Alcoholism and Other Incidental Causes

The syndicalist authors acknowledged that overwork and meager wages were not the only causes of tuberculosis. They insisted, however, that all of the other significant causes could be traced, directly or indirectly, to economic exploitation. As far as alcoholism was concerned, Dubéros simply turned the mainstream’s moral etiology on its head. Alcoholic excesses could indeed contribute to tuberculosis by depressing the constitutional ability to fight off infection. But the reasons for consumption of alcohol—and therefore one of the causes of tuberculosis—differed, Dubéros maintained, between the working class and the class of “exploiters” and “parasites.”

As much as anyone, we deplore the ravages caused by alcoholism in the working class. But if members of the bourgeoisie drink alcohol in excess by habit or vice, they force workers, by the long and hard labor they impose on them, to do the same in order to obtain the temporary strength which will enable them just to hold out and accomplish their work.^[43]

In the case of the overworked proletariat, drink was a desperate and understandable attempt at a fleeting illusion of strength regained; in the case of the idle bourgeoisie, there was no reason for it other than moral weakness. This theme was characteristic of syndicalist propaganda on working-class alcoholism; it ran through much of the movement’s literature on tuberculosis as well, a corollary to the main axiom linking overwork to disease.

Pierrot also recognized that workplace issues such as wages and hours were not the only factors contributing to the prevalence of tuberculosis among workers. He devoted two installments in his series to the role of working-class housing and one each to alcoholism and child-rearing conditions. Yet each of these factors could ultimately be traced back to poverty; work and wages, too much of one and not enough of the other, conditioned all aspects of working-class life. For example, Pierrot saw alcohol consumption as an important cause of diminished resistance. Excessive and habitual drinking resulted in the “rapid usury [of the organism] with weakening and degeneration.” If one investigated the origins and circumstances of alcoholism in France, he asserted, one would always find a social context that included either severe job-related fatigue, poor diets, or exposure to extremes of heat, cold, or humidity. In these contexts, alcohol reliably produced the necessary short-term “coup de fouet” needed to revive flagging spirits and energy. “In sum,” Pierrot concluded, “it is the excess of labor that renders alcohol indispensable, so to speak, to the worker.”^[44]

Closely related to the question of alcoholism, according to the syndicalists, was that of nutrition. In Misère et mortalité, the ESRI bemoaned the deficiency of working-class diets in both quantity and quality. Low wages forced families to skimp constantly just to put something on the table.

[The worker’s] wages are not enough, in a large city, for him to afford the luxury of consuming all the substances necessary for his survival. He is often forced to play tricks with hunger, to eat soups with little nutritional value, to drink large quantities of coffee.…, to eat bread scraped with a bit of butter, etc.

Moreover, many of the foods a poor family could afford contained harmful preservatives, fillers, and other adulterating substances. Cheap wines and spirits were made with highly toxic fortifying and coloring agents. Under such circumstances, malnutrition could even rival overwork as a determinant cause of tuberculosis.^[45]