Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
In the search for the mysterious and profound causes that may have determined the current European conflict, we have seen most of the comrades and domali on our side, from P. Kropotkin to Bataille Syndicaliste” draw criteria, data, figures from the studies and air work of Francis Delaisi. Not only because in matters of finance — the premise of every war — he is a recognized competence, not only because he is politically an unscrupulous man always willing to plunge his hands into the complicated deception of the big financiers, of the big pickpockets to show how you get rid of the pockets of direct and indirect taxpayers, the greedy genius is yoking the political machinery of the state, and is in fact, in the shadow of the republican judiciary, the only true all-powerful government of France; But also and above all because no one like him has known from the van symptoms unnoticed or neglected draw with wonderful intuition, since 1911, of the present war, of its primary phases, such a lucid and so sure prediction.
“Talking about a possible, probable, imminent war seems crazy at first sight” — wrote Francis Delaisi in “La guerre qui vient”, three years ago — “and certainly if one only consulted popular sentiment in all the countries of the world, it would not be to be feared. The German proletarians have no desire other than to target our own... the great mass of English workers are asking only to work with peace of mind in the fields, in warehouses, on construction sites; and as for the French, workers or peasants, proletarians or bourgeois, internationalist socialists or radical patriots, they have only one desire: peace.
Everything would be fine, and we could rest assured that if the people were masters of their destinies...
Unfortunately, no people in any country in the world makes its foreign policy”.
* * *
After demonstrating that this function remains the prerogative of diplomacy, cleverly chosen among the aristocrats of name and money, to serve the financial oligarchy that rules the country; that the ministerial responsibility is a mockery, that the parliamentary questioning is a mockery, that the great press and the stock pickpocket crowd, and that in these conditions “in our shady democracy a war can be unbridled, you plunge the country into the most terrible adventure by a man or a small camorra of financiers”; after having demonstrated the Anglo-French intrigues of Delcassé that there is nothing reckless in his statements, the Delaisi continued:
“A terrible war is being prepared between England and Germany. On all points of the globe the two opponents measure and threaten each other. The accidents on the Baghdad railway and the Flushing fortifications show how acute the crisis has become.
To fight, the two powers need France: Germany needs French gold, England, which has no resident armies, needs French troops.
The French Government and therefore the arbiter of the situation: do not give William the money, do not give George V the soldiers, and peace will be almost assured. Instead, the French Government is negotiating a military convention with England, and if it is signed, we (the French) will have to go and have our heads broken in Belgium’s plans to ensure that the people of London are in possession of Antwerp, and we will suddenly be exposed to the dangers of a German invasion.
(...).
In a few weeks, perhaps, the financiers of France will have sold the skin of a hundred thousand Frenchmen for some Turkish or Ethiopian railway. It is the “memento” — the Delaisi, he said at the time, in 1911 — “and the memento for those who do not want to be treated like cattle, to open their eyes, to consider coldly the situation in Europe and see the dangerous intrigue into which the financial oligarchy is preparing to plunge them”.
But the reasons for the Anglo-German conflict?
“Once upon a time, nations were peasant peoples, and it was peasant politics that of their leaders. The conflicts were border conflicts; wars, annexation or conquest: Napoleon annexed Belgium, Bismarck 1 Alsace and Lorraine...
Everything changed today. The great European nations are governed by businessmen: bankers, industrialists, shopkeepers, exporters. The purpose of these people is to find an outlet for their rails, their settlers, their capital.
(...).
Our great modern oligarchies don’t know what to do with their subjects, they want customers. Business people, business wars.”
***
So in this case.
“England, a boulder of iron on a boulder of coal, has been the queen of the industrial world throughout the 19th century. She had the ore with which machines are made, the coal with which they are activated, the means to develop an incomparable industrial mechanism, while the sea around her allowed her to develop a navy without equal...; she was the undisputed mistress of world trade”. To reproduce it in full is not possible to me: the proportions of this study would be upset, and these considerations that of the great war, of its intimate reasons, of its characters, do not want to be more than a sincere reflection, more than a modest analysis in contrast to the epic lies and fraudulent trappings with which it is recommended to the enthusiasms and consents of the naive and betrayed masses, would become eternal.
I therefore condense Delaisi’s facts and arguments, striving to be rigidly faithful and to always make it possible for me to convey his thoughts, the factors and terms of the industrial antagonism that he highlights and on which assides the present war determinant causes, the irrecusable reasons.
Against the British lordship of the sea and the international market, after the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, a formidable rival, Germany, which Bismarck pushes out of the ancient land feudalism up the streets, the conquests, the daring of modern industrialism the most evolved: On the shores of the Rhine, in Westphalia, in Saxony, in Silesia, there are, as if by magic, shipyards, workshops, arsenals; railroads and canals are winding and singing the resurrection while in the great ports of Bremen and Hamburg the most marvelous merchant fleet that has ever sailed the oceans is organized to bring on all the markets of the globe fabrics, machines, chemical products, manufactured goods of every kind of miraculous German industry. The eagle of the Kaiser contends with the cross of St. George the ways, the centuries-old domain of the ocean.
***
There is nothing exaggerated or fantastic about the dizzying ascension felt by Delaisi. You can find proof of this in the census of the industrial population erected by Paul Louis in his “Syndicalisme Europeen”, on official data.
In the 1907 census the part of the population living off industry counts 26,386,537 units compared to 20,253,421 in 1895, against 16,098,000 in 1882. The population that lives off trade and transport (it would be more accurate to say that industry makes only transport and trade) was 4,531,080 in 1882; it was 5,966,846 in 1895, rising in 1907 to 8,278,229; yes, that is, doubled in the last twenty years, not counting the energy treasures that women have poured into Germany’s new economic activity. According to the census erected by Lily Braun the 4,408,000 women who were in Germany occupied in 1882 in camps, factories, offices, became 5,203.000 in the year 1895, eight million two hundred thousand in 1907, while the population of Hamburg increased in the five years from 1905 to 1910 by 17%, that of Cologne by 19%, that of Frankfurt by 22%, that of Essen by 27%, that of Dusseldorf by 41%!
I know, and I am not under any illusion: development in the middle, in the instrument of production, as long as we are reeling resigned slaves or embellished in the anxious circle of the bourgeois regime, which has no other function than to torment, Tun against the other armed and irreconcilable I in the same person, the producer and the consumer, strengthening in the providential contradiction the dominion, its fortune, our most exacting strains, progress remains, worse than vanity, torment and irritation; we are perfectly in agreement.
And I don’t like to put our good comrade Kropotkin, by now overwhelmed by his paradoxical direction, in bitter anguish with himself, asking him if he can repudiate these facts on which he has stopped his attention and permission other times, and if he can, this admitted irrecusable condition, he can still speak of a German feudalism, of a German imperialism different and more fearsome than what he has personally experienced for so many years in England, the England of the Indies of the Egypt of the Transvaal, and has in the narrower field, in the exclusively military financial field, its faithful response in the republic across the Channel; and if, to this industrial feudalism of which the whole West of Europe, the whole American overseas are today the anguished vassals, it is preferable to the... Russian feudalism, for example, remained in the sovereign church, in aristocratic privilege, in industrial squalor; in the middle of the year one thousand, unsurpassed; and alongside which he, the recluse of Peter and Paul, the perpetual bandit, the perpetual candidate to the holy forks of Holy Russia, comes to reconcile, to take sides with such naive and unconscious enthusiasm.
I will never ask him about it, not least because it would be completely unnecessary.
Pietro Kropotkin is in the end perfectly in agreement with Paul Louis, with Francis Delaisi and with the “Subversive Chronicle” in the conviction that the industrial and commercial development of Germany, which has reached its current level of paroxysm, could not but violently clash in English competition, constituting the most serious threat, the only serious threat to international peace, the only danger of a conflict that no intervention, however authoritative, no court of arbitration, however venerable, would ever be able to deride, to appease, to mitigate; the deadly duel that the old world tears and sweeps of so many primordial savages returns, and obscures of so much barbaric eclipse the remote horizon of civilization and freedom; and of whose shady fundamental antagonism we will say even longer later.
Today, in Peter Kropotkin’s lost and surprised word, the echo of a voice that is not his, roars in the impetus of his ephemeral enthusiasm the storm of universal insanity.
On the useless massacres, on the dismay, on the late singularity of tomorrow, after the pirates have gone to the lair, in desperate silence, in the dead truce of bloodless passion, he will find the signs, the bruises of the desolate and unripe reality; and broken the mesh of aberrations, of wickedness that today envelops and subjugates him, aching with a more bitter disenchantment but surrounded by a vast, more tragic experience, in front of the oblivious ranks will return herald, master and guide.
He will find free souls and good hearts, rebellious insurgents ungrateful today to his unexpected exhortations unchanged, burning, faithful.