Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/87

 further back than 1903, as a result of the Taff Vale decision, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants had to pay £26,000 to a railway company for having declared a strike.

Need we speak after that of France, where the right of constituting Labour Unions and peasant Syndicates was obtained only in 1884, after the Anarchist agitation which broke out at Lyons and among the miners in 1883; or of Switzerland, where strikers were shot at Airolo during the boring of the St. Gothard tunnel; to say nothing of Germany, Spain, Russia, and the United States, where State intervention in favour of capitalist misrule was still worse?

On the other side, we have only to remember how every State reduces the peasants and the industrial workers to a life of misery, by means of taxes, and through the monopolies it creates in favour of the landlords, the cotton lords, the railway magnates, the publicans, and the like. We have only to think how the communal possession of the land was destroyed in this country by Enclosure Acts, or how at this very moment it is destroyed in Russia, in order to supply "hands" to the landlords and the great factories.

And we need only to look round, to see how everywhere in Europe and America the States are constituting monopolies in favour of capitalists at home, and still more in conquered lands, such as Egypt, Tonkin, the Transvaal, and so on.

What, then, is the use of talking, with Marx about the "primitive accumulation"—as if this "push" given to capitalists were a thing of the past? In reality, new monopolies have been granted every year till now by the Parliaments of all nations to railway, tramway, gas, water, and maritime transport companies, schools, institutions, and so on. The State's "push" is, and has ever been, the first foundation of all great capitalist fortunes.

In short, nowhere has the system of "non-intervention of the State" ever existed. Everywhere the State has been, and still is the main pillar and the creator, direct and indirect, of Capitalism and its powers over the masses. Nowhere, since States have grown up, have the masses had the freedom of resisting the oppression by capitalists. The few rights they have now they have gained only by determination and endless sacrifice.

To speak therefore of "non-intervention of the State" may be all right for middle-class economists, who try to persuade the