OBJECTIONS
I
Let us now examine the principal objections put forth against Communism.
Most of them are evidently caused by a simple misunderstanding, yet they
raise important questions and merit our attention.
It is not for us to answer the objections raised by authoritarian
Communism--we ourselves hold with them. Civilized nations have suffered
too much in the long, hard struggle for the emancipation of the
individual, to disown their past work and to tolerate a Government that
would make itself felt in the smallest details of a citizen's life, even
if that Government had no other aim than the good of the community.
Should an authoritarian Socialist society ever succeed in establishing
itself, it could not last; general discontent would soon force it to
break up, or to reorganize itself on principles of liberty.
It is of an Anarchist-Communist society we are about to speak, a society
that recognizes the absolute liberty of the individual, that does not
admit of any authority, and makes use of no compulsion to drive men to
work. Limiting our studies to the economic side of the question, let us
see if such a society, composed of men as they are to-day, neither
better nor worse, neither more nor less industrious, would have a chance
of successful development.
The objection is known. "If the existence of each is guaranteed, and if
the necessity of earning wages does not compel men to work, nobody will
work. Every man will lay the burden of his work on another if he is not
forced to do it himself." Let us first note the incredible levity with
which this objection is raised, without even realizing that the real
question raised by this objection is merely to know, on the one hand,
whether you effectively obtain by wage-work, the results that are said
to be obtained, and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not
already now more productive than work stimulated by wages. A question
which, to be dealt with properly, would require a serious study. But
whereas in exact sciences men give their opinion on subjects infinitely
less important and less complicated after serious research, after
carefully collecting and analyzing facts--on this question they will
pronounce judgment without appeal, resting satisfied with any one
particular event, such as, for example, the want of success of some
communist association in America. They act like the barrister who does
not see in the counsel for the opposite side a representative of a
cause, or an opinion contrary to his own, but a simple nuisance,--an
adversary in an oratorical debate; and if he be lucky enough to find a
repartee, does not otherwise care to justify his cause. Therefore the
study of this essential basis of all Political Economy, _the study of
the most favourable conditions for giving society the greatest amount of
useful products with the least waste of human energy_, does not advance.
People either limit themselves to repeating commonplace assertions, or
else they pretend ignorance of our assertions.
What is most striking in this levity is that even in capitalist
Political Economy you already find a few writers compelled by facts to
doubt the axiom put forth by the founders of their science, that the
threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work. They begin
to perceive that in production a certain _collective element_ is
introduced, which has been too much neglected up till now, and which
might be more important than personal gain. The inferior quality of
wage-work, the terrible waste of human energy in modern agricultural and
industrial labour, the ever-growing quantity of pleasure-seekers, who
shift their burden on to others' shoulders, the absence of a certain
animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent; all
this is beginning to preoccupy the economists of the "classical" school.
Some of them ask themselves if they have not got on the wrong track: if
the imaginary evil being, that was supposed to be tempted exclusively by
a bait of lucre or wages, really exists. This heresy penetrates even
into universities; it is found in books of orthodox economy.
But this does not prevent a great many Socialist reformers from
remaining partisans of individual remuneration, and defending the old
citadel of wagedom, notwithstanding that it is being delivered over
stone by stone to the assailants by its former defenders.
They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.
But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed
twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the
emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian
nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro
will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's
supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the
Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789,
the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we
shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an
injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated
peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestors;
the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian
peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by
celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an
eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There,
where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for
it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to
the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its
motive.
Moreover, who but the economists themselves taught us that while a
wage-earner's work is very often indifferent, an intense and productive
work is only obtained from a man who sees his wealth increase in
proportion to his efforts? All hymns sung in honour of private property
can be reduced to this axiom.
For it is remarkable that when economists, wishing to celebrate the
blessings of property, show us how an unproductive, marshy, or stony
soil is clothed with rich harvests when cultivated by the peasant
proprietor, they in nowise prove their thesis in favour of private
property. By admitting that the only guarantee not to be robbed of the
fruits of your labour is to possess the instruments of labour--which is
true--the economists only prove that man really produces most when he
works in freedom, when he has a certain choice in his occupations, when
he has no overseer to impede him, and lastly, when he sees his work
bringing in a profit to him and to others who work like him, but
bringing in little to idlers. Nothing else can be deducted from their
argumentation, and this is what we maintain ourselves.
As to the form of possession of the instruments of labour, the
economists only mention it _indirectly_ in their demonstration, as a
guarantee to the cultivator that he shall not be robbed of the profits
of his yield nor of his improvements. Besides, in support of their
thesis in favour of _private property_ against all other forms of
_possession_, should not the economists demonstrate that under the form
of communal property land never produces such rich harvests as when the
possession is private? But this they could not prove; in fact, it is the
contrary that has been observed.
Take for example a commune in the canton of Vaud, in the winter time,
when all the men of the village go to fell wood in the forest, which
belongs to them all. It is precisely during these festivals of labour
that the greatest ardour for work and the most considerable display of
human energy are apparent. No salaried labour, no effort of a private
owner can bear comparison with it.
Or let us take a Russian village, when all its inhabitants mow a field
belonging to the commune, or farmed by it. There you will see what man
_can_ produce when he works in common for communal production. Comrades
vie with one another in cutting the widest swathe, women bestir
themselves in their wake so as not to be distanced by the mowers. It is
a festival of labour, in which a hundred people accomplish in a few
hours a work that would not have been finished in a few days had they
worked separately. What a miserable contrast compared to them is offered
by the work of the isolated owner!
In fact, we might quote scores of examples among the pioneers of
America, in Swiss, German, Russian, and in certain French villages; or
the work done in Russia by gangs (_artels)_ of masons, carpenters,
boatmen, fishermen, etc., who undertake a task and divide the produce or
the remuneration among themselves without it passing through an
intermediary of middlemen; or else the amount of work I saw performed in
English ship-yards when the remuneration was paid on the same principle.
We could also mention the great communal hunts of nomadic tribes, and an
infinite number of successful collective enterprises. And in every case
we could show the unquestionable superiority of communal work compared
to that of the wage-earner or the isolated private owner.
Well-being--that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and
moral needs, has always been the most powerful stimulant to work. And
where a hireling hardly succeeds to produce the bare necessities with
difficulty, a free worker, who sees ease and luxury increasing for him
and for others in proportion to his efforts, spends infinitely far more
energy and intelligence, and obtains products in a far greater
abundance. The one feels riveted to misery, the other hopes for ease and
luxury in the future. In this lies the whole secret. Therefore a society
aiming at the well-being of all, and at the possibility of all enjoying
life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary work, which will be
infinitely superior and yield far more than work has produced up till
now under the goad of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.
II
Nowadays, whoever can load on others his share of labour indispensable
to existence does so, and it is believed that it will always be so.
Now, work indispensable to existence is essentially manual. We may be
artists or scientists; but none of us can do without things obtained by
manual work--bread, clothes, roads, ships, light, heat, etc. And,
moreover, however highly artistic or however subtly metaphysical are our
pleasures, they all depend on manual labour. And it is precisely this
labour--the basis of life--that everyone tries to avoid.
We understand perfectly well that it must be so nowadays.
Because, to do manual work now, means in reality to shut yourself up for
ten or twelve hours a day in an unhealthy workshop, and to remain
chained to the same task for twenty or thirty years, and maybe for your
whole life.
It means to be doomed to a paltry wage, to the uncertainty of the
morrow, to want of work, often to destitution, more often than not to
death in a hospital, after having worked forty years to feed, clothe,
amuse, and instruct others than yourself and your children.
It means to bear the stamp of inferiority all your life; because,
whatever the politicians tell us, the manual worker is always considered
inferior to the brain worker, and the one who has toiled ten hours in a
workshop has not the time, and still less the means, to give himself the
high delights of science and art, nor even to prepare himself to
appreciate them; he must be content with the crumbs from the table of
privileged persons.
We understand that under these conditions manual labour is considered a
curse of fate.
We understand that all men have but one dream--that of emerging from, or
enabling their children to emerge from this inferior state; to create
for themselves an "independent" position, which means what?--To also
live by other men's work!
As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of
"brain" workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus.
What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker,
when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave
will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow?
Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their
wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at
their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines
blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without
hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day
they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all
the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge,
scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to a few privileged
favourites.
It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and
brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social
Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will
become what it should be--the free exercise of _all_ the faculties of
man.
Moreover, it is time to submit to a serious analysis this legend about
superior work, supposed to be obtained under the lash of wagedom.
It would be sufficient to visit, not the model factory and workshop that
we find now and again, but a number of the ordinary factories, to
conceive the immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern
industry. For one factory more or less rationally organized, there are a
hundred or more which waste man's labour, without any more substantial
motive than that of perhaps bringing in a few pounds more per day to the
employer.
Here you see youths from twenty to twenty-five years of age, sitting all
day long on a bench, their chests sunken in, feverishly shaking their
heads and bodies, to tie, with the speed of conjurers, the two ends of
worthless scraps of cotton, the refuse of the lace-looms. What progeny
will these trembling and rickety bodies bequeath to their country? "But
they occupy so little room in the factory, and each of them brings me in
sixpence net every day," will say the employer.
In an immense London factory we saw girls, bald at seventeen from
carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another, when
the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables. But "It
costs so little, the work of women who have no special trade! Why should
we use a machine? When these can do no more, they will be easily
replaced, there are so many of them in the street!"
On the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a bare-footed
child asleep, with its bundle of papers in its arms ... child-labour
costs so little that it may be well employed, every evening, to sell
tenpenny-worth of papers, of which the poor boy will receive a penny, or
a penny halfpenny. And continually in all big cities you may see robust
men tramping about who have been out of work for months, while their
daughters grow pale in the overheated vapours of the workshops for
dressing stuffs, and their sons are filling blacking-pots by hand, or
spend those years during which they ought to have learned a trade, in
carrying about baskets for a greengrocer, and at the age of eighteen or
twenty become regular unemployed.
And so it is everywhere, from San Francisco to Moscow, and from Naples
to Stockholm. The waste of human energy is the distinguishing and
predominant trait of our industry, not to mention trade where it attains
still more colossal proportions.
What a sad satire is that name, Political _Economy_, given to the
science of waste and energy under the system of wagedom!
This is not all. If you speak to the director of a well-organized
factory, he will naively explain to you that it is difficult nowadays to
find a skilful, vigorous, and energetic workman, who works with a will.
"Should such a man present himself among the twenty or thirty who call
every Monday asking us for work, he is sure to be received, even if we
are reducing the number of our hands. We recognize him at the first
glance, and he is always accepted, even though we have to get rid of an
older and less active worker the next day." And the one who has just
received notice to quit, and all those who will receive it to-morrow, go
to reinforce that immense reserve-army of capital--workmen out of
work--who are only called to the loom or the bench when there is
pressure of work, or to oppose strikers. And those others--the average
workers who are sent away by the better-class factories as soon as
business is slackened? They also join the formidable army of aged and
indifferent workers who continually circulate among the second-class
factories--those which barely cover their expenses and make their way in
the world by trickery and snares laid for the buyer, and especially for
the consumer in distant countries.
And if you talk to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the
rule in such factories is--never to do your best. "Shoddy pay--shoddy
work!" this is the advice which the working man receives from his
comrades upon entering such a factory.
For the workers know that if in a moment of generosity they give way to
the entreaties of an employer and consent to intensify the work in order
to carry out a pressing order, this nervous work will be exacted in the
future as a rule in the scale of wages. Therefore in all such factories
they prefer never to produce as much as they can. In certain industries
production is limited so as to keep up high prices, and sometimes the
pass-word, "Go-canny," is given, which signifies, "Bad work for bad
pay!"
Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it
could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which
represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry
nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our
grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical
sciences towards the end of last century; not to the capitalist
organization of wagedom, but _in spite_ of that organization.
III
Those who have seriously studied the question do not deny any of the
advantages of Communism, on condition, be it well understood, that
Communism be perfectly free, that is to say, Anarchist. They recognize
that work paid with money, even disguised under the name of "labour
cheques," to Workers' associations governed by the State, would keep up
the characteristics of wagedom and would retain its disadvantages. They
agree that the whole system would soon suffer from it, even if Society
came into possession of the instruments of production. And they admit
that, thanks to an "integral" complete education given to all children,
to the laborious habits of civilized societies, with the liberty of
choosing and varying their occupations and the attractions of work done
by equals for the well-being of all, a Communist society would not be
wanting in producers who would soon make the fertility of the soil
triple and tenfold, and give a new impulse to industry.
This our opponents agree to. "But the danger," they say, "will come from
that minority of loafers who will not work, and will not have regular
habits, in spite of the excellent conditions that would make work
pleasant. To-day the prospect of hunger compels the most refractory to
move along with the others. The one who does not arrive in time is
dismissed. But one black sheep suffices to contaminate the whole flock,
and two or three sluggish or refractory workmen would lead the others
astray and bring a spirit of disorder and rebellion into the workshop
that would make work impossible; so that in the end we should have to
return to a system of compulsion that would force such ringleaders back
into the ranks. And then,--Is not the system of wages, paid in
proportion to work performed, the only one that enables compulsion to be
employed, without hurting the feelings of independence of the worker?
All other means would imply the continual intervention of an authority
that would be repugnant to free men." This, we believe, is the objection
fairly stated.
To begin with, such an objection belongs to the category of arguments
which try to justify the State, the Penal Law, the Judge, and the
Gaoler.
"As there are people, a feeble minority, who will not submit to social
customs," the authoritarians say, "we must maintain magistrates,
tribunals and prisons, although these institutions become a source of
new evils of all kinds."
Therefore we can only repeat what we have so often said concerning
authority in general: "To avoid a possible evil you have recourse to
means which in themselves are a greater evil, and become the source of
those same abuses that you wish to remedy. For, do not forget that it is
wagedom, the impossibility of living otherwise than by selling your
labour, which has created the present Capitalist system, whose vices you
begin to recognize." Besides, this way of reasoning is merely a
sophistical justification of the evils of the present system. Wagedom
was _not_ instituted to remove the disadvantages of Communism; its
origin, like that of the State and private ownership, is to be found
elsewhere. It is born of slavery and serfdom imposed by force, and only
wears a more modern garb. Thus the argument in favour of wagedom is as
valueless as those by which they seek to apologize for private property
and the State.
We are, nevertheless, going to examine the objection, and see if there
is any truth in it.
First of all,--Is it not evident that if a society, founded on the
principle of free work, were really menaced by loafers, it could protect
itself without the authoritarian organization we have nowadays, and
without having recourse to wagedom?
Let us take a group of volunteers, combining for some particular
enterprise. Having its success at heart, they all work with a will, save
one of the associates, who is frequently absent from his post. Must they
on his account dissolve the group, elect a president to impose fines,
and work out a code of penalties? It is evident that neither the one nor
the other will be done, but that some day the comrade who imperils their
enterprise will be told: "Friend, we should like to work with you; but
as you are often absent from your post, and you do your work
negligently, we must part. Go and find other comrades who will put up
with your indifference!"
This way is so natural that it is practiced everywhere, even nowadays,
in all industries, in competition with all possible systems of fines,
docking of wages, supervision, etc.; a workman may enter the factory at
the appointed time, but if he does his work badly, if he hinders his
comrades by his laziness or other defects, if he is quarrelsome, there
is an end of it; he is compelled to leave the workshop.
Authoritarians pretend that it is the almighty employer and his
overseers who maintain regularity and quality of work in factories. In
reality, in every somewhat complicated enterprise, in which the goods
produced pass through many hands before being finished, it is the
factory itself, the workmen as a unity, who see to the good quality of
the work. Therefore the best factories of British private industry have
few overseers, far less on an average than the French factories, and
less than the British State factories.
A certain standard of public morals is maintained in the same way.
Authoritarians say it is due to rural guards, judges, and policemen,
whereas in reality it is maintained _in spite_ of judges, policemen, and
rural guards. "Many are the laws producing criminals!" was said long
ago.
Not only in industrial workshops do things go on in this way; it happens
everywhere, every day, on a scale that only bookworms have as yet no
notion of. When a railway company, federated with other companies, fails
to fulfil its engagements, when its trains are late and goods lie
neglected at the stations, the other companies threaten to cancel the
contract, and that threat usually suffices.
It is generally believed, at any rate it is taught in State-approved
schools, that commerce only keeps to its engagements from fear of
lawsuits. Nothing of the sort; nine times in ten the trader who has not
kept his word will not appear before a judge. There, where trade is very
active, as in London, the sole fact of having driven a creditor to bring
a lawsuit suffices for the immense majority of merchants to refuse for
good to have any dealings with a man who has compelled one of them to go
to law.
This being so, why should means that are used to-day among workers in
the workshop, traders in the trade, and railway companies in the
organization of transport, not be made use of in a society based on
voluntary work?
Take, for example, an association stipulating that each of its members
should carry out the following contract: "We undertake to give you the
use of our houses, stores, streets, means of transport, schools,
museums, etc., on condition that, from twenty to forty-five or fifty
years of age, you consecrate four or five hours a day to some work
recognized as necessary to existence. Choose yourself the producing
groups which you wish to join, or organize a new group, provided that it
will undertake to produce necessaries. And as for the remainder of your
time, combine together with whomsoever you like, for recreation, art, or
science, according to the bent of your taste.
"Twelve or fifteen hundred hours of work a year, in one of the groups
producing food, clothes, or houses, or employed in public sanitation,
transport, and so on, is all we ask of you. For this amount of work we
guarantee to you the free use of all that these groups produce, or will
produce. But if not one, of the thousands of groups of our federation,
will receive you, whatever be their motive; if you are absolutely
incapable of producing anything useful, or if you refuse to do it, then
live like an isolated man or like an invalid. If we are rich enough to
give you the necessaries of life we shall be delighted to give them to
you. You are a man, and you have the right to live. But as you wish to
live under special conditions, and leave the ranks, it is more than
probable that you will suffer for it in your daily relations with other
citizens. You will be looked upon as a ghost of bourgeois society,
unless some friends of yours, discovering you to be a talent, kindly
free you from all moral obligation towards society by doing all the
necessary work for you.
"And finally, if it does not please you, go and look for other
conditions elsewhere in the wide world, or else seek adherents and
organize with them on novel principles. We prefer our own."
This is what could be done in a communal society in order to turn away
sluggards if they became too numerous.
IV
We very much doubt that we need fear this contingency in a society
really based on the entire freedom of the individual.
In fact, in spite of the premium on idleness offered by the private
ownership of capital, the really lazy man is comparatively rare, unless
his laziness be due to illness.
Among workmen it is often said that the bourgeois are idlers. There are
certainly enough of them, but they, too, are the exception. On the
contrary, in every industrial enterprise, you are sure to find one or
more bourgeois who work very hard. It is true that the majority of
bourgeois profit by their privileged position to award themselves the
least unpleasant tasks, and that they work under hygienic conditions of
air, food, etc., which permits them to do their business without too
much fatigue. But these are precisely the conditions which we claim for
all workers, without exception.
It must also be said that if, thanks to their privileged position, rich
people often perform absolutely useless or even harmful work in society,
nevertheless the Ministers, Heads of Departments, factory owners,
traders, bankers, etc., subject themselves for a number of hours every
day to work which they find more or less tiresome, all preferring their
hours of leisure to this obligatory work. And if in nine cases out of
ten this work is a harmful work, they find it none the less tiring for
that. But it is precisely because the middle class put forth a great
energy, even in doing harm (knowingly or not) and defending their
privileged position, that they have succeeded in defeating the landed
nobility, and that they continue to rule the masses. If they were
idlers, they would long since have ceased to exist, and would have
disappeared like the aristocracy. In a society that would expect only
four or five hours a day of useful, pleasant, and hygienic work, these
same middle-class people would perform their task perfectly well, and
they certainly would not put up with the horrible conditions in which
men toil nowadays without reforming them. If a Huxley spent only five
hours in the sewers of London, rest assured that he would have found the
means of making them as sanitary as his physiological laboratory.
As to the laziness of the great majority of workers, only philistine
economists and philanthropists can utter such nonsense.
If you ask an intelligent manufacturer, he will tell you that if workmen
only put it into their heads to be lazy, all factories would have to be
closed, for no measure of severity, no system of spying would be of any
use. You should have seen the terror caused in 1887 among British
employers when a few agitators started preaching the "_go-canny_"
theory--"Bad pay, bad work"; "Take it easy, do not overwork yourselves,
and waste all you can."--"They demoralize the worker, they want to kill
our industry!" cried those same people who the day before inveighed
against the immorality of the worker and the bad quality of his work.
But if the workers were what they are represented to be--namely, the
idler whom the employer is supposed continually to threaten with
dismissal from the workshop--what would the word "demoralization"
signify?
So when we speak of possible idlers, we must well understand that it is
a question of a small minority in society; and before legislating for
that minority, would it not be wise to study the origin of that
idleness? Whoever observes with an intelligent eye, sees well enough
that the child reputed lazy at school is often the one which simply does
not understand, because he is being badly taught. Very often, too, it is
suffering from cerebral anæmia, caused by poverty and an anti-hygienic
education. A boy who is lazy at Greek or Latin would work admirably were
he taught science, especially if he were taught with the aid of manual
labour. A girl who is stupid at mathematics becomes the first
mathematician of her class if she by chance meets somebody who can
explain to her the elements of arithmetic which she did not understand.
And a workman, lazy in the workshop, cultivates his garden at dawn,
while gazing at the rising sun, and will be at work again at nightfall,
when all nature goes to its rest.
Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same
definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people
gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor
to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are
struck with the number of "idlers" among them. They were lazy so long as
they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to
excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of
idlers.
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all
his life making the eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a
watch, while he feels he has exuberant energy which he would like to
expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot submit to being
fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand
pleasures for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less
stupid of the two, and knowing his only fault to be that of having been
born in a hovel instead of coming into the world in a castle.
Lastly, an immense number of "idlers" are idlers because they do not
know well enough the trade by which they are compelled to earn their
living. Seeing the imperfect thing they make with their own hands,
striving vainly to do better, and perceiving that they never will
succeed on account of the bad habits of work already acquired, they
begin to hate their trade, and, not knowing any other, hate work in
general. Thousands of workmen and artists who are failures suffer from
this cause.
On the other hand, he who since his youth has learned to play the piano
_well_, to handle the plane _well_, the chisel, the brush, or the file,
so that he feels that what he does is _beautiful_, will never give up
the piano, the chisel, or the file. He will find pleasure in his work
which does not tire him, so long as he is not overdriven.
Under the one name, _idleness_, a series of results due to different
causes have been grouped, of which each one could be a source of good,
instead of being a source of evil to society. Like all questions
concerning criminality and related to human faculties, facts have been
collected having nothing in common with one another. People speak of
laziness or crime, without giving themselves the trouble to analyze the
cause. They are in a hurry to punish these faults without inquiring if
the punishment itself does not contain a premium on "laziness" or
"crime."[9]
This is why a free society, if it saw the number of idlers increasing in
its midst, would no doubt think of looking first for the _cause_ of
laziness, in order to suppress it, before having recourse to punishment.
When it is a case, as we have already mentioned, of simple
bloodlessness, then before stuffing the brain of a child with science,
nourish his system so as to produce blood, strengthen him, and, that he
shall not waste his time, take him to the country or to the seaside;
there, teach him in the open air, not in books--geometry, by measuring
the distance to a spire, or the height of a tree; natural sciences,
while picking flowers and fishing in the sea; physical science, while
building the boat he will go to fish in. But for mercy's sake do not
fill his brain with classical sentences and dead languages. Do not make
an idler of him!...
Or, here is a child which has neither order nor regular habits. Let the
children first inculcate order among themselves, and later on, the
laboratory, the workshop, the work that will have to be done in a
limited space, with many tools about, under the guidance of an
intelligent teacher, will teach them method. But do not make disorderly
beings out of them by your school, whose only order is the symmetry of
its benches, and which--true image of the chaos in its teachings--will
never inspire anybody with the love of harmony, of consistency, and
method in work.
Do not you see that by your methods of teaching, framed by a Ministry
for eight million scholars, who represent eight million different
capacities, you only impose a system good for mediocrities, conceived by
an average of mediocrities? Your school becomes a University of
laziness, as your prison is a University of crime. Make the school free,
abolish your University grades, appeal to the volunteers of teaching;
begin that way, instead of making laws against laziness which only serve
to increase it.
Give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a
minute particle of some object, who is stifled at his little tapping
machine, which he ends by loathing, give him the chance of tilling the
soil, of felling trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth of a
storm, dashing through space on an engine, but do not make an idler of
him by forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine, to plough
the head of a screw, or to drill the eye of a needle.
Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few
individuals will really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that
there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] _Kropotkin: In Russian and French Prisons._ London, 1887.