Under the regime of tithes the workers “knew where they were at” concerning what they paid to their masters and tyrants: so much for the lord, so much for the priest, so much for this one, so much for that one. At the end they perceived there was not much for themselves. This made a revolution; the bourgeoisie seized the power; the people having fought to abolish the tithes it would not have been politic to reestablish them; the bourgeoisie therefore invented the tax and indirect tribute. After this plan the tithe is always deducted beforehand, but it is the capitalists, traders, and other middlemen who advance the sums thus deducted for the benefit of the State, and who are thus left with a free hand to reimburse themselves royally from the pockets of producers and consumers; and as these latter have no business directly with the treasury they can form no exact estimate of what share they have to pay, and all goes for the best in this best of all possible bourgeois worlds.
It is said we have to pay an annual tax of one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty francs a head, in France: what is that?—Why deny oneself the pleasure of having a government which busies itself with your happiness for so modest a sum? Really it is nothing at all and one would be stupid to do without such a blessing for the sake of a little thing like that! It is, indeed, nothing; and the worker does not perceive that being the only one to produce he is the only one to pay; he has not only his own bill to settle but that of all the parasites who already live from the product of his labor.
By whatever sophisms the bourgeois economists seek to prop up their system in order to justify the existence of capitalists, one thing is sure: Capital does not reproduce itself and can be nothing but the product of labor; now, as the capitalists themselves do not work their capital is therefore the fruit of others’ work. All this commerce between individual and individual, nation and nation, all these exchanges, all this transit, is the result of labor only; and the profit which remains to the middleman is the tithe torn from the labor of the producers by the owners of capital. Is it by means of the money spent that the earth produces the grain, vegetables, and fruits we need for our nourishment; the flax and hemp we must have to clothe ourselves; the pasturage necessary to fatten the cattle on which we feed? Is it by the power of capital alone that the mines yield us the metals used in our industries, or in making the machines and tools we require? Is it capital which transforms raw material and fashions it into objects for consumption?—Who would dare make the claim! Political economy itself, the object of whose existence is to ascribe everything to capital, does not go so far; it merely tries to prove that capital being indispensable to the putting of all sorts of exploitation into operation, it deserves a share—the biggest share—for the dangers and casualties it is considered to have risked in the enterprise. To demonstrate the relative unimportance of capital it is sufficient to repeat the oft-quoted hypothesis, “Let us imagine the disappearance of all monetary values, gold, silver, banknotes, commercial paper, drafts, checks, and all other bills of exchange; should we therefore stop producing?” Would the peasant therefore cease to till his bit of ground, the miner to extract his subsistence from the mine, the mechanic to fabricate articles for consumption? Would not the workers find some means of getting along without cash in exchanging their products, and to continue to live and produce without money?
The rational answer to these questions leads us to conclude that capital is but a means by which the parasites mask the superfluousness of their presence and justify the middleman whom they thrust upon the producers for the purpose of deducting in advance their tithe of the labor of others. Thus whatever means the State may employ to attack their incomes, these attacks must in the end recoil upon the producers, since the incomes themselves come only from labor. So much the greater will be the burden with which they are freighted; so much the more heavily will it fall upon the workers, swelled as it will be by the middleman; and in the final reckoning this boasted reform will be transformed, through the facts of our bad social organization, into a still greater means of exploitation and robbery.
Next after the income tax, which has had its day, the most vaunted reform of the present time is reduction of the hours of labor and the fixing of a minimum wage. To regulate the relations of capital and labor in favor of the workers, to obtain an eight-hour day instead of one of twelve, seems at first sight a tremendous progress; and it is not surprising that many allow themselves to be caught by it, using all their energies to obtain this palliative, believing themselves to be thus working for the emancipation of the proletarian class. In the chapter on authority, however, we observed that it has but one role—to defend the existing order of things; therefore to ask that the State interfere with the social relations between labor and capital is to give proof of the greatest want of logic, for its interference can turn out profitably only to him whose defender it is. In examining the tax-reform we noted that the role of the
