Against Hunger

WHILE WE WAIT FOR WAR, HUNGER HAS ARRIVED.

Hunger comes, insidiously, in no great hurry, settling in among the people like an old friend. It seems impossible that in our time it is able to extend its ravages over the entire population. We were used to seeing it kill a few hundred ragged indigents every winter. This winter hunger, ever bolder, will attack workers and farmers as much as wandering beggars. The price of food continues to rise, to such a point that people are angry.

Hundreds of exasperated women can be found in the markets standing in front of merchants strong in their right to steal, since they pay for a license from the state. Anger blinds the slaves driven to desperation, an anger born in women who are usually opposed to any agitation. And we’ve seen them press on, protesting, employing force to impose reductions in prices on merchants and, if need be, preventing markets from operating. There were violent brawls. Policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, three varieties of murder tools, were there to defend the order of theft.

The traditional response: “You demand bread? To serve you all we have is the steel of bayonets and lead.”

A peremptory response that doesn’t suffice. It is sometimes possible to stem subversive propaganda with arrests and saber and rifle blows; it is always impossible to tame hunger.

And so the protest movement against the rise in the cost of food will grow. We will see more bloody demonstrations. Finally, we will see the furious revolt of the poor inevitably smash up against the might of the masters. But what will come out of this? And, in these days of struggle, what will the men who are not the dupes of the revolutionary illusion do, men who know what the insurrection of angered plebes is worth and yet want to conquer a bit more well-being every day: what will the anarchists do?

Yet again, the anarchists will not march with the herd.

For yet again, the working mass demonstrates to us its inability to revolt usefully.

Because the continuous rise in the price of food places them in an untenable situation the poor are rising up. But they haven’t thought through their acts, they haven’t taken the trouble to study the question even in a summary fashion. They haven’t thought anything through. Let’s go! Against the high cost of living! Against those who starve us! Kill the grocer!

This protest movement is instinctive and sentimental. Too painfully insulted, the people rise up ready to strike, not quite sure against whom, without foreseeing the consequences of what they’ll do.

And so guilty are they of this that they unfailingly commit the same error: they attack the effects and neglect to investigate the causes. The housewives haven’t sought to learn why the cost of food rose: that would have been an effort of the intelligence, an act of reason. Instead, they seized the seller. As if by beating up a butcher, by hanging a baker from a lamppost (which, I hasten to recognize, could be agreeable) it would be possible to shorten an economic crisis. Proceedings as absurd as those of judges who, to suppress crime, condemn poor devils.

Too bad, for this light-mindedness will be paid for. Good people will get months of prison time; after they’ll have put up a fight for a long time the price of food will decrease slightly. Politicians will proclaim victory and the naïve will be joyful. But six months later they’ll have to start all over again.

Apart from seeking the causes of evil, everything is childishness.

To the rare curious individuals who ask the reason for the economic crisis journalists skillfully answer: the rise in the cost of food is caused by the drought.

Yes, my friends, the sun killed fruits and vegetables, roasted harvests. This is good enough reason to sell dearly what’s left, n’est-ce pas? But allow us to ask: and the enormous provisions in the department stores? The reserve of cereals and staple goods accumulated in the depots for the needs of commerce? What has become of them? No one answers, since they are intact. There are enough foodstuffs in the hands of the kings and princes of the shops that this winter everyone could eat his fill, despite the summer’s drought.

Other scholarly economists—an economist is always a scholar—declare with sorrow that the cause of all evil is that “the land doesn’t produce enough to feed people.”

They lie. The proof is in the wealth that is accumulated in the hands of a few privileged individuals. The proof is in the daily increasing productiveness of the land. What? Our natural resources are so precarious that we are at the mercy of a drought? And yet we know that every year large-scale merchants toss their overstock into the ocean which, if it were put up for sale, would cause its price to drop. In Brazil last year tons of coffee were wasted in this way. In France it is common usage among fishermen to throw overabundant catches into the sea. And we have heard stories as well of stocks of fabric burned while the poor have nothing to wear.

The truth is that a rational organization of production and consumption would easily ensure the well-being of all. With the present resources we could want for nothing. But this is the dream of a problematic future. And it should be noted that at present everything is a cause for poverty. Did it rain? The rain destroyed the crop. It didn’t rain? The sun is guilty. Or else it’s unemployment or overproduction. O irony! When the workers have produced too much hunger lies in wait for them because there is no work for them until the existing supply is exhausted.

Now we can answer the “why,” certain we are not in error.

Overproduction starves the workers because they don’t produce for the profit of all or for their own profit but rather for a small number who own capital and the instruments of production.

Drought is murderous because this small number is only concerned with its own interests. Big and small merchants have an obvious interest in selling dear, and so they grasp at the least pretext to raise prices.

And it is the control of the mines, factories, workshops and construction sites—of everything man needs to live on his labor—that allows this small minority to organize at will famines, crises, and conflicts.

Let us name in passing a few of the procedures financiers usually use: the creation of trusts, vast unions of capitalists monopolizing the production of a country or an industry in order to be its absolute master (for example, the American steel and gas trusts); what is called in stock exchange slang the cornering of a market: the purchase of the totality of a harvest or production, having as a goal the abrupt rise in prices and sometimes an actual artificial famine. And finally, crooked manipulations of the market …

Naturally, the men of prey and money apply these proceedings on a more or less large scale everywhere. We frequently even see the thirst for gain of small-scale producers and merchants become a new factor of economic troubles. Witness the cultivators of Amiens whose land, crisscrossed with canals, had not in the least suffered from the drought and who, from simple greed, raised their prices.

Like war, like prostitution, like the horrors of colonization, economic crises—famines—are inevitable because of the monstrous defects of the social organization. They are nothing but evils derived from the primordial evils: the institutions of capital and authority. We have often demonstrated this and we’ve never been refuted. This is the enemy.

But these institutions destructive of life were created by men and are defended and supported by men who venerate them, respect them, think them useful, or submit to them with indifference. If we want to combat and destroy them, we who see their harmfulness, we know what to attack: we won’t waste our time breaking our lances against the institutions themselves; instead we will attack the mindset that finds them necessary. Our action will kill the respect, confidence, and belief in the usefulness of evil idols.

Examined from this point of view, how superficial and sterile the protest agitation of socialists and syndicalists appear.

What do they want to modify? It’s true that they promise to totally transform social life later—infinitely later. But what do they do in the meanwhile? Do they attack the mentality of those who organize the crises, those who suffer from them, and those who through cowardly indolence become accomplices? Of course not!

Socialists and syndicalists demand reforms, legal measures against fraud, the abrogation of certain custom duties. And finally the boldest of them, the hotheads of syndicalism, brag of imposing a lowering of prices.

Appealing to the law and modifying regulations is foolish, the law in itself being the cause of suffering and the surest of ramparts behind which the rich take shelter.

To speak of reforms means limiting oneself to wanting to improve the conditions of famine. “When a building is unhealthy, uncomfortable, falling apart you don’t repair it, you destroy it.” What is absurd in this case remains so in the social realm, and reforms can be accurately compared to small repairs whose goal is to allow a worm-eaten miasma-filled hut to remain standing.

Combating institutions by the brute force of workers’ revolts, without as a precondition having carried out the work of education which makes for deliberate, clear-eyed, intelligent rebels, means heading straight to certain defeat.

And yet, socialists and syndicalists do nothing but this, when they don’t do even less.

How many times have they idiotically subordinated the interests of man to who-knows-what abstract interests: class, corporation, the workers’ cause. Not only is their reformist or violent action always superficial, it is sometimes horribly petty. An example: those who poison the consumers are without a doubt as dangerous as those who starve them, right? And as such, revolutionaries should track them down with equal vigor, right? Well, listen …

A little more than a year ago the union of grocers’ agents mounted an energetic campaign against the bosses. Suddenly, in the middle of the fight, the unionized citizens remembered that they served poisoners and rascals and they put up posters denouncing a few falsifications and common thefts. They received satisfaction, claimed victory as usual, and considered that they could, after all, poison and mislead the public without any inconvenience for the corporation. I am forced to admit this because once their campaign was over they ceased their denunciations and in this way continued to be the accomplices of crooked merchants.

An action so incoherent, so poorly thought through, and—to use the mot juste—so unintelligent, can only arrive at ephemeral and superficial results. Its value for social transformation is more or less nil.

In the face of the coming hunger the anarchists think that there are better things to do. What might that be? Undermine the evil at its foundation: reform man.

This is a profoundly revolutionary work of criticism and education. Of criticism: take advantage of the propitious circumstances to criticize everything, to lay bare the wounds, denounce all the defects. Destroy in people’s minds religious and moral faith, obedience, honesty, passivity in the face of misfortune. Of education: make the defeated feel the need to know, to understand and to will. As soon as the slaves have the real desire to be men and no longer believe that slavery is necessary for the good of all they will know how to liberate themselves. This day is too far off for us to count on it. But from this day on, so that the resistance against oppression become every day stronger, so that it be easier for us to live every day, we hope to see the number of men who have left slavery behind increase. Make free men: there is no other way of transforming the social environment.

But this is not all. We must react now against a regime whose consequences we don’t want to suffer from. They want to impose hunger on us. Let honest people suffer it if it pleases them. We will know how to respond as anarchists to the attempts to enthralled us through hunger. We think that individual revolt is an excellent remedy for the oppressive force of social institutions. They want to sell us at a high price the things we need? In order to have us live like dogs they want to force us to accept the leash of the wage earner? They won’t always succeed: we will take what we need.

Indeed! In trying to bend men animated by the firm will to be free they will only succeed in creating more ferocious rebels.

Justification of theft and violence, people will say? Perhaps. All of modern life justifies them. Through trade, through commerce, through wage labor, through taxes, it teaches spoliation and theft. Through the example of judges, executioners, and soldiers it teaches us to kill. In order to defend ourselves the least we can do is put to use these teachings.

Individual re-appropriation—theft—is the logical opposite of the monopolizing of wealth, just as individual revolt is naturally opposed to the arbitrariness of the law and its servants.

To famine, as to all the crises engendered by our immense social waste, the anarchists see two remedies: education and individual revolt.

(l’anarchie, September 21, 1911)