with Notes by Karl Marx

Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party

Describe theoretical
course —

The influence of
international competition —

468

The commercial and industrial revolution, which for
several centuries has been upheaving the economic foundations of
society and transforming social relations, necessitated
in the last century the displacement of the old noble
Aristocracy; it today just as imperiously necessitates the
displacement of the new plutocratic aristocracy.

The workers’ party, the only political party which represents
the economic interests of the Proletariat and which will be
one of the promoters of this social revolution, in order to group
the scattered forces of the Proletariat and win over to its cause
the members of the lower strata of the Bourgeoisie, who must
benefit from this revolution, believes the moment has come
to formulate its manifesto.

— Development of industrial property. —

a) Course of the Industrial Revolution

— The course followed by the industrial revolution is
known and can be studied around us in all its phases. — At the
outset, the producer is master of his instrument of labour and
of the product of his labour. As soon as the capitalist intervenes
in production, he assembles the producers and the instruments
of labour in a common workshop, or, if he leaves them temporarily

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with Notes by Karl Marx

Establish that there are
different stages and
that not all industries have
reached the same
degree, and that
consequently a
different solution is needed
according to the

different [...]

The bourgeois task
was to strip the worker of all
property — The task
of the revolution is
to reinstate him in
his property

scattered in the suburbs or the countryside, as in the
weaving industry, he supplies the raw material and becomes
master of the product. In the one case as in the other, the
worker, from being a free producer, has become a wage producer.

In the common or cooperative workshop begins the
division of labour among the producers

brought together, then machinery seizes upon and modifies the
instrument of labour; the tool leaves the hand of the artisan and
becomes an integral part of a machine; and the machine, moved
at first by man, donkey or horse, wind or water, ends by being
moved by steam.

The instrument of labour, having become complicated, gigantic
and of enormous value, is no longer and can no longer be
individually owned by the producer, as was the case when it was
simple, small and of little value. It passes temporarily ||[2]| into the
property of the individual or associated capitalist.

This course is inexorable — In the last centuries, the
masters of the guilds rose up to obstruct this transformation,
and the bourgeois revolution broke them; the workers,
instinctively foreseeing the countless miseries that were to
fall upon them and their families, revolted and broke the
machines; but hunger, reinforced by the bayonets of the state,
bent them. In our own day, the industrial bourgeoisie, which
is only the unconscious instrument of this transformation,
shelters behind the protectionist system and the inferiority of
French wages to avoid bringing its equipment up to the level
of the advances achieved.’* Progress

* Some examples are necessary. Jean Dollfus, one of the largest manufacturers of the cotton
industry, in his pamphlet — Plus de prohibitions sur les filés de coton, 1853, stated that the
self-acting mules, invented in
1825, were already in use in all the spinning mills of England, and that in 1853 the Société industrielle de Mulhouse awarded the first medal
for the first considerable set installed in the eastern departments. “Labour,”

469

Paul Lafargue

in industry should proceed only so long as it is in harmony
with the interest of the capitalist.

The industrialists will,
instead of making
their workers pay for the
inferiority of their equipment
by more labour and less
wages, be obliged to
use a part of the profits
they steal from them
to perfect the equipment, instead of
squandering them on
individual pleasures.

Almost always the
private interest of the
capitalist is opposed to the
progress of mechanical
equipment: whether from
stupidity or avarice.

/[3]/ But these two causes are tending to disappear. Under
the impulse of socialist propaganda, which will have recourse
to strikes and legislative action, wages will rise and hours of
labour will decrease. The protectionist regime, which the most
cynically exploiting employers claim to uphold only in

the interest of their wretched workers, is being severely

he adds, “being cheaper in France than in England, we do not have the
same advantage as the English in employing these new machines.” — Louis Reybaud, in his
Etudes sur le régime des manufactures — Le Coton, noted in 1868 that out of 1,700,000
spinning machines, scarcely 200,000 were of the improved model, and that the Heilman combing
machine for wool, invented in France before 1848, was in common use in Lancashire,
whereas in 1853 France was only just making trials; and he remarked: “It is in general upon
the conditions of labour-power that this revolution in methods of work is regulated.
As long as the hand of man provides its services cheaply, it is squandered; one seeks to
economise it when its services become more costly.” … “Very exact calculations,” he continued,
“show that French wages in Normandy and Flanders are 12 to 15%, in
Alsace 20%, and in the Vosges 30% below English wages.” — This inferiority of wages,
which condemned the workers to misery and retarded the progress of equipment, created the
scandalous fortunes of the manufacturers. J. Dollfus estimates that from 1850 to 1853 the average
profits of spinning were no less than 60 centimes per kilo, “which yielded 40% net profit, i.e., more
than the total processing cost … with such profits, after only 3 or 4 years an establishment
can be written off…”

470

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with Notes by Karl Marx

But the bourgeois,
even before the establishment of
large-scale industry,
expropriated the artisan
from all possession
of his product.

shaken, and will give way, in a more or less near future, to the
combined efforts of the great traders, who draw a new life from
grand international commerce, and of the great landed proprietors,
who, condemned to the free-exchange system for their products,
cannot bear to see their fellow-exploiters place import duties on
the machines they use and on the clothing worn by their
workers.

The industrialists then, instead of making their workers
pay for the inferiority of the equipment by more labour and
less wages, will use a part of the enormous profits they steal
from them, not for individual pleasures, but for the perfecting
of the equipment.

Moreover, in spite of these special causes, the progressive
march of industrial equipment has been accomplished in
France, thanks to the action of the International Market. One
of the most revolutionary phases of capitalist production is that
in which the national market becomes too narrow for the growing
production, and the products are forced to export themselves onto
foreign markets. Having to contend with foreign products,
French manufacturers must, willy-nilly, perfect their equipment
to lower their costs of production. |

I [4] I Nothing can arrest the industrial revolution.

b) Social Miseries Occasioned by
the Industrial Revolution

From the moment the producer found himself no longer owning
the product of his labour and his instrument of labour, and having
as his sole commodity his labour-power, the storm of social
miseries broke over him and his family.

In certain industries, such as hand-weaving,
lace-making, etc., the instrument of labour is owned by the
producer, and production still retains the domestic form: often
they are supplementary to agricultural labour. The producer
seeks by their combination to balance the budget of his
means of subsistence. These industries have been praised by
philanthropic economists as a means of preserving the
working-class family, destroyed by workshop labour, whereas
they are for the

471

5 note piquage d’once

(Cite Dr. Haxo,
lace-maker of the
Vosges.)

One must read the
economists of the first
half of the
century, Sismondi,
Villermé, Blanqui
(the academician) to
get an idea of the
miseries that presided
over the genesis of
large-scale mechanical
industry, and it is

(“Cite Audiganne — and
Beaulieu). (I--3) (See
page 5)

472

Paul Lafargue

capitalist, who only has to supply the raw material, nothing but
a means of subjecting the entire working-class family to his yoke
even in the domestic hearth, and of reducing wages, which are
supplemented by agricultural labour. The artisans, who live
isolated, cannot establish among themselves any agreement to
regulate the labour, which, despite its superiority, is among the
least well paid.*‑’

And this labour is most uncertain and variable, for
the merchant who decks himself with the title of manufacturer,
even though for his entire workshop he owns only a counting-house,
increases, diminishes, or suspends the distribution of raw material
according to the seasons and the state of the market. The history
of the lace industry is the martyrology of the women and girls
of the working class, tortured for the satisfaction of the most
frivolous and ridiculous tastes of the ruling classes. A working
population of 125,000 lace-makers, according to J. Simon, and of
220,000 according to Reybaud, lived for years on a wage varying
from 40 to 125 centimes for 12 to 16 hours of daily labour.”

Despite the advantages that domestic labour presents for
capitalists, who do not need ||[5]| to immobilise capital for the
construction of a common workshop and the purchase of
instruments of labour, it is condemned to be displaced by the
cooperative workshop, the essential form of capitalist production.
It is only in the common workshop that the industrial revolution
can be accomplished.

The common workshop under capitalist direction is the
encasement of the great mass of the working class, is the
destruction of the working-class family, is the direct and
implacable exploitation of the working nation, brutalised by
the most degrading and prolonged labour. The capitalist
workshop

” — The whole of bourgeois morality bristled against piquage
d’once, in the silk and wool industries. (See circular
of 4 September 1862 of the Chambre de Commerce d’Elbeuf).
This seizure of raw materials was for the worker only a
means of compensating for the inadequacy of his wages. But how can one describe the
shameful thefts practised by the manufacturers

and their clerks? —

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with Notes by Karl Marx

what the bourgeois
have called the reign
of Equality — the
realisation of the

rights of man.

** But it must not be
believed that these
miseries are destined to
disappear; here is what
one of the most official
economists says on this
subject: “Molinari”

(1) In note. Before 48
the workers of the
rubber factories,
oil-mills,
soap-works of
Marseille and Aix
were recruited from the
mountains of Forez
and Piedmont. These
unfortunates, paid 60

is the hell of the Proletariat. It is among the Economists and
bourgeois writers that we go to seek the description of the miseries
which have been the lot of the producers under bourgeois rule.**

— Villermé — Blanqui — Molinari page 101. Presse
21 May 1880. —

These miseries are neither local nor national; we shall find them exactly the same in the English official inquiry; they are not passing, if they abate for a moment, they return in an acute state, whether through the effect of industrial crises or the progress of machinery.

This misery of the working class is fatal; nothing, neither political reforms nor economic ones, will be able to attenuate it in a permanent manner as long as the capitalist appropriation of the instruments of labour and the products of labour continues.

Capitalist production only establishes itself by engendering the misery of the producers; and the misery of the producers becomes the essential condition of the development of capitalist wealth. The profits that constitute the capitalist’s wealth are nothing but unpaid labour, and profits are all the greater as wages are further lowered and the working day further lengthened, and it is the industrial overpopulation, which Engels has called the reserve army of labour, that the capitalist uses to bring the workers’ demands back down to the low level of his requirements. — To recruit his industrial army, the capitalist bourgeoisie emancipated the artisan from the bonds of bondage and the guild, attracted them en masse into its industrial centres, imported them from the nearby regions of foreign countries under the most fallacious promises of high wages. In Mulhouse, that elected land of industrial philanthropy, they founded the Almshouse for the Indigent to welcome, feed, lodge and find work for the new arrivals; and for 30 francs a month, they ate and slept in the workshop, taking turns day and night. The trade was so arduous and so poorly paid that the country’s workers refused it.

But European workers are no longer sufficient. The capitalist bourgeoisie turns towards Asia, towards that inexhaustible fund of men to exploit.

“— The republican administrator” let those good Chinese come —

and wherever this industrial population was nomadic and turbulent, as in the mining districts of Saône-et-Loire, they facilitated the means of establishing them permanently by building them workers’ cities, setting up soup kitchens, asylums, mutual aid societies and other institutions of utilitarian benevolence.

The miserable condition of the European workers no longer suffices for the French capitalists. The bourgeois economists seriously discussed at the Society of Political Economy, on 5 May, the possibility of introducing into Europe, as in Australia and America, the Chinese workers and the coolie system, which is nothing but intensified slavery. “The Chinese,” said Mr. Simonin, civil mining engineer, “has demonstrated experimentally that the manual worker can live and save money by contenting himself with a modest wage.” Mr. P. L. Beaulieu, director of *L’Économiste français*, said: “The often exaggerated demands of the European workers will end by bringing to Europe the men from China, India and Japan, whose sobriety is well known.”

The machine itself creates an overpopulation.

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with notes by Karl Marx

** In a note. That Simonin, who brought up this discussion, who is editor of *La France*, is one of the greatest sycophants that exist – Here is what he said in 1866 – I gave an account of this session in *L’Égalité* of [9 June 1880]. Some friends reproached me for the brutal form in which I replied.

* All the philanthropic panaceas, of Lieutenant D. Bonaparte, J. Simon, Gambetta, gratis relief, producers’ cooperation, consumers’ cooperation, credit, profit-sharing – they have been tried over and over again with the help of the government and have miserably miscarried. Nothing, nothing will be able, if not [. . .]

There you have the industrial problem –

But an overpopulation is created by the perfecting of the equipment. Every mechanical invention throws onto the pavement a part of the working population; while starving, it must stay on the spot; for after a certain time the cheapness produced by this new mechanical application enlarges the market, widens the workshop and finds work for the workers who had been displaced, until the moment when a new invention or a crisis of overproduction comes once again to throw them onto the street. The action of capitalist production on the working population is that of a suction and force pump.

It would be the height of absurdity to ask the capitalists to apply palliatives to this state of affairs. The capitalist lives, breathes, and moves only to make profits, and were he to bleed humanity dry to gain a penny, he would do it. Besides, he himself, although he benefits from the people’s miseries, is dominated by the economic forces he has set in motion; and he is as much their plaything as the proletarians, as is demonstrated by the industrial crises — small property condemned, large property generalises misery, and it cannot be otherwise so long as the forces of production are unleashed.

*’ As for the proletarians of large-scale industry, they know their ills and know that the only possible solution is expropriation by force.

(See: p.2 and the last page)

Only the proletariat, seizing political power, expropriating all the industrial capitalists, substituting for the inhuman, imbecile, fraudulent and anarchic direction of social production by the capitalists a central administration, which will entrust to the associated workers the exploitation of the common workshops, decapitalised, will regulate production, will give a new impulse to the economic forces and will put an end to the miseries of the working class. The miseries of the working class are not inherent in mechanical production itself, but in its capitalist direction. — Moreover, the central administration, substituting itself for the merchants who exploit the manual artisans working in their families with their own instrument, while respecting acquired habits, will facilitate the passage of the manual industries to large-scale industry. The phases of this transformation are scientifically known and can be shortened and softened by an intelligent direction. — There is no need to grumble; this transformation is fatal, and it is for the artisans to choose, to make it under the capitalist yoke and for the profit of the capitalists, or with the help of a central administration controlled by the proletariat.*’

Manifesto. — — 3rd section — III. Evolution of financial property

In every highly developed capitalist society, the industrial and agricultural enterprises take on such proportions that their establishment presupposes the individual accumulation of a considerable capital. And capital only accumulates by the constant despoilment of the mass of the nation. In a number of cases, (railways, mines, American-style agricultural exploitation, etc.) the capitals accumulated individually are insufficient, and it is necessary to aggregate individual capitals by means of joint-stock association. — On the other hand, the amount of floating capital that every capitalist enterprise requires for the purchase of raw materials and labour-power, the rapidity of the abundance of production, the slowness of the outflow of products, the extent and remoteness of markets, the difficulty of recovering funds, obliges every industrial capitalist, in order to maintain and develop his enterprise, constantly to resort to credit, that is to say, to advances made by social capital. Thus, the social fortune, that is to say, the ever-growing surplus of production over consumption, must be collected and centralised and always kept at the disposal to be distributed according to the needs of production and exchange. This double function of suction and force pump of the social savings is fulfilled by modern finance. Finance has become, so to speak, the heart of the economic system of Capitalism.

Because these two vital functions of society — centralisation and distribution of the national savings — instead of becoming social functions acting only for the common well-being, have been entrusted to personalities without control and without responsibility, the economic and political interests of the whole of society have been delivered into the hands of a few hundred individuals of the worst sort, “capable of everything and capable of nothing,” according to the expression of Berryer. After having seized by “criminal means ... the spoils of the provinces, the subsistence of the people, and the patrimony of the State” they hold them; they devote a part to unheard-of profusions which “insult the misery of the majority of other citizens”° and use the other indiscriminately to create and support industrial enterprises, national or foreign, sometimes the most insane.

° Edict establishing the Chamber of Justice of 1716.

The Empire powerfully aided Finance in its centralising action. Its system of public loans by small denomination, which Minister Bineau called the “democratisation of the *rente*,” by offering to the small purses, always mistrustful, the guarantee of the State for the investment of their funds, prepared the ground for the financial razzia that the credit institutions executed. The latter had only to allure the petty bourgeois and the landed peasants, as foolish as they are voracious, with the bait of large dividends, premiums, and lotteries.

The Empire did more; it subsidised the Credit institutions by tens of millions, permitted them to dispose of public funds like a banker who would engage in floating operations; it placed at the service of the *Crédit foncier* the receivers general and special to collect the rural savings. The *Crédit Mobilier*, that masterpiece of Bonapartist finance, alone, in 15 years, from 1852 to 1867, sucked in and threw back into national and international circulation a capital of nearly four milliards, and in this immense movement of business the state and city loans in which it took part do not figure. In 10 years its 15 directors extracted from the fortune that passed through their hands 8,248,445 francs for management expenses, or 54,989 francs per director per year; not counting the interest, the dividends on the shares they had awarded themselves as invention premium, and the profits they made from the jobbing of shares on the Bourse.

The Credit institutions, by giving the financiers control over the national movable fortune, allowed them to monopolise the administration of a part of the immovable fortune (railways, metallurgical plants, trans-oceanic steam navigation, etc.), and to levy tribute under the title of interest, discount, etc., on the other part which, in order to maintain and keep

Workers’ savings, too, became the prey of the financiers. “The savings banks,” says L. Reybaud in *Le Fer et la Houille* (studies on the factory system, 1874), “now contain only a very reduced portion of the people’s savings; the rest goes into speculations. … At Lyons, at Saint-Etienne, in the Gier valley, the victims were above all the most intelligent workers, those who earned high wages … Workers figure to a greater extent than is believed … many sadly showed me the dead or depreciated securities in which their little fortune had been swallowed up, naturally their choice had fallen on shady affairs. … This, then, is what those debauches of credit have led to, which had so many eulogists and accomplices. By scattering the people’s savings in adventures, the social guarantees afforded by their stability were diminished and—who knows?—perhaps the taste for revenge was given to the unfortunate victims of these unworthy speculations.” The financiers have laid bare, better than all the socialists, the hidden aim of the economists who preach saving.

“A speculator initiated into the secrets of the coulisse, as the directors were, operating month by month, buying at the lowest and selling at the highest during the year 1853, could have gained, with 100 shares of the Crédit Mobilier, 162,250 fr.

478

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with notes by Karl Marx

Export of capital

develop must call upon credit. With the public’s money, the financiers exploit industry and agriculture. Thus the Bank of France, with a share capital of 182½ millions, annually levies tithes on a circulation of nearly ten milliards. (In 1873, the total of its transactions rose to 16 milliards.) Thanks to this double credit system—credit given by the public to credit institutions, and credit given by the latter to industry and agriculture—the financiers squeeze the other categories of the ruling classes and turn them into mere extraction organisms, charged with exploiting the working class on their own account.

Modern finance has its origins in the system of public credit, that is, of public debts, whose first foundations were laid in the Middle Ages by Venice and Genoa, but which was not introduced into France until 1522 by Chancellor Duprat. The public debt contains within itself a germ of automatic progression. ||[11]| … “Loans enabling governments to meet extraordinary expenditure without the taxpayers feeling it on the spot are followed by an increase of taxes; on the other hand, this surcharge of taxes caused by the accumulation of successively contracted debts compels the government, in the event of new extraordinary expenditure, to have recourse to new taxes.” But, on the other hand, the public debt “endows unproductive money with reproductive value … without its having to undergo the risks and troubles inseparable from industrial investment and even from private usury. The public creditors, in truth, give nothing, for their principal, metamorphosed into easily transferable public securities, continues to function in their hands just as so much cash.” (337-8) Thus the public debt, capable of autonomous growth, transforms the state, whatever its form—monarchical or republican—into a machine that doubles the profits of accumulated capitals. Moreover, in order to maintain themselves and to fulfil their mission as pimps of the ruling classes, the modern states must withdraw from production an ever-growing number of producers (police, magistrature, army) and, to the extent that the class struggle intensifies, provide an outlet for internal agitations through foreign expeditions. These are incidental expenses which

479

(I shall give, apropos of the Bank,
an analysis of its
annual balance sheets
from 1869, showing that
the largest profits

Paul Lafargue

develop along with capitalist production. Thus, the exploitation of the nation by the state and that of the state by the financiers grow in direct proportion to the exploitation of industry and agriculture by Finance.

This exploitation of the state by the financiers takes various forms. — On the morrow of February, the republicans of the Provisional Government, for want of money, stopped the repayment of deposits in the Savings Banks, but proposed anticipating the half-yearly payment of the *rentes* due on 22 March and exempted Rothschild from paying the 80 millions he owed the state for the 250 million loan he had had awarded to him at the end of the reign of Louis Philippe. Five months later, one month after the popular massacres of June, on 27 July, General Cavaignac, that Mac-Mahon of the second bourgeois republic, secretly admitted the same Rothschild to a 13 million issue of *rentes*. = During the reign of Louis Philippe, the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie never ceased protesting against the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by the Bank of France of coining money and of using the credit given it by traders and industrialists to squeeze commerce and industry.* In 1840 and 1847 |[[12]| the suppression of the Bank’s privileges was energetically demanded in the Chamber of Deputies. But the Provisional Government of the 1848 Revolution, made by the petty bourgeoisie against the bankers, decreed forced currency temporarily; that is, the state gratuitously gave legal value to the Bank’s rags. The third bourgeois republic established forced currency permanently, but always with the same gratuity. In 1857, without drum or trumpet, in a single sitting, on 28 May, the last day of the session, a law voted in three or four hurried stages extended until 1897 the Bank’s privileges, which were due to expire in 1867. The law limiting the discount rate to 6% was abolished. Under the Empire, the Bank conquered its full freedom of exploitation; it only remained for it to rid

* It is known that the Bank has the right to issue in notes the value of the bills it has in its portfolio; so it is the industrialists and traders who provide the guarantee for the notes they receive and which the Bank has only the trouble of printing. And for the pleasure of guaranteeing banknotes, the bourgeois pay 2, 3 and even 10% discount. If the industrial bourgeois exploit the producers without remorse, they are in their turn exploited and treated like Jocrisses by the financiers.

480

Paul Lafargue: Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with notes by Karl Marx. Page 12.

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with notes by Karl Marx

it ever realised were
those of the years
1872, 1873 – and that
they came from the loans
the Treasury made to it
to pay off the war indemnity.)
As far as I know, the
Bank of France could always
issue as many notes as it
wished, but it was obliged
to exchange these notes for
gold or silver upon presentation. This legal limit
to the issue naturally falls
with the forced currency.
Nevertheless, the Bank of
France knows the economic
limits of the issue so well,
and has always acted so
prudently, that its notes
have never suffered the
slightest depreciation. Its
system therefore has nothing
in common with that of
the assignats!

The terms of M. Say’s bill
would have to be specified. I
do not believe that the
Bank of France can issue
notes except by way of
discounting commercial paper;
by advances on securities
determined by law; by loans
to governments; finally, by
the purchase of precious
metals by means of its notes.
Moreover,

45 since forced currency

itself of the few charges it had towards the state. On 4 February 1878, a republican minister, M. Say, today president of the Senate, but then as now the servant of the bankocrats, presented a bill that exempted the Bank from a stamp duty established by the laws of 30 June 1840, 23 August 1871, 19 February 1874 and which lightened its annual charges by

nearly two million. Moreover, M. Say asked that the Bank might issue notes without having as countervalue either metallic specie or commercial bills, as required by previous laws. This authorisation and the permanent forced currency amount to the restoration of the seventh of the assignats for the benefit of the magnates of the Bank.

= Under the Orleanist, Bonapartist, and republican governments, the financial oligarchy had the railways delivered over to it: it built them with the money of the Treasury; it operates them with the state’s guarantee. In 1868, according to G. Duchêne (*Empire industriel*):
The state subsidy for the establishment of railways amounted to
 1,536,576,544
The capital guaranteed by the state amounted to
 3,859,000,000
 5,395,576,544 fr.

Under these three governments, the construction and operation of railways gave rise to the most shameless jobbery. Lines built with the funds of the public treasury, but ruined by the wastefulness and impudent thefts of the financiers, were bought back by the state, then |

483

has been perpetuated, its
metallic reserve—without its
costing it a farthing—has
spontaneously increased to
such a degree that it always
exceeds the level prescribed
by law for the

Bank of England.

484

Paul Lafargue

|[13]| ceded back to the same financiers who had led them to bankruptcy, to be exploited by them once again, but with a higher state guarantee. To the honour of the third republic, it must be said that the contracts for buy-back and operation concluded by the Opportunist Gambettists are otherwise more onerous for the public treasury than the contracts concluded by the Rouhers of Bonapartism. = The Bonapartist empire sent French troops to Mexico to recover the Jecker claim, executed by the Commune. The opportunist republic formed a Holy Alliance with the Bismarckian government and the Tory government to depose the Khedive of Egypt, who, in order to expropriate the fellahs crushed by European usury, had thrown himself into the jaws of Rothschild and other crocodiles of international finance.

But apart from this direct action upon the state, purchased with the bribes cynically given and accepted by the political representatives of the bourgeoisie (ministers, senior officials, deputies, journalists, etc., Bonapartist or republican), who enter politics threadbare and with empty purses and there, as if by magic, turn into millionaires, the high lords of Finance exercise another influence over the political course of the country which, though indirect, is no less disastrous. The stock-exchange quotations they manipulate have become a political thermometer; the press creates and directs public opinion; the brutal centralisation of social savings, which they accomplish by the most criminal means, turns upside down the conditions of existence of the other categories of the bourgeoisie and prepares bourgeois revolutions. The February Revolution, made to the cry of reform, was the uprising of the petty bourgeoisie against the tax-paying deputies who were dominated by the big bankers. The Empire was greeted by Finance as its entry into the land of

Draft Manifesto of the French Workers’ Party with notes by Karl Marx

History teaches us
that the fatherland has
always been delivered
to the enemy by the
dominant class when
threatened with degradation
by the rising democracy.

(Cite a few
examples from antiquity,
the Middle Ages
and modern times, for
this point must
be insisted upon,
it is good ground.)

(useful addition
for the opinion)

Canaan. To escape the wrath and internal disorders engendered by financial speculations, the empire flung itself into the Franco-Prussian adventure. In the declaration of war, the stock-jobbers directed by M. de Girardin, whose protégé, M. Ollivier, was in the ministry, saw only a pretext for stock market coups. The shamefully botched peace, if it rid M. Pouyer-Quertier, then minister, and the other cotton men of France of the competition from Mulhouse, and the shareholders of the Anzin mines, of whom M. Thiers was one of the ||[14]| largest, of the competition from the Alsatian mines, it permitted in return the Usurers of Europe, summoned by M. Thiers, to hurl themselves upon France and transform her misfortunes into an inexhaustible source of financial profits. Never did any statesman better deserve from the ruling classes the title of Father of the Fatherland than M. Thiers, the Washington of the 3rd bourgeois republic; for never did any statesman bleed the Proletariat more abundantly, nor preside over a finer disembowelment of the nation’s patrimony; never did any statesman demonstrate more clearly that by Fatherland the ruling classes understand nothing but their class interests.

The colossal power that modern Finance possesses in capitalist society is absolutely independent of the form the political power assumes; it is as great in the despotic Empire of Germany as in the democratic Republic of the American Union. In France, Orléanist, Bonapartist, republican régimes succeeded one another, without the power of finance being shaken thereby; on the contrary, it grows ceaselessly. This baleful domination is not of those that a political revolution can overthrow, for it rests on the exploitation of the working class and on the public debt. The financiers, who represent the element of the bourgeois class most insignificant in number, in intelligence, in courage, will vanish only when the Proletariat, master of political power realising the social republic, expropriates the industrial capitalists, confiscates the Bank and the other credit institutions, and liquidates the public debt. Good!

But if the financiers prepare political revolutions and find immediate profits therein, it is they

485

all this is much better said by Marx’s line and a half,

restore “confidence” and open — “credit” —

order.I

486

Paul Lafargue

who during the struggle are the most cowardly, and during the repression the most ferocious. In June 1848 the men of affairs banqueting on the boulevards intoxicated the gardes mobiles and incited them to slaughter; in 1871 crammed into Versailles with their legitimate and illegitimate she-devils, they insulted and tortured the disarmed federates. In May 1871 as in June 1848, they demanded the “bleeding” of the Parisian proletariat in order to restore — “credit”!