At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly given them by the city government, receive higher pay than college professors or the head-clerks of the government ministers: I mean the porters.The price of loading and unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule of the Rigues or porters' associations, is thirty centimes per hundred kilogrammes.At this rate, it is not seldom that a man earns twelve, fifteen, and even twenty francs a day: he only has to carry forty or fifty sacks from a vessel to a warehouse.It is but a few hours' work.
What a favorable condition this would be for the development of intelligence, as well for children as for parents, if, of itself and the leisure which it brings, wealth was a moralizing principle! But this is not the case:
the porters of Lyons are today what they always have been, drunken, dissolute, brutal, insolent, selfish, and base.It is a painful thing to say, but I look upon the following declaration as a duty, because it is the truth:
one of the first reforms to be effected among the laboring classes will be the reduction of the wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others.Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain only the grossest individualism.The revolt of the silk-workers met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and the river population generally.
Nothing that happens off the wharves has any power to move them.Beasts of burden fashioned in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with politics as long as their privilege is maintained.Nevertheless, I ought to say in their defence that, some time ago, the necessities of competition having brought their prices down, more social sentiments began to awaken in these gross natures: a few more reductions seasoned with a little poverty, and the Rigues of Lyons will be chosen as the storming-party when the time comes for assaulting the bastilles.
In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through education or education through well-being.For, without considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always inclines towards barbarism and misery.Everything that has been attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the established order.Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be solved.
For the rest, if the economists, by exclusive attention to their old routine, have finally lost all knowledge of the present state of things, it cannot be said that the socialists have better solved the antinomy which division of labor raised.Quite the contrary, they have stopped with negation;
for is it not perpetual negation to oppose, for instance, the uniformity of parcellaire labor with a so-called variety in which each one can change his occupation ten, fifteen, twenty times a day at will?
As if to change ten, fifteen, twenty times a day from one kind of divided labor to another was to make labor synthetic; as if, consequently, twenty fractions of the day's work of a manual laborer could be equal to the day's work of an artist! Even if such industrial vaulting was practicable, --
and it may be asserted in advance that it would disappear in the presence of the necessity of making laborers responsible and therefore functions personal, -- it would not change at all the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the laborer; the dissipation would only be a surer guarantee of his incapacity and, consequently, his dependence.This is admitted, moreover, by the organizers, communists, and others.So far are they from pretending to solve the antinomy of division that all of them admit, as an essential condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor, -- that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers, -- and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot.
Those reformers whose schemes have nothing to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of the simplism, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of labor, then propose a plurality as a SYNTHESIS, -- such inventors, I say, are judged already, and ought to be sent back to school.
But you, critic, the reader undoubtedly will ask, what is your solution?
Show us this synthesis which, retaining the responsibility, the personality, in short, the specialty of the laborer, will unite extreme division and the greatest variety in one complex and harmonious whole.
My reply is ready: Interrogate facts, consult humanity: we can choose no better guide.After the oscillations of value, division of labor is the economic fact which influences most perceptibly profits and wages.
It is the first stake driven by Providence into the soil of industry, the starting- point of the immense triangulation which finally must determine the right and duty of each and all.Let us, then, follow our guides, without which we can only wander and lose ourselves.
Tu longe seggere, et vestigia semper adora.
NOTES:
1.A subtle philologist, M.Paul Ackermann, has shown, using the French language as an illustration, that, since every word in a language has its opposite, or, as the author calls it, its antonym, the entire vocabulary might be arranged in couples, forming a vast dualistic system.(See Dictionary of Antonyms.By PAUL ACKERMAN.Paris: Brockhaus & Avenarius.1842)
2."Treatise on Political Economy."
3.Tocqueville, "Democracy in America."
4.Meeting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, September, 1845.
5.Journal des Economistes," April, 1843.
6."The Liberty of Labor," Vol.II, p.80.
