Books: Mutual Aid
P >>
P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 | 22 |
23
Mr. Plimsoll, after he had lived for some time among the
poor, on 7s. 6d. a week, was compelled to recognize that the
kindly feelings he took with him when he began this life "changed
into hearty respect and admiration" when he saw how the relations
between the poor are permeated with mutual aid and support, and
learned the simple ways in which that support is given. After a
many years' experience, his conclusion was that" when you come to
think of it, such as these men were, so were the vast majority of
the working classes."(20) As to bringing up orphans, even by the
poorest families, it is so widely-spread a habit, that it may be
described as a general rule; thus among the miners it was found,
after the two explosions at Warren Vale and at Lund Hill, that
"nearly one-third of the men killed, as the respective committees
can testify, were thus supporting relations other than wife and
child." "Have you reflected," Mr. Plimsoll added, "what this is?
Rich men, even comfortably-to-do men do this, I don't doubt. But
consider the difference." Consider what a sum of one shilling,
subscribed by each worker to help a comrade's widow, or 6d. to
help a fellow-worker to defray the extra expense of a funeral,
means for one who earns 16s. a week and has a wife, and in some
cases five or six children to support.(21) But such
subscriptions are a general practice among the workers all over
the world, even in much more ordinary cases than a death in the
family, while aid in work is the commonest thing in their lives.
Nor do the same practices of mutual aid and support fail
among the richer classes. Of course, when one thinks of the
harshness which is often shown by the richer employers towards
their employees, one feels inclined to take the most pessimist
view of human nature. Many must remember the indignation which
was aroused during the great Yorkshire strike of 1894, when old
miners who had picked coal from an abandoned pit were prosecuted
by the colliery owners. And, even if we leave aside the horrors
of the periods of struggle and social war, such as the
extermination of thousands of workers' prisoners after the fall
of the Paris Commune--who can read, for instance, revelations
of the labour inquest which was made here in the forties, or what
Lord Shaftesbury wrote about "the frightful waste of human life
in the factories, to which the children taken from the
workhouses, or simply purchased all over this country to be sold
as factory slaves, were consigned"(22)--who can read that
without being vividly impressed by the baseness which is possible
in man when his greediness is at stake? But it must also be said
that all fault for such treatment must not be thrown entirely
upon the criminality of human nature. Were not the teachings of
men of science, and even of a notable portion of the clergy, up
to a quite recent time, teachings of distrust, despite and almost
hatred towards the poorer classes? Did not science teach that
since serfdom has been abolished, no one need be poor unless for
his own vices? And how few in the Church had the courage to blame
the children-killers, while the great numbers taught that the
sufferings of the poor, and even the slavery of the negroes, were
part of the Divine Plan! Was not Nonconformism itself largely a
popular protest against the harsh treatment of the poor at the
hand of the established Church?
With such spiritual leaders, the feelings of the richer
classes necessarily became, as Mr. Pimsoll remarked, not so much
blunted as "stratified." They seldom went downwards towards the
poor, from whom the well-to-do-people are separated by their
manner of life, and whom they do not know under their best
aspects, in their every-day life. But among themselves--
allowance being made for the effects of the wealth-accumulating
passions and the futile expenses imposed by wealth itself--
among themselves, in the circle of family and friends, the rich
practise the same mutual aid and support as the poor. Dr. Ihering
and L. Dargun are perfectly right in saying that if a statistical
record could be taken of all the money which passes from hand to
hand in the shape of friendly loans and aid, the sum total would
be enormous, even in comparison with the commercial transactions
of the world's trade. And if we could add to it, as we certainly
ought to, what is spent in hospitality, petty mutual services,
the management of other people's affairs, gifts and charities, we
certainly should be struck by the importance of such transfers in
national economy. Even in the world which is ruled by commercial
egotism, the current expression, "We have been harshly treated by
that firm," shows that there is also the friendly treatment, as
opposed to the harsh, i.e. the legal treatment; while every
commercial man knows how many firms are saved every year from
failure by the friendly support of other firms.
As to the charities and the amounts of work for general
well-being which are voluntarily done by so many well-to-do
persons, as well as by workers, and especially by professional
men, every one knows the part which is played by these two
categories of benevolence in modern life. If the desire of
acquiring notoriety, political power, or social distinction often
spoils the true character of that sort of benevolence, there is
no doubt possible as to the impulse coming in the majority of
cases from the same mutual-aid feelings. Men who have acquired
wealth very often do not find in it the expected satisfaction.
Others begin to feel that, whatever economists may say about
wealth being the reward of capacity, their own reward is
exaggerated. The conscience of human solidarity begins to tell;
and, although society life is so arranged as to stifle that
feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the upper
hand; and then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human
need by giving their fortune, or their forces, to something
which, in their opinion, will promote general welfare.
In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized
State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle
which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging
philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of
human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and heart,
because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution. What
was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be
overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution. And the
need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in
the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the
village, or the secret union of workers, re-asserts itself again,
even in our modern society, and claims its rights to be, as it
always has been, the chief leader towards further progress. Such
are the conclusions which we are necessarily brought to when we
carefully ponder over each of the groups of facts briefly
enumerated in the last two chapters.
NOTES:
1. Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, London, 1870, Introd. p. xliii.
2. The Act of Edward the Sixth--the first of his reign--
ordered to hand over to the Crown "all fraternities,
brotherhoods, and guilds being within the realm of England and
Wales and other of the king's dominions; and all manors, lands,
tenements, and other hereditaments belonging to them or any of
them" (English Guilds, Introd. p. xliii). See also Ockenkowski's
Englands wirtschaftliche Entwickelung im Ausgange des
Mittelalters, Jena, 1879, chaps. ii-v.
3. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade-Unionism,
London, 1894, pp. 21-38.
4. See in Sidney Webb's work the associations which existed at
that time. The London artisans are supposed to have never been
better organized than in 1810-20.
5. The National Association for the Protection of Labour included
about 150 separate unions, which paid high levies, and had a
membership of about 100,000. The Builders' Union and the Miners'
Unions also were big organizations (Webb, l.c. p. 107).
6. I follow in this Mr. Webb's work, which is replete with
documents to confirm his statements.
7. Great changes have taken place since the forties in the
attitude of the richer classes towards the unions. However, even
in the sixties, the employers made a formidable concerted attempt
to crush them by locking out whole populations. Up to 1869 the
simple agreement to strike, and the announcement of a strike by
placards, to say nothing of picketing, were often punished as
intimidation. Only in 1875 the Master and Servant Act was
repealed, peaceful picketing was permitted, and "violence and
intimidation" during strikes fell into the domain of common law.
Yet, even during the dock-labourers' strike in 1887, relief money
had to be spent for fighting before the Courts for the right of
picketing, while the prosecutions of the last few years menace
once more to render the conquered rights illusory.
8. A weekly contribution of 6d. out of an 18s. wage, or of 1s.
out of 25s., means much more than 9l. out of a 300l. income: it
is mostly taken upon food; and the levy is soon doubled when a
strike is declared in a brother union. The graphic description of
trade-union life, by a skilled craftsman, published by Mr. and
Mrs. Webb (pp. 431 seq.), gives an excellent idea of the amount
of work required from a unionist.
9. See the debates upon the strikes of Falkenau in Austria before
the Austrian Reichstag on the 10th of May, 1894, in which debates
the fact is fully recognized by the Ministry and the owner of the
colliery. Also the English Press of that time.
10. Many such facts will be found in the Daily Chronicle and
partly the Daily News for October and November 1894.
11. The 31,473 productive and consumers' associations on the
Middle Rhine showed, about 1890, a yearly expenditure of
18,437,500l.; 3,675,000l. were granted during the year in loans.
12. British Consular Report, April 1889.
13. A capital research on this subject has been published in
Russian in the Zapiski (Memoirs) of the Caucasian Geographical
Society, vol. vi. 2, Tiflis, 1891, by C. Egiazaroff.
14. Escape from a French prison is extremely difficult;
nevertheless a prisoner escaped from one of the French prisons in
1884 or 1885. He even managed to conceal himself during the whole
day, although the alarm was given and the peasants in the
neighbourhood were on the look-out for him. Next morning found
him concealed in a ditch, close by a small village. Perhaps he
intended to steal some food, or some clothes in order to take off
his prison uniform. As he was lying in the ditch a fire broke out
in the village. He saw a woman running out of one of the burning
houses, and heard her desperate appeals to rescue a child in the
upper storey of the burning house. No one moved to do so. Then
the escaped prisoner dashed out of his retreat, made his way
through the fire, and, with a scalded face and burning clothes,
brought the child safe out of the fire, and handed it to its
mother. Of course he was arrested on the spot by the village
gendarme, who now made his appearance. He was taken back to the
prison. The fact was reported in all French papers, but none of
them bestirred itself to obtain his release. If he had shielded a
warder from a comrade's blow. he would have been made a hero of.
But his act was simply humane, it did not promote the State's
ideal; he himself did not attribute it to a sudden inspiration of
divine grace; and that was enough to let the man fall into
oblivion. Perhaps, six or twelve months were added to his
sentence for having stolen--"the State's property"--the
prison's dress.
15. The medical Academy for Women (which has given to Russia a
large portion of her 700 graduated lady doctors), the four
Ladies' Universities (about 1000 pupils in 1887; closed that
year, and reopened in 1895), and the High Commercial School for
Women are entirely the work of such private societies. To the
same societies we owe the high standard which the girls' gymnasia
attained since they were opened in the sixties. The 100 gymnasia
now scattered over the Empire (over 70,000 pupils), correspond to
the High Schools for Girls in this country; all teachers are,
however, graduates of the universities.
16. The Verein fur Verbreitung gemeinnutslicher Kenntnisse,
although it has only 5500 members, has already opened more than
1000 public and school libraries, organized thousands of
lectures, and published most valuable books.
17. Very few writers in sociology have paid attention to it. Dr.
Ihering is one of them, and his case is very instructive. When
the great German writer on law began his philosophical work, Der
Zweck im Rechte ("Purpose in Law"), he intended to analyze "the
active forces which call forth the advance of society and
maintain it," and to thus give "the theory of the sociable man."
He analyzed, first, the egotistic forces at work, including the
present wage-system and coercion in its variety of political and
social laws; and in a carefully worked-out scheme of his work he
intended to give the last paragraph to the ethical forces--the
sense of duty and mutual love--which contribute to the same
aim. When he came, however, to discuss the social functions of
these two factors, he had to write a second volume, twice as big
as the first; and yet he treated only of the personal factors
which will take in the following pages only a few lines. L.
Dargun took up the same idea in Egoismus und Altruismus in der
Nationalokonomie, Leipzig, 1885, adding some new facts. Buchner's
Love, and the several paraphrases of it published here and in
Germany, deal with the same subject.
18. Light and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan. Coventry, 1893.
19. Many rich people cannot understand how the very poor can help
each other, because they do not realize upon what infinitesimal
amounts of food or money often hangs the life of one of the
poorest classes. Lord Shaftesbury had understood this terrible
truth when he started his Flowers and Watercress Girls' Fund, out
of which loans of one pound, and only occasionally two pounds,
were granted, to enable the girls to buy a basket and flowers
when the winter sets in and they are in dire distress. The loans
were given to girls who had "not a sixpence," but never failed to
find some other poor to go bail for them. "Of all the movements I
have ever been connected with," Lord Shaftesbury wrote, "I look
upon this Watercress Girls' movement as the most successful....
It was begun in 1872, and we have had out 800 to 1,000 loans, and
have not lost 50l. during the whole period.... What has been lost--
and it has been very little, under the circumstances--has
been by reason of death or sickness, not by fraud" (The Life and
Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder, vol.
iii. p. 322. London, 1885-86). Several more facts in point in Ch.
Booth's Life and Labour in London, vol. i; in Miss Beatrice
Potter's "Pages from a Work Girl's Diary" (Nineteenth Century,
September 1888, p. 310); and so on.
20. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen, cheap edition, London, 1870, p.
110.
21. Our Seamen, u.s., p. 110. Mr. Plimsoll added: "I don't wish
to disparage the rich, but I think it may be reasonably doubted
whether these qualities are so fully developed in them; for,
notwithstanding that not a few of them are not unacquainted with
the claims, reasonable or unreasonable, of poor relatives, these
qualities are not in such constant exercise. Riches seem in so
many cases to smother the manliness of their possessors, and
their sympathies become, not so much narrowed as--so to speak--
stratified: they are reserved for the sufferings of their own
class, and also the woes of those above them. They seldom tend
downwards much, and they are far more likely to admire an act of
courage... than to admire the constantly exercised fortitude and
the tenderness which are the daily characteristics of a British
workman's life"--and of the workmen all over the world as well.
22. Life of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, by Edwin Hodder,
vol. i. pp. 137-138.
CONCLUSION
If we take now the teachings which can be borrowed from the
analysis of modern society, in connection with the body of
evidence relative to the importance of mutual aid in the
evolution of the animal world and of mankind, we may sum up our
inquiry as follows.
In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of
species live in societies, and that they find in association the
best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in
its wide Darwinian sense--not as a struggle for the sheer means
of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions
unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which
individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and
the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development,
are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the
most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is
obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and
of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development,
and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance
of the species, its extension, and its further progressive
evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to
decay.
Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and
tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of
social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage,
in the clan and the tribe; and we found that the earliest tribal
customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo of all the
institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further
progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village
community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs,
habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among
ourselves, was developed under the principles of common
possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under
the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation
of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And
when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made
it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial
units (village communities), connected with guilds these latter
arising out of the common prosecution of a given art or craft, or
for mutual support and defence.
And finally, in the last two chapters facts were produced to
show that although the growth of the State on the pattern of
Imperial Rome had put a violent end to all medieval institutions
for mutual support, this new aspect of civilization could not
last. The State, based upon loose aggregations of individuals and
undertaking to be their only bond of union, did not answer its
purpose. The mutual-aid tendency finally broke down its iron
rules; it reappeared and reasserted itself in an infinity of
associations which now tend to embrace all aspects of life and to
take possession of all that is required by man for life and for
reproducing the waste occasioned by life.
It will probably be remarked that mutual aid, even though it
may represent one of the factors of evolution, covers
nevertheless one aspect only of human relations; that by the side
of this current, powerful though it may be, there is, and always
has been, the other current--the self-assertion of the
individual, not only in its efforts to attain personal or caste
superiority, economical, political, and spiritual, but also in
its much more important although less evident function of
breaking through the bonds, always prone to become crystallized,
which the tribe, the village community, the city, and the State
impose upon the individual. In other words, there is the
self-assertion of the individual taken as a progressive element.
It is evident that no review of evolution can be complete,
unless these two dominant currents are analyzed. However, the
self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals,
their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted
therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified
from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this
current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the
annalist, the historian, and the sociologist. History, such as it
has hitherto been written, is almost entirely a description of
the ways and means by which theocracy, military power, autocracy,
and, later on, the richer classes' rule have been promoted,
established, and maintained. The struggles between these forces
make, in fact, the substance of history. We may thus take the
knowledge of the individual factor in human history as granted--
even though there is full room for a new study of the subject on
the lines just alluded to; while, on the other side, the
mutual-aid factor has been hitherto totally lost sight of; it was
simply denied, or even scoffed at, by the writers of the present
and past generation. It was therefore necessary to show, first of
all, the immense part which this factor plays in the evolution of
both the animal world and human societies. Only after this has
been fully recognized will it be possible to proceed to a
comparison between the two factors.
To make even a rough estimate of their relative importance by
any method more or less statistical, is evidently impossible. One
single war--we all know--may be productive of more evil,
immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked
action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good. But
when we see that in the animal world, progressive development and
mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner struggle within the
species is concomitant with retrogressive development; when we
notice that with man, even success in struggle and war is
proportionate to the development of mutual aid in each of the two
conflicting nations, cities, parties, or tribes, and that in the
process of evolution war itself (so far as it can go this way)
has been made subservient to the ends of progress in mutual aid
within the nation, the city or the clan--we already obtain a
perception of the dominating influence of the mutual-aid factor
as an element of progress. But we see also that the practice of
mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very
conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop
his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when
institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest
development were also the periods of the greatest progress in
arts, industry, and science. In fact, the study of the inner life
of the medieval city and of the ancient Greek cities reveals the
fact that the combination of mutual aid, as it was practised
within the guild and the Greek clan, with a large initiative
which was left to the individual and the group by means of the
federative principle, gave to mankind the two greatest periods of
its history--the ancient Greek city and the medieval city
periods; while the ruin of the above institutions during the
State periods of history, which followed, corresponded in both
cases to a rapid decay.
As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved
during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the
triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much
deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the
fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of
the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural
philosophy--and they were made under the medieval city
organization,--once these discoveries were made, the invention
of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of
a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. If the medieval
cities had lived to bring their discoveries to that point, the
ethical consequences of the revolution effected by steam might
have been different; but the same revolution in technics and
science would have inevitably taken place. It remains, indeed, an
open question whether the general decay of industries which
followed the ruin of the free cities, and was especially
noticeable in the first part of the eighteenth century, did not
considerably retard the appearance of the steam-engine as well as
the consequent revolution in arts. When we consider the
astounding rapidity of industrial progress from the twelfth to
the fifteenth centuries--in weaving, working of metals,
architecture and navigation, and ponder over the scientific
discoveries which that industrial progress led to at the end of
the fifteenth century--we must ask ourselves whether mankind
was not delayed in its taking full advantage of these conquests
when a general depression of arts and industries took place in
Europe after the decay of medieval civilization. Surely it was
not the disappearance of the artist-artisan, nor the ruin of
large cities and the extinction of intercourse between them,
which could favour the industrial revolution; and we know indeed
that James Watt spent twenty or more years of his life in order
to render his invention serviceable, because he could not find in
the last century what he would have readily found in medieval
Florence or Brugge, that is, the artisans capable of realizing
his devices in metal, and of giving them the artistic finish and
precision which the steam-engine requires.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 | 22 |
23