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Title: The Coming Anarchy Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 1887 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communist Source: Retrieved on February 25th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/coming.html Notes: From The Nineteenth Century, No CXXVI, August 1887
The views taken in the preceding article[1] as to the combination of
efforts being the chief source of our wealth explain why more anarchists
see in communism the only equitable solution as to the adequate
remuneration of individual efforts. There was a time when a family
engaged in agriculture, and supported by a few domestic trades, could
consider the corn they raised and the plain woollen cloth they wove as
production of their own and nobody else’s labour. Even then such a view
was not quite correct: there were forests cleared and roads built by
common efforts; and even then the family had continually to apply for
communal help, as it is still the case in so many village communities.
But now, under the extremely interwoven state of industry, of which each
branch supports all others, such as the individualistic view can be held
no more. If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have
reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the
parallel growth of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge among
both the skilled engineers and the mass of the workmen; to a certain
training in organization slowly developed among British producers; and,
above all, to the world-trade which has itself grown up, thanks to works
executed thousands of miles away. The Italians who died from cholera in
digging the Suez Canal, or from ‘tunnel-disease’ in the St. Gothard
Tunnel, have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country
as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine
at Manchester; and this girl is much as the engineer who made a
labour-saving improvement in our machinery. How can we pretend to
estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around
us?
We may admire the inventive genius or the organising capacities of an
iron lord; but we must recognise that all his genius and energy would
not realise one-tenth of what they realise here if they were spent
dealing with Mongolian shepherds or Siberian peasants instead of British
workmen, British engineers, and trustworthy managers. An English
millionaire who succeeded in giving a powerful impulse to a branch of
home industry was asked the other day what were, in his opinion, the
real causes of his success? His answer was: — ‘I always sought out the
right man for a given branch of concern, and I left him full
independence — maintaining, of course, for myself the general
supervision.’ ‘Did you never fail to find such men?’ was the next
question. ‘Never.’ ‘But in the new branches which you introduced you
wanted a number of new inventions.’ ‘No doubt; we spend thousands in
buying patents.’ This little colloquy sums up, in my opinion, the real
case of those industrial undertakings which are quoted by the advocates
of ‘an adequate remuneration of individual efforts’ in the shape of
millions bestowed on the managers of prosperous industries. It shows how
far the efforts are really ‘individual.’ Leaving aside the thousand
conditions which sometimes permit a man to show, and sometimes prevent
him from showing, his capacities to their full extent, it might be asked
in how far the same capacities could bring out the same results, if the
very same employer could find no inventions were not stimulated by the
mechanical turn of mind of so many inhabitants of this country. British
industry is the work of the British nation — nay, of Europe and India
take together — not of spate individuals.
While holding this synthetic view on production, the anarchists cannot
consider, like the collectivists, that a remuneration which would be
proportionate to the hours of labour spent by each person in the
production of riches may be an ideal, or even an approach to an ideal,
society. Without entering here into a discussion as to how far the
exchange value of each merchandise is really measured now by the amount
of labour necessary for its production — a separate study must be
devoted to the subject — we must say that the collectivist ideal seems
to us merely unrealisable in a society which would be brought to
consider the necessaries for production as a common property. Such a
society would be compelled to abandon the wage-system altogether. It
appears impossible that the mitigated individualism of the collectivist
school could co-exist which the partial communism implied by holding
land and machinery in common — unless imposed by a powerful government,
much more powerful than all those of our own times. The present
wage-system has grown up from the appropriation of the necessities for
production by the few; it was a necessary condition for the growth of
the present capitalist production; and it cannot outlive it, even if an
attempt be made to pay to the worker the full value of his produce, and
money be substituted by hours of labour cheques. Common possession of
the necessaries for production implies that common enjoyment of the
fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable
organisation of society can only arise when every wage-system is
abandoned, and when every-body, contributing for the common well-being
to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common
stock of society to the fullest possible of his needs.
We maintain, moreover, not only that communism is a desirable state of
society, but that the growing tendency of modern society is precisely
towards communism — free communism — notwithstanding the seemingly
contradictory growth of individualism. In the growth of individualism
(especially during the last three centuries) we merely see the
endeavours of the individual towards emancipating himself from the
steadily growing powers of Capital and the State. But side by side with
this growth we see also, throughout history up to our own times, the
latent struggle of the producers of wealth for maintaining the partial
communism of old, as well as for reintroducing communist principles in a
new shape, as soon as favourable conditions permit it. As soon as the
communes of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries were enabled to
start their own independent life, they gave a wide extension to work in
common, to trade in common, and to a partial consumption in common. All
this has disappeared; but the rural commune fights a hard struggle to
maintain its old features, and it succeeds in maintaining them in many
places of Eastern Europe, Switzerland, and even France and Germany;
while new organizations, based on the same principles, never fail to
grow up as soon as it is possible. Notwithstanding the egotistic turn
given to public mind by the merchant-production of our century, the
communist tendency is continually reasserting itself and trying to make
its way into the public life. The penny bridge disappears before the
public bridge; so also the road which formerly had to be paid for its
use. Museums, free libraries, and free public schools; parks and
pleasure grounds; paved and lighted streets, free for everybody’s use;
water supplied to private dwellings, with a growing tendency towards
disregarding the exact amount of it used by the individual; tramways and
railways which have already begun to introduce the season ticket or the
uniform tax, and will surely go much further on this line when they are
no longer private property : all these are tokens showing in which
direction further progress is to be expected.
It is putting the wants of the individual above the valuation of the
services he has rendered, or might render, to society; it is in
considering society as a whole, so intimately connected together that a
service rendered to any individual is a service rendered to the whole
society. The librarian of the British Museum does not ask the reader
what have been his previous services to society, he simply gives him the
book he requires; and for a uniform fee, a scientific Society leaves its
gardens and museums at the free disposal of each member . The crew of a
lifeboat do not ask whether the men of a distressed ship are entitled to
be rescued at a risk of life; and the Prisoners’ Aid Society do not
inquire what the released prisoner is worth. Here are men in need of
service; they are fellow men, and no further rights are required. And if
this very city, so egotistic to-day, be visited by a public calamity —
let it be besieged, for example, like Paris in 1871, and experience
during the siege a want of food — this very same city would be unanimous
in proclaiming that the first needs to be satisfied are those of the
children and old, no matter what services they may render or have
rendered to society. And it would take care of the active defenders of
the city, whatever the degrees of gallantry displayed by each of them.
But, this tendency already existing, nobody will deny, I suppose, that,
in proportion as humanity is relieved from its hard struggle for life,
the same tendency will grow stronger. If our productive powers be fully
applied for increasing the stock of the staple necessities for life; if
a modification of the present conditions of property increased the
number of producers by all those who are not producers of wealth now;
and if manual labour reconquered its place of honour in society — all
this decuplating our production and rendering labour easier and more
attractive — the communist tendencies already existing would immediately
enlarge their sphere of application.
Taking all that into account, and still more the practical aspects of
the question as to how private property might become common property,
most of the anarchists maintain that the very next step to be made by
society, as soon as the present regime of property undergoes a
modification, will be in a communist sense. We are communists. But our
communism is not that of either the Phalanstere or the authoritarian
school : it is anarchist communism, communism without government, free
communism. It is a synthesis of the two chief aims prosecuted by
humanity since the dawn of its history — economical freedom and
political freedom.
I have already said that anarchy means no-government. We know well that
the word ‘anarchy’ is also used in the current language as synonymous
with disorder. But that meaning of ‘anarchy’ being a derived one,
implies at least two suppositions. It implies, first, that whenever
there is no government there is disorder; and it implies, moreover, that
order, due to a strong government and a strong police, is always
beneficial. Both implications, however, are anything but proved. There
is plenty of order — we should say, of harmony — in many bunches of
human activity where the government, happily, does not interfere. As to
the beneficial effects of order, the kind of order that reigned at
Naples under the Bourbons surely was not preferable to some disorder
started by Garibaldi; while the Protestants of the this country will
probably say that the good deal of disorder made by Luther was
preferable, at any rate, to the order which reigned under the Pope. As
to the proverbial ‘order’ which was once ‘restored at Warsaw,’ there
are, I suppose, no two opinions about it. While all agree that harmony
is always desirable, there is no such unanimity about order, and still
less about the ‘order’ which is supposed to reign on our modern
societies; so that we have no objection whatever to the use of the word
‘anarchy’ as a negation of what has been often described as order.
By taking for our watchword anarchy, in its sense of no-government, we
intend to express a pronounced tendency of human society. In history we
see that precisely those epochs when small parts of humanity broke down
the power of their rulers and reassumed their freedom were epochs of the
greatest progress, economical and intellectual. Be it the growth of the
free cities, whose unrivalled monuments — free work of free associations
of workers — still testify of the revival of mind and of the well-being
of the citizen; be it the great movement which gave birth to the
Reformation — those epochs witnessed the greatest progress when the
individual recovered some part of his freedom. And if we carefully watch
the present development of civilised nations, we cannot fail to discover
in it a marked and ever-growing movement towards limiting more and more
the sphere of action of government, so as to leave more and more liberty
to the initiative of the individual. After having tried all kinds of
government, and endeavoring to solve the insoluble problem of having a
government ‘which might compel the individual to obedience, without
escaping itself from obedience to collectively,’ humanity is trying now
to free itself from the bonds of any government whatever, and to respond
to its needs of organisation by the free understanding between
individuals prosecuting the same common aims. Home Rule, even for the
smallest territorial unity or group, becomes a growing need; free
agreement is becoming a substitute for the law; and free co-operation a
substitute for the governmental guardianship. One after the other those
functions which were considered as the functions of government during
the last two centuries are disputed; society moves better the less it is
governed. And the more we study the advance made in this direction, as
well as the inadequacy of governments to fulfill the expectations laid
in them, the more we are bound to conclude that Humanity, by steadily
limiting the functions of government, is marching towards reducing them
finally to nil; and we already foresee a state of society where the
liberty of the individual will be limited by no laws, no bonds — by
nothing else by his own social habits and the necessity, which everyone
feels, of finding co-operation, support, and sympathy among his
neighbours.
Of course, the no-government ethics will meet with at least as many
objectives as the no-capital economics. Our minds have been so nurtured
is prejudices as to the providential functions of government that
anarchist ideas must be received with distrust. Our whole education,
since childhood up to the grave, nurtures the belief in the necessity of
a government and its beneficial effects. Systems of philosophy have been
elaborated to support this view; history has been written from this
standpoint; theories of law have been circulated and taught for the same
purpose. All politics are based on the same principles, each politician
saying to the people he wants to support him : ‘Give me the governmental
power; I will, I can, relieve you from the hardships of your present
life.’ All our education is permeated with the same teachings. We may
open any book of sociology, history, law, or ethics : everywhere we find
government, its organisation, its deeds, playing so prominent a part
that we grow accustomed to suppose that the State and the political men
are everything; that there is nothing behind the big statesmen. The same
teachings are daily repeated in the Press. Whole columns are filled up
with minutest records of parliamentary debates, of movements of
political persons; and, while reading these columns, we too often forget
that there is an immense body of men — man-kind, in fact — growing and
dying, living in happiness or sorrow, labouring and consuming, thinking
and creating, besides those few men whose importance has been so swollen
up as to overshadow humanity.
And yet, if we revert from the printed matter to our real life, and cast
a broad glance on society as it is, we struck with the infinitesimal
part played by government in our life. Millions of human beings live and
die without having had anything to do with government. Every day
millions of transactions are made without the slightest interference of
government; and those who enter into agreements have not the slightest
intention of breaking bargains. Nay, those agreements which are not
protected by government (those of the Exchange, or card debts) are
perhaps better kept than any others. The simply habit of keeping his
word, the desire of not losing confidence, are quite sufficient in the
immense overwhelming majority of cases to enforce the keeping of
agreements. Of course, it may be said that there is still the government
which might enforce them if necessary. But not to speak of the
numberless cases which even could not be brought before a court,
everybody who has the slightest acquaintance with trade will undoubtedly
confirm the assertion that, if there were not so strong a feeling of
honour to keep agreements, trade itself would become utterly impossible.
Even those merchants and manufacturers who feel not the slightest
remorse when poisoning their customers with all kinds of abominable
drugs, duly labelled, even they also keep their commercial agreements.
But, if such a relative morality as commercial honesty exists now, under
the present conditions, when enrichment is the chief motive, the same
feeling will further develop very fast as soon as robbing somebody of
the fruits of his labour is no longer the economical basis of our life.
[1] Nineteenth Century, February 1887. The present article has been
delayed in consequence of the illness of the author.