Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Intellectual History, #20th Century, #Philosophy, #v.5, #Political Science, #Amazon.com, #Retail
In place of law, people will regulate their relationships by a combination of custom and free agreements. Such voluntary contracts will be kept without the intervention of authority to enforce them; they are ‘entered by free consent, as a free choice between different courses equally open to each of the agreeing parties’.
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The only incentive to keep them would be common interest. With the eradication of private property and poverty the incentives to crime will be few — three-quarters of crimes are due to the unequal distribution of property, not the perversity of human nature. The few disputes which might arise would easily be settled by arbitrators. And those who do commit anti-social acts will not be punished or rendered worse in prison but treated with kindness and understanding.
When it came to organizing the economy, Kropotkin went beyond Proudhon’s mutualism, and Bakunin’s collectivism, to advocate a form of anarchist communism. It meant politically a society without government, that is anarchy, and economically, the complete negation of the wage system and the ownership of the means of production in common: ‘everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs.’
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Moreover, Kropotkin believed ‘Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy.’
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He felt that anarchist communism was the union of the two fundamental tendencies of his society, a tendency towards economic equality and a tendency towards political liberty.
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As he points out in the
The Conquest of Bread
, Kropotkin felt that economic communism is the only fair solution since wealth results from collective effort and the means of production are the collective work of humanity:
Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone’s part in the production of the world’s wealth.
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The means of production would be owned not by the State but by associations or communes of producers. They would be organized on a voluntary basis and connected federally. Each person would do whatever work he could and receive from the common stock according to his needs without money, exchange or labour notes. Kropotkin makes no distinction between qualified or professional work and simple work like Marx. Without an obligatory division of labour, people would be able to choose their work and use both their mental and manual skills.
Kropotkin further advocates industrial decentralization, regional self-sufficiency, integration of town and country, and more intensive methods of food production. Unlike the Marxist and liberal economists, he argues that the troubles of capitalist economy are not the result of over-production but under-consumption. At the same time, well-being for all is quite possible. He is convinced that five hours a day for 150 days a year would suffice to satisfy the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing, and another 150 days to provide secondary necessities. The aim would be to produce ‘the greatest amount of goods necessary to the well-being of all, with the least possible waste of human energy’.
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Kropotkin is no Stoic and sees a need for luxury and the satisfaction of sensual pleasure and artistic feeling. ‘After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.’ Leisure would enable people to develop their
whole personality, to cultivate the arts and sciences, and satisfy their varied tastes. In this way ‘Luxury, ceasing to be a foolish and ostentatious display of the bourgeois class, would become an artistic pleasure.’
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All adults would be expected to do some manual labour, and no doubt writers and artists would benefit from the variety of work. While he does not share Tolstoy’s celebration of the dignity of labour, Kropotkin sees no reason why manual labour should not be attractive if it is voluntarily undertaken and performed without strain. Like William Morris, he felt ‘the most important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for all, because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely more than the man who curses his surroundings.’
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But he criticized Morris for his antipathy to machinery, and, like Godwin, welcomed the impending arrival of technology which would reduce drudgery and toil, and allow time for more fulfilling occupations.
The division of labour, which has led to the split between manual and mental workers, and specialization in a narrow field, is one of the most destructive features of capitalism:
The division of labour means labelling and stamping men for life — some to splice ropes in factories, some to be foremen in a business, others to shove huge coal baskets in a particular part of a mine; but none of them to have any idea of machinery as a whole, nor of business, nor of mines. And thereby they destroy the love of work and the capacity for invention.
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Kropotkin would like people to be free to choose their own work and vary it as they wish. He looked to new mechanical devices and communal domestic services to liberate women from household drudgery; if not, ‘half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.’ He was delighted to hear of the invention of the washing machine, for example. Nevertheless, he implies a certain sexual division of labour for he assumes women would be mainly involved in the education and rearing of children, and fails to call on men to share domestic tasks or child care. Equally, a certain racial prejudice would seem to enter the reckoning when he suggests, for example, that the workers of a given French market gardener ‘work like blacks’.
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As for living arrangements, Kropotkin is no advocate of Fourier’s communal phalansteries and suggests that it is up to the people to choose whether they want communal living-quarters or not. Unlike many communists, he recognizes that privacy is essential for many, and ‘isolation, alternating with time spent in society, is the normal desire of human nature.’
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And while every able-bodied adult might find pleasure in performing some manual and mental work each day, after a certain age — say forty or more
— they might be released from the moral obligation of manual labour to devote themselves to whatever activity they choose.
Kropotkin is well aware of the stock objections to his free society and endeavours in
The Conquest of Bread
to answer them. His form of free communism recognizes ‘the absolute liberty of the individual, that does not admit of any authority, and makes use of no compulsion to drive men to work’.
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It is a society based on voluntary work, on moral rather than material incentives. But if subsistence is guaranteed and there is no need to earn wages, why should anyone work? Kropotkin points out that compulsion — whether in the form of slavery, serfdom or wagedom — has never made anyone work well; on the contrary, it is ‘Well-being — that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic and moral needs, [which] has always been the most powerful stimulant to work’.
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Voluntary work has always been more productive than work stimulated by wages. The incentive to work would not be the threat of want or the rod but the conscious satisfaction of the work itself and a sense of contributing to the general happiness. If work is made agreeable and meaningful, fulfilling human nature and not degrading it, there is no reason why it should be avoided like the plague or appear the curse of fate. Manual work is despised now simply because of the bad conditions and low status it has. There is no intrinsic reason why it should not be enjoyable; sports, after all, could be seen as a disguised form of manual labour. Kropoktin thus sought to humanize work and to make it ‘the free exercise of
all
the faculties of man’.
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While rejecting all forms of economic or physical coercion, Kropotkin suggests that social disapproval and ostracism could be used to influence the loafer or sluggard. He might be looked upon as ‘a ghost of bourgeois society’ and even asked to leave the federation and look elsewhere in the wide world. If people did not keep their engagements they would earn the disapproval of the community. Like Godwin, Kropotkin recommends the use of public opinion to change the conduct of ‘anti-social’ individuals, but it is difficult not to see in this a potentially oppressive form of moral coercion. He also insists that all ‘will have to work with their hands’ as ‘their duty towards society’ whether they like it or not.
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And on the morrow of the revolution if monopolizers cannot be checked by the boycott or other forms of social pressure, then Kropotkin countenances the use of violence against them.
Kropotkin is on firmer ground however when he suggests most idleness is due to lack of proper training or some form of mental or physical sickness and would be very rare in a free society. As he says elsewhere, work is a habit and a physiological necessity while idleness is ‘an artificial growth’.
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Only overwork is repulsive to human nature.
In order to make work attractive and satisfy the needs of all, Kropotkin advocated a fundamental reorganization of production. To end economic imperialism, he argued that each country should become as self-sufficient as possible. No country would then be dependent on another, and in a revolutionary situation starved into submission. In place of the concentration of large factories in cities, he called for economic as well as political decentralization, believing that ‘diversity is the surest pledge of the complete development of production by mutual cooperation.’
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He therefore favoured the scattering of industry throughout the country and the integration of industry and agriculture at the local level so that there would be industrial villages and small industries. Energy in the form of electricity made this increasingly possible. His ideal is:
A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and in the industrial workshop; where every aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources — it may be a nation, or rather a region — produces and itself consumes most of its agricultural and manufactured produce.
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Agriculture moreover could be made much more intensive and productive by the aid of science and technical inventions, and it would be quite possible for a family of five to be required to do less than a fortnight’s work each year in order to grow its annual staple food. It would be quite possible for Britain, for example, to become self-sufficient in food production, and regional self-sufficiency is entirely desirable for providing fresh produce. By decentralizing industry, and combining industrial with agricultural work, it would not only give people more choice in their work but give them greater control of production and distribution. There is also a sense of unity and solidarity which comes from working the land in common. Where necessary, federal bodies would be able to co-ordinate economic life. In his
Fields, Factories, and Workshops
(1899), he gathered a wealth of data to show how this could be possible and concluded:
Have the factory and the workshop at the gates of your fields and your gardens, and work in them. Not those large establishments, of course, in which huge masses of metals have to be dealt with and which are better placed at certain spots indicated by Nature, but the countless variety of workshops and factories which are required to satisfy the infinite diversity of tastes among civilized men … factories and workshops into which men, women and children will not be driven by hunger, but will be attracted by the desire of finding an activity suited
to their tastes, and where, aided by the motor and the machine, they will choose the branch of activity which best suits their inclinations.
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Above all, such an arrangement would encourage integrated education, combining mental and manual work. The aim would be to produce ‘the
complete
human being, trained to use his brain and his hands’, especially as an initiator and an inventor in both science and technics. The principle should be ‘Through the eyes
and
the hand to the brain.’
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Learning would be best achieved by doing, since children prefer real work to abstract theory. The chief aim of education is not to make a specialist from a beginner, but
to teach him the elements of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give him that general inspiration which will induce him, later on, to put in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is beautiful, both as to form and contents, to feel the necessity of being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his heart at unison with the rest of humanity.
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Like Ruskin and Morris, he argues that art, in order to develop, must be bound up with industry by a thousand intermediate degrees.
Kropotkin sees overpopulation as no threat to his free society. His reply to Malthus is to argue that the stock of potential energy in nature is ‘little short of infinite’ in comparison with the present population of the globe. He also infers from the laws of evolution that the available means of subsistence grow at a rate ‘which increases itself in proportion as population becomes denser — unless it be artificially (and temporarily) checked by some defects of social organisation’.
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Improved methods of cultivation can increase food supply so that we have no need to fear overpopulation in the future. This century would seem to have confirmed Kropotkin’s analysis. It is precisely in the most densely populated areas that agriculture has increased productivity, and population has eased most in those countries where a high standard of living prevails.