three hundred francs per annum, which, when given
to an alms-house by the pensioner, entitles him to a bed, soup,
and washing. My heart bleeds to say it, but I think,
nevertheless, that the administration is generous: what reward
would you give to a man whose whole function consists in walking?
The legend gives but FIVE SOUS to the Wandering Jew; the
letter-carriers receive twenty or thirty; true, the greater part
of them have a family. That part of the service which calls into
exercise the intellectual faculties is reserved for the
postmasters and clerks: these are better paid; they do the work
of men.
Everywhere, then, in public service as well as free industry,
things are so ordered that nine-tenths of the laborers serve as
beasts of burden for the other tenth: such is the inevitable
effect of industrial progress and the indispensable condition of
all wealth. It is important to look well at this elementary
truth before talking to the people of equality, liberty,
democratic institutions, and other utopias, the realization of
which involves a previous complete revolution in the relations of
laborers.
The most remarkable effect of the division of labor is the decay
of literature.
In the Middle Ages and in antiquity the man of letters, a sort of
encyclopaedic doctor, a successor of the troubadour and the poet,
all-knowing, was almighty. Literature lorded it over society
with a high hand; kings sought the favor of authors, or revenged
themselves for their contempt by burning them,--them and their
books. This, too, was a way of recognizing literary sovereignty.
Today we have manufacturers, lawyers, doctors, bankers,
merchants, professors, engineers, librarians, etc.; we have no
men of letters. Or rather, whoever has risen to a remarkable
height in his profession is thereby and of necessity lettered:
literature, like the baccalaureate, has become an elementary part
of every profession. The man of letters, reduced to his simplest
expression, is the PUBLIC WRITER, a sort of writing commissioner
in the pay of everybody, whose best-known variety is the
journalist.
It was a strange idea that occurred to the Chambers four years
ago,-- that of making a law on literary property! As if
henceforth the idea was not to become more and more the
all-important point, the style nothing. Thanks to God, there is
an end of parliamentary eloquence as of epic poetry and
mythology; the theatre rarely attracts business men and savants;
and while the connoisseurs are astonished at the decline of art,
the philosophic observer sees only the progress of manly reason,
troubled rather than rejoiced at these dainty trifles. The
interest in romance is sustained only as long as it resembles
reality; history is reducing itself to anthropological exegesis;
everywhere, indeed, the art of talking well appears as a
subordinate auxiliary of the idea, the fact. The worship of
speech, too mazy and slow for impatient minds, is neglected, and
its artifices are losing daily their power of seduction. The
language of the nineteenth century is made up of facts and
figures, and he is the most eloquent among us who, with the
fewest words, can say the most things. Whoever cannot speak this
language is mercilessly relegated to the ranks of the
rhetoricians; he is said to have no ideas.
In a young society the progress of letters necessarily outstrips
philosophical and industrial progress, and for a long time serves
for the expression of both. But there comes a day when thought
leaves language in the rear, and when, consequently, the
continued preeminence of literature in a society becomes a sure
symptom of decline. Language, in fact, is to every people the
collection of its native ideas, the encyclopaedia which
Providence first reveals to it; it is the field which its reason
must cultivate before directly attacking Nature through
observation and experience. Now, as soon as a nation, after
having exhausted the knowledge contained in its vocabulary,
instead of pursuing its education by a superior philosophy, wraps
itself in its poetic mantle, and begins to play with its periods
and its hemistichs, we may safely say that such a society is
lost. Everything in it will become subtle, narrow, and false; it
will not have even the advantage of maintaining in its splendor
the language of which it is foolishly enamored; instead of going
forward in the path of the geniuses of transition, the Tacituses,
the Thucydides, the Machiavels, and the Montesquieus, it will be
seen to fall, with irresistible force, from the majesty of Cicero
to the subtleties of Seneca, the antitheses of St. Augustine, and
the puns of St. Bernard.
Let no one, then, be deceived: from the moment that the mind, at
first entirely occupied with speech, passes to experience and
labor, the man of letters, properly speaking, is simply the puny
personification of the least of our faculties; and literature,
the refuse of intelligent industry, finds a market only with the
idlers whom it amuses and the proletaires whom it fascinates, the
jugglers who besiege power and the charlatans who shelter
themselves behind it, the hierophants of divine right who blow
the trumpet of Sinai, and the fanatical proclaimers of the
sovereignty of the people, whose few mouth-pieces, compelled to
practise their tribunician eloquence from tombs until they can
shower it from the height of rostrums, know no better than to
give to the public parodies of Gracchus and Demosthenes.
All the powers of society, then, agree in indefinitely
deteriorating the condition of the parcellaire laborer; and
experience, universally confirming the theory, proves that this
worker is condemned to misfortune from his mother's womb, no
political reform, no association of interests, no effort either
of public charity or of instruction, having the power to aid him.
The various specifics proposed in these latter days, far from
being able to cure the evil, would tend rather to inflame it by
irritation; and all that has been written on this point has only
exhibited in a clear light the vicious circle of political
economy.
This we shall demonstrate in a few words.
% 2.--Impotence of palliatives.--MM. Blanqui, Chevalier, Dunoyer,
Rossi, and Passy.
All the remedies proposed for the fatal effects of parcellaire
division may be reduced to two, which really are but one, the
second being the inversion of the first: to raise the mental and
moral condition of the workingman by increasing his comfort and
dignity; or else, to prepare the way for his future emancipation
and happiness by instruction.
We will examine successively these two systems, one of which is
represented by M. Blanqui, the other by M. Chevalier.
M. Blanqui is a friend of association and progress, a writer of
democratic tendencies, a professor who has a place in the hearts
of the proletariat. In his opening discourse of the year 1845,
M. Blanqui proclaimed, as a means of salvation, the association
of labor and capital, the participation of the working man in the
profits,--that is, a beginning of industrial solidarity. "Our
century," he exclaimed, "must witness the birth of the collective
producer." M. Blanqui forgets that the collective producer was
born long since, as well as the collective consumer, and that the
question is no longer a genetic, but a medical, one. Our task is
to cause the blood proceeding from the collective digestion,
instead of rushing wholly to the head, stomach, and lungs, to
descend also into the legs and arms. Besides, I do not know what
method M. Blanqui proposes to employ in order to realize his
generous thought,--whether it be the establishment of national
workshops, or the loaning of capital by the State, or the
expropriation of the conductors of business enterprises and the
substitution for them of industrial associations, or, finally,
whether he will rest content with a recommendation of the
savings bank to workingmen, in which case the participation would
be put off till doomsday.
However this may be, M. Blanqui's idea amounts simply to an
increase of wages resulting from the copartnership, or at least
from the interest in the business, which he confers upon the
laborers. What, then, is the value to the laborer of a
participation in the profits?
A mill with fifteen thousand spindles, employing three hundred
hands, does not pay at present an annual dividend of twenty
thousand francs. I am informed by a Mulhouse manufacturer that
factory stocks in Alsace are generally below par and that this
industry has already become a means of getting money by
STOCK-JOBBING instead of by LABOR. To SELL; to sell at the
right time; to sell dear,--is the only object in view; to
manufacture is only to prepare for a sale. When I assume, then,
on an average, a profit of twenty thousand francs to a factory
employing three hundred persons, my argument being general, I am
twenty thousand francs out of the way. Nevertheless, we will
admit the correctness of this amount. Dividing twenty thousand
francs, the profit of the mill, by three hundred, the number of
persons, and again by three hundred, the number of working days,
I find an increase of pay for each person of twenty-two and
one-fifth centimes, or for daily expenditure an addition of
eighteen centimes, just a morsel of bread. Is it worth while,
then, for this, to expropriate mill-owners and endanger the
public welfare, by erecting establishments which must be
insecure, since, property being divided into infinitely small
shares, and being no longer supported by profit, business
enterprises would lack ballast, and would be unable to weather
commercial gales. And even if no expropriation was involved,
what a poor prospect to offer the working class is an
increase of eighteen centimes in return for centuries of economy;
for no less time than this would be needed to accumulate the
requisite capital, supposing that periodical suspensions of
business did not periodically consume its savings!
The fact which I have just stated has been pointed out in several
ways. M. Passy[13] himself took from the books of a mill in
Normandy where the laborers were associated with the owner the
wages of several families for a period of ten years, and he found
that they averaged from twelve to fourteen hundred francs per
year. He then compared the situation of mill-hands paid in
proportion to the prices obtained by their employers with that of
laborers who receive fixed wages, and found that the difference
is almost imperceptible. This result might easily have been
foreseen. Economic phenomena obey laws as abstract and immutable
as those of numbers: it is only privilege, fraud, and absolutism
which disturb the eternal harmony.
[13] Meeting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences,
September, 1845.
M. Blanqui, repentant, as it seems, at having taken this first
step toward socialistic ideas, has made haste to retract his
words. At the same meeting in which M. Passy demonstrated the
inadequacy of cooperative association, he exclaimed: "Does it
not seem that labor is a thing susceptible of organization, and
that it is in the power of the State to regulate the happiness of
humanity as it does the march of an army, and with an entirely
mathematical precision? This is an evil tendency, a delusion
which the Academy cannot oppose too strongly, because it is not
only a chimera, but a dangerous sophism. Let us respect good and
honest intentions; but let us not fear to say that to publish a
book upon the ORGANIZATION OF LABOR is to rewrite for the
fiftieth time a treatise upon the quadrature of the circle or the
philosopher's stone."
Then, carried away by his zeal, M. Blanqui finishes the
destruction of his theory of cooperation, which M. Passy already
had so rudely shaken, by the following example: "M. Dailly, one
of the most enlightened of farmers, has drawn up an account for
each piece of land and an account for each product; and he proves
that within a period of thirty years the same man has never
obtained equal crops from the same piece of land. The products
have varied from twenty-six thousand francs to nine thousand or
seven thousand francs, sometimes descending as low as three
hundred francs. There are also certain products--potatoes, for
instance--which fail one time in ten. How, then, with these
variations and with revenues so uncertain, can we establish even
distribution and uniform wages for laborers? . . . ."
It might be answered that the variations in the product of each
piece of land simply indicate that it is necessary to associate
proprietors with each other after having associated laborers with
proprietors, which would establish a more complete solidarity:
but this would be a prejudgment on the very thing in question,
which M. Blanqui definitively decides, after reflection, to be
unattainable,--namely, the organization of labor. Besides, it is
evident that solidarity would not add an obolus to the common
wealth, and that, consequently, it does not even touch the
problem of division.
In short, the profit so much envied, and often a very uncertain
matter with employers, falls far short of the difference between
actual wages and the wages desired; and M. Blanqui's former plan,
miserable in its results and disavowed by its author, would be a
scourge to the manufacturing industry. Now, the division of
labor being henceforth universally established, the argument is
generalized, and leads us to the conclusion that MISERY IS AN
EFFECT OF LABOR, as well as of idleness.
The answer to this is, and it is a favorite argument with the
people: Increase the price of services; double and triple wages.
I confess that if such an increase was possible it would be a
complete success, whatever M. Chevalier may have said, who needs
to be slightly corrected on this point.
According to M. Chevalier, if the price of any kind of
merchandise whatever is increased, other kinds will rise in a
like proportion, and no one will benefit thereby.
This argument, which the economists have rehearsed for more than
a century, is as false as it is old, and it belonged to M.
Chevalier, as an engineer, to rectify the economic tradition.
The salary of a head clerk being ten francs per day, and the
wages of a workingman four, if the income of each is increased
five francs, the ratio of their fortunes, which was formerly as
one hundred to forty, will be thereafter as one hundred to sixty.
The increase of wages, necessarily taking place by addition and
not by proportion, would be, therefore, an excellent method of
equalization; and the economists would deserve to have thrown
back at them by the socialists the reproach of ignorance which
they have bestowed upon them at random.
But I say that such an increase is impossible, and that the
supposition is absurd: for, as M. Chevalier has shown very
clearly elsewhere, the figure which indicates the price of the
day's labor is only an algebraic exponent without effect on the
reality: and that which it is necessary first to endeavor to
increase, while correcting the inequalities of distribution, is
not the monetary expression, but the quantity of products. Till
then every rise of wages can have no other effect than that
produced by a rise of the price of wheat, wine, meat, sugar,
soap, coal, etc.,--that is, the effect of a scarcity. For what
is wages?
It is the cost price of wheat, wine, meat, coal; it is the
integrant price of all things. Let us go farther yet: wages is
the proportionality of the elements which compose wealth, and
which are consumed every day reproductively by the mass of
laborers. Now, to double wages, in the sense in which the people
understand the words, is to give to each producer a share greater
than his product, which is contradictory: and if the rise
pertains only to a few industries, a general disturbance in
exchange ensues,--that is, a scarcity. God save me from
predictions! but, in spite of my desire for the amelioration of
the lot of the working class, I declare that it is impossible for
strikes followed by an increase of wages to end otherwise than in
a general rise in prices: that is as certain as that two and two
make four. It is not by such methods that the workingmen will
attain to wealth and--what is a thousand times more precious than
wealth--liberty. The workingmen, supported by the favor of an
indiscreet press, in demanding an increase of wages, have served
monopoly much better than their own real interests: may they
recognize, when their situation shall become more painful, the
bitter fruit of their inexperience!
Convinced of the uselessness, or rather, of the fatal effects, of
an increase of wages, and seeing clearly that the question is
wholly organic and not at all commercial, M. Chevalier attacks
the problem at the other end. He asks for the working class,
first of all, instruction, and proposes extensive reforms in this
direction.
Instruction! this is also M. Arago's word to the workingmen; it
is the principle of all progress. Instruction! . . . . It
should be known once for all what may be expected from it in the
solution of the problem before us; it should be known, I say, not
whether it is desirable that all should receive it,--this no one
doubts,--but whether it is possible.
To clearly comprehend the complete significance of M. Chevalier's
views, a knowledge of his methods is indispensable.
M. Chevalier, long accustomed to discipline, first by his
polytechnic studies, then by his St. Simonian connections, and
finally by his position in the University, does not seem to admit
that a pupil can have any other inclination than to obey the
regulations, a sectarian any other thought than that of his
chief, a public functionary any other opinion than that of the
government. This may be a conception of order as respectable as
any other, and I hear upon this subject no expressions of
approval or censure. Has M. Chevalier an idea to offer peculiar
to himself? On the principle that all that is not forbidden by
law is allowed, he hastens to the front to deliver his opinion,
and then abandons it to give his adhesion, if there is occasion,
to the opinion of authority. It was thus that M. Chevalier,
before settling down in the bosom of the Constitution, joined M.
Enfantin: it was thus that he gave his views upon canals,
railroads, finance, property, long before the administration had
adopted any system in relation to the construction of railways,
the changing of the rate of interest on bonds, patents, literary
property, etc.
M. Chevalier, then, is not a blind admirer of the University
system of instruction,--far from it; and until the appearance of
the new order of things, he does not hesitate to say what he
thinks. His opinions are of the most radical.
M. Villemain had said in his report: "The object of the higher
education is to prepare in advance a choice of men to occupy and
serve in all the positions of the administration, the magistracy,
the bar and the various liberal professions, including the higher
ranks and learned specialties of the army and navy."
"The higher education," thereupon observes M. Chevalier,[14] "is
designed also to prepare men some of whom shall be farmers,
others manufacturers, these merchants, and those private
engineers. Now, in the official programme, all these classes are
forgotten. The omission is of considerable importance; for,
indeed, industry in its various forms, agriculture, commerce, are
neither accessories nor accidents in a State: they are its chief
dependence. . . . If the University desires to justify its name,
it must provide a course in these things; else an INDUSTRIAL
UNIVERSITY will be established in opposition to it. . . . We
shall have altar against altar, etc. . . ."
[14] Journal des Economistes," April, 1843.
And as it is characteristic of a luminous idea to throw light on
all questions connected with it, professional instruction
furnishes M. Chevalier with a very expeditious method of
deciding, incidentally, the quarrel between the clergy and the
University on liberty of education.
"It must be admitted that a very great concession is made to the
clergy in allowing Latin to serve as the basis of education. The
clergy know Latin as well as the University; it is their own
tongue. Their tuition, moreover, is cheaper; hence they must
inevitably draw a large portion of our youth into their small
seminaries and their schools of a higher grade. . . ."
The conclusion of course follows: change the course of study, and
you decatholicize the realm; and as the clergy know only Latin
and the Bible, when they have among them neither masters of art,
nor farmers, nor accountants; when, of their forty thousand
priests, there are not twenty, perhaps, with the ability to make
a plan or forge a nail,--we soon shall see which the fathers of
families will choose, industry or the breviary, and whether they
do not regard labor as the most beautiful language in which to
pray to God.
Thus would end this ridiculous opposition between religious
education and profane science, between the spiritual and the
temporal, between reason and faith, between altar and throne, old
rubrics henceforth meaningless, but with which they still impose
upon the good nature of the public, until it takes offence.
M. Chevalier does not insist, however, on this solution: he knows
that religion and monarchy are two powers which, though
continually quarrelling, cannot exist without each other; and
that he may not awaken suspicion, he launches out into another
revolutionary idea,--equality.
"France is in a position to furnish the polytechnic school with
twenty times as many scholars as enter at present (the average
being one hundred and seventy-six, this would amount to three
thousand five hundred and twenty). The University has but to say
the word. . . . If my opinion was of any weight, I should
maintain that mathematical capacity is MUCH LESS SPECIAL than is
commonly supposed. I remember the success with which children,
taken at random, so to speak, from the pavements of Paris, follow
the teaching of La Martiniere by the method of Captain Tabareau."
If the higher education, reconstructed according to the views of
M. Chevalier, was sought after by all young French men instead of
by only ninety thousand as commonly, there would be no
exaggeration in raising the estimate of the number of minds
mathematically inclined from three thousand five hundred and
twenty to ten thousand; but, by the same argument, we should have
ten thousand artists, philologists, and philosophers; ten
thousand doctors, physicians, chemists, and naturalists; ten
thousand economists, legists, and administrators; twenty thousand
manufacturers, foremen, merchants, and accountants; forty
thousand farmers, wine-growers, miners, etc.,--in all, one
hundred thousand specialists a year, or about one-third of our
youth. The rest, having, instead of special adaptations, only
mingled adaptations, would be distributed indifferently
elsewhere.
It is certain that so powerful an impetus given to intelligence
would quicken the progress of equality, and I do not doubt that
such is the secret desire of M. Chevalier. But that is precisely
what troubles me: capacity is never wanting, any more than
population, and the problem is to find employment for the one and
bread for the other. In vain does M. Chevalier tell us: "The
higher education would give less ground for the complaint that it
throws into society crowds of ambitious persons without any means
of satisfying their desires, and interested in the overthrow of
the State; people without employment and unable to get any, good
for nothing and believing themselves fit for anything, especially
for the direction of public affairs. Scientific studies do not
so inflate the mind. They enlighten and regulate it at once;
they fit men for practical life. . . ." Such language, I reply,
is good to use with patriarchs: a professor of political economy
should have more respect for his position and his audience. The
government has only one hundred and twenty offices annually at
its disposal for one hundred and seventy-six students
admitted to the polytechnic school: what, then, would be its
embarrassment if the number of admissions was ten thousand, or
even, taking M. Chevalier's figures, three thousand five hundred?
And, to generalize, the whole number of civil positions is sixty
thousand, or three thousand vacancies annually; what dismay would
the government be thrown into if, suddenly adopting the
reformatory ideas of M. Chevalier, it should find itself besieged
by fifty thousand office- seekers! The following objection has
often been made to republicans without eliciting a reply: When
everybody shall have the electoral privilege, will the deputies
do any better, and will the proletariat be further advanced? I
ask the same question of M. Chevalier: When each academic year
shall bring you one hundred thousand fitted men, what will you do
with them?
To provide for these interesting young people, you will go down
to the lowest round of the ladder. You will oblige the young
man, after fifteen years of lofty study, to begin, no longer as
now with the offices of aspirant engineer, sub-lieutenant of
artillery, second lieutenant, deputy, comptroller, general
guardian, etc., but with the ignoble positions of pioneer,
train-soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot- maker, and exciseman.
There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him
to advance a step. Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of
the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die
a laborer on a second class road, or a corporal in a regiment
Oh! how much more prudent Catholicism has shown itself, and how
far it has surpassed you all, St. Simonians, republicans,
university men, economists, in the knowledge of man and society!
The priest knows that our life is but a voyage, and that our
perfection cannot be realized here below; and he contents
himself with outlining on earth an education which must be
completed in heaven. The man whom religion has moulded, content
to know, do, and obtain what suffices for his earthly destiny,
never can become a source of embarrassment to the government:
rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary
that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown
you? . . . Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery
does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use
is professional education, of what good are agricultural and
commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor
capital? And what need to cram one's self till the age of twenty
with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten the threads of a
mule-jenny or pick coal at the bottom of a pit? What! you have
by your own confession only three thousand positions annually to
bestow upon fifty thousand possible capacities, and yet you talk
of establishing schools! Cling rather to your system of
exclusion and privilege, a system as old as the world, the
support of dynasties and patriciates, a veritable machine for
gelding men in order to secure the pleasures of a caste of
Sultans. Set a high price upon your teaching, multiply
obstacles, drive away, by lengthy tests, the son of the
proletaire whom hunger does not permit to wait, and protect with
all your power the ecclesiastical schools, where the students are
taught to labor for the other life, to cultivate resignation, to
fast, to respect those in high places, to love the king, and to
pray to God. For every useless study sooner or later becomes an
abandoned study: knowledge is poison to slaves.
Surely M. Chevalier has too much sagacity not to have seen the
consequences of his idea. But he has spoken from the bottom of
his heart, and we can only applaud his good intentions: men must
first be men; after that, he may live who can.
Thus we advance at random, guided by Providence, who never warns
us except with a blow: this is the beginning and end of political
economy.
Contrary to M. Chevalier, professor of political economy at the
College of France, M. Dunoyer, an economist of the Institute,
does not wish instruction to be organized. The organization of
instruction is a species of organization of labor; therefore, no
organization. Instruction, observes M. Dunoyer, is a profession,
not a function of the State; like all professions, it ought to be
and remain free. It is communism, it is socialism, it is the
revolutionary tendency, whose principal agents have been
Robespierre, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and M. Guizot, which have
thrown into our midst these fatal ideas of the centralization and
absorption of all activity in the State. The press is very free,
and the pen of the journalist is an object of merchandise;
religion, too, is very free, and every wearer of a gown, be it
short or long, who knows how to excite public curiosity, can draw
an audience about him. M. Lacordaire has his devotees, M. Leroux
his apostles, M. Buchez his convent. Why, then, should not
instruction also be free? If the right of the instructed, like
that of the buyer, is unquestionable, and that of the instructor,
who is only a variety of the seller, is its correlative, it is
impossible to infringe upon the liberty of instruction without
doing violence to the most precious of liberties, that of the
conscience. And then, adds M. Dunoyer, if the State owes
instruction to everybody, it will soon be maintained that it owes
labor; then lodging; then shelter. . . . Where does that lead
to?
The argument of M. Dunoyer is irrefutable: to organize
instruction is to give to every citizen a pledge of liberal
employment and comfortable wages; the two are as intimately
connected as the circulation of the arteries and the veins. But
M. Dunoyer's theory implies also that progress belongs only to a
certain select portion of humanity, and that barbarism is the
eternal lot of nine-tenths of the human race. It is this which
constitutes, according to M. Dunoyer, the very essence of
society, which manifests itself in three stages, religion,
hierarchy, and beggary. So that in this system, which is that of
Destutt de Tracy, Montesquieu, and Plato, the antinomy of
division, like that of value, is without solution.
It is a source of inexpressible pleasure to me, I confess, to see
M. Chevalier, a defender of the centralization of instruction,
opposed by M. Dunoyer, a defender of liberty; M. Dunoyer in his
turn antagonized by M. Guizot; M. Guizot, the representative of
the centralizers, contradicting the Charter, which posits liberty
as a principle; the Charter trampled under foot by the University
men, who lay sole claim to the privilege of teaching, regardless
of the express command of the Gospel to the priests: GO AND
TEACH. And above all this tumult of economists, legislators,
ministers, academicians, professors, and priests, economic
Providence giving the lie to the Gospel, and shouting:
Pedagogues! what use am I to make of your instruction?
Who will relieve us of this anxiety? M. Rossi leans toward
eclecticism: Too little divided, he says, labor remains
unproductive; too much divided, it degrades man. Wisdom lies
between these extremes; in medio virtus. Unfortunately this
intermediate wisdom is only a small amount of poverty joined with
a small amount of wealth, so that the condition is not
modified in the least. The proportion of good and evil, instead
of being as one hundred to one hundred, becomes as fifty to
fifty: in this we may take, once for all, the measure of
eclecticism. For the rest, M. Rossi's juste-milieu is in direct
opposition to the great economic law: TO PRODUCE WITH THE LEAST
POSSIBLE EXPENSE THE GREATEST POSSIBLE QUANTITY OF VALUES. . . .
Now, how can labor fulfil its destiny without an extreme
division? Let us look farther, if you please.
"All economic systems and hypotheses," says M. Rossi, "belong to
the economist, but the intelligent, free, responsible man is
under the control of the moral law. . . Political economy is
only a science which examines the relations of things, and draws
conclusions therefrom. It examines the effects of labor; in the
application of labor, you should consider the importance of the
object in view. When the application of labor is unfavorable to
an object higher than the production of wealth, it should not be
applied. . . Suppose that it would increase the national wealth
to compel children to labor fifteen hours a day: morality would
say that that is not allowable. Does that prove that political
economy is false? No; that proves that you confound things which
should be kept separate."
If M. Rossi had a little more of that Gallic simplicity so
difficult for foreigners to acquire, he would very summarily have
THROWN HIS TONGUE TO THE DOGS, as Madame de Sevigne said. But a
professor must talk, talk, talk, not for the sake of saying
anything, but in order to avoid silence. M. Rossi takes three
turns around the question, then lies down: that is enough to make
certain people believe that he has answered it.
It is surely a sad symptom for a science when, in developing
itself according to its own principles, it reaches its object
just in time to be contradicted by another; as, for example, when
the postulates of political economy are found to be opposed to
those of morality, for I suppose that morality is a science as
well as political economy. What, then, is human knowledge, if
all its affirmations destroy each other, and on what shall we
rely? Divided labor is a slave's occupation, but it alone is
really productive; undivided labor belongs to the free man, but
it does not pay its expenses. On the one hand, political economy
tells us to be rich; on the other, morality tells us to be free;
and M. Rossi, speaking in the name of both, warns us at the same
time that we can be neither free nor rich, for to be but half of
either is to be neither. M. Rossi's doctrine, then, far from
satisfying this double desire of humanity, is open to the
objection that, to avoid exclusiveness, it strips us of
everything: it is, under another form, the history of the
representative system.
But the antagonism is even more profound than M. Rossi has
supposed. For since, according to universal experience (on this
point in harmony with theory), wages decrease in proportion to
the division of labor, it is clear that, in submitting ourselves
to parcellaire slavery, we thereby shall not obtain wealth; we
shall only change men into machines: witness the laboring
population of the two worlds. And since, on the other hand,
without the division of labor, society falls back into barbarism,
it is evident also that, by sacrificing wealth, we shall not
obtain liberty: witness all the wandering tribes of Asia and
Africa. Therefore it is necessary--economic science and morality
absolutely command it--for us to solve the problem of division:
now, where are the economists? More than thirty years ago,
Lemontey, developing a remark of Smith, exposed the demoralizing
and homicidal influence of the division of labor. What has
been the reply; what investigations have been made; what remedies
proposed; has the question even been understood?
Every year the economists report, with an exactness which I would
commend more highly if I did not see that it is always fruitless,
the commercial condition of the States of Europe. They know how
many yards of cloth, pieces of silk, pounds of iron, have been
manufactured; what has been the consumption per head of wheat,
wine, sugar, meat: it might be said that to them the ultimate of
science is to publish inventories, and the object of their labor
is to become general comptrollers of nations. Never did such a
mass of material offer so fine a field for investigation. What
has been found; what new principle has sprung from this mass;
what solution of the many problems of long standing has been
reached; what new direction have studies taken?
One question, among others, seems to have been prepared for a
final judgment,--pauperism. Pauperism, of all the phenomena of
the civilized world, is today the best known: we know pretty
nearly whence it comes, when and how it arrives, and what it
costs; its proportion at various stages of civilization has been
calculated, and we have convinced ourselves that all the
specifics with which it hitherto has been fought have been
impotent. Pauperism has been divided into genera, species, and
varieties: it is a complete natural history, one of the most
important branches of anthropology. Well I the unquestionable
result of all the facts collected, unseen, shunned, covered by
the economists with their silence, is that pauperism is
constitutional and chronic in society as long as the antagonism
between labor and capital continues, and that this antagonism can
end only by the absolute negation of political economy.
What issue from this labyrinth have the economists discovered?
This last point deserves a moment's attention.
In primitive communism misery, as I have observed in a preceding
paragraph, is the universal condition.
Labor is war declared upon this misery.
Labor organizes itself, first by division, next by machinery,
then by competition, etc.
Now, the question is whether it is not in the essence of this
organization, as given us by political economy, at the same time
that it puts an end to the misery of some, to aggravate that of
others in a fatal and unavoidable manner. These are the terms in
which the question of pauperism must be stated, and for this
reason we have undertaken to solve it.
What means, then, this eternal babble of the economists about the
improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity,
their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.?
All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but
the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths
of the human race in disgrace,--what is it? Did not Nature make
all men equally gross, averse to labor, wanton, and wild? Did
not patrician and proletaire spring from the same clay? Then how
happens it that, after so many centuries, and in spite of so many
miracles of industry, science, and art, comfort and culture have
not become the inheritance of all? How happens it that in Paris
and London, centres of social wealth, poverty is as hideous as in
the days of Caesar and Agricola? Why, by the side of this
refined aristocracy, has the mass remained so uncultivated? It
is laid to the vices of the people: but the vices of the upper
class appear to be no less; perhaps they are even greater. The
original stain affected all alike: how happens it, once more,
that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious
for all? Does this not show that progress itself is a privilege,
and that the man who has neither wagon nor horse is forced to
flounder about for ever in the mud? What do I say? The totally
destitute man has no desire to improve: he has fallen so low that
ambition even is extinguished in his heart.
"Of all the private virtues," observes M. Dunoyer with infinite
reason, "the most necessary, that which gives us all the others
in succession, is the passion for well-being, is the violent
desire to extricate one's self from misery and abjection, is that
spirit of emulation and dignity which does not permit men to rest
content with an inferior situation. . . . But this sentiment,
which seems so natural, is unfortunately much less common than is
thought. There are few reproaches which the generality of men
deserve less than that which ascetic moralists bring against them
of being too fond of their comforts: the opposite reproach might
be brought against them with infinitely more justice. . . .
There is even in the nature of men this very remarkable feature,
that the less their knowledge and resources, the less desire they
have of acquiring these. The most miserable savages and the
least enlightened of men are precisely those in whom it is most
difficult to arouse wants, those in whom it is hardest to inspire
the desire to rise out of their condition; so that man must
already have gained a certain degree of comfort by his labor,
before he can feel with any keenness that need of improving his
condition, of perfecting his existence, which I call the love of
well-being."[15]
[15] "The Liberty of Labor," Vol. II, p. 80.
Thus the misery of the laboring classes arises in general from
their lack of heart and mind, or, as M. Passy has said somewhere,
from the weakness, the inertia of their moral and intellectual
faculties. This inertia is due to the fact that the said
laboring classes, still half savage, do not have a sufficiently
ardent desire to ameliorate their condition: this M. Dunoyer
shows. But as this absence of desire is itself the effect of
misery, it follows that misery and apathy are each other's effect
and cause, and that the proletariat turns in a circle.
To rise out of this abyss there must be either well-being,--that
is, a gradual increase of wages,--or intelligence and
courage,--that is, a gradual development of faculties: two things
diametrically opposed to the degradation of soul and body which
is the natural effect of the division of labor. The misfortune
of the proletariat, then, is wholly providential, and to
undertake to extinguish it in the present state of political
economy would be to produce a revolutionary whirlwind.
For it is not without a profound reason, rooted in the loftiest
considerations of morality, that the universal conscience,
expressing itself by turns through the selfishness of the rich
and the apathy of the proletariat, denies a reward to the man
whose whole function is that of a lever and spring. If, by some
impossibility, material well-being could fall to the lot of the
parcellaire laborer, we should see something monstrous happen:
the laborers employed at disagreeable tasks would become like
those Romans, gorged with the wealth of the world, whose
brutalized minds became incapable of devising new pleasures.
Well-being without education stupefies people and makes them
insolent: this was noticed in the most ancient times.
Incrassatus est, et recalcitravit, says Deuteronomy. For
the rest, the parcellaire laborer has judged himself: he is
content, provided he has bread, a pallet to sleep on, and plenty
of liquor on Sunday. Any other condition would be prejudicial to
him, and would endanger public order.
At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly
given them by the city government, receive higher pay than
college professors or the head-clerks of the government
ministers: I mean the porters. The price of loading and
unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule
of the Rigues or porters' associations, is thirty centimes per
hundred kilogrammes. At this rate, it is not seldom that a man
earns twelve, fifteen, and even twenty francs a day: he only has
to carry forty or fifty sacks from a vessel to a warehouse. It
is but a few hours' work. What a favorable condition this would
be for the development of intelligence, as well for children as
for parents, if, of itself and the leisure which it brings,
wealth was a moralizing principle! But this is not the case: the
porters of Lyons are today what they always have been, drunken,
dissolute, brutal, insolent, selfish, and base. It is a painful
thing to say, but I look upon the following declaration as a
duty, because it is the truth: one of the first reforms to be
effected among the laboring classes will be the reduction of the
wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others.
Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the
lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain
only the grossest individualism. The revolt of the silk-workers
met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and
the river population generally. Nothing that happens off the
wharves has any power to move them. Beasts of burden fashioned
in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with politics as
long as their privilege is maintained. Nevertheless, I ought to
say in their defence that, some time ago, the necessities of
competition having brought their prices down, more social
sentiments began to awaken in these gross natures: a few more
reductions seasoned with a little poverty, and the Rigues of
Lyons will be chosen as the storming-party when the time comes
for assaulting the bastilles.
In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system
of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through
education or education through well-being. For, without
considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as
unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the
one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than
up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it
were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always
inclines towards barbarism and misery. Everything that has been
attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the
amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the
labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it
was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done
contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the
established order. Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always
the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by
legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be
solved.
For the rest, if the economists, by exclusive attention to their
old routine, have finally lost all knowledge of the present state
of things, it cannot be said that the socialists have better
solved the antinomy which division of labor raised. Quite the
contrary, they have stopped with negation; for is it not
perpetual negation to oppose, for instance, the uniformity of
parcellaire labor with a so-called variety in which each one can
change his occupation ten, fifteen, twenty times a day at will?
As if to change ten, fifteen, twenty times a day from one kind of
divided labor to another was to make labor synthetic; as if,
consequently, twenty fractions of the day's work of a manual
laborer could be equal to the day's work of an artist! Even if
such industrial vaulting was practicable,--and it may be asserted
in advance that it would disappear in the presence of the
necessity of making laborers responsible and therefore functions
personal,--it would not change at all the physical, moral, and
intellectual condition of the laborer; the dissipation would only
be a surer guarantee of his incapacity and, consequently, his
dependence. This is admitted, moreover, by the organizers,
communists, and others. So far are they from pretending to solve
the antinomy of division that all of them admit, as an essential
condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor,--that is, the
classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or
organizers,--and in all utopias the distinction of capacities,
the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is
admitted as a pivot. Those reformers whose schemes have nothing
to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of
the SIMPLISM, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of
labor, then propose a PLURALITY as a SYNTHESIS,--such inventors,
I say, are judged already, and ought to be sent back to school.
But you, critic, the reader undoubtedly will ask, what is your
solution? Show us this synthesis which, retaining the
responsibility, the personality, in short, the specialty of the
laborer, will unite extreme division and the greatest variety in
one complex and harmonious whole.
My reply is ready: Interrogate facts, consult humanity: we can
choose no better guide. After the oscillations of value,
division of labor is the economic fact which influences most
perceptibly profits and wages. It is the first stake driven by
Providence into the soil of industry, the starting-point of the
immense triangulation which finally must determine the right and
duty of each and all. Let us, then, follow our guides, without
which we can only wander and lose ourselves.
Tu longe sequere, et vestigia semper adora.