RENT. Three causes contribute to the production of rent: land, labour, and society. Let us disregard land initially. As for labour, we know how, by the division of industries and the formation of the working group, one increases the level of production even while the number of individuals remains the same; this is indeed the collective force of which we spoke above. But the advantage of this division is not limited to that. The more the groups, in multiplying, multiply the relations of commutation in society, the more the number of useful objects and their very utility increase. However, the increase in utility that results from the relations of the groups in equal amounts of territory and an unchanged quantity of actual service, what is this other than rent? Therefore, the creation of wealth, the creation of force.
GENERAL SECURITY. In an antagonistic population, such as existed in the Middle Ages, it is in vain that the Church tries to make its threats heard, the courts to brandish their instruments of torture, the kings and their roughneck soldiers to make their lances ring on the flagstones of their barracks; there is no safety. The earth is covered with keeps and fortresses; everyone is armed and shut in; pillage and war are the order of the day.
One blames this disorder on the barbarism of the times, and one is right to do so. But what is barbarism, or rather, what produces it? The incoherence of the industrial groups, their small numbers, and the isolation in which they act, after the example of the agricultural groups. Here, therefore, the relation of functions, the solidarity of interests that this creates, the feeling for this solidarity that the producers acquire, the new consciousness that results from it, make for more law and order than do the army, the police force, and religion. Where can a power more real and more sublime be found?
These examples suffice to explain what, in itself, is the power to which the social community gives rise. It is by exploiting this power, converted into taxes, that the princes then acquire gendarmes and all the apparatus of coercion which serves to fortify them against the attacks of their rivals, often against the wish of the populations themselves.
Q.—This changes all the generally accepted ideas on the origin of power, on its nature, its organisation and its exercise. How can one believe that such ideas could be established everywhere, if truly one must hold them to be false?
A.—The opinion of ancient peoples on the nature and the origin of social power is a testimony of its reality. Power is immanent to society just as attraction is to matter, as is Justice to the heart of man. This immanence of power in society follows from the very concept of society, since it is impossible that the units, atoms, monads,598 molecules, or people, being agglomerated, should not maintain relations with one another, forming a collectivity from which a force springs. From there it follows that power in society, like gravity in bodies, life in animals, Justice in the conscience, is a thing sui generis [i.e., in a class all its own], real and objective, the negation of which, given the fact of society, would imply a contradiction.
By its power, the first and most substantial of all its attributes, the social being thus testifies to its reality and life; it is posited, it is created, on the same basis and under the same conditions of existence as other beings.
This is what the first people felt, although they expressed it in a mystical form, when they traced the origin of social power to the gods, from whom their dynasties were descended. Their naive reason, surer than their senses, refused to admit that society, the State, the power that is manifested in them, were only abstractions, although these things remained invisible.
And it is what the philosophers did not see, when they gave birth to the State from the free will of man, or more accurately the abdication of his freedom, thus destroying by their dialectic what religion had taken such care to establish.
Q.—An essential condition of power is its unity. How will this unity be assured if the formative groups remain equal, if none obtains preponderance over the others? However, if this preponderance is granted, we return to the old system: for what then shall serve to return power to the community?
A.—The diversity of functions in society entails divergence or plurality in power no more than it entails the diversity of the final product. Power is one by nature, or it is nothing: far from creating it, any competition or prepotency, either of a member, or as a fraction of society, would only serve to abolish it. Does electricity cease to be a single thing in the battery because this battery is composed of several elements? All the same the quality of the social power varies, its intensity rises or drops, according to the number and diversity of the groups: as for its unity, it remains immutable.
Q.—Any force presupposes direction: who directs the social power?
A.—Everyone, which is to say no one. Since political power results from the relation of many forces, reason dictates immediately that these forces must balance one another so as to form a regular and harmonic whole. Justice intervenes in its turn to declare, as it did in relation to general economy, that this balance of power, in conformity with right, required by right, obliges every conscience. It is thus to Justice that the direction of power belongs; so that order in the collective being, like health, the will, etc, in the animal, is not the product of any particular initiative: it results from the organisation.
Q.—And what guarantees that Justice will be observed?
A.—The same which guarantees to us that the merchant will obey the coin, the public faith, the certainty of reciprocity: in a word, Justice.—Justice is for intelligent and free beings the supreme cause of their determinations. It has need only to be explained and understood to be affirmed by everyone and to act. It exists, or the universe is only a phantom and humanity a monster.
Q.—Then doesn’t social power, to whatever degree, itself imply Justice?
A.—No: just like property, competition, and all the economic forces, all the collective forces, power is, by nature, a stranger to right; it is force. Let us say however that, since force is an attribute of any reality, and any force being able to increase indefinitely by association, consciousness acquires all the more energy in men and the respect of Justice all the more certainty in so far as the social group is more numerous and better formed: this is why in a civilised society, however corrupt or servile it may be, there is always more Justice than in a barbarian society.
Q.—What is to be understood by the division of powers?
A.—It is the very unity of power, considered in the diversity of the groups which form it. If the observer is placed in the centre of the bundle, and from there traverses the series of the groups, the power appears to him divided; if he looks at it as the resultant of the forces in relation, he sees its unity. Any true separation is impossible. It is thus that the assumption of two independent powers, each having their share of the world, such as spiritual power and temporal power appear today, is against the nature of things, a utopia, a nonsense.
Q.—What is the proper object of the social power?
A.—It results from its definition: it is to add unceasingly to the power of man, his wealth and his well-being, by a higher production of force.
Q.—Who benefits from the social power, and generally from any collective force?
A.—All those which contributed to form it, in proportion to their contribution.
Q.—What is the limit of power?
A.—Power, by nature and destination, has no limits other than those of the group that it represents, those of the interests and the ideas that it must serve.
However, by the limit of power, or powers, or, to be more precise, of the action of power, we mean that which is determined by the groups and sub-groups of which it is the general expression. Since each of these groups and sub-groups, indeed, up to the last term of the social series that is the individual, represents the social power with respect to the others, in terms of its function, it follows that the limitation of power, or rather, its distribution, regularly accomplished under the law of Justice, is nothing other than the formula for an increase in
freedom itself.
Q.—What differentiation do you make between politics and economics?
A.—At base, they are two different ways of naming the same thing. One does not imagine that men need, for their freedom and their well-being, anything but force; for the sincerity of their relations, anything but Justice. Economy presupposes these two conditions: what more could politics yield?
Under current conditions, politics is the equivocal and risky art of making order in a society in which all laws of economy are ignored, all balance destroyed, every freedom compromised, every conscience warped, all collective force converted into a monopoly.
INSTRUCTION II
Of the Appropriation of the Collective Forces, and the Corruption of the Social Power
Q.—Is it possible that a phenomenon as considerable as that of the collective force, which changes the face of ontology, which almost touches physics, could have been concealed for so many centuries from the attention of the philosophers? How, in relation to something that interests them so closely, did the public reason, on the one hand, and personal interest, on the other, let themselves be misled for such a long time?
A.—Nothing comes except with the passage of time, in science as in nature. All starts with the infinitely small, with a seed, initially invisible, which develops little by little, toward the infinite. Thus, the persistence of error is proportional to the size of the truths. Thus, one is thus not surprised if the social power, inaccessible to the senses in spite of its reality, seemed to the first men an emanation of the divine Being, for this reason the worthy object of their religion. As little as they knew how to realise it through analysis, they had a keener sense of it, quite different in this respect from the philosophers who, arriving later, made of the State a restriction on the freedom of citizens, a mandate of their whim, a nothingness. Even today, the economists have barely identified the collective force. After two thousand years of political mysticism, we have had two thousand years of nihilism: one could not use another word for the theories which have held sway since Aristotle.
Q.—What was the consequence of this delay in knowledge of the collective Being for peoples and States?
A.—The appropriation of all collective forces and the corruption of social power; in less severe terms, an arbitrary economy and an artificial constitution of the public power.
Q.—Explain yourself on these two headings.
A.—By the constitution of the family, the father is naturally invested with the ownership and direction of the force issuing from the family group. This force soon increases from the work of slaves and mercenaries, the number of which it contributes to increase. The family becomes a tribe: the father, preserving his dignity, sees the power he has grow proportionately. It is the starting point, the type of all such appropriations. Everywhere where a group of men is formed, or a power of community, there is formed a patriciate, a seigniory.
Several families, several societies, together, form a city: the presence of a superior force is felt at once, the object of the ambition of all. Who will become its agent, its recipient, its organ? Usually, it will be that of the chiefs who hold sway over the most children, parents, allies, clients, slaves, employees, beasts of burden, capital, land—in a word, those who have at their disposal the greatest force of collectivity. It is a natural law that the greater force absorbs and assimilates the smaller forces, and that domestic power becomes a title of political power, and only the strong may compete for the crown. One knows what became of the dynasty of Saul, founded by Samuel in contempt of this law, and the difficulty of King John, called Lack-Land, in gaining the throne of England. He never would have triumphed over the resistance of the barons without the charter that he granted to them, which became the foundation of English freedoms. In our own history, when the mayor of the palace, e.g., Pépin de Herstal599 or Hugues le Blanc600, became more powerful in men and fiefs than the king, he was made king, in spite of the ecclesiastical consecration that protected the suzerain. In 1848, when Louis Napoléon was elected president of the Republic, the people of the countryside believed him to possess a fortune of twenty billion.
Furthermore, the alienation of the collective force, in addition to having been the result of ignorance, appears to have been a means of preparing races. To make the primitive man, the savage, fit for social life, a long trituration of bodies and souls must have been necessary. The education of humanity being accomplished by a kind of mutual instruction, the law of things dictated that the instructors enjoy certain prerogatives. In the future, equality will consist in the ability of each to exercise mastery in turn just as each in turn will have undergone discipline.
Q.—What you say aptly demonstrates how the great social dispossession was consummated, how inequality and misery became the cancer of civilisation. But how to explain this resignation of the consciences, this submission of wills, which for such a long period has been disturbed only by a few revolts by slaves, fanatics, proletarians?
A.—The old religion of power would, up to a certain point, rationalise the fact. One subjected oneself to power because one saw it as coming from the gods, i.e., because it was worshipped. But this religion is lost: dynastic legitimacy, droit du seigneur,601 and divine right are no longer anything but odious words, displaced by the proud principle of popular sovereignty. However, the phenomenon persists: men nowadays appear no more reluctant to subject themselves to the authority and the exploitation of a single man than were their fathers formerly. Obvious proof of the vanity of the theological and metaphysical theories, the principles of which can either perish or survive without the facts that they are supposed to cause or prevent ever ceasing to occur.
On this sad subject, over which misanthropy and scepticism prevail, the banal excuses for so many treasons and cowardices, the theory of collective force provides a peremptory answer that radically confirms the morality of the masses, while leaving the oppressors and their accomplices to their infamy.
Through the grouping of individual forces, and through the relation of the groups, the whole nation forms one body: it is a real being, of a higher order, whose movement implicates the existence and fortune of everyone. The individual is immersed in society; he emerges from this great power, from which he would separate only to fall into nothingness. Indeed, as great as the appropriation of the collective forces may be, however intense may be the tyranny, it is obvious that a share of the social benefit always remains to the mass, and that in the end, it is better for each to remain in the group than to leave it.
It is thus not actually the exploiter, it is not the tyrant, whom the workers and the citizens follow: seduction and terror enter little into their submission. It is the social power that they respect, a power ill-defined in their thinking, but outside of which they sense that they cannot subsist; a power whose prince, whoever it may be, may show them its seal and see them tremble to break with it by a revolt.
For this reason any usurper of the public power never fails to cover his crime with the pretext of the public safety, to call himself the father of the fatherland, restorer of the nation, as if the social force drew its existence from him, while in fact he is only an effigy for it, a stamp, and, so to speak, a commercial brand. And he will fall, with the same ease with which he was established, the moment his presence appears to threaten the great interest that he claimed to defend: there, in last analysis, is the cause of the fall of all governments.
Q.—Social power having been constituted as a princedom, appropriated by a dynasty or exploited by a caste, what becomes of its relations with the nation?
A.—These relations are completely inverted. In the natural order, power is born from society, it is the resultant of all the particular forces grouped for labour, defence, and Justice. According to the empirical conception suggested by the alienation of power, it is, on the contrary, society which is born naked from it; it is the generator, the creator, the author; he is higher than it: so that the prince, instead of being the simple agent of the rep
ublic as truth wants it, is made sovereign by the republic, and, like God, the dispenser of justice.
The consequence is that the prince, occupied with his personal domination, instead of ensuring and developing the social power, creates for himself, through the army, the police force and the tax, a particular force, able to resist any attack from the interior and to compel the nation to obedience at need: it is this princely force which will be called from now on power. Napoléon III, like Napoléon I, says my army, my fleet, my ministers, my prefects, my government; and he is right to say this, because none belong to the nation any longer; on the contrary, all are against the nation.
Q.—How, then, is Justice to be conceived?
A.—As an emanation of power, that which is the very negation of Justice. Indeed, under the normal condition of society, Justice dominates power, the balance and distribution of which it makes a law. Under the dynastic mode, power dominates Justice, which becomes an attribute, a function of authority. From whence the subordination of Justice to raison d’État, the last word of the old politics, judgement of all the governments which follow it, and that Christianity, by adding the reason of salvation [raison du salut] to it, did not sanctify it at all. Princes and priests quarrel over the exercise of power: neither one nor the other are worthy of it, because they all ignore the supremacy of right.
Property Is Theft! Page 89
