AGREEABLE WORK
I
When Socialists maintain that a society, freed from the rule of the
capitalists, would make work agreeable, and would suppress all repugnant
and unhealthy drudgery, they are laughed at. And yet even to-day we can
see the striking progress that is being made in this direction; and
wherever this progress has been achieved, employers congratulate
themselves on the economy of energy obtained thereby.
It is evident that a factory could be made as healthy and pleasant as a
scientific laboratory. And it is no less evident that it would be
advantageous to make it so. In a spacious and well-ventilated factory
the work is better; it is easy to introduce many small ameliorations, of
which each represents an economy of time or of manual labour. And if
most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the
workers are of no account in the organization of factories, and because
the most absurd waste of human energy is the distinctive feature of the
present industrial organization.
Nevertheless, now and again, we already find, even now, some factories
so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the
work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five
hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of varying it
according to his tastes.
There are immense works, which I know, in one of the Midland counties,
unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. They are perfect as regards
sanitary and intelligent organization. They occupy fifty English acres
of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of
fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner's cottage, and the
glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing
else. In these works are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much
as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace,
whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do
not guess its presence save when its great doors open to let out a steel
monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who
now here, now there, open a tap causing immense cranes to move one way
or another by the pressure of water.
You enter these works expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers,
and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns
and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic
pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the
immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without
crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever be their thickness.
I expected an infernal grating, and I saw machines which cut blocks of
steel thirty feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese.
And when I expressed my admiration to the engineer who showed us round,
he answered--
"A mere question of economy! This machine, that planes steel, has been
in use for forty-two years. It would not have lasted ten years if its
parts, badly adjusted, 'interfered' and creaked at each movement of the
plane!
"And the blast-furnaces? It would be a waste to let heat escape instead
of utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation
represents tons of coal?
"The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also
waste. Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it
costs less--there is less loss.
"In these works, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench,
are but a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can
see what you do, and have elbow-room.
"It is true," he said, "we were very cramped before coming here. Land
is so expensive in the vicinity of large towns--landlords are so
grasping!"
It is even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's
descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will
be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a
library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth:
underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable
put into motion at the pit's mouth. Ventilators will be always working,
and there will never be explosions. This is no dream, such a mine is
already to be seen in England; I went down it. Here again the excellent
organization is simply a question of economy. The mine of which I speak,
in spite of its immense depth (466 yards), has an output of a thousand
tons of coal a day, with only two hundred miners--five tons a day per
each worker, whereas the average for the two thousand pits in England at
the time I visited this mine in the early 'nineties, was hardly three
hundred tons a year per man.
If necessary, it would be easy to multiply examples proving that as
regards the material organization Fourier's dream was not a Utopia.
This question has, however, been so frequently discussed in Socialist
newspapers that public opinion should already be educated on this point.
Factory, forge and mine _can_ be as healthy and magnificent as the
finest laboratories in modern universities, and the better the
organization the more will man's labour produce.
If it be so, can we doubt that work will become a pleasure and a
relaxation in a society of equals, in which "hands" will not be
compelled to sell themselves to toil, and to accept work under any
conditions? Repugnant tasks will disappear, because it is evident that
these unhealthy conditions are harmful to society as a whole. Slaves can
submit to them, but free men will create new conditions, and their work
will be pleasant and infinitely more productive. The exceptions of
to-day will be the rule of to-morrow.
The same will come to pass as regards domestic work, which to-day
society lays on the shoulders of that drudge of humanity--woman.
II
A society regenerated by the Revolution will make domestic slavery
disappear--this last form of slavery, perhaps the most tenacious,
because it is also the most ancient. Only it will not come about in the
way dreamt of by Phalansterians, nor in the manner often imagined by
authoritarian Communists.
Phalansteries are repugnant to millions of human beings. The most
reserved man certainly feels the necessity of meeting his fellows for
the purpose of common work, which becomes the more attractive the more
he feels himself a part of an immense whole. But it is not so for the
hours of leisure, reserved for rest and intimacy. The phalanstery and
the familystery do not take this into account, or else they endeavour to
supply this need by artificial groupings.
A phalanstery, which is in fact nothing but an immense hotel, can please
some, and even all at a certain period of their life, but the great mass
prefers family life (family life of the future, be it understood). They
prefer isolated apartments, Anglo-Saxons even going as far as to prefer
houses of from six to eight rooms, in which the family, or an
agglomeration of friends, can live apart. Sometimes a phalanstery is a
necessity, but it would be hateful, were it the general rule. Isolation,
alternating with time spent in society, is the normal desire of human
nature. This is why one of the greatest tortures in prison is the
impossibility of isolation, much as solitary confinement becomes torture
in its turn, when not alternated with hours of social life.
As to considerations of economy, which are sometimes laid stress on in
favour of phalansteries, they are those of a petty tradesman. The most
important economy, the only reasonable one, is to make life pleasant for
all, because the man who is satisfied with his life produces infinitely
more than the man who curses his surroundings.[8]
Other Socialists reject the phalanstery. But when you ask them how
domestic work can be organized, they answer: "Each can do 'his own
work.' My wife manages the house; the wives of bourgeois will do as
much." And if it is a bourgeois playing at Socialism who speaks, he will
add, with a gracious smile to his wife: "Is it not true, darling, that
you would do without a servant in the Socialist society? You would work
like the wife of our good comrade Paul or the wife of John the
carpenter?"
Servant or wife, man always reckons on woman to do the house-work.
But woman, too, at last claims her share in the emancipation of
humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house.
She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the
rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender,
the sweeper of the house! And, owing to American women taking the lead
in obtaining their claims, there is a general complaint of the dearth of
women who will condescend to domestic work in the United States. My lady
prefers art, politics, literature, or the gaming tables; as to the
work-girls, they are few, those who consent to submit to apron-slavery,
and servants are only found with difficulty in the States. Consequently,
the solution, a very simple one, is pointed out by life itself.
Machinery undertakes three-quarters of the household cares.
You black your boots, and you know how ridiculous this work is. What can
be more stupid than rubbing a boot twenty or thirty times with a brush?
A tenth of the European population must be compelled to sell itself in
exchange for a miserable shelter and insufficient food, and woman must
consider herself a slave, in order that millions of her sex should go
through this performance every morning.
But hairdressers have already machines for brushing glossy or woolly
heads of hair. Why should we not apply, then, the same principle to the
other extremity? So it has been done, and nowadays the machine for
blacking boots is in general use in big American and European hotels.
Its use is spreading outside hotels. In large English schools, where the
pupils are boarding in the houses of the teachers, it has been found
easier to have one single establishment which undertakes to brush a
thousand pairs of boots every morning.
As to washing up! Where can we find a housewife who has not a horror of
this long and dirty work, that is usually done by hand, solely because
the work of the domestic slave is of no account.
In America they do better. There are already a number of cities in which
hot water is conveyed to the houses as cold water is in Europe. Under
these conditions the problem was a simple one, and a woman--Mrs.
Cochrane--solved it. Her machine washes twelve dozen plates or dishes,
wipes them and dries them, in less than three minutes. A factory in
Illinois manufactures these machines and sells them at a price within
reach of the average middle-class purse. And why should not small
households send their crockery to an establishment as well as their
boots? It is even probable that the two functions, brushing and washing
up, will be undertaken by the same association.
Cleaning, rubbing the skin off your hands when washing and wringing
linen; sweeping floors and brushing carpets, thereby raising clouds of
dust which afterwards occasion much trouble to dislodge from the places
where they have settled down, all this work is still done because woman
remains a slave, but it tends to disappear as it can be infinitely
better done by machinery. Machines of all kinds will be introduced into
households, and the distribution of motor-power in private houses will
enable people to work them without muscular effort.
Such machines cost little to manufacture. If we still pay very much for
them, it is because they are not in general use, and chiefly because an
exorbitant tax is levied upon every machine by the gentlemen who wish to
live in grand style and who have speculated on land, raw material,
manufacture, sale, patents, and duties.
But emancipation from domestic toil will not be brought about by small
machines only. Households are emerging from their present state of
isolation; they begin to associate with other households to do in common
what they did separately.
In fact, in the future we shall not have a brushing machine, a machine
for washing up plates, a third for washing linen, and so on, in each
house. To the future, on the contrary, belongs the common heating
apparatus that sends heat into each room of a whole district and spares
the lighting of fires. It is already so in a few American cities. A
great central furnace supplies all houses and all rooms with hot water,
which circulates in pipes; and to regulate the temperature you need only
turn a tap. And should you care to have a blazing fire in any particular
room you can light the gas specially supplied for heating purposes from
a central reservoir. All the immense work of cleaning chimneys and
keeping up fires--and woman knows what time it takes--is disappearing.
Candles, lamps, and even gas have had their day. There are entire cities
in which it is sufficient to press a button for light to burst forth,
and, indeed, it is a simple question of economy and of knowledge to give
yourself the luxury of electric light. And lastly, also in America, they
speak of forming societies for the almost complete suppression of
household work. It would only be necessary to create a department for
every block of houses. A cart would come to each door and take the boots
to be blacked, the crockery to be washed up, the linen to be washed, the
small things to be mended (if it were worth while), the carpets to be
brushed, and the next morning would bring back the things entrusted to
it, all well cleaned. A few hours later your hot coffee and your eggs
done to a nicety would appear on your table. It is a fact that between
twelve and two o'clock there are more than twenty million Americans and
as many Englishmen who eat roast beef or mutton, boiled pork, potatoes
and a seasonable vegetable. And at the lowest figure eight million fires
burn during two or three hours to roast this meat and cook these
vegetables; eight million women spend their time preparing a meal which,
taking all households, represents at most a dozen different dishes.
"Fifty fires burn," wrote an American woman the other day, "where one
would suffice!" Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if
you like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste
their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal!
Why fifty fires, when two people and one single fire would suffice to
cook all these pieces of meat and all these vegetables? Choose your own
beef or mutton to be roasted if you are particular. Season the
vegetables to your taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a
single kitchen with a single fire and organize it as beautifully as you
are able to.
Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family are
the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at
what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind
have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it
beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen
arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that
drudge--woman.
To emancipate woman, is not only to open the gates of the university,
the law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the "emancipated" woman
will always throw her domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate
woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse;
it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear
her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient
leisure to take her share of social life.
It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us
fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful
words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it
maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of
the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] It seems that the Communists of Young Icaria had understood the
importance of a free choice in their daily relations apart from work.
The ideal of religious Communists has always been to have meals in
common; it is by meals in common that early Christians manifested their
adhesion to Christianity. Communion is still a vestige of it. Young
Icarians had given up this religious tradition. They dined in a common
dining room, but at small separate tables, at which they sat according
to the attractions of the moment. The Communists of Anama have each
their house and dine at home, while taking their provisions at will at
the communal stores.