"The separation of agriculture from manufactures will pass away. The factory workmen will be at the same time field workmen."[586] "As an eminently periodic industry, which at certain times (and even more in the making of improvements than in harvest) needs a large additional force, agriculture will form the link between village and city."[587] And "the separation of mental from bodily labor will come to an end"[588] too. "Poets and scientists will no longer find poor devils who will sell their energies to them for a plate of soup; they will have to get together and print their writings themselves. Then the authors, and their admirers of both sexes, will soon acquire the art of handling the type-case and composing-stick; they will learn the pleasure of producing jointly, with their own hands, a work that they value."[589] "Every labor will be agreeable."[590] "If there is still work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so: they have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it for a few pence a day."[591] "Factories, smelters, mines, can be as sanitary and as splendid as the best laboratories of our universities; and the more perfectly they are fitted up the more they will produce."[592] And the product of such labor will be "infinitely better, and considerably greater, than the mass of goods hitherto produced under the goad of slavery, serfdom, and wage-slavery."[593]
How will distribution take place?
Every one who contributes his part to production will also have his share in the product. But it must not be assumed that this share in the product will correspond to that share in the production. "Each according to his powers; to each according to his wants."[594] "Need will be put above service; it will be recognized that every one who co-operates in production to a certain extent has in the first place the right to live, and in the second place the right to live comfortably."[595] "Every one, no matter how strong or weak, how competent or incompetent he may be, will have the right to live,"[596] and "to have a comfortable life; he will furthermore have the right to decide for himself what belongs to a comfortable life."[597]
Society's stock of goods will quite permit this. "If one considers on the one hand the rapidity with which the productive power of civilized nations is increasing, and on the other hand the limits that are directly or indirectly set to its production by present conditions, one comes to the conclusion that even a moderately sensible economic constitution would permit the civilized nations to heap up in a few years so many useful things that we should have to cry out 'Enough! enough coal! enough bread! enough clothes! Let us rest, take recreation, put our strength to a better use, spend our time in a better way!'"[598]
However, what if the stock should in fact not suffice for all wants? "The solution is—free taking of everything that exists in superfluity, and rations of that in which there is a possibility of dearth: rations according to needs, with preference to children, the aged, and the weak in general. That is what is done even now in the country. What commune thinks of limiting the use of the meadows so long as there are enough of them? what commune, so long as there are chestnuts and brushwood enough, hinders those who belong to it from taking as much as they please? And what does the peasant introduce when there is a prospect that firewood will give out? Rationing."[599]
6.—REALIZATION
The change that is promptly to be expected in the course of mankind's progress from a less happy existence to an existence as happy as possible,—the disappearance of the State, the transformation of law and property, and the appearance of the new condition,—will be accomplished, according to Kropotkin, by a social revolution; that is, by a violent subversion of the old order, which will come to pass of itself, but for which it is the function of those who foresee the course of evolution to prepare men's minds.
I. We know that we shall not reach the future condition "without intense perturbations."[600] "That justice may be victorious, and the new thoughts become reality, there is need of a frightful storm to sweep away all this rottenness, to vivify torpid souls with its breath, and to restore self-sacrifice, self-denial, and heroism to our senile, decrepit, crumbling society."[601] There is need of "social revolution: that is, the people's taking possession of society's total stock of goods, and the abolition of all authorities."[602] "The social revolution is at the door,"[603] "it stands before us at the end of this century,"[604] "it will be here in a few years."[605] It is "the task which history sets for us,"[606] but "whether we will or not, it will be accomplished independently of our will."[607]
1. "The social revolution will be no uprising of a few days: we shall have to go through a period of three, four, or five years of revolution, till the transformation of the social and economic situation is completed."[608] "During this time what we have sown to-day will be coming up and bearing fruit; and he who now is yet indifferent will become a convinced adherent of the new doctrine."[609] Nor will the social revolution be limited to a narrow area. "We must not assume, to be sure, that it will break out in all Europe at once."[610] "Germany is nearer the revolution than people think";[611] "but whether it start from France, Germany, Spain, or Russia, it will anyhow be a European revolution in the end. It will spread as rapidly as that of our predecessors the heroes of 1848, and set Europe afire."[612]
2. The first act of the social revolution will be a work of destruction.[613] "The impulse to destruction, which is so natural and justifiable because it is at the same time an impulse to renovation, will find its full satisfaction. How much old trash there is to clear away! Does not everything have to be transformed, the houses, the cities, the businesses of manufacturing and farming,—in short, all the arrangements of society?"[614] "Everything that it is necessary to abolish should be destroyed without delay: the penitentiaries and prisons, the forts that threaten cities, the slums whose disease-laden air people have breathed so long."[615]
