Chapter XIX: Part 19

Above all he wrote to me about his scientific work. He always had a decided leaning towards astronomy, and when we were at St. Petersburg he had published in Russia an excellent summary of all our knowledge of the shooting stars. With his fine critical mind he soon saw the strong or the weak points of different hypotheses; and without sufficient knowledge of mathematics, but endowed with a powerful imagination, he succeeded in grasping the results of the most intricate mathematical researches. Living with his imagination amongst the moving celestial bodies, he realized their complex movements often better than some mathematicians--especially the pure algebraists--realize them, because they often lose sight of the realities of the physical world to see only the formulæ and their logical connections. Our St. Petersburg astronomers spoke to me with great appreciation of that work of my brother. Now he undertook to study the structure of the universe: to analyze the data and the hypotheses about the worlds of suns, star-clusters, and nebulæ in the infinite space, and to disentangle their probable grouping, their life, and the laws of their evolution and decay. The Púlkova astronomer, Gyldén, spoke highly of this new work of Alexander, and introduced him by correspondence to Mr. Holden in the United States, from whom I had lately the pleasure of hearing, at Washington, an appreciative estimate of my brother’s researches. Science is greatly in need, from time to time, of such scientific speculations of a higher standard, made by a scrupulously laborious, critical, and at the same time, imaginative mind.

But in a small town of Siberia, far away from all the libraries, unable to follow the progress of science, he had only succeeded in embodying in his work the researches which had been done up to the date of his exile. Some capital work had been done since--he knew it--but how could he get access to the necessary books so long as he remained in Siberia? The approach of the term of his liberation did not inspire him with hope either. He knew that he would not be allowed to stay in any of the university towns of Russia or of Western Europe, but that his exile to Siberia would be followed by a second exile, perhaps even worse than the first, to some hamlet of Eastern Russia.

Despair took possession of him. ‘A despair like Faust’s takes hold of me at times,’ he wrote to me. When the time of his liberation was coming, he sent his wife and children to Russia, taking advantage of one of the last steamers before the close of the navigation, and, on a gloomy night, the despair of Faust put an end to his life....

* * * * *

A dark cloud hung upon our cottage for many months--until a flash of light pierced it. It came next Spring, when a tiny being, a girl who bears my brother’s name, came into the world, and at whose helpless cry I overheard in my heart quite new chords vibrating.

XVI

In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard groups of workers going about in the streets singing ‘We’ve got no work to do,’ or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked at night into Trafalgar Square to sleep there in the open air, under the wind and rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd, after having listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and Champion, rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows in the great shops. Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent, was the spirit which prevailed amongst the poorer portion of the working population in the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the recent history of the labour movement in England, but the symptoms of which were very well marked in 1886, would have been developed, and would have impressed its stamp upon the subsequent movement for a long time to come. However, the middle classes seemed to have realized the danger. Considerable sums of money were immediately subscribed in the West End for the relief of misery in the East End--certainly quite inadequate to relieve a widely spread destitution, but sufficient to show, at least, good intentions. As to the sentences which were passed upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two and three months’ imprisonment.

The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society. Beginning with the autumn and throughout the winter, I was asked to lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England and Scotland. As I had, as a rule, accepted the first invitation I received to stay the night after the lecture, it consequently happened that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next night in the narrow abode of a working family. Every night I saw considerable numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s small parlour, or in the reception-rooms of the wealthy, the most animated discussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late hour of the night--with hope in the workman’s home, with apprehension in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.

In the mansions, the main question was to know, ‘What do the socialists want? What do they intend to do?’ and next, ‘What are the concessions which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given moment in order to avoid serious conflicts?’ In these conversations I seldom heard the justice of the socialist contention merely denied, or described as sheer nonsense. But I found also a firm conviction that a revolution was impossible in England; that the claims of the mass of the workers had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less; so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working classes of England as a pledge in the meantime of still more in the future. ‘We are a left-centre country, we live by compromises,’ I was once told by an old member of Parliament, who had had a wide experience of the life of his mother country.

In workmen’s dwellings too, I noticed a difference in the questions which were addressed to me in England to those which I was asked on the Continent. General principles, of which the partial applications will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest the Latin workers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in support of a strike, or organizes the feeding of the children at the schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as a matter of fact. ‘Of course, a hungry child cannot learn,’ a French worker says. ‘It must be fed.’ ‘Of course, the employer was wrong in forcing the workers to strike.’ This is all that is said, and no praise is given on account of such minor concessions by the present individualist society to communist principles. The thought of the worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he asks whether it is the Commune, or the unions of workers, or the State which ought to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement alone will be sufficient to maintain Society in working order, and what would be the moral restraint if Society parted with its present repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic government would be capable of accomplishing serious changes in the socialist direction, and whether accomplished facts ought not to precede legislation? and so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions, gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid. But, on the other hand, the impossibility of state administration of industries seemed to have been settled long ago in the workers’ minds, and what chiefly interested most of them were matters of constructive realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make such a realization possible. ‘Well, Kropótkin, suppose that to-morrow we were to take possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea about how to manage them?’ I would, for instance, be asked as soon as we had sat down in a small workman’s parlour. Or, ‘We don’t like the idea of state management of railways, and the present management by private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers owned all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?’ The lack of general ideas was thus supplemented by a desire of going deeper into the details of the realities.

Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways, some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the outside. In France or in Switzerland, the two parties--the workers and the middle classes--not only stood arrayed against each other, but were sharply separated. So it was, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay in the country I was acquainted with none but workers--I hardly knew more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces, as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a movement, similar to what we had had in Russia in the early seventies, when our youth rushed ‘to the people,’ though by no means so intense, so full of self-sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of ‘charity.’ Here also, in England, a number of people went in all sorts of capacities to live near to the workers: in the slums, in people’s palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that a social revolution had commenced, like the hero of Morris’s comical play, ‘Tables Turned,’ who says that the revolution is not simply coming, but has already begun. As always happens however with such enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a long, tedious, preparatory, uphill work that had to be done, very many of them retired from active propaganda, and now stand outside of it as mere sympathetic onlookers.

XVII

I took a lively part in this movement, and with a few English comrades we started, in addition to the three socialist papers already in existence, an anarchist-communist monthly, ‘Freedom,’ which continues to live up to the present day. At the same time I resumed my work on anarchism where I had had to interrupt it at the moment of my arrest. The critical part of it was published during my Clairvaux imprisonment by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’ Now I began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society--so far as it can now be forecast--in a series of articles published at Paris in ‘La Révolté.’ Our ‘boy,’ ‘Le Révolté,’ prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, was compelled to change its title-page and now appeared under a feminine name. Later on these articles were published in a more elaborate form in a book, ‘La Conquête du Pain.’

These researches caused me to study more thoroughly certain points of the economic life of our present civilized nations. Most socialists had hitherto said that in our present civilized societies we actually produce much more than is necessary for guaranteeing full well-being to all. It is only the distribution which is defective; and if a social revolution took place, nothing more would be required than for everyone to return to his factory or workshop, Society taking possession for itself of the ‘surplus value’ or benefits which now go to the capitalist. I thought, on the contrary, that under the present conditions of private ownership production itself had taken a wrong turn, so as to neglect, and often to prevent, the production of the very necessaries for life on a sufficient scale. None of these are produced in greater quantities than would be required to secure well-being for all; and the over-production, so often spoken of, means nothing but that the masses are too poor to buy even what is now considered as necessary for a decent existence. But in all civilized countries the production, both agricultural and industrial, ought to and easily might be immensely increased so as to secure a reign of plenty for all. This brought me to consider the possibilities of modern agriculture, as well as those of an education which would give to everyone the possibility of carrying on at the same time both enjoyable manual work and brain work. I developed these ideas in a series of articles in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ which are now published as a book under the title of ‘Fields, Factories, and Workshops.’

Another great question also engrossed my attention. It is known to what conclusions Darwin’s formula, ‘The Struggle for Existence,’ had been developed by most of his followers, even the most intelligent of them, such as Huxley. There is no infamy in civilized society, or in the relations of the whites towards the so-called lower races, or of the ‘strong’ towards the ‘weak,’ which would not have found its excuse in this formula.

Already during my stay at Clairvaux I saw the necessity of completely revising the formula itself of ‘struggle for existence’ in the animal world, and its applications to human affairs. The attempts which had been made by a few socialists in this direction had not satisfied me, when I found in a lecture of a Russian zoologist, Prof. Kessler, a true expression of the law of struggle for life. ‘Mutual aid,’ he said in that lecture, ‘is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle; but for the _progressive_ evolution of the species the former is far more important than the latter.’ These few words--confirmed unfortunately by only a couple of illustrations (to which Syévertsoff, the zoologist of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, added one or two more)--contained for me the key of the whole problem. When Huxley published in 1888 his atrocious article, ‘The Struggle for Existence: a Program,’ I decided to put in a readable form my objections to his way of understanding the struggle for life, among animals as well as among men, the materials for which I had accumulated during a couple of years. I spoke of it to my friends. However, I found that the comprehension of ‘struggle for life’ in the sense of a war-cry of ‘Woe to the weak,’ raised to the height of a commandment of nature revealed by science, was so deeply inrooted in this country that it had become almost a matter of religion. Two persons only supported me in my revolt against this misinterpretation of the facts of nature. The editor of the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Mr. James Knowles, with his admirable perspicacity, at once seized the gist of the matter, and with a truly youthful energy encouraged me to take it in hand. The other was H. W. Bates, whom Darwin has truly described in his autobiography as one of the most intelligent men whom he ever met. He was secretary of the Geographical Society, and I knew him. When I spoke to him of my intention he was delighted with it. ‘Yes, most assuredly write it,’ he said. ‘That is true Darwinism. It is a shame to think of what “they” have made of Darwin’s ideas. Write it, and when you have published it, I will write you a letter in that sense which you may publish.’ I could not have had better encouragement, and began the work which was published in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ under the titles of ‘Mutual Aid among Animals,’ ‘among Savages,’ ‘among Barbarians,’ ‘in the Mediæval City,’ and ‘among Ourselves.’ Unfortunately I neglected to submit to Bates the first two articles of this series, dealing with animals, which were published during his lifetime; I hoped to be soon ready with the second part of the work, ‘Mutual Aid among Men,’ but it took me several years before I completed it, and in the meantime Bates was no more among us.

The researches which I had to make during these studies in order to acquaint myself with the institutions of the barbarian period and with those of the mediæval free cities, led me to another important research--the part played in history by the state, since its last incarnation in Europe, during the last three centuries. And on the other side, the study of the mutual-support institutions at different stages of civilization, led me to examine the evolutionist bases of the sense of justice and of morality in man.

Within the last ten years the growth of socialism in England has taken a new aspect. Those who judge only by the numbers of socialist and anarchist meetings held in the country, and the audiences attracted by these meetings, are prone to conclude that socialist propaganda is now on the decline. And those who judge the progress of it by the numbers of votes that are given to those who claim to represent socialism in Parliament, jump to the conclusion that there is now hardly any socialist propaganda in England. But the depth and the penetration of the socialist ideas can nowhere be judged by the numbers of votes given in favour of those who bring more or less socialism into their electoral programmes. Still less so in England. The fact is, that out of the three directions of socialism which were formulated by Fourier, Saint Simon, and Robert Owen, it is the latter which prevails in England and Scotland. Consequently it is not so much by the numbers of meetings or socialist votes that the intensity of the movement must be judged, but by the infiltration of the socialist point of view into the trade unionist, the co-operative, and the so-called municipal socialist movements, as well as the general infiltration of socialist ideas all over the country. Under this aspect, the extent to which the socialist views have penetrated is vast in comparison to what it was in 1886; and I do not hesitate to say that it is simply immense in comparison to what it was in the years 1876-82. I may also add that the persevering endeavours of the tiny anarchist groups have contributed, to an extent which makes us feel that we have not wasted our time, to spread the ideas of No-Government, of the rights of the individual, of local action, and free agreement--as against those of State all-mightiness, centralization, and discipline, which were dominant twenty years ago.

Europe altogether is traversing now a very bad phase of the development of the military spirit. This was an unavoidable consequence of the victory obtained by the German military empire, with its universal military service system, over France in 1871, and it was already then foreseen and foretold by many--in an especially impressive form by Bakúnin. But the counter-current already begins to make itself felt in modern life.

As to the way communist ideas, divested of their monastic form, have penetrated in Europe and America, the extent of that penetration has been immense during the twenty-seven years that I have taken an active part in the socialist movement and could observe their growth. When I think of the vague, confused, timid ideas which were expressed by the workers at the first congresses of the International Workingmen’s Association, or which were current at Paris during the Commune insurrection, even amongst the most thoughtful of the leaders, and compare them with those which have been arrived at to-day by an immense number of working-men, I must say they seem to me as two entirely different worlds.

There is no period in history--with the exception, perhaps, of the period of the insurrections in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries (which led to the birth of the mediæval Communes), during which a similarly deep change has taken place in the current conceptions of Society. And now, in my fifty-seventh year, I am even more deeply convinced than I was twenty-five years ago, that a chance combination of accidental circumstances may bring about in Europe a revolution far more important and as widely spread as that of 1848; not in the sense of mere fighting between different parties, but in the sense of a deep and rapid social reconstruction; and I am convinced that whatever character such movements may take in different countries, there will be displayed in all of them a far deeper comprehension of the required changes than has ever been displayed within the last six centuries; while the resistance which such movements will meet in the privileged classes will hardly have the character of obtuse obstinacy which made revolutions assume the violent character which they took in times past.

To obtain this immense result was well worth the efforts which so many thousands of men and women of all nations and all classes have made within the last thirty years.

THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS LIMITED

Transcriber’s Notes

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