Translator: Iain McKay
La Voix du Peuple, 29 December 1849
Destruam et ædificabo[1]
What! you claim that socialism, which was to regenerate commerce, agriculture, industry, property, the family, religion, art, the State; which was to revolutionise humanity and the world, is entirely within the abolition of interest, in the Bank of the People! – Yes, as the oak is in the acorn.
What! you do not want a Constitution! You want to abolish government! What will maintain order in society? What do you put in place of the State? in place of the police? in place of the great political powers? – Nothing. Society is perpetual motion. It does not need to be wound nor have its tempo set. It carries within itself its own spring, always taut, and its own pendulum.
But who will enforce the laws? Would you not like laws too? – No. An organised society has no more need of laws than of legislators. Laws in a society are like spiders in the hive: they only serve to catch the bees.
How can you talk of organisation, you who do not want laws? What organisation is yours, where there is neither legislative power, nor executive power, nor armed force, nor courts, nor police officers! That organisation is anarchy. – Exactly: society will be organised when there is no longer anyone to make laws for it, to guard it and to judge it. And it is because society has never been organised, but only in the process of being organised, that it has needed until now legislators, statesmen, heroes and police commissioners. When the tree is young, it is given a guide: one does not tie a sixty-foot oak to a stake.
You mean, no doubt, that, all men being brothers, all antagonistic interests having disappeared in the community of work and goods, association will take the place of government and laws? – Association thus understood is in the opposite sense to freedom and progress. It is still government; it is the suppression of all guarantees, the destruction of solidarity, the cessation of life; it is social disorganisation.
So, no more interest, no more government, no more Constitution, no more association, no more laws! ANARCHY in capital, in labour, and in the State; anarchy everywhere and always, that is what you call organisation, solidarity, guarantee, progress! You suppress institutions; and you call that institution society! Destroying, for you, is synonymous with building! This is how you claim to realise the republican motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! What a paradox! what irony!
– What do you want? Ancient and modern languages do not provide me with another term to render my thought, to express, in its simplicity and its grandeur, the revolutionary idea. Yes: Anarchy! that is to say, for immature nations, chaos and nothingness; for mature ones, life and light. Complete, absolute anarchy: once again, I cannot formulate otherwise the identity of the two tendencies that we have noted in the working class and bourgeois class. This is, moreover, what I hope to make you see with your eyes, touch with your fingers, consider with your mind, as if you had before you the Pantheon or the Bastille column. I will hardly need your attention.
The task I have set for myself would be beyond my strength, if I had to deal with it doctrinally, by science, history, philosophy, law. No human force could sustain such a labour.
But the mind is fertile in resources. When facts encumber it, when experience embarrasses it, when the diversity of observation perplexes it, it generalises, establishes classifications, and thus founds science: an analysis and summary of nature. When science obsesses it in turn, and the thread escapes it, then it simplifies its knowledge by reducing it all to a primal fact, and starting science anew on a higher experience.
This is the procedure I will use, in a question which would have required, to be developed scientifically, the accumulation, in a single head, of almost the entirety of human knowledge. I will not demonstrate; such a demonstration would be impossible for me. I will SHOW: that is to say, instead of explaining the thing, I will try to make it visible; in such a way that the objections that may be made to me, and to which I will have to respond, do not accuse my account of a lack of intelligibility, but only a lack of transparency. The reader must not be able to tell me, like Louis Blanc, I do not understand; but only, I do not see. Then it will be up to me to shed more light on the object in perspective, or to apply, if necessary, eyewash to the spectator’s eyes.
But, first, what is the fact that we have to bring to light? It is a matter of defining it well.
It is, in the first place, that by the combined tendency, of the proletariat which calls for a reform in property, and of the bourgeoisie which demands another in the State, government annihilates itself and disappears;
It is then that, as this abolition of government progresses and by the very fact of this abolition, liberty, equality, solidarity, security, order, all the rights enshrined in the Constitution, all the promises of the Republic, all the wishes of society, are realised.
This is what we have to recognise, is it not? what was announced two years ago by this epigraph at the head of a book of demolition: Destruam et aedificabo! Which means that a negative necessarily corresponds, in the mind and in society, to an affirmative series; so that, if the negation is complete and irreproachable, the affirmation exists; all that remains is to free it. If the honourable critics who have spoken of System of [Economic] Contradictions had understood this elementary truth, they would have spared themselves the trouble of accusing is of presumption and pride; they would have taken care not to reproach us for having excelled at demolition, but not knowing how to build anything. To demolish is to build! Will criticism ever be anything but the beast of burden of literature?...
Here then is what is understood: we have to see how, by the double movement of the revolution which carries away both the bourgeoisie and the people, government perishes in society; then how, by the extinction of government, order, that is to say liberty, equality and fraternity, is established.
Now, by what means, by what torch are we going to see all these things? – For it is obvious, being neither a painter, nor a physicist, nor a machinist, nor a government, but a simple worker of the press, I cannot show the public the future of the Revolution on a canvas, a magic lantern, or a model phalanstery. My field of exposition is the Voix du peuple; my instrument is writing. But writing only represents things to the understanding and in a successive manner: how then can we grasp the whole? What guarantee will we have of the fidelity of our understanding? What will be our compass, our criterion?
I will indicate this criterion. It could not be simpler, everyone can verify its accuracy. It is this axiom of geometry: The sum of the parts is equal to the whole. Do you believe, reader, in geometry? In this case, you can abandon yourself to our guidance: we will show you the most interesting novelties, and you will run no risk of getting lost.
Well! it is by means of this axiom: The sum of the parts is equal to the whole, that I hope to show you this true, unprecedented phenomenon, that government, through the progress of reforms, necessarily perishes in society, and that as it perishes order is born in its place, as perfect as it is possible, in the current state of our knowledge, to conceive.
And, indeed, if I show, on the one hand, that by the organisation of free credit, by the abolition or the conversion of taxation and the extension of universal suffrage, triple and inevitable consequence of the February Revolution, the governmental system is struck, in all its parts, by such a simplification, that each of the functions by which public authority manifests itself becomes useless, and that the action of power finds itself totally annihilated: it is clear that, the whole not being able to survive after the elimination of the parts, the government becomes a pure entity: created by a fiction of general thought, it enters into fiction.
And if, on the other hand, I show that wherever the action of power has ceased, there spontaneously manifests an action of freedom at once individual and co-operative [corporative], communal and nation; co-operative, because individual; national, because communal; action which is the very agreement of interests, for this simple reason that they depend only on liberty, not on property; which is the expression of all wills, because where nothing is abandoned to chance, to favour, to birth, to privilege, wills can have no other object than freedom; action which simultaneously satisfies general and particular needs, henceforth identical; if, I say, I show this progressive creation of harmony by freedom, following everywhere the decline of order by power: it will be evident again that, the whole being homogeneous in each of its parts and equal to their sum, the highest degree of order in society is expressed by the highest degree of individual freedom, in a word by ANARCHY.
Thus no philosophy, no metaphysics, no jurisprudence; no dissertation, no controversy: we would never have finished. Nothing but an empirical exposition: instead of arguments, a series of facts. And, the facts noted and admitted, it is enough that the people, author of the government, making the government for the last time, convert them into decrees, so that, in the opinion of all, the Revolution would be over in twenty-four hours.
[1] Latin for “I will destroy and I will build” (Deuteronomy). (Translator)