The second screw is the method of enslavement by depriving people of land and therefore of their food supplies. This method of enslavement also has existed and does exist wherever people are enslaved, and however much its form may be altered it exists everywhere. Sometimes the land all belongs to the sovereign, as in Turkey, and a tithe of the harvest is taken for the treasury; sometimes only part of the land, and a tax is collected from it; sometimes again the land all belongs to a small number of people and part of the labour is taken for it, as in England; or a larger or smaller part of it belongs to great landowners, as in Russia, Germany, and France. But where there is enslavement there is also appropriation of land by means of enslavement.
This screw for the enslavement of people is slackened or tightened in proportion to the strain on the other screws’ thus, in Russia when personal enslavement extended to the majority of workmen, land slavery was superfluous; but the screw of personal slavery in Russia was only relaxed when the screws of land and tax enslavement were tightened. The people were all inscribed in communes, their migration or change of location was made difficult, the land was appropriated or given to private owners, and then the peasants were set ‘free’. In England, for instance, the land enslavement is what chiefly acts, and the question of the nationalization of the land merely consists in tightening the tax screw in order to relax the screw of territorial enslavement.
The third method of enslavement-by tribute or taxation-also existed before, and in our time, with the diffusion of uniform money tokens in various states and the intensification of governmental power, it has acquired special force. This method has been so elaborated in our time that it bids fair to replace the second-the territorial-method of enslavement. It is the screw with the tightening of which the land-screw relaxes, as is evident in the economic condition of all Europe.
Within our own memory, we have lived through two transitions of slavery from one form to another in Russia: when we freed the serfs and left the proprietors in possession of most of the land, the proprietors feared that their power over the slaves would slip away; but experience showed that when letting go of the old chain of personal slavery they only had to seize the other, that of land-ownership.
The peasant lacked bread to eat and the proprietor had the land and the stores of grain, and therefore the peasant remained a slave as before. The next transition was when government demands greatly tightened the other screw-that of taxation, and most of the labourers were obliged to sell themselves into bondage to the estate-owners or to the factories. And the new form of slavery held the people yet more thoroughly, so that nine-tenths of the Russian working classes work for proprietors and factory owners only because they are compelled to do so by the demands for State and land taxes.
This is so obvious that were the government to try the experiment of not collecting direct, indirect, and land taxes for a year, all the work on other people’s land and at the factories would come to a standstill. Nine-tenths of the Russian people hire themselves out when the taxes are being collected, and on account of those taxes.
All three methods of enslavement have existed continuously and still exist; but people are inclined not to notice them as soon as new justifications are alleged for them. And what is strange is that this very method on which at the present time everything is based, the screw holding everything together, is just what is not noticed.
When in the ancient world the whole economic structure was based on personal slavery, the greatest intellects did not notice it. To Xenophon and Plato and Aristotle and to the Romans it seemed that things could not be otherwise, and that slavery was an inevitable and natural outcome of wars, without which the existence of humanity was unthinkable.
So also in the Middle Ages, and even down to recent times, people I did not see the significance of land-ownership and the slavery resulting from it, on which the whole economic structure of the Middle Ages rested. And just in the same way now, no one sees or even wishes to see that in our time the enslavement of the majority of people depends on money-taxes-State and land taxes-demanded by the governments and their dependants and collected by the administration and the army-the very administration and army that are paid for out of those taxes.
CHAPTER XXI
WHAT is surprising is not that the slaves themselves-subjected to slavery from of old-are not conscious of their condition and consider the slavery in which they have always lived to be a natural condition of human life, and regard a change in the form of slavery as an alleviation; nor is it surprising that slave-owners sometimes sincerely think they are emancipating their slaves by loosening one screw when another is already screwed tight. Both slaves and owners are accustomed to their position, and the slaves, not knowing freedom only seek alleviation or a mere chancre of the form of their slavery, while the slave-owners-desiring to hide their injustice-wish to attribute a special significance to the new forms of slavery they impose on the people m place of the old.
But it is surprising that science, which is called liberal, can when investigating the economic conditions of a people’s life avoid seeing what is at the base of the whole economic condition of the people. One would think it the business of science to discover the connexion between phenomena and the common cause of a series of phenomena.
But political economy does just the opposite: it carefully conceals the connexion of the phenomena and their significance and carefully avoids answering the simplest and most essential questions; like a lazy and restive horse it only goes well down hill when there is nothing to pull, but as soon as it is necessary to pull, it swerves, pretending that it has to go aside to do its own business. As soon as a serious essential question presents itself to science, a learned discussion is at once begun on irrelevant matters, merely with the purpose of distracting attention from the question at issue.
You ask: What is the cause of the unnatural, abnormal, irrational, and not merely useless but harmful phenomenon-that some men cannot eat or work except by the will of others? And science, with most serious mien, replies: Because some people control the work and the nourishment of others-such being the law of production.
You ask: What is this right of property on the basis of which some people appropriate the land, food, and instruments of labour of others? Science answers with most serious mien:
This right is based on the protection of a man’s work; that is, that the protection of the work of one set of men expresses itself by seizing the work of other men.
You ask: What is this money that is everywhere coined and printed by governments, that is, by the authorities, and which is forcibly demanded of the workers in such enormous quantities, and in the form of national debts is imposed on future generations of labourers? You ask whether this money exacted as taxes in quantities increased to the utmost possibility, has not an effect on the economic relations of the payers towards the receivers? And science with most serious face replies: Money is a commodity like sugar or chintz, and is distinguished only by the fact that it is the most convenient medium of exchange, but taxes have no influence on the economic condition of the people: the laws of the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth are one thing, while taxes are another.
You ask whether the circumstance that government can at its pleasure raise or lower prices, and by increasing taxes can bind in slavery all who do not possess land, has not an influence on economic conditions? And science with most serious face replies: None at all! The laws of production, distribution, and exchange are one science; taxes and State affairs in general are another science-that of finance.
You ask, finally, about the whole people being m slavery to the government, about the government being able at its own will to ruin everybody, to take all the produce of their labour and even to tear the men themselves from their work, putting them into military slavery; you ask whether this circumstance has no influence on economic conditions. To this science does not even take the trouble to reply: this is quite a separate matter-State law.
Science most seriously examining the laws of the economic life of the people whose every function and whole activity depends on the oppressor’s will, and regarding this influence of the oppressor as a natural condition of people’s life, does what an investigator of the economic conditions of the life of personal slaves of various
