社会主义下人的灵魂（九）

With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain – a gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.

随着权威的出现，惩罚将会消失。这将带来巨大的益处，这种益处的价值不可估量。如果你读过历史就会发现，人类处于困苦的时候，往往不是处于严苛的法律之下，而是处在统治者的淫威之下。而且威胁人们的往往不是恶人犯下的罪行，而是好人遭到了不公正的处罚。当这种处罚变得司空见惯时，整个社会就会变得残忍，罪恶也就会随之出现。很显然，有这样一条规律，即人们遭受的刑罚越多，社会上的犯罪行为也会随之而增加。当然了，现今的立法者已经清晰的认识到了这一点，并且一旦可行的话，就会把减轻刑罚作为他们的任务。无论是在何处，只要减轻刑罚，都会带来好的结果。The less punishment, the less crime. 而当世上不再有任何的刑罚时，也将不再有犯罪。即使仍然有犯罪，也会被医护人员当作是受了痴呆之苦，予以照顾和治疗。毕竟，我们现在称之为犯罪的东西其实并不是真正的恶行，饥荒和没有信仰才是现今罪恶的源泉。这就解释了为什么从哲学上的观点来看，现今所谓的罪犯，作为一种阶级，都只是一群十分无聊的人。他们既不是麦克白，也不是伏脱冷，他们仅仅是一群连吃都吃不饱的普通人。而当私人财产制度被废除之时，也就没有了犯罪的必要，没有了犯罪的需求，所有的恶行都将不复存在。当然了，也有一些人是为了反对财产制度而犯罪，而英国的法律却认为他们拥有了自身不该拥有的东西，并且用了最残忍的刑罚来对待他们。如果我们不考虑谋杀罪，并且同意死刑比劳改更严重这一观点，那么我相信，人们都不会认为现今被捕的这些人是真正的罪犯。而另一些人，是为了得到财产而犯罪，他们或许是因为贫困，或是对那些拥有财产的人感到失望。对于这类犯罪，当私人财产制度被废除之时，也就不会再出现了。如果社会中的每一个人都能得到他想要的，而不用被旁人指点，那么他自然也提不起兴趣去妨碍他人。嫉妒，作为当代生活中犯罪的动机之一，作为一种和人们对财产的观念紧密结合的情感，在社会主义和个人主义的笼罩下，将烟消云散。共产主义的显著特点就是没有嫉妒。

Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.

那么就会有人问了：既然没有了统治者，那么国家是用来做什么的呢？事实上，国家会变成一种管理劳动力的自发性的组织，它们将成为商品的制造者和分配者。国家存在的意义在于其实用性，而个人存在的意义在于追求美，追求真理。至于我刚刚提到的那个词语，劳动力，对，我不得不说现今谈到的所谓关于手工劳动的尊严之类的言论，统统都是废话。在现在这个社会，手工劳动者还有什么尊严可言呢？更何况他们中的大部分本来做的就是丢人的事。如果一个人所做的工作不能使他得到快乐，那么这份工作就是在精神上蹂躏他。而现在大部分的工作形式，都是这样的。试想一下，一个人要打扫八个小时泥泞的街道，任由冷风扑面，这难道不是一种令人作呕的工作吗？反正对我来说，要在精神和身体上，带着自豪感的去做这样一份工作是绝无可能的。而要欢快地扫大街，光是听着就令人恐惧。人类不是为了清除污渍而生的，所有那样的工作都该被机器取代。