Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885.
XIX Expropriation
1. We are no longer the only ones to say that Europe finds itself on the eve of a great revolution. The bourgeoisie for their part are beginning to see it and to declare the fact through the mouths of their newspapers. The Times recognized it in a recent article all the'more remarkable for emanating from a paper that never displays alarm on any subject. Deriding those who preach saving and abstention, the organ of the City invited the bourgeoisie to reflect rather on the lot which the workers endure in our society and to consider what concessions might be made to them, since they had every right to be discontented. The Journal de Geneve -- that old sinner -- said that the republic has certainly not occupied itself enough with the social question. Yet others, which we would find it repugnant to mention, but which are nonetheless the faithful voices of the great bourgeoisie and of high finance, already lament the fate reserved in the near future for the poor employer who will be forced to toil like his own workers, or fearfully declare that the waves of popular rage are mounting around them.
Recent events in the capital of Austria, the underground agitation that goes on the north of France, events in Ireland and Russia, the movements in Spain and a thousand other signs that we all know; the link of solidarity that unites the workers of France among themselves and with those of other countries -- that impalpable link which one day will make all their hearts beat together and unite them into a homogenous league, far more formidable than the unity represented by some committee or other: all these trends can only confirm such forebodings.
Finally, the situation in France which is again entering the phase when all the parties ambitious of power are willing to give each other a hand to attempt a rising; the intensified activity of diplomats which presages the approach of a European war, so many times postponed and therefore all the more certain; the inevitable consequences of that war which will necessarily be a popular insurrection within the defeated and invaded country: all these facts coming together in an epoch full of events like ours, make it possible to foretell that we are perceptibly nearer to the day of the revolution.
The bourgeoisie understands this, and is prepared to resist with violence, since it does not know and does not want to know any other means. It has decided to resist from the start and to massacre a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand workers, if necessary, plus fifty thousand women and children, to maintain its domination. It will not draw back because of the horror of the massacres. That was proved well enough on the Champ de Mars in 1790, in Lyon in 1831, in Paris in 1848 and 1871. To save their capital and the right to idleness and vice, all methods are good enough for people like this.
Their programme of action is already decided. Can we say as much for ours?
For the bourgeoisie, massacre is already a programme in itself, so long as there are soldiers -- French, German, Turk, no matter -- to whom it can be confided. Since it sets out only to sustain what already exists, to prolong the status quo, even for only fifteen years longer, the question reduces itself for them to a simple armed struggle. The matter appears before the workers in quite a different way; since their wish is precisely to modify the order of existing things, the problem for them is not so odiously simple. It extends before them in vast immensity. The bloody struggle, for which we must be as well prepared as the bourgeoisie, is nevertheless only an incident in the battle we have to wage against capital. In itself it will do no more than scare the bourgeoisie and leave everything in the same condition. Our objective is far broader than that, our plans are far higher.
For us, it is a matter of abolishing the exploitation of man by man. It is a matter of making an end to the iniquities, the vices, the crimes that result from the idle existence of some and the economic, intellectual and moral servitude of others. The problem is immense. But since past centuries have bequeathed this problem to our generation, since it is we who find ourselves under the historic necessity of working out its entire solution, we must accept the task. Besides, we have no longer to grope at hazard for a solution. It has been imposed on us by history, at the same time as the problem; it has been named and declares itself loudly in all the countries of Europe, and completes the economic and intellectual development of our century. It is expropriation; it is anarchy.
If social wealth remains in the hands of the few who possess it today; if the factory, the warehouse and the workshop remain the property of the owner; if the railways and the other means of transport continue in the hands of the companies and individuals who have made them monopolies; if the mansions in the cities and the villas of landlords remain in the possession of their present owners instead of being placed, on the day of the revolution, at the free disposition of all the workers; if all the accumulated treasures, in the banks or in the houses of the rich, do not return immediately to the collectivity -- because all of us have contributed to produce them; if the insurgent peoples does not take possession of all the goods and provisions accumulated in the great cities and does not organize affairs so that they are put at the disposal of those who need them; if the land, finally, remains the property of bankers and usurers -- to whom it belongs today, in fact if not by right -- and if the great properties are not taken away from the great proprietors to be placed in the hands of those who wish to cultivate the soil; if, finally, there emerges a new class of rulers who give orders to the ruled, the insurrection will not have been a revolution, and we shall have to start all over again. The worker, having shaken the yoke from his neck for a moment, will have to bow his head again beneath the same yoke and again submit to the whip and the goad of his employer, the arrogance of his bosses, the vice and crimes of the idle -- without mentioning the white terror, the deportations and executions, the frenzied dance of the murderers over the corpses of the workers.
Expropriation -- that is the guiding word of the coming revolution, without which it will fail in its historic mission: the complete expropriation of all those who have the means of exploiting human beings; the return to the community of the nation of everything that in the hands of anyone can be used to exploit others.
To create the situation where each person may live by working freely, without being forced to sell his work and his liberty to others who accumulate wealth by the labour of their serfs -- that is what the coming revolution must do. Ten years ago this programme (at least in its economic aspects), was accepted by all socialists. Those who called themselves socialists admitted it without reservations. Since then, so many knights of industry have come to exploit socialism in their personal interest, and have worked so well to abridge the programme, that today only the anarchists will be found to have maintained it in its integrity. It has been mutilated, stuffed with empty phrases, so that each person can interpret it as he wishes; and it has been diluted in this way, not to satisfy the workers -- for a worker when he accepts socialism usually accepts it entirely -- but simply to please the bourgeoisie, to gain a place in its ranks. Thus it is the anarchists alone who bear the immense obligation to propagate, even in the most inaccessible places, this idea of expropriation. There are no others who can be relied on for this task.
It would be a fatal error to believe that the idea of expropriation has already penetrated the minds of all the workers and that it has become for all people one of those convictions for which the man of integrity would give his life. Far from that, there are millions who have not even heard it spoken of, except through the mouths of its adversaries. Even among those who accept it, how few are those who have examined it in its various aspects and in all its details! We know, it is true, that it is above all at the time of the revolution itself that the idea of expropriation will gain most adherents, when everyone will be interested in public issues, will be reading, discussing and acting, and when the most concisely and clearly expressed ideas will be most capable of attracting the masses. And we also know that if there were only two parties in evidence during the revolution, the bourgeoisie and the people, the idea of expropriation would be accepted immediately by the latter, as soon as it was launched by no matter how small a group.
But we have to think of other enemies of the social revolution than the bourgeoisie. There are all the bastard parties that have arisen between the bourgeoisie and the socialist revolutionaries; all those who will seek to save from the wreck a part of their privileges and will cry out all the more strongly against the privileges they are prepared to sacrifice for the moment -- in the hope of regaining them later. All these intermediary groups will deploy their activity to persuade the people to let go of the substance and accept the shadow. There will be thousands of people ready to say that it is best to be content with a little so as not to lose everything; there will be people who will seek to waste time and exhaust the revolutionary impulse in vain attacks on futile things and insignificant men rather than resolutely attacking institutions; who would like to play Saint Just75 and Robespierre, instead of doing what the peasant in the past century did, taking the social wealth, putting it to immediate use and establishing the people's rights over this wealth so that all can profit from it.
To avert this peril, there is at present only one means: it is to work incessantly, from now onwards, at sowing the idea of expropriation by all our words and all our actions, so that each of our acts relates to this mother-idea, so that the word Expropriation penetrates into every area of the country, so that it be discussed in each village and become for each worker, each peasant, an integral part of the word Anarchy, and then -- but only then -- we shall be sure that on the day of revolution it will be on everyone's lips, that it will surge up formidably, thrust by the whole people, and that the blood of the people will not have been spilt in vain.
That is the idea which is emerging at this moment among anarchists in all countries concerning the task that awaits them. Time presses, but even that gives us new strength and makes us redouble our energies to reach the objective, for without that all the efforts and all the sacrifices of the people will once again be lost.
2. Before exposing how we see expropriation happening, we must respond to one objection, which is theoretically feeble but is widespread. Political economy -- that pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie -- does not cease to give praise in every way to the benefits of individual property. "Look" -- it says -- "at the prodigies the peasant accomplishes once he becomes the owner of the land he cultivates; see how he digs and harrows his lot, what crops he gains from his unpromising land! See what industry is able to realize once it is liberated from impediments, controls and guild restrictions. All these prodigies are due to individual property!"
It is true that having painted this picture, the economists do not conclude, "The land to him who cultivates it." On the contrary, they hasten to deduce from the situation, "The land to the lord who will get it cultivated by wage earners!" All the same it appears that a number of good people are taken in by such reasoning and repeat it without reflecting on it. As for us, "Utopians" precisely because we are "Utopians," we set out to lpok more deeply, to analyze, and here is what we find.
In relation to the land, we also conclude that its cultivation is done much better when the peasant becomes the owner of the field he cultivates. But to whom do our friends the economists compare the small landed proprietor? Is it, for example to one of those communities of Doukhobors (Fighters for the Spirit) who, reaching the shores of the Amur, put their cattle and the work of their young men into a common pool, drove ploughs drawn by four or five pairs of oxen through the scrub, build their houses together, and from the first year onwards found themselves rich and prosperous while the individual and isolated emigrant who tried to clear some marshy hollow had to beg from the State a few pounds of flour? It is to one of those American communities of which Nordhof tells us that, having given everyone in the commune food, clothing and shelter, would allocate a sum of a hundred dollars to each member to allow him to buy a musical instrument, a work of art, or some knickknack not to be found in the communal stores?
No! To research, to gather oneself the contradictory facts so as to elucidate them and so support or reject one's hypothesis -- that is food for a Darwin; official science prefers to ignore them. It is content with comparing the peasant proprietor with the serf, the sharecropper, the tenant!
But the serf, when he worked the land of his lord, knew in advance that the lord would take from him everything he produced, except for a meagre ration of buckwheat and rye -- just enough to hold flesh and bone together; he knew he could exhaust himself at his work and nevertheless, come springtime, he would be forced to mix grass into his flour, as the Russian peasants still do and as the French peasants did up to 1789; he knew that if he had the misfortune to enrich himself a little he would become the target of persecution by his acquisitive lord. Therefore he preferred to work as little as he could and as badly as he could. And people wonder that the grandsons of that same peasant farm his land infinitely better since they know they can store the crop for their own benefit!
The sharecropper already shows an advance on the serf. He knows that half of the crop will be taken from him by the owners of the land, but he is sure that the other half, at least, will remain his. And despite this condition -- revolting in our eyes but very just in those of the economists -- he succeeded in bettering the land he cultivated so far as that could be done with the power of his own hands.
The tenant farmer, provided his lease is assured for a certain number of years and its conditions are not too burdensome and allow him to put something aside to better his farm -- or if he has a little working capital -- will do even more in the way of improvement. Finally, thejpeasant proprietor, if he is not crippled by debts through purchasing his bit of land, and if he can build up a reserve, will cultivate even better than the serf, the sharecropper and the tenant because he knows that, apart from taxes and the lion's share taken by his creditors, whatever he draws from the land by his hard labour will belong to him.
But what can one conclude from these facts? Nothing except that nobody likes to work for another and that the land will never be properly cultivated so long as the cultivator knows that in one way or another the best part of his crop will be taken by some idler -- landlord, bourgeois or creditor -- or by the taxes of the State. As for finding in these facts the least basis of a comparison between individual property and collective possession -- to do that one must be much inclined to draw conclusions where the facts do not support them.
Yet there is something also to be deduced from these facts. The work of the sharecropper and the tenant farmer, of whom we have spoken, and above all that of the small proprietor is more intensive than that of the serf or slave. Yet agriculture does not prosper, either under the system of sharecropping, or that of tenancy, or even that of small proprietorship. Half a century ago one could reasonably believe that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found in the small landholding, for at that epoch the peasant proprietor was indeed beginning to enjoy a certain prosperity, all the more striking since it succeeded to the poverty of the previous century. But that golden age of the small landowners passed away quickly. Today the peasant who owns a small plot hardly makes ends meet. He falls into debt, he becomes the prey of the cattle merchant, the land shark, thejusurers; pjromissory^notes and mortgages ruin whole villages, even more than the frightful taxes imposed by the State and the municipality. The small proprietor flounders in difficulties, and if the peasant still retains the title of ownership, he is virtually the tenant of the bankers and moneylenders. He believes he will one day be rid of his debts, but they do nothing but grow. Against the few hundred who prosper, one must count the millions who will never escape from the bonds of usury except through a revolution.
How does this well-recognized situation, documented by volumes of statistics, come into being and overturn all the theories of the benefits of property?
The explanation is quite simple. It does not lie in American competition: the situation existed before that began. It is not even a matter of taxes; reduce them and the process will slow down, but it will not be halted. The explanation lies in another fact; having remained stationary for fifteen centuries, agriculture has begun to progress in Europe during the past fifty years in various directions (whose immediate effects are negative). The growing needs of the farmer are complemented by the facilities for borrowing offered him by the bank, the factory, the brokers, the petty gentry of the towns, to entangle him in their coils; to this must be added the high cost of land, so much monopolised by the rich, whether for their enjoyment or for the needs of industry or trade.
Let us analyze the first of these factors, which in our view is the more widespread. To keep ahead of the progress of agriculture, and to sell at the same price as those who cultivate the land by steam-driven machines and increase their crops with chemical fertilisers, the peasant today must have a certain capital to allow for improvements in his methods. Without reservejunds no agriculture is possible. The house becomes dilapidated, the horse grows old, the cow ceases to give milk, the plough wears out, the wagon breaks down: they have to be replaced or repaired. But beyond that, it is necessary to increase the livestock, to get improved kinds of implements, and to enrich the soil. For that it is necessary all at once to spend several thousand-franc notes, and it is thousand-franc notes that the peasant can never find. What then is he to do? He practices in vain the "system of a single heir," which has depopulated (rural) France, but this does not save him. He ends up sending his children to the town to augment the urban proletariat; he himself is mortgaged and driven into debt so that he becomes a serf once again, a serf of the banker as he formerly was of the lord.
This is small property as it is today. Those who still sing its praises are half a century behind the times; they reason from facts observed fifty years ago; they ignore present-day realities.
This simple fact which can be summed up in a new word: "no agriculture without reserve funds," contains a whole education on which the "nationalisers of the land" would do well to reflect.
If tomorrow the partisans of Henry George76 were to dispossess all the English lords of all their properties; if they distributed the land in small holdings to all who wanted to cultivate it; if the cost of a lease were reduced as low as one wished, even to nothing; there would be a surplus or well-being over twenty or thirty years; but at the end of twenty or thirty years everything would start all over again.
The land demands more care. To obtain twenty-nine hectolitres -- of wheat as they do in Norfolk, and up to thirty-six or forty-two hectolitres and such a crop is no longer a fiction -- the land must be cleared of stones, drained, and the soil ploughed deeply; manure must be bought and roads kept up. Finally, land has to be cleared, to keep pace with the growing needs of a growing population.
All this calls for expenditure and for a quantity of labour the family alone cannot provide -- and that is why agriculture remains stationary. To obtain the crops that are now being gotten by intensive cultivation, it is sometimes necessary to spend on drainage, in a month or so, four or five thousand days of work (twenty thousand francs) on a single hectare. This is what the capitalist does, and this is what the small landowner can never do with the wretched hoard he manages to put aside through depriving himself of everything that would enter into the life of a truly human being. The earth demands that man contribute his vivifying work before pouring out its rain of golden grain -- and man fails to do so. Shut up all his life in industrial barracks, he makes marvellous textiles for the rajahs of India, for the slave-owners of Africa, for the wives of bankers; he weaves to clothe the Egyptians, the Tartars of Turkestan, when he is not walking around with folded arms outside the silent factories, and the land does not receive the cultivation that would provide for the needs and comfort of millions. Meat is still a luxury for twenty million French people.
Apart from those who already apply themselves day by day to work on the land, it still needs millions more helpful hands at certain periods, to improve the fields, to clear the meadows of stones, and to create with the help of nature's own powers an enriched soil that in due course will provide bountiful harvests. The land calls on the town to send its men, its machines, its vehicles, but these all remain in the town, the men unoccupied, the machines and vehicles employed to satisfy the vanity of the rich of the entire world.
Far from being a source of wealth to the country, individual property has become a hindrance to the development of agriculture. While certain innovators are opening up new ways of cultivating the earth, this process remains stationary over almost the whole vast mass of Europe, thanks to individual property.
Does it follow that the social revolution should overthrow all the boundaries and hedges of private properties, demolish gardens and orchards, and drive the steam tractor over everything, so as to introduce the doubtful benefits of large-scale cultivation as certain authoritarian reformers image?
This is precisely what, for our part, we want to avoid. We would take care not to touch the holding of the peasant who cultivates it himself with .his children and without wage labour. But we would expropriate all land that was not cultivated by the hands of those who at present possess the land. And when the social revolution is accomplished, when the city worker no longer toils for an employer, but to meet the needs of all, bands of workers -- joyous and gay -- will set out for the countryside to give the expropriated fields the kind of cultivation they lack and to transform the barren lands in a short time into fertile plains, spreading the wealth of the land through the country, and offering to all -- "take it, it is there!" -- the rich and varied products that the earth and the warmth and light of the sun are asking to give them. As to the small proprietor, do you think he will not ask to play his part in the great human family?
The support that the battalions of ragged unemployed Londoners, known as the Hop-Pickers, give today to the Kentish farmers, the help the town sometimes gives to the village at vintage time, will be offered in the future for cultivation, as it is today for the harvest. Agriculture, as the speculators of the Far West have admirably understood, is an eminently periodic industry which at certain times calls for great reinforcements of labour, to improve the soil, above all to bring in the crop, and if this need led to the common working of the soil, it would become the bond of union between the village and the town; it could blend them into a single family.
Enterprises like the Mammoth Farms and similar undertakings in the United States, where culture is carried out nowadays on an immense scale by thousands of barefoot workers, hired for a few months and dismissed immediately the particular task or harvest is accomplished, could just as easily become the parks where industrial workers recover from their exhaustion.
The future does not belong to individual property, to the peasant penned in a fragment of land that barely sustains him. It belongs to communist cultivation. That alone -- yes, that alone -- can give back to the earth what we have a right to demand from it.
But it is perhaps in industry that we shall find the benefits of private property? There is no need to expand on the evils generated in industry by private property, which is another word for capital. All socialists are well aware of that and of the nature of these evils. The poverty of the worker, the insecurity of his future, even if hunger is not knocking at the door today; the endless crises and unemployment, the exploitation of women and children, the wasting away of the race; the unhealthy excesses of the idle rich and the reduction of the worker to the condition of a beast of burden, deprived of the means of sharing in the joys of knowledge, of art, of science; all that has been discussed so often and so well that it is pointless to repeat it here. The same applies to the wars to promote export and the domination of markets; the civil wars, and the colossal conflicts between nations with their monstrous budgets that result in the extermination of whole generations! Nor must we forget the moral depravity of the possessing class, and the false direction it gives to science, to the arts, to ethical principles. And finally there are the governments that justify themselves by the need to stem the rebellion of the oppressed; the law and its crimes, its executioners and judges; the subjection and servility that result from their presence and the depravity that it spreads through society. Such is the cost of personal property and the personal power it engenders.
But perhaps, despite all these faults, despite all these evils, private property still provides us with a few services that counterbalance its negative aspects? Perhaps, given the human stupidity of which our rulers tell us, it is still the only means by which society can work? Perhaps we owe to it the industrial and scientific progress of our century? This is what the so-called "savants" tell us, at least. But let us see on what they base their statements, and what are their arguments.
Their arguments? Here is the only one, the unique one, that they have advanced: "Look -- they say -- at the progress of industry over the past hundred years, since it was freed from the fetters of guild and government! Look at all those railways, those telegraphs, those machines each of which replaces the work of a hundred or two hundred persons, and which make everything from the swingbridge that weighs hundreds of tons to the finest of lace! All that is due to private enterprise, to the desire of men to enrich themselves!"
And indeed the progress accomplished in the production of wealth over the past hundred years has been gigantic, and it is for that very reason -- let us note in passing -- that a corresponding change in the sharing out of the products becomes necessary today. But is it entirely to the personal interest and the intelligent greed of the employers that we owe such progress? Have there not been other factors much more important which might have produced the same results and might have counterbalanced the harmful effects of the industrialists' appetites?
We all know what these factors are. It is enough to name them for their importance to become evident. First of all, there is the steam engine -- handy, easy to operate and always ready to work -- which has revolutionized industry. There is the creation of the chemical industries that have become so important that their development, according to the technologists, gives the true measure of the industrial growth of each nation. They are entirely the product of our century: can you remember what chemistry was in the past century? Finally there is the whole movement of ideas that has appeared since the end of the eighteenth century and, in disengaging man from the embrace of metaphysics, has allowed him to make physical and mechanical discoveries that have transformed industry. Who would dare to say, in the presence of these powerful factors, that the abolition of controls and guild restrictions was more important for industry then the great discoveries of our century? And, given these discoveries, who would dare to affirm at the same time that a method of collective production, whatever its form, would not have benefitted from them in the same way, or even more, than private industry?
As to the discoveries themselves, one must have neglected reading any of the biographies of inventors, and have known none of them personally, to persist in supposing that they were impelled by the thirst for gain! Most of them have died on straw pallets, and we know how capital and private property have actually retarded the putting into practice of great innovations and the improvements they bring about.
At the same time, to uphold on this ground the advantages of individual property it would still be necessary to prove that the latter is opposed to industrial progress. Without that proof, the assumption is pointless. But this thesis is clearly unsustainable, for the sole and good reason that we have never seen a communist collective that possessed the capital necessary to operate a great industry opposing the introduction into that industry of new inventions. On the contrary, no matter how imperfect are the associations, cooperatives etc., that we have recently seen emerging, no matter what their faults, their sin has never been that of being deaf to industrial progress.
We may find much to criticize in the various institutions of a collective character that have been attempted over the past century. But the notable fact is that the greatest reproach we can make to them is precisely that of not having been collective enough. Against the great joint stock associations that have pierced isthmuses and chains of mountains, we bring above all the reproach that they have constituted a new form of anonymous employership and have whitened with the bones of human beings each metre of their canals and tunnels; against the working class organizations we bring the reproach of constituting an aristocracy of the privileged, who ask for nothing better than to exploit their brothers. But neither one nor the other can be accused of showing a spirit of inertia, hostile to the improvement of industry. The only conclusion one can draw at present is that the less opportunity personal interest and the egoism of individuals have of taking the place of the collective spirit in these enterprises, the better their chance of success.
It follows from this quick and much too brief analysis that when people boast of the benefits of personal property, such statements reveal a truly desperate superficiality. Do not let us preoccupy ourselves too much with them. Let us seek rather to determine what form the appropriation of social wealth by all the people should assume; let us attempt to identify the dominant tendency of modern society, and standing on that foundation, try to discover what form expropriation can take at the time of the coming revolution.
3. No problem is more important, and we urge all our comrades to study it in all its aspects and discuss it continually in view of the fact that realizing it is a task that sooner or later will be imposed upon us. On that expropriation, and its good or bad application, the immediate success or the temporary failure of the revolution depends.
In fact, none of us can ignore that any attempt at revolution must be condemned in advance if it does not respond to the interests of the great majority and find means to satisfy them. It is not enough to cherish a noble ideal. Man does not live by high thoughts or superb discourses, for he needs bread as well; the belly has even more rights than the brain, for it nourishes the entire organism. Very well! If on the morrow of the revolution the popular masses have only words at their disposal, if they do not recognize by facts whose evidence is as blinding as sunlight that the situation has been transformed to their advantage, and if the overturning of power ends up as merely a change of persons and formulas, nothing will have been achieved. There will remain only one more disillusionment. And we shall have to put ourselves once again to the ungrateful task of Sisyphus, rolling his eternal rock.
For the revolution to be anything more than a word, for the reaction not to lead us on the morrow to the same situation as on the eve, the conquest on the day itself must be worth the trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not find themselves even poorer today. You will remember the naive republicans of 1848 proposing to put "three months of poverty at the service of the provisional government." The three months of poverty were accepted with enthusiasm, and indeed they were repaid when the time had gone by, but with grapeshot and mass transportation. The poor had hoped that the painful months of waiting would be enough for those mitigating laws to be passed that would transform them into free men and assure them, with work, their daily bread. Instead of asking, would it not have been a surer method to take? Instead of making a show of their poverty, would it not have been preferable to put an end to it? There is no doubt that devotion is a great and beautiful thing, but it is not devotion but betrayal when we abandon to their wretched fate all those who march beside us. That those who take part in the fight may die is fitting, but their deaths must be useful! Nothing is more just than that the men of devotion should sacrifice themselves, but the people in general should profit from the sacrifice of these valiant ones!
Only a general expropriation can satisfy the multitudes who suffer and are oppressed. From the domain of theory we must enter that of practice. But for expropriation to respond to the need, which is to put an end to private property and return all to all, it must be carried out on a vast scale. On a small scale, it will be seen only as a mere pillage; on a large scale it is the beginning of social reorganization. Undoubtedly we shall show ourselves entirely ignorant of the laws of history if we imagine that, in the twinkling of an eyelid, a whole vast country might become our field of experiment. The peoples of France, Europe, the world, will not turn into anarchists by a sudden transformation; yet we know that on the one hand the insanity of governments, their ambitions, their bankruptcies, and on the other hand the incessant propaganda of ideas will result in great disturbances of equilibrium. At such a time we must act. But how often already have the revolutionaries been surprised, letting events pass by, without utilizing them for their cause, seeing a propitious turn of fortune flee without seizing on it!
So, when these days come -- and it is for you to hasten their coming -- in which a whole region and great cities with their suburbs will have got rid of their governments, our work is marked out; all industrial and other plants must be returned to the community, social property held by individuals must be returned to its true master -- which is all of us, so that each can have his full share of the goods available for consumption, so that production of all that is necessary and useful can continue, and that social life, far from being interrupted, can be carried on with the greatest energy. Without the gardens and fields that give us produce indispensable for life, without the granaries, the warehouses, the shops that gather together the products of work, without the factories and workshops that provide textiles and metalwork, without the means of defence, without the railways and other ways of communication that allow us to exchange our products with the neighbouring free communes and combine our efforts for resistance and attack, we are condemned in advance to perish; we shall stifle like a fish out of water which can no longer breathe though bathed entirely in the vast ocean of air.
Let us remember the great strike of railway engineers that took place a few years ago in America. The great mass of people recognized that their cause was just; everyone was fed up with the insolence of the companies, and was happy to see them placed at the mercy of their workers. But when the latter neglected to take hold of the railway lines and locomotives of which they were masters, when the movement of goods of all kinds was interrupted, when produce and merchandise went up double in price, public opinion changed sides. "The companies may rob us and break our arms and legs, but it is these fools of strikers who leave us to die of hunger!" Do not forget such incidents! The interests of the crowd must be safeguarded and its needs as well as its instincts for justice must be fully satisfied.
Yet it is not enough to recognize the principle; it must be applied.
It is often repeated to us: "Try then to touch the peasant's plot of land, the labourer's shack, and you'll see how they'll greet you! A jab with a pitchfork and a good kick!" Fair enough! But, as we have already said, we have no intention of touching either the plot of land or the shack. We shall be very careful not to attack our best friends, those who, without knowing it today, will certainly be our allies tomorrow. It is for their benefit that expropriation will be carried out. We know that there exists a level of income below which lies destitution and above which lies superfluity. In each town, in each country, that level is different; but popular instinct is not deceived, and without it being necessary to lay down statistics on fine paper and fill a whole series of volumes with figures, the people will know how to regain its dues. In our beautiful society it is a scanty minority that has allocated to itself the better part of the national revenue, that has built for itself the palaces in the cities and the great homes in the country, that in the banks accumulates bullion, notes and bonds of all kinds which represent the savings of collective work. Seize all that, and at the same blow you liberate the unfortunate peasant every clod of whose ground is encumbered with a mortgage, the small shop- keeper who lives constantly in fear as he foresees bills falling due, distraints, inevitable failure, and all that lamentable crowd who have no bread for the morrow. Would that multitude remain indifferent on the eve of the revolution, could it fail to understand on the very day of uprising that it depends on itself whether it remain free or fall back into poverty and eternal anxiety? Or will it again have the naivete1, instead of liberating itself, to name once again a government of people with supple hands and glib tongues? Will it have no awareness that thus it will replace old masters by new ones? Let it do its own work if it wants that to be done, and confide it to representatives if it wishes to be betrayed.
We know that reasoning is not everything. It is not enough that those who are concerned recognise what their concern really is: to live without continual worries about the future and without the humiliation of obeying masters; our ideas regarding property must also change, and public morality must be changed accordingly. We must understand without hesitation or reserve that all products, the whole of what man has accumulated and made use of, are due to the common work of all, and have only one owner, humanity. We must see private property clearly for what it is in reality, a conscious or unconscious theft of the wealth of all people, and take hold of it joyously for the common benefit when the hour of reckoning sounds. In earlier revolutions, when it was a question of replacing a king of the older line by a king of the younger line, or of substituting lawyers in "the best of all republics," proprietors succeeded to proprietors, and the social system did not change. Thus the placards proclaiming "Death to Thieves," which at that time were placed at the entrances to all the palaces were in perfect harmony with current morality, and many a poor devil who laid fingers on a coin of the realm or perhaps even on bread in the baker's shop, would be shot as an example of the people's justice.
The worthy national guard, incarnating all the infamous solemnity of the laws the monopolists drew up for the defence of their properties, proudly showed the corpse laid out on the palace steps, and his comrades praised him as a champion of right. But those placards of 1830 and 1848 will not be seen again on the walls of the insurgent cities. For theft will no longer be possible when everything belongs to all. "Take and do not waste, for all this belongs to you, and you will have need of it." But destroy without delay everything that should be overthrown: the penal fortresses and the prisons, the forts directed against the towns and the unhealthy quarters where you have so long breathed an air heavy with poison. Instal yourselves in the palaces and mansions, and make a bonfire of the piles of bricks and wormeaten wood that were your hovels. The instinct to destroy, which is so natural and so just because it is also an urge to renew,77 will find much to satisfy it. So many outworn things to replace! For everything will have to be remade: houses, whole towns, agricultural and industrial plant, in fact every material aspect of society.
To each great event in history there is a corresponding evolution in human morality. For the morality of equals is certainly not that of the charitable rich and the grateful poor. In a new world we will need a new law, and it is clearly a new world that manifests itself. Our adversaries have been endlessly lamenting: "The gods depart! the kings depart! the prestige of authority is vanishing!" And who will replace the gods, the kings and the priests, if it is not the free individual, relying on his own strength? Naive faith departs. Make way for science! Good will and charity disappear. Make way for justice!
Notes 75. Louis de Saint Just (1767-1794) became one of the leading Jacobin ideologues when he published his Esprit de la revolution et de la Constitution de France. He was tireless in self-sacrifice for the cause, but, when he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, became a ruthless persecutor of all who disagreed with him. Some have seen him as a saint of the revolution, others -- with perhaps more justice -- as a cold-blooded and sadistic bigot. He was guillotined at the same time as Robespierre in July 1794. Trans.
76. Henry George (1839-97) is best known as the founder of the single tax movement, whose ideas were very influential among American socialists and radicals in the late nineteenth century. Believing that one of the main causes of poverty was the fact that both land revenues and the unearned increase in land values profited only the few, he proposed a single tax on land from which all the expenses of government would be met. Kropotkin appears to have misread his proposals. Trans.
77. This, of course, is a modification of the famous aphorism by Kropotkin's great predecessor, Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) who in 1842 declared "The passion to destroy is also a creative urge." Trans.