Books: Mutual Aid
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P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid
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Ere long history will have to be re-written on new lines, so
as to take into account these two currents of human life and to
appreciate the part played by each of them in evolution. But in
the meantime we may avail ourselves of the immense preparatory
work recently done towards restoring the leading features of the
second current, so much neglected. From the better-known periods
of history we may take some illustrations of the life of the
masses, in order to indicate the part played by mutual support
during those periods; and, in so doing, we may dispense (for the
sake of brevity) from going as far back as the Egyptian, or even
the Greek and Roman antiquity. For, in fact, the evolution of
mankind has not had the character of one unbroken series. Several
times civilization came to an end in one given region, with one
given race, and began anew elsewhere, among other races. But at
each fresh start it began again with the same clan institutions
which we have seen among the savages. So that if we take the last
start of our own civilization, when it began afresh in the first
centuries of our era, among those whom the Romans called the
"barbarians," we shall have the whole scale of evolution,
beginning with the gentes and ending in the institutions of our
own time. To these illustrations the following pages will be
devoted.
Men of science have not yet settled upon the causes which
some two thousand years ago drove whole nations from Asia into
Europe and resulted in the great migrations of barbarians which
put an end to the West Roman Empire. One cause, however, is
naturally suggested to the geographer as he contemplates the
ruins of populous cities in the deserts of Central Asia, or
follows the old beds of rivers now disappeared and the wide
outlines of lakes now reduced to the size of mere ponds. It is
desiccation: a quite recent desiccation, continued still at a
speed which we formerly were not prepared to admit.(1) Against
it man was powerless. When the inhabitants of North-West Mongolia
and East Turkestan saw that water was abandoning them, they had
no course open to them but to move down the broad valleys leading
to the lowlands, and to thrust westwards the inhabitants of the
plains.(2) Stems after stems were thus thrown into Europe,
compelling other stems to move and to remove for centuries in
succession, westwards and eastwards, in search of new and more or
less permanent abodes. Races were mixing with races during those
migrations, aborigines with immigrants, Aryans with
Ural-Altayans; and it would have been no wonder if the social
institutions which had kept them together in their mother
countries had been totally wrecked during the stratification of
races which took place in Europe and Asia. But they were not
wrecked; they simply underwent the modification which was
required by the new conditions of life.
The Teutons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Slavonians,
and others, when they first came in contact with the Romans, were
in a transitional state of social organization. The clan unions,
based upon a real or supposed common origin, had kept them
together for many thousands of years in succession. But these
unions could answer their purpose so long only as there were no
separate families within the gens or clan itself. However, for
causes already mentioned, the separate patriarchal family had
slowly but steadily developed within the clans, and in the long
run it evidently meant the individual accumulation of wealth and
power, and the hereditary transmission of both. The frequent
migrations of the barbarians and the ensuing wars only hastened
the division of the gentes into separate families, while the
dispersing of stems and their mingling with strangers offered
singular facilities for the ultimate disintegration of those
unions which were based upon kinship. The barbarians thus stood
in a position of either seeing their clans dissolved into loose
aggregations of families, of which the wealthiest, especially if
combining sacerdotal functions or military repute with wealth,
would have succeeded in imposing their authority upon the others;
or of finding out some new form of organization based upon some
new principle.
Many stems had no force to resist disintegration: they broke
up and were lost for history. But the more vigorous ones did not
disintegrate. They came out of the ordeal with a new organization--
the village community--which kept them together for the next
fifteen centuries or more. The conception of a common territory,
appropriated or protected by common efforts, was elaborated, and
it took the place of the vanishing conceptions of common descent.
The common gods gradually lost their character of ancestors and
were endowed with a local territorial character. They became the
gods or saints of a given locality; "the land" was identified
with its inhabitants. Territorial unions grew up instead of the
consanguine unions of old, and this new organization evidently
offered many advantages under the given circumstances. It
recognized the independence of the family and even emphasized it,
the village community disclaiming all rights of interference in
what was going on within the family enclosure; it gave much more
freedom to personal initiative; it was not hostile in principle
to union between men of different descent, and it maintained at
the same time the necessary cohesion of action and thought, while
it was strong enough to oppose the dominative tendencies of the
minorities of wizards, priests, and professional or distinguished
warriors. Consequently it became the primary cell of future
organization, and with many nations the village community has
retained this character until now.
It is now known, and scarcely contested, that the village
community was not a specific feature of the Slavonians, nor even
of the ancient Teutons. It prevailed in England during both the
Saxon and Norman times, and partially survived till the last
century;(3) it was at the bottom of the social organization of
old Scotland, old Ireland, and old Wales. In France, the communal
possession and the communal allotment of arable land by the
village folkmote persisted from the first centuries of our era
till the times of Turgot, who found the folkmotes "too noisy" and
therefore abolished them. It survived Roman rule in Italy, and
revived after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was the rule with
the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, the Finns (in the pittaya, as
also, probably, the kihla-kunta), the Coures, and the lives. The
village community in India--past and present, Aryan and
non-Aryan--is well known through the epoch-making works of Sir
Henry Maine; and Elphinstone has described it among the Afghans.
We also find it in the Mongolian oulous, the Kabyle thaddart, the
Javanese dessa, the Malayan kota or tofa, and under a variety of
names in Abyssinia, the Soudan, in the interior of Africa, with
natives of both Americas, with all the small and large tribes of
the Pacific archipelagoes. In short, we do not know one single
human race or one single nation which has not had its period of
village communities. This fact alone disposes of the theory
according to which the village community in Europe would have
been a servile growth. It is anterior to serfdom, and even
servile submission was powerless to break it. It was a universal
phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan organization,
with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play still,
some part in history.(4)
It was a natural growth, and an absolute uniformity in its
structure was therefore not possible. As a rule, it was a union
between families considered as of common descent and owning a
certain territory in common. But with some stems, and under
certain circumstances, the families used to grow very numerous
before they threw off new buds in the shape of new families;
five, six, or seven generations continued to live under the same
roof, or within the same enclosure, owning their joint household
and cattle in common, and taking their meals at the common
hearth. They kept in such case to what ethnology knows as the
"joint family," or the "undivided household," which we still see
all over China, in India, in the South Slavonian zadruga, and
occasionally find in Africa, in America, in Denmark, in North
Russia, and West France.(5) With other stems, or in other
circumstances, not yet well specified, the families did not
attain the same proportions; the grandsons, and occasionally the
sons, left the household as soon as they were married, and each
of them started a new cell of his own. But, joint or not,
clustered together or scattered in the woods, the families
remained united into village communities; several villages were
grouped into tribes; and the tribes joined into confederations.
Such was the social organization which developed among the
so-called "barbarians," when they began to settle more or less
permanently in Europe.
A very long evolution was required before the gentes, or
clans, recognized the separate existence of a patriarchal family
in a separate hut; but even after that had been recognized, the
clan, as a rule, knew no personal inheritance of property. The
few things which might have belonged personally to the individual
were either destroyed on his grave or buried with him. The
village community, on the contrary, fully recognized the private
accumulation of wealth within the family and its hereditary
transmission. But wealth was conceived exclusively in the shape
of movable property, including cattle, implements, arms, and the
dwelling house which--"like all things that can be destroyed by
fire"--belonged to the same category(6). As to private
property in land, the village community did not, and could not,
recognize anything of the kind, and, as a rule, it does not
recognize it now. The land was the common property of the tribe,
or of the whole stem, and the village community itself owned its
part of the tribal territory so long only as the tribe did not
claim a re-distribution of the village allotments. The clearing
of the woods and the breaking of the prairies being mostly done
by the communities or, at least, by the joint work of several
families--always with the consent of the community--the
cleared plots were held by each family for a term of four,
twelve, or twenty years, after which term they were treated as
parts of the arable land owned in common. Private property, or
possession "for ever" was as incompatible, with the very
principles and the religious conceptions of the village community
as it was with the principles of the gens; so that a long
influence of the Roman law and the Christian Church, which soon
accepted the Roman principles, were required to accustom the
barbarians to the idea of private property in land being
possible.(7) And yet, even when such property, or possession for
an unlimited time, was recognized, the owner of a separate estate
remained a co-proprietor in the waste lands, forests, and
grazing-grounds. Moreover, we continually see, especially in the
history of Russia, that when a few families, acting separately,
had taken possession of some land belonging to tribes which were
treated as strangers, they very soon united together, and
constituted a village community which in the third or fourth
generation began to profess a community of origin.
A whole series of institutions, partly inherited from the
clan period, have developed from that basis of common ownership
of land during the long succession of centuries which was
required to bring the barbarians under the dominion of States
organized upon the Roman or Byzantine pattern. The village
community was not only a union for guaranteeing to each one his
fair. share in the common land, but also a union for common
culture, for mutual support in all possible forms, for protection
from violence, and for a further development of knowledge,
national bonds, and moral conceptions; and every change in the
judicial, military, educational, or economical manners had to be
decided at the folkmotes of the village, the tribe, or the
confederation. The community being a continuation of the gens, it
inherited all its functions. It was the universitas, the mir--a
world in itself.
Common hunting, common fishing, and common culture of the
orchards or the plantations of fruit trees was the rule with the
old gentes. Common agriculture became the rule in the barbarian
village communities. True, that direct testimony to this effect
is scarce, and in the literature of antiquity we only have the
passages of Diodorus and Julius Caesar relating to the
inhabitants of the Lipari Islands, one of the Celt-Iberian
tribes, and the Sueves. But there is no lack of evidence to prove
that common agriculture was practised among some Teuton tribes,
the Franks, and the old Scotch, Irish, and Welsh.(8) As to the
later survivals of the same practice, they simply are countless.
Even in perfectly Romanized France, common culture was habitual
some five and twenty years ago in the Morbihan (Brittany).(9)
The old Welsh cyvar, or joint team, as well as the common culture
of the land allotted to the use of the village sanctuary are
quite common among the tribes of Caucasus the least touched by
civilization,(10) and like facts are of daily occurrence among
the Russian peasants. Moreover, it is well known that many tribes
of Brazil, Central America, and Mexico used to cultivate their
fields in common, and that the same habit is widely spread among
some Malayans, in New Caledonia, with several Negro stems, and so
on.(11) In short, communal culture is so habitual with many
Aryan, Ural-Altayan, Mongolian, Negro, Red Indian, Malayan, and
Melanesian stems that we must consider it as a universal--
though not as the only possible--form of primitive
agriculture.(12)
Communal cultivation does not, however, imply by necessity
communal consumption. Already under the clan organization we
often see that when the boats laden with fruits or fish return to
the village, the food they bring in is divided among the huts and
the "long houses" inhabited by either several families or the
youth, and is cooked separately at each separate hearth. The
habit of taking meals in a narrower circle of relatives or
associates thus prevails at an early period of clan life. It
became the rule in the village community. Even the food grown in
common was usually divided between the households after part of
it had been laid in store for communal use. However, the
tradition of communal meals was piously kept alive; every
available opportunity, such as the commemoration of the
ancestors, the religious festivals, the beginning and the end of
field work, the births, the marriages, and the funerals, being
seized upon to bring the community to a common meal. Even now
this habit, well known in this country as the "harvest supper,"
is the last to disappear. On the other hand, even when the fields
had long since ceased to be tilled and sown in common, a variety
of agricultural work continued, and continues still, to be
performed by the community. Some part of the communal land is
still cultivated in many cases in common, either for the use of
the destitute, or for refilling the communal stores, or for using
the produce at the religious festivals. The irrigation canals are
digged and repaired in common. The communal meadows are mown by
the community; and the sight of a Russian commune mowing a meadow--
the men rivalling each other in their advance with the scythe,
while the women turn the grass over and throw it up into heaps--
is one of the most inspiring sights; it shows what human work
might be and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is divided among
the separate households, and it is evident that no one has the
right of taking hay from a neighbour's stack without his
permission; but the limitation of this last rule among the
Caucasian Ossetes is most noteworthy. When the cuckoo cries and
announces that spring is coming, and that the meadows will soon
be clothed again with grass, every one in need has the right of
taking from a neighbour's stack the hay he wants for his
cattle.(13) The old communal rights are thus re-asserted, as if
to prove how contrary unbridled individualism is to human nature.
When the European traveller lands in some small island of the
Pacific, and, seeing at a distance a grove of palm trees, walks
in that direction, he is astonished to discover that the little
villages are connected by roads paved with big stones, quite
comfortable for the unshod natives, and very similar to the "old
roads" of the Swiss mountains. Such roads were traced by the
"barbarians" all over Europe, and one must have travelled in
wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away from the chief lines of
communication, to realize in full the immense work that must have
been performed by the barbarian communities in order to conquer
the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two
thousand years ago. Isolated families, having no tools, and weak
as they were, could not have conquered it; the wilderness would
have overpowered them. Village communities alone, working in
common, could master the wild forests, the sinking marshes, and
the endless steppes. The rough roads, the ferries, the wooden
bridges taken away in the winter and rebuilt after the spring
flood was over, the fences and the palisaded walls of the
villages, the earthen forts and the small towers with which the
territory was dottedall these were the work of the barbarian
communities. And when a community grew numerous it used to throw
off a new bud. A new community arose at a distance, thus step by
step bringing the woods and the steppes Under the dominion of
man. The whole making of European nations was such a budding of
the village communities. Even now-a-days the Russian peasants, if
they are not quite broken down by misery, migrate in communities,
and they till the soil and build the houses in com mon when they
settle on the banks of the Amur, or in Manitoba. And even the
English, when they first began to colonize America, used to
return to the old system; they grouped into village
communities.(14)
The village community was the chief arm of the barbarians in
their hard struggle against a hostile nature. It also was the
bond they opposed to oppression by the cunningest and the
strongest which so easily might have developed during those
disturbed times. The imaginary barbarian--the man who fights
and kills at his mere caprice--existed no more than the
"bloodthirsty" savage. The real barbarian was living, on the
contrary, under a wide series of institutions, imbued with
considerations as to what may be useful or noxious to his tribe
or confederation, and these institutions were piously handed down
from generation to generation in verses and songs, in proverbs or
triads, in sentences and instructions. The more we study them the
more we recognize the narrow bonds which united men in their
villages. Every quarrel arising between two individuals was
treated as a communal affair--even the offensive words that
might have been uttered during a quarrel being considered as an
offence to the community and its ancestors. They had to be
repaired by amends made both to the individual and the
community;(15) and if a quarrel ended in a fight and wounds, the
man who stood by and did not interpose was treated as if he
himself had inflicted the wounds.(16) The judicial procedure was
imbued with the same spirit. Every dispute was brought first
before mediators or arbiters, and it mostly ended with them, the
arbiters playing a very important part in barbarian society. But
if the case was too grave to be settled in this way, it came
before the folkmote, which was bound "to find the sentence," and
pronounced it in a conditional form; that is, "such compensation
was due, if the wrong be proved," and the wrong had to be proved
or disclaimed by six or twelve persons confirming or denying the
fact by oath; ordeal being resorted to in case of contradiction
between the two sets of jurors. Such procedure, which remained in
force for more than two thousand years in succession, speaks
volumes for itself; it shows how close were the bonds between all
members of the community. Moreover, there was no other authority
to enforce the decisions of the folkmote besides its own moral
authority. The only possible menace was that the community might
declare the rebel an outlaw, but even this menace was reciprocal.
A man discontented with the folkmote could declare that he would
abandon the tribe and go over to another tribe--a most dreadful
menace, as it was sure to bring all kinds of misfortunes upon a
tribe that might have been unfair to one of its members.(17) A
rebellion against a right decision of the customary law was
simply "inconceivable," as Henry Maine has so well said, because
"law, morality, and fact" could not be separated from each other
in those times.(18) The moral authority of the commune was so
great that even at a much later epoch, when the village
communities fell into submission to the feudal lord, they
maintained their judicial powers; they only permitted the lord,
or his deputy, to "find" the above conditional sentence in
accordance with the customary law he had sworn to follow, and to
levy for himself the fine (the fred) due to the commune. But for
a long time, the lord himself, if he remained a co-proprietor in
the waste land of the commune, submitted in communal affairs to
its decisions. Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the
folkmote--Wer daselbst Wasser und Weid genusst, muss gehorsam
sein--"Who enjoys here the right of water and pasture must
obey"--was the old saying. Even when the peasants became serfs
under the lord, he was bound to appear before the folkmote when
they summoned him.(19)
In their conceptions of justice the barbarians evidently did
not much differ from the savages. They also maintained the idea
that a murder must be followed by putting the murderer to death;
that wounds had to be punished by equal wounds, and that the
wronged family was bound to fulfil the sentence of the customary
law. This was a holy duty, a duty towards the ancestors, which
had to be accomplished in broad daylight, never in secrecy, and
rendered widely known. Therefore the most inspired passages of
the sagas and epic poetry altogether are those which glorify what
was supposed to be justice. The gods themselves joined in aiding
it. However, the predominant feature of barbarian justice is, on
the one hand, to limit the numbers of persons who may be involved
in a feud, and, on the other hand, to extirpate the brutal idea
of blood for blood and wounds for wounds, by substituting for it
the system of compensation. The barbarian codes which were
collections of common law rules written down for the use of
judges--"first permitted, then encouraged, and at last
enforced," compensation instead of revenge.(20) The compensation
has, however, been totally misunderstood by those who represented
it as a fine, and as a sort of carte blanche given to the rich
man to do whatever he liked. The compensation money (wergeld),
which was quite different from the fine or fred,(21) was
habitually so high for all kinds of active offences that it
certainly was no encouragement for such offences. In case of a
murder it usually exceeded all the possible fortune of the
murderer "Eighteen times eighteen cows" is the compensation with
the Ossetes who do not know how to reckon above eighteen, while
with the African tribes it attains 800 cows or 100 camels with
their young, or 416 sheep in the poorer tribes.(22) In the great
majority of cases, the compensation money could not be paid at
all, so that the murderer had no issue but to induce the wronged
family, by repentance, to adopt him. Even now, in the Caucasus,
when feuds come to an end, the offender touches with his lips the
breast of the oldest woman of the tribe, and becomes a
"milk-brother" to all men of the wronged family.(23) With
several African tribes he must give his daughter, or sister, in
marriage to some one of the family; with other tribes he is bound
to marry the woman whom he has made a widow; and in all cases he
becomes a member of the family, whose opinion is taken in all
important family matters.(24)
Far from acting with disregard to human life, the barbarians,
moreover, knew nothing of the horrid punishments introduced at a
later epoch by the laic and canonic laws under Roman and
Byzantine influence. For, if the Saxon code admitted the death
penalty rather freely even in cases of incendiarism and armed
robbery, the other barbarian codes pronounced it exclusively in
cases of betrayal of one's kin, and sacrilege against the
community's gods, as the only means to appease the gods.
All this, as seen is very far from the supposed "moral
dissoluteness" of the barbarians. On the contrary, we cannot but
admire the deeply moral principles elaborated within the early
village communities which found their expression in Welsh triads,
in legends about King Arthur, in Brehon commentaries,(25) in old
German legends and so on, or find still their expression in the
sayings of the modern barbarians. In his introduction to The
Story of Burnt Njal, George Dasent very justly sums up as follows
the qualities of a Northman, as they appear in the sagas:--
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