Manufacturing Co., even if he also belongs to other companies. Everyone
is also permitted to leave the company whenever he chooses. The board
of management decides in what branch of the works the members shall be
employed.
2. Every member is entitled to an amount of the net proceeds of the
company corresponding to the quantity of work which is done.
3. The amount of work is calculated according to the number of hours,
to which two per cent. is added to that of the older members, and ten
per cent. to foremen, and ten per cent. for night work.
4. The engineers are paid as if working from ten to fifteen hours,
according to ability. The value of the manager is estimated in the
general assembly.
5. Out of the company’s profits a deduction is first made towards
repayment of capital, and after this the tax to the state is deducted.
The remainder is divided among members.
6. If the company is dissolved or liquidated, the members are
responsible in proportion to the amount of profit which they get
from revenues of the company, and this responsibility for the amount
which is still pledged is proportionately laid upon new members. When
a member leaves the company, his responsibility for debt which has
already been contracted is not extinguished. In case of dissolution,
liquidation, or sale, this responsibility corresponds to the claim of
the responsible member to the means of the company which are in hand,
or to his share in what is sold.
7. The principal judicial body of the company is the general assembly
in which every member has the same right to speak and exercise the
same active and passive right of choice. The general assembly makes
its determination by simply counting the majority of votes. A majority
of three quarters is necessary for changing the statutes and for a
dissolution or liquidation of the company.
8. The general assembly practises its right either directly or by means
of chosen officials, who are answerable to it for their actions.
9. The business of the society is managed by a directorate of three
members who hold office at the will of the general assembly. The
subordinate functionaries are chosen by the managers.
10. The general assembly selects every year a committee of inspection
which consists of five members. This body has to control and make a
report upon the books and the manner in which the company is conducted.
Now, as a member of the company, our visitor would have the amount he
has earned credited to him at a Central Bank, which keeps his accounts
and sends him an abstract every week; and through this bank he would
make the larger part of his disbursements. The products of the company,
moreover, are valued, stored, and sold by a Central Warehouse, in much
the same fashion that under the present regime a manufacturer’s whole
output may be disposed of through a big department store or a mail
order house.
Let us now sum this up. The collection and disposition of capital
belongs to the community; and the total capital available for
further production each year is based directly upon the productive
capacities of the community, without the waste and leakage that arises
in present-day society though what Mr. Thorstein Veblen calls the
conspicuous waste--the futile expenditures--of the leisured classes.
That this collection of a capital tax upon income would be any more
difficult than the present corporation tax or private income tax,
which is now dissipated to the extent of some 90 per cent. or so upon
armies and navies, is seriously to be doubted. In addition to this, the
process of open book-keeping enables the Central Bank and the Central
Warehouse to have an accurate knowledge of potential production, and
thus there exists an accurate basis for apportioning credit. At the
same time the value of commodities comes by this means to have a direct
relation to the costs of production rather than to what the traffic
will bear.
On all these heads the trained economist will doubtless have many
points to contest; but in their broad outlines there is no abrupt
departure from current practise in any of these items, and not much
reason, perhaps, why they should not be more thoroughly instituted.
With the various ramifications of Edendale industry and corporate
finance it is not my business to deal; we have gone far enough to see
that very little indeed remains when the question of means has been
gone into.
The chief good that Freeland seems to offer is freedom in industrial
enterprise. An association of men can get land and capital on demand,
and devote themselves to either agriculture or manufacturing industry;
and the risk of failure is minimized by a complete knowledge of the
probable demand and probable supply calculated by the statistical
bureau. Failing an outlet for industry through association, there
remains the land itself, for individual cultivation. “Every family in
Freeland dwells in its own house, and every house is surrounded by its
great garden, a thousand square meters in extent. These houses are the
private property of the inhabitants, and serve, like the gardens, for
private use. The inhabitants of Freeland do not, as a rule, recognize
any kind of ownership of land; they rather go upon the principle that
the land must be put in everyone’s hands to do with what he chooses.
This, in the most literal and wide sense of the word, means that every
inhabitant of Freeland can cultivate every piece of land whenever he
pleases. But this only relates to the land which is set apart for
cultivation, and not that set apart for living upon.... The inhabitants
of Freeland have agreed, with regard to the size and disposition
of the land, serving for the creation of a dwelling house, to form
regulations, and a kind of building court ... which has to determine
what ground is and what is not to be built upon, parcels out the land
for building, sees to the laying out of streets, canals, and the like,
and especially takes care that not more than one building is erected
upon one building allotment.”
5
What sort of life arises out of this kind of industrial association,
these provisions for the common use of machinery and land? It is all
rather dry and colorless, a sort of picture postcard view of the
Promised Land.
We are told that there are a great number of public buildings in
Edendale--an administrative palace, the Central bank, the University,
the Academy of Arts, three Public Libraries, four Theaters, the grand
central goods warehouse, a great number of schools and other buildings.
In addition, extraordinary means are taken to provide for public
cleanliness, and the aqueducts in Edendale--we seem to be reading a
Chamber of Commerce report!--are “almost without any equal in the
world,” moreover, “they are being extended daily.” The refuse is
cleaned away by a system of pneumatic sucking apparatus. The streets
are entirely macadamized. Electric tramways cross them in every
direction and bind the suburbs to the town. Such glimpses as we get of
Edendale remind us, in fact, of a go-ahead city in California or South
Africa. The utopia of Freeland is progressive enough in all conscience;
for many of these mechanical devices were only vague anticipations in
1889; but it is progressive in a mechanical sense; and when we examine
it carefully, people seem to live the same sort of life here as they do
in a “modern” European or American city.
There are differences, of course; and I do not seek to minimize their
importance: the slum proletariat has been abolished; everyone belongs
to the middle class and enjoys the felicities of a high-grade clerk
or an engineer or minor official. This is the peculiarity of our
nineteenth century utopians: they do not so much criticize the goods
of their times as demand more of them! Buckingham and Hertzka, though
they differ in details, wish to extend middle class values throughout
society--comfort and security and a plenitude of soap and sanitation.
Even when the means they propose are revolutionary, the institutions
they would erect are conceived very much in the image of current use
and wont, and are unspeakably tame.
As we pass from Hertzka to Bellamy these facts glare insistently at
us. The slight air of tedium that I have not been able to disguise
in dealing with these utopias arises, I believe, from our excessive
familiarity with their contents. Our nineteenth century utopias, if
we except those of Fourier and Spence and a few more distinguished
ones which we shall presently come to, do not dream of a renovated
world: they keep on adding inventions to the present one. These utopias
become vast reticulations of steel and red-tape, until we feel that we
are caught in the Nightmare of the Age of Machinery; and shall never
escape. If this characterization seem unjust, I beg the reader to
compare the utopias before Bacon with the utopias after Fourier, and
find out how little human significance remains in the post-eighteenth
century utopia when the machinery for supporting the good life is
blotted out. These utopias are all machinery: the means has become the
end, and the genuine problem of ends has been forgotten.
CHAPTER EIGHT
How Étienne Cabet dreamed of a new Napoleon called Icar, and
a new France called Icaria; and how his utopia, with that
which Edward Bellamy shows us in Looking Backward, gives us
a hint of what machinery might bring us to if the industrial
organization were nationalized.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
Étienne Cabet opened his eyes upon the year that preceded the meeting
of the National Assembly in 1788, and closed them upon the Empire of
Napoleon III.
It would be foolish to give an account of Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie
without noting these facts; for the reason that Cabet’s most
impressionable years were drenched with the flamboyant light of the
Napoleonic conquests and the Napoleonic tradition which remained as an
afterglow when the conquests themselves had fallen below the horizon.
The spectacle of a nationalized church and a nationalized system of
education, extending their ministrations to the smallest commune
through a vast system of bureaucracy, must have given a solidity to his
dreams which the interruption of the first Napoleon’s personal downfall
could only have reinforced.
To understand why the Journey to Icaria, as we may call it, should
have been one of the best sellers among workingmen in 1845, and to see
why Louis Blanc should have attempted to set up an organization of
National Workshops in 1848, one must realize the historic momentum of
Napoleon’s dictatorship. Cabet consciously or unconsciously idealized
the Napoleonic tradition; and in Icaria he consummated it. That Cabet’s
futile will-to-power should have led him, under the inspiration of
Owen, to the swamps of Missouri as the leader of a little band of
communist pioneers is an ironic twist of circumstance: his Icaria was
a national state, with all its pomp and dignity and splendor, and not
a squalid collection of huts in the midst of a dreary prairie. Cabet
died in America, as much perhaps from an outraged sense of dignity as
from any physical disease, and nothing came of his utopia until Edward
Bellamy gave it a fresh outline in Looking Backward.
2
With the romantic element in the Journey to Icaria--the English lord
and the Icarian family he visits, and the various friendships and love
affairs that are outlined in its pages--I purpose to have nothing to
do. These things add an element of complication to Cabet’s picture
without doing very much to illuminate it.
Icaria is a country divided into a hundred provinces almost equal
in extent and almost the same in population. These provinces are in
turn divided into ten communes, which are likewise almost equal,
and the provincial capital is in the center of the province, whilst
each communal city is the center of the commune. The elegance and
precision of the decimal system has overlaid the facts of geography
and as one looks over the map of the imaginary country one recalls
the way in which the French revolution divided France into arbitrary
administrative areas called departments, upsetting those ancient
regional groupings which corresponded, roughly, with the natural units
of soil, climate, population, and historic continuity.
In the midst of Icaria is the city of Icara. Icara is a reconstructed
Paris, built on a reconstructed Seine. It is almost circular, cut
into two equal parts by a river whose banks have been straightened
and enclosed in two straight walls; and the bed has been deepened to
receive ocean vessels. In the middle of the city the river divides
into two arms, which form a rather big circular island--though the
islands formed naturally by the division of a river are inevitably
not circular!--and here is the civic center, planted with trees, in
the midst of which stands a palace. There is a superb garden elevated
on a terrace; in the center, a vast column surmounted by a colossal
statue that dominates all the buildings. On each side of the river
is a big quay, bordered by public offices. The effect is indubitably
metropolitan.
The city is divided into quarters: Icara has sixty communes of almost
equal size. In each quarter is a school, a hospital, a temple, shops,
public places, and monuments. The streets are straight and wide, the
city being traversed by fifty avenues parallel to the river and fifty
perpendicular to it. How it is possible to reconcile this street plan
with a circular city I have no notion; and Cabet apparently did not
take the trouble to cast his verbal specifications into a definite
picture or plan. Each block has fifteen houses on each side, with a
public building in the middle, and one at each end; and between the
rows of houses are gardens which the inhabitants of Icaria, like
those of Utopia, have a great pride in keeping up. The blocks are
arranged around squares, very much like those of Belgravia and Mayfair
in London; but the gardens are public ones and are cared for by the
inhabitants.
The Icarian villages are almost as metropolitan as the principal city
itself. One notes a great preoccupation with hygienic conveniences and
sanitary regulations. There are dust collectors of special model; the
sidewalks are covered with glass against rain; and the stations for
omnibuses are also covered. The streets are well-lighted and paved.
Stables, slaughter houses, and hospitals are on the outskirts of the
village. The factories and warehouses are on the railway lines and
canals, and half the streets are closed to all traffic except dog-carts.
In sum, Icaria enjoys a highly sophisticated and metropolitan form of
life. Everything has been “arranged,” everything has been “attended
to.” There are no upsetting complications and diversities. Even the
weather has been disposed of. Nothing short of a very powerful and
persistent organization could have accomplished these things. What is
this organization?
3
In the beginning was Icar, the dictator who established the government
of Icaria, and out of Icar there sprang a number of bureaux,
departments, and committees. Let us follow a typical Icarian through
his day, and examine the institutions he comes in contact with.
Our Icarian is an early riser by necessity, for at 6 A. M. breakfast is
served in a restaurant or factory. It is not a capricious breakfast;
it is such a breakfast, perhaps, as the guardians of Battle Creek,
Michigan, dream of. The food that is served in Icaria is regulated by
a committee of scientists; and while everybody has all that is good
for him, precisely what is good and in what amounts, someone else has
decided in advance. So it is at present in our armies and navies,
and to some extent in our cheap lunchrooms, the difference being that
there remains, outside Icaria, the possibility of breaking away from
the routine and following caprice and appetite without respect for the
committee of dietitians.
When our Icarian has breakfasted, he goes to his work, seven hours
in summer, six in winter. He works the same number of hours as every
other Icarian, and whether he works in the field or the workshop, the
products of his industry are deposited in public stores. Who is his
employer? The State. Who owns all the instruments of production and
service, down to the horses and carriages? The State. Who organizes the
workers? The State. Who constructs the stores and factories, attends
to the cultivation of the ground, has houses built, and makes all the
things necessary for clothing, lodging, and transport? The same. In
theory, the public is the sole proprietor and director of industry; in
practice--Cabet doesn’t tell us otherwise and it necessarily follows in
a system of national industry--a body of engineers and officials have
taken over the dictatorship of Icar and are running the affairs of the
community.
How familiar this Icaria seems to us. Utopia--_c’est la guerre_!
When he is through with his work, our Icarian possibly changes his
clothes. Exactly what clothes are necessary, and what are permissible
has already been prescribed by a committee on clothes; which comes to
saying that every Icarian’s dress is a uniform, even as every Icarian
is an official of the State. Eating, working, dressing, sleeping--there
is no getting away from State regulations. The uniformity that irks
us in modern life and that makes people who have some remnant of free
initiative in their makeup chafe in the civil service, to say nothing
of the army, is extended to the last degree in Icaria. Napoleon’s
conception of a nation in arms is dominant; only now it is a nation in
overalls.
Our Icarian’s father and mother were married after a six-month interval
of courtship. Since they took advantage of the institution at the
earliest moment permitted by law, he was twenty and she was eighteen.
By education, they had been taught to look upon conjugal fidelity as a
desideratum; and they realized that concubinage and adultery would be
looked upon as crimes by public opinion, even if these crimes were not
punished by law. Before our Icarian was born his mother received public
instruction on maternity.
Up to the age of five our Icarian’s education was domestic; but from
the fifth to the seventeenth or eighteenth year, domestic instruction
was combined with intellectual and moral education, under a program
laid down by a committee which had consulted all systems of education,
ancient and modern. His general or elementary education was the same as
that of every other Icarian; but at seventeen for girls and eighteen
for men, his professional education began.
The only industries or professions open to our Icarians were those
recognized and sanctioned by the State; and every year a list is
published telling the number of workers needed in each profession. The
number of workers, in turn, is determined by a committee on industry,
which plans the amount of goods that must be produced during the coming
year. Our Icarian begins work at eighteen, his sister at seventeen;
and he is exempt from work at sixty-five, while she would be exempt at
fifty. The republic, I may note parenthetically, asks from each commune
the sort of industrial and agricultural production which goes best
with its natural resources; delivering its surplus production to other
communes and giving it, in turn, what it may lack.
Cabet describes all these institutions in the minutest fashion, down
to the noiseless window with which each Icarian’s house is equipt; but
the broad outlines of the industrial and social system are contained
in this picture. What we see is a National State, abundantly organized
for war, and remaining on that footing in the midst of its peace-time
activities. What is not of national importance, in this scheme of
things, is of no importance; and the people who decide what is or is
not of national importance are the officeholders--I find it difficult
to discover a utopian equivalent for this word or to fancy any great
improvement in utopia--in the capital.
The political activities that regulate these Icarian institutions
do not greatly reassure us. From each of the thousand communes two
deputies are chosen to hold office for two years: this constitutes
the national representation. The basis of this system is the
communal assembly; and from this communal assembly the provincial
representatives are drawn. The national executive consists of sixteen
members, each with a special department; and it is plain that here is
the seat of power; for exactly what business remains in the hands of
the two thousand legislators when the food committee has determined
the amount and variety of food, the industrial committee the quantity
and kind of manufactured products, and the educational committee the
methods, subjects, and aims of education, it is a little hard to
determine.
There are no newspapers and no means of organized criticism, except
the right of submitting propositions to the popular assemblies. The
only thing resembling public opinion is the collective opinion of
these assemblies. The newspapers are published by the government, one
for the nation, one for the province, and one for the commune; and
they are devoted solely to the presentation of news, divorced from
opinion. For this kind of political system, and for all the power that
it might presume to wield, there is a word in philosophy which has
no substitute--epiphenomenon. The popular system of representation
in Icaria is but a shadow of that dictatorial power which was first
wielded by Icar and was in turn transmitted to the committees and
bureaux.
If I have been criticizing Icaria in terms of the last century of
political experience, I can only plead that it is because Icaria is so
little like Utopia and so much like the actual order of things. It must
be prepared to stand fire as a _fait accompli_: indeed, in the early
days of the second Russian revolution it came near to being a _fait
accompli_--there was more of Cabet than of Marx perhaps in embryonic
Soviet Russia! Icaria is essentially not an ideal but an idealization;
and it is in order to keep the two from being confused that I have
emphasized its little weaknesses. What is good in Icaria is what is
good in the institution of an army; what is bad is what is bad in the
execution of a war. If the good life could be perpetrated by a junta
of busybodies, as Plato would call them, Icaria would be a model
community.
4
Looking backward into the future: that was the paradox by which a
young New England romancer, Edward Bellamy, concerned like Thoreau and
Emerson and the rest of the great Concord school with the well-being
of his community, descended from literature to sociology; and stirred
the minds of thousands of people in America in much the same fashion
that Theodor Hertzka, writing at the same time, stirred his European
contemporaries. Having begun to romanticize about reality, Bellamy
during the decade that followed the publication of Looking Backward,
devoted himself to realizing his romance. In a later work, Equality,
he set forth his picture of the New Society of the year 2000 in much
greater detail; just as if the popularity of his first work committed
him to take up seriously the tasks of the economist and the statesman.
The chief pleasure, nowadays, in both of these books is the familiar
one of recognition; for if Bellamy did not portray a better future he
at any rate, like Mr. H. G. Wells, in his early romances, outlined
many parts of a future that has for us, in the twentieth century,
become an actuality; a fact which makes us realize very poignantly
the limitations of his utopia. In spite of a thin-lipped style,
Bellamy handles his story in a neat, workmanlike way, with a certain
plausibility and familiarity which doubtless explains the fact that it
can still be found, without any difficulty, on the fiction shelves of
our circulating public libraries.