The Slavery of Our Times

"That’s right, but he was taken up by anarchists globally. He’s the most translated anarchist in China and Japan, for example, and had a big influence on Mahatma Gandhi in India. Indeed it’s very problematic. Certainly in Europe, and especially in places like France and Spain with a strong Catholic church, the anarchist movement has traditionally been anti-clerical and hostile to religious control over society, particularly in education. It’s in Spain that Francisco Ferrer tried to set up his Escola Moderna in contravention of the church. However, within that, the argument that people like Bakunin put forward is that it’s not so much about the church itself, but the ways in which certain ideas about human wickedness and incapability are being structured into our ways of thinking. And that’s not just done by the church, but also by statists. Secular politics usually works by the same logic as the church: people need to be perfected, and they can only be perfected by ethical institutions. Bakunin called this political theology. If you’re against political theology, you’re likely an anti-cleric, but it’s possible to imagine religious practice without theology. I think that’s really where anarchists, and where Tolstoy is. His faith is not based on the imposition of external rules. In The Slavery of Our Times, he writes that you can’t have free agreement if you’re constantly being threatened by some kind of punishment, in this world or the afterlife. Faith is about mobilising what’s good in you and others in order to live a better life. Undoubtedly some anarchists would say that they can’t accept that, because it admits the idea of a divinity, which is against their principles. But I think there’s room within anarchism for faith. Certainly within contemporary anarchist movements, especially the ones interested in decolonising and finding solidarity with indigenous groups, there’s much more latitude for thinking about different belief systems and ways in which they can intersect, overlap, and still find resonance with anarchist practice. It’s easy to be seduced into thinking that these kinds of hardships don’t exist. At some point Tolstoy writes that we’re ‘hypnotised.’ And he also says that we’re being ‘bought off’ by the goods that have become available to us. To him, one of the flaws of socialism is to think that all we need to do is take control of the means of production, and everybody can have all the rich have now. Tolstoy thinks that’s a ridiculous thing to say; if you really want to live an anarchist life, you’ll have to get used to living very differently and within your means. For us today, it might be living within our ecological means; for Tolstoy he was thinking of what was available in a rural society through local production. We’ve got a lot of precarity now, and different kinds of problems to the ones Tolstoy knew in his time: anxiety , depression , stress, boredom, delinquency, and all those things that subsequent anarchists talk about, like Paul Goodman in the 1960s. Those are still conditions of slavery . Tolstoy says it’s not just a metaphor; this is going on. Scratch the surface and it’s there. And you won’t get rid of it as long as you don’t change the fundamental ways in which we live. One of the reasons I chose the essay is because of the way he sets it up as a story. You’re taken into this conversation between workers, and you can still imagine that happening in a different context today. Slavery is the relationship that forces you to work for subsistence. Tolstoy lives at a time where slavery in America has been abolished, and twenty million serfs have been emancipated in Russia . And yet he says: it’s all an illusion. There’s no real freedom. The emancipated serfs have been forced to take on debt, in order to serve the masters who used to own them outright. That’s exactly what David Graeber argues: debt is the basis on which we are enslaved. Tolstoy asks what the difference is between ‘slave John’ who used to be forced to clean out the cesspit for his master, and ‘worker John’ who, on the basis of a free contract, can refuse to clean out the cesspit of his employer, but whose place can be taken by any number of workers who are ready to do the work. It’s still a relationship of slavery, based on domination. What’s changed is the principle of the ownership."