societies of amateurs—learned societies, philanthropic societies, etc.
"Take all the great enterprises: the Suez Canal, e.g., Trans-Atlantic navigation, the telegraph that unites the two Americas. Take, in fine, this organisation of commerce, which provides that when you get up in the morning you are sure to find bread at the bakers' … meat at the butchers', and everything you want in the shops. Is this the work of the State? Certainly, to-day we pay middlemen abominably dearly. Well, all the more reason to suppress them, but not to think it necessary to confide to the Government the care of providing our goods and our clothing."[1]
Remarkable fact! we began by snapping our fingers at Marx, who only thought of suppressing surplus value, and had no idea of the organisation of production, and we end by demanding the suppression of the profits of the middleman, while, so far as production is concerned, we preach the most bourgeois laissez-faire, laissez passer. Marx might, not without reason, have said, he laughs best who laughs last!
We all know what the "free agreement" of the bourgeois entrepeneur is, and we can only admire the "absolute" naïvété of the man who sees in it the precursor of communism. It is exactly this Anarchic "arrangement" that must be got rid of in order that the producers may cease to be the slaves of their own products.[2]
As to the really free societies of savants, artists, philanthropists, &c., Kropotkine himself tells us what their example is worth. They are "made up of human beings freely seeking one another after having done their work as producers." Although this is not correct—since in these societies there is often not a single producer—this still farther proves that we can only be free after we have settled our account with production. The famous "ten-
