The Social Revolution/Part 2/Chapter 7
hunting and the hunted, the struggling and resisting, the annihilated and being annihilated of the present competitive struggle are excluded and therewith the contrast between exploiter and exploited.
INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION.
So much for the most important economic problems that arise from the political victory of the proletariat and the means to their solution. It would be very alluring in this connection to follow these conditions further, to investigate the problems which housing and international commerce, the relations of city and country, etc., carry with them, all of which will be deeply touched by the domination of the proletariat and cannot continue in their present manner. But I must turn from the discussion of these themes at this point because I have said elsewhere the most essential things that I have to say upon them (the position of a socialist community in relation to colonies and world's commerce I have discussed in my preface to "Atlanticus, A View of the Future State," p. XIX, and "The Future of the Individual Home," in my Agrarfrage, p. 447, etc.). I wish to discuss only one point in this connection about which much indefiniteness exists—the future of intellectual production.
We have here hitherto only investigated the problem of material production which is most fundamental. But upon this basis there arises a production of artistic works, scientific investigation and literary activities of various forms. The continuation of this production is no less necessary for modern civilization than the undisturbed continuance of the production of bread and meat, coal and iron. A proletarian revolution, however, renders its continuance in the former manner impossible. What has it to substitute therefor? That no reasonable man to-day fears that the victorious proletariat will cause a return to the old condition of barbarism or that it will fling art and science and superfluous rubbish into the lumber room, but that on the contrary it is just among those broad popular sections of the proletariat that the most interest and the highest regard for art and science is to be found, I have already shown in my essay concerning "Reform and Revolution." But my whole inquiry is not so much in the nature of an investigation into what the victorious proletariat might do as to what by virtue of the power of logic and facts it can and must do.
There will be no lack of the necessary material objects for art and science. We have already seen that it is one of the strong points of the proletarian regime that through the abolition of private property in the means of production the possibility will be created of wiping out in the quickest possible manner the ruins of the outgrown means and methods of production which to-day prevent the unfolding of the modern productive powers and which beneath the present dominion of private property can only be slowly and incompletely swept out of the road by competition. The wealth of society must thereby at once attain a level far above that inherited from capitalist society.
But material objects alone are not sufficient to secure this elevation. Wealth alone does not give rise to a great ideal life. The question is whether the conditions of production of material goods in socialist society are consistent with the necessary conditions of a highly developed intellectual production. This is strongly denied by our opponents.
Let us next examine some forms of existing intellectual production. It takes on three forms: production through organs of society for direct satisfaction of social needs; then, the production of goods in individual industries, and finally the production of goods under capitalist industry.
To the first form of intellectual production belongs the whole system of education from kindergartens to universities. If we disregard the insignificant private schools, this is to-day almost wholly in the hands of society and is conducted by the State not for the purpose of making profits or on account of gain. This holds above all of the modern national and municipal schools, but also of those which are mainly ruins descended from the Middle Ages, but which still exist under clerical organization and community support, and which are especially prominent in the land of Anglo-Saxon culture.
This social educational system is of the highest significance for the intellectual life, especially for the scientific, and this is not simply through its influence upon the growing youth. It controls ever more and more scientific investigation in that its teachers, especially in the high schools, have more and more a monopoly of scientific apparatus without which scientific investigation is to-day almost impossible. This is especially true in the field of the natural sciences whose technique has become so highly developed that, aside from a few millionaires, the State alone is able to supply the means demanded for the establishment and maintenance of the necessary scientific apparatus. But in many branches of social science, ethnology and archaeology and others, the scientific apparatus of investigation has become ever more comprehensive and expensive. Because of this, science becomes ever more and more an unremunerative occupation, by which a man cannot live and to which only those people can devote themselves who are paid by the State unless they have been very fortunate in the choice of their parents—or of their wives. Attainment of the necessary preliminary knowledge for productive scientific activity demands again a great and ever increasing amount of money. So it is that science is more and more monopolized by the governmental powers and the possessing classes.
At the very least a proletarian regime can abolish the conditions which hamper scientific activity at present. It must formulate its educational system, as was previously pointed out, so that each genius will have within his reach all the knowledge that the social educational system has at its disposal. It will increase enormously the demand for educated people, and therewith also for the power of scientific investigation. Finally it will operate through the abolition of class antagonisms to make the investigators in the sphere of social science, where employed by the State, internally and externally free. So long as there are class antagonisms there will be very different standpoints from which society will be observed. There is no greater hypocrisy or self-deception than the talk about an existing science which is above class antagonisms. Science exists only in the heads of investigators and these are the products of society and cannot get out of it or reach above it. Even in a socialist society science will be dependent upon social conditions, but these will then at least be uniform and not antagonistic.
Even worse than the internal dependence upon social conditions, from which no investigator can free himself, is the external dependence of many of those from governmental or other dominating institutions, for example, clerical. These compel the intellectual workers to direct their views according to those of the governing classes and will not permit them to investigate freely and independently, and it compels them to seek in a scientific manner for arguments that will justify the existing order and repel the aspiring classes. So the class dominion operates directly to demoralize science. The intellectual workers will have every reason to breathe freer when the proletarian regime sweeps away the direct and indirect dominion of the class of capitalists and land owners. The intellectual life so far as it is connected with education has nothing to fear and everything to hope from the victory of the proletariat.
How is it, then, with the production of intellectual commodities? In this connection we will first study individual production. Here painting and sculpture come most prominently into consideration, together with a portion of literary writing.
A proletarian regime will no more make this form of commodity production impossible, than it will abolish the little private industry in material production. Just as little as the needle and thimble, will brush and palette, or ink and pen belong to those means of production which must under all conditions be socialized. But one thing is well possible and that is that with the cessation of capitalist exploitation the number of purchasers that heretofore constituted the market for the commodities produced by the little artistic industry will be reduced. This will certainly not be without influence on the articles of artistic production. It will not abolish such production but only alter its character. The easel painting and statuettes which can most easily change their places and possessors, that can be placed wherever we wish, are the special form of commodity production in art. They include those forms of artistic work that can easiest take the form of commodities, which, like jewelry, can be accumulated and stored either for the purpose of re-selling at a profit or to hoard as treasures. It is possible that their production for the purposes of sale will find many obstacles in a socialist society. But in place of these, other forms of artistic production will appear.
A proletarian regime will immensely increase the number of public buildings. It will endeavor to make attractive every place occupied by the people, whether for labor, for consultation, or for pleasure. Instead of accumulating statuettes and pictures that will be thrown into a great impersonal market from whence they finally find a place utterly unknown to the artist and are used for wholly unthought of purposes, the artist will work together with the architect as was the case in the Golden Age of art in Athens under Pericles and in the Italian Renaissance. One art will support and raise the other and artistic labor will have a definite social aim so that its products, its surroundings and its public will not be dependent on chance.
On the other side the necessity to produce artistic works for sale as commodities will cease. Above all there will no longer be need to offer individual labor for profit or as wage labor, or for the production of commodities.
I have already pointed out that a proletarian regime would endeavor, as is perfectly evident from the standpoint of the wageworker, to shorten the labor time and raise the wages. I have also shown to how high a degree this can be done, particularly in the line of highly developed capitalist production, simply through the concentration of industry in the most perfect centers of production and through the most perfect utilization of these most perfect industries. It is by no means fantastic to conclude that a doubling of the wages and a reduction of labor time to half of the present one is possible at once, and technical science is already sufficiently advanced to expect rapid progress in this field. The further one goes in this direction the more the possibility increases for those who are engaged in material production to give themselves up also to intellectual activity and especially to those forms that bring no material gain, but rather find their reward in themselves and which are the highest forms of intellectual activity. The greater increased leisure may in part, indeed in overwhelming part, lead to pure intellectual enjoyment. With the talented the creative genius will be free and the union of material with artistic literary and scientific production will be made possible.
This union, however, will not be simply possible. It will be an economic necessity. We have seen that a proletarian regime must aim to make culture a universal good. If we should seek to extend culture in the present sense of the word it would end in making the growing generation useless for material production and hence would undermine the foundations of society. To-day the social division of labor is developed in such a manner that material and intellectual labor are well-nigh mutually exclusive. Material production exists under such conditions that only the few who have been favored by nature or by special conditions are able to engage in the higher intellectual labor. On the other side intellectual labor as it is carried on to-day makes those who follow it incapable of and disinclined toward physical labor. To give culture to all mankind under such conditions would simply make all material production impossible because then no one would be found who could or would carry it on. If we are to make the higher intellectual culture a common good without endangering the existence of society, then not simply pedagogical but economic necessity demands that this be done in such a manner that the growing generation will be made familiar in schools not simply with intellectual but also with physical labor and the habit of uniting intellectual and material production will be firmly rooted.
The proletarian regime must proceed from two directions to secure the union of material and intellectual production and to free the latter in the mass of the population from its present material fetters. On the one side this must be done through the continuous shortening of the labor time of the so-called hand laborers. This will come as a result of the increasing productivity of labor whereby more time will be continuously granted for intellectual labor to those engaged in material production. On the other side this will be accomplished by an increase of the physical labor of the cultured, an unavoidable result of the continual increase in numbers of the latter.
It is, however, plain that with this union, physical labor for gain and for the necessary labor in the interest of society, and intellectual labor for the free exercise of personality would be freed from every social compulsion. For intellectual labor is much more incompatible with such compulsion than physical. This liberation of intellectual labor by the proletariat is not the pious wish of the Utopian but the economically necessary consequence of its victory.
Finally we must observe the third form of intellectual production—that which is capitalistically exploited. Since the first of these three forms of intellectual production includes mainly science and the second the fine arts, so what we have to say now applies to the utilization of all spheres of intellectual activity, but particularly, however, to the heroes of the pen and the stage, to whom now stand opposed as capitalist directors of industry, the publishers, periodical owners and theater directors.
Capitalist exploitation in such a form is impossible of continuance under a proletarian regime. It rests, however, upon the fact that to get even a questionable intellectual production to the public requires an expensive technical apparatus and extensive co-operative powers. The individual cannot here act for himself. Does that, however, not mean that here again the alternative to capitalist industry is national industry? If this is so, must not the centering of so great and important a part of the intellectual life in the State threaten in the highest degree that intellectual life with uniformity and stagnation? It is true that the governmental power will cease to be a class organ, but will it not still be the organ of a majority? Can the intellectual life be made dependent upon the decisions of the majority? Would not every new truth, every new conception and discovery be comprehended and thought out by the insignificant minority? Does not this new order threaten to bring at once the best and keenest of the intellectual thinkers in the various spheres into continuous conflict with the proletarian regime? And even if this creates increased freedom for the artistic and scientific development would not this be more than offset by the fetters that it will lay upon the intellectual activity when this can only be pursued by social means? Here is certainly an important but not an insoluble problem.
We must first notice that as for all production so also for the social necessities of intellectual production the State will from the beginning not be the only leading and means-granting organ which will come into consideration, but there will also be municipalities. Through these alone all uniformity and every domination of the intellectual life by central power is excluded. As another substitute for the capitalist industry in individual production, still other organizations must be considered; those of free unions which will serve art and science and the public life and advance production in these spheres in the most diverse ways, or undertake them directly as even to-day we have countless unions which bring out plays, publish newspapers, purchase artistic works, publish writings, fit out scientific expeditions, etc. The shorter the hours of labor in material production and the higher the wages the more will these free unions be favored. They must increase in numbers, in enthusiasm and in the intelligence of their members as well as in the resources which the intellectuals can contribute to support the common cause. I expect that these free unions will play an even more important role in the intellectual life. It is their destiny to enter into the place now occupied by capital and individual production and to organize and to lead the social nature.
Here also the proletarian regime leads not to greater bondage but to greater freedom.
Freedom of education and of scientific investigation from the fetters of capitalist dominion; freedom of the individual from the oppression of exclusive, exhaustive physical labor; displacement of the capitalist industry in the intellectual production of society by the free unions,—along this road proceeds the tendency of the proletarian regime in the sphere of intellectual production.
We see that the problems in the field of production are of a contradictory nature. The capitalist system of production has created the task of formulating the social process of production in a simple and systematic manner. This task consists in placing the individual in a fixed order to whose rules he must conform. On the other side this same manner of production has more than ever brought the individual to a self-consciousness, placed him on his own feet and freed him from society. More than ever mankind demands to-day the possibility of developing a personality and its relation to other men in order to determine in the freest manner the more sensitive and individual of these relations, especially the marriage relation, but also their relation as artists and thinkers to the external world.
Regulation of social chaos and liberation of the individual—these are the two historical tasks that capitalism has placed before society. They appear to be contradictory, but they are simultaneously soluble because each of them belongs to a different sphere of social life. Undoubtedly whoever should seek to rule both spheres in the same manner would find himself involved in insoluble contradictions. It is on this point that anarchism is wrecked. Anarchism arises out of the reaction of the little bourgeois against the repressive and oppressive capitalism. The little handworker who was accustomed to direct his labor according to his own pleasure rebels against the discipline and the monotony of the factory. His ideal remains the free labor of the individual and when this is no longer possible he seeks to replace it by common working together in free unions wholly independent of each other.
The "new middle class," the intellectuals, is, as we have already seen many times, in its social position only a refined and more sensitive expression of the earlier little bourgeois. Its manner of working develops in them the same need for free labor, the same repugnance to discipline and uniformity. So it is that their social ideal becomes the same as that of the small bourgeois, that is the anarchist. But that which is a progressive ideal in their sphere of production shows itself to be reactionary in the field of material production where it corresponds to the conditions of production of the now extinct hand work.
In the present stage of production there are only two possible forms of material production so far as production in quantities is concerned, aside from a few remnants which are mainly curiosities: on the one side communistic with social property in the means of production, and the systematic direction of production from a central point, or the capitalistic. The anarchistic system of production can, under the best conditions, be only a transitory episode. Material production through free unions without central production leads to chaos unless the commodities produced exchange on the basis of the law of value determined by free competition. We have seen above what the consequence is for individual industry under free competition. It determines the correct proportionality of individual means of production to one another and prevents any one from swamping society with buttons or leaving it without bread. Production of commodities under the present conditions of social production must continuously take on some form of capitalist production, as countless productive co-operatives have shown. To strive for an anarchist ideal in material production is at best a Sisyphus task.
It is wholly different with intellectual production. This is built upon material production, on the surplus of products and labor powers which proceed from material production. It is possible only when material life is secured. If the latter falls into confusion then our whole existence is threatened. Consequently it is absolutely unimportant for society in what relations the existing surplus of products and labor powers are applied to the individual fields of free intellectual creation. The exception to this is the educational system which has its special laws, and has not yet been turned over to free competition in any society, but has been socially regulated. Society would fall into bad condition if all the world should set to work at the manufacture of one kind of commodities such, for example, as buttons, and thereby direct too much labor power to this, so that not enough was left for the production of others, such, for example, as bread. On the other hand the relation between lyric poems and tragedies, works on Assyriology and botany which are to be produced is no essential one; it has neither maximum nor minimum point. If to-day there should be twice as many dramas as yesterday, and at the same time one-half as many lyrics, or if to-day twenty works on Assyriology should appear and only ten Botanical, while yesterday the relations were reversed, still the existence of society would not be touched in the slightest thereby. These facts find their economic expression in that the law of value, in spite of all psychological theories of value, only holds good for material production and not for intellectual. In this field a central direction of production is not only unnecessary, but absolutely foolish. Here free production can rule without the necessity of production of commodities of value or of capitalist production.
Communism in material production, anarchism in the intellectual. This is the type of the socialist productive system which will arise from the dominion of the proletariat or, in other words, out of the social revolution by the logic of economic facts whatever may be the wishes, ideas and theories of the proletariat.
THE PRELIMINARY PSYCHICAL CONDITIONS TO
THE DOMINION OF THE PROLETARIAT.
It will have occurred to very many readers that in this investigation I have spoken only of economic conditions. I have not investigated what are to be the ethical foundations of the new society, whether they shall rest upon Kantian or Spencerian, upon the categorical imperative, or whether the greatest good to the greatest number shall be the principal motive. I have not investigated which of the above theories shall constitute the juridical foundation, whether the right to the complete product of labor, or the right to existence, or some other one of the fundamental economic rights which the judicial socialists have discovered. No doubt laws and ethics will play a part in the