 Chapter 14 of the Conquest of Bread This is the Library of Oaks Recording. All Library of Oaks recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Library of Oaks.org. Recording by Enko, the Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, Consumption and Production, Part 1. Looking at society and its political organization from a different standpoint than that of all the authoritarian schools for we start from a free individual to reach a free society instead of beginning by the state to come down to the individual, we follow the same method in economic questions. We study the needs of the individuals and the means by which we satisfy them before discussing production, exchange, taxation, government and so on. At first sight, the difference may appear trifling, but in reality it upsets all the canons of official political economy. If you open the works of any economist, you will find that he begins with production that is, by the analysis of the means employed nowadays through the creation of wealth and division of labor, the factory, its machinery, the accumulation of capital. From Adam Smith to Marx, all have proceeded along these lines. Only in the latter parts of their books do they treat of consumption, that is to say, of the means resorted to enough prison society to satisfy the needs of the individuals. And even there they confine themselves to explaining how riches are divided, among those who vie with one another for their possession. Perhaps you will say this is logical. Before satisfying needs, you must create the wherewithal to satisfy them. But before producing anything, must you not feel the need of it, or is it not necessary that first drove men to hunt, to raise cattle, to cultivate them, to make implements and later on to invent machinery? Is it not the study of the needs that should govern production to save a lease? It would therefore be quite as logical to begin by considering the needs, and afterwards to discuss how production is, and ought to be organized in order to satisfy these needs. This is precisely what we mean to do. But as soon as we look at political economy from this point of view, it entirely changes its aspect, it seizes to be a simple description of Marx and becomes a science. And we may define this science as the study of the needs of mankind and the means of satisfying them with the least possible waste of human energy. Its true name should be physiology of society. It constitutes a parallel science to the physiology of plants and animals, which is the study of the needs of plants and animals, and of the most advantageous ways of satisfying them. In the series of sociological sciences, the economy of human societies takes the place occupied in the series of biological sciences by the physiology of organic bodies. We say, here are human beings, united in a society. All of them feel the need of living in healthy houses. The savage hut no longer satisfies them, they require a more or less comfortable solid shelter. The question is then, whether taking the present capacity of man for production, every man can have a house of his own, and what is hindering him from having it? And as soon as we ask this question, we see that every family in Europe could perfectly well have a comfortable house, such as all built in England, in Belgium or in Pullman city, or else an equivalent set of rooms, a certain number of days' work would suffice to build a pretty little house well fitted up and lighted by electricity. The nine-tenths of Europeans have never possessed a healthy house, because at all times, common people have had to work day-in-day to satisfy the needs of their rulers, and have never had the necessary leisure or money to build or to have built the home of their dreams, and they can have no houses and will inhabit hoovers as long as present conditions remain unchanged. It is thus seen that our method is quite contrary to that of the economists who immortalized the so-called laws of production and reckoning up the number of houses built every year, demonstrated by statistics that as the number of new-built houses is too small to meet all demands, nine-tenths of Europeans must live in havels. Let us pause on to food. After having enumerated the benefits occurring from the division of labour, economists tells us the division of labour requires that some men should work at agriculture and others at manufacture, or must producing so much, factory so much, exchange being carried on in such a way, they analyze the sale, the profit, the net-gate over surplus value, the wages, the taxes, banking, and so on. But after having followed them so far, we are none the wiser, and if we ask them, how is it that millions of human beings are in want of bread, when every family could grow sufficient wheat to feed 10, 20, and even 100 people annually? They answer us by drawing the same anthem, division of labour, wages, surplus value, capital, etc. Arriving at the same conclusion that production is insufficient to satisfy all needs, a conclusion which, if true, does not answer the question, can or cannot man by his labour produce the bread he needs, and if he cannot, what is it that he does him? Here are 350 million Europeans. They need so much bread, so much meat, wine, milk, eggs, and butter every year. They need so many houses, so much clothing. This is the minimum of their needs. Can they produce all this, and if they can, will sufficient leisure be left them for art, science, and amusement? In a word, for everything that is not comprised in the category of absolute necessities, if the answer is in the affirmative, what hinders them going ahead? What must they do to remove the obstacles? Is it time that is needed to achieve such a result? Let them take it, but let us not lose sight of the aim of production, the satisfaction of the needs of all. If the most imperious needs of men remain unsatisfied now, what must do to increase the productivity of our work? But is there no other cause, may it not be that production, having lost sight of the needs of men, has trade in an absolutely wrong direction, and that its organization is at fault? And as we can prove as such is the case, let us see how to reorganize production, so as to really satisfy all needs. This seems to us the only right way of facing things, the only way that would allow of political economy becoming a science, the science of social physiology. It is evident that so long as science treats our production as it is carried on at present by civilized nations, by Hindu communes or by savages, it can hardly state facts otherwise than the economy states them now, that is to say as a simple descriptive chapter, analogous to the descriptive chapters of Zoology and Botany. But if this chapter were written so as to throw some light on the economy of energy that is necessary to satisfy human needs, the chapter would gain in precision, as well as the descriptive value, it would clearly show the fragile waste of human energy under a present system, and it would prove that as long as this system exists, the needs of humanity will never be satisfied. The point of view we see would be entirely changed, behind the loom that we've so many yards of cloth, behind the steel plate perforator, and behind the safe in which dividends are hoarded, we should see men, the autism of production, more often than not, excluded from the things he has prepared for others, we should also understand that the standpoint of being wrong, the so-called laws of value and exchange, are but a very false explanation of the events as they happen nowadays, and that things will come to pass very differently when production is organized in such a manner as to meet all needs of society. There is not one single principle of political economy that does not change its aspect if you look at it from our point of view. Take for instance, overproduction, a world which every day re-ecodes in our ears, is via a single-economist-academician who can did it for academical owners who has not supported arguments proving that economic rises are due to overproduction, that at a given moment more curtain, more cloth, more watches are produced than are needed, are we not all of us funded against the rapacity of a capitalist who are obstinately bent on producing more than can possibly be consumed, however un-careful examination, all these reasonings prove unsound. In fact, is there one single community among those in universal use, which is producing greater quantity than need be? Examine one by one all communities set out by countries exporting on a large scale, and you will see that nearly all are produced in insufficient quantities for the inhabitants of the countries exporting them. It is not a surplus of weight that the Russian peasant sent to Europe, the most plentiful harvest of weight and right in Europe and Russia only yield enough of a population, and as a rule, the peasant depraves himself of what he actually needs when he sells his wheat or right to pay rent and taxes. It is not a surplus of coal that England sends to the four corners of the globe, because only three quarters of it turn per head of the population, and nearly remains for home domestic consumption, and millions of Englishmen are deprived of fire in the winter or have only just enough to boil a few vegetables. In fact, setting aside useless luxuries, there is in England, which exports more than any other country, one single community in universal use, Cotton's, whose production is sufficiently great to perhaps exceed the needs of a community. Yet when we look upon the racks that force for wearing apparel worn by over a third of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, we are led to ask ourselves whether the cotton exported would not at the whole shoot the real needs of the population. As a rule, it is not a surplus that is exported, though it may have been so originally. The fable of a bare-footed shoemaker is as true of nations as it was formerly of individual artisans. We export the necessary commodities, and we do so because the workmen cannot buy with their wages, what they are produced, and pay besides the rent and interest to the capitalist and the banker. Not only does the ever-growing need of comfort remain unsatisfied, but the strict necessities of life are often wanting. Therefore, surplus production does not exist, at least not in the sense given to it by the theories of political economy. Taking another point, all economists ask us that there is a well-proved law. Man produces more than he consumes. After he has lived on the proceed of history, there remains a surplus. The safe family of cultivators produces enough to feed several families, and so forth. For us, this oft-repeated sentence has no sense if it meant that each generation lived something to future generations. It would be true. Thus, for example, a former plants a tree that will live maybe for 30, 40 or 800 years, and whose fruits will still be gathered by the former grandchildren, or he clears a few acres of virgin soil, and we say that the heritage of future generations has been increased by that much, roads, bridges, canals, his house and his furniture, or so much wealth bequeathed to succeeding generations. But this is not what is meant. We are told that the cultivator produces more than he needs to consume, rather should they say that, the state having always taken from him a large share of his produce for taxes, the price for tithe, and the landlord for rent, a whole class of men has been created who formerly consume what they produce, save what was set aside for unforeseen accidents, or expenses incurred in afforestation, roads, etc., but who today are compelled to live very poorly from hand to mouth, the remainder having been taken from them by the state, the landlord, the price, and the usual. Therefore, we prefer to say, the agricultural laborer, the industrial worker, and so on consume less than they produce because they are compelled to sell most of the produce of their labor and to be satisfied with but a small portion of it. Let us also observe that if the needs of the individual are taken as the starting point of our political economy, we cannot fail to reach communism, an organization which enables us to satisfy all needs in the most rural and economical way. While if we start from our present method of production and aim at gain and surplus value without asking whether our production corresponds to the satisfaction of needs, we necessarily arrive at capitalism, or at most at collectivism, both being but two different forms of the present wages system. In fact, when we consider the needs of the individual and of society, and the means which one has resorted in order to satisfy them during his varied phases of development, we see at once the necessity of systemizing our efforts instead of producing half as odd as we do nowadays. It becomes evident that the appropriation by a few of all which does not consume and transmitted from one generation to another is not in the general interest, and we see as a fact that owing to these methods, the needs of three quarters of society are not satisfied, so that the present waste of human strength in users thinks is only the more criminal. We discover moreover that the most advantageous use of all commodities would be for each of them to go first for satisfying those needs, which are the most pressing that in other words, the so-called value in use of a commodity does not depend on a simple whim as has often been affirmed, but on the satisfaction it brings to real needs. Communism that is to say an organization which would correspond to a view of consumption, production and exchange, taken as a whole, therefore becomes the logical consequence of such a comprehension of things, the only one in our opinion that is really scientific, a society that will satisfy the needs of all and which will know how to organize production to answer to this aim, will also have to make a clean sweep of several prejudices concerning industry, and first of all the theory often pushed by economists, the division of labor theory, which we are going to discuss in the next chapter. Of Consumption and Production, Recording by Enku Chapter 15 of the Conquest of Bread, This is a Library of Works Recording. All Library of Works Recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit libraryofworks.org, recording by Enku. The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, The Division of Labor. Political economy has always confined itself to stating facts occurring in society and justifying them in the interests of the main clause. Therefore, it pronounces itself in favor of the division of labor in industry. Having found it profitable to capitalists, it has set it up as a principle. Look at the village Smith, said Adam Smith, the father of modern political economy. If he has never been accustomed to making nails, he will only succeed by hard toil in forging two or three hundred a day, and even then they will be bad, but if the same Smith has never made anything but nails, he will easily supply as many as two thousand three hundred in the course of a day. And Smith has turned to the conclusion, divide labor, specialize, go on specializing, let us have Smiths who only know how to make heads or points of nails. And by this means, we shall produce more, we shall grow rich, that a Smith condemned for life to make the heads of nails would lose all interest in his work, that he would be entirely at the mercy of his employer with his limited handicraft, that he would be out of work for months out of twelve, and that his wages would fall very low down when it would be easy to replace him by an apprentice. Smith did not think of all this when he exclaimed, long live the division of labor, this is the real goldmine that will enrich the nation, and all join him in this cry. And later on, when Isis Mundi, or a GBC, began to understand that the division of labor, instead of enriching the whole nation, only enriches the rich, and that the worker who is doomed for life to making the eighteenth part of a pin, grossed to be the sixth into poverty, what did official economists propose? Nothing. They did not say to themselves that by a lifelong grind at one and the same mechanical toil, the worker would lose his intelligence and his spirit of invention, and that on the contrary, a variety of occupations would result in considerably augmenting the productivity of the nation. But this is the very issue we have now to consider. If however, learned economists were the only ones to preach the permanent and often hereditary division of labor, we might allow them to preach it as much as they pleased. But the ideas taught by doctors of science filter into man's minds and pervert them, and from repeatedly hearing the division of labor, profits, interests, credit, etc., spook on others' problems long since solved, all middle class people, and workers too, and by arguing like economists, they venerate the same fetishes, thus we see most socialists, even those who have not feared to point out the mistakes of the economical science, justifying the division of labor. Talk to them about the organization of work during the revolution, and they answer that the division of labor must be maintained, but if you sharpen pins before the revolution, you must go unsharpening them after. True, you will not have to work more than five hours a day, but you will have to sharpen pins all your life, while others will make designs for machines that will enable you to sharpen hundreds of millions of pins during your lifetime, and others again will be specialists in the higher branches of literature, science, and art, etc. You were born to sharpen pins, while the pastor was born to invent the inoculation against anthrax, and the revolution will give you both to your respective improvements. Well, it is this horrible principle so not just to society, so brutalizing to the individual, source of so much harm, that we propose to discuss in its diverse manifestations. We know the consequences of the division of labor full well. It is evident that first of all, we are divided into two classes. On the one hand, producers who consume very little, and are exempt from thinking because they only do physical work, and who work badly because their brains remain inactive, and on the other hand, the consumers who produce little or hardly anything have a privilege of thinking for the others, and who think badly because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to them. Then we have the laborers of the soil who know nothing of machinery, while those who work at machinery ignore everything about agriculture. The idea of modern industry is a child tending a machine that he cannot and must not understand, and if four men who find him, if his attention flags for a moment, the ideal of industrial agriculture is to do away with the agricultural laborer all together, and to set a man who does odd jobs to turn a steamplow or a thrashing machine. The division of labor means labeling and stamping men for life, some to supply shelves and factories, some to be four men in a business, others to shove huge coal-bore skates in a particular part of their mind, but none of them to have any idea of machinery as a whole, no of business, no of mines, and thereby they destroy the love of work and the capacity for invention that at the beginning of modern industry created the machinery on which we pride ourselves so much. What we have done for individuals, they also wanted to do for nations. Humanity was to be divided into national workshops, having each its specialty. Russia we were taught was destined by nature to grow corn, England to spin cotton, Belgium to weave cloth, while Switzerland was to train nurses and governesses, more over each the Paris city was to establish a specialty. Lyon was to weave silk, Uwe and to make lace, and Paris fancy articles. In this way, economists said an immense field was open for production and consumption, and in this way an era of limitless wealth for mankind was at hand. However, these great hopes vanished as forces technical knowledge spread abroad, as long as England stood alone as a weave of cotton and as a metalwork on a large scale, as long as only Paris made artistic fancy articles etc. all went well. Economists could preach the school division of labor without being refuted, but a new current of thought induced by and by all civilized nations to manufacture for themselves. They found it advantageous to produce what they formally received from other countries or from their colonies, which in their turn aimed at emancipating themselves from the mother country. Scientific discoveries universalized the methods of production, and henceforth it was used to pay an exorbitant price abroad for what would easily be produced at home, and now we see already that this industrial revolution striked the crushing blue of the theory of a division of labor, which for a long time was supposed to be so sound. And of a division of labor, recording by Enko. Chapter 16 of a Conquest of Bread This is a labravox recording. All labravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit labravox.org Recording by Enko. The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin. The decentralization of industry. Open Footnote. A full development of these ideas will be found in my book Fields, Factories and Workshops. Published by Mrs. Thomas Nelson and Sons in the popular series in 1912. Close Footnote, Part 1. After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had nearly succeeded in ruining the main industries, which had sprung up in France at the end of a preceding century. She also became mistress of the seas and had no rivals of importance. She took in the situation and knew how to turn its privileges and advantages to account. She established an industrial monopoly and imposing upon her neighbors her prices for the goods she alone could manufacture. Accumulated riches upon riches. But as the middle-class revolution of the 18th century had abolished her dumb and created a proletariat in France, French industry hampered for a time in its flight, sold again, and from the second half of the 19th century, France is to be a tributary of England for manufactured goods. Today, she too has grown into a nation with an export trade. She sells 4 more than 60 million pounds worth of manufactured goods and two thirds of these goods are fabrics. The number of French men working for export or living by the foreign trade is estimated at 3 millions. France is therefore no longer England's tributary. In her turn, she has driven to monopolize certain branches of foreign industry, such as silks and readymade clovers, and has ripped immense profits therefrom. But she is on the point of losing this monopoly forever, just as England is on the point of losing the monopoly of cotton goods. Traveling is what industry has reached Germany. 50 years ago, Germany was a tributary of England and France for most manufactured communities in the higher branches of industry. It is no longer so. In the course of the last 50 years, and especially since the Franco-German War, Germany has completely reorganized her industry. The new factories are stocked with the best machinery, the latest creations of industry or art in cotton goods from Manchester, or in silks from Lyons, etc., or now realizing new German factories. It took two or three generations of workers at Lyons and Manchester to construct the modern machinery. But Germany adopted it in its perfected state. Technical schools adapted to the needs of industry supply the factories with an army of intelligent workmen, practical engineers who can work with both hand and brain. The German industry starts at the point which was only reached by Manchester and Lyons after 50 years of dropping in the dock of exertion and experiments. It follows that since Germany manufactures so well at home, she diminishes her imports from France and England year by year. She has not only become the rival in manufactured goods in Asia and in Africa, but also in London and in Paris. Short-sighted people in France may cry out against the Frankfurt Treaty. English manufacturers may explain German competition by little difference in railway tariffs. They may linger on the pity side of questions and neglect great historical facts, but it is nonetheless certain that the main industries, formerly in the hands of England and France, have progressed its way and in Germany they have found a country, young, full of energy, possessing an intelligent middle class and eager in its turn to enrich itself by foreign trade. While Germany has freed itself from subjection to France and England, has manufactured her own cotton cloth and constructed her own machines in fact manufactured all commodities, the main industries have also taken root in Russia. Where the development of manufacture is the more constructive as it sprang up but yesterday. At the time of the abolition of surfdom in 1861, Russia had hardly any factories. Everything needed in the way of machines, rails, railway engines, fine dress materials came from the West. 20 years later, she possessed already 85,000 factories and the value of the goods manufactured in Russia had increased fourfold. The old machinery was superseded and now nearly all were still in use in Russia, three quarters of the iron, two thirds of the coal, all railway engines, railway carriers, rails, nearly all steamers are made in Russia. Russia designed to route economists to remain an agricultural territory has rapidly developed into a manufacturing country. She orders hardly anything from England and very little from Germany. Economists hold the customs responsible for these facts and yet cotton is manufactured in Russia or sold at the same price as in London. Capital taking new cognizance or forerlands, German and English capitalists accompanied by engineers and foremen of their own nationalities have introduced in Russia and in Poland manufacturers whose goods compete in excellence with the best from England. If customs were abolished tomorrow, manufacturer would only gain by it not long ago. The British manufacturers delivered another hard blow to the import of cloth and woolens from the West. They set up in southern and middle Russia. Immense wool factories stocked with the most perfect machinery from Bradford and already now Russia imports only the highest sorts of cloth and woolen fabric from England, France and Austria. The remainder is fabricated at home, both in factories and as domestic industries. The main industries not only move eastward, they are spreading also to the southern peninsulas. The Turing exhibition of 1884 already demonstrated the progress made in Italian manufactured produce and let us not make any mistake about it. The mutual hatred over French and Italian middle classes has no other origin than their industrial rivalry. Spain is also becoming an industrial country. While in the East, Bohemia has suddenly sprung into importance as a new center of manufacturers provided with perfected machinery and applying the best scientific methods. We might also mention Hungary's rapid progress in the main industries. But let us rather take Brazil as an example. You're gonna miss sentence Brazil to cultivate cotton forever, to export it in its raw state and to receive cotton cloth from Europe in exchange. In fact 40 years ago, Brazil had only nine rich little cotton factories with 385 spindles. Today, they are 160 cotton wheels possessing 1,500,000 spindles and 50,000 looms, which for 500,000 yards of textiles on the market annually. Even Mexico is now very successful in manufacturing cotton cloth. Instead of importing it from Europe as to the United States, they have quite freed themselves from European technology and have triumphantly developed their manufacturing powers to an enormous extent. But it was India which gave the most striking proof against the specialization of national industry. We all know the theory the great European nations need colonies for colonies and raw material cotton fiber and wash wool, spices etc. to the Movoland. And the Movoland and the pretence of sending them manufactured wares gets rid of her damaged stuff, her machine scrap iron and everything which she no longer has any use for. It costs her little or nothing and nonetheless the articles or sold at exhibited prices. Such was the theory, such was the practice for a long time. In London and Manchester fortunes were made while India was being ruined. In the India Museum in London, unheard of riches collected in Calcutta and Bombay by English merchants are to be seen. But other English merchants and capitalists concede a very simple idea that it would be more expedient to exploit the natives of India by making cottoncloth in India itself, than to import from 20 to 24 million pounds worth of goods annually. At first a series of experiments ended in failure. Indian weavers, artists and experts in their own craft could not enew themselves to factory life. The machinery set from Liverpool was bad, the climate had to be taken into account and merchants had to adapt themselves to new conditions. Now fully mastered before British India could become the menacing rival of the motherland she is today. She now possesses more than 200 cotton mills which employ about 230,000 workmen and contain more than 6 million spindles and 80,000 looms and 40 jute mills with 400,000 spindles. She exports annually to China to the Dutch Indies and to Africa nearly 8 million pounds worth of the same white cottoncloth said to be England's specialty. And while English workmen are often unemployed and in great want, Indian women weave cotton by machinery for the four east at wages of six pence a day. In short, the intelligent manufacturers are fully aware that the day is not for us when they will know what to do with the factory hands who formerly would have cottoncloth for export from England besides which it is becoming more and more evident that India will know import a single ton of iron from England, the initial difficulties in using the coal and the iron ore obtained in India have been overcome and foundries rivaling those in England have been built on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Colonies competing with the motherland in its production of manufactured goods such as the factor which will regulate economy in the 20th century and why should India not manufacture what should be the hindrance capital but capital goes wherever they are meant. Poor enough to be exploited knowledge but knowledge recognizes no national boy years. Technical skill of a worker? No. Or then Hindu workmen inferior to the hundreds of thousands of boys and girls not 18 years old at present working in the English textile factories but too. After having glance at national industries it would be very interesting to turn to some special branches. Let us take silk for example and eminently French produce in the first half of the 19th century. Real New Halyons became the emporium of the silk trade. At first raw silk was gathered in southern France. Till little by little they ordered it from Italy, from Spain, from Austria, from the Kikizus and from Japan for the manufacture of their silk fabrics. In 1875 out of 5 million kilos of raw silk converted into stuffs in the vicinity of Lyons there were only 400,000 kilos of France silk but if Lyons manufactured imported silk why should not suit the land Germany, Russia do as much. Consequently silk weaving began to develop in the villages around the region. They became a great center of the silk trade. The Caucasian administration engaged women from Morsay and workmen from Lyons to teach Georgians the perfected rearing of silkworms and the art of converting silk into fabrics to the Caucasian peasants. Austria followed then Germany with the help of Lyons workmen built Greek silk factories. The United States did like that pattern and today the silk trade is no longer a French monopoly. Silks are made in Germany, in Austria, in the United States and in England and it is now recognized that one third of the silk stuffs used in France are imported in winter Caucasian peasants with silk handkerchiefs at a wage that would mean starvation to the silk beavers of Lyons. Italian Germany sends silk to France and Lyons which in 1870-4 exported to 460 million francs worth of silk fabrics exports now only one half of that amount. In fact the time is not for off when Lyons will only send higher clothes goods and a few novelties as patterns to Germany, Russia and Japan and so it is in all industries. Belgium has no longer a cloth monopoly. Cloth is made in Germany, in Russia, in Austria, in the United States. Switzerland and the France-Jura have no longer a clockwork monopoly. Watchers are made everywhere. Scotland no longer refines sugar for Russia. Refine Russian sugar is imported into England. Italy although now possessing cold no iron makes our own iron clad and engines for her steamers. Chemical industry is no longer an English monopoly. Sulphuric acid and soda are made even in the Urals. Steam engines made at Winterthur have acquired everywhere a wide reputation and at the present moment Switzerland which has never called no iron and no sepals to import them. Nothing but excellent technical schools makes machinery better and cheaper than England so ends a fury of exchange. The tendency of trade as for all else is our decentralization. Every nation finds its advantages to combine agriculture with the greatest possible variety of factories. The specialization of which economists spoke so highly certainly has enriched a number of capitalists but is now no longer of any use and the contrary it used to the advantage of every region every nation to grow their own weight their own vegetables and to manufacture at home most of the produce they consume. This diversity is the surest pledge of a complete development of production by mutual cooperation and the moving course of progress while specialization is now a hindrance to progress. Agriculture can only prosper in proximity to factories and no sooner does a single factory appear than an infinite variety of other factories must bring up around so that mutually supporting and stimulating one another by their inventions they increase their productivity. Part three it is foolish indeed to export wheat and to import flour to export wool and import cloth to export iron and import machinery not only because transportation is a waste of time and money but above all because the country with no developed industry inevitably remains behind the times in agriculture because the country with no large factories to bring steel to a finished condition is doomed to be backward in all of the industries and lastly because the industrial and technical capacities of a nation remain undeveloped if they are not exercised in a variety of industries nowadays everything holds together in the world of production. Cultivation of a soil is no longer possible without machinery without great irrigation works without railways without new factories and to adapt this machinery these railways these irrigation engines etc to local conditions a certain spirit of invention and a certain amount of technical skill must be developed while they necessarily lie dormant so long as space and plough shares of the only implements of cultivation if fields ought to be properly cultivated if they ought to yield the abundant harvest that man has the right to expect it is essential that workshops, funders and factories develop within the reach of the fields a variety of occupations and a variety of skill arising therefrom both working together for a common aim these are the true forces of progress and now let us imagine the inhabitants of the city territory whether both or small stepping for the first time unto the path of a social revolution we are sometimes told that nothing will have changed that the minds of factories etc will be expropriated and proclaim national or communal property that every man will go back to his usual work and that the revolution will then be accomplished but this is a mere dream the social revolution cannot take place so simply we have already mentioned that should the revolution break out tomorrow in Paris, Lyon or any other city should the workers lay hands on factories houses and banks present production would be completely revolutionized by this simple fact international commerce will come to a standstill so also with the importation of foreign bread stuffs the circulation of commodities and other provisions will be paralyzed and then the city or territory in revolt will be compelled to provide for itself and to reorganize its production so as to satisfy its own needs if it fails to do so it is death if it succeeds it will revolutionize the economic life of the country the quantity of imported provisions having decreased consumption having increased while million Parisians working for exportation purposes having been thrown out of work a great number of things imported today from distant or neighboring countries not reaching their destination fancy trade being temporarily at a standstill what will the inhabitants have to eat six months after the revolution we think that when the stores containing food stuffs are empty the masses will seek to obtain their food from the land they will see the necessity of cultivating the soil of combining agricultural production with industrial production in the suburbs of Paris itself and its environments they will have to abandon the merely ornamental trades and consider their most urgent need bread a great number of the inhabitants of the cities will have to become agriculturalists not in the same manner as the present peasants who wear themselves out ploughing for a wage that barely provides them with sufficient food for the year but by following the principles of an intensive agriculture of a market gardeners applied on a large scale by means of a best machinery that men has invented who can invent they will till the land not however like the country beast of burden a Paris jeweler with object to that they will organize cultivation and better principles and not in the future but at once during the revolutionary struggles from fear of being wasted by the enemy agriculture will have to be carried out on intelligent lines by men and women are willing themselves of the experience of a present time organizing themselves in joyous gangs for pleasant work like those who a hundred years ago work in the chandelier most for the feast of a federation a work of delight when not carried to excess when scientifically organized when men invent and improve seeds tools and is conscious of being a useful member of a community of course they will not only cultivate wheat and oats they will also produce those things which we formally used to order from foreign ports and let us not forget that for inhabitants of a revolted territory foreign ports may include all districts that have not joined in the revolutionary movement during the revolutions of 1793 and 1871 Paris was made to feel that foreign ports meant even the country district at her very gates the speculating grains at price stored in 1793 and 1794 the succulents of Paris as badly and even worse than the german armies brought on to french soil by the Versailles conspirators the revolted city will be compelled to do without these foreigners and why not France invented beetroot sugar when sugarcane ran short during the continental blockade Parisians discovered salt pet in their cellars when they no longer receive any from abroad shall we be inferior to our brand for those who hardly list the first words of science a revolution is more than a mere change of a prevailing political system it implies the awakening of human intelligence the increasing of the inventive spirit tenfold a hundredfold it is the dawn of the new science the science of men like Laplace, Lamoc, Lavasi it is a revolution in the minds of men as deep and deeper still than in their institutions and they are still economists tell us that once the revolution is made everyone will return to his workshop as is posting through revolution we're going home after a walk in the Eping Forest to begin with the sole fact of having laid hands on middle-class property will imply the necessity of completely reorganizing the whole of economic life in the workshops but dockyards the factories and the revolution surely will not fail to work in this direction should Paris during the social revolution be cut off from the world for a year or two by the supporters of middle-class rule it's millions of intelects not get depressed by factory life that city of little trades which stimulate the spirit of invention will show the world what men's brain can accomplish without asking for help from without but the motor force of the sun that gives light the power of the wind that sweeps away impurities and the silent life forces that work in the earth we tread on we shall see then what a variety of trades mutually cooperating on a spot of a globe and animated by a revolution can do to feed club house and supply with all manner of luxuries millions of intelligent men we need right no fiction to prove this what we are sure of what has already been experimented upon and recognizes practical would suffice to carry it into effect if the attempt will fertilize be defied by the daring inspiration of a revolution and the spontaneous impulse of the masses and of a decentralization of the industry recording by ankle Chapter 17 of the conquest of bread visit a library of recording or library of recordings or in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit library of recording by ankle the conquest of bread by peter kropotkin agriculture part one political economy has often been reproached with drawing all its deductions from the decidedly force principle that the only incentive capable of forcing a man to augment his power of production his personal interest in its narrow sense the reproach is perfectly true so true that epochs of great industrial discoveries and true progress in industry or precisely those in which the happiness of all was inspiring men and in which personal enrichment was least thought of the great investigators in science and the great inventors aim above all at giving greater freedom of mankind and if what stevenson jackard etc could have only foreseen what a state of misery their sleepless nights would bring to the workers they certainly would have burned their designs and broken their models another principle that pervades political economy is just as false it is the taxid admission common to all economists that if there is often overproduction in certain branches a society will nevertheless never have sufficient products to satisfy the wants of all and that consequently the day will never come when nobody will be forced to sell his labor in exchange for wages this taxid admission is found at the basis of all theories and all the so-called laws taught by economists and yet it is certain that the day when any civilized association of individuals would ask itself what are the needs of all and the means of satisfying them it would see that in industry as in agriculture it already possesses sufficient to provide abundantly for all needs and condition that ignores how to apply these means to satisfy real needs but this is true as regards industry no one can contest indeed it suffices us to study the processors already in use to extract cores and ore to obtain steel and work it to manufacture on a great scale what is used for clothing etc in order to perceive that we could already increase our production four fold or more and yet use for that less work than we are using now we go further we assert that agriculture is in the same position those who cultivate the soil like the manufacturers already could increase their production not only four fold but 10 fold and they can put it into practice as soon as they feel the need of it as soon as the socialist organization of work will be established instead of the present capitalistic one each time agriculture is spoken of men imagine a peasant bending over the plough throwing badly assorted corn fathered into the ground and waiting anxiously for what the good or bad season will bring forth they think of a family working from morn to night and reaping as reward a rude bed dry bread and coarse beverage in a word the picture the savages of labor year and for this man ground down to such a misery the utmost relief that society proposes is to reduce their taxes over rent but even most social reformers do not care to imagine a cultivator standing iraq taking leisure and producing by a few hours work per day sufficient food to nourish not only his own family but a hundred men more at the least in their most glowing dreams of a future socialists do not go beyond American extensive culture which after all is but the infancy of a cultural art but the thinking agriculturalist has broader ideas today his conceptions are only for grander scale he only asked for a fraction of an acre in order to produce sufficient vegetables for a family and to feed 25 home bees he needs no more space than he formally required to feed one his aim is to make his own soil to defy seasons and climate to warm both air and earth around the young plant to produce in a word on one acre what he used to gather from 50 acres and that without any excessive fatigue by greatly reducing on the contrary the total of former labor he knows that we will be able to feed everybody by giving to the culture of the fields no more time than what each can give with pleasure and joy this is the present tendency of agriculture while scientific men led by Liebig the creator the chemical fury of agriculture often gotten the wrong track in the love of mere theories unlettered agriculturalists open up new routes to prosperity market gardeners of paris choice or scotch and english gardeners Flemish and Lombardian farmers peasants of Jersey, Guernsey and farmers on the Sealy ice have opened up such large horizons that the mind hesitates to grasp them while up till lately family of peasants needed at least 17 to 20 acres to live on the produce of the soil and we know how peasants live we can now no longer see what is the minimum area on which all that is necessary to a family can be grown even including articles of luxury if the soil is worked by means of intensive culture 20 years ago it could already be asserted that a population of 30 million individuals could live very well without importing anything on what could be grown in Great Britain but now when we see the progress recently made in France in Germany in England and when we contemplate the new horizons which opened before us we can say that in cultivating the earth as it is already cultivated in many places even on poor soils 50 or 60 million inhabitants to the territory of Great Britain would still be a very feeble proportion to what man could extract from the soil in any case open bracket as we are about to demonstrate close bracket we may consider it as absolutely proof but if tomorrow Paris and the two departments of Senn and of Sene was organize themselves as an anarchist commune in which all work with their hands and if the entire universe refused to send them a single bushella wheat a single head of cattle a single basket of fruit and left them only the territory of the two departments they could not only produce all the corn meat and vegetables necessary for themselves but also vegetables and fruit which are now articles of luxury in sufficient quantities for all and in addition we affirm that the sum total of this labor would be four less than that expanded at present to feed these people with corn in more of a study in Oveian and Russia with vegetables produced a little everywhere by extensive agriculture and with fruit grown in the south it is self-evident that we in Noah's desire all exchange to be suppressed know that each region should strive to produce that which will only grow in its climate by a more or less artificial nature but we care to draw attention to the fact that the theory of exchange such as is understood today is strangely exaggerated that exchange is often useless and even harmful we assert more over that people have never had a right conception of the immense labor of southern wine growers know that of Russian and Hungarian corn growers whose excessive labor could also be very much reduced if they adopted intensive culture instead of a present system of extensive agriculture part two it would be impossible to could hear the mass of facts on which we base our assertions we are therefore obliged to refer our readers who want further information to another book fields factories and workshops open footnote a new and large edition of it has been published by Thomas Nelson and sons in their Shilling Library close footnote above all we earnestly invite those who are interested in the question to read several excellent works published in France and elsewhere and of which we give a list at the close of this book open note La Réportation Métrique des impôts by E. Toubault two volumes published by Guilhemain in 1880 open bracket we do not in the list agree with Toubault's conclusions but it is a real encyclopedia indicating the sources which prove what can be obtained from the sorry close bracket La Culture Marachère by M. Pons Paris 1869 Le Potagé Gresson Paris 1885 An excellent practical work Physiologie et culture du blé by Ressler Paris 1881 Le Blé, Sa Culture Intensive et Extensive by Le Couteux Paris 1883 La Cité Chinoise by Eugène Simon Le Dictionnaire d'Aréculture by Baral open bracket Aschette editor close bracket The Rue Amstead Experiments by W. M. Frim London 1888 Culture with Art Manueux etc open bracket The Field Office Editor close bracket Fields Factories & Workshops by The Offer open bracket Thomas Nelson & Sons close bracket close note As to the inhabitants of large towns who have as yet no real notion of what agriculture can be we advise them to explore the surrounding market gardens they need but observe and question the market gardeners and a new world will be open to them they will then be able to see what European agriculture may be in the 20th century and they will understand we what force the social revolution will be armed when we know the secret of taking everything we need from the soil a few facts will suffice to show that our assertions are in no way exaggerated we only wish them to be preceded by a few general remarks we know in what a rich condition European agriculture is if the cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner he is robbed by the state if the state taxes him moderately the money lender enslave him by means of promissory notes and soon turns him into a simple tenant of soil belonging in reality to a financial company the landlord the state and the banker thus plunders the cultivator by means of rent taxes and interest the sum varies in each country but it never falls below the quarter very often the half of the raw produce in France and in Italy agriculturalists paid the state quite recently as much as 44% of the gross produce moreover the share of the owner and of state always goes on increasing as soon as the cultivator has obtained more plentiful crops by prodigies of labor invention or initiative the tribute he will owe to the landowner the state and the banker will augment in proportion if he doubles the number of bachelors rip per acre rent will be doubled and taxes too the state will take care to raise them still more if the prices go up and so on in short everywhere the cultivator the soil works 12 to 16 hours a day these three vultures take from him everything he mightly buy they rock him everywhere or what would enable him to improve his culture this is why agriculture progresses so slowly the cultivator can only occasionally make some progress in some exceptional regions and the quite exceptional circumstances following up an quarrel between the three vampires and yet we have said nothing about the tribute every cultivator pays to the manufacturer every machine every speed every barrel of chemical manure is sold to him at three or four times it's real cost no let us forget the middlemen who levies the lion's share of the earth's produce this is why during all this century of invention and progress agriculture has only improved from time to time and very limited areas happily they have always been small oasis neglected for some time by the vulture and here we learn what intensive agriculture can produce for mankind let us mention a few examples in the american priori's open bracket which however only yield meager spring weight crops from 7 to 15 bushels acre and even these are often made by periodical droughts for the bracket 500 men working only during eight months produce the annual food of 50 000 people with all the improvements over the last three years one month yearly labor open bracket 300 days close bracket yields delivered in chicago's flower the yearly food of 250 men here the result is obtained by a great economy in manual labor on those vast plains ploughing harvesting thrashing or organizing almost military fashion there's no useless running to and through no loss of time all is done with parade-like precision this is agriculture on a large scale extensive agriculture which takes the soil from nature without seeking to improve it when the earth has yielded all it can they leave it they seek elsewhere for a virgin soil to be exhausted in its turn but here is also intensive agriculture which is already work and will be more and more so by machinery its objective is to cultivate a limited space well to maneuver to improve to concentrate work and to obtain the largest crop possible this kind of culture spreads every year and whereas agriculture is in the south of France and on the third are plains of western america or content with an average crop of 11 to 15 bushels per acre by extensive culture they reap regularly 39 even 55 and sometimes 60 bushels per acre in the north of France the annual consumption of the men is thus obtained from less than a quarter of a acre and the more intense the culture is the less work is expanded to obtain a bushel of wheat machinery repaces men at the preliminary work and for the improvements needed by the land such as draining clearing of stones which will double the crops in future once and for ever sometimes nothing but keeping the soil free of weeds without manuring allows an average soil to yield excellent crops from year to year it has been done for 40 years in succession at revampstead in her fourth year however let us not write an agricultural romance but be satisfied with a crop of 44 bushels per acre that needs no exceptional soil but merely a rational culture and let us see what it means there are 3,600,000 individuals who inhabit the two departments of Sien and Senewals consume merely for their food a little less than 22 million bushels of cereals chiefly wheat and in our hypothesis they would have to cultivate in order to obtain this crop 494,200 acres out of 1,507,300 acres which they possess it is evident they would not cultivate them with spades that would need too much time 96 workdays of 5 hours per acre it would be preferable to improve the soil once for all to drain what needed draining to level what needed leveling to clear the soil of stones were it even necessary to spend 5 million days of 5 hours in this preparatory work an average of 10 workdays to each acre then they would plant with a steam digger which would take 1 and 3 fifths of a day per acre and they would give another 1 and 3 fifths of a day for working with a double pluff seeds would be sorted by steam instead of taking half a zod and they would be carefully sown in rows instead of being throwed to the four winds now all this work would not take 10 days of 5 hours per acre if the work were done under good conditions but if 10 million workdays are given to good culture during 3 or 4 years the result will be that later on crops of 40-455 bushels per acre will be obtained by only working half the time 50 million workdays will thus have been spent to give bread to a population of 3,600,000 inhabitants and the work would be such that everyone could do it without having muscles of steel or without having even work per ground before the initiative and the general distribution of work would come from those who know the soil as to the work itself there is no advancement of either sex so Enfield has to be incapable of looking of the machines and of contributing his share to agrarian work after a few hours' apprenticeship well, when we consider that in the present hours there are in a city like Paris without counting the unemployed of the upper-closures there are always about 100,000 workmen out of work in their several trades we see that the powerless in our present organization would alone suffice to give with a rational culture all the bread that is necessary for the 3 or 4 million inhabitants of the two departments we repeat this is no fancy dream and we have not yet spoken of a truly intensive agriculture we have not depended upon the wheat one bracket obtained in 3 years by Mr. Hallett close bracket of which one grain replanted produced 5,000 or 6,000 and occasionally 10,000 grains which would give a wheat necessary for a family of 5 individuals on an area of 120 square yards on the contrary we have only mentioned what is being already achieved by numerous farmers in France, England, Belgium etc and what might be done tomorrow with the experience and knowledge acquired already by practice on a large scale but without a revolution neither tomorrow nor after tomorrow we'll see it done because it is not to the interests of landlords and capitalists and because business who would find their profit in it have neither the knowledge nor the money nor the time to obtain what is necessary to go ahead the society of today has not yet reached this stage but let Parisians proclaim an anarchist commune and they will of necessity come to it because they will not be foolish enough to continue making less serious toys open bracket which Vienna or so and Berlin make as well already close bracket and to run the risk of being left without bread moreover agricultural work by the help of machinery would soon become the most attractive and the most joyful of all occupations we have had enough jewelry and enough dust cloves they would say it is high time for the workers to recruit their strength in agriculture to go in search of vigor of impressions of nature of the joy of life that they have forgotten in the dog factories of the suburbs in the middle ages it was alpine pasture lands rather than guns which allowed the swiss to shake off lords and kings modern agriculture will allure a city in revolt to free itself from the combined bourgeois forces point three we have seen how the three and one half million inhabitants of the three departments around Paris could find ample bread by cultivating only a third of their territory let us now pause on to cattle Englishmen who eat much meat consume on average a little less than 220 pounds a year per adult supposing all meats consume more oxen that makes a little less than the third of an ox and ox a year for five individuals open bracket including children close bracket is already a sufficient ration for three and one half million inhabitants this would make an annual consumption of 700,000 head of cattle today with a pastoral system we need at least five million acres to nourish 660,000 head of cattle this makes nine acres per each head of horned cattle nevertheless we've probably moderately watered by spring water open bracket has recently done a thousand of acres in the southwest of france school bracket one and one fourth million acres already suffice but if intensive culture is practiced and beetroot is grown for four years you only need a quarter of that a year that is to say about 310,000 acres and if we have recourse to maize and practice and silage open bracket the compression of fodder while grain close bracket like arabs we obtain fodder on an area of 217,500 acres in the environment of Milan where sewer water is used to irrigate the fields fodder for two to three horned cattle per each acre is obtained on an area of 22,000 acres and on a few favored fields up to 177 tons of hay to the 10 acres have been cropped the yearly preventive 36 milk cows nearly nine acres per head of cattle only done under the pastoral system and only two and one half acres for nine oxen or cows under the new system these are the opposite extremes in modern agriculture in Guenzi the total of 9,894 acres utilised nearly half open bracket 4,695 acres cross bracket are covered with cereals and kitchen gardens only 5,189 acres remain as meadows on these 5,189 acres 1,480 horses 7,260 head of cattle 900 sheep and 4,200 pigs or fed which makes more than three hide of cattle per two acres without reckoning the sheep or the pigs it is needless to add that the fertility of the soil is made by seaweed and chemical manures returning to our three and one half million inhabitants belonging to Paris and its environs we see that the land necessary for the rearing of cattle comes down from 5 million acres to 197,000 well then let us not stop at the lowest figures let us take those of ordinary intensive culture let us liberally add to the land necessary for smaller cattle which must replace some of the horned bees and aloe 295,000 acres for the rearing of cattle 294,000 if you like on the 1,013,000 acres remaining of the bread has been provided for the people let us be generous and give 5 million work days to put this land into a productive state after having therefore employed in the course of the year 20 million work days half of which are for permanent improvements we shall have bread and meat assured to us without including all the extra meat obtainable in the shape of fowls, pigs, rabbits etc without taking into consideration that a population provided with excellent vegetables and fruit consumes less meat than Englishmen who supplement their poor supply of vegetables by animal food now how much do 20 million work days of 5 hours make per inhabitant? very little indeed a population of 3 and 1 half millions must have at least 1,200,000 editmen and as many women capable of work well then to give bread and meat to all it would need only 17 half days of work a year per man add 3 million work days or double that number if you like in order to obtain milk that will make 25 work days of 5 hours in all nothing more than a little pleasurable country exercise to obtain the 3 principal products bread, meat and milk the 3 products which after housing cause daily anxiety to 9 tenths of mankind and yet let us not tire of repeating these are not fancy dreams we have only to what is, what been obtained by experience on a large scale agriculture could be recognized in this way tomorrow if property laws and general ignorance did not offer opposition the day Paris has understood that to know what you eat and how it is produced is a question of public interest the day when everybody will have understood that this question is infinitely more important than all the parliamentary debates of the present times on that day the revolution will be an accomplished fact Paris will take possession of the two departments and cultivate them and then the Parisian worker after having labored a third of his existence in order to buy bad and insufficient food will produce it himself under his walls within the enclosure of his thoughts open bracket if they still exist close bracket and a few hours of healthy and attractive work and now we pass on to food and vegetables let us go outside Paris and visit the establishment of a market gardener who accomplishes wonders open bracket ignored by learn economists close bracket at a few miles from the academies let us visit suppose Mr. Ponce the author of the work on market gardening who makes no secret of what the earth yields him and who has published it all along Mr. Ponce and especially his workmen work like niggers it takes eight men to cultivate a plot a little less than three acres open bracket 2.7 close bracket they work 12 and even 15 hours a day that is to say three times more than is needed 24 of them would not be too many to which Mr. Ponce will probably answer that as he pays the terrible sum of 100 pounds rent a year for his 2.7 acres of land and 100 pounds for manure bought in the barracks he is obliged to exploit he would no doubt answer being exploited I exploit in my turn this isolation has also cost him 1,200 pounds of which certainly more than half went as tribute to the idle balance of industry in reality this establishment represents at most 3,000 work days probably much less but let us examine his crops nearly 10 tons of carrots nearly 10 tons of onions radishes and small vegetables 6,000 heads of cabbage 3,000 heads of cauliflower 5,000 baskets of tomatoes 5,000 dozen of child's fruit 154,000 salads in short a total of 125 tons of vegetables and fruit to 2.7 acres 120 yards long by 109 yards broad which makes more than 44 tons of vegetables to the acre but a man does not eat more than 660 pounds of vegetables and fruit a year and two and one-half acres of a market garden yield enough vegetables and fruit to richly supply the table of 350 adults during the year thus 24 persons employed a whole year in cultivating 2.7 acres of land and only five working hours a day would produce sufficient vegetables and food for 350 adults which is equivalent at least to 500 individuals to put it another way in cultivating like Mr. Ponds and his results have already been surpassed 350 adults should each give a little more than 100 hours a year open bracket 103 goose bracket to produce vegetables and food necessary for 500 people let us mention that such a production is not the exception it takes place under the walls of Paris on an area of 1220 acres by 5,000 market gardeners only these market gardeners are reduced nowadays to a state of beast of burden in order to pay an average rent of 32 pounds per acre but do not these facts which can be verified by everyone prove that 17,300 acres open bracket of the 519,000 remaining to a scale bracket would suffice to give all necessary vegetables as well as a liberal amount of food to a three and one-half million inhabitants of our three departments as to the quantity of work necessary to produce these food and vegetables it would amount to 50 million worth days of five hours open bracket 50 days per adult male food bracket if we measure by the market gardener standard of work that we could reduce this quantity if we had recourse to a process in vogue in Jersey and Guernsey we must also remember that the Paris market gardener is forced to work so hard because he mostly produces early season foods the high prices of which have to pay for fabulous rights and that this system of culture entails more work than is necessary for growing the ordinary staple foods vegetables and food besides the market gardeners of Paris not having the means to make a great outlier in their gardens and being obliged to be heavily for gloss wood, iron and coal obtain their artificial heat out of manure while it can be had at much less cost in hothouses but for the market gardeners we see are forced to become machines and to renounce all joys of life in order to obtain their marvelous crops but these hard grinders have rendered a great service to humanity in teaching us that the soil can be made they make it with all hard beds of manure which have already served to give the necessary warmth to young plants and to early fruit and they make it in such great quantity that they are compelled to sell it in pot otherwise it would raise the level of their gardens by one inch every year they do it so well open bracket Subaru teaches us in his dictionary of agriculture in an article on market gardeners close market that in recent contracts the market gardener stipulates that he will carry away his soil with him when he leaves the bit of ground he's cultivating bloom carried away on courts with furniture and gloss frames that is the answer of practical cultivators of learned treatises of the record who represented rent as a means of equalizing the natural advantages of the soil the soil is worth what the man is worth that is the gardener's motto and yet the market gardeners of paris and war labor three times as hard to obtain the same results as their fellow workers in guianzi or in england applying industry to agriculture these laws make their climate in addition to their soil by means of a greenhouse 50 years ago the greenhouse was the luxury of the rich it was kept to grow exotic plant for pleasure but nowadays its use begins to be generalized a tremendous industry has grown up lately in guianzi and jersey where hundreds of acres are already covered with gloss to say nothing of countless small greenhouses kept in every little form garden acres and acres of greenhouses have lately been built also at worth in pen bracket 103 acres in 1912 good bracket in the suburbs of london and in several other ports of england and scotland they are built of all qualities beginning with those which are granite walls down to those which represent mere shelters made in planks and gloss frames which cost even now with all the tribute paid to capitalists and middlemen as than three s6 deeper square yard and a gloss most of them are hated for at least three or four months every year but even the cool greenhouses which are not heated at all give excellent results of course not for growing grapes and tropical plants but for potatoes carrots peas tomatoes and so on in this way man emancipates himself from climate and at the same time he avoids also the heavy work with the hotbeds and he saves both in buying much less manual and in work three men to the acre each of them working less than 60 hours a week produce on very small spaces what formerly required acres and acres of land the result of all this recent conquest of culture is that if one half only of the adults of the city gave each about 50 half days for the culture of the finest food and vegetables out of season we would have all the year round an unlimited supply of that sort of food and vegetables for the whole population but there is a still more important fact to notice the greenhouse has nowadays a tendency to become a mere kitchen garden under gloss and when it is used to such a purpose the simplest plank and gloss unheated shelters already give fabulous crops such as for instance 500 bushels of potatoes per acre as a first crop ready by the end of April after which is second and a third crop or obtained in the extremely high temperature which prevails in the summer under gloss i gave in my fields factories and workshops most striking facts in this direction sufficient to say here that at Jersey 34 men with one train gardener only cultivated 13 acres under gloss from which they obtained 143 tons of food and early vegetables using for this extraordinary culture less than 1000 tons of coal and this is done now in Guernsey and Jersey on a very large scale quite a number of steamers constantly plying between Guernsey and London only to exclude the crops of the greenhouses nowadays in order to obtain that same crop of 500 bushels of potatoes we must plough every year a surface of four acres plant it cultivate it and so on whereas with the gloss even if we shall have to give perhaps to start with half a day's work per square yard in order to build the greenhouse we shall save afterwards at least one half and probably three quarters of the yearly labor required formally these are facts results which everyone can verify himself and these facts are already a hint as to what men could obtain from the earth if he treated it with intelligence part five in all the above we have reasoned upon what already we've stood the test of experience intensive culture of the fields irrigated meadows the hot house and finally the kitchen garden under gloss or realities more of a tendency is to extend and to generalize these methods of culture because they are a lot of obtaining more produce with less work and with more certainty in fact after having studied the most simple gloss shelters of Guernsey we affirm that taking all in all for less work is expended for obtaining potatoes and the gloss in April running growing them in the open air which requires digging a space four times as large watering it weeding it etc work is like perhaps economizing employing a perfected tool or machine even when an initial expense had to be incurred to buy the tool complete figures concerning the culture of common vegetables and the gloss for still wanting this culture is of recent origin and is only carried out on small areas but we have already figures concerning the 50 years old culture of early season grapes and these figures are conclusive in the north of England on the scotch frontier they are called only cost 3 s a ton at the peak mouth they have long since taken to growing hot house grapes 30 years ago these grapes wrapping generally were sold by the grower at 20 s per pound and we sold at 40 s per pound for napoleon free stable we did the same grower says them at only 2 s 6 deeper pound he tells us so himself in a horticultural journal the fall in the process is caused by the tons and tons of grapes arriving in January to London and Paris thanks to the cheapness of gold and an intelligent culture grapes from the north travel now southwards in a contrary direction to ordinary fruit because so little that in me english and jersey grapes are sold at 1 s 8 deeper pound by the gardeners and yet this price like that of 40 s 30 years ago is only kept up by slack production in March Belgium grapes are sold at from 6 d to 8 d while in October grapes cultivated in immense quantities and the gloss and with a little artificial heating in the environs of London are sold at the same price as grapes bought by the pound in the vineyards of Switzerland and the Rhine that is to say for a few half pence yet they still cost two thirds too much by reason of the excessive threat of the soil and the cost of installation and heating on which the gardener pays a formidable tribute to the manufacturer and the middlemen this being understood we may say that it costs next to nothing to have delicious grapes under the latitude of in our misty londonine autumn in one of the suburbs for instance a ruch gloss and plaster shelter 9 feet 10 inches long by 6 and 1 half feet wide resting against our cottage gave us about 50 pounds of grapes of an exquisite flavor in October for nine consecutive years the crop came from a humbug vine stalk six year old and the shelter was so bad that the rain came through at night the temperature was always that of outside it was evidently not heated but it would have been as useless as heating the street and the care which was given was pruning the vine half an hour every year and bringing a wheel barrel full of manure which was thrown over the stalk of the vine planted in red clay outside the shelter on the other hand you estimate the amount of care given to the vine and the borders of the rind of lake layman the terraces constructed stone upon stone and the slopes of the hills the transport of manure and also of earth to a height of 200 or 300 feet we come to the conclusion that on the whole the expenditure of work necessary to cultivate vines is more considerable in switzerland or on the banks of the rind that it is under gloss in london suburbs this may seem paradoxical because it is generally believed that vines grow themselves in the south of europe and that the vine growers were cost nothing but gordoners and horticulturists far from contradicting us confirm our assertions the most advantageous culture in england is vine culture wrote a practical gardener editor of the english journal of horticulture in the 19th century pricers speak eloquently for themselves as we know translating these facts into communist language we may assert that the man or woman who takes 20 hours a year from his leisure time to give some little care very pleasant in the main to two or three vines stalks sheltered by simple gloss under a new european climate will gather as many grapes as their family and friends can eat and that applies not only to vines but to all fruit trees the commune that will put the processors of intensive culture into practice on a large scale will have all possible vegetables indigenous or exotic and all desirable without employing more than about 10 hours a year per inhabitant in fact nothing would be easier than to verify the above statements by direct experiment suppose 100 acres of a light loom when bracket such as we have that worthy close bracket or transform into a number of market gardens each one with its gloss houses for the rearing of the seedlings and young plants suppose also that 50 more acres are covered with gloss houses and the organization of the whole is left to practical experience french maraché and guianzi or worthy greenhouse gardeners in basing the maintenance of these 150 acres on the jersey average requiring the work of three men per acre and the gloss which makes less than 8600 hours of work a year it would need about 1,300,000 hours for the 150 acres 50 competed gardeners could give five hours a day to this work and the rest would be simply done by people who without being gardeners by profession would soon learn how to use a speed and to handle the plants but this work would yield at least we have seen it in a preceding chapter all necessaries and articles of luxury in the way of fruit and vegetables for at least 40,000 or 50,000 people let us admit that among this number there are 30,500 adults willing to work at the kitchen garden then each one would have to give 100 hours a year distributed over the whole year these hours of work would become hours of recreation spent among friends and children in beautiful gardens more beautiful probably than those of the legendary semi-ramies this is the balanced sheet of the labor to be spent in order to be able to eat the satiety fruit which were deprived of today and to have vegetables in abundance now so scrupulous duration out by the housewife when she has to reckon each half penny which must go to enriched capitalists and non-owners open note summing up the figures given on agriculture figures proving that the inhabitants of the two departments of Sen and Senewas can live perfectly well on their own territory by employing very little time annually to obtain food we have departments of Sen and Senewas number of inhabitants in 1889 3,900,000 EIA in acres 1,507,300 average number of inhabitants per acre 2.6 EIA has to be cultivated to feed the inhabitants open bracket in acres full bracket corn and cereals 494,000 natural and artificial medus 494,000 vegetables and fruit from 17,300 to 25,000 leaving a balance for houses, roads, parks, forests 494,000 quantity of annual work necessary to improve and cultivate the above surfaces in five-hour work days cereals open bracket culture crop close bracket 15,000,000 medus milk rearing of cattle 10,000,000 market gardening culture high-clothed fruit 33,000,000 extras 12,000,000 total 70,000,000 if we suppose that only half of the able-bodied adults open bracket men and women close bracket are willing to work out agriculture we see that 70,000,000 work days must be divided among 1,200,000 individuals which gives us 58 work days of five hours for each of these workers we that the population of the two departments would have all necessary bread meat milk vegetables and food both for ordinary and even luxurious consumption today a workman spends for the necessary food of his family open bracket generally less than what is necessary close bracket at least one-third of his 300 work days a year about 1,000 hours be it instead of 290 that is he just gives about 700 hours too much to threaten the idle and the would-be administrators because he does not produce his own food but buys it of middlemen who in their turn buy it of peasants who exhaust themselves by working with bad tools because being robbed by the Leniners in the state they cannot procure better ones close note if only humanity had the consciousness of what it can and if that consciousness only gave it the power to will if it only knew that co-edits of the spirit is the rock on which all revolutions have stranded until now port six we can easily perceive a new horizon opening before the social revolution each time we speak of revolution the face of the worker who has seen children wanting food documents and he asks what of bread will they be sufficient if everyone eats according to his appetite what if the peasants ignorant tools of reaction starve our towns as the black bands did in France in 1793 what shall we do let them do their worth the large cities will have to do without them at what then should the hundreds of thousands of workers who are asphyxiated today in small workshops and factories be employed on the day they regain their liberty will they continue to shut themselves up in factories after the revolution will they continue to make luxurious toys for export when they see their stock or corn getting exhausted meat becoming scarce and vegetables disappearing without being replaced evidently not they will leave the town and go into the fields aided by a machinery which will enable the weakest of us to put a shoulder to the wheel they will carry a revolution into previously enslaved culture as they will have carried it into institutions and ideas hundreds of acres will be covered with gloss and men and women with delicate fingers will foster the growth of young plants hundreds of other acres will be ploughed by steam improved by manuals or enriched by artificial soil obtained by the pulverization of rocks happy cries of occasional laborers will cover these acres with crops guided in the work and experiments partly by those who know agriculture but especially by the great and practical spirit of a people who rise from long slumber and illumined by the bright beacon of the happiness of all and in two or three months the early crops will receive the most pressing wants and provide food for a people who after so many centuries of expectation will at least be able to appease their hunger and eat according to their appetite in the meanwhile popular genius the genius of a nation which revolts and knows its wants will work at experimenting with new processes of culture that we already catch a glimpse of and that only needs the baptism of experience to become universal light will be experimented with that unknown agent of culture which makes barley ripen in 45 days under the latitude of their cooks light concentrated or artificial will rival heat in hostening the growth of plants a mushy of the future will in that a machine to guide the rays of the sun and make them work so that we shall no longer seek sun heats stored in cold in the depths of the earth we will experiment the watering of the soil with cultures of microorganisms a rational idea conceived but yesterday which will permit us to give to the soil of those little living beings necessary to feed the rootlets to decompose and assimilate the component parts of the soil they will experiment but let us stop here or we shall enter into the realm of fancy let us remain in the reality of acquired facts with the processors of culture in use applied on a large scale and already victory in the struggle against industrial competition who can give ourselves ease and luxury in return for agreeable work the near future will show what is practical in the processors that recent scientific discoveries give us a glimpse of let us limit ourselves at present to opening up the new path that consists in the study of the needs of men and the means of satisfying them the only thing that may be wanting to the revolution is the boldness of initiative with our minds already narrowed in our youth and enslaved by the force in our mature age we hardly dare to think if the new ideas mentioned before venturing on an opinion of our own we consult musty books a hundred years old to know what ancient masters thought on the subject it is not food that will fail if boldness of thought and initiative are not wanting to the revolution of all the great days of the french revolution the most beautiful the greatest was the one on which delegates who had come from all parts of France to Paris work all with the speed to plane the ground of the chandomores preparing it for the fate of the federation that day France was united animated by the new spirit she had a vision of a future in the working in the command of the soil and it will again be by the working in command of the soil that the enfranchised societies will find their unity and will obliterate the hatred and oppression which are thither to divide them henceforth able to conceive solidarity that immense power which increases mass energy and creative forces a hundred fall the new society will march to the conquest of the future with all the vigor of youth seizing to produce for unknown buyers and looking in its bits for needs and days to be satisfied society will liberally assure the life and ease of each of its members as well as that moral satisfaction which will give when freely chosen and freely accomplished and the joy of living without encroaching on the life of others inspired by a new daring born of a feeling of solidarity all will march together to the conquest of the high jaws of knowledge and artistic creation a society thus inspired will fear neither dissensions within no enemies without to the coalitions of the past it will oppose a new harmony the initiative of each and all the daring which springs from the awakening of the people's genius before such an irresistible force conspiring kings will be powerless nothing will remain for them but to bow before it and to harness themselves to the chariot of humanity rolling towards new horizons opened up by the social revolution and of agriculture recording by Enko and of the conquest of bread by Peter Kropotkin