We want to be free: so much the worse for the slaves who, trembling at the idea of losing their chains, rally around their masters; we need not listen to their lamentations, for after all they will be with us when we have become the stronger. We want to be free: so much the worse for those who still want masters, and the more so that the masters usually want none of them except to pit them against others. Yes; the empiricists are those who want to destroy the effects, leaving the causes in existence, those who propose emollients when the operator’s scalpel is needed, those who seek to put the patient asleep, hoping that nature alone will act, while a small operation would relieve the patient immediately. It is surprising how people cheat themselves with words, how aphorisms seem to acquire weight when it is a question of preaching routine and fear of innovation. “One must go forward by carefully feeling one’s way,” they tell us; “humanity never advances by sudden leaps.” They forget that here it is three or four thousand years, for the Latin races only, that these experiments and step-by-step policies have been going on, that the exploited have awaited the realization of the promises made to them, have waxed passionate and struggled to obtain the same reforms forever promised though their situation has in nowise altered. We always suffer from the same evils, and now they propose to apply the same old poultices under the name of “the rational method.” Intelligence has grown, science has broadened, industry has widened to an immeasurable scope; pleasures have been refined and multiplied; but who profits by this progress?—Always the idle, possessing minority! Who famishes in order to produce without profiting thereby?—Always the spoliated masses! Ever since humanity has formed itself into societies, the exploited have made their complaints and lamentations heard; they have struggled without pause or relaxation to obtain concessions from their masters, which might soften their lot; they have prostrated themselves like flunkeys or again stood proudly erect, importuned at times like beggars or again recovered strength when the measure of poverty and oppression, being full, forced them to revolt, making death preferable to their existing condition. And yet this condition has always remained the same. Often their masters have been compelled to make room for them in legislative halls; often they have had to grant the reforms demanded; very often they themselves have been compelled to put restrictions upon their exploitations and authority. Have the governed been less oppressed, the exploited less squeezed? Has not poverty been as intense as ever, wealth concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, day by day becoming fewer?
Well, then, to propose to poor wretches to keep on with the experimental method, confining demands to new reforms just as empirical, (since those which would be likely to destroy the generating cause must be renounced for fear of the revolution) is to ask the mass of the workers to consent to be exploited indefinitely, seeing that the experience of the past proves to us that so long as the organic bases of society are unchanged these so-called reforms will always turn to the profit of those who hold wealth and power.
Finally, this: our opponents, when honest, do not hesitate to admit the present social organization is bad, vicious, and arbitrary, the bourgeoisie deriving their luxury and idleness solely from the poverty and overwork it imposes upon the toilers. They admit with us that the situation cannot last, that revolt is inevitable, that the social organization is forcing us into it; for there must necessarily come a time when the wretched will weary of starving while compelled to toil like beasts of burden. Well, then, since the conflict is inevitable—and legitimate—why exhaust strength in trying to avoid it? Why seek to make others hope for a pacific solution which you know to be impossible? Is not this a benevolent playing into the hands of the exploiters who seek to lull the intelligence of the workers to sleep by lying promises, in order to muzzle them more easily and lengthen the period of their exploitation? This is another of the consequences of the vicious social organization to which we are subjected, that he who is not squarely with the exploited and does not accept all their demands, finds himself necessarily on the side of the exploiters. All his good will and intentions in desiring to relieve our sufferings are nothing but narcotics, which, while dulling the edge of the miseries of the poor, deliver us over, bound hand and foot, to our exploiters.
If the conflict be inevitable would it not be better to prepare for it by seeking to develop within the minds of all the idea of a regenerated future society which, after all, is admitted to be good?—“If it were practicable,” add these well-meaning conservatives by way of corrective and as a concession to conservatism.—Is not such enlightenment necessary in order that when the day is come, those who take part in the revolution, may be able to profit by the struggle they will be called upon to sustain; that they may know what institutions are hurting them and must be destroyed; that they may not once more be turned into ridicule by their exploiters? Would this not be more rational and scientific than to lose one’s time deploring what cannot be prevented; than to devote oneself to protecting what is acknowledged to be bad under the pretext that it might be worse? Is it not, in fact, an utter want of logic to claim that because new ideas have not yet been applied, their application must be indefinitely postponed, because we do not know what they might bring forth? Is it not reasoning under pressure of fear of the new, and apathy in breaking off acquired
