THE ASSERTION OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE THAT RURALLABORERS 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 gentle-man, 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 work-people 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 barrack4ife 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.
