of bourgeois democrats?
Certainly, even without straying outside the bourgeois system, many improvements are possible: and in fact between the proletariats of various countries there are very wide disparities in moral and material circumstances. We are indeed interested in people’s circumstances being improved to the greatest possible extent, starting today, both by the immediate impact of reduced suffering and because when one is better nourished, has greater freedom, and is better educated, one has a greater determination and more strength to fully emancipate oneself. But a change in the people’s circumstances is not dependent—and socialists should know this—on the freedoms inscribed in statutes or in the manner in which the State levies its taxes. The difference lies in the degree of consciousness to which the people have been raised, the measure of oppression they are prepared to endure, and the extent of the resistance they put up against the ruling classes’ extortions. Let me have a docile, disunited, frightened people and they will be ground into the worst poverty and slavishness, no matter what the laws may say. Let me have a people demanding a humane existence; and they will be treated humanely… and if—in order to do away with those afflictions that the people are no longer prepared to put up with—it takes liberal laws, those laws will be passed by the bourgeois themselves, lest the people get used to doing without laws.
The point, therefore, is to teach the people what their rights are, to organize them and school them in resistance; and that, rather than chasing after the mirage of laws, ought to be what any socialist party deserving of the name is about.
Moreover, the voting socialists do not vote in the hope of winning, neither in these nor in many elections to come. The object, they say, is to make a statement. In which case, why not state their program in its entirety?
True, to listen to the Piedmont regional committee, one would think that they believe they are on the brink of becoming ministers. In this election, these good folk proposed to campaign only for a withdrawal from Africa and on behalf of universal suffrage on the grounds that “it would be impossible in any case to push the whole program through in one parliament”!!! Imagine.
But let us scrutinize the demands of the “Milanese” socialists somewhat more closely.
Cutting military expenditure “because attempts to make savings are ineffective, unless applied to the military structure.”
This sounds like dearly departed Minister Sella. Among the many arguments against militarism, the socialists have now picked out the one about savings, which means absolutely nothing to the proletarians. If it were merely a matter of expenditure, militarism, given current social conditions, might be almost a blessing. Send some of the soldiery home, cut back on the staffing of the arms factories, naval dockyards, and military supply manufacturers and there will be many more unemployed people to compete for jobs and to force down wages.
Or do these socialists not understand that, under the capitalist system, the workers could not care less if their work is useful or useless: the essential point is that they have jobs.
Universal suffrage—The socialists know that, underlying the present society, there is the class struggle, and they want, or should want anyway, the proletarians to become conscious of the antagonism that exists between their interests and those of the bourgeoisie. What better way of highlighting that antagonism than being able to state that the laws, all of them directed against the people, are made by masters? Why give encouragement to the people’s illusion that they are the makers of the laws and that they can amend them?
Universal suffrage is the best means of deception for those who crave “harmony and concord between the social classes,” but it makes no sense that today it is being called for by socialists—albeit authoritarian, parliamentarist socialists.
Progressive taxation—So what has become of the celebrated theories of the iron law of wages and the repercussions of taxes, which were once upon a time among the marxist school’s mainstays?
Lo and behold, from the fatalism and oversimplification of old they have fallen into the most anodyne expediencies of bourgeois reformism. Is Giolitti by any chance a member of the party?
* * *
One final observation.
The parliamentary socialists are forever repeating that their deputies cannot turn traitor because they are subject to the party’s discipline and mere executors of the will of the party, but are all proletarian voters members of their party?
The “Party” lets in or expels whoever it wants, issues watchwords for every occasion, gives its endorsement or issues its condemnation… and we have nothing to say about that since everyone is free not to join the Party or to leave it as he sees fit.
But if there is the slightest glimmer of truth in representation, so-called, the deputies should obey their voters and not the Party.
Or is it a matter of offering a foretaste of the famed “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which would then prove to be the dictatorship of “Party” over people, and of a handful of men over “Party”?
Poor socialism!
134 Milan, being the seat of Filippo Turati’s Critica Sociale and of the “central organ of the Italian Socialist Party,” Lotta di Classe, was the party’s intellectual stronghold.
Regarding Arton
Translated from “A proposito di Arton,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 2 (March 21, 1897).
The Arton trial, currently under way in France, is more and more exposing the corruption in parliamentary circles.
There is the matter of the 2,200,000 francs placed at Arton’s disposal by the Panama Company for the purpose of buying the votes of deputies.135
It looks as if we are about to learn, for sure, the names of those who let themselves be bought and that we will then be able to properly judge many who, when the elections come around, talk about sacrificing themselves for the good of the people.
The matter has become run-of-the-mill by now and there is nothing in it likely to overawe the Italian public, which is used to the politico-banking feats of so many deplored, and which suspects there may be an equal or larger number of more powerful deplorable figures behind them.
It may be useful, though, to call attention back to this broader phenomenon common to parliaments in every age and in every country—lawmakers making their votes a saleable property—and show how this depends not so much on the dishonesty of this or that specific individual, but on the position in which the deputy finds himself by the very nature of his role.
Back in the days when the first Panama scandals broke, the Bonapartist deputy Lafauconnerie, accused of having bought, or accepted as a gift from the baron of Reinach, some Panama shares and having subsequently voted to suit the interests of the Company, answered the newspaper L’Éclair in pretty much these terms: “Yes sir, I am a businessman and I do business; I am a share-holder in the Panama Company and I vote in favor of the Company. So what? Doesn’t everybody do likewise? Doesn’t the landowner vote to protect farming, the industrialist in whatever way he thinks is best suited to the interests of his industry? Or is the expectation that, on becoming deputies, we cease to be men, cease to be property-owners, businessmen, professionals, and take on the task of ruining ourselves and those from our same class!”
That deputy, who may have been more candid or, if one prefers,
