Knowledge is Power – Power is Knowledge

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On Education

Knowledge is power! Education sets you free! This saying, which was emphasized earlier in the prologue (to the Dresden Festival), and which we hear so often in the mouths of our opponents, will be the focus of my lecture today. Yes, in the mouth of our opponents, and used against us, and in refutation of the statement propounded by us, the Social Democrats: that the chief activity of the worker should be directed toward changing our political and social conditions, and that the exclusive pursuit of educational goals is nothing but a time-consuming dalliance for the worker and benefits neither the individual nor the whole.

Knowledge is power! This is indeed a true saying. Knowledge is power, knowledge gives power, and because it gives power, the knowing and the powerful have always sought to preserve knowledge as the monopoly of their caste, station, and class, and to keep it from the unknowing, the powerless – who from time immemorial have constituted the great masses of the people. This is how it has always been; this is how it remains today. If we skim through the history of mankind from the hoariest times of antiquity right up to the present: it is everywhere the same spectacle. One caste, one estate, one class appropriates knowledge for itself and uses it as an instrument of power to oppress and exploit the other castes, estates, or classes. The priests of Egypt and India: what was their thousand-year rule based on? They were in sole possession of knowledge – of what was known at the time of natural forces, the course of the stars, the nature of man; and this knowledge was for them the magic wand, the scepter before which the amazed, admiring masses reverently bowed; it was the chain with which the priests, supported by the warrior caste – for warrior and priest have always walked hand-in-hand, brotherly, in the subjugation of the world – took hold of the state and society and made them subservient. We see the priests of Greece, Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, of modern and most recent times filled by the same desire: to retain knowledge for themselves as the primary wellspring of power and domination, and to shut it off from the mass of the people. Knowledge is for the rulers, ignorance for the ruled. In the slave states of North America there was a law that threatened death to anyone who taught a Black person to read and write. The slave owners knew very well that if the slaves became conscious of their slavery, if their eyes were opened, it would spell an end to the “eternal” and “sacred” institution of slavery. Here among us, in “educated” Europe, in the so-called cultural states in general, the dissemination of knowledge among the people is not punished with death, but it is no less effectively ensured that knowledge does not reach the people. Knowledge is under the lock and key of the rulers, inaccessible to the ruled, except in the sort of prepared and falsified form that suits the rulers. And once a ruled class, like the French bourgeoisie in the last century, succeeded in capturing knowledge, and with the help of knowledge political power, it regularly used its power merely to consolidate itself in power, to promote its own material interests, and to cast the “lower classes” into bondage and spiritual darkness. I am not exaggerating, I speak only of an incontrovertible truth, confirmed by history on every page, when I say:

There has never been a ruling caste, a ruling estate, a ruling class that has used its knowledge and its power to enlighten, educate, and nurture the ruled, and which has not, on the contrary, systematically cut them off from true education, the education that sets you free.

That is part of the very essence of domination. He who rules wants to make himself strong and the subjugated weak. And whoever wants universal education must therefore fight against all domination.

We Germans don’t just call ourselves “the nation of thinkers,” we also consider ourselves the most educated people in the world. Now, in his immortal work on civilization, Buckle says of the Germans: “there is no nation in Europe in which we find so wide an interval between the highest minds and the lowest minds. The German philosophers possess a learning, and a reach of thought, which places them at the head of the civilized world. The German people are more superstitious, more prejudiced, and, notwithstanding the care which the government takes of their education, more really ignorant, and more unfit to guide themselves, than are the inhabitants either of France or of England. Their great authors address themselves, not to their country, but to each other. Their language is utterly incomprehensible to the lower classes.” In short, Buckle maintains that literature in Germany is entirely disconnected from the people; the gulf between those who know and those who know not is nowhere as vast as in Germany. In contrast to Germany, that brilliant English historian writes about the American Republic that “in no other [country] are there so few men of great learning, and so few men of great ignorance.”

I do not wish to go into Buckle’s verdict in detail here. It was not rendered carelessly – such a conscientious scholar would not be capable of doing so. There is no doubt that Germany has far more people, both in absolute and relative terms, who can read and write than England and France; but reading and writing in and of themselves are not education, they are mere tools for acquiring education. And based on my personal observations, I would not hesitate for a moment to say that the workers of England and France are on average far superior to German workers in their knowledge of their rights and obligations in the state and society, even though very few of them, but nearly all German workers, have learned to read and write in school. For them, the more developed political and economic life partly makes up for what was lacking in their youthful education; and life is the best school, which cannot be replaced by any theoretical instruction, no matter how excellent.

It likewise seems indisputable that the educational divide between the higher and lower classes of the population is wider in Germany than in England and France; and it is generally admitted that the language of our so-called national literature – not to mention the language of our scholars, which is notorious for its incomprehensibility – is not understandable to the masses of the nation. However, the same is more or less true of all cultural nations. A Frenchman said of the Russians: “Grattez le Russe, et le Tartare apparait!” – scratch a Russian and the Tartar appears. You can say much the same about our modern culture: If you scratch the culture of today, barbarism appears. Our culture – and the culture of a nation represents the sum of the education present within it – is only skin deep; a thin veneer, a shining varnish on the outside and underneath it crudeness, superstition, the war of all against all, the war of destruction, the strong devouring the weak, perhaps not literally, but no less genuinely.

[ . . . ]

The number of those who can passably read is indisputably far greater, and I admit that reading is a far more important educational tool than writing. He who can read and is inclined to educate himself will, if he has time and access to reading materials, gradually fill the gaps in his upbringing and acquire a genuine education. But are such reading materials available to our people? That question must be answered in the negative. Any bookseller can tell you that our classical literature, as Buckle has reproached us, does not exist for the people. Only in recent times, when very cheap editions have started being issued, have some of the works by of great authors begun to penetrate into the middle strata of the population. The books of our scholars are sealed with seven seals for the masses; the intellectual nourishment of the people is the daily press: newspapers and cheap entertainment weeklies. Unfortunately, this intellectual nourishment is the same as the bodily nourishment on which the people depend; like the latter, it is adulterated and unhealthful, and it is as harmful to the spirit as the latter is to the body. We do not have a single entertainment weekly that seeks to ennoble the mind of the reader. Pure monetary speculations, they pursue merely the goal of making money. And most money can be made if they swim with the current, flatter the fashionable prejudices, and appeal to the weaknesses, the base passions, and the coarser instincts. And so they have the clientele of the great multitudes, of the “educated” and uneducated rabble and – the protection of the grandees who have an interest in the great multitudes, the people, not attaining the education that “sets you free,” not attaining the knowledge that “is power.” The cheapest entertainment weeklies, which chiefly circulate among the people – I include here the so-called colportage or delivery novels – are almost entirely, I think one can say: without exception, in form they are miserable rubbish and in content they are opium for the mind and poison for morality. The best thing about this literature, because it appears more infrequently and is not so widely distributed, is that it is relatively harmless compared to the daily political press, which extends it influence everywhere, also into circles that are impenetrable to every other kind of reading. Everyone who can read, reads a newspaper – either at home, at the neighbor’s, or in the tavern. Alongside the school and the barracks, the press is our third great educational institution. And it is worthy of its colleagues. Of one heart and mind with them, it complements their work. What is learned in the barracks and the school, it carries forth into the land, into every house, every cabin – except that it does not always speak in the tone of the schoolmaster and corporal, but often puts on a free-thinking mantle, and likes to speak of the people’s welfare, enlightenment, democratic achievements, and other fashionable articles, because that “draws,” and the unappetizing wares sell more easily under such pretty labels.

[ . . . ]

Recently, an “Association for the Freedom of the School” was set up in Berlin, which has tasked itself with directing all efforts to improve the education of the people and with removing the education of the people from the deleterious influences of the state and the church. Nothing could be more laudable. But, unfortunately, the gentlemen leading it are putting the cart before the horse. That is already apparent in the first paragraph of the statutes, which reads: “In cultured states, normal social conditions can only emerge out of a normal school system.” A wondrous confusion of cause and effect! “Normal social conditions” require a “normal school system,” but they do not emerge from it, because a normal school system is possible only under normal social conditions, and because the abnormal social conditions which now prevail do not allow a normal school system to arise. Normal social conditions do not emerge from a normal school system, rather, a normal school system can only emerge out of normal social conditions. No doubt, if the entire people today were educated, we would also quickly arrive at sensible social and political conditions, which means presupposing something that is impossible.

All we ask of the men who are placing the primary emphasis on the education of the people is practical and logical consistency. We, too, consider the education of the people the highest good. But we love it not only platonically. It must become reality. Education of the people – that is primary schools in which all children are equally given the best possible instruction; education of the people, that is education free of charge; education of the people, that is educational institutions that continue the work of the primary school and prepare the young man and the young woman for a life’s vocation; education of the people, that is state and societal institutions that promote genuine humanity – in a word: education of the people, if that phrase is not to be a hollow one, a lie, means and demands the fundamental transformation of today’s political and social conditions; and anyone who is serious about the education of the people has a moral obligation to work with us toward that transformation.

Social Democracy is the party of education in the most eminent sense of the word.

Today’s state and today’s society, which we are fighting against, are the enemies of education; as long as they exist, they will prevent knowledge from becoming a common good. Anyone who wants knowledge to be bestowed on all must therefore work toward the transformation of the state and society. You, gentlemen, the members of the Association for Workers’ Education, understand this. You understand that the temple of science is closed to the people, that the doors of education are blocked by a Great Wall of China. The key to the temple must be seized, the wall must be torn down. The instrument is political and social agitation. To be sure, the enemies who stand in our way are powerful. But they themselves are unwittingly providing us with the weapons of victory. The conditions are becoming ever more unnatural, are clashing ever more glaringly with the interests of the general community, the people, humanity. How innumerable are not those whose eyes were opened by the horror of the last war! The more the state develops into a class state, the greater the pressure it must exert on the dominated, exploited classes, the deeper and more universal the dissatisfaction it must produce. And likewise with modern society: the more that capitalism, large-scale production is taken to extremes, the greater the gulf between the poor and the rich, the more imperative it becomes for the masses to confront the necessity to shake off the yoke of wage slavery.

No doubt, efforts are made to cut the people off from the possibility of education. But necessity is the best teacher. Every new machine preaches the gospel of social emancipation; every new factory is a greenhouse of Social Democracy; every ruined artisan and small master swells the ranks of the proletarian army. And so, with light hearts and confident courage, let’s get to work! “The future belongs to us!” The enemies cannot take a step without strengthening our army with deserters from their ranks.

We are not struggling for domination, not for privileges. We want to abolish domination as such. Where there is domination there is servitude, and where there is servitude, there is exploitation. We fight against domination in all forms, political and social domination. We seek the free state under popular rule, which, built on the ruins of the current class rule, elevates the harmony of interests into the truth – a free society in a free state, the state that grants everyone equally the means for the harmonious development of his abilities, and which, in fulfillment of the Aristotelian ideal, “strives for the highest good”: the true cultural state. And we seek a free society, which replaces the immoral, soul- and body-crushing wage labor with brotherly, cooperative work, and which plugs up the source of all evils of state and the society: the exploitation of man by man.

It is only in a free state and a free society that today’s disharmony will dissolve into harmony. Only in a free state with a free society can we attain the universal harmony that is the highest goal of culture: the harmony of interests, the harmony of man with man, the harmony of man with himself – harmony externally: harmony of nations, harmony within the state and society; harmony internally: harmony within the individual by developing all capabilities and by eliminating the contradiction between ideal and reality, between theory and practice, between morality and action.

This goal can be achieved only through the path of political agitation. The Leipzig (Dresden) Association of Workers’ Education has realized this, thereby demonstrating that it is conscious of the task of an educational association. Do not let anything divert you from your path. Draw fresh strength from every obstacle. The path leads to victory. . . There is education, knowledge for all. The state and society stand between us and the goal. We must go beyond the state and society. If we forego the battle, the political battle, we forego education, knowledge. “Through education to freedom,” that is the wrong slogan, the slogan of the false friends. We respond: Through freedom to education! The people can achieve education only in a free state under popular rule. Only if the people gain political education will the gates of knowledge open up for it. Without power for the people no knowledge! Knowledge is power! – Power is knowledge!

The Bourgeoisie and its Civilization

(An extract from Liebknecht’s speech, “Knowledge is Power — Power is Knowledge”, delivered before the Dresden Educational Society, February 5, 1872.)

Knowledge is power! This is indeed a true saying; knowledge is power; knowledge gives power, and since knowledge is power, the knowing and the mighty have ever sought to retain knowledge as their monopoly of caste, of station, of class, and to withhold knowledge from those who know not, from the powerless — who always have constituted the great mass of the population. Thus it has ever been; thus it remains to-day.

There never has existed a ruling class, a ruling caste, a ruling station, that has used its knowledge and its power for the enlightenment, the education, the training of those under it, and which has not — on the contrary — systematically cut them off from true education, from the education which makes men free.

A Frenchman once said, concerning the Russians: Grattez le russe et vous trouverez le Tatar! Similarly one might say of our modern civilization: if you scratch our modern civilization, you find the barbarism under it. All civilization and the civilization of a nation represents the sum of culture present in it — is merely a thin veneer, a shining varnish on the outside, under which you will find crudity, superstition, the war of all against all, the war of destruction, in which the strong devours the weak, not literally perhaps, but none the less genuinely.

You will recall the first international industrial exposition, which took place in London in 1851. A calm had followed upon the storms of the “mad years” — 1848 and 1849. The Parisian proletariat was mourning over the tombs of the June heroes. The dreams of liberty of the German people had been ended; the fighters for liberty had been court-martialed, imprisoned, and exiled. The bourgeoisie, rejoicing in the silence of the cemetery, had absorbed miraculous powers from this political decomposition and had blossomed to extraordinary prosperity. In fact, “boundless prosperity” prevailed, and the bourgeoisie of all lands and climes made pilgrimages to London to visit the Crystal Palace, the temple of the new god, who would scatter from his inexhaustible horn of plenty riches and peace over the human race, now intoxicated with joyous prospects. The “murderous swords” had been transformed into “machines of blessing”, the era of war had terminated forever; henceforth the nations would compete only in the arena of industry and of material progress, inspired with noble emulation, to test their powers in peaceful competition.

The entire press of Europe and America gave rich expression in those days to all these illusions. But how soon had the “fair dream vanished”! The enthusiastic shouts had not ceased to echo, with which the bourgeoisie had hailed the presumable inception of the millennial kingdom, when the musket shots of December 2 (1851) were again rattling in Paris, and thousands of unarmed men, women and children were shot down by drunken soldiers like wild beasts at the command of a perjured scoundrel; and this saber-rattling, blood-dripping monster became the “deliverer of society” and had himself crowned “Emperor of the French”. And the civilized world? The princes warmly embraced their “dear brother”. The nobility was jubilant over this new victory over the “canaille”. And the bourgeoisie, which only yesterday had dithyrambically celebrated the final triumph of the “arts of peace”, the elimination of the “swords of murder”, which had been magnified in prose and verse, now prostrated itself in worship before the bloody sword that had accomplished the salvation of society!

Three years later, the Crimean War broke out and hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in it, without advancing the welfare of humanity by a single inch; eight years later came the Italian War, accompanied by similar slaughter and by the “same outcome” for humanity. And since then, if we consider only Europe and not the other continents, there have been three more wars in a single decade — each one transcending the preceding one in magnitude, in the amount of blood shed and in “glory”, and in all three of these wars it was the “nation of thinkers” that led, that played the first part: the War of Prussia and Austria against Denmark (1864); the war of Prussia against Austria and the rest of Germany (1866); the war of Prussia and Germany against France (1870)! These wars destroyed the lives and the well-being and happiness of millions of men, and their result for mankind, weighed in the balance of reason, is zero!

Particularly the last of these wars, blasphemously entitled the “Holy War”, is profoundly and painfully interesting to the historian of civilization, to him who loves his fellowman. Two nations, each imagining itself as situated “at the head of civilization”, as a matter of fact the two most distinguished representatives of civilization on the European continent, fly at each other’s throats like wild beasts, rend each other’s flesh, and evince a truly bestial delight in murder, without the slightest reasonable cause, merely at the wish and at the command of a few individuals who take good care of their own skins meanwhile. And this is not true only of those who are directly concerned in the slaughter; no, even those who remain at home, seated comfortably behind their stoves or the tables in the beer-shop, all the representatives of the intelligentsia, the lights of science, the most distinguished “thinkers” of this “nation of thinkers”, journalists, professors and other intellectuals — instead of protesting against the war as an act of high treason against civilization and humanity, instead of admonishing their misguided peoples to return to peace, they poured oil into the fire, they fanned the flames with mad fanaticism, the flames that were consuming the most precious achievements of civilization, and made the timely discovery that the most sublime cultural deed, the noblest activity of human virtue, was war!

A German professor — what baseness is so low that a German professor could not be found so low to descend to it — actually proved this contention “scientifically” in an (of course) very learned dissertation, written for the purpose, which culminated in the statement: “The greater the quantity of labor devoted by a state to its mobilization, the greater the sum of the virtues produced thereby.” All of which is merely a somewhat awkward circumscription of the principle: Mass murder is the pinnacle of virtue. The more massive this mass murder becomes, the greater the virtue; the better the mass murder is prepared, the more virtuous is the state. And I would have you mark this: this statement was not an isolated product of a diseased brain — God forbid — it was only the expression of the generally prevalent mood, only a crass formulation of the bloodthirsty insanity which was preached day by day by our entire press — with a few hardly noticeable exceptions — to the public.

The press, this “focus of the intellectual life of a nation” — this “watch tower of right and truth”, as the saying goes in the mouths of good-natured enthusiasts, had become a torch destined to reduce civilization to ashes and to discredit every man who would offer any opposition to these shameful orgies of nationalistic insanity.

Our civilization is only skin deep: it is merely barbarism whitewashed with a few humanitarian aspirations; war had stripped it of its dazzling cosmetic of civilization; its bestiality now disported itself without a fig-leaf; and no one can be surprised but the one who has been subject to false conceptions of the nature of our present-day civilization.

I have spoken about the bulky military budgets. A not less eloquent language is spoken — on the question of the nature of our civilization — by the meager educational budgets.

The bulky military budgets and the meager educational budgets are unmistakable thermometers for our civilization, and the destructive criticism which they present to its hypocritical face cannot be mitigated by any sophistic attempts to embellish it.

Still drawing their sustenance from legend and tradition, frivolous and unprincipled flatterers of nation and monarchs may trumpet out to all the world: “We are the most cultured nation in the world. We have the best educational system.” Hypocritical fallacies, all of them!

The thing they fail to keep in mind is that the ability to read and write is by no means equivalent to education.

And even the reading and writing taught in German schools are not without their own peculiarities. All that glitters is not gold, and many of the things traditionally supposed to glitter do not even glitter. In the levies of recruits, according to official statistics, there are found a considerable number of young persons born and “bred” in Germany who cannot read or write at all.

“Like school, like state” — this is an ideological proverb, “like state, like school” — this would be the genuine translation and transposition in a realpolitical sense. The school is the mightiest instrument for liberation, and the school is the mightiest instrument for enslavement, depending on the nature and the purpose of the state. In the free state it is a means for liberation; in the unfree state the school is a means for enslavement. “Education makes free” — to expect the unfree state to educate its people would be equivalent to expecting it to commit suicide. The modern class state demands lack of freedom in its very essence. The school as it is bears the same relation to the school as it should be as the state as it is bears to the state as it should be. The state as it is, i.e., the class state, debases the school to be an instrument of class rule.

By the side of the school and the barracks, the press is our third great educational institution. And it is a worthy counterpart to the two I have already mentioned.

Together with school and barracks, the press completes the great holy trinity of popular stupefaction. And this holy alliance against the emancipation of humanity is encouraged by every means which the Church can contribute to its success, as must necessarily be expected by reason of the nature of the Church. While school and Church and barracks are exclusively educational institutions in the hands of the state, the press may be considered as an instrument common to the state and to society.

“Society” finds this joint operation with the “state” extremely profitable to it. The newspaper business is one of the most lucrative sources of profit. The demand for newspapers is increasing from day to day, and, since the owners of privately printed newspapers are often “aided” in such an amiable and generous manner by the state, often receiving money into the bargain — also a kind of “state aid”!— they enjoy a threefold advantage: they are supplied with “good wares”, which contribute to the solidification and “perpetuation” of the class domination; they economize in their operating costs, and thus correspondingly increase their profits; and they assure themselves of the protection of the state.

The fetishism of brute force, the cry of “Crucify him” uttered against every man who tears the mask from this rotten system of society, the distortion of all values, transforming infamy into virtue, gilding the mire, magnifying to the skies the cunning of the horse-dealer and the crudity of the stableman, which are lauded as diplomatic genius — cherishing the national prejudices, inflaming national hatreds — when did the press ever — aside from short intervals of nobler activities — pursue any other mission? A willing servant of the class state and the bourgeois system of society, it has but one lodestar: it glorifies the interests of the class state and of bourgeois society, in short, everything that is favorable to them, that supports them, though it be the basest drivel; everything that contradicts the class state and the bourgeois system of society, it bespews with venom, though it be the most precious treasure of genuine human civilization. Characterlessness is worshiped; character is dragged in the mire; injustice is lauded as a divinely ordained world order; social evils are embellished with beauty patches; in short, vulgarity, dissipation, corruption, corruption in the lowest sense: everything for money; money for everything. No political or industrial swindle is too shameful, too base, too dirty, not to find eager and enthusiastic support in this press — for money. The sucker-baiting activities of the Stock Exchange and promotion swindlers take in their victims on a large scale, with the aid of the press; the promotion swindler sets the traps, lays the net, and the press drives in the victims, not failing to fill its own pockets in the process.

The daily press is the faithful mirror of the state and of society, and the impartial and inexorable historian of the future will find sufficient material in the issues of our newspapers for a single year to enable him to pronounce a final condemnation of our present-day system of state and society.

Workers who think, who feel themselves to be human beings, who have a conception of their rights and duties — for them the present-day employer has no use; they are a “pestilence” in the factory or workshop; they “poison” their surroundings; but the worker must have healthy limbs, strong bones, able “hands”. A vigorous, normal body, if possible without a brain — this would be the genuine model worker of the bourgeois employer. In other words, bodily defects are useful neither to the state nor to the purposes of society; mental defects are not so bad; and when we learn, therefore, that the great majority of the population suffers from some mental defect or other, we are necessarily forced to infer that the mental defectiveness must be even far more general than that of the body.

The science of statistics, which like all the other sciences has been pressed into the service of the state and society, does not like to concern itself with this shady side of our civilization; yet even statistics have been obliged to record the fact that infant mortality in the lower classes is far more extensive, and that the average duration of life in those classes is far lower than in the upper classes. Statistics have, furthermore, been obliged to record the fact that labor, on which the state and society are based, provides those who do not labor, i.e., the upper classes, with wealth and a prolongation of life, while it provides the workers themselves, i.e., the lower classes, with poverty, disease, decrepitude and premature death.

Our hearts recoil involuntarily when we read of the human hecatombs sacrificed by our “civilization” from time to time on the altar of the bloody god of war; and yet — what are these hecatombs of war, compared with the myriads slaughtered, murdered, year in year out, day by day, by our society, on the altar of industrialism, without interruption? Yes — I say murdered; any one who is obliged by his fellow humans, merely because they have the power over him, to engage in a mode of life which must necessarily lead him — according to mathematical certainty, and according to the prediction of any person capable of thought — to a premature death, such a man has been murdered; and if the blame does not rest with a specific individual, it rests at least with the conditions and institutions that have caused this man’s death, and in a certain unmistakable sense, all those individuals are also responsible, as a totality, who in their private and class interests have created these conditions and institutions, and maintained them in force, although their ruinous and murderous effects are perfectly obvious.

Admirers of the present-day system speak of the “battlefields of industry on which there are no corpses”. What a delusion, or rather, what a fraud! No corpses! If we should gather, for the period of but a single year, and lay out in a row one next to the other, the corpses of the workers, of their wives, their children, in short, of all persons who have inhaled death in venomous workshops and factory rooms by reason of excessive work, long before the time allotted to them by nature, even before half this time has elapsed — and if we place in another row the corpses of all the soldiers who have died in all the “holy” and unholy wars of the last twenty years, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Danes, Englishmen, Americans — now all fraternally united in death — the former row, that of the workers who died in bed, died a “natural death”, according to the doctor’s certificate, will extend far further than the bloody row of the tattered and torn corpses, defaced by gaping wounds, that once were soldiers. And the terrible thing is that with very few exceptions these battle victims of industry can be proved to have been slain by a vicious, conscienceless operation of business, indifferent to the life and health of the worker, in other words homicide, even according to the legal definition of the word; yet it is a sanctified, practically unpunished homicide; for State, the vulture, will take every precaution not to pluck out the eyes of Society, the vulture.

So much for the “Kultur” of our present-day society!

Thanks to the division of labor and to the work of machines, labor is being deprived more and more of the element of soul.

Far be it from me to fulminate against the division of labor. The division of labor increases the productivity of labor, and is therefore an essential element in human progress. Yet our present-day society practices a division of labor at the expense of the laboring individual, and the enhanced productivity of labor redounds to the advantage not of the generality, least of all of the workers, but of the minority which exploits labor.

I wish not to be misunderstood; I am not an opponent of the machine. The machine-breakers, who were so active among the workers of England sat the outset of large-scale industry in that country, were entirely reactionary, and were acting in accordance with a false view of things, with failure as a result — to the great good of mankind, but not of the individual working man. It is precisely the curse of our present-day civilization, that every general progress is useful only to a privileged minority, and even lowers, on the other hand, both relatively and absolutely, the position of the disinherited masses, that every “blessing” of civilization results in the decline, the extermination of entire communities of workers; as an example, I shall merely mention the extermination of the hand weavers in the Erzgebirge, which is now going on; a heart-moving social tragedy that arouses no one’s tears, at least no one’s that could or should remedy it.

To eliminate this curse, to make the general will synonymous with the will of each individual, this is our goal. The machine will cease to oppress the working individual, will cease to debase him to the level of a purely mechanical performance — we can hardly call it an activity — as soon as it ceases to be the property of an individual, of a single class. From the moment in which the machine enters into the service of the generality, the master of the worker becomes his servant, it will free him instead of enslaving him; it will enrich him instead of impoverishing him. The Socialist Party, therefore, rightly demands the expropriation of machines, as well as of all instruments of labor — and rightly, not only from the point of view of humanity, but also — I might also say — for legal reasons, in so far as machines and instruments of labor are the product of the collective intelligence as a whole, and therefore should not be claimed by any individual as an absolute isolated property.

To be sure, we are told by the spokesmen of the golden calf: “If you eliminate the prospect of gain, you will destroy inventive talent, you will destroy initiative, you will destroy progress.” Nothing could be farther from the fact. Even now, it is not the prospect of gain that spurs men on. The performances of those who are egged on by the desire for gain are of very subordinate nature when compared with the achievements of science to which we owe our progress; and it will at all periods be a very simple matter to find suitable talents for such subordinate tasks. The worshipers of the golden calf are turning the truth upside down. For every single person who is inspired by the prevailing conditions of production and by his prospect of gain, to make a useful invention, in fact, to perform any useful mental work, there are thousands who might under reasonable social conditions have performed useful things, things valuable to human progress, and who have been prevented from doing so and destroyed mentally by the prevailing social conditions. And the one individual who now has a useful function would have performed not just as much but far more under a sensible, i.e., a just organization of society, encouraging all human capacities and satisfying all human demands. Our present-day society not only does not encourage the development of talents, but suppresses or cripples talents outright.

Present-day society, therefore, has no right to term itself a civilizing force and to call us a subversive force. This society is hostile to civilization, for it prevents its blossoming, and we, the champions of the new socialist society, are the defenders of civilization against the uncivilizing old society, which keeps knowledge from the people, which oppresses the people in the body and in the spirit, which sacrifices the common weal to anti-social class interests, which makes property the monopoly of an exploiting minority, degrades the worker into a thing, the family to a pious wish, as far as the proletariat is concerned, morality to hypocrisy, and education to a lie.

Property, family, morality, education! It is really an unparalleled piece of impudence for our bourgeoisie to take such words into its mouth at all. They are in favor of property — they mean the property they have robbed from the workers. They are in favor of the family — but they have destroyed the family of the worker. They are in favor of morality — but the morality they preach in theory is trodden under foot by them in practice, like all their fair theories. They even preach liberty, and cast the worker back into slavery; they preach civic virtues, and grovel in the dust before the victorious saber; they preach peace, and revel in the atrocities of war; they preach the “harmony of interests” and incite social warfare.

Never was this hypocrisy, this contradiction between theory and practice more crassly manifested than during the Commune at Paris last year. The program of the Paris Commune was local self-administration, the abolition of militarism, the separation of Church and School, free public instruction, the separation of Church and State, the abolition of the death penalty, all of them demands that the bourgeoisie had also espoused in theory. But no sooner did the bourgeoisie find that here an effort was really being made to put through its own theoretical demands in earnest, than they pounced upon the Commune movement in mad fury and hailed the victory of the Versailles hangmen with fanatical jubilation. There can be no amnesty for this shameful denial of their own creed, for this act of high treason against conscience and humanity.

And as for education — the bourgeoisie actually dares to speak of education, the bourgeoisie, which does not even content itself with sucking the marrow from the bones of the worker, its wage slave, but even robs him of his spirit, his soul, affords him and his children not even the necessary time for continuing their education, prevents him and his children from securing any kind of culture, degrades him beneath the beast, condemns him to an existence which it would consider unworthy of its horses and its dogs!

So much for the bourgeois lie of education.

Bourgeois morality and bourgeois practice are not more crassly divergent than are the education actually handed out by the bourgeoisie and the education which its fine phrases publish as its ideal.

Another point. Let no one talk to us about science and art in present-day society. “Art must seek its bread”, and instead of being the molder of the people it is the concubine of the great and the wealthy. Woe to the artist of to-day who, insisting on his higher calling, would dare try to be independent, would dare refrain from intriguing for the dishonoring protection of distinguished patrons, by vile flattery, parasitism and even worse, who would not pay any money for the laudations of the press — a thousand to one he will die of hunger or of a broken heart, killed by silence or killed by the written criticisms of the kept press, which brands as a rebellious criminal who must be inexorably hounded to death any artist who will not pay the tribute that is its due. And science! What has the people to do with science? What has science to do with the people? Science is not for the people. It is to be used against the people. Science the Queen, the liberator of the world, has become the petty prostitute of the ruling classes. “Professors and whores can always be had for money!” was the cynical remark once made, in a moment of frankness, by the late King of Hanover.

So long as the present-day state and the present-day society continue, there will be no civilization, no education, no mental development of the people.