The wealth of the rich is derived from the poverty of the poor
In response to expropriation, people may say: “You will have the rich coming in from outside. How are you to prevent a person from amassing millions in China, and then settling among you? How are you going to prevent them from surrounding themselves with wage-slaves, and from exploiting them and enriching themselves at their expense? You cannot bring about a revolution all over the world at the same time. Well, then—are you going to search everybody who enters your country and confiscate the money they bring with them?” Those who ask this have never paused to enquire where the fortunes of the rich come from. A little thought would, however, suffice to show them that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any destitute, there will no longer be any rich to exploit them.
Take the middle ages, when great fortunes began to spring up. A feudal baron seizes on a fertile valley. But as long as the fertile valley is empty of workers, our baron is not rich. Their land brings them in nothing; they might as well have a property on the moon. What does our baron do to enrich themselves? They search for poor peasants. If every peasant-farmer had a piece of land, free from rent and taxes, and had in addition the tools and the stock necessary for farm labour – Who would plough the lands of the baron? Everyone would look after their own. But there are thousands of destitute people ruined by wars, natural disaster, etc. They have neither horse nor plough. (Iron was very costly in the Middle Ages, and a horse even more so.) All these destitute poeople are trying to better their condition.
One day they see on the road at the confines of our baron’s estate a notice-board indicating that the labourer who is willing to settle on this estate will receive the tools and materials to build their cottage and sow their fields, and a portion of land rent free for a certain number of years. So the poor wretches come to settle on the baron’s lands. In nine or ten years the baron begins to tax them. Five years later they increase the rent. Then they doubles it, and the peasant accepts these new conditions because they cannot find better ones elsewhere. Little by little, with the aid of laws made by the barons, the poverty of the peasant becomes the source of the landlord’s wealth.
And that’s how these things happened in the Middle Ages. And today is it not still the same thing? The landlord owes their wealth to the poverty of the peasants, and the wealth of the capitalist comes from the same source. Take the case of a citizen of the middle class, who somehow finds themself in possession of, say, 100,000 a year, but then they would have nothing left at the end of ten years. So, being a ‘practical person’, they prefer to keep their fortune intact, and also maintain an income as well. This is very easy in our society, for the good reason that the towns and cities swarm with workers who are living paycheck to paycheck. So our worthy citizen starts a business. The banks don’t hesitate to lend them another $100,000, especially if they have a reputation for being “business savy”; and with this money they can command the labour of, for the sake of this example, a hundred people. But if everybody had their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at a mediocre wage while the commodities one produces in a day sell in the market for much more?
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 4. Expropriation (p. 84).