come down on the defaulters with the strong hand of a law to make them
pay, just as they are now compelled to pay their Income Tax? I submit,
then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either
external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the
evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain.
I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree
of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a
transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to
men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities
altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as
possible, much less honorable.
It must not be supposed that the economic difficulties which I pointed
out as fatal to Individualist Anarchism are entirely removed by
Communism. It is true that if all the bread and coal in the country
were thrown into a common store from which each man could take as
much as he wanted whenever he pleased without direct payment, then no
man could gain any advantage over his fellows from the fact that some
farms and some coal-mines are better than others. And if every man
could step into a train and travel whither he would without a ticket,
no individual could speculate in the difference between the traffic
from Charing Cross to the Mansion House and that from Ryde to Ventnor.
One of the great advantages of Communism will undoubtedly be that huge
masses of economic rent will be socialized by it automatically. All
rent arising from the value of commodities in general use which can
be produced, consumed, and replaced at the will of man to the full
extent to which they are wanted, can be made rent free by communizing
them. But there must remain outside this solution, first, the things
which are not in sufficiently general use to be communized at all;
second, things of which an unlimited free supply might prove a
nuisance, such as gin or printing; and thirdly, things for which the
demand exceeds the supply. The last is the instance in which the rent
difficulty recurs. It would take an extraordinary course of demolition,
reconstruction, and landscape gardening to make every dwelling house
in London as desirable as a house in Park Lane, or facing Regent's
Park, or overlooking the Embankment Gardens. And since everybody cannot
be accommodated there, the exceptionally favored persons who occupy
those sites will certainly be expected to render an equivalent for
their privilege to those whom they exclude. Without this there would
evidently be no true socialization of the habitation of London. This
means, in practice, that a public department must let the houses out
to the highest bidders, and collect the rents for public purposes.
Such a department can hardly be called Anarchistic, however democratic
it may be. I might go on to enlarge considerably on the limits to the
practicability of direct Communism, which varies from commodity to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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