Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [48]
Shaw, with his unrelenting common sense, picked out the trouble in a Fabian Tract called The Impossibilities of Anarchism, published in 1893 and reprinted several times during the next ten years. If man is good and institutions bad, he asked, if man will be good again as soon as the corrupt system ceases to oppress him, “how did the corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise?” Yet the fact that Shaw felt required to write the Tract was his tribute to the force of the Idea.
The most vexing problem of the Anarchist plan was the question of an accounting of the value of goods and services. According to the theories of Proudhon and Bakunin, everyone would be paid in goods in proportion to what he produced. But this required a body to establish values and do the accounting, an Authority, which was anathema to “pure” Anarchy. As resolved by Kropotkin and Malatesta, the solution was to assume that everyone would want to work for the good of the whole, and since all work would be agreeable and dignified, everyone would contribute freely and take from the community storehouse freely without the necessity of accounting.
In proof Kropotkin evolved his theory of “mutual aid” to show that Anarchism had a scientific basis in the laws of nature. Darwin’s thesis, he argued, had been perverted by capitalist thinkers. Nature was not, in fact, red in tooth and claw nor animated by the instinct of each living thing to survive at the cost of its fellow but, on the contrary, by the instinct of each to preserve the species through “mutual assistance.” He drew examples from the ants and the bees and from wild horses and cattle—who form a ring when attacked by wolves—and from the communal field and village life of men in the Middle Ages. He greatly admired the rabbit, which, though defenceless and adapted to nothing in particular, yet survived and multiplied. The rabbit symbolized for him the durability of the meek who, an earlier Preacher had claimed, would inherit the earth.
Although Kropotkin never slackened his lust for the total destruction of the bourgeois world, that world could not forbear to honor him. He was such a distinguished scholar—and besides, a Prince. When he refused membership in the Royal Geographic Society because it was under royal patronage, he was invited anyway to the Society’s dinner, and when he refused to rise upon the chairman’s toast to “The King!” the chairman promptly rose again to propose “Long live Prince Kropotkin!” and the whole company stood up to join in the toast. When he visited the United States in 1901 and lectured to the Lowell Institute in Boston, he was entertained by its intellectual elite and, not to be outdone, by Mrs. Potter Palmer in Chicago. His memoirs were commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly, his books bore the imprint of the most respectable publishers. When Mutual Aid appeared, the Review of Reviews called it “a good healthy cheerful, delightful book which does one good to read.”
Aside from Kropotkin, Anarchist thought was most highly developed in France. Among a wide assortment, some serious and some frivolous, the leaders were Elisée Reclus and Jean Grave. Reclus, with a dark-bearded melancholy face of somber beauty like that of a Byzantine Christ, was the soothsayer of the movement. He had fought on the barricades of the Commune and marched to prison down the dusty blood-stained road to Versailles. He came from a distinguished family of scholars and, besides his work as a geographer, had devoted years to explaining and preaching the Anarchist system through his books and through the journals he edited at one time or another with Kropotkin and Grave. In his