Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Translator: Iain McKay
La Voix du Peuple, 11 January 1850
The following objection is made to me:
Your theory is only a sophism. This supposedly anarchic organisation of credit and banking is also only a delegation by the people renewed by the State, a small State alongside the State. Where then, if you please, is the difference between the two systems? What is the reason why the present State, all organised, should not add circulation and credit to its present responsibilities, and does not administer the national Bank according to the principle of gratuity [of credit], as well and better than independent officials, appointed, supervised and directed by the chambers of commerce? It was, in truth, not worth speaking so loudly about the abolition of the State, only to then give us this pale imitation of the State. Why do you not want the State?
That observation could not fail to be addressed by me: I do not weaken it nor conceal it.
I admit, if one judges my theory by a first and unique example, that the difference between the governmental system and that which I call anarchic is inappreciable. The people, in their collectivity, acts with arms, as it thinks with the head of each citizen; and, since the functions are divided, it is true to say furthermore that in each function there are one or more individuals who think and act for all. In this regard, I agree with the governmentalists: the people is represented by each citizen, society by each worker, as humanity is represented by each man.
But there is not one single public function, one single industry in society; and the question is precisely to know if public thought or action can and must be exercised ex aequo, in equal measure and title, by all citizens individually and independently of one another: this is the democratic and anarchic system; – or whether this collective thought, [collective] action must become the exclusive attribute of an elite of functionaries, appointed for this purpose by the people and in relation to whom the others are then, no longer COLLEAGUES, but obedient and passive subjects, instruments. It is this latter system which, for reasons that it is useless to recall, has until the present been in force in society, and which has been called in turn, according the scarcely varied modes of its application, hierarchical or theocratical, monarchical, oligarchical, etc., all designations that, at bottom, always indicate the same thing, namely the State, sometimes of priests, sometimes of a dynasty, here of patricians or nobles, elsewhere of tribunes or demagogues.
The spirit of this system was perfectly expressed in the Charter of 1830, of which the Constitution of 1848 is, in this respect, only a degeneration.
“Legislative power,” said this Charter, article 14, “is exercised collectively by the king, the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies.”
So much for thought, so much for counsel. The people do not think for themselves, that is to say, through the totality of their members; they think, they legislate through their representatives. And the popular thought, expressed by the legislative delegation, without any other criterion or guarantee of certainty than the good pleasure of the delegates, acquires the force of law; there is nothing left but to obey.
Now for action.
“The king is the head of the State. He commands the forces of land and sea, declares war, makes treaties of peace, alliance, and commerce, appoints all public administration positions, and makes the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws.”
I do not speak of the innumerable restrictions subsequently placed on the initiative of the people, on their action, on their spontaneity, all of which are the consequence of the principle of authority. Bossuet deduced this in his Politique tirée de l’écriture sainte. I limit myself to these citations. The State is the constitutional silencing of the people, the legal alienation of its thought and of its initiative into the hands of one man, monarch, or a few men, oligarchs; and the two powers, legislative and executive, established, the people have only to keep quiet and obey.
We others, anarchists, say on the contrary:
A social science exists: political economy has posited it, it develops its principles every day.
These principles, rid of every characteristic of personality and arbitrariness, pure ideas of individual reason, are the necessary and immutable axioms which steer societies, at first unknowingly, and later with reflection and which, once promulgated by the people, exclude all political convention, all human legislation. The rule of the law is succeeded by the reign of the IDEA.
We also say:
Universal suffrage exists: it is the imprescriptible and inalienable right of the people, the form of its expressions. Contrary to article 13 of the Charter of 1830, which assigns to the executive power, delegated by the people, the nomination of all positions, and consequently the full exercise of the public power, universal suffrage implies the nomination by the people of all the functionaries without exception, their permanent revocability, and consequently the government of the people by the people.
Thus the people appoint, at one or two degrees at most of election, according to the importance of the positions, all its officials; and as, by the natural division of labour and the separation of industries, the ensemble of the functions is nothing other than the social organism itself; as the totality of the officials embraces the totality of the citizens, it follows that the whole people enters into the administration and into the State; that each citizen fulfils a function, not servile or subordinate, but independent and responsible; that all, in short, are elected by one another, and exercise their specific share of public authority.
Centralisation, from being unique and hierarchical as it was before, becomes multiple and democratic. What we call the State and whose existence supposes, on the one hand, a very small number of citizens, supposedly delegated or mandated, who make the law and command; on the other, a countless multitude, reputed to be sovereign and who merely obey; the State, I say, no longer exists, it is society; the law is repealed, it is the idea.
That is what we will express in a still more concrete, more intelligible and more practical manner, by saying: The people bestow no general mandate; it only gives specific delegations. The general mandate is hierarchy, royalty, despotism; the specific delegation is, on the contrary, liberty, equality and fraternity: it is anarchy.
The State, an organism of convention, essentially parasitical, distinct from the people, outside and above the people, receiving from the people a mandate at once general and specific, the State, having by itself neither science nor ideas, supplants them by the law. – Anarchy, on the contrary, is the living society, the people having consciousness of its ideas, governing itself as it works, by division of industries, specific delegation of jobs, in short by the egalitarian distribution of forces.
Now, it is easy to understand why we do not want the State, either in the organisation of the national Bank, or in the exercise of any function and of any industry.
We do not want the State in the Bank: on what grounds could we want it? Has the Bank not been established by the people? Have the administrators, directors, managers not received their investiture from the sovereign? Are they not placed under the immediate supervision of the chambers of commerce, which are the popular committees for everything concerning credit, circulation and finances! What good is a hierarchical director or supervisor, highly paid, when the people itself directs and supervises without a salary?
We do not want the State, because the State, so-called agent or servant of the people, by a general and unlimited proxy of the voters, no sooner exists than it creates for itself an interest of its own, often contrary to the interests of the people; because, acting then in that interest, it makes public officials its own creatures, from which results nepotism, corruption, and little by little the formation of an official tribe, an enemy of labour as well as of liberty.
We do not want the State, because the State, in order to increase its extra-popular power, tends to multiply its employees indefinitely; then, to attach them ever more, to constantly increase their pay. Since 1830, without any known utility, the sum of the salaries for functionaries employed by the State in the service of the people has been increased by 65 million, and the budget for expenditures increased from one billion 1,800 million.
We do not want the State, because, when the taxes are no longer sufficient for its squanderings, for the payment of its favours and sinecures, the State resorts to loans and embezzlements, and after having taken someone else’s money, it still finds a way to have its plunder applauded. This is how the floating debt, under the reign of Louis-Philippe, reached 800 million, and the State, after having robbed the savings banks, the municipal funds, the securities of privileged functionaries, and devoured the money of the holders of treasury bonds, was forced, in order to escape bankruptcy, to consolidate all its thefts, which means to constitute them as perpetual annuities, the interest on which the people pay today.
Democrats, do you want to perpetuate, to generalise it forever theft and exploitation amongst yourselves? Preserve this regime of the State; maintain that alienation of the public power for the profit of a few ambitious men, who will reward you for your credulity with shame and misery; and then hand over to these so-called delegates of the people, to these servants of the people, hand over to them the national Bank.
Soon you will see them dipping into the cash register with both hands. When there are no coins, they will take notes. Now, you know that Bank notes, given without cover, in exchange for nothing, notes which, as a consequence, represent nothing, that circulate without security or mortgage, are assignats; and the assignat, citizens, is theft.[1]
You will see them, in order to increase their takings, and pay their henchmen, under the pretext that interest collected by the State benefits the community and is not usury, successively raise the discount rate to 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 per 100. After February, did you not hear them, these theorists of government, claim for the State, the net profit of the railways, mines, insurance companies, and finally the banks? The net profit, do you understand? that is to say the agio, the interest, the usury, everything, finally, that is not the fruit of labour. Did they think then of free credit? Did they want to seize power to establish that gratuity? And you, when you asked the provisional government to abolish the exploitation of man by man, did you suspect that the joining of the banks to the State was only a new form of exploitation?
We do not want the State, because we would like to purge society of all that is called bankruptees, usurers, loups-cerviers[2], speculators, robbers, swindlers, stellionataires[3], bribe-takers, forgers, counterfeiters, manipulators, parasites, hypocrites and Statesmen; because in our eyes all Statesmen are alike, and they are all, to varying degrees, enemies of justice and freedom, eaters, as Cato said, of human flesh.
And in this regard, judge, by what is happening today, what may still happen to you under this dreadful and devouring tutelage of the State. The Constitutionnel quoted yesterday, with a malicious satisfaction, a passage from the Voix du peuple, in which we highlighted the dangers that a revolution whose object has not been determined, and whose course was mapped beforehand from opinion, would inevitably have for the country. See, it said to its readers, what the democratic and social Republic promises you![4]
Instead of reporting our words, why did it not cite the acts, the specific acts of the current government, the acts and deeds of M. Louis Bonaparte?
There, it is General Gémeau who, in the name of the State, for reasons of State, in the exclusive interest of the State, suspends, in the sixth military division, the freedom of the press, closes the cafés and public establishments, prohibits commerce: all this, because the democratic newspapers displease the State; because the gatherings, even by chance, of citizens in certain places of consumption are suspect to the State; because true and egalitarian commerce threatens to supplant the commerce of monopoly, protected by the State.
Certainly, it is indubitable that. if Louis Blanc were president of the Republic, and the delegates of the Luxembourg were prefects and generals under his orders, not only the Constitutionnel and the Univers[5] would be suspended, but the Voix du people itself and all the anarchist newspapers suppressed. It is certain that, with the dictatorship of Louis Blanc, the workers’ associations that were not established according to the model outlined by the master would not be tolerated by the State. Every citizen designated as a first-rate worker would see themselves, in the name of fraternity, seized by the State: for fear that he would exploit his brothers through free industry, they would make him exploit them through official industry; he would be made a parasite of the State. Could a dictator, a servant of the people, responsible for the order and security of all, do less for good order and good morals? That is what we would see, without a doubt, with the governmentalism of M. Louis Blanc. But by what right does the Constitutionnel accuse the copyist of its own patron, the one whom the patriots have nicknamed the Thiers of the republican party?
Here, it is the minister of public education, Mr. de Parieu, who, assisted by a Jesuitical majority, suppresses, by a stroke of parliamentary authority, one might as well say a coup d’état, the freedom of education. Doubtless there is no lack of democrats, or so-called democrats, as little interested in the freedom of education as they are in any other freedom, who, on occasion, would not fail to follow the example of the current majority [in the Assembly]; and I am quite sure that, if Louis Blanc were in the place of M. de Parieu, he would do as he has done. Could a statesman, a friend of the people, charged with the future of the younger generations, abandon the education of the young to paternal care?. . . But with what audacity does the Constitutionnel dare to denounce the schismatics of the democracy to the hatred of its readers? How is it this the sacred name of freedom not choke it in the throat, not burn its tongue?
Ah! if there still existed friends of freedom, men seeking justice and peace, true revolutionaries finally, on the rumbling volcano, whose crater is called government, they would form a league against this concentration of powers that is killing us, that will make us perish, when the inevitable reaction of opinion will have made it return, from the hands of a stupid absolutism, to those of a drunken demagoguery. But why do I speak of freedom to men whom the zeal for pleasures holds enslaved; who have never known how to do anything but cut their throats for the choice of their princes and their Statesmen? Freedom! they have stifled it in the arms of their mistresses. Pass then, Bonaparte; come, come, Louis Blanc, come, in your turn, to avenge, by dint of despotism, Freedom!
[1] Assignats were paper money (fiat currency) authorised by the Constituent Assembly from 1789 to 1796, during the French Revolution to address imminent bankruptcy. They were originally meant to backed by the value of land seized by the State from the Crown, aristocracy and the church. (Translator)
[2] A rapacious, unscrupulous financier, a stock market wolf. (Translator)
[3] Someone who sells a good which they are not the owner or selling the same good to several people. (Translator)
[4] Le Constitutionnel was a French political daily newspaper, based in Paris. Liberal in politics, it played a key role in the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and became one of the main government newspapers of the Second Empire. (Translator)
[5] L’Univers was a French daily newspaper with a Catholic orientation. (Translator)