nging to all kinds of
societies of amateurs--learned societies, philanthropic societies, etc.

"Take all the great enterprises: the Suez Canal, _e.g._, Trans-Atlantic
navigation, the telegraph that unites the two Americas. Take, in fine,
this organisation of commerce, which provides that when you get up in
the morning you are sure to find bread at the bakers' ... meat at the
butchers', and everything you want in the shops. Is this the work of the
State? Certainly, to-day we pay middlemen abominably dearly. Well, all
the more reason to suppress them, but not to think it necessary to
confide to the Government the care of providing our goods and our
clothing."[57]

Remarkable fact! we began by snapping our fingers at Marx, who only
thought of suppressing surplus value, and had no idea of the
organisation of production, and we end by demanding the suppression of
the profits of the middleman, while, so far as production is concerned,
we preach the most bourgeois _laissez-faire, laissez passer_. Marx
might, not without reason, have said, he laughs best who laughs last!

We all know what the "free agreement" of the bourgeois _entrepreneur_
is, and we can only admire the "absolute" naivete of the man who sees in
it the precursor of communism. It is exactly this Anarchic "arrangement"
that must be got rid of in order that the producers may cease to be the
slaves of their own products.[58]

As to the really free societies of _savants_, artists, philanthropists,
etc., Kropotkine himself tells us what their example is worth. They are
"made up of human beings freely seeking one another after having done
their work as producers." Although this is not correct--since in these
societies there is often not a single _producer_--this still farther
proves that we can only be free after we have settled our account with
production. The famous "tendency of the nineteenth century," therefore,
tells us nothing on the main question--how the unlimited liberty of the
individual can be made to harmonise with the economic requirements of a
communistic society. And as this "tendency" constitutes the whole of the
scientific equipment of our "Anarchist thinker," we are driven to the
conclusion that his appeal to science was merely verbiage, that he is,
in spite of his contempt for the Utopians, one of the least ingenious of
these, a vulgar hunter in search of the "best Ideal."

The "free agreement" works wonders, if not in Anarchist society, which