exploitation of the laborer toiling for a bare subsistence wage has
become one of the chief arts of life among the holders of tenant
rights. It also produces a delusive promise of endless employment
which blinds the proletariat to those disastrous consequences of rapid
multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator and peasant
proprietor. But indeed the more you degrade the workers, robbing them
of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration
from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, on the
one pleasure and the one human tie left to them--the gratification of
their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud
this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes
a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover
that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of “overpopulation.”
But your slaves are beyond caring for your cries; they breed like
rabbits; and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease,
obscenity, drunkenness, and murder. In the midst of the riches which
their labor piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles
you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town from them;
you appoint special carriages on your railways and special seats in
your churches and theatres for them; you set your life apart from
theirs by every class barrier you can devise; and yet they swarm about
you still: your face gets stamped with your habitual loathing and
suspicion of them; your ears get so filled with the language of the
vilest of them that you break into it when you lose your self-control;
they poison your life as remorselessly as you have sacrificed theirs
heartlessly. You begin to believe intensely in the devil. Then comes
the terror of their revolting; the drilling and arming of bodies of
them to keep down the rest; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of
frantic coercion, followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the
meantime, the population continues to increase!
“ILLTH.”
It is sometimes said that during this grotesquely hideous march of
civilization from bad to worse, wealth is increasing side by side
with misery. Such a thing is eternally impossible; wealth is steadily
decreasing with the spread of poverty. But riches are increasing, which
is quite another thing. The total of the exchange values produced in
the country annually is mounting perhaps by leaps and bounds. But the
accumulation of riches, and consequently of an excessive purchasing
power, in the hands of a class, soon satiates that class with socially
useful wealth, and sets them offering a price for luxuries. The moment
a price is to be had for a luxury, it acquires exchange value, and
labor is employed to produce it. A New York lady, for instance, having
a nature of exquisite sensibility, orders an elegant rosewood and
silver coffin, upholstered in pink satin, for her dead dog. It is made;
and meanwhile a live child is prowling barefooted and hunger-stunted in
the frozen gutter outside. The exchange-value of the coffin is counted
as part of the national wealth; but a nation which cannot afford food
and clothing for its children cannot be allowed to pass as wealthy
because it has provided a pretty coffin for a dead dog. Exchange value
itself, in fact, has become bedevilled like everything else, and
represents, no longer utility, but the cravings of lust, folly, vanity,
gluttony, and madness, technically described by genteel economists as
“effective demand.” Luxuries are not social wealth; the machinery for
producing them is not social wealth; labor skilled only to manufacture
them is not socially useful labor; the men, women, and children who
make a living by producing them are no more self-supporting than
the idle rich for whose amusement they are kept at work. It is the
habit of counting as wealth the exchange values involved in these
transactions that makes us fancy that the poor are starving in the
midst of plenty. They are starving in the midst of plenty of jewels,
velvets, laces, equipages, and race-horses; but not in the midst of
plenty of food. In the things that are wanted for the welfare of the
people we are abjectly poor; and England’s social policy to-day may be
likened to the domestic policy of those adventuresses who leave their
children half-clothed and half-fed in order to keep a carriage and
deal with a fashionable dressmaker. But it is quite true that whilst
wealth and welfare are decreasing, productive power is increasing; and
nothing but the perversion of this power to the production of socially
useless commodities prevents the apparent wealth from becoming real.
The purchasing power that commands luxuries in the hands of the rich,
would command true wealth in the hands of all. Yet private property
must still heap the purchasing power upon the few rich and withdraw it
from the many poor. So that, in the end, the subject of the one boast
that private property can make--the great accumulation of so-called
“wealth” which it points so proudly to as the result of its power to
scourge men and women daily to prolonged and intense toil, turns out
to be a simulacrum. With all its energy, its Smilesian “self-help,”
its merchant-princely enterprise, its ferocious sweating and
slave-driving, its prodigality of blood, sweat and tears, what has it
heaped up, over and above the pittance of its slaves? Only a monstrous
pile of frippery, some tainted class literature and class art, and not
a little poison and mischief.
* * * * *
This, then, is the economic analysis which convicts Private Property of
being unjust even from the beginning, and utterly impossible as a final
solution of even the individualist aspect of the problem of adjusting
the share of the worker in the distribution of wealth to the labor
incurred by him in its production. All attempts yet made to construct
true societies upon it have failed; the nearest things to societies so
achieved have been civilizations, which have rotted into centres of
vice and luxury, and eventually been swept away by uncivilized races.
That our own civilization is already in an advanced stage of rottenness
may be taken as statistically proved. That further decay instead of
improvement must ensue if the institution of private property be
maintained, is economically certain. Fortunately, private property
in its integrity is not now practicable. Although the safety-valve
of emigration has been furiously at work during this century, yet
the pressure of population has forced us to begin the restitution
to the people of the sums taken from them for the ground landlords,
holders of tenant right, and capitalists, by the imposition of an
income tax, and by compelling them to establish out of their revenues
a national system of education, besides imposing restrictions--as yet
only of the forcible-feeble sort--on their terrible power of abusing
the wage contract. These, however, are dealt with by Mr. Sidney Webb
in the historic essay which follows. I should not touch upon them at
all, were it not that experience has lately convinced all economists
that no exercise in abstract economics, however closely deduced, is
to be trusted unless it can be experimentally verified by tracing
its expression in history. It is true that the process which I have
presented as a direct development of private property between free
exchangers had to work itself out in the Old World indirectly and
tortuously through a struggle with political and religious institutions
and survivals quite antagonistic to it. It is true that cultivation
did not begin in Western Europe with the solitary emigrant pre-empting
his private property, but with the tribal communes in which arose
subsequently the assertion of the right of the individual to private
judgment and private action against the tyranny of primitive society.
It is true that cultivation has not proceeded by logical steps from
good land to less good; from less good to bad; and from bad to worse:
the exploration of new countries and new regions, and the discovery of
new uses for old products, has often made the margin of cultivation
more fruitful than the centre, and, for the moment (whilst the centre
was shifting to the margin), turned the whole movement of rent and
wages directly counter to the economic theory. Nor is it true that,
taking the world as one country, cultivation has yet spread from the
snowline to the water’s edge. There is free land still for the poorest
East End match-box maker if she could get there, reclaim the wilderness
there, speak the language there, stand the climate there, and be
fed, clothed, and housed there whilst she cleared her farm; learned
how to cultivate it; and waited for the harvest. Economists have
been ingenious enough to prove that this alternative really secures
her independence; but I shall not waste time in dealing with that.
Practically, if there is no free land in England, the economic analysis
holds good of England, in spite of Siberia, Central Africa, and the
Wild West. Again, it is not immediately true that men are governed in
production solely by a determination to realize the maximum of exchange
value. The impulse to production often takes specific direction in the
first instance; and a man will insist on producing pictures or plays
although he might gain more money by producing boots or bonnets. But,
his specific impulse once gratified, he will make as much money as he
can. He will sell his picture or play for a hundred pounds rather than
for fifty. In short, though there is no such person as the celebrated
“economic man,” man being wilful rather than rational, yet when the
wilful man has had his way he will take what else he can get; and so
he always does appear, finally if not primarily, as the economic man.
On the whole, history, even in the Old World, goes the way traced
by the economist. In the New World the correspondence is exact. The
United States and the Colonies have been peopled by fugitives from
the full-blown individualism of Western Europe, pre-empting private
property precisely as assumed in this investigation of the conditions
of cultivation. The economic relations of these cultivators have not
since put on any of the old political disguises. Yet among them, in
confirmation of the validity of our analysis, we see all the evils of
our old civilizations growing up; and though with them the end is not
yet, still it is from them to us that the great recent revival of the
cry for nationalization of the land has come, articulated by a man who
had seen the whole tragedy of private property hurried through its acts
with unprecedented speed in the mushroom cities of America.
On Socialism the analysis of the economic action of Individualism
bears as a discovery, in the private appropriation of land, of the
source of those unjust privileges against which Socialism is aimed.
It is practically a demonstration that public property in land is the
basic economic condition of Socialism. But this does not involve at
present a literal restoration of the land to the people. The land is
at present in the hands of the people: its proprietors are for the
most part absentees. The modern form of private property is simply a
legal claim to take a share of the produce of the national industry
year by year without working for it. It refers to no special part
or form of that produce; and in process of consumption its revenue
cannot be distinguished from earnings, so that the majority of
persons, accustomed to call the commodities which form the income
of the proprietor his private property, and seeing no difference
between them and the commodities which form the income of a worker,
extend the term private property to the worker’s subsistence also,
and can only conceive an attack on private property as an attempt to
empower everybody to rob everybody else all round. But the income of a
private proprietor can be distinguished by the fact that he obtains it
unconditionally and gratuitously by private right against the public
weal, which is incompatible with the existence of consumers who do not
produce. Socialism involves discontinuance of the payment of these
incomes, and addition of the wealth so saved to incomes derived from
labor. As we have seen, incomes derived from private property consist
partly of economic rent; partly of pensions, also called rent, obtained
by the sub-letting of tenant rights; and partly of a form of rent
called interest, obtained by special adaptations of land to production
by the application of capital: all these being finally paid out of the
difference between the produce of the worker’s labor and the price
of that labor sold in the open market for wages, salary, fees, or
profits.[11] The whole, except economic rent, can be added directly to
the incomes of the workers by simply discontinuing its exaction from
them. Economic rent, arising as it does from variations of fertility
or advantages of situation, must always be held as common or social
wealth, and used, as the revenues raised by taxation are now used, for
public purposes, among which Socialism would make national insurance
and the provision of capital matters of the first importance.
The economic problem of Socialism is thus solved; and the political
question of how the economic solution is to be practically applied
does not come within the scope of this essay. But if we have got
as far as an intellectual conviction that the source of our social
misery is no eternal well-spring of confusion and evil, but only an
artificial system susceptible of almost infinite modification and
readjustment--nay, of practical demolition and substitution at the will
of Man, then a terrible weight will be lifted from the minds of all
except those who are, whether avowedly to themselves or not, clinging
to the present state of things from base motives. We have had in this
century a stern series of lessons on the folly of believing anything
for no better reason than that it is pleasant to believe it. It was
pleasant to look round with a consciousness of possessing a thousand
a year, and say, with Browning’s David, “All’s love; and all’s law.”
It was pleasant to believe that the chance we were too lazy to take in
this world would come back to us in another. It was pleasant to believe
that a benevolent hand was guiding the steps of society; overruling
all evil appearances for good; and making poverty here the earnest of
a great blessedness and reward hereafter. It was pleasant to lose the
sense of worldly inequality in the contemplation of our equality before
God. But utilitarian questioning and scientific answering turned all
this tranquil optimism into the blackest pessimism. Nature was shewn
to us as “red in tooth and claw”: if the guiding hand were indeed
benevolent, then it could not be omnipotent; so that our trust in it
was broken: if it were omnipotent, it could not be benevolent; so that
our love of it turned to fear and hatred. We had never admitted that
the other world, which was to compensate for the sorrows of this, was
open to horses and apes (though we had not on that account been any
the more merciful to our horses); and now came Science to shew us the
corner of the pointed ear of the horse on our own heads, and present
the ape to us as our blood relation. No proof came of the existence of
that other world and that benevolent power to which we had left the
remedy of the atrocious wrongs of the poor; proof after proof came
that what we called Nature knew and cared no more about our pains
and pleasures than we know or care about the tiny creatures we crush
underfoot as we walk through the fields. Instead of at once perceiving
that this meant no more than that Nature was unmoral and indifferent,
we relapsed into a gross form of devil worship, and conceived Nature
as a remorselessly malignant power. This was no better than the old
optimism, and infinitely gloomier. It kept our eyes still shut to the
truth that there is no cruelty and selfishness outside Man himself;
and that his own active benevolence can combat and vanquish both. When
the Socialist came forward as a meliorist on these lines, the old
school of political economists, who could see no alternative to private
property, put forward in proof of the powerlessness of benevolent
action to arrest the deadly automatic production of poverty by the
increase of population, the very analysis I have just presented. Their
conclusions exactly fitted in with the new ideas. It was Nature at
it again--the struggle for existence--the remorseless extirpation of
the weak--the survival of the fittest--in short, natural selection
at work. Socialism seemed too good to be true: it was passed by as
merely the old optimism foolishly running its head against the stone
wall of modern science. But Socialism now challenges individualism,
scepticism, pessimism, worship of Nature personified as a devil,
on their own ground of science. The science of the production and
distribution of wealth is Political Economy. Socialism appeals to
that science, and, turning on Individualism its own guns, routs it
in incurable disaster. Henceforth the bitter cynic who still finds
the world an eternal and unimprovable doghole, with the placid person
of means who repeats the familiar misquotation, “The poor ye shall
have always with you,” lose their usurped place among the cultured,
and pass over to the ranks of the ignorant, the shallow, and the
superstitious. As for the rest of us, since we were taught to revere
proprietary respectability in our unfortunate childhood, and since we
found our childish hearts so hard and unregenerate that they secretly
hated and rebelled against respectability in spite of that teaching,
it is impossible to express the relief with which we discover that
our hearts were all along right, and that the current respectability
of to-day is nothing but a huge inversion of righteous and scientific
social order weltering in dishonesty, uselessness, selfishness, wanton
misery, and idiotic waste of magnificent opportunities for noble and
happy living. It was terrible to feel this, and yet to fear that it
could not be helped--that the poor must starve and make you ashamed
of your dinner--that they must shiver and make you ashamed of your
warm overcoat. It is to economic science--once the Dismal, now the
Hopeful--that we are indebted for the discovery that though the evil
is enormously worse than we knew, yet it is not eternal--not even very
long lived, if we only bestir ourselves to make an end of it.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] “Principles of Political Economy,” Vol. I, Index to chap. xvi
(1865).
[3] “Manual of Political Economy,” Book II, chap. iii, p. 116 (1876).
[4] “Economics of Industry,” Book II, chap. iii, sec. 3, p. 84 (1879).
[5] “Principles of Political Economy,” Book II, chap. vii, p. 301
(1883).
[6] “Brief Text-book of Political Economy,” chap. ii, sec. 216, p. 173
(1885).
[7] “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” chap. ii. p. 34
(1817).
[8] Profit is here used colloquially to denote the excess of the value
of an article over its cost.
[9] When one of the conditions of earning a wage is the keeping up
of a certain state, subsistence wages may reach a figure to which
the term seems ludicrously inappropriate. For example, a fashionable
physician in London cannot save out of £1,000 a year; and the post
of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland can only be filled by a man who brings
considerable private means to the aid of his official salary of £20,000.
[10] The current rate must, under present conditions, eventually fall
to zero, and even become “negative.” By that time shares which now
bring in a dividend of 100 per cent, may very possibly bring in 200
or more. Yet the fall of the rate has been mistaken for a tendency of
interest to disappear. It really indicates a tendency of interest to
increase.
[11] This excess of the product of labor over its price is treated as
a single category with impressive effect by Karl Marx, who called it
“surplus value” (_mehrwerth_).
HISTORIC.
BY SIDNEY WEBB.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL.
In discussing the historic groundwork of Socialism, it is worth
remembering that no special claim is made for Socialism in the
assertion that it possesses a basis in history. Just as every human
being has an ancestry, unknown to him though it may be; so every idea,
every incident, every movement has in the past its own long chain of
causes, without which it could not have been. Formerly we were glad to
let the dead bury their dead: nowadays we turn lovingly to the records,
whether of persons or things; and we busy ourselves willingly among
origins, even without conscious utilitarian end. We are no longer
proud of having ancestors, since every one has them; but we are more
than ever interested in our ancestors, now that we find in them the
fragments which compose our very selves. The historic ancestry of the
English social organization during the present century stands witness
to the irresistible momentum of the ideas which Socialism denotes. The
record of the century in English social history begins with the trial
and hopeless failure of an almost complete industrial individualism,
in which, however, unrestrained private ownership of land and capital
was accompanied by subjection to a political oligarchy. So little
element of permanence was there in this individualistic order that,
with the progress of political emancipation, private ownership of the
means of production has been, in one direction or another, successively
regulated, limited and superseded, until it may now fairly be claimed
that the Socialist philosophy of to-day is but the conscious and
explicit assertion of principles of social organization which have been
already in great part unconsciously adopted. The economic history
of the century is an almost continuous record of the progress of
Socialism.[12]
Socialism, too, has in the record of its internal development a history
of its own. Down to the present generation, the aspirant after social
regeneration naturally vindicated the practicability of his ideas by
offering an elaborate plan with specifications of a new social order
from which all contemporary evils were eliminated. Just as Plato had
his Republic and Sir Thomas More his Utopia, so Babœuf had his Charter
of Equality, Cabet his Icaria, St. Simon his Industrial System, and
Fourier his ideal Phalanstery. Robert Owen spent a fortune in pressing
upon an unbelieving generation his New Moral World; and even Auguste
Comte, superior as he was to many of the weaknesses of his time, must
needs add a detailed Polity to his Philosophy of Positivism.
The leading feature of all these proposals was what may be called their
statical character. The ideal society was represented as in perfectly
balanced equilibrium, without need or possibility of future organic
alteration. Since their day we have learned that social reconstruction
must not be gone at in this fashion. Owing mainly to the efforts of
Comte, Darwin and Herbert Spencer, we can no longer think of the
ideal society as an unchanging state. The social ideal, from being
static, has become dynamic. The necessity of the constant growth and
development of the social organism has become axiomatic. No philosopher
now looks for anything but the gradual evolution of the new order
from the old, without breach of continuity or abrupt change of the
entire social tissue at any point during the process. The new becomes
itself old, often before it is consciously recognized as new; and
history shews us no example of the sudden substitutions of Utopian and
revolutionary romance.