There are two distinct kinds of socialism, “good” socialism and 
“bad” socialism. 

Bad socialism is “the war of labour against capital’. At its door are 
laid all the horrors: equal distribution of the land, abolition of the 
family ties, organised plunder, etc. | 

Good socialism is “harmony between labour and capital’. In its train 
are found the abolition of ignorance, the elimination of the causes of 
pauperism, the establishment of credit, the multiplication of 
property, the reform of taxation, in a word, 

“the system which most closely approximates to mankind’s conception of the 
kingdom of God on earth” [p. 9]. 

This good socialism must be used to stifle the bad variety. 

“Socialism is possessed of a lever; that lever was the budget. But it needed a fulcrum 
if it was to turn the world upside down. That fulcrum was supplied by the Revolution 
of February 24: universal suffrage’ [p. 12]. 

The source of the budget is taxation. So the effect of universal 
suffrage on the budget must be its effect on taxation. And it is by its 
effect on taxation that “good” socialism is realised. 

“France cannot pay more than 1,200 million francs in taxes annually. How would 
vou set about reducing expenditure to this sum?” 

“You have written into two charters and one constitution in the Jast thirty-five 
years that every Frenchman shall contribute to the upkeep of the state in proportion 
to his wealth. In the last thirty-five years, this equality of taxation has been a myth.... 
Let us examine the French system of taxation” [pp. 14-15, 17]. 

I. Land-tax. The land-tax does not fall equally on all landowners: 

“If two adjacent plots are given the same assessment in the land-register, the two 
landowners pay the same tax, without any distinction between the apparent and the 
actual owners” [p. 22], 

i.e. between the owner who is encumbered with mortgages and the 
one who is not. 

Furthermore, the tax on land bears no relation to the taxes which 
are levied on other kinds of property. When the National Assembly 
introduced it in 1790, it was influenced by the physiocratic school, 
which regarded the soil as the only source of net income and 
therefore placed the full burden of taxation on the landowners. The 
tax on land is therefore based on an error in economics. If taxation 
were distributed equally, the owner of land would be liable for 20 per 
cent of his income, whereas he now pays 53 per cent. 

Finally, according to its original purpose, the tax on land ought 
only to fall on the owner and never on the tenant of the farm-land. 
Instead, according to M. Girardin, it always falls on the tenant of the 
farm-land. 

In this M.Girardin commits an error in economics. Either the 
tenant farmer really is a tenant farmer, in which case it is not he but 
the owner or the consumer on whom the tax falls; or else he is, 
despite the appearance of tenancy, basically merely in the owner’s 
employ, as in Ireland and frequently in France, in which case the 
taxes imposed on the owner will always fall on him, whatever name 
they are given. 

II. Tax on persons and movable property. This tax, which was also 
decreed by the National Assembly in 1790, was intended to fall 
directly on liquid assets. The amount of house-rent paid was taken to 
indicate the value of the assets. This tax falls in reality on the 
landowner, the peasant and the manufacturer, whilst it represents 
an insignificant burden or none at all for the rentier. It is therefore 
the complete opposite of what its authors intended. Besides, 
a millionaire may live in a garret with two rickety chairs— 
unjust, etc. 

III. Door and window tax. An attack on the health of the people. A 
fiscal device directed against clean air and daylight. 

‘Almost one half of the dwellings in France have either only one door and no 
windows, or at most one door and one window” [p. 38]. 

This tax was adopted on 24th Vendémiaire of the year VII 
(October 14, 1799) because of an urgent need for money, as a 
temporary and extraordinary measure; but in principle it was 
rejected. 

IV. Licence-tax (trades-tax). A tax not on profit but on the exercise 
of industry. A penalty for work. Designed to fall on the manufac- 
turer, it falls largely on the consumer. In any case, when this tax was 

imposed in 1791, it was also only a question of satisfying a 
momentary need for money. 

V. Registration and stamp duty. The droit d’enregistrement”™* 
originated with Francis I and had initially no fiscal purpose (?). In 
1790 the obligatory registration of contracts concerning property 
was extended and the fee raised. The tax operates in such a way that 
buying and selling cost more than donations and legacies. Stamp 
duty is a purely fiscal device which applies equally to unequal profits. 

VI. Beverage-tax. The quintessence of injustice, an impediment to 
production, an irritant, the most costly to collect. (See moreover 
Issue III: 1848-1849, Consequences of June 13.*) 

VII. Customs-duties. A chaotic historical accumulation of pointless, 
mutually contradictory rates of duty injurious to industry. E. g. raw 
cotton is taxed at 22 frs. 50 cts. per 100 kilos in France. Passons outre.” 

VIII. Octroi2* Lacks even the excuse of protecting a national 
industry. Internal customs. Originally a local poor-tax, but now 
chiefly a burden upon the poorer classes, resulting in the adultera- 
tion of their food. Puts as many obstacles in the way of national 
industry as there are towns. 

So much for what Girardin has to say concerning the individual 
taxes. The reader will have noticed that his criticism 1s as shallow as it 
is correct. It is reducible to three arguments: 

1. that no tax ever falls on the class intended by those who imposed 
the tax, but is shifted on to another class; 

2. that every temporary tax takes root and becomes permanent; 

3. that no tax is proportional to wealth, just, equal, or equitable. 

These general economic objections to present taxation are 
repeated in every country. However, the French tax system has one 
characteristic peculiarity. Just as the British are the historic nation 
par excellence with regard to public and private law, so the French are 
with regard to the system of taxation, although in all other respects 
they have codified, simplified and broken with tradition in 
accordance with universal principles. Girardin says on this point‘: 

“In France we live under the rule of almost all the fiscal procedures of the ancien 
régime. Taille,” poll-tax, aide,“ customs, salt-tax, registration fees, tax on legal 

submissions, greffe, tobacco monopoly, excessive profits from the postal services and 
the sale of gunpowder, the lottery, parish or state corvée, billetting, octrois, river and 
road tolls, extraordinary levies—all these things may have changed their names, but 
they all persist in essence and have become no less a burden on the people nor any 
more productive for the treasury. The basis of our financial system is totally 
unscientific. It reflects nothing more than the traditions of the Middle Ages, which are 
in turn themselves the legacy of the ignorant and predatory fiscal practice of the 
Romans” [p. 102]. 

Nevertheless, as long ago as the National Assembly of the first 
revolution, our fathers cried out: 

“We have made the revolution only in order to take taxation into our own hands.” 

But although this state of affairs was able to persist under the 
Empire, the Restoration and the July monarchy, its hour has now 
struck: 

“The abolition of electoral privilege necessarily entails the abolition of all fiscal 
inequality. [...] There is therefore no time to be lost in coming to grips with the finance 
reform, if science is not to be ousted by violence.... Taxation is virtually the sole 
foundation on which our society rests.... Social and political reforms are sought in the 
remotest and most elevated places; the most important are to be found in taxation. 
Seek here, and ye shall find” [pp. 103, 105, 108). 

And what do we find? 

“As we conceive taxation, taxation should be an insurance premium paid by those 
who have property, to insure themselves against all risks which might disturb them in the 
possession and enjoyment of it... This premium must be proportional and strict in its 
exactitude, Every tax which is not a guarantee against a risk, the price for a commodity 
or the equivalent for a service, must be abandoned —we allow but two exceptions: tax 
on foreign countries (dowane) and tax on death (enregistrement).... The taxpayer is 
thus replaced by the insured person.... Everyone who has an interest in payment pays, 
and pays only to the extent of his interest.... We go further and say: every tax stands 
condemned by the mere fact that it bears the name of tax or imposition. Every tax must 
be abolished [...] for the peculiar characteristic of a tax is that it is obligatory, whereas it 
is in the nature of insurance to be voluntary” [pp. 120, 122, 127-28]. 

This insurance premium must not be confused with a tax on 
income; it is rather a tax on capital, in the same way that an insurance 
premium does not guarantee income but capital assets as a whole. 
The state acts in exactly the same way as the insurance companies, 
who do not want to know what revenue the thing insured yields but 
what it is worth. 

‘The national wealth of France is estimated at 134 thousand million, from which 
liabilities of 28 thousand million must be subtracted. If the budget expenditure is 

reduced to 1,200 million, only 1 per cent of the capital would need to be levied to raise 
the state to the level of a colossal mutual insurance company” [p. 130]. 

And from that moment onward —“no more revolutions!’ [P. 131.] 

“The word solidarity will replace the word authority, communal interest will become 
the bond linking the members. of society” [p. 133]. 

M. Girardin does not rest content with this general suggestion but 
at the same time gives us a form for an insurance policy or 
registration such as will be issued to every citizen by the state. 

Each year the former tax-collector gives the insured a policy 
consisting of “four pages of the size of a passport”. On the first page 
is the name of the insured with his registration number, as well as the 
form for the receipts of the premium payments. On the second page 
are all the personal particulars of the insured and his family, along 
with a detailed estimate of the value he puts on his total assets, 
certified as correct; on the third page, the budget of the state along 
with a general balance for France, and on the fourth, all sorts of 
more or less useful statistical information. The policy serves as a 
passport, election card and travel record for workers, etc. The 
registers of these policies allow the state in turn to prepare the four 
Great Books: the Great Book of Population, the Great Book of 
Property, the Great Book of the Public Debt, and the Great Book of 
Mortgage Debts, which together contain full statistics of all the assets 
of France. | 

Taxation is merely the premium paid by the insured to permit him 
to enjoy the following benefits: 1. the right to public protection, a 
free legal service, free religious practice, free education, credit 
against security and a savings-bank pension; 2. exemption from 
military service in peace time; 3. protection from destitution; 
4. compensation for loss through fire, floods, hail, cattle-disease and 
shipwreck. 

We further observe that M. Girardin intends to raise the compen- 
sation sum which the state has to pay, in case of loss by insured per- 
sons, by means of various fines, etc., from the product of the 
nationally-owned estates and the fees from enregistrement and 
customs, which will have been maintained, as well as from the state 
monopolies. 

Tax reform is the hobby-horse of every radical bourgeois, the 
specific element in all bourgeois economic reforms. From the earliest 
medieval philistines to the modern English free-traders, the main 
struggle has revolved around taxation. 

Tax reform has as its aim either the abolition of traditional taxes 
which impede the progress of industry, or less extravagant state 
budgets, or more equal distribution. The further it slips from his 
grasp in practice, the more keenly does the bourgeois pursue the 
chimerical ideal of equal distribution of taxation. 

The distribution relations, which rest directly upon bourgeois 
production, the relations between wages and profit, profit and 
interest, rent and profit, may at most be modified in inessentials by 
taxation, but the latter can never threaten their foundations. All 
investigations and discussions about taxation presuppose the ever- 
lasting continuance of these bourgeois relations. Even the abolition 
of taxes could only hasten. the development of bourgeois property 
and its contradictions. 

Taxation may benefit some classes and oppress others harshly, as 
we observe, for example, under the rule of the financial aristocracy. 
It is ruinous only for those intermediate sections of society between 
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose position does not allow 
them to shift the burden of taxation to another class. 

Every new tax depresses the proletariat one step further; the 
abolition of an old tax increases not wages but profits. In a 
revolution, taxation, swollen to colossal proportions, can be used as a 
form of attack against private property; but even then it must be an 
incentive for new, revolutionary measures or eventually bring about 
a reversion to the old bourgeois relations. 

The reduction of taxes, their more equitable distribution, etc., 
etc., is a banal bourgeois reform. The abolition of taxes is bourgeois 
socialism. This bourgeois socialism appeals especially to the industrial 
and commercial middle sections and to the peasants. The big 
bourgeoisie, who are already living in what is for them the best of 
possible worlds,* naturally despise the utopia of a best of worlds. 

M. Girardin abolishes taxes by transforming them into an insur- 
ance premium. By paying a certain percentage, the members of 
society insure each other’s assets against fire and flood, against hail 
and bankruptcy and against every possible risk which today disturbs 
the peace of bourgeois enjoyment. The annual contribution is not 
merely fixed by the insured persons collectively, but is determined by 
each individual himself. He estimates his assets himself. The crises of 
trade and agriculture, the torrent of losses and bankruptcies, all the 
fluctuations and vicissitudes of the bourgeois mode of life, which 
have been epidemic since the introduction of modern industry, all 
the poetry of bourgeois society will disappear. Universal security 
and insurance” will become a reality. The burgher has it in 
writing from the state that he cannot under any circumstances 

be ruined. All the shady sides have gone from the present world, its 
bright sides live on, their brilliancy enhanced, in short, that system of 
government has become reality ‘“‘which most closely approximates to 
the bourgeois conception of the kingdom of God on earth”. In place 
of authority, solidarity; in place of compulsion, freedom; in place of 
the state, a committee of administrators—and the puzzle of 
Columbus and the egg is solved, the mathematically precise 
contribution of each “insured person”, according to his assets. Each 
“insured person” carries a complete constitutional state, a fully 
formed bicameral system, within his breast. The fear of paying the 
state too much, the bourgeois opposition in the Chamber of 
Deputies, impels him to underestimate his assets. His interest in 
preserving his property, the conservative element of the Chamber of 
Peers, inclines him to overestimate them. The constitutional 
interaction of these opposing tendencies of necessity engenders the 
true balance of powers, the precisely correct valuation of assets, the 
exact proportion of the contribution. 

A certain Roman wished his house might be made of glass so that 
his every action would be visible to all. The bourgeois wishes that not 
his own house but that of his neighbour should be of glass. This wish 
too is fulfilled. For example: a citizen asks me for an advance, 
or wishes to form an association with me. I ask him for his policy, 
and in it I have a confession, entire and in detail, of all his civil 
circumstances, guaranteed by his interest correctly understood and 
countersigned by the insurance board. A beggar knocks at my door 
and begs for alms. Let me see his policy. The burgher must be sure 
that his alms are going to the right man. I engage a servant, I take 
him into my house, I entrust myself to him for good or ill: let me see 
his policy! 

“How many marriages are concluded without the two parties knowing exactly what 
to rely on concerning the reality of the dowry or their mutually exaggerated 
expectations” [p. 178]. 

Let us see their policies! 

In future the exchange of loving hearts will be reduced to the 
exchange of policies by the two parties. Thus fraud will disappear, 
which today provides the sweetness and the bitterness of life, and the 
Kingdom of Truth in the strict sense of the word will become a 
reality. Nor is that all: 

“Under the present system, the courts cost the state some Ths million, under our 
system offences will bring revenue instead of expense, for they will be transmuted into 
fines and compensation—what an idea!” [Pp. 190-91.] 

Everything in this best of possible worlds brings in profit: crimes 
disappear and offences yield revenue.’ Finally, as under this system 
property is protected against all risks and the state is no more than 
the universal insurance for all interests, the workers are always 
employed: “No more revolutions!” 

If that is not what the bourgeois wants, 
Then I don’t know what else he wants! 

The bourgeois state is nothing more than the mutual insurance of 
the bourgeois class against its individual members, as well as against 
the exploited class, insurance which will necessarily become increas- 
ingly expensive and to all appearances increasingly independent of 
bourgeois society, because the oppression of the exploited class is 
becoming ever more difficult. The change of name changes nothing 
in the nature of this insurance. M.Girardin himself is at once 
obliged to abandon the apparent independence from insurance 
which he for a moment allows individuals to enjoy. Anyone who 
estimates his assets too low is liable to punishment: the insurance 
fund buys his property from him at the price he has set and even 
encourages informers with rewards. Nor is that the worst: anyone 
who prefers not to insure his assets at all is declared outside society 
and simply outlawed. Society of course cannot tolerate the formation 
of a class in its midst which rebels against its very conditions of 
existence. Compulsion, authority, bureaucratic interference which 
are precisely what Girardin wants to eliminate, reappear in society. If 
for a moment he made abstraction of the conditions of bourgeois 
society, he did so only in order to return to them by another route. 

Behind the abolition of taxation lurks the abolition of the state. 
The abolition of the state has meaning with the Communists, only as 
the necessary consequence of the abolition of classes, with which the 
need for the organised might of one class to keep the others down 
automatically disappears. In bourgeois countries the abolition of the 
state means that the power of the state is reduced to the level found 
in North America. There, the class contradictions are but incom- 
pletely developed; every clash between the classes is concealed by the 
outflow of the surplus proletarian population to the west; interven- 
tion by the power of the state, reduced to a minimum in the east, 
does not exist at all in the west. In feudal countries the abolition of 
the state means the abolition of feudalism and the creation of an 

ordinary bourgeois state. In Germany it conceals either a cowardly 
flight from the struggles that lie immediately ahead, a spurious 
inflating of bourgeois freedom into absolute independence and 
autonomy of the individual, or, finally, the indifference of the 
bourgeois towards all forms of state, provided the development 
of bourgeois interests is not obstructed. It is of course not the fault of 
the Berliners Stirner and Faucher that this abolition of the state “in 
the higher sense” is being preached in so fatuous a way. La plus belle 
fille de la France ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a? 

What remains of M.Girardin’s insurance company is the tax on 
capital, as opposed to the tax on income, and in place of all other 
taxes. Capital for M. Girardin is not confined to capital employed in 
production, it embraces all movable and immovable assets. In respect 
of this tax on capital, he boasts: 

“It is like the egg of Columbus, it is a pyramid which must stand on its base and not 
on its apex, [...] it is the stream cutting a course for itself, the revolution without 
revolutionaries, progress with never a backward step, movement with neither jar nor 
jolt, finally it is the Idea in all its simplicity and the true Law” [pp. 135-36]. 

There is no denying that of all the costermongering advertise- 
ments that M. Girardin has ever produced—and they, as we know, 
are legion—this a a for capital-tax represents the master- 
piece. 

Incidentally the tax on capital, as the sole form of taxation, has its 
merits. All the economists and Ricardo in particular have demon- 
strated the advantages of a single form of taxation. The tax on 
capital, as the sole form of taxation, eliminates at a stroke the 
expense of the numerous staff previously needed to administer 
taxation, interferes least with the regular process of production, 
circulation and consumption and is the only tax to fall on luxury 
capital. 

But M.Girardin’s tax on capital is not limited to this. Its effects 
include yet other and very special blessings. 

Capital assets of equal size will be obliged to pay the same rates of 
tax to the state, regardless of whether they bring in 6 per cent, 3 per 
cent or no income at all. The consequence of this is that idle capital 
will be put to work and will increase the volume of productive capital, 
and that capital which is already productive will be put to yet further 
exertions, i. e. it will produce more in less time. The consequence of 
these two things will be a fall in profit and in the rate of interest. 

M. Girardin however asserts that profit and the rate of interest will 
then rise—a true economic miracle. The transformation of unpro- 
ductive into productive capital and the increasing productivity of 
capital in general have intensified and aggravated the development 
of crises in industry and depressed profits and the rate of interest. 
The tax on capital can only hasten this process, exacerbate crises and 
thereby increase the growth of revolutionary elements.— ‘‘No more 
revolutions!” 

A second miraculous effect of the tax on capital, according to 
M. Girardin, is that it would attract capital from the land, where its 
yield is low, to industry, where its yield is higher, bring down land 
prices and transplant to France the concentration of land, Britain’s 
large-scale agriculture and therewith all of Britain’s advanced 
industry. Quite apart from the fact that this would require a similar 
migration to France of the other conditions of British industry too, 
M. Girardin is here guilty of quite peculiar errors. Farming in France 
is suffering not from a surplus but from a lack of capital. Not by 
withdrawing capital from farming but on the contrary by pouring 
industrial capital into agriculture have British concentration and 
British farming come about. The price of land in Britain is far higher 
than in France; the total value of the land in Britain is almost as 
much as the whole national wealth of France, in Girardin’s 
estimation. Concentration in France would therefore not merely not 
cause the price of land to fall, on the contrary it would cause it to rise. 
The concentration of landed property in Britain has furthermore 
totally swept away whole generations of the population. The same 
concentration, to which the tax on capital will of course necessarily 
contribute by hastening the ruin of the peasants, would in France 
drive the great mass of the peasants into the towns and make 
revolution all the more inevitable. And finally, if in France the tide 
has already begun to turn from fragmentation to concentration, in 
Britain the large landed estates are making giant strides towards 
renewed disintegration, conclusively proving that agriculture neces- 
sarily proceeds in an incessant cycle of concentration and fragmenta- 
tion of the land, as long as bourgeois conditions as a whole continue 
to exist. 

Enough of these miracles. Let us turn to the provision of credit for 
mortgage deposits. 

Credit for mortgage deposits will initially only be available to 
landowners. The state will issue mortgage notes, resembling bank- 
notes in all respects except that land is the guarantee instead of 
cash or bullion. These mortgage notes will be advanced by the state 
at 4 per cent to peasants in debt, and will be used to satisfy their 

mortgage creditors; in place of the private creditor, the state now has 
the mortgage on the land and consolidates the debt so that 
repayment can never be demanded. The total of mortgage debts in 
France amounts to 14 thousand million. It is true that Girardin only 
envisages the issue of 5 thousand million mortgage notes, but the 
augmentation of paper money by such a sum would have the effect, 
not of making capital cheaper, but of devaluing paper money 
entirely. Moreover, Girardin lacks the courage to impose a fixed rate 
on this new paper. To obviate devaluation he proposes that the 
holders of these notes should exchange them al pari* for 3 per cent 
national debt certificates. The outcome of the transaction is thus as 
follows: the peasant who formerly paid 5 per cent interest and 1 per 
cent conveyancing, and renewal and other fees, now only pays 4 per 
cent and thus gains 2 per cent; the state borrows at 3 per cent and 
lends at 4 per cent, and thus gains 1 per cent; the former mortgage 
creditor, who previously received 5 per cent, is obliged by the 
threatening devaluation of mortgage notes gratefully to accept the 3 
per cent he is offered by the state; he therefore loses 2 per cent. 
Furthermore the peasant does not need to pay his debt and the 
creditor can never realise what the state owes him. What these 
dealings therefore amount to is that behind the thin camouflage of 
the mortgage notes the mortgage creditors are directly robbed of 2 
out of their 5 per cent. On the only occasion, apart from taxation, 
therefore that M.Girardin plans to change social relations them- 
selves, he is forced to make a direct attack on private property, he has 
to become a revolutionary and to give up his whole utopia. And this 
attack is not even of his own invention. He borrowed it from the 
German Communists, who after the February Revolution were the 
first to demand that mortgage debts should be transformed into 
debts to the state; admittedly in an entirely different fashion from 
M. Girardin, who even publicly opposed it. It is characteristic that on 
the sole occasion when M. Girardin proposes a somewhat revolution- 
ary measure he has not the courage to suggest anything but a 
palliative which can only make the development of fragmentation in 
landownership in France the more chronic, and turn the clock back 
in that regard by a few decades, until the present state of affairs is 
finally reached again. 

The only thing the reader will have missed throughout Girardin’s 
exposé is the workers. But of course bourgeois socialism always 

presupposes that society 1s exclusively composed of capitalists, so as to be 
able then to resolve the issue between capital and wage labour 
according to this point of view.