2.

Before exposing how we see expropriation happening, we must respond to one objection, which is theoretically feeble but is widespread. Political economy -- that pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie -- does not cease to give praise in every way to the benefits of individual property. "Look" -- it says -- "at the prodigies the peasant accomplishes once he becomes the owner of the land he cultivates; see how he digs and harrows his lot, what crops he gains from his unpromising land! See what industry is able to realize once it is liberated from impediments, controls and guild restrictions. All these prodigies are due to individual property!"

It is true that having painted this picture, the economists do not conclude, "The land to him who cultivates it." On the contrary, they hasten to deduce from the situation, "The land to the lord who will get it cultivated by wage earners!" All the same it appears that a number of good people are taken in by such reasoning and repeat it without reflecting on it. As for us, "Utopians" precisely because we are "Utopians," we set out to look more deeply, to analyze, and here is what we find.

In relation to the land, we also conclude that its cultivation is done much better when the peasant becomes the owner of the field he cultivates. But to whom do our friends the economists compare the small landed proprietor? Is it, for example to one of those communities of Doukhobors (Fighters for the Spirit) who, reaching the shores of the Amur, put their cattle and the work of their young men into a common pool, drove ploughs drawn by four or five pairs of oxen through the scrub, build their houses together, and from the first year onwards found themselves rich and prosperous while the individual and isolated emigrant who tried to clear some marshy hollow had to beg from the State a few pounds of flour? It is to one of those American communities of which Nordhof tells us that, having given everyone in the commune food, clothing and shelter, would allocate a sum of a hundred dollars to each member to allow him to buy a musical instrument, a work of art, or some knickknack not to be found in the communal stores?

No! To research, to gather oneself the contradictory facts so as to elucidate them and so support or reject one's hypothesis -- that is food for a Darwin; official science prefers to ignore them. It is content with comparing the peasant proprietor with the serf, the sharecropper, the tenant!

But the serf, when he worked the land of his lord, knew in advance that the lord would take from him everything he produced, except for a meagre ration of buckwheat and rye -- just enough to hold flesh and bone together; he knew he could exhaust himself at his work and nevertheless, come springtime, he would be forced to mix grass into his flour, as the Russian peasants still do and as the French peasants did up to 1789; he knew that if he had the misfortune to enrich himself a little he would become the target of persecution by his acquisitive lord. Therefore he preferred to work as little as he could and as badly as he could. And people wonder that the grandsons of that same peasant farm his land infinitely better since they know they can store the crop for their own benefit!

The sharecropper already shows an advance on the serf. He knows that half of the crop will be taken from him by the owners of the land, but he is sure that the other half, at least, will remain his. And despite this condition -- revolting in our eyes but very just in those of the economists -- he succeeded in bettering the land he cultivated so far as that could be done with the power of his own hands.

The tenant farmer, provided his lease is assured for a certain number of years and its conditions are not too burdensome and allow him to put something aside to better his farm -- or if he has a little working capital -- will do even more in the way of improvement. Finally, the peasant proprietor, if he is not crippled by debts through purchasing his bit of land, and if he can build up a reserve, will cultivate even better than the serf, the sharecropper and the tenant because he knows that, apart from taxes and the lion's share taken by his creditors, whatever he draws from the land by his hard labour will belong to him.

But what can one conclude from these facts? Nothing except that nobody likes to work for another and that the land will never be properly cultivated so long as the cultivator knows that in one way or another the best part of his crop will be taken by some idler -- landlord, bourgeois or creditor -- or by the taxes of the State. As for finding in these facts the least basis of a comparison between individual property and collective possession -- to do that one must be much inclined to draw conclusions where the facts do not support them.

Yet there is something also to be deduced from these facts. The work of the sharecropper and the tenant farmer, of whom we have spoken, and above all that of the small proprietor is more intensive than that of the serf or slave. Yet agriculture does not prosper, either under the system of sharecropping, or that of tenancy, or even that of small proprietorship. Half a century ago one could reasonably believe that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found in the small landholding, for at that epoch the peasant proprietor was indeed beginning to enjoy a certain prosperity, all the more striking since it succeeded to the poverty of the previous century. But that golden age of the small landowners passed away quickly. Today the peasant who owns a small plot hardly makes ends meet. He falls into debt, he becomes the prey of the cattle merchant, the land shark, the usurers; promissory-notes and mortgages ruin whole villages, even more than the frightful taxes imposed by the State and the municipality. The small proprietor flounders in difficulties, and if the peasant still retains the title of ownership, he is virtually the tenant of the bankers and moneylenders. He believes he will one day be rid of his debts, but they do nothing but grow. Against the few hundred who prosper, one must count the millions who will never escape from the bonds of usury except through a revolution.

How does this well-recognized situation, documented by volumes of statistics, come into being and overturn all the theories of the benefits of property?

The explanation is quite simple. It does not lie in American competition: the situation existed before that began. It is not even a matter of taxes; reduce them and the process will slow down, but it will not be halted. The explanation lies in another fact; having remained stationary for fifteen centuries, agriculture has begun to progress in Europe during the past fifty years in various directions (whose immediate effects are negative). The growing needs of the farmer are complemented by the facilities for borrowing offered him by the bank, the factory, the brokers, the petty gentry of the towns, to entangle him in their coils; to this must be added the high cost of land, so much monopolised by the rich, whether for their enjoyment or for the needs of industry or trade.

Let us analyze the first of these factors, which in our view is the more widespread. To keep ahead of the progress of agriculture, and to sell at the same price as those who cultivate the land by steam-driven machines and increase their crops with chemical fertilisers, the peasant today must have a certain capital to allow for improvements in his methods. Without reserve funds no agriculture is possible. The house becomes dilapidated, the horse grows old, the cow ceases to give milk, the plough wears out, the wagon breaks down: they have to be replaced or repaired. But beyond that, it is necessary to increase the livestock, to get improved kinds of implements, and to enrich the soil. For that it is necessary all at once to spend several thousand-franc notes, and it is thousand-franc notes that the peasant can never find. What then is he to do? He practices in vain the "system of a single heir," which has depopulated (rural) France, but this does not save him. He ends up sending his children to the town to augment the urban proletariat; he himself is mortgaged and driven into debt so that he becomes a serf once again, a serf of the banker as he formerly was of the lord.

This is small property as it is today. Those who still sing its praises are half a century behind the times; they reason from facts observed fifty years ago; they ignore present-day realities.

This simple fact which can be summed up in a new word: "no agriculture without reserve funds," contains a whole education on which the "nationalisers of the land" would do well to reflect.

If tomorrow the partisans of Henry George Henry George (1839-97) is best known as the founder of the single tax movement, whose ideas were very influential among American socialists and radicals in the late nineteenth century. Believing that one of the main causes of poverty was the fact that both land revenues and the unearned increase in land values profited only the few, he proposed a single tax on land from which all the expenses of government would be met. Kropotkin appears to have misread his proposals. Trans. ⁷³ were to dispossess all the English lords of all their properties; if they distributed the land in small holdings to all who wanted to cultivate it; if the cost of a lease were reduced as low as one wished, even to nothing; there would be a surplus or well-being over twenty or thirty years; but at the end of twenty or thirty years everything would start all over again.

The land demands more care. To obtain twenty-nine hectolitres -- of wheat as they do in Norfolk, and up to thirty-six or forty-two hectolitres and such a crop is no longer a fiction -- the land must be cleared of stones, drained, and the soil ploughed deeply; manure must be bought and roads kept up. Finally, land has to be cleared, to keep pace with the growing needs of a growing population.

All this calls for expenditure and for a quantity of labour the family alone cannot provide -- and that is why agriculture remains stationary. To obtain the crops that are now being gotten by intensive cultivation, it is sometimes necessary to spend on drainage, in a month or so, four or five thousand days of work (twenty thousand francs) on a single hectare. This is what the capitalist does, and this is what the small landowner can never do with the wretched hoard he manages to put aside through depriving himself of everything that would enter into the life of a truly human being. The earth demands that man contribute his vivifying work before pouring out its rain of golden grain -- and man fails to do so. Shut up all his life in industrial barracks, he makes marvellous textiles for the rajahs of India, for the slave-owners of Africa, for the wives of bankers; he weaves to clothe the Egyptians, the Tartars of Turkestan, when he is not walking around with folded arms outside the silent factories, and the land does not receive the cultivation that would provide for the needs and comfort of millions. Meat is still a luxury for twenty million French people.

Apart from those who already apply themselves day by day to work on the land, it still needs millions more helpful hands at certain periods, to improve the fields, to clear the meadows of stones, and to create with the help of nature's own powers an enriched soil that in due course will provide bountiful harvests. The land calls on the town to send its men, its machines, its vehicles, but these all remain in the town, the men unoccupied, the machines and vehicles employed to satisfy the vanity of the rich of the entire world.

Far from being a source of wealth to the country, individual property has become a hindrance to the development of agriculture. While certain innovators are opening up new ways of cultivating the earth, this process remains stationary over almost the whole vast mass of Europe, thanks to individual property.

Does it follow that the social revolution should overthrow all the boundaries and hedges of private properties, demolish gardens and orchards, and drive the steam tractor over everything, so as to introduce the doubtful benefits of large-scale cultivation as certain authoritarian reformers image?

This is precisely what, for our part, we want to avoid. We would take care not to touch the holding of the peasant who cultivates it himself with .his children and without wage labour. But we would expropriate all land that was not cultivated by the hands of those who at present possess the land. And when the social revolution is accomplished, when the city worker no longer toils for an employer, but to meet the needs of all, bands of workers -- joyous and gay -- will set out for the countryside to give the expropriated fields the kind of cultivation they lack and to transform the barren lands in a short time into fertile plains, spreading the wealth of the land through the country, and offering to all -- "take it, it is there!" -- the rich and varied products that the earth and the warmth and light of the sun are asking to give them. As to the small proprietor, do you think he will not ask to play his part in the great human family?

The support that the battalions of ragged unemployed Londoners, known as the Hop-Pickers, give today to the Kentish farmers, the help the town sometimes gives to the village at vintage time, will be offered in the future for cultivation, as it is today for the harvest. Agriculture, as the speculators of the Far West have admirably understood, is an eminently periodic industry which at certain times calls for great reinforcements of labour, to improve the soil, above all to bring in the crop, and if this need led to the common working of the soil, it would become the bond of union between the village and the town; it could blend them into a single family.

Enterprises like the Mammoth Farms and similar undertakings in the United States, where culture is carried out nowadays on an immense scale by thousands of barefoot workers, hired for a few months and dismissed immediately the particular task or harvest is accomplished, could just as easily become the parks where industrial workers recover from their exhaustion.

The future does not belong to individual property, to the peasant penned in a fragment of land that barely sustains him. It belongs to communist cultivation. That alone -- yes, that alone -- can give back to the earth what we have a right to demand from it.

But it is perhaps in industry that we shall find the benefits of private property? There is no need to expand on the evils generated in industry by private property, which is another word for capital. All socialists are well aware of that and of the nature of these evils. The poverty of the worker, the insecurity of his future, even if hunger is not knocking at the door today; the endless crises and unemployment, the exploitation of women and children, the wasting away of the race; the unhealthy excesses of the idle rich and the reduction of the worker to the condition of a beast of burden, deprived of the means of sharing in the joys of knowledge, of art, of science; all that has been discussed so often and so well that it is pointless to repeat it here. The same applies to the wars to promote export and the domination of markets; the civil wars, and the colossal conflicts between nations with their monstrous budgets that result in the extermination of whole generations! Nor must we forget the moral depravity of the possessing class, and the false direction it gives to science, to the arts, to ethical principles. And finally there are the governments that justify themselves by the need to stem the rebellion of the oppressed; the law and its crimes, its executioners and judges; the subjection and servility that result from their presence and the depravity that it spreads through society. Such is the cost of personal property and the personal power it engenders.

But perhaps, despite all these faults, despite all these evils, private property still provides us with a few services that counterbalance its negative aspects? Perhaps, given the human stupidity of which our rulers tell us, it is still the only means by which society can work? Perhaps we owe to it the industrial and scientific progress of our century? This is what the so-called "savants" tell us, at least. But let us see on what they base their statements, and what are their arguments.

Their arguments? Here is the only one, the unique one, that they have advanced: "Look -- they say -- at the progress of industry over the past hundred years, since it was freed from the fetters of guild and government! Look at all those railways, those telegraphs, those machines each of which replaces the work of a hundred or two hundred persons, and which make everything from the swingbridge that weighs hundreds of tons to the finest of lace! All that is due to private enterprise, to the desire of men to enrich themselves!"

And indeed the progress accomplished in the production of wealth over the past hundred years has been gigantic, and it is for that very reason -- let us note in passing -- that a corresponding change in the sharing out of the products becomes necessary today. But is it entirely to the personal interest and the intelligent greed of the employers that we owe such progress? Have there not been other factors much more important which might have produced the same results and might have counterbalanced the harmful effects of the industrialists' appetites?

We all know what these factors are. It is enough to name them for their importance to become evident. First of all, there is the steam engine -- handy, easy to operate and always ready to work -- which has revolutionized industry. There is the creation of the chemical industries that have become so important that their development, according to the technologists, gives the true measure of the industrial growth of each nation. They are entirely the product of our century: can you remember what chemistry was in the past century? Finally there is the whole movement of ideas that has appeared since the end of the eighteenth century and, in disengaging man from the embrace of metaphysics, has allowed him to make physical and mechanical discoveries that have transformed industry. Who would dare to say, in the presence of these powerful factors, that the abolition of controls and guild restrictions was more important for industry then the great discoveries of our century? And, given these discoveries, who would dare to affirm at the same time that a method of collective production, whatever its form, would not have benefitted from them in the same way, or even more, than private industry?

As to the discoveries themselves, one must have neglected reading any of the biographies of inventors, and have known none of them personally, to persist in supposing that they were impelled by the thirst for gain! Most of them have died on straw pallets, and we know how capital and private property have actually retarded the putting into practice of great innovations and the improvements they bring about.

At the same time, to uphold on this ground the advantages of individual property it would still be necessary to prove that the latter is opposed to industrial progress. Without that proof, the assumption is pointless. But this thesis is clearly unsustainable, for the sole and good reason that we have never seen a communist collective that possessed the capital necessary to operate a great industry opposing the introduction into that industry of new inventions. On the contrary, no matter how imperfect are the associations, cooperatives etc., that we have recently seen emerging, no matter what their faults, their sin has never been that of being deaf to industrial progress.

We may find much to criticize in the various institutions of a collective character that have been attempted over the past century. But the notable fact is that the greatest reproach we can make to them is precisely that of not having been collective enough. Against the great joint stock associations that have pierced isthmuses and chains of mountains, we bring above all the reproach that they have constituted a new form of anonymous employership and have whitened with the bones of human beings each metre of their canals and tunnels; against the working class organizations we bring the reproach of constituting an aristocracy of the privileged, who ask for nothing better than to exploit their brothers. But neither one nor the other can be accused of showing a spirit of inertia, hostile to the improvement of industry. The only conclusion one can draw at present is that the less opportunity personal interest and the egoism of individuals have of taking the place of the collective spirit in these enterprises, the better their chance of success.

It follows from this quick and much too brief analysis that when people boast of the benefits of personal property, such statements reveal a truly desperate superficiality. Do not let us preoccupy ourselves too much with them. Let us seek rather to determine what form the appropriation of social wealth by all the people should assume; let us attempt to identify the dominant tendency of modern society, and standing on that foundation, try to discover what form expropriation can take at the time of the coming revolution.