Fields, Factories, and Workshops Tomorrow

6. Colin Ward. Editor's Introduction (1985)

"We have already moved a long way from the expansive 1950s when our prophets were urging us to sever, at last, the connection between work and purchasing power. In those days Robert Theobald was demanding a "guaranteed annual income" to be paid to every American as a constitutional right, and John Kenneth Galbraith was arguing for what he called Cyclically Graduated Compensation - a dole which went up when the economy took a down-turn, so that people could go on spending, as Keynes before him urged, and consequently keep other people employed, and which went down when full employment was approached." ""One day", Galbraith forecast, "we shall remove the economic penalties and also the social stigma associated with involuntary unemployment. This will make the economy much easier to manage." But, he added in 1960, "we haven't done this yet".[7] Nor have we by the 1980s protesting as governments cut back on their token job creation schemes, when faced by the era of micro-processors."

"In a paper commissioned by the British Cabinet Office, Professor Tom Stonier of Bradford University declares that by early in the next century only 10% of the present labour force will be required to provide a technologically advanced society with all its material wants or needs.[8]

7. The self service economy. Dr Gershuny "...sees the decline of the service economy as accompanied by the emergence of a 'self'-service economy in the same way that the automatic washing machine in the home can be said to supercede the laundry industry. His American equivalent is Scott Burns, author of 'The Household Economy', with his claim that "America is going to be transformed by nothing more or less that the inevitable maturation and decline of the market economy. The instrument for this positive change will be the household - the family - revitalised as a powerful and relatively autonomous productive unit.[10]."

Break from the idea of employment.

"The only way to banish the spectre of unemployment is to break free from our enslavement to the idea of employment. The pre-industrial economy was, after all, a domestic economy, and the old American phrase for an employee, a 'hired man' carries with it the notion that he was something less than a free citizen, as does the old socialist definition of the working class as those with nothing to sell but their labour power. The very word 'employment' has only been used in its modern sense since the 1840s just as 'unemployment' in the sense in which we use it, is even more recent."

Evolution of labour

"We do need of course to remind ourselves that wage labour and even factory production existed before the industrial revolution. Adam Smith in the mid-18th century told readers of 'The Wealth of Nations' that in every part of Europe twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent, and he gave us the classic account of the division of labour. A centur after him, Marx concluded that the condition he called alienation resulted from the worker's loss of ownership of his skills, tools, products, time and space. Any account of the industrial revolution in this country tells how workers were driven by starvation to accept the disciplines of employment. For me, the classical description was that of J L and Barbara Hammond in their book 'The Town Labourer'. The home worker in domestic industry, they observed, "worked long hours, but they were his own hours; his wife and children worked, but they worked beside him, and there was no alien power over their lives; his house was stifling, but he could slip into his garden; he had spells of unemployment, but he could use them for cultivating cabbages. The forces that rules his fate were in a sense outside his daily life; they did not overshadow and envelop his home, his family, his movements and habits, his hours for work and his hours for food . . .""

8. Informal economies.

A list by Professor Pahl "...taking the options available to someone who wants to get a broken window repaired. He might:

Firstly, hire a glaier through the formal economy, paying him the full cost including his share of the overheads of the building firm and value-added tax.

Secondly, find someone nearby who is known to be able to ment windows and pay cash for the job, possibly thereby entering the Black Economy because he would not know whether such a person was declaring all his or her income, paying all his or her tax, or working in time alrady paid for by another employer.

Thirdly, he might ask a neighbour to do it within the communal economy, either in exchange for specific goods or services now or in the future, or as part of a broader ongoing relationship.

Or, ,fourthly, he might do the job himself in his own time with his own tools, within the household economy."

10. Formal and informal economy dependence

"The formal economy 'depends' on the informal economy, but the reverse is also true. The household economy depends on manufactured articles produced in the regular economy. So does the hidden economy of illicit sales, the communal economy of joint use of expensive equipment, or the enormous variety of sub-contracting which is combined in the finished and measurable product of the official economy."

18. Author's Preface. 1898

"It was eagerly discussed some fifty years ago under the names of 'harmonised labour', 'integral education', and so on. It was pointed out at that time that the greatest sum total of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually-varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only."

23. Chapter 1. The Decentralisation of Industries

24. "Dazzled with the results obtained by a century of marvellous inventions, especially in England, our economists and political men went still farther in their dreams of division of labour. They proclaimed the necessity of dividing the whole of humanity into national workshops having each of them its own speciality. We were taught, for instance, that Hungary and Russia are predestined by nature to grow corn in order to feed the manufacturing countries; that Britain had to provide the world-market with cottons, iron goods, and coal; Belgium with woollen cloth; and so on. Nay, within each nation, each region had to have its own speciality. So it has been for some time since; so it ought to remain. Fortunes have been made in this way, and will continue to be made in the same way. It being proclaimed that the wealth of nations is measured by the amount of profits made by the few, and that the largest profits are made by means of specialisation of labour, the question was not conceived to exist as to whether human beings 'would' always submit to such a specialisation; whether nations could be specialised like isolated workmen. The theory was good for today - why should we care for tomorrow? Tomorrow might bring its own theory!"

25. "Knowledge ignores artifical political boundaries."

28. "Let us turn a hundred years back. France lay bleeding at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Her young industry, which had begun to grow by the end of the eighteenth century, was crushed down. Germany, Italy were powerless in the industrial field. The armies of the great Republic had struck a mortal blow to serfdom on the Continent; but with the return of reaction efforts were made to revive the decaying institution, and serfdom meant no industry worth speaking of. The terrible wars between France and England, which wars are often explained by merely political causes, had a much deeper meaning - an economical meaning. They were wars for the supremacy [p29] on the world market, wars against French industry and commerce, supported by a strong navy which France had begun to build - and Britain won the battle. She became supreme on the seas. Bordeaux was no more a rival to London; as to the French industries, they seemed to be killed in the bud. And, aided by the powerful impulse given to natural sciences and technology by a great era of inventions, finding no serious competitors in Europe, Britain began to develop her manufactures. To produce on a large scale in immense quantities became the watchword. The necessary human forces were at hand in the peasantry, partly driven by force from the land, partly attracted to the cities by high wages. The necessary machinery was created, and the British production of manufactured goods went on at a gigantic pace. In the course of less than seventy years - from 1810 to 1878 - the output of coal grew from 10 to 133,000,000 tons; the imports of raw materials rose from 30 to 380,000,000 tons; the exports of manufactured goods from 46 to 200,000,000 pounds. The tonnage of the commercial fleet was nearly trebled. Fifteen thousand miles of railways were built.

        It is useless to repeat now at what a cost the above results were achieved. The terrible revelations of the parliamentary commissions of 1840-2 as to the atrocious condition of the manufacturing classes, the tales of 'cleared estates', and kidnapped children are still fresh in the memory. They will remain standing monuments for showing by what means the great industry was implanted in this country. But the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the privileged classes was going on at a speed never dreamed of before. The incredible riches which now astonish the foreigner in the private houses of England were accumulated during that period; the exceedingly expensive standard of life which makes a person considered rich on the Continent appear as only a modest means in Britain was introduced during that time. The taxed property alone doubled during the last thirty years of the above period, while during the same years (1810-78) no less than P1,112,000,000 - nearly P2,000,000,000 by this time - was invested by English capitalists either in foreign industries or in foreign loans."

30. "But the monopoly of industrial production could not remain with England for ever. Neither industrial knowledge nor enterprise could be kept for ever as a privilege of these islands. Necessarily, fatally, they began to cross the Channel and spread over the Continent. The Great Revolution had created in France a numerous class of peasant proprietors, who enjoyed nearly half a century of comparative well-being, or, at least, of a guaranteed labour. The ranks of homeless town workers increased slowly. But the middle-class revolution of 1789-93 had already made a distinction between the peasant householders and the village 'proletaires', and by favouring the former to the detriment of the latter, it compelled the labourers who had no household nor land to abandon their vilalges, and thus to form the first nucleus of working classes given up to the emrcy of manufacturers. Moreover, the peasant-proprietors themselves, after having enjoyed a period of undeniable prosperity, began in their turn to feel the pressure of bad times, and their children were compelled to look for employment in manufactures. Wars and revolution had checked the growth of industry; but it began to gow again during the second half of our century; it developed, it improved; and now, notwithstanding the loss of Alsace, France is no longer the tributary to England for manufactured produce which she was sixty years ago. Today her exports of manufacture goods are valued at nearly one-half of those of Great Britain, and two-thirds of them are textiles; while her imports of the same consist chiefly of the finer sorts of cotton and woolen yarn - partly re-exported as stuffs - and a small quantity of woollen goods. For her own consumption France shows a decided tendency towards becoming entirely a self-supporting country, and for the sale of her manufactured goods she is tending to rely, not on her colonies, but especially on her own wealthy home market."

Germany.

"Germany follows the same lines. During the last fifty years, and especially since the last war, her industry has undergone a thorough reorganisation. Her population having rapidly increased from 40 to 60,000,000, this increment went entirely to increase the urban population - without taking hands from agriculture - and in the cities it went to increas the population [p31] engaged in industry. Her industrial machinery has been thoroughly improved, and her new-born manufacturers are supplied now with a machinery which mostly represents the last word of technical progress. She has plenty of workmen and technologists endowed with a superior technical and scientific education; and in an army of learned chemists, physicists and engineers her industry has a most powerful and intelligent aid, both for directly improving it and for spreading in the country serious scientific and technical knowledge. As a whole, Germany offers now the spectacle of a nation in a period of 'Aufschwung', of a sudden development, with all the forces of a new start in every domain of life. Fifty years ago she was a customer to England. Now she is already a competitor in the European and Asiatic markets, and at the present sspeedy rate of growth of her industries, her competition will soon be felt even more acutely than it is already felt."

31. Technical distribution pattern in 19th century Europe.

"At the same time the wave of industrial production, after having had its origin in the north-west of Europe, spreads towards the east and south-east, always covering a wider circle. And, in properotion as it advances east, and penetrates into younger countries, it implants there all the improvements due to a century of mechanical and chemical inventions; it borows from science all the help that science can give to industry; and it finds populations eager to graph the last results of modern knowledge. The new manufactures of Germany begin where Manchester arrived after a century of experiments and groping; and Russia begins where Manchester and Saxony have now reached. Russia, in her turn, tries to emancipate herself from her dependency upon Western Europe, and rapidly begins to manufacture all those goods she formerly used to import, either from Britain or from Germany."

40. "Each region will become its own producer and its own consumer of manufactured goods. But that unavoidably implies that, at the same time, ti will be its own producer and consumer of agricultural produce..."

41. Editor's Appendix

"That this [national specialization] is all for the best is explained by the argument that this international division of labour results in a country getting otherwise unobtainable goods, getting more of them, and getting them more cheaply, and that in consequence total production will increase cumulatively. [as David Richardo believed]

        Kropotkin rejected this approach, declaring that 'integration' rather than 'division' of labour is the characteristic of the future economy. He was addressing himself primarily to a British audience which assumed that Britain was the workshop of the world, and that for ever more the world would depend on textiles from Lancashire, coal from Newcastle, and ships from the Clyde. In an age when the word 'textiles' brings to mind Hong Kong, 'fuel' means various sheikdoms in the Middle East, and 'shipping' reminds us that the European country producing the biggest tonnage is Spain, we may be more ready to question traditional assumptions.

        In 1938 the United Kingdom and Germany were the world's leading exporters, each with about 22 per cent by value of manufactured goods exported. Today the United Kingdom share is about 10 per cent. J. M. Livingstone emphasises that this is not simply the effect of the Second World War on the economy: 'In every year, except 1935, Britain had a deficit on current account, and this had to be met by accepting increasing indebtedness and the gradual liquidation of overseas assets. The war accelerated the process, but there is no doubt that the British economy would eventually have found itself in much the same position as it did in the early 1940s. The war merely brought the crisis forward by a decade or two.'[1]

43. Car Industry.

"The ghost of Kropotkin would point to the existence of a thriving Australian car industry (an American subsidiary, admittedly) or to the Indian car industry (based on obsolescent British machine tools and die castings, but bringing the inestimable advantage of locally available spares), to illustrate his prediction of production for a 'local' market. He might, with more relevance, point to the fact that the output of the car industry depends upon artificial stimulation of demand and on aritifical obsolescence. Doubling the useful life of a vehicle would ruin the industry because it would cancel out the assumed advantages of widening the potential market. Henry Ford nearly bankrupted his firm by his insistence on continuing production of his Model T which 'any hick up a dirt road could keep running'."

Vehicle inefficiency.

"Its demands on non-renewable resources are fantastic; vast quantities of energy and of water are absorbed in its manufacture; provision for it, n roads, in fossil fuels and human lives, is exorbitant; it is a major polluter. Sir Herbert Manzoni, the late City Engineer of Birmingham (in which capacity he carved up that city to keep the traffic flowing), remarked that 'it is probably the most wasteful and uneconomic contrivance which has yet appeared among our personal possessions. The average passenger-load of motor cars in our streets is certainly less than two persons, and in terms of transportable load some 400 cubic feet of vehicle weighing over 1 ton is used to convey 4 cubic feet of humanity weighing about 2 hundredweight, the ratio being about 10 to 1 in weight and 100 to 1 in bulk. The economics as 'a science devoted to the study of the needs of men and of the means of satisfying them with the least possible waste of energy', would have been dumbfounded by the profligate waste of resources in our mass-market industries. His only question (as ours) would be: 'How long can it last?'"

44. Some contemporary observers see Kropotkin's world-wide distribution of industry coming true simply through capital's search for cheap labour: [quoting from David Hamilton, 'Technology, Man and the Environment. 1973)]

'As wages rise in the rich countries, pushing up the manufacturer's costs, the industries on which these countries built their technological structure - textiles, agriculture, iron- and steel-making, and ship-building among them - are gradually being transferred tot he poorer countries where manufacturers can pay their staff lower wages. The mass-production industries, such as cars, plastics and washing machines, will be the next to go. Moreover, the search for fuels and materials is spreading into the hitherto unexplored or unexploited parts of the world. As the rich nations deplete or exhaust their reserves, the developing countries that possess them in plenty will command a better bargaining position as supplies of raw materials. This of itelf will enforce a new relationship between the two.'"

45. "Dr. Schumacher identified the economic needs of the poor countries thus:

''First', that workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.

'Second', that these workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough to be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports.

'Third', that the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimised, not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organisation, raw-material supply,financing, marketing, and so forth.

'Fourth', that production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.' [9. E. F. Schumacher, 'Social and Economic Problems Calling for the Development of Intermediate Technology' (Intermediate Technology Development Group, 1967)]

The progressive distribution of industry

160. "In the 1950s, Professor S. R. Dennison made the same discovery, declaring that the relief that modern industry 'inevitably' leads to larger units of production was a Marxist fallacy:

'Over a wide range of industry the productive efficiency of small units was at least equal to, and in some cases surpassed that of the industrial giants. About 92 per cent of the businesses in the United Kingdom employed fewer than 250 people and were responsible for by far the greater part of the total national production. The position in the United States was about the same.'"

161. "The international co-ordination, without central control, of railways was one of Kropotkin's standard arguments for the success of non-hierarchical federation. Paul Goodman noted that: 'It is just such a situation that Kropotkin points to as an argument for anarchism - the example he uses is the rail-road-network of Europe, laid down and run to perfection with no plan imposed from above.' I suspect that he is wrong about the motor industry. We know, from the much-publicised experience of Volvo, that manufacturers in the interests of 'job enlargement' find it perfectly feasible to abandon the giant assembly-line in favour of small working groups. We know too that, in Colin Buchanan's words, 'two-thirds of the factory value of a car is represented by components brought by the actual manufacturer from 'outside suppliers'. Brake drums, water pumps, oil seals, fuses, gaskets, connection rods, dynamos, petrol tanks, shock absorbers, carburettors, ball bearings, axles, cam-shafts, road springs and a couple hundred other items in car assembly are in fact made by a very large number of specialist firms scattered all over the country.'[7. 'Mixed Blessing: The Motor in Britain' 1958]"

162. "...Gerald Newbould concludes in his book, 'Management and Merger Activity', that while the declared aims of mergers and take-overs [beginning in the late 1960s] was industrial efficiency, the real objects were the creation or reinforcement of market dominance or defence against competitors.[10]

        A growing number of such mergers are, of course, sheer financial piracy: the activity known as asset-stripping, when a company is acquired with the intention of making a profit, not from its productive activities, but by closing it down and selling off its assets - real property and capital goods. This certainly affects any attempt to draw contemporary conclusions from Kropotkin's analysis. In a debate in the House of Commons on the subject, Mr Arthur Blenkinsop said: "In 1960, 100 of our largest firms were responsible for 22 per cent of the nation's net industrial assets. By 1970 there had been a dramatic change, and the 100 largest firms were responsible for 50 per cent of our industrial assets. That is a much heavier concentration than that in the United States of America.' In the same debate, Mr. T. H. Skeet remarked: 'In 1949 the top ten companies accounted for 25 per cent of pre-taxed profits of all British industrial and commercialcompanies. By 1969 the figure was about 50 per cent. Therefore, the concentration had doubled in twenty years. . . . The Bolton Report also indicated that small firms, as a share of manufacturing output, accounted in 1924 for 42 per cent and in 1951 for 32 per cent, and that in 1968 the figure had gone down to 25 per cent."[11. House of Commons debate on 24 November 1972 on 'Take-overs and Mergers', Parlamentary Debates, Vol. 846, No. 19]

165. The Garden Cities Association. "On one side, we have a stream of advocates of decentralist planning: Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford, who have had some influence on official policy. But on the other, we have the 'natural' movements of capital and labour which have contradicted the trends which he predicted. Howard's immensely inventive and influential book was first published under the title 'Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform' in the same year as Kropotkin's book. When it was re-issued as 'Garden Cities of Tomorrow' in 1902, Howard made use of Kropotkin's findings.[17] His disciples, from Thomas Adams,[18] first Secretary of the Garden Cities Association (later the T.C.P.A.), through Lewis Mumford,[19] to Paul and Percival Goodman,[20] have acknowledged the fertile influence of Kropotkin's work. Howard's book was a creative synthesis of decentralist ideas which, as Mumford declared, ay the foundation 'for a new cycle in urban civilisation: one in which the means of life will be subservient to the purposes of living, and in which the pattern needed for biological survival and economic efficiency will likewise lead to social and personal fulfilment'."

166. The increase of urbanism. "'In 1850 there were four cities of the world with more than one million people. In 1950 there were about a hundred cities with a million or more population. By 2000 - less than three decades away - there will be over 1,000 cities of this magnitude."

Supporters of Village Industry

"The urgency of the task of developing industry on a village scale has been stressed in India by Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan, and in Africa by Julius Nyerere.[27] It was the intention behind the experiments sponsored by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst of Dartington Hall,[28] and is brilliantly expressed in E. F. Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful',[29 a book which marvellously complements Kropotkin's work."

188. The prophecy of choice.

"There is a well-known passage in Marx's 'German Ideology' in which he envisages the abolition of the division of labour in a Communist society where, since 'nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, production as a whole is regulated by society, thus making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner. . . .' Kropotkin too wanted the 'moral and physical advantages which man would derive from dividing his work between the field and the workshop'."

But the opposite has happened.

"Studying the combination of farm-work and factory-work in Belgium, Rene Dumont concluded that 'the part-time farmer leads a life of virtual slavery'[1] precisely because the farmers he met did their work 'after' an eight-hour day in a factory. Kropotkin's vision has shrunk to a footnote from Peter Self and H. S. Storing: 'As a spare-time activity, it should be repeated, the importance of small-scale farming, in conjunction with employment in decentralised industries, may well grow.'[2] The nearest thing to Kropotkin's industrial villages are the Chinese communes. J. K. Galbraith stresses their significance for the countries of the Third World:

'Hsu Hang Commune has 20,500 inhabitants and roughly 4,200 acres of land, all irrigated. This is no great amount of land - less than an irrigated acre per family. The crops are grain (2 crops of rice a year, plus 1 of wheat), cotton, hogs, and a variety of factory enterprises. . . . The families we visited, in addition to private, tiny vegetable plots, also each had their personal pig. Then we went to the factories. These, including some we did not see, make elementary treshing machines, furniture, basket-ware, boxes, light bulbs, chemicals and steel pipe. The factories are small - at most a few dozen workers in those we saw - and there is not much attempt at line production. Men and women are mostly either making a whole item or a substantial component. Still, they are serious operations - not a show. The justification is not efficiency but the employment of labour that would otherwise have little to do - technically it is the Chinese answer to one of the greatest problems of rural Asia, that of recurrent and disguised unemployment.'[3]"

189. The increase of work hours.

"What would have amazed Kropotkin most about changes in Western industry, just as it would have amazed a dozen other prophets who, as a result of the same kind of careful analysis, predicted the three-hour day, the three-day week, or the three-week month, is that working hours have scarcely diminished. In Britain, although the unions were demanding an eight-hour day eighty years ago, a report issued in 1971 found factories with a twelve-hour shift system in which employees were working a seventy-two hour week. It found that more than 250,000 men in the country were working more than seventy hours a week, and that whereas the standard working week has dropped to forty hours, overtime has increased. An overwhelming majority of the workers interviewed said that they preferred more money to more leisure. In the United States the number of people working more than forty-eight hours a week rose from 13 per cent of the work force in 1948 to 20 per cent in 1965, while the number of people who were moonlighting, or holding more than one job, has doubled since 1950. The reason, of course, is not that people prefer work to leisure, but that in order to enjoy their leisure they feel the need to earn more, and consequently to work longer. Or it may be just to get the money to pay the rent."

Increase of specialization of brain and manual work.

"In both manufacturing and service industries the intellectual content of most jobs has been systematically reduced so that most jobs require neither skill nor training, neither ingeenuity nor creativity, merely the ability to 'switch off' until clocking-out time. The people who do have creative or rewarding jobs, far from taking their share of routine chores, demand assistants, ancillaries, auxiliaries - minions in fact - to relieve them of the brainless aspects of the work."

190. Of Education.

Kropotkin "...hoped, one might say, to give the industrial worker a theoretical grounding in his trade so that he comprehends the principles behind the operations he performs, and to give the scientist a taste of practical craftsmanship, with the aim that their their two functions might become interchangeable. Now in fact, in the history of technical education in Britain, there has been a tradition of lone voices, from Lyon Playfair to Lord Eustace Percy, who, like Kropotkin, urged an 'integral' education. This was in fact the basis of the polytechnic ideal, though the academics who run our polytechnics probably never knew it. For in practice there has been, as Stephen Cotgrove said, a conflict 'between the needs of an industrial society for a scientific and technological elite, and the ideals of a liberal education derived from a society in which such an education was appropriate for a predominantly governing and administrative elite'.[6]"

198. "Either you must stand in the ranks of the peasants and the artisans who, whatsoever economists and moralists may promise them in the future, are now periodically doomed to starve after each bad crop or during their strikes, and to be shot down by their own sons the moment they lose patience. Or you must train your faculties so as to be a military commander of the masses, or to be accepted as one of the wheels of the governing machinery of the state, or to become a manager of men in commerce or industry.' For many centuries there was no other choice, and men followed that advice, without finding in it happiness, either for themselves and their own children, or for those whom they pretended to preserve from worse misfortunes.

        But modern knowledge has another issue to offer to thinking men. It tells them that in order to be rich they need not take the bread from the mouths of others; but that the more rational outcome would be a society in which men, with the work of their own hands and intelligence, and by the aid of the machinery already invented and to be invented, should themselves create all imaginable riches. Technics and science will not be lagging behind if production takes such a direction. Guided by observation, analysis and experiment, they will answer all possible demands. They will reduce the time which is necessary for producing wealth to any desired amount, so as to leave to everyone as much leisure as he or she may ask for. They surely cannot guarantee happiness, because happiness depends as much, or even more, upon the individual himself as upon his surroundings. But they guarantee, at least, the happiness that can be found in the full and varied exercise of the different capacities of the human being, in work that need not be overwork, and in the consciousness that one is not endeavoring to base his own happiness upon the misery of others."

201. Editor's Postscript. "Kropotkin sought a society which combined labour-intensive agriculture and small-scale industry, both producing for local needs, in a decentralised pattern of settlement in which the division of labour had been replaced by the integration of brain-work and manual work, and he was optimistic enough that trends current in his day were leading to this kind of society. His picture of the future appealed to his felow anarchists as the kind of economic structure which would suit a worker-controlled federation of self-governing workshops and rural communes. It appealed to the ideologists of decentralist planning like Howard, Geddes and Mumford. It appealed to the advocates of small-holdings: those who wanted to see a highly productive intensive horticulture provide a good living for a new kind of sophisticated peasantry."

Ward mentions three examples similar to Kropotkin's ideal. China, Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, and the 'kibbutz'.

203. Edward Goldsmith. 'Blueprint for Survival'. "They present a long-term time-table for change, covering the years of 1975-2075, anticipating by the middle of the next century, 'sufficient diversity of agriculture, decentralisation of industry and redistribution of government, together with a large proportion of people whose education is designed for life in the stable society, for the establishment of self-sufficient, self-regulating communities to be well-advanced'."

"...even forthright opponentfs of the 'Blueprint', like Peter Self, urge a switch of priorities along the following lines:

'More Stress On'                        'Less Stress On'

Intrinsic satisfaction of work        Maximum consumption

Durable artifacts                Rapid turnover

Craft apprenticeship                Activity rates

Quality of environment                Increases in G.N.P.

Balanced community                Physical mobility

Devolution of government        (Alleged) economies of scale

These too reflect Kropotkin's programme, but, as Professor Self asks, when are such ideas to find a place in 'actual' programmes? All the current trends of government and industry are in the opposite direction."

204. "In December 1919, at the very end of his life, in the midst of the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, he [Kropotkin] wrote:

'Today, however, after the cruel lesson of the last war, it should be clear to every serious person and above all to every worker, that such wars, and even crueller ones still, 'are inevitable so long as certain countries consider themselves', so that these countries provide the raw materials while 'they accumulate wealth themselves on the basis of the labour of others'.

        'More than that. We have the right to assert that the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis will be impossible so long as manufacturing industry and, in consequence, the prosperity of the workers in the factories, depend as they do today on the exploitation of the peasants of their own or other countries.

        'We should not forget that at the moment it is not only the capitalists who exploit the labour of others and who are "imperialists". They are not only ones who aspire to conquer cheap manpower to obtain raw materials in Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. As the workers are beginning to take part in political power, the contagion of colonial imperialism is infecting them too. . . . It is clear that in these conditions one may still predict a series of wars for the civilised countries - wars even more bloody and even more savage - if these countries do not bring about among themselves a social revolution, and do not reconstruct their lives on a new and more social basis. All Europe and the United States, with the exception of the exploiting minority, feels this necessity.

        'But it is impossible to achieve such a revolution by means of dictatorship and state power. Without a widespread reconstruction coming from below - put into practice by the workers and peasants themselves - the social revolution is condemned to bankruptcy. The Russian Revolution has confirmed this again, and we must hope that this lesson will be understood; that everywhere in Europe and America serious efforts will be made to create within the working class - peasants, workers and intellectuals - the personnel of a future revolution which will not obey orders from above but will be capable of elaborating for itself the free forms of the whole new economic life.'[4. Peter Kropotkin, postscript to Russian edition of 'Words of a Rebel' (Petrograd and Moscow, 1921); translated by Nicolas Walter in 'Freedom', Anarchist Pamphlet No. 5 (London, Freedom Press, 1970)"

----

36. Cotton

"There was a time when this country had almost the monopoly in cotton industries; but already in 1880 she possessed only 55 percent of all the spindles at work in Europe, the United States and India and a little more than one-half of the looms. In 1893 the proportion was further reduced to 49 per cent of the spindles, and now the United Kingdom has only 41 per cent of all the spindles." "It was quite natural that France, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, Japan, the United States, and even Mexico and Brazil, should begin to spin their own yarns and to weave their own cotton stuffs."

Metal

"What has happened with regard to cottons is going on also with regard to other industries. Great Britain, which stood in 1880 at the head of the list of countries producing pig-iron, came in 1904 the third in the same list, which was headed by the United States and Germany; while Russia, which occupied the seventh place in 1880, comes now fourth, after Great Britain."

Wool

"Britain and Belgium have no longer the monopoly of the woollen trade. Immense factories at Verviers are silent; the Belgian weavers are misery-striken, while Germany yearly increases her production of woollens, and exports nine times more woolens than Belgium. Austria has her own woolens and exports them; Riga, Lodz and Moscow supply Russia with fine woolen cloths; and the growth of the woollen industry in each of the last-named countries calls into existence hundreds of connected trades."

37. Silk

"For many years France has had the monopoly of the silk trade. Silkworms being reared in Southern France, it was quite natural that Lyons should grow into a centre for the manufacture of silks. Spinning, domestic weaving, and dyeing works developed to a great extent. But eventually the industry took such an extension that home supplies of raw silk became insufficient, and raw silk was imported from Italy, Spain and Southern Austria, Asia Minor [Turkey], the Caucasus and Japan, to the amount of from P9,000,000 to P11,000,000 in 1875 and 1876, while France had only P800,000 worth of her own silk. Thousands of peasant boys and girls were attracted by high wages to Lyons and the neighbouring district; the industry was prosperous.

        However, by-and-by new centres of silk trade grew up at Basel and in the peasant houses round Zurich. French emigrants imported the trade into Switzerland, and it developed there, especially after the civil war of 1871. Then the Caucasus administration invited French workmen and women from Lyons and Marseilles to teach the Georgians and the Russians the best means of rearing the silkworm, as well as the whole of the silk trade; and Stavropol became a new centre for silkweaving. Austria and the United States did the same; and what are now the ressults?

        During the years 1872-81 Switzerland more than doubled the produce of her silk industry; Italy and Germany increased it by one-third; and the Lyons region, which formerly manufactured to the value of 454 million francs a year, showed in 1887 a return of only 378 millions. And it is reckoned by French specialists that at present no less than one-third of the silk stuffs used in France are imported from Zurich, Crefeld and Barmen. Nay, even Italy, which has now 191,000 pesons engaged in the industry, sends her silks to France and competes with Lyons."

Other examples

"Greenock no longer supplies Russia with sugar, because Russia has plenty of her own at the same price as it sells at in England. The watch trade is no more a speciality of Switzerland: watches are now made everywhere. India extracts from her 90 collieries two-thirds of her annual consumption of coal. The chemical trade which grew up on the banks of the Clyde and Tyne, owing to the special advantages offered for the import of Spanish pyrites and the agglomeration of such a variety of industries along the two estuaries, is now in decay. Spain, with the help of English capital, is beginning to utilise her own pyrites for herself; and Germany has become a great centre for the manufacture of sulphuric acid and soda - nay, she already complains about over-production."