By affirming that this division of the factors of production is the basic law of production, an economist does what a zoologist would do who, seeing a great 1my greenfinches with clipped wings in little cages, should conclude that a little cage and a small water-pail drawn up along rails, are the essential conditions of the life of birds, and that the life of birds is composed of these three factors. However many finches there may be with clipped wings in cardboard cages, the zoologist should not consider cardboard cages a natural condition of birds. However many workers may be driven from their places and deprived of their produce and of the implements of their toil, the natural characteristic of a worker to live on the earth and produce with his own implements the things he needs will remain the same.
There are the claims made by some people to the earth and to the labourers’ implements of toil, just as in the ancient world there were the claims of some men to own the persons of others; but as there cannot be a division of people into owners and slaves, such as people wished to establish in the ancient world, so there cannot be a division of the factors of production into land and capital, such as economists in present-day society wish to establish. But these unjustifiable encroachments by some men on the freedom of others, men of science call natural factors of production. Instead of taking its bases from the natural characteristics of human society, science has taken them from a specific case and, wishing to justify that specific case, has admitted one man’s right to the land whereon another feeds himself, and to the tools of labour with which another works; that is, it has admitted a right which never existed and never can exist and which bears a contradiction in its very expression, for the right a man claims to land he does not work on is really nothing but the right to use land I do not use, and the right to the tools of labour is nothing but the right to work with tools I do not work with.
Science by its division of the factors of production asserts that the natural condition of the workman is the unnatural condition in which he finds himself, just as in the ancient world, by the division into citizens and slaves, people asserted that the unnatural condition of the slaves was a natural characteristic of man. That division, accepted by science merely to justify an existing evil which it has adopted as the basis of its investigations, has resulted in science vainly trying to furnish some kind of explanation of existing facts, and while denying the clearest and simplest answers to the questions presented, giving answers that amount to nothing.
The question for economic science is this: What is the cause of the fact that some people who have land and capital are able to enslave those who have no land or capital? The reply which common sense presents is that this results from money, which has the effect of enslaving people. But science denies this, and says that it does not result from the nature of money but from the fact that some people have land and capital and others have not.
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
