The Slavery of Our Times

Preface

"They that take the sword shall perish by the sword."

Nearly fifteen years ago the census in Moscow evoked in me a series of thoughts and feelings which I expressed as best I could in a book called 'What Must We Do Then' Towards the end of last year I once more reconsidered the same questions, and the conclusions to which I came were the same as in that book. But as I think that during these ten years I have reflected on the questions discussed in What Must We Do Then more quietly and minutely in relation to the teachings at present existing and diffused among us, I now offer the reader new considerations, leading to the same replies as before. I think these considerations may be of use to people who are honestly trying to elucidate their position in society and clearly to define the moral obligations flowing from that position. I, therefore, publish them.

The fundamental thought both of that book and of this article is the repudiation of violence. That repudiation I learnt and understood from the Gospels, where it is most clearly expressed in the words: It was said to you, An Eye for an Eye...that is, you have been taught to oppose violence by violence, but I teach you: turn the other cheek when you are struck-that is, suffer violence, but do not employ it. I know that the use of those great words-in consequence of the unreflectingly perverted interpretations alike of Liberals and of Churchmen, who on this matter agree-will be a reason for most so-called cultured people not to read this article, or to be biased against it; but, nevertheless, I place those words as the epigraph of this work.

I cannot prevent people who consider themselves enlightened from considering the Gospel teaching to be an obsolete guide to life-a guide long outlived by humanity. But I can indicate the source from which I drew my consciousness of a truth which people are as yet far from recognizing, and which alone can save men from their sufferings.

And this I do. 11 July, 1900.

Quotations

"Ye have heard that it was said, An Eye for an Eye, and a Tooth for a Tooth" (Matt. v.38; Ex. xxi. 24). "But I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil; but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matt. v.39). "And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also" (Matt. v.40). "Give to every one that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again" (Luke vi. 30). "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise" (Luke vi. 31).

"And all that believed were together, and had all things common" (Acts ii. 44)." "And Jesus said, When it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather, for the heaven is red" (Matt. xvi. 2). "And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the heaven is red and lowering. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to discern the face of the heaven; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times" (Matt. xvi. 3).

"The system on which all the nations of the world are acting is founded in gross deception, in the deepest ignorance, or a mixture of both; so that under no possible modification of the principles on which it is based can it ever produce good to man; on the contrary, its practical results must ever be to produce evil continually." -Robert Owen.

"We have much studied and much perfected of late the great civilized invention of the division of labor, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided, but the men-divided into mere segments of men, broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished-sand of human souls- we should think there might be some loss in it also.

"Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin . . . into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with-this is to be slave-masters indeed. . It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine which is leading the mass of the nations into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day.

"It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and, therefore, look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.

"It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them."-From "The Stones of Venice," by John Ruskin, Vol. II, Chap. VI., §§ 13-16.

Chapter I: Goods-porters who work thirty-seven hours

An acquaintance of mine who works on the Moscow-Kursk Railway as a weigher, in the course of conversation mentioned to me that the men who load the goods on to his scales work for thirty-seven hours on end.

Though I had full confidence in the speaker's truthfulness I was unable to believe him. I thought he was making a mistake, or exaggerating, or that I misunderstood something.

But the weigher narrated the conditions under which this work is done so exactly that there was no room left for doubt. He told me that there are two hundred and fifty such goods-porters at the Kursk station in Moscow. They were all divided into gangs of five men, and were on piece-work, receiving from one rouble to iR. 15 (say two shillings to two and fourpence, or forty-eight cents to fifty-six cents) for one thousand poods (over sixteen tons) of goods received or dispatched.

They come in the morning, work for a day and a night at unloading the trucks, and in the morning, as soon as the night is ended, they begin to reload, and work on for another day. So that in two days they get one night's sleep.

Their work consists of unloading and moving bales of seven, eight, and up to ten poods (say 252, 280 and up to nearly 364 pounds). Two men place the bales on the backs of the other three who carry them. By such work they earn less than a ruble (two shillings, or forty-eight cents) a day. They work continually without holiday.

The account given by the weigher was so circumstantial that it was impossible to doubt it, but, nevertheless, I decided to verify it with my own eyes, and I went to the goods-station.

Finding my acquaintance at the goods-station, I told him that I had come to see what he had told me about. "No one I mention it to believes it," said I.

Without replying to me, the weigher called to some one in a shed. "Nikita, come here."

From the door appeared a tall, lean workman in a torn coat.

"When did you begin work?"

"When? Yesterday morning."

"And where were you last night?"

"I was unloading, of course."

"Did you work during the night?" asked I.

"Of course we worked."

"And when did you begin work to-day?"

"We began in the morning-when else should we begin?"

"And when will you finish working?"

"When they let us go; then we shall finish!"

The four other Workmen of his gang came up to us. They all wore torn coats and were without overcoats, though there were about -2O Reaumur of cold (13 below zero, Fahrenheit).

I began to ask them about the conditions of their work, and evidently surprised them by taking an interest in such a simple and natural thing (as it seemed to them) as their thirty-six hour work.

They were all villagers; for the most part fellow countrymen of my own-from Tula; some, however, were from ArIa', and some from Vorosnezh. They lived in Moscow in lodgings, some of them with their families, but most of them without. Those who have come here alone send their earnings home to the village.

They board with contractors. Their food costs them ten rubles (say £1 Is., or five dollars per month). They always eat meat, disregarding the fasts. Their work always keeps them occupied more than hours running, because it takes more than half an hour to get to their lodgings and from their lodgings, and, besides, they are often kept at work beyond the time fixed.

Paying for their own food, they earn, by such thirty- seven-hour on-end work, about twenty-five rubles a month.

To my question, why they did such convict work, they replied:

"Where is one to go to?"

"But why work thirty-six hours on end? Cannot the work be arranged in shifts?"

"We do what we're told to."

"Yes; but why do you agree to it?"

"We agree because we have to feed ourselves. 'If you don't like it-be off!' If one's even an hour late, one has one's ticket shied at one, and is told to march; and there are ten men ready to take the place."

The men were all young, only one was somewhat older, perhaps about forty. All their faces were lean, and had exhausted, weary eyes, as if the men were drunk. The lean workman to whom I first spoke struck me especially by the strange weariness of his look. I asked him whether he had not been drinking today.

"I don't drink," answered he, in the decided way in which men who really do not drink always reply to that question.

"And I do not smoke," added he.

"Do the others drink?" asked I.

"Yes; it is brought here."

"The work is not light, and a drink always adds to one's strength," said the older workman.

This workman had been drinking that day, but it was not in the least noticeable.

After some more talk with the workmen I went to watch the work.

Passing long rows of all sorts of goods, I came to some workmen slowly pushing a loaded truck. I learned afterwards that the men have to shunt the trucks them- selves and to keep the platform dear of snow, without being paid for the work. It is so stated in the "Conditions of Pay." These workmen were just as tattered and emaciated as those with whom I had been talking. When they had moved the truck to its place I went up to them and asked when they had begun work, and when they had dined.

I was told that they had started work at seven o'clock, and had only just dined. The work had prevented their being let off sooner.

"And when do you get away?"

"As it happens; sometimes not till ten o'clock," replied the men, as if boasting of their endurance. Seeing my interest in their position, they surrounded me, and, probably taking me for an inspector, several of them speaking at once, informed me of what was evidently their chief subject of complaint-namely, that the apartment in which they could sometimes warm themselves and snatch an hour's sleep between the day-work and the night-work was crowded. All of them expressed great dissatisfaction at this crowding.

"There may be one hundred men, and nowhere to lie down; even under the shelves it is crowded," said dissatisfied voices. "Have a look at it yourself. It is close here."

The room was certainly not large enough. In the thirty-six-foot room about forty men might find place to lie down on the shelves.

Some of the men entered the room with me, and they vied with each other in complaining of the scantiness of the accommodation.

"Even under the shelves there is nowhere to lie down," said they.

These men, who in twenty degrees of frost, without overcoats, carry on their backs 240 pound loads during thirty-six hours; who dine and sup not when they need food, but when their overseer allows them to eat; living altogether in conditions far worse than those of dray horses, it seemed strange that these people only complained of insufficient accommodation in the room where they warm themselves. But though this seemed to me strange at first, yet, entering further into their position, I understood what a feeling of torture these men, who never get enough sleep, and who are half-frozen, must experience when, instead of resting and being warmed, they have to creep on the dirty floor under the shelves, and there, in the stuffy and vitiated air, become still weaker and more broken down.

Only, perhaps, in that miserable hour of vain attempt to get rest and sleep do they painfully realize all the horror of their life-destroying thirty-seven-hour work, and that is why they are specially agitated by such an apparently insignificant circumstance as the overcrowding of their room.

Having watched several gangs at work, and having talked with some more of the men and heard the same story from them all, I drove home, having convinced myself that what my acquaintance had told me was true.

It was true that for money, only enough to subsist on, people considering themselves free men thought it necessary to give themselves up to work such as, in the days of serfdom, not one slave-owner, however cruel, would have sent his slaves to. Let alone slave-owners, not one cab-proprietor would send his horses to such work, for horses cost money, and it would be wasteful, by excessive, thirty-seven-hour work, to shorten the life of an animal of value.

Chapter II: Society's indifference while men perish

To oblige men to work for thirty-seven hours continuously without sleep, besides being cruel is also uneconomical. And yet such uneconomical expenditure of human lives continually goes on around us.

Opposite the house in which I live is a factory of silk goods, built with the latest technical improvements. About three thousand women and seven hundred men work and live there. As I sit in my room now I hear the unceasing din of the machinery, and know-for I have been there-what that din means. Three thousand women stand, for twelve hours a day, at the looms amid a deafening roar; winding, unwinding, arranging the silk threads to make silk stuffs. All the women (except those who have just come from the villages) have an unhealthy appearance. Most of them lead a most intemperate and immoral life. Almost all, whether married or unmarried, as soon as a child is born to them send it off either to the village or to the Foundlings' Hospital, where eighty per cent of these children perish. For fear of losing their places the mothers resume work the next day, or on the third day after their confinement.

So that during twenty years, to my knowledge, tens of thousands of young, healthy women-mothers-have ruined and are now ruining their lives and the lives of their children in order to produce velvets and silk stuffs.

I met a beggar yesterday, a young man on crutches, sturdily built, but crippled. He used to work as a navvy, with a wheelbarrow, but slipped and injured himself internally. He spent all he had on peasant-women healers and on doctors, and has now for eight years been homeless, begging his bread, and complaining that God does not send him death.

How many such sacrifices of life there are that we either know nothing of, or know of, but hardly notice, considering them inevitable!

I know men working at the blast-furnaces of the Tula Iron Foundry who, to have one Sunday free each fortnight, will work for twenty-four hours-that is, after working all day they will go on working all night. I have seen these men. They all drink vodka to keep up their energy, and obviously, like those goods-porters on the railway, they quickly expend not the interest, but the capital of their lives.

And what of the waste of lives among those who are employed on admittedly harmful work, in looking-glass, cartridge, match, sugar, tobacco, and glass factories; in mines or as gilders?

There are English statistics showing that the average length of life among people of the upper classes is fifty- five years, and the average of life among working people in unhealthy occupations is twenty-nine years.

Knowing this (and we cannot help knowing it), we who take advantage of labor that costs human lives should, one would think (unless we are beasts), not be able to enjoy a moment's peace. But the fact is that we well-to-do people, liberals and humanitarians, very sensitive to the sufferings not of people only, but also of animals, unceasingly make use of such labor, and try to become more and more rich-that is, to take more and more advantage of such work. And we remain perfectly tranquil.

For instance, having learned of the thirty-seven-hour labor of the goods-porters, and of their bad room, we at once send there an inspector, who receives a good salary, and we forbid people to work more than twelve hours, leaving the workmen (who are thus deprived of one-third of their earnings) to feed themselves as best they can; and we compel the railway company to erect a large and convenient room for the workmen. Then with perfectly quiet consciences we continue to receive and dispatch goods by that railway, and we ourselves continue to receive salaries, dividends, rents from houses or from land, etc. Having learned that the women and girls at the silk factory, living far from their families, ruin their own lives and those of their children, and that a large half of the washerwomen who iron our starched shirts, and of the typesetters who print the books and papers that while away our time, get consumption, we only shrug our shoulders and say that we are very sorry things should be so, but that we can do nothing to alter it, and we continue with tranquil consciences to buy silk stuffs, to wear starched shirts and to read our morning paper. We are much concerned about the hours of the shop assistants, and still more about the long hours of our own children at school; we strictly forbid carters to make their horses drag heavy loads, and we even organize the killing of cattle in slaughter-houses, so that the animals may feel it as little as possible. But how wonderfully blind we become as soon as the question concerns those millions of workers who perish slowly, and often painfully, all around us, at labors the fruits of which we use for our convenience and pleasure!

Chapter III: Justification of the existing position by science

This wonderful blindness which befalls people of our circle can only be explained by the fact that when people behave badly they always invent a philosophy of life which represents their bad actions to be not bad actions at all, but merely results of unalterable laws beyond their control. In former times such a view of life was found in the theory that an inscrutable and unalterable will of God existed which foreordained to some men a humble position and hard work and to others an exalted position and the enjoyment of the good things of life.

On this theme an enormous quantity of books were written and an innumerable quantity of sermons preached. The theme was worked up from every possible side. It was demonstrated that God created different sorts of people-slaves and masters; and that both should be satisfied with their position. It was further demonstrated that it would be better for the slaves in the next world; and afterwards it was shown that although the slaves were slaves and ought to remain such, yet their condition would not be bad if the masters would be kind to them. Then the very last explanation, after the emancipation of the slaves, was that wealth is entrusted by God to some people in order that they may use part of it in good works, and so there is no harm in some people's being rich and others poor.

These explanations satisfied the rich and the poor (especially the rich) for a long time. But the day came when these explanations became unsatisfactory, especially to the poor, who began to understand their position. Then fresh explanations were needed. And just at the proper time they were produced. These new explanations came in the form of science--political economy: which declared that it had discovered the laws which regulate division of labor and of the distribution of the products of labor among men. These laws, according to that science, are that the division of labor and the enjoyment of its products depend on supply and demand, and capital, rent, wages of labor, values, profits, etc.; in general, on unalterable laws governing man's economic activities.

Soon, on this theme as many books and pamphlets were written and lectures delivered as there had been treatises written and religious sermons preached on the former theme, and still unceasingly mountains of pamphlets and books are being written and lectures are being delivered; and all these books and lectures are as cloudy and unintelligible as the theological treatises and the sermons, and they, too, like the theological treatises, fully achieve their appointed purpose-that is, they give such an explanation of the existing order of things as justifies some people in tranquilly refraining from labor and in utilizing the labor of others.

The fact that, for the investigations of this pseudo- science, not the condition of the people in the whole world through all historic time was taken to show the general order of things, but only the condition of people in a small country, in most exceptional circumstances- England at the end of the Eighteenth and the beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries -this fact did not in the least hinder the acceptance as valid of the result to which the investigators arrived; any more than a similar acceptance is now hindered by the endless disputes and disagreements among those who study that science and are quite unable to agree as to the meaning of rent, surplus value, profits, etc. Only the one fundamental position of that science is acknowledged by all-namely, that the relations among men are conditioned, not by what people consider right or wrong, but by what is advantageous for those who occupy an advantageous position.

It is admitted as an undoubted truth that if in society many thieves and robbers have sprung up who take from the laborers the fruits of their labor, this happens not because the thieves and robbers have acted badly, but because such are the inevitable economic laws, which can only be altered slowly by an evolutionary process indicated by science; and therefore, according to the guidance of science, people belonging to the class of robbers, thieves or receivers of stolen goods may quietly continue to utilize the things obtained by thefts and robbery.

Though the majority of people in our world do not know the details of these tranquilizing scientific explanations any more than they formerly knew the details of the theological explanations which justified their position, yet they all know that an explanation exists; that scientific men, wise men, have proved convincingly, and continue to prove, that the existing order of things is what it ought to be, and that, therefore, we may live quietly in this order of things without ourselves' trying to alter it.

Only in this way can I explain the amazing blindness of good people in our society who sincerely desire the welfare of animals, but yet with quiet consciences devour the lives of their brother men.

Chapter IV: The assertion of economic science that rural laborers must enter the factory system

The theory that it is God's will that some people should own others satisfied people for a very long time. But that theory, by justifying cruelty, caused such cruelty as evoked resistance, and produced doubts as to the truth of the theory.

So now with the theory that an economic evolution is progressing, guided by inevitable laws, in consequence of which some people must collect capital, and others must labor all their lives to increase those capitals, preparing themselves meanwhile for the promised communalisation of the means of production; this theory, causing some people to be yet more cruel to others, also begins (especially among common people not stupefied by science) to evoke certain doubts.

For instance, you see goods-porters destroying their lives by thirty-seven hours' labor, or women in factories, or laundresses, or typesetters, or all those millions of people who live in hard, unnatural conditions of monotonous, stupefying, slavish toil, and you naturally ask, What has brought these people to such a state? And how are they to be delivered from it? And science replies that these people are in this condition because the railway belongs to this company, the silk factory to that gentleman, and all the foundries, factories, typographies, and laundries to capitalists, and that this state of things will come right by work-people forming unions, co-operative societies, strikes, and taking part in government, and more and more swaying the masters and the government till the workers first obtain shorter hours and increased wages, and finally all the means of production will pass into their hands, and then all will be well. Meanwhile, all is going on as it should go, and there is no need to alter anything.

This answer must seem to an unlearned man, and particularly to our Russian folk, very surprising. In the first place, neither in relation to the goods-porters, nor the factory women, nor all the millions of other laborers suffering from heavy, unhealthy, stupefying labor does the possession of the means of production by capitalists explain anything. The agricultural means of production of those men who are now working at the railway have not been seized by capitalists: they have land, and horses, and plows, and harrows, and all that is necessary to till the ground; also these women working at the factory are not only not forced to it by being deprived of their implements of production, but, on the contrary, they have (for the most part against the wish of the elder members of their families) left the homes where their work was much wanted, and where they had implements of production.

Millions of workpeople in Russia and in other countries are in like case. So that the cause of the miserable position of the workers cannot be found in the seizure of the means of production by capitalists. The cause must lie in that which drives them from the villages. That, in the first place. Secondly, the emancipation of the workers from this state of things (even in that distant future in which science promises them liberty) can be accomplished neither by shortening the hours of labor, nor by increasing wages, nor by the promised communalisation of the means of production.

All that cannot improve their position, for the misery of the laborer's position-alike on the railway, in the silk factory and in every other factory or workshop consists not in the longer or shorter hours of work (agriculturists sometimes work eighteen hours a day, and as much as thirty-six hours on end, and consider their lives happy ones), nor does it consist in the low rate of wages, nor in the fact that the railway or the factory is not theirs, but it consists in the fact that they are obliged to work in harmful, unnatural conditions often dangerous and destructive to life, and to live a barracks life in towns -a life full of temptations and immorality-and to do compulsory labor at another's bidding.

Latterly the hours of labor have diminished and the rate of wages has increased; but this diminution of the hours of labor and this increase in wages have not improved the position of the worker, if one takes into account not their more luxurious habits-watches with chains, silk kerchiefs, tobacco, vodka, beef, beer, etc.- but their true welfare-that is, their health and morality, and chiefly their freedom.

At the silk factory with which I am acquainted, twenty years ago the work was chiefly done by men, who worked fourteen hours a day, earned on an average fifteen rubles a month, and sent the money for the most part to their families in the villages. Now nearly all the work is done by women working eleven hours, some of whom earn as much as twenty-five rubles a month (over fifteen rubles on the average), and for the most part not sending it home, but spend all they earn here chiefly on dress, drunkenness and vice. The diminution of the hours of work merely increases the time they spend in the taverns.

The same thing is happening, to a greater or lesser extent, at all the factories and works. Everywhere, notwithstanding the diminution of the hours of labor and the increase of wages, the health of the operatives is worse than that of country workers, the average duration of life is shorter, and morality is sacrificed, as cannot but occur when people are torn from those conditions which most conduce to morality-family life, and free, healthy, varied and intelligible agricultural work.