CHAPTER 13
THE SHAPE OF AN ANARCHIST SOCIETY

 

IT IS A COMMON objection to anarchism that, while the anarchist makes an effective, and, indeed, convincing criticism of existing society and of the other means of realising the necessary social revolution, he makes little in the way of concrete proposals for the future of society after the revolution.

This statement is justified only to the extent that the anarchist does not lay down any firm and detailed plans for a society, which, being divorced from the social conceptions of contemporary society, may well evolve in a manner different from any we conceive at the present day.  Society grows with the maturing of the ideas of the men within it, grows according to natural rather than artificial laws, and its form cannot be dictated by the plans or schemes of individuals.  It is not for us, who are still bound, to plan the lives of those who will be free, for when the people have liberated themselves from authority and exploitation, they will arrange their individual and social lives not according to the ideas of social theorists, but according to their own ever-evolving needs as human and social beings.

When property and class relationships have been broken down and replaced by the equal relationships of free men, when authority has vanished and society is conducted on the basis of voluntary co-operation, there will certainly be a great change in social values and, indeed, in the attitude of men to life itself.  Many of the prevalent conceptions of contemporary society will vanish.  The belief in material progress for its own sake will be replaced by the belief in a social evolution towards a balanced life.  Ambition as we know it, social and financial ambition, will find no place in a classless society.  Men will be satisfied with a sufficiency of material comforts and with work that fulfils their creative needs.  Where there is enough for all, luxury, which is only the complement of poverty, will lose its attraction, and, where men are not frustrated by unsympathetic and fruitless occupations, they will not desire to perpetuate or to enjoy vicariously the extravagances which provide the sensational variety in an imperfect society.  Time will no longer be the driving fury it represents in a competitive society, for with the proper development of productive and scientific resources man will be able to acquire both sufficient leisure and the congenial work which will enable him to practise the art of living in a manner that so far has been possible, for the most part, to the wealthy and leisured alone, and to them, even, only in a limited degree.

These are generalisations merely, but they do represent the only kind of thing one can say with confidence about the manner of human life after the classless society has been attained.  Anything in the way of a more detailed picture is likely to be little more than a representation of the personal predilections of the author, like Morris’s News From Nowhere.

But although the anarchist would be unwise, and, indeed; insincere to paint a portrait of society as it will develop after the classless society has been erected and human life has been purged of all the competitive elements that beset contemporary society, he can and does develop a plan of how society can be organised, immediately after the social revolution, on a voluntary and co-operative basis that will ensure the development of social freedom.

Anarchism, as has been said already, is based on the concepts of freedom and justice, justice being that reciprocity of freedom without which no real individual freedom is possible.  The social principles that follow from these concepts are mutual aid, or co-operation, and communism, or common ownership of the means of production (not to be confused with Leninist and Marxist Communism which implies State ownership of the means of production).

In the anarchist view these principles are expressed concretely in the administration of economic and functional affairs by voluntary associations of the workers for the purpose of running the factories and the farms and providing the necessary social services such as posts, drainage, roads, etc.  Each industry would be administered by its own workers who are the most competent people for that purpose.

The medical services, for instance, would be provided by the doctors, nurses and pharmacists, who, having expert knowledge of their professions, are obviously better fitted to do this than politicians chosen according to the methods of parliamentary democracy.

Similarly, theatres would be operated by the actors and theatrical workers themselves, and in this way, in a society where the profit motive had ended; those best fitted would provide dramatic entertainment to the people and form their natural mentors in this art.  Quality would replace the traditional box office appeal, and, where there existed no longer the false standard of vulgarity induced by the debasement of taste through the stultification of a state education, the peoples’ appreciation could be raised until they had once again an attitude to good drama comparable with that of the populace of Sophoclean Athens or Shakespearean England.

Again, in the production of the physical necessities of life the most competent people to run industry are the people who actually know it from vocational experience.

It may be argued that the workers in modern industry often take little interest in their work and are concerned mostly with expending as little energy in as short a time for as much money as possible.  This is probably true in many cases, but it arises from no other cause than the conditions that surround the modern industrial worker.

Commodities in modern society are produced primarily for profit, only secondarily for use.  Production is used for the benefit of the ruling class, the owning or, in Fascist states, the directing class, and the worker is given a share of the proceeds of production which approximates as nearly as possible to the amount which will keep him alive and fit to produce more goods to benefit the owning or directing class.  The exactness of approximation to the living standard depends upon the bargaining power of the worker, which is in inverse proportion to the prosperity of industry.  Thus, where industry is expanding and the labour pool is small, the workers have a certain power to force a comparatively good standard from the capitalists, in whose interests it is to give concessions rather than risk a stoppage of work which would result in diminished production and consequently lower profits.  But, where the market is restricted, where competition between capitalists forces prices down and contracts the margin of profit, where the shrinkage of production and the introduction of economical methods increases the pool of available unemployed labour, the workers, on their part, lose the power to gain ameliorations under the competitive system, and the capitalists on their side are unable to make concessions and at the same time retain an appreciable margin of profits.

In a totalitarian economy the position is somewhat, different.  Goods are then, indeed produced primarily for use, and profit becomes a secondary, though still powerful motive.  But the use for which the goods are produced is not the happiness of the people, but the needs of the totalitarian state, and in particular the needs of war.  This type of use becomes negative, as it is destined primarily for destruction - both of the goods produced and of the means of production of rival totalitarian nations.  Thus the worker’s position is, in spite of the different basis of production, no better under the totalitarian state than under “democratic” capitalism.  He still works under as bad conditions and for as low wages as his masters can impose on him, and produces goods that do not benefit him but which, indeed, are often detrimental to his welfare and destructive to his life.

Under such conditions the worker cannot be expected to take an interest in work which is made irksome by the monotony of a division of labour carried often to the absurdity of a man tightening up nuts all day long on car parts carried past him on a moving band.  The factory system as we know it is in itself demoralising; when it is combined with an exploiting system under which a man works long hours for the pittance that keeps him alive, while the major portion of the product of his labour either goes to the rich or is consumed in the mad destruction of war, it is almost impossible for him to have any enthusiasm for his work or any interest in its organisation.

But work in itself is natural to mankind.  Man’s body and senses were shaped in the evolutionary process to enable him to obtain the food necessary for his sustenance and to avoid death from his natural enemies.  Civilisation has mitigated the biological factors that caused such a development.  Man does not have to strive so hard for his food, and his natural enemies have been replaced by unnatural ones, which are not to be combated by the same means as the tiger or the snake.  But he remains a creature mentally and physically constructed and conditioned for work.  By work I do not mean toil, best the measure of exercise that will satisfy the natural demands of his constitution and keep him from mental and physical decay.  This exercise can be obtained through sport, but sport, while exercising the body and the faculties, lacks the element of creation or production which lies at the basis of work, and which almost every man needs to make his life complete.

The natural need for work can be seen in the way the craftsman, where he still remains, is devoted to his work; in the way the writer, artist, or doctor with a real vocation will work long and arduous hours on some piece of work from which he can expect to gain little or no remuneration; in the way, even in a factory, some men will enjoy and become devoted to their work if it happens to contain a creative element; and in the way many men engaged in non-productive work, such as ordinary clerical work, will spend their free hours on gardening or some manual craft or artistic employment which fulfils their need for creative work.

The necessity for work, then, springs not from the need to earn money, but from a need for creation that is natural to every man.  This need sprang originally from the natural necessity to obtain food, but it has become so much a human attribute that even when nature provides a plentitude of food to be gathered for little labour, as in some tropical countries, man finds it necessary to employ his time on elaborate craftsman’s work, such as the images of the natives of Equatorial Africa or the Polynesian islands.  Modern competitive society imposes the need to work for money in order to live.  A communist society which had abolished money and the wage system would still have to face the need for a certain amount of work, even though much less than at present, in order to keep the community from want.  But the present nature of man is such that, even if neither of these conditions were present, if all the food he needed hung on trees and the climate were too warm for clothing, he would still have to find some kind of satisfying creative work to fulfil his spiritual need.

Common work is the basis of society, whatever form that society takes.  It is the first social necessity.  It is also, as we have seen, a necessity for the individual man.  Therefore the need of social man and the need of the individual man coincide, and there seems no human reason to suppose that, once productive work has been divested of the irksome characteristics imposed by the present factory system, men will be disinclined to perform the comparatively small portion of work necessary for their contribution to the common production, or will prove themselves incompetent in the control of the function of which they have, from practice, the most exhaustive knowledge.

These facts were proved, in the event, during the Spanish Revolution, when the workers took over their factories and the peasants collectivised the land, and worked them more successfully than the previous capitalist and feudal owners, so that output in the factories was increased and the production of agricultural goods raised to much more than its pre-revolution level.  The workers, having lost their masters, showed no tendency towards indolence.  On the contrary, the fact that they were at last controlling their own factories and land and railways gave them an enthusiasm which made them work harder in the cause of the revolution than they had ever worked before.  With such an example before us, it seems indeed unlikely that more than a few men will be unwilling to do the much smaller amount of much pleasanter work which will follow the foundation of a free society.  And of those few who do not fit in with the normal productive work of society, the majority will probably be artists or have some gift that may benefit the community although it is performed outside the normal pattern of productive life.

It is largely because they regard work as a natural function of man and one that he will perform quite apart from the compulsion of doing so for fear his individual belly should go empty, that the anarchists advocate the replacement of the wage system and money relationships by the distribution of goods to every man according to his needs, no matter what he does or does not do towards the common work.  The need to work for money in order to live is a limitation of freedom.  A man can only be truly free when he has his means of livelihood given him freely, without any payment in labour or other coin, and then does what work he is capable and willing to do for the good of the community, which is ultimately his own good.  Few men, as I have said, will so lack responsibility that they will fail to carry out their fair share of the communal work.

Commercial distribution would be replaced by communal storehouses from which the goods would be distributed to the members of the commune according to their needs.  At first, before the new society was working to its full productive capacity, some form of rationing of scarce goods might be necessary.  But later, when a sufficiency of goods was being produced, this would become unnecessary.

It is objected that such a distribution of goods would result in the greedy members of society taking more than their share, and in a general spread of excess of every kind among the population.  But the objection ignores the fact that acquisitive greed is the product of a desire to have possessions as a form of security in an insecure society where want and scarcity are the objects of fear, conscious or subconscious, in every grade of society.  Remove insecurity and inequality, and the acquisitive urge will die away; remove want and men will not desire luxury.  Where money values and exchange are abolished, it will no longer be necessary to gather possessions other than for use.

Even today, few people acquire more of the necessities of life than they actually need for themselves.  The money of the rich is spent not on gaining greater quantities of food than they can eat, but on unnecessary objects and activities that acquire an artificial value in modern society because of their scarcity and consequent symbolic relationship to money and privilege.  Without a money backing, for instance, diamonds will become as valuable as paste or glass, and no more so.

When the necessities of life are abundant, men will no more think of taking more than they need than a sane man would think of allowing the water tap to run all day just for the satisfaction of having acquired more than his neighbour.  Nor will there be any object in hoarding goods, if men are always sure there will be sufficient for their requirements whenever they need it.

The theory of possible excess after the revolution is equally groundless.  Excesses spring from social and individual frustration, and when that frustration is mitigated the need to commit excesses diminishes at the same degree.  The theory that a man gets drunk because beer is freely available is quite at variance with the facts.  He gets drunk to escape from his circumstances, and, if he finds it imperative, will do so at the expense of comforts and even necessities, as is shown by the way many poor working people spend on drink money which they need for food and clothing.  When society has been freed from the slaveries of government and the wage system, from exploitation and privilege, there will be a corresponding liberation of men from many of their frustrations, and, in consequence, a reduced rather than an increased tendency towards excess.  The fact that before the war there was less evident drunkenness in Paris, where intoxicants were cheap and always available, than in London, where they were comparatively dear and available only during restricted hours, shows that the availability of liquor has in itself no relationship to the frequency of drunkenness.

The anarchists therefore believe that the free distribution, without obligation, of goods to satisfy the needs of every man will, by making him economically free, give him, a greater incentive to work, both for the community and for his own satisfaction, and that in such a system of free distribution there lies not the temptation to excess but, on the contrary, the influence that will lead men to seek a balanced and healthy life. 

We have discussed what are probably the two most important features of the anarchist society, namely, the organisation of production and the method of distribution.  It remains to discuss the pattern of organisation of society that would best serve the anarchist objects of free production and distribution.

This pattern is embraced in the doctrine of social decentralisation.  The anarchist believes that centralisation of administration leads inevitably, as in the modern state, to the consolidation of power in a few hands.  Thus, when the independent town administration of the Middle Ages gave way to the centralised administrations of the great European states, there was a concentration of power in the hands of a few people in the capital city and a gradual loss of liberty and prosperity among the remainder of the population.

Therefore the anarchist believes in the decentralisation of the administrative function.  Affairs must be managed by the people they concern.  Thus each man will manage the affairs that concern him alone, each family the affairs that concern itself, and so on to the commune and the town, the factory and the farm.  Society will be organised as far as possible in the small autonomous units of this type that will be federated, the factories by industry, the communes by region, for the co-ordination of common affairs.

These federal organisations will not exist as organs wielding centralised power.  They will merely be the organs through which their constituent units can co-operate and so co-ordinate their activities that the production of goods and services is carried out to ensure an efficient functioning of society.  A form of centralism in co-ordination will be necessary, but it will amount to little more than an information bureau through which the various production units can find out what the community needs and organise their own efforts to serve that end without waste or scarcity.  This federal bureau will in itself have no power whatever over the units it co-ordinates.  It is absurd to imagine that the workers of the factory will need any authority to force them to produce a quantity of goods that will be neither inadequate nor superfluous.  Their own sense of responsibility will look after that once they realise it lies in their hands and not in those of some capitalist boss or government department.  Authority of any kind invariably breeds corruption in those who wield it and irresponsibility in those over whom it is wielded.  But give men their freedom and they will manage their own affairs better than anyone else can look after them on their behalf.

Certain essential aspects of the free society seem to need separate consideration and the following chapters will be devoted respectively to Land and Industry, and Personal Liberty and Culture.