THE NEED FOR LUXURY
I
Man is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking,
and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material wants are
satisfied, other needs, which, generally speaking, may be described as
of an artistic character, will thrust themselves forward. These needs
are of the greatest variety; they vary with each and every individual;
and the more society is civilized, the more will individuality be
developed, and the more will desires be varied.
Even to-day we see men and women denying themselves necessaries to
acquire mere trifles, to obtain some particular gratification, or some
intellectual or material enjoyment. A Christian or an ascetic may
disapprove of these desires for luxury; but it is precisely these
trifles that break the monotony of existence and make it agreeable.
Would life, with all its inevitable drudge and sorrows, be worth living,
if, besides daily work, man could never obtain a single pleasure
according to his individual tastes?
If we wish for a Social Revolution, it is no doubt, first of all, to
give bread to everyone; to transform this execrable society, in which we
can every day see capable workmen dangling their arms for want of an
employer who will exploit them; women and children wandering shelterless
at night; whole families reduced to dry bread; men, women, and children
dying for want of care and even for want of food. It is to put an end to
these iniquities that we rebel.
But we expect more from the Revolution. We see that the worker,
compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to
ignore the higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science,
and especially of scientific discovery; of art, and especially of
artistic creation. It is in order to obtain for all of us joys that are
now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of
developing everyone's intellectual capacities, that the social
revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been
secured, leisure is the supreme aim.
No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in
need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to
satisfy it, the worker's child must go without bread! But in a society
in which all have the necessary food and shelter, the needs which we
consider luxuries to-day will be the more keenly felt. And as all men do
not and cannot resemble one another (the variety of tastes and needs is
the chief guarantee of human progress) there will always be, and it is
desirable that there should always be, men and women whose desire will
go beyond those of ordinary individuals in some particular direction.
Everybody does not need a telescope, because, even if learning were
general, there are people who prefer to examine things through a
microscope to studying the starry heavens. Some like statues, some like
pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess
a good piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes
vary, but the artistic needs exist in all. In our present, poor
capitalistic society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them
unless he is heir to a large fortune, or by dint of hard work
appropriates to himself an intellectual capital which will enable him to
take up a liberal profession. Still he cherishes the _hope_ of some day
satisfying his tastes more or less, and for this reason he reproaches
the idealist Communist societies with having the material life of each
individual as their sole aim. "In your communal stores you may perhaps
have bread for all," he says to us, "but you will not have beautiful
pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry--in
short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human
tastes. And you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides
the bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the drab
linen in which all your lady citizens will be dressed."
These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider,
and which the founders of new societies, established in American
deserts, never understood. They believed that if the community could
procure sufficient cloth to dress all its members, a music-room in which
the "brothers" could strum a piece of music, or act a play from time to
time, it was enough. They forgot that the feeling for art existed in the
agriculturist as well as in the burgher, and, notwithstanding that the
expression of artistic feeling varies according to the difference in
culture, in the main it remains the same. In vain did the community
guarantee the common necessaries of life, in vain did it suppress all
education that would tend to develop individuality, in vain did it
eliminate all reading save the Bible. Individual tastes broke forth, and
caused general discontent; quarrels arose when somebody proposed to buy
a piano or scientific instruments; and the elements of progress flagged.
The society could only exist on condition that it crushed all individual
feeling, all artistic tendency, and all development.
Will the anarchist Commune be impelled by the same direction?--Evidently
not, if it understands that while it produces all that is necessary to
material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the
human mind.
II
We frankly confess that when we think of the abyss of poverty and
suffering that surrounds us, when we hear the heartrending cry of the
worker walking the streets begging for work, we are loth to discuss the
question: How will men act in a society, whose members are properly fed,
to satisfy certain individuals desirous of possessing a piece of Sèvres
china or a velvet dress?
We are tempted to answer: Let us make sure of bread to begin with, we
shall see to china and velvet later on.
But as we must recognize that man has other needs besides food, and as
the strength of Anarchy lies precisely in that that it understands _all_
human faculties and _all_ passions, and ignores none, we shall, in a few
words, explain how man can contrive to satisfy all his intellectual and
artistic needs.
We have already mentioned that by working 4 or 5 hours a day till the
age of forty-five or fifty, man could easily produce _all_ that is
necessary to guarantee comfort to society.
But the day's work of a man accustomed to toil does not consist of 5
hours; it is a 10 hours' day for 300 days a year, and lasts all his
life. Of course, when a man is harnessed to a machine, his health is
soon undermined and his intelligence is blunted; but when man has the
possibility of varying occupations, and especially of alternating manual
with intellectual work, he can remain occupied without fatigue, and even
with pleasure, for 10 or 12 hours a day. Consequently, the man who will
have done the 4 or 5 hours of manual work that are necessary for his
existence, will have before him 5 or 6 hours which he will seek to
employ according to his tastes. And these 5 or 6 hours a day will fully
enable him to procure for himself, if he associates with others, all he
wishes for, in addition to the necessaries guaranteed to all.
He will discharge first his task in the field, the factory, and so on,
which he owes to society as his contribution to the general production.
And he will employ the second half of his day, his week, or his year, to
satisfy his artistic or scientific needs, or his hobbies.
Thousands of societies will spring up to gratify every taste and every
possible fancy.
Some, for example, will give their hours of leisure to literature. They
will then form groups comprising authors, compositors, printers,
engravers, draughtsmen, all pursuing a common aim--the propagation of
ideas that are dear to them.
Nowadays an author knows that there is a beast of burden, the worker, to
whom, for the sum of a few shillings a day, he can entrust the printing
of his books; but he hardly cares to know what a printing office is
like. If the compositor suffers from lead-poisoning, and if the child
who sees to the machine dies of anæmia, are there not other poor
wretches to replace them?
But when there will be no more starvelings ready to sell their work for
a pittance, when the exploited worker of to-day will be educated, and
will have his _own_ ideas to put down in black and white and to
communicate to others, then the authors and scientific men will be
compelled to combine among themselves and with the printers, in order to
bring out their prose and their poetry.
So long as men consider fustian and manual labour a mark of inferiority,
it will appear amazing to them to see an author setting up his own book
in type, for has he not a gymnasium or games by way of diversion? But
when the opprobrium connected with manual labor has disappeared, when
all will have to work with their hands, there being no one to do it for
them, then the authors as well as their admirers will soon learn the art
of handling composing-sticks and type; they will know the pleasure of
coming together--all admirers of the work to be printed--to set up the
type, to shape it into pages, to take it in its virginal purity from the
press. These beautiful machines, instruments of torture to the child who
attends on them from morn till night, will be a source of enjoyment for
those who will make use of them in order to give voice to the thoughts
of their favourite author.
Will literature lose by it? Will the poet be less a poet after having
worked out of doors or helped with his hands to multiply his work? Will
the novelist lose his knowledge of human nature after having rubbed
shoulders with other men in the forest or the factory, in the laying out
of a road or on a railway line? Can there be two answers to these
questions?
Maybe some books will be less voluminous; but then, more will be said on
fewer pages. Maybe fewer waste-sheets will be published; but the matter
printed will be more attentively read and more appreciated. The book
will appeal to a larger circle of better educated readers, who will be
more competent to judge.
Moreover, the art of printing, that has so little progressed since
Gutenberg, is still in its infancy. It takes two hours to compose in
type what is written in ten minutes, but more expeditious methods of
multiplying thought are being sought after and will be discovered.[6]
What a pity every author does not have to take his share in the printing
of his works! What progress printing would have already made! We should
no longer be using movable letters, as in the seventeenth century.
III
Is it a dream to conceive a society in which--all having become
producers, all having received an education that enables them to
cultivate science or art, and all having leisure to do so--men would
combine to publish the works of their choice, by contributing each his
share of manual work? We have already hundreds of learned, literary, and
other societies; and these societies are nothing but voluntary groups of
men, interested in certain branches of learning, and associated for the
purpose of publishing their works. The authors who write for the
periodicals of these societies are not paid, and the periodicals, apart
from a limited number of copies, are not for sale; they are sent gratis
to all quarters of the globe, to other societies, cultivating the same
branches of learning. This member of the Society may insert in its
review a one-page note summarizing his observations; another may publish
therein an extensive work, the results of long years of study; while
others will confine themselves to consulting the review as a
starting-point for further research. It does not matter: all these
authors and readers are associated for the production of works in which
all of them take an interest.
It is true that a learned society, like the individual author, goes to a
printing office where workmen are engaged to do the printing. Nowadays,
those who belong to the learned societies despise manual labour which
indeed is carried on under very bad conditions; but a community which
would give a generous philosophic and _scientific_ education to all its
members, would know how to organize manual labour in such a way that it
would be the pride of humanity. Its learned societies would become
associations of explorers, lovers of science, and workers--all knowing a
manual trade and all interested in science.
If, for example, the Society is studying geology, all will contribute to
the exploration of the earth's strata; each member will take his share
in research, and ten thousand observers, where we have now only a
hundred, will do more in a year than we can do in twenty years. And when
their works are to be published, ten thousand men and women, skilled in
different trades, will be ready to draw maps, engrave designs, compose,
and print the books. With gladness will they give their leisure--in
summer to exploration, in winter to indoor work. And when their works
appear, they will find not only a hundred, but ten thousand readers
interested in their common work.
This is the direction in which progress is already moving. Even to-day,
when England felt the need of a complete dictionary of the English
language, the birth of a Littré, who would devote his life to this work,
was not waited for. Volunteers were appealed to, and a thousand men
offered their services, spontaneously and gratuitously, to ransack the
libraries, to take notes, and to accomplish in a few years a work which
one man could not complete in his lifetime. In all branches of human
intelligence the same spirit is breaking forth, and we should have a
very limited knowledge of humanity could we not guess that the future is
announcing itself in such tentative co-operation, which is gradually
taking the place of individual work.
For this dictionary to be a really collective work, it would have been
necessary that many volunteer authors, printers, and printers' readers
should have worked in common; but something in this direction is done
already in the Socialist Press, which offers us examples of manual and
intellectual work combined. It happens in our newspapers that a
Socialist author composes in lead his own article. True, such attempts
are rare, but they indicate in which direction evolution is going.
They show the road of liberty. In future, when a man will have something
useful to say--a word that goes beyond the thoughts of his century, he
will not have to look for an editor who might advance the necessary
capital. He will look for collaborators among those who know the
printing trade, and who approve the idea of his new work. Together they
will publish the new book or journal.
Literature and journalism will cease to be a means of money-making and
living at the cost of others. But is there any one who knows literature
and journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that
literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formerly
protected it, and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which,
with rare exceptions, pays for it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to
the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste of the greater
number?
Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of
human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be
exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for those who love
them.
IV
Literature, science, and art must be cultivated by free men. Only on
this condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the
yoke of the State, of Capital, and of the bourgeois mediocrity which
stifles them.
What means has the scientist of to-day to make researches that interest
him? Should he ask help of the State, which can only be given to one
candidate in a hundred, and which only he may obtain who promises
ostensibly to keep to the beaten track? Let us remember how the Academy
of Sciences of France repudiated Darwin, how the Academy of St.
Petersburg treated Mendeléeff with contempt, and how the Royal Society
of London refused to publish Joule's paper, in which he determined the
mechanical equivalent of heat, finding it "unscientific."[7]
It was why all great researches, all discoveries revolutionizing
science, have been made outside academies and universities, either by
men rich enough to remain independent, like Darwin and Lyell, or by men
who undermined their health by working in poverty, and often in great
straits, losing endless time for want of a laboratory, and unable to
procure the instruments or books necessary to continue their researches,
but persevering against hope, and often dying before they had reached
the end in view. Their name is legion.
Altogether, the system of help granted by the State is so bad that
science has always endeavoured to emancipate itself from it. For this
very reason there are thousands of learned societies organized and
maintained by volunteers in Europe and America,--some having developed
to such a degree that all the resources of subventioned societies, and
all the wealth of millionaires, would not buy their treasures. No
governmental institution is as rich as the Zoological Society of London,
which is supported by voluntary contributions.
It does not buy the animals which in thousands people its gardens: they
are sent by other societies and by collectors of the entire world. The
Zoological Society of Bombay will send an elephant as a gift; another
time a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros is offered by Egyptian naturalists.
And these magnificent presents are pouring in every day, arriving from
all quarters of the globe--birds, reptiles, collections of insects, etc.
Such consignments often comprise animals that could not be bought for
all the gold in the world; thus a traveller who has captured an animal
at life's peril, and now loves it as he would love a child, will give it
to the Society because he is sure it will be cared for. The entrance fee
paid by visitors, and they are numberless, suffices for the maintenance
of that immense institution.
What is defective in the Zoological Society of London, and in other
kindred societies, is that the member's fee cannot be paid in work; that
the keepers and numerous employes of this large institution are not
recognized as members of the Society, while many have no other incentive
to joining the society than to put the cabalistic letters F.Z.S (Fellow
of the Zoological Society) on their cards. In a word, what is needed is
a more perfect co-operation.
We may say the same about inventors, that we have said of scientists.
Who does not know what sufferings nearly all great inventions have cost?
Sleepless nights, families deprived of bread, want of tools and
materials for experiments, this is the history of nearly all those who
have enriched industry with inventions which are the truly legitimate
pride of our civilization.
But what are we to do to alter the conditions that everybody is
convinced are bad? Patents have been tried, and we know with what
results. The inventor sells his patent for a few pounds, and the man who
has only lent the capital pockets the enormous profits often resulting
from the invention. Besides, patents isolate the inventor. They compel
him to keep secret his researches which therefore end in failure;
whereas the simplest suggestion, coming from a brain less absorbed in
the fundamental idea, sometimes suffices to fertilize the invention and
make it practical. Like all State control, patents hamper the progress
of industry. Thought being incapable of being patented, patents are a
crying injustice in theory, and in practice they result in one of the
great obstacles to the rapid development of invention.
What is needed to promote the spirit of invention is, first of all, the
awakening of thought, the boldness of conception, which our entire
education causes to languish; it is the spreading of a scientific
education, which would increase the number of inquirers a hundredfold;
it is faith that humanity is going to take a step forward, because it is
enthusiasm, the hope of doing good, that has inspired all the great
inventors. The Social Revolution alone can give this impulse to thought,
this boldness, this knowledge, this conviction of working for all.
Then we shall have vast institutes supplied with motor-power and tools
of all sorts, immense industrial laboratories open to all inquirers,
where men will be able to work out their dreams, after having acquitted
themselves of their duty towards society; machinery palaces where they
will spend their five or six hours of leisure; where they will make
their experiments; where they will find other comrades, experts in other
branches of industry, likewise coming to study some difficult problem,
and therefore able to help and enlighten each other,--the encounter of
their ideas and experience causing the longed-for solution to be found.
And yet again, this is no dream. Solanóy Gorodók, in Petersburg, has
already partially realized it as regards technical matters. It is a
factory well furnished with tools and free to all; tools and motor-power
are supplied gratis, only metals and wood are charged for at cost price.
Unfortunately workmen only go there at night when worn out by ten hours'
labour in the workshop. Moreover, they carefully hide their inventions
from each other, as they are hampered by patents and Capitalism--that
bane of present society, that stumbling-block in the path of
intellectual and moral progress.
V
And what about art? From all sides we hear lamentations about the
decadence of art. We are, indeed, far behind the great masters of the
Renaissance. The technicalities of art have recently made great
progress; thousands of people gifted with a certain amount of talent
cultivate every branch, but art seems to fly from civilization!
Technicalities make headway, but inspiration frequents artists' studios
less than ever.
Where, indeed, should it come from? Only a grand idea can inspire art.
_Art_ is in our ideal synonymous with creation, it must look ahead; but
save a few rare, very rare exceptions, the professional artist remains
too philistine to perceive new horizons.
Moreover, this inspiration cannot come from books; it must be drawn from
life, and present society cannot arouse it.
Raphael and Murillo painted at a time when the search of a new ideal
could be pursued while retaining the old religious traditions. They
painted to decorate churches which themselves represented the pious work
of several generations of a given city. The basilic with its mysterious
aspect, its grandeur, was connected with the life itself of the city,
and could inspire a painter. He worked for a popular monument; he spoke
to his fellow-citizens, and in return he received inspiration; he
appealed to the multitude in the same way as did the nave, the pillars,
the stained windows, the statues, and the carved doors. Nowadays the
greatest honour a painter can aspire to is to see his canvas, framed in
gilded wood, hung in a museum, a sort of old curiosity shop, where you
see, as in the Prado, Murillo's Ascension next to a beggar of Velasquez
and the dogs of Philip II. Poor Velasquez and poor Murillo! Poor Greek
statues which _lived_ in the Acropolis of their cities, and are now
stifled beneath the red cloth hangings of the Louvre!
When a Greek sculptor chiseled his marble he endeavored to express the
spirit and heart of the city. All its passions, all its traditions of
glory, were to live again in the work. But to-day the _united_ city has
ceased to exist; there is no more communion of ideas. The town is a
chance agglomeration of people who do not know one another, who have no
common interest, save that of enriching themselves at the expense of one
another. The fatherland does not exist.... What fatherland can the
international banker and the rag-picker have in common? Only when
cities, territories, nations, or groups of nations, will have renewed
their harmonious life, will art be able to draw its inspiration from
_ideals held in common_. Then will the architect conceive the city's
monument which will no longer be a temple, a prison, or a fortress;
then will the painter, the sculptor, the carver, the ornament-worker
know where to put their canvases, their statues, and their decoration;
deriving their power of execution from the same vital source, and
gloriously marching all together towards the future.
But till then art can only vegetate. The best canvases of modern artists
are those that represent nature, villages, valleys, the sea with its
dangers, the mountain with its splendours. But how can the painter
express the poetry of work in the fields if he has only contemplated it,
imagined it, if he has never delighted in it himself? If he only knows
it as a bird of passage knows the country he soars over in his
migrations? If, in the vigour of early youth, he has not followed the
plough at dawn, and enjoyed mowing grass with a large sweep of the
scythe next to hardy haymakers vying in energy with lively young girls
who fill the air with their songs? The love of the soil and of what
grows on it is not acquired by sketching with a paint-brush--it is only
in its service; and without loving it, how paint it? This is why all
that the best painters have produced in this direction is still so
imperfect, not true to life, nearly always merely sentimental. There is
no _strength_ in it.
You must have seen a sunset when returning from work. You must have been
a peasant among peasants to keep the splendour of it in your eye. You
must have been at sea with fishermen at all hours of the day and night,
have fished yourself, struggled with the waves, faced the storm, and
after rough work experienced the joy of hauling a heavy net, or the
disappointment of seeing it empty, to understand the poetry of fishing.
You must have spent time in a factory, known the fatigues and the joys
of creative work, forged metals by the vivid light of a blast furnace,
have felt the life in a machine, to understand the power of man and to
express it in a work of art. You must, in fact, be permeated with
popular feelings, to describe them.
Besides, the works of future artists who will have lived the life of
the people, like the great artists of the past, will not be destined for
sale. They will be an integral part of a living whole that would not be
complete without them, any more than they would be complete without it.
Men will go to the artist's own city to gaze at his work, and the
spirited and serene beauty of such creations will produce its beneficial
effect on heart and mind.
Art, in order to develop, must be bound up with industry by a thousand
intermediate degrees, blended, so to say, as Ruskin and the great
Socialist poet Morris have proved so often and so well. Everything that
surrounds man, in the street, in the interior and exterior of public
monuments, must be of a pure artistic form.
But this can only be realized in a society in which all enjoy comfort
and leisure. Then only shall we see art associations, of which each
member will find room for his capacity; for art cannot dispense with an
infinity of purely manual and technical supplementary works. These
artistic associations will undertake to embellish the houses of their
members, as those kind volunteers, the young painters of Edinburgh, did
in decorating the walls and ceilings of the great hospital for the poor
in their city.
A painter or sculptor who has produced a work of personal feeling will
offer it to the woman he loves, or to a friend. Executed for love's
sake,--will his work, inspired by love, be inferior to the art that
to-day satisfies the vanity of the philistine, because it has cost much
money?
The same will be done as regards all pleasures not comprised in the
necessaries of life. He who wishes for a grand piano will enter the
association of musical instrument makers. And by giving the association
part of his half-days' leisure, he will soon possess the piano of his
dreams. If he is fond of astronomical studies he will join the
association of astronomers, with its philosophers, its observers, its
calculators, with its artists in astronomical instruments, its
scientists and amateurs, and he will have the telescope he desires by
taking his share of the associated work, for it is especially the rough
work that is needed in an astronomical observatory--bricklayer's,
carpenter's, founder's, mechanic's work, the last touch being given to
the instrument of precision by the artist.
In short, the five or seven hours a day which each will have at his
disposal, after having consecrated several hours to the production of
necessities, would amply suffice to satisfy all longings for luxury,
however varied. Thousands of associations would undertake to supply
them. What is now the privilege of an insignificant minority would be
accessible to all. Luxury, ceasing to be a foolish and ostentatious
display of the bourgeois class, would become an artistic pleasure.
Everyone would be the happier for it. In collective work, performed with
a light heart to attain a desired end, a book, a work of art, or an
object of luxury, each will find an incentive and the necessary
relaxation that makes life pleasant.
In working to put an end to the division between master and slave, we
work for the happiness of both, for the happiness of humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] They _have_ already been discovered since the above lines were
written.
[7] We know this from Playfair, who mentioned it at Joule's death.