Part 21 (1/2)

Moreover, the directors of free a.s.sociations of workers can put into force a means of compulsion, the power of which is more unqualified and absolute than that of the most unmitigated tyranny: the all-embracing reciprocal control of the a.s.sociates, whose influence even the most obstinate cannot permanently withstand. It is certainly indispensable that the workers as a whole, or a large majority of them, should be reasonable men whose intelligence is sufficient to enable them to understand their own interests. But this is the first and foremost _conditio sine qua non_ of the establishment of economic justice. That economic justice--up to the present the highest outcome of the evolution of mankind--is suitable only to men who have raised themselves out of the lowest stage of brutality, is in no respect open to question. Hence it follows that nations and individuals who have not yet reached this stage of development must be educated up to it; and this educational work is not difficult if it be but undertaken with a will. We doubt that it could altogether fail anywhere, if undertaken seriously and in the right way.

And now let us look at the second side of the question which has been thrown out. Is it correct that, in consequence of the solidarity of interests which exists in the free community, the weal and woe of the whole are indissolubly bound up with the success of any individual undertaking?

If it be meant by this that in such a community everyone is interested in the weal of everyone else, and consequently in the success of every undertaking, then it fully expresses what is the fact; but--and this was evidently the meaning of the speaker--if it is meant that the weal of such a community is dependent upon the success of every single undertaking of its members, then it is utterly groundless. If an undertaking does not thrive, its members leave it and turn to one that is more prosperous--that is all. On the other hand, this mobility of labour, bound up with the solidarity of interests, protects the free community from the worse consequences of actual miscarriage. If there should be an ill-advised choice of directors, the unqualified officials can do but relatively little mischief; they see themselves--that is, the undertaking under their control--promptly forsaken by the workers, and the losses are insignificant because confined within a small area. In fact, this mobility proves itself to be in the last resort the most effectual corrective of all kinds of mistakes, the agency by which all the defective forms of organisation and the less capable minds are thrust aside and automatically superseded by better. For the undertakings which, from any cause whatever, fail to thrive are always in a comparatively short time absorbed by better, without involving in ruin--as happens under the exploiting system of society--those who were engaged in the former undertakings. Hence it is not necessary that these free organisations should in all cases strike the highest note at the very beginning in order eventually to attain to perfect order and excellence; for in the friendly compet.i.tion what is defective rapidly vanishes from sight, being merged in what is proved to be superior, which then alone holds the field.

JOHN KILMEAN (_Right_): Let us grant, then, that the a.s.sociations of free labour are organised as well as, or better than, the capitalists'

a.s.sociations of the old exploiting world. Is there, nevertheless, no ground to fear that they will exhibit serious defects in comparison with undertakings conducted by individual employers? That self-interest, so far as concerns the workers themselves, can for the first time have full play in stimulating activity is true; but with respect to the management the reverse is the fact. At least one would think that the interest of the individual undertaker in the success of the business belonging to him alone must be a keener one than that of directors, who are nothing more than elected functionaries whose industrial existence is in no way indissolubly connected with the undertaking. The advantages which the private undertaking conducted by the individual proprietor has. .h.i.therto exhibited over the joint-stock company, it must, in the nature of things, also have over the free a.s.sociations.

THEODOR YPSILANTI (_Freeland_): Let us a.s.sume, for the present, that this is so. But are the advantages of the individual undertaker over the joint-stock company really so great? It is not necessary to theorise for and against, since practice has long ago p.r.o.nounced its verdict. And what is this? Simply that the joint-stock undertaking has gradually surpa.s.sed, nay, in the most important and the most extensive branches of business totally superseded, the much-lauded private undertaking. It can be confidently a.s.sorted that in every kind of undertaking which is large enough to support the--certainly somewhat costly--apparatus of a joint-stock company, the joint-stock company is undisputed master of the field, so that there remains to the private undertaking, as its domain, nothing more than the dwarf concerns with which our free society does not meddle. It cannot be said that this is due to the larger money power of the combined capital, for even relatively small undertakings, whose total capital is many times less than that of a great many private millionaires, prefer, I may say choose exclusively, the joint-stock form. It is quite as great a mistake to ascribe this fact to the reluctance of private capitalists to run the risk involved in certain undertakings, and to their consequent preference for joint-stock undertakings; for, in the first place, it is generally the least risky branches of business in which the joint-stock form most exclusively prevails; and in the second place, we see only too often that individual capitalists place enormous sums in single companies, and even found undertakings in a joint-stock form with their own capital. But a decisive proof of the superiority of the joint-stock company is the universal fact that the great capitalists are everywhere entrusting the control of their property to joint-stock companies. If the account-books of the wealthy in every civilised exploiting country were to be examined, it would unquestionably be found that at least nine-tenths of the capitalists had employed the greatest part of their capital which was not invested in land in the purchase of shares. This, however, simply shows that the rich prefer not to manage their wealth themselves, but to allow it to be managed by joint stock companies.

The orthodox theory, spun out of the flimsiest fictions, is not able to do anything with this fact; it therefore ignores it, or seeks to explain it by a number of fresh fictions, such as the fable of divided risk, or some other similar subterfuge. The truth is that the self-interest of the employer has very little to do with the real direction of the businesses belonging to him--so far as concerns great undertakings--for not the employer, but specially appointed wage-earners, are, as a rule, the actual directors; the alleged advantage of the private undertaking, therefore, does not exist at all. On the other hand, the undertaking of the private capitalist is at a very heavy disadvantage in compet.i.tion with that of the joint-stock company, inasmuch as the latter almost always attracts by far the greater amount of intelligence. The capitalist, even the largest, is on the average no cleverer than other men--that is, generally speaking, he is _not_ particularly clever. It may, perhaps, be objected that he would scarcely have attained to great wealth had he not possessed superior abilities; but apart from the fact that it has yet to be established whether in the modern exploiting society it is really special mental gifts, and not rather other things, that lead to the acc.u.mulation of great wealth, most large fortunes are no longer in the hands of the original acquirers, but in those of their heirs. Consequently, in private undertakings, if not the actual direction, yet certainly the highest authority, and particularly the final decision as to the choice of the actual directors, lies in the hands of men who, shall we say, half of them, possess less than the average, nine-tenths of the rest about the average, and only one-twentieth of them more than the average of human intelligence. Naturally nineteen-twentieths of the undertakings thought out and established by such men will be either indifferent or bad. It will be further objected that it is in the main the same men to whom a similar _role_ falls in the creation and officering of joint-stock companies. Very true. But here it is usual for the few able men among the wealthy to take the _role_ of leaders; the stupid or the moderately gifted are changed from autocratic despots into a herd of common docile cattle, who, led by the instinct of self-interest, blindly follow the abler men. And even when it is otherwise, when the incapable rich man stubbornly insists upon thrusting forward his empty pate, he finds himself compelled to give reasons for what he does, to engage in the game of question and answer with his fellow shareholders, and ordinarily he is thus preserved from the gross follies which he would be sure to commit if the whole responsibility rested upon himself. In a word, capitalists acting together as joint-stock companies as a rule exhibit more ability than capitalists acting independently. But even if it were not so, the selections which they make--as shareholders--in appointing the chief managers of their business are infinitely better than those made by private capitalists, because a whole category of intelligences, and that of the highest and best kind, stands at the disposal of the joint-stock company, but not of the private undertaker. Many persons who offer themselves as directors, members of council of administration, presidents, of joint-stock companies, would never condescend to enter into the service of an individual. The general effect of all this is, that joint-stock companies in the greater number of cases possess far abler, more intelligent managers than private undertakings--a circ.u.mstance which no one will overlook who is but even moderately well acquainted with the facts of the case.

The alleged superiority of the private undertaking, supposed to be due to the personal care and oversight of the owner, is therefore nothing more than one of the many fables in which the exploiting world believes in spite of the most obvious lack of truth. But even the trifling advantages which the private undertaking really has over the joint-stock company cannot be claimed as against freely a.s.sociated labour. Colleague Tonof has already pointed out that ignorance and indifference, those most dangerous characteristics of most shareholders, are not to be feared in those who take part in labour a.s.sociations. Here it can never happen that an unscrupulous minority will obtain control of the management and exploit the undertaking for the benefit of some private interest; here it is natural that the whole body of members, who are interested in the successful conduct of the business, should incessantly and attentively watch the behaviour of the officials they have elected; and in view of the perfect transparency of all the business transactions in the free community, secret practices and crooked ways--those inevitable expedients of dishonour--are not to be thought of. In a word, the form of labour organisation corresponding to the higher stage of civilisation proves itself to be infinitely superior in every respect to the form of organisation prevalent in the past--a fact which, strictly speaking, is a matter of course.

It does not follow that this form of organisation is the most suitable for every kind of labour; there are branches of production--I mention merely the artistic or the scientific--in which the individual must stand by himself; but we do not apply the principle of a.s.sociation to these branches. For no one would forcibly impose this principle, and the individual freedom that is nowhere interfered with is able of itself to take care that what is done is everywhere done in the way that has been found to be most consistent with nature, and best.

MIGUEL DIEGO (_Right_): We know now that the new system unites in itself all the natural requisites of success; it has been shown before that its introduction was demanded by the progress of civilisation. How comes it that, in spite of all, the new system enters the world, not as the product of the co-operation of elementary automatically occurring historical events, but rather as a kind of art-product, as an artificially produced outcome of the efforts of certain individuals? What if the International Free Society had not been formed, or if its appeal had been without response, its work crushed in the germ, or in some other way made to miscarry? It will be admitted that these are conceivable contingencies.

What would have become of economic justice if any one of these possibilities had occurred? If social reform is in truth an inevitable necessity, it must ultimately be realised in spite of the opposition of the whole world; it must show itself to be indissolubly bound up with forces which will give it the victory over prejudice, ill-will, and adverse accident. Thus alone would proof be given that the work in which we are engaged is something more than the ephemeral fruit of fallible human ingenuity--that rather those men who gave it the initial impulse and watched over its development were acting simply as the instruments of the universal force which, if _they_ had not done the work, would have found other instruments and other ways to attain the inevitable end.

HENRI NEY (_Freeland_): If the existence of economic justice as an established fact depended upon the action of the founders of Freeland, little could have been said, not merely as to its necessary character, but also as to the certainty of its continuance. For what individual men attempt, other men can frustrate. It is true that, as far as outward appearances go, all historical events are human work: but the great necessary events of history are distinguished from merely accidental occurrences by the fact that in them all the actors are clearly seen to be simply the instruments of destiny, instruments which the genius of mankind calls into being when it is in need of them. We do not know who invented language, the first tool, writing; but whoever it was, we know that he was a mere instrument of progress, in the sense that, with the same certainty with which we express any other natural law, we can venture to a.s.sert that language, the tool, writing, would have been invented even if their respective accidental inventors had never seen the light. The same holds good of economic freedom: it would have been realised, even if none of us who actually realised it for the first time had existed. Only in such a case the form of its entrance into the world of historical fact would probably have been a different, perhaps a more pacific, a more joyous one still than that of which we are the witnesses; but perhaps it might have been a violent and horrible one.

In order to show this in a manner that excludes all doubt, it must first be demonstrated that the continuance of modern society as it has been evolved in the course of the last century is in the very nature of things an impossibility. For this purpose you must allow me to carry you back some distance.

In the original society of barbarism, when the productiveness of labour was so small that the weaker could not be exploited by the stronger, and one's own prosperity depended upon the suppression and annihilation of compet.i.tors, a thirst for blood, cruelty, cunning, were not merely necessary to the self-preservation of the individual, but they were obviously serviceable to the society to which the individual belonged. They were, therefore, not only universally prevalent, but were reckoned as virtues. The most successful and most merciless slayer of men was the most honourable member of his tribe, and was lauded in speech and song as an example worthy of imitation.

When the productiveness of labour increased, these 'virtues' lost much of their original importance; but they were not converted into vices until slavery was invented, and it became possible to utilise the labour instead of the flesh of the conquered. Then bloodthirsty cruelty, which hitherto had been profitable, became injurious, since, for the sake of a transient enjoyment--that of eating human flesh--it deprived the victorious individual, as well as the society to which he belonged, of the permanent advantage of augmented prosperity and increased power. Consequently, the b.e.s.t.i.a.l thirst for blood gradually disappeared in the new form of the struggle for existence, and from a cherished virtue it pa.s.sed into a characteristic which met with increasing disapproval--that is, it became a vice. It necessarily became a vice, for only those tribes which were the subjects of this process of moral transformation could enjoy all the advantages of the new forms of labour and of the new social inst.i.tution, slavery, and could therefore increase in civilisation and power, and make use of their augmented power to extirpate or to bring into subjection the tribes that persisted in their old cannibal customs. In this way, in the course of thousands of years, there grew up among men a new ethics which, in its essential features, has been preserved until our days--the ethics of exploitation.

But to call this ethics 'philanthropy' is the strangest of mistakes. It is true that the savage bloodthirsty hatred between man and man had given place to milder sentiments; but it is a long way from those sentiments to genuine philanthropy, by which we understand the recognition of our fellow-man as our equal, and not merely that chilly benevolence which we entertain towards even dumb animals. Real philanthropy is as inconsistent with exploitation as with cannibalism. For though the new form of the struggle for existence abhors the death of the vanquished, it subst.i.tutes for it the oppression and subjugation of man by man as an imperative requirement of social prosperity. And it should be clearly understood that real and unselfish philanthropy is not merely not demanded by the kind of struggle for existence which is carried on by the exploiting society, but is known to be distinctly injurious, and is quite impracticable as a universally operative race-instinct. Individuals may love their fellow-men as themselves; but as long as exploitation is in force, such men must remain rare, and by no means generally esteemed, exceptions. Only hypocrisy or gross self-deception will question this. Certainly the so-called civilised nations of the West have for more than a thousand years written upon their banners the words 'Love thy neighbour as thyself,' and have not shrunk from a.s.serting that they lived up to those words, or that at least they endeavoured to do so. But in truth they loved their fellow-man, in the best of cases, as a useful domestic animal, have without the slightest scruple profited by his painful toil, by his torture, and have not been prevented by any sentiment of horror from slaughtering him in cold blood when such a course was or seemed to be profitable to them. And such were not the sentiments and feelings of a few particularly hard-hearted individuals, but of the whole body of society; they were not condemned but imperatively demanded by public opinion, lauded as virtues under all sorts of high-sounding names, and, so far as deeds and not empty phrases were in question, their ant.i.thesis, the genuine philanthropy, pa.s.sed at best as pitiable folly, or more generally as a crime worthy of death. He who uttered the words quoted above, and to Whom prayers were offered in the churches, would have been repeatedly crucified, burnt, broken on the wheel, hanged by them all, in the most recent past perhaps imprisoned, had He again ventured, as He did nineteen centuries ago, to preach in the market-place, in burning living words that could not be misunderstood, that which men's purblind eyes and their minds clouded by a thousand years of ancient self-deception read, but did not understand, in the writings of His disciples.

But the decisive point is, that in the epoch of exploitation mankind could not have thought or felt, not to say acted, otherwise. They were compelled to practise exploitation so long as this was a necessity of civilisation; they were therefore unable either to feel or exercise philanthropy, for that was as little in harmony with exploitation as repugnance to homicide was with cannibalism. Just as in the first barbaric epoch of mankind that which the exploiting period called 'humanity' would have been detrimental to success in the struggle for existence, so, later, that which _we_ call humanity, the genuine philanthropy, would have placed any nation that had practised it at a disadvantage. To eat or to be eaten--that was the alternative in the epoch of cannibalism; to oppress or to be oppressed, in the epoch of exploitation.

A change in the form and productiveness of labour has recently been effected; neither social inst.i.tutions nor moral sensibilities can escape the influence of that change. But--and here I come to the last decisive point--there are certainly several alternatives conceivable. The first is that with which we have hitherto been exclusively occupied: the social inst.i.tutions accommodate themselves to the change in the form of labour, and the modification of the struggle for existence thus brought about leads to a corresponding revolution in moral sentiments; friendly compet.i.tion and perfect solidarity of interests supersede the reciprocal struggle for advantage, and the highest philanthropy supersedes the exploitation of man.

If we would once for all remove the last doubt as to the unqualified necessity of this phase of evolution, let us suppose that the contrary has happened, that the adaptation of the social inst.i.tutions to the modified form of labour is not effected. At any rate the mind can imagine such a possibility; and I hold it to be superfluous, at this point in the demonstration, to discuss the probability or the improbability of such a supposition--we simply a.s.sume the case. But it would be absurd likewise to a.s.sume that this persistence of the old form of the social inst.i.tutions could occur without being necessarily accompanied by very material reactions both upon the forms of labour and upon the moral instincts of mankind. Those over-orthodox but not less thoughtless social politicians who accept the above a.s.sumption, hold it to be possible for a cause of such enormous and far-reaching importance as is an increased productiveness of labour, that makes it possible for all men to enjoy abundance and leisure, to remain without the slightest influence upon the course of human evolution. They overlook the fact that the struggle for existence in human society must in any case be changed under the influence of this factor, whether the social inst.i.tutions undergo a corresponding adaptation or not, and that consequently the inquiry must in any case be made what reaction this changed form of the struggle for existence can or must exercise upon the totality of human inst.i.tutions?

And in what consists the change in the struggle for existence, in such a case as that indicated above? _Simply in a partial reversion to the form of struggle of the first, the cannibal, epoch of mankind!_

We have seen that exploitation transformed the earlier struggle, that aimed at annihilating the compet.i.tor, into one directed towards his subjugation.

But now, when the productiveness of labour is so great that the consumption, kept down by exploitation, is no longer able to follow it, the suppression, the--if not the physical, yet the industrial--annihilation of the compet.i.tor is once more a necessary condition of everyone's prosperity, and the struggle for existence a.s.sumes at once the forms of subjugation and annihilation. In the domain of industry it now profits little to have arbitrary authority over any number of human subjects of exploitation; if the exploiter is not able to drive his co-exploiter from the market, he must succ.u.mb in the struggle for existence. And the exploited now have not merely to defend themselves from the harsh treatment of their masters: they must, if they would ward off hunger, fight with tooth and claw for the only too few places at the food-crib in the 'labour market.' Is it conceivable that such a terrible alteration in the fundamental conditions of the struggle for existence can remain without influence upon human ethics?

Cause and effect _must_ correspond--the ethics of the cannibal epoch _must_ triumphantly return. In consequence of the altered character of the conflict of annihilation, the former cruel and malicious instincts will undergo a modification, but the fundamental sentiment, the unqualified animosity against one's fellow-man, must return. During the thousands of years when the struggle was directed towards the making use of one's neighbour, and especially when the exploited had become accustomed to reverence in the exploiter a higher being, there was possible between master and servant at least that degree of attachment which exists between a man and his beast. Neither masters nor servants had any necessary occasion to hate each other. Mutual consideration, magnanimity, kindness, grat.i.tude, could in such a condition become--certainly very sparingly--subst.i.tutes for philanthropy. But now, when exploitation and suppression are at one and the same time the watchwords of the struggle, the above-mentioned virtues must more and more a.s.sume the character of obstacles to a successful struggle for existence, and must consequently disappear in order to make room for mercilessness, cunning, cruelty, malice. And all these disgraceful characteristics must not merely become universally prevalent: they must also become universally esteemed, and be raised from the category of the most shameful kinds of baseness to that of 'virtues.' As little as it is possible to conceive of a 'humane' cannibal or of an exploiter under the influence of real philanthropy, so little is it possible to think of a magnanimous and--in the former sense--virtuous exploiter permanently under the colossal burden of over-production; and as certainly as the cannibal society was compelled to recognise the thirst for murder as the most praiseworthy of all virtues, so certainly must the exploiting society, cursed by over-production, learn to reverence the most cunning deceiver as its ideal of virtue. But it will be objected that, logically una.s.sailable as this position may be, it is contradicted by facts. Over-production, the disproportion between the productivity of labour and the capacity for consumption as conditioned by the existing social inst.i.tutions, has practically existed for generations; and yet it would be a gross exaggeration to a.s.sert that the moral sensibilities of civilised humanity had undergone such a terrible degeneration as is indicated above. It is certainly true that, in consequence of the increasingly reckless industrial compet.i.tive struggle, many kinds of valueless articles are produced in larger and larger quant.i.ties--nay, that there is beginning to prevail a certain confusion in public opinion, which is no longer able clearly to distinguish between honest services and successful roguery; but it is equally true, on the other hand, that never before was humanity in all its forms so highly esteemed and so widely diffused as it is in the present. These undeniable facts, however, do not show that over-production can ultimately lead to any other than the above-indicated results--which would be logical nonsense; they only show, on the one hand, that this dreadful morbid phenomenon in the industrial domain of mankind has not yet been long enough in existence to have fully matured its fruit, and that, on the other hand, the moral instinct of mankind felt a presentiment of the right way out of the economic dilemma long before that right way had become practicable. It is only a few generations since the disproportion between productivity and consumption became unmistakably evident: and what are a few generations in the life of mankind? The ethics of exploitation needed many centuries in order to subvert that of cannibalism: why should the relapse into the ethics of cannibalism proceed so much more rapidly? But the instinctive presentiment that growing civilisation will be connected, not with social stagnation and moral retrogression, but with both social and moral progress--this yearning for liberty, equality, and fraternity ineradicably implanted in the Western mind, despite all the follies and the horrors to which it for a time gave rise--it was just this 'drop of foreign blood in the European family of nations,' this Semitic-Christian leaven, which, when the time of servitude was past, preserved that Western mind from falling even temporarily into a servile and barbarous decay. Things will _not_ follow the last indicated course of evolution--exploitation will _not_ persist alongside of increased productivity; and that is the reason why the indicated moral consequences will not ensue. If, however, it be a.s.sumed that material progress and exploitation combined are the future lot of mankind, this cannot logically be conceived otherwise than as accompanied by a complete moral relapse. Yet a third form of evolution may be a.s.sumed as conceivable: in the antagonism between the productivity of labour and the current social rights, the former--the new form of labour--might succ.u.mb; in the face of the impossibility of making full use of the acquired industrial capacity, mankind might lose this capacity again. In such a case, the concord between productivity and consumption, labour and right, would have recovered the old basis, and as a consequence the ethics of mankind might also remain in the same track. Progress towards genuine philanthropy would necessarily be suspended, for the struggle for existence would, as before, be based upon the subjugation of one's fellow-men, but the necessity for the struggle of annihilation would be avoided. The presentiment of the possibility of such a development was not foreign to the Western mind; there have not been wanting, particularly during the last generations, attempts, partly conscious and partly unconscious, to load men's minds in this direction.

Alarmed and driven nearly to distraction by the strangling embrace of over-production, whole nations have at times attacked the fundamental sources of production, sought to choke the springs of the fruitfulness of labour, and persecuted with violent hatred the progress of civilisation, whose fruits were for the time so bitter. These attacks upon popular culture, upon the different kinds of division of labour, upon machinery, cannot be understood except in connection with the occasional attempts to end the discord between production and distribution by diminis.h.i.+ng the former. It is impossible not to see that in this way morality also would be preserved from a degeneracy the real cause of which this sort of reformers certainly did not understand, but which hovered before their mind's eye as an indistinct presentiment. And now, having noticed _seriatim_ the three conceivable forms of evolution--namely, (1) the adaptation of social rights to the new and higher forms of labour and the corresponding evolution of a new and higher morality; (2) the permanent antagonism between the form of labour and social rights, and the corresponding degeneracy of morality; (3) the adaptation of the form of labour to the hitherto existing social rights by the sacrifice of the higher productivity, and the corresponding permanence of the hitherto existing morality--we now ask ourselves whether in the struggle between these three tendencies any but the first can come off as conqueror. They all three are conceivable; but is it conceivable that material or moral decay can a.s.sert itself by the side of both moral and material progress, or will ultimately triumph over these? It is possible, we will say even probable, that but for our successful undertaking begun twenty-five years ago, mankind would for the most part still longer have continued to traverse the path of moral degeneracy on the one hand, and of antagonism to progress on the other; yet there would never therefore have been altogether wanting attempts in the direction of social deliverance, and the ultimate triumph of such attempts could be only a question of time. No; mankind owes us nothing which it would not have obtained without us: if we claim to have rendered any service, it is merely that of having brought about more speedily, and perhaps with less bloodshed, that which must have come. [Vehement and long-continued applause and enthusiastic cheers from all sides. The leaders of the opposition one after another shook the hands of the speaker and a.s.sured him of their support.]

(_End of Third Day's Debate_)

CHAPTER XXVI

FOURTH DAY