The wonderful expansion of production under the influence of applied science is a favourite theme of the anarchists. Kropotkin has treated us to some delightful illustrations of this in his Conquest of Bread. He begins by pointing out the wonders already accomplished by market gardeners living in the neighbourhood of Paris. One of these, employing only three men working twelve to fifteen hours a day, was able, thanks to intensive cultivation, to raise 110 tons of vegetables on one acre of ground. Taking this as his basis, he calculates that the 3,600,000 inhabitants in the departments of the Seine and the Seine-et-Oise could produce all the corn, milk, vegetables, and fruit which they could possibly need in the year with fifty-eight half-days labour per man. By parity of reasoning he arrives at the conclusion that twenty-eight to thirty-six days’ work per annum would secure for each family a healthy, comfortable home such as is occupied by English working men at the present time. The same thing applies to clothing. American factories produce on an average forty yards of cotton in ten hours. “Admitting that a family needs two hundred yards a year at most, this would be equivalent to fifty hours’ labour, or ten half-days of five hours each,[1357] and that all adults save women bind themselves to work five hours a day from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty.… Such a society could in return guarantee well-being to all its members.”[1358] Élisée Reclus shares these hopes. It seems to him that “in the great human family hunger is simply the result of a collective crime, and it becomes an absurdity when we remember that the products are more than double enough for all the needs of consumers.”[1359]
Amid such superabundant wealth, in a world thus transformed into a land of milk and honey, distribution would not be a very difficult problem. Nothing really could be easier. “No stint or limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those commodities which are scarce or apt to run short.”[1360] Such was to be the guiding principle. In practice the women and children, the aged and the infirm, were to come first and the robust men last, for such even is the etiquette of the soup kitchen, which has become a feature of some recent strikes. As to the laws of value which are supposed to determine the present distribution of wealth, and which the economists fondly believe to be necessary and immutable, the anarchists regard them as being no concern of theirs. The futility of such doctrines is a source of some amusement to them.[1361]
IV: REVOLUTION
But how is the beautiful dream to be realised? The way thither, from the miserable wilderness wherein we now dwell to the Promised Land of which they have given us a glimpse, lies through Revolution—so the anarchist tells us.
A theory of revolution forms a necessary part of the anarchist doctrine. In the mind of the public it is too often thought to be the only message which the anarchists have to give. We must content ourselves with a very brief reference to it, for the non-economic ideas of anarchism have already detained us sufficiently long.
Proudhon is soon out of the running. We have already had occasion to refer to his disapproval of violence and revolution. It seemed to him that the anarchic ideal was for ever impossible apart from a change of heart and a reawakening of conscience. But his successors were somewhat less patient. To their minds revolution seemed an unavoidable necessity from which escape was impossible. Even if we could imagine all the privileged individuals of to-day agreeing among themselves on the night of some fourth of August to yield up every privilege which they possess and to enter the ranks of the proletariat of their own free will, such a deed would hardly be desirable. The people, says Reclus, with their usual generosity, would simply let them do as they liked, but would say to their former masters, “Keep your privileges.” “It is not because justice should not be done, but things ought to find a natural equilibrium. The oppressed should rise in their own strength, the despoiled seize their own again, and the slaves regain their own liberty. Such things can only really be attained as the result of a bitter struggle.”[1362]
It is not that Bakunin, Kropotkin, or their disciples revel in bloodshed or welcome outbreaks of violence. Bloodshed, although inevitably and inseparably connected with revolution, is none the less regrettable, and should always be confined within the narrowest limits. “Bloody revolutions are occasionally necessary because of the crass stupidity of mankind; but they are always an evil, an immense evil, and a great misfortune; not only because of their victims, but also because of the pure and perfect character of the aims in view of which they are carried out.”[1363] “The question,” says Kropotkin,[1364] “is not how to avoid revolutions, but how to secure the best results by checking civil war as far as possible, by reducing the number of victims, and by restraining the more dangerous passions.” To do this we must rely upon people’s instincts, who, far from being sanguinary, “are really too kind at heart not to be very soon disgusted with cruelty.”[1365] The attack must be directed not against men but against their position, and the aim must be not individuals but their status. Hence Bakunin lays great stress upon setting fire to the national archives, and to papers of all kinds relating to title in property, upon the immediate suppression of all law courts and police, upon the disbanding of the army, and the instant confiscation of all instruments of production—factories, mines, etc. Kropotkin in the Conquest of Bread gives us a picture of an insurgent commune laying hold of houses and occupying them, seizing drapers’ establishments and taking whatever they need, confiscating the land, cultivating it, and distributing its products. If revolutionists only proceeded in this fashion, never respecting the rights of property at all (which was the great mistake made by the Commune in its dealing with the Bank of France during the rising of 1871), the revolution would soon be over and society would speedily reorganise itself on a new and indestructible basis and with a minimum of bloodshed.
But the tone is not always equally pacific. Bakunin during at least one period of his life preached a savage and merciless revolution against privilege of every kind. At that time, indeed, he might justly have passed as the inventor of the active propaganda which, strenuously pursued for many years by a few exasperated fanatics, had the effect of rousing public opinion everywhere against anarchism. “We understand revolution,” someone has remarked, “in the sense of an upheaval of what we call the worst passions, and we can imagine its resulting in the destruction of what we to-day term public order.” “Brigandage,” it is remarked elsewhere, “is an honourable method of political propaganda in Russia, where the brigand is a hero, a defender and saviour of the people.”[1366] In a kind of proclamation entitled The Principles of Revolution, which, as some writers point out, ought not to be attributed to Bakunin, but which at any rate appears to give a fair representation of his ideas at this period of his life, we meet with the following words: “The present generation should blindly and indiscriminately destroy all that at present exists, with this single thought in mind—to destroy as much and as quickly as possible.”[1367] The means advocated are of a most varied description: “Poison, the dagger, and the sword … revolution makes them all equally sacred. The whole field is free for action.”[1368] Bakunin had always shown a good deal of sympathy for the rôle of the conspirator. In the Statutes of the International Brotherhood, which prescribed the rules of conduct for a kind of revolutionary association created by Bakunin in 1864, are some passages advocating violence which are as bloodcurdling as anything contained in Netchaieff’s famous Revolutionary Catechism. It is difficult to find lines more full of violent revolutionary exasperation than that passage of the Statutes of the International Socialist Alliance which forms the real programme of the anarchists. Since it also seems to us to give a fairly faithful expression of Bakunin’s thoughts on the matter, it will afford a fitting close to our exposition.
“We want a universal revolution that will shake the social and political, the economic and philosophical basis of society, so that of the present order, which is founded upon property, exploitation, dominion, and authority, and supported either by religion or philosophy, by bourgeois economics or by revolutionary Jacobinism, there may not be left, either in Europe or anywhere else, a single stone standing. The workers’ prayer for peace we would answer by demanding the freedom of all the oppressed and the death of everyone who lords it over them, exploiters and guardians of every kind. Every State and every Church would be destroyed, together with all their various institutions, their religious, political, judicial, and financial regulations; the police system, all university regulations, all social and economic rules whatsoever, so that the millions of poor human beings who are now being cheated and gagged, tormented and exploited, delivered from the cruellest of official directors and officious curates, from all collective and individual tyranny, would for once be able to breathe freely.”[1369]
A discussion of anarchist doctrine lies beyond our province. Moreover, such sweeping generalisations disarm all criticism. Their theories are too often the outbursts of passionate feeling and scarcely need refuting. Let us, then, try to discover the kind of influence they have had.