For we all know that if the technicians and capitalists who built the railroads and the factories thought about the workers, it was only of how to squeeze the last bit of work out of them. And as we have seen, both among ourselves and in Europe and America, they have fully succeeded in doing this.
In all harmful things there is some good. After a conflagration we can warm ourselves and light our pipes with the glowing charcoal; but why say that the conflagration is useful?
Let us at least not deceive ourselves. We all know the motives which prompt the building of railroads and factories and the production of kerosene and matches.
The engineer builds the railroad either for the government for military purposes or for capitalists for financial purposes. He makes machinery for the factory-owner for his own profit and for that of the capitalist. All that he makes and devises he makes and devises for the purposes of the government or of the capitalist and the rich people.
The most cunning of his inventions are directly aimed either at injuring the people-as with cannon, torpedoes, solitary confinement cells, apparatus for the spirit-monopoly, telegraphs, and so forth, or for producing things that not only are not useful but are quite beyond the reach of the people, such as electric light, telephones, and all the innumerable appliances for the increase of comfort-or, finally, for things by which people can be corrupted and induced to part with the last of their money-that is, their last labour-such as, first of all vodka, spirits, beer, opium, and tobacco, then cotton prints, kerchiefs, and all sorts of trifles.
If it happens that the inventions of men of science and the work of engineers sometimes is of use to the people, as with railroads, cotton prints, iron pots, and scythes, that only
proves that everything in the world is connected, and from any harmful activity some chance advantage may accrue even to those for whom the activity is generally harmful.
The scientists and artists could only say that their activity was useful to the people if they made it their aim to serve the labourers as they now make it their aim to serve the governments and the capitalists.
We could say it if scientists and artists set themselves the aim of serving the people’s needs, but there are none who do so.
All the learned people are absorbed with their priestly occupations, from which result the investigations of protoplasm, spectral analyses of the stars, and so forth. But with what kind of axe and what kind of axe-handle it is best to chop, what sort of saw works best, how best to knead bread, what flour to use, how to set it, how to make a fire, and how to build the stove, what food, what drink, and what dishes, to use, which mushrooms should be eaten and how best to prepare them-about these things science never reflects. Yet it is all matter for science to deal with.
I know that by its definition science should be useless, but that is an obvious and too impudent excuse. The business of science is to serve men. We have invented telegraphs, telephones, and phonographs; but in real life, in the people’s work, what progress have we made? We have enumerated two million insects! But have we domesticated a single new animal since Biblical times when the animals we now have, had already long been domesticated?
The elk, the stag, the partridge, the quail, and the grouse, are all still wild. Our botanists have discovered the cell, and in the cell protoplasm, and in protoplasm something else, and in that again something else. These occupations will evidently not end for a long time-because there can be no end to them; and so they have no time to occupy themselves with what people need. And then again, since Egyptian and Jewish antiquity, when wheat and lentil were already cultivated, down to our own time, not a single plant has been added to the food of the people except potatoes, and it was not science that gave us them.
They have invented torpedoes, appliances for the use of the spirit-monopoly, and for privies, but our spinning-wheel, peasant-woman’s loom, village plough, hatchet, flail, rake, and the yoke and bucket, are still the same that they were in the times of Rurik,1 or if they have been altered it has not been done by scientists.
The same is true in regard to art. We have raised a multitude of men to the rank of great writers, have analysed them minutely, and written mountains of criticisms, and criticisms of those criticisms, and criticisms of the criticisms of the criticisms, and have collected galleries of pictures, and have studied all the schools of art acutely, and we have such symphonies and operas that it becomes hard for us ourselves to listen to them. But what have we added to the folk-tales and legends and stories and songs? What pictures have we given to the people and what music? In Nikolski-street2 books and pictures for the people are produced, and in Tula concertinas are made, but in neither have we taken any part.
1 The first Russian Prince (830 to 879 A.D.).-A. M.
2 A street in the centre of Moscow, where cheap chapbooks for the peasants were sold.-A. M.
Most striking and obvious is the false direction of our science and art in the very branches which, one would think, should by their very purpose be of use to the people, but which in consequence of the false direction appear harmful rather than useful.
The engineer, doctor, teacher, artist, author, by the very purpose of their calling, one would imagine, should serve the people-and what happens? Under the present tendency they can bring nothing but harm to the people.
An engineer, a mechanic, must work with capital. Without capital he is useless. All his knowledge is such that, to apply it, he needs capital and the exploitation of labour on a large scale, and not to mention that he is himself accustomed to spend at least fifteen hundred to two thousand rubles a year, and therefore cannot live in a village, where no one could give him such a remuneration, his occupation itself prevents his serving the people. He can by higher mathematics reckon the span of a bridge, calculate the power and efficiency of a motor, and so forth, but faced by the simple problems of peasant-toil he sticks fast. How to improve the village plough or cart, how to make the streams fordable-of all this, in the conditions in which the peasants live, he knows and understands less than the meanest peasant. Give him workshops, all the various kinds of people he needs, import machines for him from abroad, and then he will arrange matters. But in the existing conditions of labour of millions of people, he is quite unable to find ways of lightening their toil, and his own occupations, habits, and needs, render him unsuited for such an affair.
The doctor is in a still worse position. His pseudo-science is all so arranged that he can only cure those who do nothing and can command the labour of others. He needs an endless number of expensive appliances, instruments, medicaments, and hygienically arranged rooms, food, and water-closets, to enable him to act scientifically; besides his own salary he needs such expenses that to cure one patient he has to starve hundreds of others who bear those expenses. He has studied in the capitals under celebrities who only take patients who can be treated in hospitals, or who while being treated can purchase the apparatus needed for the treatment, and can even travel immediately from the north to the south, or to such and such watering-places.
Their science is of such a kind that every Zemstvo-1doctor, complains of not having the means to treat the labourers-that they are so poor that it is impossible to place the patients in hygienic conditions; and at the same time that doctor complains that there are no hospitals, that he cannot manage all the work, and that he needs more assistants, doctors, and trained helpers. What does this mean? It means that the chief calamity of the people, causing illnesses to arise and spread and remain untreated, is the insufficiency of their means of livelihood.
And science, under the banner of a division of labour, calls its combatants to help these people. Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.
1 The Zemstvos resembled our County Councils, and had charge of the medical service in country districts.-A. M.
But the means are lacking, and therefore they must be taken from the peasants who fall ill and become infected and are not cured from lack of means.
The defenders of medicine for the people are always saying that, as yet, this business is but little developed.
Evidently it is little developed, for if-which God forbid-it should be developed, and on the people’s backs instead of two doctors, midwives and trained female assistants to a District, there were twenty such-as is proposed-there would soon be no one left to heal. Scientific assistance for the people, of which the defenders of science talk, should be of quite a different kind. And the kind of assistance that should be given has not yet been begun.
It will begin when the man of science, the technician, or the doctor, will not consider permissible the division-which is to say, the seizure-of the labour of other people which now
