Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 05 - Food - The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin
Transcript
- Chapter five Food Part one. If the coming revolution is to be a social revolution, it will be distinguished from all former uprising not only by its aim but also by its methods. To attain a new end, new means are required. The three great popular movements which we have seen in France during the last hundred years differ from each other in many ways, but they have one common feature. In each case, the people strove to overturn the old regime and spent their heart's blood for the cause. Then, after having borne the brunt of the battle, they sank again into obscurity. A government composed of men more or less honest, was form and undertook to organize the Republic in seventeen ninety three, Labour in eighteen forty eight, and the Free Commune in eighteen seventy one. Imbued with Jacobin ideas, this government occupied itself first of all with political questions such as the reorganization of the machinery of government, the purifying of the ministry, the separation of church and state, civic liberty, and such matters. It is true the workmen's clubs kept an eye on the members of the new government and often opposed their ideas. On them. But even in these clubs, whether the leaders belonged to the middle or to the working classes, it was always the middle class ideas which prevailed. They discussed various political questions at great length, but forgot to discuss the question of bread. Great ideas sprang up at such times, ideas that have moved the world. Words were spoken which still stir our hearts at the interval of the century, But the people were starving in the slums. From the very commencement of the revolution. Industry inevitably came to a stop. The circulation of produce was checked, and the capital concealed itself. The master, the employer had nothing to fear at such times. He battened on his dividends, if indeed he did not speculate on the wretchedness around. But the wagejourner was reduced to live from hand to mouth, want knocked at the door. Famine was a broad Inna the land. Such famine has hardly been seen under the old regime. The Girondis are starving us, was to cry of the workmen's quarters in seventeen ninety three, and thereupon the Girondis were guillotined and full powers were given to the mountain and to the commune. The commune indeed concerned itself with the question of bread, and made heroic efforts to feed Paris at Lyons Fouchet and Colo de Ebois established city granaries, but the sums spent on filling them were woefully insufficient. The town councils made great efforts to procure corn, the bakers who hoarded flour were hanged, and still the people lacked bread. Then they turned on the royalist conspirators and laid the blame at their door. They guiltied a dozen or fifteen a day servants and duchesses alike, especially servants for the duchess had gone to coblans. But if they had guilty one hundred dukes in viscounts every day, it would have been equally hopeless. The want only grew, for the wage earner cannot live without his wage, and the wage was not forth coming. What difference could a thousand corpses more or less make to him? Then the people began to grow weary. So much for your vaunted revolution. You were more wretched than ever before, whispered the reactionary in the ears of the worker, and little by little. The rich took courage, emerged from their hiding places and flaunted their luxury in the face of the starving multitude. They dressed up like scented bops and said to the workers, come, enough of this foolery, what have you gained by rebellion? Sick at heart, his patience at an end, the revolutionary had to at least admit to himself that the cause was lost. Once more, he retreated into his hovel and awaited the worst. Then the reaction proudly asserted itself and accomplished a politic stroke. The revolution dead, nothing remained but to trample its corpse underfoot. The white terror began. Blood flowed like water, the guiltine was never idle, The prisons were crowded, while the pageant of rank and fashion resumed its old course and went on as merrily as before. This picture is typical of all a revolutions. In eighteen forty eight, the workers of Paris placed three months of starvation at the service of the Republic, and then, having riched the limits of their powers, they made one last desperate effort, an effort which was drowned in blood. In eighteen seventy one, the Commune perished for lack of combatants. It had taken measures for the separation of church and state, but it neglected at last until too late, to take measures for providing people with bread. And so it came to pass in Paris that the elegance and fine gentlemen could spurn the confederates and bid them to go sell their lives for a miserable pittance, and leave their betters to feast at their ease in fashionable restaurants. At last the commune saw its mistake and open communal kitchens, but it was too late. The days were already numbered, and the troops of Versailles were on the ramparts bread. It is bred that the revolution needs. Let others spend their time in issuing pompous proclamations and decorating themselves lavishly with official gold place and in talking about political liberty. Be it ours to see, from the first day of the revolution to the last, in all provinces fighting for freedom, that there is not a single man who locks bread, not a single woman compelled to stand with the wearful crowd outside the bake house door, that a happily coarse loaf may be thrown to her in charity, not a single child pining for want of food. It has always been the middle class idea to harangue about great principles, great lives. Rather, the idea of the people will be to provide bread for all. And while middle class citizens and workmen infested with middle class ideas admire their own rhetoric in the talking shops, and practical people are engaged in endless discussions on forms of government, we the utopian dreamers, we shall have to consider the question of daily bread. We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with the watchword of bread for all, the revolution will triumph. Part two. That we are utopians is well known. So utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all, an idea extremely displeasing to middle class citizens, whatever their party color, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied. All the same, we maintain our contention. Bread must be found for the people of the revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people, the revolution will be on the right road. For in solving the question of bread, we must accept the principles of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution. It is certain that the coming revolution, like in that respect to the revolution of eighteen forty eight, will burst upon us in the middle of a great industrial crisis. Things have been seething for half a century now and can only go from bad to worse. Everything tends that way, new nations entering the lists of international trade and fighting for possession of the world's markets, wars, taxes, ever increasing natural debts, the insecurity of the morrow, and huge colonial undertakings in every corner of the globe. There are a million of unemployed workers in Europe at this moment. It will still be worse when a revolution has burst upon us and spread like fire laid to the train of grundpowder. The number of outer works will be doubled as soon as barricades are erected in Europe and the United States. What is to be done to provide these multitudes with bread? We do not know whether the folk who call themselves practical people have ever asked themselves this question in all its nakedness. But we do know that they wish to maintain the wage system, and we must therefore expect to have national workshops and public works vaunted as a mean of giving food to the unemployed. Because national workshops were open in seventeen eighty nine and in seventeen ninety three, because the same means were resorted to in eighteen forty eight, because Napoleon the Third succeeded in contenting the Parisian Prolatinisa for eighteen years by giving them public works, which cost Paris today its dead of eighty million pounds and its municipal tax of three or four pounds. Ahead because this excellent method of taming the beast was customary in Rome and even in Egypt four thousand years ago, and lastly, because despots, kings and emperors have always employed the ruse of throwing a scrap of food to the people to gain time to snatch up the whip, it is natural that the practical men should extol this method of perpetuating the wage system. What need to rack our brains when we have the time honored method of the Pharaohs at our disposal. Yet should the revolution be so misguided as to start on this path, it would be lost. In eighteen forty eight, when the National workshops were opened on February twenty seventh, they unemployed at Paris numbered only eight hundred. A fortnight later they had already increased of forty nine thousand. They would soon have been one hundred thousand, without counting those who crowded in from the provinces. Yet at that time trade and manufacturers in France only employed half as many hands as today, and we know that in the time of revolution, exchange and industry suffer most from the general upheaval. To realize this, we have only to think for a moment of the number of workmen whose labor depends directly or indirectly upon export trade, or of the number of hands employed in producing luxuries whose consumers are the middle class minority. A revolution in Europe means the unavoidable stoppage of at least half the factories and workshops. It means millions of workers and their families thrown on the streets, and our practical men would seek to avert this truly terrible situation by means of national relief works, that is to say, by means of new industries created on the spot to give work to the unemployed. It is evident, as Prodan has already pointed out, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete disorganization of the system based on private enterprise and wage labor. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand in its entirety, and to reorganize it to meet the needs of a whole people. But this cannot be accomplished in a day or a month. It must take a certain time thus to reorganize the system of production, and during this time millions of men will be deprived of the means of subsistence. What then is to be done? There is only one really practical solution of the problem. Boldly to face the great tasks which awaits us, and instead of trying to patch up a situation which we ourselves have made untenable, to proceed to reorganize the production on a new basis. Thus, the really practical force of action, in our view, would be that the people should take immediate possession of all the food of the insurgent districts, keeping strict account of it all that none might be wasted, and that by the aid of these accumulated resources, everyone might be able to tide over the crisis. During that time, an agreement would have to be made with the factory workers, the necessary raw materials given them, and the means of subsistence assured to them, while they work to supply the needs of the agriculture population. For we must not forget that while France weaves silks and satin and sedck, the wives of German financiers, the Empress of Russia and the Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and while Paris fashions wonderful trinkets and playthings for rich folk all the world over, two thirds of the French peasantry have not proper lamps to give them light, or the implements necessary for modern agriculture. Lastly, unproductive land, of which there is plenty, would have to be turned to the best advantage. Poor soils, enriched and rich soils, which yet under the prison system, do not yield a quarter, no nor a tenth of what they might produce submitted to intensive culture and tilled with as much care as a market garden or a flower pot. It is impossible to imagine any other practical solution of the problem, and whether we like it or not, sheer force of circumstances will bring it to pass. Par Three. The most prominent characteristic of capitalism is the wage system, which in brief amounts to this. A man or group of men possessing the necessary capital starts some industrial enterprise. He undertakes to supply the factory or workshops with raw material, to organize production, to pay the employees of fixed wage, and lastly to pocket the surf plus value or profits, under pretext of recouping himself for managing the concern, for running the risk it may involve, and for the fluctuations of price in the market value of the wares. To preserve the system, those who now monopolize capital would be ready to make certain concessions to share, for example, a part of the profits with the workers, or rather to establish a sliding scale which would oblige them to raise wages when prices were high. In brief, they would consent to certain sacrifices on condition that they were still allowed to direct industry and to take its first fruits. Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish wages. Though it introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things, it only substitutes the state, that is to say, representative government, national or local for the individual employer of labour. Under collectivism, it is the representatives of the nation or of the district, and their deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of production in the interest of all. Moreover, collectivism draws a very subtle, but very far reaching distinction between the work of the laborer and of the man who has learned a craft. Unskilled labor, in the eyes of the collectivists is simple labor, while the work of the craftsmen, the mechanic, the engineer, the man of science, et cetera, is what Marx calls complex labor, and is entitled to a higher wage. But laborers and craftsmen, weavers and men of science are all wage servants of the state, all officials, as we have said lately, to gild the pill. The coming revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system in all its forms and a possibility, and to render communism, which is the negation of waste slavery. The only possible solution for even omitting that the collectivist modification of the present system, as possible if introduced gradually during a period of prosperity and peace, though for my part I question its practicability even under such conditions, it would become impossible in a period of revolution, when the need of feeding hungry millions springs up for the first call to arms. A political revolution can be accomplished without shaking the foundations of industry, but a revolution where the people lay hands upon property will inevitably paralyze exchange and production. Millions of public money would not suffice for wages to the millions of outer works. This point cannot be too much assistant upon the reorganization of industry on a new basis, and we shall presently show how tremendous this problem is. Cannot be accomplished in a few days. Nor, on the other hand, will the people submit to be half starved for years in order to oblige theorists who uphold the wage system to tide over the period of stress. They will demand what they have always demanded. In such case, communization of supplies, the giving of rations, it will be vain to preach patients. The people will be patient no longer, and if food is not put in common, they will plunder the bakeries. If the people are not strong enough to carry all before them, they will be shot down to give collectivism a fair field for experiment. To this end, order must be retained at any price, order, discipline, obedience, and as the capitalists will soon realize that when the people are shot down by those who call themselves revolutionists, the revolution itself will become hateful in the eyes of the masses, and they will certainly lend their support to the champions of order, even though they are collectivists. In such a line of conduct, the capitalists will see a means of hereafter crushing the collectivists in their turn. If order is established in this fashion, the consequences are easy to foresee. Not content with shooting down the marauders, the faction of order will search out the ringleaders of the mob. They will set up again law courts and reinstate the hangman. The most ardent revolutionists will be sent to the scaffold. I'll be seventeen ninety three over again. Do not let us forget how reaction triumphed in the last century. First the Abeltist the badmen were guillotine those whom Mignier was, the memory of the struggle fresh upon him, still called anarchists. The Dantonists soon follow them, and when the Party of Robespierre had guillotined these revolutionaries, they in turn had to mount the scaffold. Whereupon the people, sick of bloodshed and seeing the revolution lost, thrrupt the sponge and let the reactionaries do their worst. If order is restored, we say, the social democrats will hang the anarchists. The fabia will hang the social Democrats, and will in their turn be hanged by the reactionaries, and the revolution will come to an end. But everything confirms us in the belief that the energy of the people will carry them far enough, and that when the revolution takes place, the idea of anarchist communism will have gained ground. It is not an artificial idea. The people themselves have breathed it in our ear, and the number of communists is ever increasing as the impossibility of any other solution becomes more and more evident. And if the impetus of the people is strong enough, affairs will take a very different turn. Instead of plundering the baker's shops one day and starving the next, the people of the insurgent cities will take possession of the warehouses, the cattle markets, in fact, of all the provision stores, and of all the food to be had. The well intentioned citizens, men and women both will form themselves into bands of volunteers and address themselves to the task of making a rough general inventory of the contents of each shop and warehouse. In twenty four hours, the revolted town or district will know what Paris has not found out yet in spite of its statistical committees, and what it never did find out during the siege, the quantity of provisions it contains. In forty eight hours, millions of copies will be printed of the tables giving it sufficiently exact amounts of the available food, the places where it is stored, and the means of distribution. In every block of houses, in every street, in every town. Ward bands of volunteers will have been organized. These commissariat volunteers will work in unison and keep in touch with each other. If only the Jacquobin Banetts the Knuckan in the way, if only the self styled scientific theorists did not thrust themselves into darkened council, or rather let them expound their muddle headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power. And that admirable spirit of organization inherent in the people above all, in every social grade of the French nation, but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate even in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a revolution an immense guild of free workers ready to furnish to each and all in the necessary food. Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organizing genius of the great misunderstood the people to those who have seen it in Paris in the days of the barricades, or in London during the Great Doctor Strike, when half a million starving folk had to be fed, and they will tell you how superior it is to the official netness of bubbledom. And even supposing we have to endure a certain amount of discomfort and confusion for a fortnight or a month. Surely that would not matter very much. For the mass of people. It would still be an improvement on their former condition. And besides, in times of revolution, one can dine contently enough on a bit of bread and cheese while eagerly discussing events. In any case, a system which springs up spontaneously under stress of immediate need will be infinitely preferable to anything invented between four walls by a high bound theorist sitting on any number of committees. Part four. The people of the great towns will be driven, by force of circumstances to take possession of all the provisions, beginning with the barest necessaries, and gradually extending communism to other things, in order to satisfy the needs of all the citizens. The sooner it is done, the better. The sooner it is done, the less misery there will be, and the less strife. But upon what basis must society be organized in order that all may share and share alike? This is the question that meets us at the outset. We answer that there are no two ways of it. There is only one way in which communism can be established equitably. Only one way we satisfies their instincts of justice and is at the same time practical, namely, the system already adopted of the agrarian communes of Europe. Take for example, a peasant commune, no matter where, even in France, where the Jacobins have done their best to destroy all communal usage. If the commune possesses woods and copses, then so long as there is plenty wood for all, everyone can take as much as he wants, without other let or hindrance than the public opinion of his neighbors. As to the timber trees, which are always scarce, they have to be carefully apportioned. The same with the communal pasture land, And while there is enough and to spare, no limit is to put on what the cattle of each homestead may consume, nor to the number of beasts raising upon the pastures. Rasy grounds are not divided, nor is the fodder duled out unless there is scarcity. All the Swiss communes, and many of those in France and Germany too, wherever there is communal pasture land, practice the system, and in the countries of Eastern Europe, where there are great forests, and no scarcity of land. We find the peasants belling the trees as they need them, and cultivating as much as the soil as they require, without any thought a limiting each man's share of timber or of land. But the timber will be divided and the land parceled out to each household according to its needs, as soon as either becomes scarce, as is already the case in Russia. In a word, the system is this, 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. Of the three hundred and fifty millions who inhabit Europe, two hundred millions still follow the system of natural communism. It is the fact worth remarking that the same system prevails in the great towns in the distribution of one commodity, at least which is found in abundance. The water is supplied to each house as long as there is no fear of the supply running short. No water company thinks of checking the consumption of the water in each house. Take what you please, but during the great drafts, if there is any fear of supply failing. The water companies know that all they have to do is to make known the fact by means of a short advertisement in the papers, and the citizens will reduce their consumption of water and not let it run to waste. But if if the water were actually scarce, what would be done? Recourse would be had in a system of rations. Such a measure is so natural, so inherent in common sense. The Paris twice asked to be put on rations during the two sieges which it underwent in eighteen seventy one. Is it necessary to go into details to prepare tables showing how the distribution of rations may work to prove that it is just and equitable, infinite more just and equitable than in an existing state of things. All these tables and details will not serve to convince those of the middle classes, nor alas those of the workers tainted with middle class prejudices, who regard the people as a mob of savages ready to fall upon and devour each other. Directly, the government ceases to direct affairs. But those only who have never seen the people resolve and act on their own initiative could doubt for a moment that if the masses were masters of the situation, they would distribute rations to each and all his strictest accordance with just and equity. If you were to give utterance in any gathering of people to the opinion that delicacies, game and such like should be reserved for the fasidious palates of aristocratic idlers, and black bread given to the sick in the hospitals, you would be hissed. But say, at the same gathering, preach at the street corners and in the marketplaces, that the most tempting delicacies ought to be kept for the sick and the feeble, especially for the sick. Say that if there are only five braces of partridge in the entire city, in only one case of sherry wine, they should go to the sick people and the convalescence. Say that after the sick come the children. For them, the milk of the cows and goats should be reserved. If there is not enough for all, to the children and the aged, the last piece of meat, and to the strong man dry bread. If the community be reduced to that extremity, say in a word that if this or that article of consumption runs short and has to be duled out to those who have the most need most should be given. Say that, and see if you do not meet with universal agreement. The man who is full fed does not understand this, but the people do understand and have always understood it. And even the child of luxury, if he is thrown on the street and comes into contact with the masses, even he will learn to understand. The theorists for whom the soldier's uniform and the barrack mess table are civilization's last word, would like no doubt to start a regime of national kitchens and spartan broth. They would point out the advantages thereby gained the economy in fuel and food if such huge kitchens were established where every one could come for their rations of soup and bread and vegetables. We do not question these advantages. We are well aware that important economies have already been achieved in this direction, as for instance, when the handmail or quorn and the beggar's oven attached to each house were abandoned, we can see perfectly well that it would be more economical to cook broth or a hundred families at once instead of lighting a hundred separate fires. We know Besides that there are a thousand ways of doing up potatoes, but that cooked in one huge pot for a hundred families, they would be just as good. We know, in fact, that variety in cooking being a matter of the seasoning introduced by each cook or housewife, the cooking together of a hundredweight of potatoes would not prevent each cook or housewife from dressing and serving them in any way she pleased. And we know that stock made from meat can be converted into a hundred different soups to suit a hundred different tastes. But though we are quite aware of these facts, we still maintain that no one has a right to force the housewife to take her potatoes from the communal kitchen ready cooked, if she prefers to cook them herself in her own pot on our own fire. And above all, we should wish that each one to be free to take his meals with his family, or with his friends, or even in a restaurant, if so it seemed good him. Naturally, large public kitchens will spring up to take the place of the restaurants where people are poisoned. Nowadays, already the Parisian housewife gets the stalk for her soup from the butcher and transforms it into whatever soup she likes. And the London housekeepers know that they can have a joint roasted, or an apple or rhubarb tart baked at the baker's for a trifling sum, thus economizing time and fuel. And when the communal kitchen, the common bakehouse of the future is established and the people can get their food cooked without the risk of being cheated or poisoned, the custom will no doubt become general of going to the communal kitchen for the fundamental parts of the meal, leaving the last touches to be added as individual taste shall suggest. But to make a hard and fast rule of this, to make a duty of taking home our food ready cooked, that would be as repungent to our modern minds as the ideas of the covent of the barrack, morbid ideas born in brains warp by tyranny superstition. Who will have the right to the food of the commune will assuredly be the first question which we shall have to ask ourselves. Every township will answer for itself, and we are convinced that the answers will all be dictated by the sentiment of justice until labour is reorganized. As long as the disturbed period lasts, and while it is impossible to distinguish between inveterate idlers and genuine workers thrown out of work, the available food ought to be shared by all without exception. Those who have been enemies to the new order will hasten of their own accord to rid the commune of their presence. But it seems to us that the masses of the people, which have always been magnanimous and have nothing of vindictiveness in their disposition, will be ready to share their bread with all who remain with them, conquered and conquerors alike. It will be no loss to the revolution to be inspired by such an idea. And when the work is set a going again, the antagonists of yesterday will stand side by side in the same workshops. A society where work is free will have nothing to fear from idlers. But provisions will run short in a month. Our critics at once exclaim so much the better, say we, it will prove that, for the first time on record, the people have had enough to eat. As to the question of obtaining fresh supplies, we shall discuss the means in our next chapter. End of chapter five,