Labor of the Future: Introducing the Anarchist Kropotkin at the End of the 19th

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When socialists say that a society freed from capital can make work enjoyable and abolish all work that is disgusting or harmful to health, they are usually laughed at.

And yet we are already seeing striking successes in this direction; and wherever such improvements were introduced, the owners could only rejoice in the resulting energy savings.

A plant and a factory can, no doubt, be made as healthy and attractive as a scientific laboratory; and there is no doubt also that it is beneficial to do so in all respects.

In a spacious room, with good air, work goes better, and various small improvements that lead to savings in time and labor are easier to apply.

And if in our time the premises of most of the factories are so dirty and unhealthy, this is due to the fact that during the construction of them the worker was completely ignored and human forces are wasted in them in the most ridiculous way.

However, even now - although still in the form of a rare exception - one can see here and there factories so well equipped that it would be quite pleasant to work there, if only the work did not last more than four or five hours a day and if everyone could contribute there is a certain variety in it in accordance with their inclinations.

We can point, for example, to one plant - unfortunately, engaged in the manufacture of military shells and guns - which in the sense of a reasonable sanitary organization leaves nothing to be desired. It covers an area of twenty acres, of which fifteen are covered with a glass roof. The floor is made of refractory bricks and is as clean as in a miner's house, and the glass roof is thoroughly washed by dedicated workers.

At this plant, steel ingots weighing up to 1200 pounds are forged, but the presence of a huge furnace, inside which the temperature reaches a thousand degrees, is not felt even thirty steps from it: you notice it only when a red-hot steel mass comes out of the monster's mouth. And this monster is controlled by only three or four workers who open one or the other faucet, and huge levers are set in motion by the force of water pressure in the pipes.

You enter this plant, expecting that you will immediately be deafened by the sound of hammers, and you see that there are no hammers at all: huge cannons weighing 6,000 pounds and the axles of large steamers are forged simply by the pressure of hammers set in motion by the pressure of water in pipes. To squeeze the metal mass, the worker, instead of forging, simply turns the crane. And with such hydraulic forging, the metal mass becomes smoother and without kinks, whatever its thickness.

You are expecting a terrible clang and rumble of machines, but meanwhile you see that the machines are cutting metal masses five fathoms in length as soundlessly as if they were cutting a piece of cheese. And when we shared our experience with the engineer accompanying us, he calmly replied:

For us, this is a matter of economy. This machine, for example, planing steel, has been serving us for forty-two years; if its parts were poorly matched or too weak and therefore cracked and creaked with every movement, it would not have served even ten years! Are you surprised by the melting furnaces? Why waste heat, instead of using it for the oven itself? That would be a completely unnecessary expense.

Indeed, why force the stokers to roast when the heat lost by radiation represents whole tons of coal?

The hammers, which previously made all buildings shake twenty miles in circumference, would have been a similar waste of time. Pressure forging is much better than blowing, and it costs less because there is less waste. A spacious room around the machines? good lighting? purity? - all this is the purest calculation. A person works better when he sees well and when he is not cramped. Here in our former premises, in the city, everything was really very bad with us. The tightness is terrible. You know how terribly expensive land is there because of the greed of the landowners.

The same can be said for coal mines. Everyone knows, at least from Zola's novel or from the newspapers, what the coal mines are now. Meanwhile, in the future, when the mines are well ventilated, the temperature in them will be as even as it is now in the working room; there will be no horses in them, condemned to live and die underground all their lives, since carriages with coal will move either along an endless steel cable set in motion at the entrance to the mine, or by electricity; fans will be everywhere, and explosions will be impossible.

And this is not a dream either; there are already several such mines in England, and I was able to inspect one of them, where everything is arranged in this way. Here, just like in a factory, good sanitation has led to enormous cost savings. Despite its great depth (210 fathoms), this mine produces a thousand tons of coal per day with only two hundred workers, that is, five tons (300 poods) per day for each worker, while in all two thousand mines in England the average amount is the coal mined by each worker barely reaches 300 tons per year, that is, only 60 poods per day.

Many other examples could be cited to prove that, at least in relation to the arrangement of the material situation, Fourier's thought about is far from being an unrealizable dream.

But the socialists have already written so much about this that nowadays everyone admits that it is possible to make factories, factories or mines as clean as the best laboratories of modern universities, and that the better they are arranged in this respect, the more productive human labor will be. …

After that, can one really doubt that in a society of equals, in a society where they will not sell for a piece of bread, work will in fact become a rest and pleasure?

Any unhealthy or disgusting work will disappear, because under these new conditions it will undoubtedly prove harmful to society as a whole. This kind of work can be done by slaves; a free man will create new working conditions - labor that is attractive and incomparably more productive.

The same will happen with the household chores that society now imposes on a woman - this sufferer for all of humanity.

II

A society revived by the revolution will also be able to abolish domestic slavery - the last form of slavery, which, at the same time, may be the most stubborn, because it is the oldest. But the liberated society will take it differently than the state communists - adorers of harsh power with their Arakcheyevs - thought.

Millions of human beings will never agree to live in a phalanx. True, even the least sociable person sometimes feels the need to meet other people for common work - work that becomes more attractive if a person feels at the same time part of one huge whole.

But the hours of leisure devoted to rest and loved ones are much more personal. Meanwhile, phalansters and even familisters * do not take into account this need, or if they do, they try to satisfy it artificially.

The phalanster, which, in essence, is nothing more than a huge hotel, may be liked by some, or even all, at certain periods of their lives; but the vast majority of people still prefer family life (of course, the family life of the future). People are more fond of separate apartments, and the Norman and Anglo-Saxon race even prefer separate houses of four, five or more rooms, in which you can live with your family or in a close circle of friends.

Phalanster can be good at times, but it would be very bad if it became the general rule.

Human nature requires that hours spent in society alternate with hours of loneliness. One of the most terrible tortures in prison is precisely the impossibility of being alone, just as solitary confinement, in turn, becomes torture when it does not alternate with times spent in the company of others.

We are sometimes told that life in a phalanx is more economical, but this is the smallest and most empty economy.

The real, the only reasonable economy is to make life pleasant for everyone, because when a person is satisfied with life, he produces immeasurably more than when he curses everything around him *.

Other socialists deny phalansters, but when asked how to arrange housework, they answer:. And if you are dealing with a bourgeois playing socialism, he turns with a pleasant smile to his wife and says:

* The Communists of Young Ikaria apparently understood how important it is to give people freedom of choice in their daily communication with each other, apart from work. The ideal of the religious communists has always been associated with a common meal; the first Christians expressed their adherence to Christianity in a common meal, and traces of this are still preserved in the sacrament. The young Ikarians broke with this religious tradition. They all dine in one room, but at separate tables, where people sit down, depending on their personal sympathies.

The communists living in Anama have their own separate houses and dine at their own place, although they take all the provisions they need from the community stores - as much as anyone wants.

To which the wife replies with a sweet and sour smile: - and thinks to herself at the same time that, fortunately, it will not be so soon.

Whether it is a servant or a wife, a man always expects to take the woman's housework over to him.

But the woman, for her part, also begins to demand finally her share in the liberation of humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden in her home; it is enough for her that she devotes so many years of her life to raising children. She doesn't want to be a cook, a dishwasher, a maid in the house! American women are ahead of all others in their demands, and in the United States there are complaints everywhere about the lack of women willing to do household chores.

Ladies prefer art, politics, literature or some kind of fun; the female workers, on the other hand, do the same, and there are sighs and sighs everywhere about the impossibility of finding. There are few American women in the United States who would agree to domestic servitude slavery.

The solution to the question is prompted, however, by life itself, and this solution, as usual, is very simple.

The machine takes over three quarters of all chores.

You clean your own shoes and you know how ridiculous it is. Driving twenty or thirty times on a boot with a brush - what could be more stupid than that? Only because millions of Europeans, men and women, are forced to sell themselves to do this work for some kind of lair and meager food, only because a woman feels like a worker, it is possible that millions of hands do this stupid operation every day.

Meanwhile, hairdressers already have machine round brushes for smoothing both straight and tousled hair. Why, then, not apply the same technique to the other end of the human body? Why not? Indeed, they do so. Large American and European hotels are already adopting such a boot cleaning machine, and this machine is being extended beyond hotels.

So, for example, in England, in some large schools where boys live for fifty or even two hundred people with teachers, the heads of these boarding schools hand over the cleaning of boots to a special entrepreneur who takes it upon himself to clean a thousand pairs of boots every morning by car. And this, of course, turns out to be more profitable than keeping hundreds of maids especially for this stupid occupation. A former shoemaker I know collects all this pile of boots in the evening, and in the morning sends them out cleaned by car.

Take the dishwashing. Is there somewhere a mistress who would love this work - boring and dirty, which is only done by hand, because the work of a domestic slave is considered worthless?

In America, this slave labor is gradually beginning to be replaced by more meaningful labor. There are cities where hot water is supplied to the houses as well as cold water in our country, and this already facilitates the solution of the issue. And one woman, Mrs. Cochran, did it by half: the machine she invented washes, wipes and dries twenty dozen plates or dishes in less than three minutes. These machines are manufactured in Illinois and are sold at prices that are affordable for larger families.

As for small families, over time they will give their dishes to the sink in the same way as shoes are now given for cleaning - and, probably, the same institution will take over both these functions.

Women clean knives, peel off their skin from their hands, squeeze out clothes, sweep floors and clean carpets, raising clouds of dust, which then needs to be removed with great difficulty from all the cracks where she sits, but all this is done this way to this day only because the woman continues to be a slave.

Meanwhile, all this work could already be done much better by a machine. And when the driving force is conducted into all the houses, then all kinds of machines, simplified so that they take up a little space, will come into their own. The machine that sucks the dust, however, has already been invented.

Note that by themselves all such machines are very inexpensive, and if now we pay so much for them, then it depends on the fact that they are not widespread, and most importantly, that all kinds of gentlemen who speculate on the ground, on raw material, on fabrications, sales, taxes, etc., charge us at least three or four times our real value, each capitalizing on every new need that arises.

But small cars, which can be in every house and apartment, are not yet the last word in the release of domestic labor. The family must come out of its present isolation, unite in an artel with other families in order to jointly do the work that is now being done in each family separately.

Indeed, the future is not at all that every family has one machine for cleaning boots, another for washing dishes, a third for washing clothes, etc. The future belongs to one common stove that heats all the rooms of the whole block and thus eliminates the need to light hundreds of lights.

This is already being done in some American cities; hot water is piped from a common stove to all houses and to all rooms, and to change the temperature of the room, it is enough to turn on the tap. If you want to start a fire in some room, then you can light a gas or an electric stove in your fireplace. All the enormous work of cleaning fireplaces and keeping them on fire, which consumes millions of working hands in England, thus gradually disappears, and women are well aware of how much time today's fireplaces take from them.

Candle, lamp and even gas are already out of date. There are entire cities where it is enough to press a button to get light, and the whole question of electric lighting now boils down to how to get rid of the whole army of monopolists who have everywhere seized (with the help of the state) electric lighting in their hands.

Finally - again in America - we are already talking about the formation of societies that could almost completely eliminate domestic work. For this, one such institution would be sufficient for each group of houses. A special carriage would come for baskets of boots to be cleaned, for dirty dishes, for linen, for small things that need to be cleaned (if it's worth it), for carpets - and the next day it would bring the work already completed and well done. And at the hour of the morning breakfast, hot tea or coffee and the whole breakfast could appear on your table.

Indeed, look at what is being done now. Between twelve and two o'clock in the afternoon, thirty million Americans and twenty million Englishmen eat a piece of roast beef or lamb or boiled pork - sometimes chicken or fish - and a portion of potatoes and some vegetables, depending on the season.

And so they do from day to day and from year to year, occasionally adding something to their dinner. In order to roast this meat and boil these vegetables, at least ten million fires are lit for two or three hours, and ten million women spend time preparing these meals, which, in total, include no more than ten different foods.

Have breakfast, if you like, at home, with your family, with your children; but why, please tell me, would these fifty women waste two or three hours every morning preparing such a simple meal? Choose your own piece of beef or lamb, if you are such a gourmand, season your own vegetables if you prefer one or the other sauce. But let there be only one large kitchen and one well-arranged stove to roast meat and boil these vegetables for fifty families!

To live as we live now, of course, is meaningless; but this is due to the fact that the work of a woman has never been considered anything; because until now, even people striving for liberation have never taken a woman into account in their dreams of liberation; because they consider it incompatible with their masculine dignity to think, which is why they charge them like a beast of burden on a woman.

Freeing a woman does not mean opening the doors of a university, court, or parliament for her, because a liberated woman always puts the housework on some other woman.

To free a woman is to save her from the dull labor of the kitchen and the laundry; it means getting settled in such a way as to give her the opportunity to feed and raise her children, at the same time to have enough free time to take part in social life.

And it will come true, it is already starting to come true. We must remember that a revolution that will only enjoy beautiful phrases about Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, but will preserve the domestic slavery of women, will not be a real revolution. A whole half of humanity, being in kitchen slavery, would later have to start their revolution in order to free themselves from the other half.

P. A. Kropotkin