the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market
in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought
to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries
it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself,
thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut
their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out
on the pavement with no more food for their vice. Every year in
all industries lockouts occur with the regularity of the seasons.
Over-work, destructive of the organism, is succeeded by absolute rest
during two or four months, and when work ceases the pittance ceases.
Since the vice of work is diabolically attached to the heart of the
laborers, since its requirements stifle all the other instincts of
nature, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily
limited by consumption and by the supply of raw materials, why devour
in six months the work of a whole year; why not distribute it uniformly
over the twelve months and force every workingman to content himself
with six or five hours a day throughout the year instead of getting
indigestion from twelve hours during six months? Once assured of their
daily portion of work, the laborers will no longer be jealous of each
other, no longer fight to snatch away work from each other's hands and
bread from each other's mouths, and then, not exhausted in body and
mind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness.
Brutalized by their vice, the laborers have been unable to rise to the
conception of this fact, that to have work for all it is necessary
to apportion it like water on a ship in distress. Meanwhile certain
manufacturers in the name of capitalist exploitation have for a long
time demanded a legal limitation of the work day. Before the commission
of 1860 on professional education, one of the greatest manufacturers of
Alsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwiller, declared: "The day of twelve hours
is excessive and ought to be reduced to eleven, while work ought to
be stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption of this
measure, although it may appear onerous at first sight. We have tried
it in our industrial establishments for four years and find ourselves
the better for it, while the average production, far from having
diminished, has increased." In his study of machines M. F. Passy quotes
the following letter from a great Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere:
"Our machines, although the same as those of the English spinning
mills, do not produce what they ought to produce or what those same
machines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two
hours a day less. We all work two good hours too much. I am convinced
that if we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen we should have
the same product and we should consequently produce more economically."
Again, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a remark of a great Belgian
manufacturer that the weeks in which a holiday falls result in a
product not less than ordinary weeks.[19]
An aristocratic government has dared to do what a people, duped in
their simplicity by the moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and
moral industrial considerations of the economists, who like the birds
of ill omen, croaked that to reduce by one hour the work in factories
was to decree the ruin of English industry, the government of England
has forbidden by a law strictly enforced to work more than ten hours a
day, and as before England remains the first industrial nation of the
world.[20]
The experiment tried on so great a scale is on record; the experience
of certain intelligent capitalists is on record. They prove beyond a
doubt that to strengthen human production it is necessary to reduce
the hours of labor and multiply the pay days and feast days, yet the
French nation is not convinced. But if the miserable reduction of two
hours has increased English production by almost one-third in ten
years, what breathless speed would be given to French production
by a legal limitation of the working day to three hours. Cannot the
laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust
their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up
and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all,
that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer
men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful
faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious
madness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of
the economist: "Let us work, let us work to increase the national
wealth.' O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial
equipment develops slowly. Stop braying and listen to an economist,
no other than M. L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a
few months ago. "It is in general by the conditions of hand-work that
the revolution in methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand-work
furnishes its services at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts
are made to economize it when its services become more costly."[21]
To force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron
it is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of
the machines of flesh and blood. Do you ask for proofs? They can
be furnished by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was
invented and applied at Manchester because the spinners refused to
work such long hours as before. In America the machine is invading all
branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding
of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a
thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so
painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in
the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in
a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Under the old regime, the laws of the church guaranteed the
laborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays,
during which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great
crime of catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once
it was in the saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced the week
of seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer
have more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers
from the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them under
the yoke of work.
The hatred against the holidays does not appear until the modern
industrial and commercial bourgeoisie takes definite form, between the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that they
be reduced. He refused because "one of the current heresies of the
day is regarding feasts" (Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666
Perefixus, archbishop of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his
diocese. protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapted to
the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less
solicitous for the people's rest. It dethroned the saints in heaven in
order to abolish their feast days on earth.
Religious reform and philosophical free thought were but pretexts which
permitted the jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast
days of the people.
[15] These gigantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara wins
his bride by expelling the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Romancero
relates the story:
Les bodas fueron en Burgos
Las tornabodas en Salas:
En bodas y tornabodas
Pasaron siete semanas
Tantas vienen de las gentes
Que no caben por las plazas
(The wedding was at Bourges, the infaring at Salas. In the wedding and
the infaring seven weeks were spent. So many people came that the town
could not hold them...).
The men of these seven-weeks weddings were the heroic soldiers of the
wars of independence.
[16] Karl Marx's "Capital".
[17] "The proportion in which the population of the country is employed
as domestics in the service of the wealthy class indicates its progress
in national wealth and civilization." (R. M. Martin, "Ireland Before
and After the Union," 1818). Gambetta, who has denied that there was
a social question ever since he ceased to be the poverty stricken
lawyer of the Café Procope, undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing
domestic class when he announced the advent of new social strata.
[18] Two examples: The English government to satisfy the peasants of
India, who in spite of the periodical famines desolating their country
insist on cultivating poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been
obliged to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the Chinese
Government the free entry of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia,
in spite of the mortality resulting from it are obliged to clothe
themselves in the English fashion in order to consume the products of
the Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cotton mills.
[19] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question Ouvrière au XIX siècle, 1872.
[20] It should be observed that this was written in 1883, since which
time the United States has taken the first rank. The soundness of
Lafargue's reasoning is confirmed by the fact that in this country the
hours of labor in the most important industries are even less than in
England. (Translator.)
[21] Louis Reybaud. Le coton, son regime, ses problèmes (1863).
IV.
NEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC.
We have seen that by diminishing the hours of labor new mechanical
forces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by
obliging the laborers to consume their products the army of workers
will be immensely increased. The capitalist class once relieved from
its function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of
soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn
from useful labor to help it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor
market will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit
on work. It will be impossible to find employment for that swarm of
former unproductives, more numerous than insect parasites, and after
them must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their
vain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals
to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with
laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will
be need of severe laws to compel the working women and workingmen who
have been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to
take the hygienic and calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish
their health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume
European products at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will
be necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down
and learn to twirl their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love
as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of
European moralists.
And that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers
of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial
equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will
be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste
for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities.
Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it
eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of
drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the
pope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy
without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.
The proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the
capitalists ten hours of forge and factory; that is their great
mistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be
forbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should
be allowed to bring testimony to the fact that throughout their whole
lives they have been perfect vagabonds, and if they swear they wish to
continue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the general mania
for work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning
at the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money.
Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first
to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing
them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labor of
over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since
their birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their
title to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their
instincts. There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place
them. Dufaure might be set at cleaning public closets, Gallifet[22]
might perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The
members of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stock yards to
pick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators might
play the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for
the others, occupations could be found for them on a level with their
intelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, only
they would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxication.
Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the bugs and vermin in the
departments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be
necessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists
out of due regard for their acquired habits.
But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be heaped upon the moralists
who have perverted nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites,
"and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskers
to deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to
understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and
devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality,—and that only
to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity,—it is so
far otherwise that on the contrary, God knows, what cheer they make;
et _Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt_.[23] You may read it
in great letters, in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching
bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with
sulphur."[24] On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead
of swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under
capitalism, the communists and collectivists will eat, drink and dance
to their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and
political sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the
economic, catholic, protestant, jewish, positivist and free-thought
church; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian,
altruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall
be compelled to hold a candle until it burns their fingers, shall
starve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and
shall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a
year with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife
grinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten
hours.
The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the
regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second,
there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And
here we have the very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall
organize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages,
giving legislative exhibitions. The generals in riding boots, their
breasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through
the streets and courts levying recruits among the good people. Gambetta
and his comrade Cassagnac shall tend door. Cassagnac, in full duelist
costume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out
burning tow, shall threaten every one with his father's pistol[25] and
sink into a hole as soon as they show him Lullier's portrait. Gambetta
will discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a
doctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great
Russia that stultifies him with the mincemeat she promises to make of
Prussia and who would fain see mischief brewing in the west of Europe
so as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home;
on Mr. Bismark who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on
the amnesty ... then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with
red and white and blue, the three national colors, he will beat the
tattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles
and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to
encourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good
spirits.
In the barracks the entertainment will open with the "Electoral Farce".
In the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses' ears, the
bourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of
political liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely
promising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes
of the miseries of the people and with copper in their voices of the
glories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in
chorus, hi han! hi han!
Then will start the great play, "The Theft of the Nation's Goods."
Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy-faced and bald-headed,
fat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning,
is stretching herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial
Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is
mechanically devouring men, women and children, whose thrilling and
heart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten's muzzle,
a hyena's body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his
pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted
by gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with
whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps
of merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his
nether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and
the book of the national budget between his teeth, is encamped at the
head of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When
the laborers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayonets, have
laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened
to the manufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell
mell upon the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of
gold, emptying casks of wine. When they have devoured all they can,
they sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and
vomitings. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens,
Historic Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the heads of
the capitalists, hiccoughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With
her broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating
with fear.
* * * * *
If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades
its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength,
not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist
exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right
to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more
than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with
joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we
ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly
resolution....
Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men,
the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing
painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century
compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured
their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their
brains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of
the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Gallifet was the general who was directly responsible for the
massacre of thousands of French workingmen at the closing days of the
Paris Commune.
[23] They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. (Juvenal.)
[24] Rabelais "Pantagruel," Book II. Chapter XXXIV. Translation of
Urquhart and Motteux.
[25] Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Granier, was prominent as a
conservative politician, journalist and duelist.
APPENDIX
Our moralists are very modest people. If they invented the dogma of
work, they still have doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the
soul, rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper functioning of
the entrails and other organs. They wish to try its workings on the
populace, _in anima vili_, before turning it against the capitalists,
to excuse and authorize whose vices is their peculiar mission.
But, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why thus cudgel your brains to
work out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your
masters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish
to see it scoffed at, dishonored? Let us open the history of ancient
peoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. "I could
not affirm," says the father of history, Herodotus, "whether the Greeks
derived from the Egyptians the contempt which they have for work,
because I find the same contempt established among the Thracians, the
Cythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in a word, because among most
barbarians, those who learn mechanical arts and even their children are
regarded as the meanest of their citizens. All the Greeks have been
nurtured in this principle, particularly the Lacedaemonians."[26]
"At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles who had to concern
themselves but with the defense and the administration of the
community, like the savage warriors from whom they descended. Since
they must thus have all their time free to watch over the interests
of the republic, with their mental and bodily strength, they laid all
labor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedaemon, even the women were
not allowed to spin or weave that they might not detract from their
nobility."[27]
The Romans recognized but two noble and free professions, agriculture
and arms. All the citizens by right lived at the expense of the
treasury without being constrained to provide for their living by any
of the sordid arts (thus, they designated the trades), which rightfully
belonged to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the people, accused
Tarquin, the tyrant, of the special outrage of having converted free
citizens into artisans and masons.[28]
The ancient philosophers had their disputes upon the origin of ideas
but they agreed when it came to the abhorrence of work. "Nature,"
said Plato in his social utopia, his model republic, "Nature has
made no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who
exercise them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who are by their
very condition excluded from political rights. As for the merchants
accustomed to lying and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city
only as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have degraded himself
by the commerce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he
is convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; the punishment
shall be doubled for each repeated offense."[29]
In his "Economics," Xenophon writes, "The people who give themselves
up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good
reason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day
long, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot
fail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind
be affected." "What honorable thing can come out of a shop?" asks
Cicero. "What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything
called shop is unworthy of an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit
without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must
regard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their
toil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself
and puts himself in the rank of slaves."[30]
Proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of
these philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous
care: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the
rank of slaves, he commits a crime which deserves years of imprisonment.