organising the unemployed, will try to extract a profit to the
ratepayers from pauper farms by paying the lowest rates of wages. He
would find this way of proceeding very congenial, and would soon,
if permitted, simply municipalise slave-driving. In this way the
municipal and rural organisation of labor, even when its necessity and
its advantages are realised, can do nothing but change the form of
exploitation of labor if the workers in public employ are to be paid a
wage fixed by the competition of the market, and the profits of their
labor used only for the relief of the rates. Under such circumstances
we should have the whole of the rates paid by the communal workers,
while the private employers would go free. This would not be a
transition to Socialism, but only a new way of creating a class of
municipal serfs, which would make our towns burlesques of the ancient
Greek slaveholding “democracies.” We shall find surer ground by
recalling and applying the principle of Socialism that the laborers
shall enjoy the full product of their toil. It seems to me that this
might be worked out somewhat in the following way:
Out of the value of the communal produce must come rent of land
payable to the local authority, rent of plant needed for working
the industries, wages advanced and fixed in the usual way, taxes,
reserve fund, accumulation fund, and the other charges necessary for
the carrying on of the communal business. All these deducted, the
remaining value should be divided among the communal workers as a
“bonus.” It would be obviously inconvenient, if not impossible, for
the district authority to sub-divide this value and allot so much to
each of its separate undertakings--so much left over from gas works
for the men employed there, so much from the tramways for the men
employed on them, and so on. It would be far simpler and easier for the
municipal employees to be regarded as a single body, in the service of
a single employer, the local authority; and that the surplus from the
whole of the businesses carried on by the Communal Council should be
divided without distinction among the whole of the communal employees.
Controversy will probably arise as to the division: shall all the
shares be equal; or shall the workers receive in proportion to the
supposed dignity or indignity of their work? Inequality, however, would
be odious; and I have already suggested (p. 145) a means of adjusting
different kinds of labor to a system of equal division of net product.
This meets the difficulty of the varying degrees of irksomeness
without invidiously setting up any kind of socially useful labor as
more honorable than any other--a distinction essentially unsocial
and pernicious. But since in public affairs ethics are apt to go to
the wall, and appeals to social justice too often fall on deaf ears,
it is lucky that in this case ethics and convenience coincide. The
impossibility of estimating the separate value of each man’s labor with
any really valid result, the friction which would arise, the jealousies
which would be provoked, the inevitable discontent, favoritism and
jobbery that would prevail: all these things will drive the Communal
Council into the right path, equal remuneration of all workers. That
path once entered on, the principle of simplification will spread; and
presently it will probably be found convenient that all the Communal
Councils shall send in their reports to a Central Board, stating the
number of their employees, the amount of the values produced, the
deductions for rent and other charges, and their available surplus.
All these surpluses added together would then be divided by the total
number of communal employees, and the sum thus reached would be the
share of each worker. The national trusts would at first be worked
separately on lines analogous to those sketched for the Communes;
but later these would be lumped in with the rest, and still further
equalise the reward of labor. As private enterprises dwindle, more
and more of the workers will pass into communal employ, until at last
the Socialist ideal is touched of a nation in which all adults are
workers, and all share the national product. But be it noted that all
this grows out of the first organisation of industry by Municipalities
and County Councils, and will evolve just as fast or just as slowly
as the community and its sections choose. The values dealt with, and
the numbers employed at first, would not imply as much complexity of
detail as is involved in many of the great businesses now carried on by
individuals and by companies. The same brains will be available for the
work as are now hired by individuals; and it is rather the novelty of
the idea than the difficulty of its realisation which will stand in the
way of its acceptance.
It is probable, however, that for some time to come, the captains
of industry will be more highly paid than the rank and file of the
industrial army, not because it is just that they should receive higher
remuneration, but because they, having still the alternative of private
enterprise, will be able to demand their ordinary terms, at which
it will pay the community better to engage them than to do without
them--which would be indeed impossible. But their remuneration will
fall as education spreads: their present value is a scarcity value,
largely dependent on their monopoly of the higher education; and as the
wider training is thrown open to all, an ever-increasing number will
become qualified to act as organisers and directors.
The form in which the worker’s share is paid to him is not a matter of
primary importance. It would probably be convenient to have Communal
Banks, issuing cheques like those of the Cheque Bank; and these banks
could open credits to the workers to the amount of their remuneration.
The way in which each worker expended his wealth would of course be his
own business.
The above method of dealing with the surplus remaining from communal
labor after rent and other charges had been paid to the Municipality,
would prove the most potent factor in the supersession of private
enterprises. The amounts produced by the communal organisations would
exceed those produced under individualist control; but even if this
were not so, yet the shares of the communal workers, as they would
include the produce now consumed by idlers, would be higher than any
wage which could be paid by the private employer. Hence competition to
enter the communal service, and a constant pressure on the Communal
Councils to enlarge their undertakings.
It should be added that children and workers incapacitated by age or
sickness should receive an equal share with the communal employees. As
all have been children, are at times sick, and hope to live to old age,
all in turn would share the advantage; and it is only just that those
who have labored honestly in health and through maturity should enjoy
the reward of labor in sickness and through old age.
The shares of individuals and of Municipalities being thus apportioned,
there remains only a word to say as to the Central National
Council--the “State” _par excellence_. This would derive the revenues
necessary for the discharge of its functions, from contributions
levied on the Communal Councils. It is evident that in the adjustment
of these contributions could be effected the “nationalisation” of any
special natural resources, such as mines, harbors, &c., enjoyed by
exceptionally well situated Communes. The levy would be, in fact, of
the nature of an income tax.
Such a plan of Distribution--especially that part of it which equalises
the shares in the product--is likely to provoke the question: “What
will be the stimulus to labor under the proposed system? Will not
the idle evade their fair share of labor, and live in clover on the
industry of their neighbors?”
The general stimulus to labor will be, in the first place, then
as now, the starvation which would follow the cessation of labor.
Until we discover the country in which jam-rolls grow on bushes, and
roasted sucking-pigs run about crying “Come eat me!” we are under an
imperious necessity to produce. We shall work because, on the whole,
we prefer work to starvation. In the transition to Socialism, when the
organisation of labor by the Communal Councils begins, the performance
of work will be the condition of employment; and as non-employment will
mean starvation--for when work is offered, no relief of any kind need
be given to the healthy adult who refuses to perform it--the strongest
possible stimulus will force men to work. In fact, “work or starve”
will be the alternative set before each communal employee; and as men
now prefer long-continued and ill-paid work to starvation, they will
certainly, unless human nature be entirely changed, prefer short and
well-paid work to starvation. The individual shirker will be dealt with
much as he is to-day: he will be warned, and, if he prove incorrigibly
idle, discharged from the communal employ. The vast majority of men
now seek to retain their employment by a reasonable discharge of their
duty: why should they not do the same when the employment is on easier
conditions? At first, discharge would mean being flung back into the
whirlpool of competition, a fate not lightly to be challenged. Later,
as the private enterprises succumbed to the competition of the Commune,
it would mean almost hopelessness of obtaining a livelihood. When
social reorganisation is complete, it would mean absolute starvation.
And as the starvation would be deliberately incurred and voluntarily
undergone, it would meet with no sympathy and no relief.
The next stimulus would be the appetite of the worker for the result
of the communal toil, and the determination of his fellow-workers to
make him take his fair share of the work of producing it. It is found
at the present time that a very small share of the profits arising
from associated labor acts as a tremendous stimulus to each individual
producer. Firms which allot a part of their profits for division among
their employees, find the plan profitable to themselves. The men work
eagerly to increase the common product, knowing that each will have a
larger bonus as the common product is larger: they become vigilant as
to waste in production; they take care of the machinery; they save gas,
etc. In a word, they lessen the cost as much as they can, because each
saving means gain to them. We see from the experiments of Leclaire and
Godin that inventiveness also is stimulated by a share in the common
produce. The workers in these businesses are ever trying to discover
better methods to improve their machinery, in a word to progress,
since each step forward brings improvement of their lot. Inventions
come from a desire to save trouble, as well as from the impulse of
inventive genius, the joy in accomplishing an intellectual triumph,
and the delight of serving the race. Small inventions are continually
being made by clever workmen to facilitate their operations, even
when they are not themselves personally gainers by them; and there
is no reason to fear that this spontaneous exercise of inventiveness
will cease when the added productivity of labor lightens the task or
increases the harvest of the laborer. Is it to be argued that men will
be industrious, careful, and inventive when they get only a fraction
of the result of their associated labor, but will plunge into sloth,
recklessness and stagnation when they get the whole? that a little gain
stimulates, but any gain short of complete satisfaction would paralyse?
If there is one vice more certain than another to be unpopular in a
Socialistic community, it is laziness. The man who shirked would find
his mates making his position intolerable, even before he suffered the
doom of expulsion.
But while these compelling motives will be potent in their action
on man as he now is, there are others, already acting on some men,
which will one day act on all men. Human beings are not the simple
and onesided organisms they appear to the superficial glance of the
Individualist--moved only by a single motive, the desire for pecuniary
gain--by one longing, the longing for wealth. Under our present social
system, the struggle for riches assumes an abnormal and artificial
development: riches mean nearly all that makes life worth having,
security against starvation, gratification of taste, enjoyment of
pleasant and cultured society, superiority to many temptations,
self-respect, consideration, comfort, knowledge, freedom, as far as
these things are attainable under existing conditions. In a society
where poverty means social discredit, where misfortune is treated as a
crime, where the prison of the workhouse is a guerdon of failure, and
the bitter carking harassment of daily wants unmet by daily supply is
ever hanging over the head of each worker, what wonder that money seems
the one thing needful, and that every other thought is lost in the
frensied rush to escape all that is summed up in the one word Poverty?
But this abnormal development of the gold-hunger would disappear upon
the certainty for each of the means of subsistence. Let each individual
feel absolutely secure of subsistence, let every anxiety as to the
material wants of his future be swept away; and the longing for wealth
will lose its leverage. The daily bread being certain, the tyranny of
pecuniary gain will be broken; and life will begin to be used in living
and not in struggling for the chance to live. Then will come to the
front all those multifarious motives which are at work in the complex
human organism even now, and which will assume their proper importance
when the basis of physical life is assured. The desire to excel, the
joy in creative work, the longing to improve, the eagerness to win
social approval, the instinct of benevolence; all these will start
into full life, and will serve at once as the stimulus to labor and
the reward of excellence. It is instructive to notice that these very
forces may already be seen at work in every case in which subsistence
is secured, and they alone supply the stimulus to action. The soldier’s
subsistence is certain, and does not depend on his exertions. At once
he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism, to his _esprit
de corps_, to the honor of his flag; he will dare anything for glory,
and value a bit of bronze, which is the “reward of valor,” far more
than a hundred times its weight in gold. Yet many of the private
soldiers come from the worst of the population; and military glory
and success in murder are but poor objects to aim at. If so much can
be done under circumstances so unpromising, what may we not hope from
nobler aspirations? Or take the eagerness, self-denial, and strenuous
effort, thrown by young men into their mere games! The desire to be
captain of the Oxford eleven, stroke of the Cambridge boat, victor
in the foot-race or the leaping, in a word, the desire to excel, is
strong enough to impel to exertions which often ruin physical health.
Everywhere we see the multiform desires of humanity assert themselves
when once livelihood is secure. It is on the devotion of these to the
service of Society, as the development of the social instincts teaches
men to identify their interests with those of the community, that
Socialism must ultimately rely for progress; but in saying this we are
only saying that Socialism relies for progress on human nature as a
whole, instead of on that mere fragment of it known as the desire for
gain. If human nature should break down, then Socialism will break
down; but at least we have a hundred strings to our Socialist bow,
while the Individualist has only one.
But Humanity will not break down. The faith which is built on it is
faith founded on a rock. Under healthier and happier conditions,
Humanity will rise to heights undreamed of now; and the most exquisite
Utopias, as sung by the poet and idealist, shall, to our children, seem
but dim and broken lights compared with their perfect day. All that we
need are courage, prudence, and faith. Faith, above all, which dares to
believe that justice and love are not impossible; and that more than
the best that man can dream of shall one day be realised by men.
THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
TRANSITION.[73]
BY G. BERNARD SHAW.
When the British Association honored me by an invitation to take part
in its proceedings, I proposed to do so by reading a paper entitled
“_Finishing_ the Transition to Social Democracy.” The word “finishing”
has been, on consideration, dropped. In modern use it has gathered
a certain sudden and sinister sense which I desire carefully to
dissociate from the process to be described. I suggested it in the
first instance only to convey in the shortest way that we are in the
middle of the transition instead of shrinking from the beginning of
it; and that I propose to deal with the part of it that lies before us
rather than that which we have already accomplished. Therefore, though
I shall begin at the beginning, I shall make no apology for traversing
centuries by leaps and bounds at the risk of sacrificing the dignity of
history to the necessity for coming to the point as soon as possible.
Briefly, then, let us commence by glancing at the Middle Ages. There
you find, theoretically, a much more orderly England than the England
of to-day. Agriculture is organised on an intelligible and consistent
system in the feudal manor or commune; handicraft is ordered by the
guilds of the towns. Every man has his class, and every class its
duties. Payments and privileges are fixed by law and custom, sanctioned
by the moral sense of the community, and revised by the light of that
moral sense whenever the operation of supply and demand disturbs
their adjustment. Liberty and Equality are unheard of; but so is Free
Competition. The law does not suffer a laborer’s wife to wear a silver
girdle; neither does it force her to work sixteen hours a day for
the value of a modern shilling. Nobody entertains the idea that the
individual has any right to trade as he pleases without reference to
the rest. When the townsfolk, for instance, form a market, they quite
understand that they have not taken that trouble in order to enable
speculators to make money. If they catch a man buying goods solely in
order to sell them a few hours later at a higher price, they treat that
man as a rascal; and he never, as far as I have been able to ascertain,
ventures to plead that it is socially beneficent, and indeed a pious
duty, to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. If he did,
they would probably burn him alive, not altogether inexcusably. As to
Protection, it comes naturally to them.
This Social Order, relics of which are still to be found in all
directions, did not collapse because it was unjust or absurd. It
was burst by the growth of the social organism. Its machinery was
too primitive, and its administration too naïve, too personal,
too meddlesome to cope with anything more complex than a group of
industrially independent communes, centralised very loosely, if at
all, for purely political purposes. Industrial relation with other
countries were beyond its comprehension. Its grasp of the obligations
of interparochial morality was none of the surest: of international
morality it had no notion. A Frenchman or a Scotchman was a natural
enemy: a Muscovite was a foreign devil: the relationship of a negro
to the human race was far more distant than that of a gorilla is
now admitted to be. Thus, when the discovery of the New World began
that economic revolution which changed every manufacturing town into
a mere booth in the world’s fair, and quite altered the immediate
objects and views of producers, English adventurers took to the sea
in a frame of mind peculiarly favorable to commercial success. They
were unaffectedly pious, and had the force of character which is only
possible to men who are founded on convictions. At the same time, they
regarded piracy as a brave and patriotic pursuit, and the slave trade
as a perfectly honest branch of commerce, adventurous enough to be
consistent with the honor of a gentleman, and lucrative enough to make
it well worth the risk. When they stole the cargo of a foreign ship, or
made a heavy profit on a batch of slaves, they regarded their success
as a direct proof of divine protection. The owners of accumulated
wealth hastened to “venture” their capital with these men. Persons of
all the richer degrees, from Queen Elizabeth downward, took shares
in the voyages of the merchant adventurers. The returns justified
their boldness; and the foundation of the industrial greatness and
the industrial shame of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
laid; modern Capitalism thus arising in enterprises for which men are
now, by civilised nations, hung or shot as human vermin. And it is
curious to see still, in the commercial adventurers of our own time,
the same incongruous combination of piety and rectitude with the most
unscrupulous and revolting villainy. We all know the merchant princes
whose enterprise, whose steady perseverance, whose high personal honor,
blameless family relations, large charities, and liberal endowment
of public institutions mark them out as very pillars of society; and
who are nevertheless grinding their wealth out of the labor of women
and children with such murderous rapacity that they have to hand over
the poorest of their victims to sweaters whose sole special function
is the evasion of the Factory Acts. They have, in fact, no more sense
of social solidarity with the wage-workers than Drake had with the
Spaniards or negroes.
With the rise of foreign trade and Capitalism, industry so far outgrew
the control, not merely of the individual, but of the village, the
guild, the municipality, and even the central government, that it
seemed as if all attempt at regulation must be abandoned. Every law
made for the better ordering of business either did not work at all, or
worked only as a monopoly enforced by exasperating official meddling,
directly injuring the general interest, and reacting disastrously on
the particular interest it was intended to protect. The laws, too,
had ceased to be even honestly intended, owing to the seizure of
political power by the capitalist classes, which had been prodigiously
enriched by the operation of economic laws which were not then
understood.[74] Matters reached a position in which legislation and
regulation were so mischievous and corrupt, that anarchy became the
ideal of all progressive thinkers and practical men. The intellectual
revolt formally inaugurated by the Reformation was reinforced in the
eighteenth century by the great industrial revolution which began with
the utilisation of steam and the invention of the spinning jenny.[75]
Then came chaos. The feudal system became an absurdity when its basis
of communism with inequality of condition had changed into private
property with free contract and competition rents. The guild system had
no machinery for dealing with division of labor, the factory system, or
international trade: it recognized in competitive individualism only
something to be repressed as diabolical. But competitive individualism
simply took possession of the guilds, and turned them into refectories
for aldermen, and notable additions to the grievances and laughing
stocks of posterity.
The desperate effort of the human intellect to unravel this tangle of
industrial anarchy brought modern political economy into existence.
It took shape in France, where the confusion was thrice confounded;
and proved itself a more practical department of philosophy than the
metaphysics of the schoolmen, the Utopian socialism of More, or the
sociology of Hobbes. It could trace its ancestry to Aristotle; but
just then the human intellect was rather tired of Aristotle, whose
economics, besides, were those of slave holding republics. Political
economy soon declared for industrial anarchy; for private property; for
individual recklessness of everything except individual accumulation
of riches; and for the abolition of all the functions of the State
except those of putting down violent conduct and invasions of private
property. It might have echoed Jack Cade’s exclamation, “But then are
we in order, when we are most out of order.”