What Shall We Do?

by graf Leo Tolstoy

The peasant gives money as a security against persons unknown but numerous, who would undertake to work out so much linen for this money. Those who will undertake to work the linen will do it because they did not succeed in feeding the sheep, and for these they must pay in money; and the peasant who will get the money for the sheep will take it, only because he must pay for the corn, which was a failure that year. The same goes on in the State and all over the world.

A man sells the produce of his past, present or future labour, sometimes his food-stuff, not mostly because money is a convenient exchange for him,—he would exchange without money,—but because he is required by means of violence to give money, as a security on his work.

When Pharaoh has demanded the labour of his slaves, then the slaves have given him all their labour, but they could give only the past and present labour, and could not give that of the future. But with the spread of money tokens and their result of “credit” it becomes possible to give also one's future work for money.

Money, with the existence of violence in society, offers the means for a new form of impersonal slavery, which replaces the personal one. A slave-owner claims a right to the work of Peter, Iván, Sidor. But wherever money is required from everybody, the owner of money acquires a claim on the labour of all those unknown people who are in need of money. Money removes the painful side of slavery, by which the owner knows about his right on Iván, at the same time it removes all those human relations between the owner and the slave, which softened down the burden of personal slavery.

I will not dwell on the theory that perhaps such a state is necessary for the development of mankind, for its progress and so forth—I will not dispute it. I only strive to make clear to myself the conception of money and to discover the general misconception I have made in accepting money, as a representative of labour. I became convinced by experience that money is not a representative of labour, but in the great majority of cases is a representative of violence, or of specially complex artifices founded on violence.

Money in our time has already altogether lost the desirable significance of being the representative of labour; such significance it may have in exceptional cases, but as a rule it has become the right or the possibility of using the labour of others.

This spreading of money, of credit and different conventional signs, more and more confirm this meaning of money. Money is the possibility or the right to use the labours of others.

Money is a new form of slavery differing from the old form of slavery only by its impersonality, by the freedom it gives from all human relations to the slave.

Money is money, a value always equal to itself, and which is always considered quite correct and lawful, and the use of which is not considered immoral, as slavery was.

In my young days a game of lotto was introduced in the clubs. All eagerly played the game and, as was said, many lost their fortunes, ruined their families, lost money entrusted to them, and government funds, and finally shot themselves, so that the game was forbidden and is still forbidden.