Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 09 - The Need for Luxury - The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin
Transcript
- Chapter nine, The need for luxury part one man, however, is not a being whose exclusive purpose in life is eating, drinking, and providing a shelter for himself. As soon as his material once are satisfied, other needs of an artistic character will thrust themselves forward. The more ardently aims of life vary with each and every individual. In. The more society is civilized, the mora will individuality be developed, and the more will desires be varied. Even today we see men and women denying themselves necessaries to acquire mere trifles, to obtain some particular gratification or some intellectual or material enjoyment. A Christian or an ascetic may disapprove of these desires for luxury, but it is precisely these trifles that break the monotony of existence and make it agreeable. Would life, with all its inevitable sorrows, be worth living if besides daily work, man could never obtain a single pleasure according to his individual tastes. If we wish for a social revolution, it is no doubt in the first place to give bread to all, to transform this execrable society in which we can every day see robust workmen dangling their arms for want of an employer who will exploit them. Women and children wandering shelterless at night, whole families reduced to dry bread men, women and children dying for want of care, and even for want of food. It is to put an end to these iniquities that we rebel, but we expect more from the revolution. We see that the worker, compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to ignorance of these higher delights, the highest within man's reach, of science, and especially of scientific discovery, of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain these joys for all, which are now reserved to a few, in order to give leisure and the possibility of developing intellectual capacities, that the social Revolution must guarantee daily bread to all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim, no doubt. Nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in need of bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime. To satisfy it, the worker's child must go without bread. But in a society which all can eat sufficiently, the needs which we consider luxuries today will be the more keenly felt, and as all men do not and cannot resemble one another, the variety of tastes and needs is the chief guarantee of human progress. There will always be, and it is desirable that there should always be, men and women whose desire will go beyond those of ordinary individuals in some particular direction. Everybody does not need a telescope, because even if learning were general, there are people who prefer examining things through a microscope to studying the starry heavens, some like statues, some pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess an excellent piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes vary, but the artistic needs exist in all. In our present poor, capitalistic to society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them unless he is an heir to a large fortune, or by dint of hard work, appropriates to himself and an intellectual capital which will enable him to take up a liberal profession. Still he cherishes the hope of some day satisfying his tastes more or less, and for this reason he reproaches the idealist communist societies. With having the material life of each individual as their sole aim. Quote. In your communal stores, you may perhaps have bread for all, he says to us, but you will not have beautiful pictures, optical instruments, luxurious furniture, artistic jewelry, in short, the many things that minister to the infinite variety of human tastes. And in this way you suppress the possibility of obtaining anything besides the bread and meat which the commune can offer to all, and the gray linen in which all your lady citizens will be dressed. These are the objections which all communist systems have to consider, in which the founders of new societies established in American deserts never understood. They believe that if the community could procure a sufficient cloth to dress all its members, the music hall in which the brothers could strom a piece of music or act to play from time to time, it was enough. They forgot that the feeling of art existed in the agriculturalist as well as in the burgher, And notwithstanding that the expression of artistic feeling varies according to the difference in culture, in the main it remains the same in vain. Did the community guarantee the common necessities of life in vain? Did it suppress all education that would tend to develop individuality in vain? Did it eliminate all readings save the Bible? Individual tastes broke forth and caused general discontent. Quarrels arose when somebody proposed to buy a piano or scientific instruments, and the elements of progress flagged. The society could only exist on condition that it crushed all individual feeling, all artistic tendency, and all development. Will the anarchist commune be impelled by the same direction, Evidently not, if it understands that while it produces all that is necessary to material life, it must also strive to satisfy all manifestations of the human mind. Part two. We frankly confess that when we think of the abyss of poverty and suffering that surrounds us, when we hear the heartrending cry of the worker walking the streets begging for work, we are loth to discuss the question, how willmen act in a society whose members are properly fed to satisfy certain individuals desirous of possessing a piece of sev china or a velvet dress, we are tempted to answer. Let us make sure of bread to begin with. We shall see to china and velvet later on. But as we recognize that man has other needs besides food, and as the strength of anarchy lies precisely in that it understands all human faculties and all passions and ignores none, we shall, in a few words explain how man can contrive to satisfy all his intellectual and artistic needs. We have already mentioned that by working four or five hours a day till the age of forty five or fifty, man could easily produce all that is necessary to guarantee comfort to society. But the day's work, if a man accustomed to toil, does not consist of hours, it is a ten hours day for three hundred days a year, and lasts all his life. Of course, when a man is harnessed to a machine, his health is soon undermined and his intelligence is blunted. But when man has the possibility of varying occupations, and especially of alternating manual with intellectual work, he can remain occupied without fatigue and even with pleasure, for ten or twelve hours a day. Consequently, the man who will have done four or five hours of manual work necessary for his existence will have before him five or six hours, which he will seek to employ according to his taste. And these five or six hours a day will fully enable him to procure for himself, if he associates with others all he wishes for, in addition to the necessaries guaranteed to all. He will discharge first his task in the field, the factory, and so on, which he owes to society as his contribution to the general production. And he will employ the second half of his day, his week, or his year to satisfy his artistic or scientific needs or his hobbies. Thousands of societies will spring up to gratify every taste in every possible fancy. Some, for example, will give their hours of leisure to literature. They will then form groups comprising authors, compositors, printers, engravers, draftsmen, all pursuing a common aim, the propagation of ideas that are dear to them. Nowadays, an author knows that there is a beast of burden, the worker to whom for the sum of a few shillings a day, he can entrust the printing of his books. But he hardly cares to know what a printing office is like if the compositor suffers from lead poisoning, and if the child who sees to the machine dies of anemia, are there not other poor riches to replace them? But when there will be no more starvelings ready to sell their work for a pittance, when the exploited worker of today will be educated and will have his own ideas to put down in black and white and to communicate to others, then the authors and scientific men will be compelled to combine among themselves and with the printers in order to bring out their prose and their poetry. So long as men consider fustion and manual labor as a mark of inferiority, it will appear amazing to them to see an author setting up his own book in type, for has he not a gymnasium or games by way of diversion. But when the opprobrium connected with manual labor has disappeared, when all will have to work with their hands, there being no one to do it for them, then the authors, as well as their admirers, will soon learn the art of handling, composing sticks and type. They will know the pleasure of coming together All admirers of the work to be printed, to set up the type, to shape it into pages, to take it in its virginal purity from the press. These beautiful machines, instruments of torture to the child who attends on them from morn till night, will be a source of enjoyment for those who will make use of them in order to give voice to the thoughts of their favorite author. Will literature lose by it? Will the poet be less a poet after having worked out of doors or helped with his hands to multiply his work? Will the novelist lose his knowledge of human nature after having rubbed shoulders with other men in the forest or the factory, in the laying out of a road or on a railway line. Can there be two answers to these questions. Maybe some books will be less voluminous, but then more will be said on fewer pages. Maybe fewer waste sheets will be published, but the matter printed will be more attentively read and more appreciated. The book will appeal to a larger circle of better educated readers, who will be more competent to judge moreover, the art of printing that has so little progressed in Schutenberg is still in its infancy. It takes two hours to compose and type what is written in ten minutes. But more expeditious methods of multiplying thought are being sought after and will be discovered. What a pity every author does not have to take his share in the printing of his works. What progress printing would have already made. We should no longer be using the movable letters as in the seventeenth century? Part three? Is it a dream to conceive a society in which, all having become producers, all having received an education that enables them to cultivate science or art, and all having leisure to do so, men would combine to publish the works of their choice by contributing each his share of manual work. We have already hundreds of learned, literary and other societies. And these societies are nothing but voluntary groups of men interested in certain branches of learning, and associated for the purpose of publishing their works. The authors who write for the periodicals that these societies are not paid, and the periodicals are not for sale. They are sent gratis to all quarters of the globe, to other societies cultivating the same branches of learning. This member of the society may insert in its review a one page note summarizing his observations. Another may publish therein and extensive work the results of long years of study, while others will confine themselves to consulting their review as a starting point for further research. It does not matter. All these authors and readers are associated for the production of works in which all of them take an interest. It is true that a learned society, like the individual author, goes to a printing office where workmen are engaged to do the printing. Nowadays, those who belong to the learned societies despise manual labor, which indeed is carried on under very bad conditions. But a community which would give a generous philosophic and scientific education to all its members would know how to organize manual labor in such a way that it would be the pride of humanity. Its learned societies would become associations of explorers, lovers of science, and workers, all knowing a manual trade, and all interested in science. If, for example, the society is studying geology, all will contribute to the exploration of the Earth's strata. Each member will take his share in research, and ten thousand observers, where we have now only one hundred will do more in a year than we can do in twenty years. And when their works are to be published, ten thousand men and women skilled in different trades will be ready to draw maps and grave designs, compose and print the books with gladness. Will they give their leisure in summer to exploration, in winter to indoor work. And when their works appear, they will find not only one hundred, but ten thousand readers in trit in their common work. This is the direction in which progress is already moving. Even today. When England felt the need of a complete dictionary of the English language, the birth of a latree who would devote his life to this work was not waited for. Volunteers were appealed to, and a thousand men offered their services spontaneously and gratuitously, to ransack the libraries, to take notes, and to accomplish in a few years a work which one man could not complete in his lifetime. In all branches of human intelligence, the same spirit is breaking forth, and we should have a very limited knowledge of humanity. Could we not guess that the future is announcing itself in such tentative cooperation, which is gradually taking the place of individual work. For this dictionary to be a really collective work, it would have required that many of volunteer authors, printers and printers readers should have worked in common. But something in this direction is done already in the socialist press, which offers us examples of manual and intellectual work combined. It happens in our newspapers that a socialist author composes and led his own article. Such attempts are rare, but they indicate in which direction evolution is going. They show the road of liberty in future. When a man will have something useful to say, a word that goes beyond the thoughts of his century, he will not have to look for an editor who might advance the necessary capital. He will look for collaborators among those who know the printing trade and who approve the idea of his new work. Together they will publish the new book or journal. Literature and journalism will cease to be a means of money making and living at the cost of others. But is there anyone who knows literature and journalism from within, and who does not ardently desire that literature should at last be able to free itself from those who formally protected it and who now exploit it, and from the multitude, which, with rare exceptions, pays it in proportion to its mediocrity, or to the ease with which it adapts itself to the bad taste of the greater number. Letters and science will only take their proper place in the work of human development when freed from all mercenary bondage. They will be exclusively cultivated by those that love them and for those that love them. Part four. Literature, science and art must be cultivated by free men. Only on this condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the yoke of the state of capital and of the bourgeois mediocrity which stifles them. What means has the scientist of today to make researches that interest him? Should he ask help of the state which can only be given to one candidate in one hundred, and which none may obtain who does not ostensibly promise to keep to the beaten track. Let us remember how the Institute of France censured Darwin, how the Academy of Saint Petersburg treated Mendelaef with contempt and how the Royal Society of London refused to publish Jewels paper in which he determined the mechanical equivalent of heat, finding it unscientific. It is why all great researches, all discoveries revolutionizing science, have been made outside academies and universities, either by men rich enough to remain independent, like Darwin and Lyle, or by men who undermine their health by working in poverty and often in great straits, losing no end of time for want of a laboratory, and unable to procure the instruments or books necessary to continue their researches, but persevering against hope, and often dying before they had reached the end in view. Their name is Legion. Altogether, the system of help granted by the state is so bad that science has always endeavored to emancipate itself from it. For this very reason, there are thousands of learned societies organized and maintained by volunteers in Europe and America, some having developed to such a degree that all the resources of subventioned societies and the wealth of millionaires would not buy their treasures. No governmental institution is as rich as the Zoological Society of London, which is supported by voluntary contributions. It does not by the animals which in thousands people its gardens. They are sent by other societies and by collectors of the entire world. The Zoological Society of Bombay will send an elephant as a gift. Another time a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros is offered by Egyptian naturalists. And these magnificent presents are pouring in every day, arriving from all all quarters of the globe, birds, reptiles, collections of insects, et cetera. These consignments often comprise animals that cannot be bought for all the gold in the world. Thus, a traveler who has captured an animal at life's peril and now loves it as he would love a child, will give it to the society because he is sure it will be cared for. The entrance be paid by visitors, and they are numberless suffices for the maintenance of that immense institution. What is defective in the Zoological Society of London and in other kindred societies, is that the member's fee cannot be paid in work that the keepers and numerous employees of this large institution are not recognized as members of the society, while many have no other incentive to joining the society than to put the Kabbalistic letters f z S. Fellow of the Zoological Society on their cards. In a word, what is needed is a more perfect cooperation. We may say the same about inventors that we have said of scientists, who does not know what sufferings. Nearly all great inventions that have come to light have cost sleepless nights, families deprived of bread, want of tools and materials for experiments. Is the history of nearly all those who have enriched industry with inventions, which are the truly legitimate pride of our civilization. But what are we to do to alter conditions that everybody is convinced are bad. Patents have been tried, and we know with what results. The inventor sells his patent for a few shillings, and the man who has only lent the capital pockets the often enormous profits resulting from the invention. Besides, patents isolate the inventor. They compel him to keep secret his researches, which therefore end in failure. Where As the simplest suggestion coming from a brain less, absorbed in the fundamental idea, sometimes suffices to fertilize the invention and make it practical. Like all state control, patents hamper the progress of industry thought being incapable of being patented. Patents are a crying injustice in theory and in practice. They result in one of the great obstacles to the rapid development of invention. What is needed to promote the spirit of invention is first of all, the awakening of thought, the boldness of conception, which our entire education causes to languish. It is the spreading of a scientific education which would increase the number of inquirers one hundredfold. It is fate that humanity is going to take a step forward. End of Chapter nine