Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/86



It is self-evident that if the Anarchists differ so much in their methods of investigation and in their fundamental principles, both from the academic men of science and from their Social Democratic colleagues, they must equally differ from them in their means of action.

Holding the opinions we do about Law and the State, we evidently cannot see a source of Progress, and still less an approach to the required social changes, in an ever-growing submission of the individual to the State.

We cannot either go on saying, as superficial critics of present society often say when they require the State management of industries, that modern Capitalism has its origin in an "anarchy of production" due to the "non-intervention of the State" and to the Liberal doctrine of "let things alone" (laissez faire, laissez passer). This would amount to saying that the State has practised this doctrine, while in reality it never has practised it. We know, on the contrary, that while all Governments have given the capitalists and monopolists full liberty to enrich themselves with the underpaid labour of working men reduced to misery, they have never, nowhere given the working men the liberty of opposing that exploitation. Never has any Government applied the "leave things alone" principle to the exploited masses. It reserved it for the exploiters only.

In France, even under the terrible "revolutionary" (i.e., Jacobinist) Convention, strikes were treated as a "coalition"—as "a conspiracy to form a State within the State"—and punished with death. So we need not speak after that of the anti-Labour legislation of the Napoleonic Empire, the monarchic Restoration, or even the present middle-class Republic.

In England, working men were hanged for striking, under the pretext of "intimidation," as late as in 1813; and in 1834 working men were transported to Australia for having dared to found, with Robert Owen, a "National Trades' Union." In the "sixties" strikers were sent to hard labour for picketing, under the pretext of thus defending "freedom of labour"; and not