Communalism

“ Each Common interest was in turn forthwith removed from society, set up against it as a higher Collective interest, wrested from the individual activity of the members of society, and turned into a subject for governmental administration, from the bridges, the school house and the communal property of a village community, up to the railroads, the national wealth and the national University of France. Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself, in its struggle against the revolution, compelled, with its repressive measures, to strengthen the means and the centralization of the government. ”

“ Peculiar historical circumstances may have prevented the classical development, as in France, of the bourgeois form of government, and may have allowed, as in England, to complete the great central State organs by corrupt vestries, jobbing councillors, and ferocious poor-law guardians in the towns, and virtually hereditary magistrates in the counties. The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. ”

“ But the principle of association, applied in the cities, is not a fact purely German. ... Association is a fact which is neither Germanic nor Roman; it is universal, and is produced spontaneously among all peoples, in all social classes, when circumstances exact and favor its appearance. The communal revolution then is a national event. The commune was born, like other forms of popular emancipation, from the need which the inhabitants of the cities had of substituting a limited and regulated exploitation for the arbitrary exploitation of which they were the victims. ”

“ If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national Government, it was, at the same time, a workingmen's Government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of the Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world. ”

“ All communists without exception propose that the people as a whole, or some particular division of the people, as a village or commune, should own all the means of production—land, [36] houses, factories, railroads, canals, etc.; that production should be carried on in common; and that officers, selected in one way or another, should distribute among the inhabitants the fruits of their labor. Under such circumstances inequalities could have no opportunity to spring up; nor do we find communistic experiments failing because it is impossible to maintain equality. ”

“ This communal organization of society continued for thousands of years and its vestiges still exist amid the highest enlightenment, as the foundation for business corporations, partnerships, and, indeed, all commercial and other coöperation,—communism—the greatest good to the greatest number, being the basis of all civilized laws. ”

“ In the Commune, government and public policy have an importance unknown to barbaric society, but the Commune still wears the character of a powerful assemblage of small associations rather than of a single society, or of a State in the true and strict sense of the word. Life indeed courses more swiftly through these numberless groups,409 and is quickened by their activity. Social vigour is chiefly to be looked for in family cliques, and in the Companies of the Arts and Trades, of the Nobles and of the Burghers, all of whom have laws, statutes, magistrates, and tribunals of their own. ”

“ Among the German, and still more among the Russian, peasantry are found habits of free coöperation and discussion almost uninfluenced by the character of the state; and it is a familiar and well-supported view that the village commune, self-governing as regards local affairs and habituated to discussion, is a very widespread institution in settled communities, and the continuator of a similar autonomy previously existing in the clan. “It is man who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but the commune seems to come directly from the hand of God.” ”

“ Now what constitutes the commonweal, or common notion of what is for the common good, will and always must be expressed in the form of laws of some kind—either political laws, instituted by the citizens in public assembly, as of old by folk-moot, or if you will by real councils or parliaments of the people, or by social customs growing up from the experience of Society. The fact that at present many or the majority of laws and customs are bad, does not mean that we can do without good laws or good customs. ”

“ The idea is sinking deep into the masses, it is giving them a rallying cry. We count on the present generation to bring about the Social Revolution within the Commune, to put an end to the ignoble system of middle-class exploitation, to rid the people of the tutelage of the State, to inaugurate a new era of liberty, equality, solidarity in the evolution of the human race. ”

“ The common interest is there in both cases; but in the case of the village community it is a permanent, not merely a passing, ground for co-operation; and if we must take to heart the warnings given by some legal historians not to see communism where there is only joint action, we must also insist that common action, which is in effect communal action, is quite possible without those who act either possessing, or feeling the need of possessing, any definite status. ”

“ To the wise men who were entrusted with the formation of that union and common government, it was obvious enough that each separate society should be entrusted with the management of its own peculiar interests, and that the united government should take charge only of those interests which were common and general. ”

“ But, after all, the life of the communist has much more varied interests and excitements than that of the farmer or his family; for a commune is a village, and usually forms a tolerably densely crowded aggregation of people—more like a small section cut out of a city than like even a village. There is also a wholesome variety of occupations; and country life, to those who love it, presents an infinite fund of amusement and healthful work. ”

“ Will you not cease to regard each other as enemies, and look upon one another as the children of a common mother, and come and reason together?
"Let us banish all outside influences from our deliberations, and assemble around our council board with the constitution of our country and the organic law of this territory, as the great charts for our guidance and direction. The bona fide inhabitants of the territory alone are charged with the solemn duty of enacting her laws, upholding her government, maintaining peace, and laying the foundation for a future commonwealth. ”

“ Those who howled loudest knew that the action of the Commune was justified, but as with the wolf and the lamb, the typical bourgeois is bound by his traditions and class interests to make out the Commune and all connected with it as having been in the wrong, and he will continue to do so, despite all facts and arguments to the contrary. After all, the best advice to give the authorities of the modern state is "kill not that ye be not killed." ”

“ For example, all governments armed with force are to be done away. In their stead is to come voluntary association. Democratic communes are everywhere to replace organic states. There is to be no centralisation, no one great Commune, but numbers of little communes, to suit the convenience of individual preference. ”

“ The wonderful feat of quietly emancipating forty million bonded servitors, at one stroke, the institution on a tremendous scale of what the dreamers have declared to be the classic relation of social man—communism, the division of land, taking about one-half from the rich and giving it to the poor—such marvels as these throw a halo of Arabian magic about the history of this simple people since 1861. ”

“ In the event, then, of an order for mobilization, we shall attempt to bring about the Revolution, in order to lay hold of the social wealth usurped today by a minority. We shall transform the dwelling houses, now the property of individual landlords, into communal property.
The New Society We shall work the factories, mines, all the great enterprises, by our unions and our engineers. Our unions of workers will administer, like great co-operative societies, the big stores of today. ”

“ The better peace that now prevailed throughout France made town life, trade and commerce, possible on a larger scale than in the rough times of absolute feudal anarchy. |The communal movement.| The communal movement was now beginning in northern France, and though the king was far from being, as the older historians make him, the ‘enfranchiser of the communes,’ he was at least not fiercely hostile to the less revolutionary sides of the new movement. ”

“ No doubt certain definitions of the functions and mutual relations of the Communal authorities might be extracted from the Emancipation Law and subsequent official documents, but as a rule neither the Village Elder nor the members of the Village Assembly ever heard of such definitions; and yet every peasant knows, as if by instinct, what each of these authorities can do and cannot do. The Commune is, in fact, a living institution, whose spontaneous vitality enables it to dispense with the assistance and guidance of the written law, and its constitution is thoroughly democratic. ”

“ Instead of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune, as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical characteristics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state-appointed functionaries and offhand regulations in accordance with modern enlightenment. The spirit of communal exclusiveness—the resistance to the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional feeling in the peasant. ”

“ In reality, the Communal Constitution brought the rural producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their districts, and there secured to them, in the working men, the natural trustees of their interests.—The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now superseded, State power. ”

“ A species of communism seems to be a portion of the French character; for we discover, that, even at that early day, paysans, or habitans, collected together in villages, had their common fields, where the separate portion of each family was still a part of the common stock—and their tract of pasture-land, where there was no division, or separate property. ”

“ Then, when the people had obtained possession of the government, reforms would begin: return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equal and free family for the moral and oppressive family; absolute equality, civil, political and economic; individual independence guaranteed, thanks to the possession and the integral product of the instruments of work ”

“ From every agglomeration of men, from every city, from every nation, there inevitably arises a collective force.
Place this collective force at the service of liberty, let it rule by universal suffrage, the city becomes a commune, the nation becomes a republic.
This collective force is not, of its nature, intelligent. Belonging to all, it belongs to no one; it floats about, so to speak, outside of the people. ”

“ There are, of course, opposed interests in every community: attractive forces, which produce trade unions, guilds, corporations, companies, and the like; and repulsive forces, which result from the opposed interests of employers and employed, landlords and tenants, and similar pairs of different classes in the community. As time goes on, and the State advances with it, these forces will gain in strength; the cohesion of classes will become greater; association will grow as naturally as the bubbles form on the [122] surface of our evening beverage. ”

“ Oh, when a fellow gets the social revolution into his head he can see millions of proletarians marching to victory, and then the Coöperative Commonwealth looms up big before him in all its Bellamy glory. ”

“ So deeply seated, indeed, is this tendency to conflict between the different interests or portions of the community, that it would result from the action of the government itself, even though it were possible to find a community, where the people were all of the same pursuits, placed in the same condition of life, and in every respect, so situated, as to be without inequality of condition or diversity of interests. ”

“ For this reason coöperation, an alternative to communism,—which they abhor,—comes naturally to them. On the other hand, the ease with which they can be organised makes them peculiarly amenable to political influence. ”

“ From the family certain powers are delegated to the next higher social unit, the village or communal group, which in its turn concedes certain of its inherent rights to the organic group of communities, or states, and finally the states commit to the last and general authority, the national government, some of the elements of authority that have been delegated to them. ”

“ It is really a looking forward to an ideal commonwealth, in which the labor troubles and despotisms of to-day shall be adjusted on the same principle as the political troubles and despotisms of the last century were settled; namely, the principle that each citizen shall be industrially the equal of every other, as all are now political equals. ”

“ In countries like France, where there is a great traditional preponderance of the central authority, it may be among the possibilities, though the probable decline of war—the main cause of mechanical consolidation—should work in the opposite direction.
There are few things that would be more salutary to the life of our people than a lively and effective civic consciousness in towns, villages and rural communities. I trust this is growing and feel no dread of any socialism which it may prove to involve. ”