[41] ``Notwithstanding the egotistic turn given to the public mind by the merchant-production of our century, the Communist tendency is continually reasserting itself and trying to make its way into public life.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.''--Kropotkin, ``Anarchist Communism.'' [42] An able discussion of this question, at of various others, from the standpoint of reasoned and temperate opposition to Anarchism, will befound in Alfred Naquet's ``L'Anarchie et le Collectivisme,'' Paris, 1904.
Is such a system possible? First, is it technically possible to provide the necessaries of life in such large quantities as would be needed if every man and woman could take as much of them from the public stores as he or she might desire?
The idea of purchase and payment is so familiar that the proposal to do away with it must be thought at first fantastic.Yet I do not believe it is nearly so fantastic as it seems.Even if we could all have bread for nothing, we should not want more than a quite limited amount.As things are, the cost of bread to the rich is so small a proportion of their income as to afford practically no check upon their consumption; yet the amount of bread that they consume could easily be supplied to the whole population by improved methods of agriculture (I am not speaking of war-time).The amount of food that people desire has natural limits, and the waste that would be incurred would probably not be very great.As the Anarchists point out, people at present enjoy an unlimited water supply but very few leave the taps running when they are not using them.And one may assumethat public opinion would be opposed to excessive waste.We may lay it down, I think, that the principle of unlimited supply could be adopted in regard to all commodities for which the demand has limits that fall short of what can be easily produced.And this would be the case, if production were efficiently organized, with the necessaries of life, including not only commodities, but also such things as education.Even if all education were free up to the highest, young people, unless they were radically transformed by the Anarchist regime, would not want more than a certain amount of it.And the same applies to plain foods, plain clothes, and the rest of the things that supply our elementary needs.
I think we may conclude that there is no technical impossibility in the Anarchist plan of free sharing.
But would the necessary work be done if the individual were assured of the general standard of comfort even though he did no work?
Most people will answer this question unhesitatingly in the negative.Those employers in particular who are in the habit of denouncing their employes as a set of lazy, drunken louts, will feel quite certain that no work could be got out of them except under threat of dismissal and consequent starvation.But is this as certain as people are inclined to sup- pose at first sight? If work were to remain what most work is now, no doubt it would be very hard to induce people to undertake it except from fear of destitution.But there is no reason why work should remain the dreary drudgery in horrible conditions that most of it is now.[43] If men had to be tempted to work instead of driven to it, the obvious interest of the community would be to make work pleasant.So long as work is not made on the whole pleasant, it cannot be said that anything like a good state of society has been reached.Is the painfulness of work unavoidable?
[43] ``Overwork is repulsive to human nature--not work.Overwork for supplying the few with luxury--not work for the well- being of all.Work, labor, is a physiological necessity, a necessity of spending accumulated bodily energy, a necessity which is health and life itself.If so many branches of useful work are so reluctantly done now, it is merely because they mean overwork, or they are improperly organized.But we know--old Franklin knew it--that four hours of useful work every daywould be more than sufficient for supplying everybody with the comfort of a moderately well-to-do middle-class house, if we all gave ourselves to productive work, and if we did not waste our productive powers as we do waste them now.As to the childish question, repeated for fifty years: `Who would do disagreeable work?' frankly I regret that none of our savants has ever been brought to do it, be it for only one day in his life.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.'' Kropotkin, ```Anarchist Communism.''
