1 A reference to Sir Wm. Crookes’ theory of the ‘fourth state of matter’, a novelty at the time Tolstoy wrote this work.-A.M.
CHAPTER XXXII
DIVISION of labour has always existed in human society, and probably always will; but the question for us is not whether it exists and will exist, but what we must be guided by to see that the division shall be a fair one. If we take observation for our standard we thereby renounce all standards, and any division of labour we see existing that seems to us suitable, we shall accept as right, and this is what the reigning science leads us to.
Division of labour! Some are occupied with mental and spiritual, others with muscular physical work. With what assurance people say that! They wish to believe so, and it seems to them that in fact a perfectly correct exchange of services occurs, whereas what exists is really only a simple and very old form of coercion.
‘Thou, or rather you’ (for it always takes many to feed one), ‘feed me, clothe me, and do all that rough work for me which I demand and to your performance of which I have been accustomed from childhood, and I will do for you the mental work of which I am capable and to which I am accustomed. You give me bodily food and I will give you spiritual food.’ (The account seems quite correct, and would be correct if this exchange of services were voluntary; if those who supply the bodily food were not obliged to furnish it before they receive the spiritual food.)
The producer of spiritual food says: ‘In order that I may give you spiritual food, feed me, clothe me, and clean up all the dirt I make.’ But the producer of bodily food has to do all this without presenting any demands, and must deliver the bodily food even if he does not receive any spiritual food. If the exchange were voluntary the conditions of the two would be alike.
We agree that spiritual food is as necessary for man as bodily food. The savant and the artist say: ‘Before we can begin to serve men with spiritual food we require them to supply us with bodily food.’ But why does not the producer of bodily food say that before he serves them with bodily food he needs spiritual food, and unless he receives it he cannot work?
You say: ‘I need the work of a ploughman, blacksmith, boot maker, carpenter, bricklayer, privy-cleaner, and others, in order that I may prepare my spiritual food.’ Every labourer ought equally to say: ‘Before I go to work to prepare bodily food for you, I must first have the fruits of your spiritual work. To have strength for my work I need religious teaching, good order in social life, applications of science to my work, and the enjoyments and consolations afforded by art. I have not time to work out my own explanation of the meaning of life-furnish me with it. I have not time to devise regulations for social life which would prevent infringements of justice-furnish me with them. I have not time to busy myself with mechanics, physics, chemistry, and technology-give me books which show how to improve my tools, my methods of work, my dwelling, my heating, and my lighting. I have not time to busy myself with poetry, plastic art, and music-furnish me with the stimulations and consolations that life requires; supply me with the products of art. You say you cannot occupy yourself with your important and necessary affairs if you are deprived of the work done for you by the labouring people, but I say,’ the labourer remarks, ‘that I cannot occupy myself with my not less important and necessary labours-ploughing, carting manure, and cleaning up your dirt-if I am deprived of religious guidance adapted to the demands of my reason and conscience, of wise government to make my labour secure, of indications supplied by knowledge to facilitate my work, and of the joys of art to ennoble my toil. All that you have as yet offered me as spiritual food does not suit me, I cannot even understand what good it can be to anyone. And till I receive food suitable for me, as for every man, I cannot feed you with the bodily food that I produce.’ What will happen if the labourer says that?
If he should, you know it will not be a joke but the simplest justice.
If a labourer should say that, justice will be far more on his side than on that of the mental worker. Justice will be more on his side because the work supplied by the labourer is more important, more indispensable, than the work of the mental worker, and because nothing prevents the mental worker from giving the labourer the spiritual food promised him; while the labourer is hindered from supplying bodily food by the fact that he himself has not enough of it.
What shall we, mental workers, reply if such simple and legitimate demands are presented to us? How shall we satisfy them? With Filaret’s Catechism, Sokolov’s Sacred Stories, and with leaflets issued by various monasteries and from St. Isaac’s Cathedral-to satisfy his religious needs; with the Code of Laws, decisions of the various Departments of the Court of Appeal and the statutes of various Committees and Commissions-to satisfy his demands for social justice; with spectral analysis, measurements of the Milky Way, abstract geometry, microscopic investigations, disputes about spiritualism and mediumism, the proceedings of the Academy of Science-to satisfy his demands for knowledge? With what shall we satisfy his artistic demands?
With Pushkin, Dostoevski, Turgenev, L. Tolstoy, with pictures from the French Salon and by our own artists, representing naked women, satin, velvet, landscapes, and genre pictures, with Wagner’s music and that of our own composers? None of these things suits him or can suit him, for we with our right to make use of the labour of the people and the absence of any obligation as to our production of spiritual food have entirely lost sight of the one purpose our activity should have. We do not even know what the working-folk need, we have forgotten their manner of life, their view of things, and their way of speaking; we have even forgotten the labouring man himself, and study. him as an ethnographic rarity or as a newly discovered America.
So we demanding bodily food for ourselves, have undertaken to supply spiritual food, but as a result of an imaginary division of labour allowing us not only to dine first and then work, but allowing whole generations to eat well without producing anything-we have prepared as payment to the people for our sustenance something that is only suitable, or it appears to us suitable, for science and art-but unsuitable and (like Limburg cheese) quite incomprehensible and repulsive to the very people whose labour we have devoured on the pretext that we would supply them with spiritual food.
We in our blindness have to such an extent lost sight of the obligation we had taken upon ourselves, that we have even forgotten the purpose for which our work is done and have made the very people we had undertaken to serve a subject for our scientific and artistic activity.
We study and depict them for our own amusement and distraction, and have quite forgotten that we should not study and depict them-but should serve them.
To such an extent have we lost sight of the obligation we took upon ourselves, that we do not even notice that what we had undertaken to do in the sphere of science and art has been done not by us but by others, and that our place has been occupied. It turns out that while we were disputing-as the theologians disputed about the Immaculate Conception-now about the spontaneous generation of organisms, now about spiritualism, now about the form of atoms, now about pangenesis, and now about what there is in protoplasm, and so on-the people all the same required spiritual food, and men who were the failures and outcasts of science and art began, at the order of business men anxious solely for profit, to supply the masses with spiritual food, and have supplied it. For some forty years elsewhere in Europe, and for some ten years past in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been circulated, and shows have been opened, and the people look on, and sing, and receive their spiritual food, but not from us who had undertaken to supply it-while we who justify our idleness by the spiritual food we are supposed to supply, sit and gape. But we must not gape, for our last justification is slipping from under our feet.
We have specialized. We have our special functional activity. We are the brain of the people. They feed us, and we have undertaken to instruct them. Only on that account have we emancipated ourselves from labour. What have we taught the labourers and what are we teaching them? They have waited one year, ten years, hundreds of years. And still we discuss and teach and entertain one another, but have forgotten them. To such an extent have we forgotten them that others have started to teach and entertain them and we did not even notice it, so little was our talk of the division of labour serious, and so evident is it that what we say of the benefit we confer on the masses is merely a shameless pretence.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THERE was a time when the Church guided
