Ethel Mannin (1900-1985) was a novelist, biographer, travel writer, memoirist and author of childrens books and political essays. As a pacifist anarchist she worked with Emma Goldman in England to solicit support for the Spanish anarchists during the Revolution and Civil War. Thefollowing excerpts are taken from the conclusion to her book, Bread and Roses: An Utopian Survey and Blue-Print (London: MacDonald & Co., 1944), in which she setsforth an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society. The need for a transvaluation of values was something Emma Goldman had also emphasized (Volume 1, Selection 89).
IF WE ARE AGREED THAT PROGRESS IS THE realization of our Utopias [Oscar Wilde, Volume 1, Selection 6 1 I the problem remains—how to set about this realization. It is not to be achieved through any political party, or any leadership. Theworld has had a surfeit of political parties and leaders. The need is not for politicians and leaders, but for a change in the heart of man. Given the will to it the Utopian dream could be realized; there could be that world in which men, whatever language they spoke, whatever colour their skins, whatever their religions, were brothers in the true sense, racially united in their common humanity, acknowledging one race only—the human race; a world in which all things were in common, each giving to society according to his ability and taking according to his need; a world in which there was no buying or selling, no useless toil, no exploitation of the many by the privileged few; a world in which human beings lived according to the natural law of mutual aid, in a stateless, moneyless, and co-operative society; a world of true liberty, equality and fraternity.
There could be such a world ifhumanity wanted it enough. Ifthis present civilization, rapidly destroying itself through mechanical force, the machine, accelerated beyond all control, finally collapsed amid its smoking ruins, it might be that those who survived, purged beyond all imagining by their sufferings, would be given the vision of a new world, a new way of life—new as on the first dawn when God looked upon the world and sawthat it was good. Nothing less will serve.
The need... is for the complete transvaluation ofvalues in all spheres, social, moral, economic, industrial, agricultural. That our present economics are the economics of the mad-house is clear, and that we are draining the good earth of its fertility, creating deserts, by taking from it without returning, denyi ng the natural cycle of life...
Utopia has nothing to do with reform; Utopia is the new heaven and the new earth; it does not spring from any political party or system, but from the dream in the heart of man; a revolution in the human mind. By all means let us sanction this and that reform—provided it is not one step forward and two back. Whether or not we can sanction political revolution depends on whether or notwe are prepared to sanction violence as a means to an end. But it is clear that Utopia cannot proceed from violence. The history of bloody revolution everywhere is the history of failure. Revolution there must be, the ‘complete change, turning upside down, great reversal of conditions, fundamental reconstruction,’ of the dictionary definition of the word, but people are not to be bludgeoned into it; only what is achieved through the great upsurge ofthe human spirit, out ofthe impassioned desire ofthe multitude, endures; what is imposed by force has no roots, and cannot last. There is no realization ofUto-pia without the change of values, and no change of values without change of heart—spiritual revolution. Utopia can be founded only on man’s love for man; on love and cooperation; not on hate and the seizing of material power. When one section of the community triumphs over another it is only a matter of time before the section from whom power has been wrested reasserts itself—in the same way that it is only a matter of time before a conquered nation rises once more to power, and to say that history repeats itself is only another way of saying that wars beget wars.
This is not to deny the importance of the day to day struggles—the struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism, ofworkers against capitalist exploitation. To suggest that subject peoples should wait, passively, for imperialist governments to experience a change ofheart, repent oftheir sins, and hand over the keys ofthe kingdom, is manifestly absurd. Ceaselessly the demand for freedom must go up, the doctrine of j ustice be preached. The masses, the world over, do not have to seize power, since it is by their toil that the wheels go round and the earth brings forth; this is their power; their strength lies in their realization of it. With the withdrawal of their co-operation the whole machinery of the social system ceases to function, and the power of politicians breaks, eventually, under the pressure of the moral force of public opinion. No general strike, no rioting, was necessary on the part of the British working classes in 1920 to break the government's intention ofintervention against the revolutionaries in Soviet Russia; the government was defeated by the great weight ofopinion ofthe common people who poured out into the public squares and into meeting-places in mass protest. The shameful Hoare-Laval pact during the Abyssinian war [fascist Italy's invasion of EthiopiaJ was similarly defeated by the great weight of popular opinion against it. The power of moral force has not yet been fully tried out, though in India one old, frail man [GandhiJ has demonstrated its potentialities—as the Early Christians demonstrated the potentialities of co-operative living according to the law of love.
The change of heart requisite for the realization of millennium is not, ultimately, a matter of conversion from one idea to another, but of the collapse—from exhaustion—of existing systems. Civilizations rise and fall; the machine accelerates to the point at which it blows itself up. Out of the ensuing chaos emerges the morning-star; there breaks upon the world a new day, with new ideas, new values—new vision. So long as there exists the system of society based on private profit, so long will there be injustice and exploitation—the hard heart, that is to say the commercial heart, the imperialist heart, with its lust for power, and all that that connotes of the domination of man by man. Within such a system the heart is not to be changed. But systems become outworn and new conceptions develop. Eventually we do not have to convert the imperialist and the capitalist and the militarist because they cease to be. There are tides in the affairs of men that wash away systems and civilizations.
And the tide is rising in the world today, though few realize it, and Nature herself is taking a hand in the process. The earth the source of all life, is losing its fertility; Nature is being revenged for the profligacy of Man, ‘the most extravagant accelerator ofwaste the world has ever endured,' as the eminent American professor, F. H. King, wrote in his great work, Farmers ofForty Centuries in China, Korea andJapan. He adds that Man's ‘withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his reach, himself not excepted.' In his Cleanliness and Godliness, Mr. Reginald Reynolds, indicts ‘an evil and adulterating generation,' declaring, with bitter truth, that ‘of all the things that posterity will remember about us, for nothing will it so justly condemn our age as for our profligacy. They will say ofus in time to come that we wasted human labour in unemployment, and human life in war; that we willingly destroyed food on the preposterous excuse that it was necessary to maintain its price; that is to say, to make it more dear to our own pockets; that we killed time because we did not know how to live; that we debilitated our constitutions by destroying vitamins, inventing elaborate methods of ruining every decent thing that was eatable; and that we destroyed the soil itself by this same mania for waste’...
What it all amounts to is that Man mast find a new way oflivingorperish. The dominating forces of our world today are Money and the Machine; they are responsible for our over-industrialization and our wars, and between the non-productiveness of the one, and the destructiveness of the other, what chance has civilization? Our only chance of survival lies in recognition of the danger—of the rising tide—and restoration of those basic values which acknowledge the earth as the only real wealth, and its fertility as ‘the substratum of all that is living.'
The fertility of the earth is being destroyed through the commercialization of agriculture, which demands intensive production, quick returns on outlay. It means that the whole source of Man's existence is slowly returning to dust, through the ascendancy of money—because the values of our civilization are the urban values of the stock exchange and the marketplace, and therefore none ofthe steps in the right direction advocated by the Planners, and the reformers in general, can be anything but continual readjustments in a losing struggle for survival—the make shifts by which a system fundamentally anti-life is kept going...
So long as Man continues to exploit the soil for profit he sows the seeds of his own destruction, not merely because Nature becomes his enemy, responding to his machines and his chemicals by the withdrawal offertility, the dusty answer of an ultimate desert barrenness, but because his whole attitude to life is debased; his gods become Money and Power, and wars and unemployment and useless toil become his inevitable portion.
That twentieth-century human beings, with all their imperfections, can live an ordered, cooperative life, free of centralized government, has been demonstrated by the Catalonian experiment during the Spanish Civil War; a beginning was even made with the abolition of money. Groups of people in all countries, throughout the ages, from the Early Christians down to present-day communities, have shown by example what can be achieved through cooperative living. Utopias cannot exist islanded in a non-Utopian world, but these experiments indicate what is possible given the will to the dream.
London, December, 1943—May, 1944
World History
