Books: Mutual Aid

P >> P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid

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It seems, therefore, hopeless to look for mutual-aid
institutions and practices in modern society. What could remain
of them? And yet, as soon as we try to ascertain how the millions
of human beings live, and begin to study their everyday
relations, we are struck with the immense part which the
mutual-aid and mutual-support principles play even now-a-days in
human life. Although the destruction of mutual-aid institutions
has been going on in practice and theory, for full three or four
hundred years, hundreds of millions of men continue to live under
such institutions; they piously maintain them and endeavour to
reconstitute them where they have ceased to exist. In our mutual
relations every one of us has his moments of revolt against the
fashionable individualistic creed of the day, and actions in
which men are guided by their mutual aid inclinations constitute
so great a part of our daily intercourse that if a stop to such
actions could be put all further ethical progress would be
stopped at once. Human society itself could not be maintained for
even so much as the lifetime of one single generation. These
facts, mostly neglected by sociologists and yet of the first
importance for the life and further elevation of mankind, we are
now going to analyze, beginning with the standing institutions of
mutual support, and passing next to those acts of mutual aid
which have their origin in personal or social sympathies.

When we cast a broad glance on the present constitution of
European society we are struck at once with the fact that,
although so much has been done to get rid of the village
community, this form of union continues to exist to the extent we
shall presently see, and that many attempts are now made either
to reconstitute it in some shape or another or to find some
substitute for it. The current theory as regards the village
community is, that in Western Europe it has died out by a natural
death, because the communal possession of the soil was found
inconsistent with the modern requirements of agriculture. But the
truth is that nowhere did the village community disappear of its
own accord; everywhere, on the contrary, it took the ruling
classes several centuries of persistent but not always successful
efforts to abolish it and to confiscate the communal lands.

In France, the village communities began to be deprived of
their independence, and their lands began to be plundered, as
early as the sixteenth century. However, it was only in the next
century, when the mass of the peasants was brought, by exactions
and wars, to the state of subjection and misery which is vividly
depicted by all historians, that the plundering of their lands
became easy and attained scandalous proportions. "Every one has
taken of them according to his powers... imaginary debts have
been claimed, in order to seize upon their lands; "so we read in
an edict promulgated by Louis the Fourteenth in 1667.(3) Of
course the State's remedy for such evils was to render the
communes still more subservient to the State, and to plunder them
itself. in fact, two years later all money revenue of the
communes was confiscated by the King. As to the appropriation of
communal lands, it grew worse and worse, and in the next century
the nobles and the clergy had already taken possession of immense
tracts of land--one-half of the cultivated area, according to
certain estimates--mostly to let it go out of culture.(4) But
the peasants still maintained their communal institutions, and
until the year 1787 the village folkmotes, composed of all
householders, used to come together in the shadow of the
bell-tower or a tree, to allot and re-allot what they had
retained of their fields, to assess the taxes, and to elect their
executive, just as the Russian mir does at the present time. This
is what Babeau's researches have proved to demonstration.(5)

The Government found, however, the folkmotes "too noisy," too
disobedient, and in 1787, elected councils, composed of a mayor
and three to six syndics, chosen from among the wealthier
peasants, were introduced instead. Two years later the
Revolutionary Assemblee Constituante, which was on this point at
one with the old regime, fully confirmed this law (on the 14th of
December, 1789), and the bourgeois du village had now their turn
for the plunder of communal lands, which continued all through
the Revolutionary period. Only on the 16th of August, 1792, the
Convention, under the pressure of the peasants' insurrections,
decided to return the enclosed lands to the communes;(6) but it
ordered at the same time that they should be divided in equal
parts among the wealthier peasants only--a measure which
provoked new insurrections and was abrogated next year, in 1793,
when the order came to divide the communal lands among. all
commoners, rich and poor alike, "active" and "inactive."

These two laws, however, ran so much against the conceptions
of the peasants that they were not obeyed, and wherever the
peasants had retaken possession of part of their lands they kept
them undivided. But then came the long years of wars, and the
communal lands were simply confiscated by the State (in 1794) as
a mortgage for State loans, put up for sale, and plundered as
such; then returned again to the communes and confiscated again
(in 1813); and only in 1816 what remained of them, i.e. about
15,000,000 acres of the least productive land, was restored to
the village communities.(7) Still this was not yet the end of
the troubles of the communes. Every new regime saw in the
communal lands a means for gratifying its supporters, and three
laws (the first in 1837 and the last under Napoleon the Third)
were passed to induce the village communities to divide their
estates. Three times these laws had to be repealed, in
consequence of the opposition they met with in the villages; but
something was snapped up each time, and Napoleon the Third, under
the pretext of encouraging perfected methods of agriculture,
granted large estates out of the communal lands to some of his
favourites.

As to the autonomy of the village communities, what could be
retained of it after so many blows? The mayor and the syndics
were simply looked upon as unpaid functionaries of the State
machinery. Even now, under the Third Republic, very little can be
done in a village community without the huge State machinery, up
to the prefet and the ministries, being set in motion. It is
hardly credible, and yet it is true, that when, for instance, a
peasant intends to pay in money his share in the repair of a
communal road, instead of himself breaking the necessary amount
of stones, no fewer than twelve different functionaries of the
State must give their approval, and an aggregate of fifty-two
different acts must be performed by them, and exchanged between
them, before the peasant is permitted to pay that money to the
communal council. All the remainder bears the same character.(8)

What took place in France took place everywhere in Western
and Middle Europe. Even the chief dates of the great assaults
upon the peasant lands are the same. For England the only
difference is that the spoliation was accomplished by separate
acts rather than by general sweeping measures--with less haste
but more thoroughly than in France. The seizure of the communal
lands by the lords also began in the fifteenth century, after the
defeat of the peasant insurrection of 1380--as seen from
Rossus's Historia and from a statute of Henry the Seventh, in
which these seizures are spoken of under the heading of
"enormitees and myschefes as be hurtfull... to the common
wele."(9) Later on the Great Inquest, under Henry the Eighth,
was begun, as is known, in order to put a stop to the enclosure
of communal lands, but it ended in a sanction of what had been
done.(10) The communal lands continued to be preyed upon, and
the peasants were driven from the land. But it was especially
since the middle of the eighteenth century that, in England as
everywhere else, it became part of a systematic policy to simply
weed out all traces of communal ownership; and the wonder is not
that it has disappeared, but that it could be maintained, even in
England, so as to be "generally prevalent so late as the
grandfathers of this generation."(11) The very object of the
Enclosure Acts, as shown by Mr. Seebohm, was to remove this
system,(12) and it was so well removed by the nearly four
thousand Acts passed between 1760 and 1844 that only faint traces
of it remain now. The land of the village communities was taken
by the lords, and the appropriation was sanctioned by Parliament
in each separate case.

In Germany, in Austria, in Belgium the village community was
also destroyed by the State. Instances of commoners themselves
dividing their lands were rare,(13) while everywhere the States
coerced them to enforce the division, or simply favoured the
private appropriation of their lands. The last blow to communal
ownership in Middle Europe also dates from the middle of the
eighteenth century. In Austria sheer force was used by the
Government, in 1768, to compel the communes to divide their lands--
a special commission being nominated two years later for that
purpose. In Prussia Frederick the Second, in several of his
ordinances (in 1752, 1763, 1765, and 1769), recommended to the
Justizcollegien to enforce the division. In Silesia a special
resolution was issued to serve that aim in 1771. The same took
place in Belgium, and, as the communes did not obey, a law was
issued in 1847 empowering the Government to buy communal meadows
in order to sell them in retail, and to make a forced sale of the
communal land when there was a would-be buyer for it.(14)

In short, to speak of the natural death of the village
communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to
speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a
battlefield. The fact was simply this: The village communities
had lived for over a thousand years; and where and when the
peasants were not ruined by wars and exactions they steadily
improved their methods of culture. But as the value of land was
increasing, in consequence of the growth of industries, and the
nobility had acquired, under the State organization, a power
which it never had had under the feudal system, it took
possession of the best parts of the communal lands, and did its
best to destroy the communal institutions.

However, the village-community institutions so well respond
to the needs and conceptions of the tillers of the soil that, in
spite of all, Europe is up to this date covered with living
survivals of the village communities, and European country life
is permeated with customs and habits dating from the community
period. Even in England, notwithstanding all the drastic measures
taken against the old order of things, it prevailed as late as
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mr. Gomme--one of the
very few English scholars who have paid attention to the subject--
shows in his work that many traces of the communal possession
of the soil are found in Scotland, "runrig" tenancy having been
maintained in Forfarshire up to 1813, while in certain villages
of Inverness the custom was, up to 1801, to plough the land for
the whole community, without leaving any boundaries, and to allot
it after the ploughing was done. In Kilmorie the allotment and
re-allotment of the fields was in full vigour "till the last
twenty-five years," and the Crofters' Commission found it still
in vigour in certain islands.(15) In Ireland the system
prevailed up to the great famine; and as to England, Marshall's
works, which passed unnoticed until Nasse and Sir Henry Maine
drew attention to them, leave no doubt as to the
village-community system having been widely spread, in nearly all
English counties, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.(16) No more than twenty years ago Sir Henry Maine was
"greatly surprised at the number of instances of abnormal
property rights, necessarily implying the former existence of
collective ownership and joint cultivation," which a
comparatively brief inquiry brought under his notice.(17) And,
communal institutions having persisted so late as that, a great
number of mutual-aid habits and customs would undoubtedly be
discovered in English villages if the writers of this country
only paid attention to village life.(18)

As to the Continent, we find the communal institutions fully
alive in many parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the
Scandinavian lands, and Spain, to say nothing of Eastern Europe;
the village life in these countries is permeated with communal
habits and customs; and almost every year the Continental
literature is enriched by serious works dealing with this and
connected subjects. I must, therefore, limit my illustrations to
the most typical instances. Switzerland is undoubtedly one of
them. Not only the five republics of Uri, Schwytz, Appenzell,
Glarus, and Unterwalden hold their lands as undivided estates,
and are governed by their popular folkmotes, but in all other
cantons too the village communities remain in possession of a
wide self-government, and own large parts of the Federal
territory.(19) Two-thirds of all the Alpine meadows and
two-thirds of all the forests of Switzerland are until now
communal land; and a considerable number of fields, orchards,
vineyards, peat bogs, quarries, and so on, are owned in common.
In the Vaud, where all the householders continue to take part in
the deliberations of their elected communal councils, the
communal spirit is especially alive. Towards the end of the
winter all the young men of each village go to stay a few days in
the woods, to fell timber and to bring it down the steep slopes
tobogganing way, the timber and the fuel wood being divided among
all households or sold for their benefit. These excursions are
real fetes of manly labour. On the banks of Lake Leman part of
the work required to keep up the terraces of the vineyards is
still done in common; and in the spring, when the thermometer
threatens to fall below zero before sunrise, the watchman wakes
up all householders, who light fires of straw and dung and
protect their vine-trees from the frost by an artificial cloud.
In nearly all cantons the village communities possess so-called.
Burgernutzen--that is, they hold in common a number of cows, in
order to supply each family with butter; or they keep communal
fields or vineyards, of which the produce is divided between the
burghers, or they rent their land for the benefit of the
community.(20)

It may be taken as a rule that where the communes have
retained a wide sphere of functions, so as to be living parts of
the national organism, and where they have not been reduced to
sheer misery, they never fail to take good care of their lands.
Accordingly the communal estates in Switzerland strikingly
contrast with the miserable state of "commons" in this country.
The communal forests in the Vaud and the Valais are admirably
managed, in conformity with the rules of modern forestry.
Elsewhere the "strips" of communal fields, which change owners
under the system of re-allotment, are very well manured,
especially as there is no lack of meadows and cattle. The high
level meadows are well kept as a rule, and the rural roads are
excellent.(21) And when we admire the Swiss chalet, the mountain
road, the peasants' cattle, the terraces of vineyards, or the
school-house in Switzer land, we must keep in mind that without
the timber for the chalet being taken from the communal woods and
the stone from the communal quarries, without the cows being kept
on the communal meadows, and the roads being made and the
school-houses built by communal work, there would be little to
admire.

It hardly need be said that a great number of mutual-aid
habits and customs continue to persist in the Swiss villages. The
evening gatherings for shelling walnuts, which take place in
turns in each household; the evening parties for sewing the dowry
of the girl who is going to marry; the calling of "aids" for
building the houses and taking in the crops, as well as for all
sorts of work which may be required by one of the commoners; the
custom of exchanging children from one canton to the other, in
order to make them learn two languages, French and German; and so
on--all these are quite habitual;(22) while, on the other
side, divers modern requirements are met in the same spirit. Thus
in Glarus most of the Alpine meadows have been sold during a time
of calamity; but the communes still continue to buy field land,
and after the newly-bought fields have been left in the
possession of separate commoners for ten, twenty, or thirty
years, as the case might be, they return to the common stock,
which is re-allotted according to the needs of all. A great
number of small associations are formed to produce some of the
necessaries for life--bread, cheese, and wine--by common
work, be it only on a limited scale; and agricultural
co-operation altogether spreads in Switzerland with the greatest
ease. Associations formed between ten to thirty peasants, who buy
meadows and fields in common, and cultivate them as co-owners,
are of common occurrence; while dairy associations for the sale
of milk, butter, and cheese are organized everywhere. In fact,
Switzerland was the birthplace of that form of co-operation. It
offers, moreover, an immense field for the study of all sorts of
small and large societies, formed for the satisfaction of all
sorts of modern wants. In certain parts of Switzerland one finds
in almost every village a number of associations--for
protection from fire, for boating, for maintaining the quays on
the shores of a lake, for the supply of water, and so on; and the
country is covered with societies of archers, sharpshooters,
topographers, footpath explorers, and the like, originated from
modern militarism.

Switzerland is, however, by no means an exception in Europe,
because the same institutions and habits are found in the
villages of France, of Italy, of Germany, of Denmark, and so on.
We have just seen what has been done by the rulers of France in
order to destroy the village community and to get hold of its
lands; but notwithstanding all that one-tenth part of the whole
territory available for culture, i.e. 13,500,000 acres, including
one-half of all the natural meadows and nearly a fifth part of
all the forests of the country, remain in communal possession.
The woods supply the communers with fuel, and the timber wood is
cut, mostly by communal work, with all desirable regularity; the
grazing lands are free for the commoners' cattle; and what
remains of communal fields is allotted and re-allotted in certain
parts Ardennes--in the usual of France--namely, in the
way.(23)

These additional sources of supply, which aid the poorer
peasants to pass through a year of bad crops without parting with
their small plots of land and without running into irredeemable
debts, have certainly their importance for both the agricultural
labourers and the nearly three millions of small peasant
proprietors. It is even doubtful whether small peasant
proprietorship could be maintained without these additional
resources. But the ethical importance of the communal
possessions, small as they are, is still greater than their
economical value. They maintain in village life a nucleus of
customs and habits of mutual aid which undoubtedly acts as a
mighty check upon the development of reckless individualism and
greediness, which small land-ownership is only too prone to
develop. Mutual aid in all possible circumstances of village life
is part of the routine life in all parts of the country.
Everywhere we meet, under different names, with the charroi, i.e.
the free aid of the neighbours for taking in a crop, for vintage,
or for building a house; everywhere we find the same evening
gatherings as have just been mentioned in Switzerland; and
everywhere the commoners associate for all sorts of work. Such
habits are mentioned by nearly all those who have written upon
French village life. But it will perhaps be better to give in
this place some abstracts from letters which I have just received
from a friend of mine whom I have asked to communicate to me his
observations on this subject. They come from an aged man who for
years has been the mayor of his commune in South France (in
Ariege); the facts he mentions are known to him from long years
of personal observation, and they have the advantage of coming
from one neighbourhood instead of being skimmed from a large
area. Some of them may seem trifling, but as a whole they depict
quite a little world of village life.

"In several communes in our neighbourhood," my friend writes,
"the old custom of l'emprount is in vigour. When many hands are
required in a metairie for rapidly making some work--dig out
potatoes or mow the grass--the youth of the neighbourhood is
convoked; young men and girls come in numbers, make it gaily and
for nothing. and in the evening, after a gay meal, they dance.

"In the same communes, when a girl is going to marry, the
girls of the neighbourhood come to aid in sewing the dowry. In
several communes the women still continue to spin a good deal.
When the winding off has to be done in a family it is done in one
evening--all friends being convoked for that work. In many
communes of the Ariege and other parts of the south-west the
shelling of the Indian corn-sheaves is also done by all the
neighbours. They are treated with chestnuts and wine, and the
young people dance after the work has been done. The same custom
is practised for making nut oil and crushing hemp. In the commune
of L. the same is done for bringing in the corn crops. These days
of hard work become fete days, as the owner stakes his honour on
serving a good meal. No remuneration is given; all do it for each
other.(24)

"In the commune of S. the common grazing-land is every year
increased, so that nearly the whole of the land of the commune is
now kept in common. The shepherds are elected by all owners of
the cattle, including women. The bulls are communal.

"In the commune of M. the forty to fifty small sheep flocks
of the commoners are brought together and divided into three or
four flocks before being sent to the higher meadows. Each owner
goes for a week to serve as shepherd.

"In the hamlet of C. a threshing machine has been bought in
common by several households; the fifteen to twenty persons
required to serve the machine being supplied by all the families.
Three other threshing machines have been bought and are rented
out by their owners, but the work is performed by outside
helpers, invited in the usual way.

"In our commune of R. we had to raise the wall of the
cemetery. Half of the money which was required for buying lime
and for the wages of the skilled workers was supplied by the
county council, and the other half by subscription. As to the
work of carrying sand and water, making mortar, and serving the
masons, it was done entirely by volunteers [just as in the Kabyle
djemmaa]. The rural roads were repaired in the same way, by
volunteer days of work given by the commoners. Other communes
have built in the same way their fountains. The wine-press and
other smaller appliances are frequently kept by the commune."

Two residents of the same neighbourhood, questioned by my
friend, add the following:--

"At O. a few years ago there was no mill. The commune has
built one, levying a tax upon the commoners. As to the miller,
they decided, in order to avoid frauds and partiality, that he
should be paid two francs for each bread-eater, and the corn be
ground free.

"At St. G. few peasants are insured against fire. When a
conflagration has taken place--so it was lately--all give
something to the family which has suffered from it--a chaldron,
a bed-cloth, a chair, and so on--and a modest household is thus
reconstituted. All the neighbours aid to build the house, and in
the meantime the family is lodged free by the neighbours."

Such habits of mutual support--of which many more examples
could be given--undoubtedly account for the easiness with which
the French peasants associate for using, in turn, the plough with
its team of horses, the wine-press, and the threshing machine,
when they are kept in the village by one of them only, as well as
for the performance of all sorts of rural work in common. Canals
were maintained, forests were cleared, trees were planted, and
marshes were drained by the village communities from time
immemorial; and the same continues still. Quite lately, in La
Borne of Lozere barren hills were turned into rich gardens by
communal work. "The soil was brought on men's backs; terraces
were made and planted with chestnut trees, peach trees, and
orchards, and water was brought for irrigation in canals two or
three miles long." Just now they have dug a new canal, eleven
miles in length.(25)

To the same spirit is also due the remarkable success lately
obtained by the syndicats agricoles, or peasants' and farmers'
associations. It was not until 1884 that associations of more
than nineteen persons were permitted in France, and I need not
say that when this "dangerous experiment" was ventured upon--so
it was styled in the Chambers--all due "precautions" which
functionaries can invent were taken. Notwithstanding all that,
France begins to be covered with syndicates. At the outset they
were only formed for buying manures and seeds, falsification
having attained colossal proportions in these two branches;(26)
but gradually they extended their functions in various
directions, including the sale of agricultural produce and
permanent improvements of the land. In South France the ravages
of the phylloxera have called into existence a great number of
wine-growers' associations. Ten to thirty growers form a
syndicate, buy a steam-engine for pumping water, and make the
necessary arrangements for inundating their vineyards in
turn.(27) New associations for protecting the land from
inundations, for irrigation purposes, and for maintaining canals
are continually formed, and the unanimity of all peasants of a
neighbourhood, which is required by law, is no obstacle.
Elsewhere we have the fruitieres, or dairy associations, in some
of which all butter and cheese is divided in equal parts,
irrespective of the yield of each cow. In the Ariege we find an
association of eight separate communes for the common culture of
their lands, which they have put together; syndicates for free
medical aid have been formed in 172 communes out of 337 in the
same department; associations of consumers arise in connection
with the syndicates; and so on.(28) "Quite a revolution is going
on in our villages," Alfred Baudrillart writes, "through these
associations, which take in each region their own special
characters."

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