Élisée Reclus
“Ouvrier, prends la machine ! Prends la terre, paysan !” Le Révolté: Organe Socialiste, 24 January 1880
Our enemies, the defenders of private property, have always claimed that their best ally is the small peasant landowner. According to them, Jacques Bonhomme stands guard day and night around his plot of land, waiting for some “dreadful socialist” worker to jump him or hang him in the corner of his barn. According to them, the difference in interests between the peasant and the city worker is such that the antagonism between the two classes must remain forever, and naturally count on this immortal hatred to retain power and capital.
What is true in this way of seeing? Without doubt, there is a great difference between the peasant who owns property and the worker who owns only his body weakened by hunger, but it is not fair to compare them. The comparison must be made between true proletarians, those in the countryside as well as those in the towns, between those who, from both parties, depend for their work on the goodwill of a master. And do the gentlemen economists not know that, even in France, the country par excellence of small property, the destitute of the soil are counted in millions? Do they not know that in almost all the countries of Europe, the fate of the peasant is, like that of the factory worker, one of irremediable misery? Must they not admit that in England, the homeland of this much-vaunted political economy, that the cultivator of the countryside is a debased mercenary, “Fallen so low,” says the Fortnightly Review, “that if we gave him the land, he would not know what to do with it?” It is a charming picture of country life, as sung by poets and painted by artists. Leafy trees, a stream of pure water, a barn full of shiny-haired animals frolicking in the yard, a fat farmer’s wife with her infant, surrounded by playing children, welcoming with a kind smile the man returning from the fields, the hearth, the steaming meal that can be seen through the half-open door; all this is charming and sweet. But now go and see in Silesia what a horrible tragedy this idyll has turned into. There, no more fire, no food, no clothes: men, women, children, lie sick on pallets or on the bare earth, and hungry rats come to devour the corpses! Such is the regime of private property. The land belongs to a few great personages: too bad for those who were not born princes or whose lucky star did not make them bankers!
Now, contemporary history proves to us that this regime of capitalist property is developing more and more: inevitably, by the normal development of economic laws, small property must be devoured by the big; the plots of land belonging to the peasant are destined to round off the large estates, just as small workshops are an inevitable prey for the powerful factory owners and the big financiers enrich themselves from the ruin of small speculators. In this respect, nothing is more instructive than the correspondence placed in the great English newspapers on the exploitation of the soil, as it is now practiced in the most fertile States of the North-American Republic. Let the peasants of Europe take heed! What the capitalists have found good to do on the western side of the Atlantic, have no doubt that they will soon learn to do on the opposite shore! It is precisely those who give us information on American farms who are commissioners charged by the English government with importing good agricultural methods into Europe.
Let us take as an example of these American farms, that of Casselton, situated in the plains which extend to the west of Lake Superior. A railway company, on very good terms with the government, as are all the large financial companies, has been granted in this region an area of 30,000 hectares in one holding: this is a little more than the surface area of the canton of Geneva. This vast space was entrusted to a skilled agriculturalist who had already managed to make his fortune elsewhere, and our man settled in the middle of the solitude to transform it into a wheat, clover and hay factory. He has in his sheds a hundred ploughs, a hundred sowing machines, a hundred harvesters, twenty threshers; about fifty railway wagons come and go incessantly between the stations in the field and the nearest port, whose piers and ships also belong to the company. A network of telephones goes from the central house to all the buildings on the estate; his voice is heard everywhere, he has an ear for every noise, nothing is done without his orders and far from his supervision.
As for the living tools of the factory, they consist of four hundred horses and six hundred men. The stables are arranged in such a way that, as soon as they leave the gate, the animals begin to trace the furrow several kilometres long that they have to gouge to the end of the field: each of their steps is utilised by the thrifty proprietor. The judicious use of human forces is carried out in the same way; all the movements of the workers are regulated upon leaving the common dormitory. There, no children or women come to disturb the task; the workers are grouped into squads with their captains and their sergeants; their own duty is to obey and keep silent in the ranks. At the end of autumn, the entire army is disbanded, only ten men remain to watch over the stables. The following year, the recruiters call for other soldiers, because the company judged that it would be undesirable to employ the same worker: this would have the great disadvantage of tying them too much to the land, of making them think that a clod could belong to them!
Is this not the ideal of the agricultural farm, and do not all the agronomists of the United States and England have reason to be delighted? Moreover, the financial results are admirable. With four hundred horses and six hundred men, employed for seven months, they obtain a quantity of wheat that represents the food of a least fifty thousand people. A triumphant example of what can be obtained through grand scientific cultivation, but no less a striking example of the monopoly that a few capitalists can claim over the work and life of all!
And what a terrible fate does this industrial progress prepare for all workers, labourers and peasants, if the right of monopolisation is maintained, if property continues to be concentrated in the hands of a few! It is all very well that one man employed in the service of machinery can supply enough products for a hundred other people; but in this case, what need does the owner have of the crowd of workers who come to present themselves to him? Everywhere work is simplified and the number of workers increases. Here, where ten men collaborated, one is enough; there, where his product was 10, it is now 100. Everywhere the needy besiege the workshops and the capitalist can lower wages from year to year, sort the men to keep only the most docile and the most subdued. If the Frenchman reasons too much, if he is too independent, he will be replaced by the German! If the German eats too much, he will be replaced by the Chinese! That is the will of political economy! It is the law of supply and demand, it is the law of the strongest! No difference can remain in this respect between the factory of the cities and the factory of the fields. The peasant owner of a plot of land can enjoy his leftover like the artisan and the petit bourgeois. The time will come when all competition with the methodical exploiter of the soil, served by capital and machinery, will become completely impossible for him, and on that day, he will have nothing left but to become a beggar.
Unless, however, united with the worker, his companion in toil and misery, he has finally reconquered common property!
Worker, seize the machine!
Seize the land, peasant!