{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_52984/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_52984","id":"gutenberg_52984","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52984","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Sociology","Hours of labor","Social problems","Socialism","Working class"],"text":"THE\n  RIGHT TO BE LAZY\n\n  AND OTHER STUDIES\n\n  BY\n  PAUL LAFARGUE\n\n  Translated by CHARLES H. KERR\n\n\n  CHICAGO\n  CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY\n\n\n\n\n  Copyright, 1907\n\n  BY CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY\n\n[Illustration: Printer's stamp.]\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE\n\n\nM. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education\nof 1849, said: \"I wish to make the influence of the clergy all-powerful\nbecause I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches\nman that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy\nwhich on the contrary bids man to enjoy.\" M. Thiers was stating\nthe ethics of the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow\nintelligence he incarnated.\n\nThe Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained\nby the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once\ntriumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion\nto support its economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and\nsixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and\nglorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our\ndays, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of\nits thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the\nwage-workers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics,\nstrikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to\nreduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his\njoys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine\nturning out work without respite and without thanks.\n\nThe revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by\nthe philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march\nup to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism;\nthey must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action\nthe prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in\nthe faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall\ncease to be the vale of tears for the laborer; that in the communist\nsociety of the future, which we shall establish \"peaceably if we may,\nforcibly if we must,\" the impulses of men will be given a free rein,\nfor \"all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid\nbut their misuse and their excesses,[1]\" and they will not be avoided\nexcept by their mutual counter-balancing, balancing, by the harmonious\ndevelopment of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, \"It is\nonly when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it\narrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigor.[2]\" Such was\nalso the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.[3]\n\nThis refutation of the \"Right to Work\" which I am republishing with\nsome additional notes appeared in the weekly \"Egalit\u00e9\", 1880, second\nseries.\n\n                                        P. L.\n\n  _Sainte-P\u00e9lagie Prison_, 1883.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[1] Descartes. \"Les Passions de l'\u00e2me.\"\n\n[2] Doctor Beddoe. \"Memoirs of the Anthropological Society.\"\n\n[3] Charles Darwin. \"Descent of Man.\"\n\n\n\n\nTABLE OF CONTENTS\n\n\n                                                                   Page\n\n  THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY\u2014\n\n      I. A Disastrous Dogma                                           9\n\n     II. Blessings of Work                                           14\n\n    III. The Consequences of Over-Production                         30\n\n     IV. New Songs to New Music                                      48\n\n     Appendix                                                        57\n\n  SOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS                                    63\n\n  THE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM                                      105\n\n  THE WOMAN QUESTION                                                111\n\n  THE SOCIALIST IDEAL                                               139\n\n  THE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN                     157\n\n\n\n\nTHE RIGHT TO BE LAZY\n\n  Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except\n  in being lazy.\n                                        \u2014Lessing.\n\n\n\n\nI.\n\nA DISASTROUS DOGMA.\n\n\nA strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where\ncapitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its\ntrain the individual and social woes which for two centuries have\ntortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious\npassion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force\nof the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental\naberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a\nsacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be\nwiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed\nto rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be\na Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement\nto that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics\nor free-thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in\ncapitalist society.\n\nIn capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy,\nof all organic deformity. Compare the thorough-bred in Rothschild's\nstables, served by a retinue of bipeds, with the heavy brute of the\nNorman farms which plows the earth, carts the manure, hauls the crops.\nLook at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders\nof religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the\ndogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.[4]\n\nWhen, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native\nbeauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic\nprejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. Spain, which,\nalas, is degenerating, may still boast of possessing fewer factories\nthan we have of prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices in his\nadmiration of the hardy Andalusian, brown as his native chestnuts,\nstraight and flexible as a steel rod; and the heart leaps at hearing\nthe beggar, superbly draped in his ragged _capa_, parleying on terms\nof equality with the duke of Ossuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the\nprimitive animal has not been atrophied, work is the worst sort of\nslavery.[5] The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for\nwork: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew\nonly exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that\nmen like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the\npeople; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed\nthe hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers\nof antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free\nman, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods:\n\nO Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit.[6]\n\nJesus, in his sermon on the Mount, preached idleness: \"Consider the\nlilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they\nspin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not\narrayed like one of these.\" Jehovah the bearded and angry god, gave his\nworshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of\nwork, he rests for all eternity.\n\nOn the other hand, what are the races for which work is an organic\nnecessity? The Auvergnians; the Scotch, those Auvergnians of the\nBritish Isles; the Galicians, those Auvergnians of Spain; the\nPomeranians, those Auvergnians of Germany; the Chinese, those\nAuvergnians of Asia. In our society, which are the classes that love\nwork for work's sake? The peasant proprietors, the little shop-keepers;\nthe former bent double over their fields, the latter crouched in their\nshops, burrow like the mole in his subterranean passage and never stand\nup to look at nature leisurely.\n\nAnd meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the\nproducers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will\nfree humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a\nfree being,\u2014the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its\nhistoric mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work.\nRude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and\nsocial woes are born of its passion for work.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[4] European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and\nthe proud bearing of the men of primitive races, not soiled by what\nPaeppig calls \"the poisonous breath of civilization.\" Speaking of\nthe aborigines of the Oceanic Islands, Lord George Campbell writes:\n\"There is not a people in the world which strikes one more favorably\nat first sight. Their smooth skin of a light copper tint, their hair\ngolden and curly, their beautiful and happy faces. In a word, their\nwhole person formed a new and splendid specimen of the 'genus homo';\ntheir physical appearance gave the impression of a race superior to\nours.\" The civilized men of ancient Rome, witness Caesar and Tacitus,\nregarded with the same admiration the Germans of the communist tribes\nwhich invaded the Roman empire. Following Tacitus, Salvien, the priest\nof the fifth century who received the surname of master of the Bishops,\nheld up the barbarians as an example to civilized Christians: \"We are\nimmodest before the barbarians, who are more chaste than we. Even\nmore the barbarians are wounded at our lack of modesty; the Goths do\nnot permit debauchees of their own nation to remain among them; alone\nin the midst of them, by the sad privilege of their nationality and\ntheir name, the Romans have the right to be impure. (Pederasty was\nthen the height of the fashion among both pagans and Christians.) The\noppressed fly to the barbarians to seek for mercy and a shelter.\" (De\nGubernatione Dei.) The old civilization and the rising Christianity\ncorrupted the barbarians of the ancient world, as the old Christianity\nand the modern capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of\nthe new world.\n\nM. F. LePlay, whose talent for observation must be recognized, even\nif we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted with philanthropic\nand Christian pharisaism, says in his book \"Les Ouvriers Europ\u00e9ens\"\n(1885): \"The Propensity of the Bachkirs for laziness (the Bachkirs are\nsemi-nomadic shepherds of the Asiatic slope of the Ural mountains);\nthe leisure of nomadic life, the habit of meditation which this\nengenders in the best endowed individuals.\u2014all this often gives them a\ndistinction of manner, a fineness of intelligence and judgement which\nis rarely to be observed on the same social level in a more developed\ncivilization.... The thing most repugnant to them is agricultural\nlabor: they will do anything rather than accept the trade of a farmer.\"\nAgriculture is in fact the first example of servile labor in the\nhistory of man. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal,\nCain, is a farmer.\n\n[5] The Spanish proverb says: Descanzar es salud. (Rest is healthful.)\n\n[6] O Melibaeus! a god has granted us this idleness. Virgil's Bucolics.\n(See appendix.)\n\n\n\n\nII.\n\nBLESSINGS OF WORK.\n\n\nIn 1770 at London, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title,\n\"An Essay on Trade and Commerce\". It made some stir in its time.\nThe author, a great philanthropist, was indignant that \"the factory\npopulation of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in\ntheir quality of Englishmen all the individuals composing it have\nby right of birth the privilege of being freer and more independent\nthan the laborers of any country in Europa. This idea may have its\nusefulness for soldiers, since it stimulates their valor, but the\nless the factory workers are imbued with it the better for themselves\nand the state. Laborers ought never to look on themselves as\nindependent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage\nsuch infatuations in a commercial state like ours, where perhaps\nseven-eighths of the population have little or no property. The cure\nwill not be complete until our industrial laborers are contented to\nwork six days for the same sum which they now earn in four.\" Thus,\nnearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as\na curb to the noble passions of man. \"The more my people work, the\nless vices they will have\", wrote Napoleon on May 5th, 1807, from\nOsterod. \"I am the authority ... and I should be disposed to order\nthat on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened\nand the laborers return to their work.\" To root out laziness and curb\nthe sentiments of pride and independence which arise from it, the\nauthor of the \"Essay on Trade\" proposed to imprison the poor in ideal\n\"work-houses\", which should become \"houses of terror, where they should\nwork fourteen hours a day in such fashion that when meal time was\ndeducted there should remain twelve hours of work full and complete\".\n\nTwelve hours of work a day, that is the ideal of the philanthropists\nand moralists of the eighteenth century. How have we outdone this _nec\nplus ultra_! Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in\nwhich the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned\nto compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but\nalso women and children.[7] And to think that the sons of the heroes\nof the Terror have allowed themselves to be degraded by the religion\nof work, to the point of accepting, since 1848, as a revolutionary\nconquest, the law limiting factory labor to twelve hours. They proclaim\nas a revolutionary principle the Right to Work. Shame to the French\nproletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness.\nA Greek of the heroic times would have required twenty years of\ncapitalist civilization before he could have conceived such vileness.\n\nAnd if the miseries of compulsory work and the tortures of hunger have\ndescended upon the proletariat more in number than the locusts of the\nBible, it is because the proletariat itself invited them. This work,\nwhich in June 1848 the laborers demanded with arms in their hands,\nthis they have imposed on their families; they have delivered up to\nthe barons of industry their wives and children. With their own hands\nthey have demolished their domestic hearths. With their own hands they\nhave dried up the milk of their wives. The unhappy women carrying\nand nursing their babes have been obliged to go into the mines and\nfactories to bend their backs and exhaust their nerves. With their own\nhands they have broken the life and the vigor of their children. Shame\non the proletarians! Where are those neighborly housewives told of\nin our fables and in our old tales, bold and frank of speech, lovers\nof Bacchus? Where are those buxom girls, always on the move, always\ncooking, always singing, always spreading life, engendering life's joy,\ngiving painless birth to healthy and vigorous children?... Today we\nhave factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers, with impoverished\nblood, with disordered stomachs, with languid limbs.... They have never\nknown the pleasure of a healthful passion, nor would they be capable\nof telling of it merrily! And the children? Twelve hours of work\nfor children! O, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy\nof Moral and Political Science, not all the Germinys of jesuitism\ncould have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the\nchildren, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their\norganism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory.\n\nOur epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the\ncentury of pain, misery and corruption.\n\nAnd all the while the philosophers, the bourgeois economists\u2014from\nthe painfully confused August Comte to the ludicrously clear\nLeroy-Beaulieu; the people of bourgeois literature\u2014from the quackishly\nromantic Victor Hugo to the artlessly grotesque Paul de Kock,\u2014all have\nintoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, the eldest son\nof Work. Listen to them and you would think that happiness was soon\nto reign over the earth, that its coming was already perceived. They\nrummaged in the dust of past centuries to bring back feudal miseries\nto serve as a sombre contrast to the delights of the present times.\nHave they wearied us, these satisfied people, yesterday pensioners at\nthe table of the nobility, today pen-valets of the capitalist class\nand fatly paid? Have they reckoned us weary of the peasant, such as\nLa Bruy\u00e8re described him? Well, here is the brilliant picture of\nproletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840, penned by\none of their own men, Dr. Villerm\u00e9, member of the Institute, the same\nwho in 1848 was a member of that scientific society (Thiers, Cousin,\nPassy, Blanqui, the academician, were in it), which disseminated among\nthe masses the nonsense of bourgeois economics and ethics.\n\nIt is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Villerm\u00e9 speaks,\u2014the Alsace\nof Kestner and Dollfus, those flowers of industrial philanthropy and\nrepublicanism. But before the doctor raises up before us his picture of\nproletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Mr.\nTh. Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg & Co., depicting the condition\nof the old-time artisan: \"At Mulhouse fifty years ago (in 1813, when\nmodern mechanical industry was just arising) the laborers were all\nchildren of the soil, inhabiting the town and the surrounding villages,\nand almost all owning a house and often a little field.\"[8] It was\nthe golden age of the laborer. But at that time Alsatian industry did\nnot deluge the world with its cottons, nor make millionaires out of\nits Dollfus and Koechlin. But twenty-five years after, when Villerm\u00e9\nvisited Alsace, the modern Minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had\nconquered the country; in its insatiable appetite for human labor it\nhad dragged the workmen from their hearths, the better to wring them\nand press out the labor which they contained. It was by thousands\nthat the workers flocked together at the signal of the steam whistle.\n\"A great number,\" says Villerm\u00e9, \"five thousand out of seventeen\nthousand, were obliged by high rents to lodge in neighboring villages.\nSome of them lived three or four miles from the factory where they\nworked.[9]\n\n\"At Mulhouse in Dornach, work began at five o'clock in the morning and\nended at eight o'clock in the evening, summer and winter. It was a\nsight to watch them arrive each morning into the city and depart each\nevening. Among them were a multitude of women, pale, often walking\nbare-footed through the mud, and who for lack of umbrellas when the\nrain or snow fell, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their\nheads. There was a still larger number of young children, equally\ndirty, equally pale, covered with rags, greasy from the machine oil\nwhich drops on them while they work. They were better protected from\nthe rain because their clothes shed water; but unlike the women just\nmentioned, they did not carry their day's provisions in a basket, but\nthey carryed in their hands or hid under their clothing as best they\nmight, the morsel of bread which must serve them as food until time for\nthem to return home.\n\nThus to the strain of an insufferably long day\u2014at least fifteen\nhours\u2014is added for these wretches the fatigue of the painful daily\njourneys. Consequently they reach home overwhelmed by the need of\nsleep, and next day they rise before they are completely rested in\norder to reach the factory by the opening time.\"\n\nNow, look at the holes in which were packed those who lodge in the\ntown: \"I saw at Mulhouse in Dornach, and the neighboring houses, some\nof those miserable lodgings where two families slept each in its corner\non straw thrown on the floor and kept in its place by two planks....\nThis wretchedness among the laborers of the cotton industry in the\ndepartment of the upper Rhine is so extreme that it produces this sad\nresult, that while in the families of the manufacturers, merchants,\nshop-keepers or factory superintendents, half of the children reach\ntheir twenty-first year, this same half ceases to exist before the\nlapse of two years in the families of weavers and cotton spinners.\"\n\nSpeaking of the labor of the workshop, Villerm\u00e9 adds: \"It is not a\nwork, a task, it is a torture and it is inflicted on children of six\nto eight years. It is this long torture day after day which wastes\naway the laborers in the cotton spinning factories\". And as to the\nduration of the work Villerm\u00e9 observes, that the convicts in prisons\nwork but ten hours, the slaves in the west Indies work but nine hours,\nwhile there existed in France after its Revolution of 1789, which had\nproclaimed the pompous Rights of Man \"factories where the day was\nsixteen hours, out of which the laborers were allowed only an hour and\na half for meals.\"[10]\n\nWhat a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of\nthe bourgeoisie! What woeful gifts from its god Progress! The\nphilanthropists hail as benefactors of humanity those who having done\nnothing to become rich, give work to the poor. Far better were it to\nscatter pestilence and to poison the springs than to erect a capitalist\nfactory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work,\nand farewell joy, health and liberty; farewell to all that makes life\nbeautiful and worth living.[11]\n\nAnd the economists go on repeating to the laborers, \"Work, to increase\nsocial wealth\", and nevertheless an economist, Destutt de Tracy,\nanswers: \"It is in poor nations that people are comfortable, in\nrich nations they are ordinarily poor\"; and his disciple Cherbuliez\ncontinues: \"The laborers themselves in co-operating toward the\naccumulation of productive capital contribute to the event which sooner\nor later must deprive them of a part of their wages\". But deafened and\nstupified by their own howlings, the economists answer: \"Work, always\nwork, to create your prosperity\", and in the name of Christian meekness\na priest of the Anglican Church, the Rev. Mr. Townshend, intones: Work,\nwork, night and day. By working you make your poverty increase and your\npoverty releases us from imposing work upon you by force of law. The\nlegal imposition of work \"gives too much trouble, requires too much\nviolence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only\na pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the\nmost natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the\nmost powerful efforts.\" Work, work, proletarians, to increase social\nwealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming\npoorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is\nthe inexorable law of capitalist production.\n\nBecause, lending ear to the fallacious words of the economists, the\nproletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of\nwork, they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial\ncrises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then\nbecause there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers,\nthe shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its\nwhip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of\nwork, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted\nupon themselves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of\ntheir present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: \"We\nare hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as\nwe are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested the wheat and gathered\nthe grapes.\" They do not besiege the warehouse of Bonnet, or Jujurieux,\nthe inventor of industrial convents, and cry out: \"M. Bonnet, here\nare your working women, silk workers, spinners, weavers; they are\nshivering pitifully under their patched cotton dresses, yet it is they\nwho have spun and woven the silk robes of the fashionable women of all\nChristendom. The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no\ntime to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time\nto rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk\nteeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in\nabstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the\nfruits of their labor. Come, M. Bonnet, give them your silks, M. Harmel\nshall furnish his muslins, M. Pouyer-Quertier his calicos, M. Pinet his\nboots for their dear little feet, cold and damp. Clad from top to toe\nand gleeful, they will be delightful to look at. Come, no evasions,\nyou are a friend of humanity, are you not, and a Christian into the\nbargain? Put at the disposal of your working girls the fortune they\nhave built up for you out of their flesh; you want to help business,\nget your goods into circulation,\u2014here are consumers ready at hand.\nGive them unlimited credit. You are simply compelled to give credit\nto merchants whom you do not know from Adam or Eve, who have given\nyou nothing, not even a glass of water. Your working women will pay\nthe debt the best they can. If at maturity they let their notes go to\nprotest, and if they have nothing to attach, you can demand that they\npay you in prayers. They will send you to paradise better than your\nblack-gowned priests steeped in tobacco.\"\n\nInstead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general\ndistribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers,\nperishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the\nworkshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they\nassail the manufacturers: \"Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us\nwork, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us\".\nAnd these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright,\nsell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had\nbread on the table. And the philanthropists of industry profit by their\nlockouts to manufacture at lower cost.\n\nIf industrial crises follow periods of over-work as inevitably as night\nfollows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end,\nthey also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer\nhas credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and\nborrows again, to furnish raw material to his laborers, and goes on\nproducing without considering that the market is becoming satiated\nand that if his goods don't happen to be sold, his notes will still\ncome due. At his wits' end, he implores the banker, he throws himself\nat his feet, offering his blood, his honor. \"A little gold will do my\nbusiness better\", answers the Rothschild. \"You have 20,000 pairs of\nhose in your warehouse; they are worth 20c. I will take them at 4c.\"\nThe banker gets possession of the goods and sells them at 6c or 8c,\nand pockets certain frisky dollars which owe nothing to anybody: but\nthe manufacturer has stepped back for a better leap. At last the crash\ncomes and the warehouses disgorge. Then so much merchandise is thrown\nout of the window that you cannot imagine how it came in by the door.\nHundreds of millions are required to figure the value of the goods that\nare destroyed. In the last century they were burned or thrown into the\nwater.[12]\n\nBut before reaching this decision, the manufacturers travel the world\nover in search of markets for the goods which are heaping up. They\nforce their government to annex Congo, to seize on Tonquin, to batter\ndown the Chinese Wall with cannon shots to make an outlet for their\ncotton goods. In previous centuries it was a duel to the death between\nFrance and England as to which should have the exclusive privilege of\nselling to America and the Indies. Thousands of young and vigorous men\nreddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the\nsixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.\n\nThere is a surplus of capital as well as of goods. The financiers no\nlonger know where to place it. Then they go among the happy nations who\nare loafing in the sun smoking cigarettes and they lay down railroads,\nerect factories and import the curse of work. And this exportation of\nFrench capital ends one fine morning in diplomatic complications. In\nEgypt, for example, France, England and Germany were on the point of\nhairpulling to decide which usurers shall be paid first. Or it ends\nwith wars like that in Mexico where French soldiers are sent to play\nthe part of constables to collect bad debts.[13]\n\nThese individual and social miseries, however great and innumerable\nthey may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas\nand jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall\nsay \"I will\". But to arrive at the realization of its strength the\nproletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics,\neconomic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural\ninstincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times\nmore noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by\nthe metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom\nitself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day\nand night for leisure and feasting.\n\nThus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils\nwell known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that\nthe ethics innoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to\nwhich it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most\nterrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become\na mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to\nthe human organism, a passion useful to the social organism only when\nwisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this\nis an arduous task beyond my strength. Only communist physiologists,\nhygienists and economists could undertake it. In the following pages\nI shall merely try to show that given the modern means of production\nand their unlimited reproductive power it is necessary to curb the\nextravagant passion of the laborers for work and to oblige them to\nconsume the goods which they produce.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[7] At the first Congress of Charities held at Brussels in 1857 one\nof the richest manufacturers of Marquette, near Lille, M. Scrive, to\nthe plaudits of the members of the congress declared with the noble\nsatisfaction of a duty performed: \"We have introduced certain methods\nof diversion for the children. We teach them to sing during their work,\nalso to count while working. That distracts them and makes them accept\nbravely \"those twelve hours of labor which are necessary to procure\ntheir means of existence.\" Twelve hours of labor, and such labor,\nimposed on children less than twelve years old! The materialists will\nalways regret that there is no hell in which to confine these Christian\nphilanthropic murderers of childhood.\n\n[8] Speech delivered before the International Society of Practical\nStudies in Social Economics, at Paris in May 1863, and published in the\nFrench \"Economist\" of the same epoch.\n\n[9] Note that this was before the era of railroads and street cars.\n(Translator.)\n\n[10] L. R. Villerm\u00e9. Tableau de l'\u00e9tat physique et moral des ouvriers\ndans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie (1840). It is not\nbecause Dollfus, Koechlin and other Alsatian manufacturers were\nrepublicans, patriots and protestant philanthropists that they treated\ntheir laborers in this way, for Blanqui, the academician, Reybaud, the\nprototype of Jerome Paturot, and Jules Simon, have observed the same\namenities for the working class among the very catholic and monarchical\nmanufacturers of Lille and Lyons. These are capitalist virtues which\nharmonize delightfully with all political and religious convictions.\n\n[11] The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their invalids\nand old people; they show their affection for them by putting an end\nto a life which is no longer enlivened by combats, feasts and dances.\nAll primitive peoples have given these proofs of affection to their\nrelatives: the Massagetae of the Caspian Sea (Herodotus), as well as\nthe Wens of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden\neven lately they preserved clubs called family clubs which served to\ndeliver parents from the sorrows of old age. How degenerate are the\nmodern proletarians to accept with patience the terrible miseries of\nfactory labor!\n\n[12] At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin in Jan. 21, 1879, the\nlosses in the iron industry of Germany during the last crisis were\nestimated at $109,056,000.\n\n[13] M. Clemenceau's \"Justice\" said on April 6, 1880, in its financial\ndepartment: \"We have heard this opinion maintained, that even without\npressure the billions of the war of 1870 would have been equally lost\nfor France, that is under the form of loans periodically put out to\nbalance the budgets of foreign countries; this is also our opinion.\"\nThe loss of English capital on loans of South American Republics is\nestimated at a billion dollars. The French laborers not only produced\nthe billion dollars paid Bismarck, but they continued to pay interest\non the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine and other income\ndrawers, who brought on the war and the rout. Nevertheless they still\nhave one shred of consolation: these billions will not bring on a war\nof reprisal.\n\n\n\n\nIII.\n\nTHE CONSEQUENCES OF OVER-PRODUCTION.\n\n\nA Greek poet of Cicero's time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention\nof the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave\nwomen and bring back the Golden Age: \"Spare the arm which turns the\nmill, O, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain\nthat day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor\nof the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and\nbehold the axle tree, shaken, turning with its spokes and making the\nheavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and\nlet us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants\nus.\" Alas!, the leisure which the pagan poet announced has not come.\nThe blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the\nliberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men.\nIts productiveness impoverishes them.\n\nA good workingwoman makes with her needles only five meshes a minute,\nwhile certain circular knitting machines make 30,000 in the same time.\nEvery minute of the machine is thus equivalent to a hundred hours of\nthe workingwomen's labor, or again, every minute of the machine's\nlabor, gives the workingwomen ten days of rest. What is true for the\nknitting industry is more or less true for all industries reconstructed\nby modern machinery. But what do we see? In proportion as the machine\nis improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity\nand exactness, the laborer, instead of prolonging his former rest\ntimes, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to rival the machine. O,\nabsurd and murderous competition!\n\nThat the competition of man and the machine might have free course,\nthe proletarians have abolished wise laws which limited the labor\nof the artisans of the ancient guilds; they have suppressed the\nholidays.[14] Because the producers of that time worked but five\ndays out of seven, are we to believe the stories told by lying\neconomists, that they lived on nothing but air and fresh water? Not\nso, they had leisure to taste the joys of earth, to make love and to\nfrolic, to banquet joyously in honor of the jovial god of idleness.\nGloomy England, immersed in protestantism, was then called \"Merrie\nEngland.\" Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and the unknown authors of the\nromances make our mouths water with their pictures of those monumental\nfeasts[15] with which the men of that time regaled themselves between\ntwo battles and two devastations, in which everything \"went by the\nbarrel\". Jordaens and the Flemish School have told the story of these\nfeasts in their delightful pictures. Where, O, where, are the sublime\ngargantuan stomachs of those days; where are the sublime brains\nencircling all human thought? We have indeed grown puny and degenerate.\nEmbalmed beef, potatoes, doctored wine and Prussian schnaps,\njudiciously combined with compulsory labor have weakened our bodies and\nnarrowed our minds. And the times when man cramps his stomach and the\nmachine enlarges its output are the very times when the economists\npreach to us the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence and the\ndogma of work. Really it would be better to pluck out such tongues and\nthrow them to the dogs.\n\nBecause the working class, with its simple good faith, has allowed\nitself to be thus indoctrinated, because with its native impetuosity\nit has blindly hurled itself into work and abstinence, the capitalist\nclass has found itself condemned to laziness and forced enjoyment, to\nunproductiveness and over-consumption. But if the over-work of the\nlaborer bruises his flesh and tortures his nerves, it is also fertile\nin griefs for the capitalist.\n\nThe abstinence to which the productive class condemns itself obliges\nthe capitalists to devote themselves to the over-consumption of the\nproducts turned out so riotously by the laborers. At the beginning\nof capitalist production a century or two ago, the capitalist was a\nsteady man of reasonable and peaceable habits. He contented himself\nwith one wife or thereabouts. He drank only when he was thirsty and\nate only when he was hungry. He left to the lords and ladies of the\ncourt the noble virtues of debauchery. Today every son of the newly\nrich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the disease for which\nquicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed upon\nthe workmen in quicksilver mines; every capitalist crams himself with\ncapons stuffed with truffles and with the choicest brands of wine in\norder to encourage the breeders of blooded poultry and the growers of\nBordelais. In this occupation the organism rapidly becomes shattered,\nthe hair falls out, the gums shrink away from the teeth, the body\nbecomes deformed, the stomach obtrudes abnormally, respiration becomes\ndifficult, the motions become labored, the joints become stiff, the\nfingers knotted. Others, too feeble in body to endure the fatigues of\ndebauchery, but endowed with the bump of philanthropic discrimination,\ndry up their brains over political economy, or juridical philosophy\nin elaborating thick soporific books to employ the leisure hours\nof compositors and pressmen. The women of fashion live a life of\nmartyrdom, in trying on and showing off the fairy-like toilets\nwhich the seamstresses die in making. They shift like shuttles from\nmorning until night from one gown into another. For hours together\nthey give up their hollow heads to the artists in hair, who at any\ncost insist on assuaging their passion for the construction of false\nchignons. Bound in their corsets, pinched in their boots, d\u00e9collett\u00e9\nto make a coal-miner blush, they whirl around the whole night through\nat their charity balls in order to pick up a few cents for poor\npeople,\u2014sanctified souls!\n\nTo fulfill his double social function of non-producer and\nover-consumer, the capitalist was not only obliged to violate his\nmodest taste, to lose his laborious habits of two centuries ago and to\ngive himself up to unbounded luxury, spicy indigestibles and syphilitic\ndebauches, but also to withdraw from productive labor an enormous mass\nof men in order to enlist them as his assistants.\n\nHere are a few figures to prove how colossal is this waste of\nproductive forces. According to the census of 1861, the population of\nEngland and Wales comprised 20,066,244 persons, 9,776,259 male and\n10,289,965 female. If we deduct those too old or too young to work, the\nunproductive women, boys and girls, then the \"ideological professions\",\nsuch as governors, policemen, clergy, magistrates, soldiers,\nprostitutes, artists, scientists, etc., next the people exclusively\noccupied with eating the labor of others under the form of land-rent,\ninterest, dividends, etc. ... there remains a total of eight million\nindividuals of both sexes and of every age, including the capitalists\nwho function in production, commerce, finance, etc. Out of these eight\nmillions the figures run:\n\n  Agricultural laborers, including herdsmen, servants\n    and farmers' daughters living at home               1,098,261\n  Factory Workers in cotton, wool, hemp,\n    linen silk, knitting                                  642,607\n  Mine Workers                                            565,835\n  Metal Workers (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.)     396,998\n  Domestics                                             1,208,648\n\n\"If we add together the textile workers and the miners, we obtain\nthe figures of 1,208,442; if to the former we add the metal workers,\nwe have a total of 1,039,605 persons; that is to say, in each case a\nnumber below that of the modern domestic slaves. Behold the magnificent\nresult of the capitalist exploitation of machines.\"[16] To this class\nof domestics, the size of which indicates the stage attained by\ncapitalist civilization, must still be added the enormous class of\nunfortunates devoted exclusively to satisfying the vain and expensive\ntastes of the rich classes: diamond cutters, lace-makers, embroiderers,\nbinders of luxurious books, seamstresses employed on expensive gowns,\ndecorators of villas, etc.[17]\n\nOnce settled down into absolute laziness and demoralized by enforced\nenjoyment, the capitalist class in spite of the injury involved in\nits new kind of life, adapted itself to it. Soon it began to look\nupon any change with horror. The sight of the miserable conditions\nof life resignedly accepted by the working class and the sight of\nthe organic degradation engendered by the depraved passion for work\nincreased its aversion for all compulsory labor and all restrictions\nof its pleasures. It is precisely at that time that, without taking\ninto account the demoralization which the capitalist class had imposed\nupon itself as a social duty, the proletarians took it into their\nheads to inflict work on the capitalists. Artless as they were, they\ntook seriously the theories of work proclaimed by the economists and\nmoralists, and girded up their loins to inflict the practice of these\ntheories upon the capitalists. The proletariat hoisted the banner, \"He\nwho will not work Neither shall he Eat\". Lyons in 1831 rose up for\nbullets or work. The federated laborers of March 1871 called their\nuprising \"The Revolution of Work\". To these outbreaks of barbarous fury\ndestructive of all capitalist joy and laziness, the capitalists had\nno other answer than ferocious repression, but they know that if they\nhave been able to repress these revolutionary explosions, they have\nnot drowned in the blood of these gigantic massacres the absurd idea\nof the proletariat wishing to inflict work upon the idle and reputable\nclasses, and it is to avert this misfortune that they surround\nthemselves with guards, policemen, magistrates and jailors, supported\nin laborious unproductiveness. There is no more room for illusion as\nto the function of modern armies. They are permanently maintained only\nto suppress the \"enemy within\". Thus the forts of Paris and Lyons\nhave not been built to defend the city against the foreigner, but to\ncrush it in case of revolt. And if an unanswerable example be called\nfor, we mention the army of Belgium, that paradise of capitalism. Its\nneutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and nevertheless its\narmy is one of the strongest in proportion to its population. The\nglorious battlefields of the brave Belgian army are the plains of the\nBorinage and of Charleroi. It is in the blood of the unarmed miners and\nlaborers that the Belgian officers temper their swords and win their\nepaulets. The nations of Europe have not national armies but mercenary\narmies. They protect the capitalists against the popular fury which\nwould condemn them to ten hours of mining or spinning. Again, while\ncompressing its own stomach the working class has developed abnormally\nthe stomach of the capitalist class, condemned to over-consumption.\n\nFor alleviation of its painful labor the capitalist class has withdrawn\nfrom the working class a mass of men far superior to those still\ndevoted to useful production and has condemned them in their turn to\nunproductiveness and over-consumption. But this troop of useless mouths\nin spite of its insatiable voracity, does not suffice to consume all\nthe goods which the laborers, brutalized by the dogma of work, produce\nlike madmen, without wishing to consume them and without even thinking\nwhether people will be found to consume them.\n\nConfronted with this double madness of the laborers killing themselves\nwith over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of\ncapitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply\ntheir powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and\ncreate in them fictitious needs. Since the European laborers, shivering\nwith cold and hunger, refuse to wear the stuffs they weave, to drink\nthe wines from the vineyards they tend, the poor manufacturers in\ntheir goodness of heart must run to the ends of the earth to find\npeople to wear the clothes and drink the wines: Europe exports every\nyear goods amounting to billions of dollars to the four corners of\nthe earth, to nations that have no need of them.[18] But the explored\ncontinents are no longer vast enough. Virgin countries are needed.\nEuropean manufacturers dream night and day of Africa, of a lake in the\nSaharan desert, of a railroad to the Soudan. They anxiously follow the\nprogress of Livingston, Stanley, Du Chaillu; they listen open-mouthed\nto the marvelous tales of these brave travelers. What unknown wonders\nare contained in the \"dark continent\"! Fields are sown with elephants'\nteeth, rivers of cocoa-nut oil are dotted with gold, millions of\nbacksides, as bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, are awaiting\ncotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnaps and bibles\nfrom which they may learn the virtues of civilization.\n\nBut all to no purpose: the over-fed capitalist, the servant class\ngreater in numbers than the productive class, the foreign and barbarous\nnations, gorged with European goods; nothing, nothing can melt away\nthe mountains of products heaped up higher and more enormous than the\npyramids of Egypt. The productiveness of European laborers defies all\nconsumption, all waste.\n\nThe manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to\nturn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless\ndepraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts\ndirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain\ncloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same\ndurability as the promises made to voters. At Lyons, instead of leaving\nthe silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, it is loaded\ndown with mineral salts, which while increasing its weight, make it\nfriable and far from durable. All our products are adulterated to aid\nin their sale and shorten their life. Our epoch will be called the\n\"Age of adulteration\" just as the first epochs of humanity received\nthe names of \"The Age of Stone\", \"The Age of Bronze\", from the\ncharacter of their production. Certain ignorant people accuse our pious\nmanufacturers of fraud, while in reality the thought which animates\nthem is to furnish work to their laborers, who cannot resign themselves\nto living with their arms folded. These adulterations, whose sole\nmotive is a humanitarian sentiment, but which bring splendid profits\nto the manufacturers who practice them, if they are disastrous for\nthe quality of the goods, if they are an inexhaustible source of\nwaste in human labor, nevertheless prove the ingenuous philanthropy\nof the capitalists, and the horrible perversion of the laborers, who\nto gratify their vice for work oblige the manufacturers to stifle the\ncries of their conscience and to violate even the laws of commercial\nhonesty.\n\nAnd nevertheless, in spite of the over-production of goods, in spite of\nthe adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market\nin countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought\nto compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries\nit to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself,\nthither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut\ntheir appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out\non the pavement with no more food for their vice. Every year in\nall industries lockouts occur with the regularity of the seasons.\nOver-work, destructive of the organism, is succeeded by absolute rest\nduring two or four months, and when work ceases the pittance ceases.\nSince the vice of work is diabolically attached to the heart of the\nlaborers, since its requirements stifle all the other instincts of\nnature, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily\nlimited by consumption and by the supply of raw materials, why devour\nin six months the work of a whole year; why not distribute it uniformly\nover the twelve months and force every workingman to content himself\nwith six or five hours a day throughout the year instead of getting\nindigestion from twelve hours during six months? Once assured of their\ndaily portion of work, the laborers will no longer be jealous of each\nother, no longer fight to snatch away work from each other's hands and\nbread from each other's mouths, and then, not exhausted in body and\nmind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness.\n\nBrutalized by their vice, the laborers have been unable to rise to the\nconception of this fact, that to have work for all it is necessary\nto apportion it like water on a ship in distress. Meanwhile certain\nmanufacturers in the name of capitalist exploitation have for a long\ntime demanded a legal limitation of the work day. Before the commission\nof 1860 on professional education, one of the greatest manufacturers of\nAlsace, M. Bourcart of Guebwiller, declared: \"The day of twelve hours\nis excessive and ought to be reduced to eleven, while work ought to\nbe stopped at two o'clock on Saturday. I advise the adoption of this\nmeasure, although it may appear onerous at first sight. We have tried\nit in our industrial establishments for four years and find ourselves\nthe better for it, while the average production, far from having\ndiminished, has increased.\" In his study of machines M. F. Passy quotes\nthe following letter from a great Belgian manufacturer M. Ottevaere:\n\"Our machines, although the same as those of the English spinning\nmills, do not produce what they ought to produce or what those same\nmachines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two\nhours a day less. We all work two good hours too much. I am convinced\nthat if we worked only eleven hours instead of thirteen we should have\nthe same product and we should consequently produce more economically.\"\nAgain, M. Leroy Beaulieu affirms that it is a remark of a great Belgian\nmanufacturer that the weeks in which a holiday falls result in a\nproduct not less than ordinary weeks.[19]\n\nAn aristocratic government has dared to do what a people, duped in\ntheir simplicity by the moralists, never dared. Despising the lofty and\nmoral industrial considerations of the economists, who like the birds\nof ill omen, croaked that to reduce by one hour the work in factories\nwas to decree the ruin of English industry, the government of England\nhas forbidden by a law strictly enforced to work more than ten hours a\nday, and as before England remains the first industrial nation of the\nworld.[20]\n\nThe experiment tried on so great a scale is on record; the experience\nof certain intelligent capitalists is on record. They prove beyond a\ndoubt that to strengthen human production it is necessary to reduce\nthe hours of labor and multiply the pay days and feast days, yet the\nFrench nation is not convinced. But if the miserable reduction of two\nhours has increased English production by almost one-third in ten\nyears, what breathless speed would be given to French production\nby a legal limitation of the working day to three hours. Cannot the\nlaborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust\ntheir own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up\nand long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all,\nthat absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer\nmen but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful\nfaculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious\nmadness for work. Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of\nthe economist: \"Let us work, let us work to increase the national\nwealth.' O, idiots, it is because you work too much that the industrial\nequipment develops slowly. Stop braying and listen to an economist,\nno other than M. L. Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a\nfew months ago. \"It is in general by the conditions of hand-work that\nthe revolution in methods of labor is regulated. As long as hand-work\nfurnishes its services at a low price, it is lavished, while efforts\nare made to economize it when its services become more costly.\"[21]\n\nTo force the capitalists to improve their machines of wood and iron\nit is necessary to raise wages and diminish the working hours of\nthe machines of flesh and blood. Do you ask for proofs? They can\nbe furnished by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was\ninvented and applied at Manchester because the spinners refused to\nwork such long hours as before. In America the machine is invading all\nbranches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding\nof wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a\nthousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so\npainful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in\nthe American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in\na sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[14] Under the old regime, the laws of the church guaranteed the\nlaborer ninety rest days, fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight holidays,\nduring which he was strictly forbidden to work. This was the great\ncrime of catholicism, the principal cause of the irreligion of the\nindustrial and commercial bourgeoisie: under the revolution, when once\nit was in the saddle, it abolished the holidays and replaced the week\nof seven days by that of ten, in order that the people might no longer\nhave more than one rest day out of the ten. It emancipated the laborers\nfrom the yoke of the church in order the better to subjugate them under\nthe yoke of work.\n\nThe hatred against the holidays does not appear until the modern\nindustrial and commercial bourgeoisie takes definite form, between the\nfifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Henry IV asked of the pope that they\nbe reduced. He refused because \"one of the current heresies of the\nday is regarding feasts\" (Letters of Cardinal d'Ossat). But in 1666\nPerefixus, archbishop of Paris, suppressed seventeen of them in his\ndiocese. protestantism, which was the Christian religion adapted to\nthe new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less\nsolicitous for the people's rest. It dethroned the saints in heaven in\norder to abolish their feast days on earth.\n\nReligious reform and philosophical free thought were but pretexts which\npermitted the jesuitical and rapacious bourgeoisie to pilfer the feast\ndays of the people.\n\n[15] These gigantic feasts lasted for weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara wins\nhis bride by expelling the Moors from old Calatrava, and the Romancero\nrelates the story:\n\n  Les bodas fueron en Burgos\n  Las tornabodas en Salas:\n  En bodas y tornabodas\n  Pasaron siete semanas\n  Tantas vienen de las gentes\n  Que no caben por las plazas\n\n(The wedding was at Bourges, the infaring at Salas. In the wedding and\nthe infaring seven weeks were spent. So many people came that the town\ncould not hold them...).\n\nThe men of these seven-weeks weddings were the heroic soldiers of the\nwars of independence.\n\n[16] Karl Marx's \"Capital\".\n\n[17] \"The proportion in which the population of the country is employed\nas domestics in the service of the wealthy class indicates its progress\nin national wealth and civilization.\" (R. M. Martin, \"Ireland Before\nand After the Union,\" 1818). Gambetta, who has denied that there was\na social question ever since he ceased to be the poverty stricken\nlawyer of the Caf\u00e9 Procope, undoubtedly alluded to this ever-increasing\ndomestic class when he announced the advent of new social strata.\n\n[18] Two examples: The English government to satisfy the peasants of\nIndia, who in spite of the periodical famines desolating their country\ninsist on cultivating poppies instead of rice or wheat, has been\nobliged to undertake bloody wars in order to impose upon the Chinese\nGovernment the free entry of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia,\nin spite of the mortality resulting from it are obliged to clothe\nthemselves in the English fashion in order to consume the products of\nthe Scotch distilleries and the Manchester cotton mills.\n\n[19] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. La Question Ouvri\u00e8re au XIX si\u00e8cle, 1872.\n\n[20] It should be observed that this was written in 1883, since which\ntime the United States has taken the first rank. The soundness of\nLafargue's reasoning is confirmed by the fact that in this country the\nhours of labor in the most important industries are even less than in\nEngland. (Translator.)\n\n[21] Louis Reybaud. Le coton, son regime, ses probl\u00e8mes (1863).\n\n\n\n\nIV.\n\nNEW SONGS TO NEW MUSIC.\n\n\nWe have seen that by diminishing the hours of labor new mechanical\nforces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by\nobliging the laborers to consume their products the army of workers\nwill be immensely increased. The capitalist class once relieved from\nits function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of\nsoldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn\nfrom useful labor to help it in consuming and wasting. Then the labor\nmarket will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit\non work. It will be impossible to find employment for that swarm of\nformer unproductives, more numerous than insect parasites, and after\nthem must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their\nvain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals\nto decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with\nlaces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will\nbe need of severe laws to compel the working women and workingmen who\nhave been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to\ntake the hygienic and calisthenic exercises requisite to re-establish\ntheir health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume\nEuropean products at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will\nbe necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down\nand learn to twirl their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love\nas they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of\nEuropean moralists.\n\nAnd that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers\nof our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial\nequipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will\nbe compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste\nfor abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities.\nInstead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it\neats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of\ndrinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the\npope and will drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy\nwithout commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.\n\nThe proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the\ncapitalists ten hours of forge and factory; that is their great\nmistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be\nforbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should\nbe allowed to bring testimony to the fact that throughout their whole\nlives they have been perfect vagabonds, and if they swear they wish to\ncontinue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the general mania\nfor work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning\nat the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money.\nSocial discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first\nto rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing\nthem harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labor of\nover-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since\ntheir birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their\ntitle to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their\ninstincts. There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place\nthem. Dufaure might be set at cleaning public closets, Gallifet[22]\nmight perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The\nmembers of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stock yards to\npick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered. The senators might\nplay the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for\nthe others, occupations could be found for them on a level with their\nintelligence. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, only\nthey would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxication.\nFerry, Freycinet and Tirard might destroy the bugs and vermin in the\ndepartments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be\nnecessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists\nout of due regard for their acquired habits.\n\nBut vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be heaped upon the moralists\nwho have perverted nature, the bigots, the canters, the hypocrites,\n\"and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskers\nto deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to\nunderstand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and\ndevotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality,\u2014and that only\nto sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity,\u2014it is so\nfar otherwise that on the contrary, God knows, what cheer they make;\net _Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt_.[23] You may read it\nin great letters, in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching\nbellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with\nsulphur.\"[24] On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead\nof swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under\ncapitalism, the communists and collectivists will eat, drink and dance\nto their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and\npolitical sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the\neconomic, catholic, protestant, jewish, positivist and free-thought\nchurch; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian,\naltruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall\nbe compelled to hold a candle until it burns their fingers, shall\nstarve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and\nshall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a\nyear with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife\ngrinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten\nhours.\n\nThe lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the\nregime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second,\nthere will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And\nhere we have the very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall\norganize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages,\ngiving legislative exhibitions. The generals in riding boots, their\nbreasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through\nthe streets and courts levying recruits among the good people. Gambetta\nand his comrade Cassagnac shall tend door. Cassagnac, in full duelist\ncostume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out\nburning tow, shall threaten every one with his father's pistol[25] and\nsink into a hole as soon as they show him Lullier's portrait. Gambetta\nwill discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a\ndoctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great\nRussia that stultifies him with the mincemeat she promises to make of\nPrussia and who would fain see mischief brewing in the west of Europe\nso as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home;\non Mr. Bismark who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on\nthe amnesty ... then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with\nred and white and blue, the three national colors, he will beat the\ntattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans, the truffles\nand the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to\nencourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good\nspirits.\n\nIn the barracks the entertainment will open with the \"Electoral Farce\".\n\nIn the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses' ears, the\nbourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of\npolitical liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely\npromising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes\nof the miseries of the people and with copper in their voices of the\nglories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in\nchorus, hi han! hi han!\n\nThen will start the great play, \"The Theft of the Nation's Goods.\"\n\nCapitalist France, an enormous female, hairy-faced and bald-headed,\nfat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning,\nis stretching herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial\nCapitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is\nmechanically devouring men, women and children, whose thrilling and\nheart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten's muzzle,\na hyena's body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his\npocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted\nby gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with\nwhips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps\nof merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his\nnether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and\nthe book of the national budget between his teeth, is encamped at the\nhead of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When\nthe laborers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayonets, have\nlaid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened\nto the manufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell\nmell upon the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of\ngold, emptying casks of wine. When they have devoured all they can,\nthey sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and\nvomitings. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens,\nHistoric Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the heads of\nthe capitalists, hiccoughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With\nher broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating\nwith fear.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\nIf, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades\nits nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength,\nnot to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist\nexploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right\nto misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more\nthan three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with\njoy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we\nask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly\nresolution....\n\nLike Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men,\nthe women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing\npainfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century\ncompulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured\ntheir nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their\nbrains. O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother of\nthe arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[22] Gallifet was the general who was directly responsible for the\nmassacre of thousands of French workingmen at the closing days of the\nParis Commune.\n\n[23] They simulate Curius but live like Bacchanals. (Juvenal.)\n\n[24] Rabelais \"Pantagruel,\" Book II. Chapter XXXIV. Translation of\nUrquhart and Motteux.\n\n[25] Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Granier, was prominent as a\nconservative politician, journalist and duelist.\n\n\n\n\nAPPENDIX\n\n\nOur moralists are very modest people. If they invented the dogma of\nwork, they still have doubts of its efficacy in tranquilizing the\nsoul, rejoicing the spirit, and maintaining the proper functioning of\nthe entrails and other organs. They wish to try its workings on the\npopulace, _in anima vili_, before turning it against the capitalists,\nto excuse and authorize whose vices is their peculiar mission.\n\nBut, you, three-for-a-cent philosophers, why thus cudgel your brains to\nwork out an ethics the practice of which you dare not counsel to your\nmasters? Your dogma of work, of which you are so proud, do you wish\nto see it scoffed at, dishonored? Let us open the history of ancient\npeoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. \"I could\nnot affirm,\" says the father of history, Herodotus, \"whether the Greeks\nderived from the Egyptians the contempt which they have for work,\nbecause I find the same contempt established among the Thracians, the\nCythians, the Persians, the Lydians; in a word, because among most\nbarbarians, those who learn mechanical arts and even their children are\nregarded as the meanest of their citizens. All the Greeks have been\nnurtured in this principle, particularly the Lacedaemonians.\"[26]\n\n\"At Athens the citizens were veritable nobles who had to concern\nthemselves but with the defense and the administration of the\ncommunity, like the savage warriors from whom they descended. Since\nthey must thus have all their time free to watch over the interests\nof the republic, with their mental and bodily strength, they laid all\nlabor upon the slaves. Likewise at Lacedaemon, even the women were\nnot allowed to spin or weave that they might not detract from their\nnobility.\"[27]\n\nThe Romans recognized but two noble and free professions, agriculture\nand arms. All the citizens by right lived at the expense of the\ntreasury without being constrained to provide for their living by any\nof the sordid arts (thus, they designated the trades), which rightfully\nbelonged to slaves. The elder Brutus to arouse the people, accused\nTarquin, the tyrant, of the special outrage of having converted free\ncitizens into artisans and masons.[28]\n\nThe ancient philosophers had their disputes upon the origin of ideas\nbut they agreed when it came to the abhorrence of work. \"Nature,\"\nsaid Plato in his social utopia, his model republic, \"Nature has\nmade no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who\nexercise them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who are by their\nvery condition excluded from political rights. As for the merchants\naccustomed to lying and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city\nonly as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have degraded himself\nby the commerce of the shop shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he\nis convicted, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; the punishment\nshall be doubled for each repeated offense.\"[29]\n\nIn his \"Economics,\" Xenophon writes, \"The people who give themselves\nup to manual labor are never promoted to public offices, and with good\nreason. The greater part of them, condemned to be seated the whole day\nlong, some even to endure the heat of the fire continually, cannot\nfail to be changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that the mind\nbe affected.\" \"What honorable thing can come out of a shop?\" asks\nCicero. \"What can commerce produce in the way of honor? Everything\ncalled shop is unworthy of an honorable man. Merchants can gain no profit\nwithout lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Again, we must\nregard as something base and vile the trade of those who sell their\ntoil and industry, for whoever gives his labor for money sells himself\nand puts himself in the rank of slaves.\"[30]\n\nProletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, listen to the voice of\nthese philosophers, which has been concealed from you with jealous\ncare: A citizen who gives his labor for money degrades himself to the\nrank of slaves, he commits a crime which deserves years of imprisonment.\n\nChristian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism had not perverted\nthese philosophers of the ancient republics. Speaking for free\nmen, they expressed their thought naively. Plato, Aristotle, those\nintellectual giants, beside whom our latter day philosophers are but\npygmies, wish the citizens of their ideal republics to live in the\nmost complete leisure, for as Xenophon observed, \"Work takes all the\ntime and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.\"\nAccording to Plutarch, the great claim of Lycurgus, wisest of men, to\nthe admiration of posterity, was that he had granted leisure to the\ncitizens of Sparta by forbidding to them any trade whatever. But our\nmoralists of Christianity and capitalism will answer, \"These thinkers\nand philosophers praised the institution of slavery.\" Perfectly true,\nbut could it have been otherwise, granted the economic and political\nconditions of their epoch? War was the normal state of ancient\nsocieties. The free man was obliged to devote his time to discussing\nthe affairs of state and watching over its defense. The trades were\nthen too primitive and clumsy for those practicing them to exercise\ntheir birth-right of soldier and citizen; thus the philosophers and\nlaw-givers, if they wished to have warriors and citizens in their\nheroic republics, were obliged to tolerate slaves. But do not the\nmoralists and economists of capitalism praise wage labor, the modern\nslavery; and to what men does the capitalist slavery give leisure?\nTo people like Rothschild, Schneider, and Madame Boucicaut, useless\nand harmful slaves of their vices and of their domestic servants.\n\"The prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and\nAristotle,\"\u2014this has been written disdainfully; and yet Aristotle\nforesaw: \"that if every tool could by itself execute its proper\nfunction, as the masterpieces of Daedalus moved themselves or as the\ntripods of Vulcan set themselves spontaneously at their sacred work;\nif for example the shuttles of the weavers did their own weaving, the\nforeman of the workshop would have no more need of helpers, nor the\nmaster of slaves.\"\n\nAristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of\nfire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful\ninexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred\nlabor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of\ncapitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system,\nworst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the\nsaviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae\nartes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and\nliberty.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[26] Herodotus, Book II.\n\n[27] Biot. De L'abolition de L'esclavage ancien en Occident, 1840.\n\n[28] Livy, Book I.\n\n[29] Plato's \"Republic,\" Book V.\n\n[30] Cicero's \"De Officiis,\" I, 42.\n\n\n\n\nSOCIALISM AND THE INTELLECTUALS\n\nADDRESS DELIVERED AT PARIS MARCH 23, 1900, AT A MEETING CALLED BY THE\nGROUP OF COLLECTIVIST STUDENTS ATTACHED TO THE PARTI OUVRIER FRAN\u00c7AIS.\n\n\nLadies and Gentlemen:\u2014I am happy to deliver this address under the\npresidency of Vaillant, because it is a pledge of the close and lasting\nunion between our two organizations, and because Vaillant is one of the\nintellectuals of the socialist party; he is acknowledged to be the most\nlearned of French socialists and perhaps of European socialists, now\nthat Marx, Engels and Lavroff are no longer with us.\n\nThe group of collectivist students which has organized this conference,\nhas been led to choose this subject, because French socialism has just\npassed through a crisis which is not exactly one of growth, though\nsuch it has been called, but which has been caused by the arrival\nof a certain number of bourgeois intellectuals within the ranks of\nthe party. It is therefore interesting to examine the situation of\nthe intellectuals in capitalist society, their historic role since\nthe revolution of 1789, and the manner in which the bourgeoisie has\nkept the promises it made them when it was struggling against the\naristocracy.\n\nThe eighteenth century was the century of reason\u2014everything, religion,\nphilosophy, science, politics, privileges of classes, of the state,\nof municipalities, was submitted to its pitiless criticism. Never\nin history has there been such a fermentation of ideas and such a\nrevolutionary preparation of men's minds. Mirabeau, who himself\nplayed a great role in the ideological agitation, might well say in\nthe national assembly: \"We have no time to think, but happily, we\nhave a supply of ideas.\" All that was needed was to realize them.\nCapitalism, to reward the intellectuals who had labored with so much\nenthusiasm for the coming of its revolution, promised them honors and\nfavors; intelligence and wisdom, as well as virtue, should be the\nsole privileges of the society it was founding upon the ruins of the\nold order. Promises cost it little; it announced to all men that it\nbrought them joy and happiness, with liberty, equality and fraternity,\nwhich, although eternal principles, were now born for the first time.\nIts social world was to be so new that even before the Republic was\nproclaimed, Camille Desmoulins demanded that they begin a new era which\nshould date from the taking of the Bastile.\n\nI need not teach you what application capitalism has made of these\neternal principles which by way of cynical raillery, the Republic\ncarves on the lintels of her prisons, her penitentiaries, her barracks\nand her halls of state.[31] I will only remind you that savage and\nbarbarous tribes, uncorrupted by civilization, living under the\nregime of common property, without inscribing anywhere these eternal\nprinciples, without even formulating them, practice them in a manner\nmore perfect than ever was dreamed of by the capitalists who discovered\nthem in 1789.\n\nIt did not take long to determine the value of the promises of\ncapitalism; the very day it opened its political shop, it commenced\nproceedings in bankruptcy. The constituent assembly, which formulated\nthe Rights of man and of the citizen and proclaimed equality before the\nlaw, discussed and voted, in 1790, an electoral act which established\ninequality before the law; no one was to be a voter but the \"active\ncitizen,\" paying in money a direct tax equal to three days' labor, and\nno one was to be eligible to office but the citizen paying a direct\ntax of a \"silver mark,\" about 55 francs. \"But under the law of the\nsilver mark,\" clamored Loustallot, Desmoulins and the intellectualists\nwithout real estate, \"Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose 'Social Contract is\nthe bible of the revolution, would be capable neither of voting nor\nof holding office.\" The electoral law deprived so many citizens of\npolitical rights, that in the municipal elections of 1790, at Paris,\na city which counted about half a million inhabitants, there were but\n12,000 voters, Bailly was chosen mayor by 10,000 votes.\n\nIf the eternal principles were not new, it is also true that the\nflattering promises made by the intellectuals had already begun to be\nrealized before the advent of capitalism to power. The church, which\nis a theocratic democracy, opens her bosom to all. That they may\nenter, all lay aside their titles and privileges, and all can aspire\nto the highest positions; popes have risen from the lower ranks of\nsociety. Sixtus Fifth had in his youth tended swine. The church of the\nmiddle ages jealously attracted to herself the thinkers and men of\nlearning, although she respected the preference of those who wished to\nremain laymen, but extended over them her protection and her favors;\nshe allowed them all boldness of thought, on the single condition of\nkeeping up the appearance of faith, and never leaving her enclosure\nto lavish themselves upon the vulgar. Thus Copernicus might write and\ndedicate to the pope his \"treatise on the revolutions of the celestial\nbodies,\" in which, contrary to the teaching of the Bible, he proves\nthat the earth turns around the sun. But Copernicus was a canon at\nFrannbourg and he wrote in Latin. When a century later Galileo, who\nwas not identified with the clergy and who on the contrary sought the\nprotection of the secular authorities, professed publicly, at Venice\nand Florence, the theories of Copernicus, the Vatican stretched out\nits terrible hand over him and forced the illustrious old man to deny\nhis scientific belief. Even after the crisis of protestantism, the\nchurch preserved its liberality toward the scientists who belonged\nto it. Mersenne, a monk of the order of the Minimes, one of the\ngreat geometers of the seventeenth century, a precursor and friend\nof Descartes, corresponded freely with Hobbes, the father of modern\nmaterialism; the notes of the French edition of \"De Cive\" contain\nfragments of this correspondence.\n\nThe church, in keeping up this liberal conduct, may have been animated\nby a disinterested love of pure science, but what chiefly concerned\nher was the interest of her dominancy; she wished to monopolize the\nintellectuals and science, just as in the old theocratic Egypt the\npriests had done to whom the Greek thinkers resorted in search of the\nfirst elements of science and philosophy.\n\nIt would be insulting capitalism to attribute to it a disinterested\nlove of science, which from its point of view has but one reason for\nexistence, that of utilizing natural forces to the enhancement of\nits wealth. It cares nothing for pure speculation and it is by way\nof self-defence that it allows its scientists to devote their mental\nenergy to theoretic researches instead of exhausting it on practical\napplications. This contempt for pure speculation is shown under a\nphilosophic form in the positivism of Auguste Comte, who embodies so\nwell the narrowness of the groveling spirit of capitalism.\n\nBut if science apart from its industrial applications does not interest\nthe bourgeoisie their solicitude for the intellectuals takes on none\nof the forms which we saw in that of the church, and nowhere is their\nindifference to them better shown than in the relative position of\nmaterial property and of intellectual property before the law.\n\nMaterial property, whatever its origin, is by capitalist law a thing\neternal; it is forever assured to its possessor; it is handed down from\nfather to son to the end of the centuries, and no civil or political\npower may lay upon it a sacrilegious hand. We have lately seen a\ncharacteristic example of this inviolability of material property.\n\nThe keeper of the signal station at Durban transmitted to the Boers\nheliographic dispatches informing them regarding the ships which\nentered the harbor, the men, the horses and the munitions of war which\nthey transported. His treason brought him 125,000 francs, which, like\nan intelligent capitalist, he deposited in the bank. The English\nmilitary authorities seized the traitor, condemned him and shot him,\nbut they respected his property so honorably acquired, and his widow\nand son are now its legitimate possessors. The law, apart from certain\nvariations, being the same in all capitalist countries, things go on in\nFrance as in England. No authority could lay hand on the property of\nBazaine, nor make De Lesseps, Cottu and their families disgorge the\nmillions artfully extracted from the \"lambs\" on Panama canal stock.\n\nThis legal sanctity of property is a new thing, in France it dates\nfrom the revolution of 1789. The old regime, which had small respect\nfor this sort of property, authorized the confiscation of the property\nof those legally condemned, and the abolition of confiscation is one\nof the first reforms demanded in the petitions of Paris and several\nprovincial cities to the states general. Capitalism, by forbidding the\nconfiscation of property obtained by fraudulent and infamous means,\nproclaims that the source of its fortune is quite as fraudulent and\ninfamous as that of criminals and traitors.\n\nCapitalist law has none of these amenities for intellectual property.\nLiterary and artistic property such as the law protects at all has but\na precarious life, limited to the life of the author and a certain time\nafter his death\u2014fifty years according to the latest legislation; that\ntime passed, it lapses into common property; for example, beginning\nwith March of this year, any publisher has the right to bring out for\nhis own profit the works of Balzac, the genius of romantic literature.\n\nLiterary property, though a matter of interest to publishers, who\nare certainly few in number, brings no benefit to the mass of the\ncapitalist class, but not so with property in inventions, which is of\nprime importance to all the manufacturing and mercantile capitalists.\nConsequently over it the law extends no protection. The inventor, if he\nwishes to defend his intellectual property against capitalist pirates,\nmust begin by buying that right, taking out a patent, which he must\nrenew every year; on the day he misses a payment, his intellectual\nproperty becomes the lawful prey of the robbers of capitalism. Even if\nhe pays, he can secure that right only for a time; in France, fourteen\nyears. And during these few years, not long enough generally to get\nhis invention fully introduced into practical industry, it is he, the\ninventor, who at his own expense has to set in motion the machinery of\nthe law against the capitalist pirates who rob him.\n\nThe trade-mark, which is a capitalistic property that never required\nany intellectual effort, is on the contrary indefinitely protected by\nlaw like material property.\n\nIt is with reluctance that the capitalist class has granted the\ninventor the right of defending his intellectual property, for by\nvirtue of its position as the ruling class it regards itself as\nentitled to the fruits of intellectual labor as well as of manual\nlabor; just as the feudal lord asserted his right of possession over\nthe property of his serfs. The history of the inventors of our century\nis the monstrous story of their spoliation by the capitalists; it is a\nlong and melancholy roll of martyrs. The inventor, by the very fact of\nhis genius, is condemned with his family to ruin and suffering.\n\nIt is not only inventions requiring long and laborious study, heavy\noutlay for their completion and long time for their introduction, that\nplunge the inventor into the inferno of poverty; this is equally true\nof inventions that are most simple, most immediately applicable and\nmost fertile in rich results. I will mention but one example: there\nlately died at Paris in extreme poverty a man whose invention saves\nmillions of francs a year to the railroads and mining companies;\nhe had discovered a way to utilize the mountains of coal dust that\nencumbered the neighborhood of wharfs and mines by converting it into\n\"briquettes,\" such as are today in common use for fuel.\n\nThe capitalist bourgeoisie, the most revolutionary class that ever\noppressed human societies, cannot increase its wealth without\ncontinuously revolutionizing the means of production, continuously\nincorporating into its industrial equipment new applications of\nmechanics, chemistry and physics. Its thirst for inventions is so\ninsatiable that it creates factories for inventions. Certain American\ncapitalists united in constructing for Edison at Menlo Park the most\nwonderful laboratory in the world, and in putting at his disposal\ntrained scientists, chosen workmen, and the ordinary materials\nnecessary to make and keep on making inventions which the capitalists\npatent, exploit or sell. Edison, who is himself a shrewd business man,\nhas taken care to secure for himself a part of the benefits brought by\nthe Menlo Park inventions.\n\nBut not all inventors are able like Edison to dictate terms to the\ncapitalists who equip invention factories. The Thompson-Houston Company\nat Paris and Siemens at London and Berlin,[32] in connection with\ntheir plants for turning out electrical machinery, have laboratories\nwhere ingenious men are kept busy searching out new applications of\nelectricity. At Frankfort the manufactory of aniline dyes, the largest\nin the world, where anti-pyrine, that mineral quinine, was discovered,\nkeeps on its pay roll more than a hundred chemists to discover new\nproducts of coal-tar. Each discovery is at once patented by the house,\nwhich, by way of encouragement, gives a reward to the inventor.\n\nWe may up to a certain point regard all factories and workshops\nas laboratories for inventions, since a considerable number of\nimprovements in machinery have been devised by workmen in the course\nof their work. The inventor having no money to patent and apply his\ndiscovery, the employer takes out the patent in his own name, and in\naccordance with the spirit of capitalist justice, it is he who reaps\nall the benefit. When the government takes it into its head to rewards\ntalent, it is the employer who receives the decoration; the inventive\nworkman, who is not an intellectual, continues to revolve like the\nother machines under the black and greasy number which distinguishes\nhim, and as in this capitalist world he must be content with little, he\nconsoles himself for his poverty by the reflection that his invention\nis bringing wealth and honor to his employer.\n\nThe capitalist class, which to increase its wealth is in pressing need\nof inventions, is in even more imperative need of intellectuals to\nsupervise their application and to direct its industrial machinery. The\ncapitalists, before they equipped invention factories, had organized\nfactories to turn out intellectuals. Dollfus, Scherer-Kestner and\nother employes of Alsace, the most intelligent, most philanthropic\nand consequently the heaviest exploiters in France before the war,\nhad founded with their spare pennies at Mulhouse, schools of design,\nof chemistry and of physics, where the brightest children of their\nworkmen were instructed gratis, in order that they might always have\nat hand and at reasonable figure the intellectual capacities required\nfor carrying on their industries. Twenty years ago the directors of the\nMulhouse school persuaded the municipal council of Paris to establish\nthe city school of chemistry and physics. At the beginning, whether\nit is still the case I do not know, the pupils were recruited in the\ncommon schools, they received a higher education, gratis, a dinner at\nnoon at the school, and fifty francs a month to indemnify the parents\nfor the loss from the fact that their sons were not in the workshop.\n\nOn the platform of the constituent assembly of 1790 the Marquis of\nFoucault could declare that to be a laborer it was not necessary to\nknow how to read and write. The necessities of industrial production\ncompel the capitalist of today to speak in language altogether\ndifferent; his economic interests and not his love of humanity and\nof science force him to encourage and to develop both elementary and\nhigher education.\n\nBut the slave merchants of ancient Rome were, by the same title,\npatrons of education. To the more intelligent of their human\nmerchandise they gave instruction in medicine, philosophy, Greek\nliterature, music, science, etc. The education of the slave enhanced\nhis market value. The slave who was an expert cook brought a better\nfigure than the slave doctor, philosopher or literator. In our days it\nis still so; the big capitalists pay their chief cooks better than the\nstate pays the professors of liberal arts, even though they be members\nof the Institute. But contrary to the practice of the Roman slave\nmerchants, our capitalist class lavishes instruction only in order to\ndepress the selling price of intellectual capacity.\n\nGreek mythology tells how Midas had the gift of turning everything\ninto gold; the capitalist class has a similar property, it transforms\neverything that it touches into merchandise; it has done this for\nintellectual capacities; chemists, engineers and Latin scholars are\nbought like she-asses and guano.\n\nA voice: \"And they buy deputies, too!\"\n\nPeople who have no tallow nor veal nor socks to sell have their\nconscience and their votes; when they are deputies, they are bought.\n\nWhen intellectual capacities become merchandise they have to be treated\nlike other merchandise, and they are. When there are many oysters in\nthe market the price of oysters goes down, but when the arrivals are\nscarce the price goes up. When chemists and engineers are plenty on the\nlabor market, the price of inventors and of chemists goes down. Now\nthat the Central School and the School of Physics and Chemistry turn\nout yearly upon the pavements of Paris chemists by the dozen, their\nprice has considerably gone down. Twenty years ago the capitalist paid\na chemist reasonably, he gave him $100 to $120 a month and engaged him\nby the year. The employers whose regard for an employee is measured by\nwhat they have to pay him, were full of politeness and consideration\nfor their chemists who cost so dear. But since they have been abundant,\ntheir price has fallen to $40 and $30 a month; in the north they are\nnot engaged by the year but for the sugar season, which lasts three or\nfour months, at the end of which they are discharged with the workmen.\nGo and shift for yourself, says the employer. Next fall when the beets\ncome I know I shall find chemists to superintend making them into\nsugar.\n\nThe chemists are not exceptional; you know only too well that in all\nbranches there is an over-production of intellectuals, and that when\na place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer themselves to fill it; and\nit is this pressure which permits the capitalists to lower the price\nof the intellectuals and to put it even below the wage of the manual\nlaborer.\n\nPoverty is harder for the intellectual than for the workingman; it\nbruises him morally and physically. The workingman, enduring hardships\nfrom childhood and knocking about the street and the shops, is\naccustomed to enduring the troubles of life; the intellectual, brought\nup in a hot-house, has the life bleached out of him by the shadow of\nthe college walls, his nervous system is over-developed and takes on an\nunhealthy impressionability. What the workingman endures thoughtlessly\nis to him a painful shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths\nof his moral being by the exigencies of a wage-worker's life. With the\nsame or even a higher wage the intellectual is in a worse economic\ncondition than the laborer, for the latter may dress as cheaply as he\nlikes, but the former, if only not to offend the eye of his employer\nand his chiefs with whom he is brought in contact is obliged to dress\nexpensively and even elegantly. He must save on his food what he has\nto spend on his clothing.\n\nThe capitalists have degraded the intellectuals below the economic\nlevel of the manual laborers. This is their reward for having so\nmagnificently prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution of the\neighteenth century.\n\nJaures in his preface to the Socialist History of France says that\n\"the intellectual bourgeoisie, offended by a brutal and commercial\nsociety and disenchanted with the bourgeois power, is rallying to the\nsupport of socialism.\" Unfortunately nothing could be less exact. This\ntransformation of the intellectual faculties into merchandise, which\nought to have filled the intellectuals with wrath and indignation,\nleaves them indifferent. Never would the free citizen of the ancient\nrepublics of Athens and Rome have submitted to such degradation. The\nfree man who sells his work, says Cicero, lowers himself to the rank\nof the slaves. Socrates and Plato were indignant against the Sophists\nwho required pay for their philosophic teaching, for to Socrates and\nPlato thought was too noble a thing to be bought and sold like carrots\nand shoes. Even the French clergy of 1789 resented as a mortal insult\nthe proposition to pay a salary for worship. But our intellectuals are\naccustoming themselves to such degradation.\n\nSpurred on by the mercantile passion, they are never better satisfied\nwith themselves or with society than when they succeed in selling\ntheir intellectual merchandise at a good price; they have even come\nto the point of making its selling price the measure of its value.\nZola, who is one of the most distinguished representatives of literary\nintellectualism, estimates the artistic value of a novel by the number\nof editions sold. To sell their intellectual merchandise has become\nin them such an all-absorbing principle that if one speaks to them of\nsocialism, before they inquire into its theories, they ask whether in\nthe socialistic society intellectual labor will be paid for and whether\nit will be rewarded equally with manual labor.\n\nImbeciles! they have eyes but they see not that it is the capitalist\nbourgeoisie which establishes that degrading equality: and to increase\nits wealth degrades intellectual labor to the point of paying it at a\nlower rate than manual labor.\n\nWe should have to put off the triumph of socialism not to the year\n2,000 but to the end of the world if we had to wait upon the delicate,\nshrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the intellectuals. The\nhistory of the century is at hand to teach us just how much we have a\nright to expect from these gentlemen.\n\nSince 1789 governments of the most diverse and opposed character have\nsucceeded each other in France; and always, without hesitation, the\nintellectuals have hastened to offer their devoted services. I am not\nmerely speaking of those two-for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up\nthe newspapers, the parliaments and the economic associations; but I\nmean the scientists, the university professors, the members of the\nInstitute; the higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow the\nknee.\n\nPrinces of science, who ought to have conversed on equal terms with\nkings and emperors, have marketed their glory to buy offices and favors\nfrom ephemeral ministers. Cuvier, one of the mightiest geniuses of the\nmodern era, whom the revolution took from the household of a nobleman\nto make of him at twenty-five years one of the Museum professors,\nCuvier took the oath of allegiance and served with fidelity the\nRepublic, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis Philippe, the last\nof whom created him a peer of France to reward him for his career of\nservility.\n\nTo devote one's self to all governments without distinction is not\nenough. Pasteur placed his glorious name at the service of the\nfinanciers, who placed him in the administrative council of the Credit\nFoncier, side by side with Jules Simon, with dukes and counts, with\nsenators, deputies and ex-ministers, in order to entrap the \"lambs.\"\nWhen De Lesseps was equipping his colossal swindle of the Panama canal,\nhe enrolled the intellectuals of the Institute, of the French Academy,\nof literature, of the clergy, of all the circles of higher life.\n\nIt is not in the circle of the intellectuals, degraded by centuries\nof capitalist oppression, that we must seek examples of civic courage\nand moral dignity. They have not even the sense of professional\nclass-consciousness. At the time of the Dreyfus affair, a certain\nminister discharged, as if he had been a mere prison guard, one of the\nprofessors of chemistry in the Polytechnic school who had had the rare\ncourage to give public expression to his opinion. When in a factory the\nemployer dismisses a workman in too arbitrary a fashion, his comrades\ngrumble, and sometimes quit work, even though misery and hunger await\nthem in the street.\n\nAll his colleagues in the Polytechnic school bowed their heads in\nsilence; each one crouched in self-regarding fear, and what is still\nmore characteristic, not a single partisan of Dreyfus in the Society\nof the Rights of Man or in the ranks of the press raised a voice to\nremind them of the idea of professional solidarity. The intellectuals,\nwho on all occasions display their transcendental ethics, have still a\nlong road to travel before they reach the moral plane of the working\nclass and of the socialist party.\n\nThe scientists have not only sold themselves to the governments\nand the financiers; they have also sold science itself to the\ncapitalist-bourgeoisie. When in the eighteenth century there was\nneed to prepare the minds of men for the revolution, by sapping the\nideologic foundations of aristocratic society, then science fulfilled\nits sublime mission of freedom; it was revolutionary; it furiously\nattacked Christianity and the intuitional philosophy. But when the\nvictorious bourgeoisie decided to base its new power on religion, it\ncommanded its scientists, its philosophers and its men of letters to\nraise up what they had overthrown; they responded to the need with\nenthusiasm. They reconstructed what they had demolished; they proved\nby scientific, sentimental and romantic argument the existence of God\nthe father, of Jesus the son and of Mary the virgin mother. I do not\nbelieve history offers a spectacle equal to that presented in the first\nyears of the nineteenth century by the philosophers, the scientists\nand the literary men, who from revolutionaries and materialists\nsuddenly transformed themselves into reactionaries, intuitionalists and\ncatholics.\n\nThis backward movement still continues; when Darwin published his\nOrigin of Species, which took away from God his role of creator in the\norganic world, as Franklin had despoiled him of his thunderbolt, we\nsaw the scientists, big and little, university professors and members\nof the Institute, enrolling themselves under the orders of Flourens,\nwho for his own part had at least his eighty years for an excuse,\nthat they might demolish the Darwinian theory, which was displeasing\nto the government and hurtful to religious beliefs. The intellectuals\nexhibited that painful spectacle in the fatherland of Lamark and of\nGeoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the creators of the evolution theory, which\nDarwin completed and made proof against criticism.\n\nToday, now that the clerical anxiety is somewhat appeased, the\nscientists venture to profess the evolution theory, which they never\nopposed without a protest from their scientific conscience, but they\nturn it against socialism so as to keep in the good graces of the\ncapitalists. Herbert Spencer, Haeckel and the greatest men in the\nschool of Darwinism demonstrate that the classification of individuals\ninto rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners,\nis the necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature, instead of\nbeing the fulfillment of the will and the justice of God. Natural\nselection, they say, which has differentiated the organs of the human\nbody, has forever fixed the ranks and the functions of the social body.\nThey have, through servility, even lost the logical spirit. They are\nindignant against Aristotle because he, being unable to conceive of the\nabolition of slavery, declared that the slave was marked off by nature;\nbut they fail to see that they are saying something equally monstrous\nwhen they affirm that natural selection assigns to each one his place\nin society.\n\nThus it is no longer God or religion which condemn the workers to\nwretchedness\u2014it is science. Never was there an intellectual bankruptcy\nmore fraudulent.\n\nM. Bruneti\u00e8res, one of those intellectuals who do not feel their\ndegradation and who joyfully fulfill their servile task, was right when\nhe proclaimed the failure of science. He does not suspect how colossal\nthis bankruptcy is.\n\nScience, the great emancipator, that has tamed the powers of nature,\nand might in so doing have freed man from toil to allow him to develop\nfreely his faculties of mind and body; science, become the slave of\ncapital, has done nothing but supply means for capitalists to increase\ntheir wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the working class.\nIts most wonderful applications to industrial technique have brought to\nthe children, the women and the men of the working class nothing but\nover-work and misery!\n\nThe middle-class revolutionary party of 1789 cried out in horror and\nindignation against the lords, who through the long summer nights\ncompelled their serfs to beat the ponds near their castles in order\nto keep the frogs from croaking. What would they say if they saw what\nwe see? Improvements in lighting date from the capitalist period. At\nthe end of the last century Argant and Carcel invented the lamp with\na double current of air, at the beginning of this Chevreul invented\nthe stearic candle, then gas was discovered, then petroleum, then\nthe electric light, turning night into day. What benefits have these\nscientific improvements in lighting brought to the workers? They have\nenabled employers to impose night work upon millions of proletarians,\nnot in the midsummer nights and in the balmy air of the fields, but\nthrough nights of summer and winter in the poisonous air of the\nworkshops and factories. The industrial applications of mechanics\nand chemistry have transformed the happy and stimulating work of the\nartisan into a torture which exhausts and kills the proletarian.\n\nWhen science subdued the forces of nature to the service of man, ought\nshe not to have given leisure to the workers that they might develop\nthemselves physically and intellectually; ought she not to have changed\nthe \"vale of tears\" into a dwelling place of peace and joy? I ask you,\nhas not science failed in her mission of emancipation?\n\nThe obtuse capitalist himself is conscious of this failure; so he\ndirects his economists and his other intellectual domestics to prove to\nthe working class that it has never been so happy and that its lot goes\non improving.\n\nThe economists, considering that to deserve the good graces of\nthe capitalists it was not enough to falsify economic facts, are\nsuppressing economic science, which is becoming dangerous for the\ndomination of capital. Ever since Adam Smith and Ricardo they go on\nrepeating the same errors regarding value, regarding the productivity\nof the predatory and idle capitalist, compiling facts and arranging\nstatistics which guide the capitalists in their speculations; but they\ndare not draw conclusions and build systems with the materials that\nthey have accumulated. When Ricardo wrote, the phenomena of modern\nproduction were beginning their evolution, their communist tendencies\ncould not be perceived, one could then study them without taking sides\nand could build up a science without fear of wounding the interests\nof capital. But now that they have arrived at their full development\nand show clearly their communal tendencies, the economists shut their\neyes that they may not see, and they wage war against the principles\nestablished by Ricardo, which after having served as a basis for the\nold bourgeois economy, have become the points of departure of the\nMarxian economy. To take a whack at the socialist theories and put\nthemselves at the service of the financiers, like barkers and fakirs of\ntheir bogus goods, are the intellectual functions of the economists.\nLatterly the owners of silver mines have enlisted them to sing the\npraises of bimetallism, while Cecil Rhodes, Barnato, Beit, Robbers &\nCompany called them in to boom the Transvaal gold mines.\n\nThe intellectuals of art and literature, like the jesters of the old\nfeudal courts, are the entertainers of the class which pays them. To\nsatisfy the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their leisure\u2014this\nis their sole artistic aim. The men of letters are so well broken to\nthis servile duty that they do not understand the spirit of Moli\u00e8re,\ntheir great ancestor, all the while that they adore the letter of his\nworks. Moli\u00e8re is the writer most written about in France; learned\nmen have devoted themselves to gathering up the scattered fragments\nof his erratic and careless youth, to fixing the date and the hour\nof the representations of his comedies; if they had unearthed an\nauthentic piece of excrement from him they would have set it in gold\nand would kiss it devotedly, but the spirit of Moli\u00e8re escapes them.\nYou have read, as I have, many critical analyses of his dramas. Did\nyou ever find one of them which brought out in clear light the role of\nthis militant playwright, who more than a century before Beaumarchais\nand before revolution, at Versailles, in the very court of the great\nmonarch, thrust at the nobility of the court and of the provinces,\nattacked the church before which Descartes and the rest trembled,\nhurled his jests at Aristotle, the unquestioned authority of La\nSorbonne, that secular church; who ridiculed the Pyrrhonism which the\nneo-Kantians of our own days oppose to the materialist philosophy of\nMarxian socialism, but which then was the weapon of the catholics, of\nPascal, of Huet, the bishop of Avranches, to strike and to overthrow\nhuman reason, with its impudent desire or reaching knowledge by its\nown strength. Pitiful, wretched reason, clamored these Kantians before\nKant, you can know nothing without the aid of faith! Moli\u00e8re is unique\nin European literature, you must go back to the epoch of glorious\nAthens to find his counterpart in Aristophanes.\n\nIf the bourgeois critics timidly and unintelligently mention this side\nof Moli\u00e8re, there is another of which their ignorance is complete.\nMoli\u00e8re was the man of his class, the champion of the bourgeois class.\nLike the socialists who say to the workers, \"Break with the liberal\nbourgeoisie, which deceives you when it does not slaughter you;\" he\ncried to the Georges Dandins and to the \"bourgeois noblemen,\" \"Avoid\nthe nobles like pests; they deceive you, mock you and rob you.\"\n\nThe great capitalist bourgeoisie does not choose to work, either\nwith its hands or its brain; it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to\npractice lewdness and to look dignified in its beastly and cumbersome\nluxury; it does not even deign to occupy itself with politics; men like\nRothschild, De Lesseps, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, do not run\nfor office; they find it more economical to buy the deputies than the\nvoters, and more convenient to put their clerks into the ministries\nthan to take part in parliamentary struggles. The big capitalists\ninterest themselves only in the operations of the stock exchange, which\nafford the delights of gambling; they dignify these by the pompous name\nof \"speculations,\"\u2014a word formerly reserved for the highest processes\nof philosophical or mathematical thought. The capitalists are getting\nthemselves replaced in the supervision and management of the great\nindustrial and commercial enterprises by intellectuals, who carry\nthem on, and usually are well paid for doing so. These intellectuals\nof industry and politics, the privileged portion of the wage class,\nimagine that they are an integral part of the capitalist class, while\nthey are only its servants; on every occasion they take up its defense\nagainst the working class, which finds in them its worst enemies.\n\nIntellectuals of this description can never be led into socialism;\ntheir interests are too closely bound up with those of the capitalist\nclass for them to detach themselves and turn against it. But below\nthese favored few there is a swarming and famishing throng of\nintellectuals whose lot grows worse in proportion to the increase of\ntheir numbers. These intellectuals belong to socialism. They ought\nto be already in our ranks. Their education ought to have given\nthem the necessary intelligence to deal with social problems, but it\nis this very education which obstructs their hearing and keeps them\naway from socialism. They think their education confers on them a\nsocial privilege, that it will permit them to get through the world\nby themselves, each making his own way in life by crowding out his\nneighbor or standing on the shoulders of everyone else. They imagine\nthat their poverty is transitory and that they only need a stroke of\ngood luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think,\nis the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them\nthe grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them\nby the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or\nintellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance,\nthat it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more\ncapitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual\nraising himself out of his class go on diminishing.\n\nAnd while they build castles in Spain, capital crushes them, as it has\ncrushed the small merchants and the small manufacturers, who thought\nthey, too, with free credit and a little luck, might become first-class\ncapitalists, whose names should be written in the Great Book of the\nPublic Debt.\n\nThe intellectuals, in all that has to do with the understanding of\nthe social movement, do not rise above the intellectual level of\nthose little bourgeois who scoffed so fiercely at the bunglers of\n1830 and who, after being ruined and merged in the proletariat, none\nthe less continue to detest socialism; to such a degree were their\nheads perverted by the religion of property. The intellectuals, whose\nbrains are stuffed with all the prejudices of the bourgeois class, are\ninferior to those little bourgeois of 1830 and 1848 who at least were\nnot afraid of gunpowder; they have not their spirit of combativeness,\nthey are true imbeciles,\u2014if we restore to this word its original Latin\nmeaning of unsuited for war. Without resistance they endure rebuffs and\nwrongs and they do not think of uniting, of organizing themselves to\ndefend their interests and give battle to capital on the economic field.\n\nThe intellectual proletariat as we know it is a recent growth, it has\nespecially developed in the last forty years. When after the amnesty of\nthe condemned of the Commune, we began again the socialist propaganda,\nbelieving that it would be easy to draw the intellectuals into the\nmovement we took up our dwelling in their cultured Latin quarter,\nGuesde taking up his residence in the Rue de la Pitie, Vaillant in the\nRue Monge and I in the Boulevard de Port Royal. We became acquainted\nwith hundreds of young men, students of law, of medicines, of the\nsciences, but you can count on your fingers those whom we brought into\nthe socialist camp. Our ideas attracted them one day, but the next day\nthe wind blew from another quarter and turned their heads.\n\nAn honorable merchant of Bordeaux, a prominent member of the municipal\ncouncil, said in the time of the empire to my father, who was disturbed\nover my socialism:\n\n\"Friend Lafargue, you must let youth take its course; I was a socialist\nwhen I studied at Paris, I was connected with the secret societies\nand I took part in the movement for demanding of Louis Philippe the\npardon of Barbes.\" The young men of our age turn quickly, let them get\nback to their homes and they develop prominent abdomens and become\nreactionaries.\n\nWe welcomed joyfully the entrance of Jaures into socialism; we thought\nthat the new form which he brought to our propaganda would make it\npenetrate into circles that we had not been able to touch. He has\nin fact made a decided impression on the university circle, and we\nowe it in part to him that the nurslings of the Ecole Normale have\nideas regarding the social movement which are a little less absurd\nand formless than those with which their learning and intelligence\nhave hitherto been contented. Lately, joining forces with the radical\npoliticians who had lost their working-class following, they have\ninvaded the socialist party. Their souls overflow with the purest\nintentions; if their peaceful habits prevent them from throwing\nthemselves into the conflict, and if their lofty culture forbids them\nto take their place in the ranks of the comrades, they nevertheless\ncondescend to instruct us in ethics, to polish off our ignorance, to\nteach us how to think, to offer us such crumbs of science as we may be\nable to digest, and to direct us; they modestly offer themselves to us\nas leaders and schoolmasters.\n\nThese intellectuals who have spent their youth in the university\nthat they might become experts on exercises, polishers of phrases,\nphilosophers or doctors, imagine one can improvise himself into a\nmaster of the socialist theory by attending a single lecture or by the\ncareless reading of a single pamphlet. Naturalists who had felt the\nneed of painful research to learn the habits of mollusks or of the\npolyps who live in a community on the coral banks, think that they know\nenough to regulate human societies, and that by keeping their stand\non the first steps of the ascending ladder of animal life they can\nthe better discern the human ideal. The philosophers, the moralists,\nthe historians and the politicians have aims equally lofty; they bring\nan abundant supply of ideas and a new method of action to replace the\nimperfect theory and tactics which in all capitalist countries have\nserved to build up socialist parties strong in numbers, unity and\ndiscipline.\n\nThe class struggle is out of fashion, declare these professors of\nsocialism. Can a line of demarcation be drawn between classes? Do not\nthe working people have savings bank accounts of $20, $40 and $100,\nbringing them 50 cents, $1.50 and $3.00 of interest yearly? Is it not\ntrue that the directors and managers of mines, railroads and financial\nhouses are wage-workers, having their functions and duties in the\nenterprises which they manage for the account of capitalists? The\nargument is unanswerable, but by the same token there is no vegetable\nkingdom nor animal kingdom because we can not separate them \"with\nan ax,\" as it were, for the reason that at their points of contact,\nvegetables and animals merge into each other. There is no longer any\nday or any night because the sun does not appear on the horizon at the\nsame moment all over the earth, and because it is day at the antipodes\nwhile it is night here.\n\nThe concentration of capital? A worn-out tune of 1850. The corporations\nby their stocks and bonds parcel out property and distribute it among\nall the citizens. How blinded we were by our sectarianism when we\nthought that this new form of property, essentially capitalistic,\nwas enabling the financiers to plunge their thieving hands into the\nsmallest purses, to extract the last pieces of silver.\n\nThe poverty of the working class! But it is diminishing and soon will\ndisappear through the constant increase of wages, while interest\non money is constantly diminishing; some fine day it will descend\nto zero and the bourgeois will be overjoyed to offer their beloved\ncapital on the altar of socialism. That to-morrow or the day after\nthe capitalist will be forced to work, is the prediction of Mr.\nWaldeck-Rousseau. And there are intellectuals whose condition grows\nworse in proportion as capitalism develops, who are stultified by the\nutterances of the employers to a point where they affirm that the\nposition of wage-workers is improving, and there are intellectuals\nwho assume to possess some knowledge of political economy, who affirm\nthat interest on money is rapidly diminishing. Could these reformers\nof socialism perchance be ignorant that Adam Smith calculated at the\nend of the eighteenth century that 3 per cent was the normal interest\nof capital running no risk, and that the financiers of our own epoch\nconsider that it is still around 3 per cent that the interest rate\nmust fluctuate. If a few years ago this rate seemed to fall below 2\u00bd\nper cent, it has risen today above 3 per cent. Capital is merchandise,\nlike intellectual capacities and carrots; as such it is subject to\nthe fluctuations of supply and demand. It was then more offered than\ndemanded, whereas since the development of the industrial plant of\nRussia, since the opening of China to European exploitation, etc., the\nover-supply of capital has been absorbed and its price rises with its\nscarcity. But the intellectuals have too many trifles to think of and\ntoo many harmonious phrases to construct for giving any thought to\neconomic phenomena. They take for sterling truths all the lies of the\ncapitalists, and repeat with pious conviction the old litanies of the\northodox economic church: \"There are no classes, wealth is coming to be\ndistributed more and more equitably, the workers are growing richer and\nthose living on incomes are growing poorer, and the capitalist society\nis the best of all possible societies; these truths shine forth like\nsuns and none but partisans and mystics can deny them.\"\n\nThese intellectuals propose to modify the tactics as well as the\ntheories of the socialist party; they wish to impose upon it a new\nmethod of action. It must no longer strive to conquer the public powers\nby a great struggle, legal or revolutionary as need may be, but let\nitself be conquered by every ministry of a republican coalition; it is\nno longer to oppose the socialist party to all the bourgeois parties;\nwhat is needed is to put it at the service of the liberal party; we\nmust no longer organize it for the class struggle, but keep it ready\nfor all the compromises of politicians. And to further the triumph of\nthe new method of action, they propose to disorganize the socialist\nparty, to break up its old systems and to demolish the organizations\nwhich for twenty years have labored to give the workers a sense of\ntheir class interests and to group them in a party of economic and\npolitical struggle.\n\nBut the intellectuals will lose their labors; thus far they have only\nsucceeded in drawing closer the ties uniting the socialists of the\ndifferent organizations, and in making themselves ridiculous.\n\nThe intellectuals ought to have been the first of all the various\ngroups to revolt against capitalist society, in which they occupy\na subordinate position so little in keeping with their hopes and\ntheir talents, but they do not even understand it; they have such a\nconfused idea of it that Auguste Comte, Renan, and others more or less\ndistinguished have cherished the dream of reviving for their benefit an\naristocracy copied after the model of the Chinese mandarin system. Such\nan idea is a reflection of past ages in their heads, for nothing is\nin more absolute opposition with the modern social movement than such\npretensions. The intellectuals in previous states of society formed\na world outside and above that of production, having charge only of\neducation, of the direction of religious worship, and of the political\nadministration.\n\nThe mechanic industry of these societies combine in the same producer,\nmanual labor and intellectual labor; it was for example the same\ncabinetmaker who designed and executed the piece of furniture, who\nbought its first material and who even undertook its sale. Capitalist\nproduction has divorced two functions which once were indissolubly\nunited; on the one side it puts the manual workers, who become more\nand more servants of the machine, and on the other the intellectual\nworkers, engineers, chemists, managers, etc. But these two categories\nof workers, however different and contrary they may be in their\neducation and habits, are welded together, to the point that a\ncapitalist industry can not be carried on without manual laborers any\nmore than without intellectual wage-workers.\n\nUnited in production, united under the yoke of capitalist exploitation,\nunited they should be also in revolt against the common enemy. The\nintellectuals, if they understood their own real interests would come\nin crowds to socialism, not through philanthropy, not through pity for\nthe miseries of the workers, not through affectation and snobbery,\nbut to save themselves, to assure the future welfare of their wives\nand children, to fulfill their duty to their class. They ought to be\nashamed of being left behind in the social battle by their comrades in\nthe manual category. They have many things to teach them, but they have\nstill much to learn from them; the workingmen have a practical sense\nsuperior to theirs, and have given proof of an instinctive intuition\nof the communist tendencies of modern capitalism which is lacking to\nthe intellectuals, who have only been able by a conscious mental effort\nto arrive at this conception. If only they had understood their own\ninterests, they would long since have turned against the capitalist\nclass the education which it has generously distributed in order\nbetter to exploit them; they would have utilized their intellectual\ncapacities, which are enriching their masters, as so many improved\nweapons to fight capitalism and to conquer the freedom of their class,\nthe wage-working class.\n\nCapitalist production, which has overthrown the old conditions of life\nand of work, has elaborated new forms, which already can be discerned\nwithout supernatural vision, but which to the intellectuals remain\nsealed under seven seals. One of the leading lights of intellectualism,\nM. Durkheim, in his book, \"The Division of Labor,\" which made some\nnoise in university circles, can not conceive of society except on\nthe social pattern of ancient Egypt, each laborer remaining, his life\nthrough, penned up in one single trade. However, unless one is so\nunfortunate as to be affected by the hopeless near-sightedness of the\nEcole Normale, one can not help seeing that the machine is suppressing\ntrades, one after the other, in a way to let only one survive, that\nof the machinist, and that when it has finished its revolutionary\nwork which the socialists will complete by revolutionizing capitalist\nsociety, the producer of the communist society will plow and sow with\nthe machine today, will spin, will turn wood or polish steel to-morrow,\nand will exercise in turn all the trades to the greater profit of his\nhealth and his intelligence.\n\nThe industrial applications of mechanics, chemistry and physics,\nwhich, monopolized by capital, oppress the worker, will, when they\nshall be common property, emancipate man from toil and give him leisure\nand liberty.\n\nMechanical production, which under capitalist direction can only buffet\nthe worker back and forth from periods of over-work to periods of\nenforced idleness, will when developed and regulated by a communist\nadministration, require from the producer, to provide for the normal\nneeds of society, only a maximum day of two or three hours in the\nworkshop, and when this time of necessary social labor is fulfilled he\nwill be able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual pleasures of\nlife.\n\nThe artist then will paint, will sing, will dance, the writer will\nwrite, the musician will compose operas, the philosopher will build\nsystems, the chemist will analyze substances not to gain money, to\nreceive a salary, but to deserve applause, to win laurel wreaths, like\nthe conquerors at the Olympic games, but to satisfy their artistic and\nscientific passion; for one does not drink a glass of champagne or kiss\nthe woman he loves for the benefit of the gallery. The artist and the\nscientist may then repeat the enthusiastic words of Kepler, that hero\nof science: \"The elector of Saxony with all his wealth can not equal\nthe pleasure I have felt in composing the Mysterium Cosmographicum.\"\n\nWill not the intellectuals end by hearing the voice of the socialist\ncalling them to the rescue, to emancipate science and art from the\ncapitalist yoke, to liberate thought from the slavery of commercialism?\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[31] Ever since the French Revolution the law has required the words\n\"Libert\u00e9. Egalit\u00e9. Fraternit\u00e9.\" to be placed over the door of every\npublic building in France.\u2014Translator.\n\n[32] It is a well-known fact that in the American establishments of\nthese and similar companies each workman before receiving employment\nmust sign papers transferring to the corporation the title to all\ninventions made by him while in its service.\u2014Translator.\n\n\n\n\nTHE BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM\n\n\nThe nineteenth century was the century of capitalism. Capitalism\nfilled that century to overflowing with its commerce, its industry,\nits manners, its fashions, its literature, its art, its science,\nits philosophy, its religion, its politics and its civil code, more\nuniversal than the laws imposed by Rome upon the nations of the ancient\nworld. The capitalist movement, starting from England, the United\nStates and France, has shaken the foundations of Europe and of the\nworld. It has forced the old feudal monarchies of Austria and Germany\nand the barbaric despotism of Russia to put themselves in line; and in\nthese last days it has gone into the extreme East, into Japan, where\nit has overthrown the feudal system and implanted the industry and the\npolitics of capitalism.\n\nCapitalism has taken possession of our planet; its fleets bring\ntogether the continents which oceans had separated; its railroads,\nspanning mountains and deserts, furrow the earth; the electric wires,\nthe nervous system of the globe, bind all nations together, and their\npalpitations reverberate in the great centers of population. Now for\nthe first time there is a contemporary history of the world. Events in\nAustralia, the Transvaal, China, are known in London, Paris, New York,\nat the moment they are brought about, precisely as if they happened in\nthe outskirts of the city where the news is published.\n\nCivilized nations live off the products of the whole earth. Egypt,\nIndia, Louisiana, furnish the cotton, Australia the wool, Japan the\nsilk, China the tea, Brazil the coffee, New Zealand and the United\nStates the meat and grain. The capitalist carries in his stomach and on\nhis back the spoils of the universe.\n\nThe study of natural phenomena has undergone an unprecedented, an\nunheard-of, development. New sciences, geology, chemistry, physics,\netc., have arisen. The industrial application of the forces of nature\nand of the discoveries of science has taken on a still more startling\ndevelopment; some of the geometrical discoveries of the scientists\nof Alexandria, two thousand years old, have for the first time been\nutilized.\n\nThe production of machine industry can provide for all demand and more.\nThe mechanical application of the forces of nature has increased man's\nproductive forces tenfold, a hundredfold. A few hours' daily labor,\nfurnished by the able-bodied members of the nation, would produce\nenough to satisfy the material and intellectual needs of all.\n\nBut what has come of the colossal and wonderful development of science,\nindustry and commerce in the nineteenth century? Has it made humanity\nstronger, healthier, happier? Has it given leisure to the producers?\nHas it brought comfort and contentment to the people?\n\nNever has work been so prolonged, so exhausting, so injurious to man's\nbody and so fatal to his intelligence. Never has the industrial labor\nwhich undermines health, shortens life and starves the intellect been\nso general, been imposed on such ever-growing masses of laborers. The\nmen, women and children of the proletariat are bent under the iron yoke\nof machine industry. Poverty is their reward when they work, starvation\nwhen they lose their jobs.\n\nIn former stages of society, famine appeared only when the earth\nrefused her harvests. In capitalist society, famine sits at the hearth\nof the working class when granaries and cellars burst with the fruits\nof the earth, and when the market is gorged with the products of\nindustry.\n\nAll the toil, all the production, all the suffering of the working\nclass has but served to heighten its physical and mental destitution,\nto drag it down from poverty into wretchedness.\n\nCapitalism, controlling the means of production and directing the\nsocial and political life of a century of science and industry, has\nbecome bankrupt. The capitalists have not even proved competent, like\nthe owners of chattel slaves, to guarantee to their toilers the work to\nprovide their miserable livelihood; capitalism massacred them when they\ndared demand the right to work\u2014a slave's right.[33]\n\nThe capitalist class has also made a failure of itself. It has seized\nupon the social wealth to enjoy it, and never was the ruling class more\nincapable of enjoyment. The newly rich, those who have built up their\nfortunes by accumulating the filchings from labor, live like strangers\nin the midst of luxury and artistic treasures, with which they surround\nthemselves through a foolish vanity, to pay homage to their millions.\n\nThe leading capitalists, the millionaires and billionaires, are\nsad specimens of the human race, useless and hurtful. The mark of\ndegeneracy is upon them. Their sickly offspring are old at birth. Their\norgans are sapped with diseases. Exquisite meats and wines load down\ntheir tables, but the stomach refuses to digest them; women expert in\nlove perfume their couches with youth and beauty, but their senses are\nbe-numbed. They own palatial dwellings in enchanting sites, and they\nhave no eyes, no feeling for joyful nature, with its eternal youth\nand change. Sated and disgusted with everything, they are followed\neverywhere by ennui as by their shadows. They yawn at rising and when\nthey go to bed; they yawn at their fests and at their orgies. They\nbegan yawning in their mother's womb.\n\nThe pessimism which, in the wake of capitalist property, made its\nappearance in ancient Greece six centuries before Jesus Christ, and\nwhich has since formed the foundation of the moral and religious\nphilosophy of the capitalist class, became the leading characteristic\nof the philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century. The\npessimism of Theognis sprang from the uncertainties and vicissitudes of\nlife in the Greek cities, torn by the perpetual wars between rich and\npoor; the pessimism of the capitalist is the bitter fruit of satiety,\nennui and the impoverishment of the blood.\n\nThe capitalist class is falling into its second childhood; its\ndecreptitude appears in its literature, now returning to its\nstarting point. Romantic literature, the literary form proper to the\ncapitalist class, which started out with the romantic Christianity\nof Chateaubriand, is returning to the same point, after passing\nthrough the historical novel and the character novel. (Witness in this\ncountry the immense sale of \"Ben Hur\" and its imitators.\u2014Translator.)\nCapitalism, which in its virile and combative youth in the eighteenth\ncentury had wished to emancipate itself from Christianity, resigns\nitself in its old age to practices of the grossest superstition.\n\nThe capitalist class, bankrupt, old, useless and hurtful, has finished\nits historic mission; it persists as ruling class only through its\nacquired momentum. The proletariat of the twentieth century will\nexecute the decree of history; will drive it from its position of\nsocial control. Then the stupendous work in science and industry\naccomplished by civilized humanity, at the price of such toil and\nsuffering, will engender peace and happiness; then will this vale of\ntears be transformed into an earthly paradise.\n\n\nFOOTNOTE:\n\n[33] I allude to the Days of June, 1848. The Insurgents demanded the\n\"Right to Work.\"\n\n\n\n\nTHE WOMAN QUESTION\n\n\nThe bourgeois has thought and still thinks that woman ought to\nremain at home and devote her activity to supervising and directing\nthe housekeeping, caring for her husband, and manufacturing and\nnourishing children. Even Xenophon, at the time when the bourgeoisie\nwas newly born and was taking its shape in ancient society, traced\nthe main outlines of this ideal of woman. But if through the course\nof centuries, this ideal may have appeared reasonable, because it\ncorresponded to economic conditions which prevailed, it is no longer\nanything more than an ideological survival, since these conditions have\nceased to exist.\n\nThe domestication of woman presupposes that she fulfills in the\nhousehold certain numerous functions which absorb all her energy; now,\nthe most important and the most exacting of these domestic labors\u2014the\nspinning of wool and linen, the cutting and making up of clothing,\nlaundry work, baking, etc.,\u2014are carried on by capitalistic industry.\nIt furthermore presupposes that man by his contribution to the family\ncapital and his earnings provides for the material needs of the\nfamily; now, among the comfortable bourgeoisie, marriage is as much an\nassociation of capitals[34] as a union of persons and often the capital\ncontributed by the wife exceeds that of the husband, and in the small\nbourgeoisie the gains of the father of the family have fallen so low\nthat the children,\u2014girls as well as boys,\u2014are compelled to earn their\nliving in business, railroad offices, banks, teaching, civil service\npositions, etc., while it often happens that the young wife continues\nto work outside in order to help out the resources of the housekeeping,\nwhen the earnings of the husband do not suffice to cover the expenses.\n\nThe daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, as well as those\nof the working class, thus enter into competition with their father,\nbrothers and husband. This economic antagonism, which the bourgeoisie\nhad prevented from developing by confining the wife to the family\ndwelling, is becoming general and is intensified in proportion as\ncapitalistic production develops; it invades the fields of the liberal\nprofessions\u2014medicine, law, literature, journalism, the sciences,\netc.,\u2014where man had reserved for himself a monopoly, which he imagined\nwas to be eternal. The laborers, as is always the case, have been the\nfirst to draw the logical consequences of the participation of woman\nin social production; they have replaced the ideal of the artisan,\u2014the\nwife who is nothing but a housekeeper,\u2014by a new ideal,\u2014woman as a\ncompanion in their economic and political struggles for the raising of\nwages and the emancipation of labor.\n\nThe bourgeois has not yet succeeded in understanding that his ideal\nis already long since out of date and that it must be remodeled\nto correspond to the new conditions of the social environment;\nnevertheless since the first half of the nineteenth century the ladies\nof the bourgeoisie have begun to protest against their inferior\nposition in the family, so much the more intolerable in that their\ndowry placed them on a footing of equality with the husband; they\nrebelled against the domestic slavery and the parsimonious life to\nwhich they were condemned, as well as the deprivation of intellectual\nand material enjoyments which was imposed upon them; the bolder ones\nwent so far as to demand free love and to ally themselves with the\nutopian sects which preached the emancipation of woman.[35] The\nphilosophers and the moralists had the simplicity to believe that they\nwould stop the woman movement by opposing to it the sacred interest\nof the family, which they declared could not survive without the\nsubjection of woman to the labors of the household, the sewing on\nof shirt buttons, the mending of hose, etc., her duty was to devote\nherself to these obscure and thankless labors, in order that man\nmight freely unfold and display his brilliant and superior faculties.\nThese same philosophers, who lectured the rebellious ladies on the\ncult of the family, sang the praises of capitalist industry, which,\nby forcing the wife away from the domestic hearth and her child's\ncradle to condemn her to the forced labor of the factory, destroys the\nworking-class family.\n\nThe bourgeois ladies laughed at the sermons, equally imbecile and\nethical, of these solemn philosophers; they kept on their way and\nattained the end they set for themselves; like the patrician lady of\nancient Rome and the countess of the eighteenth century, they threw\noff the cares of housekeeping and of the nursing of the child upon\nmercenaries, that they might devote themselves wholly to the toilet,\nthat they might be the most luxuriously arrayed dolls in the capitalist\nworld and in order to make business move. The daughters and wives of\nAmerican plutocracy have attained the extreme limits of this sort of\nemancipation; they are transforming their fathers and husbands into\naccumulators of millions, which they squander madly. Since the toilet\ndoes not exhaust the entire activity of the ladies of capitalism, they\nfind amusement in breaking the marriage contract in order to assert\ntheir independence and improve the race. The Communist Manifesto\nremarks that the innumerable divorce suits in which adultery is alleged\nare indisputable proofs of the respect inspired in the bourgeois of\nboth sexes by the sacred bonds of marriage which the \"licentious\nsocialists\" talk of loosening.\n\nWhen the daughters and wives of the small bourgeoisie, obliged to\nearn their living and to increase the resources of the family, began\nto invade the stores, the offices, the civil service and the liberal\nprofessions, the bourgeois were seized with anxiety for their means\nof existence already so reduced; feminine competition would reduce\nthem still further. The intellectuals who took up the defense of the\nmales, thought it prudent not to start afresh with the ethical sermons\nwhich had miscarried so piteously in the case of the wealthy bourgeois\nladies;\u2014they appealed to science; they demonstrated by reasons which\nwere irrefutable and loftily scientific that woman cannot emerge from\nthe occupations of housekeeping without violating the laws of nature\nand history. They proved to their complete satisfaction that woman\nis an inferior being, incapable of receiving a higher intellectual\neducation and of furnishing the combination of attention, energy and\nagility demanded by the professions in which she was entering into\ncompetition with man. Her brain, less voluminous, less heavy and less\ncomplex than that of man, is a \"child's brain.\" Her less developed\nmuscles have not the strength for attack and for resistance; the\nbones of her forearm, her pelvis, her femur, and in fact all her\nosseous, muscular and nervous system do not permit her to undertake\nmore than the routine of the household. Nature designed her in all her\norganization to be the servant of man, just as the odious god of the\nJews and Christians marked out the race of Ham for slavery.\n\nHistory contributed its startling confirmation of these ultra\nscientific truths; the philosophers and the historians affirmed that\nalways and everywhere the wife, subordinate to the man, had been\nshut up in the house, in the woman's apartments; if such had been her\nlot in the past, such was to be her destiny in the future, was the\npositive declaration of Auguste Comte, the profoundest of bourgeois\nphilosophers. Lombroso, the illustrious comedian, went him one better:\nhe seriously declared that social statistics proclaimed the inferiority\nof woman, since the number of female criminals is below that of male\ncriminals; while buried in these figures, he might have added that the\nstatistics of insanity demonstrate the same inferiority. Thus we see\nthat ethics, anatomy, physiology, social statistics and history riveted\nforever upon woman the chains of domestic servitude.\n\n\nII.\n\nBachofen, Morgan and a crowd of anthropologists have revised the\nopinion of the historians and philosophers upon the role played by\nwoman in the past. They have shown that everywhere the paternal\nfamily, which subordinated woman to man, had been preceded by the\nmaternal family, which gave the first place to woman. The Greek\nlanguage contains the record of her two conditions: while the Spartans,\namong whom matriarchal customs persisted, still continued to call\nher _despoina_, the mistress of the house, the sovereign, the other\nGreeks gave to the wife the name _damar_, the subdued, the vanquished.\nThe Odyssey, in characterizing Nausicaa, says that she is _parthenos\nadmes_, the girl not subdued, that is to say, without a husband,\nwithout a master. The modern expression \"yoke of marriage\" preserves\nthe ancient idea.\n\nHesiod, in opposition to Homer, who tells only of patriarchal customs,\npreserves precious recollections of the matriarchal family; he tells\nus that when it existed man, even if he were a hundred years old,\nlived with his prudent mother,\u2014he was fed in her house like a great\nchild. (Works and Days, V. 129-130.) It was not the woman who then had\nthe \"child's brain\", but the man; everything seems in fact to prove\nthat her intelligence was the first to develop. This intellectual\nsuperiority caused her to be deified before man in the primitive\nreligions of Egypt, the Indies, Asia and Greece, and caused the first\ninventions of the arts and trades, with the exception of metal working,\nto be attributed to goddesses and not to gods. The Muses, originally\nthree in number, were in Greece, even in preference to Apollo, the\ngoddesses of poetry, music and the dance. Isis, \"mother of corn ears\nand lady of bread,\" and Demeter, lawgiver, had taught the Egyptians and\nGreeks the tillage of barley and wheat and made them renounce their\nanthropophagic repasts. The woman appeared to the pre-patriarchal man,\nlike the Germans whom Tacitus knew, as having within herself something\nholy and providential, _aliquid sanctum et providum_ (Germania VIII).\nHer prudence and foresight gave her this divine character. Must we\nconclude that this intellectual superiority, which manifested itself\nwhen the economic environment is rudimentary, is a natural phenomenon?\n\nBut, in any case, it may be asserted that the vitality of woman is\nsuperior to that of man. The life insurance companies of the United\nStates, England and Holland, which do not base their calculation upon\nscientific fairy tales of the intellectuals but upon mortality tables,\npay woman an annuity below that which they give man, because her\nprobabilities of death are less. Here for example is the annuity paid\nfor a capital of $1,000 by American and Dutch companies:[36]\n\n                     New York.        Holland.\n    Age.          Men.    Women.    Men.    Women.\n  50 years      $ 76.47  $ 69.57  $ 76.80  $ 73.60\n  60 years        97.24    88.03    98.50    93.50\n  70 years       134.31   122.48   142.00   136.70\n  80 years       183.95   168.00   222.70   211.70\n\nIt may be objected that man, leading a more active life, is more\nsubject to accidents, diseases, and other causes of death, and that\nconsequently the prolonged life of woman does not prove the higher\nvitality of her organism, but the advantages of a life less subject to\naccident.\n\nThe answer to this objection is found in the statistics of the various\nnations. There is in no country a perfect equilibrium between the\nnumber of women and that of men; for 1,000 men there are in Belgium\n1,005 women, in France 1,014, in England 1,062, in Scotland 1,071 and\nin Norway 1,091. Nevertheless in these countries with the feminine\npreponderance there is an excess of masculine births: of the whole\nof Western Europe for every 1000 girls there are born from 1,040 to\n1,060 boys. If, in spite of this excess of masculine births, more\ngirls survive, it is because the greater mortality of the boys shows\nthe balance in favor of the girls; and this higher mortality cannot\nbe explained by the life of man being more subject to accident, since\nit is observed at an early age, notably during the first two years.\nAll the diseases of childhood, with the exception of diphtheria and\nwhooping cough, are to a perceptible extent more fatal among boys than\namong girls; from zero to five years the male sex is particularly\nfrail; at all ages, except between ten and fifteen years, the male\nmortality is in excess of the female.\n\nThe superior vitality of the female sex is also noticeable in\nthe greater ease with which it builds up its organism. M. Iribe,\nsuperintendent of the sanitarium of Hendaye, to which are sent Parisian\nchildren from three to fourteen years of age, who are afflicted with\nanaemia, incipient tuberculosis, scrofula and rickets, reports that at\nthe time of their dismissal, at the end of six months, the progress in\nweight, girth and chest development is incomparably higher in the girls\nthan in the boys, the increase in weight is double and often more.\n\nThe same statement has been made by other superintendents of\nsanitariums. (Bulletin Medical, No. 81, 1903.)\n\nWoman undeniably possesses a greater vitality than man. M. Gustav\nLoisel has made inquiry \"as to whether this difference existed in\nembryonic life, and what may be its cause?\" He has communicated the\nresults of his inquiries to the Biological Society of Paris, which\npublished them in its Bulletin of November 6, 1903.\n\nM. Loisel availed himself of 792 weights and measurements made upon 72\nfoetuses at the Maternity Hospital of Paris by C. E. Legou;[37] from\nthe following weights of the foetuses at three, four, five and six\nmonths he obtains the following figures:\n\n                      Males.   Females.   Differences.\n                          Grammes.       Grammes.\n  Total weight       1908.18   1708.11   200.07 in favor of males\n  Kidneys              16.87     17.19     2.67 in favor of males\n  Superrenal glands     5.15      6.43     0.32 in favor of females\n  Liver                88.35     96.31     1.28 in favor of females\n  Spleen                2.59      2.38     7.90 in favor of females\n  Thymus                3.89      3.97     0.21 in favor of males\n  Heart                10.97     12.60     0.08 in favor of females\n  Lungs                47.29     44.62     1.63 in favor of females\n  Brain               236.94    235.17     1.17 in favor of males\n\n\"These figures thus show us,\" says M. Loisel, \"a preponderance already\nexisting in favor of the females as regards the kidneys, the superrenal\nglands, the liver, the thymus and the heart; this predominance is the\nmore noticeable since the total weight of the body is larger in the\nmale than in the female.\"\n\nIf now we take the relation between the total weight and the weight of\nthe organs which are heaviest in the male, we find that the proportion\nis still in favor of the female:\n\n\nPROPORTION OF TOTAL WEIGHT.\n\n             Males.       Females.\n  Spleen   1 to 736       1 to 718\n  Lungs    1 to  40       1 to  38\n  Brain    1 to   8       1 to   7\n\nThe organs here examined, brain included, are thus absolutely or\nrelatively heavier in the female foetus than in the male foetus.\n\nM. Loisel has also examined into the proportion of the weights of\nthe different organs to the total weight according to the age of the\nfoetus. He has prepared a table, from which I take only the figures\nconcerning the brain:\n\n                                Proportion of\n  AGE         TOTAL WEIGHT     weight of brain\n                               to total weight.\n             Males   Females    Males   Females\n            Grammes  Grammes\n  3 Months    58.33   65.96     1/6.5   1/7\n  4 Months   167.25  182.58     1/7.3   1/6.6\n  5 Months   336.33  295.00     1/7.6   1/7.5\n  6 Months   732.58  636.00     1/8.3   1/7.3\n\nThe weight of the male foetus, which is below that of the female\nfoetus, at three months, when the sex has just been determined, grows\nmore rapidly and the proportion between the weight is always to the\nadvantage of the females from the fourth month on.\n\n\"To sum up,\" says M. Loisel, \"all the organs are heavier in the female\nfoetus than in the male foetus up to about the fourth month. The\npredominance then passes over to the male, but only for the lungs\nand the organs for sex-union, thus the cardiac muscle always remains\nheavier in the female. The organs which are of real service to the\nindividual during the embryonic life always remain more developed in\nthe female sex.\n\nIf now we consider that the differences in favor of the females are\nespecially in the liver, the heart, the superrenal glands and the\nkidneys, we shall come to the conclusion that the greater vitality of\nthe female organisms corresponds to their being better nourished and\nbetter purified.\"[38]\n\n\nIII.\n\nThe superior organization possessed by woman at birth, assuring her\nthroughout her life a much greater vitality, is probably demanded\nby the part she plays in the production of the species, a part\naltogether more prolonged and exhausting than that of the man who,\nwhen fertilization is accomplished, has no more to do, while then\nthe travail of woman begins, to continue during long months, through\npregnancy and after birth. The women of savage tribes suckle their\nchildren for two years and more. It sometimes happens that the male\npays dear for his inutility; after union, the bees kill the males,\nand the male spider must hastily take himself off that he may not be\ndevoured by the larger and stronger female. Among the Sakawas, at\nthe annual feast of Mylitta Anaitis, they sacrificed at Babylon the\nhandsome slave who had just united with the priestess who incarnated\nthe Assyrian goddess. This bloody religious ceremonial must have been a\nreproduction of an Amazonian custom.\n\nThe life of savagery and barbarism permits woman to develop her\nsuperiority from birth; each sex there has its special function; it\nis the division of labor in embryo. The man, whose muscular system is\nmore developed, \"fights, hunts, fishes and sits down,\" according to the\nAustralian native, he regards all the rest as under the jurisdiction\nof woman, whose function puts brain activity into play at an earlier\nepoch. She has charge of the communal house, which often shelters a\nclan of more than one hundred individuals; she prepares clothing from\nskins and other raw materials; she charges herself with the cultivation\nof the garden, the rearing of domestic animals and the manufacture\nof household utensils; she preserves, economizes, cooks, distributes\nthe provisions, vegetable and animal, which have been gathered during\nthe course of the year; and like the Valkyries of the Scandinavians\nand the Keres of the pre-Homeric Greeks, she accompanies the warrior\non the field battle, aids in the fray, raises him up if he is wounded\nand cares for him; her assistance is so appreciated that, according to\nTacitus, the barbarians who under the leadership of Civilis revolted\nagainst Vespasian, were seized with pity for the Roman soldiers because\ntheir wives did not accompany them when they marched to combat.\nPlato likewise who, like the chosen ones initiated in the Eleusinian\nMysteries, was more informed regarding ancient customs than is\nsupposed, makes the women to be present in the battles of the warriors\nof his Republic.\n\nThese multiple and diverse functions, which obliged woman to reflect,\nto calculate, to think of the morrow and to look ahead at long range,\nmust necessarily have developed her intellectual faculties; thus the\ncraniologists say that only a slight difference exists between the\ncranial capacity of the two sexes in the negroes, the Australians,\nand the red skins, while they find that it goes on increasing among\ncivilized people. Woman is for the careless and improvident savage, a\nprovidence; she is the prudent and prescient being who presides over\nhis destinies from birth to death. Man, making his religions with\nthe events and the intellectual acquisitions of his daily life, was\nthus obliged to begin by deifying woman. The pre-Homeric Greeks and\nRomans had placed their destinies under the control of goddesses,\nthe Fates\u2014Moirai, Parcae\u2014whose name signifies in the Latin language\n\"sparing,\" \"economic,\" and in the Greek the part which falls to each\none in the distribution of food or of booty.\n\nIf we relieve the rich and poetical Greek mythology of the symbolical,\nallegorical and mystical lucubrations with which the philosophers\nand the poets of the classical epoch and the Alexandrine period have\noverloaded and complicated it, and which the German mythologists,\nservilely copied by those of France and England, have carried on to\ntheir own more perfect confusion, it becomes an inestimable storehouse\nof prehistoric customs which preserves the memory of the manners\nwhich travelers and anthropologists now observe living again among\nthe savages and barbarous nations of Africa and the New World. The\nmythological legend furnishes us with information of the relative value\nof feminine and masculine intelligence among the Greeks, before they\nhad entered upon the patriarchal period.\n\nJupiter, the \"father of the gods\", as Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylos\ncall him, after having driven the feminine divinities from Olympus,\nenthroned there the patriarchate, which for some generations had\nbeen established upon earth; the religious heaven always reflects\nterrestrial manners as the moon reflects the light of the sun. But\nJupiter, who like every barbarian, knew how to use his fists (Iliad\nXV. 228), who boasted that he was the strongest of the gods, and who\nto dominate the others kept next his throne two servants, Force and\nViolence, always ready to obey his orders, was inadequately prepared by\nhis intellectual qualities to replace woman in the government of the\nOlympian family; in order to supply the capacities which were lacking\nto him, Hesiod tells us that he married Metis, \"the wisest among\nmortals and gods.\" The savage and the barbarian, that he may take into\nhimself the courage of a fallen enemy, devours his throbbing heart;\nJupiter carried off Metis to assimilate her cunning, her prudence\nand her wisdom, for her name in the Greek language has these diverse\nmeanings; these qualities were considered as belonging to woman.\n\nBut the process of assimilation took some time, if we may judge from\nthe rascally farce played upon him by Prometheus. The latter killed\nand butchered an enormous ox, in one pile he placed the flesh which\nhe covered with the skin upon which he deposited the entrails; in\nanother pile he put the bare bones which he adroitly concealed under\nheaps of fat. \"You have divided the parts very badly,\" said the father\nof gods and men. \"Most worthy Jupiter, greatest of living gods,\ntake the part that your wisdom counsels you to choose,\" replied the\nastute Prometheus. The ruler of the heavens, listening only to his\ngluttony, laid both hands upon the heap of fat amid the laughter of\nthe Olympians; his wrath was terrible when he saw the bare bones.\n(Theogony 435 _et seq._) Such a farce would hardly have been played in\nthe Olympian heaven had it not been that on the earth similar tests had\nbeen required to prove to the Father that his intellectual faculties\ndid not justify him in taking the place of the Mother in the leadership\nof the family and the management of its property.\n\nThe higher position in the family and society, which man conquered\nby brute force, while it compelled him to a mental activity to which\nhe was little accustomed, at the same time put at his disposal\nopportunities for reflection and development which constantly\nincreased. Woman, \"subdued,\" as the Greek expression has it, shut up in\nthe narrow circle of the family, the leadership of which had been taken\nfrom her, and having little or no contact with the outside world, saw\non the contrary a great reduction of the means of development which\nshe had enjoyed, and to complete her subjection she was forbidden the\nintellectual culture which was given to man. If in spite of these\nfetters and these disadvantages, the disastrous effects of which cannot\nbe exaggerated, the brain of woman continued to evolve, it was because\nwoman's intelligence profited through the progress realized by the\nmasculine brain; for one sex transmits to the other the qualities which\nit has acquired; thus pullets of certain varieties inherit the spurs\nwhich are highly developed among the cocks, while in other varieties\nthey transmit to the males their exaggerated crests. \"It is fortunate,\"\nsays Darwin upon this point, \"that the equal transmission of the\ncharacteristics of both sexes has been a general rule in the whole\nseries of mammals, otherwise, it is probable that man would have become\nas superior to woman in intellectual power as the peacock is to the\nfemale in ornamental plumage.\" (Descent of Man\u2014Sexual Selection, VIII\nand XIX.)\n\nBut defects as well as valuable qualities are transmitted from one sex\nto the other: if woman has profited by the brain-growth of man, he\nhas in his turn been retarded in his development by the sluggishness\nin the development of woman's brain, produced by the reduction to the\nsmallest minimum of intellectual activity to which he has condemned\nher. The breeders who seek the choicest results are as careful to\nhave irreproachable females as males; amateur cockfighters attach as\nmuch importance to the selection of the pullets as to the cocks, they\nproduce only from those which are armed with spurs and which have the\nfighting spirit. It may be said that humanity, since it emerged from\ncommunism of the clan to live under the system of private property, has\nbeen developed by the efforts of one sex alone and that its evolution\nhas been retarded through the obstacles interposed by the other sex.\nMan by systematically depriving woman of the means of development,\nmaterial and intellectual, has made of her a force retarding human\nprogress.\n\nIn fact if we study and compare the different periods of savagery\nand barbarism, we cannot but observe the continuous and remarkable\nprogress in human mind, because women and men, exercising freely their\nphysical and mental faculties, contribute equally to the evolution of\nthe species; this has been retarded ever since humanity entered into\nthe period of civilization and private property, because then woman,\nconstrained and confined in her development, cannot contribute to\nit in so effective a way. The senile stagnation in which China has\nvegetated for more than a thousand years can only be attributed to\nthe degradation of woman, which has gone to the point of the cruel\nmutilation of her feet that she may be imprisoned the more closely\nin the woman's quarters. Europe also suffers from the degradation of\nwoman, since in spite of the extraordinary material progress of these\nlast two thousand years and the increasing and no less extraordinary\naccumulation of human knowledge, it cannot be maintained that the\nbrain of the civilized modern exceeds in power and capacity that of\nthe Greeks of the classic epoch, which extends from the seventh to\nthe fourth century before the Christian era. It is certain that a\nVictor Hugo, a Zola, or any university graduate or doctor has stored\nin his brain an abundance of positive and diversified conceptions not\npossessed by Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Protagoras and Aristotle, but that\ndoes not prove that his imagination and his intelligence, or that of\nhis contemporaries is more rich, more varied and more vast than that of\nthe generations of Ionia and Attica, who were the artificers of that\nincomparable budding and blossoming of science, philosophy, literature\nand art at which history marvels and who reveled in that subtle and\nparadoxical play of sophistical philosophy, the like of which has not\nagain been seen. The sophists\u2014Photagoras, Gorgias, Socrates, Plato,\netc., stated, discussed and solved the problems of the spiritualistic\nphilosophy and many others besides: yet the Hellenes of Asia Minor and\nof Greece had emerged from barbarism only a few centuries before. Many\nreasons may be cited to explain this arrest in human development, but\nthe principal one is the subjection of woman.\n\n\nIV.\n\nCapitalist production, which takes charge of most of the labors to\nwhich woman devoted herself in the gentile house, has levied into its\narmy of wage-workers in factory, shop, office and schoolroom, the\nwives and daughters of the working class and of the small bourgeoisie,\nin order to procure cheap labor. Its pressing need of intellectual\ncapacities has set aside the venerable and venerated axiom of masculine\nethics: \"to read, write and count ought to be all of a woman's\nknowledge;\" it has required that girls like boys be instructed in the\nrudiments of the sciences. The first step once taken, they could not\nbe forbidden to enter the universities. They proved that the feminine\nbrain, which the intellectuals had declared a \"child's brain,\" was as\ncapable as the masculine brain of receiving all scientific instruction.\nThe abstract sciences (mathematics, geometry, mechanics, etc.), the\nfirst whose study had been accessible to woman, were also the first in\nwhich they could give the measure of their intellectual capacities;\nthey are now attacking the experimental sciences (physiology, physics,\nchemistry, applied mechanics, etc.), in America and Europe there arises\na throng of women who are marching on a level with men in spite of the\ninferiority of the conditions of development in which they have lived\nsince their first infancy.\n\nAs Capitalism has not snatched woman from the domestic hearth and\nlaunched her into social production to emancipate her, but to exploit\nher more ferociously than man, so it has been careful not to overthrow\nthe economic, legal, political and moral barriers which had been raised\nto seclude her in the marital dwelling. Woman, exploited by capital,\nendures the miseries of the free laborer and bears in addition her\nchains of the past. Her economic misery is aggravated; instead of being\nsupported by her father or husband, to whose rule she still submits,\nshe is obliged to earn her living; and under the pretext that she has\nfewer necessities than man, her labor is paid less; and when her\ndaily toil in the shop, the office or school is ended, her labor in\nthe household begins. Motherhood, the sacred, the highest of social\nfunctions, becomes in capitalistic society a cause of horrible misery,\neconomic and physiologic. The social and economic condition of woman is\na danger for the reproduction of the species.\n\nBut this crushing and pitiful condition announces the end of her\nservitude, which begins with the establishment of private property and\nwhich can end only with its abolition. Civilized humanity, oppressed\nby the mechanical mode of production, turns its face toward a society,\nbased on common property, in which woman, delivered from the economic,\nlegal and moral chains which bind her, may develop freely her physical\nand intellectual faculties, as in the time of the communism of the\nsavages.\n\nThe savages, to forbid primitive promiscuity and successfully restrain\nthe circle of sexual relations, found no other means than to separate\nthe sexes; there are reasons for believing that the women took the\ninitiative in this separation, which the specialization of their\nfunctions consolidated and emphasized. This was manifested socially by\nreligious ceremonials and secret languages peculiar to each set and\neven by struggles;[39] and after having taken the character of violent\nantagonism, it ended in the brutal subjection of woman, which still\nsurvives although it is progressively attenuated in proportion as the\ncompetition of the two sexes becomes more general and intense upon\nthe economic field. But the modern antagonism will not end with the\nvictory of one sex over the other, for it is one of the phenomena of\nthe struggle of labor against capital, which will find its solution in\nthe emancipation of the working class in which women as well as men are\nincorporated.\n\nThe technique of production which tends to suppress the specialization\nof trades and functions and to replace muscular effort by attention\nand intellectual skill and which, the more it is perfected, mingles\nand confounds man and woman the more in social labor, will prevent the\nreturn of the conditions which in savage and barbarous nations had\nmaintained the separation of the sexes. Common property will put an end\nto the economic antagonism of specialization.\n\nBut if it is possible to catch a glimpse of the end of female servitude\nand of the antagonism of the sexes and to conceive for the human\nspecies an era of incomparable bodily and mental progress, brought\nabout by women and men of a high development in muscle and brain, it is\nimpossible to foresee the sexual relations of free and equal women and\nmen who will not be united nor separated by sordid material interests\nand by the gross ethics engendered by such interests. But if we may\njudge by the present and the past, men, in whom the genetic passion\nis more violent and more continuous than in women\u2014the same phenomenon\nis observed in the males and females of the whole animal series\u2014will\nbe obliged to exhibit their physical and intellectual qualities to\nwin their sweethearts. Sexual selection, which, as Darwin has shown,\nfulfilled an important role in the development of the animal species\nand which, with rare exceptions, has ceased to play this part in the\nIndo-European races for about three thousand years, will again become\none of the most active factors in the perfecting of the human race.\n\nMotherhood and love will permit women to regain the higher position\nwhich she occupied in primitive societies, the memory of which has been\npreserved by the legends and myths of the ancient religions.\n\n\nFOOTNOTES:\n\n[34] The dowry has played an important role in the history of woman:\nat the beginning of the patriarchal period the husband buys her from\nher father, who has to refund her purchase price if for any cause\nwhatever he repudiates her and sends her back to her family; later this\npurchase price is returned to him and constitutes her dowry, which\nher relatives are accustomed to double. From the moment when the wife\nenters into her husband's house with a dowry, she ceases to be a slave\nwhom he may dismiss, sell and kill. The dowry, which in Rome and Athens\nbecame a legal charge upon the property of the husband, was, in case\nof her repudiation or divorce, to be restored to her in preference to\nany creditor. \"No pleasure is derived from the riches which a woman\nbrings into the household,\" says a fragment of Euripides, \"they only\nserve to render divorce difficult.\" The comic authors ridiculed the\nhusbands, who in fear of a suit over the dowry, fell into dependence\nupon the wife. A character in Plautus says to a husband who is talking\nagainst his wife, \"You accepted the money of her dowry, you sold your\nauthority\u2014imperium.\" The wealthy Roman matrons carried their insolence\nto such a point that they did not trust the management of their dowry\nto their husbands, they gave it over to the stewards, who sometimes\nfulfilled with them another service, as the evil-speaking Martial\nstates.\n\nAdultery on the part of the wife involved a legal divorce and the\nrestitution of the dowry, but rather than come to this painful\nextremity, the husbands preferred to close their eyes to the foibles\nof their wives; at Rome and at Athens the law had to strike at them\nin order to recall them to their marital dignity; in China a certain\nnumber of bamboo strokes were applied to the soles of their feet. The\npenalties not being sufficient to encourage the husbands to repudiate\ntheir adulterous wives, the law, in order to prop up masculine virtue,\npermitted those who denounced the infidelity of the wife to retain a\npart of the dowry; there were then men who married only in prospect\nof the adultery of the wife. The Roman women evaded the law by having\nthemselves enrolled in the censor's book on the list of prostitutes,\nto whom it did not apply. The number of matrons inscribed became so\nconsiderable that the Senate, under Tiberius passed a decree forbidding\n\"women who had a patrician for a grandfather, husband or father to\ntraffic in their bodies.\" (Tacitus, Annals II., 85.) Adultery on the\npart of the wife in the patrician society of antiquity, as well as\nin the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century, had become so\ngeneral that it had so to speak entered into the social customs. It was\nlooked upon lightly as a corrective and accompaniment of marriage.\n\n[35] The Saint Simon manifesto of 1830 announced that the religion of\nSaint Simon had come \"to put an end to that shameful traffic, that\nlegal prostitution, which under the name of marriage often blesses\nthe monstrous union of self-surrender and egoism, of light and of\nignorance, of youth and decrepitude.\"\n\n[36] The French companies make no differences between the sexes because\nthey pay very small annuities. La G\u00e9nerale, the most important one in\nFrance, gives for $1,000 at the age of 50 years an annuity of $64.20;\nat 60 years $80.80; at 70 years $118.50; at 80 years $134.70. Thus\nit realizes immense profits: its shares which in 1819 were worth 750\nfrancs each were quoted last January at 31,300 francs.\n\n[37] E. Legou. \"Some Considerations on the Development of the Foetus.\"\nParis. 1903. The weights and measurements of M. Legou were made for\nofficial use.\n\n[38] The latest observations upon ants and bees tend to prove that the\nfertilized eggs would give birth to females and to workers; and the\nnonfertilized to males, which consequently would be born from eggs that\nare less complex.\n\n[39] A. W. Howit, who observed among the Australians a species of\nsexual totemism, says that it often happens that the women and men of\none and the same clan fight, when the animal that serves as the totem\nfor one sex is killed by the other sex.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SOCIALIST IDEAL\n\n\nOur comrades in Germany were discussing some time since the question\nwhether Socialism is a science. Socialism is not and cannot be a\nscience for the simple reason that it is a political party and must\ndisappear when its work is accomplished after the abolition of the\nclasses which gave birth to it; but the end which it pursues is\nscientific.\n\nGuizot, who had a vague idea of the theory of the class\nstruggle\u2014himself a product of the Revolution, which was a dramatic\nstruggle between classes\u2014said with good reason that a class cannot\nemancipate itself until it possesses the qualities requisite for taking\nthe leadership of society; now one of these qualities is to have a\nmore or less definite conception of the social order which it proposes\nto substitute for that which is oppressing it. This conception cannot\nbut be a social ideal, or, to employ a scientific word, a social\nhypothesis; but an hypothesis, as well in the natural sciences as in\nsocial science, may be utopian or scientific.\n\nSocialism, because it is a political party of the oppressed class,\nhas therefore an ideal. It groups and organizes the efforts of the\nindividuals who wish to build on the ruins of capitalist society, based\nupon individual property, an ideal or hypothetical society based upon\ncommon property in the means of production.\n\nOnly through the class struggle can modern socialism realize its\nsocial ideal, which possesses the qualities demanded of any hypothesis\nthat claims a scientific character. The fact of choosing a scientific\ngoal, and of trying to reach it only through the class struggle,\ndistinguishes it from the Socialism of 1848, which was pursuing through\nthe reconciliation of classes a social ideal which could not but be\nutopian considering the historic moment in which it was conceived.\nSocialism has thus evolved from Utopia into science. Engels has traced\nthe main lines of this evolution in his memorable pamphlet, \"Socialism,\nUtopian and Scientific.\" It is the same with all sciences, which begin\nwith Utopia to arrive at positive knowledge; this course is imposed by\nthe very nature of the human mind.\n\nMan progresses in social life as in intellectual life, only by starting\nfrom the known and traveling toward the unknown, and that unknown must\nbe represented by the imagination; that imaginary conception of the\nunknown, which cannot but be hypothetical, is one of the most powerful\nincentives to action, it is the very condition of every forward\nstep. It is natural that men like Bernstein in Germany and Jaur\u00e8s in\nFrance should seek to domesticate Socialism and to put it in tow of\nliberalism, accusing it of hypnotising its soldiers with an ideal of\nthe year 3000, which makes them live in the expectation of a Messianic\n\"catastrophe\" and reject the immediate advantages of an understanding\nand co-operation with bourgeois parties, and which blinds them to\ntheir shocking errors regarding the concentration of wealth, the\ndisappearance of small industry and the middle class, the increase of\nclass antagonisms, the spreading and intensification of the misery of\nthe working class, etc. These errors may have been plausible hypotheses\nbefore 1848, but since then events have shown their falsity. This\nunfortunate ideal prevents them from descending from the revolutionary\nheights to accept the responsibilities of power and of setting aside\nthe cause of labor to devote themselves entirely tongue and pen, to\nthe rehabilitation of a millionaire leader; it obliges them to oppose\nall exterior policies and acts, to vote not a cent nor a soldier for\ncolonial expeditions, which carry labor, Christianity, syphilis and the\nalcoholism of civilization to the barbaric tribes. The neo-methodists\nof the ancient and outworn gospel of the brotherhood of classes advise\nthe socialists to suppress their ideal, or, since it unfortunately\ncaptivates the masses of the people, to speak of it without caring\nfor it, as Jaur\u00e8s does, that they may consecrate themselves to\npractical necessities, to the vast plans of agricultural and industrial\nco-operation, to popular universities, etc.\n\nThe dilettantes of politics, these practical groundlings of\nopportunism, nevertheless hold themselves up for transcendent idealists\nand march with their eyes fixed upon the stars, because they substitute\nfor ideas a brilliant orchestra of sonorous words and eternal\nprinciples.\n\nThese bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the\nRevolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses\nand their theories; according to them science should have stopped with\nthe study of facts in themselves without dreaming of uniting them into\na general system. \"What is the use of cutting stones without putting\nup a building,\" replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple\nof Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his theory on the\ncontinuity of species, which, only thirty years after his death, was\nto take on a new birth with Darwin. They are still reproaching the\nphysiologists for wasting their time in elaborating hypotheses which\nlast on an average only three years and which cannot explain what\ntakes place in a muscle which contracts and in a brain which thinks.\nThey grumble against the hypotheses of the physicists, who do not know\nthe real nature of elasticity, of electrical conductivity, or even\nwhat happens when a particle of sugar is dissolved. They would like\nto prohibit scientists from any speculation because it is disastrous\nand may lead into error. But the latter protest and declare that\nimagination is one of the first and most indispensable faculties of\nthe scientist, and that the hypotheses to which they give birth, even\nthough they be erroneous and able to survive only three years, are\nnevertheless the necessary condition of all scientific progress.\n\nIf the communist ideal were an hypothesis undemonstrable and false it\nwould still be a propelling force of social progress, but such is not\nthe case.\n\nThe hypothesis in science, as in the social field, is the more\nundemonstrable and susceptible of error in proportion as the data\ncontributing to its elaboration are less numerous and more uncertain.\nGreek science, which had to furnish a conception of the world when the\ndata regarding the phenomena of nature were of the most rudimentary,\nwas obliged to resort to hypotheses which for boldness and intuitive\naccuracy are marvels of history and of thought; after having admitted,\naccording to the vulgar opinion, that the earth was flat, and that\nthe temple of Delphi was situated at its center, they put forth the\nhypothesis of its spherical form, then undemonstrable.\n\nSocialism, which dates from the first years of the nineteenth century,\nstarted, like Greek science, from hypotheses the more erroneous, and\nfrom ideal the more utopian, in that the social world which it proposed\nto transform was less known; and at that epoch could not be known for\nthe excellent reason that it was in course of formation.\n\nThe machine operated by steam was beginning to edge into industry\nwhere the tool, managed by the artisan, was moved by human power,\nand in some rare circumstances by animals, wind or waterfalls. The\nSocialist thinkers, as Engels observes, were then obliged to draw from\ntheir own brain the social ideal which they could not extract from the\ntumultuous economic environment in full course of transformation.\nThey grasped again, infusing new life into it, the communist ideal\nwhich has slumbered in the mind of man since he emerged from the\ncommunism of primitive society which the poetic Greek mythology calls\nthe golden age and which has awakened to shine here and there with a\nglorious splendor at great epochs of social upheaval. They sought,\nthen, to establish communism, not because the economic environment\nwas ready for its introduction, but because men were miserable,\nbecause the laws of justice and equality were violated, because the\nprecepts of the Christ could not be followed in their purity. The\ncommunistic ideal, not springing from economic reality, was then but\nan unconscious reminiscence of a prehistoric past, and came only\nfrom idealistic notions upon a justice, an equality and a gospel law\nno less idealistic; it is then idealistic in the second degree, and\nconsequently utopian.\n\nThe Socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, who\nrekindled the communist ideal, had the rare merit of giving it a\nconsistency less idealistic. They spoke little of the Christian\nreligion, of justice and of equality; Robert Owen laid the\nresponsibilities of social evils upon the family, property and\nreligion; Charles Fourier criticises the ideas of justice and morality\nintroduced by the bourgeois Revolution of '89 with incomparable\nanimation and irony. They did not weep over the misery of the poor,\nbut left that to Victor Hugo and the charlatans of romanticism. They\npreached the social problem from its realistic side, the only side\nfrom which it can be solved. They used their talents to prove that\na social organization of production would succeed in satisfying the\ndesires of all without reducing the share of any, not even that of the\nprivileged capitalist class. Meanwhile the recent application of steam\nand machinery demanded also a new organization of labor, and this was\nthe constant concern of the industrial bourgeoisie. The socialists were\nthus pursuing the same end as the industrials; bourgeois and socialists\nmight consequently come to an understanding. We therefore find in the\nsocialist sects of that epoch industrials, engineers and financiers\nwho in the second half of the century cast away their sympathy for the\nworkers and occupied an important place in capitalist society.\n\nThe socialism of that epoch could not under these conditions be\nanything else than pacific; instead of entering on the struggle with\nthe capitalists, the socialists thought only of converting them to\ntheir system of social reform from which they were to be the first to\nbenefit. They proclaimed the association of capital, intelligence and\nlabor, the interests of which, according to them, were identical! they\npreached a mutual understanding between the employer and the employed,\nbetween the exploiter and the exploited; they know no class struggle;\nthey condemned strikes and all political agitation, especially if it\nwere revolutionary; they desired order in the street and harmony in the\nworkshop. They demanded, finally, nothing more than was desired by the\nnew industrial bourgeoisie.\n\nThey foresaw that industry, strengthened by the motive power of steam,\nmachinery and the concentration of the instruments of labor, would have\na colossal producing power, and they had the simplicity to believe that\nthe capitalists would content themselves with taking only a reasonable\npart of the wealth thus created, and would leave to their co-operators,\nthe manual and intellectual laborers, a portion sufficient to enable\nthem to live in comfort. This socialism was marvellously agreeable\nto capital, since it promised an increase of wealth and advised an\nunderstanding between the laborer and the employer. It recruited\nthe great majority of its adepts in the educational hotbeds of the\nbourgeoisie. It was utopian, therefore it was the socialism of the\nintellectuals.\n\nBut precisely because it was utopian, the laborers, in constant\nantagonism with their employers on questions of labor and hours,\nlooked on it with suspicion. They could understand nothing of this\nsocialism which condemned strikes and political action and which\nassumed to harmonize the interests of capital and labor, of the\nexploiter and exploited. They kept aloof from the socialists and gave\nall their sympathies to the bourgeois republicans, because they were\nrevolutionary. They joined their secret societies and climbed with them\nupon the barricades to make riots and political revolutions.\n\nMarx and Engels took socialism at the point to which the great utopians\nhad brought it, but instead of torturing their brains to improvise the\norganization of labor and of production, they studied that which was\nalready created by the very necessities of the new mechanical industry\nwhich had arrived at a degree of development sufficient to permit\nits power and its tendency to be apparent. Its productivity was so\nenormous, as Fourier and Saint Simon had foreseen, that it was capable\nof providing abundantly for the normal needs of all the members of\nsociety. This was the first time in history that such a productive\npower had been observed, and it was because capitalist production could\nsatisfy all needs, and for that reason alone, that it is possible to\nreintroduce communism, that is to say the equal participation of all in\nsocial wealth, and the free and complete development of the physical,\nintellectual and moral faculties. Communism is no longer a utopia but a\npossibility.\n\nMachinery replaces the individualistic production of the small\nindustry, by the communistic production of the capitalistic factory,\nbut property in the means of labor has remained individual, as in the\ntime of the small industry. There is then a contradiction between the\nindividualistic mode of possession and the communist mode of production\nand this contradiction translates itself into the antagonism between\nthe laborer and the capitalist employer. The producers, who form the\nimmense majority of the nation, no longer possess the instruments\nof labor, the possession of which is centralized in the idle hands\nof a decreasing minority. The social problem imposed by mechanical\nproduction will be solved, as the social problems imposed by preceding\nmodes of production have been solved, by precipitating the evolution\nbegun by economic force, by finishing the expropriation of the\nindividual in the means of production, by giving to the communistic\nmode of production the communistic mode of possession which it demands.\n\nThe communism of contemporary socialists no longer proceeds, like that\nof former times, from the cerebral lucubrations of gifted thinkers; it\nproceeds from economic reality, it is the final goal of the economic\nforces which, without attracting the attention of the capitalists and\ntheir intellectuals, have fashioned the communistic mold of a new\nsociety, the coming of which we only have to hasten. Communism, then,\nis no longer a utopian hypothesis; it is a scientific ideal. It may be\nadded that never has the economic structure of any society been better\nand more completely analyzed than capitalist society, and that never\nwas a social ideal conceived with such numerous and positive data as\nthe communist idea of modern socialism.\n\nAlthough it is the economic forces which fashion men at the pleasure\nand spur them to action, and although these constitute the mysterious\nforce determining the great currents of history which the Christians\nattribute to God, and the free-thinking bourgeois assign to Progress,\nto Civilization, to the Immortal Principles and other similar manitous,\nworthy of savage tribes, they are nevertheless the product of human\nactivity. Man, who created them and brought them into the world, has\nthus far let himself be guided by them; yet now that he has understood\ntheir nature and grasped their tendency, he can act upon their\nevolution. The socialists who are accused of being stricken by Oriental\nfatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to\nbring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms\nlike the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee before\nits fundamental dogma, _laissez faire_, _laissez passer_, propose on\nthe contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been\nsubdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to\nwork misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their\nideal to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for the grace of\nGod, and the capitalists for wealth; they prepare, on the contrary,\nto realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capitalist\nclass and to its sentiments of justice and humanity, but by fighting\nit, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its\neconomic despotism.\n\nSocialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence\na criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its\nenfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition\nwith that of the ruling class. The struggle is waged at first in\nthe ideological world before the physical shock of the revolutionary\nbattle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which\nmust be revolted against, for \"the ideas of the ruling class are the\nideas of society,\" or these ideas are the intellectual reflection of\nits material interests.\n\nThus, the wealth of the ruling class is produced by slave labor;\nreligion, ethics, philosophy and literature agree in authorizing\nslavery. The ugly God of the Jews and Christianity strikes with his\ncurse the progeny of Ham, that it may furnish slaves. Aristotle, the\nencyclopedic thinker of Greek philosophy, declares that slaves are\npredestined by nature and that no rights exist for them, for there\ncan be no rights except between equals. Euripides in his tragedies\npreaches the doctrine of servile morality; St. Paul, St. Augustine and\nthe Church teach slaves submission to their earthly masters that they\nmay deserve the favor of their heavenly master; Christian civilization\nintroduced slavery into America and maintains it there until economic\nphenomena prove that slave labor is a method of exploitation more\ncostly and less profitable than free labor.\n\nAt the epoch when the Greco-Roman civilization was dissolving, when the\nlabor of artisans and free workers began to be substituted for slave\nlabor, pagan religion, philosophy and literature decided to accord them\ncertain rights. The same Euripides who advised the slave to lose his\npersonality in that of the master does not wish him to be despised.\n\"There is nothing shameful in slavery but the name,\" says the pedagogue\nin Ion, \"the slave, moreover, is not inferior to the free man when\nhe has a noble heart.\" The mysteries of Eleusis and of Orphism, like\nChristianity, which continues their work, admit slaves among their\ninitiated and promise them liberty, equality and happiness after death.\n\nThe dominating class of the Middle Ages being military, the Christian\nreligion and social ethics condemned lending money at interest, and\ncovered the lender with infamy; to take interest for money loaned\nwas then something so ignominious that the Jewish race, obliged to\nspecialize itself in the trade of money, still bears the shame of it.\nBut today, now that the Christians have become Jews, and the ruling\nclass lives on the interest of its capital, the trade of the lender at\ninterest is the most honorable, the most desirable, the most exclusive.\n\nThe oppressed class, although the ideology of the oppressing class\nis imposed upon it, nevertheless elaborates religious, ethical and\npolitical ideas corresponding to its condition of life; vague and\nsecret at first, they gain in precision and force in proportion as the\noppressed class takes definite form and acquires the consciousness\nof its social utility and of its strength; and the hour of its\nemancipation is near when its conception of nature and of society\nopposes itself openly and boldly to that of the ruling class.\n\nThe economic conditions in which the bourgeois moves and evolves make\nof it a class essentially religious. Christianity is its work and will\nlast as long as this class shall rule society. Seven or eight centuries\nbefore Christ, when the bourgeoisie had its birth in the commercial\nand industrial cities of the Mediterranean sea, we may observe the\nelaboration of a new religion; the gods of paganism created by warrior\ntribes could not be suited to a class consecrated to the production\nand sale of merchandise. Mysterious cults (the mysteries of the\nCabiri, of Demeter, of Dionysus, etc.) revive the religious traditions\nof the prehistoric matriarchical period; the idea of a soul and its\nexistence after death revive; the idea of posthumous punishments and\nrewards to compensate for acts of social injustice are introduced,\netc. These religious elements, combined with the intellectual data of\nGreek philosophy, contribute to form Christianity, the religion, _par\nexcellence_, of societies which have for their foundation property\nbelonging to the individual and the class which enrich themselves by\nthe exploitation of wage labor. For fifteen centuries all the movements\nof the bourgeoisie, either for organization, or for self-emancipation,\nor for the acquisition of power have been accompanied and complicated\nby religious crises; but always Christianity more or less modified\nremains the religion of society. The revolutionists of 1789, who in the\nardor of the struggle promised themselves to de-Christianize France,\nwere eager when the bourgeoisie were victorious to raise again the\naltars they had overthrown and to reintroduce the cult that they had\nproscribed.\n\nThe economic environment which produces the proletariat relieves\nit on the contrary from every idea of sentiment. There is not seen\neither in Europe nor in America among the laboring masses of the great\nindustries any anxiety to elaborate a religion to replace Christianity,\nnor any desire to reform it. The economic and political organizations\nof the working class are completely uninterested as to any doctrinal\ndiscussion of religious and spiritual dogmas, although they combat the\npriests of all cults because they are the lackeys of the capitalist\nclass.\n\nThe victory of the proletariat will deliver humanity from the nightmare\nof religion. The belief in superior beings to explain the natural\nworld and the social inequality, and to prolong the dominion of the\nruling class, and the belief in the posthumous existence of the soul\nto recompense the inequality of fate will have no more justification\nonce man, who has already grasped the general causes of the phenomena\nof nature, shall live in a communist society from whence shall have\ndisappeared the inequality and the injustice of capitalistic society.\n\nThe militant socialists, following the example of the encyclopedists\nof the eighteenth century, have to make a merciless criticism of the\neconomic, political, historical, philosophical, moral and religious\nideas of the capitalist class in order to prepare in all spheres\nof thought the triumph of the new ideology which the proletariat\nintroduces into the world.\n\n\n\n\nTHE RIGHTS OF THE HORSE AND THE RIGHTS OF MAN\n\n\nCapitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the\nmetaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely\nand more firmly to his economic duty.\n\n\"I make you free,\" so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, \"free to\nearn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free\nto sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you\nten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till\nyou are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough\nstrength left to gulp down your soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You\nhave but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the\nright to pay taxes.\"\n\nProgress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity, but\nthey have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds\ncall \"lower.\"\n\nCivilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too\ngreat a task to go through the long list of its benefactions; I will\nname but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the\npassionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.\n\nHorses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys\nso many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes\nwhich serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were\nnot morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they\nwould have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub\ndown, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their\nexcrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.\n\nAristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they\nexercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a\ncoupon-clipper's contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed\nthe lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover,\ntimothy and other succulent plants.\n\nThese four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social\ninfluence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their\nbrothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with\ntheir beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid\nperfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords\nconsent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand\nmen and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the\nbroiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their\nfeats of running and leaping. They respect none of the social dignities\nbefore which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence.\nAt Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize\nlaunched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the\nlooks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an\napology and withdrew.\n\nIt is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic\nancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been\ncorrupted by their high social station: had they taken it into their\nheads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate\nluxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing lace and diamonds, and\ndrinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more\noverwhelming drudgery would be impending over the class of wage-workers.\n\nThrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine\naristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh,\nlike the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India\nto carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been\nman-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have\nbuilt slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out\nand dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their\nanthropophagic tastes.\n\nThe proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their\npeck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the\naristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights\nthat are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the \"Rights of\nMan.\"\n\nThe first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society\nwill recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.\n\nThe colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins\nto enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has\nscarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country\nto fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to\nsuckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow,\nin which he gambols until he is grown.\n\nThe moralists and politicians of the \"Rights of Man\" think it would\nbe monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest\nin the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before\nand two months after confinement, should have the right and the means\nto absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics\nof civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable\nabomination\u2014to demand for babies the rights of colts.\n\nAs for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little\ntoes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of\ncapitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is\ntaken that they be completely formed before they are set to work, and\ntheir tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.\n\nThis care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their\nlives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois\npress when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and\ntannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the\nunhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of\nthe bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies\nfor the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be\nexcited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the\nbourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross\negoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without\nhis heart being torn by it.\n\nThis same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen\nto sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to\nseven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate\nfrom fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the\nentertainment of a quadruped than for paying the wages of a biped. It\nhas never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of\nthe \"Rights of Man\" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to\nassure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his\ndeath.\n\nThe Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are \"unwritten\nrights,\" as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the\nconsciousness of all men.\n\nThe horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights,\nwith no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that\nhe would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of\nlentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality,\nto Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about\nas useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.\n\nCivilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself\nindifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons,\npass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in\nthe stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by\nwage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when\nthe sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on\nthe tender grass of the mountains.\n\nThe Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not\nagain bring up her faithful sons in the love of \"mutton,\" represents\nJesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a\nweary lamb.\n\nTrue, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only\nthe love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of\nthe Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since\nour jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation\nin eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at\nleast the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the\nsacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop\nand lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.\n\nLaborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty\nin producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the\nbuffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand\nfor yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.\n\n\n\n\nTHE END.\n\n\n\n\n  \u250c\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2510\n  \u2502 Transcriber's Note:                                               \u2502\n  \u2502                                                                   \u2502\n  \u2502 Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.      \u2502\n  \u2502                                                                   \u2502\n  \u2502 Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant  \u2502\n  \u2502 form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.     \u2502\n  \u2502                                                                   \u2502\n  \u2502 Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.             \u2502\n  \u2502                                                                   \u2502\n  \u2502 Footnotes were moved to the end of chapters and numbered in one   \u2502\n  \u2502 continuous sequence.                                              \u2502\n  \u2502                                                                   \u2502\n  \u2502 Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, _like    \u2502\n  \u2502 this_.                                                            \u2502\n  \u2514\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2518","title":"The right to be lazy, and other studies","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":33760}