We ask: Why can people who have land and capital enslave those who have none?-and we are told: ‘Because they have land and capital.’ But that is what we were asking about. To be deprived of land and of the tools of production is enslavement. It is the old reply: tacit dormire quia habet virtus dormitiva.1 But life does not cease to present its essential question, and even science itself sees this and tries to give a reply, but cannot do so as long as it starts from the basis it has chosen and revolves in a vicious circle. To be able to do it, science should first of all renounce its false division of the factors of production, that is, should cease to take the results of phenomena for their causes, and should
1 It causes sleep because it has a sleep-giving quality.
first seek the nearest, and then the more remote, causes of those phenomena which form the subject of its investigation. Science should reply to the question: What is the reason of the fact that some people are deprived of the land and of the implements of production, while others possess them? Or what is the reason of the alienation of the land and the implements of labour from those who cultivate the land and use the implements? And as soon as science sets itself that question quite new considerations present themselves, turning upside down all the assumptions of the former quasi-science which revolved in a vicious circle of assertions that the poverty of the workers results from the fact that they are poor. To plain men it seems indubitable that the proximate cause of the enslavement of some people by others is money. But science denies this, and says that money is only an instrument of exchange which has nothing in common with the enslavement of people. Let us see whether that is so.
CHAPTER XVIII
WHERE does money come from? Under what conditions does a nation always have money, and under what conditions do we know nations not using it? A tribe lives in Africa or Australia, as in olden times the Scythians or the Drevlyans1 lived. Such a tribe lives, ploughing, raising cattle, and growing fruit. We hear of them at the dawn of history, and history begins with the incursion of conquerors. The conquerors always do one and the same thing: they take from the tribe all they can take, cattle, grain, woven stuffs, and even male and female prisoners, and carry it all off. Some years later the conquerors return, but the tribe has not yet recovered from its ruin and there is but little to be taken from it, so the conquerors devise other better ways of exploiting the tribe. These ways are very simple and occur naturally to everyone.
The first method is personal slavery. This involves the inconvenience of having to direct the whole working force of the tribe and feed them all; so a second method naturally presents itself-that of leaving the tribe on its land, while claiming for oneself the ownership of the land and dividing it among one’s followers in order through them to exploit the people’s labour. But this method too has its inconveniences. The followers have to manage all the productive operations of the tribe; and a third method, as primitive as the others, is introduced-that of demanding a certain periodic tribute from the conquered. The conqueror’s aim is to take as much as possible of the people’s produce. Obviously, to do this, he must take the things that have the highest value among the tribesmen and that at the same time are not bulky but can conveniently be stored, such as skins and gold.
So the conqueror usually imposes on the family or tribe a periodic tribute in skins and gold and by this means exploits the toil of the people in the way most convenient to himself. The skins and the gold having been almost all taken from the tribe, the conquered people to obtain gold have to sell to one another and to the conqueror and his followers everything they have, both their property and their work. This same process went on in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, and goes on still. In the ancient world, with the frequent conquest of one nation by another and in the absence of recognition of the equality of man, personal slavery was the most usual method by which some people enslaved others, and the centre of gravity of that enslavement rested on
1 A Slavonic tribe mentioned in early Russian history.
chattel slavery. In the Middle Ages the feudal system-that is, the property in land bound up with it, and serfdom-partly replaced chattel slavery, and the centre of gravity of the enslavement was shifted from the person to the land: in recent times, since the discovery of America and the development of trade and the influx of gold accepted as the general money standard, with the intensification of government power, money tribute has become the chief method of enslaving people and on it all the economic relations of man are based. In a volume of literary productions there is an article by Professor Yanzhul which gives the recent history of the Fiji Islands. If I wanted to invent a most striking illustration of the way in which the demand for money has become in our days the chief instrument by which some men enslave others. I could not invent anything more glaring and convincing than this true story, which is based on documentary evidence and occurred the other day.
The Fijians live in Polynesia on islands in the Southern Pacific Ocean. The whole group, Professor Yanzhul tells us, consists of small islands covering about 8,000 square miles. Only half of them are inhabited, by a population of 150,000 natives and 1,500 whites. The native inhabitants, who emerged from savagery long ago, are distinguished among the natives of Polynesia by their ability, and are capable of work and of development, as they have proved by rapidly becoming good farmers and cattle-breeders. They were thriving, but in 1859 the kingdom found itself in a desperate position. The Fijians and their King Thakombau needed money. They needed $45,000 for contributions or indemnities demanded by the United States of America for violence said to have been inflicted by Fijians on some citizens of the American republic.
To collect this sum the Americans sent a squadron, which suddenly seized some of the best islands as security and even threatened to bombard and destroy the settlements unless the contribution was paid to the American representatives by a given date. The Americans had been among the first white men to settle in Fiji with missionaries. Selecting or seizing under one pretext or another the best plots of land on the islands and laying out cotton and coffee plantations they hired whole crowds of natives, whom they bound by contracts the savages did not understand, or obtained through contractors who dealt in live chattels. Conflicts between such planters and the natives, whom they regarded as slaves, were inevitable, and a conflict of that kind served as pretext for the American demand for compensation. Despite its prosperity Fiji till then had been in the habit of making payments in kind, as was customary in Europe till the Middle Ages.
The natives did not use money, and their trade was entirely done by barter; goods were exchanged for goods, and the few public or government levies were collected in country produce. What were the Fijians and their King Thakombau to do when the Americans categorically demanded $45,000 under threat of dire consequences in case of nonpayment. For the Fijians the figure itself was incomprehensible, not to speak of the money, which they had never seen in such quantities. Thakombau consulted with the other chiefs, and decided to turn to the Queen of England. At first he asked her to take the islands under her protection, and later on asked her simply to annex them. But the English treated this petition cautiously and were in no hurry to rescue the semi-savage monarch from his difficulties. Instead of a direct reply they fitted out a special expedition, in 1860, to investigate the Fiji Islands, in order to decide whether it was worth spending money on satisfying the American creditors and annexing the islands to the British dominions.
Meanwhile the American government continued to insist on payment, took possession, as security, of some of the best positions, and having observed the prosperity of the people, raised its demand from $45,000 to $90,000, and threatened to raise it still further if Thakombau did not pay promptly. So, pressed on all sides, poor Thakombau, who was ignorant of European methods of arranging credit transactions, began, on the advice of European settlers, to seek money from Melbourne merchants on any terms, even if he had to yield his whole kingdom to private persons. And so in Melbourne, in response to Thakombau’s appeal, a trading Company was formed.
This Company, which took the name of the Polynesian Company, concluded an agreement with the Fiji rulers on terms very favourable to itself. Undertaking to meet the debt to the American government
