His needs have grown—that is sure; he wants a relative luxury which he formerly did without—that is evident. But this results, as we have already seen, from the increase in the expenditure of his energies on the one hand, and on the other, from his intellectual development; whence it comes that though the relations between himself, and his exploiters rank him beneath them, he acquires a greater consciousness of his own worth and personal dignity. This luxury, these wants, he knows to be legitimate, for he has earned them.
Nor will anyone dare maintain that this increase in expenditures is superfluous on the part of the worker; no one will dare contest his right to partake of the wealth he has helped to create. Nobody but the economists of the old school are still stupid enough to charge him with improvidence, or have the effrontery to preach economy to those who can satisfy only the fewest of their desires. It would be still more out of place to reproach the worker with the new wants he has created for himself, since at the present moment he pays for them with the severest privations, and since that sort of prosperity—altogether relative—which he enjoyed during the period of the development of industry, is now barely maintained by a very limited number of the privileged employees of each corporation, while the great mass are again forced to live on wages which, in consequence of periods of enforced idleness, have been reduced to the same rate as fifty years ago.
While the needs of the workers have doubled, the means of production have been multiplied tenfold; the increase in wages and the reduction in the price of products would have enabled them to satisfy this increase of needs; but the capitalists alone have benefited most definitely and extensively by the excess of production, and today the worker with his new needs and the impossibility of satisfying them, on account of the multiplicity of his periods of enforced idleness, is more miserable than before; for over and above his misery he is conscious of not having deserved it, knowing that he alone is the producer of all which is consumed or possessed. What he also knows, is that if the stores are crammed with products, reducing him to idleness, it is because he and his are forced to deprive themselves and cannot consume as they wish. He knows that what creates his exploiters’ wealth creates poverty for him. Had he been allowed to consume at will, and had he not been driven to produce, the stores would not be crammed, there would be no periods of enforced idleness while he and his family are starving. This is what every worker must say to himself, who reflects, compares the results obtained and reasons upon the facts unfolded during his existence. Yes, the worker has developed; yes, he has seen the outflowering of progress, which vanishes when he seeks to grasp it; and the acuteness of his sensations has come to make him suffer today from what would scarcely have touched him formerly. And here again experience, far from making him hope for a gradual improvement, reveals to him an ever growing poverty, its increase becoming heavier and heavier, and always more debasing. Far from fearing an abrupt transformation, he who reflects will seek with all his might to hasten it.
There remains the alleged amelioration of the laws, their raison d’être conforming more and more to the general welfare rendering them protectors of public utility. And this again is an illusion, for the best laws are by their very nature falsified in practice, distorted from their purpose in the application. The penal code is always just as severe, weighs with equal vexation upon the poor, while remaining equally indulgent, equally benevolent to the privileged. The law is always just as ferocious towards him who steals a rabbit from his neighbor, but it lets the bankers who operate with millions “work” at their ease; the stockjobbers of the bourse, the lottery swindlers of the “General Union,” the Panama sharks, the “Mary-Renauds,” the “Mace Bernauds,” the founders of pepper mines and sugarloaf quarries, may catch suckers in perfect security; if some magistrate should venture to poke his nose into their affairs and ask for explanations, instead of having them brought before him between two constables, like vulgar Anarchists, he very humbly goes to them, taking good care to cut short his indiscretion, which he himself recognizes to be out of place. He is ready, however, to get even with the first wretch who may have helped himself to a meal without paying for it, because he had no cash.
All are
