THE
CAPITALIST
SYSTEM
by Michael Bakunin

This pamphlet is an excerpt from The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social 
Revolution and included in The Complete Works of Michael Bakunin under the 
title ``Fragment.'' Parts of the text were originally translated into 
English by G.P. Maximoff for his anthology of Bakunin's writings, with 
missing paragraphs translated by Jeff Stein from the Spanish edition, 
Diego Abad de Santillan, trans. (Buenos Aires 1926) vol. III, pp. 181-196. 

Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism 
which no bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is 
property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and 
the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the 
State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital 
produces anything when not fertilized by labor - that means the power and 
the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to 
exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who 
thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both.
Note that I have left out of account altogether the following question: In 
what way did property and capital ever fall into the hands of their 
present owners? This is a question which, when envisaged from the points 
of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be answered in any other 
way but one which would serve as an indictment against the present owners. 
I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement that property 
owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own productive 
labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their capital, 
or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the commercial 
and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat, all 
live at the expense of the proletariat. (Speculation and exploitation no 
doubt also constitute a sort of labor, but altogether non-productive 
labor.)
I know only too well that this mode of life is highly esteemed in all 
civilized countries, that it is expressly and tenderly protected by all 
the States, and that the States, religions, and all the juridical laws, 
both criminal and civil, and all the political governments, monarchies and 
republican - with their immense judicial and police apparatuses and their 
standing armies - have no other mission but to consecrate and protect such 
practices. In the presence of these powerful and respectable authorities I 
cannot even permit myself to ask whether this mode of life is legitimate 
from the point of view of human justice, liberty, human equality, and 
fraternity. I simply ask myself: Under such conditions, are fraternity and 
equality possible between the exploiter and the exploited, are justice and 
freedom possible for the exploited?
Let us even suppose, as it is being maintained by the bourgeois economists 
and with them all the lawyers, all the worshippers and believers in the 
juridical right, all the priests of the civil and criminal code - let us 
suppose that this economic relationship between the exploiter and the 
exploited is altogether legitimate, that it is the inevitable consequence, 
the product of an eternal, indestructible social law, yet still it will 
always be true that exploitation precludes brotherhood and equality.
It goes without saying that it precludes economic equality. Suppose I am 
your worker and you are my employer. If I offer my labor at the lowest 
price, if I consent to have you live off my labor, it is certainly not 
because of devotion or brotherly love for you. And no bourgeois economist 
would dare to say that it was, however idyllic and naive their reasoning 
becomes when they begin to speak about reciprocal affections and mutual 
relations which should exist between employers and employees. No, I do it 
because my family and I would starve to death if I did not work for an 
employer. Thus I am forced to sell you my labor at the lowest possible 
price, and I am forced to do it by the threat of hunger.
But - the economists tell us - the property owners, the capitalists, the 
employers, are likewise forced to seek out and purchase the labor of the 
proletariat. Yes, it is true, they are forced to do it, but not in the 
same measure. Had there been equality between those who offer their labor 
and those who purchase it, between the necessity of selling one's labor 
and the necessity of buying it, the slavery and misery of the proletariat 
would not exist. But then there would be neither capitalists, nor property 
owners, nor the proletariat, nor rich, nor poor: there would only be 
workers. It is precisely because such equality does not exist that we have 
and are bound to have exploiters.
This equality does not exist because in modern society where wealth is 
produced by the intervention of capital paying wages to labor, the growth 
of the population outstrips the growth of production, which results in the 
supply of labor necessarily surpassing the demand and leading to a 
relative sinking of the level of wages. Production thus constituted, 
monopolized, exploited by bourgeois capital, is pushed on the one hand by 
the mutual competition of the capitalists to concentrate evermore in the 
hands of an ever diminishing number of powerful capitalists, or in the 
hands of joint-stock companies which, owing to the merging of their 
capital, are more powerful than the biggest isolated capitalists. (And the 
small and medium-sized capitalists, not being able to produce at the same 
price as the big capitalists, naturally succumb in the deadly struggle.) 
On the other hand, all enterprises are forced by the same competition to 
sell their products at the lowest possible price. It [capitalist monopoly] 
can attain this two-fold result only by forcing out an ever-growing number 
of small or medium-sized capitalists, speculators, merchants, or 
industrialists, from the world of exploiters into the world of the 
exploited proletariat, and at the same time squeezing out ever greater 
savings from the wages of the same proletariat.
	On the other hand, the mass of the proletariat, growing as a result of 
the general increase of the population - which, as we know, not even 
poverty can stop effectively - and through the increasing 
proletarianization of the petty-bourgeoisie, ex-owners, capitalists, 
merchants, and industrialists - growing, as I have said, at a much more 
rapid rate than the productive capacities of an economy that is exploited 
by bourgeois capital - this growing mass of the proletariat is placed in a 
condition wherein the workers are forced into disastrous competition 
against one another.
For since they possess no other means of existence but their own manual 
labor, they are driven, by the fear of seeing themselves replaced by 
others, to sell it at the lowest price. This tendency of the workers, or 
rather the necessity to which they are condemned by their own poverty, 
combined with the tendency of the employers to sell the products of their 
workers, and consequently buy their labor, at the lowest price, constantly 
reproduces and consolidates the poverty of the proletariat. Since he finds 
himself in a state of poverty, the worker is compelled to sell his labor 
for almost nothing, and because he sells that product for almost nothing, 
he sinks into ever greater poverty.
Yes, greater misery, indeed! For in this galley-slave labor the productive 
force of the workers, abused, ruthlessly exploited, excessively wasted and 
underfed, is rapidly used up. And once used up, what can be its value on 
the market, of what worth is this sole commodity which he possesses and 
upon the daily sale of which he depends for a livelihood? Nothing! And 
then? Then nothing is left for the worker but to die.
What, in a given country, is the lowest possible wage? It is the price of 
that which is considered by the proletarians of that country as absolutely 
necessary to keep oneself alive. All the bourgeois economists are in 
agreement on this point. Turgot, who saw fit to call himself the `virtuous 
minister' of Louis XVI, and really was an honest man, said:
``The simple worker who owns nothing more than his hands, has nothing else 
to sell than his labor. He sells it more or less expensively; but its 
price whether high or low, does not depend on him alone: it depends on an 
agreement with whoever will pay for his labor. The employer pays as little 
as possible; when given the choice between a great number of workers, the 
employer prefers the one who works cheap. The workers are, then, forced to 
lower their price in competition each against the other. In all types of 
labor, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to 
what is necessary for survival.'' (Reflexions sur la formation et la 
distribution des richesses)
J.B. Say, the true father of bourgeois economists in France also said:  
``Wages are much higher when more demand exists for labor and less if 
offered, and are lowered accordingly when more labor is offered and less 
demanded. It is the relation between supply and demand which regulates the 
price of this merchandise called the workers' labor, as are regulated all 
other public services. When wages rise a little higher than the price 
necessary for the workers' families to maintain themselves, their children 
multiply and a larger supply soon develops in proportion with the greater 
demand. When, on the contrary, the demand for workers is less than the 
quantity of people offering to work, their gains decline back to the price 
necessary for the class to maintain itself at the same number. The 
families more burdened with children disappear; from them forward the 
supply of labor declines, and with less labor being offered, the price 
rises... In such a way it is difficult for the wages of the laborer to 
rise above or fall below the price necessary to maintain the class (the 
workers, the proletariat) in the number required.'' (Cours complet d' 
economie politique)
After citing Turgot and J.B. Say, Proudhon cries: ``The price, as compared 
to the value (in real social economy) is something essentially mobile, 
consequently, essentially variable, and that in its variations, it is not 
regulated more than by the concurrence, concurrence, let us not forget, 
that as Turgot and Say agree, has the necessary effect not to give to 
wages to the worker more than enough to barely prevent death by 
starvation, and maintain the class in the numbers needed.''1
The current price of primary necessities constitutes the prevailing 
constant level above which workers' wages can never rise for a very long 
time, but beneath which they drop very often, which constantly results in 
inanition, sickness, and death, until a sufficient number of workers 
disappear to equalize again the supply of and demand for labor. What the 
economists call equalized supply and demand does not constitute real 
equality between those who offer their labor for sale and those who 
purchase it. Suppose that I, a manufacturer, need a hundred workers and 
that exactly a hundred workers present themselves in the market - only one 
hundred, for if more came, the supply would exceed demand, resulting in 
lowered wages. But since only one hundred appear, and since I, the 
manufacturer, need only that number - neither more nor less - it would 
seem at first that complete equality was established; that supply and 
demand being equal in number, they should likewise be equal in other 
respects. Does it follow that the workers can demand from me a wage and 
conditions of work assuring them of a truly free, dignified, and human 
existence? Not at all! If I grant them those conditions and those wages, 
I, the capitalist, shall not gain thereby any more than they will. But 
then, why should I have to plague myself and become ruined by offering 
them the profits of my capital? If I want to work myself as workers do, I 
will invest my capital somewhere else, wherever I can get the highest 
interest, and will offer my labor for sale to some capitalist just as my 
workers do.
If, profiting by the powerful initiative afforded me by my capital, I ask 
those hundred workers to fertilize that capital with their labor, it is 
not because of my sympathy for their sufferings, nor because of a spirit 
of justice, nor because of love for humanity. The capitalists are by no 
means philanthropists; they would be ruined if they practiced 
philanthropy. It is because I hope to draw from the labor of the workers 
sufficient profit to be able to live comfortably, even richly, while at 
the same time increasing my capital - and all that without having to work 
myself. Of course I shall work too, but my work will be of an altogether 
different kind and I will be remunerated at a much higher rate than the 
workers. It will not be the work of production but that of administration 
and exploitation.
But isn't administrative work also productive work? No doubt it is, for 
lacking a good and an intelligent administration, manual labor will not 
produce anything or it will produce very little and very badly. But from 
the point of view of justice and the needs of production itself, it is not 
at all necessary that this work should be monopolized in my hands, nor, 
above all, that I should be compensated at a rate so much higher than 
manual labor. The co-operative associations already have proven that 
workers are quite capable of administering industrial enterprises, that it 
can be done by workers elected from their midst and who receive the same 
wage. Therefore if I concentrate in my hands the administrative power, it 
is not because the interests of production demand it, but in order to 
serve my own ends, the ends of exploitation. As the absolute boss of my 
establishment I get for my labor ten or twenty times more than my workers 
get for theirs, and this is true despite the fact that my labor is 
incomparably less painful than theirs.
But the capitalist, the business owner, runs risks, they say, while the 
worker risks nothing. This is not true, because when seen from his side, 
all the disadvantages are on the part of the worker. The business owner 
can conduct his affairs poorly, he can be wiped out in a bad deal, or be a 
victim of a commercial crisis, or by an unforeseen catastrophe; in a word 
he can ruin himself. This is true. But does ruin mean from the bourgeois 
point of view to be reduced to the same level of misery as those who die 
of hunger, or to be forced among the ranks of the common laborers? This so 
rarely happens, that we might as well say never. Afterwards it is rare 
that the capitalist does not retain something, despite the appearance of 
ruin. Nowadays all bankruptcies are more or less fraudulent. But if 
absolutely nothing is saved, there are always family ties, and social 
relations, who, with help from the business skills learned which they pass 
to their children, permit them to get positions for themselves and their 
children in the higher ranks of labor, in management; to be a state 
functionary, to be an executive in a commercial or industrial business, to 
end up, although dependent, with an income superior to what they paid 
their former workers.
The risks of the worker are infinitely greater. After all, if the 
establishment in which he is employed goes bankrupt, he must go several 
days and sometimes several weeks without work, and for him it is more than 
ruin, it is death; because he eats everyday what he earns. The savings of 
workers are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their 
weak sentiment of justice, the remorse that is awakened by chance in the 
bosom of their class. This ridiculous and hateful myth will never soothe 
the anguish of the worker. He knows the expense of satisfying the daily 
needs of his large family. If he had savings, he would not send his poor 
children, from the age of six, to wither away, to grow weak, to be 
murdered physically and morally in the factories, where they are forced to 
work night and day, a working day of twelve and fourteen hours.
If it happens sometimes that the worker makes a small savings, it is 
quickly consumed by the inevitable periods of unemployment which often 
cruelly interrupt his work, as well as by the unforeseen accidents and 
illnesses which befall his family. The accidents and illnesses that can 
overtake him constitute a risk that makes all the risks of the employer 
nothing in comparison: because for the worker debilitating illness can 
destroy his productive ability, his labor power. Over all, prolonged 
illness is the most terrible bankruptcy, a bankruptcy that means for him 
and his children, hunger and death.
I know full well that under these conditions that if I were a capitalist, 
who needs a hundred workers to fertilize my capital, that on employing 
these workers, all the advantages are for me, all the disadvantages for 
them. I propose nothing more nor less than to exploit them, and if you 
wish me to be sincere about it, and promise to guard me well, I will tell 
them:
``Look, my children, I have some capital which by itself cannot produce 
anything, because a dead thing cannot produce anything. I have nothing 
productive without labor. As it goes, I cannot benefit from consuming it 
unproductively, since having consumed it, I would be left with nothing. 
But thanks to the social and political institutions which rule over us and 
are all in my favor, in the existing economy my capital is supposed to be 
a producer as well: it earns me interest. From whom this interest must be 
taken - and it must be from someone, since in reality by itself it 
produces absolutely nothing - this does not concern you. It is enough for 
you to know that it renders interest. Alone this interest is insufficient 
to cover my expenses. I am not an ordinary man as you. I cannot be, nor do 
I want to be, content with little. I want to live, to inhabit a beautiful 
house, to eat and drink well, to ride in a carriage, to maintain a good 
appearance, in short, to have all the good things in life. I also want to 
give a good education to my children, to make them into gentlemen, and 
send them away to study, and afterwards, having become much more educated 
than you, they can dominate you one day as I dominate you today. And as 
education alone is not enough, I want to give them a grand inheritance, so 
that divided between them they will be left almost as rich as I. 
Consequently, besides all the good things in life I want to give myself, I 
also want to increase my capital. How will I achieve this goal? Armed with 
this capital I propose to exploit you, and I propose that you permit me to 
exploit you. You will work and I will collect and appropriate and sell for 
my own behalf the product of your labor, without giving you more than a 
portion which is absolutely necessary to keep you from dying of hunger 
today, so that at the end of tomorrow you will still work for me in the 
same conditions; and when you have been exhausted, I will throw you out, 
and replace you with others. Know it well, I will pay you a salary as 
small, and impose on you a working day as long, working conditions as 
severe, as despotic, as harsh as possible; not from wickedness - not from 
a motive of hatred towards you, nor an intent to do you harm - but from 
the love of wealth and to get rich quick; because the less I pay you and 
the more you work, the more I will gain.''
This is what is said implicitly by every capitalist, every industrialist, 
every business owner, every employer who demands the labor power of the 
workers they hire.
But since supply and demand are equal, why do the workers accept the 
conditions laid down by the employer? If the capitalist stands in just as 
great a need of employing the workers as the one hundred workers do of 
being employed by him, does it not follow that both sides are in an equal 
position? Do not both meet at the market as two equal merchants - from the 
juridical point of view at least - one bringing a commodity called a daily 
wage, to be exchanged for the daily labor of the worker on the basis of so 
many hours per day; and the other bringing his own labor as his commodity 
to be exchanged for the wage offered by the capitalist? Since, in our 
supposition, the demand is for a hundred workers and the supply is 
likewise that of a hundred persons, it may seem that both sides are in an 
equal position.
Of course nothing of the kind is true. What is it that brings the 
capitalist to the market? It is the urge to get rich, to increase his 
capital, to gratify his ambitions and social vanities, to be able to 
indulge in all conceivable pleasures. And what brings the worker to the 
market? Hunger, the necessity of eating today and tomorrow. Thus, while 
being equal from the point of juridical fiction, the capitalist and the 
worker are anything but equal from the point of view of the economic 
situation, which is the real situation. The capitalist is not threatened 
with hunger when he comes to the market; he knows very well that if he 
does not find today the workers for whom he is looking, he will still have 
enough to eat for quite a long time, owing to the capital of which he is 
the happy possessor. If the workers whom he meets in the market present 
demands which seem excessive to him, because, far from enabling him to 
increase his wealth and improve even more his economic position, those 
proposals and conditions might, I do not say equalize, but bring the 
economic position of the workers somewhat close to his own - what does he 
do in that case? He turns down those proposals and waits. After all, he 
was not impelled by an urgent necessity, but by a desire to improve his 
position, which, compared to that of the workers, is already quite 
comfortable, and so he can wait. And he will wait, for his business 
experience has taught him that the resistance of workers who, possessing 
neither capital, nor comfort, nor any savings to speak of, are pressed by 
a relentless necessity, by hunger, that this resistance cannot last very 
long, and that finally he will be able to find the hundred workers for 
whom he is looking - for they will be forced to accept the conditions 
which he finds it profitable to impose upon them. If they refuse, others 
will come who will be only too happy to accept such conditions. That is 
how things are done daily with the knowledge and in full view of everyone.
If, as a consequence of the particular circumstances that constantly 
influence the market, the branch of industry in which he planned at first 
to employ his capital does not offer all the advantages that he had hoped, 
then he will shift his capital elsewhere; thus the bourgeois capitalist is 
not tied by nature to any specific industry, but tends to invest (as it is 
called by the economists - exploit is what we say) indifferently in all 
possible industries. Let's suppose, finally, that learning of some 
industrial incapacity or misfortune, he decides not to invest in any 
industry; well, he will buy stocks and annuities; and if the interest and 
dividends seem insufficient, then he will engage in some occupation, or 
shall we say, sell his labor for a time, but in conditions much more 
lucrative than he had offered to his own workers.
The capitalist then comes to the market in the capacity, if not of an 
absolutely free agent, at least that of an infinitely freer agent than the 
worker. What happens in the market is a meeting between a drive for lucre 
and starvation, between master and slave. Juridically they are both equal; 
but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist, even before the 
market transaction has been concluded whereby the worker sells his person 
and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf 
because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head 
and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by 
the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the 
employer.
And once the contract has been negotiated, the serfdom of the workers is 
doubly increased; or to put it better, before the contract has been 
negotiated, goaded by hunger, he is only potentially a serf; after it is 
negotiated he becomes a serf in fact. Because what merchandise has he sold 
to his employer? It is his labor, his personal services, the productive 
forces of his body, mind, and spirit that are found in him and are 
inseparable from his person - it is therefore himself. From then on, the 
employer will watch over him, either directly or by means of overseers; 
everyday during working hours and under controlled conditions, the 
employer will be the owner of his actions and movements. When he is told: 
``Do this,''  the worker is obligated to do it; or he is told: ``Go there,'' 
he must go. Is this not what is called a serf?
M. Karl Marx, the illustrious leader of German Communism, justly observed 
in his magnificent work Das Kapital2 that if the contract freely entered 
into by the vendors of money -in the form of wages - and the vendors of 
their own labor -that is, between the employer and the workers - were 
concluded not for a definite and limited term only, but for one's whole 
life, it would constitute real slavery. Concluded for a term only and 
reserving to the worker the right to quit his employer, this contract 
constitutes a sort of voluntary and transitory serfdom. Yes, transitory 
and voluntary from the juridical point of view, but nowise from the point 
of view of economic possibility. The worker always has the right to leave 
his employer, but has he the means to do so? And if he does quit him, is 
it in order to lead a free existence, in which he will have no master but 
himself? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He 
is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell himself to the 
first employer. Thus the worker's liberty, so much exalted by the 
economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical 
freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently 
it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the 
whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession 
of terms of serfdom -voluntary from the juridical point of view but 
compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief 
interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is 
real slavery.
This slavery manifests itself daily in all kinds of ways. Apart from the 
vexations and oppressive conditions of the contract which turn the worker 
into a subordinate, a passive and obedient servant, and the employer into 
a nearly absolute master - apart from all that, it is well known that 
there is hardly an industrial enterprise wherein the owner, impelled on 
the one hand by the two-fold instinct of an unappeasable lust for profits 
and absolute power, and on the other hand, profiting by the economic 
dependence of the worker, does not set aside the terms stipulated in the 
contract and wring some additional concessions in his own favor. Now he 
will demand more hours of work, that is, over and above those stipulated 
in the contract; now he will cut down wages on some pretext; now he will 
impose arbitrary fines, or he will treat the workers harshly, rudely, and 
insolently.
But, one may say, in that case the worker can quit. Easier said than done. 
At times the worker receives part of his wages in advance, or his wife or 
children may be sick, or perhaps his work is poorly paid throughout this 
particular industry. Other employers may be paying even less than his own 
employer, and after quitting this job he may not even be able to find 
another one. And to remain without a job spells death for him and his 
family. In addition, there is an understanding among all employers, and 
all of them resemble one another. All are almost equally irritating, 
unjust, and harsh.
Is this calumny? No, it is in the nature of things, and in the logical 
necessity of the relationship existing between the employers and their 
workers.

NOTES:
1.  Not having to hand the works mentioned, I took these quotes from la 
Histoire de la Revolution de 1848, by Louis Blanc.  Mr. Blanc continues 
with these words:  ``We have been well alerted.  Now we know, without room 
for doubt, that according to all the doctrines of the old political 
economy, wages cannot have any other basis than the regulation between 
supply and demand, although the result is that the remuneration of labor 
is reduced to what is strictly necessary to not perish by starvation.  
Very well, and let us do no more than repeat the words inadvertently 
spoken in sincerity  by Adam Smith, the head of this school: It is small 
consolation for individuals who have no other means for existence than 
their labor.'' (Bakunin)	
2. Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, by Karl Marx; Erster 
Band.  This work will need to be translated into French, because nothing, 
that I know of, contains an analysis so profound, so luminous, so 
scientific, so decisive, and if I can express it thus, so merciless an 
expose of the formation of bourgeois capital and the systematic and cruel 
exploitation that capital continues exercising over the work of the 
proletariat.  The only defect of this work... positivist in direction, 
based on a profound study of economic works, without admitting any logic 
other than the logic of the facts -  the only defect, say, is that it has 
been written, in part, but only in part, in a style excessively 
metaphysical and abstract... which makes it difficult to explain and 
nearly unapproachable for the majority of workers, and it is principally 
the workers who must read it nevertheless. The bourgeois will never read 
it or, if they read it, they will never want to comprehend it, and if they 
comprehend it they will never say anything about it; this work being 
nothing other than a sentence of death, scientifically motivated and 
irrevocably pronounced, not against them as individuals, but against their 
class. (Bakunin)

