Babeuvism and the Notion of Public Duty
In Babeuvism, as described by Aulard, we have an exemplar of state-slavery (the servile state) that commodifies men as means to its social ends. Article 3 of the document Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf reads:
“Nature has imposed on every man the obligation of labor; no one, without crime, can abstain from work.”
When considered carefully, this codicil is quite startling in its implications -as much in what it doesn’t say as in what it does. Initially we are struck by the presumption that the juridical law shall speak for nature itself. But does nature’s law require juridical enactment? Are its ‘judgments’ not immediately and irrevocably enacted, absent the involvement of courts? The implication is that such laws derive not from the codes or traditions of men, but from Nature herself, situating them in the context of a transcendent authority, yet without appeal to any God. Thus the law of nature is higher than man’s law, and assumes the dimension of universal jurisdiction. But there is more to be said about the nature of this obligation of work, avoidance of which is said to be “crime.”
To whom is this work owed? If it is to nature, then a man is entitled to prefer the redress of nature to work. Note, then, that in the place of the wholly natural redress of extinction is the juridical discipline appropriate to social disorder. Yet crime is a political-juridical conception that applies only to subjects under government. And so it’s here we see the key to the logic of Babeauvism: the invocation of nature as a transcendent source of social authority, but the denial of nature in the application of social technique to determine this order. The system of Babeau does not propose to return man to nature, or the state of inequality, but rather situates man in the synthetic state, which it then gives the name of nature, that it might borrow the ‘authority’ of nature.
Understood in this way, we can only refer such abstention from the compulsion of work a crime against the state. But what sort of crime? To fail to remit the obligation of work must be considered theft, then, but the theft of whose property, if, by the application of articles 4 and 6 we have abolished private property? Where there is no property, there can be no theft, except against the whole of the people, which, in toto, is deprived of my additional increment. So the question remains whose property we have misappropriated through our hypothetical sloth? It must be the property of the state, whose law it is that work is obligatory, and who is the juridical embodiment of the people as a whole. Thus the conclusion that Babeuvism establishes a state monopoly of labor, and the state is the inheritor of the value of that labor, on behalf of the abstraction referred to as the “people” who are, in fact, imbued with the transcendent authority and totalism of nature. Man as determinative of nature, and, in fact, nature itself, is the central theme of secular Humanism. It rejects nature qua nature, with its law wrought in sinew. This is made more clear in the Manifesto of Equals. Article 18 of the Act of Insurrection, promulgated by the Insurrection Committee of Public Safety reads:
“Public and Private Property is placed in the custody of the people.”
The custody of the people is of course political argot for the custody of political commisariats. We recognize brute force when presented with it. No idealistic plebiscite is intended here. Political utility governs. Article 19 gives the formula:
“Then duty of terminating the Revolution and of bestowing on the Republic liberty, equality, and the Constitution of 1793 will be confided to a national assembly, composed of a democrat for each department, appointed by the insergent people [Ed. who can “the people” be insugent against?] upon the nomination of the insurrection committee.”
In the present instance, it is proposed that a political committee will present nominees to the people, it is presumed, as “the people” are incompetent to locate and present their own nominees. As nearly as can be determined, the functional definition of a “people” capable of insurgency against itself (since there can be no one who escapes inclusion), is precisely those who support the Revolution. Those who do not support it are, de jure, not “the people” but non-human obstacles to be swept aside. Setting aside the rather puerile matter of the impossibility of complete coincidence in political and social opinion among the insurgent people, we come to the practicality of the effective composition of the people for political purposes, and find that it consists in none other than an elite cadres of provocateurs who presume to speak for all, and to dispose of the spoils of revolution.
Thus the managerial class that directs the operation of revolutionary activity becomes the elite which, by definition, cannot exist in a “democracy.” One point remains to be made in this connection concerning the constitution of the nation when it has been denatured by the importation of alien elements and the disregard for its territorial integrity. These twin-assualts on nationality per se, are effected by none other than the modern form of the same managerial elites we have just seen are presumed by Babeuvism, and in fact, by the state collectivism nessistated by the conditions of modernity itself. And just as with this former colectivism, so today the citizen of the denatured nation is a chattel of the state, for the individual cannot have property in himself. It is by this same inhuman logic that today we see the frequent calls for mandatory “national service” proceding from the political warrens of both the titular right and the left. The “public” to whom this duty is owed, is none other than the managerial class who are the incarnation of “the people.”
