The division of labour has always existed in human society, and I
daresay always will exist; but the question for us is, not if it has
been and will still continue, but, what should guide us in providing
that this division may be a right one.
If we take the facts of observation for our standard, we refuse to have
any standard at all: for every division of labour which we see among
men, and which may seem to us to be right, we shall consider right; and
this is what the ruling Scientific Science is leading us to.
Division of labour!
"Some are occupied with mental and spiritual, others with muscular and
physical, labour."
With what an assurance men express this! They wish to think it, and so
that which is transparently the ancient violence, seems to them in
reality a fair exchange of services.
"Thou," or rather, "you" (because it is always the many who have to feed
the one),--"you feed me, dress me, do for me all this rough labour which
I require of you, and to which you are accustomed from your infancy, and
I will do for you that mental work to which I have already become
accustomed. Give me bodily food, and in return I will give you the
spiritual."
The statement seems fair; and it would really be so if such exchange of
services were free; if those who supply the bodily food were not obliged
to supply it before they get the spiritual. The producer of the
spiritual food says, "In order that I may be able to give you this food,
you must feed me, clothe me, and remove all filth from my house."
But the producer of bodily food must do his work without making any
claims of his own, and he has to give the bodily food whether he receive
spiritual food or not. If the exchange were a free one the conditions on
both sides would be equal. We agree that spiritual food is as necessary
to man as bodily. But the learned man, the artist, says, "Before we can
begin to serve men by giving them spiritual food, we want men to provide
us with bodily food."
But why should not the producers of this say, "Before we begin to serve
you with bodily food, we want spiritual food; and until we receive it,
we cannot labour?"
You say, "I require the labour of a ploughman, a smith, a book-maker, a
carpenter, masons, and others, in order that I may prepare the spiritual
food I have to offer."
Every workman might say, too, "Before I go to work to prepare bodily
food for you, I want the fruits of the spirit. In order to have strength
for labouring, I require a religious teaching, the social order of
common life, application of knowledge to labour, and the joys and
comforts which art gives. I have no time to work out for myself a
teaching concerning the meaning of life,--give it to me. I have no time
to think out statutes of common life which would prevent the violation
of justice,--give me this too. I have no time to study mechanics,
natural philosophy, chemistry, technology; give me books with
information as to how I am to improve my tools, my ways of working, my
dwelling, its heating and lighting. I have no time to occupy myself with
poetry, with plastic art, or music. Give me the excitements and comforts
necessary for life; give me the productions of the arts."
You say it would be impossible for you to do your important and
necessary business if you were deprived of the labour that
working-people do for you; and I say, a workman may declare, "It is
impossible for me to do my important and necessary business, not less
important than yours,--to plough, to cart away refuse, and to clean
_your_ houses,--if I am deprived of a religious guidance corresponding
to the wants of my intellect and my conscience, of a reasonable
government which will secure my labour, of information for easing my
labour, and the enjoyment of art to ennoble it. All you have hitherto
offered me in the shape of spiritual food is not only of no use to me
whatever, I cannot even understand to whom it could be of any use. And
until I receive this nourishment, proper for me as for every man, I
cannot produce bodily food to feed you with."
What if the working-people should speak thus? And if they did, it would
be no jest but the simplest justice. If a workman said this, he would be
far more in the right than a man of intellectual labour; because the
labour produced by the workman is more urgent and more necessary than
that of the intellectual worker, and because a man of intellect is
hindered by nothing from giving that spiritual food which he promised to
give, while the workingman is hindered in giving the bodily food by the
fact that he himself is short of it.
What, then, should we intellectual labourers answer, if such simple and
lawful claims were made upon us? How should we satisfy these claims?
Should we satisfy the religious wants of the people by the catechism of
Philaret, by sacred histories of Sokolof, by the literature sent out by
monasteries and cathedrals? Should we satisfy their demand for order by
the "Code of Laws," and cassation verdicts of different departments, or
by reports of committees and commissions? And should we satisfy their
want of knowledge by giving them spectrum analysis, a survey of the
Milky Way, speculative geometry, microscopic investigations,
controversies concerning spiritualism and mediumism, the activity of
academies of science? How should we satisfy their artistic wants? By
Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Turgenief, L. Tolstoy? By pictures of French
_salons_, and of those of our artists who represent naked women, satin,
velvet, and landscapes, and pictures of domestic life; by the music of
Wagner, and that of our own musicians?
All this is of no use and cannot be of use because we, with our right to
utilize the labour of the people and absence of all duties in
preparation of their spiritual food, have quite lost from sight the
single destination our activity should have.
We do not even know what is required by the workman; we have even
forgotten his mode of life, his views of things, his language; we have
even lost sight of the very working-people themselves, and we study them
like some ethnographical rarity or newly-discovered continent. Demanding
for ourselves bodily food, we have taken upon ourselves to provide the
spiritual; but in consequence of the imaginary division of labour,
according to which we may not only first take our dinner and afterwards
do our work, but may during many generations dine luxuriously and do no
work,--we, in the way of compensation for our food, have prepared
something which is of use, as it seems to us, for ourselves and for
science and art, but of no use whatever for those very people whose
labour we consume under the pretext of providing them in return with
intellectual food; not only is of no use, but is quite unintelligible
and distasteful to them.
In our blindness, we have to such a degree left out of sight the duty we
took upon us, that we have even forgotten for what our labour is being
done; and the very people whom we undertook to serve we have made an
object of our scientific and artistic activities. We study them and
represent them for our own pleasure and amusement: but we have quite
forgotten that it is our duty, not to study and depict, but to serve
them.
We have to such a degree left out of sight the duty we assumed that we
have not even noticed that other people do what we undertook in the
departments of science and art, and that our place turns out to be
occupied.
It appears that while we have been in controversy,--now about the
immaculate conception, and now about spontaneous generation; now about
spiritualism, and now about the forms of atoms; now about pangenesis,
now about protoplasms, and so on,--all this while the people none the
less required spiritual food, and the abortive outcasts of science and
art began to provide for the people this spiritual food to the order of
various speculators, who had in view exclusively their own profit and
gain.
Now, for some forty years in Europe, and ten years in Russia, millions
of books and pictures and songs have been circulating; shows have been
opened: and the people gaze and sing, and receive intellectual food,
though not from those who promised to provide it for them; and we, who
justify our idleness by the need for that intellectual food which we
pretend to provide for the people, are sitting still, and taking no
notice.
But we cannot do so, because our final justification has vanished from
under our feet. We have taken upon ourselves a peculiar department: we
have a peculiar functional activity of our own. We are the brain of the
people. They feed us, and we have undertaken to teach them. Only for the
sake of this have we freed ourselves from labour. What, then, have we
been teaching them? They have waited years, tens of years, hundreds of
years. And we are still conversing among ourselves, and teaching each
other, and amusing ourselves, and have quite forgotten them; we have so
totally forgotten them, that others have taken upon themselves to teach
and amuse them, and we have not even become aware of this in our
flippant talk about division of labour: and it is very obvious that all
our talk about the utility we offer to the people was only a shameful
excuse.