these philosophers of the ancient republics. Speaking for free
men, they expressed their thought naively. Plato, Aristotle, those
intellectual giants, beside whom our latter day philosophers are but
pygmies, wish the citizens of their ideal republics to live in the
most complete leisure, for as Xenophon observed, "Work takes all the
time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends."
According to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus, wisest of men, to
the admiration of posterity, was that he had granted leisure to the
citizens of Sparta by forbidding to them any trade whatever. But our
moralists of Christianity and capitalism will answer, "These thinkers
and philosophers praised the institution of slavery." Perfectly true,
but could it have been otherwise, granted the economic and political
conditions of their epoch? War was the normal state of ancient
societies. The free man was obliged to devote his time to discussing
the affairs of state and watching over its defense. The trades were
then too primitive and clumsy for those practicing them to exercise
their birth-right of soldier and citizen; thus the philosophers and
law-givers, if they wished to have warriors and citizens in their
heroic republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves. But do not the
moralists and economists of capitalism praise wage labor, the modern
slavery; and to what men does the capitalist slavery give leisure?
To people like Rothschild, Schneider, and Madame Boucicaut, useless
and harmful slaves of their vices and of their domestic servants.
"The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and
Aristotle,"—this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle
foresaw: "that if every tool could by itself execute its proper
function, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the
tripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work;
if for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the
foreman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the
master of slaves."
Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of
fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful
inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred
labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of
capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system,
worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the
saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae
artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and
liberty.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Herodotus, Book II.
[27] Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.
[28] Livy, Book I.
[29] Plato's "Republic," Book V.
[30] Cicero's "De Officiis," I, 42.
SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS
ADDRESS DELIVERED AT PARIS MARCH 23, 1900, AT A MEETING CALLED BY THE
GROUP OF COLLECTIVIST STUDENTS ATTACHED TO THE PARTI OUVRIER FRANÇAIS.
Ladies and Gentlemen:—I am happy to deliver this address under the
presidency of Vaillant, because it is a pledge of the close and lasting
union between our two organizations, and because Vaillant is one of the
intellectuals of the socialist party; he is acknowledged to be the most
learned of French socialists and perhaps of European socialists, now
that Marx, Engels and Lavroff are no longer with us.
The group of collectivist students which has organized this conference,
has been led to choose this subject, because French socialism has just
passed through a crisis which is not exactly one of growth, though
such it has been called, but which has been caused by the arrival
of a certain number of bourgeois intellectuals within the ranks of
the party. It is therefore interesting to examine the situation of
the intellectuals in capitalist society, their historic role since
the revolution of 1789, and the manner in which the bourgeoisie has
kept the promises it made them when it was struggling against the
aristocracy.
The eighteenth century was the century of reason—everything, religion,
philosophy, science, politics, privileges of classes, of the state,
of municipalities, was submitted to its pitiless criticism. Never
in history has there been such a fermentation of ideas and such a
revolutionary preparation of men's minds. Mirabeau, who himself
played a great role in the ideological agitation, might well say in
the national assembly: "We have no time to think, but happily, we
have a supply of ideas." All that was needed was to realize them.
Capitalism, to reward the intellectuals who had labored with so much
enthusiasm for the coming of its revolution, promised them honors and
favors; intelligence and wisdom, as well as virtue, should be the
sole privileges of the society it was founding upon the ruins of the
old order. Promises cost it little; it announced to all men that it
brought them joy and happiness, with liberty, equality and fraternity,
which, although eternal principles, were now born for the first time.
Its social world was to be so new that even before the Republic was
proclaimed, Camille Desmoulins demanded that they begin a new era which
should date from the taking of the Bastile.
I need not teach you what application capitalism has made of these
eternal principles which by way of cynical raillery, the Republic
carves on the lintels of her prisons, her penitentiaries, her barracks
and her halls of state.[31] I will only remind you that savage and
barbarous tribes, uncorrupted by civilization, living under the
regime of common property, without inscribing anywhere these eternal
principles, without even formulating them, practice them in a manner
more perfect than ever was dreamed of by the capitalists who discovered
them in 1789.
It did not take long to determine the value of the promises of
capitalism; the very day it opened its political shop, it commenced
proceedings in bankruptcy. The constituent assembly, which formulated
the Rights of man and of the citizen and proclaimed equality before the
law, discussed and voted, in 1790, an electoral act which established
inequality before the law; no one was to be a voter but the "active
citizen," paying in money a direct tax equal to three days' labor, and
no one was to be eligible to office but the citizen paying a direct
tax of a "silver mark," about 55 francs. "But under the law of the
silver mark," clamored Loustallot, Desmoulins and the intellectualists
without real estate, "Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose 'Social Contract is
the bible of the revolution, would be capable neither of voting nor
of holding office." The electoral law deprived so many citizens of
political rights, that in the municipal elections of 1790, at Paris,
a city which counted about half a million inhabitants, there were but
12,000 voters, Bailly was chosen mayor by 10,000 votes.
If the eternal principles were not new, it is also true that the
flattering promises made by the intellectuals had already begun to be
realized before the advent of capitalism to power. The church, which
is a theocratic democracy, opens her bosom to all. That they may
enter, all lay aside their titles and privileges, and all can aspire
to the highest positions; popes have risen from the lower ranks of
society. Sixtus Fifth had in his youth tended swine. The church of the
middle ages jealously attracted to herself the thinkers and men of
learning, although she respected the preference of those who wished to
remain laymen, but extended over them her protection and her favors;
she allowed them all boldness of thought, on the single condition of
keeping up the appearance of faith, and never leaving her enclosure
to lavish themselves upon the vulgar. Thus Copernicus might write and
dedicate to the pope his "treatise on the revolutions of the celestial
bodies," in which, contrary to the teaching of the Bible, he proves
that the earth turns around the sun. But Copernicus was a canon at
Frannbourg and he wrote in Latin. When a century later Galileo, who
was not identified with the clergy and who on the contrary sought the
protection of the secular authorities, professed publicly, at Venice
and Florence, the theories of Copernicus, the Vatican stretched out
its terrible hand over him and forced the illustrious old man to deny
his scientific belief. Even after the crisis of protestantism, the
church preserved its liberality toward the scientists who belonged
to it. Mersenne, a monk of the order of the Minimes, one of the
great geometers of the seventeenth century, a precursor and friend
of Descartes, corresponded freely with Hobbes, the father of modern
materialism; the notes of the French edition of "De Cive" contain
fragments of this correspondence.
The church, in keeping up this liberal conduct, may have been animated
by a disinterested love of pure science, but what chiefly concerned
her was the interest of her dominancy; she wished to monopolize the
intellectuals and science, just as in the old theocratic Egypt the
priests had done to whom the Greek thinkers resorted in search of the
first elements of science and philosophy.
It would be insulting capitalism to attribute to it a disinterested
love of science, which from its point of view has but one reason for
existence, that of utilizing natural forces to the enhancement of
its wealth. It cares nothing for pure speculation and it is by way
of self-defence that it allows its scientists to devote their mental
energy to theoretic researches instead of exhausting it on practical
applications. This contempt for pure speculation is shown under a
philosophic form in the positivism of Auguste Comte, who embodies so
well the narrowness of the groveling spirit of capitalism.
But if science apart from its industrial applications does not interest
the bourgeoisie their solicitude for the intellectuals takes on none
of the forms which we saw in that of the church, and nowhere is their
indifference to them better shown than in the relative position of
material property and of intellectual property before the law.
Material property, whatever its origin, is by capitalist law a thing
eternal; it is forever assured to its possessor; it is handed down from
father to son to the end of the centuries, and no civil or political
power may lay upon it a sacrilegious hand. We have lately seen a
characteristic example of this inviolability of material property.
The keeper of the signal station at Durban transmitted to the Boers
heliographic dispatches informing them regarding the ships which
entered the harbor, the men, the horses and the munitions of war which
they transported. His treason brought him 125,000 francs, which, like
an intelligent capitalist, he deposited in the bank. The English
military authorities seized the traitor, condemned him and shot him,
but they respected his property so honorably acquired, and his widow
and son are now its legitimate possessors. The law, apart from certain
variations, being the same in all capitalist countries, things go on in
France as in England. No authority could lay hand on the property of
Bazaine, nor make De Lesseps, Cottu and their families disgorge the
millions artfully extracted from the "lambs" on Panama canal stock.
This legal sanctity of property is a new thing, in France it dates
from the revolution of 1789. The old regime, which had small respect
for this sort of property, authorized the confiscation of the property
of those legally condemned, and the abolition of confiscation is one
of the first reforms demanded in the petitions of Paris and several
provincial cities to the states general. Capitalism, by forbidding the
confiscation of property obtained by fraudulent and infamous means,
proclaims that the source of its fortune is quite as fraudulent and
infamous as that of criminals and traitors.
Capitalist law has none of these amenities for intellectual property.
Literary and artistic property such as the law protects at all has but
a precarious life, limited to the life of the author and a certain time
after his death—fifty years according to the latest legislation; that
time passed, it lapses into common property; for example, beginning
with March of this year, any publisher has the right to bring out for
his own profit the works of Balzac, the genius of romantic literature.
Literary property, though a matter of interest to publishers, who
are certainly few in number, brings no benefit to the mass of the
capitalist class, but not so with property in inventions, which is of
prime importance to all the manufacturing and mercantile capitalists.
Consequently over it the law extends no protection. The inventor, if he
wishes to defend his intellectual property against capitalist pirates,
must begin by buying that right, taking out a patent, which he must
renew every year; on the day he misses a payment, his intellectual
property becomes the lawful prey of the robbers of capitalism. Even if
he pays, he can secure that right only for a time; in France, fourteen
years. And during these few years, not long enough generally to get
his invention fully introduced into practical industry, it is he, the
inventor, who at his own expense has to set in motion the machinery of
the law against the capitalist pirates who rob him.
The trade-mark, which is a capitalistic property that never required
any intellectual effort, is on the contrary indefinitely protected by
law like material property.
It is with reluctance that the capitalist class has granted the
inventor the right of defending his intellectual property, for by
virtue of its position as the ruling class it regards itself as
entitled to the fruits of intellectual labor as well as of manual
labor; just as the feudal lord asserted his right of possession over
the property of his serfs. The history of the inventors of our century
is the monstrous story of their spoliation by the capitalists; it is a
long and melancholy roll of martyrs. The inventor, by the very fact of
his genius, is condemned with his family to ruin and suffering.
It is not only inventions requiring long and laborious study, heavy
outlay for their completion and long time for their introduction, that
plunge the inventor into the inferno of poverty; this is equally true
of inventions that are most simple, most immediately applicable and
most fertile in rich results. I will mention but one example: there
lately died at Paris in extreme poverty a man whose invention saves
millions of francs a year to the railroads and mining companies;
he had discovered a way to utilize the mountains of coal dust that
encumbered the neighborhood of wharfs and mines by converting it into
"briquettes," such as are today in common use for fuel.
The capitalist bourgeoisie, the most revolutionary class that ever
oppressed human societies, cannot increase its wealth without
continuously revolutionizing the means of production, continuously
incorporating into its industrial equipment new applications of
mechanics, chemistry and physics. Its thirst for inventions is so
insatiable that it creates factories for inventions. Certain American
capitalists united in constructing for Edison at Menlo Park the most
wonderful laboratory in the world, and in putting at his disposal
trained scientists, chosen workmen, and the ordinary materials
necessary to make and keep on making inventions which the capitalists
patent, exploit or sell. Edison, who is himself a shrewd business man,
has taken care to secure for himself a part of the benefits brought by
the Menlo Park inventions.
But not all inventors are able like Edison to dictate terms to the
capitalists who equip invention factories. The Thompson-Houston Company
at Paris and Siemens at London and Berlin,[32] in connection with
their plants for turning out electrical machinery, have laboratories
where ingenious men are kept busy searching out new applications of
electricity. At Frankfort the manufactory of aniline dyes, the largest
in the world, where anti-pyrine, that mineral quinine, was discovered,
keeps on its pay roll more than a hundred chemists to discover new
products of coal-tar. Each discovery is at once patented by the house,
which, by way of encouragement, gives a reward to the inventor.
We may up to a certain point regard all factories and workshops
as laboratories for inventions, since a considerable number of
improvements in machinery have been devised by workmen in the course
of their work. The inventor having no money to patent and apply his
discovery, the employer takes out the patent in his own name, and in
accordance with the spirit of capitalist justice, it is he who reaps
all the benefit. When the government takes it into its head to rewards
talent, it is the employer who receives the decoration; the inventive
workman, who is not an intellectual, continues to revolve like the
other machines under the black and greasy number which distinguishes
him, and as in this capitalist world he must be content with little, he
consoles himself for his poverty by the reflection that his invention
is bringing wealth and honor to his employer.
The capitalist class, which to increase its wealth is in pressing need
of inventions, is in even more imperative need of intellectuals to
supervise their application and to direct its industrial machinery. The
capitalists, before they equipped invention factories, had organized
factories to turn out intellectuals. Dollfus, Scherer-Kestner and
other employes of Alsace, the most intelligent, most philanthropic
and consequently the heaviest exploiters in France before the war,
had founded with their spare pennies at Mulhouse, schools of design,
of chemistry and of physics, where the brightest children of their
workmen were instructed gratis, in order that they might always have
at hand and at reasonable figure the intellectual capacities required
for carrying on their industries. Twenty years ago the directors of the
Mulhouse school persuaded the municipal council of Paris to establish
the city school of chemistry and physics. At the beginning, whether
it is still the case I do not know, the pupils were recruited in the
common schools, they received a higher education, gratis, a dinner at
noon at the school, and fifty francs a month to indemnify the parents
for the loss from the fact that their sons were not in the workshop.
On the platform of the constituent assembly of 1790 the Marquis of
Foucault could declare that to be a laborer it was not necessary to
know how to read and write. The necessities of industrial production
compel the capitalist of today to speak in language altogether
different; his economic interests and not his love of humanity and
of science force him to encourage and to develop both elementary and
higher education.
But the slave merchants of ancient Rome were, by the same title,
patrons of education. To the more intelligent of their human
merchandise they gave instruction in medicine, philosophy, Greek
literature, music, science, etc. The education of the slave enhanced
his market value. The slave who was an expert cook brought a better
figure than the slave doctor, philosopher or literator. In our days it
is still so; the big capitalists pay their chief cooks better than the
state pays the professors of liberal arts, even though they be members
of the Institute. But contrary to the practice of the Roman slave
merchants, our capitalist class lavishes instruction only in order to
depress the selling price of intellectual capacity.
Greek mythology tells how Midas had the gift of turning everything
into gold; the capitalist class has a similar property, it transforms
everything that it touches into merchandise; it has done this for
intellectual capacities; chemists, engineers and Latin scholars are
bought like she-asses and guano.
A voice: "And they buy deputies, too!"
People who have no tallow nor veal nor socks to sell have their
conscience and their votes; when they are deputies, they are bought.
When intellectual capacities become merchandise they have to be treated
like other merchandise, and they are. When there are many oysters in
the market the price of oysters goes down, but when the arrivals are
scarce the price goes up. When chemists and engineers are plenty on the
labor market, the price of inventors and of chemists goes down. Now
that the Central School and the School of Physics and Chemistry turn
out yearly upon the pavements of Paris chemists by the dozen, their
price has considerably gone down. Twenty years ago the capitalist paid
a chemist reasonably, he gave him $100 to $120 a month and engaged him
by the year. The employers whose regard for an employee is measured by
what they have to pay him, were full of politeness and consideration
for their chemists who cost so dear. But since they have been abundant,
their price has fallen to $40 and $30 a month; in the north they are
not engaged by the year but for the sugar season, which lasts three or
four months, at the end of which they are discharged with the workmen.
Go and shift for yourself, says the employer. Next fall when the beets
come I know I shall find chemists to superintend making them into
sugar.
The chemists are not exceptional; you know only too well that in all
branches there is an over-production of intellectuals, and that when
a place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer themselves to fill it; and
it is this pressure which permits the capitalists to lower the price
of the intellectuals and to put it even below the wage of the manual
laborer.
Poverty is harder for the intellectual than for the workingman; it
bruises him morally and physically. The workingman, enduring hardships
from childhood and knocking about the street and the shops, is
accustomed to enduring the troubles of life; the intellectual, brought
up in a hot-house, has the life bleached out of him by the shadow of
the college walls, his nervous system is over-developed and takes on an
unhealthy impressionability. What the workingman endures thoughtlessly
is to him a painful shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths
of his moral being by the exigencies of a wage-worker's life. With the
same or even a higher wage the intellectual is in a worse economic
condition than the laborer, for the latter may dress as cheaply as he
likes, but the former, if only not to offend the eye of his employer
and his chiefs with whom he is brought in contact is obliged to dress
expensively and even elegantly. He must save on his food what he has
to spend on his clothing.
The capitalists have degraded the intellectuals below the economic
level of the manual laborers. This is their reward for having so
magnificently prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution of the
eighteenth century.
Jaures in his preface to the Socialist History of France says that
"the intellectual bourgeoisie, offended by a brutal and commercial
society and disenchanted with the bourgeois power, is rallying to the
support of socialism." Unfortunately nothing could be less exact. This
transformation of the intellectual faculties into merchandise, which
ought to have filled the intellectuals with wrath and indignation,
leaves them indifferent. Never would the free citizen of the ancient
republics of Athens and Rome have submitted to such degradation. The
free man who sells his work, says Cicero, lowers himself to the rank
of the slaves. Socrates and Plato were indignant against the Sophists
who required pay for their philosophic teaching, for to Socrates and
Plato thought was too noble a thing to be bought and sold like carrots
and shoes. Even the French clergy of 1789 resented as a mortal insult
the proposition to pay a salary for worship. But our intellectuals are
accustoming themselves to such degradation.