may perhaps be looked for not so much from the direct action of
these elements of the higher education, as from those very socialist
forms of property and industry, which we believe to be the primary
condition for allowing such higher education to affect the majority at
all. Nothing so well trains the individual to identify his life with
the life of society as the identification of the conditions of his
material sustenance with those of his fellows, in short, as industrial
co-operation. Not for many centuries has there been such compulsion as
now for the individual to acknowledge a social ethic. For now, for the
first time since the dissolution of the early tribal communisms, and
over areas a hundred times wider than theirs, the individual worker
earns his living, fulfils his most elementary desire, not by direct
personal production, but by an intricate co-operation in which the
effect and value of his personal effort are almost indistinguishable.
The apology for individualist appropriation is exploded by the logic
of the facts of communist production: no man can pretend to claim the
fruits of his own labor; for his whole ability and opportunity for
working are plainly a vast inheritance and contribution of which he is
but a transient and accidental beneficiary and steward; and his power
of turning them to his own account depends entirely upon the desires
and needs of other people for his services. The factory system, the
machine industry, the world commerce, have abolished individualist
production; and the completion of the co-operative form towards which
the transition stage of individualist capitalism is hurrying us, will
render a conformity with social ethics, a universal condition of
tolerable existence for the individual.
This expectation is already justified by the phenomena of contemporary
opinion. The moral ideas appropriate to Socialism are permeating the
whole of modern society. They are clearly recognisable not only in
the proletariat, but also in the increasing philanthropic activity of
members of the propertied class, who, while denouncing Socialism as a
dangerous exaggeration of what is necessary for social health, work
honestly enough for alleviatory reforms which converge irresistibly
towards it. The form, perhaps, does not outrun the spirit, any more
than the spirit anticipates the form; and it may have been sufficient
in this paper to have shown some grounds for the conviction that
Socialist morality, like that of all preceding systems, is only that
morality which the conditions of human existence have made necessary;
that it is only the expression of the eternal passion of life seeking
its satisfaction through the striving of each individual for the
freest and fullest activity; that Socialism is but a stage in the
unending progression out of the weakness and the ignorance in which
society and the individual alike are born, towards the strength and
the enlightenment in which they can see and choose their own way
forward--from the chaos where morality is not to the consciousness
which sees that morality is reason; and to have made some attempt to
justify the claim that the cardinal virtue of Socialism is nothing else
than Common Sense.
FOOTNOTES:
[66] “The Quintessence of Socialism.” Swan, Sonnenschein and Co.
[67] _E. G._, see “Communism and Socialism,” by Theodore D. Woolsey
Sampson, Low and Co., London.
[68] To the intelligent Socialist this phrase has, of course, no
meaning. But against the non-Socialist who employs it, it may be
legitimately used, _ad captandum_.
[69] See _National Review_ for February, 1888, “Are Rich Landowners
Idle?” by Lady Janetta Manners (now Duchess of Rutland).
THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.
PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM.
BY GRAHAM WALLAS.
In the early days of Socialism no one who was not ready with a complete
description of Society as it ought to be, dared come forward to
explain any point in the theory. Each leader had his own method of
organising property, education, domestic life, and the production of
wealth. Each was quite sure that mankind had only to fashion themselves
after his model in order, like the prince and princess in the fairy
story, to live happily ever after. Every year would then be like the
year before; and no more history need be written. Even now a thinker
here and there like Gronlund or Bebel sketches in the old spirit an
ideal commonwealth; though he does so with an apology for attempting
to forecast the unknowable. But Socialists generally have become, if
not wiser than their spiritual fathers, at least less willing to use
their imagination. The growing recognition, due in part to Darwin,
of causation in the development of individuals and societies; the
struggles and disappointments of half a century of agitation; the
steady introduction of Socialistic institutions by men who reject
Socialist ideas, all incline us to give up any expectation of a final
and perfect reform. We are more apt to regard the slow and often
unconscious progress of the Time spirit as the only adequate cause of
social progress, and to attempt rather to discover and proclaim what
the future _must_ be, than to form an organisation of men determined to
make the future what it should be.
But the new conception of Socialism has its dangers as well as the old.
Fifty years ago Socialists were tempted to exaggerate the influence
of the ideal, to expect everything from a sudden impossible change of
all mens’ hearts. Nowadays we are tempted to under-value the ideal--to
forget that even the Time spirit itself is only the sum of individual
strivings and aspirations, and that again and again in history changes
which might have been delayed for centuries or might never have come at
all, have been brought about by the persistent preaching of some new
and higher life, the offspring not of circumstance but of hope. And of
all the subjects upon which men require to be brought to a right mind
and a clear understanding, there is, Socialists think, none more vital
to-day than Property.
The word Property has been used in nearly as many senses as the word
Law. The best definition I have met with is John Austin’s “any right
which gives to the entitled party such a power or liberty of using
or disposing of the subject ... as is merely limited generally by
the rights of all other persons.”[70] This applies only to private
property. It will be convenient in discussing the various claims of the
State, the municipality, and the individual, to use the word in a wider
sense to denote not only the “power or liberty” of the individual, but
also the “rights of all other persons.” In this sense I shall speak
of the property of the State or municipality. I shall also draw a
distinction, economic perhaps rather than legal, between property in
things, or the exclusive right of access to defined material objects,
property in debts and future services, and property in ideas (copyright
and patent right).
The material things in which valuable property rights can exist, may
be roughly divided into means of production and means of consumption.
Among those lowest tribes of savages who feed on fruit and insects,
and build themselves at night a rough shelter with boughs of trees,
there is little distinction between the acts of production and
consumption. But in a populous and civilised country very few even of
the simplest wants of men are satisfied directly by nature. Nearly
every commodity which man consumes is produced and renewed by the
deliberate application of human industry to material objects. The
general stock of materials on which such industry works is “Land.” Any
materials which have been separated from the general stock or have
been already considerably modified by industry, are called capital
if they are either to be used to aid production or are still to be
worked on before they are consumed. When they are ready to be consumed
they are “wealth for consumption.” Such an analysis, though generally
employed by political economists, is of necessity very rough. No one
can tell whether an object is ready for immediate consumption or not,
unless he knows the way in which it is to be consumed. A pine forest
in its natural condition is ready for the consumption of a duke with
a taste for the picturesque; for he will let the trees rot before
his eyes. Cotton-wool, a finished product in the hands of a doctor,
is raw material in the hands of a spinner. But still the statement
that Socialists work for the owning of the means of production by the
community and the means of consumption by individuals, represents
fairly enough their practical aim. Not that they desire to prevent
the community from using its property whenever it will for direct
consumption, as, for instance, when a piece of common land is used
for a public park, or the profits of municipal waterworks are applied
to keep up a municipal library. Nor do they contemplate any need for
preventing individuals from working at will on their possessions in
such a way as to make them more valuable. Even Gronlund, with all
his hatred of private industry, could not, if he would, prevent any
citizen from driving a profitable trade by manufacturing bread into
buttered toast at the common fire. But men are as yet more fit for
association in production, with a just distribution of its rewards,
than for association in the consumption of the wealth produced. It is
true indeed that the economies of associated consumption promise to be
quite as great as those of associated production; and it was of these
that the earlier Socialists mainly thought. They believed always that
if a few hundred persons could be induced to throw their possessions
and earnings into a common stock to be employed according to a common
scheme, a heaven on earth would be created. Since then, an exhaustive
series of experiments has proved that in spite of its obvious economy
any system of associated consumption as complete as Fourier’s
“Phalanstère” or Owen’s “New Hampshire” is, except under very unusual
conditions, distasteful to most men as they now are. Our picture
galleries, parks, workmen’s clubs, or the fact that rich people are
beginning to live in flats looked after by a common staff of servants,
do indeed shew that associated consumption is every year better
understood and enjoyed; but it remains true that pleasures chosen by
the will of the majority are often not recognised as pleasures at all.
As long as this is so, private property and even private industry must
exist along with public property and public production. For instance,
each family now insists on having a separate home, and on cooking
every day a separate series of meals in a separate kitchen. Waste
and discomfort are the inevitable result; but families at present
prefer waste and discomfort to that abundance which can only be bought
by organisation and publicity. Again, English families constitute
at present isolated communistic groups, more or less despotically
governed. Our growing sense of the individual responsibility and
individual rights of wives and children seems already to be lessening
both the isolation of these groups and their internal coherency; but
this tendency must go very much further before society can absorb the
family life, or the industries of the home be managed socially. Thus,
associated production of all the means of family life may be developed
to a very high degree before we cease to feel that an Englishman’s
home should be his castle, with free entrance and free egress alike
forbidden. It is true that the ground on which houses are built
could immediately become the property of the community; and when one
remembers how most people in England are now lodged, it is obvious that
they would gladly inhabit comfortable houses built and owned by the
State. But they certainly would at present insist on having their own
crockery and chairs, books and pictures, and on receiving a certain
proportion of the value they produce in the form of a yearly or weekly
income to be spent or saved as they pleased. Now whatever things of
this kind we allow a man to possess, we must allow him to exchange,
since exchange never takes place unless both parties believe themselves
to benefit by it. Further, bequest must be allowed, since any but a
moderate probate duty or personalty would, unless supported by a strong
and searching public opinion, certainly be evaded. Moreover, if we
desire the personal independence of women and children, then their
property, as far as we allow property at all, must for a long time to
come be most carefully guarded.
There would remain therefore to be owned by the community the land
in the widest sense of the word, and the materials of those forms of
production, distribution, and consumption, which can conveniently be
carried on by associations larger than the family group. Here the main
problem is to fix in each case the area of ownership. In the case of
the principal means of communication and of some forms of industry, it
has been proved that the larger the area controlled, the greater is the
efficiency of management; so that the postal and railway systems, and
probably the materials of some of the larger industries, would be owned
by the English nation until that distant date when they might pass to
the United States or the British Empire, or the Federal Republic of
Europe. Land is perhaps generally better held by smaller social units.
The rent of a town or an agricultural district depends only partly on
those natural advantages which can be easily estimated once for all
by an imperial commissioner. The difference in the rateable value of
Warwick and of Birmingham is due, not so much to the sites of the two
towns, as to the difference in the industry and character of their
inhabitants. If the Birmingham men prefer, on the average, intense
exertion resulting in great material wealth, to the simpler and quieter
life lived at Warwick, it is obviously as unjust to allow the Warwick
men to share equally in the Birmingham ground rents, as it would be
to insist on one standard of comfort being maintained in Paris and in
Brittany.
At the same time, those forms of natural wealth which are the
necessities of the whole nation and the monopolies of certain
districts, mines for instance, or harbors, or sources of water-supply,
must be “nationalised.” The salt and coal rings of to-day would be
equally possible and equally inconvenient under a system which made the
mining populations absolute joint owners of the mines. Even where the
land was absolutely owned by local bodies, those bodies would still
have to contribute to the national exchequer some proportion of their
income. The actual size of the units would in each case be fixed by
convenience; and it is very likely that the development of the County
Government Act and of the parochial and municipal systems will soon
provide us with units of government which could easily be turned into
units of ownership.
The savings of communities--if I may use the word community to express
any Social Democratic unit from the parish to the nation--would
probably take much the same form that the accumulation of capital
takes nowadays: that is to say, they would consist partly of mills,
machinery, railways, schools, and the other specialised materials
of future industry, and partly of a stock of commodities such as
food, clothing, and money, by which workers might be supported
while performing work not immediately remunerative. The savings of
individuals would consist partly of consumable commodities or of the
means of such industry as had not been socialised, and partly of
deferred pay for services rendered to the community, such pay taking
the form of a pension due at a certain age, or of a sum of commodities
or money payable on demand.
Voluntary associations of all kinds, whether joint-stock companies,
religious corporations, or communistic groups would, in the eyes of
the Social Democratic State, consist simply of so many individuals
possessing those rights of property which are allowed to individuals.
They might perform many very useful functions in the future as in the
past; but the history of the city companies, of the New River company,
the Rochdale Pioneers, or the Church of England shows the danger of
granting perpetual property rights to any association not co-extensive
with the community, although such association may exist for professedly
philanthropic objects. Even in the case of universities, where the
system of independent property-owning corporations has been found
to work best, the rights of the State should be delegated and not
surrendered.
On this point the economic position of modern Social Democrats differs
widely from the transfigured joint stockism of the present co-operative
movement or from the object of the earlier Socialists, for whose
purposes complete community was always more important than complete
inclusiveness. Even Socialist writers of to-day do not always see
that the grouping of the citizens for the purpose of property holding
must be either on the joint-stock basis or on the territorial basis.
Gronlund, in spite of contradictory matter in other parts of his
“Co-operative Commonwealth,” still declares that “each group of workers
will have the power of distributing among themselves the whole exchange
value of their work,” which either means that they will, as long as
they are working, be the absolute joint owners of the materials which
they use, or means nothing at all. Now the proposal that any voluntary
association of citizens should hold absolute and perpetual property
rights in the means of production, seems to be not a step towards
Social Democracy, but a negation of the whole Social Democratic
idea. This of course brings us to the following difficulty. If our
communities even when originally inclusive of the whole population
are closed: that is, are confined to original members and their
descendants, new comers will form a class like the plebians in Rome,
or the “metoeci” in Athens, without a share in the common property
though possessed of full personal freedom; and such a class must be a
continual social danger. On the other hand, if all newcomers receive
at once full economic rights, then any country in which Socialism
or anything approaching it is established, will be at once over-run
by proletarian immigrants, from those countries in which the means
of production are still strictly monopolised. If this were allowed,
then, through the operation of the law of diminishing return and the
law of population based on it, the whole body of the inhabitants
even of a Socialist State, might conceivably be finally brought down
to the bare means of subsistence. It does not seem necessary to
conclude that Socialism must be established over the whole globe if
it is to be established anywhere. What is necessary is that we face
the fact, every day becoming plainer, that any determined attempt to
raise the condition of the proletariat in any single European country
must be accompanied by a law of aliens considerate enough to avoid
cruelty to refugees, or obstruction to those whose presence would
raise our intellectual or industrial average, but stringent enough to
exclude the unhappy “diluvies gentium,” the human rubbish which the
military empires of the continent are so ready to shoot upon any open
space. Such a law would be in itself an evil. It might be unfairly
administered; it might increase national selfishness and would probably
endanger international good will; it would require the drawing of a
great many very difficult lines of distinction; but no sufficient
argument has been yet advanced to disprove the necessity of it.
On the question of private property in debts, the attitude of the law
in Europe has changed fundamentally in historical times. Under the
old Roman law, the creditor became the absolute owner of his debtor.
Nowadays, not only may a man by becoming bankrupt and surrendering all
his visible property, repudiate his debts and yet retain his personal
liberty; but in Factory Acts, Employers’ Liability Acts, Irish Land
Acts, etc., certain contracts are illegal under all circumstances.
With the growth of Socialism, this tendency would be quickened. The
law would look with extreme jealously upon any agreement by which one
party would be reduced even for a time to a condition of slavery,
or the other enabled to live even for a time without performing any
useful social function. And since it has been clearly recognised that
a certain access to the means of industry is a first condition of
personal freedom, the law would refuse to recognise any agreement to
debar a man from such access, or deprive him of the results of it.
No one would need to get into debt in order to provide himself with
the opportunity of work, nor would anyone be allowed to give up the
opportunity of work in order to obtain a loan. This, by making it more
difficult for creditors to recover debts, would also make it more
difficult for would-be debtors to obtain credit. The present homestead
law would, in fact, be extended to include everything which the State
thought necessary for a complete life. But as long as private industry
and exchange go on to such an extent as to make a private commercial
system convenient, so long will promises to pay circulate, and, if
necessary, be legally enforced under the conditions above marked out.
To whatever extent private property is permitted, to that same extent
the private taking of Rent and Interest must be also permitted. If you
allow a selfish man to own a picture by Raphael, he will lock it up
in his own room unless you let him charge something for the privilege
of looking at it. Such a charge is at once Interest. If we wish all
Raphael’s pictures to be freely accessible to everyone, we must prevent
men not merely from exhibiting them for payment, but from owning them.
This argument applies to other things besides Raphael’s pictures.
If we allow a man to own a printing press, or a plough, or a set of
bookbinders’ tools, or a lease of a house or farm, we must allow him so
to employ his possession that he may, without injuring his neighbor,
get from it the greatest possible advantage. Otherwise, seeing that the
community is not responsible for its intelligent use, any interference
on the part of the community may well result in no intelligent use
being made of it at all; in which event all privately owned materials
of industry not actually being used by their owners would be as
entirely wasted as if they were the subjects of a chancery suit. It
is easy to see that the Duke of Bedford is robbing the community of
the rent of Covent Garden. It is not so easy to see that the owners
of the vacant land adjoining Shaftesbury Avenue have been robbing the
community for some years past of the rent which ought to have been
made out of the sites which they have left desolate. I know that it
has been sometimes said by Socialists: “Let us allow the manufacturer
to keep his mill and the Duke of Argyle to keep his land, as long as
they do not use them for exploitation by letting them out to others on
condition of receiving a part of the wealth created by those others.”
Then, we are told, the manufacturer or Duke will soon discover that he
must work hard for a living. Such sentiments are seldom ill received
by men in the humor to see dukes and capitalists earning, as painfully
as may be, their daily bread. Unluckily, there are no unappropriated
acres and factory sites in England sufficiently advantageous to be used
as efficient substitutes for those upon which private property has
fastened; and the community would be wise if it paid the Duke of Argyle
and Mr. Chamberlain anything short of the full economic rent of their
properties rather than go further and fare worse. Therefore, if we
refused either to allow these gentlemen to let their property to those
who would use it, or hesitated to take it and use it for ourselves,
we should be actually wasting labor. The progressive socialisation of
land and capital must proceed by direct transference of them to the
community through taxation of rent and interest and public organisation
of labor with the capital so obtained; not solely by a series of
restrictions upon their use in private exploitation. Such concurrent
private exploitation, however unrestricted, could not in any case bring
back the old evils of capitalism; for any change in the habits of the
people or in the methods of industry which made associated production
of any commodity on a large scale convenient and profitable, would
result at once in the taking over of that industry by the State exactly
as the same conditions now in America result at once in the formation
of a ring.