Page:Eden Paul and Cedar Paul - Communism (1921).pdf/20

 Stated in the terms of modern psychology this means that man has a group self as well as an individual self, and that freedom cannot be secured for the individual self alone. The new society will be based, not upon the specious freedom of the "individual voter," the freedom envisaged by formal democracy; but upon the freedom of self-governing occupational groups or soviets—self-governing in so far as is consistent with the needs of the whole of communist society. This soviet idea is the most characteristic feature of twentieth-century communism. It may be that the largest kinds of occupational groups under communism wil1 be the great industrial unions which play so important a part in the guild conception of society. Certainly the "professional unions" are at this stage coming to bulk more and more largely in the organisation of Soviet Russia. But to the communists the guild scheme seems a premature and utopian attempt at the detailed formulation of methods that will have to be worked out in actual practice.

Enough to say that through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the economic revolution, and through the educational policy of the ergatocratic commonwealth, we shall ultimately achieve a social order wherein people will do spontaneously what they do under coercion to-day; wherein each will learn to adapt himself to the harmonious development of the whole; wherein the voluntary association of labour will replace the coercion to associated labour. Freedom through self-discipline is the goal of communism: the remoter goal.

The immediate objective is the social revolution. First things first. Destruction is the revolutionist's first task. He cannot begin to build until the ground is clear, and the ground is still encumbered with the fortresses of capitalist imperialism. "The imposing edifice of society above my head holds no delights for me," wrote Jack London in 1905 (Revolution and other Essays, pp. 250, 251). "It is the foundation … that interests me. There I am content to labour, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists, and class-conscious working men, getting a solid pry now and again and setting the whole structure rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars to work, we’ll topple it over, along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlour floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that is breathed will be clear, noble, and alive."