But though authority is discussed, jeered at, lashed, it is, unfortunately, far from having disappeared from our customs. People are so used to being led by a string that they would imagine themselves lost the moment there was no longer anybody to keep them tied. They are so accustomed to seeing the gendarme’s cap, the belted paunch of the mayor, the meddling and official insolence of the bureaucracy, the sorry-looking countenances of judge and policeman, appear in their lives at every turn, that they have reached the point of becoming accustomed to these filthy promiscuities, considering them as things which are certainly disagreeable, on which, when occasion offers, they never miss playing a dirty trick with satisfaction, but which they cannot imagine disappearing without humanity’s being dislocated at once! Strange contradiction of the human mind! Men submit to this authority with reluctance, they scoff at it, violate it when they can, and believe themselves lost when anyone talks of doing away with it. A matter of habit, it seems!
But this prejudice is so much the more illogical, if we may use the term, so much the more stupid, when the ideal of each individual in regard to “good” government, is to have one which he would have the chance to cashier the moment it tried to prevent him from acting as he pleased. It was to flatter this ideal that the bourgeoisie invented universal suffrage.
If the republic has enjoyed so much credit among the workers; if, after so many deceptions, universal suffrage is still considered by the governed as a means of enfranchisement, it is because they have been made to believe that by changing the men in power they could change the system of exploitation which oppresses us into a system from which welfare and felicity for all would result. Profound error, which allows the intriguing to lead the workers astray, in pursuit of illusory reforms, incapable of bringing about any change in their situation, and accustoming them to expect everything from a change of personnel in this machine for oppression called the State;—an error which, in every revolution, has permitted schemers to juggle away popular victories, to install themselves in the sinecures of those who have been swept away by the revolutionary tempest, and to form a new caste of exploiters by creating around them new interests, which, once established, have succeeded in imposing their authority, reducing to silence those who had had the naivete to carry them to the pinnacle of power!
What an abyss of contradictions is the human mind! If one discusses with individuals even slightly intelligent, they will readily agree that if all men were reasonable there would be no need of government. They themselves could get along easily without it. But unfortunately all men are not reasonable; some would abuse their strength to oppress others, to live at others’ expense and do nothing. To guard against these inconveniences some authority is necessary “to keep them straight.” Which in concrete terms comes back to saying that, taken in a lump, people are too bad to come to an understanding among themselves, but that, taken individually or in fractions, they know how to govern others, and that we must make haste to put the power into their hands, in order that they may enforce their will upon all. O unhappy logic! How human reasoning doth trip thee up!
So long as there are persons to give commands, will they not necessarily be in antagonism with those they command? Will not those in power, if they be sincere, have ideas of their own to further? And these ideas, though they may be good, may also be very bad. Drowned in the mass, they will remain without power; with authority in the hands of those who profess them, they will be thrust upon those who reject them. And the more sincere the individuals in power the more pitiless would they be against those who should revolt against their way of seeing things, being convinced that they were working for the good of humanity.
In the preceding chapter we saw that our political slavery is determined by our economic situation. We have soldiers, judges, ministers, etc., because we have bankers and proprietors; the one entails the other. If we succeed in overthrowing those who exploit us in the workshop, if we succeed in ridding ourselves of those who have got us by the entrails, there will no longer be any need of the force which protects them; it will have no more reason for existence. In fact there is a necessity for government, for laws, for deputies to make these laws and a magistracy to apply them, for a police-force to maintain the decisions of the magistracy, because those who possess need some force to defend what they have seized against the claims of those they have dispossessed.
But the worker—what has he to defend? What matters to him all this governmental paraphernalia, the expense for whose maintenance he alone bears, without deriving any profit therefrom, and which is there solely to teach him that he has no rights save that of starving in the midst of the abundance he has created? In the somber days of revolt, when misery grown more intense urges the workers into the street en masse, it is again these “social” institutions which stand before them and bar their route to the future. We must, therefore, destroy them, and take good care to reconstitute no new aristocracy, which could have but one purpose: to enjoy the most and the quickest at the expense of its protégés. What matters the choice of the hand that strikes you? It is not to be struck at all, that one should aim at! Let us not forget that whatever the name in which the new authority clothes itself, however benign it may seek to appear, whatever be the amendments it proposes, whatever be the mode of recruiting its
