The Capitalist System
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By Mikhail Bakunin
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Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism which no
bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is property, what
is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner
they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without
working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not
fertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploiting
the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess
neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive
power to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of account
altogether the following question: In what way did property and capital ever
fall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, when
envisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be
answered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment against
the present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement
that property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own
productive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their
capital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the
commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat,
all live at the expense of the proletariat. (Speculation and exploitation no
doubt also constitute a sort of labor, but altogether non-productive labor.)
I know only too well that this mode of life is highly esteemed in all
civilized countries, that it is expressly and tenderly protected by all the
States, and that the States, religions, and all the juridical laws, both
criminal and civil, and all the political governments, monarchies and
republican - with their immense judicial and police apparatuses and their
standing armies - have no other mission but to consecrate and protect such
practices. In the presence of these powerful and respectable authorities I
cannot even permit myself to ask whether this mode of life is legitimate from
the point of view of human justice, liberty, human equality, and fraternity.
I simply ask myself: Under such conditions, are fraternity and equality
possible between the exploiter and the exploited, are justice and freedom
possible for the exploited?
Let us even suppose, as it is being maintained by the bourgeois economists
and with them all the lawyers, all the worshippers and believers in the
juridical right, all the priests of the civil and criminal code - let us
suppose that this economic relationship between the exploiter and the
exploited is altogether legitimate, that it is the inevitable consequence,
the product of an eternal, indestructible social law, yet still it will
always be true that exploitation precludes brotherhood and equality. It
goes without saying that it precludes economic equality. Suppose I am your
worker and you are my employer. If I offer my labor at the lowest price, if I
consent to have you live off my labor, it is certainly not because of devotion
or brotherly love for you. And no bourgeois economist would dare to say that it
was, however idyllic and naive their reasoning becomes when they begin to speak
about reciprocal affections and mutual relations which should exist between
employers and employees. No, I do it because my family and I would starve to
death if I did not work for an employer. Thus I am forced to sell you my labor
at the lowest possible price, and I am forced to do it by the threat of hunger.
But - the economists tell us - the property owners, the capitalists, the
employers, are likewise forced to seek out and purchase the labor of the
proletariat. Yes, it is true, they are forced to do it, but not in the same
measure. Had there been equality between those who offer their labor and
those who purchase it, between the necessity of selling one's labor and the
necessity of buying it, the slavery and misery of the proletariat would not
exist. But then there would be neither capitalists, nor property owners, nor
the proletariat, nor rich, nor poor: there would only be workers. It is
precisely because such equality does not exist that we have and are bound to
have exploiters.
This equality does not exist because in modern society where wealth is
produced by the intervention of capital paying wages to labor, the growth
of the population outstrips the growth of production, which results in the
supply of labor necessarily surpassing the demand and leading to a relative
sinking of the level of wages. Production thus constituted, monopolized,
exploited by bourgeois capital, is pushed on the one hand by the mutual
competition of the capitalists to concentrate evermore in the hands of an
ever diminishing number of powerful capitalists, or in the hands of
joint-stock companies which, owing to the merging of their capital, are
more powerful than the biggest isolated capitalists. (And the small and
medium-sized capitalists, not being able to produce at the same price as the
big capitalists, naturally succumb in the deadly struggle.) On the other
hand, all enterprises are forced by the same competition to sell their
products at the lowest possible price. It [capitalist monopoly] can attain
this two-fold result only by forcing out an ever-growing number of small or
medium-sized capitalists, speculators, merchants, or industrialists, from
the world of exploiters into the world of the exploited proletariat, and at
the same time squeezing out ever greater savings from the wages of the same
proletariat.
On the other hand, the mass of the proletariat, growing as a result of the
general increase of the population - which, as we know, not even poverty
can stop effectively - and through the increasing proletarianization of the
petty-bourgeoisie, ex-owners, capitalists, merchants, and industrialists -
growing, as I have said, at a much more rapid rate than the productive
capacities of an economy that is exploited by bourgeois capital - this
growing mass of the proletariat is placed in a condition wherein the workers
are forced into disastrous competition against one another.
For since they possess no other means of existence but their own manual
labor, they are driven, by the fear of seeing themselves replaced by others,
to sell it at the lowest price. This tendency of the workers, or rather the
necessity to which they are condemned by their own poverty, combined with
the tendency of the employers to sell the products of their workers, and
consequently buy their labor, at the lowest price, constantly reproduces
and consolidates the poverty of the proletariat. Since he finds himself in
a state of poverty, the worker is compelled to sell his labor for almost
nothing, and because he sells that product for almost nothing, he sinks into
ever greater poverty.
Yes, greater misery, indeed! For in this galley-slave labor the productive
force of the workers, abused, ruthlessly exploited, excessively wasted and
underfed, is rapidly used up. And once used up, what can be its value on
the market, of what worth is this sole commodity which he possesses and upon
the daily sale of which he depends for a livelihood? Nothing! And then? Then
nothing is left for the worker but to die.
What, in a given country, is the lowest possible wage? It is the price of that
which is considered by the proletarians of that country as absolutely
necessary to keep oneself alive. All the bourgeois economists are in agreement
on this point. Turgot, who saw fit to call himself the `virtuous minister' of
Louis XVI, and really was an honest man, said:
"The simple worker who owns nothing more than his hands, has nothing else to
sell than his labor. He sells it more or less expensively; but its price
whether high or low, does not depend on him alone: it depends on an agreement
with whoever will pay for his labor. The employer pays as little as possible;
when given the choice between a great number of workers, the employer prefers
the one who works cheap. The workers are, then, forced to lower their price in
competition each against the other. In all types of labor, it necessarily
follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for
survival." (Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses)
J.B. Say, the true father of bourgeois economists in France also said: "Wages
are much higher when more demand exists for labor and less if offered, and are
lowered accordingly when more labor is offered and less demanded. It is the
relation between supply and demand which regulates the price of this
merchandise called the workers' labor, as are regulated all other public
services. When wages rise a little higher than the price necessary for the
workers' families to maintain themselves, their children multiply and a larger
supply soon develops in proportion with the greater demand. When, on the
contrary, the demand for workers is less than the quantity of people offering
to work, their gains decline back to the price necessary for the class to
maintain itself at the same number. The families more burdened with children
disappear; from them forward the supply of labor declines, and with less labor
being offered, the price rises... In such a way it is difficult for the wages
of the laborer to rise above or fall below the price necessary to maintain the
class (the workers, the proletariat) in the number required." (Cours complet
d' economie politique)
After citing Turgot and J.B. Say, Proudhon cries: "The price, as compared to
the value (in real social economy) is something essentially mobile,
consequently, essentially variable, and that in its variations, it is not
regulated more than by the concurrence, concurrence, let us not forget, that
as Turgot and Say agree, has the necessary effect not to give to wages to the
worker more than enough to barely prevent death by starvation, and maintain
the class in the numbers needed."1
The current price of primary necessities constitutes the prevailing constant
level above which workers' wages can never rise for a very long time, but
beneath which they drop very often, which constantly results in inanition,
sickness, and death, until a sufficient number of workers disappear to
equalize again the supply of and demand for labor. What the economists call
equalized supply and demand does not constitute real equality between those
who offer their labor for sale and those who purchase it. Suppose that I, a
manufacturer, need a hundred workers and that exactly a hundred workers
present themselves in the market - only one hundred, for if more came, the
supply would exceed demand, resulting in lowered wages. But since only one
hundred appear, and since I, the manufacturer, need only that number - neither
more nor less - it would seem at first that complete equality was established;
that supply and demand being equal in number, they should likewise be equal in
other respects. Does it follow that the workers can demand from me a wage and
conditions of work assuring them of a truly free, dignified, and human
existence? Not at all! If I grant them those conditions and those wages, I,
the capitalist, shall not gain thereby any more than they will. But then,
why should I have to plague myself and become ruined by offering them the
profits of my capital? If I want to work myself as workers do, I will invest
my capital somewhere else, wherever I can get the highest interest, and will
offer my labor for sale to some capitalist just as my workers do.
If, profiting by the powerful initiative afforded me by my capital, I ask
those hundred workers to fertilize that capital with their labor, it is not
because of my sympathy for their sufferings, nor because of a spirit of
justice, nor because of love for humanity. The capitalists are by no means
philanthropists; they would be ruined if they practiced philanthropy. It is
because I hope to draw from the labor of the workers sufficient profit to be
able to live comfortably, even richly, while at the same time increasing my
capital - and all that without having to work myself. Of course I shall work
too, but my work will be of an altogether different kind and I will be
remunerated at a much higher rate than the workers. It will not be the work of
production but that of administration and exploitation.
But isn't administrative work also productive work? No doubt it is, for
lacking a good and an intelligent administration, manual labor will not
produce anything or it will produce very little and very badly. But from the
point of view of justice and the needs of production itself, it is not at all
necessary that this work should be monopolized in my hands, nor, above all,
that I should be compensated at a rate so much higher than manual labor. The
co-operative associations already have proven that workers are quite capable
of administering industrial enterprises, that it can be done by workers
elected from their midst and who receive the same wage. Therefore if I
concentrate in my hands the administrative power, it is not because the
interests of production demand it, but in order to serve my own ends, the ends
of exploitation. As the absolute boss of my establishment I get for my labor
ten or twenty times more than my workers get for theirs, and this is true
despite the fact that my labor is incomparably less painful than theirs.
But the capitalist, the business owner, runs risks, they say, while the worker
risks nothing. This is not true, because when seen from his side, all the
disadvantages are on the part of the worker. The business owner can conduct
his affairs poorly, he can be wiped out in a bad deal, or be a victim of a
commercial crisis, or by an unforeseen catastrophe; in a word he can ruin
himself. This is true. But does ruin mean from the bourgeois point of view to
be reduced to the same level of misery as those who die of hunger, or to be
forced among the ranks of the common laborers? This so rarely happens, that we
might as well say never. Afterwards it is rare that the capitalist does not
retain something, despite the appearance of ruin. Nowadays all bankruptcies
are more or less fraudulent. But if absolutely nothing is saved, there are
always family ties, and social relations, who, with help from the business
skills learned which they pass to their children, permit them to get
positions for themselves and their children in the higher ranks of labor, in
management; to be a state functionary, to be an executive in a commercial or
industrial business, to end up, although dependent, with an income superior
to what they paid their former workers.
The risks of the worker are infinitely greater. After all, if the
establishment in which he is employed goes bankrupt, he must go several days
and sometimes several weeks without work, and for him it is more than ruin,
it is death; because he eats everyday what he earns. The savings of workers
are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their weak sentiment
of justice, the remorse that is awakened by chance in the bosom of their
class. This ridiculous and hateful myth will never soothe the anguish of the
worker. He knows the expense of satisfying the daily needs of his large
family. If he had savings, he would not send his poor children, from the age
of six, to wither away, to grow weak, to be murdered physically and morally
in the factories, where they are forced to work night and day, a working day
of twelve and fourteen hours.
If it happens sometimes that the worker makes a small savings, it is quickly
consumed by the inevitable periods of unemployment which often cruelly
interrupt his work, as well as by the unforeseen accidents and illnesses which
befall his family. The accidents and illnesses that can overtake him
constitute a risk that makes all the risks of the employer nothing in
comparison: because for the worker debilitating illness can destroy his
productive ability, his labor power. Over all, prolonged illness is the most
terrible bankruptcy, a bankruptcy that means for him and his children, hunger
and death.
I know full well that under these conditions that if I were a capitalist, who
needs a hundred workers to fertilize my capital, that on employing these
workers, all the advantages are for me, all the disadvantages for them. I
propose nothing more nor less than to exploit them, and if you wish me to be
sincere about it, and promise to guard me well, I will tell them:
"Look, my children, I have some capital which by itself cannot produce
anything, because a dead thing cannot produce anything. I have nothing
productive without labor. As it goes, I cannot benefit from consuming it
unproductively, since having consumed it, I would be left with nothing. But
thanks to the social and political institutions which rule over us and are
all in my favor, in the existing economy my capital is supposed to be a
producer as well: it earns me interest. From whom this interest must be taken
- and it must be from someone, since in reality by itself it produces
absolutely nothing - this does not concern you. It is enough for you to know
that it renders interest. Alone this interest is insufficient to cover my
expenses. I am not an ordinary man as you. I cannot be, nor do I want to be,
content with little. I want to live, to inhabit a beautiful house, to eat and
drink well, to ride in a carriage, to maintain a good appearance, in short,
to have all the good things in life. I also want to give a good education to
my children, to make them into gentlemen, and send them away to study, and
afterwards, having become much more educated than you, they can dominate you
one day as I dominate you today. And as education alone is not enough, I want
to give them a grand inheritance, so that divided between them they will be
left almost as rich as I. Consequently, besides all the good things in life
I want to give myself, I also want to increase my capital. How will I achieve
this goal? Armed with this capital I propose to exploit you, and I propose
that you permit me to exploit you. You will work and I will collect and
appropriate and sell for my own behalf the product of your labor, without
giving you more than a portion which is absolutely necessary to keep you from
dying of hunger today, so that at the end of tomorrow you will still work for
me in the same conditions; and when you have been exhausted, I will throw you
out, and replace you with others. Know it well, I will pay you a salary as
small, and impose on you a working day as long, working conditions as severe,
as despotic, as harsh as possible; not from wickedness - not from a motive of
hatred towards you, nor an intent to do you harm - but from the love of wealth
and to get rich quick; because the less I pay you and the more you work, the
more I will gain."
This is what is said implicitly by every capitalist, every industrialist,
every business owner, every employer who demands the labor power of the workers
they hire.
But since supply and demand are equal, why do the workers accept the conditions
laid down by the employer? If the capitalist stands in just as great a need of
employing the workers as the one hundred workers do of being employed by him,
does it not follow that both sides are in an equal position? Do not both meet
at the market as two equal merchants - from the juridical point of view at
least - one bringing a commodity called a daily wage, to be exchanged for the
daily labor of the worker on the basis of so many hours per day; and the other
bringing his own labor as his commodity to be exchanged for the wage offered
by the capitalist? Since, in our supposition, the demand is for a hundred
workers and the supply is likewise that of a hundred persons, it may seem
that both sides are in an equal position.
Of course nothing of the kind is true. What is it that brings the capitalist
to the market? It is the urge to get rich, to increase his capital, to gratify
his ambitions and social vanities, to be able to indulge in all conceivable
pleasures. And what brings the worker to the market? Hunger, the necessity of
eating today and tomorrow. Thus, while being equal from the point of juridical
fiction, the capitalist and the worker are anything but equal from the point
of view of the economic situation, which is the real situation. The capitalist
is not threatened with hunger when he comes to the market; he knows very well
that if he does not find today the workers for whom he is looking, he will
still have enough to eat for quite a long time, owing to the capital of which
he is the happy possessor. If the workers whom he meets in the market present
demands which seem excessive to him, because, far from enabling him to
increase his wealth and improve even more his economic position, those
proposals and conditions might, I do not say equalize, but bring the economic
position of the workers somewhat close to his own - what does he do in that
case? He turns down those proposals and waits. After all, he was not impelled
by an urgent necessity, but by a desire to improve his position, which,
compared to that of the workers, is already quite comfortable, and so he can
wait. And he will wait, for his business experience has taught him that the
resistance of workers who, possessing neither capital, nor comfort, nor any
savings to speak of, are pressed by a relentless necessity, by hunger, that
this resistance cannot last very long, and that finally he will be able to
find the hundred workers for whom he is looking - for they will be forced to
accept the conditions which he finds it profitable to impose upon them. If
they refuse, others will come who will be only too happy to accept such
conditions. That is how things are done daily with the knowledge and in full
view of everyone.
If, as a consequence of the particular circumstances that constantly
influence the market, the branch of industry in which he planned at first
to employ his capital does not offer all the advantages that he had hoped,
then he will shift his capital elsewhere; thus the bourgeois capitalist is
not tied by nature to any specific industry, but tends to invest (as it is
called by the economists - exploit is what we say) indifferently in all
possible industries. Let's suppose, finally, that learning of some industrial
incapacity or misfortune, he decides not to invest in any industry; well, he
will buy stocks and annuities; and if the interest and dividends seem
insufficient, then he will engage in some occupation, or shall we say, sell
his labor for a time, but in conditions much more lucrative than he had
offered to his own workers.
The capitalist then comes to the market in the capacity, if not of an
absolutely free agent, at least that of an infinitely freer agent than the
worker. What happens in the market is a meeting between a drive for lucre and
starvation, between master and slave. Juridically they are both equal; but
economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist, even before the market
transaction has been concluded whereby the worker sells his person and his
liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this
terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his
family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful
calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer.
And once the contract has been negotiated, the serfdom of the workers is
doubly increased; or to put it better, before the contract has been
negotiated, goaded by hunger, he is only potentially a serf; after it is
negotiated he becomes a serf in fact. Because what merchandise has he sold to
his employer? It is his labor, his personal services, the productive forces of
his body, mind, and spirit that are found in him and are inseparable from his
person - it is therefore himself. From then on, the employer will watch over
him, either directly or by means of overseers; everyday during working hours
and under controlled conditions, the employer will be the owner of his actions
and movements. When he is told: "Do this," the worker is obligated to do it;
or he is told: "Go there," he must go. Is this not what is called a serf?
M. Karl Marx, the illustrious leader of German Communism, justly observed in
his magnificent work Das Kapital that if the contract freely entered into by
the vendors of money -in the form of wages - and the vendors of their own
labor -that is, between the employer and the workers - were concluded not for
a definite and limited term only, but for one's whole life, it would
constitute real slavery. Concluded for a term only and reserving to the
worker the right to quit his employer, this contract constitutes a sort of
voluntary and transitory serfdom. Yes, transitory and voluntary from the
juridical point of view, but nowise from the point of view of economic
possibility. The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he
the means to do so? And if he does quit him, is it in order to lead a free
existence, in which he will have no master but himself? No, he does it in
order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same
hunger which forced him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the
worker's liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois
republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible
realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter
falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a
continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -voluntary from the
juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by
momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other
words, it is real slavery.
This slavery manifests itself daily in all kinds of ways. Apart from the
vexations and oppressive conditions of the contract which turn the worker into
a subordinate, a passive and obedient servant, and the employer into a nearly
absolute master - apart from all that, it is well known that there is hardly
an industrial enterprise wherein the owner, impelled on the one hand by the
two-fold instinct of an unappeasable lust for profits and absolute power, and
on the other hand, profiting by the economic dependence of the worker, does
not set aside the terms stipulated in the contract and wring some additional
concessions in his own favor. Now he will demand more hours of work, that is,
over and above those stipulated in the contract; now he will cut down wages
on some pretext; now he will impose arbitrary fines, or he will treat the
workers harshly, rudely, and insolently.
But, one may say, in that case the worker can quit. Easier said than done.
At times the worker receives part of his wages in advance, or his wife or
children may be sick, or perhaps his work is poorly paid throughout this
particular industry. Other employers may be paying even less than his own
employer, and after quitting this job he may not even be able to find another
one. And to remain without a job spells death for him and his family. In
addition, there is an understanding among all employers, and all of them
resemble one another. All are almost equally irritating, unjust, and harsh.
Is this calumny? No, it is in the nature of things, and in the logical
necessity of the relationship existing between the employers and their
workers.
| 13.11.10 | 13h29 • Mis à jour le 13.11.10 | 13h29 