These forms at once begin to act like a disciplined army and within five years the whole work is done: the people are not only deprived of the right to use the land, and of their property, but also of their liberty; they are slaves.
The third act begins: the situation is too hard and the unfortunate people hear rumours that it is possible to exchange masters and go into slavery to someone else. (Of emancipation from the slavery imposed by money there is no longer any thought.) And the tribe calls in another master, to whom it submits with a request to mitigate its condition. The English come, see that the possession of these islands will make it possible for them to feed the drones of whom they have bred too many, and the English government annexes these islands with their inhabitants, but does not take them as chattel slaves and does not even take the land and distribute it to its own supporters.
Those old methods are now unnecessary. All that is necessary is that a tribute should be exacted; one large enough on the one hand to keep the slaves in slavery, and sufficient on the other to feed a multitude of drones.
The inhabitants had to pay £70,000 sterling. That is the fundamental condition on which England agreed to rescue the Fijians from their American slavery, and at the same time this was all that was necessary for the complete enslavement of the natives. But it turned out that under the conditions they were in the Fijians could not possibly pay £70,000. The demand was too great. The English modify the demand for a time, and take part of the claim in produce, in order, in due course, when money should be in circulation, to raise their exaction to its full amount.
England did not act like the former Company, whose procedure may be compared to the first arrival of savage conquerors among a savage people, when all they want is to seize what they can get and to go away again, but England acts as a far-seeing enslaver: it does not at once kill the hen that lays the golden egg, but will even feed it, knowing the hen to be a good layer. At first she slackens the reins for her own advantage, in order later to pull them in and reduce the Fijians to the state of monetary enslavement in which the European and civilized world finds itself, and from which no emancipation is in sight.
Money is a harmless medium of exchange, only not when at the shores of a country loaded cannon are directed against its inhabitants. As soon as money is forcibly exacted at the cannon’s mouth, then inevitably that is repeated which occurred on the Fiji Islands and has been repeated, and is repeated, everywhere and always: in the case of the old Princes of Russia and the Drevlyans, and with all governments and their subjects.
People who have the power to coerce others will do it by the forcible demand of such a quantity of money as will oblige the coerced to become the slaves of the coercers. And besides this, what happened in the case of the English and the Fijians always happens, namely that the coercers, in order to hasten the enslavement, will in their demands for money always exceed rather than understate the limit of what is needed for the purpose.
They will reach that limit without exceeding it only if a moral feeling is present, and even if that feeling does exist, they will always reach it when they are themselves in want. But governments will always exceed that limit, first because a government has no moral feelings, and secondly because, as we know, governments are themselves in extreme want, due to wars and to the need of paying their supporters. Governments are always irredeemably in debt and, even if they wished to, could not help following the rule expressed by a Russian statesman of the eighteenth century, that ‘one must shear the peasant and not let him get overgrown’.
All governments are irredeemably in debt, and this debt in its totality (apart from fortuitous diminutions in England and America) increases from year to year in a terrifying progression. Similarly do the budgets grow, that is the necessity of struggling with other aggressors and making payments of money and land to those who aid its own aggressions, and therefore the charges on land grown the same way.
Wages do not grow-not on account of the law of rent, but because there is an exaction by violence, of payments to the state and for the land, which has the purpose of taking from people all their surplus so that to satisfy this demand they must sell their labour: for the exploitation of that labour is the object of the imposition. of the taxes.
But the exploitation of that labour is only possible when, in the aggregate, more is demanded than the workers can pay without depriving themselves of nourishment. Raising the scale of wages would destroy the possibility of this slavery, and therefore, while there is violence, it never can be raised. And this simple and intelligible action of one set of men on another, economists have called the ‘iron law’ while the instrument by means of which this action is produced they call a ‘medium of exchange’.
Money-this harmless medium of exchange is needed by men in their mutual intercourse. But why has there never been, or could there be, money in its present-day significance where no forcible demand for money-taxes exists? And why has there always been, and always will be as there is among the Fijians, the Kirgiz, the Africans, the Phoenicians, and in general among people who do not pay taxes-either the direct exchange of things for things, or else the use of casual tokens of value, such as sheep, furs, skins, or shells? Any particular kind of money; only obtains currency among people when it is forcibly demanded of them all.
Only then does it become necessary to everyone that he may ransom himself from violence, and only then does it obtain a constant exchange value. And what then acquires value is not what is most convenient as a medium of exchange but what the government demands. If gold is demanded, gold will have value; if knucklebones were demanded, knuckle-bones would have value. If this were not so, why has the emission of this medium of exchange always formed, and why does it form, a prerogative of government? People-let us say the Fijians-have established a medium of exchange; well then let them exchange as they please, and you who have power-that is who have means to inflict violence-should not interfere with that exchange.
But as it is, you coin money, forbidding anyone else to coin it, or else (as among us in Russia) you merely print bits of paper with the Tsar’s head on them and sign them with a particular signature, exacting penalties for any imitation of this money, and you distribute it to your assistants, and in payment of state and land taxes demand just these coins or these bits of paper with just that signature, and so much of it that a workman has to give his whole labour to obtain these same bits of paper, or coins, and you assure us that we need this money-as a ‘medium of exchange’.
Men are all free and they do not oppress one another, do not, hold one another in slavery, only there is this money in use and an iron law according to which rent rises and wages dwindle to a minimum! The fact that half (and more than half) the Russian peasants are enslaved as labourers to landowners and to mill-owners, on account of direct and indirect taxes and land dues, does not at all mean, what is obvious, that the compulsory exaction of direct indirect, and land taxes paid in money to the government and to its assistants-the land-owners-compels workmen to go into slavery to those who take the money, but it means that money exists-a medium of exchange-and that there is an iron law!
Before the serfs were emancipated I could compel Vanka to do any kind of work, and if he refused I sent him to the rural police and they whipped his bottom till Vanka submitted. At the same time if I made Vanka overwork himself or did not give him land or food, the matter went before the authorities and I had to answer for it. Now men are free but I can make Vanka, Sidorka, or Petrushka do any kind of work, and if he refuses I do not give him money for his taxes and they will whip his bottom till he submits; besides which I can make a German, a Frenchman, a Chinaman or a Hindu who lacks land and bread, work for me by not giving him money to hire land or buy bread unless he submits to me.
And if I make him work without food beyond his strength, and if I kill him with work, no one will say a word to me, and
