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CHAPTER 14
LAND AND INDUSTRY

ONE OF THE FAULTS of modern industrial society lies in the social and economic division between town and country, and the unhealthy preponderance of the urban aggregation over the despoiled and neglected countryside.

This problem has for long received the attention of anarchists, and in particular of Kropotkin, who devoted considerable sections of such works as Fields, Factories and Workshops and The Conquest of Bread to the consideration of a solution.

The anarchists reach this problem with an attitude that is not biased, like that of Marxists, by a prejudice in favour of the industrial proletariat. The Marxists have been led by their myth of the industrial proletariat, the factory workers, as the conscious class, the leaders of the revolution, to disregard and even to despise the country worker and the country life. They have concerned themselves almost entirely with the problems of the industrial worker considered as such, and their programmes are framed to fit in with their concept of a proletarian dictatorship. We are not here concerned with the mythical nature of this dictatorship, but with the fact that in paying homage to it the Left parties have almost unanimously neglected the land and the country worker.

From the idea of the messianic role of the industrial workers follows the theory that the revolution can only be carried out in an industrial country. In fact, the events of history have disproved this thesis. While the revolution, in the hands of great Left political movements, has retreated in all the industrial countries before the counter-revolution, in the predominantly peasant countries alone has the revolution made a determined stand and the consciousness of the people progressed rather than retreated. It is in countries like Spain, India, China, that we see most hope of an early revolution, just as the revolution has in fact attained its highest degree of realisation in peasant countries, and, very largely, through the action of the peasants themselves.

Experience then, shows, that the industrial workers are no more conscious socially than the peasants, and that the more industrialised a country is, the less effective are its revolutionary movements. From this it would seem that the unnatural lives of industrial workers might make them, in the mass, less conscious than the peasants. To support this, there are two further significant facts.

Firstly, industrial workers in countries based primarily on a peasant economy, who have often been bred as peasants and frequently retain some close contact with the country, are in general more socially conscious than similar workers in industrial countries, as is shown by the revolutionary progress of the Spanish workers. In a similar manner the most live of the proletariat, both socially and culturally, in England, the classic industrial country, are the miners, who in their peculiar urban circumstances retain frequently a close contact with rural surroundings.

Secondly, farm workers in a primarily industrial country (i.e. a country like England, where the interests of an imperialist industrial capitalism have restricted home agricultural development in favour of food imports from colonial and dependent countries) are, as a result of the prevalence of social standards associated with an industrial society, and also because of the draining away of the younger country men to the industrial and urban areas, comparatively less conscious than Spanish; Mexican or Chinese peasants.

This relatively greater independence and integrity of will and thought is in part an expression of the physically and mentally healthier nature of country life, in part due to the necessary decentralisation of functions in agricultural society, and in part to the tradition of communal life which exists in the villages of all countries. Mutual aid is part of the country life today, as it was in ancient China and fifteenth century Europe, and springs naturally from the necessities of a life not completely controlled by centralised authority, and, indeed, by its very nature not capable of being so controlled.

Rural life, then, tends towards a society based on individual initiative and voluntary co-operation. (It also tends towards better health. People live longer in the country, and, in spite of frequently unsanitary conditions, diseases are less prevalent). The reverse is true of modern industrial life. Industry, both under capitalism and the various totalitarian systems, is based on the factory, the large aggregation of workers. Under these conditions, individual initiative is negated in uniformity, co-operation in regimentation. The workman’s function tends to become reduced more and more to mechanical and trivial repetition in a division of labour carried to absurdity and mental stultification in such systems as that of Henry Ford. The factory workers live a mass life, not only in the factory but also in the great urban warrens in which they dwell, cut off from any close or lasting contact with rural life. In the factory system and in the conditions of life that attend it, in the great aggregations of thousands of men working in a functional monotony unavoidable under such a system, there is an inner demoralisation which is the greatest contributory cause of the intellectual sterility of so many of the industrial workers.

It is obvious that in a society based on freedom a system of production that results in mental and emotional slavery cannot be allowed to survive. In an anarchist society there will no longer be any need for men to waste their lives in the monotonous performance of a single function. Freedom must allow a man to become complete, to develop his personality and express his inner needs to the fullest extent possible. And to this end something very different from the present form of industrial organisation must be evolved.

Two changes present themselves as being radical and necessary. Firstly, the anarchist principle of decentralisation must be used in the industrial as well as the administrative field. The factory system must be ended, and, as far as possible, the great aggregations of industry must be broken up and spread over the country, so that there are no longer whole tracts of country dominated entirely by industry.

Certain modern technical developments have made this possible. The invention of the electric grid system has taken away the need for industry to cluster round the coal districts, and the arrival of modern road transport has ended the valley pattern of industry dictated by the railways with their low gradients. Through an extensive dissemination of power from regional centres, thousands of small mills and factories scattered about the country might replace the great factories. Sentimentalists may complain that this would spoil the landscape, but there is no reason why this should happen, as electricity has taken away the filth associated with steam propelled factories, and, as anyone will appreciate who has seen the pre-steam mills around Stroud and also some of the better modern rural factories, there is no reason why an architecturally well designed factory should appear any more out of place in the country than a nobleman’s palace. Certain heavy industries or industries involving noxious fumes might have to be segregated, but these would be only a very small proportion of the factories and could probably be much reduced in extent, and unpleasantness.

At the same time it would be necessary to abolish the harmful forms of division of labour. Even in a society not dominated by profit motives there would still have to be a great deal of mass production of certain articles, but where science was used for service and not monetary gain it would no doubt be possible to replace most of the monotonous functions by mechanism. It is not entirely absurd to envisage a form of mass production in which the pattern maker would be the only productive worker, the machinery, governed by a few men in a control room, dealing with the whole process from the entry of the raw materials at one end of the shop to the exit of the finished article at the other end. If the labour needed on mass production could thus be reduced to a minimum; it would be possible for men to devote much of their lives to the wide field for revived craftsmanship which would be opened to those types of production where mass production is, in fact, less desirable or necessary. Similarly, by the use of scientific methods many of the more unpleasant occupations could be improved and reduced in their extent. Coal mining, for instance, could be diminished by the use of other means of providing electric power, by the electrification of railways and workshops, and the development of mining machinery. Other unpleasant work could similarly be reduced or even eliminated by a rational application of scientific knowledge.

There are yet many fields in which scientific research has moved slowly owing to restricting vested interests or to the lack of profit under a capitalist system. In a free society, for instance, new sources of power might well be developed which would change the whole nature of industry. Already the first experiments have been made in the solar engine and the solar accumulator, the development of which has been retarded because they were out of keeping with the vested interests involved in the present forms of power production.

The second necessary change is the breaking down of the distinction between town and country workers. Life will become many-sided. Men will no longer be industrial or agricultural workers, urban or country dwellers. The country must regain its importance in the national life, and a growing flow of population back from the cities will establish new contact between rural and urban areas, which will bring the town masses in touch with the healthier country way of life and establish a means of circulation between land and city which will lead to a just and healthy relationship between the two ways of living and their respective peoples.

The attainment of this object in any country, and particularly in England, would entail a change in the basis of farming as well as that of industry. English farming for the last sixty or seventy years has been an industry not only neglected, but even deliberately retarded by the capitalist ruling class. This was necessary because British manufacturers, exporting to undeveloped countries, had in some way or other to receive commodities in exchange for their exported goods and as interest on the surplus capital invested abroad. So with the export trade in finished articles grew up the parallel import trade in food and raw materials. The basis of English industrial capitalism became the balance of exported manufactures and imported food, and the vital necessity of preserving this balance has dominated to this day the policy of the British governments towards agriculture.

For many years past the, soil of England has not been used for anything like its full potential productivity. In peacetime much less than half the food consumed in England was grown at home. Whereas (as I have demonstrated in New Life to the Land), it is possible, given the arable acreage of the heroic age of 1880 and crop yields equivalent to those attained by ordinary farmers in Denmark and the Low Countries; to produce sufficient food (including sugar) to feed the people of Britain at pre-war standards. If the methods perfected in agricultural research were used to attain a really intensive culture, this comparatively low standard (for many of the workers) could be replaced by abundance for all.

These conclusions have been reached not only by anarchists, but also by such agricultural experts as Sir R. G. Stapledon, by such capable farmers as David Lloyd George, and by capitalists, like the Chairman of the I.C.I., largest fertiliser manufacturers in the country, whose interests do not require the maintenance of the Malthusian myth.

The post-war world will find more and more of the countries now undeveloped progressing towards self-sufficiency in manufactured goods. Britain’s manufactures may not be needed outside its own borders. And, as one cannot eat ploughshares and chemicals, it is better to use them to grow what one can eat.

Self-sufficiency will be forced upon this country, and the breakdown of the imperialist trading system will undoubtedly hasten the end of capitalist society, and provide opportunities for successful revolutionary movements.

But there are more, concrete reasons why anarchists advocate regional self-sufficiency, as opposed to national self-sufficiency.

The first is one of revolutionary strategy. An absolutely simultaneous world revolution is unlikely. A country that revolts may find itself in a hostile world for a period before revolutions follow elsewhere, and in this interim it will almost certainly be subjected to ruthless blockades by the surviving governments. Therefore the first consideration of a revolution must be the provision of adequate food for the people, in order to avoid the circumstance of hunger, which has been the doom of so many revolutions in the present century. The indispensable fighter in any revolution is Comrade Bread.

Another reason which would arise out of the immediate circumstances of the revolution would be the fact that colonial exploitation would cease, the people of the empire would be left to decide for themselves how they would live, and we could expect with no certainty that anything like the former volume of foodstuffs would reach us from the former granaries of capitalist Britain.

The remaining reasons are more of a long-term nature. Firstly, economic regionalism is a corollary of the organisational decentralisation which is one of the main tenets of anarchism, and which would be little more than a myth if it had no economic basis.

Secondly, if food were produced at home, it would be more nourishing because, if an efficient and speedy distribution were arranged, it would not be subjected to the various preservation processes which lower the value of so much food under the import system.

Thirdly, a great expansion of agriculture would help to attain the object of breaking down the barriers between town and country. More intensive work would require more farm workers, and when industry has ceased to be concerned to any great extent with manufacture for export and mass production had been organised on labour saving lines, many men would be free to work in the country.

If rational scientific principles were applied to industry and agriculture, it would be quite possible, by an absorption of people not valuably employed and an elimination of unnecessary labour, to produce a sufficiency of goods in the four hours mentioned by Kropotkin or, probably, in an even shorter daily period of work.

Exactly how the integration of town and country life would take place after the social revolution is something we cannot foretell. It will certainly grow up organically and unpredictably in accordance with the needs of the people.

But I can mention two experiments already born, within contemporary society, which may contain the germs of the future relationship between town and country, farm and industry.

The first is Howard’s idea of the garden city. We are inclined to despise garden cities for various reasons, partly because the two most famous became the gathering places of bourgeois oddities, partly because the garden cities founded by Quaker industrialists were hedged with as many restrictions as a prison. But the original idea of the garden city, as expressed by Howard, was intrinsically good. “Town and Country,” Howard said, “must be married, and out of this union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation.” Howard envisaged a series of openly built towns, with plenty of garden space within their bounds, as in the medieval city. He suggested a limit of thirty thousand inhabitants, so as to give an urban unit that would have social cohesion without congestion. Each city would be surrounded by a wide belt of country, to be used both for recreation and agriculture. Within the city, industries could be carried out in small hygienic factories; and on the edges food could be grown in close proximity to the consumer.

It seems possible that the development of the garden city may well be, as Lewis Mumford has suggested, the way to realise Kropotkin’s idea of the reintegration of town and country life.

The other modern experiment to which I shall refer offers a hint as to how to reintegrate farm and industrial work. In Belgium, before the war, it had become the custom in certain districts for industrial workers and miners to own or rent smallholdings in the countryside fairly close to their work. They would work, say, four days a week in the factory or mine, and the rest of the week on their holding. It was found that these men had both better health and a higher real standard of living than men who worked a full week in a factory and had no holdings. From this idea we might envisage a form of organisation of groups who would spend part of their time in a workshop and the rest of their weekly, working time on the land adjacent to it.

These two examples give us some idea of the way in which it would be possible to approach Kropotkin’s ideal of a society of combined, integrated labour, and institute a form of life in which man’s capacities would find better fulfilment through a variety of occupations, each contributing to the balance of a physically and mentally healthier life.


	CHAPTER 14 LAND AND INDUSTRY ONE OF THE FAULTS of modern industrial society lies in the social and economic division between town and country, and the unhealthy preponderance of the urban aggregation over the despoiled and neglected countryside. This problem has for long received the attention of anarchists, and in particular of Kropotkin, who devoted considerable sections of such works as Fields, Factories and Workshops and The Conquest of Bread to the consideration of a solution. The anarchists reach this problem with an attitude that is not biased, like that of Marxists, by a prejudice in favour of the industrial proletariat. The Marxists have been led by their myth of the industrial proletariat, the factory workers, as the conscious class, the leaders of the revolution, to disregard and even to despise the country worker and the country life. They have concerned themselves almost entirely with the problems of the industrial worker considered as such, and their programmes are framed to fit in with their concept of a proletarian dictatorship. We are not here concerned with the mythical nature of this dictatorship, but with the fact that in paying homage to it the Left parties have almost unanimously neglected the land and the country worker. From the idea of the messianic role of the industrial workers follows the theory that the revolution can only be carried out in an industrial country. In fact, the events of history have disproved this thesis. While the revolution, in the hands of great Left political movements, has retreated in all the industrial countries before the counter-revolution, in the predominantly peasant countries alone has the revolution made a determined stand and the consciousness of the people progressed rather than retreated. It is in countries like Spain, India, China, that we see most hope of an early revolution, just as the revolution has in fact attained its highest degree of realisation in peasant countries, and, very largely, through the action of the peasants themselves. Experience then, shows, that the industrial workers are no more conscious socially than the peasants, and that the more industrialised a country is, the less effective are its revolutionary movements. From this it would seem that the unnatural lives of industrial workers might make them, in the mass, less conscious than the peasants. To support this, there are two further significant facts. Firstly, industrial workers in countries based primarily on a peasant economy, who have often been bred as peasants and frequently retain some close contact with the country, are in general more socially conscious than similar workers in industrial countries, as is shown by the revolutionary progress of the Spanish workers. In a similar manner the most live of the proletariat, both socially and culturally, in England, the classic industrial country, are the miners, who in their peculiar urban circumstances retain frequently a close contact with rural surroundings. Secondly, farm workers in a primarily industrial country (i.e. a country like England, where the interests of an imperialist industrial capitalism have restricted home agricultural development in favour of food imports from colonial and dependent countries) are, as a result of the prevalence of social standards associated with an industrial society, and also because of the draining away of the younger country men to the industrial and urban areas, comparatively less conscious than Spanish; Mexican or Chinese peasants. This relatively greater independence and integrity of will and thought is in part an expression of the physically and mentally healthier nature of country life, in part due to the necessary decentralisation of functions in agricultural society, and in part to the tradition of communal life which exists in the villages of all countries. Mutual aid is part of the country life today, as it was in ancient China and fifteenth century Europe, and springs naturally from the necessities of a life not completely controlled by centralised authority, and, indeed, by its very nature not capable of being so controlled. Rural life, then, tends towards a society based on individual initiative and voluntary co-operation. (It also tends towards better health. People live longer in the country, and, in spite of frequently unsanitary conditions, diseases are less prevalent). The reverse is true of modern industrial life. Industry, both under capitalism and the various totalitarian systems, is based on the factory, the large aggregation of workers. Under these conditions, individual initiative is negated in uniformity, co-operation in regimentation. The workman’s function tends to become reduced more and more to mechanical and trivial repetition in a division of labour carried to absurdity and mental stultification in such systems as that of Henry Ford. The factory workers live a mass life, not only in the factory but also in the great urban warrens in which they dwell, cut off from any close or lasting contact with rural life. In the factory system and in the conditions of life that attend it, in the great aggregations of thousands of men working in a functional monotony unavoidable under such a system, there is an inner demoralisation which is the greatest contributory cause of the intellectual sterility of so many of the industrial workers. It is obvious that in a society based on freedom a system of production that results in mental and emotional slavery cannot be allowed to survive. In an anarchist society there will no longer be any need for men to waste their lives in the monotonous performance of a single function. Freedom must allow a man to become complete, to develop his personality and express his inner needs to the fullest extent possible. And to this end something very different from the present form of industrial organisation must be evolved. Two changes present themselves as being radical and necessary. Firstly, the anarchist principle of decentralisation must be used in the industrial as well as the administrative field. The factory system must be ended, and, as far as possible, the great aggregations of industry must be broken up and spread over the country, so that there are no longer whole tracts of country dominated entirely by industry. Certain modern technical developments have made this possible. The invention of the electric grid system has taken away the need for industry to cluster round the coal districts, and the arrival of modern road transport has ended the valley pattern of industry dictated by the railways with their low gradients. Through an extensive dissemination of power from regional centres, thousands of small mills and factories scattered about the country might replace the great factories. Sentimentalists may complain that this would spoil the landscape, but there is no reason why this should happen, as electricity has taken away the filth associated with steam propelled factories, and, as anyone will appreciate who has seen the pre-steam mills around Stroud and also some of the better modern rural factories, there is no reason why an architecturally well designed factory should appear any more out of place in the country than a nobleman’s palace. Certain heavy industries or industries involving noxious fumes might have to be segregated, but these would be only a very small proportion of the factories and could probably be much reduced in extent, and unpleasantness. At the same time it would be necessary to abolish the harmful forms of division of labour. Even in a society not dominated by profit motives there would still have to be a great deal of mass production of certain articles, but where science was used for service and not monetary gain it would no doubt be possible to replace most of the monotonous functions by mechanism. It is not entirely absurd to envisage a form of mass production in which the pattern maker would be the only productive worker, the machinery, governed by a few men in a control room, dealing with the whole process from the entry of the raw materials at one end of the shop to the exit of the finished article at the other end. If the labour needed on mass production could thus be reduced to a minimum; it would be possible for men to devote much of their lives to the wide field for revived craftsmanship which would be opened to those types of production where mass production is, in fact, less desirable or necessary. Similarly, by the use of scientific methods many of the more unpleasant occupations could be improved and reduced in their extent. Coal mining, for instance, could be diminished by the use of other means of providing electric power, by the electrification of railways and workshops, and the development of mining machinery. Other unpleasant work could similarly be reduced or even eliminated by a rational application of scientific knowledge. There are yet many fields in which scientific research has moved slowly owing to restricting vested interests or to the lack of profit under a capitalist system. In a free society, for instance, new sources of power might well be developed which would change the whole nature of industry. Already the first experiments have been made in the solar engine and the solar accumulator, the development of which has been retarded because they were out of keeping with the vested interests involved in the present forms of power production. The second necessary change is the breaking down of the distinction between town and country workers. Life will become many-sided. Men will no longer be industrial or agricultural workers, urban or country dwellers. The country must regain its importance in the national life, and a growing flow of population back from the cities will establish new contact between rural and urban areas, which will bring the town masses in touch with the healthier country way of life and establish a means of circulation between land and city which will lead to a just and healthy relationship between the two ways of living and their respective peoples. The attainment of this object in any country, and particularly in England, would entail a change in the basis of farming as well as that of industry. English farming for the last sixty or seventy years has been an industry not only neglected, but even deliberately retarded by the capitalist ruling class. This was necessary because British manufacturers, exporting to undeveloped countries, had in some way or other to receive commodities in exchange for their exported goods and as interest on the surplus capital invested abroad. So with the export trade in finished articles grew up the parallel import trade in food and raw materials. The basis of English industrial capitalism became the balance of exported manufactures and imported food, and the vital necessity of preserving this balance has dominated to this day the policy of the British governments towards agriculture. For many years past the, soil of England has not been used for anything like its full potential productivity. In peacetime much less than half the food consumed in England was grown at home. Whereas (as I have demonstrated in New Life to the Land), it is possible, given the arable acreage of the heroic age of 1880 and crop yields equivalent to those attained by ordinary farmers in Denmark and the Low Countries; to produce sufficient food (including sugar) to feed the people of Britain at pre-war standards. If the methods perfected in agricultural research were used to attain a really intensive culture, this comparatively low standard (for many of the workers) could be replaced by abundance for all. These conclusions have been reached not only by anarchists, but also by such agricultural experts as Sir R. G. Stapledon, by such capable farmers as David Lloyd George, and by capitalists, like the Chairman of the I.C.I., largest fertiliser manufacturers in the country, whose interests do not require the maintenance of the Malthusian myth. The post-war world will find more and more of the countries now undeveloped progressing towards self-sufficiency in manufactured goods. Britain’s manufactures may not be needed outside its own borders. And, as one cannot eat ploughshares and chemicals, it is better to use them to grow what one can eat. Self-sufficiency will be forced upon this country, and the breakdown of the imperialist trading system will undoubtedly hasten the end of capitalist society, and provide opportunities for successful revolutionary movements. But there are more, concrete reasons why anarchists advocate regional self-sufficiency, as opposed to national self-sufficiency. The first is one of revolutionary strategy. An absolutely simultaneous world revolution is unlikely. A country that revolts may find itself in a hostile world for a period before revolutions follow elsewhere, and in this interim it will almost certainly be subjected to ruthless blockades by the surviving governments. Therefore the first consideration of a revolution must be the provision of adequate food for the people, in order to avoid the circumstance of hunger, which has been the doom of so many revolutions in the present century. The indispensable fighter in any revolution is Comrade Bread. Another reason which would arise out of the immediate circumstances of the revolution would be the fact that colonial exploitation would cease, the people of the empire would be left to decide for themselves how they would live, and we could expect with no certainty that anything like the former volume of foodstuffs would reach us from the former granaries of capitalist Britain. The remaining reasons are more of a long-term nature. Firstly, economic regionalism is a corollary of the organisational decentralisation which is one of the main tenets of anarchism, and which would be little more than a myth if it had no economic basis. Secondly, if food were produced at home, it would be more nourishing because, if an efficient and speedy distribution were arranged, it would not be subjected to the various preservation processes which lower the value of so much food under the import system. Thirdly, a great expansion of agriculture would help to attain the object of breaking down the barriers between town and country. More intensive work would require more farm workers, and when industry has ceased to be concerned to any great extent with manufacture for export and mass production had been organised on labour saving lines, many men would be free to work in the country. If rational scientific principles were applied to industry and agriculture, it would be quite possible, by an absorption of people not valuably employed and an elimination of unnecessary labour, to produce a sufficiency of goods in the four hours mentioned by Kropotkin or, probably, in an even shorter daily period of work. Exactly how the integration of town and country life would take place after the social revolution is something we cannot foretell. It will certainly grow up organically and unpredictably in accordance with the needs of the people. But I can mention two experiments already born, within contemporary society, which may contain the germs of the future relationship between town and country, farm and industry. The first is Howard’s idea of the garden city. We are inclined to despise garden cities for various reasons, partly because the two most famous became the gathering places of bourgeois oddities, partly because the garden cities founded by Quaker industrialists were hedged with as many restrictions as a prison. But the original idea of the garden city, as expressed by Howard, was intrinsically good. “Town and Country,” Howard said, “must be married, and out of this union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilisation.” Howard envisaged a series of openly built towns, with plenty of garden space within their bounds, as in the medieval city. He suggested a limit of thirty thousand inhabitants, so as to give an urban unit that would have social cohesion without congestion. Each city would be surrounded by a wide belt of country, to be used both for recreation and agriculture. Within the city, industries could be carried out in small hygienic factories; and on the edges food could be grown in close proximity to the consumer. It seems possible that the development of the garden city may well be, as Lewis Mumford has suggested, the way to realise Kropotkin’s idea of the reintegration of town and country life. The other modern experiment to which I shall refer offers a hint as to how to reintegrate farm and industrial work. In Belgium, before the war, it had become the custom in certain districts for industrial workers and miners to own or rent smallholdings in the countryside fairly close to their work. They would work, say, four days a week in the factory or mine, and the rest of the week on their holding. It was found that these men had both better health and a higher real standard of living than men who worked a full week in a factory and had no holdings. From this idea we might envisage a form of organisation of groups who would spend part of their time in a workshop and the rest of their weekly, working time on the land adjacent to it. These two examples give us some idea of the way in which it would be possible to approach Kropotkin’s ideal of a society of combined, integrated labour, and institute a form of life in which man’s capacities would find better fulfilment through a variety of occupations, each contributing to the balance of a physically and mentally healthier life.