Page:The Social General Strike - Arnold Roller (1912).djvu/22

 machinery, which the productive Trade Unions will send to the country and which will be put and attended by city working men. The big steam ploughs and harvesting machines, and the continual contact of the working man with the farmer, will soon make the fences disappear from the small farms.

In this way the country will also necessarily come to village Communism, to the organisation which corresponds best with the productive Trade Unions of the workers in the cities and industrial centres, until all differences between city and country, peasant and working man, have completely disappeared.

In the beginning of this part it was amply illustrated how, through the demolition of the capitalistic society, millions of workers would be left idle. They could from now on employ themselves in useful capacities. While one part of them would be occupied erecting modern houses, the biggest part would turn to agriculture and the production of provisions.

Systematically and effectively they will try to make use of the immense riches of the oceans and seas, availing themselves of the vast amount of living organisms in them, and beginning the systematic cultivation of sea animal life.

So far, most advancement in modern science and technics has been used for the benefit of other industries; while in most countries agriculture stands no higher than it did 4,000 years ago. Now thousands of intelligent people would turn to this field to combine industry with agriculture and apply the latest conceptions of science and chemistry.

No more will there be lying idle whole sections of land to serve as hunting grounds for the large landlords. No more will land be lying unfertile; it will be cultivated, and even rocks pulverised in order to produce artificial soil. By irrigation, by drainage, by careful vegetable gardening, the general use of hothouses, artificial fertilising, etc., the productivity of the land can be multiplied tenfold, even a hundredfold, and by this means solve the problem of food, because of which previous big revolutions have perished; and in this way produce prosperity for all.

Working on the field a few hours in the day during a few weeks, facilitated by machinery, will be far from being a burden, and will be considered a recreation by city folks. In Kropotkin's great work, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," this question is thoroughly dealt with, and by particular reports and statistics it is proved that even in those countries which have to import a large part of their supplies at present there is room enough to produce a supply for all the people, if intensive and thorough cultivation of the ground were but practised.

This does away with the apprehension that eventually the country in which the proletariat was victorious could be starved out by cutting off the supply of provisions from foreign countries. We now see how the idea and organisation of the General Strike not only possesses a destructive power, but in itself bears the elements for the reorganisation of society, and for that reason alone already deserves the name of a "Weltanschauung" (a final conception).