Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Commune of Paris (1896).djvu/12

 12 The teaching of 1871 has benefitted the workers of every land, enabling them to break with their old prejudices and come to a clearer and simpler understanding as to what their Revolution is to be.

The next rising of Communes will not be merely a "Communal" movement. Those who still think that independent, local self-governing bodies must be first established and that these must try to make economic reforms within their own localities, are being carried along by the further development of the popular spirit, at least in France. The Communes of the next Revolution will proclaim and establish their independence by direct Socialist revolutionary action, abolishing private property. When the revolutionary situation ripens, which may happen any day, and governments are swept away by the people, when the middle-class camp which only exists by State protection, is thus thrown into disorder, the insurgent people will not wait until some new government decrees, in its marvellous wisdom, a few economic reforms. The people them -elves will abolish private property by a violent expropriation, taking possession, in the name of the whole community, of all the wealth accumulated by the labour of past generations.

They will not wait to expropriate the holders of social capital by a decree which necessarily would remain a dead letter if not accomplished in fact by the workers themselves. They will take possession thereof on the spot and establish their rights by utilising it without delay. They will organise themselves in the workshops to continue the work, but what they will produce will be what is wanted by the masses, not what gives the highest profit to employers. They will exchange their hovels for healthy dwellings in the houses of the rich; they will organise themselves to turn to immediate use the wealth stored up in the towns; they will take possession of it as if it had never been stolen from them by the middle-class.

And when the industrial baron who has been levying black-mail upon the worker is once evicted, production will continue, throwing off the trammels which impede it, putting an end to the speculations which kill and the confusion which disorganises it, transforming itself conformably to. the necessities of the moment under the impulsion given to it by free labour. "Men never worked in France as they did in 1793, after the soil was snatched from the hands of the nobles," says the historian Michelet. Never have men worked as they will on the day when labour becomes free and everything