with themselves or with society than when they succeed in selling
their intellectual merchandise at a good price; they have even come
to the point of making its selling price the measure of its value.
Zola, who is one of the most distinguished representatives of literary
intellectualism, estimates the artistic value of a novel by the number
of editions sold. To sell their intellectual merchandise has become
in them such an all-absorbing principle that if one speaks to them of
socialism, before they inquire into its theories, they ask whether in
the socialistic society intellectual labor will be paid for and whether
it will be rewarded equally with manual labor.
Imbeciles! they have eyes but they see not that it is the capitalist
bourgeoisie which establishes that degrading equality: and to increase
its wealth degrades intellectual labor to the point of paying it at a
lower rate than manual labor.
We should have to put off the triumph of socialism not to the year
2,000 but to the end of the world if we had to wait upon the delicate,
shrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the intellectuals. The
history of the century is at hand to teach us just how much we have a
right to expect from these gentlemen.
Since 1789 governments of the most diverse and opposed character have
succeeded each other in France; and always, without hesitation, the
intellectuals have hastened to offer their devoted services. I am not
merely speaking of those two-for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up
the newspapers, the parliaments and the economic associations; but I
mean the scientists, the university professors, the members of the
Institute; the higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow the
knee.
Princes of science, who ought to have conversed on equal terms with
kings and emperors, have marketed their glory to buy offices and favors
from ephemeral ministers. Cuvier, one of the mightiest geniuses of the
modern era, whom the revolution took from the household of a nobleman
to make of him at twenty-five years one of the Museum professors,
Cuvier took the oath of allegiance and served with fidelity the
Republic, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis Philippe, the last
of whom created him a peer of France to reward him for his career of
servility.
To devote one's self to all governments without distinction is not
enough. Pasteur placed his glorious name at the service of the
financiers, who placed him in the administrative council of the Credit
Foncier, side by side with Jules Simon, with dukes and counts, with
senators, deputies and ex-ministers, in order to entrap the "lambs."
When De Lesseps was equipping his colossal swindle of the Panama canal,
he enrolled the intellectuals of the Institute, of the French Academy,
of literature, of the clergy, of all the circles of higher life.
It is not in the circle of the intellectuals, degraded by centuries
of capitalist oppression, that we must seek examples of civic courage
and moral dignity. They have not even the sense of professional
class-consciousness. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, a certain
minister discharged, as if he had been a mere prison guard, one of the
professors of chemistry in the Polytechnic school who had had the rare
courage to give public expression to his opinion. When in a factory the
employer dismisses a workman in too arbitrary a fashion, his comrades
grumble, and sometimes quit work, even though misery and hunger await
them in the street.
All his colleagues in the Polytechnic school bowed their heads in
silence; each one crouched in self-regarding fear, and what is still
more characteristic, not a single partisan of Dreyfus in the Society
of the Rights of Man or in the ranks of the press raised a voice to
remind them of the idea of professional solidarity. The intellectuals,
who on all occasions display their transcendental ethics, have still a
long road to travel before they reach the moral plane of the working
class and of the socialist party.
The scientists have not only sold themselves to the governments
and the financiers; they have also sold science itself to the
capitalist-bourgeoisie. When in the eighteenth century there was
need to prepare the minds of men for the revolution, by sapping the
ideologic foundations of aristocratic society, then science fulfilled
its sublime mission of freedom; it was revolutionary; it furiously
attacked Christianity and the intuitional philosophy. But when the
victorious bourgeoisie decided to base its new power on religion, it
commanded its scientists, its philosophers and its men of letters to
raise up what they had overthrown; they responded to the need with
enthusiasm. They reconstructed what they had demolished; they proved
by scientific, sentimental and romantic argument the existence of God
the father, of Jesus the son and of Mary the virgin mother. I do not
believe history offers a spectacle equal to that presented in the first
years of the nineteenth century by the philosophers, the scientists
and the literary men, who from revolutionaries and materialists
suddenly transformed themselves into reactionaries, intuitionalists and
catholics.
This backward movement still continues; when Darwin published his
Origin of Species, which took away from God his role of creator in the
organic world, as Franklin had despoiled him of his thunderbolt, we
saw the scientists, big and little, university professors and members
of the Institute, enrolling themselves under the orders of Flourens,
who for his own part had at least his eighty years for an excuse,
that they might demolish the Darwinian theory, which was displeasing
to the government and hurtful to religious beliefs. The intellectuals
exhibited that painful spectacle in the fatherland of Lamark and of
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the creators of the evolution theory, which
Darwin completed and made proof against criticism.
Today, now that the clerical anxiety is somewhat appeased, the
scientists venture to profess the evolution theory, which they never
opposed without a protest from their scientific conscience, but they
turn it against socialism so as to keep in the good graces of the
capitalists. Herbert Spencer, Haeckel and the greatest men in the
school of Darwinism demonstrate that the classification of individuals
into rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners,
is the necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature, instead of
being the fulfillment of the will and the justice of God. Natural
selection, they say, which has differentiated the organs of the human
body, has forever fixed the ranks and the functions of the social body.
They have, through servility, even lost the logical spirit. They are
indignant against Aristotle because he, being unable to conceive of the
abolition of slavery, declared that the slave was marked off by nature;
but they fail to see that they are saying something equally monstrous
when they affirm that natural selection assigns to each one his place
in society.
Thus it is no longer God or religion which condemn the workers to
wretchedness—it is science. Never was there an intellectual bankruptcy
more fraudulent.
M. Brunetières, one of those intellectuals who do not feel their
degradation and who joyfully fulfill their servile task, was right when
he proclaimed the failure of science. He does not suspect how colossal
this bankruptcy is.
Science, the great emancipator, that has tamed the powers of nature,
and might in so doing have freed man from toil to allow him to develop
freely his faculties of mind and body; science, become the slave of
capital, has done nothing but supply means for capitalists to increase
their wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the working class.
Its most wonderful applications to industrial technique have brought to
the children, the women and the men of the working class nothing but
over-work and misery!
The middle-class revolutionary party of 1789 cried out in horror and
indignation against the lords, who through the long summer nights
compelled their serfs to beat the ponds near their castles in order
to keep the frogs from croaking. What would they say if they saw what
we see? Improvements in lighting date from the capitalist period. At
the end of the last century Argant and Carcel invented the lamp with
a double current of air, at the beginning of this Chevreul invented
the stearic candle, then gas was discovered, then petroleum, then
the electric light, turning night into day. What benefits have these
scientific improvements in lighting brought to the workers? They have
enabled employers to impose night work upon millions of proletarians,
not in the midsummer nights and in the balmy air of the fields, but
through nights of summer and winter in the poisonous air of the
workshops and factories. The industrial applications of mechanics
and chemistry have transformed the happy and stimulating work of the
artisan into a torture which exhausts and kills the proletarian.
When science subdued the forces of nature to the service of man, ought
she not to have given leisure to the workers that they might develop
themselves physically and intellectually; ought she not to have changed
the "vale of tears" into a dwelling place of peace and joy? I ask you,
has not science failed in her mission of emancipation?
The obtuse capitalist himself is conscious of this failure; so he
directs his economists and his other intellectual domestics to prove to
the working class that it has never been so happy and that its lot goes
on improving.
The economists, considering that to deserve the good graces of
the capitalists it was not enough to falsify economic facts, are
suppressing economic science, which is becoming dangerous for the
domination of capital. Ever since Adam Smith and Ricardo they go on
repeating the same errors regarding value, regarding the productivity
of the predatory and idle capitalist, compiling facts and arranging
statistics which guide the capitalists in their speculations; but they
dare not draw conclusions and build systems with the materials that
they have accumulated. When Ricardo wrote, the phenomena of modern
production were beginning their evolution, their communist tendencies
could not be perceived, one could then study them without taking sides
and could build up a science without fear of wounding the interests
of capital. But now that they have arrived at their full development
and show clearly their communal tendencies, the economists shut their
eyes that they may not see, and they wage war against the principles
established by Ricardo, which after having served as a basis for the
old bourgeois economy, have become the points of departure of the
Marxian economy. To take a whack at the socialist theories and put
themselves at the service of the financiers, like barkers and fakirs of
their bogus goods, are the intellectual functions of the economists.
Latterly the owners of silver mines have enlisted them to sing the
praises of bimetallism, while Cecil Rhodes, Barnato, Beit, Robbers &
Company called them in to boom the Transvaal gold mines.
The intellectuals of art and literature, like the jesters of the old
feudal courts, are the entertainers of the class which pays them. To
satisfy the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their leisure—this
is their sole artistic aim. The men of letters are so well broken to
this servile duty that they do not understand the spirit of Molière,
their great ancestor, all the while that they adore the letter of his
works. Molière is the writer most written about in France; learned
men have devoted themselves to gathering up the scattered fragments
of his erratic and careless youth, to fixing the date and the hour
of the representations of his comedies; if they had unearthed an
authentic piece of excrement from him they would have set it in gold
and would kiss it devotedly, but the spirit of Molière escapes them.
You have read, as I have, many critical analyses of his dramas. Did
you ever find one of them which brought out in clear light the role of
this militant playwright, who more than a century before Beaumarchais
and before revolution, at Versailles, in the very court of the great
monarch, thrust at the nobility of the court and of the provinces,
attacked the church before which Descartes and the rest trembled,
hurled his jests at Aristotle, the unquestioned authority of La
Sorbonne, that secular church; who ridiculed the Pyrrhonism which the
neo-Kantians of our own days oppose to the materialist philosophy of
Marxian socialism, but which then was the weapon of the catholics, of
Pascal, of Huet, the bishop of Avranches, to strike and to overthrow
human reason, with its impudent desire or reaching knowledge by its
own strength. Pitiful, wretched reason, clamored these Kantians before
Kant, you can know nothing without the aid of faith! Molière is unique
in European literature, you must go back to the epoch of glorious
Athens to find his counterpart in Aristophanes.
If the bourgeois critics timidly and unintelligently mention this side
of Molière, there is another of which their ignorance is complete.
Molière was the man of his class, the champion of the bourgeois class.
Like the socialists who say to the workers, "Break with the liberal
bourgeoisie, which deceives you when it does not slaughter you;" he
cried to the Georges Dandins and to the "bourgeois noblemen," "Avoid
the nobles like pests; they deceive you, mock you and rob you."
The great capitalist bourgeoisie does not choose to work, either
with its hands or its brain; it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to
practice lewdness and to look dignified in its beastly and cumbersome
luxury; it does not even deign to occupy itself with politics; men like
Rothschild, De Lesseps, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, do not run
for office; they find it more economical to buy the deputies than the
voters, and more convenient to put their clerks into the ministries
than to take part in parliamentary struggles. The big capitalists
interest themselves only in the operations of the stock exchange, which
afford the delights of gambling; they dignify these by the pompous name
of "speculations,"—a word formerly reserved for the highest processes
of philosophical or mathematical thought. The capitalists are getting
themselves replaced in the supervision and management of the great
industrial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, who carry
them on, and usually are well paid for doing so. These intellectuals
of industry and politics, the privileged portion of the wage class,
imagine that they are an integral part of the capitalist class, while
they are only its servants; on every occasion they take up its defense
against the working class, which finds in them its worst enemies.
Intellectuals of this description can never be led into socialism;
their interests are too closely bound up with those of the capitalist
class for them to detach themselves and turn against it. But below
these favored few there is a swarming and famishing throng of
intellectuals whose lot grows worse in proportion to the increase of
their numbers. These intellectuals belong to socialism. They ought
to be already in our ranks. Their education ought to have given
them the necessary intelligence to deal with social problems, but it
is this very education which obstructs their hearing and keeps them
away from socialism. They think their education confers on them a
social privilege, that it will permit them to get through the world
by themselves, each making his own way in life by crowding out his
neighbor or standing on the shoulders of everyone else. They imagine
that their poverty is transitory and that they only need a stroke of
good luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think,
is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them
the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them
by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or
intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance,
that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more
capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual
raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.
And while they build castles in Spain, capital crushes them, as it has
crushed the small merchants and the small manufacturers, who thought
they, too, with free credit and a little luck, might become first-class
capitalists, whose names should be written in the Great Book of the
Public Debt.
The intellectuals, in all that has to do with the understanding of
the social movement, do not rise above the intellectual level of
those little bourgeois who scoffed so fiercely at the bunglers of
1830 and who, after being ruined and merged in the proletariat, none
the less continue to detest socialism; to such a degree were their
heads perverted by the religion of property. The intellectuals, whose
brains are stuffed with all the prejudices of the bourgeois class, are
inferior to those little bourgeois of 1830 and 1848 who at least were
not afraid of gunpowder; they have not their spirit of combativeness,
they are true imbeciles,—if we restore to this word its original Latin
meaning of unsuited for war. Without resistance they endure rebuffs and
wrongs and they do not think of uniting, of organizing themselves to
defend their interests and give battle to capital on the economic field.
The intellectual proletariat as we know it is a recent growth, it has
especially developed in the last forty years. When after the amnesty of
the condemned of the Commune, we began again the socialist propaganda,
believing that it would be easy to draw the intellectuals into the
movement we took up our dwelling in their cultured Latin quarter,
Guesde taking up his residence in the Rue de la Pitie, Vaillant in the
Rue Monge and I in the Boulevard de Port Royal. We became acquainted
with hundreds of young men, students of law, of medicines, of the
sciences, but you can count on your fingers those whom we brought into
the socialist camp. Our ideas attracted them one day, but the next day
the wind blew from another quarter and turned their heads.
An honorable merchant of Bordeaux, a prominent member of the municipal
council, said in the time of the empire to my father, who was disturbed
over my socialism:
"Friend Lafargue, you must let youth take its course; I was a socialist
when I studied at Paris, I was connected with the secret societies
and I took part in the movement for demanding of Louis Philippe the
pardon of Barbes." The young men of our age turn quickly, let them get
back to their homes and they develop prominent abdomens and become
reactionaries.
We welcomed joyfully the entrance of Jaures into socialism; we thought
that the new form which he brought to our propaganda would make it
penetrate into circles that we had not been able to touch. He has
in fact made a decided impression on the university circle, and we
owe it in part to him that the nurslings of the Ecole Normale have
ideas regarding the social movement which are a little less absurd
and formless than those with which their learning and intelligence
have hitherto been contented. Lately, joining forces with the radical
politicians who had lost their working-class following, they have
invaded the socialist party. Their souls overflow with the purest
intentions; if their peaceful habits prevent them from throwing
themselves into the conflict, and if their lofty culture forbids them
to take their place in the ranks of the comrades, they nevertheless
condescend to instruct us in ethics, to polish off our ignorance, to
teach us how to think, to offer us such crumbs of science as we may be
able to digest, and to direct us; they modestly offer themselves to us
as leaders and schoolmasters.
These intellectuals who have spent their youth in the university
that they might become experts on exercises, polishers of phrases,
philosophers or doctors, imagine one can improvise himself into a
master of the socialist theory by attending a single lecture or by the
careless reading of a single pamphlet. Naturalists who had felt the
need of painful research to learn the habits of mollusks or of the
polyps who live in a community on the coral banks, think that they know
enough to regulate human societies, and that by keeping their stand
on the first steps of the ascending ladder of animal life they can
the better discern the human ideal. The philosophers, the moralists,
the historians and the politicians have aims equally lofty; they bring
an abundant supply of ideas and a new method of action to replace the
imperfect theory and tactics which in all capitalist countries have
served to build up socialist parties strong in numbers, unity and
discipline.
The class struggle is out of fashion, declare these professors of
socialism. Can a line of demarcation be drawn between classes? Do not
the working people have savings bank accounts of $20, $40 and $100,
bringing them 50 cents, $1.50 and $3.00 of interest yearly? Is it not
true that the directors and managers of mines, railroads and financial
houses are wage-workers, having their functions and duties in the
enterprises which they manage for the account of capitalists? The
argument is unanswerable, but by the same token there is no vegetable
kingdom nor animal kingdom because we can not separate them "with
an ax," as it were, for the reason that at their points of contact,
vegetables and animals merge into each other. There is no longer any
day or any night because the sun does not appear on the horizon at the
same moment all over the earth, and because it is day at the antipodes
while it is night here.
The concentration of capital? A worn-out tune of 1850. The corporations
by their stocks and bonds parcel out property and distribute it among
all the citizens. How blinded we were by our sectarianism when we
thought that this new form of property, essentially capitalistic,
was enabling the financiers to plunge their thieving hands into the
smallest purses, to extract the last pieces of silver.
The poverty of the working class! But it is diminishing and soon will
disappear through the constant increase of wages, while interest
on money is constantly diminishing; some fine day it will descend
to zero and the bourgeois will be overjoyed to offer their beloved
capital on the altar of socialism. That to-morrow or the day after
the capitalist will be forced to work, is the prediction of Mr.
Waldeck-Rousseau. And there are intellectuals whose condition grows
worse in proportion as capitalism develops, who are stultified by the
utterances of the employers to a point where they affirm that the
position of wage-workers is improving, and there are intellectuals
who assume to possess some knowledge of political economy, who affirm
that interest on money is rapidly diminishing. Could these reformers
of socialism perchance be ignorant that Adam Smith calculated at the
end of the eighteenth century that 3 per cent was the normal interest
of capital running no risk, and that the financiers of our own epoch
consider that it is still around 3 per cent that the interest rate
must fluctuate. If a few years ago this rate seemed to fall below 2½
per cent, it has risen today above 3 per cent. Capital is merchandise,
like intellectual capacities and carrots; as such it is subject to
the fluctuations of supply and demand. It was then more offered than
demanded, whereas since the development of the industrial plant of
Russia, since the opening of China to European exploitation, etc., the
over-supply of capital has been absorbed and its price rises with its
scarcity. But the intellectuals have too many trifles to think of and
too many harmonious phrases to construct for giving any thought to
economic phenomena. They take for sterling truths all the lies of the
capitalists, and repeat with pious conviction the old litanies of the
orthodox economic church: "There are no classes, wealth is coming to be
distributed more and more equitably, the workers are growing richer and
those living on incomes are growing poorer, and the capitalist society
is the best of all possible societies; these truths shine forth like
suns and none but partisans and mystics can deny them."