Q.—How, in this system of usurpation, are the relations of citizens determined as to persons, services, and goods?
A.—Such is Justice before power, such will it be in the nation: i.e., Justice being seen as an emanation of force, as much human as divine, force becomes, in sum, the measure of right, and society, instead of resting on the balance of forces, has inequality for its principle, i.e., the negation of order.
Q.—After all that, what must the social and political organisation be?
A.—It is easy to render an account of it. The collective forces having been appropriated, public power having been converted into an inheritance, individuals and families, already unequal by the chance of nature, having become more so by civilisation, society is constituted as a hierarchy. This is what was expressed by the dynastic religion and the oath of fidelity to the imperial person. In this system, it is by principle that Justice, or what is called by this name, always weighs on the side of the superior against the inferior: which, under the appearance of an inescapable autocracy, is instability itself.
And, sad to say, all the world is complicit here with the prince: the spirit of equality which Justice creates in man was neutralised or destroyed by the contrary prejudice, which renders invincible the alienation of all collective force.
Q.—How, in this travesty of Justice, society, and power, is unity preserved?
A.—The nature of things implies that unity should result from the balance of forces, made compulsory by Justice, which thus becomes the true sovereign, and which, in this capacity, educates all the participants in public power. Today, unity consists in the absorption of any faculty, any interest, any initiative by the person of the prince: it is social death. And as society can neither die nor do without unity, antagonism is established between society and power, until the catastrophe arrives.
Q.—In this state of affairs, the diminution of power from time immemorial seemed a guarantee for society: of what does such a reduction consist, and for what can it serve?
A.—Apart from what the prince has by way of inheritance or private domain, apart from the command of the armies, the collection of taxes and the appointment of civil servants, the principle is that he hands over the surplus, lands, mines, cultures, industries, transportation, banks, trade, education, to the whims, to the absolute disposition, to the unrestrained competition or immoral coalition of the privileged class. What enters into the province of economy is supposed not to concern him at all; it must not be interfered with. What one calls the limit of power, in a word, is the surrender of the true social force to a feudal caste, which is decorated with the name of civil liberties: an absurd transaction that no government can support, and that will before long serve as a new leavening agent for the revolution. Today, in France, the emperor is master of all: but by the same token, he has always put himself in danger of losing everything: thus time shall tell, one way or another.
Q.—Thus conditioned, power is without an object.
A.—No: the object of power is precisely then to maintain this system of contradictions, in the absence of Justice and as an inverted image of Justice.
Q.—Give the synonymy of power.
A.—The artificial constitution of power having deteriorated its concept, language was to feel the effects: here, as everywhere, words are the key to history.
Regarded as the inheritance of the prince, as his establishment, his profession, his trade, the social power was called the State. Like the common people, the king said: my State, or my Estates, for my domain, my establishment. —The Revolution, transporting from the prince to the country the property of power, preserved this word, today synonymous with the res publica , the republic.
As the personnel of power is supposed to govern the nation and to govern its destinies, one gives to this personnel and to power itself the name of government, an expression as false as it is ambitious. In theory, society is ungovernable; it obeys only Justice, on pain of death. In fact, the so-called governments, liberal and absolute, with their arsenal of laws, decrees, edicts, statutes, plebiscites, payments, ordinances, never controlled anyone or anything. Living a completely instinctive life, acting at the pleasure of invincible necessities, under the pressure of prejudices and circumstances which they do not understand, generally being pushed by the current of society which from time to time breaks them, they can hardly, by their own initiative, accomplish anything other than disorder. And the proof of it is that all end miserably.
Finally, if one considers in power this eminent dignity that makes it higher than any individual, any community, one calls it sovereign: a dangerous expression, from which it is to be wished that democracy will guard itself in the future. Whatever the power of the collective being, it does not constitute for that reason, in comparison with the citizen, a sovereignty: it would make almost as much sense to say that a machine in which a hundred thousand spindles turn is the sovereign of the hundred thousand spinners it represents. As we have said, Justice alone commands and governs, the Justice that creates power by making the balance of power obligatory for all. Between power and the individual, there is thus nothing but right, and all sovereignty is denied; sovereignty is the denial of Justice, it is religion.
INSTRUCTION III
Of the Forms of Government and Their Evolution During the Pagan-Christian Period
Q.—Would the history of nations and the revolutions of States then present nothing but the play of economic forces, at times contrary and conflictual, according to the views of the prince, the egoism of the great, and the prejudices of the people, sometimes favoured and harmonised according to right?
A.—It is so: let us add only that the arbitrary must have its period, Justice always bringing society back to balance, having sooner or later to triumph definitively over subversive influences.
Q.—For this long period, which one could, in a sense, call revolutionary, since the State continually goes from one revolution to another, what are the forms of power?
A.—According to whether the government is supposed to belong to only one, several, or all, one calls it monarchy, aristocracy or democracy. A compromise also often takes place between these elements, and a mixed government results from it, which one supposes for that reason to be more solid, and which is no more sustainable than the others.
In another sense, one calls the forms of government the conditions to which the existence of power is subjected. Thus, the Charter of 1830, having fixed the principles of public law, defines in some chapters the forms of government, i.e. that which concerns the king, the Chambers, the ministers, the legal order.
The idea of consecrating the conditions of power in writing is an old one: the Jews attributed their constitution to God, who would have given it to Moses under the name of Berith,602 alliance, pact, charter or testament.
These constitutions all rest on the preconceived idea that since society does not progress by itself, having in itself neither potentiality nor harmony, power as well as direction coming to it from on high via a dynasty, a Church, or a senate, one could not be too prudent in the organisation of power, in the choice of the prince, in the election of the senators, in legislative and administrative formalities, in jurisdiction, etc.
Q.—Which of these governmental forms deserves preference?
A.—None: other than the extent to which they partake of the nature of things and express the genius of the people, their defects are the same; this is why history shows them supplanting one another continuously, without society being able to find stability anywhere.
The consecration of the principle of inequality by the lack of balance in economic transactions;
The appropriation of collective forces;
The establishment of a factitious power in place of the real power of society;
The abolition of Justice by raison d’État;
Direction given over to the prince’s whim, if the State is monarchical, and, on any other assumption, to party cabals;
The continua
l tendency to the absorption of society by the State:
That, for the duration of the preparatory period, is the basis on which the political order is constituted, whatever name it takes and whatever pretended guarantee it gives.
Q.—But democracy means the restoration of the nation to the ownership and enjoyment of its own forces: why does it appear that you condemn this form of government as much as the others?
A.—As long as democracy is not elevated to the true conception of power, it cannot be, as it has not been so far, anything other than a lie, a shameful transition of brief duration, sometimes from aristocracy to monarchy, sometimes from monarchy to aristocracy. The Revolution held onto this word as a promise [une pierre d’attente]; some seventy years hence, we have made of it a broken promise [une pierre de scandale].
Q.—Thus, short of a revolution in ideas, is all political stability, all social morality, all freedom or happiness impossible for man and the citizen?
A.—It is not only history that reveals this to be true, nor Justice and equality, which demonstrate it as their inevitable sanction; it is economic science at its most elementary, positive, and real that proves it. The collective forces having been appropriated, the social power having been corrupted and alienated, the government oscillates from demagogy to despotism and from despotism to demagogy, sowing ruin and multiplying catastrophes, in almost regular periods.
Q.—Is there nothing more to be gathered, for the philosopher, from this study of the formation, growth, and decline of the old States?
A.—They were, in their very inorganism, the revelation of a new State, and something like an embryogenesis of the Revolution. What progress, indeed, what idea do we not owe to them?
The development of the economic forces, among the first rank of which the collective forces are to be found;
The discovery of the social power in the relation of all these forces;
The rationality of forms of government, varying according to race, soil, climate, industry, the relative importance of the constituent elements serving to mark the political centre of gravity in each country;
The idea of universal solidarity or humanitarian force, sometimes emerging from the struggle of States, sometimes from their agreement;
The idea of a balance of economic and social forces, attempted in the name of a balance of powers;
The development of right, the highest expression of man and society;
A greater understanding of history, to resume the perspective of this physiology of the collective being; so many centuries of a civilisation that was seemingly negative, because it was the enemy of equality, becoming centuries of affirmation, demonstrating the genesis and equilibrium of forces:
Here are what philosophical thought discovers underneath the revolutions and cataclysms; here, for the constitution of the order to come, the fruit of so many sorrows and disappointments.
Q.—It is perpetual peace which you announce after so many others. But do you not think that war, having its principle in the unsoundable abysses of the human heart, the war that all religions commend, that nothing is enough to engage, like the duel, is incoercible, indestructible?
A.—War, in the person of which the Christian worships the judgement of God, which some so-called rationalists attribute to the ambition of princes and popular passions, is caused by the imbalance of economic forces and the insufficiency of the statutory, civil, public and popular law that serves as a rule. Any nation in which economic balance is violated, the forces of production constituted as a monopoly, and public authority given over to the discretion of exploiters is, ipso facto, a nation at war with the remainder of mankind. The very principle of monopolisation and inequality that presided over its political and economic constitution pushes it to the monopolisation, per fas et nefas,603 of all the globe’s wealth, to the subjugation of all peoples: no truth in the world is better established. Let balance be established, let Justice arrive, and all war is impossible. There is no more force to sustain it; it would imply an action of nothingness upon reality, a contradiction.
Q.—You explain everything by collective forces, by their diversity and inequality, by their alienation, by the conflict to which this alienation gives rise, by their imperceptible but ultimately victorious tendency, via the influence of an indefectible Justice, to equilibrium. What share of influence over human events do you attribute to the initiative of heads of State, to their councils, their geniuses, their virtues, and their crimes? What part, in a word, is played by free will?
A.—It is a priest who said that man acts and God disposes. Man is the absolute power, inexperienced, blind man, to whom is promised empire over the earth; God is the social legislation that directs this untamed will without its knowledge, enlightening it little by little, and finally recreating it in its own likeness. Human action in history is thus, initially, force, spontaneity, combat; then recognition of the law that it enacts, and that is nothing other than the balancing of its freedom, i.e., Justice. In its struggles, the free being expresses, by its oscillations, the formula of its movement; it is this formula that constitutes civilisation and takes the place of providence for us: here is all the mystery. May the day come when all this governmental crew that swarms in the darkness shall disappear.
Q.—What is theocracy?
A.—A symbolic of the social force.
Among all people, the feeling of this force caused national religion to emerge, under the influence of which domestic religions, little by little, disappeared. Everywhere, the god was this collective force, personified and adored under a mystical name. The religion thus serving as a basis for government and Justice, logic dictated that theology would become the heart of politics, that consequently the Church would take the place of the State, the priesthood that of the noble, and the sovereign pontiff that of the emperor or king. Such is the theocratic idea. A product of Christian spiritualism, its appearance awaited the moment when, all nations meeting under a common law, the things of heaven would gain preponderance over the things of the earth in our souls. But it was the dream of a moment, an attempt aborted as soon as it was conceived, which was to always remain in a theoretical state. The Church, placing the reality of its ideal in heaven, above and apart from the social community, consequently denied the immanence of a force in this community, just as it denied in man the immanence of Justice; and it is this force, of which princes remained only the agents and instruments, that gave the Church its exclusionary status.
Q.—What improvement did Christianity bring to the government of peoples?
A.—None: it did nothing but change the protocol. The ancient noble, patrician, warrior or sheikh asserted his usurpation by virtue of necessity; the noble Christian asserts it in the name of Providence. For the first, nobility was a fact of nature; for, second; it is a fact of grace. But for both of these, royalty supported noble privilege, religion consecrated it. Wherefore the claims of the catholic Church to sovereignty, and its attempt at theocracy, vigorously repressed by the princes, and soon abandoned by the theologians themselves. A transaction intervened: the separation of spiritual and temporal was set up in axiom of public law; a new leaven of discord was thrown among the nations. Half pagan, half Christian, politics carried tyranny in its train; Justice was sacrificed and freedom compromised more than ever.
INSTRUCTION IV
Constitution of Social Power by the Revolution
Q.—In what terms has the Revolution expressed itself on the reality of social power?
A.—No express declaration exists in this respect. However, as much as the Revolution finds repugnant the ancient mysticism that placed Justice and power in heaven, it also finds insufficient the nominalism that followed it, which tends to make the collective being and the power that is in it, like Justice, words, concepts. There is not a single idea, not a single act of the Revolution that can be explained through this metaphysics. All that it produced, all that it promises, would be a castle in the air and another illusory transcendence if
it did not presuppose in society an effectivity of power, consequently a reality of existence that is assimilated to all creation, to all being. In any case, the silence of the Revolution as to the nature of power pertains only to the first two acts of this great drama: aren’t we, today, especially since 1848, in the midst of an eruption of revolutionary ideas? And don’t science and philosophy join with induction to confirm our thesis?
Q.—In the absence of texts, can you give your reasons?
A.—Science says to us that any body is a composite the final elements of which no analysis can find, held to one another by an attraction, a force.
What is force? It is, like substance, like the atoms it holds grouped together, a thing inaccessible to the senses, that the intelligence grasps only through its manifestations, as the expression of a relationship.
RELATIONSHIP: here, in the last analysis, is that to which all phenomenality, all reality, all force, all existence is referred. Just as the idea of being encompasses that of force and relation, in the same way that of relation inexorably presupposes force and substance, becoming and being. So that everywhere where the mind grasps a relation, experience discovering nothing else, we must conclude from this relation the presence of a force, and consequently a reality.
The Revolution denies divine right, in other words, the supernatural origin of social power. That means, in theory, that if a being does not have its power to be in itself, it cannot be; in fact, that the power which is detected in society having human relations for expression, its nature is human; consequently that the collective being is not a phantom, an abstraction, but an existence.
Property Is Theft! Page 90
