THE
RIGHT TO BE LAZY
AND OTHER STUDIES
BY
PAUL LAFARGUE
Translated by CHARLES H. KERR
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
Copyright, 1907
BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
[Illustration: Printer's stamp.]
PREFACE
M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education
of 1849, said: "I wish to make the influence of the clergy all-powerful
because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches
man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy
which on the contrary bids man to enjoy." M. Thiers was stating
the ethics of the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow
intelligence he incarnated.
The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained
by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once
triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion
to support its economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and
glorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our
days, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of
its thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the
wage-workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics,
strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to
reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his
joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine
turning out work without respite and without thanks.
The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by
the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march
up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism;
they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action
the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in
the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall
cease to be the vale of tears for the laborer; that in the communist
society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may,
forcibly if we must," the impulses of men will be given a free rein,
for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid
but their misuse and their excesses,[1]" and they will not be avoided
except by their mutual counter-balancing, balancing, by the harmonious
development of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, "It is
only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it
arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigor.[2]" Such was
also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.[3]
This refutation of the "Right to Work" which I am republishing with
some additional notes appeared in the weekly "Egalité", 1880, second
series.
P. L.
_Sainte-Pélagie Prison_, 1883.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Descartes. "Les Passions de l'âme."
[2] Doctor Beddoe. "Memoirs of the Anthropological Society."
[3] Charles Darwin. "Descent of Man."
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY—
I. A Disastrous Dogma 9
II. Blessings of Work 14
III. The Consequences of Over-Production 30
IV. New Songs to New Music 48
Appendix 57
SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS 63
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM 105
THE WOMAN QUESTION 111
THE SOCIALIST IDEAL 139
THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN 157
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except
in being lazy.
—Lessing.
I.
A DISASTROUS DOGMA.
A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where
capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its
train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have
tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious
passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force
of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental
aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a
sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be
wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed
to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be
a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement
to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics
or free-thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in
capitalist society.
In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy,
of all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's
stables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the
Norman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops.
Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders
of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the
dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.[4]
When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native
beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic
prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which,
alas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories
than we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his
admiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts,
straight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing
the beggar, superbly draped in his ragged _capa_, parleying on terms
of equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the
primitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of
slavery.[5] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for
work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew
only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that
men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the
people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed
the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers
of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free
man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:
O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.[6]
Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: "Consider the
lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they
spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these." Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his
worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of
work, he rests for all eternity.
On the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic
necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the
British Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the
Pomeranians, those Auvergnians of Germany; the Chinese, those
Auvergnians of Asia. In our society, which are the classes that love
work for work's sake? The peasant proprietors, the little shop-keepers;
the former bent double over their fields, the latter crouched in their
shops, burrow like the mole in his subterranean passage and never stand
up to look at nature leisurely.
And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the
producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will
free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a
free being,—the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its
historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.
Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and
social woes are born of its passion for work.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and
the proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what
Paeppig calls "the poisonous breath of civilization." Speaking of
the aborigines of the Oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell writes:
"There is not a people in the world which strikes one more favorably
at first sight. Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair
golden and curly, their beautiful and happy faces. In a word, their
whole person formed a new and splendid specimen of the 'genus homo';
their physical appearance gave the impression of a race superior to
ours." The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and Tacitus,
regarded with the same admiration the Germans of the communist tribes
which invaded the Roman empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the priest
of the fifth century who received the surname of master of the Bishops,
held up the barbarians as an example to civilized Christians: "We are
immodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even
more the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do
not permit debauchees of their own nation to remain among them; alone
in the midst of them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and
their name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was
then the height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The
oppressed fly to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter." (De
Gubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising Christianity
corrupted the barbarians of the ancient world, as the old Christianity
and the modern capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of
the new world.
M. F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized, even
if we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with philanthropic
and Christian pharisaism, says in his book "Les Ouvriers Européens"
(1885): "The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are
semi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic slope of the Ural mountains);
the leisure of nomadic life, the habit of meditation which this
engenders in the best endowed individuals.—all this often gives them a
distinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence and judgement which
is rarely to be observed on the same social level in a more developed
civilization.... The thing most repugnant to them is agricultural
labor: they will do anything rather than accept the trade of a farmer."
Agriculture is in fact the first example of servile labor in the
history of man. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal,
Cain, is a farmer.
[5] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.)
[6] O Melibaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. Virgil's Bucolics.
(See appendix.)
II.
BLESSINGS OF WORK.
In 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title,
"An Essay on Trade and Commerce". It made some stir in its time.
The author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that "the factory
population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in
their quality of Englishmen all the individuals composing it have
by right of birth the privilege of being freer and more independent
than the laborers of any country in Europa. This idea may have its
usefulness for soldiers, since it stimulates their valor, but the
less the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves
and the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves as
independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage
such infatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps
seven-eighths of the population have little or no property. The cure
will not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to
work six days for the same sum which they now earn in four." Thus,
nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as
a curb to the noble passions of man. "The more my people work, the
less vices they will have", wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from
Osterod. "I am the authority ... and I should be disposed to order
that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened
and the laborers return to their work." To root out laziness and curb
the sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the
author of the "Essay on Trade" proposed to imprison the poor in ideal
"work-houses", which should become "houses of terror, where they should
work fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was
deducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete".
Twelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal of the philanthropists
and moralists of the eighteenth century. How have we outdone this _nec
plus ultra_! Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in
which the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned
to compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but
also women and children.[7] And to think that the sons of the heroes
of the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded by the religion
of work, to the point of accepting, since 1848, as a revolutionary
conquest, the law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They proclaim
as a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French
proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness.
A Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of
capitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.
And if the miseries of compulsory work and the tortures of hunger have
descended upon the proletariat more in number than the locusts of the
Bible, it is because the proletariat itself invited them. This work,
which in June 1848 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands,
this they have imposed on their families; they have delivered up to
the barons of industry their wives and children. With their own hands
they have demolished their domestic hearths. With their own hands they
have dried up the milk of their wives. The unhappy women carrying
and nursing their babes have been obliged to go into the mines and
factories to bend their backs and exhaust their nerves. With their own
hands they have broken the life and the vigor of their children. Shame
on the proletarians! Where are those neighborly housewives told of
in our fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of speech, lovers
of Bacchus? Where are those buxom girls, always on the move, always
cooking, always singing, always spreading life, engendering life's joy,
giving painless birth to healthy and vigorous children?... Today we
have factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers, with impoverished
blood, with disordered stomachs, with languid limbs.... They have never
known the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable
of telling of it merrily! And the children? Twelve hours of work
for children! O, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy
of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germinys of jesuitism
could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the
children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their
organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory.
Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the
century of pain, misery and corruption.
And all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists—from
the painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear
Leroy-Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature—from the quackishly
romantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock,—all have
intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son
of Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon
to reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived. They
rummaged in the dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miseries
to serve as a sombre contrast to the delights of the present times.
Have they wearied us, these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at
the table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the capitalist class
and fatly paid? Have they reckoned us weary of the peasant, such as
La Bruyère described him? Well, here is the brilliant picture of
proletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840, penned by
one of their own men, Dr. Villermé, member of the Institute, the same
who in 1848 was a member of that scientific society (Thiers, Cousin,
Passy, Blanqui, the academician, were in it), which disseminated among
the masses the nonsense of bourgeois economics and ethics.
It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Villermé speaks,—the Alsace
of Kestner and Dollfus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and
republicanism. But before the doctor raises up before us his picture of
proletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr.
Th. Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., depicting the condition
of the old-time artisan: "At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when
modern mechanical industry was just arising) the laborers were all
children of the soil, inhabiting the town and the surrounding villages,
and almost all owning a house and often a little field."[8] It was
the golden age of the laborer. But at that time Alsatian industry did
not deluge the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires out of
its Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five years after, when Villermé
visited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had
conquered the country; in its insatiable appetite for human labor it
had dragged the workmen from their hearths, the better to wring them
and press out the labor which they contained. It was by thousands
that the workers flocked together at the signal of the steam whistle.
"A great number," says Villermé, "five thousand out of seventeen
thousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring villages.
Some of them lived three or four miles from the factory where they
worked.[9]
"At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five o'clock in the morning and
ended at eight o'clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a
sight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each
evening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walking
bare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the
rain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their
heads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally
dirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil
which drops on them while they work. They were better protected from
the rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just
mentioned, they did not carry their day's provisions in a basket, but
they carryed in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they
might, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for
them to return home.
Thus to the strain of an insufferably long day—at least fifteen
hours—is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily
journeys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed by the need of
sleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in
order to reach the factory by the opening time."
Now, look at the holes in which were packed those who lodge in the
town: "I saw at Mulhouse in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, some
of those miserable lodgings where two families slept each in its corner
on straw thrown on the floor and kept in its place by two planks....
This wretchedness among the laborers of the cotton industry in the
department of the upper Rhine is so extreme that it produces this sad
result, that while in the families of the manufacturers, merchants,
shop-keepers or factory superintendents, half of the children reach
their twenty-first year, this same half ceases to exist before the
lapse of two years in the families of weavers and cotton spinners."
Speaking of the labor of the workshop, Villermé adds: "It is not a
work, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six
to eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes
away the laborers in the cotton spinning factories". And as to the
duration of the work Villermé observes, that the convicts in prisons
work but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours,
while there existed in France after its Revolution of 1789, which had
proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man "factories where the day was
sixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and
a half for meals."[10]
What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of
the bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The
philanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done
nothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to
scatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist
factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work,
and farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life
beautiful and worth living.[11]
And the economists go on repeating to the laborers, "Work, to increase
social wealth", and nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy,
answers: "It is in poor nations that people are comfortable, in
rich nations they are ordinarily poor"; and his disciple Cherbuliez
continues: "The laborers themselves in co-operating toward the
accumulation of productive capital contribute to the event which sooner
or later must deprive them of a part of their wages". But deafened and
stupified by their own howlings, the economists answer: "Work, always
work, to create your prosperity", and in the name of Christian meekness
a priest of the Anglican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, intones: Work,
work, night and day. By working you make your poverty increase and your
poverty releases us from imposing work upon you by force of law. The
legal imposition of work "gives too much trouble, requires too much
violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only
a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the
most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the
most powerful efforts." Work, work, proletarians, to increase social
wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming
poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is
the inexorable law of capitalist production.
Because, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the
proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of
work, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial
crises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then
because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers,
the shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its
whip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of
work, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted
upon themselves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of
their present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: "We
are hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as
we are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested the wheat and gathered
the grapes." They do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux,
the inventor of industrial convents, and cry out: "M. Bonnet, here
are your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are
shivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they
who have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all
Christendom. The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no
time to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time
to rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk
teeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in
abstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the
fruits of their labor. Come, M. Bonnet, give them your silks, M. Harmel
shall furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his
boots for their dear little feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe
and gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, no evasions,
you are a friend of humanity, are you not, and a Christian into the
bargain? Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they
have built up for you out of their flesh; you want to help business,
get your goods into circulation,—here are consumers ready at hand.
Give them unlimited credit. You are simply compelled to give credit
to merchants whom you do not know from Adam or Eve, who have given
you nothing, not even a glass of water. Your working women will pay
the debt the best they can. If at maturity they let their notes go to
protest, and if they have nothing to attach, you can demand that they
pay you in prayers. They will send you to paradise better than your
black-gowned priests steeped in tobacco."
Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general
distribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers,
perishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the
workshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they
assail the manufacturers: "Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us
work, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us".
And these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright,
sell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had
bread on the table. And the philanthropists of industry profit by their
lockouts to manufacture at lower cost.
If industrial crises follow periods of over-work as inevitably as night
follows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end,
they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer
has credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and
borrows again, to furnish raw material to his laborers, and goes on
producing without considering that the market is becoming satiated
and that if his goods don't happen to be sold, his notes will still
come due. At his wits' end, he implores the banker, he throws himself
at his feet, offering his blood, his honor. "A little gold will do my
business better", answers the Rothschild. "You have 20,000 pairs of
hose in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c."
The banker gets possession of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c,
and pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing to anybody: but
the manufacturer has stepped back for a better leap. At last the crash
comes and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much merchandise is thrown
out of the window that you cannot imagine how it came in by the door.
Hundreds of millions are required to figure the value of the goods that
are destroyed. In the last century they were burned or thrown into the
water.[12]
But before reaching this decision, the manufacturers travel the world
over in search of markets for the goods which are heaping up. They
force their government to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to batter
down the Chinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their
cotton goods. In previous centuries it was a duel to the death between
France and England as to which should have the exclusive privilege of
selling to America and the Indies. Thousands of young and vigorous men
reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
There is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no
longer know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who
are loafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads,
erect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of
French capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications. In
Egypt, for example, France, England and Germany were on the point of
hairpulling to decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends
with wars like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play
the part of constables to collect bad debts.[13]
These individual and social miseries, however great and innumerable
they may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas
and jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall
say "I will". But to arrive at the realization of its strength the
proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics,
economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural
instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times
more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by
the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom
itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day
and night for leisure and feasting.
Thus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils
well known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that
the ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to
which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most
terrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become
a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to
the human organism, a passion useful to the social organism only when
wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this
is an arduous task beyond my strength. Only communist physiologists,
hygienists and economists could undertake it. In the following pages
I shall merely try to show that given the modern means of production
and their unlimited reproductive power it is necessary to curb the
extravagant passion of the laborers for work and to oblige them to
consume the goods which they produce.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels in 1857 one
of the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrive, to
the plaudits of the members of the congress declared with the noble
satisfaction of a duty performed: "We have introduced certain methods
of diversion for the children. We teach them to sing during their work,
also to count while working. That distracts them and makes them accept
bravely "those twelve hours of labor which are necessary to procure
their means of existence." Twelve hours of labor, and such labor,
imposed on children less than twelve years old! The materialists will
always regret that there is no hell in which to confine these Christian
philanthropic murderers of childhood.
[8] Speech delivered before the International Society of Practical
Studies in Social Economics, at Paris in May 1863, and published in the
French "Economist" of the same epoch.
[9] Note that this was before the era of railroads and street cars.
(Translator.)
[10] L. R. Villermé. Tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers
dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie (1840). It is not
because Dollfus, Koechlin and other Alsatian manufacturers were
republicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that they treated
their laborers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician, Reybaud, the
prototype of Jerome Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same
amenities for the working class among the very catholic and monarchical
manufacturers of Lille and Lyons. These are capitalist virtues which
harmonize delightfully with all political and religious convictions.
[11] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their invalids
and old people; they show their affection for them by putting an end
to a life which is no longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances.
All primitive peoples have given these proofs of affection to their
relatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea (Herodotus), as well as
the Wens of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden
even lately they preserved clubs called family clubs which served to
deliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate are the
modern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of
factory labor!
[12] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 21, 1879, the
losses in the iron industry of Germany during the last crisis were
estimated at $109,056,000.
[13] M. Clemenceau's "Justice" said on April 6, 1880, in its financial
department: "We have heard this opinion maintained, that even without
pressure the billions of the war of 1870 would have been equally lost
for France, that is under the form of loans periodically put out to
balance the budgets of foreign countries; this is also our opinion."
The loss of English capital on loans of South American Republics is
estimated at a billion dollars. The French laborers not only produced
the billion dollars paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay interest
on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine and other income
drawers, who brought on the war and the rout. Nevertheless they still
have one shred of consolation: these billions will not bring on a war
of reprisal.
III.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION.
A Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention
of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave
women and bring back the Golden Age: "Spare the arm which turns the
mill, O, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain
that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor
of the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and
behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its spokes and making the
heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and
let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants
us." Alas!, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come.
The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the
liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men.
Its productiveness impoverishes them.
A good workingwoman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute,
while certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time.
Every minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of
the workingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's
labor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the
knitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed
by modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine
is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity
and exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest
times, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O,
absurd and murderous competition!
That the competition of man and the machine might have free course,
the proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor
of the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the
holidays.[14] Because the producers of that time worked but five
days out of seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying
economists, that they lived on nothing but air and fresh water? Not
so, they had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to make love and to
frolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial god of idleness.
Gloomy England, immersed in protestantism, was then called "Merrie
England." Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the unknown authors of the
romances make our mouths water with their pictures of those monumental
feasts[15] with which the men of that time regaled themselves between
two battles and two devastations, in which everything "went by the
barrel". Jordaens and the Flemish School have told the story of these
feasts in their delightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the sublime
gargantuan stomachs of those days; where are the sublime brains
encircling all human thought? We have indeed grown puny and degenerate.
Embalmed beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prussian schnaps,
judiciously combined with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and
narrowed our minds. And the times when man cramps his stomach and the
machine enlarges its output are the very times when the economists
preach to us the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence and the
dogma of work. Really it would be better to pluck out such tongues and
throw them to the dogs.
Because the working class, with its simple good faith, has allowed
itself to be thus indoctrinated, because with its native impetuosity
it has blindly hurled itself into work and abstinence, the capitalist
class has found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to
unproductiveness and over-consumption. But if the over-work of the
laborer bruises his flesh and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile
in griefs for the capitalist.
The abstinence to which the productive class condemns itself obliges
the capitalists to devote themselves to the over-consumption of the
products turned out so riotously by the laborers. At the beginning
of capitalist production a century or two ago, the capitalist was a
steady man of reasonable and peaceable habits. He contented himself
with one wife or thereabouts. He drank only when he was thirsty and
ate only when he was hungry. He left to the lords and ladies of the
court the noble virtues of debauchery. Today every son of the newly
rich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the disease for which
quicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed upon
the workmen in quicksilver mines; every capitalist crams himself with
capons stuffed with truffles and with the choicest brands of wine in
order to encourage the breeders of blooded poultry and the growers of
Bordelais. In this occupation the organism rapidly becomes shattered,
the hair falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, the body
becomes deformed, the stomach obtrudes abnormally, respiration becomes
difficult, the motions become labored, the joints become stiff, the
fingers knotted. Others, too feeble in body to endure the fatigues of
debauchery, but endowed with the bump of philanthropic discrimination,
dry up their brains over political economy, or juridical philosophy
in elaborating thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours
of compositors and pressmen. The women of fashion live a life of
martyrdom, in trying on and showing off the fairy-like toilets
which the seamstresses die in making. They shift like shuttles from
morning until night from one gown into another. For hours together
they give up their hollow heads to the artists in hair, who at any
cost insist on assuaging their passion for the construction of false
chignons. Bound in their corsets, pinched in their boots, décolletté
to make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the whole night through
at their charity balls in order to pick up a few cents for poor
people,—sanctified souls!
To fulfill his double social function of non-producer and
over-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his
modest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to
give himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic
debauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass
of men in order to enlist them as his assistants.
Here are a few figures to prove how colossal is this waste of
productive forces. According to the census of 1861, the population of
England and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259 male and
10,289,965 female. If we deduct those too old or too young to work, the
unproductive women, boys and girls, then the "ideological professions",
such as governors, policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers,
prostitutes, artists, scientists, etc., next the people exclusively
occupied with eating the labor of others under the form of land-rent,
interest, dividends, etc. ... there remains a total of eight million
individuals of both sexes and of every age, including the capitalists
who function in production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of these eight
millions the figures run:
Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, servants
and farmers' daughters living at home 1,098,261
Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp,
linen silk, knitting 642,607
Mine Workers 565,835
Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.) 396,998
Domestics 1,208,648
"If we add together the textile workers and the miners, we obtain
the figures of 1,208,442; if to the former we add the metal workers,
we have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in each case a
number below that of the modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent
result of the capitalist exploitation of machines."[16] To this class
of domestics, the size of which indicates the stage attained by
capitalist civilization, must still be added the enormous class of
unfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying the vain and expensive
tastes of the rich classes: diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroiderers,
binders of luxurious books, seamstresses employed on expensive gowns,
decorators of villas, etc.[17]
Once settled down into absolute laziness and demoralized by enforced
enjoyment, the capitalist class in spite of the injury involved in
its new kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to look
upon any change with horror. The sight of the miserable conditions
of life resignedly accepted by the working class and the sight of
the organic degradation engendered by the depraved passion for work
increased its aversion for all compulsory labor and all restrictions
of its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, without taking
into account the demoralization which the capitalist class had imposed
upon itself as a social duty, the proletarians took it into their
heads to inflict work on the capitalists. Artless as they were, they
took seriously the theories of work proclaimed by the economists and
moralists, and girded up their loins to inflict the practice of these
theories upon the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, "He
who will not work Neither shall he Eat". Lyons in 1831 rose up for
bullets or work. The federated laborers of March 1871 called their
uprising "The Revolution of Work". To these outbreaks of barbarous fury
destructive of all capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had
no other answer than ferocious repression, but they know that if they
have been able to repress these revolutionary explosions, they have
not drowned in the blood of these gigantic massacres the absurd idea
of the proletariat wishing to inflict work upon the idle and reputable
classes, and it is to avert this misfortune that they surround
themselves with guards, policemen, magistrates and jailors, supported
in laborious unproductiveness. There is no more room for illusion as
to the function of modern armies. They are permanently maintained only
to suppress the "enemy within". Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons
have not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to
crush it in case of revolt. And if an unanswerable example be called
for, we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism. Its
neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and nevertheless its
army is one of the strongest in proportion to its population. The
glorious battlefields of the brave Belgian army are the plains of the
Borinage and of Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed miners and
laborers that the Belgian officers temper their swords and win their
epaulets. The nations of Europe have not national armies but mercenary
armies. They protect the capitalists against the popular fury which
would condemn them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, while
compressing its own stomach the working class has developed abnormally
the stomach of the capitalist class, condemned to over-consumption.
For alleviation of its painful labor the capitalist class has withdrawn
from the working class a mass of men far superior to those still
devoted to useful production and has condemned them in their turn to
unproductiveness and over-consumption. But this troop of useless mouths
in spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice to consume all
the goods which the laborers, brutalized by the dogma of work, produce
like madmen, without wishing to consume them and without even thinking
whether people will be found to consume them.
Confronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves
with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of
capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply
their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and
create in them fictitious needs. Since the European laborers, shivering
with cold and hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to drink
the wines from the vineyards they tend, the poor manufacturers in
their goodness of heart must run to the ends of the earth to find
people to wear the clothes and drink the wines: Europe exports every
year goods amounting to billions of dollars to the four corners of
the earth, to nations that have no need of them.[18] But the explored
continents are no longer vast enough. Virgin countries are needed.
European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the
Saharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the
progress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu; they listen open-mouthed
to the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. What unknown wonders
are contained in the "dark continent"! Fields are sown with elephants'
teeth, rivers of cocoa-nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of
backsides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting
cotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles
from which they may learn the virtues of civilization.
But all to no purpose: the over-fed capitalist, the servant class
greater in numbers than the productive class, the foreign and barbarous
nations, gorged with European goods; nothing, nothing can melt away
the mountains of products heaped up higher and more enormous than the
pyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of European laborers defies all
consumption, all waste.
The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to
turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless
depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts
dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain
cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same
durability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving
the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded
down with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it
friable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid
in their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the
"Age of adulteration" just as the first epochs of humanity received
the names of "The Age of Stone", "The Age of Bronze", from the
character of their production. Certain ignorant people accuse our pious
manufacturers of fraud, while in reality the thought which animates
them is to furnish work to their laborers, who cannot resign themselves
to living with their arms folded. These adulterations, whose sole
motive is a humanitarian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits
to the manufacturers who practice them, if they are disastrous for
the quality of the goods, if they are an inexhaustible source of
waste in human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous philanthropy
of the capitalists, and the horrible perversion of the laborers, who
to gratify their vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle the
cries of their conscience and to violate even the laws of commercial
honesty.