Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885.

XIV
Law and Authority

1.

"When there is ignorance in the heart of a society and disorder in people's minds, laws become numerous. Men expect everything from legislation and, each new law being a further miscalculation of reality, they are led to demand incessantly what should emerge from themselves, from their education, from the condition of their manners and morals."
It was not a revolutionary who said that, or even a reformer. It was a jurisconsult, Dalloz, author of the collection of French laws which goes by the name of Repertoire de la Legislation. And his words, though written by a man who himself was a maker and admirer of laws, represent accurately the normal condition of our societies.

In contemporary States a new law is considered a remedy for all ills. Instead of themselves reforming what is wrong, people begin by demanding a law that will modify it. If the road between two villages becomes impassable, the peasants will say a law is needed regarding local roads. The rural policeman has insulted someone, taking advantage of the timidity of those who show him their respect. "We need a law," says the insulted man, "that will make policemen more polite." Trade and agriculture are lagging behind. "We need a law of protection!" is the reaction of the labourer, the cattle breeder and the grain speculator; even the old clothes merchants demand a law to protect their little trade. The employer lowers wages or lengthens the working day. "We must have a law to put an end to that," clamour the fledgling deputies, instead of telling the workers that there is a more effective way of "putting an end to that," by taking from the employer whatever he has stolen from generations of workers. In brief, what is needed is a law about roads, a law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law about a dyke to keep out all the errors and all the evils that are the result only of human idleness and cowardice.

We are all so perverted by an education that from an early age seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt and develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by an existence under the rod of the law that rules all: our birth, our education, our development, our loves and our friendships, that, if this continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of reasoning for ourselves.

Our societies seem no longer to understand that it is possible to live otherwise than under the regime of law, elaborated by a representative government and applied by a handful of rulers; and even when they have succeeded in emancipating themselves from this yoke, their first course is to resume it immediately. "Year One of Freedom" has never lasted more than a single day, for the very day after proclaiming it, people hastened to put themselves once again under the yoke of the law, of authority.

In fact, for thousands of years those who govern us have continually repeated in every tone: "Respect for the law, obedience for authority." Fathers and mothers bring up their children with this feeling. The schools reaffirm it: they prove its necessity by inculcating into the children scraps of false science, cleverly put together; they make a cult of obedience to the law; they mingle the Deity and the law of the masters in one and the same divinity. The heroes of history that they fabricate are those who obey the law and protect it against rebellion.

When, later on, the child finds his way into public life, both society and literature, striking each day and each moment like the drop of water wearing at a stone, continue to inculcate him with the same prejudice. Books of history, of political science, of social economy abound in this respect for the law; even the physical sciences have been recruited, and, through the introduction of false language into these languages of observation borrowed from theology and authoritarianism, it has become easy to befog our intelligence with the aim of maintaining respect for the law. The press performs the same task; there is not an article in the newspapers that does not propagate obedience to the law, even when each day on the editorial page they declare the impeccability of the law and show how it is dragged through all sorts of mire, through all kinds of ordure, by those who are appointed to maintain it. Servility towards the law has become a virtue, and I doubt if there is a single revolutionary who did not begin in his youth by defending the law against what are generally called "abuses," which in fact are the inevitable consequences of the law itself.

Art sings in chorus with so-called science. The heroes of the sculptor, the painter and the musician cover the law with their shields and with eyes aflame and quivering nostrils, are ready to strike with their swords anyone who would dare to harm it. Temples were raised to such heroes, they were declared to be high priests whom even the revolutionaries did not dare to touch; and if the revolution sought to sweep aside an old institution, it was again by a law that it would attempt to consecrate its work.

This jumble of rules of conduct, inherited from slavery, serfdom, feudalism and royalty, which we call the law, has replaced those monsters of stone before whom human victims were sacrificed, and whom men in servitude did not dare even to flout for fear of being killed by the fires of heaven.

It is since the advent of the bourgeoisie -- since the Great French Revolution -- that this cult of the law has been established with especial success. Under the old regime little was said about it, except among men like Montesquieu58, Rousseau and Voltaire, who posed the law in opposition to royal caprice by which one was expected to obey the good pleasure of the king and his flunkies, under the penalty of being hanged or thrown into prison. But during and after the revolution, the lawyers who came to power did their best to affirm this principle, on which they sought to establish their power. The bourgeoisie accepted it without hesitation, as a means of salvation, to establish a dam that would hold back the popular torrent. The priesthood hastened to sanctify it to save its own ship that was foundering in the waves of the torrent. The people finally accepted it as an improvement on the caprice and violence of the past.

To understand all this, we must transport ourselves imaginatively into the eighteenth century. One's heart must have bled from hearing of the atrocities which in those times were perpetrated on men and women of the people, by the all-powerful nobles, if one is to appreciate the magic influence that these words: "Equality before the law, obedience to the law, without distinction of birth or fortune," exercised a century ago on the peasant mind. Having been treated in the past more cruelly than an animal, having never had any rights and having never obtained justice against the most revolting acts of the nobility, unless he avenged himself by killing the lord and getting himself hanged, he saw himself recognized in this maxim, at least in theory and in regard to his personal rights, as the equal of the lord. Whatever that law might be, it promised to extend itself equally to the lord and the labourer, and it proclaimed the equality, before the law, of the poor and the rich. That promise, as we know today, was a lie; but at that time it seemed to be a progress, a homage paid to truth. That is why, when the saviours of the threatened bourgeoisie, the Robespierres and the Dantons, basing themselves on the writings of the bourgeois philosophers, the Rousseaus and the Voltaires, proclaimed "respect for the law, equally and for all" -- the people, whose revolutionary urge was already dying down in the face of an enemy more and more solidly organized, accepted the compromise. It placed its neck under the yoke of the law, so as to save itself from the arbitrary rule of the aristocracy.

Since then the bourgeoisie has not ceased to exploit this maxim which, with that other principle, representatiye government, comprises the philosoghy of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. It has preached it in the schools, it has created its arts and sciences with that aim in view, it has pushed it everywhere, like those devout English ladies who slip their religious tracts under our doors. And it has worked so well, that today we see the emergence of this appalling fact: that on the very day when the spirit of rebellion is reawakened, men who wish to be free demand of their masters to be so good as to protect them by modifying the laws created by the same masters.

But times and minds have nevertheless changed during the past century. Everywhere one finds rebels who do not wish to obey the law unless they know where it originates, what its use may be, whence came the obligation to obey it and the respect with which it is surrounded. The revolution that is approaching will be a true revolution and not a simple uprising, precisely because the rebels of our day submit to their criticism all those foundations of society that have been venerated up to the present, and above all, the great fetish of the law.

They analyze its origins, and they find there, either a god -- product of the terror of savages, and stupid, mean and spiteful like the priests who lay claim to its supernatural origin -- or a heritage of bloodshed, of conquest by iron and fire. They study its character, and they find its distinctive characteristic in immobility, as opposed to the continuing development of humanity. They ask how the law is sustained, and they see the atrocities of Byzantinism and the cruelties of the Inquisition; the tortures of the Middle Ages, living flesh cut into ribbons by the executioner's whip, and the chains, clubs and axes that are put at the service of the law; the dark dungeons of the prisons, and the sufferings, tears and curses they conceal. Even today they are still there, the axe, the rope, the rifle, and the prisons; on one hand the brutalization of the prisoner reduced to the condition of an animal in a cage, and on the other the judge, stripped of all the feelings that form the better part of human nature, living a kind of dream in a world of juridical fictions, and applying with a voluptuous pleasure the penalty of the guillotine, which is bloody or dry according to the pleasure of this coldly wicked fool, who is the only one unaware of the abyss of degradation into which he has fallen in comparison with those he condemns.

We see a race of law-makers who know nothing of the areas on which they legislate, voting today on a law regarding city sanitation, without the least knowledge of hygiene, and tomorrow regulating the arming of the troops without having handled a rifle, making laws on education without giving an honest education to their own children, legislating in every direction, but never forgetting the penalties that will strike with imprisonment and worse men who are a thousand times less immoral than these same law-makers. Finally we see the jailor who has lost almost all human feeling, the gendarme trained as a bloodhound, the complacent stool-pigeon, informing turned into a virtue, corruption transformed into a system; all the vices, all the worst sides of human nature, nurtured and favoured by the triumph of the law.

We see all this, and because of it, instead of repeating idiotically, "Respect the law!" we cry out "Despise the law and all its attributes." That cowardly maxim, "Obedience to the law," we replace by "Revolt against all laws!" Merely compare the crimes committed in the name of each law and what good it may have produced, weigh the good against the bad -- and you will see whether we are right.

2.

The law is a relatively modern phenomenon; humanity lived century after century without any kind of written law, not even one simply carved in symbols, on stones, at the entries to temples. In that epoch the relations between men were regulated by simple customs, by habits and usages, which constant repetition rendered venerable and which everyone acquired in childhood, as they learnt to win their food by hunting, rearing cattle or tilling the land.

All human societies have passed through that primitive stage, and even at the present time a great proportion of humanity lives without written rules. The tribes have manners and customs -- "customary right" as the jurists say; they are social by habit, and that is enough to sustain good relations, between the members of the village, the tribe, the community. It is the same among us, the civilized people; you need only go out of the great cities to see that the mutual relations of the inhabitants are still regulated, not by the written law of the legislators, but by old customs that are still generally accepted. The peasants of Russia, Italy, Spain, and even much of France and England, have no conception of the written law. The latter enters their lives only to control their relations with the State; as to their mutual relations, they still follow the old customs. Once it was so for all humanity.

When one studies the customs of primitive peoples, two very different currents appear.

Since man is not a solitary creature, he develops within himself the feelings and habits that tend to sustain society and propagate the race. Without sociable feeling, without practices leading to solidarity, life in common would have been entirely impossible.

Such feelings and practices are not established by the law; they precede all laws. Nor is it religion that lays them down; they are anterior to all religions, for they are to be found already among animals that live in societies. They develop spontaneously, through the nature of things like those habits among animals which men call instinct; they emerge from a useful and even necessary process of evolution that sustains society in the struggle for existence in which it is involved. Savages end up no longer eating each other, because they find that it is much more advantageous to devote themselves to some kind of culture rather than to procure once a year the pleasure of nourishing themselves on the flesh of an aged parent. Within those tribes which are absolutely independent and know neither laws nor priests and whose ways have been portrayed by many travellers, members of the same clan cease to knife each other in every dispute, since the habit of living in society has ended by developing in them a certain sense of brotherhood and solidarity; they prefer to refer to third parties to settle their differences. The hospitality of primitive peoples, the respect for human life, the feeling for reciprocity, compassion for the weak, the courage to sacrifice oneself in the interest of others, which one learns to practice first towards children and friends and afterwards towards all members of the community -- all these qualities developed among mankind before there were any laws and independently of any religion, as they had developed among all the social animals. Such sentiments and practices are the inevitable result of life in society. Without being inherent in man (as the priests and metaphysicians say) these qualities are the result of life in common.

But, alongside these customs, necessary for the life of societies and conservation of the race, other passions and desires appear and other habits and customs emerge from them. The desire to dominate others and impose one's will on them; the desire to lay hold the products of a neighbouring tribe's work; the desire to subjugate other men, so as to gather luxuries around one, without oneself working, while slaves produce what is necessary and procure for their master all the pleasures and sensual satisfactions: such personal and egotistic desires create another current of habits and customs. The priest, that charlatan who exploits superstition and, having freed himself of the fear of devils, spreads it among others; the warrior, that braggart who urges the invasion and pillage of neighbours so as to return loaded with booty and followed by slaves: both, hand in hand, succeed in imposing on primitive societies customs that are advantageous to themselves and that tend to perpetuate their domination over the masses. Profiting from the indolence, fear and inertia of the ordinary people, and from the constant repetition of the same actions, they succeed in establishing permanently the customs that become the basis of their domination.

To that end, they exploit first of all the spirit of routine that is so developed among men and already is so striking among children, and primitive folk, as well as among animals. Particularly when he is superstitious, man is always fearful of exchanging what is for what might be; in general he venerates whatever is ancient. "Our fathers lived so; they were not unhappy and, as they taught, you should do the same!" say the old men to the young people whenever the latter want to change something. The unknown frightens them; they prefer to hold on to the past, even when that past means poverty, oppression and slavery. One might even say that the more unfortunate a man is, the more he fears changing his situation, lest he become even more wretched; it is only when a ray of hope and a hint of well-being enter his miserable cabin, that he begins to want something better, to criticize his old way of living, to desire a change. If that desire has not penetrated him, if he has not shaken off the tutelage of those who make use of his superstitions and fears, he will choose to remain in the same situation. If the young people want to change something, the old will raise the cry of alarm against the innovators. A primitive man may well prefer to let himself be killed rather than transgress the customs of his people, since from childhood he has been told that the slightest infraction of established customs might bring misfortune down upon him and even result in the ruin of his whole tribe. And even today, there are many politicians and even self-styled revolutionaries who act in the same way, clinging to a past that is on its way out. How many of them have no care but to seek out precedents? And how many ardent innovators are merely the imitators of past revolutions?

This spirit of routine, which finds its origin in superstition, indolence and cowardice, is always the great strength of the oppressors; and in primitive human societies it was always exploited by the priests and the military chiefs, perpetuating customs advantageous to them alone, which they succeeded in imposing on the tribes. So long as this spirit of conservatism, cleverly exploited, sufficed to allow the chiefs to trespass on the freedom of individuals; so long as the inequalities between men were natural ones and were not magnified and multiplied by the concentration of power and wealth; there was not yet any need for the law and for the formidable machinery of tribunals that would impose it with their ever increasing penalties.

But when society had begun to split up into two hostile classes -- one that seeks to establish its domination and the other that seeks to escape from it -- then the struggle broke out. Whoever was the conqueror now hastened to give permanence to the accomplished situation; he sought to make it unchallengeable, to render it holy and venerable by all the criteria that the conquered might respect. Law made its appearance, sanctified by the priest and having at its service the warrior's mace. It sought to stabilize the customs that were advantageous to the dominant minority, and the military authority undertook to ensure obedience. At the same time the warrior found in this new function an instrument for validating his power; no longer did he have at his service mere brute force, for now he was the defender of the law.

But if the law presented nothing more than a series of regulations favouring merely the rulers, it would have difficulty in being accepted and obeyed. Therefore the legislator mingled in his code the two currents of which we have just been speaking; the maxims that represent the principles of morality and solidarity developed through life in common, and the orders that are always needed to consecrate inequality. The customs that are absolutely essential for the very existence of society were easily mingled in the Code with practices imposed by the rulers, and aspired to the same respect from the crowd. "Do not kill!" says the Code, and it hastens to add, "Pay your tithe to the priest!" "Do not steal!" says the Code, and immediately afterward, "Whoever does not pay his taxes shall be punished!"

Such is the law, and the double character that it sustains to this day. Its origin lies in the desire of the dominant class to preserve the customs which they themselves have imposed for their own advantage. Its true character lies in the clever mingling of customs which have no need of laws to be respected, with the other customs that offer advantages only for the rulers, that are harmful to the masses and are maintained only by the fear of punishment.

No more than individual capital, born of fraud and violence and developed under the auspices of authority, has the law any title to human respect. Born of violence and superstition, established in the interest of the priest, the conqueror and the rich exploiter, it will be abolished entirely on the day the people decide to break their chains.

Of all this we shall become even more convinced as we analyze, in the following chapter, the further development of the law under the auspices of religion, authority, and the present-day parliamentary system.

3.

We have seen how the law was born out of established customs and usages, and how from the beginming it represented a clever mixture of sociable customs necessary for the preservation of the human race, with other customs imposed by those who exploited to their advantage popular superstitions and the right of the strongest. This double character of the law has determined its further development among peoples who are increasingly disciplined. But while the nucleus of sociable customs written into the law undergoes a slight and slow modification over the centuries, it is the other aspect of the law that develops apace, always to the advantage of the dominant classes, always to the detriment of the oppressed classes. Only with difficulty and very rarely can one wrest from the dominant class any law that represents, or seems to represent, a guarantee for the disinherited. But then that law will merely abrogate a preceding law that had been made for the advantage of the ruling class. "The best laws," said Buckle59 "were those that abrogated preceding laws." But what terriible efforts have been necessary, what streams of blood have had to be shed each time the effort was made to abrogate one of those institutions that serve to keep the people in fetters! To abolish the last vestiges of serfdom and of feudal rights, to break the power of the royal gang, France had to pass through four years of revolution and twenty years of war. To abrogate the least of the iniquitous laws that the past has bequeathed to us, dozens of years of struggle are needed and in the end most of them will only disappear during revolutionary periods.

The socialists have already told on many occasions the history of capital. They have recounted how it was born of wars and pillage, of slavery and serfdom, of fraud and modern ways of exploitation. They have shown how it was nourished by the blood of the workers and how it has slowly conquered the entire world. They have still to write the same kind of history regarding the genesis and development of the law. The popular mind, as always going ahead of the savants, is already working out the philosophy of that history and marking out its essential landmarks.

Created in order to guarantee the fruits of pillage, monopoly and exploitation, the law has followed the same phases of development as capital; twin brother and sister, they have walked hand in hand, both of them feeding on the sufferings and sorrows of humanity. Their history has been practically the same in all the countries of Europe. It is only the details that differ; the basic system is identical, and one has only to cast an eye over the development of the law in France, or in Germany, to understand the essential characteristics of its development in most European countries.

In its origins, the law was the national pact or contract. On the Roman parade ground the legions and the people agreed on their contract. The Field of May60 of the primitive communes of Switzerland (where the assembled people vote their own laws) retains a memory of that epoch despite all the changes that have taken place through the permeation of a centralizing bourgeois civilization. It is true that this contract was not always freely accepted; even at that epoch the rich and the powerful were trying to impose their will. But at least they encountered an obstacle to their efforts in the popular masses which often made their strength felt.

As the Church on one side and the gentry on the other succeeded in reducing the people to servitude, the right to make laws escaped from the hands of the nation and passed into those of the privileged. The Church extended its powers; sustained by the wealth which accumulated in its coffers, it interfered more and more in private life, and, under the pretext of saving souls, it exploited the soil of its serfs; it levied its dues from all classes and broadened its jurisdiction; it multiplied both crimes and punishments, and enriched itself in proportion to crimes committed, since it was into its strongboxes that the proceeds of the fines would flow. The laws had no relevance to the interests of the nation: "One might rather think of them as emanating from a gathering of fanatics rather than of legislators," observed one historian of French law.

At the same time, as the lord for his part extended his power over the farm labourers and the town artisans, he became also both judge and legislator. In the tenth century such monuments of public law as existed were not much more than treaties regulating the obligations, feudal tasks and tributes of the serfs and the lord's vassals. The legislators of this period were a handful of brigands, ever increasing in numbers and organizing themselves to exploit a people that became more and more passive as its members dedicated themselves to tilling the fields. They exploited to their advantage the feeling of justice that is inherent in all peoples; they posed as men of justice, yet made the very application of justice a source of revenue, and formulated laws that served to sustain their domination.

Later on these very laws, gathered together and classified by the legal experts, served as the basis for our modern codes. And people still talk of respecting the codes -- those heritages of the baron and the priest!

The first revolution, the revolution of the communes, succeeded in abolishing these laws only in part, for the charters of the free communes were mostly no more than compromises between seigniorial and episcopal legislation and the new relations that were created in the heart of the free commune. And yet, what a difference between those laws and our present-day laws! The commune did not bring itself to imprisoning and guillotining its citizens for reasons of State; it limited itself to expelling whoever plotted with the enemies of the commune and demolishing his home. For most of the so-called "crimes and misdemeanours" it restricted itself to imposing fines; one even sees in the Communes of the 12th century that principle which is so just, but now forgotten, by which the whole community took responsibility for the misdeeds committed by its members. The societies of that era, considering crime as an accident or a misfortune -- which to this day is the conception of Russian peasants -- and refusing to admit the principle of personal vengeance, which is preached in the Bible, understood that for each crime the fault lies with all society. It needed all the influence of the Byzantine church, which imported among the Celts and the Germans the penalty of death and the horrible torments that were later inflicted on those who were considered criminals, and as well as the influence of the Roman civil code -- developed by imperial Rome -- to introduce those notions of unlimited property in land which, in the end, overwhelmed the communalist customs of the primitive peoples.

We know that the free communes were unable to sustain themselves; they became the prey of the kings. And as royalty gained further strength, the right of legislation passed more and more into the hands of a clique. Appeals to the notion were made only to sanction the taxes imposed by the kings. Parliaments (sometimes called at intervals of two centuries at the pleasure and whim of the Court), "extraordinary councils," "assemblies of noblemen" or ministers who hardly listened to the grievances of the king's subjects -- these were the legislators. And even later, when all the powers were concentrated in a single person who said, "The State is I," it was "in the secrecy of the Prince's Council," according to the fantasy of a minister or an imbecile king, that the edicts were fabricated which the subjects were expected to obey under pain of death. All judicial guarantees were abolished; the nation became a serf to the royal power and a handful of courtiers. The most terrible of penalties -- breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, flaying alive, tortures of all kinds -- produced by the sick fantasy of monks and frenzied fools who sought their pleasures in the sufferings of the tormented: such was the "progress" that made its appearance at this epoch.

It is to the Great Revolution that belongs the honour of having begun the demolition of that crazy structure of laws left to us by feudalism and the reign of kings. But after having demolished certain parts of this ancient edifice, the revolution transferred the power of lawmaking into the hands of the bourgeoisie which in turn began to erect a new scaffolding of laws designed to maintain and perpetuate its domination over the masses. In its parliaments it legislated far and wide, and mountains of useless papers accumulated with alarming rapidity. But what, basically, are all these laws?

Most of them have only one aim: protecting individual property, which means the riches acquired by the exploitation of man by man, opening further fields of exploitation to capital, and sanctioning the new forms exploitation assumes as capital seizes on new areas of human life -- railways, telegraphs, electric light, chemical industries, even the expression of human thought through literature and science, etc. The rest of the laws, basically, have always the same aim: to maintain the governmental machine that assures capital the exploitation and accumulation of all the wealth that is produced. Magistrature, police, armed forces, public instruction, finance -- all serve the same God: capital; all have but one end, to protect and further the exploitation of the workers by the capitalist. Analyze all the laws that have been made in the last eighty years, and you will find nothing else. The protection of individuals, which is presented to you as the true mission of the law, occupies only an almost imperceptible place, for in our present-day societies attacks on the person, dictated directly by hatred and brutality, are on the decline. If someone is killed nowadays, it is usually for robbery and rarely for personal revenge. And if this kind of crime and misdemeanour continues to diminish, it is certainly not due to legislation, but to the development of our societies, to our increasingly sociable habits, not to the prescriptions of our laws. If one were to abrogate tomorrow all the laws concerning the protection of people, if one ceased tomorrow all prosecutions for crimes against people, the number of attacks caused by personal revenge or brutality would not show the least increase.

Perhaps someone will say that over the past fifty years a good number of liberal laws have been passed. But when one analyses these liberal laws one finds that they are no more than the abrogation of laws we have inherited from the barbarism of previous centuries. All the liberal laws and the whole of the radical programme can be summed up in these words: abolition of the laws that are inconvenient to the bourgeoisie itself, and a return to the laws of the twelfth century communes, extended to all citizens. The abolition of the death penalty, juries for all "crimes" (the jury, more liberally administered than today, existed in the 12th century), an elected magistrate, the right to prosecute public servants, the abolition of standing armies -- all this, which we are told is an invention of modern liberalism, is no more than a return to freedoms that existed before the Church and the King extended their grasp over humanity.

The protection of exploitation, directly by laws regarding property, and indirectly by sustaining the State -- there is the essence and substance of our modern codes and the preoccupation of our costly machines of legislation. It is time now no longer to accept phrases but to take account of what exists in reality. The law which was originally presented to us as a collection of customs useful for the preservation of society, is now no more than an instrument for maintaining exploitation and for the domination of the idle rich over the labouring masses. Today its civilizing mission is nil; it has only one mission, the maintenance of exploitation.

That is how we must tell the history of the development of the law. Must we respect it for that? Certainly not. No more than capital itself, the product of brigandage, does it have a right to our respect. And the first duty of the revolutionaries in the nineteenth century will be to make a bonfire of all existing laws, as they will of all titles to property.

4.

If one studies the millions of laws that rule humanity, one can see easily that they are divisible into three main categories: protection of property, protection of government, protection of persons. And in analyzing these three categories one comes to the same conclusion regarding each of them: the uselessness and harmfulness of the law.

As for the protection of property, the socialists know what that means. Laws regarding property are not fashioned to guarantee either individuals or society the fruits of their labour. They are made, on the contrary, to pilfer from the producer part of what he produces and to assure to the few whatever they have pilfered, either from the producers or from society as a whole. When the law established the right of Sir Such-and-Such over a house, for example, it established his right, not over a cabin that he might have built himself, nor over a house he might have erected with the help of a few friends; nobody would dispute his right if such had been the case. The law, on the contrary, established his rights over a mansion that is not the product of his labour, first because he has had it built by others, whom he has not paid the true value of their work, and next because his mansion represents a social value he could not produce on his own: the law establishes his rights over a portion of that which belongs to everybody and not to anyone in particular. The same house, built in the beautiful heart of Siberia, would not have the value it has in a large city. Its value derives, as we know, from the works of fifty generations who have built the city, adorned it, provided it with water and gas, with fine boulevards, universities, theatres and shops, with railways and roads radiating in all directions.

Thus in recognizing the rights of Sir Such-and-Such over a house in Paris, in London, in Rouen, the law appropriates to him -- unjustly -- a certain part of the products of the work of all humanity. And it is precisely because that appropriation is a crying injustice (all other forms of property have the same character) that it has needed a whole arsenal of laws and a whole army of soldiers, policemen and judges to sustain it, against the good sense and the feeling of justice that is inherent in humanity.

Thus the greater part of our laws -- the civil codes of all countries -- have no other object than to maintain this appropriation, this monopoly to the profit of a few against the whole of humanity. Three quarters of the cases judged by the tribunals are merely quarrels that have cropped up among monopolists; two robbers quarrelling over the booty. And a great part of our criminal laws have the same aim, since their object is to keep the worker in a position subordinate to the employer, to assure to one the exploitation of the other.

As to guaranteeing the producer the product of his work, there are not even any laws that provide it. That is so simple and so natural, so much in accordance with human customs and habits that the law has not even dreamed of it. Open brigandage, with arms in hand, no longer exists in our century; a worker need no longer dispute with another worker over the products of their toil; if there is some failure of understanding between them, they deal with it without having recourse to the law, by calling in a third party, and if there is anyone who insists on requiring from another person a part of what he has produced, it can only be the property-owner, coming to claim his lion's share. As to humanity in general, it respects everywhere the right of each person over what he has produced, without the need to have any special laws to cover it.

All these laws about property, which make up the great volumes of codes and are the delight of our lawyers, have no object but that of protecting the unjust appropriation of the work of humanity by certain monopolists, and thus have no reason to exist; and socialist revolutionaries are determined to make them vanish on the day of the revolution. We can, in fact and in full justice, make a great bonfire of all the laws that are related to the so-called "rights of property," of all the property titles, of all the archives -- in brief, of all that has reference to an institution which soon will be considered a blot on the history of humanity as humiliating as slavery and serfdom in past centuries.

What we have just said about the laws concerning property applies completely to the second category of laws -- the laws that maintain the government -- constitutional laws, in other words.

Once again there is a whole arsenal of laws, decrees, or ordinances, this time serving to protect the various forms of representative government -- by delegation or usurpation -- under which human societies struggle for existence. We know very well -- the anarchists have often demonstrated it by their incessant criticism of the various forms of government -- that the mission of all governments, monarchical, constitutional and republican, is to protect and maintain by force the privileges of the owning classes: aristocracy, priesthood and bourgeoisie. A good third of our laws, the "fundamental" laws, laws on taxes, customs duties, on the organization of ministries and their chancelleries, on the army, the police, the church, etc. -- and there are tens of thousands of them in every country -- have no other end but to maintain, keep in repair and develop the governmental machine, which in its turn serves almost entirely to protect the privileges of these possessing classes. Analyze all these laws, observe them in action from day to day, and you will see that there is not a single one worth keeping, beginning with those that bound the communes hand and foot to the parson, the local merchant and the governmental boss, and ending with that famous constitution (the 19th or 20th since 1789),61 which gives us a chamber of dunces and petty speculators ready for the dictatorship of any adventurer who comes along, for the rule of some crowned cabbage-head.

Briefly, regarding these laws there can be no doubt. Not only the anarchists, but also the more or less revolutionary middle class are in agreement on this: that the best use one can make of the laws concerning the organization of government is to burn them in a bonfire celebrating their end.

There remains the first category of laws, the most important, because most of the prejudices cluster around them; the laws regarding the protection of persons, the punishment and prevention of "crimes." If the law enjoys a certain consideration, it is because people believe this category of laws absolutely indispensable for the security of the individual in society. Laws have developed from the nucleus of customs that were useful for human societies and were exploited by the rulers to sanction their domination. The authority of the chiefs of the tribes, of the rich families of the communes, and of the king, were supported by the function of judges which they exercised, and even to the present, when people talk of the need for government, it is its function of supreme judge that is implied. "Without government, people would strangle each other," says the village wiseacre. "The ultimate end of society is to give every accused person twelve honest jurors," said Edmund Burke.

But despite all the presuppositions that exist on this subject, it is high time the anarchists loudly declared that this category of the laws is as useless and harmful as the rest.

First of all, when we consider the so-called "crimes," the attacks against the persons, it is well known that two thirds or even three quarters of them are inspired by the desire to lay hold of somebody's wealth. That immense category of so-called "crimes and misdemeanours" would disappear on the day private property ceased to exist.

"But," we shall be told, "there will still be the brutes who make attempts on the lives of citizens, who strike with the knife in every quarrel, who avenge the least offence by a murder, if there are not laws to restrain them and punishments to hold them back." This is the refrain that has been sung to us ever since we expressed doubt of society's right to punish. Yet one fact has been clearly established: the severity of punishments in no way diminishes the number of crimes. You can hang, draw and quarter the murderers as much as you like, but the number of murders will not diminish. On the other hand, if you abolish the death penalty there will not be a single murder more. Statisticians and legists know that when the severity of the penal code is lessened there is never an increase in the number of attempts against the lives of citizens. On the other hand, when the crops are abundant, when bread is cheap and the weather is good, the number of murders decreases at once. It is proved by statistics that the number of crimes increases and declines in relation to the price of necessities and to good or bad weather. Not that all murders are inspired by hunger. Far from it; but when the harvests are good and necessities are affordably priced, people are happy and less wretched than usual, and they do not let themselves be led away by dark passions that tempt them to stick knives into the chests of their neighbours for futile reasons.

Besides, it is well known that fear of punishment has not halted a single murderer. Whoever is about to kill his neighbour for vengeance or poverty does not reflect a great deal on the consequences; there has never been a murderer who lacked the firm conviction that he would escape from prosecution. Let anyone think about this subject, let him analyze crimes and punishments, their motives and consequences, and if he knows how to reason without letting himself be influenced by preconceived ideas, he is bound to reach this conclusion:

"Without considering a society where people will receive a better education, where the development of all their faculties and the possibility of using them will give men and women so much pleasure that they would not risk it all by indulging in murder, without considering that future society, and taking into account only our present society, with the sad products of poverty we see everywhere in the low taverns of the cities, the number of murders would not increase in any way if one day it were decided that no punishment be inflicted on murderers; indeed it is very likely there would be a fall in the number of cases involving recidivists, brutalized in the prisons."

We are told constantly of the benefits of the law and of the salutary effects of punishment. But has anyone ever tried to establish a balance between the benefits that are attributed to the law and its penalties, and the degrading effect of those penalties on humanity? One has merely to consider the accumulation of evil passions that are awakened among the spectators by the atrocious punishments inflicted publicly in our streets and squares. Who is it that has thus fostered and developed the instincts of cruelty among humanity (instincts unknown to the animals, man having become the most cruel animal on earth), if it is not the king, the judge and the priest, armed by the law, who had flesh torn away by strips, with burning pitch poured into the wounds, had limbs dislocated, bones broken, men sawn in two, so as to maintain their authority? You need merely consider the torrent of depravity let loose in human societies by spying and informing, encouraged by judges and paid for by the government in hard cash under the pretext of assisting the discovery of crimes. You need only to go into prisons and observe there what the man becomes who is deprived of liberty and thrust among other depraved beings permeated with all the corruption and vice that breed in our prisons today, to realise that the more they are "reformed," the more detestable the prisons become, our modern and model penitentiaries being a hundred times more corrupting than the dungeons of the middle ages. Finally, you need only consider what corruption and deprivation of the mind is generated among humankind by these ideas of obedience (essence of the law), of punishment, of authority having the right to punish and judge apart from the urgings of conscience, by all the functions of executioners, jailers and informers -- in brief by all that immense apparatus of law and authority. You have only to consider all that, and you will certainly be in agreement with us, when we say that law and its penalties are abominations that should cease to exist.

Meanwhile, people who are not ruled by police, and because of that are less imbued by authoritarian prejudices, have perfectly understood that someone called a "criminal" is simply an unfortunate; that it is not a question of whipping or chaining him, or causing his death on the scaffold or in prison, but of succouring him by the most brotherly care, by treating him as an equal and taking him to live among honest people. And we hope the coming revolution will resound with this call:

"Burn the guillotines, demolish the prisons, drive away the judge, the policeman, the spy -- an impure race if ever there was one -- but treat as a brother him who has been led by passion to do ill to his kind; above all deprive the truly great criminals, those ignoble products of bourgeois idleness, of the possibility of parading their vices in seductive form, and you can be sure that we shall no longer have more than a very small number of crimes to point to in our society. Apart from idleness, what sustains crime is law and authority; the laws on property, the laws on government, the laws with their penalties and punishments. And Authority, which takes on itself to make these laws and apply them.

"No more laws! No more judges! Freedom, Brotherhood and the practice of Solidarity are the only effective bulwark we can raise to the anti-social instincts of a few among us."


Notes

58. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, Baron de. (1669-1755). French political philosopher, whose main and most influential work, L'Esprit des Lois was 14 years in preparation, although it took only 2 years before an English translation appeared in 1750. Trans.

59. Buckle. See note 53. Trans.

60. The Field of May. In some of the smaller Swiss cantons a measure of direct democracy still prevails, and the citizens gather in a field on the edge of the town, often with a great lime tree as a focus as in Appenzell, and actually vote their own laws on the spot, appointing at the same time a council to see that the people's will is carried out. Trans.

61. Here Kropotkin is presumably referring to the Constitution of the Third Republic, which was adopted in 1875. Trans.