The sphere of medicine, like that of engineering, lies as yet untouched. All the questions of how best to divide the work time, how best to nourish oneself, on what and in what form, when and how it is best to clothe oneself, to cover one’s feet, to resist dampness and cold, how best to wash and feed the children, swaddle them, and so forth, in the actual circumstances in which the working people live-all these questions have not yet been put. So it is, too, with the scientific, pedagogic, teachers’ activity. Science has, in just the same way, so managed that, in accord with pedagogic science, only rich people can be taught, and the teachers, like the engineers and doctors, involuntarily pay court to money and among us especially to the government
And this cannot be otherwise, for a school with model arrangements (as a general rule the more scientifically arranged a school the more expensive it is), with adjustable benches, globes and maps, and libraries, and methodics for teachers and for pupils, is such as would involve the doubling of the rates in each village. Such is the demand of science.
The people need their children for work, and the poorer the people the more they need them. The defenders of science say: pedagogy even now benefits the people, but when it is developed things will be still better. But if it develops and instead of twenty schools to a district there are a hundred and all of them scientific, and the people have to pay for those schools, they will be more and more impoverished and will be yet more in need of their children’s work.
What, then, is to be done? say people in reply to this.
The government will establish schools and make education compulsory as is done in Europe; but the money will again be taken from the people, who will be worked yet harder and will have yet less leisure, and compulsory education will not act. Again the only salvation is for the teacher to live the life of a labourer and teach for such remuneration as may be freely and willingly given him.
Such is the false tendency of science, which deprives it of the possibility of fulfilling its duty, which is to serve the people. But this false tendency of our intellectuals is yet more evident in the activity of art, which by its very nature should be accessible to the people.
Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.
For the preparation of his great works, an artist who is a painter must have a studio in which an association of at least forty carpenters or boot makers could work who now freeze or stifle in a slum. Nor is that enough; he needs nature, costumes, travel. The Academy of Arts has expended millions of rubles, collected from the people, on the encouragement of art, and the productions of this art are to be found in palaces and are not understood or wanted by the masses.
To express their great ideas musicians have to collect some two hundred men in white neckties or in costumes, and to expend hundreds of thousands of rubles on producing an opera. And the productions of this art could produce nothing but perplexity and weariness among the people, were they ever able to hear them.
Authors and writers of stories, one would think, do not need special surroundings, studios, nature, orchestras, and actors; but here, too, it appears that for the preparation of his great works a writer besides comfortable lodgings and all the pleasures of life, needs travel, palaces, studies, the pleasures of art, and visits to theatres, concerts, watering places, &c. If he does not himself earn money he is given a pension to enable him to write better. And again these writings, so much esteemed by us, remain rubbish for the people, who do not want them at all.
What if, as the men engaged on science and art desire, yet more of these producers of spiritual food are reared and it becomes necessary in each village to build a studio and introduce an orchestra and maintain an author in such conditions as artists consider essential?
I imagine that the working people would sooner pledge themselves never to see a picture, or hear a symphony, or read any poem or story, than be obliged to feed all those drones.
But why, one would ask, should artists not serve the people? In every hut there are icons and pictures; every peasant and every peasant woman sings; many of them have musical instruments, and they all tell stories and recite verses, while many of them read. How is it that these two things-made for one another like lock and key-have gone so far apart that there seems no possibility of bringing them together?
Tell a painter that without studios, nude models, and costumes, he should paint penny pictures, and he will tell you that this would be to abandon art as he understands it: tell a musician that he should play on a balalayka, a concertina, or a guitar, and should teach the peasant women to sing songs: tell a poet or an author that he should abandon his poems, his novels, his satires, and should compose songs, books, stories and fairy tales, which unlettered folk could understand-and they will tell you that you are mad.
But is it not a worse madness that people who have emancipated themselves from labour on the plea that they would provide spiritual food for those who have reared them and who feed and clothe them, should afterwards have so forgotten this obligation that they do not know how to prepare food fit for the people, and should consider this abandonment of their duty a merit?
‘But it is so everywhere,’ is what is said in reply. It is very irrational everywhere; and it will remain irrational as long as people, under the pretext of a division of labour and a promise to serve the people with spiritual food, continue merely to devour the people’s labour. Service of the people by sciences and arts will only exist when men live with the people and as the people live, and without presenting any claims will offer their scientific and artistic services, which the people will be free to accept or decline as they please.
CHAPTER XXXV
To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity’s progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat’s progress. It only hinders it.
The so-called division of labour, that is, the seizure of the labour of others which in our time has become a usual condition of the activity of men of science and art, has been and still remains the chief cause of the slowness of humanity’s forward movement. The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.
And the unfairness of this distribution is not diminished in proportion to the successes achieved by the sciences and arts, but is only increased. Nor is it surprising that this is so, for this unjust distribution of wealth results simply from the theory of the division of labour which is preached by the men of science and art for their personal selfish ends. Science defends the division of labour as an immutable law, sees that the division of wealth based on the division of labour is unjust and pernicious, and asserts that its activity, which accepts the division of labour, will result in benefit to mankind. It appears that some men make use of the labours of others, but that if they go on for a very long time and to a still greater extent making use of the labour of others, then this un-just distribution of wealth-that is, this exploitation of other people’s work-will come to an end.
Men are standing at an ever-increasing spring of water and are busy diverting it from thirsty people, but assert that it is they who produce the water and that very soon so much of it will be collected that there will be enough for everybody. But this water, which has flowed and flows unceasingly and supplies drink to all humanity, is not only not the result of the activity of these men who standing round the spring turn the water aside but on the contrary,
