But even if a means could be found to get all to agree to produce certain articles (though there is no such means, and can be none, except coercion), who, in a free society, without capitalistic production, competition, and its law of supply and demand, will decide which articles are to have the preference? Which are to be made first, and which after? Are we first to build the Siberian Railway and fortify Port Arthur, and then macadamise the roads in our country districts, or vice-versa? Which is to come first, electric lighting or irrigation of the fields?
And then comes another question, insoluble with free worlonen, Which men are to do which work? Evidently all will prefer hay-making or drawing to stoking or cess-pool-cleaning.How, in apportioning the work, are people to be induced to agree?
No statistics can answer these questions.The solution can be only theoretical; it may be said that there will be people to whom power will be given to regulate all these matters.Some people will decide these questions and others will obey them.
But besides the questions of apportioning and directing production and of selecting work, when the means of production are communalised, there will be another and most important question, as to the degree of division of labor that can be established in a socialistically organised society.The now existing division of labor is conditioned by the necessities of the workers.A worker only agrees to live all his life underground, or to make the one-hundredth part of one article all his life, or to move his hands up and down amid the roar of machinery all his life, because he will otherwise not have means to live.
But it will only be by compulsion that a workman, owning the means of production and not suffering want, can be induced to accept such stupefying and soul-destroying conditions of labor as those in which people now work.
Division of labor is undoubtedly very profitable and natural to people; but if people are free, division of labor is only possible up to a certain very limited extent, which has been far overstepped in our society.
If one peasant occupies himself chiefly with bootmaking, and his wife weaves, and another peasant plows, and a third is a blacksmith, and they all, having acquired special dexterity in their own work, afterwards exchange what they have produced, such division of labor is advantageous to all, and free people will naturally divide their work in this way.But a division of labor by which a man makes one one-hundredth of an article, or a stoker works in 1500 of heat, or is choked with harmful gases, such divisions of labor is disadvantageous, because though it furthers the production of insignificant articles, it destroys that which is most precious-the life of man.And, therefore, such division of labor as now exists can only exist where there is compulsion.Rodbertus says that communal division of labor unites mankind.That is true, but it is only free division, such as people voluntarily adopt, that unites.
If people decide to make a road, and one digs, another brings stones, a third breaks them, etc., that sort of division of work unites people.
But if, independently of the wishes, and sometimes against the wishes, of the workers, a strategical railway is built, or an Eiffel tower, or stupidities such as fill the Paris Exhibition, and one workman is compelled to obtain iron, another to dig coal, a third to make castings, a fourth to cut down trees, and a fifth to saw them up, without even having the least idea what the things they are making are wanted for, then such division of labor not only does not unite men, but, on the contrary, it divides them.
And, therefore, with communalised implements of production, if people are free, they will only adopt division of labour in so far as the good resulting will outweigh the evils it occasions to the workers.And as each man naturally sees good in extending and diversifying his activities, such division of labor as now exists will evidently be impossible in a free society.
To suppose that with communalised means of produc-tion there will be such an abundance of things as is now produced by compulsory division of labor is like suppos-ing that after the emancipation of the serfs the domestic orchestras2 and theaters, the home-made carpets and laces and the elaborate gardens which depended on serf-labor would continue to exist as before.So that the supposition that when the Socialist ideal is realised every one will be free, and will at the same time have at his disposal everything, or almost everything, that is now made use of by the well-to-do classes, involves an obvious self-contradiction.The Slavery of Our Times -- Ch 7 -- Leo TolstoyFrom The Slavery of Our Times by Leo Tolstoy
