Economic Harmonies

Such is the final result of the providential plan, of the great laws of Nature, when they act without impediment, when we consider them in themselves, apart from the disturbance to which their action has been subjected by error and violence. At the sight of this harmony the economist may well cry out, as does the astronomer on beholding the movement of the planets, or the physiologist when he contemplates the structure of our human organs:
Digitus Dei est hic!*94

But man is a free agent, and consequently fallible. He is subject to ignorance and passion. His will, which can err, enters as an element into the workings of economic laws; he can misunderstand them, he can nullify them, he can divert them from their purpose. Just as the physiologist, after admiring the infinite wisdom that has gone into the creation and arrangement of each one of our organs and vital parts, also studies them in their abnormal state, when they are sickly and diseased; so we too shall have to enter a new world, the world of social disturbances.

We shall introduce this new study with a few observations on man himself. It would be impossible for us to evaluate the ills of society, their origin, their effects, their function, the ever narrowing limits within which their own action compresses them (a phenomenon that constitutes what I would almost dare to call a harmonious discord), if we did not examine the necessary consequences of free will, the aberrations due to self-interest, which always entail retribution, and the great laws of human responsibility and solidarity.

We have seen that all the
social harmonies are contained in germ in these two principles: PROPERTY and LIBERTY. We shall see that all the social discords are merely the extension of these two contrary principles: PLUNDER and OPPRESSION.

And, indeed, the words “property” and “liberty” merely express two aspects of the same fundamental notion. From the economic point of view, liberty is connected with the act of production, property with the thing produced. And, since value has its origin in human activity, we can say that liberty implies and includes property. The same holds true of oppresson as related to plunder.

Liberty! Therein, in the last analysis, lies the source of harmony. Oppression! Therein lies the source of discord. The struggle between these two forces fills the annals of history.

And since oppression has as its aim the unjust seizure of property, since it is transformed into and merges its identity with plunder, it is plunder that I shall show in action.

Man comes into this world bound to the yoke of want, which is pain.

He can escape only by subjecting himself to the yoke of toil, which is also pain.

He has, then, only a choice between two kinds of pain, and he hates pain.

For this reason he looks about him, and if he sees that his fellow man has accumulated wealth, he conceives the idea of making it his own. Hence, property unjustly acquired, or plunder!

Plunder! Here is a new element in the economy of society.

From the day when plunder first appeared on earth, until that day, if it ever comes, when plunder will have completely disappeared, this element has had and will have a profound effect on the entire social mechanism; it will disturb, to the point of making them unrecognizable, the operation of the harmonious laws that we have worked to discover and describe.

Our task, then, will not be done until we have given a complete account of plunder.

Perhaps it will be thought that it is only an accidental, abnormal phenomenon, a sore that will soon heal, unworthy of scientific investigation.

But let us beware. Plunder occupies, in the traditions of families, in the history of nations, in the occupations of individuals, in the physical and intellectual energies of all classes, in the arrangements of society, in the precautions of governments, almost as important a place as property itself.

No, plunder is not a passing scourge, accidentally affecting the social mechanism, and the science of economics may not exclude it from consideration.

In the beginning this sentence was pronounced on man: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Hence, it appears that effort and satisfaction are indissolubly joined, and that the one can never exist unless paid for by the other. Yet everywhere we see man revolting against this law, and saying to his brother: Yours be the toil; mine, the fruit of that toil.

Enter the hut of the savage hunter or the tent of the nomadic shepherd. What sight meets your eyes? The wife, thin, disfigured, terrified, faded before her time, bears all the burden of the household chores, while the husband lolls in idleness. What idea can we form here of family harmony? It has disappeared, because force has laid upon the defenceless the burden of toil. And how many centuries of civilization will it take before woman will be raised from this frightful degradation?

Plunder, in its most brutal form, brandishing torch and sword, fills the annals of history. What are the names that make up history? Cyrus, Sesostris,
*95 Alexander, Scipio, Caesar, Attila, Tamerlane, Mohammed, Pizarro, William the Conqueror—outright plunder by means of conquest. To it go the laurel wreaths, the monuments, the statues, the triumphal arches, the songs of the poets, the heady admiration of women!

Soon the conqueror thinks of a better way of dealing with the conquered than to kill them, and slavery covers the earth. Almost down to our own day, all over the world, it was the accepted way of life, leaving in its wake hatred, resistance, civil strife, and revolution. And what is slavery except organized oppression with plunder as its object?

If plunder arms the strong against the weak, it no less lets loose the intelligent upon the credulous. What industrious peoples are there on earth who have escaped exploitation at the hand of sacerdotal theocracies, Egyptian priests, Greek oracles, Roman augurs, Gallic druids, brahmins, muftis, ulemas,
*96 bonzes, monks, ministers, mountebanks, sorcerers, soothsayers, plunderers of all garbs and denominations? It is the genius of plunderers of this ilk to place their fulcrum in heaven and to glory in a sacrilegious complicity with God! They put in chains, not men’s bodies alone, but their minds as well. They put the brand of servitude as much upon the conscience of a Seid
*97 as upon the brow of a Spartacus, thus achieving what would seem to be impossible: the enslavement of the mind.

Enslavement of the mind! What a frightful association of words! O liberty! We have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by conquest, nigh unto death in servitude, jeered at in the courts of the mighty, driven from the schools, mocked in the drawing room, misinterpreted in the studio, anathematized in the temple. It would seem that in thought thou shouldst find an inviolable refuge. But if thou shouldst surrender in this last haven, what becomes of the hope of the ages and of the dignity of man?

Yet in the long run (so man’s forward-looking nature wills it) plunder generates, in the very places where it holds sway, opposition that paralyzes its power, and knowledge that unmasks its impostures. It does not yield on that account, however; it merely becomes more cunning, and wrapping itself in forms of government and alignments, playing one faction against another, turns to political scheming, so long a fertile source of illicit power. Then we see plunder usurping the citizens’ liberty in order the more readily to exploit their wealth, and draining off their substance the better to conquer their liberty. Private enterprise becomes public enterprise. Everything is done by government functionaries; a stupid and vexatious bureaucracy swarms over the land. The public treasury becomes a vast reservoir into which those who work pour their earnings, so that the henchmen of the government may tap them as they will. Transactions are no longer regulated by free bargaining, and nothing can establish or preserve the principle of
service for service.

In this state of things the true notion of property is effaced, and every man appeals to the law to give his services an artificial and arbitrary value.

Thus, we enter the era of privilege. Plunder, becoming more and more subtle, establishes itself in monopolies and hides behind restrictions; it diverts the natural course of exchange and forces capital, and after it, labor and the whole population, into artificial channels. It produces laboriously in the north what could be produced easily in the south; it creates precarious industries and livelihoods; it substitutes for the gratuitous forces of Nature the onerous drudgery of human labor; it supports business concerns that cannot survive against competition, and then invokes the use of force against their competitors; it arouses international jealousies, encourages nationalistic sentiments, and invents ingenious theories that make allies of its own dupes; it always has impending industrial panics and bankruptcies; it undermines in the minds of the citizens all confidence in the future, all faith in liberty, and even their sense of justice. And then, when science exposes these misdeeds, Plunder stirs up even its victims against science, with the battle cry: Onward to utopia! Indeed, it repudiates not only the science that stands in its way, but even the idea that science can be applied to these areas, declaring with crowning cynicism: There are no absolute principles!

Nevertheless, spurred on by their suffering, the working-class masses revolt and topple over everything above them. Government, taxation, legislation, everything is at their mercy, and you believe perhaps that Plunder’s reign is at an end; you believe that the principle of service for service will be established on the only foundation possible or imaginable, that of liberty. Undeceive yourself. Alas! This pernicious idea has infiltrated the masses: property has no origin, sanction, legitimacy, or justification other than the law, and thereupon the masses institute legislation to plunder one another. Suffering from the wounds inflicted upon them, they undertake to heal everyone of their number by giving to each the right to oppress his neighbor. This is called solidarity, brotherhood: “You have produced; I have not; we are comrades; let us share.” “You own something; I own nothing; we are brothers; let us share.”

We must therefore examine the abuses perpetrated in recent years in the name of “association,” “organization of labor,” “interest-free credit,” etc. We shall have to subject them to this acid test: Are they in harmony with the principle of liberty or of oppression? In other words: Are they in conformity with the great economic laws, or do they constitute a disturbance of their operation?
*98

Plunder is too universal, too persistent, to be considered a purely accidental phenomenon. In this case, as in so many others, it is impossible to separate the study of natural laws from the study of the things that disturb their operation.

But, it will be said, if plunder necessarily enters into the workings of the social mechanism as a
discord, how do you dare affirm the harmony of economic laws?

I shall repeat here what I have said elsewhere: In everything that concerns man, a being who is
perfectible only because he is
imperfect, harmony does not consist in the complete absence of
evil, but in its gradual reduction. The social body, like the physical body, is possessed of a curative force,
vis medicatrix, whose laws and unfailing power cannot be studied without again eliciting the words:
Digitus Dei est hic.**42