The Community

This is the secret of wealth; find the starving and destitute, pay them enough to survive the day, and make them produce greater worth in the day. Amass a personal fortune by these means, and then increase it by some lucky hit, made with the help of the State.

(paraphrased/updated from Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin)

Need we go on to speak of small fortunes attributed by the economists to intelligence or penny-pinching, when we know that mere saving in itself brings in nothing?

Take a shoemaker, for instance. Grant that his work is well paid, that he has plenty of business, and that by strict frugality he saves perhaps four hundred dollars per month.

Grant that our shoemaker is never ill, that he does not half starve himself, in spite of his passion for economy; that he does not marry or that he has no children; that he does not die of disease; all is optimal!

Well, at the age of fifty he will not have scraped together $200,000; and he will not have enough to live on during his old age, when he is past work. This is not how great fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker, soon has saved some money in the bank, and that bank lends it to the capitalist who is just about to “employ labour,” i.e. to exploit the poor. Then our shoemaker takes an apprentice, the child of some poor wretch, who will think himself lucky if in five years time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living.

Meanwhile our shoemaker, if business is good, soon takes a second, and then a third apprentice. By and by he will take two or three working men — poor wretches, thankful to receive wages for work that is worth far more, and if our shoemaker is “in luck,” that is to say, if he is keen enough and mean enough, his working men and apprentices will bring him an amount over and above the product of his own toil. He can then enlarge his business. He will gradually become rich, and no longer have any need for frugality. He will leave a snug little fortune to his son.

That is what people call “being economical and having frugal, temperate habits.” At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor - that wealth is leeched from the labor of the employees who still remain in poverty.

Commerce seems an exception to this rule. “Such a man,” we are told, “buys tea in China, brings it to France, and realizes a profit of thirty per cent on his original outlay. He has exploited nobody.”

Nevertheless the case is the same. If our merchant had carried his bales on his back, well and good! In early medieval times that was exactly how foreign trade was conducted, and so no one reached such giddy heights of fortune as in our days. Very few and very hardly earned were the gold coins which the medieval merchant gained from a long and dangerous voyage. It was less the love of money than the thirst of travel and adventure that inspired his undertakings.

Nowadays the method is simpler. A merchant who has some capital need not stir from his desk to become wealthy. He telegraphs to an agent telling him to buy a hundred tons of tea; he freights a ship, and in a few weeks, in three months if it is a sailing ship, the vessel brings him his cargo. He does not even take the risks of the voyage, for his tea and his vessel are insured, and if he has expended four thousand pounds he will receive more than five thousand; that is to say, if he has not attempted to speculate in some novel commodities, in which case he runs a chance of either doubling his fortune or losing it altogether.

Now, how could he find men willing to cross the sea, to travel to China and back, to endure hardship and slavish toil and to risk their lives for a miserable pittance?

How could he find dock labourers willing to load and unload his ships for “starvation wages”? How? Because they are needy and starving. Go to the seaports, visit the cook-shops and taverns on the quays, and look at these men who have come to hire themselves, crowding round the dock-gates, which they besiege from early dawn, hoping to be allowed to work on the vessels. Look at these sailors, happy to be hired for a long voyage, after weeks and months of waiting. All their lives long they have gone to the sea in ships, and they will sail in others still, until they have perished in the waves.

Enter their homes, look at their wives and children in rags, living one knows not how till the father’s return, and you will have the answer to the question.

Individualism increasing during the last four centuries is the individual trying to protect themselves from the tyranny of Capital and of the State.

For a time I imagined, and those in power declared, that I could free myself entirely from the State and from society. “By means of money,” I said, “I can buy all that I need.” But the individual was on a wrong tack, and modern history has taught me to recognize that, without the help of all, I can do nothing, although my strong-boxes may be full of gold.

As we can see, alongside this Individualism, there is a tendency to retain all that remains of the Communism of small towns, and, on the other, to establish the Communist principle in the thousand developments of modern life.

As soon as the communes of the middle ages had succeeded in rising out of serfdom, their communal productivity and communal consumption began to extend and develop rapidly. The township — and not private persons — freighted ships and equipped expeditions, and the benefit arising from the foreign trade did not accrue to individuals, but was shared by all. The townships also bought provisions for their citizens. Traces of these institutions have lingered on into the nineteenth century, and the folk piously cherish the memory of them in their legends.

Even now, the rural township still struggles to preserve the last traces of this Communism, and it somewhat succeeds — except when the State intervenes to magnify petty differences between people to break the town's unity.

Meanwhile new organizations, based on the same principle — to every man according to his needs — spring up under a thousand different forms; for without a salt of Communism the present societies could not exist. In spite of the individualist turn given to our minds by the commercial system, the tendency towards Communism is constantly appearing, and influences our activities in a variety of ways.

The bridges, for the use of which a toll was levied in the old days, are now become public property and free to all. Museums, free libraries, free schools, free meals for children; parks and gardens open to all; streets paved and lighted, free to all; water supplied to every house without measure or stint — all such arrangements are founded on the principle: “Take what you need.”

We are beginning to think of society as a whole, not just town by town, each part of which is so intimately bound up with the others that a service rendered to one is a service rendered to all.

When you go into a public library, the librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book, or the fifty books which you require, and comes to your assistance if you do not know how to search.

At St. Petersburg, if you are pursuing an invention, you go into a special laboratory or a workshop, where you are given a place, a carpenter’s bench, a turning lathe, all the necessary tools and scientific instruments, provided only you know how to use them; and you are allowed to work there as long as you please. There are the tools; interest others in your idea, join with fellow workers skilled in various crafts, or work alone if you prefer it. Invent a flying machine, or invent nothing — that is your own affair. You are pursuing an idea — that is enough.

In the same way, those who pilot the lifeboat do not ask credentials from the crew of a sinking ship; they launch their boat, risk their lives in the raging waves, and sometimes perish, all to save those whom they do not even know. And what need to know them? “They are human beings, and they need our aid — that is enough, that establishes their right — To the rescue! “

Thus we find a tendency, eminently communistic, springing up on all sides, and in various guises, in the very heart of theoretically individualist societies.

This tendency exists and is felt as soon as the most pressing needs of each are satisfied, and in proportion as the productive power of the race increases.