An additional legal norm in the next stage of evolution will, according to Kropotkin, be that by virtue of which "every one who co-operates in production to a certain extent has, for one thing, the right to live; for another, the right to live comfortably."[498]
4.—THE STATE
I. According to Kropotkin, in mankind's progress from a less happy existence to an existence as happy as possible the State will shortly disappear.
1. The State has become a hindrance to mankind's evolution toward a happiness as great as possible.
"What does this monstrous engine serve for, that we call 'State'? For preventing the exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist, of the peasant by the landlord? or for assuring us of work? for providing us food when the mother has nothing but water left for her child? No, a thousand times no."[499] But instead of this the State "meddles in all our affairs, pinions us from cradle to grave. It prescribes all our actions, it piles up mountains of laws and ordinances that bewilder the shrewdest lawyer. It creates an army of office-holders who sit like spiders in their webs and have never seen the world except through the dingy panes of their office-window. The immense and ever-increasing sums that the State collects from the people are never sufficient: it lives at the expense of future generations, and steers with all its might toward bankruptcy. 'State' is tantamount to 'war'; one State seeks to weaken and ruin another in order to force upon the latter its law, its policy, its commercial treaties, and to enrich itself at its expense; war is to-day the usual condition in Europe, there is a thirty years' supply of causes of war on hand. And civil war rages at the same time with foreign war; the State, which was originally to be a protection for all and especially for the weak, has to-day become a weapon of the rich against the exploited, of the propertied against the propertyless."[500]
In these respects there is no distinction to be made between the different forms of the State. "Toward the end of the last century the French people overthrew the monarchy, and the last absolute king expiated on the scaffold his own crimes and those of his predecessors."[501] "Later all the countries of the Continent went through the same evolution: they overthrew their absolute monarchies and flung themselves into the arms of parliamentarism."[502] "Now it is being perceived that parliamentarism, which was entered upon with such great hopes, has everywhere become a tool for intrigue and personal enrichment, for efforts hostile to the people and to evolution."[503] "Precisely like any despot, the body of representatives of the people—be it called Parliament, Convention, or anything else; be it appointed by the prefects of a Bonaparte or elected with all conceivable freedom by an insurgent city—will always try to enlarge its competence, to strengthen its power by all sorts of meddling, and to displace the activity of the individual and the group by the law."[504] "It was only a forty years' movement, which occasionally even set fire to grain-fields, that could bring the English Parliament to secure to the tenant the value of the improvements made by him. But if it is a question of protecting the capitalist's interest, threatened by a disturbance or even by agitation,—ah, then every representative of the people is on hand, then it acts with more recklessness and cowardice than any despot. The six-hundred-headed beast without a name has outdone Louis IX and Ivan IV."[505] "Parliamentarism is nauseating to any one who has seen it near at hand."[506]
"The dominion of men, which calls itself 'government,' is incompatible with a morality founded on solidarity."[507] This is best shown by "the so-called civil rights, whose value and importance the bourgeois press is daily praising to us in every key."[508] "Are they made for those who alone need them? Certainly not. Universal suffrage may under some circumstances afford to the bourgeoisie a certain protection against encroachments by the central authority, it may establish a balance between two authorities without its being necessary for the rivals to draw the knife on each other as formerly; but it is valueless when the object is to overthrow authority or even to set bounds to it. For the rulers it is an excellent means of deciding their disputes; but of what use is it to the ruled? Just so with the freedom of the press. To the mind of the bourgeoisie, what is the best thing that has been alleged in its favor? Its impotence. 'Look at England, Switzerland, the United States,' they say. 'There the press is free and yet the dominion of capital is more assured than in any other country.' Just so they think about the right of association. 'Why should we not grant full right of association?' says the bourgeoisie. 'It will not impair our privileges. What we have to fear is secret societies; public unions are the best means to cripple them.' 'The inviolability of the home? Yes, this we must proclaim aloud, this we must inscribe in the statute-books,' say the sly bourgeois, 'the police certainly must not be looking into our pots and kettles. If things go wrong some day, we will snap our fingers at a man's right to his own house, rummage everything, and, if necessary, arrest people in their beds.' 'The secrecy of letters? Yes, just proclaim its inviolability aloud everywhere, our little privacies certainly must not come to the light. If we scent a plot against our privileges, we shall not stand much on ceremony. And if anybody objects, we shall say what an English minister lately said among the applause of Parliament: "Yes, gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart and with the deepest reluctance that we are having letters opened, but the country (that is, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) is in danger!"' That is what political rights are. Freedom of the press and freedom of association, the inviolability of the home, and all the rest, are respected only so long as the people make no use of them against the privileged classes. But on the day when the people begin to use them for the undermining of privileges all these 'rights' are thrown overboard."[509]
2. The stage of evolution to which the State belongs will soon be left behind by man. The State is doomed.[510]
It is "of a relatively modern origin."[511] "The State is a historic formation which, in the life of all nations, has at a certain time gradually taken the place of free associations. Church, law, military power, and wealth acquired by plunder, have for centuries made common cause, have in slow labor piled stone on stone, encroachment on encroachment, and thus created the monstrous institution which has finally fixed itself in every corner of social life—nay, in the brains and hearts of men—and which we call the State."[512]
It has now begun to decompose. "The peoples—especially those of the Latin races—are bent on destroying its authority, which merely hampers their free development; they want the independence of provinces, communes, and groups of laborers; they want not to submit to any dominion, but to league themselves together freely."[513] "The dissolution of the States is advancing at frightful speed. They have become decrepit graybeards, with wrinkled skins and tottering feet, gnawed by internal diseases and without understanding for the new thoughts; they are squandering the little strength that they still had left, living at the expense of their numbered years, and hastening their end by falling foul of each other like old women."[514] The moment of the State's disappearance is therefore close at hand.[515] Kropotkin says now that it will come in a few years,[516] now that it will come at the end of the nineteenth century.[517]
