Second Series. WHY I AM A COMMUNIST. BY WILLIAM MORRIS. WHY I AM AN EXPROPRIATIONIST. By L.S. BEVINGTON. The Why I Ams. LONDON: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY JAMES TOCHATTI, “LIBERTY” PRESS. 1894.PRICE ONE PENNY.

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WHY I AM A COMMUNIST.

BY WILLIAM MORRIS.

Objection has been made to the use of the word “Communism” to express fully-developed Socialism, on the ground that it has been used for the Community-Building, which played so great a part in some of the phases of Utopian Socialism, and is still heard of from time to time nowadays. Of Communism in this sense I am not writing now; it may merely be said in passing that such experiments are of their nature non-progressive; at their best they are but another form of the Mediæval monastery, withdrawals from the Society of the day, really implying hopelessness of a general change; which is only attainable by the development of Society as it is; by the development of the consequences of its faults and anomalies, as well as of what germ of real Society it contains.

This point of mistaken nomenclature being cleared off, it remains to ask what real Communism is, and the answer is simple: it is a state of Society the essence of which is Practical Equality of condition. Practical, i.e., equality as modified by the desires, and capacity for enjoyment of its various members. This is its economical basis; its ethical basis is the habitual and full recognition of man as a social being, so that it brings about the habit of making no distinction between the common welfare and the welfare of the individual.

I am a Communist, therefore, because—1st, it seems to me that mankind is not thinkable outside of Society; and 2ndly, because there is no other basis, economical and ethical, save that above stated, on which a true Society can be formed; any other basis makes waste and unnecessary suffering an essential part of the system. In short I can see no other system under which men can live together except these two, Slavery and Equality.

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The first of these two says, some standard of worth having been determined (of course not as a result of the immediate agreement of men living under such and such a system, but of the long development of many centuries) those who have attained to that standard are the masters of those who have not so attained, and live as well as surrounding circumstances, together with a quasi-equitable arrangement amongst the worthy, will allow them, by using those who have not come up to the standard above mentioned: in the dealings between the worthy with the non-worthy there is no attempt at any equitable arrangement (I was going to say no pretence, but at the present day that would not be quite true); the worthy use their advantage to the utmost, and it is a recognized assumption that the non-worthy are in a state of permanent inferiority, and their well-doing or ill-doing must be looked at from quite a different point of view from that of the worthy. For instance at the present day, the income which would imply ruin and disgrace to a member of the worthy class, would mean success and prosperity to a working man. It must be added that the standard of superiority is always an arbitrary one, and does not necessarily mean any real superiority on the side of the worthy; and that especially in our own days, when the unworthy or disinherited class is the one class which has any real function, is, in fact, the useful class; the functions of the worthy amongst us being directed solely towards their own class; they being otherwise a burden on the whole public.

Now this theory of society has been that held for the most part from early historical periods till our own days, though from time to time there have been protests raised against it. The standard of worthiness has varied, but the essential assertion of the necessity for inequality has always been there. In its two earlier phases; birth and race, i.e., the belonging, really or theoretically, to page: 4 the lineage of the original conquering tribe, conferred the privilege of using the labour of those not so recognized; and Chattel Slavery was the method of using their labour in Ancient, and Serfom Serfdom in Mediæval times. In our own days the method of exercising privilege has changed from the use of the arbitrary accident of birth, to the acquirement (by any means not recognized as illegal) of an indeterminate amount of wealth which enables its possessor to belong to the useless class.

It would not be very profitable to discuss which of these three systems of inequality, to wit, Chattel Slavery, Serfdom, or Wage-Earning, is per se the better or the worse; it is enough to say that since the present one has come down to us in due course of development from the others, it gives us a hope of progress which could not have belonged to them. And in fact a new theory of Society can now be put forward, not as a mere abstraction, but as a root change in Social conditions which is in actual course of realization.

This theory is Communism; which says: In a true Society the capacities of all men can be used for their mutual well being; the due unwasteful use of those capacities produces wealth in the proper sense of the word and cannot fail to produce it; this wealth produced by the Community can only be fully used by the Community; for if some get more than they need, that portion which cannot be used must of necessity be wasted, and the whole Community is impoverished thereby; and again further impoverished by the necessity for the producers having to work harder than they otherwise need; which in its turn brings about grievous and burdensome inequality; for all men feel unnecessary work to be slavish work. Again, though men's desires for wealth vary, yet certain needs all men have, and since we have seen that it is the Community which produces wealth in a true society, to force on any class lack of these needs is to practically thrust them out of page: 5 the Community and constitute them a class of inferiority; and since we know that they can all work usefully, on what grounds can we do this? Certainly on no grounds that they as men can really agree to. We must force them into submission, or cajole them into it. And when force and fraud are used to keep any men in an artificial inequality, there is an end of true Society.

Communism, therefore can see no reason for inequality of condition: to each one according to his needs, from each one according to his capacities, must always be its motto. And if it be challenged to answer the question, what are the needs of such and such a man, how are they to be estimated? The answer is that the habitual regard towards Society as the real unit, will make it impossible for any man to think of claiming more than his genuine needs. I say that it will not come into his mind that it is possible for him to advance himself by injuring someone else. While, on the other hand, it will be well understood that unless you satisfy a man's needs, yon cannot make the best of his capacities. We are sometimes asked by people who do not understand either the present state of society or what Communism aims at, as to how we shall get people to be doctors, learned scientists, etc., in the new condition of things.

The answer is clear; by affording opportunities to those who have the capacity for doctoring etc.; the necessary cost of such opportunities being borne by the Community; and as the position of a doctor who has mistaken his vocation would clearly be an uncomfortable one in a society where people knew their real wants, and as he could earn his livelihood by engaging himself to do what be could do, he would be delivered from the now very serious temptation of pretending to be a doctor when he is not one.

I might go through a long series of objections which ignorant persons make to the only reasonable form of Society, but that is scarcely my business here. I will page: 6 assert that I am a Communist because, amongst other reasons, I believe that a Communal Society could deal with every problem with which a Capitalist Society has perforce to deal, but with free hands and therefore with infinitely better chance of success. I believe that a Communal Society would bring about a condition of things in which we should be really wealthy, because we should have all we produced, and should know what we wanted to produce; that we should have so much leisure from the production of what are called “utilities,” that any group of people would have leisure to satisfy its cravings for what are usually looked on as superfluities, such its works of art, research into facts, literature, the unspoiled beauty of nature; matters that to my mind are utilities also, being the things that make life worth living and which at present nobody can have in their fulness.

I believe in the final realization of this state of things, and now I come to the method by which they are to be reached. And here I feel I shall be dealing in matter about which there may be and must be divers opinions even amongst those who are consciously trying to bring about Communal conditions.

In the first place I do not (who does really) believe in Catastrophical Communism. That we shall go to sleep on Saturday in a Capitalistic Society and wake on Monday into a Communistic Society is clearly an impossibility. Again I do not believe that our end will be gained by open war; for the executive will be too strong for even an attempt at such a thing to be made until the change has gone so far, that it will be too weak to dare to attack the people by means of direct physical violence.

What we have to do first is to make Socialists. That we shall always have to do until the change is come. Some time ago we seemed to have nothing else to do than that, and could only do it by preaching; but the page: 7 times are changed; the movement towards a communal life has spread wonderfully within the last three or four years; the instinctive feeling towards Socialism has at last touched the working classes, and they are moving toward the great change; how quickly it is not easy for us, who are in the midst of the movement, to determine; but this instinct is not leading them to demand the full change directly; rather they are attacking those positions which must be won, before we come face to face with the last citadel of Capitalism, the privilege of rent, interest, and profit. Broadly speaking they see that it is possible to wrest from their masters an improved life, better livelihood, more leisure, treatment in short as citizens, not as machines. I say from their masters: for there is nowhere else whence it can come. Now to show sympathy with this side of the movement, and to further those who are working for it, is a necessity, if we are to make Socialists nowadays. For again I say it is the form in which the workers are taking in Socialism; the movement is genuine and spontaneous amongst them; and how important that is, those know best who remember how a few years ago the movement was confined to a few persons, of education and of superior intelligence, most of whom belonged by position to the middle classes. Neither need we fear that when the working classes have gained the above mentioned advantages they will stop there. They will not and they cannot. For the results of the struggle will force on them the responsibilities of managing their own affairs, and mastership will wane before Communal management almost before people are aware of the change at hand.

This will bring us at last to the period of what is now understood by the word Socialism when the means of production and the markets will be in the hands of those who can use them, i.e., the operatives of various kinds; when great accumulations of wealth will be page: 8 impossible, because money will have lost its privilege; when everybody will have an opportunity of well-doing offered him; and this period of incomplete Socialism will, I believe, gradually melt into true Communism without any violent change. At first indeed, men will not be absolutely equal in condition; the old habit of rewarding excellence or special rare qualities with extra money payment will go on for a while, and some men will possess more wealth than others; but as on the one hand they will have to work in order to possess that wealth, and as on the other the excess of it will procure them but small advantage in a Society tending towards equality, as in fact they begin to understand that in a Community where none are poor, extra wealth beyond the real needs of a man cannot be used, we shall begin to cease estimating worth by any standard of material reward, and the position of complete equality as to condition will be accepted without question. I do not say that gifted persons will not try to excel; but their excellence will be displayed not at the expense of their neighbours but for their benefit.

By that time also we shall have learned the true secret of happiness, to wit, that it is brought about by the pleasurable exercise of our energies; and since opportunity will be given for everyone to do the work he is fitted for under pleasant and unburdensome conditions, there will be no drudgery to escape from, and consequently no competition to thrust ones one's neighbour out of his place in order to attain to it.

As to what may be called the business conduct of Communism, it has been said often, and rightly as I think, that it will concern itself with the administration of things rather than the government of men. But this administration must take form, and that form must of necessity be democratic and federative; that is to say there will be certain units of administration, ward, parish, commune, whatever they may be called, and page: 9 these units all federated within certain circles, always enlarging. And in each such body, if differences of opinion arise, as they would be sure to do, there would be surely nothing for it but that they should be settled by the will of the majority. But it must be remembered that whereas in our present state of society, in every assembly there are struggles between opposing interests for the mastery, in the assemblies of a Communal Society, there would be no opposition of interests, but only divergencies of opinion, as to the best way of doing what all were agreed to do. So that the minority would give way without any feeling of injury. It is a matter of course that since everybody would share to the full in the wealth and good life won by the whole community, so everybody would share in the responsibility of carrying on the business of the community; but this business of administration they would as sensible people reduce as much as possible, that they might be the freer to use their lives in the pleasure of living, and creating, and knowing, and resting.

This is a brief sketch of what I am looking forward to as a Communist: to sum up, it is Freedom from artificial disabilities; the development of each man's capacities for the benefit of each and all. Abolition of waste by taking care that one man does not get more than he can use, and another less than he needs; consequent condition of general well-being and fulness of life, neither idle and vacant, nor over burdened with toil.

All this I believe we can and shall reach directly by insisting on the claim for the communization of the means of production; and that claim will be made by the workers when they are fully convinced of its necessity; I believe further that they are growing convinced of it, and will one day make their claim good by using the means which the incomplete democracy of the day puts within their reach. That is they will at last form page: 10 a wide spread and definite Socialist party, which will, by using the vote, wrest from the present possessing classes the instruments which are now used to govern the people in the interest of the possessing classes, and will use them for effecting the change in the basis of society, which would get rid of the last of the three great oppressions of the world.

WHY I AM AN EXPROPRIATIONIST.

BY L.S. BEVINGTON.

I advocate and I look forward to wholesale expropriation because I do not believe there is any such thing as a right to property, and because I hold that it is disastrous, nay, fatal, to the welfare of all individuals composing the community, to have to regulate their lives and affairs in accordance with a fictitious abstraction which has no warrant and no basis in the natural laws of life. I desire universal expropriation, not merely because the power that property-holding gives to man over man is in wrong hands, and consequently abused, but because it seems clear to me that property-holding is all abuse in itself, and that to hold property is to make wrong use of anyone's hands at all. I desire to see the bottom knocked out of the noxious property idea itself, for good and all.

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“The love of money is the root of all evil.” Why ? Because the love of money is the love of domination. Property is government. Property—that is, the prohibitive custody by particular persons of any part of the general resources—cannot be shown to have any value at all for any one, merely as “owner,” except the power it gives him over the faculties and liberties of his fellow-creatures. And this is a false value, an illusion. It is a craze to believe that you are necessarily better off—the richer or the freer—through dominating your fellows by dint of keeping prohibitive custody of what may be of greater service (intrinsic value) to them than to yourself.

No true, nature-based title to property as merely such can be shown to exist. Perhaps even some Anarchists will demur to this. The belief still lingers that there is such a thing as a man's natural right to “own,” to have the prohibitive custody and disposal of, whatever his industry or skill may have produced or constructed out of the raw material provided by Nature. “There is one true title to property—to custody of superfluity—and that is the Labor title;” so say many. It is a delusion. There can be no such thing as a natural title to what is after all an artificial and merely nominal relation between a man and his product; a relation having no basis in reality. That which at the outset is not anybody's cannot be made anybody's by manipulation. This is not a mere metaphysical quibble. He who produces anything useful has, other things equal, a first comer's economic right to use, consume, or enjoy it, up to the limit of his own ability to do so. Yet this use of his product is not what the world specially means by ownership. This is not the cursed thing that keeps the world poor and squalid and sordid. Ownership begins to be talked of (here disputed, there enforced) just where the natural relation of a man to men's wealth leaves off—just where the limit of ability to use or enjoy has been page: 12 fully reached. This natural limit once overstepped there is no other natural limit to be found ever again, till revolution sets one. The moment that ownership, merely as ownership, begins to be stickled for, then, no matter what its “title” may be, property will be able and eager to defend itself by means of law; it will “govern,” and ensure to the owner the opportunities of becoming indefinitely richer and richer, with the necessary result that the non-owner must become ever poorer and poorer. Nothing more stable than conventional concession originally placed or left in the hands of individuals, whether producers or not, any power over that part of wealth which remains after satisfaction of requirement—which the individual cannot use, and his fellows are in want of. Conventions remain unquestioned until some lurking hurtfulness in them comes out as a glaring social evil, and then, whether backed by government or not, the struggle or their displacement begins, and their doom is fixed.

As to the modern cry, “the product to the producer,” it is surely all right economically and ethically, so far as it goes. But directly it is insisted on that “the whole of the product belongs to the producer as his property” (to use, waste, sell, or hoard at his pleasure) and directly it is insinuated that human faculties and the wealth the faculties (help to) win are of equal inviolability, then we are face to face with the worst of social superstitions once more. The property holder will remain dominator, the property-holding class will remain the dominating class and its weapon, the Government, will remain in existence until the idea that things or privileges can “belong” to persons or groups of persons, is seen for the figment it actually is. Government is only another name for property. You can make Government hop from one leg to another, and on the standing leg hop from one point to another. But it will wink at you and evade you, so long as Property exists. You can page: 13 alter Property's title; what was Strength of Arms one day became Inheritance next; then Purchase. To-morrow perhaps it will be Labor. The poison is in it still. It casts a shadow still, on one or another side of itself,—the dark shadow of Mammon's “laws.” It absolutely needs Government, to be alternately its protector and its tool, so long as under any form it remains a recognized institution.

At the present hour the notion that it is only the existing title to possession and not the institution of property itself which cries for abolition is fraught with social danger. I am very sure indeed that in a community regulated in recognition of individual ownership, or even state ownership (virtual ownership by a central company of officials), every citizen will be less free, less happy, less a man, than might be as a member of a community where free access to products of industry should have become the universal rule. Reciprocally free access of individuals to personally superfluous products of individual industry, reciprocally free access of districts to the locally superfluous products of local industry—this is what we want for the weal and solidarity peace of our lives as a world full of friends.

I see as much danger in taking property from one class only to give it another, as in taking Government out of the hands of one class only to give it to another. Nay, it is the identical danger under another name. The prohibitive custody of superfluous wealth, as now maintained in the case of landlords and capitalists, all Socialists see to be evil. To land this prohibitive custody in the hands of an official class, as would be virtually done under “Social Democracy,” all Anarchists see to be evil. But to say to the producer: Whatever personal superfluity you by the use of your personal faculties unearth or construct is therefore “yours,” to withold at pleasure from the immediate use of those to page: 14 whom it would be immediately serviceable—this is not generally seen to be an evil. Yet it is only to conventionally make the producer a dictator of terms to his fellow men, and to leave the broad gate that leads to destruction wider open than ever. Let us cease to trade, and learn to trust. Let me have free access to opportunity and material for the constructive or productive, exercise of any faculties I may possess, and then J. K. and L. only do me a service in coming and making free use of so much of my product as remains useless to myself. Of course this is an extreme position, but it is one on which Nature smiles in the case of communities of intelligent dumb creatures, and I am utopian enough to believe that we word-befogged humans have not yet so far spoilt our own impulses and ruined our own chances as to make it impossible or even very difficult to organise freely on these lines. That is, after once the existing cruel system shall have been paralyzed or broken up. It needs that we make up our minds to inquire less anxiously what is “wise and prudent,” and be quicker in response to the simple dictates of common-sense and good-will as they present themselves from day to day and from hour to hour.

A man who has made such use of material that a hat is the result, has made a hat. That is all he has made. He has not made a “right to property” in the hat, either for himself or anybody else. Before this exercise of his faculty there existed the materials, tools, and himself. There exist now, the tools, and himself, and the hat. He is related to the hat as its producer, not as its owner. If he has no hat and wants one, the obviously fit place for the hat is on his head. He then becomes further related to the hat as its wearer; and still the word “owner” remains a term without special meaning. But say that be already has a hat and the first passer-by has none, and wants one, then the fit place for one of the hats is on the passer-by's head. page: 15 It sounds childish, but it's true. The hatter has not produced, over and above a hat, any such identical thing as a “right” to forbid the hatless man to wear the hat, apart from some arbitrary terms of his (the hatter's) making, and which the hatless man, as likely as not, is unable to comply with except to his own damage. (Ah, “damage,”—he must pay damage, must he? See how instinct lurks in language! Realize the unhealth of a community run on lines, in which damage results to some one at every turn of its minutest wheels).

The hatter's product is his product, not his property. His hands belong to him, but not his tools. His tools are, whoever made them, fitly and justly in his hands, his product is the product of his hands plus the tools which other hands have made; and the same justice and common-sense which is satisfied by the placing in his hands as needing them the tools which he did not make, but which he needs and were not in request elsewhere, demands the placing of the needed hat on the head of the hatless stranger. None of us would object to this sort of method of distribution if we were sure that our pleasure in life did not consist in the abundance of things which we possess, but in the fitness of such things as we had to our real needs and enjoyments, and in the degree of freedom and enjoyment of our powers accorded its by our fellows. But we are not sure that our fellows would leave us free, would not take advantage of us, if we did not force them a little by means of witholding something that they require or desire until they have first paid for it in service to ourselves. And so we stickle for “ownership” (under one title or another) so that at a push we may have the wherewithal to compel or to bribe someone or other to do our bidding. It is a lot of trouble wasted. It is very poor economy. None of this is surely new, but it needs constant re-statement, even among Anarchists, page: 16 by those of us who see the most vital of all social questions to be involved in it.

“Property is Robbery,” said Proudhon. That is not the bottom truth about property. François Guy in his work on Prejudices justly points out that the word “robbery” subtly connotes recognition of property. Expropriation should, for the true and radical Anarchist, mean something quite different from, something much more than, any mere retributive robbery, any seizure of possessions as such, any usurpation of title to possession as such. It should mean the total subversion of every vestige of this most solid and yet most insidious form of government, and the final explosion of the idea that there is or can be anything real or useful in property holding. Every pretext by which such an idea is still bolstered can be, and should be, by ruthless logic torn to pieces. Every action, political or social, purposing to reinstate cruel old pretensions under new sanctions should be unflinchingly opposed to the death.

I have in this article done no more than just step on the threshold of the subject. Space does not now allow me to justify the position. But I am an Expropriationist in the fullest sense that can be given to this clumsy word, because I reguard regard the property idea as a craze—the very most pestilent delusion that the human mind, tricked by language has ever had the misfortune to entertain.