ABSTRACT

The decrease in rents of houses, interest and farm rents is favourable to the workers and feared by the idle; in the same way, the increase in wages pleases the former and displeases the latter. Is it possible to contribute towards obtaining what the workers consider to be to their advantage? Can one, by political measures or simply by industrial combinations, facilitate a reduction in the rent that the workers give to the idle, under the names of rents of houses, interest and farm rents or an increase in the wages they receive for their work? This is the question we are going to examine here. The economists had already asked themselves this question and their answer was: laissez-faire! This is the only advice to give when one is at a loss: but as nothing happens alone and in human affairs it is always men who operate, we must ask, when societies do not know what to do and say, whether this is not the moment chosen by genius to map out and open new roads and to draw the masses along them. Laissez-faire, they say. Well, we ask for nothing else: but what must we do? Tell us. When humanity started to feel slavery hanging heavy, well-meaning souls also said: ‘Laissez-faire, everything will come right with time.’ Fortunately, time at this period wore a holy robe; it lived in sacred places and travelled the world saying to peoples and kings: All men are brothers. time spoke thus because he was a Christian, he was a priest and chains fell at the sound of his voice; he did not content himself with laissez-faire, he ordered and forbade; he canonised the friend of the poor and reproved the barbarous master; in other words, he judged and governed. Today time is no longer Christian; he does not even believe in anything; how could he order or forbid? There are no more holy places for him, only the citizen’s narrow dwelling; no more holy robe, only the uniform of the police commissaire: no court of penitence, but the assizes, penal servitude and the Place de Grève;2 no more pastors for lost sheep, but how many lawyers, bailiffs, attorneys and judges to shear them; no more tithes, it is true, but how many court taxes, fees and charges; no more confessional, but how many gendarmes’ sentry boxes! time is no longer a priest; he is a bourgeois, he is idle. The bourgeois is a man who, doing nothing, is afraid of those who do; he lives on the work of others and consequently lives in fear that the one who feeds

him will reduce his pittance. Look at the English lords! They make what they call sacrifices; they make it a rule to reduce their expenses, in order to provide for the workers’ most pressing needs and keep them in a state of poverty, without going as far as despair, momentarily avoiding serious disturbances: this is what they call the poor tax. The poor tax is nothing other than an increase in wages for the workers: but as has already been pointed out, its effect is nearly nil from a purely economic point of view; the more it increases, the more, on the other hand, the real wages paid by the industrial entrepreneur decrease, which means that the day’s income, made up of wages and local assistance, remains about constant. Furthermore, this effect is disastrous from a moral point of view; the poor tax is a good excuse for the solicitude of employers towards their workers to be transformed into pitiless barbarity; this flagrant abandonment is a perpetual cause of unrest which can sometimes be put down by force, but which is constantly threatening. There is no need to examine this subject at length; fortunately in France it is judged not only by theories but above all by general sympathy; the mere name of poor tax is enough for the thing thus called to be dismissed. In France, the man who works does not wish to live on charity; thanks be to God we are no longer, unlike the English, feudal or Christian enough for that; we know that charity is next to idleness, so we shall soon understand that the largest charity ever given bears the name of interest, rent of houses and farm rent. This charity richly supports a host of lazy individuals, whose public and private life is even more curious than that of GilBlas’ beggars, or Boccaccio’s monks,3 the Queen of Navarre4 or La Fontaine.5 In their meetings, their cliques, their books and their newspapers, these lazy individuals are, however, very busy; they are active and involved; they are restless, they reason and discuss, they judge all points, and everything seems either good or bad to them, according to whether their farm rent, their annuities and their house rents are paid to them regularly and generously, or, on the contrary, they are delayed, reduced or unpaid. In other words, they are highly active in increasing or preserving their share of the fruits of the work which they take annually from the workers in order to maintain their idleness. The places where they meet are neither dark cellars nor dirty attics, neither dismal convents nor bleak hermitages. I repeat that they are neither beggars nor Capuchins, but good idle bourgeois who do not carry a beggar’s bag but who have stewards who collect for them and who, as real vergers for parishes of idleness, know how to say: for the contribution to parish expenses. Now that we have set them out, let us consider the means we can use to gradually limit and finally completely destroy the social importance they still enjoy today, this importance being such an absurdity in a society which is in daily revolt against sinecures and concurrent drawing that it can only be, at least partially, the cause of the disorder which afflicts us at present. Let us first point out that any idea of violence to put an end to such a situation would be absurd on the part of the workers. The idle may delude themselves into thinking that the use of the bayonet and bullets is acceptable when workers are

asking for bread; they have no better reason to give than to say that for them it is allowed; it would indeed be difficult to make men who work all day understand that justice, reason and usefulness combine to surround idleness with pleasure and work with misery. But for workers who are not kings (despite what the defenders of the sovereignty of the people may say) force cannot be a last resort: for workers it is easy to demonstrate, even to the idle who find demonstrations most wearisome, that those who produce everything, in arts, sciences and in industry, that those who perfect feelings, elevate intelligence and enrich the world should before and above all have the affection and respect of men and also a large part of the riches they have produced. It is clear when seeking to convince men of such a truth that powder and cannon can only cloud the sight and deafen them; and unless one agrees, in order to keep the titles and privileges of idleness, to pass for a fool, for an idiot, or rather a blind egotist, nobody can contest such an obvious truth for long. Given this, how can and should workers, artists, scholars and industrialists, how can and should producers, those who improve, enlighten and enrich peoples, operate in order to pacifically and little by little escape from their exploitation by the idle and to gradually diminish the weight of the labours imposed upon them with the sole aim of supplying the consumption of the idle? The first of all the means is undeniably the one we are using here and everywhere where the words of Saint-Simon are heard: it is to teach all that the institutions which consecrate the exploitation of the worker by the idle and which are epitomised in all the principles of heredity, whether it be titles and honours or offices and emoluments or taken as the transmission of the privilege of living without working; that these institutions must be replaced by others founded, not on the rights of birth, but on those of competence, and thus which would guarantee each individual, whatever his origins, the benefits of education, the advantages of an office and lastly honourable rest after a life of labour. However, there are other means and they are mainly those that superficial spirits demand from us; until we expose these means, they think they have the right to call us dreamers, even though they acknowledge that our principles are admirable, our intentions commendable and generous; before going any further, let us say a few words in answer to this accusation of daydreaming, based on these grounds. Slavery has been abolished in France, and we can clearly see today that the destruction of this privilege of one man over another is the direct consequence of the Christian word: all men are brothers. But if the Christians, who were the first to imagine the abolition of slavery, had like us been asked about the abolition of the last privilege of birth: ‘By what means will you remove habits, feelings and interests all based on the right of one man over another? How would you persuade masters to emancipate their serfs, to deprive themselves and their children of this property, the noblest of all, that of mankind?’ The orthodox Christian would have been in greater difficulty than we are, as he professed to leave unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,6 and not to be involved in politics; he would have replied: ‘All

men are brothers, I feel it, it is God’s will; may his will be done on earth!’ And his prayer, unceasingly repeated, taught and preached, would have affected the serf’s lot indirectly, by softening his lord’s heart. This is indeed how Christians behaved. But we shall not content ourselves with wishing for what we want to make reality; we who claim to both practise and theorise; we who do not refuse the world, the earth and the flesh but love them and wish to know and cultivate them; we who include in our theology both political economy and metaphysics, because our God is not a pure spirit, and he is all that exists; finally we who claim that our politics is new like our religion and that our politics and our religion are one and the same thing, we cannot content ourselves like Christians with designating an aim, that is to say what should be desired; we must also explain the means, we must set out and say what must be done. Let us furthermore add for those who accuse us of daydreaming, that if the future we announce to them appears to them impossible to attain, this is above all because few people as yet know this future and desire it, and we therefore need to devote all our efforts to making them love it and to showing them that this world does not yet exist and will only do so if it is called for and desired by all. When this first lesson has been taught, once a large number of generous spirits, liberal minds and active men are convinced like us of the need to give humanity this future of peace and freedom which SaintSimon brought it, then transitional means needed to operate a social transformation will not only come readily to all minds, but will be easily applied, without resistance and above all with a consciousness of the objective to which they lead; then everything will be ready to prevent the upheaval which has until now been inseparable from all human evolution. Let us consider these transitional means. Today we shall set forth some of the most important and successively develop them in other articles.