ABSTRACT
Are the decreases in farm rents, rents of houses and interest and the increases in wages useful, appropriate and fair? Should they be encouraged or fought against? Does there exist a golden mean we can settle on? These are questions to which different solutions are given according to the angle from which one considers the question and which are worth examining; they include something far more positive, they are of more interest to the whole of society than a collection of mystic combinations of constitutional theories promising freedom, guarantees, and which give neither daily bread nor help to the labouring, suffering masses. According to us, these questions are solved differently according to the viewpoint in which one is placed, and this observation does not apply solely to the subject we are intending to discuss here. It is because there are different points of view in the world that there are conflicts of interest, disagreements between ideas, trouble, anarchy and disorder in all society. What are these different points of view which seem to be numerous to judge from the perpetual discord visible on all sides? As we have often said, they amount to two: that of the idle and that of the workers. Everything, from morals to fine arts, science and its teaching, industry and its products, may be envisaged from these two aspects: The advanTage of workers or The advanTage of The idle. While workers wish for an increase in wages, a decrease in interest, rents of houses and farm rents, the idle who live on their rents of houses, farm rents and interest and who pay the wages think the opposite to the workers. We know that the economists, a few men who rendered great service by first drawing attention to the phenomena of the industrial order, were very skilful in raising the question we are addressing today, but having turned the problems over and over, they then dropped them, leaving them as obscure and as fruitless as before. This is what they said: ‘Wages are higher when the supply of labour is smaller and demand is greater; the same is true of farm rents, rents of houses and interest.’ And as they also say that the value of a thing is the result of a debate between the person supplying and the one demanding, this means that the explanation they give for the rise in wages may be summed up as follows:
wages are all the higher because they are higher, which is admittedly not hard to follow. Let us say it again: economists have rendered a great service by being the first to consider the maTerial interests which men of science, the learned scholars, in their role as chrisTians, had until then sadly neglected. Praise be to Quesnay, to Smith and even to Mr Say, who popularised them; but the state of ignorance experienced by all the economists of the principle of the social order according to which some men own the work instrument while others borrow it, according to which the former live on a part of the fruits of the labour provided by the latter; this ignorance hid from them the political law, the human law which has throughout the centuries condemned the idleness of the owner, the capitalist, the lender, to continual decline, and has gradually elevated work to the consideration, function and wealth it deserves. In other words, they considered the present constitution of property as an immutable fact, despite the significant changes to which history shows us it has been subjected, and they have always reasoned as if mankind was eternally subjected to this barbarous classification, unfair and eminently harmful, which attributes a large part of enjoyment to one class without work and to the majority a heavy burden of labour, laden down with vice, ignorance and misery. Until such time as Greece or Rome saw slaves who had become philosophers, poets and orators, and ennobled emancipated men reach the highest spheres of finance, it could be believed, and many rebels at that time thought so, that slavery, that is, to saying one owned a man, was an immutable fact; it was easy to call dreamers and even troublemakers that obscure Galilean and his humble disciples who came preaching that all men were brothers, of the same blood, of the same race, children of the same God. The economists of the time, students of Aristotle as those of our time are students of Quesnay, must have exclaimed: ‘The foundations of social order are being attacked, you are going to upset all existences, the republic is in danger, caveant consules!’2 It none the less remains that from this moment the social situation must have been seen quite differently by the slaves, the emancipated and a large part of the plebeians, than by the dying patriarchy, and by these knights who had grown fat on the finance of the sweat of the people. Then the proletarians of Rome ran through the streets of Rome shouting ‘bread and shows’; the people asked to be cleared of their debt to the nobility, for the interest rate they paid to financiers to be reduced and their wages to be increased. The politicians of the time, at a loss, sometimes had a few massacred, sometimes gave in to their demands; they ordered patrol after patrol, and citizens were constantly mobilised to disperse these real or imagined revolts in a climate of disorder, fear and alarm. Slaves and the people had little better idea of what they wanted than the good of the empire, but they had at least the advantage of not wanting the past or even the present; the past and the present were slavery; they ardently sought the future, and the future was Jesus, announcing the fraternity of mankind. The same disturbances exist today: does this mean we still have slaves? Today the people have the same hatred of the past, the upper classes the same
ignorance of the future: do we still have a patriarchy? Today we announce to the rich and the poor, to the master and the employees, more than human fraternity, universal parTnership, classificaTion according To abiliTy, remuneraTion according To works: has a new Christ appeared? As long as men are not partners, it is obvious that there will be struggles among them; there is, as we have already said, no golden mean. Being a partner is above all having a common interest; not to be so is to have opposing interests and not just two distinct interests, since individuals do not remain isolated from one another and as soon as there is an exchange of services or products between them, if no partnership exists, one tries to exploit the other and inversely; both are distrustful of the strength or the ruse of their opponent and both waste precious time and effort standing on their guard, which they could more usefully spend helping one another. Those who are not convinced by this theoretical demonstration have only to watch and listen to what is being said and happening around them: they will easily distinguish these two interests which radically divide society into two classes, the idle and the workers, and on which are based a host of contradictory reasoning and hostile acts which perpetuate war within the state, in cities and even in households. In the past, a squire, a page, a footman and even a serf were linked to their lord by a feeling of gratitude for the service rendered by his glorious sword, for the protection they received from him and for the example of courage and generosity which he unfailingly gave to them. Our intention is not to present this type of relationship as a model of association; we are merely trying to show why today nobody, whatever his rank, can count on the obedience, affection or devotion of those from whom he demands some work; why from the servant in his relationship with his master and the worker with his bourgeois, to the subject in his duties towards his sovereign, we find distrust and ruse, brutality and revolt. It is because they have no common interest, they are not associates despite calling what brings them together a society. We will certainly not put forward the organisation of the Christian Church as a perfect example of a society, with the strong make-up of its numerous families in monasteries, convents, abbeys and cathedrals; it is however true that if we compare the relationship which existed between the members of these families, between the subjects and the heads of this vast kingdom, and those before our eyes, we can clearly see the moral darkness which has taken over our time which we are so prompt to call the Age of Enlightenment. On one side is order, obedience, effort and at the same time emulation, activity and economy; on the other is disorder, insubordination, anarchy and unbridled competition which is cruel warfare, and above all wastage and idleness, compared to which the lazy laxness of the major seventeenth-century beneficiaries would be fervour of a sort which would make the monks’ scarlet look pale. As the aim is not to rebuild a military society, but a pacific society, not to found families of celibates devoted only to spiritual tasks, but real human families, lovers of the mind (science) as much as of flesh (industry), seeking truth and knowledge, cultivating strength and beauty, the only merit of the two
examples we have provided is to give indications as to the possibility of constituting a society whose members would be linked by a common aim; if it has been possible to associate men for warfare, or for mystic contemplation detesting earthly joys, it should surely be easier to link them together, to associate them by presenting them with a common, entirely pacific aim, meeting the needs of each and every one, an aim which is favourable to all sorts of works and workers? It should above all be easier if in this society there were no privileges of birth which are so often the source of contradiction between the ability of the office holder and the importance of the office and which inevitably engenders disorder, that is to say oppression on one side and revolt on the other? This is indeed the cause of all the disruption to which people are subjected nowadays. One of the most important duties of the social order, which nevertheless does not receive the title of public duty, that of the disTribuTion of insTrumenTs and workshops, is carried out by men who have neither the knowledge, nor the tastes, nor the habits needed to do so well, by owners and capiTalisTs; in addition, this so poorly performed office is rewarded with a liberality compared to which the best sinecures are almost nothing. As a result, the beneficiaries of these advantages have an interest which is completely different from that of the people from whom they are exacted, that is to say the workers. One could perhaps argue that these interests are not diametrically opposed, as the owner’s rent could increase concomitantly with the worker’s income, further to a general increase in revenue. It is in this that their interests are opposed, but only because the former are idle, or can be so, while the others work and cannot rest for a year, a month or a day without starving to death. We thus call on the feeling of justice which exists today in the heart of all men, lying dormant, and we are convinced that they will all acknowledge that it is not fair to pay idleness as much and more than work; and this is particularly clear at a time like ours, in which we see so many wretched workers and so many idle who demoralise the workers. This is truly the scourge of our present society; fortunately it will be easier to cure nowadays, since the so-called lower classes, the labouring classes, have largely been stripped of their brutality and above all of their original ferocity, and the upper classes (and we must also say that the upper classes are the idle classes), even more civilised, will shrink from austerity measures which would not have frightened the citizens of Sparta, but whose uselessness and danger they will be quick to apprehend once they have seen the deeper meaning, the hidden but instinctive aim of these frequent revolutions, of these perpetual riots, this constantly renewed unrest. All would then feel that the efforts aiming to reduce interest, rents of houses and farm rents, that is to say to reduce the rent given by the worker to the idle owner, as well as those favouring a rise in wages, would have the enormous advantage of increasing the social importance of work and gradually discrediting idleness. All would realise that these efforts and the institutions which supported them would be useful, not only to the labouring classes, who are the most numerous and the poorest, but to the whole of society; since the position of an idle
class in the midst of a working people is less easy, less tranquil, less happy than is generally believed; we can clearly see the blood-stained and palpable misfortunes of the lower classes, we must be pressed, as we are, from all sides, not to bemoan so many other misfortunes, hidden behind gilt panelling, covered in lace and satin, concealed in the joys of balls and shows; misfortunes which kill in a feather bed as others kill on a bed of straw. The men who embrace such a task, who will constantly have in hand this touchstone to allow them to evaluate social events, will be engaged in real politics and will smile on recalling what we call politics today. They will wonder how, having destroyed all the institutions and beliefs which once linked the superior to the inferior, the master to the worker, woman to man, the child to the family, the citizen to his fatherland, man to humanity, assigning them all to a common destiny, it was possible to spend so many years making and unmaking dynasties, drafting and tearing up constitutions, organising municipalities, without knowing what was the common interest of a town; forming authorities without knowing to what goal the authorities should lead society; debating and voting thousands of laws in total ignorance of the supreme law to which the development of humanity is subjected; they will above all ask themselves how they could have rejected the first man to say: ‘Society is not made up of only the idle and workers; the aim of politics should be to improve the moral, physical and intellectual lot of the workers and the gradual decline of the idle; this means, as far as the idle are concerned, the destruction of all the privileges of birth, and as for the workers, their classification according to ability and remuneration according to works.’ In a further article we shall set out the different ways of encouraging the decrease in interest, rents of houses and farm rents, and the increase in wages.
