Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/73

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Modern Science and Anarchism.
69

it, and wakes up his thoughts concerning the possibility of organising consumption, production, and exchange without the intervention of the capitalist and the State.

The opinions of the Anarchists concerning the form which the remuneration of labour may take in a society freed from the yoke of Capital and State still remain divided.

To begin with, all are agreed in repudiating the now form of the Wage System which would be established if the State became the owner of all the land, the mines, the factories, the railways, and so on, and the great organiser and manager of agriculture and all the industries. If these powers were added to those which the State already possesses (taxes, defence of the territory, subsidised religions, etc.), we should create a new tyranny, even more terrible than the old one.

The greater number of Anarchists accept the Communist solution. They see that the only form of Communism that would be acceptable in a civilised society is one which would exist without the continual interference of Government, i.e., the Anarchist form. And they realise also that an Anarchist society of a large size would be impossible, unless it would begin by guaranteeing to all its members a certain minimum of well-being produced in common. Communism and Anarchy thus complete each other.

However, by the side of this main current there are those who see in Anarchism a rehabilitation of Individualism.

This last current is, in our opinion, a survival from those times when the power of production of food stuffs and of all industrial commodities had not yet reached the perfection they have attained now. In those times Communism was truly considered as equivalent to general poverty and misery, and well-being was looked at as something which is accessible to a very small number only. But this quite real and extremely important obstacle to Communism exists no more. Owing to the immense productivity of human labour which has been reached nowadays in all directions—agricultural and industrial—it is quite certain, on the contrary, that a very high degree of well-being can easily be obtained in a few years by Communist work.

Be this as it may, the Individualist Anarchists sub-divide into two branches. There are, first, the pure Individualists, in the sense of Max Stirner, who have lately gained some support in the beautiful poetical form of the writings of Nietzsche. But we have already said once how metaphysical and remote from real life is this "self-assertion of the individual"; how it runs