Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

40 / ANARCHISM
Division simply separates the various parts of labour, leaving each to devote
himself to the specialty best suited to his tastes: the workshop groups the labourers
according to the relation of each part to the whole ... Now, through the workshop,
production is going to increase, and at the same time the deficit.
...[W]hoever says reduction of expenses says reduction of services, not, it is
true, in the new shop, but for the workers at the same trade who are left outside, as
well as fo r many others whose accessory services will be less needed in future. Therefore
every establishment of a workshop corresponds to an eviction of workers: this
assertion, utterly contradictory though it may appear, is as true of the workshop as of
a machine.
The economists admit it: but here they repeat their eternal refrain that, after a
lapse of time, the demand for the product having increased in proportion to the reduction
of price, labour in turn will come finally to be in greater demand than ever.
Undoubtedly, WITH TIME, the equilibrium will be restored; but, I must add again, the
equilibrium will be no sooner restored at this point than it will be disturbed at another,
because the spirit of invention never stops, any more than labour. Now, what
theory could justify these perpetual hecatombs "When we have reduced the number
of toilers," wrote Sismondi, "to a fo urth or a fifth of what it is at present, we shall
need only a fourth or a fifth as many priests, physicians, etc. When we have cut them
off altogether, we shall be in a position to dispense with the human race." And that is
what really would happen if, in order to put the labour of each machine in proportion
to the needs of consumption-that is, to restore the balance of values continually destroyed-it
were not necessary to continually create new machines, open other markets,
and consequently multiply services and displace other arms. So that on the one
hand industry and wealth, on the other population and misery, advance, so to speak,
in procession, one always dragging the other after it.
The machine, or the workshop, after having degraded the worker by giving him
a master, completes his degeneracy by reducing him from the rank of artisan to that
of common labourer ...
Ifnot misery, then degradation: such is the last alternative which machinery offers
to the workman. For it is with a machine as with a piece of artillery: the captain
excepted, those whom it occupies are servants, slaves ...
With machinery and the workshop, divine right-that is, the principle of authority-makes
its entrance into political economy. Capital, Mastership, Privilege,
Monopoly, Loaning, Credit, Property, etc.-such are, in economic language, the various
names of! know not what, but which is otherwise called Power, Authority, Sovereignty,
Written Law, Revelation, Religion, God in short, cause and principle of all our