Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
to be.
It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected.
The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society
had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were
ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
unchanged.
So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to
every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it
loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it.
For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's
High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced
peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands
cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School
movement should depart from its original conception, that of a
temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and
should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution,
then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected
matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real
knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than
unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of
classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation
of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our
goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is
not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give
with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a
brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no,
we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of
culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an
idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour
which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old
handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic
depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the
area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of
labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will
complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of
it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will
be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do
with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is
that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it
mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a
shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short.
The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the
shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
under the next day's toil.
The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it
would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
streets.
The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in
rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons
asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself,
and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable
economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has
succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State
that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this
point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till
lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like
that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from
mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is
the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must
remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out
and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which
dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is
ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad
nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs,
can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put
into practice the principle which I have called that of the
Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline,
endeavour to explain.
The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It
demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a
certain degree fixed by technical conditions--that the day's work as
a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and
association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle
shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people
remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so
long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes
from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a
union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly
its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to
forced labour, and destroys culture.