But Science says: Your conclusions are the result of your ignorance. Learn the laws of the production distribution, and exchange of wealth, and do not confuse economic with political questions. The facts you refer to are not infringements of your liberty but necessary sacrifices which you, like other people, must bear for your own freedom and welfare. ‘But, you see, they have taken. my son and promise to carry off all my sons as soon as’ they grow up,’ again replies the simple man. ‘They took him by force and have driven him under fire into some strange land of which we had never heard and for aims we cannot understand.
And, you see, the land we are not allowed to plough and for want of which we starve is owned by a man we have never seen and whose usefulness we cannot even comprehend. And the taxes for which the policeman took the cow from my children by force, will for all I know go to that same policeman who took the cow, and to various members of Commissions and Ministries whom I do not know and in whose utility I do not believe. How can all this violence secure my liberty, and all this evil promote my welfare?’
It is possible to compel a man to be a slave and to do. what he considers bad for himself, but it is impossible to make him think that while suffering violence he is free and that the evident evil he endures forms his welfare. That seems impossible, but is just what has been done in our time by the aid of science.
The government, that is armed men using force, decide what they must take from those whom they coerce: like the English in dealing with the Fijians, they decide how much labour require of their slaves, beside how many assistants they need to collect this labour, organize their assistants as soldiers, as landed proprietors, and as tax collectors and the slaves yield their labour and at the same time believe that they give it up not because their masters wish it, but because, for their own freedom and welfare, service and bloody sacrifice offered to a divinity called ‘the State’ are essential, and that while paying this service to this divinity they remain free. They believe this because formerly religion and the priests said so, and now science and the learned people talk that way.
But we need only cease to believe blindly what others, calling themselves priests and learned men, for the absurdity of such assertions to become evident. People who do violence to others assure them that this violence is necessary for the State and that the State is necessary for the freedom and welfare of the people: it turns out that the oppressors oppress the people to promote their freedom, and harm them for their good. But men are rational beings that they may understand wherein their welfare lies and may promote it freely.
And affairs the goodness of which is unintelligible to people and to which they are driven by force, cannot be good for them, for a rational being can regard as good only what presents itself to his reason as being so. If from passion or lack of sense men are drawn towards evil, all that others who do not commit the same errors can do is to persuade them to do what accords with their real welfare. People may be persuaded that their welfare will be greater if they all become soldiers, are all deprived of land, and give their whole labour for taxes; but until all men regard this as their welfare and therefore do it voluntarily, it cannot be called the general good of man. The sole sign of the goodness of an undertaking is that people do it of their own free will, and man’s life is full of such affairs.
Ten workmen provide themselves with cooper’s tools in order to work together, and doing this they do what is certainly for their common welfare; but it is not possible to suppose that these workmen if they compel by violence an eleventh man to participate in their association, could affirm that what was their common good would also be good for this eleventh man.
So also with gentlemen who give a dinner to a friend of theirs; it is impossible to assert that this dinner will be good for someone from whom they take ten rubles by force for it. So also with peasants who decide to dig a pond for their convenience.
For those who consider the existence of the pond a benefit worth more than the cost of labour expended upon it, the making of it will be a common good, but for him who considers the existence of this pond as less important than the harvesting of a field with which he is behind-hand, the digging of this pond cannot be considered a good. So also of roads people make, and of churches, and museums, and a great variety of social and political affairs. All these things can be a good only for those who regard them as such and engage on them freely and willingly, as in the case of the purchase of the cooper’s tools for the association, the dinner given by the gentlemen, or the pond dug by the peasants. But undertakings to which people have to be forcibly driven cease to be a common good just on account of that violence.
This is all so clear and simple that if people had not so long been deceived it would not be necessary to explain anything. We live, let us suppose, in a village, and we, all the villagers, have decided to build a bridge across a bog into which we sink. We have agreed or promised to give so much money, or timber, or so many days’ work from each household. We have agreed to do this because this bridge will be worth more to us than its building will cost. But among us there are some for whom it is better not to have the bridge than to spend money on it, or who at least think that this is so.
Can coercing these people to take part in building the bridge make it a benefit to them? Evidently not, for those who considered free participation in the building of the bridge disadvantageous will consider it yet more disadvantageous when it is compulsory. Let us even suppose that we all without exception agreed to build this bridge and promised to contribute so much money or labour from each household for the work, but it so happens that some of those who promised to contribute have not done so because their circumstances changed, causing them to think it better to be without a bridge than to spend money on it; or simply they have changed their minds; or even reckon on others building the bridge without their contribution and on still being able to use it.
Can the compelling of these people to take part in building the bridge make their compulsory sacrifice a benefit to them? Evidently not, for if they did not fulfill their promise owing to altered circumstances which made it harder for them to contribute to the bridge than to do without a bridge, obligatory contributions will be only a greater evil to them. And if the ref users aimed at taking advantage of the labour of others, still, compelling them to make sacrifices will merely be a punishment for their intention, and a quite unproven intention punished before it had been carried into effect; but in neither case will compulsion to participate in an undesired affair be an advantage to them.
So it is when sacrifices are undertaken for an affair intelligible to everyone and of evident and undoubted utility, such as a bridge across a bog all have to cross. How much more unjust and senseless will it be to compel millions of people to make sacrifices for an aim that is unintelligible, intangible, and often indubitably harmful, as is the case with military service and the payment of taxes. But according to science what appears to everyone an evil is a common good; it seems that there are people, a tiny minority, who alone know wherein the common good lies, and, though all the rest of the people consider this common good to be an evil, this minority, while compelling all the rest to do this evil, can consider this evil to be a common good. . . .
Therein lies the chief superstition and chief deception hindering the progress of humanity towards truth and welfare. The maintenance of this superstition and this deception is the aim of political sciences in general and of what. is called political economy m particular Its aim is to hide from people the condition of oppression and slavery in which they are. The means it employs for this purpose are, when dealing with the violence that conditions the whole economic life of the enslaved, purposely to treat this violence as natural and inevitable, and thus to deceive people and divert their eyes from the real cause of their misery.
Slavery has long been abolished. It was abolished in Rome, and in America, and in Russia, but what was abolished was the word and not the thing itself.
Slavery
