THE above title may strike some of my readers as strange. It is assumed
by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-to
people that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not,
believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless,
he is earning his livelihood by it—he is “employed,” as the phrase goes;
and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with
congratulations and praises, if he is only “industrious” enough and
deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of
labour. In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern
morality that all labour is good in itself—a convenient belief to those
who live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I
recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a
little deeper.
Let us grant, first, that the race of man must either labour or perish.
Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of
some sort or degree. Let us see, then, if she does not give us some
compensation for this compulsion to labour, since certainly in other
matters she takes care to make the acts necessary to the continuance of
life in the individual and the race not only endurable, but even
pleasurable.
You may be sure that she does so, that it is of the nature of man, when
he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work under certain
conditions. And, yet, we must say in the teeth of the hypocritical
praise of all labour, whatsoever it may be, of which I have made mention,
that there is some labour which is so far from being a blessing that it
is a curse; that it would be better for the community and for the worker
if the latter were to fold his hands and refuse to work, and either die
or let us pack him off to the workhouse or prison—which you will.
Here, you see, are two kinds of work—one good, the other bad; one not far
removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a
burden to life.
What is the difference between them, then? This: one has hope in it, the
other has not. It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly also to
refuse to do the other.
What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes
it worth doing?
It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure
in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good
quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth
having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for
all for us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit,
the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man feels the loss of the
bit of string he fidgets with.
I have put the hope of rest first because it is the simplest and most
natural part of our hope. Whatever pleasure there is in some work, there
is certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring up
our slumbering energies to action, the beast-like dread of change when
things are pretty well with us; and the compensation for this animal pain
is animal rest. We must feel while we are working that the time will
come when we shall not have to work. Also the rest, when it comes, must
be long enough to allow us to enjoy it; it must be longer than is merely
necessary for us to recover the strength we have expended in working, and
it must be animal rest also in this, that it must not be disturbed by
anxiety, else we shall not be able to enjoy it. If we have this amount
and kind of rest we shall, so far, be no worse off than the beasts.
As to the hope of product, I have said that Nature compels us to work for
that. It remains for _us_ to look to it that we _do_ really produce
something, and not nothing, or at least nothing that we want or are
allowed to use. If we look to this and use our wills we shall, so far,
be better than machines.
The hope of pleasure in the work itself: how strange that hope must seem
to some of my readers—to most of them! Yet I think that to all living
things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies, and that
even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at
work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at
it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well
as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only
his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his
hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we
shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.
Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope
of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in
our daily creative skill.
All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to
live, that we may live to toil.
Therefore, since we have, as it were, a pair of scales in which to weigh
the work now done in the world, let us use them. Let us estimate the
worthiness of the work we do, after so many thousand years of toil, so
many promises of hope deferred, such boundless exultation over the
progress of civilization and the gain of liberty.
Now, the first thing as to the work done in civilization and the easiest
to notice is that it is portioned out very unequally amongst the
different classes of society. First, there are people—not a few—who do
no work, and make no pretence of doing any. Next, there are people, and
very many of them, who work fairly hard, though with abundant easements
and holidays, claimed and allowed; and lastly, there are people who work
so hard that they may be said to do nothing else than work, and are
accordingly called “the working classes,” as distinguished from the
middle classes and the rich, or aristocracy, whom I have mentioned above.
It is clear that this inequality presses heavily upon the “working”
class, and must visibly tend to destroy their hope of rest at least, and
so, in that particular, make them worse off than mere beasts of the
field; but that is not the sum and end of our folly of turning useful
work into useless toil, but only the beginning of it.
For first, as to the class of rich people doing no work, we all know that
they consume a great deal while they produce nothing. Therefore,
clearly, they have to be kept at the expense of those who do work, just
as paupers have, and are a mere burden on the community. In these days
there are many who have learned to see this, though they can see no
further into the evils of our present system, and have formed no idea of
any scheme for getting rid of this burden; though perhaps they have a
vague hope that changes in the system of voting for members of the House
of Commons may, as if by magic, tend in that direction. With such hopes
or superstitions we need not trouble ourselves. Moreover, this class,
the aristocracy, once thought most necessary to the State, is scant of
numbers, and has now no power of its own, but depends on the support of
the class next below it—the middle class. In fact, it is really composed
either of the most successful men of that class, or of their immediate
descendants.
As to the middle class, including the trading, manufacturing, and
professional people of our society, they do, as a rule, seem to work
quite hard enough, and so at first sight might be thought to help the
community, and not burden it. But by far the greater part of them,
though they work, do not produce, and even when they do produce, as in
the case of those engaged (wastefully indeed) in the distribution of
goods, or doctors, or (genuine) artists and literary men, they consume
out of all proportion to their due share. The commercial and
manufacturing part of them, the most powerful part, spend their lives and
energies in fighting amongst themselves for their respective shares of
the wealth which they _force_ the genuine workers to provide for them;
the others are almost wholly the hangers-on of these; they do not work
for the public, but a privileged class: they are the parasites of
property, sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so;
sometimes, as the doctors and others above mentioned, professing to be
useful, but too often of no use save as supporters of the system of
folly, fraud, and tyranny of which they form a part. And all these we
must remember have, as a rule, one aim in view; not the production of
utilities, but the gaining of a position either for themselves or their
children in which they will not have to work at all. It is their
ambition and the end of their whole lives to gain, if not for themselves
yet at least for their children, the proud position of being obvious
burdens on the community. For their work itself in spite of the sham
dignity with which they surround it, they care nothing: save a few
enthusiasts, men of science, art or letters, who, if they are not the
salt of the earth, are at least (and oh, the pity of it!) the salt of the
miserable system of which they are the slaves, which hinders and thwarts
them at every turn, and even sometimes corrupts them.
Here then is another class, this time very numerous and all-powerful,
which produces very little and consumes enormously, and is therefore in
the main supported, as paupers are, by the real producers. The class
that remains to be considered produces all that is produced, and supports
both itself and the other classes, though it is placed in a position of
inferiority to them; real inferiority, mind you, involving a degradation
both of mind and body. But it is a necessary consequence of this tyranny
and folly that again many of these workers are not producers. A vast
number of them once more are merely parasites of property, some of them
openly so, as the soldiers by land and sea who are kept on foot for the
perpetuating of national rivalries and enmities, and for the purposes of
the national struggle for the share of the product of unpaid labour. But
besides this obvious burden on the producers and the scarcely less
obvious one of domestic servants, there is first the army of clerks,
shop-assistants, and so forth, who are engaged in the service of the
private war for wealth, which, as above said, is the real occupation of
the well-to-do middle class. This is a larger body of workers than might
be supposed, for it includes amongst others all those engaged in what I
should call competitive salesmanship, or, to use a less dignified word,
the puffery of wares, which has now got to such a pitch that there are
many things which cost far more to sell than they do to make.
Next there is the mass of people employed in making all those articles of
folly and luxury, the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of
the rich non-producing classes; things which people leading a manly and
uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever
may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not
wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable
man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The
sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment
and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all
kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication
between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he
is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful—all things which serve the
pleasure of people, free, manly and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Nor
can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or
other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of
England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I
am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire,
but which our useless toil makes—and sells?
Now, further, there is even a sadder industry yet, which is forced on
many, very many, of our workers—the making of wares which are necessary
to them and their brethren, _because they are an inferior class_. For if
many men live without producing, nay, must live lives so empty and
foolish that they _force_ a great part of the workers to produce wares
which no one needs, not even the rich, it follows that most men must be
poor; and, living as they do on wages from those whom they support,
cannot get for their use the _goods_ which men naturally desire, but must
put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with coarse food that does not
nourish, with rotten raiment which does not shelter, with wretched houses
which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret
to the tent of the nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage.
Nay, the workers must even lend a hand to the great industrial invention
of the age—adulteration, and by its help produce for their own use shams
and mockeries of the luxury of the rich; for the wage-earners must always
live as the wage-payers bid them, and their very habits of life are
_forced_ on them by their masters.
But it is waste of time to try to express in words due contempt of the
productions of the much-praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be
enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of
exploiting on which modern manufacture rests. In other words, our
society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed
and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make
the slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery.
To sum up, then, concerning the manner of work in civilized States, these
States are composed of three classes—a class which does not even pretend
to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a
class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work
which is often unproductive.
Civilization therefore wastes its own resources, and will do so as long
as the present system lasts. These are cold words with which to describe
the tyranny under which we suffer; try then to consider what they mean.
There is a certain amount of natural material and of natural forces in
the world, and a certain amount of labour-power inherent in the persons
of the men that inhabit it. Men urged by their necessities and desires
have laboured for many thousands of years at the task of subjugating the
forces of Nature and of making the natural material useful to them. To
our eyes, since we cannot see into the future, that struggle with Nature
seems nearly over, and the victory of the human race over her nearly
complete. And, looking backwards to the time when history first began,
we note that the progress of that victory has been far swifter and more
startling within the last two hundred years than ever before. Surely,
therefore, we moderns ought to be in all ways vastly better off than any
who have gone before us. Surely we ought, one and all of us, to be
wealthy, to be well furnished with the good things which our victory over
Nature has won for us.
But what is the real fact? Who will dare to deny that the great mass of
civilized men are poor? So poor are they that it is mere childishness
troubling ourselves to discuss whether perhaps they are in some ways a
little better off than their forefathers. They are poor; nor can their
poverty be measured by the poverty of a resourceless savage, for he knows
of nothing else than his poverty; that he should be cold, hungry,
houseless, dirty, ignorant, all that is to him as natural as that he
should have a skin. But for us, for the most of us, civilization has
bred desires which she forbids us to satisfy, and so is not merely a
niggard but a torturer also.
Thus then have the fruits of our victory over Nature been stolen from us,
thus has compulsion by Nature to labour in hope of rest, gain, and
pleasure been turned into compulsion by man to labour in hope—of living
to labour!
What shall we do then, can we mend it?
Well, remember once more that it is not our remote ancestors who achieved
the victory over Nature, but our fathers, nay, our very selves. For us
to sit hopeless and helpless then would be a strange folly indeed: be
sure that we can amend it. What, then, is the first thing to be done?
We have seen that modern society is divided into two classes, one of
which is _privileged_ to be kept by the labour of the other—that is, it
forces the other to work for it and takes from this inferior class
everything that it _can_ take from it, and uses the wealth so taken to
keep its own members in a superior position, to make them beings of a
higher order than the others: longer lived, more beautiful, more
honoured, more refined than those of the other class. I do not say that
it troubles itself about its members being positively long lived,
beautiful or refined, but merely insists that they shall be so relatively
to the inferior class. As also it cannot use the labour-power of the
inferior class fairly in producing real wealth, it wastes it wholesale in
the production of rubbish.
It is this robbery and waste on the part of the minority which keeps the
majority poor; if it could be shown that it is necessary for the
preservation of society that this should be submitted to, little more
could be said on the matter, save that the despair of the oppressed
majority would probably at some time or other destroy Society. But it
has been shown, on the contrary, even by such incomplete experiments, for
instance, as Co-operation (so called), that the existence of a privileged
class is by no means necessary for the production of wealth, but rather
for the “government” of the producers of wealth, or, in other words, for
the upholding of privilege.
The first step to be taken then is to abolish a class of men privileged
to shirk their duties as men, thus forcing others to do the work which
they refuse to do. All must work according to their ability, and so
produce what they consume—that is, each man should work as well as he can
for his own livelihood, and his livelihood should be assured to him; that
is to say, all the advantages which society would provide for each and
all of its members.
Thus, at last, would true Society be founded. It would rest on equality
of condition. No man would be tormented for the benefit of another—nay,
no one man would be tormented for the benefit of Society. Nor, indeed,
can that order be called Society which is not upheld for the benefit of
every one of its members.
But since men live now, badly as they live, when so many people do not
produce at all, and when so much work is wasted, it is clear that, under
conditions where all produced and no work was wasted, not only would
every one work with the certain hope of gaining a due share of wealth by
his work, but also he could not miss his due share of rest. Here, then,
are two out of the three kinds of hope mentioned above as an essential
part of worthy work assured to the worker. When class robbery is
abolished, every man will reap the fruits of his labour, every man will
have due rest—leisure, that is. Some Socialists might say we need not go
any further than this; it is enough that the worker should get the full
produce of his work, and that his rest should be abundant. But though
the compulsion of man’s tyranny is thus abolished, I yet demand
compensation for the compulsion of Nature’s necessity. As long as the
work is repulsive it will still be a burden which must be taken up daily,
and even so would mar our life, even though the hours of labour were
short. What we want to do is to add to our wealth without diminishing
our pleasure. Nature will not be finally conquered till our work becomes
a part of the pleasure of our lives.
That first step of freeing people from the compulsion to labour
needlessly will at least put us on the way towards this happy end; for we
shall then have time and opportunities for bringing it about. As things
are now, between the waste of labour-power in mere idleness and its waste
in unproductive work, it is clear that the world of civilization is
supported by a small part of its people; when all were working usefully
for its support, the share of work which each would have to do would be
but small, if our standard of life were about on the footing of what
well-to-do and refined people now think desirable. We shall have
labour-power to spare, and shall, in short, be as wealthy as we please.
It will be easy to live. If we were to wake up some morning now, under
our present system, and find it “easy to live,” that system would force
us to set to work at once and make it hard to live; we should call that
“developing our resources,” or some such fine name. The multiplication
of labour has become a necessity for us, and as long as that goes on no
ingenuity in the invention of machines will be of any real use to us.
Each new machine will cause a certain amount of misery among the workers
whose special industry it may disturb; so many of them will be reduced
from skilled to unskilled workmen, and then gradually matters will slip
into their due grooves, and all will work apparently smoothly again; and
if it were not that all this is preparing revolution, things would be,
for the greater part of men, just as they were before the new wonderful
invention.
But when revolution has made it “easy to live,” when all are working
harmoniously together and there is no one to rob the worker of his time,
that is to say, his life; in those coming days there will be no
compulsion on us to go on producing things we do not want, no compulsion
on us to labour for nothing; we shall be able calmly and thoughtfully to
consider what we shall do with our wealth of labour-power. Now, for my
part, I think the first use we ought to make of that wealth, of that
freedom, should be to make all our labour, even the commonest and most
necessary, pleasant to everybody; for thinking over the matter carefully
I can see that the one course which will certainly make life happy in the
face of all accidents and troubles is to take a pleasurable interest in
all the details of life. And lest perchance you think that an assertion
too universally accepted to be worth making, let me remind you how
entirely modern civilization forbids it; with what sordid, and even
terrible, details it surrounds the life of the poor, what a mechanical
and empty life she forces on the rich; and how rare a holiday it is for
any of us to feel ourselves a part of Nature, and unhurriedly,
thoughtfully, and happily to note the course of our lives amidst all the
little links of events which connect them with the lives of others, and
build up the great whole of humanity.
But such a holiday our whole lives might be, if we were resolute to make
all our labour reasonable and pleasant. But we must be resolute indeed;
for no half measures will help us here. It has been said already that
our present joyless labour, and our lives scared and anxious as the life
of a hunted beast, are forced upon us by the present system of producing
for the profit of the privileged classes. It is necessary to state what
this means. Under the present system of wages and capital the
“manufacturer” (most absurdly so called, since a manufacturer means a
person who makes with his hands) having a monopoly of the means whereby
the power to labour inherent in every man’s body can be used for
production, is the master of those who are not so privileged; he, and he
alone, is able to make use of this labour-power, which, on the other
hand, is the only commodity by means of which his “capital,” that is to
say, the accumulated product of past labour, can be made productive to
him. He therefore buys the labour-power of those who are bare of capital
and can only live by selling it to him; his purpose in this transaction
is to increase his capital, to make it breed. It is clear that if he
paid those with whom he makes his bargain the full value of their labour,
that is to say, all that they produced, he would fail in his purpose.
But since he is the monopolist of the means of productive labour, he can
_compel_ them to make a bargain better for him and worse for them than
that; which bargain is that after they have earned their livelihood,
estimated according to a standard high enough to ensure their peaceable
submission to his mastership, the rest (and by far the larger part as a
matter of fact) of what they produce shall belong to him, shall be his
_property_ to do as he likes with, to use or abuse at his pleasure; which
property is, as we all know, jealously guarded by army and navy, police
and prison; in short, by that huge mass of physical force which
superstition, habit, fear of death by starvation—IGNORANCE, in one word,
among the propertyless masses enables the propertied classes to use for
the subjection of—their slaves.
Now, at other times, other evils resulting from this system may be put
forward. What I want to point out now is the impossibility of our
attaining to attractive labour under this system, and to repeat that it
is this robbery (there is no other word for it) which wastes the
available labour-power of the civilized world, forcing many men to do
nothing, and many, very many more to do nothing useful; and forcing those
who carry on really useful labour to most burdensome over-work. For
understand once for all that the “manufacturer” aims primarily at
producing, by means of the labour he has stolen from others, not goods
but profits, that is, the “wealth” that is produced over and above the
livelihood of his workmen, and the wear and tear of his machinery.
Whether that “wealth” is real or sham matters nothing to him. If it
sells and yields him a “profit” it is all right. I have said that, owing
to there being rich people who have more money than they can spend
reasonably, and who therefore buy sham wealth, there is waste on that
side; and also that, owing to there being poor people who cannot afford
to buy things which are worth making, there is waste on that side. So
that the “demand” which the capitalist “supplies” is a false demand. The
market in which he sells is “rigged” by the miserable inequalities
produced by the robbery of the system of Capital and Wages.
It is this system, therefore, which we must be resolute in getting rid
of, if we are to attain to happy and useful work for all. The first step
towards making labour attractive is to get the means of making labour
fruitful, the Capital, including the land, machinery, factories, &c.,
into the hands of the community, to be used for the good of all alike, so
that we might all work at “supplying” the real “demands” of each and
all—that is to say, work for livelihood, instead of working to supply the
demand of the profit market—instead of working for profit—i.e., the power
of compelling other men to work against their will.
When this first step has been taken and men begin to understand that
Nature wills all men either to work or starve, and when they are no
longer such fools as to allow some the alternative of stealing, when this
happy day is come, we shall then be relieved from the tax of waste, and
consequently shall find that we have, as aforesaid, a mass of
labour-power available, which will enable us to live as we please within
reasonable limits. We shall no longer be hurried and driven by the fear
of starvation, which at present presses no less on the greater part of
men in civilized communities than it does on mere savages. The first and
most obvious necessities will be so easily provided for in a community in
which there is no waste of labour, that we shall have time to look round
and consider what we really do want, that can be obtained without
over-taxing our energies; for the often-expressed fear of mere idleness
falling upon us when the force supplied by the present hierarchy of
compulsion is withdrawn, is a fear which is but generated by the burden
of excessive and repulsive labour, which we most of us have to bear at
present.
I say once more that, in my belief, the first thing which we shall think
so necessary as to be worth sacrificing some idle time for, will be the
attractiveness of labour. No very heavy sacrifice will be required for
attaining this object, but some _will_ be required. For we may hope that
men who have just waded through a period of strife and revolution will be
the last to put up long with a life of mere utilitarianism, though
Socialists are sometimes accused by ignorant persons of aiming at such a
life. On the other hand, the ornamental part of modern life is already
rotten to the core, and must be utterly swept away before the new order
of things is realized. There is nothing of it—there is nothing which
could come of it that could satisfy the aspirations of men set free from
the tyranny of commercialism.
We must begin to build up the ornamental part of life—its pleasures,
bodily and mental, scientific and artistic, social and individual—on the
basis of work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the consciousness
of benefiting ourselves and our neighbours by it. Such absolutely
necessary work as we should have to do would in the first place take up
but a small part of each day, and so far would not be burdensome; but it
would be a task of daily recurrence, and therefore would spoil our day’s
pleasure unless it were made at least endurable while it lasted. In
other words, all labour, even the commonest, must be made attractive.
How can this be done?—is the question the answer to which will take up
the rest of this paper. In giving some hints on this question, I know
that, while all Socialists will agree with many of the suggestions made,
some of them may seem to some strange and venturesome. These must be
considered as being given without any intention of dogmatizing, and as
merely expressing my own personal opinion.
From all that has been said already it follows that labour, to be
attractive, must be directed towards some obviously useful end, unless in
cases where it is undertaken voluntarily by each individual as a pastime.
This element of obvious usefulness is all the more to be counted on in
sweetening tasks otherwise irksome, since social morality, the
responsibility of man towards the life of man, will, in the new order of
things, take the place of theological morality, or the responsibility of
man to some abstract idea. Next, the day’s work will be short. This
need not be insisted on. It is clear that with work unwasted it _can_ be
short. It is clear also that much work which is now a torment, would be
easily endurable if it were much shortened.
Variety of work is the next point, and a most important one. To compel a
man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or
change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison-torment.
Nothing but the tyranny of profit-grinding makes this necessary. A man
might easily learn and practise at least three crafts, varying sedentary
occupation with outdoor—occupation calling for the exercise of strong
bodily energy for work in which the mind had more to do. There are few
men, for instance, who would not wish to spend part of their lives in the
most necessary and pleasantest of all work—cultivating the earth. One
thing which will make this variety of employment possible will be the
form that education will take in a socially ordered community. At
present all education is directed towards the end of fitting people to
take their places in the hierarchy of commerce—these as masters, those as
workmen. The education of the masters is more ornamental than that of
the workmen, but it is commercial still; and even at the ancient
universities learning is but little regarded, unless it can in the long
run be made _to pay_. Due education is a totally different thing from
this, and concerns itself in finding out what different people are fit
for, and helping them along the road which they are inclined to take. In
a duly ordered society, therefore, young people would be taught such
handicrafts as they had a turn for as a part of their education, the
discipline of their minds and bodies; and adults would also have
opportunities of learning in the same schools, for the development of
individual capacities would be of all things chiefly aimed at by
education, instead, as now, the subordination of all capacities to the
great end of “money-making” for oneself—or one’s master. The amount of
talent, and even genius, which the present system crushes, and which
would be drawn out by such a system, would make our daily work easy and
interesting.
Under this head of variety I will note one product of industry which has
suffered so much from commercialism that it can scarcely be said to
exist, and is, indeed, so foreign from our epoch that I fear there are
some who will find it difficult to understand what I have to say on the
subject, which I nevertheless must say, since it is really a most
important one. I mean that side of art which is, or ought to be, done by
the ordinary workman while he is about his ordinary work, and which has
got to be called, very properly, Popular Art. This art, I repeat, no
longer exists now, having been killed by commercialism. But from the
beginning of man’s contest with Nature till the rise of the present
capitalistic system, it was alive, and generally flourished. While it
lasted, everything that was made by man was adorned by man, just as
everything made by Nature is adorned by her. The craftsman, as he
fashioned the thing he had under his hand, ornamented it so naturally and
so entirely without conscious effort, that it is often difficult to
distinguish where the mere utilitarian part of his work ended and the
ornamental began. Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the
workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by
this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and
pleasure in the work by the workman was a matter of more importance
still, for it stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure. All this
has now quite disappeared from the work of civilization. If you wish to
have ornament, you must pay specially for it, and the workman is
compelled to produce ornament, as he is to produce other wares. He is
compelled to pretend happiness in his work, so that the beauty produced
by man’s hand, which was once a solace to his labour, has now become an
extra burden to him, and ornament is now but one of the follies of
useless toil, and perhaps not the least irksome of its fetters.
Besides the short duration of labour, its conscious usefulness, and the
variety which should go with it, there is another thing needed to make it
attractive, and that is pleasant surroundings. The misery and squalor
which we people of civilization bear with so much complacency as a
necessary part of the manufacturing system, is just as necessary to the
community at large as a proportionate amount of filth would be in the
house of a private rich man. If such a man were to allow the cinders to
be raked all over his drawing-room, and a privy to be established in each
corner of his dining-room, if he habitually made a dust and refuse heap
of his once beautiful garden, never washed his sheets or changed his
tablecloth, and made his family sleep five in a bed, he would surely find
himself in the claws of a commission _de lunatico_. But such acts of
miserly folly are just what our present society is doing daily under the
compulsion of a supposed necessity, which is nothing short of madness. I
beg you to bring your commission of lunacy against civilization without
more delay.
For all our crowded towns and bewildering factories are simply the
outcome of the profit system. Capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic
land-owning, and capitalistic exchange force men into big cities in order
to manipulate them in the interests of capital; the same tyranny
contracts the due space of the factory so much that (for instance) the
interior of a great weaving-shed is almost as ridiculous a spectacle as
it is a horrible one. There is no other necessity for all this, save the
necessity for grinding profits out of men’s lives, and of producing cheap
goods for the use (and subjection) of the slaves who grind. All labour
is not yet driven into factories; often where it is there is no necessity
for it, save again the profit-tyranny. People engaged in all such labour
need by no means be compelled to pig together in close city quarters.
There is no reason why they should not follow their occupations in quiet
country homes, in industrial colleges, in small towns, or, in short,
where they find it happiest for them to live.
As to that part of labour which must be associated on a large scale, this
very factory system, under a reasonable order of things (though to my
mind there might still be drawbacks to it), would at least offer
opportunities for a full and eager social life surrounded by many
pleasures. The factories might be centres of intellectual activity also,
and work in them might well be varied very much: the tending of the
necessary machinery might to each individual be but a short part of the
day’s work. The other work might vary from raising food from the
surrounding country to the study and practice of art and science. It is
a matter of course that people engaged in such work, and being the
masters of their own lives, would not allow any hurry or want of
foresight to force them into enduring dirt, disorder, or want of room.
Science duly applied would enable them to get rid of refuse, to minimize,
if not wholly to destroy, all the inconveniences which at present attend
the use of elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench and noise; nor
would they endure that the buildings in which they worked or lived should
be ugly blots on the fair face of the earth. Beginning by making their
factories, buildings, and sheds decent and convenient like their homes,
they would infallibly go on to make them not merely negatively good,
inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of
architecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed, would be born
again and flourish.
So, you see, I claim that work in a duly ordered community should be made
attractive by the consciousness of usefulness, by its being carried on
with intelligent interest, by variety, and by its being exercised amidst
pleasurable surroundings. But I have also claimed, as we all do, that
the day’s work should not be wearisomely long. It may be said, “How can
you make this last claim square with the others? If the work is to be so
refined, will not the goods made be very expensive?”
I do admit, as I have said before, that some sacrifice will be necessary
in order to make labour attractive. I mean that, if we _could_ be
contented in a free community to work in the same hurried, dirty,
disorderly, heartless way as we do now, we might shorten our day’s labour
very much more than I suppose we shall do, taking all kinds of labour
into account. But if we did, it would mean that our new-won freedom of
condition would leave us listless and wretched, if not anxious, as we are
now, which I hold is simply impossible. We should be contented to make
the sacrifices necessary for raising our condition to the standard called
out for as desirable by the whole community. Nor only so. We should,
individually, be emulous to sacrifice quite freely still more of our time
and our ease towards the raising of the standard of life. Persons,
either by themselves or associated for such purposes, would freely, and
for the love of the work and for its results—stimulated by the hope of
the pleasure of creation—produce those ornaments of life for the service
of all, which they are now bribed to produce (or pretend to produce) for
the service of a few rich men. The experiment of a civilized community
living wholly without art or literature has not yet been tried. The past
degradation and corruption of civilization may force this denial of
pleasure upon the society which will arise from its ashes. If that must
be, we will accept the passing phase of utilitarianism as a foundation
for the art which is to be. If the cripple and the starveling disappear
from our streets, if the earth nourish us all alike, if the sun shine for
all of us alike, if to one and all of us the glorious drama of the
earth—day and night, summer and winter—can be presented as a thing to
understand and love, we can afford to wait awhile till we are purified
from the shame of the past corruption, and till art arises again amongst
people freed from the terror of the slave and the shame of the robber.
Meantime, in any case, the refinement, thoughtfulness, and deliberation
of labour must indeed be paid for, but not by compulsion to labour long
hours. Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild
dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet
_made no use_.
They are called “labour-saving” machines—a commonly used phrase which
implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What
they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the
unskilled, to increase the number of the “reserve army of labour”—that
is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to
intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their
masters). All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of
the employers of labour, or force them to expend those profits in bitter
commercial war with each other. In a true society these miracles of
ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimizing the amount of
time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so
reduced as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the
more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it
was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would “pay” the
individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community.
So much for the ordinary use of machinery, which would probably, after a
time, be somewhat restricted when men found out that there was no need
for anxiety as to mere subsistence, and learned to take an interest and
pleasure in handiwork which, done deliberately and thoughtfully, could be
made more attractive than machine work.
Again, as people freed from the daily terror of starvation find out what
they really wanted, being no longer compelled by anything but their own
needs, they would refuse to produce the mere inanities which are now
called luxuries, or the poison and trash now called cheap wares. No one
would make plush breeches when there were no flunkies to wear them, nor
would anybody waste his time over making oleomargarine when no one was
_compelled_ to abstain from real butter. Adulteration laws are only
needed in a society of thieves—and in such a society they are a dead
letter.
Socialists are often asked how work of the rougher and more repulsive
kind could be carried out in the new condition of things. To attempt to
answer such questions fully or authoritatively would be attempting the
impossibility of constructing a scheme of a new society out of the
materials of the old, before we knew which of those materials would
disappear and which endure through the evolution which is leading us to
the great change. Yet it is not difficult to conceive of some
arrangement whereby those who did the roughest work should work for the
shortest spells. And again, what is said above of the variety of work
applies specially here. Once more I say, that for a man to be the whole
of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and
never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by
theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society. Lastly, if
this rougher work were of any special kind, we may suppose that special
volunteers would be called on to perform it, who would surely be
forthcoming, unless men in a state of freedom should lose the sparks of
manliness which they possessed as slaves.
And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than repulsive,
either by the shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its
recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and
therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs it freely,—if there
be any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker, what then?
Well, then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it
undone, for it were better that they should. The produce of such work
cannot be worth the price of it.
Now we have seen that the semi-theological dogma that all labour, under
any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer, is hypocritical and
false; that, on the other hand, labour is good when due hope of rest and
pleasure accompanies it. We have weighed the work of civilization in the
balance and found it wanting, since hope is mostly lacking to it, and
therefore we see that civilization has bred a dire curse for men. But we
have seen also that the work of the world might be carried on in hope and
with pleasure if it were not wasted by folly and tyranny, by the
perpetual strife of opposing classes.
* * * * *
It is Peace, therefore, which we need in order that we may live and work
in hope and with pleasure. Peace so much desired, if we may trust men’s
words, but which has been so continually and steadily rejected by them in
deeds. But for us, let us set our hearts on it and win it at whatever
cost.
What the cost may be, who can tell? Will it be possible to win peace
peaceably? Alas, how can it be? We are so hemmed in by wrong and folly,
that in one way or other we must always be fighting against them: our own
lives may see no end to the struggle, perhaps no obvious hope of the end.
It may be that the best we can hope to see is that struggle getting
sharper and bitterer day by day, until it breaks out openly at last into
the slaughter of men by actual warfare instead of by the slower and
crueller methods of “peaceful” commerce. If we live to see that, we
shall live to see much; for it will mean the rich classes grown conscious
of their own wrong and robbery, and consciously defending them by open
violence; and then the end will be drawing near.
But in any case, and whatever the nature of our strife for peace may be,
if we only aim at it steadily and with singleness of heart, and ever keep
it in view, a reflection from that peace of the future will illumine the
turmoil and trouble of our lives, whether the trouble be seemingly petty,
or obviously tragic; and we shall, in our hopes at least, live the lives
of men: nor can the present times give us any reward greater than that.