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Title: The Impossibilities of Anarchism
Author: George Bernard Shaw
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Language: English
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Fabian Tract No. 45.
THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF
ANARCHISM.
BY
BERNARD SHAW
PUBLISHED BY
THE FABIAN SOCIETY
PRICE TWOPENCE
LONDON
TO BE OBTAINED OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 276 STRAND, W.C.
REPRINTED NOVEMBER 1895
THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF ANARCHISM.[1]
Anarchists and Socialists.
Some years ago, as the practical policy of the Socialist party in
England began to shape itself more and more definitely into the
program of Social-Democracy, it became apparent that we could not
progress without the gravest violations of principles of all sorts.
In particular, the democratic side of the program was found to
be incompatible with the sacred principle of the Autonomy of the
Individual. It also involved a recognition of the State, an institution
altogether repugnant to the principle of Freedom. Worse than that,
it involved compromise at every step; and principles, as Mr. John
Morley once eloquently showed, must not be compromised. The result
was that many of us fell to quarrelling; refused to associate with
one another; denounced each other as trimmers or Impossibilists,
according to our side in the controversy; and finally succeeded in
creating a considerable stock of ill-feeling. My own side in the
controversy was the unprincipled one, as Socialism to me has always
meant, not a principle, but certain definite economic measures
which I wish to see taken. Indeed, I have often been reproached for
limiting the term Socialism too much to the economic side of the great
movement towards equality. That movement, however, appears to me to
be as much an Individualist as a Socialist one; and though there are
Socialists, like Sir William Harcourt, to whom Socialism means the
sum total of humanitarian aspiration, in which the transfer of some
millions of acres of property from private to public ownership must
seem but an inessential and even undesirable detail, this sublimer
shade of Socialism suffers from such a lack of concentration upon
definite measures, that, but for the honor and glory of the thing,
its professors might as well call themselves Conservatives. Now what
with Socialists of this sort, and persons who found that the practical
remedy for white slavery was incompatible with the principle of
Liberty, and the practical remedy for despotism incompatible with
the principle of Democracy, and the practical conduct of politics
incompatible with the principle of Personal Integrity (in the sense
of having your own way in everything), the practical men were at last
driven into frank Opportunism. When, for instance, they found national
and local organization of the working classes opposed by Socialists on
the ground that Socialism is universal and international in principle;
when they found their Radical and Trade Unionist allies ostracized
by Socialists for being outside the pale of the Socialist faith one
and indivisible; when they saw agricultural laborers alienated by
undiscriminating denunciations of allotments as "individualistic";
then they felt the full force of the saying that Socialism would
spread fast enough if it were not for the Socialists. It was bad
enough to have to contend with the conservative forces of the modern
unsocialist State without also having to fight the seven deadly
virtues in possession of the Socialists themselves. The conflict
between ideal Socialism and practical Social-Democracy destroyed
the Chartist organization half a century ago, as it destroyed the
Socialist League only the other day. But it has never gone so far as
the conflict between Social-Democracy and Anarchism. For the Anarchists
will recommend abstention from voting and refusal to pay taxes in
cases where the Social-Democrats are strenuously urging the workers
to organize their votes so as to return candidates pledged to contend
for extensions of the franchise and for taxation of unearned incomes,
the object of such taxation being the raising of State capital for all
sorts of collective purposes, from the opening of public libraries to
the municipalization and nationalization of our industries. In fact,
the denunciation of Social-Democratic methods by Anarchists is just
as much a matter of course as the denunciation of Social-Democratic
aims by Conservatives. It is possible that some of the strangers
present may be surprised to hear this, since no distinction is made
in the newspapers which support the existing social order between
Social-Democrats and Anarchists, both being alike hostile to that
order. In the columns of such papers all revolutionists are Socialists;
all Socialists are Anarchists; and all Anarchists are incendiaries,
assassins and thieves. One result of this is that the imaginative
French or Italian criminal who reads the papers, sometimes declares,
when taken red-handed in the commission of murder or burglary, that
he is an Anarchist acting on principle. And in all countries the more
violent and reckless temperaments among the discontented are attracted
by the name Anarchist merely because it suggests desperate, thorough,
uncompromising, implacable war on existing injustices. It is therefore
necessary to warn you that there are some persons abusively called
Anarchists by their political opponents, and others ignorantly so
described by themselves, who are nevertheless not Anarchists at all
within the meaning of this paper. On the other hand, many persons
who are never called Anarchists either by themselves or others,
take Anarchist ground in their opposition to Social-Democracy just
as clearly as the writers with whom I shall more particularly deal.
The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the
"Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type,
Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon
Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr.
Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist
than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of
the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and
to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to
the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw
upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby
making it the most vital organ in the social body. Obviously there
are natural limits to the application of both views; and Anarchists
and Social-Democrats are alike subject to the fool's argument that
since neither collective provision for the individual nor individual
freedom from collective control can be made complete, neither party
is thoroughly consistent. No dialectic of that kind will, I hope, be
found in the following criticism of Anarchism. It is confined to the
practical measures proposed by Anarchists, and raises no discussion
as to aims or principles. As to these we are all agreed. Justice,
Virtue, Truth, Brotherhood, the highest interests of the people, moral
as well as physical: these are dear not only to Social-Democrats and
Anarchists, but also to Tories, Whigs, Radicals, and probably also to
Moonlighters and Dynamitards. It is with the methods by which it is
proposed to give active effect to them that I am concerned here; and
to that point I shall now address myself by reading you a paper which
I wrote more than four years ago on the subject chosen for to-night.
I may add that it has not been revived from a wanton desire to renew
an old dispute, but in response to a demand from the provincial Fabian
Societies, bewildered as they are by the unexpected opposition of
the Anarchists, from whom they had rather expected some sympathy.
This old paper of mine being the only document of the kind available,
my colleagues have requested me to expunge such errors and follies
as I have grown out of since 1888, and to take this opportunity of
submitting it to the judgment of the Society. Which I shall now do
without further preamble.
Individualist Anarchism.
The full economic detail of Individualist Anarchism may be inferred
with sufficient completeness from an article entitled "State Socialism
and Anarchism: how far they agree, and wherein they differ," which
appeared in March, 1888, in _Liberty_, an Anarchist journal published
in Boston, Mass., and edited by the author of the article, Mr. Benjamin
R. Tucker. An examination of any number of this journal will shew that
as a candid, clear-headed, and courageous demonstrator of Individualist
Anarchism by purely intellectual methods, Mr. Tucker may safely be
accepted as one of the most capable spokesmen of his party.
"The economic principles of Modern Socialism," says Mr. Tucker, "are
a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the
early chapters of his _Wealth of Nations_--namely, that labor is the
true measure of price. From this principle, these three men [Josiah
Warren, Proudhon and Marx] deduced 'that the natural wage of labor is
its product.'"
Now the Socialist who is unwary enough to accept this economic
position will presently find himself logically committed to the Whig
doctrine of _laissez-faire_. And here Mr. Tucker will cry, "Why not?
_Laissez-faire_ is exactly what we want. Destroy the money monopoly,
the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly. Enforce then only those
land titles which rest on personal occupancy or cultivation;[2]
and the social problem of how to secure to each worker the product
of his own labor will be solved simply by everyone minding his own
business."[3]
Let us see whether it will or not. Suppose we decree that henceforth no
more rent shall be paid in England, and that each man shall privately
own his house, and hold his shop, factory, or place of business
jointly with those who work with him in it. Let everyone be free to
issue money from his own mint without tax or stamp. Let all taxes on
commodities be abolished, and patents and copyrights be things of the
past. Try to imagine yourself under these promising conditions with
life before you. You may start in business as a crossing sweeper,
shopkeeper, collier, farmer, miller, banker, or what not. Whatever
your choice may be, the first thing you find is that the reward of
your labor depends far more on the situation in which you exercise it
than on yourself. If you sweep the crossing between St. James's and
Albemarle Streets you prosper greatly. But if you are forestalled not
only there, but at every point more central than, say, the corner of
Holford Square, Islington, you may sweep twice as hard as your rival in
Piccadilly, and not take a fifth of his toll. At such a pass you may
well curse Adam Smith and his principle that labor is the measure of
price, and either advocate a democratically constituted State Socialist
municipality, paying all its crossing sweepers equally, or else cast
your broom upon the Thames and turn shopkeeper. Yet here again the same
difficulty crops up. Your takings depend, not on yourself, but on the
number of people who pass your window per hour. At Charing Cross or
Cheapside fortunes are to be made: in the main street at Putney one
can do enough to hold up one's head: further out, a thousand yards
right or left of the Portsmouth Road, the most industrious man in the
world may go whistle for a customer. Evidently retail shopkeeping is
not the thing for a man of spirit after Charing Cross and Cheapside
have been appropriated by occupying owners on the principle of first
come first served. You must aspire then to wholesale dealing--nay, to
banking. Alas! the difficulty is intensified beyond calculation. Take
that financial trinity, Glyn, Mills and Currie; transplant them only
a few miles from Lombard Street; and they will soon be objects of
pity to the traditional sailor who once presented at their counter a
cheque for £25 and generously offered to take it in instalments, as he
did not wish to be too hard on them all at once. Turning your back on
banking, you meddle in the wheat trade, and end by offering to exchange
an occupying ownership of all Salisbury Plain for permission to pay a
rack rent for premises within hail of "The Baltic" and its barometer.
Probably there are some people who have a blind belief that crossing
sweepers, "The Baltic," Lombard Street, and the like, are too utterly
of the essence of the present system to survive the introduction of
Anarchism. They will tell me that I am reading the conditions of the
present into the future. Against such instinctive convictions it is
vain to protest that I am reading only Mr. Tucker's conditions. But at
least there will be farming, milling, and mining, conducted by human
agents, under Anarchism. Now the farmer will not find in his perfect
Anarchist market two prices at one time for two bushels of wheat of the
same quality; yet the labor cost of each bushel will vary considerably
according to the fertility of the farm on which it was raised, and the
proximity of that farm to the market. A good soil will often yield
the strongest and richest grain to less labor per acre or per bushel
than must be spent on land that returns a crop less valuable by five
shillings a quarter. When all the best land is held by occupying
owners, those who have to content themselves with poorer soils will
hail the principle that labor is the measure of price with the thumb
to the nose. Among the millers, too, there must needs be grievous
mistrust of Proudhon and Josiah Warren. For of two men with equally
good heart to work and machinery to work with, one may be on a stream
that will easily turn six millstones; whilst the other, by natural
default of water, or being cut off by his fellow higher up stream, may
barely be able to keep two pairs of stones in gear, and may in a dry
season be ready to tie these two about his neck and lie down under the
scum of his pond. Certainly, he can defy drought by setting to work
with a steam engine, steel rollers, and all the latest contrivances
for squashing wheat into dust instead of grinding it into flour; yet,
after all his outlay, he will not be able to get a penny a sack more
for his stuff than his competitor, to whose water-wheel Nature is
gratuitously putting her shoulder. "Competition everywhere and always"
of his unaided strength against that of his rival he might endure; but
to fight naked against one armed with the winds and waves (for there
are windmills as well as watermills) is no sound justice, though it
be sound Anarchism. And how would occupying ownership of mines work,
when it is an easier matter to get prime Wallsend and Silkstone out
of one mine than to get slates and steam fuel out of another, even
after twenty years' preliminary shaft-sinking? Would Mr. Tucker, if
he had on sale from a rich mine some Silkstone that had only cost
half as much labor as steam coal from a relatively poor one, boldly
announce:--"Prices this day: Prime Silkstone, per ton, 25s.; best steam
ditto, 50s. Terms, cash. Principles, those of Adam Smith--see 'Wealth
of Nations' _passim_"? Certainly not with "competition everywhere
and always," unless custom was no object to him in comparison with
principle.
It is useless to multiply instances. There is only one country in
which any square foot of land is as favorably situated for conducting
exchanges, or as richly endowed by nature for production, as any other
square foot; and the name of that country is Utopia. In Utopia alone,
therefore, would occupying ownership be just. In England, America
and other places, rashly created without consulting the Anarchists,
Nature is all caprice and injustice in dealing with Labor. Here you
scratch her with a spade; and earth's increase and foison plenty are
added to you. On the other side of the hedge twenty steam-diggers will
not extort a turnip from her. Still less adapted to Anarchism than
the fields and mines is the crowded city. The distributor flourishes
where men love to congregate: his work is to bring commodities to
men; but here the men bring themselves to the commodities. Remove
your distributor a mile, and his carts and travellers must scour the
country for customers. None know this better than the landlords. Up
High Street, down Low Street, over the bridge and into Crow Street, the
toilers may sweat equally for equal wages; but their product varies;
and the ground rents vary with the product. Competition levels down
the share kept by the worker as it levels up the hours of his labor;
and the surplus, high or low according to the fertility of the soil or
convenience of the site, goes as high rent or low rent, but always in
the long run rack rent, to the owner of the land.
Now Mr. Tucker's remedy for this is to make the occupier--the actual
worker--the owner. Obviously the effect would be, not to abolish his
advantage over his less favorably circumstanced competitors, but simply
to authorize him to put it into his own pocket instead of handing it
over to a landlord. He would then, it is true, be (as far as his place
of business was concerned) a worker instead of an idler; but he would
get more product as a manufacturer and more custom as a distributor
than other equally industrious workers in worse situations. He could
thus save faster than they, and retire from active service at an age
when they would still have many years more work before them. His
ownership of his place of business would of course lapse in favor
of his successor the instant he retired. How would the rest of the
community decide who was to be the successor--would they toss up for
it, or fight for it, or would he be allowed to nominate his heir, in
which case he would either nominate his son or sell his nomination for
a large fine? Again, his retirement from his place of business would
leave him still in possession, as occupying owner, of his private
residence; and this might be of exceptional or even unique desirability
in point of situation. It might, for instance, be built on Richmond
Hill, and command from its windows the beautiful view of the Thames
valley to be obtained from that spot. Now it is clear that Richmond
Hill will not accommodate all the people who would rather live there
than in the Essex marshes. It is easy to say, Let the occupier be the
owner; but the question is, Who is to be the occupier? Suppose it were
settled by drawing lots, what would prevent the winner from selling
his privilege for its full (unearned) value under free exchange and
omnipresent competition? To such problems as these, Individualist
Anarchism offers no solution. It theorizes throughout on the assumption
that one place in a country is as good as another.
Under a system of occupying ownership, rent would appear only in its
primary form of an excess of the prices of articles over the expenses
of producing them, thus enabling owners of superior land to get more
for their products than cost price. If, for example, the worst land
worth using were only one-third as productive as the best land, then
the owner-occupiers of that best land would get in the market the
labor cost of their wares three times over. This 200 per cent premium
would be just as truly ground rent as if it were paid openly as such
to the Duke of Bedford or the Astors. It may be asked why prices must
go up to the expenses of production on the very worst land. Why not
ascertain and charge the average cost of production taking good and bad
land together?[4] Simply because nothing short of the maximum labor
cost would repay the owners of the worst land. In fact, the worst
land would not be cultivated until the price had risen. The process
would be as follows. Suppose the need of the population for wheat
were satisfied by crops raised from the best available land only.
Free competition in wheat-producing would then bring the price down
to the labor cost or expenses of production. Now suppose an increase
of population sufficient to overtax the wheat-supplying capacity of
the best land. The supply falling short of the demand, the price of
wheat would rise. When it had risen to the labor cost of production
from land one degree inferior to the best, it would be worth while to
cultivate that inferior land. When that new source came to be overtaxed
by the still growing population, the price would rise again until it
would repay the cost of raising wheat from land yet lower in fertility
than the second grade. But these descents would in nowise diminish
the fertility of the best land, from which wheat could be raised as
cheaply as before, in spite of the rise in the price, which would apply
to all the wheat in the market, no matter where raised. That is, the
holders of the best land would gain a premium, rising steadily with the
increase of population, exactly as the landlord now enjoys a steadily
rising rent.[5] As the agricultural industry is in this respect
typical of all industries, it will be seen now that the price does not
rise because worse land is brought into cultivation, but that worse
land is brought into cultivation by the rise of price. Or, to put it
in another way, the price of the commodity does not rise because more
labor has been devoted to its production, but more labor is devoted
to its production because the price has risen. Commodities, in fact,
have a price before they are produced; we produce them expressly to
obtain that price; and we cannot alter it by merely spending more
or less labor on them. It is natural for the laborer to insist that
labor _ought to be_ the measure of price, and that the _just_ wage of
labor is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn
in economics is that labor is not and never can be the measure of
price under a competitive system. Not until the progress of Socialism
replaces competitive production and distribution, with individual greed
for its incentive, by Collectivist production and distribution, with
fair play all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labor
or commodities represent their just value.
Thus we see that "competition everywhere and always" fails to
circumvent rent whilst the land is held by competing occupiers who
are protected in the individual ownership of what they can raise from
their several holdings. And "the great principle laid down by Adam
Smith," formulated by Josiah Warren as "Cost is the proper limit of
price," turns out--since in fact price is the limit of cost--to be
merely a preposterous way of expressing the fact that under Anarchism
that small fraction of the general wealth which was produced under the
least favorable circumstances would at least fetch its cost, whilst all
the rest would fetch a premium which would be nothing but privately
appropriated rent with an Anarchist mask on.
We see also that such a phrase as "the natural wage of labor is its
product" is a misleading one, since labor cannot produce subsistence
except when exercised upon natural materials and aided by natural
forces external to man. And when it is so produced, its value in
exchange depends in nowise on the share taken by labor in its
production, but solely to the demand for it in society. The economic
problem of Socialism is the just distribution of the premium given
to certain portions of the general product by the action of demand.
As Individualist Anarchism not only fails to distribute these, but
deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist
Anarchism is the negation of Socialism, and is, in fact, Unsocialism
carried as near to its logical completeness as any sane man dare carry
it.
Communist Anarchism.
State Socialism and Anarchism, says Mr. Tucker, "are based on two
principles, the history of whose conflict is almost equivalent to the
history of the world since man came into it; and all intermediate
parties, including that of the upholders of the existing society,
are based upon a compromise between them." These principles are
Authority--the State Socialist principle, and Liberty--the Anarchist
principle. State Socialism is then defined as "the doctrine that all
the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless
of individual choice," whereas Anarchism is "the doctrine that all
the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary
associations, and that the State should be abolished."
Now most revolutionists will admit that there was a stage in the
growth of their opinions when the above seemed an adequate statement
of the alternatives before them. But, as we have seen, when the
Individualist Anarchist proceeds to reduce his principle to practice,
he is inevitably led to Mr. Tucker's program of "competition everywhere
and always" among occupying owners, subject only to the moral law of
minding their own business. No sooner is this formulated than its
effect on the distribution of wealth is examined by the economist, who
finds no trouble in convicting it, under the economic law of rent,
of privilege, monopoly, inequality, unjust indirect taxation, and
everything that is most repugnant to Anarchism. But this startling
reverse, however it may put the Anarchist out of conceit with his
program, does not in the least reconcile him to State Socialism. It
only changes his mind on one point. Whilst his program satisfied him,
he was content to admit that State Socialism was the only possible
alternative to Individualist Anarchism--nay, he rather insisted
on it, because the evils of the State Socialist alternative were
strong incentives to the acceptance of the other. But the moment it
becomes apparent that the one is economically as bad as the other,
the disillusioned Individualist Anarchist becomes convinced of the
insufficiency of his analysis of the social problem, and follows it
up in order to find out a _tertium quid_, or third system which shall
collect and justly distribute the rent of the country, and yet prevent
the collecting and distributing organ from acquiring the tyrannous
powers of governments as we know them. There are two such systems at
present before the world: Communism and Social-Democracy. Now there is
no such thing as Anarchist Social-Democracy; but there is such a thing
as Anarchist Communism or Communist Anarchism. It is true that Mr.
Tucker does not recognize the Communist Anarchist as an Anarchist at
all: he energetically repudiates Communism as the uttermost negation
of true Anarchism, and will not admit any logical halting place
between thoroughgoing State Socialism and thoroughgoing Individualist
Anarchism. But why insist on anybody occupying a logical halting place?
We are all fond of shewing that on any given subject there are only
two of these safe spots, one being the point of agreement with us, and
the other some inconceivable extremity of idiocy. But for the purposes
of the present criticism it will be more practical to waive such crude
rationalizing, and concede that to deal with Mr. Tucker without also
dealing with Peter Kropotkine is not to give Anarchism fair play.
The main difficulty in criticising Kropotkine lies in the fact that,
in the distribution of generally needed labor products, his Communism
is finally cheap and expedient, whereas Mr. Tucker's Individualism, in
the same department, is finally extravagant and impossible. Even under
the most perfect Social-Democracy we should, without Communism, still
be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of
grub. High as that ideal must seem to anyone who complacently accepts
the present social order, it is hardly high enough to satisfy a man in
whom the social instinct is well developed. So long as vast quantities
of labor have to be expended in weighing and measuring each man's
earned share of this and that commodity--in watching, spying, policing,
and punishing in order to prevent Tom getting a crumb of bread more or
Dick a spoonful of milk less than he has a voucher for, so long will
the difference between Unsocialism and Socialism be only the difference
between unscientific and scientific hoggishness. I do not desire to
underrate the vastness of that difference. Whilst we are hogs, let
us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead
of--well, instead of the sort we are at present. But we shall not have
any great reason to stand on the dignity of our humanity until a just
distribution of the loaves and fishes becomes perfectly spontaneous,
and the great effort and expense of a legal distribution, however just,
is saved. For my own part, I seek the establishment of a state of
society in which I shall not be bothered with a ridiculous pocketful of
coppers, nor have to waste my time in perplexing arithmetical exchanges
of them with booking clerks, bus conductors, shopmen, and other
superfluous persons before I can get what I need. I aspire to live in a
community which shall be at least capable of averaging the transactions
between us well enough to ascertain how much work I am to do for it in
return for the right to take what I want of the commoner necessaries
and conveniences of life. The saving of friction by such an arrangement
may be guessed from the curious fact that only specialists in sociology
are conscious of the numerous instances in which we are to-day forced
to adopt it by the very absurdity of the alternative. Most people will
tell you that Communism is known only in this country as a visionary
project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll
off across the common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light
of the common gas lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the
common street, and into the common Trafalgar Square, where, on the
smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an
instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the
common policeman, and haled off to the common gaol.[6] When you suggest
to these people that the application of Communism to the bread supply
is only an extension, involving no new principle, of its application
to street lighting, they are bewildered. Instead of picturing the
Communist man going to the common store, and thence taking his bread
home with him, they instinctively imagine him bursting obstreperously
into his neighbor's house and snatching the bread off his table on the
"as much mine as yours" principle--which, however, has an equally sharp
edge for the thief's throat in the form "as much yours as mine." In
fact, the average Englishman is only capable of understanding Communism
when it is explained as a state of things under which everything is
paid for out of the taxes, and taxes are paid in labor. And even then
he will sometimes say, "How about the brainwork?" and begin the usual
novice's criticism of Socialism in general.
Now a Communist Anarchist may demur to such a definition of Communism
as I have just given; for it is evident that if there are to be taxes,
there must be some authority to collect those taxes. I will not insist
on the odious word taxes; but I submit that if any article--bread, for
instance--be communized, by which I mean that there shall be public
stores of bread, sufficient to satisfy everybody, to which all may come
and take what they need without question or payment, wheat must be
grown, mills must grind, and bakers must sweat daily in order to keep
up the supply. Obviously, therefore, the common bread store will become
bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributes to its support
as much labor as the bread he consumes costs to produce. Communism or
no Communism, he must pay or else leave somebody else to pay for him.
Communism will cheapen bread for him--will save him the cost of scales
and weights, coin, book-keepers, counter-hands, policemen, and other
expenses of private property; but it will not do away with the cost
of the bread and the store. Now supposing that voluntary co-operation
and public spirit prove equal to the task of elaborately organizing
the farming, milling and baking industries for the production of
bread, how will these voluntary co-operators recover the cost of their
operations from the public who are to consume their bread? If they
are given powers to collect the cost from the public, and to enforce
their demands by punishing non-payers for their dishonesty, then they
at once become a State department levying a tax for public purposes;
and the Communism of the bread supply becomes no more Anarchistic than
our present Communistic supply of street lighting is Anarchistic.
Unless the taxation is voluntary--unless the bread consumer is free
to refuse payment without incurring any penalty save the reproaches
of his conscience and his neighbors, the Anarchist ideal will remain
unattained. Now the pressure of conscience and public opinion is by
no means to be slighted. Millions of men and women, without any legal
compulsion whatever, pay for the support of institutions of all sorts,
from churches to tall hats, simply out of their need for standing
well with their neighbors. But observe, this compulsion of public
opinion derives most of its force from the difficulty of getting the
wherewithal to buy bread without a reputation for respectability.
Under Communism a man could snap his fingers at public opinion without
starving for it. Besides, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied
upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men
to act morally. Its operation is for all practical purposes quite
arbitrary, and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile
to the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships
Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going to
church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his pretending
to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe; and it enforces these
ordinances in a sufficient majority of cases without help from the
law: its tyranny, in fact, being so crushing that its little finger is
often found to be thicker than the law's loins. But there is no sincere
public opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he can
get it for nothing. Indeed it is just the other way: public opinion
has been educated to regard the performance of daily manual labor as
the lot of the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire
property and leave off working. Even members of the professions rank
below the independent gentry, so called because they are independent of
their own labor. These prejudices are not confined to the middle and
upper classes: they are rampant also among the workers. The man who
works nine hours a day despises the man who works sixteen. A country
gentleman may consider himself socially superior to his solicitor or
his doctor; but they associate on much more cordial terms than shopmen
and car-men, engine drivers and railway porters, bricklayers and
hodmen, barmaids and general servants. One is almost tempted in this
country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the snob, until
you get down to those who are so oppressed that they have not enough
self-respect even for snobbery, and thus are able to pluck out of the
heart of their misery a certain irresponsibility which it would be a
mockery to describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you
rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy,
ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles,
precedences and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality
of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those
who gain by it. In fact, the notion that poverty favors virtue was
clearly invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this world
they would gain in the next.
Kropotkine, too optimistically, as I think, disposes of the average
man by attributing his unsocialism to the pressure of the corrupt
system under which he groans. Remove that pressure, and he will think
rightly, says Kropotkine. But if the natural man be indeed social
as well as gregarious, how did the corruption and oppression under
which he groans ever arise? Could the institution of property as we
know it ever have come into existence unless nearly every man had
been, not merely willing, but openly and shamelessly eager to quarter
himself idly on the labor of his fellows, and to domineer over them
whenever the mysterious workings of economic law enabled him to do
so? It is useless to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies
of absolute morality are to be admitted in the discussion at all, he
must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil, who is
being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in
disregarding his neighbor's happiness he is taking the surest way to
sacrifice his own. And under the present system he never can learn that
lesson thoroughly, because he is an inveterate gambler, and knows that
the present system gives him a chance, at odds of a hundred thousand
to one or so against him, of becoming a millionaire, a condition which
is to him the summit of earthly bliss, as from it he will be able to
look down upon those who formerly bullied and patronized him. All this
may sound harsh, especially to those who know how wholesomely real is
the workman's knowledge of life compared to that of the gentleman, and
how much more genuinely sympathetic he is in consequence. Indeed, it
is obvious that if four-fifths of the population were habitually to
do the utter worst in the way of selfishness that the present system
invites them to do, society would not stand the strain for six weeks.
So far, we can claim to be better than our institutions. But the fact
that we are too good for complete Unsocialism by no means proves that
we are good enough for Communism. The practical question remains,
Could men trained under our present system be trusted to pay for their
food scrupulously if they could take it for nothing with impunity?
Clearly, if they did not so pay, Anarchist Communism would be bankrupt
in two days. The answer is that all the evils against which Anarchism
is directed are caused by men taking advantage of the institution of
property to do this very thing--seize their subsistence without working
for it. What reason is there for doubting that they would attempt
to take exactly the same advantage of Anarchist Communism? And what
reason is there to doubt that the community, finding its bread store
bankrupt, would instantly pitch its Anarchism to the four winds, and
come down on the defaulters with the strong hand of a law to make them
pay, just as they are now compelled to pay their Income Tax? I submit,
then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either
external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the
evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain.
I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree
of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a
transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to
men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities
altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as
possible, much less honorable.
It must not be supposed that the economic difficulties which I pointed
out as fatal to Individualist Anarchism are entirely removed by
Communism. It is true that if all the bread and coal in the country
were thrown into a common store from which each man could take as
much as he wanted whenever he pleased without direct payment, then no
man could gain any advantage over his fellows from the fact that some
farms and some coal-mines are better than others. And if every man
could step into a train and travel whither he would without a ticket,
no individual could speculate in the difference between the traffic
from Charing Cross to the Mansion House and that from Ryde to Ventnor.
One of the great advantages of Communism will undoubtedly be that huge
masses of economic rent will be socialized by it automatically. All
rent arising from the value of commodities in general use which can
be produced, consumed, and replaced at the will of man to the full
extent to which they are wanted, can be made rent free by communizing
them. But there must remain outside this solution, first, the things
which are not in sufficiently general use to be communized at all;
second, things of which an unlimited free supply might prove a
nuisance, such as gin or printing; and thirdly, things for which the
demand exceeds the supply. The last is the instance in which the rent
difficulty recurs. It would take an extraordinary course of demolition,
reconstruction, and landscape gardening to make every dwelling house
in London as desirable as a house in Park Lane, or facing Regent's
Park, or overlooking the Embankment Gardens. And since everybody cannot
be accommodated there, the exceptionally favored persons who occupy
those sites will certainly be expected to render an equivalent for
their privilege to those whom they exclude. Without this there would
evidently be no true socialization of the habitation of London. This
means, in practice, that a public department must let the houses out
to the highest bidders, and collect the rents for public purposes.
Such a department can hardly be called Anarchistic, however democratic
it may be. I might go on to enlarge considerably on the limits to the
practicability of direct Communism, which varies from commodity to
commodity; but one difficulty, if insurmountable, is as conclusive as
twenty.
It is sufficient for our present purpose to have shewn that Communism
cannot be ideally Anarchistic, because it does not in the least do
away with the necessity for _compelling_ people to pay for what they
consume; and even when the growth of human character removes that
difficulty there will still remain the question of those commodities
to which the simple Communist method of so-called "free distribution"
is inapplicable. One practical point more requires a word; and that
is the difficulty of communizing any branch of distribution without
first collectivizing it. For instance, we might easily communize the
postal service by simply announcing that in future letters would be
carried without stamps just as they now are with them, the cost being
thrown entirely upon imperial taxation. But if the postal service were,
like most of our distributive business, in the hands of thousands of
competing private traders, no such change would be directly possible.
Communism must grow out of Collectivism, not out of anarchic private
enterprise. That is to say, it cannot grow directly out of the present
system.
But must the transition system therefore be a system of despotic
coercion? If so, it will be wrecked by the intense impulse of men
to escape from the domination of their own kind. In 1888 a Russian
subject, giving evidence before the Sweating Inquiry in the House of
Lords, declared that he left the Russian dominion, where he worked
thirteen hours a day, to work eighteen hours in England, _because he is
freer here_. Reason is dumb when confronted with a man who, exhausted
with thirteen hours' toil, will turn to for another five hours for
the sake of being free to say that Mr. Gladstone is a better man than
Lord Salisbury, and to read Mill, Spencer, and _Reynold's Newspaper_
in the six hours left to him for sleep. It brings to mind the story of
the American judge who tried to induce a runaway slave to return to
the plantation by pointing out how much better he was treated there
than the free wage-nigger of the Abolitionist states. "Yes," said the
runaway; "but would you go back if you were in my place?" The judge
turned Abolitionist at once. These things are not to be reasoned away.
Man will submit to fate, circumstance, society, anything that comes
impersonally over him; but against the personal oppressor, whether
parent, schoolmaster, overseer, official chief, or king, he eternally
rebels. Like the Russian, he will rather be compelled by "necessity"
to _agree_ to work eighteen hours, than ordered by a master to work
thirteen. No modern nation, if deprived of personal liberty or national
autonomy, would stop to think of its economic position. Establish a
form of Socialism which shall deprive the people of their sense of
personal liberty; and, though it double their rations and halve their
working hours, they will begin to conspire against it before it is a
year old. We only disapprove of monopolists: we _hate_ masters.
Then, since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or
compulsory labor, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under
personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce
just distribution without Communism, and maintain the incentive to
labor without mastership? The answer is, by Democracy. And now, having
taken a positive attitude at last, I must give up criticizing the
Anarchists, and defend Democracy against _their_ criticisms.
Democracy.
I now, accordingly, return to Mr. Tucker's criticism of State
Socialism, which, for the sake of precision, had better be called
Social-Democracy. There is a Socialism--that of Bismarck; of the
extinct young England party; of the advocates of moralized feudalism;
and of mob contemners generally--which is not Social-Democracy,
but Social-Despotism, and may be dismissed as essentially no more
hopeful than a system of Moralized Criminality, Abstemious Gluttony,
or Straightforward Mendacity would be. Mr. Tucker, as an American,
passes it over as not worth powder and shot: he clearly indicates a
democratic State by his repeated references to the majority principle,
and in particular by his assertion that "there would be but one article
in the constitution of a State Socialistic country: 'The right of
the majority is absolute.'" Having thus driven Democracy back on its
citadel, he proceeds to cannonade it as follows:
"Under the system of State Socialism, which holds the community
responsible for the health, wealth and wisdom of the individual,
the community, through its majority expression, will insist
more and more on prescribing the conditions of health, wealth,
and wisdom, thus impairing and finally destroying individual
independence and with it all sense of individual responsibility.
"Whatever, then, the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their
system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the
expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all
must kneel; a State school of medicine, by whose practitioners
the sick must invariably be treated; a State system of hygiene,
proscribing what all must and must not eat, drink, wear and do; a
State code of morals, which will not content itself with punishing
crime, but will prohibit what the majority decide to be vice; a
State system of instruction, which shall do away with all private
schools, academies and colleges; a State nursery, in which all
children must be brought up in common at the public expense; and,
finally, a State family, with an attempt at stirpiculture, or
scientific breeding, in which no man or woman will be allowed to
have children if the State prohibits them, and no man or woman
can refuse to have children if the State orders them. Thus will
Authority achieve its acme and Monopoly be carried to its highest
power."
In reading this one is reminded of Mr. Herbert Spencer's habit of
assuming that whatever is not white must be black. Mr. Tucker, on the
ground that "it has ever been the tendency of power to add to itself,
to enlarge its sphere, to encroach beyond the limits set for it,"
admits no alternative to the total subjection of the individual, except
the total abolition of the State. If matters really could and did come
to that I am afraid the individual would have to go under in any case;
for the total abolition of the State in this sense means the total
abolition of the collective force of Society, to abolish which it would
be necessary to abolish Society itself. There are two ways of doing
this. One, the abolition of the individuals composing society, could
not be carried out without an interference with their personal claims
much more serious than that required, even on Mr. Tucker's shewing,
by Social-Democracy. The other, the dispersion of the human race into
independent hermitages over the globe at the rate of twenty-five to the
square mile, would give rise to considerable inequality of condition
and opportunity as between the hermits of Terra del Fuego or the Arctic
regions and those of Florida or the Riviera, and would suit only a
few temperaments. The dispersed units would soon re-associate; and
the moment they did so, goodbye to the sovereignty of the individual.
If the majority believed in an angry and jealous God, then, State or
no State, they would not permit an individual to offend that God and
bring down his wrath upon them: they would rather stone and burn the
individual in propitiation. They would not suffer the individual to go
naked among them; and if he clothed himself in an unusual way which
struck them as being ridiculous or scandalous, they would laugh at,
him; refuse him admission to their feasts; object to be seen talking
with him in the streets; and perhaps lock him up as a lunatic. They
would not allow him to neglect sanitary precautions which they
believed essential to their own immunity from zymotic disease. If the
family were established among them as it is established among us, they
would not suffer him to intermarry within certain degrees of kinship.
Their demand would so rule the market that in most places he would find
no commodities in the shops except those preferred by a majority of the
customers; no schools except those conducted in accordance with the
ideas of the majority of parents; no experienced doctors except those
whose qualifications inspired confidence in a whole circle of patients.
This is not "the coming slavery" of Social-Democracy: it is the slavery
already come. What is more, there is nothing in the most elaborately
negative practical program yet put forward by Anarchism that offers the
slightest mitigation of it. That in comparison with ideal irresponsible
absolute liberty it is slavery, cannot be denied. But in comparison
with the slavery of Robinson Crusoe, which is the most Anarchistic
alternative Nature, our taskmistress, allows us, it is pardonably
described as "freedom." Robinson Crusoe, in fact, is always willing to
exchange his unlimited rights and puny powers for the curtailed rights
and relatively immense powers of the "slave" of majorities. For if the
individual chooses, as in most cases he will, to believe and worship as
his fellows do, he finds temples built and services organized at a cost
to himself which he hardly feels. The clothes, the food, the furniture
which he is most likely to prefer are ready for him in the shops; the
schools in which his children can be taught what their fellow citizens
expect them to know are within fifteen minutes' walk of his door; and
the red lamp of the most approved pattern of doctor shines reassuringly
at the corner of the street. He is free to live with the women of his
family without suspicion or scandal; and if he is not free to marry
them, what does that matter to him, since he does not wish to marry
them? And so happy man be his dole, in spite of his slavery.
"Yes," cries some eccentric individual; "but all this is untrue of me.
I want to marry my deceased wife's sister. I am prepared to prove that
your authorized system of medicine is nothing but a debased survival of
witchcraft. Your schools are machines for forcing spurious learning on
children in order that your universities may stamp them as educated men
when they have finally lost all power to think for themselves. The tall
silk hats and starched linen shirts which you force me to wear, and
without which I cannot successfully practice as a physician, clergyman,
schoolmaster, lawyer, or merchant, are inconvenient, unsanitary, ugly,
pompous, and offensive. Your temples are devoted to a God in whom I do
not believe; and even if I did believe in him I should still regard
your popular forms of worship as only redeemed from gross superstition
by their obvious insincerity. Science teaches me that my proper food
is good bread and good fruit: your boasted food supply offers me cows
and pigs instead. Your care for my health consists in tapping the
common sewer, with its deadly typhoid gases, into my house, besides
discharging its contents into the river, which is my natural bath
and fountain. Under color of protecting my person and property you
forcibly take my money to support an army of soldiers and policemen
for the execution of barbarous and detestable laws; for the waging
of wars which I abhor; and for the subjection of my person to those
legal rights of property which compel me to sell myself for a wage to
a class the maintenance of which I hold to be the greatest evil of our
time. Your tyranny makes my very individuality a hindrance to me: I
am outdone and outbred by the mediocre, the docile, the time-serving.
Evolution under such conditions means degeneracy: therefore I demand
the abolition of all these officious compulsions, and proclaim myself
an Anarchist."
The proclamation is not surprising under the circumstances; but it does
not mend the matter in the least, nor would it if every person were
to repeat it with enthusiasm, and the whole people to fly to arms for
Anarchism. The majority cannot help its tyranny even if it would. The
giant Winkelmeier must have found our doorways inconvenient, just as
men of five feet or less find the slope of the floor in a theatre not
sufficiently steep to enable them to see over the heads of those in
front. But whilst the average height of a man is 5ft. 8in. there is no
redress for such grievances. Builders will accommodate doors and floors
to the majority, and not to the minority. For since either the majority
or the minority must be incommoded, evidently the more powerful must
have its way. There may be no indisputable reason why it ought not;
and any clever Tory can give excellent reasons why it ought not; but
the fact remains that it will, whether it ought or not. And this is
what really settles the question as between democratic majorities and
minorities. Where their interests conflict, the weaker side must go to
the wall, because, as the evil involved is no greater than that of the
stronger going to the wall,[7] the majority is not restrained by any
scruple from compelling the weaker to give way.
In practice, this does not involve either the absolute power of
majorities, or "the infallibility of the odd man." There are some
matters in which the course preferred by the minority in no way
obstructs that preferred by the majority. There are many more in
which the obstruction is easier to bear than the cost of suppressing
it. For it costs something to suppress even a minority of one. The
commonest example of that minority is the lunatic with a delusion;
yet it is found quite safe to entertain dozens of delusions, and be
generally an extremely selfish and troublesome idiot, in spite of the
power of majorities; for until you go so far that it clearly costs
less to lock you up than to leave you at large, the majority will not
take the trouble to set itself in action against you. Thus a minimum
of individual liberty is secured, under any system, to the smallest
minority. It is true that as minorities grow, they sometimes, in
forfeiting the protection of insignificance, lose more in immunity
than they gain in numbers; so that probably the weakest minority is
not the smallest, but rather that which is too large to be disregarded
and too weak to be feared; but before and after that dangerous point
is weathered, minorities wield considerable power. The notion that
they are ciphers because the majority could vanquish them in a trial
of strength leaves out of account the damage they could inflict on
the victors during the struggle. Ordinarily an unarmed man weighing
thirteen stone can beat one weighing only eleven; but there are very
few emergencies in which it is worth his while to do it, because if
the weaker man resists to the best of his ability (which is always
possible) the victor will be considerably worse off after the fight
than before it. In 1861 the Northern and Southern States of America
fought, as prize-fighters say, "to a finish"; and the North carried its
point, yet at such a heavy cost to itself that the Southern States have
by no means been reduced to ciphers; for the victorious majority have
ever since felt that it would be better to give way on any but the most
vital issues than to provoke such another struggle. But it is not often
that a peremptory question arises between a majority and minority of
a whole nation. In most matters only a fragment of the nation has any
interest one way or the other; and the same man who is in a majority on
one question is in a minority on another, and so learns by experience
that minorities have "rights" which must be attended to. Minorities,
too, as in the case of the Irish Party in the English Parliament,
occasionally hold the balance of power between majorities which
recognize their rights and majorities which deny them. Further, it is
possible by decentralization to limit the power of the majority of the
whole nation to questions upon which a divided policy is impracticable.
For example, it is not only possible, but democratically expedient, to
federate the municipalities of England in such a manner that Leicester
might make vaccination penal whilst every other town in the island made
it compulsory. Even at present, vaccination is not in fact compulsory
in Leicester, though it is so in law. Theoretically, Leicester has been
reduced to a cipher by the rest of England. Practically, Leicester
counts twelve to the dozen as much as ever in purely local affairs.
In short, then, Democracy does not give majorities absolute power,
nor does it enable them to reduce minorities to ciphers. Such limited
power of coercing minorities as majorities must possess, is not given
to them by Democracy any more than it can be taken away from them by
Anarchism. A couple of men are stronger than one: that is all. There
are only two ways of neutralizing this natural fact. One is to convince
men of the immorality of abusing the majority power, and then to make
them moral enough to refrain from doing it on that account. The other
is to realize Lytton's fancy of _vril_ by inventing a means by which
each individual will be able to destroy all his fellows with a flash
of thought, so that the majority may have as much reason to fear the
individual as he to fear the majority. No method of doing either is
to be found in Individualist or Communist Anarchism: consequently
these systems, as far as the evils of majority tyranny are concerned,
are no better than the Social-Democratic program of adult suffrage
with maintenance of representatives and payment of polling expenses
from public funds--faulty devices enough, no doubt, but capable
of accomplishing all that is humanly possible at present to make
the State representative of the nation; to make the administration
trustworthy; and to secure the utmost power to each individual and
consequently to minorities. What better can we have whilst collective
action is inevitable? Indeed, in the mouths of the really able
Anarchists, Anarchism means simply the utmost attainable thoroughness
of Democracy. Kropotkine, for example, speaks of free development from
the simple to the composite by "the free union of free groups"; and his
illustrations are "the societies for study, for commerce, for pleasure
and recreation" which have sprung up to meet the varied requirements of
the individual of our age. But in every one of these societies there is
government by a council elected annually by a majority of voters; so
that Kropotkine is not at all afraid of the democratic machinery and
the majority power. Mr. Tucker speaks of "voluntary association," but
gives no illustrations, and indeed avows that "Anarchists are simply
unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats." He says, indeed, that "if the
individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is
tyranny"; but if governing oneself means doing what one pleases without
regard to the interests of neighbors, then the individual has flatly no
such right. If he has no such right, the interference of his neighbors
to make him behave socially, though it is "external government," is
not tyranny; and even if it were they would not refrain from it on
that account. On the other hand, if governing oneself means compelling
oneself to act with a due regard to the interests of the neighbors,
then it is a right which men are proved incapable of exercising without
external government. Either way, the phrase comes to nothing; for it
would be easy to show by a little play upon it, either that altruism is
really external government or that democratic State authority is really
self-government.
Mr. Tucker's adjective, "voluntary," as applied to associations for
defence or the management of affairs, must not be taken as implying
that there is any very wide choice open in these matters. Such
association is really compulsory, since if it be foregone affairs will
remain unmanaged and communities defenceless. Nature makes short work
of our aspirations towards utter impunity. She leaves communities in no
wise "free" to choose whether they will labor and govern themselves.
It is either that or starvation and chaos. Her tasks are inexorably
set: her penalties are inevitable: her payment is strictly "payment by
results." All the individual can do is to shift and dodge his share of
the task on to the shoulders of others, or filch some of their "natural
wage" to add to his own. If they are fools enough to suffer it, that
is their own affair as far as Nature is concerned. But it is the aim
of Social-Democracy to relieve these fools by throwing on all an equal
share in the inevitable labor imposed by the eternal tyranny of
Nature, and so secure to every individual no less than his equal quota
of the nation's product in return for no more than his equal quota of
the nation's labor. These are the best terms humanity can make with
its tyrant. In the eighteenth century it was easy for the philosophers
and for Adam Smith to think of this rule of Nature as being "natural
liberty" in contrast to the odious and stupid oppression of castes,
priests, and kings--the detested "dominion of man over man." But we,
in detecting the unsoundness of Adam Smith's private property and
_laisser-faire_ recipe for natural liberty, begin to see that though
there is political liberty, there is no natural liberty, but only
natural law remorselessly enforced. And so we shake our heads when we
see LIBERTY on the title-page of Mr. Tucker's paper, just as we laugh
when we see THE COMING SLAVERY on Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Man and the
State."
We can now begin to join the threads of our discussion. We have seen
that private appropriation of land in any form, whether limited by
Individualist Anarchism to occupying owners or not, means the unjust
distribution of a vast fund of social wealth called rent, which can by
no means be claimed as due to the labor of any particular individual
or class of individuals. We have seen that Communist Anarchism,
though it partly--and only partly--avoids the rent difficulty, is,
in the condition of morals developed under existing Unsocialism,
impracticable. We have seen that the delegation of individual
powers by voting; the creation of authoritative public bodies; the
supremacy of the majority in the last resort; and the establishment
and even endowment, either directly and officially or indirectly and
unconsciously, of conventional forms of practice in religion, medicine,
education, food, clothing, and criminal law, are, whether they be evils
or not, inherent in society itself, and must be submitted to with the
help of such protection against their abuse as democratic institutions
more than any others afford. When Democracy fails, there is no antidote
for intolerance save the spread of better sense. No form of Anarchism
yet suggested provides any escape. Like bad weather in winter,
intolerance does much mischief; but as, when we have done our best in
the way of overcoats, umbrellas, and good fires, we have to put up with
the winter; so, when we have done our best in the way of Democracy,
decentralization, and the like, we must put up with the State.
The Anarchist Spirit.
I suppose I must not leave the subject without a word as to the value
of what I will call the Anarchist spirit as an element in progress.
But before I do so, let me disclaim all intention of embarrassing
our Anarchist friends who are present by any sympathy which I may
express with that spirit. On the Continent the discussion between
Anarchism and Social-Democracy is frequently threshed out with the help
of walking-sticks, chair-legs, and even revolvers. In England this
does not happen, because the majority of an English audience always
declines to take an extreme position, and, out of an idle curiosity
to hear both sides, will, on sufficient provocation, precipitately
eject theorists who make a disturbance, without troubling itself
to discriminate as to the justice of their views. When I had the
privilege some time ago of debating publicly with Mr. G. W. Foote on
the Eight Hours question, a French newspaper which dealt with the
occasion at great length devoted a whole article to an expression of
envious astonishment at the fact that Mr. Foote and I abstained from
vilifying and finally assaulting one another, and that our partisans
followed our shining example and did not even attempt to prevent
each other's champions from being heard. Still, if we do not permit
ourselves to merge Socialism, Anarchism, and all the other isms into
rowdyism, we sometimes debate our differences, even in this eminently
respectable Fabian Society, with considerable spirit. Now far be it
from me to disarm the Anarchist debater by paying him compliments. On
the contrary, if we have here any of those gentlemen who make it their
business to denounce Social-Democrats as misleaders of the people and
trimmers; who declaim against all national and municipal projects, and
clamor for the abolition of Parliaments and County Councils; who call
for a desperate resistance to rent, taxes, representative government
and organised collective action of every sort: then I invite them
to regard me as their inveterate opponent--as one who regards such
doctrine, however sincerely it may be put forward, as at best an
encouragement to the workers to neglect doing what is possible under
pretext of waiting for the impossible, and at worst as furnishing
the reactionary newspapers in England, and the police agents on the
Continent, with evidence as to the alleged follies and perils of
Socialism. But at the same time, it must be understood that I do not
stand here to defend the State as we know it. Bakounine's comprehensive
aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their
religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic
and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable
and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary "educated
man," who believes that institutions make men instead of men making
institutions. I fully admit and vehemently urge that the State at
present is simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the
poor by brute force. You may, if you are a stupid or comfortably-off
person, think that the policeman at the corner is the guardian of
law and order--that the gaol, with those instruments of torture, the
treadmill, plank bed, solitary cell, cat o' nine tails, and gallows,
is a place to make people cease to do evil and learn to do well. But
the primary function of the policeman, and that for which his other
functions are only blinds, is to see that you do not lie down to sleep
in this country without paying an idler for the privilege; that you do
not taste bread until you have paid the idler's toll in the price of
it; that you do not resist the starving blackleg who is dragging you
down to his level for the idler's profit by offering to do your work
for a starvation wage. Attempt any of these things, and you will be
haled off and tortured in the name of law and order, honesty, social
equilibrium, safety of property and person, public duty, Christianity,
morality, and what not, as a vagrant, a thief, and a rioter. Your
soldier, ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is
really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as
food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter and clothing;
and he must, on pain of being arbitrarily imprisoned, punished with
petty penances like a naughty child, pack-drilled, flogged or shot,
all in the blessed name of "discipline," do anything he is ordered
to, from standing in his red coat in the hall of an opera house as a
mere ornament, to flogging his comrade or committing murder. And _his_
primary function is to come to the rescue of the policeman when the
latter is overpowered. Members of Parliament whose sole qualifications
for election were £1000 loose cash, an "independent" income, and a
vulgar strain of ambition; parsons quoting scripture for the purposes
of the squire; lawyers selling their services to the highest bidder
at the bar, and maintaining the supremacy of the moneyed class on the
bench; juries of employers masquerading as the peers of proletarians
in the dock; University professors elaborating the process known as
the education of a gentleman; artists striving to tickle the fancy
or flatter the vanity of the aristocrat or plutocrat; workmen doing
their work as badly and slowly as they dare so as to make the most
of their job; employers starving and overworking their hands and
adulterating their goods as much as _they_ dare: these are the actual
living material of those imposing abstractions known as the State,
the Church, the Law, the Constitution, Education, the Fine Arts, and
Industry. Every institution, as Bakounine saw, religious, political,
financial, judicial, and so on, is corrupted by the fact that the men
in it either belong to the propertied class themselves or must sell
themselves to it in order to live. All the purchasing power that is
left to buy men's souls with after their bodies are fed is in the hands
of the rich; and everywhere, from the Parliament which wields the
irresistible coercive forces of the bludgeon, bayonet, machine gun,
dynamite shell, prison and scaffold, down to the pettiest centre of
shabby-genteel social pretension, the rich pay the piper and call the
tune. Naturally, they use their power to steal more money to continue
paying the piper; and thus all society becomes a huge conspiracy and
hypocrisy. The ordinary man is insensible to the fraud just as he is
insensible to the taste of water, which, being constantly in contact
with his mucous membrane, seems to have no taste at all. The villainous
moral conditions on which our social system is based are necessarily
in constant contact with our moral mucous membrane, and so we lose our
sense of their omnipresent meanness and dishonor. The insensibility,
however, is not quite complete; for there is a period in life which
is called the age of disillusion, which means the age at which a man
discovers that his generous and honest impulses are incompatible with
success in business; that the institutions he has reverenced are shams;
and that he must join the conspiracy or go to the wall, even though
he feels that the conspiracy is fundamentally ruinous to himself and
his fellow-conspirators. The secret of writers like Ruskin, Morris and
Kropotkine is that they see the whole imposture through and through,
in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its
temporal power, its riches, its splendor, its prestige, its intense
respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension.
But Kropotkine, as I have shewn, is really an advocate of free
Democracy; and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an
Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from
a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at
all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is
free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as "the tyranny
of the majority" and "the coming slavery." I suggest this with the
more confidence because William Morris's views are largely identical
with those of Kropotkine: yet Morris, after patient and intimate
observation of Anarchism as a working propaganda in England, has
definitely dissociated himself from it, and has shewn, by his sketch of
the communist folk-mote in his _News from Nowhere_, how sanely alive he
is to the impossibility of any development of the voluntary element in
social action sufficient to enable individuals or minorities to take
public action without first obtaining the consent of the majority.
On the whole, then, I do not regard the extreme hostility to existing
institutions which inspires Communist Anarchism as being a whit more
dangerous to Social-Democracy than the same spirit as it inspires the
peculiar Toryism of Ruskin. Much more definitely opposed to us is the
survival of that intense jealousy of the authority of the government
over the individual which was the mainspring of the progress of the
eighteenth century. Only those who forget the lessons of history the
moment they have served their immediate turn will feel otherwise than
reassured by the continued vitality of that jealousy among us. But this
consideration does not remove the economic objections which I have
advanced as to the practical program of Individualist Anarchism. And
even apart from these objections, the Social-Democrat is compelled,
by contact with hard facts, to turn his back decisively on useless
denunciation of the State. It is easy to say, Abolish the State; but
the State will sell you up, lock you up, blow you up, knock you down,
bludgeon, shoot, stab, hang--in short, abolish you, if you lift a hand
against it. Fortunately, there is, as we have seen, a fine impartiality
about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of the
State power. They take their wages and obey their orders without asking
questions. If those orders are to demolish the homestead of every
peasant who refuses to take the bread out of his children's mouths in
order that his landlord may have money to spend as an idle gentleman in
London, the soldier obeys. But if his orders were to help the police to
pitch his lordship into Holloway Gaol until he had paid an Income Tax
of twenty shillings on every pound of his unearned income, the soldier
would do that with equal devotion to duty, and perhaps with a certain
private zest that might be lacking in the other case. Now these orders
come ultimately from the State--meaning, in this country, the House of
Commons. A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workmen
will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlords.
A House of Commons consisting of 660 workmen and 10 gentlemen will
probably, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldier to take money
from the landlords for the people. With that hint I leave the matter,
in the full conviction that the State, in spite of the Anarchists,
will continue to be used against the people by the classes until it is
used by the people against the classes with equal ability and equal
resolution.
Printed by G. STANDRING, 7 and 9 Finsbury Street, London, E.C.
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FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: A paper read to the Fabian Society by G. Bernard Shaw, on
16th October, 1891.]
[Footnote 2: This is an inference from the following paragraph in Mr.
Tucker's article:
"Second in importance comes the land monopoly, the evil effects of
which are seen principally in exclusively agricultural countries, like
Ireland. This monopoly consists in the enforcement by government of
land titles which do not rest on personal occupancy and cultivation.
It was obvious to Warren and Proudhon that as soon as individuals
should no longer be protected by their fellows in anything but personal
occupation and cultivation of land, ground rent would disappear, and so
usury have one less leg to stand on."
See also Mr. Tucker's article entitled "A Singular Misunderstanding,"
in _Liberty_ of the 10th September, 1892. "Regarding land," writes
Mr. Tucker, "it has been steadily maintained in these columns that
protection should be withdrawn from all land titles except those based
on personal occupancy and use."]
[Footnote 3: "Nor does the Anarchistic scheme furnish any code of
morals to be imposed on the individual. 'Mind your own business,' is
its only moral law."]
[Footnote 4: This would of course be largely practicable under a
Collectivist system.]
[Footnote 5: English readers need not baulk themselves here because
of the late fall of agricultural rents in this country. Rent, in the
economic sense, covers payment for the use of land for any purpose,
agricultural or otherwise; and town rents have risen oppressively.
A much more puzzling discrepancy between the facts and the theory
is presented by the apparent absence of any upward tendency in the
prices of general commodities. However, an article may be apparently
no less cheap or even much cheaper than it was twenty years ago; and
yet its price may have risen enormously relatively to its average cost
of production, owing to the average cost of production having been
reduced by machinery, higher organization of the labor of producing
it, cheapened traffic with other countries, etc. Thus, in the cotton
industry, machinery has multiplied each man's power of production
eleven hundred times; and Sir Joseph Whitworth was quoted by the
President of the Iron and Steel Institute some years ago as having
declared that a Nottingham lace machine can do the work formerly done
by 8,000 lacemakers. The articles entitled "Great Manufacture of Little
Things," in Cassell's _Technical Educator_, may be consulted for
examples of this sort in the production of pins, pens, etc. Suppose,
then, that an article which cost, on the average, fivepence to make in
1850, was then sold for sixpence. If it be now selling for threepence,
it is apparently twice as cheap as it was. But if the cost of
production has also fallen to three-halfpence, which is by no means an
extravagant supposition, then the price, considered relatively to the
cost of production, has evidently risen prodigiously, since it is now
twice the cost, whereas the cost was formerly five-sixths of the price.
In other words, the surplus, or rent, per article, has risen from
16 2/3 per cent. to 100 per cent., in spite of the apparent cheapening.
This is the explanation of the fact that though the workers were
probably never before so monstrously robbed as they are at present, it
is quite possible for statisticians to prove that on the whole wages
have risen and prices fallen. The worker, pleased at having only to pay
threepence where he formerly paid sixpence, forgets that the share of
his threepence that goes to an idler may be much larger than that which
went out of each of the two threepences he paid formerly.]
[Footnote 6: Written in the 1887-92 period, during which Trafalgar
Square was forcibly closed against public meetings by the Salisbury
administration.]
[Footnote 7: The evil is decidedly _less_ if the calculation proceeds
by the popular method of always estimating an evil suffered by a
hundred persons as a hundred times as great as the same evil suffered
by only one. This, however, is absurd. A hundred starving men are not
a hundred times as hungry as one starving man, any more than a hundred
five-foot-eight men are each five hundred and sixty-six feet eight
inches high. But they are a hundred times as strong a political force.
Though the evil may not be cumulative, the power to resist it is.]
* * * * *
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber Notes: |
| |
| P.17. 'antonomy' changed to 'autonomy' |
| P.22. 'Tuc er's' changed to 'Tucker's' |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
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