I. According to Kropotkin, the progress of mankind from a less happy existence to an existence as happy as possible will shortly bring us to the disappearance not indeed of property, but of its present form, private property.
1. Private property has become a hindrance to the evolution of mankind toward a happiness as great as possible.
What are the effects of private property to-day? "The crisis, which was formerly acute, has become chronic; the crisis in the cotton trade, the crisis in the production of metals, the crisis in watchmaking, all the crises, rage concurrently now and do not come to an end. The unemployed in Europe to-day are estimated at several million; those who beg their way from city to city, or gather in mobs to demand 'work or bread' with threats, are estimated at tens of thousands. Great branches of industry are destroyed; great cities, like Sheffield, forsaken. Everything is at a standstill, want and misery prevail everywhere: the children are pale, the wife has grown five years older in one winter, disease and death are rife among the workingmen—and people talk of over-production!"[548] One might reply that in peasant ownership of land, at least, private property has good effects.[549] "But the golden age is over for the small farmer. To-day he hardly knows how to make both ends meet. He gets into debt, becomes a victim of the cattle-dealer, the real-estate jobber, the usurer; notes and mortgages ruin whole villages, even more than the frightful taxes imposed by State and commune. Small proprietorship is in a desperate condition; and even if the small farmer is still owner in name, he is in fact nothing more than a tenant paying rent to money-dealers and usurers."[550]
But private property has still more sweeping indirect effects. "So long as we have a caste of idlers who have us feed them under the pretext that they must lead us, so long these idlers will always be a focus of pestilence to general morality. He who lives his life in dull laziness, who is always bent merely on getting new pleasures, who by the very basis of his existence can know no solidarity, and who by his course of life cultivates the vilest self-seeking,—he will always pursue the coarsest sensual pleasures and debase everything around him. With his bag full of dollars and his bestial impulses he will go and dishonor women and children, degrade art, the drama, the press, sell his country and its defenders, and, because he is too cowardly to murder with his own hands, will have his proxies murder the choicest of his nation when, some day, he is afraid for his darling money-bag."[551] "Year by year thousands of children grow up in the physical and moral filth of our great cities, among a population corrupted by the struggle for daily bread, and at the same time they daily see the immorality, idleness, prodigality, and ostentation of which these same cities are full."[552] "Thus society is incessantly bringing forth beings who are incapable of an honorable and industrious life, and who are full of anti-social feelings. It does homage to them when success crowns their crimes, and sends them to the penitentiary when they are unlucky."[553]
Private property offends against justice. "The labor of all has produced the entire accumulated mass of wealth, that of the present generation as well as that of all that went before. The house in which we happen to be together has value only by its being in Paris, this glorious city in which the labor of twenty generations is piled layer upon layer. If it were removed to the snow-fields of Siberia, it would be worth substantially nothing. This machine, invented and patented by you, has in it the labor of five or six generations; it has a value only as a part of the vast whole that we call nineteenth-century industry. Take your lace-making machine to the Papuans in New Guinea, and it is valueless."[554] "Science and industry; theory and practice; the invention and the putting the invention in operation, which leads to new inventions again; head work and hand work,—all is connected. Every discovery, every progress, every increase in our wealth, has its origin in the total bodily and mental activity of the past and present. Then by what right can any one appropriate to himself the smallest fraction of this vast total and say 'this belongs to me and not to you'?"[555]—But this unjust appropriation of what belongs to all has nevertheless taken place. "Among the changes of time a few have taken possession of all that is made possible to man by the production of goods and the increase of his productive power. To-day the land, though it owes its value to the needs of a ceaselessly increasing population, belongs to a minority which can hinder the people from cultivating it, and which does so—or at least does not permit the people to cultivate it in a manner accordant with modern needs. The mines, which represent the toil of centuries, and whose value is based solely on the needs of industry and the necessities of population, belong likewise to a few, and these few limit the mining of coal, or entirely forbid it when they find a better investment for their money. The machines, too, are the property of a handful of men; and, even if a machine has indubitably been brought to its present perfection by three generations of workers, it nevertheless belongs to a few givers of work. The roads, which would be scrap-iron but for Europe's dense population, industry, trade, and travel, are in the possession of a few shareholders who perhaps do not even know the location of the lines from which they draw princely incomes."[556]
2. Mankind will soon have passed the stage of evolution to which private property belongs. Private property is doomed.[557]
Private property is a historic formation: it "has developed parasitically amidst the free institutions of our earliest ancestors,"[558] and this in the closest connection with the State. "The political constitution of a society is always the expression, and at the same time the consecration, of its economic constitution."[559] "The origin of the State, and its reason for existence, lie in the fact that it interferes in favor of the propertied and to the disadvantage of the propertyless."[560] "The omnipotence of the State constitutes the foundation of the strength of the bourgeoisie."[561]
But private property is already on the way to dissolution. "The economic chaos can last no longer. The people are tired of the crises which the greed of the ruling classes provokes. They want to work and live, not first drudge a few years for scanty wages and then become for many years victims of want and objects of charity. The workingman sees the incapacity of the ruling classes: he sees how unable they are either to understand his efforts or to manage the production and exchange of goods."[562] Hence "one of the leading features of our century is the growth of Socialism and the rapid spreading of Socialist views among the working classes."[563] The moment when private property is to disappear is near, therefore: be it in a few years,[564] be it at the end of the nineteenth century,[565] in any case it will come soon.[566]
II. In mankind's next stage of evolution, which, as has been shown, must soon be attained, property will take such form that only property of society shall exist. The "next phase of evolution,"[567] "higher form of social organization,"[568] will "inevitably"[569] be not only Anarchism, but "Anarchistic Communism."[570] "The tendencies towards economical and political freedom are two different manifestations of the very same need of equality which constitutes the very essence of all struggles mentioned by history";[571] "these two powerful currents of thought characterize our century."[572]
In this way a comfortable life will be guaranteed to every person who co-operates in production to a certain extent.
1. Mankind's next stage of evolution will no longer know any but the property of society.
"In our century the Communist tendency is continually reasserting itself. The penny bridge disappears before the public bridge; and the turnpike road before the free road. The same spirit pervades thousands of other institutions. Museums, free libraries, and free public schools; parks and pleasure grounds; paved and lighted streets, free for everybody's use; water supplied to private dwellings, with a growing tendency towards disregarding the exact amount of it used by the individual; tramways and railways which have already begun to introduce the season ticket or the uniform tax, and will surely go much further on this line when they are no longer private property: all these are tokens showing in what direction further progress is to be expected."[573]
So will the future society be Communistic. "The first act of the nineteenth-century commune will consist in laying hands on the entire capital accumulated in its bosom."[574] This applies "to the materials for consumption as well as to those for production."[575] "People have tried to make a distinction between the capital that serves for the production of goods and that which satisfies the wants of life, and have said that machines, factories, raw materials, the means of transportation, and the land are destined to become the property of the community; while dwellings, finished products, clothing, and provisions will remain private property. This distinction is erroneous and impracticable. The house that shelters us, the coal and gas that we burn, the nutriment that our body burns up, the clothing that covers us, and the book from which we draw instruction, are all essential to our existence and are just as necessary for successful production and for the further development of mankind as are machines, factories, raw materials, and other factors of production. With private property in the former goods, there would still remain inequality, oppression, and exploitation; a half-way abolition of private property would have its effectiveness crippled in advance."[576]
There is no fear that the Communistic communes will isolate themselves.[577] "If to-day a great city transforms itself into a Communistic commune, and introduces community of the materials for both work and enjoyment, then in a very few days, if it is not shut in by hostile armies, trains of wagons will appear in its markets, and raw materials will arrive from distant ports; and the city's industrial products, when once the wants of the population are satisfied, will go to the ends of the earth seeking purchasers; throngs of strangers will stream in from near and far, and will afterward tell at home of the marvelous life of the free city where everybody works, where there are neither poor nor oppressed, where every one enjoys the fruit of his toil, and no one interferes with another's doing so."[578]
2. The Communism of the future society will "not be the Communism of the convent or the barrack, such as was formerly preached, but a free Communism which puts the joint products at the disposal of all while leaving to every one the liberty of using them at home."[579] To get an entirely clear idea of every detail of it, indeed, is not as yet possible; "nevertheless we must come to an agreement about the fundamental features at least."[580]
What form will production take?
That must first be produced which is requisite "for the satisfaction of man's most urgent wants."[581] For this it suffices "that all adults, with the exception of those women who are occupied with the education of children, engage to do five hours a day, from the age of twenty or twenty-two to the age of forty-five or fifty, of any one (at their option) of the labors that are regarded as necessary."[582] "For instance, a society would enter into the following contract with each of its members: 'We will guarantee to you the enjoyment of our houses, stores of goods, streets, conveyances, schools, museums, etc., on condition that from your twentieth year to your forty-fifth or fiftieth you apply five hours every day to one of the labors necessary to life. Every moment you will have your choice of the groups you will join, or you may found a new one provided that it proposes to do necessary service. For the rest of your time you may associate yourself with whom you like for the purpose of scientific or artistic recreation at your pleasure. We ask of you, therefore, nothing but twelve or fifteen hundred hours' work annually in one of the groups which produce food, clothing, and shelter, or which care for health, transportation, etc.; and in return we insure to you all that these groups produce or have produced'."[583]
There will be time enough, therefore, to produce what is requisite for the satisfaction of less urgent wants. "When one has done in the field or the factory the work that he is under obligation to do for society, he can devote the other half of his day, his week, or his year, to the satisfaction of artistic or scientific wants."[584] "The lover of music who wishes a piano will enter the association of instrument-makers; he will devote part of his half-days, and will soon possess the longed-for piano. Or the enthusiast in astronomy will join the astronomers' association with its philosophers, observers, calculators, and opticians, its scholars and amateurs; and he will obtain the telescope he wishes, if only he dedicates some work to the common cause—for there is a deal of rough work necessary for an observatory, masons' work, carpenters' work, founders' work, machinists' work—the final polish, to be sure, can be given to the instrument of precision by none but the artist. In a word, the five to seven hours that every one has left, after he has first devoted some hours to the production of the necessary, are quite sufficient to render possible for him every kind of luxury."[585]
"The separation of agriculture from manufactures will pass away. The factory workmen will be at the same time field workmen."[586] "As an eminently periodic industry, which at certain times (and even more in the making of improvements than in harvest) needs a large additional force, agriculture will form the link between village and city."[587] And "the separation of mental from bodily labor will come to an end"[588] too. "Poets and scientists will no longer find poor devils who will sell their energies to them for a plate of soup; they will have to get together and print their writings themselves. Then the authors, and their admirers of both sexes, will soon acquire the art of handling the type-case and composing-stick; they will learn the pleasure of producing jointly, with their own hands, a work that they value."[589] "Every labor will be agreeable."[590] "If there is still work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so: they have always known that there were plenty of starving men who would do it for a few pence a day."[591] "Factories, smelters, mines, can be as sanitary and as splendid as the best laboratories of our universities; and the more perfectly they are fitted up the more they will produce."[592] And the product of such labor will be "infinitely better, and considerably greater, than the mass of goods hitherto produced under the goad of slavery, serfdom, and wage-slavery."[593]
How will distribution take place?
Every one who contributes his part to production will also have his share in the product. But it must not be assumed that this share in the product will correspond to that share in the production. "Each according to his powers; to each according to his wants."[594] "Need will be put above service; it will be recognized that every one who co-operates in production to a certain extent has in the first place the right to live, and in the second place the right to live comfortably."[595] "Every one, no matter how strong or weak, how competent or incompetent he may be, will have the right to live,"[596] and "to have a comfortable life; he will furthermore have the right to decide for himself what belongs to a comfortable life."[597]
Society's stock of goods will quite permit this. "If one considers on the one hand the rapidity with which the productive power of civilized nations is increasing, and on the other hand the limits that are directly or indirectly set to its production by present conditions, one comes to the conclusion that even a moderately sensible economic constitution would permit the civilized nations to heap up in a few years so many useful things that we should have to cry out 'Enough! enough coal! enough bread! enough clothes! Let us rest, take recreation, put our strength to a better use, spend our time in a better way!'"[598]
However, what if the stock should in fact not suffice for all wants? "The solution is—free taking of everything that exists in superfluity, and rations of that in which there is a possibility of dearth: rations according to needs, with preference to children, the aged, and the weak in general. That is what is done even now in the country. What commune thinks of limiting the use of the meadows so long as there are enough of them? what commune, so long as there are chestnuts and brushwood enough, hinders those who belong to it from taking as much as they please? And what does the peasant introduce when there is a prospect that firewood will give out? Rationing."[599]
