Gustave Hervé

“ We know how the upstarts of your Revolution, having become prefects, state councilors, and senators of the Empire, manufactured Codes which rule us still, and which are so favorable to property, so hard on the workers and the poor.
We know how they drew up the functionaries of their class and for those of ours the scandalously unequal scales of pay still in force; and our system of taxation, so light a burden on the shoulders of the strong, so heavy on the shoulders of the weak. ”

“ Advocate-General, that when a war breaks out there is on one side a Government entirely in the wrong, which attacks, and on the other a Government which has all the right on its side, and which suffers a cowardly aggression? You believe that it is easy to know who is in the wrong when a war breaks out! Look at the Boer government and the Japanese government! It was they who declared war. But are they for that any more the aggressors than the English and the Russian governments which provoked them into war? ”

“ As for us, the revolutionary socialists, we have repudiated the flag on which are displayed in letters of gold the names of so many butcheries.
What is a Country? Flags are only emblems; they have no value beyond what they represent. What, then, do we mean by a country or a nation? What are all the countries of today?
Allow me, gentlemen of the jury, to make use of an illustration, a sort of parable, which will enable you better to understand our sentiments. ”

“ We may not be of the same class, we may consider your class to be the enemy of ours, yet, still the claims of class have not killed in us all feelings of humanity.
We know well that under your bourgeois garb there beats the heart of a man, like our own. In the interest of your class itself, in the interest of the men and the women of your class—our brothers and sisters in humanity—we would have you pause before further exasperating by a vindictive verdict, our class, which is already sufficiently exasperated against you. ”

“ And you may be sure, gentlemen, that the Russian people will gain more by the civil war which they are waging at this moment against their rulers, if they win and even if they lose, than the Japanese people from their victories in Manchuria.
If ever we feel any interest at all in a war between nations, it is in that exceptional case where the war, under the guise of a war of nations, is really a civil war, a class war. ”

“ By a more rational and more equitable organization of production we shall create a society in which there will be well-being, knowledge, and beauty for all; a society which will be far better than that of today, even for your sons and daughters; a socialist country—a country which it will be worth our while to defend against the aggression of any bourgeoisie whatsoever. ”

“ The right of labor combination? It is tempered by the power of your class to subdue the workers leaders by starvation through dismissal.
The right to strike? The witnesses whom you have heard, witnesses from own class in many cases, come to tell you how strikers, even inoffensive strikers, are sabred and horsewhipped, and how, after strikes, even victorious ones, the powerful employers thin out the ringleaders in order to terrify the rest. ”

“ Corrupted by the intimidation of the employers in the districts dominated by the factory of the country mansion, corrupted everywhere by the ignorance of the electors, who leave school too early with only a rudimentary instruction, universal suffrage is led by the nose by your journals with big circulations, which are all in the hands of the capitalists, and which systematically falsify the facts in order to manufacture public opinion to their liking. ”

“ And in full agreement with them we only await the opportunity in this Europe, where the railways, the telegraph, cheap newspapers, and the same capitalist system have suppressed distance and rendered uniform the conditions of life, to found that free European federation, prelude to the great human federation, in which the countries of today will be absorbed, just as the ancient provinces became absorbed in the France, England, and Germany as we know them now. ”

“ When a war breaks out, the big capitalist and governmental journals in each country always make out that the other country is the aggressor. As for us here, what we know is this, that if war occurs between France and Germany it will be a conflict between the capitalist classes for the markets of the world. Therefore, whoever may be the apparent aggressor, we will not fight. You patriots will fight if your country is attacked and also, doubtless, if she attacks another country. ”

“ Hundreds of active socialists were struck down; thousands of years of imprisonment were distributed; and with what result, gentlemen of the jury?
At the very height of the persecution, the journal of the party, printed in Switzerland, penetrated even into the German barracks; leaflets, similar to those which our comrade Gohier read to you, were secretly circulated in all quarters, the forbidden fruit being greedily devoured by the German workers. Never before had the propaganda been so strenuous or so fruitful. ”

“ To complete the work of making the perfect patriot, to poison his whole system, nothing more is necessary than to let him become intoxicated with military pomp, which is still more impressive than the pomp of religion. ”

“ The contractors who provide paper-soled boots and diseased meat for the soldiers, the manufacturers of armaments, the financiers who lend money to their vanquished country at five and six per cent, all these have nothing to lose by a war, even an unsuccessful war.
The Advocate-General may not like civil war, but we consider that it is the only sort of war which can possibly be of any advantage to us. From all times it has been so wherever a social revolution has triumphed. ”

“ What difference can it make to us whether it is a French or German advocate-general who prosecutes us, or whether the police who brutally ill-treat us and the soldiers who shoot us down in strikes are of one nationality or the other? ”

“ In former times the parliamentary socialists of France and Germany were outspoken anti-militarists and internationalists. You all know that Bebel in Germany had to spend eighteen months in a fortress prison for having protested against the brutal annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. The German parliamentary socialists, more thorough going than ours, have even refused on every occasion to vote for the war supplies in parliament; but, in Germany just as in France, the parliamentary socialists have always been careful not to shock the patriotic prejudices of the voters. ”

“ You believe, perhaps, gentlemen of the jury—a natural illusion among the privileged classes—that it is by labor and thrift that one arrives at the table of the happy ones of this world. We know that one does arrive there sometimes by labor and by the spirit of organization and economy ”

“ The patriotism of the American worker, then, has more the characteristics of a shallow “jingoism” combined with race and nationality prejudices born of proximity rather than of distance. The “foreign enemy” is not beyond our boundaries, but in our midst. Although carefully nurtured by the capitalist in his own interest, this form of “patriotism” is likely to prove less deep-rooted and endurable than that in France, on account of fewer traditions here and of the enforced association of native with foreign workers in American industry. ”

“ But we others, who are all manual or brain workers, we know very well that if occasionally a man gains fortune and ease by his own labor and privations, it is ever so much more often by the work and the privations of others.
The Robber Class! And if you, gentlemen, are ignorant of the history of your class, we, here, are not. We know that in the Revolutionary Assemblies of 1789 and 1793 there was not a single workman, not a single peasant, but only members of the bourgeoisie, big and little, who worked for the interests of their class. ”

“ Instead of religious processions, we now have those imposing military reviews, which we have all run after in our time in order to see the march-past, in the heat and dust, of those interminable ranks of instruments of slaughter and of young men, the flower of the nation, marked for future butcheries. ”

“ The Industrial Workers of the World is peculiarly pledged to this task. It aims to unite all wage-workers, without distinction of race, nationality, sex, or any other consideration except that they are exploited by a master, into One Big Union of the Working Class, “to take possession of the earth and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system,” thus putting an end forever to the rule of the robber class. ”

“ You seem to think that if we became tomorrow the subjects of the Kaiser, all our political liberties would disappear, and with them the right to speak our native language. Come, now! Mr. Advocate-General. You are unaware perhaps that universal suffrage exists in Germany for the elections to the imperial parliament, the Reichstag; that labor organizations are twice as numerous on the other side of the Rhine as they are here; that public meetings are as numerous as they are here; and that the German socialist daily papers are “redder” than those labeled “socialist” in this country. ”

“ Our compatriots are not the capitalists here, who would have us massacred if they could, just as they massacred our fathers in the Commune. Our compatriots are the conscious proletarians, the socialists, the revolutionaries of the whole world, who wage everywhere the same battle as ourselves for the establishment of a better society. ”

“ But, as we do not hold you individually responsible for the evils of the present social system, we desire that the approaching Revolution should make as few victims as possible among your class. When the turn comes for our class to judge yours, we shall be glad to be able to say to the more exasperated and bitter of our comrades that, in the time of your might there were decent people among you, which is the truth ”

“ Here, as in France and in all other countries, the child’s brain is stuffed with stories of alleged “heroes” of American history from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt as a preparatory schooling for the future slave to acquire the necessary respect for and obedience to his master—whose mastership, in America as in Europe, has resulted from fraud, cunning, financial manipulation, land steals, and by fishing in troubled waters during and after wars of conquest or expansion, as well as through the merciless exploitation of the working class in industry. ”

“ Socialism, founded the class struggle, has so thoroughly killed in our hearts all national sentiment that we could not help smiling the other day when our friend Gohier, not quite cured of his old patriotism, spoke to us with emotion of the affront over the Fashoda affair. ”

“ By temperament, and in order to avoid useless persecutions, the German social democrats have never shown any love for noisy demonstration of anti-patriotism, persuaded that their secret propaganda is quite as profitable to their cause as the more dangerous open propaganda. That is the reason why in our International Conventions, as well as in their own national conventions, the German socialists may at times appear somewhat timid in their attitude on anti-patriotism. ”

“ Far away from that table I perceive a herd of beasts of burden, condemned to forbidding, dirty, dangerous, and mindless toil, without respite or repose, and, above all, without security for the morrow; small tradesmen, nailed to their counters on Sundays and holidays, and more and more crushed out every day by the competition of the big stores; small industrial employers, ground out of existence by the competition of the big factory owners ”

“ Since your Revolution of 1789, for a whole century your class has built up its fortune on the ruin of the weak, all in accordance with the Code; and today a few hundred thousand men, of whom many are mere drones, have monopolized all the principal means of production, mines, factories, railways, and banks, levying directly or indirectly, on the toil of the great mass of the disinherited a tribute heavier than any impost of the past.
“Rights” of the Workers But our country is much superior to all others, it appears. It is you, the Advocate-General, like so many others, who tell us that. ”

“ If you maintain the German fatherland in such a state that the German workman begins to doubt whether it is to his interest to defend it, then take care not to land us in a foreign war, for on that day you are lost. ”

“ We, the anti-patriots, will not sacrifice at your bidding the only possession we have, our lives, whatever may be the motives or pretexts put forward. If we must risk our lives, then we will risk them not in defending our country, but in attempting to found the socialist country which we already carrying in our brains. ”

“ Insurrection Rather Than War And, now that I have shown you the menacing side of our revolutionary socialism—the class war—let me in conclusion, gentlemen of the jury, point out to you the broadly humanitarian side of it, so that you may point it out also to those who might be led to reproach you for our acquittal. ”

“ In the event, then, of an order for mobilization, we shall attempt to bring about the Revolution, in order to lay hold of the social wealth usurped today by a minority. We shall transform the dwelling houses, now the property of individual landlords, into communal property.
The New Society We shall work the factories, mines, all the great enterprises, by our unions and our engineers. Our unions of workers will administer, like great co-operative societies, the big stores of today. ”