A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months—until a flash of light pierced it. It came next Spring, when a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and at whose helpless cry I overheard in my heart quite new chords vibrating.
XVI
In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups of workers going about in the streets singing ‘We’ve got no work to do,’ or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked at night into Trafalgar Square to sleep there in the open air, under the wind and rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd, after having listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and Champion, rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows in the great shops. Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent, was the spirit which prevailed amongst the poorer portion of the working population in the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the recent history of the labour movement in England, but the symptoms of which were very well marked in 1886, would have been developed, and would have impressed its stamp upon the subsequent movement for a long time to come. However, the middle classes seemed to have realized the danger. Considerable sums of money were immediately subscribed in the West End for the relief of misery in the East End—certainly quite inadequate to relieve a widely spread destitution, but sufficient to show, at least, good intentions. As to the sentences which were passed upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two and three months’ imprisonment.
The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society. Beginning with the autumn and throughout the winter, I was asked to lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland. As I had, as a rule, accepted the first invitation I received to stay the night after the lecture, it consequently happened that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next night in the narrow abode of a working family. Every night I saw considerable numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s small parlour, or in the reception-rooms of the wealthy, the most animated discussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late hour of the night—with hope in the workman’s home, with apprehension in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.
In the mansions, the main question was to know, ‘What do the socialists want? What do they intend to do?’ and next, ‘What are the concessions which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given moment in order to avoid serious conflicts?’ In these conversations I seldom heard the justice of the socialist contention merely denied, or described as sheer nonsense. But I found also a firm conviction that a revolution was impossible in England; that the claims of the mass of the workers had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less; so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working classes of England as a pledge in the meantime of still more in the future. ‘We are a left-centre country, we live by compromises,’ I was once told by an old member of Parliament, who had had a wide experience of the life of his mother country.
In workmen’s dwellings too, I noticed a difference in the questions which were addressed to me in England to those which I was asked on the Continent. General principles, of which the partial applications will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest the Latin workers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in support of a strike, or organizes the feeding of the children at the schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as a matter of fact. ‘Of course, a hungry child cannot learn,’ a French worker says. ‘It must be fed.’ ‘Of course, the employer was wrong in forcing the workers to strike.’ This is all that is said, and no praise is given on account of such minor concessions by the present individualist society to communist principles. The thought of the worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he asks whether it is the Commune, or the unions of workers, or the State which ought to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement alone will be sufficient to maintain Society in working order, and what would be the moral restraint if Society parted with its present repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic government would be capable of accomplishing serious changes in the socialist direction, and whether accomplished facts ought not to precede legislation? and so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions, gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid. But, on the other hand, the impossibility of state administration of industries seemed to have been settled long ago in the workers’ minds, and what chiefly interested most of them were matters of constructive realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make such a realization possible. ‘Well, Kropótkin, suppose that to-morrow we were to take possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea about how to manage them?’ I would, for instance, be asked as soon as we had sat down in a small workman’s parlour. Or, ‘We don’t like the idea of state management of railways, and the present management by private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers owned all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?’ The lack of general ideas was thus supplemented by a desire of going deeper into the details of the realities.
Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways, some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the outside. In France or in Switzerland, the two parties—the workers and the middle classes—not only stood arrayed against each other, but were sharply separated. So it was, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay in the country I was acquainted with none but workers—I hardly knew more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces, as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a movement, similar to what we had had in Russia in the early seventies, when our youth rushed ‘to the people,’ though by no means so intense, so full of self-sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of ‘charity.’ Here also, in England, a number of people went in all sorts of capacities to live near to the workers: in the slums, in people’s palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that a social revolution had commenced, like the hero of Morris’s comical play, ‘Tables Turned,’ who says that the revolution is not simply coming, but has already begun. As always happens however with such enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a long, tedious, preparatory, uphill work that had to be done, very many of them retired from active propaganda, and now stand outside of it as mere sympathetic onlookers.
XVII
I took a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades we started, in addition to the three socialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘Freedom,’ which continues to live up to the present day. At the same time I resumed my work on anarchism where I had had to interrupt it at the moment of my arrest. The critical part of it was published during my Clairvaux imprisonment by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’ Now I began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society—so far as it can now be forecast—in a series of articles published at Paris in ‘La Révolté.’ Our ‘boy,’ ‘Le Révolté,’ prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, was compelled to change its title-page and now appeared under a feminine name. Later on these articles were published in a more elaborate form in a book, ‘La Conquête du Pain.’
These researches caused me to study more thoroughly certain points of the economic life of our present civilized nations. Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all. It is only the distribution which is defective; and if a social revolution took place, nothing more would be required than for everyone to return to his factory or workshop, Society taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value’ or benefits which now go to the capitalist. I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, so as to neglect, and often to prevent, the production of the very necessaries for life on a sufficient scale. None of these are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means nothing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is now considered as necessary for a decent existence. But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at the same time both enjoyable manual work and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ which are now published as a book under the title of ‘Fields, Factories, and Workshops.’