THE word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has
a terrible sound in most people’s ears, even when we have explained to
them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and
all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in
the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize
on the executive power for the moment. Even when we explain that we use
the word revolution in its etymological sense, and mean by it a change in
the basis of society, people are scared at the idea of such a vast
change, and beg that you will speak of reform and not revolution. As,
however, we Socialists do not at all mean by our word revolution what
these worthy people mean by their word reform, I can’t help thinking that
it would be a mistake to use it, whatever projects we might conceal
beneath its harmless envelope. So we will stick to our word, which means
a change of the basis of society; it may frighten people, but it will at
least warn them that there is something to be frightened about, which
will be no less dangerous for being ignored; and also it may encourage
some people, and will mean to them at least not a fear, but a hope.
Fear and Hope—those are the names of the two great passions which rule
the race of man, and with which revolutionists have to deal; to give hope
to the many oppressed and fear to the few oppressors, that is our
business; if we do the first and give hope to the many, the few _must_ be
frightened by their hope; otherwise we do not want to frighten them; it
is not revenge we want for poor people, but happiness; indeed, what
revenge can be taken for all the thousands of years of the sufferings of
the poor?
However, many of the oppressors of the poor, most of them, we will say,
are not conscious of their being oppressors (we shall see why presently);
they live in an orderly, quiet way themselves, as far as possible removed
from the feelings of a Roman slave-owner or a Legree; they know that the
poor exist, but their sufferings do not present themselves to them in a
trenchant and dramatic way; they themselves have troubles to bear, and
they think doubtless that to bear trouble is the lot of humanity, nor
have they any means of comparing the troubles of their lives with those
of people lower in the social scale; and if ever the thought of those
heavier troubles obtrudes itself upon them, they console themselves with
the maxim that people do get used to the troubles they have to bear,
whatever they may be.
Indeed, as far as regards individuals at least, that is but too true, so
that we have as supporters of the present state of things, however bad it
may be, first those comfortable unconscious oppressors who think that
they have everything to fear from any change which would involve more
than the softest and most gradual of reforms, and secondly those poor
people who, living hard and anxiously as they do, can hardly conceive of
any change for the better happening to them, and dare not risk one tittle
of their poor possessions in taking any action towards a possible
bettering of their condition; so that while we can do little with the
rich save inspire them with fear, it is hard indeed to give the poor any
hope. It is, then, no less than reasonable that those whom we try to
involve in the great struggle for a better form of life than that which
we now lead should call on us to give them at least some idea of what
that life may be like.
A reasonable request, but hard to satisfy, since we are living under a
system that makes conscious effort towards reconstruction almost
impossible: it is not unreasonable on our part to answer, “There are
certain definite obstacles to the real progress of man; we can tell you
what these are; take them away, and then you shall see.”
However, I purpose now to offer myself as a victim for the satisfaction
of those who consider that as things now go we have at least got
something, and are terrified at the idea of losing their hold of that,
lest they should find they are worse off than before, and have nothing.
Yet in the course of my endeavour to show how we might live, I must more
or less deal in negatives. I mean to say I must point out where in my
opinion we fall short in our present attempts at decent life. I must ask
the rich and well-to-do what sort of a position it is which they are so
anxious to preserve at any cost? and if, after all, it will be such a
terrible loss to them to give it up? and I must point out to the poor
that they, with capacities for living a dignified and generous life, are
in a position which they cannot endure without continued degradation.
How do we live, then, under our present system? Let us look at it a
little.
And first, please to understand that our present system of Society is
based on a state of perpetual war. Do any of you think that this is as
it should be? I know that you have often been told that the competition,
which is at present the rule of all production, is a good thing, and
stimulates the progress of the race; but the people who tell you this
should call competition by its shorter name of _war_ if they wish to be
honest, and you would then be free to consider whether or no war
stimulates progress, otherwise than as a mad bull chasing you over your
own garden may do. War or competition, whichever you please to call it,
means at the best pursuing your own advantage at the cost of some one
else’s loss, and in the process of it you must not be sparing of
destruction even of your own possessions, or you will certainly come by
the worse in the struggle. You understand that perfectly as to the kind
of war in which people go out to kill and be killed; that sort of war in
which ships are commissioned, for instance, “to sink, burn, and destroy;”
but it appears that you are not so conscious of this waste of goods when
you are only carrying on that other war called _commerce_; observe,
however, that the waste is there all the same.
Now let us look at this kind of war a little closer, run through some of
the forms of it, that we may see how the “burn, sink, and destroy” is
carried on in it.
First, you have that form of it called national rivalry, which in good
truth is nowadays the cause of all gunpowder and bayonet wars which
civilized nations wage. For years past we English have been rather shy
of them, except on those happy occasions when we could carry them on at
no sort of risk to ourselves, when the killing was all on one side, or at
all events when we hoped it would be. We have been shy of gunpowder war
with a respectable enemy for a long while, and I will tell you why: It is
because we have had the lion’s-share of the world-market; we didn’t want
to fight for it as a nation, for we had got it; but now this is changing
in a most significant, and, to a Socialist, a most cheering way; we are
losing or have lost that lion’s share; it is now a desperate
“competition” between the great nations of civilization for the
world-market, and to-morrow it may be a desperate war for that end. As a
result, the furthering of war (if it be not on too large a scale) is no
longer confined to the honour-and-glory kind of old Tories, who if they
meant anything at all by it meant that a Tory war would be a good
occasion for damping down democracy; we have changed all that, and now it
is quite another kind of politician that is wont to urge us on to
“patriotism” as ’tis called. The leaders of the Progressive Liberals, as
they would call themselves, long-headed persons who know well enough that
social movements are going on, who are not blind to the fact that the
world will move with their help or without it; these have been the
Jingoes of these later days. I don’t mean to say they know what they are
doing: politicians, as you well know, take good care to shut their eyes
to everything that may happen six months ahead; but what is being done is
this: that the present system, which always must include national
rivalry, is pushing us into a desperate scramble for the markets on more
or less equal terms with other nations, because, once more, we have lost
that command of them which we once had. Desperate is not too strong a
word. We shall let this impulse to snatch markets carry us whither it
will, whither it must. To-day it is successful burglary and disgrace,
to-morrow it may be mere defeat and disgrace.
Now this is not a digression, although in saying this I am nearer to what
is generally called politics than I shall be again. I only want to show
you what commercial war comes to when it has to do with foreign nations,
and that even the dullest can see how mere waste must go with it. That
is how we live now with foreign nations, prepared to ruin them without
war if possible, with it if necessary, let alone meantime the disgraceful
exploiting of savage tribes and barbarous peoples, on whom we force at
once our shoddy wares and our hypocrisy at the cannon’s mouth.
Well, surely Socialism can offer you something in the place of all that.
It can; it can offer you peace and friendship instead of war. We might
live utterly without national rivalries, acknowledging that while it is
best for those who feel that they naturally form a community under one
name to govern themselves, yet that no community in civilization should
feel that it had interests opposed any other, their economical condition
being at any rate similar; so that any citizen of one community could
fall to work and live without disturbance of his life when he was in a
foreign country, and would fit into his place quite naturally; so that
all civilized nations would form one great community, agreeing together
as to the kind and amount of production and distribution needed; working
at such and such production where it could be best produced; avoiding
waste by all means. Please to think of the amount of waste which they
would avoid, how much such a revolution would add to the wealth of the
world! What creature on earth would be harmed by such a revolution?
Nay, would not everybody be the better for it? And what hinders it? I
will tell you presently.
Meantime let us pass from this “competition” between nations to that
between “the organizers of labour,” great firms, joint-stock companies;
capitalists in short, and see how competition “stimulates production”
among them: indeed it does do that; but what kind of production? Well,
production of something to sell at a profit, or say production of
profits: and note how war commercial stimulates that: a certain market is
demanding goods; there are, say, a hundred manufacturers who make that
kind of goods, and every one of them would if he could keep that market
to himself; and struggles desperately to get as much of it as he can,
with the obvious result that presently the thing is overdone, and the
market is glutted, and all that fury of manufacture has to sink into cold
ashes. Doesn’t that seem something like war to you? Can’t you see the
waste of it—waste of labour, skill, cunning, waste of life in short?
Well, you may say, but it cheapens the goods. In a sense it does; and
yet only apparently, as wages have a tendency to sink for the ordinary
worker in proportion as prices sink; and at what a cost do we gain this
appearance of cheapness! Plainly speaking, at the cost of cheating the
consumer and starving the real producer for the benefit of the gambler,
who uses both consumer and producer as his milch cows. I needn’t go at
length into the subject of adulteration, for every one knows what kind of
a part it plays in this sort of commerce; but remember that it is an
absolutely necessary incident to the production of profit out of wares,
which is the business of the so-called manufacturer; and this you must
understand, that, taking him in the lump, the consumer is perfectly
helpless against the gambler; the goods are forced on him by their
cheapness, and with them a certain kind of life which that energetic,
that aggressive cheapness determines for him: for so far-reaching is this
curse of commercial war that no country is safe from its ravages; the
traditions of a thousand years fall before it in a month; it overruns a
weak or semi-barbarous country, and whatever romance or pleasure or art
existed there, is trodden down into a mire of sordidness and ugliness;
the Indian or Javanese craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely,
working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of strange beauty on a
piece of cloth: a steam-engine is set a-going at Manchester, and that
victory over nature and a thousand stubborn difficulties is used for the
base work of producing a sort of plaster of china-clay and shoddy, and
the Asiatic worker, if he is not starved to death outright, as
plentifully happens, is driven himself into a factory to lower the wages
of his Manchester brother worker, and nothing of character is left him
except, most like, an accumulation of fear and hatred of that to him most
unaccountable evil, his English master. The South Sea Islander must
leave his canoe-carving, his sweet rest, and his graceful dances, and
become the slave of a slave: trousers, shoddy, rum, missionary, and fatal
disease—he must swallow all this civilization in the lump, and neither
himself nor we can help him now till social order displaces the hideous
tyranny of gambling that has ruined him.
Let those be types of the consumer: but now for the producer; I mean the
real producer, the worker; how does this scramble for the plunder of the
market affect him? The manufacturer, in the eagerness of his war, has
had to collect into one neighbourhood a vast army of workers, he has
drilled them till they are as fit as may be for his special branch of
production, that is, for making a profit out of it, and with the result
of their being fit for nothing else: well, when the glut comes in that
market he is supplying, what happens to this army, every private in which
has been depending on the steady demand in that market, and acting, as he
could not choose but act, as if it were to go on for ever? You know well
what happens to these men: the factory door is shut on them; on a very
large part of them often, and at the best on the reserve army of labour,
so busily employed in the time of inflation. What becomes of them? Nay,
we know that well enough just now. But what we don’t know, or don’t
choose to know, is, that this reserve army of labour is an absolute
necessity for commercial war; if _our_ manufacturers had not got these
poor devils whom they could draft on to their machines when the demand
swelled, other manufacturers in France, or Germany, or America, would
step in and take the market from them.
So you see, as we live now, it is necessary that a vast part of the
industrial population should be exposed to the danger of periodical
semi-starvation, and that, not for the advantage of the people in another
part of the world, but for their degradation and enslavement.
Just let your minds run for a moment on the kind of waste which this
means, this opening up of new markets among savage and barbarous
countries which is the extreme type of the force of the profit-market on
the world, and you will surely see what a hideous nightmare that
profit-market is: it keeps us sweating and terrified for our livelihood,
unable to read a book, or look at a picture, or have pleasant fields to
walk in, or to lie in the sun, or to share in the knowledge of our time,
to have in short either animal or intellectual pleasure, and for what?
that we may go on living the same slavish life till we die, in order to
provide for a rich man what is called a life of ease and luxury; that is
to say, a life so empty, unwholesome, and degraded, that perhaps, on the
whole, he is worse off than we the workers are: and as to the result of
all this suffering, it is luckiest when it is nothing at all, when you
can say that the wares have done nobody any good; for oftenest they have
done many people harm, and we have toiled and groaned and died in making
poison and destruction for our fellow-men.
Well, I say all this is war, and the results of war, the war this time,
not of competing nations, but of competing firms or capitalist units: and
it is this war of the firms which hinders the peace between nations which
you surely have agreed with me in thinking is so necessary; for you must
know that war is the very breath of the nostrils of these fighting firms,
and they have now, in our times, got into their hands nearly all the
political power, and they band together in each country in order to make
their respective governments fulfil just two functions: the first is at
home to act as a strong police force, to keep the ring in which the
strong are beating down the weak; the second is to act as a piratical
body-guard abroad, a petard to explode the doors which lead to the
markets of the world: markets at any price abroad, uninterfered-with
privilege, falsely called _laissez-faire_, {13} at any price at home, to
provide these is the sole business of a government such as our industrial
captains have been able to conceive of. I must now try to show you the
reason of all this, and what it rests on, by trying to answer the
question, Why have the profit-makers got all this power, or at least why
are they able to keep it?
That takes us to the third form of war commercial: the last, and, the one
which all the rest is founded on. We have spoken first of the war of
rival nations; next of that of rival firms: we have now to speak of rival
men. As nations under the present system are driven to compete with one
another for the markets of the world, and as firms or the captains of
industry have to scramble for their share of the profits of the markets,
so also have the workers to compete with each other—for livelihood; and
it is this constant competition or war amongst them which enables the
profit-grinders to make their profits, and by means of the wealth so
acquired to take all the executive power of the country into their hands.
But here is the difference between the position of the workers and the
profit-makers: to the latter, the profit-grinders, war is necessary; you
cannot have profit-making without competition, individual, corporate, and
national; but you may work for a livelihood without competing; you may
combine instead of competing.
I have said war was the life-breath of the profit-makers; in like manner,
combination is the life of the workers. The working-classes or
proletariat cannot even exist as a class without combination of some
sort. The necessity which forced the profit-grinders to collect their
men first into workshops working by the division of labour, and next into
great factories worked by machinery, and so gradually to draw them into
the great towns and centres of civilization, gave birth to a distinct
working-class or proletariat: and this it was which gave them their
_mechanical_ existence, so to say. But note, that they are indeed
combined into social groups for the production of wares, but only as yet
mechanically; they do not know what they are working at, nor whom they
are working for, because they are combining to produce wares of which the
profit of a master forms an essential part, instead of goods for their
own use: as long as they do this, and compete with each other for leave
to do it, they will be, and will feel themselves to be, simply a part of
those competing firms I have been speaking of; they will be in fact just
a part of the machinery for the production of profit; and so long as this
lasts it will be the aim of the masters or profit-makers to decrease the
market value of this human part of the machinery; that is to say, since
they already hold in their hands the labour of dead men in the form of
capital and machinery, it is their interest, or we will say their
necessity, to pay as little as they can help for the labour of living men
which they have to buy from day to day: and since the workmen they employ
have nothing but their labour-power, they are compelled to underbid one
another for employment and wages, and so enable the capitalist to play
his game.
I have said that, as things go, the workers are a part of the competing
firms, an adjunct of capital. Nevertheless, they are only so by
compulsion; and, even without their being conscious of it, they struggle
against that compulsion and its immediate results, the lowering of their
wages, of their standard of life; and this they do, and must do, both as
a class and individually: just as the slave of the great Roman lord,
though he distinctly felt himself to be a part of the household, yet
collectively was a force in reserve for its destruction, and individually
stole from his lord whenever he could safely do so. So, here, you see,
is another form of war necessary to the way we live now, the war of class
against class, which, when it rises to its height, and it seems to be
rising at present, will destroy those other forms of war we have been
speaking of; will make the position of the profit-makers, of perpetual
commercial war, untenable; will destroy the present system of competitive
privilege, or commercial war.
Now observe, I said that to the existence of the workers it was
combination, not competition, that was necessary, while to that of the
profit-makers combination was impossible, and war necessary. The present
position of the workers is that of the machinery of commerce, or in
plainer words its slaves; when they change that position and become free,
the class of profit-makers must cease to exist; and what will then be the
position of the workers? Even as it is they are the one necessary part
of society, the life-giving part; the other classes are but hangers-on
who live on them. But what should they be, what will they be, when they,
once for all, come to know their real power, and cease competing with one
another for livelihood? I will tell you: they will be society, they will
be the community. And being society—that is, there being no class
outside them to contend with—they can then regulate their labour in
accordance with their own real needs.
There is much talk about supply and demand, but the supply and demand
usually meant is an artificial one; it is under the sway of the gambling
market; the demand is forced, as I hinted above, before it is supplied;
nor, as each producer is working against all the rest, can the producers
hold their hands, till the market is glutted and the workers, thrown out
on the streets, hear that there has been over-production, amidst which
over-plus of unsaleable goods they go ill-supplied with even necessaries,
because the wealth which they themselves have created is
“ill-distributed,” as we call it—that is, unjustly taken away from them.
When the workers are society they will regulate their labour, so that the
supply and demand shall be genuine, not gambling; the two will then be
commensurate, for it is the same society which demands that also
supplies; there will be no more artificial famines then, no more poverty
amidst over-production, amidst too great a stock of the very things which
should supply poverty and turn it into well-being. In short, there will
be no waste and therefore no tyranny.
Well, now, what Socialism offers you in place of these artificial
famines, with their so-called over-production, is, once more, regulation
of the markets; supply and demand commensurate; no gambling, and
consequently (once more) no waste; not overwork and weariness for the
worker one month, and the next no work and terror of starvation, but
steady work and plenty of leisure every month; not cheap market wares,
that is to say, adulterated wares, with scarcely any _good_ in them, mere
scaffold-poles for building up profits; no labour would be spent on such
things as these, which people would cease to want when they ceased to be
slaves. Not these, but such goods as best fulfilled the real uses of the
consumers, would labour be set to make; for profit being abolished,
people could have what they wanted, instead of what the profit-grinders
at home and abroad forced them to take.
For what I want you to understand is this: that in every civilized
country at least there is plenty for all—is, or at any rate might be.
Even with labour so misdirected as it is at present, an equitable
distribution of the wealth we have would make all people comparatively
comfortable; but that is nothing to the wealth we might have if labour
were not misdirected.
Observe, in the early days of the history of man he was the slave of his
most immediate necessities; Nature was mighty and he was feeble, and he
had to wage constant war with her for his daily food and such shelter as
he could get. His life was bound down and limited by this constant
struggle; all his morals, laws, religion, are in fact the outcome and the
reflection of this ceaseless toil of earning his livelihood. Time
passed, and little by little, step by step, he grew stronger, till now
after all these ages he has almost completely conquered Nature, and one
would think should now have leisure to turn his thoughts towards higher
things than procuring to-morrow’s dinner. But, alas! his progress has
been broken and halting; and though he has indeed conquered Nature and
has her forces under his control to do what he will with, he still has
himself to conquer, he still has to think how he will best use those
forces which he has mastered. At present he uses them blindly,
foolishly, as one driven by mere fate. It would almost seem as if some
phantom of the ceaseless pursuit of food which was once the master of the
savage was still hunting the civilized man; who toils in a dream, as it
were, haunted by mere dim unreal hopes, borne of vague recollections of
the days gone by. Out of that dream he must wake, and face things as
they really are. The conquest of Nature is complete, may we not say? and
now our business is, and has for long been, the organization of man, who
wields the forces of Nature. Nor till this is attempted at least shall
we ever be free of that terrible phantom of fear of starvation which,
with its brother devil, desire of domination, drives us into injustice,
cruelty, and dastardliness of all kinds: to cease to fear our fellows and
learn to depend on them, to do away with competition and build up
co-operation, is our one necessity.
Now, to get closer to details; you probably know that every man in
civilization is worth, so to say, more than his skin; working, as he must
work, socially, he can produce more than will keep himself alive and in
fair condition; and this has been so for many centuries, from the time,
in fact, when warring tribes began to make their conquered enemies slaves
instead of killing them; and of course his capacity of producing these
extras has gone on increasing faster and faster, till to-day one man will
weave, for instance, as much cloth in a week as will clothe a whole
village for years: and the real question of civilization has always been
what are we to do with this extra produce of labour—a question which the
phantom, fear of starvation, and its fellow, desire of domination, has
driven men to answer pretty badly always, and worst of all perhaps in
these present days, when the extra produce has grown with such prodigious
speed. The practical answer has always been for man to struggle with his
fellow for private possession of undue shares of these extras, and all
kinds of devices have been employed by those who found themselves in
possession of the power of taking them from others to keep those whom
they had robbed in perpetual subjection; and these latter, as I have
already hinted, had no chance of resisting this fleecing as long as they
were few and scattered, and consequently could have little sense of their
common oppression. But now that, owing to the very pursuit of these
undue shares of profit, or extra earnings, men have become more dependent
on each other for production, and have been driven, as I said before, to
combine together for that end more completely, the power of the
workers—that is to say, of the robbed or fleeced class—has enormously
increased, and it only remains for them to understand that they have this
power. When they do that they will be able to give the right answer to
the question what is to be done with the extra products of labour over
and above what will keep the labourer alive to labour: which answer is,
that the worker will have all that he produces, and not be fleeced at
all: and remember that he produces collectively, and therefore he will do
effectively what work is required of him according to his capacity, and
of the produce of that work he will have what he needs; because, you see,
he cannot _use_ more than he needs—he can only _waste_ it.
If this arrangement seems to you preposterously ideal, as it well may,
looking at our present condition, I must back it up by saying that when
men are organized so that their labour is not wasted, they will be
relieved from the fear of starvation and the desire of domination, and
will have freedom and leisure to look round and see what they really do
need.
Now something of that I can conceive for my own self, and I will lay my
ideas before you, so that you may compare them with your own, asking you
always to remember that the very differences in men’s capacities and
desires, after the common need of food and shelter is satisfied, will
make it easier to deal with their desires in a communal state of things.
What is it that I need, therefore, which my surrounding circumstances can
give me—my dealings with my fellow-men—setting aside inevitable accidents
which co-operation and forethought cannot control, if there be such?
Well, first of all I claim good health; and I say that a vast proportion
of people in civilization scarcely even know what that means. To feel
mere life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one’s limbs and exercising
one’s bodily powers; to play, as it were, with sun and wind and rain; to
rejoice in satisfying the due bodily appetites of a human animal without
fear of degradation or sense of wrong-doing: yes, and therewithal to be
well formed, straight-limbed, strongly knit, expressive of countenance—to
be, in a word, beautiful—that also I claim. If we cannot have this claim
satisfied, we are but poor creatures after all; and I claim it in the
teeth of those terrible doctrines of asceticism, which, born of the
despair of the oppressed and degraded, have been for so many ages used as
instruments for the continuance of that oppression and degradation.
And I believe that this claim for a healthy body for all of us carries
with it all other due claims: for who knows where the seeds of disease
which even rich people suffer from were first sown: from the luxury of an
ancestor, perhaps; yet often, I suspect, from his poverty. And for the
poor: a distinguished physicist has said that the poor suffer always from
one disease—hunger; and at least I know this, that if a man is overworked
in any degree he cannot enjoy the sort of health I am speaking of; nor
can he if he is continually chained to one dull round of mechanical work,
with no hope at the other end of it; nor if he lives in continual sordid
anxiety for his livelihood, nor if he is ill-housed, nor if he is
deprived of all enjoyment of the natural beauty of the world, nor if he
has no amusement to quicken the flow of his spirits from time to time:
all these things, which touch more or less directly on his bodily
condition, are born of the claim I make to live in good health; indeed, I
suspect that these good conditions must have been in force for several
generations before a population in general will be really healthy, as I
have hinted above; but also I doubt not that in the course of time they
would, joined to other conditions, of which more hereafter, gradually
breed such a population, living in enjoyment of animal life at least,
happy therefore, and beautiful according to the beauty of their race. On
this point I may note that the very variations in the races of men are
caused by the conditions under which they live, and though in these
rougher parts of the world we lack some of the advantages of climate and
surroundings, yet, if we were working for livelihood and not for profit,
we might easily neutralize many of the disadvantages of our climate, at
least enough give due scope to the full development of our race.
Now the next thing I claim is education. And you must not say that every
English child is educated now; that sort of education will not answer my
claim, though I cheerfully admit it is something: something, and yet
after all only class education. What I claim is liberal education;
opportunity, that is, to have my share of whatever knowledge there is in
the world according to my capacity or bent of mind, historical or
scientific; and also to have my share of skill of hand which is about in
the world, either in the industrial handicrafts or in the fine arts;
picture-painting, sculpture, music, acting, or the like: I claim to be
taught, if I can be taught, more than one craft to exercise for the
benefit of the community. You may think this a large claim, but I am
clear it is not too large a claim if the community is to have any gain
out of my special capacities, if we are not all to be beaten down to a
dull level of mediocrity as we are now, all but the very strongest and
toughest of us.
But also I know that this claim for education involves one for public
advantages in the shape of public libraries, schools, and the like, such
as no private person, not even the richest, could command: but these I
claim very confidently, being sure that no reasonable community could
bear to be without such helps to a decent life.
Again, the claim for education involves a claim for abundant leisure,
which once more I make with confidence; because when once we have shaken
off the slavery of profit, labour would be organized so unwastefully that
no heavy burden would be laid on the individual citizens; every one of
whom as a matter of course would have to pay his toll of some obviously
useful work. At present you must note that all the amazing machinery
which we have invented has served only to increase the amount of
profit-bearing wares; in other words, to increase the amount of profit
pouched by individuals for their own advantage, part of which profit they
use as capital for the production of more profit, with ever the same
waste attached to it; and part as private riches or means for luxurious
living, which again is sheer waste—is in fact to be looked on as a kind
of bonfire on which rich men burn up the product of the labour they have
fleeced from the workers beyond what they themselves can use. So I say
that, in spite of our inventions, no worker works under the present
system an hour the less on account of those labour-saving machines,
so-called. But under a happier state of things they would be used simply
for saving labour, with the result of a vast amount of leisure gained for
the community to be added to that gained by the avoidance of the waste of
useless luxury, and the abolition of the service of commercial war.
And I may say that as to that leisure, as I should in no case do any harm
to any one with it, so I should often do some direct good to the
community with it, by practising arts or occupations for my hands or
brain which would give pleasure to many of the citizens; in other words,
a great deal of the best work done would be done in the leisure time of
men relieved from any anxiety as to their livelihood, and eager to
exercise their special talent, as all men, nay, all animals are.
Now, again, this leisure would enable me to please myself and expand my
mind by travelling if I had a mind to it: because, say, for instance,
that I were a shoemaker; if due social order were established, it by no
means follows that I should always be obliged to make shoes in one place;
a due amount of easily conceivable arrangement would enable me to make
shoes in Rome, say, for three months, and to come back with new ideas of
building, gathered from the sight of the works of past ages, amongst
other things which would perhaps be of service in London.
But now, in order that my leisure might not degenerate into idleness and
aimlessness, I must set up a claim for due work to do. Nothing to my
mind is more important than this demand, and I must ask your leave to say
something about it. I have mentioned that I should probably use my
leisure for doing a good deal of what is now called work; but it is clear
that if I am a member of a Socialist Community I must do my due share of
rougher work than this—my due share of what my capacity enables me to do,
that is; no fitting of me to a Procrustean bed; but even that share of
work necessary to the existence of the simplest social life must, in the
first place, whatever else it is, be reasonable work; that is, it must be
such work as a good citizen can see the necessity for; as a member of the
community, I must have agreed to do it.
To take two strong instances of the contrary, I won’t submit to be
dressed up in red and marched off to shoot at my French or German or Arab
friend in a quarrel that I don’t understand; I will rebel sooner than do
that.
Nor will I submit to waste my time and energies in making some trifling
toy which I know only a fool can desire; I will rebel sooner than do
that.
However, you may be sure that in a state of social order I shall have no
need to rebel against any such pieces of unreason; only I am forced to
speak from the way we live to the way we might live.
Again, if the necessary reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must
be helped to do it by a machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as
little time as possible may be spent upon it, and that I may be able to
think of other things while am tending the machine. And if the work be
specially rough or exhausting, you will, I am sure, agree with me in
saying that I must take turns in doing it with other people; I mean I
mustn’t, for instance, be expected to spend my working hours always at
the bottom of a coal-pit. I think such work as that ought to be largely
volunteer work, and done, as I say, in spells. And what I say of very
rough work I say also of nasty work. On the other hand, I should think
very little of the manhood of a stout and healthy man who did not feel a
pleasure in doing rough work; always supposing him to work under the
conditions I have been speaking of—namely, feeling that it was useful
(and consequently honoured), and that it was not continuous or hopeless,
and that he was really doing it of his own free will.
The last claim I make for my work is that the places I worked in,
factories or workshops, should be pleasant, just as the fields where our
most necessary work is done are pleasant. Believe me there is nothing in
the world to prevent this being done, save the necessity of making
profits on all wares; in other words, the wares are cheapened at the
expense of people being forced to work in crowded, unwholesome, squalid,
noisy dens: that is to say, they are cheapened at the expense of the
workman’s life.
Well, so much for my claims as to my _necessary_ work, my tribute to the
community. I believe people would find, as they advanced in their
capacity for carrying on social order, that life so lived was much less
expensive than we now can have any idea of; and that, after a little,
people would rather be anxious to seek work than to avoid it; that our
working hours would rather be merry parties of men and maids, young men
and old enjoying themselves over their work, than the grumpy weariness it
mostly is now. Then would come the time for the new birth of art, so
much talked of, so long deferred; people could not help showing their
mirth and pleasure in their work, and would be always wishing to express
it in a tangible and more or less enduring form, and the workshop would
once more be a school of art, whose influence no one could escape from.
And, again, that word art leads me to my last claim, which is that the
material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and
beautiful; that I know is a large claim, but this I will say about it,
that if it cannot be satisfied, if every civilized community cannot
provide such surroundings for all its members, I do not want the world to
go on; it is a mere misery that man has ever existed. I do not think it
possible under the present circumstances to speak too strongly on this
point. I feel sure that the time will come when people will find it
difficult to believe that a rich community such as ours, having such
command over external Nature, could have submitted to live such a mean,
shabby, dirty life as we do.
And once for all, there is nothing in our circumstances save the hunting
of profit that drives us into it. It is profit which draws men into
enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for instance; profit
which crowds them up when they are there into quarters without gardens or
open spaces; profit which won’t take the most ordinary precautions
against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which
turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers; which condemns all but the
rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and
at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name.
I say it is almost incredible that we should bear such crass stupidity as
this; nor should we if we could help it. We shall not bear it when the
workers get out of their heads that they are but an appendage to
profit-grinding, that the more profits that are made the more employment
at high wages there will be for them, and that therefore all the
incredible filth, disorder, and degradation of modern civilization are
signs of their prosperity. So far from that, they are signs of their
slavery. When they are no longer slaves they will claim as a matter of
course that every man and every family should be generously lodged; that
every child should be able to play in a garden close to the place his
parents live in; that the houses should by their obvious decency and
order be ornaments to Nature, not disfigurements of it; for the decency
and order above-mentioned when carried to the due pitch would most
assuredly lead to beauty in building. All this, of course, would mean
the people—that is, all society—duly organized, having in its own hands
the means of production, to be _owned_ by no individual, but used by all
as occasion called for its use, and can only be done on those terms; on
any other terms people will be driven to accumulate private wealth for
themselves, and thus, as we have seen, to waste the goods of the
community and perpetuate the division into classes, which means continual
war and waste.
As to what extent it may be necessary or desirable for people under
social order to live in common, we may differ pretty much according to
our tendencies towards social life. For my part I can’t see why we
should think it a hardship to eat with the people we work with; I am sure
that as to many things, such as valuable books, pictures, and splendour
of surroundings, we shall find it better to club our means together; and
I must say that often when I have been sickened by the stupidity of the
mean idiotic rabbit warrens that rich men build for themselves in
Bayswater and elsewhere, I console myself with visions of the noble
communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy
ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past,
embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce;
such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near
for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective
life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty,
or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should
think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and
meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live
in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in all
respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live in,
simply because I call it my own, or my house.
It is not an original remark, but I make it here, that my home is where I
meet people with whom I sympathise, whom I love.
Well, that is my opinion as a middle-class man. Whether a working-class
man would think his family possession of his wretched little room better
than his share of the palace of which I have spoken, I must leave to his
opinion, and to the imaginations of the middle class, who perhaps may
sometimes conceive the fact that the said worker is cramped for space and
comfort—say on washing-day.
Before I leave this matter of the surroundings of life, I wish to meet a
possible objection. I have spoken of machinery being used freely for
releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary
labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic
turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt
to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are
surrounded by machinery. I don’t quite admit that; it is the allowing
machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the
beauty of life nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the terrible
crime we have fallen into of using our control of the powers of Nature
for the purpose of enslaving people, we careless meantime of how much
happiness we rob their lives of.
Yet for the consolation of the artists I will say that I believe indeed
that a state of social order would probably lead at first to a great
development of machinery for really useful purposes, because people will
still be anxious about getting through the work necessary to holding
society together; but that after a while they will find that there is not
so much work to do as they expected, and that then they will have leisure
to reconsider the whole subject; and if it seems to them that a certain
industry would be carried on more pleasantly as regards the worker, and
more effectually as regards the goods, by using hand-work rather than
machinery, they will certainly get rid of their machinery, because it
will be possible for them to do so. It isn’t possible now; we are not at
liberty to do so; we are slaves to the monsters which we have created.
And I have a kind of hope that the very elaboration of machinery in a
society whose purpose is not the multiplication of labour, as it now is,
but the carrying on of a pleasant life, as it would be under social
order—that the elaboration of machinery, I say, will lead the
simplification of life, and so once more to the limitation of machinery.
Well, I will now let my claims for decent life stand as I have made them.
To sum them up in brief, they are: First, a healthy body; second, an
active mind in sympathy with the past, the present, and the future;
thirdly, occupation fit for a healthy body and an active mind; and
fourthly, a beautiful world to live in.
These are the conditions of life which the refined man of all ages has
set before him as the thing above all others to be attained. Too often
he has been so foiled in their pursuit that he has turned longing eyes
backward to the days before civilization, when man’s sole business was
getting himself food from day to day, and hope was dormant in him, or at
least could not be expressed by him.
Indeed, if civilization (as many think) forbids the realization of the
hope to attain such conditions of life, then civilization forbids mankind
to be happy; and if that be the case, then let us stifle all aspirations
towards progress—nay, all feelings of mutual good-will and affection
between men—and snatch each one of us what we can from the heap of wealth
that fools create for rogues to grow fat on; or better still, let us as
speedily as possible find some means of dying like men, since we are
forbidden to live like men.
Rather, however, take courage, and believe that we of this age, in spite
of all its torment and disorder, have been born to a wonderful heritage
fashioned of the work of those that have gone before us; and that the day
of the organization of man is dawning. It is not we who can build up the
new social order; the past ages have done the most of that work for us;
but we can clear our eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then
see that the attainment of a good condition of life is being made
possible for us, and that it is now our business to stretch out our hands
to take it.
And how? Chiefly, I think, by educating people to a sense of their real
capacities as men, so that they may be able to use to their own good the
political power which is rapidly being thrust upon them; to get them to
see that the old system of organizing labour _for individual profit_ is
becoming unmanageable, and that the whole people have now got to choose
between the confusion resulting from the break up of that system and the
determination to take in hand the labour now organized for profit, and
use its organization for the livelihood of the community: to get people
to see that individual profit-makers are not a necessity for labour but
an obstruction to it, and that not only or chiefly because they are the
perpetual pensioners of labour, as they are, but rather because of the
waste which their existence as a class necessitates. All this we have to
teach people, when we have taught ourselves; and I admit that the work is
long and burdensome; as I began by saying, people have been made so
timorous of change by the terror of starvation that even the unluckiest
of them are stolid and hard to move. Hard as the work is, however, its
reward is not doubtful. The mere fact that a body of men, however small,
are banded together as Socialist missionaries shows that the change is
going on. As the working-classes, the real organic part of society, take
in these ideas, hope will arise in them, and they will claim changes in
society, many of which doubtless will not tend directly towards their
emancipation, because they will be claimed without due knowledge of the
one thing necessary to claim, _equality of condition_; but which
indirectly will help to break up our rotten sham society, while that
claim for equality of condition will be made constantly and with growing
loudness till it _must_ be listened to, and then at last it will only be
a step over the border and the civilized world will be socialized; and,
looking back on what has been, we shall be astonished to think of how
long we submitted to live as we live now.