Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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Tolstoy not only called for the communal ownership of land but wished to overcome the division of labour, especially between manual and mental work. He made an impassioned plea for all to share in the manual labour of the world. Like Proudhon, he extolled the virtue and dignity of labour and called for a more simple life close to nature. He was confident that there would be enough land for all if it was fairly distributed.
Since it was a lack of land and the burden of taxes that drove men to work in the towns, Tolstoy recommended Henry George’s Single Tax System to free land from its present owners and to allow the peasants to cultivate as much acreage as their needs would require. In the long run, he looked to a complete abolition of taxes and landed property. His ultimate ideal however was not some mythic Arcadia in the past. He recognized that
under existing conditions nearly all agricultural labourers as well as factory workers were slaves. Nor was he opposed to technology as such and looked, like Kropotkin, to technical improvements which would give us ‘control over nature’ without destroying human life.
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In order to bring about a free and just society, Tolstoy completely repudiated the use of physical force. He clearly understood that it is impossible to use violent means to bring about peaceful ends, to wield power to abolish power: ‘All revolutionary attempts only furnish new justification for the violence of Governments, and increase their power.’
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Even if a change in the existing order were to be brought about by violent means, nothing could guarantee that the enemies of the new order would not try and overthrow it by use of the same violence. The new order would therefore have to maintain itself by violence and very quickly be corrupted like the old order.
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Again, Tolstoy rightly pointed out that political assassinations only strengthen the State and provide an excuse for its further repression of the people. To murder people is hardly a proper way of improving the condition of the people, and the killing of kings and presidents is as useful as cutting one of the Hydra’s heads.
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In a notebook, Tolstoy asked: ‘Is there not a difference between the killing that a revolutionist does and that which a policeman does?’ He replied bluntly: ‘There is as much difference as between cat-shit and dog-shit. But I don’t like the smell of either one or the other.’
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Only by the ending of force, and the slavery which results from force, can an enlightened society be created.
In this, Tolstoy was one of the most consistent and far-sighted of anarchists. He saw public opinion not violence as the most valuable and effective instrument to eradicate government, although he overlooked its tyrannical potential to make people conform. In his writings, he continually appealed to the rational and the moral person. For him reason and love are not separate but two aspects of the same moral activity: ‘Righteousness will be produced by reasonable love, verified by truth; and truth only by loving reason, having as its aim righteousness.’
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Tolstoy insisted that government is founded on opinion, so that ‘Public opinion produces the power, and the power produces the public opinion.’
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The solution is therefore to change public opinion through discussion and persuasion, by pointing out that all governments are harmful and obsolete. The essential thing for people to see is that strength lies not in force but in truth. Indeed, all the terrible organization of brute force is as nothing compared ‘to the consciousness of truth, which surges in the soul of one man who knows the power of truth, which is communicated from him to a
second and a third, as one candle lights an innumerable quantity of others’.
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Like Godwin before him, and Gandhi after him, Tolstoy had an unswerving confidence in the omnipotence of truth.
For Tolstoy there can be only ‘one permanent revolution — a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man’.
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Since only a person living in accordance with his conscience can have a good influence on others, he urged that one try and achieve inner self-perfection. To the working people, he recommended what he called the law of reciprocity: ‘for your true welfare you should live only according to the law of God, a brotherly life, doing unto others that which you wish others to do unto you.’
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But while Tolstoy was against resisting evil by physical force, he was no quietist. Impressed by Thoreau’s example of refusing to pay a tax as a protest against slavery, he recommended civil disobedience to help dismantle evil institutions and practices. In order to abolish governments, he encouraged people to refuse to participate in them, to fight on their behalf, to pay taxes, to appeal to governmental violence for protection of their property or persons. Since to take part in elections, courts of law, or in the administration of government is the same thing as participation in the violence of government, he urged that they should be eschewed at all times.
Again, to get rid of landed property, Tolstoy suggested that the workers should simply abstain from participation in landed property: ‘You should not support the iniquity of landed property, either by violence enacted by the troops, or by working on the lands of the landlords, or renting them.’
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As for the upper classes, they can alleviate the suffering of the workers by not making people work for them, by doing themselves as far as possible all work that is tedious and unpleasant, and by inventing technological processes to diminish disagreeable work. He also encouraged co-operative activity and experiments: ‘the founding of co-operatives and participation in them,’ he wrote, ‘is the only social activity which a moral, self-respecting person who doesn’t wish to be a party to violence can take part in our time.’
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Convinced of the power of truth, Tolstoy wrote a long letter to the Tsar on the evils of autocracy and coercion and urged him to abolish the private ownership of land. In a letter to the Prime Minister he further advocated Henry George’s single tax system on land and the abolition of private property. Not surprisingly, they declined the advice. Given his brilliant analysis of the corruption of power and the violence of government, Tolstoy should not have expected anything else.
At the time, the Tsar and the court were deeply disturbed by the unrest his works were causing throughout Russia. The spiritual censor K. P. Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod, added to a report about a Tolstoyan to the Tsar:
It is impossible to conceal from oneself that in the last few years the intellectual stimulation under the influence of the works of Count Tolstoy has greatly strengthened and threatens to spread strange, perverted notions about faith, the Church, government, and society. The direction is entirely negative, alien, not only to the Church, but to the national spirit. A kind of insanity has taken possession of people’s minds.
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Before Alexander III died in 1894, one of the last acts of his government was to ban Russian journalists from saying anything about Tolstoy’s life and works in the foreign press.
In his old age, Tolstoy increasingly stressed the religious basis of his moral and political convictions. He liked to claim that he was not for the government nor for the revolutionaries, but for the people. He did not tire from reiterating that the only radical method capable of eliminating violence and oppressions is a revival of the religious consciousness of the people. While he wrote in a notebook in September 1905 ‘Socialism is unconscious Christianity’, he later wrote in his diary: ‘Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The strongest and more intelligent will always make use of the weaker and more stupid. Justice and equality in the good things of life will never be achieved by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by negating oneself and recognizing the meaning of one’s life in service to others.’
He had a prophetic awareness of the implications of the Marxist road to power: ‘Even if that should happen which Marx predicted, then the only thing that will happen is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capitalists are ruling, but then the directors of the working class will rule.’ Marxists go wrong, Tolstoy claimed, in seeing economics at the root of all things, whereas humanity develops through growth in consciousness. Tolstoy argued that Marx was therefore mistaken ‘in the supposition that capital will pass from the hands of private people into the hands of the government, and from the government, representing the people, into the hands of the workers’.
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The failure of the 1905 Revolution in Russia only confirmed Tolstoy’s views. He wrote to a correspondent: ‘I rejoice for the revolution, but grieve for those who, imagining that they are making it, are destroying it. The violence of the old regime will only be destroyed by non-participation in violence, and not at all by the new and foolish acts of violence which are now being committed.’ He considered what was being done by all the ‘comic parties and committees’ to be neither important nor good: ‘unless the people, the real people, the hundred million peasants who work on the land, by their passive non-participation in violence make all this frivolous, noisy, irritable and touchy crowd harmless and unnecessary, we shall certainly
arrive at a military dictatorship.’
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In an article
On the Social Movement in Russia
(1905), he further rejected the liberal idea that a good society could be brought about by substituting constitutional government for autocracy, and went out of his way to demonstrate the lack of freedom in parliamentary regimes in the West.
In his more considered response in
The Significance of the Russian Revolution
(1906), Tolstoy repeated his view that the Russian people should stay on the land, and avoid the industrial civilization of the West. The only effective way to bring an end to coercive government is the practice of non-resistant love. The ideal cannot be realized by any organized movement but by each individual’s moral self-improvement. Not surprisingly, Lenin, while praising his criticism of capitalist exploitation and governmental violence, saw in Tolstoy’s advocacy of religion ‘one of the most corrupt things existing in the world’. The Tolstoyan non-resistance to evil, he declared, was ‘the most serious cause of the defeat of the first revolutionary movement’.
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Another admirer, Bernard Shaw, also had his doubts about certain aspects of Tolstoy’s social and moral philosophy. He included him in a list of five men who are building up ‘the intellectual consciousness of the race’, but wrote that even if we embrace Tolstoyism, we cannot live for ever afterwards on one another’s charity: ‘We may simplify our lives and become vegetarians; but even the minimum of material life will involve the industrial problems of its production and its distribution, and will defy Anarchism … Anarchism in industry, as far as it is practicable, produces exactly the civilization that we have today, and … the first thing a Tolstoyan community would have to do would be to get rid of it.’
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As a Fabian socialist, reneging on the anarchist sympathies of his youth, Shaw equated ‘anarchism in industry’ with the
laissez-faire
economics advocated by Benjamin Tucker (whose journal
Liberty
Shaw contributed to) rather than with the communism of Kropotkin which sought to abolish the wage-system.
In his old age, Tolstoy had increasing troubles at home with his wife and family, who found his righteousness irritating and his preaching insufferable. In public, he was as vigorous as ever in the cause of justice and peace. After reading in 1908 of the execution of twenty peasants for an attack on a landowner’s home, he wrote his famous article
I Cannot Be Silent
against capital punishment. He accepted that revolutionary crimes are terrible, but they do not compare with the criminality and stupidity of the government’s legalized violence. Since the government claimed that the executions were done for the general welfare of the Russian people, he felt as one of the people he was an unconscious participant in the crime. To free himself from this intolerable position, he wrote:
either these inhuman deeds may be stopped, or that my connection with them may be snapped and I put in prison, where I may be clearly conscious that these horrors are not committed on my behalf; or still better (so good that I dare not dream of such happiness) that they may put on me, as on those twelve or twenty peasants, a shroud and a cap and may push me also off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighten the well-soaped noose around my old throat.
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Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy’s Christian and pacifist version of anarchism won many followers and Yasnaya Polyana became a place of pilgrimage. He lent his support to many causes, including the emigration to Canada of the oppressed Dukhobors who shared his belief that one must not obey man rather than God. He was always ready to offer his advice to social reformers. Just before he died, Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi, who had been overwhelmed by a reading of
The Kingdom of God is Within You
, that ‘love, i.e. the striving of human souls towards unity and the activity resulting from such striving, is the highest law and only law of human life.’ Since it is incompatible with violence, he concluded that ‘all our taxes collected by force, our judicial and police institutions and above all our armies must be abolished’.
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Whatever his failings, Tolstoy made a supreme effort to practise what he preached. His grand ideal of chastity was repeatedly defeated in his own bed; the wildness of his passions held sway over the calmness of his reason. But in the fields he did his share of manual labour like a pious
muzhik.
He dressed simply, refused to be served by servants, and took up boot repairing, living like a peasant on his own estate and adopting a vegetarian diet. He made his fortune over to his wife, and gave away the copyright on his last books. But while his conduct enhanced his international reputation, it only increased his problems with his family, who could not understand his new direction; only his youngest daughter sympathized.