Chapter 6

Our farmers are already free. The problem with them is not now concerned with freedom, but how they may be brought into a solidarity with each other and the nation. To make our proletarians free and masters of their own energies, in unison with each other and the national being, is the most pressing labor of the many before us. Unless there be economic freedom there can be no other freedom. The right of no individual to subsistence should be at the good will of any other individual. More than mere comfort depends on it. There are eternal and august rights of the soul to be safeguarded, and the economic position of men should be protected by organization and democratic law. I have already discussed some of the avenues through which workers in our time have looked with hope. I have little belief that these roads lead anywhere but back to the old City of Slavery, however they may seem to curve away at the outset. The strike, on whatever scale, is no way to freedom, though the strike--or the threat of it--may bring wages nearer to subsistence level. The art of warfare is too much in the hands of specialists for trust to be placed in revolution. A machine-gun with a few experts behind it is worth a thousand revolutionary workers, however maddened they may be. Does political action, on which so many rely, promise more? I do not believe it does. I believe that to appeal to legislatures is to appeal to bodies dominated by those interested in maintaining the present social order, although they may act so as to redress the worst evils created by it. In Ireland, for this generation at least, it would be impossible to secure in a legislative assembly majorities representative of the class we wish to see emancipated. It may seem as if I had closed all the paths out of the social labyrinth; but the way to emancipation has, I think, already been surveyed by pioneers. A policy of social reconstruction is practical, and needs but steady persistence for its realization. That policy--I refer to co-operative action--has been adopted in various forms by workers in many countries; and what is needed here is to study and coordinate these applications of co-working, and to form a general staff of labor who will, on behalf of the workers, examine the weapons fashioned by their class elsewhere, and who will draw up a plan of campaign as the staff of an army do previous to military operations. It will be found that economic action along co-operative lines has, in one country, barriers placed before its expansion which could be set aside by supplementing this action by methods elaborated by the genius of workers elsewhere.

It is not my purpose here to repeat in detail methods of organization, partly technical, which can be found fully described in many admirable books, but rather to indicate the order of advance, the methods of coordination of these, and their final absorption and transformation in the national being. There is a great deal of ignorance about things essential to safe action. When men are filled with enthusiasm they are apt to apply their new principles rashly in schemes which are bound to fall, just as over-confident soldiers will in battle sometimes rush a position prematurely which they cannot hold, because the general line of their army has not advanced sufficiently to support them. Sacrifices are made with no permanent result, and the morale of the army is injured.

In the rural districts the advance must, in the nature of things, be from production to consumption, and with urban workers inversely from a control over distribution to a mastery over production. I have often wondered over the blindness of workers in towns in Ireland, who have made so little use in the economic struggle of the freedom they have to spend their wage where they choose. They speak of this struggle as the class war; but they carry on the conflict most energetically where it is most difficult for them to succeed, and hardly at all where it would be comparatively easy for them to weaken the resources of their antagonists. In warfare much use is made of flanking movements, which aim at cutting the enemy's communication with his base of supply. Frontal attacks are dangerous. It is equally true in economic warfare. The strike is a frontal attack, and those they fight are entrenched deeply with all the artillery of the State, the press, science, and wealth on their side. What would we think of an army which, at the close of each week's fighting, voluntarily surrendered to the enemy the ground, guns, ammunition, and prisoners captured through the previous six days? Yet this is what our workers do. The power opposed to them is mainly economic, though there is an intellectual basis for it also. But the wages of the workers, little for the individual, yet a large part of the national income if taken for the mass, goes back to strengthen the system they protest against through purchases of domestic requirements. The creation of co-operative stores ought to be the first constructive policy adopted by Irish labor. It ought to be as much a matter of class honor with them to be members of stores as to be in the trade union of their craft. The store may be regarded as the commissariat department of the army of labor. Many a strike has failed of its object, and the workers have gone back defeated, because their neglect of the commissariat made them unable to hold out for that last week when both sides are desperate and at the end of their resources. But it is not mainly as an aid to the strike that I advocate democratizing the distributive trade, but because control over distribution gives a large measure of control over production. The history of co-operative workshops indicates that these have rarely been successful unless worked in conjunction with distributive stores. The retail trader is not sympathetic with co-operative production. As the cat is akin to the tiger, so is the individual trader--no matter on how small a scale he operates--a kinsman of the great autocrats of industry, and he will sympathize with his economic kinsmen and will retail their goods in preference to those produced in co-operative workshops.

The control of agencies of distribution by the workers at a certain stage in their development enables them to start productive enterprises with more safety and less expense in regard to advertisement than the capitalist can. In fact the co-operative store, properly organized, creates a tied trade for the output of co-operative workshops. It is a source of financial aid to these, and will invest funds in them and assist trades unions gradually to transform themselves into co-operative guilds of producers which should be their ultimate ideal. As I shall show later on, the store will enable the urban worker to enter into intimate alliance with the rural producer. Their interests are really identical. In every town in Ireland efforts should be made to democratize the distributive agencies, and the workers will have many allies in this, driven by the increased cost of living to search out the most economical agencies of purchase. If the proletarians are not in a majority in Ireland--a nation where the farmers are the most numerous single class--they certainly form the majority in the cities; and the co-operative store, while admitting to membership all who will apply, ought to be and would be sympathetic with the efforts of labor to emancipate itself, and would be a powerful lever in its hands. As the stores increase in number, an analysis of their trade will reveal year by year in what directions co-operative production of particular articles may safely be attempted. More and more by this means the producing power and the capital at the disposal of the worker will be placed at the service of democracy. The first steps are the most difficult. In due time the workers will have educated a number of their members, and will have attached to themselves men of proved capacity to be the leaders in fresh enterprises, manufactures of one kind or another, democratic banking institutions, all supporting each other and leaning on each other and playing into each other's hands.

The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities for making Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain. I do not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal or permanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a great turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal. The co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over the world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and the next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of; but the really important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takes place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts to make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the lives and spirits of men.

XII.

We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference to the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul again with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which would, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism in our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concerted action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purpose in our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated and unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests are identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urban and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and the countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed, and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the countersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same way that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them not to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seems to me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns capital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae I would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until further inquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be true, but to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a static character, we must convince people they are true by close argument and still more so by realistic illustration.

To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--the agricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action will not defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he to wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of labor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triumph of the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers or autocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the nature of the industry men are engaged in. The jeweler would probably desire the permanence of the social order which created most wealthy people who could afford to buy his wares. The farmer's industry, if we consider it closely, is the most democratic of any in its application to society. The produce of the farm, in its final distribution, is divided into portions more or less equal and conditioned in quantity by the digestive powers of an individual. The wealthiest millionaire cannot eat more bread, butter, meat, vegetables, or fruit than the manual laborer would eat if the latter could afford to get such things. In fact he would eat rather less, because the manual worker has a much better appetite, indeed requires more food. It appears to be the interest of the farmer to support any urban movement whose object it is to see that every worker in the towns is remunerated so that he, his wife, and his children can procure as much food as they require. Any underpaid worker in the towns is a wrong to the farmer--a willing customer who yet cannot buy. If there is, let us say, a sum of fifteen hundred pounds a week to be paid away in a town, it is to the interest of farmers that that sum should be paid to a thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings a week rather than to fifty men at thirty pounds a week. In the case of the workers a greater part of the money will be spent on food. But if fifty men have thirty pounds a week each, it will be spent to satisfy the appetites of a much smaller number of people. A larger proportion will be spent on furniture, pictures, motor-cars and what not. It may be spent so as to give some kind of employment, but it will not be a division of the money so much to the interests of the farmer. However we analyze the problem it appears to be to the farmer's interests to support democratic movements in the cities, certainly up to the point where every worker in the towns has a wage which enables himself and his family to eat all they require for health. It is also to the interests of farmers to support any system of distribution of goods which eliminates the element of profit in the sale. After the farmer gets his price it is to his interests that food should be increased in cost as little as possible when the article is transferred to the consumer, because if farm produce has to bear too many profits it will be expensive for the consumer, and there will be a lessened demand. So associations like the co-operative stores, which aim at the elimination of the element of profit in distribution, should be approved of by the farmers.

Now we come to the townsman again. Is it his interest to support the farmers in his own country or to regard the world as his farm? The argument on the economic side is not so clear, but it is, I think, just as sound. If agriculture is neglected in any country the rural population pour into the towns. The country becomes a fountain of blackleg labor. Rural labor has no traditions of trade unionism, and takes any work at any price. There are fewer people engaged in producing food, and its cost rises. Food must be imported from abroad; and there is national insecurity, as in times of war their is always the danger of the trade routes overseas being blocked by an enemy, and this again has to be provided against by heavy expenditure for militarist purposes. The farther away an army is from its base the more insecure is its position, and the same thing is true in the industrial life of nations. International trade there must always be. It is one of the means by which the larger solidarity of humanity is to be achieved; but that will never come about until there is a nobler and more human life within the states, and we must begin by perfecting national life before we consider empires and world federations. So in this essay only the national being is considered.

I desire to unite countryman and townsman in one movement, and to make the co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. How are we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer and consumer? I think that this can best be brought about by co-operative federations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale, and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to their interest to be affiliated. Now the townsman cannot to any extent supply food for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural production in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the State would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban cooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmers be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural production themselves. They will do it better than the townsman could, more efficiently and more economically. They will never be able, with the world in competition, to put up prices artificially. How can the two main divisions of national life be brought together in a national solidarity? We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are not only producers but consumers. They do not go about naked in the fields. They require clothes, furniture, tea, coffee, sugar, oil, soap, candles, pots and pans--in fact the farmer's wife needs nearly all the things the townsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food. But even here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in the shops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm. Country bread is made in the bakery more and more. Butter, cheese, and bacon are made in factories, and the farmer's tendency is to buy what bread, bacon, and butter he requires, selling the milk to be made into butter to a creamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs to a factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to the country as in the town. Already in Ireland a considerable number of farmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning what originally were purely agricultural associations into general purposes societies, where the farmer's wife can purchase her domestic requirements as well as her man his machinery, fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, and seeds. It would be to the interest of rural societies to deal with co-operative wholesales just as much as it is in the interest of urban stores to do so. It would be to their interest to take shares in these wholesales and productive federations, and see that they cater for the farmer's interests as much as for the townsman's.

The urban co-operators, on their side, will see the opportunities for productive co-operation the union of rural and urban movements would create. They naturally will desire to employ as many people as possible in co-operative production. Farmers are surrounded by rings of all kinds: machinery manufacturers who will not sell to their societies, manure manufacturers' alliances who keep up prices. It is a great industry, this of supplying the farmer with his fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, cake, machinery. These rural co-operative societies are increasing in number year by year. Farmers want clothes, hats, and boots: and the necessary machinery for their industry is almost entirely of urban manufacture--ploughs, binders, separators, harrows, and many other implements of tillage. It is an immense industry and yet to be co-operatively exploited. In the towns some progress has been made in distribution. But a nation depends upon its wealth producers and not upon its consumers. Co-operators might double, treble, or quadruple the distributive trade, and still occupy only a very secondary position in national life unless they enter more largely upon production. We will never make the co-operative idea the fundamental one in the civilization of Ireland until we employ a very large part of the population in production. Now we have at present, thanks to the energy of the pioneers of agricultural co-operation, a new market opening in the country for things which the townsman can produce. Does not this suggest new productive urban enterprises? Does it not favor an evolution of manufacturing industry, so that democratic control may finally replace the autocratic control of the capitalist? The trades unions cannot do this alone by following up any of their traditional policies. They cannot go into trade on their own account with any guarantee of success unless they are associated with agencies of distribution. But if co-operators--urban and rural--through their federations invade more and more the field of production they will draw to themselves the hearts and hopes of the workers and idealists in the nation. People are really more concerned about the making of an income than about the spending of it. It is a necessity of our policy if it is to bring about the co-operative commonwealth, that co-operators must adventure much more largely into production than they have hitherto done.

Now let us see what we have come to. There is a country movement which is not merely one for agricultural production. It is rapidly taking up the distribution of goods. There is an urban movement not merely concerned with distribution but entering upon production. They can be brought into harmony if the same federations act for both branches of the movement. The meeting-place of the two armies should be there. If this policy is adopted there will gradually grow-up that unity of purpose between country and urban workers which is the psychological basis and necessary precedent for national action for the common good. The policy of identity of interest must be real, and it can only be real when the identity of interest is obvious, and it can only be made obvious when the symbols of that unity and identity are visible day by day in buildings and manufactures, things which are handled and seen, and in transactions which daily bring that unity to mind. The old poetic ideal of a United Ireland was and could only be a geographical expression, and not a human reality, so long as men were individualist in economics and were competing and struggling with each other for mastery.

By the co-operative commonwealth more is meant than a series of organizations for economic purposes. We hope to create finally, by the close texture of our organizations, that vivid sense of the identity of interest of the people in this island which is the basis of citizenship, and without which there can be no noble national life. Our great nation-states have grown so large, so myriad are their populations, so complicated are their interests, that most people in them really feel no sense of brotherhood with each other. We have yet to create inside our great nation-states social and economic organizations, which will make this identity of interest real and evident, and not seem merely a metaphor, as it does to most people today. The more the co-operative movement does this for its members, the more points of contact they find in it, the more will we tend to make out of it and its branches real social organisms, which will become as closely knit psychically as physically the cells in a human body are knit together. Our Irish diversities of interest have made us world-famous; but such industrial and agricultural organizations would swallow up these antagonisms, as the serpents created by the black art of the Egyptian magicians were swallowed up by the rod Aaron cast on the floor, and which was made animate by the white magic of the Lord.

XIII.