The Thoughts and Studies of G. Bernard Shaw: Personal Letters, Articles, Lectures & Essays. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Thoughts and Studies of G. Bernard Shaw: Personal Letters, Articles, Lectures & Essays

that he must join the conspiracy or go to the wall, even though he feels that the conspiracy is fundamentally ruinous to himself and his fellow-conspirators. The secret of writers like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkine is that they see the whole imposture through and through, in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendor, its prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension. But Kropotkine, as I have shewn, is really an advocate of free Democracy; and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as “the tyranny of the majority” and “the coming slavery.” I suggest this with the more confidence because William Morris’s views are largely identical with those of Kropotkine: yet Morris, after patient and intimate observation of Anarchism as a working propaganda in England, has definitely dissociated himself from it, and has shewn, by his sketch of the communist folk-mote in his News from Nowhere, how sanely alive he is to the impossibility of any development of the voluntary element in social action sufficient to enable individuals or minorities to take public action without first obtaining the consent of the majority.

On the whole, then, I do not regard the extreme hostility to existing institutions which inspires Communist Anarchism as being a whit more dangerous to Social-Democracy than the same spirit as it inspires the peculiar Toryism of Ruskin. Much more definitely opposed to us is the survival of that intense jealousy of the authority of the government over the individual which was the mainspring of the progress of the eighteenth century. Only those who forget the lessons of history the moment they have served their immediate turn will feel otherwise than reassured by the continued vitality of that jealousy among us. But this consideration does not remove the economic objections which I have advanced as to the practical program of Individualist Anarchism. And even apart from these objections, the Social-Democrat is compelled, by contact with hard facts, to turn his back decisively on useless denunciation of the State. It is easy to say, Abolish the State; but the State will sell you up, lock you up, blow you up, knock you down, bludgeon, shoot, stab, hang — in short, abolish you, if you lift a hand against it. Fortunately, there is, as we have seen, a fine impartiality about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of the State power. They take their wages and obey their orders without asking questions. If those orders are to demolish the homestead of every peasant who refuses to take the bread out of his children’s mouths in order that his landlord may have money to spend as an idle gentleman in London, the soldier obeys. But if his orders were to help the police to pitch his lordship into Holloway Gaol until he had paid an Income Tax of twenty shillings on every pound of his unearned income, the soldier would do that with equal devotion to duty, and perhaps with a certain private zest that might be lacking in the other case. Now these orders come ultimately from the State — meaning, in this country, the House of Commons. A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workmen will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlords. A House of Commons consisting of 660 workmen and 10 gentlemen will probably, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldier to take money from the landlords for the people. With that hint I leave the matter, in the full conviction that the State, in spite of the Anarchists, will continue to be used against the people by the classes until it is used by the people against the classes with equal ability and equal resolution.