Proposed Roads to Freedom by Bertrand Russell (mobile ebook reader TXT) 📖

liberation. Marriage should be a free, spontaneous meeting of mutual instinct, filled with happiness not unmixed with a feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of respect of each for the other that makes even the most trifling interference with liberty an utter impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep horror. It is not so that marriage is conceived by lawyers who make settlements, or by priests who give the name of ``sacrament'' to an institution which pretends to find something sanctifiable in the brutal lusts or drunken cruelties of a legal husband. It is not in a spirit of freedom that marriage is conceived by most men and women at present: the law makes it an opportunity for indulgence of the desire to interfere, where each submits to some loss of his or her own liberty, for the pleasure of curtailing the liberty of the other. And the atmosphere of private property makes it more difficult than it otherwise would be for any better ideal to take root.

It is not so that human relations will be conceived when the evil heritage of economic slavery has ceased to mold our instincts. Husbands and wives, parents and children, will be only held together by affection: where that has died, it will be recognized that nothing worth preserving is left. Because affection will be free, men and women will not find in private life an outlet and stimulus to the love of domineering, but all that is creative in their love will have the freer scope. Reverence for whatever makes the soul in those who are loved will be less rare than it is now: nowadays, many men love their wives in the way in which they love mutton, as something to devour and destroy. But in the love that goes with reverence there is a joy of quite another order than any to be found by mastery, a joy which satisfies the spirit and not only the instincts; and satisfaction of instinct and spirit at once is necessary to a happy life, or indeed to any existence that is to bring out the best impulses of which a man or woman is capable.

In the world which we should wish to see, there will be more joy of life than in the drab tragedy of modern every-day existence. After early youth, as things are, most men are bowed down by forethought, no longer capable of light-hearted gaiety, but only of a kind of solemn jollification by the clock at the appropriate hours. The advice to ``become as little children'' would be good for many people in many respects, but it goes with another precept, ``take no thought for the morrow,'' which is hard to obey in a competitive world. There is often in men of science, even when they are quite old, something of the simplicity of a child: their absorption in abstract thought has held them aloof from the world, and respect for their work has led the world to keep them alive in spite of their innocence. Such men have succeeded in living as all men ought to be able to live; but as things are, the economic struggle makes their way of life impossible for the great majority.

What are we to say, lastly, of the effect of our projected world upon physical evil? Will there be less illness than there is at present? Will the produce of a given amount of labor be greater? Or will population press upon the limits of subsistence, as Malthus taught in order to refute Godwin's optimism?

I think the answer to all these questions turns, in the end, upon the degree of intellectual vigor to be expected in a community which has done away with the spur of economic competition. Will men in such a world become lazy and apathetic? Will they cease to think? Will those who do think find themselves confronted with an even more impenetrable wall of unreflecting conservatism than that which confronts them at present? These are important questions; for it is ultimately to science that mankind must look for their success in combating physical evils.

If the other conditions that we have postulated can be realized, it seems almost certain that there must be less illness than there is at present. Population will no longer be congested in slums; children will have far more of fresh air and open country; the hours of work will be only such as are wholesome, not excessive and exhausting as they are at present.

As for the progress of science, that depends very largely upon the degree of intellectual liberty existing in the new society. If all science is organized and supervised by the State, it will rapidly become stereotyped and dead. Fundamental advances will not be made, because, until they have been made, they will seem too doubtful to warrant the expenditure of public money upon them. Authority will be in the hands of the old, especially of men who have achieved scientific eminence; such men will be hostile to those among the young who do not flatter them by agreeing with their theories. Under a bureaucratic State Socialism it is to be feared that science would soon cease to be progressive and acquired a medieval respect for authority.

But under a freer system, which would enable all kinds of groups to employ as many men of science as they chose, and would allow the ``vagabond's wage'' to those who desired to pursue some study so new as to be wholly unrecognized, there is every reason to think that science would flourish as it has never done hitherto.[61] And, if that were the case, I do not believe that any other obstacle would exist to the physical possibility of our system.

[61] See the discussion of this question in the preceding chapter.

The question of the number of hours of work necessary to produce general material comfort is partly technical, partly one of organization. We may assume that there would no longer be unproductive labor spent on armaments, national defense, advertisements, costly luxuries for the very rich, or any of the other futilities incidental to our competitive system. If each industrial guild secured for a term of years the advantages, or part of the advantages, of any new invention or methods which it introduced, it is pretty certain that every encouragement would be given to technical progress. The life of a discoverer or inventor is in itself agreeable: those who adopt it, as things are now, are seldom much actuated by economic motives, but rather by the interest of the work together with the hope of honor; and these motives would operate more widely than they do now, since fewer people would be prevented from obeying them by economic necessities. And there is no doubt that intellect would work more keenly and creatively in a world where instinct was less thwarted, where the joy of life was greater, and where consequently there would be more vitality in men than there is at present.

There remains the population question, which, ever since the time of Malthus, has been the last refuge of those to whom the possibility of a better world is disagreeable. But this question is now a very different one from what it was a hundred years ago. The decline of the birth-rate in all civilized countries, which is pretty certain to continue, whatever economic system is adopted, suggests that, especially when the probable effects of the war are taken into account, the population of Western Europe is not likely to increase very much beyond its present level, and that of America is likely only to increase through immigration. Negroes may continue to increase in the tropics, but are not likely to be a serious menace to the white inhabitants of temperate regions. There remains, of course, the Yellow Peril; but by the time that begins to be serious it is quite likely that the birth-rate will also have begun to decline among the races of Asia If not, there are other means of dealing with this question; and in any case the whole matter is too conjectural to be set up seriously as a bar to our hopes. I conclude that, though no certain forecast is possible, there is not any valid reason for regarding the possible increase of population as a serious obstacle to Socialism.

Our discussion has led us to the belief that the communal ownership of land and capital, which constitutes the characteristic doctrine of Socialism and Anarchist Communism, is a necessary step toward the removal of the evils from which the world suffers at present and the creation of such a society as any humane man must wish to see realized. But, though a necessary step, Socialism alone is by no means sufficient. There are various forms of Socialism: the form in which the State is the employer, and all who work receive wages from it, involves dangers of tyranny and interference with progress which would make it, if possible, even worse than the present regime. On the other hand, Anarchism, which avoids the dangers of State Socialism, has dangers and difficulties of its own, which make it probable that, within any reasonable period of time, it could not last long even if it were established. Nevertheless, it remains an ideal to which we should wish to approach as nearly as possible, and which, in some distant age, we hope may be reached completely. Syndicalism shares many of the defects of Anarchism, and, like it, would prove unstable, since the need of a central government would make itself felt almost at once.

The system we have advocated is a form of Guild Socialism, leaning more, perhaps, towards Anarchism than the official Guildsman would wholly approve. It is in the matters that politicians usually ignore— science and art, human relations, and the joy of life —that Anarchism is strongest, and it is chiefly for the sake of these things that we included such more or less Anarchist proposals as the ``vagabond's wage.'' It is by its effects outside economics and politics, at least as much as by effects inside them, that a social system should be judged. And if Socialism ever comes, it is only likely to prove beneficent if non- economic goods are valued and consciously pursued.

The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others. It must be a world in which affection has free play, in which love is purged of the instinct for domination, in which cruelty and envy have been dispelled by happiness and the unfettered development of all the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights. Such a world is possible; it waits only for men to wish to create it.

Meantime, the world in which we exist has other aims. But it will pass away, burned up in the fire of its own hot passions; and from its ashes will spring a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, with the light of morning in its eyes.

INDEX

Academy, Royal, 107 Africa, 149, 165 Agriculture, 90 ff. Alexander II, 43 Allemane, 60 America, xi, 31, 74 ff., 125, 140, 210 American Federation of Labor, 76 Anarchism, passim— defined, 33 and law, 33, 51, 111 ff., 198 ff. and violence, 33, 52-4, 72, 121 ff. and distribution, 93 ff. and wages, 96 ff. anti-German, 46 attitude to syndicalism, 79 congress in Amsterdam, 79 Ants, 152 Army, private, 120, 123 Art, 109, 111, 138, 166 ff., 203 and appreciation, 169, 181-6 and commercialism, 181 and freedom, 182 Artists, 103 under State Socialism, 174 Asia, 149, 158, 210 Australia, 151 Authors, Guild of, 179 Autonomy, 133, 137, 160

Backwoods, 133 Bakunin, x, 3649 biography, 3747 writings, 4749 and Marx, 38 ff., 59 n. and Pan-Slavism, 41, 45 and Dresden insurrection, 41 imprisonments, 41 anti-German, 45 and production, 50 Bebel, 66 Benbow, William, 71 n. Bergson, 68 Bernstein, 27-29, 56 Bevington, 53 Bismarck, 30 Books under Socialism, 178 Bornstedt, 39 Bourgeoisie, 11 Bourses du Travail, 54, 63 Boycott, 68 Briand, 72 Bright, 21 Brooks, John Graham, 75, 77n. Brousse, Paul, 60 Bureaucracy, 128, 174 Button-hooks, 182

Cafiero, 48n.
Capital, 6, 10, 18-25
Capitalism, 2, 202
 and war, 139 ff.

California, 181
Censor of plays, 107
Champion, 91
Charlton, Broughton, 19
Chewing-gum, 189
China, 137, 140
Christ, 187
Chuang Tzu, 33
Churches, 201
Civil Service, 128
Class war, xvi, 9 ff., 27, 29, 81,
 66, 116 149
Clemenceau, 71
Cobden, 21
Cole, G. I). H., 89n., 63, 64n.,
 73, 76, 81n., 134, 190
Communism, 10 ff.
 anarchist, 1, 38ff., 60, 96n.,
 100n., 106n.
Communist Manifesto, 5, 9-18,
114, 148
Competitiveness, 160
Concentration of Capital, Law
 of, 8, 23-5
Confederation General du
 Travail, 63-65, 71, 74
Conquest of Bread, The, 80, 87
Constantine, 108, 187
Creativeness, 186-7
Crime, 118 ff.
Cultivation, intensive, 89
Cultures maraicheres, 91

Darwin, 173
Deleon, 76
Democracy, 2, 30, 129 ff., 148, 167
Deutche Jahrbuscher, 38
Devolution, 200
Disarmament, 153
Disraeli, 30
Distribution, 99 ff.
Dubois, Felix, 62
Duelling, 123

Education, 169 ff., 189, 193, 196 Edward VI, 22 Empire Knouto-Germanique, 48 Engels, 3, 6, 17, 38 Envy, 160-169 Evils— physical, 188, 207-11 of character, 188, ~2-07 of power, 188 ff. Evolution,