WHAT IS TO BE DONE
I
In the foregoing chapters I have intimated that every phase of the
question of freedom for women is bound up with the larger question
of human freedom. If it is freedom that women want, they can not be
content to be legally equal with men; but having gained this equality
they must carry on their struggle against the oppressions which
privilege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of an usurped
economic power. All human beings, presumably, would gain by freedom;
but women particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, they
are victims of special prepossessions which mere legal equality with
men may hardly be expected to affect.
If, on the other hand, it is dominance that they desire, they might,
indeed, conceivably attain this without freedom; but one can not see
much encouragement for that wish in the present trend of affairs.
Before women could dominate, they would not only have to overcome
the prejudices, superstitions, and legal disabilities which have
contributed to their subjection; but they would also have to get the
upper hand of men economically. They would have to manœuvre themselves
into that advantage in opportunity which men at present enjoy. One
can hardly see how this could be brought about except by some kind of
_coup d’état_, for the tendency of modern legislation, as I have shown,
far from being calculated to enlarge the scope of women’s economic
activity, is likely rather to narrow it; nor is it entirely probable
that the establishment of mere legal equality would count for much in
the premises, for the courts may always decide that any legislation
designed for the Larger Good is valid even though it may clash with
the principle of equal rights.[30] Suppose, however, that the momentum
gathered by the woman’s movement should carry society through a period
of sex-equality and bring it out on the other side--the side of female
domination--then men and women would simply have exchanged places,
and the social evils which now afflict mankind would remain, _mutatis
mutandis_. Women would be more nearly free than men, as men are now
more nearly free than women; but no one would be really free, because
real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one
sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the
disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage. It
can not be too often repeated that political and social freedom are
unattainable unless and until economic freedom has been attained--but
this is not a concern of either sex or class. In order to live, women,
like men, must eat; to eat, they, like men, must labour; to labour,
they, like men, must have opportunity. Control of men’s and women’s
economic opportunity, therefore, means control of their livelihood,
and control of men’s and women’s livelihood means control of men and
women. Real freedom, therefore, does not come in sight of either men
or women until this control is abated; that is to say, until (speaking
in technical terms) the two active factors in production, capital and
labour, which are _pro tanto_ sexless, have free access to the passive
factor, natural resources--in other words, until the private monopoly
of natural resources is dissolved.
If the struggle of women to rid themselves of their peculiar
disabilities were to turn out into an attempt to dominate men as men
have for so long dominated women, one could perfectly understand
the psychology behind such an attempt. With the exception of a few
individuals, humankind has thus far achieved no very high idea of
freedom. The ambition of subject classes has never gone much beyond
the desire to enjoy the privileges usurped by their masters. They
have resented being dominated, but not domination; they have had no
repugnance to the thought of dominating others. Their psychology was
very well summed up by _Punch_, in the remark of one old market-woman
to another (I quote from memory): “You see, Mrs. ----, when we have a
Labour Government we’ll all be equal, and then I shall have a servant
to do my work for me.” It is because of this myopic view of the nature
of freedom that all revolutions have been mere scrambles for advantage,
and have accomplished nothing more than a shifting of power from one
class to another, or as John Adams said, “a mere change of impostors.”
If the woman’s movement should resolve itself into a similar scramble,
it would be unfortunate but not surprising, for women may hardly be
expected to rise at once above the retaliatory spirit which is one of
the common curses of humanity.
They would have good _ex parte_ arguments ready to their tongue; many
an argument, indeed, which has been advanced to defend their subjection
might be effectively turned around. Their part in parenthood for
example, has long been held to justify their subjection under the
guise of protection in this function. It would be equally logical to
argue that women, as mothers of the race, should dominate the family
because, as givers of life, they have a deeper personal interest and
a greater natural right in their children than men have. It might be
argued that they should control all public affairs because of the
greater understanding of the value of human life and deeper interest
in the welfare of humanity that motherhood brings. One often hears the
argument--which no amount of female bloodthirst in time of war ever
seems to make effectively ridiculous--that if women were in power there
would be no wars, because they, knowing the cost of giving life, would
not consent to its wilful wholesale destruction. The doctrine that
women are closer to the race than men is really dangerous to those who
now preach it; for it affords the best kind of basis for the contention
that women should dominate in all matters concerning the race--and all
human affairs may be held to concern the race in one way or another.
Perhaps the best argument for the domination of women is that if
society, like parliamentary government, must for ever contemplate a
mere sterile succession of outs and ins, it is time that women had
their innings. But the analogy with the parliamentary system goes
further. Public faith in the parliamentary principle has waned almost
to the disappearing-point, and the system has suffered wholesale
discredit, because it became slowly but surely evident that what
actually kept them up was “the cohesive power of public plunder.”
If women took what might be called by analogy the political view of
their right to their innings, and let it animate them in a scuffle for
predominance, the general reaction would be similar. In a matter of
this kind, great numbers of people would be found objective enough to
glance at such an effort and pass it by in disapproval of the waste of
energy involved in bringing about a readjustment that promised nothing
better than a shifting of the incidence of injustice. Women would thus
forfeit a great deal of sympathy, and at the same time probably create
even more antagonism than they have thus far had to face. They would
place themselves in a position similar to that of organized labour,
which is so intent on contending for what it conceives to be its own
interest--a position of advantage in bargaining on wages and conditions
of labour--that by the narrowness of its policy it antagonizes a great
deal of public sentiment which must inevitably be enlisted on its
behalf if it undertook to contend for the general interest, in which
its own is included, and in the service of which its own is bound, in
the long run, to be best served.
What the nature of this general interest is, I have already intimated.
It is economic, and it can be advanced only through the establishment
of an order of society in which every human being shall enjoy the
natural right to labour and to enjoy all that his labour produces.
It is upon mankind’s security in this right that human freedom,
in whatever mode or aspect--social, philosophical, political,
religious--primarily depends.
The right to labour and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour means
only the right of free access to the source of subsistence, which is
land.[31] If access to that source may be arbitrarily denied, the right
to labour is denied, and the opportunity to get one’s living becomes
a privilege which may be withheld or granted as suits the need or
convenience of the person who bestows it, and wholly on his own terms.
If access may be had only on the payment of tribute, the condition
abrogates the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour, for the tribute
consumes a share of it.
While access to land is free, no one need know want; for he may always
get his living by applying his labour to natural resources “on his
own.” He may always, that is, work for himself instead of depending
for his living on the chance to work for an employer. Under such
conditions, moreover, no one need content himself, as the labourer
is forced to content himself at present, with a small share of what
his labour produces, for as Turgot pointed out a century and a half
ago, he can always demand of an employer the full equivalent of what
he could earn by working for himself. It is clear that under such an
economic system, the share of the capitalist in any product would
amount only to a fair competitive return on his actual investment.
Under the present system the capitalist often enjoys both directly and
indirectly the advantage of monopoly, which enables him to appropriate
an unfair proportion of his workers’ labour-product. He is a direct
beneficiary of monopoly when he holds legal title to the source of
his product--cultivable land, mines, forests, water-power--or where
he holds franchises or profits by protective tariffs or embargoes.
He is an indirect beneficiary when he profits by the competition
for work among workers whom monopoly has deprived of free access to
land. The steel-trust, as I have remarked, is a striking example of a
capitalist organization which benefits both directly and indirectly by
monopoly. On the one hand, it monopolizes and holds out of access vast
mining-properties, and monopolizes the home market through a protective
tariff. On the other, it levies tribute on labour by virtue of the
scarcity of opportunity created by monopoly in general.
Another excellent instance of this dual advantage is furnished by the
railways of this country. Not only have they received governmental
land-grants worth enough to cover their construction-costs many times
over, but they hold a valuable franchise-monopoly in the exclusive
right to do business over a long continuous strip of land called their
“right of way”; by means of which monopoly they drain the commerce
of a vast area as a river drains its waters. Through the enormous
wealth which these monopolies have enabled them to accumulate, they
have been able to influence governmental policy in ways designed to
enhance their privileges; for example, they have been able to curtail
water-transportation and thus reduce competition. They have profited by
tariffs, as through the emergency-law some years ago, which raised the
tariff on wheat just enough to cover the difference between the cost
of landing a bushel of wheat from the Argentine at one of our Eastern
ports, and the rate for transporting it by railway from our Western
wheat-fields. Through the Interstate Commerce Commission, of which they
captured control almost as soon as it was formed, they are allowed
to levy rates which represent not the cost of transportation but the
amount which can be exacted for it. So much for their direct benefit
from monopoly. Indirectly they benefit in the same way as any other
capitalist, through the opportunity to exploit a labour-surplus created
and maintained by monopoly; and while they are somewhat hindered in
making the most of this opportunity by the effectiveness of defensive
organization among their skilled employees, they have a pretty free
hand with their thousands of unskilled workers, and manage on the whole
to do very well out of them.
Even where the capitalist is not himself to any significant extent a
monopolist, he derives great benefit from monopoly, for it is thanks to
the monopolist of natural resources that he is able to keep labourers
at, or very near, the margin of subsistence. He is not always, however,
undisturbed in the enjoyment of his advantage; for he may be himself
quite as much at the mercy of monopoly as the workers he exploits.
The tenant-farmer affords an excellent example of this. He is the
capitalist in the farming-industry, who pays to the land-monopolist
tribute in the form of rent, to the railways tribute in exorbitant
freight-rates on his implements and products, to the manufacturers of
his implements tribute in the form of tariffs. He furnishes the capital
necessary for operating the farm, pays the wages of such labour as he
may require, and takes for himself what is left after all these charges
have been met, which in this country is so little that it does not
suffice to pay him both interest on his capital and wages for his own
labour--a condition which explains the steady drift of our population
from the farms to the cities, and which also accounts for the
extraordinary fact that agriculture, which is in volume our greatest
industry is, _qua_ industry, bankrupt. All the money in farming is now,
and for some time has been, in the rise of land-values. It is evident,
then, that save where capital and monopoly are united, capital as well
as labour is victimized by monopoly. This is one of the most important
facts of our system, and almost everyone overlooks it. The whole
producing organization is levied upon by a power which itself performs
no service whatever in return for the wealth that it appropriates;
which is, on the contrary, an incubus on the producing organization.
To put this statement more clearly, the monopolist, whose control of
the sources of production makes his exactions inescapable, is limited
in those exactions only by the amount that the traffic will bear. If a
condition arises which makes a certain kind of production especially
desirable, there will naturally be a pressure of people desiring to
undertake that kind of production, and the monopolist who controls its
source will exact in payment for access to that source an amount fixed
by the number of competitors seeking access. He is thus able to absorb
all the returns of the industry which depends on his monopoly, except
just so much as is necessary to encourage people to keep on with it.
For example, during the war the owners of our Western wheat-lands, who
had been demanding one-third of the crop in rent, raised the amount to
two-fifths, because at the price fixed by the Government wheat-growing
was profitable and there were many would-be producers seeking access to
wheat-lands. The same condition was reflected in the selling price of
land. Farms were sold and resold at advancing prices until land that
had sold before the war for sixty-five dollars an acre was bringing
two hundred. During the period of deflation thousands of acres bought
on mortgages reverted from one buyer to another until the original
owner had back his land plus whatever profit he had had from its sale.
All this raising of rents and this buying and selling at inflated
prices, did nothing for production, obviously, except to drain off the
lion’s share of its proceeds into the pocket of the monopolist; for all
speculative values must necessarily be paid finally out of production,
since there is no other source for them to come from. The producing
organization thus carries an enormous load of people who draw their
living from it and give neither goods nor services in return; who live,
that is to say, by appropriating the labour-products of others without
compensation--in other words, by legalized theft.
As monopoly extends and tightens its grip on the sources of production,
it is enabled to exact an increasing share of the proceeds, until
the point is reached where industry can no longer meet its demands
and continue to pay interest and wages. For example, so long as this
country had a frontier, the monopolist was in no position to exact a
very great share of production, for the producer had the alternative
of pushing on to the margin of cultivation where there were as yet
no landlords to support. The monopolist, therefore, could exact no
more than the difference between what a man might earn in a sparsely
settled country, remote from markets, and what he could earn by
carrying on production in a more thickly settled and more nearly
monopolized region. So long as this condition endured, production in
this country was able to pay tribute to monopoly and still pay the
capitalist a fairly good rate of interest and the labourer a fairly
good wage. But since the late nineteenth century, when the frontier
was closed, all the best of the country’s land and natural resources
being legally occupied, monopoly has been able to exact an ever greater
share of production; for while monopoly progresses, the population
grows, and competitive demand for access to the source of production
increases; and these two causes combine to cut down free economic
opportunity to the disappearing point. Thus it seems only a matter of
time until production will break down under the exactions of monopoly
and revolution and readjustment will follow. The breakdown has already
begun in the basic industry, agriculture, for, as I have stated above,
the tenant farmer is no longer able to meet the charges of monopoly
and still earn interest and wages. Therefore our agrarian population,
literally starved off the land, is steadily drifting to the cities, to
swell the numbers of workers who crowd the industrial labour-market.
This is to say that our civilization is dying at the root; and this
having presently grown too rotten to nourish it or support it, a little
wind of revolution or foreign invasion will one day overturn it, as all
civilizations which have hitherto existed have been overturned by the
same cause. “_Latifundia_,” said Pliny, “_perdiderunt Romam_.”
This same economic system exists in all the great countries of the
world save Russia, where it broke down under the Czarist régime and has
not been re-established. It is farther advanced in the countries of
the old world than it is here, because this country is more recently
settled. This fact constitutes the only difference between the economic
order in the old world and that in the new--a difference in the degree
that exploitation has reached.
Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new world or the old, it
exists by means of a governmental organization which its beneficiaries
control and use to protect their privileges against the expropriated
and exploited masses. There is general agreement among scholars that in
government, exploitation came first, and what we know as law and order
are its incidental by-products; and that however far the development
of these by-products may go, they are never allowed to interfere with
exploitation. “The State,” says Oppenheimer, “grew from the subjugation
of one group of men by another. Its basic justification, its _raison
d’être_, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.”
Both the origin and the essential nature of the State remain perfectly
clear so long as the conquering class remains distinct from the subject
classes and keeps these in a state of vassalage, without freedom of
movement, and subject to transfer from one owner to another along with
the land on which they dwell. In our own age, they are quite evident
in the dealings of the Western powers with weak peoples, as in India
or the Philippine Islands, or the mandated territories under the
League of Nations, where foreign Governments, through their military
organizations, protect their nationals in an economic exploitation of
the native population, and themselves levy taxes upon the natives to
pay the costs of the process. The nature and purpose of the State are
clear, indeed, in any community where the owning and exploiting class
exercises direct control over the propertyless dependent classes
as more or less chattels. The landed aristocracy of Europe formerly
exercised this direct control, as their titles, now grown meaningless,
indicate.
But where the form of the State has undergone a change which precludes
this direct control by the owning class, the nature of the State, and
its essential function, are obscured. Under the republicanism which
succeeded the American and French revolutions, the expropriated classes
have gained freedom of movement, a limited freedom of opinion, and a
nominal share in the exercise of government. The peasant is no longer
bound to the soil he tills; he may leave it at will to seek his fortune
elsewhere--on the terms of another landlord. The owning classes no
longer directly exercise government or directly enjoy honours and
titles by virtue of ownership. The peoples of the Western world,
at least where parliamentarism has not broken down, have a nominal
freedom with little of the reality. Nominal freedom of movement is
worth little to the man who faces the alternative of being exploited
where he is, or being exploited elsewhere. Nominal freedom of opinion
is not extremely valuable when expression of opinion may cost one the
opportunity to earn one’s living; and the right to vote offers little
satisfaction when it means merely a right of choice between rival
parties and candidates representing exactly the same system of economic
exploitation.
The political revolution which followed the breakdown of feudalism did
the world its greatest service in launching the _idea_ of freedom; it
did nothing--or relatively very little--for its substance. Through its
agency the equal right of all human beings to “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness” has come to be granted in theory though not in
fact; it remained for the Russian Revolution to proclaim the further
idea that the basis of this right is not political but economic. The
political revolution did more; by establishing political democracy,
it put into the hands of the people the power to achieve economic
democracy by peaceful means. But by that very act it obscured the
essential function of the State and the source of its power, which
remained clear as long as those who owned ruled directly by virtue
of ownership; and thus it hindered a clear perception of the causal
relation between privilege and slavery. By abolishing hereditary power,
it effected a redistribution of privilege, and at the same time forced
privilege to exercise its control of government by indirect means.
Privilege was no longer seated on the throne, but it remained, through
its control of economic opportunity, the power behind the throne;[32] a
power all the more difficult to dislodge now that it exercised control
without assuming responsibility. Republicanism has proved the futility
of dislodging a privileged class without abolishing privilege; for this
simply prepares the way for the rise of a new privileged class which
will use government to enforce its exploitation of the propertyless
class, in a different way, perhaps, but quite as effectively as its
predecessors.
The psychological effect of the political equality established under
republicanism is extremely demoralizing. As I have remarked, the
subject classes have never desired freedom so much as a chance at
the privileges that they see other people enjoy. Political equality,
with its breaking-down of class distinctions, creates an impression
of equality of opportunity--and indeed to the extent that government
maintains no disabling legal discriminations among members of the
enfranchised class,[33] it actually establishes equality. No member
of that class is excluded from the benefits of privilege by anything
save his inability to get possession of it; and this fact, especially
in a country where opportunity is comparatively plentiful, is more
likely to confirm people in their loyalty to a system under which
they stand even a dog’s chance to become beneficiaries of privilege,
than it is to stimulate an endeavour to abolish privilege altogether.
In this country the incalculable richness of natural resources and
the enormous wealth to be gained by speculative enterprise under a
government which gives full rein to monopoly, contributed immensely to
the corruption of the citizenry. Speculation became the normal course
of enterprise, the most approved method of money-getting; and the more
ruinously did the monopolist exploit the country’s resources, as Mr.
Veblen has pointed out, the greater the regard in which he was held
by his fellow citizens. Never before in the world’s history had so
many people a chance at the enjoyment of privilege as in the pioneer
period of American development. The country’s resources were gutted for
profit, not developed for use. The use-value of land was incidental
to its value as real estate. Every farmer became a speculator, and
consequently the margin of cultivation, instead of being pushed out
gradually in response to the natural increase in the country’s needs,
was extended artificially and with extreme rapidity, with the result
that farms were miles apart and unnecessary difficulties in marketing,
and in the maintenance of education and social life, were created.
The country resembled the modern city-addition of the real-estater,
with all the framework of settlement, waiting for the pressure of
population to enhance the selling-price of land. Not only was the
public mind corrupted by the apparently limitless opportunity to enjoy
privilege--not only was speculation confused with production--but
all this opportunity was blindly attributed to the blessings of
republicanism. “The greatest government on earth” came to be regarded
as the guardian of free opportunity for all citizens, in spite of the
very evident fact that no government which protects land-monopoly can
possibly maintain freedom of opportunity, for in the course of monopoly
all available natural resources are shortly pre-empted, and those
people who are born after occupation is complete will find nothing left
to pre-empt. Thus American patriotism took on a religious fervour, and
the corruption of the populace was complete.
The rise of industrialism has done as much as anything else to
engender misapprehension of the State’s essential nature, its chief
function, and the source of its power. It is significant that the
Physiocrats lived and observed the workings of the State before the
industrial era, in an agricultural country, where the relation between
land-monopoly and government was direct and inescapable; and that
Karl Marx lived and wrote after the rise of the factory-system, in a
highly industrialized country. The Physiocrats, for whom the basic
economic problem was unobscured, therefore attributed involuntary
poverty to its actual cause; while Marx, confusing capital’s fortuitous
advantage from monopoly with monopoly itself, laid the responsibility
at the door of capitalism. To be sure, Marx recognized and stated the
fact that expropriation must precede exploitation; but he did not
draw the obvious conclusion that the way to break capital’s power to
exploit the worker is by simple reimpropriation. At present there
is a general impression that the factory-system lured the population
into the cities, and thus caused the overcrowding that results in
scarcity of jobs and inadequacy of wage. As a matter of fact, the
factory-system found the cities already overcrowded with exploitable
labour. In England, for example, the Enclosures Acts had deprived the
people of what common land remained to them, and had driven them into
the cities where they lived in inconceivable filth and squalor, eking
out a miserable existence under the old family-system of industry.
The machine-system found all this expropriated and exploitable human
material ready to serve its ends--far more, indeed, than it needed,
as the riots among the workers deprived of their livelihood by its
labour-saving tools, plainly indicated. The industrial revolution,
then, did not produce the overcrowding of the labour-market; but the
capitalist of the revolution profited by an overcrowding that already
existed. He reaped indirectly the fruits of monopoly. He profited
likewise, and profits still, by every labour-saving device, for it
enabled him at once to dispense with some labourers and, because of
the increase of unemployment thus caused, to pay his remaining workers
less. Capital was thus enabled to appropriate much more than its
rightful share of production, and hence to amass enormous wealth, by
means of which it influenced government on behalf of its own further
enrichment. In this country, it has secured a system of protective
tariffs which amount to a governmental delegation of taxing-power to
the protected industries; it gives them a monopoly of the home-market
and enables them to add to the price of their product the amount of
the tariff which has been set against the competing foreign article.
Capital has found other ways of creating monopolies, such as the
combinations in restraint of trade at which the ineffectual Sherman
law was levelled. As the exactions of monopoly increase, and the
exploitation of labour nears the point of diminishing return, the
capitalist-monopolist embarks, with the protection of government,
on a policy of economic imperialism. He monopolizes the markets of
weak nations at the point of his Government’s bayonets. He invests
in foreign enterprises which offer high returns for himself and risk
of war for the Government which backs him--that is to say, for the
exploited masses at home who must support the Government and furnish
its soldiers. In short, he constitutes himself a menace to peace and
prosperity both at home and abroad; so that it is not to be wondered
at if people observing his sinister activities, take capital to be
the cause of the economic injustice from which it derives its power.
Yet, if natural resources were put freely in competition with industry
for the employment of labour, the inflamed fortunes of the capitalist
class would disappear. Monopoly having been abolished,[34] the
capitalist-monopolist would no longer exist, and the capitalist would
no longer be in a position to exact from production anything more than
his rightful interest--that is, as I have said, the amount fixed by
free competitive demand for the use of his capital.
There is yet another cause of confusion in the long-established custom
of regarding land as private property, whereas it is not, rightly
speaking, private property at all, but the source from which property
is produced by the combined efforts of labour and capital. The right
to property in wealth which has been produced, as, for instance, the
coat on one’s back, may be defended on the ground that it is the
product of one’s own labour, or has been acquired through exchange of
an equivalent amount of one’s own product; but the right to property
in land can not be defended on the same ground, because land is not a
labour-product. The distinction is simply between labour-made property
and law-made property. Under our present system of tenure, to be sure,
the purchase price of land--that is, the investment of capital that the
owner has made in order to get title--may represent human labour--but
this is merely to say that the owner has invested his capital in
privilege, or law-made property; that he has purchased, under
governmental guarantee, a certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely
as the investor in governmental securities purchases a governmental
guarantee that a certain share of future labour-products will be
taken from the producers and turned over to him. The fact that, under
political government, capital may be invested in privilege in no wise
alters the iniquitous nature of privilege, and a sound public policy
would disallow an investor’s plea of good faith _ex post facto_.[35]
Under a system which did not permit such investments, those people who
wished to put their capital to gainful use would invest it in the only
legitimate way, which is in productive enterprise.
It is, perhaps, partly because of the confusion of thought produced by
all these causes, that no revolution has ever abolished the exploiting
State and the privileges that it exists to secure. But it must also be
remembered that all revolutions have risen out of factional disputes
or class-wars, and that in the latter case, the chief interest of the
revolting class has been not to abolish privilege but to redistribute
it. The French Revolution, for instance, expropriated the land-owning
nobility, but its politicians dared not abolish private land-monopoly,
for the bourgeoisie which supported the revolution would not have
tolerated such an interference with their own enjoyment of privilege.
In one important respect the Russian Revolution is an exception to
this rule. It is a class-revolution, but its avowed ultimate purpose
is to abolish even that State-organization which itself at present
maintains.[36] It is too early for any forecast to be made concerning
the outcome of this attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the
Russian Revolution has already performed an inestimable service to the
world in proclaiming that the nature of freedom is not political but
economic, and in refusing, as a State-organization, to use its power
for the maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living by the
exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of influence abroad.
In order to abolish privilege it is not necessary, in a political
democracy, to wait for the economic breakdown which its exactions
inevitably bring about--that is to say, it is not necessary to wait
until the number of wasteful idlers that production must support shall
become so numerous and so wasteful that it can no longer meet their
exactions. The ballot has been a pretty ineffectual weapon in the hands
of the rank and file, but--so much must be said for republicanism--it
could be made effective. First, however, the rank and file would
have to learn what it is that this weapon should be used against--it
would have to become aware of the nature of real freedom, and to wish
real freedom to prevail. The power of privilege under republicanism
depends not only on its control of wealth, but much more upon its
control of thought and opinion. That a campaign of education among the
voters can seriously endanger the position of privilege was proved
in England during the great land-values campaign of 1914, which was
cut short by the war. But the task of education is not easy, because
of the conditions I have just been discussing, which obscure the
essential nature of privilege, and of the State. We have had in this
country a great deal of outcry against privilege, and it has aroused
considerable popular sympathy; but the zeal engendered thereby has not
advanced the cause of freedom, because the outcry was directed against
the capitalist and the exploiting power gained by his fortuitous
advantage from privilege, but not against privilege itself. The nature
of privilege was obscured. It is evidently necessary, then, if the
ballot is ever to be successfully employed against privilege, to know
what privilege means and to clear away all confusion about it, so that
the voters may see what is at fault in our economic system, and what
remedial steps are necessary.
The essential nature of freedom has been already shown. It comes out
in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural resources,
resulting in complete freedom of the individual to apply his productive
labour where he will. It is freedom to produce, and its corollary,
freedom to exchange--the _laissez-faire_, _laissez-passer_ of the
Physiocrats. How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to say.
I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the question as at present
so important as that of establishing a clear understanding of the
nature of freedom. When enough people come to see that the root of all
bondage, economic, political, social--even the bondage of superstition
and taboo--is expropriation, reimpropriation will not be long in
following; and it may be achieved by a method quite different from all
those which theorists have thus far devised. When people know what
they need, they are usually pretty resourceful about finding means to
get it; and so long as they do not know what they need, all the means
of securing it that can be suggested, however excellent, must remain
ineffective from the lack of sufficient will to use them.
II
In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the effect that freedom
would have upon this or that phase of human relations. There is really
no field of human activity that would not be profoundly affected by
it. A system of free economic opportunity would exert upon the lives
of human beings precisely as great an influence as that exerted by the
present economic system: that is to say, their mode of life, their
education, their quality of spirit, their cast of thought, would all
be determined by their command of wealth, precisely as they now are.
But where the present economic system operates to place the great mass
of wealth at the command of a very small percentage of the population
and thus to keep the majority in an involuntary and oppressive poverty
unfavourably affecting body, mind and spirit in a thousand ways, a
system of free opportunity would place in the hands of every human
being all the wealth that his labour, freely employed, could produce,
and at the same time it would relieve productive labour from the heavy
burden of privilege. Thus that huge share of wealth which now goes
to maintain the privileged classes in luxurious idleness, and that
further huge share which supports vast bureaucracies and keeps up
armies and navies to secure the foreign investments of the privileged
classes, would be diverted to its proper use. The number of workers
would be augmented by all those privilegees and placeholders who
now live without producing;[37] but opportunity would be increased
in infinitely greater proportion; therefore these newcomers would
find no difficulty in supporting themselves. On the other hand, the
immense reduction in luxury and waste thus brought about would very
much shorten the hours of labour. The worker whose labour, in addition
to maintaining himself and his dependents, is supporting two or
three idlers and paying for a share of governmental waste besides,
must necessarily spend many more hours at work than the worker whose
exertions are required only for the support of himself and his natural
dependents. But while the labour of each producer would decrease,
production would be increased by the opening of new opportunities, by
the increase in number of the producers, and by the enhanced power of
consumption made possible through their greater command of wealth.
The redistribution which would follow upon the establishment of free
opportunity, and the curtailment of waste, would satisfy a share of
this new demand; but just as production and exchange, in a period of
comparative prosperity at present, are stimulated by the increased
consuming power of the public, so, when artificial restrictions on
production had been removed, the increased power of consumption which
would result would act as a permanent stimulus to production and
exchange.
I will not speculate about the conditions arising during the period
of adjustment to the new conditions of economic freedom. If bad,
they would be but temporary, and though they are often magnified as
arguments against freedom by those who either can not or do not wish to
see beyond them, they have no proper place in this discussion, which
is concerned only with the permanent effect of free opportunity on the
lives, spirits and minds of human beings. It may be doubted that the
intercalary hardships of the transition would be great; but if they
were to be twice as great as the most timorous would forecast them,
would they not be preferable to those attending the protraction of the
present system to its inevitable break-up? That is the real question.
Thomas Jefferson said that rather than the French Revolution should
fail, he would see half Europe perish, and “though but an Adam and Eve
were left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it
is now.”
Who can picture the profound alteration in the attitude of people
toward life and their fellow-beings, if they were but emancipated from
the fear of want which now besets all of humankind? Even the rich and
the well-to-do are not exempt from this fear; for an economic security
based on an unsound economic system is like those walks which are
thrown along the thin crust of earth among the geysers of Yellowstone
Park, where those who walk them are in danger that a misstep may plunge
them through the thin crust to perish in the scalding heat beneath.
While an economic system based upon the legalized robbery of one class
by another remains in force, the abyss of involuntary poverty will
always yawn for those who may lose their command of wealth through
their own incapacity for management, or through circumstances beyond
their control. It seems likely that an instinctive sense of this is at
least partly responsible for the constant effort of people already
well off to increase their fortunes. It is certainly responsible for a
great deal of effort to get wealth by dishonest means--that is to say,
by those forms of dishonesty which are without legal sanction. The fear
of want produces avarice, chicanery, fraud, servility, envy, suspicion,
distrust. It leads to unlegalized theft, to murder, to prostitution.
It produces a class of people who, in a society which denies free
opportunity and puts a premium on graft, live by their wits, and in
so doing often display an energy and ability which would be useful
to a society that offered it no opportunity save that for honest
and useful employment. Moreover, this fear of want keeps the great
majority of people constantly occupied with the means of existence,
when they should properly be devoting a large share of their time to
the fulfilment of its purpose, which is that enjoyment gained from
developing one’s spiritual capacities and pursuing spiritual interests.
Those thus preoccupied can not employ with either imagination or profit
what leisure they have. Rather, they will merely use their leisure to
overcome their weariness of themselves. Their pleasures will be mere
pastimes, of the kind that subvert thought and dull imagination. Thus
little scope is left for the higher activities of the spirit, and the
quality of life is impoverished.
The spiritual effects of the fear of want are naturally most clearly
observable in countries where it is most widespread and deep-rooted.
England offers a particularly good field for observation of these
phenomena, for economic exploitation by a conquering class which has
merged into a powerful owning aristocracy, is there advanced to the
point of breakdown; therefore all the results of economic exploitation
are present in overflowing measure. The most striking, perhaps, are
the servility and snobbery which find sanction even in the Church
catechism, in the passage admonishing candidates for confirmation to
order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their betters--that is
to say, those born to a higher place in the social order. The English
novelists, from the days of Richardson and Fielding down to the
present, have faithfully recorded the unlovely characteristics bred
in a people by the ever-present necessity of keeping an eye to the
main chance; by the knowledge that fortune may depend less on merit
and ability than on a servile currying of favour with those powerful
persons who, through the fortuitous circumstance of birth, are in
control of economic opportunity. Richardson was himself demoralized
by the social system to which the economic system had given rise. His
acceptance of arrogance in the owning class and abjectness in the
exploited, shows how acquiescence in injustice can corrupt even a man
of genius. “Pamela” is a veritable study in servility; an unconscious
and devastating exposition of the basic principle of English society.
Fielding, on the other hand, was too critical to be corrupted by
it, and his books are all the more valuable for the objectivity
with which he presents the demoralization that a predatory economic
system has produced. What an array of characters he parades before
his readers--avaricious, envious, suspicious, self-seeking, arrogant,
venal! Even the hero of his great novel, “Tom Jones,” is not above
prostituting himself to an elderly lady of wealth when he finds himself
in danger of want and with no more honest means of getting a living,
having been brought up as a gentleman, that is to say, an idler. This
greatest of English novelists was well aware of the effect produced on
the collective life of his nation by an arbitrary division of human
kind into “High people and Low people,” and he took occasion to comment
upon it with a penetrating satire.
Now the world being divided thus into people of fashion and
people of no fashion, a fierce contention arose between them; nor
would those of one party, to avoid suspicion, be seen publicly
to speak to those of the other, tho’ they often held a very good
correspondence in private ... but we who know them, must have
daily found very high persons know us in one place and not in
another, today and not tomorrow; ... and perhaps if the gods,
according to the opinions of some, made men only to laugh at them,
there is no part of our behavior which answers the end of our
creation better than this.
One might say that the profuseness of unamiable qualities with which
Fielding endows so many of his characters, was due to a peculiar humour
or pessimism in this writer, if one did not find those same qualities
plentifully distributed among the characters of his successors. Dickens
created a whole gallery of highly interesting and unadmirable folk, and
one finds such faithful counterparts in Thackeray, for example, or in
George Eliot, that they are to be explained not as the mere creation of
any author’s imagination, but as a product of the society in which he
lived and observed.
There is material for an excellent study of the relation of the
economic and social system to the literary art, in the important rôle
that money plays in English fiction. That intense preoccupation with
the means of existence which is enforced by the fear of want, has
profoundly affected the plots and characters of English novels. The
number of plots which hinge on someone’s attempt to get someone else’s
money, is astonishing. The number of men and women who either marry
or attempt to marry for money, is legion; and no English novelist has
the hardihood to settle his characters for life without providing them
with a living, generally through inheritance or the generosity of some
wealthy patron. It is significant that if they are going to make their
own fortunes they usually strike out to make them in the new world,
where there is some opportunity. The preoccupation with getting money,
not through industry but through inheritance, cadging, or chicanery,
is reduced to its lowest terms in the stories of W. W. Jacobs about
life along the waterfront of London. These entertaining and racy
stories, with monotonous regularity, present one theme, and that theme
is the attempt of one character to do another--usually his closest
associate--out of some trifling sum of money. It is interesting to note
that one of the striking differences between English and American
fiction is that where the former deals with money-getting the latter is
likelier to deal with money-making. The one represents a society where
opportunity is pretty thoroughly monopolized; the other a society in
which it is as yet somewhat less so.
It is not the fear of want alone which demoralizes and corrupts. In
a society where the greatest respect is paid to those who live in
idleness through legalized theft; where men of genius may be treated
like lackeys by those whose only claim to superiority is their command
of wealth; where industry and ability yield smaller returns than
flattery and servility; in such a society there is little to encourage
honesty and independence of spirit. So long as honour is paid to those
who live by other people’s labour, in proportion to their power of
commanding it, so long will praise of honesty, industry, and thrift
savour of hypocrisy, and so long will the mass of people be under small
temptation to cultivate these virtues; and so long, also, will the
moralists who seek to inculcate them be open to the same suspicion of
insincerity as are those bankers who stand to profit substantially by
the thrift they preach among depositors. There is something grimly
amusing in the complaints so frequently heard from those who live
in ease, about the shiftlessness of the working classes and their
dishonest workmanship; complaints which are well founded, perhaps, but
do not take into account the slight incentive that is furnished by the
knowledge that the profits of industry and honest workmanship will
be diverted into other pockets than those of the workers. If labour
takes every opportunity of giving as little as it can for as much as
it can get, one must remember that it but follows the example set by
the owning classes, an example that has yielded them rich returns both
in wealth and in the esteem of their fellow-men. Under a free economic
system no such demoralizing example would exist. The material rewards
of honesty, industry, and thrift would accrue to those who practised
these virtues; and since there would be no opportunity to gain esteem
through the appropriation of other people’s labour, those who wished
to enjoy it would be forced to depend on more worthy means, such as
ability, integrity, and uprightness in their dealings with other people.
In a free society, ignorance, vice and crime would tend to disappear.
We should have no people in high places whose large-scale theft
would make them fitter inmates for jails, and no people in jails for
those petty thefts to which need is a perennial incentive. Jails,
indeed, would be very little needed by such a society; for what with
the abolition of the State, with its long list of law-made crimes,
and the disappearance of those social conditions which are largely
responsible for the few infractions of moral law which constitute real
crime, there would be very few offenders to occupy them. I have already
remarked that need is a constant incentive to theft; it is also the
chief cause of ignorance; and ignorance and misery are fecund sources
of vice, as well as of the physical and mental degeneracy which result
in imbecility and idiocy. If need were removed, if every human being
were assured from birth of physical well-being and ample opportunity to
develop mentally to the full extent of his capacity, these distressing
results of involuntary poverty would not long exist to menace the peace
and health of communities and fill reformers and eugenists with alarm.
The cities where human beings are crowded together under conditions
subversive of health and decency would be gradually emptied of their
surplus population. At present they are largely asylums for the
expropriated, but when land was once more freely available they would
resume their natural character as centres of industry and exchange.
There would be no more centres of want, misery and vice, like centres
of infection, to menace the health and well-being of society. Man,
reclaimed by the land which is his natural home, would appear for
what he really is, a child of the earth, rather than an industrial
machine far removed from his rightful heritage of close, health-giving
connexion with the soil from which his sustenance comes. Life, in
short, having been placed on its natural basis, might be expected
to proceed along natural lines of development. Mankind, assured of
physical health, would progress steadily in health of mind and activity
of spirit; and being freed from its pressing need to take thought of
the morrow, it would have leisure to seek the kingdom of heaven--not
that heaven which the church promises as a future reward for orthodox
communicants, but the kingdom of heaven which “is within you,” the
happiness that comes from the harmonious development of the highest
faculties of body, mind and spirit, and their use in the promotion of a
beautiful individual and collective life. Superstition and intolerance
would disappear with the ignorance that produces them. Thought would
no longer be hampered either by fear or the consciousness of dependence
on an order of things unfit to bear the light of reason; but every
human being would be free to exercise that independence of mind
that only the most courageous or the most securely placed may allow
themselves at present. The long story of martyrdom for opinion would
come to an end when freedom of opinion no longer threatened a vested
interest in the perpetuation of injustice. Thus that “progressive
humanization of man in society” which is civilization in the highest
sense, would be in a way to be promoted as it has never been promoted
in any society of which the world has knowledge.
III
Theoretically, it might still be possible for free economic opportunity
and its benefits to exist for men only or for women only; but in
order to exclude a whole sex from participation in them, it would be
necessary to reduce its members to the status of chattels. Now, to
reduce half of humanity to slavery is practically unthinkable; it would
necessitate a reversion to an order of thought that has largely been
outgrown; for all social injustice, in the last analysis, is founded in
an ignorance and prejudice which cause even its victims to acquiesce
in it. Indeed, without this acquiescence, social injustice may be
called impossible. “After the primary necessities of food and raiment,
freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.” Because of
this instinct for freedom, the subjection of any class in society can
be continued only so long as that class itself fails clearly to realize
the injustice of its position; when it comes into a clear realization
of this injustice it will demand and eventually obtain the removal
of its disabilities. The subjection of women, such as it has been,
lasted only so long as women themselves acquiesced in it.[38] When they
developed a sense of injury, they began to demand the equality with
men which is their right, and ignorance, prejudice and superstition
are yielding before the demand. There is no reason to suppose that
women, having progressed thus far, would tolerate without a sharp
struggle any reversion to the injustice from which they have escaped.
Ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, moreover, are incompatible
with the enlightenment which will be necessary in order to secure
economic justice even for one-half of humanity; for that enlightenment
postulates not only the desire to enjoy freedom oneself, but the desire
that all people may enjoy it--that is, it postulates repudiation of the
idea of dominance. Thus society not only could not endure half slave,
half free; it would not wish so to endure.
Women are at present under certain disabilities which legal equality
with men can hardly be expected to remove. Those disabilities are:
1. Economic: Women are the victims of unjust discriminations in
industry and the professions in regard to training, opportunities,
tenure of employment, and wages. They are also victimized by
ill-considered “welfare” legislation sponsored by benevolent persons,
and by male workers whose purpose is to rid themselves of unwelcome
competition.[39]
If legal equality of the sexes were established, women might be able,
under the law, to force public industrial schools to give them equal
opportunities for training; they might also be able to enforce a demand
for equal pay with men for equal work. It is even conceivable that they
might force employers to lay off workers, during periods of depression,
on a proportional basis--men and women together, in proportion to
the number of each sex employed. All this, however, would entail
unremitting vigilance, and great effort in getting legal enactments;
it would also entail a great deal of governmental machinery, with all
the waste and ineffectiveness implied by the term; and it would leave
the general labour-problem precisely where it is at present. As for the
matter of opportunity, so long as industry is in the hands of private
concerns, I see no way by which employers can be forced under an
equal-rights law to employ women where they prefer to employ men. Nor
is there any certainty that legal equality will save working women from
having the race “safeguarded” at their expense. But if land were put
freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, all
these disabilities would disappear. Women would enjoy the same freedom
as men to get their living by their labour, and since there would be no
such thing as a labour-surplus, their wage, like that of men, would be
the full product of their labour, and not that share which employers
or governmental boards thought fit to grant them. There would be no
need for reformers or other benevolent persons to secure them fair
hours and conditions of labour, or to get them excluded from hazardous
employments; for there is no way to make a worker accept onerous
conditions of labour from an employer if he have an ever-present
alternative of going out and creating more agreeable conditions by
working for himself. The worker whose independent position makes it
possible to refuse to work an excessive number of hours or under
unhealthful or dangerous or disagreeable conditions, will simply
refuse, and there will be an end of it. Thus employers, instead of
being prevented from exploiting women beyond a certain point, would be
rendered incapable of exploiting anyone in any degree. Nor would male
workers longer have any incentive to avail themselves of “protective”
legislation in order to reduce the competition of women with men in
the labour-market; for it is only where opportunity is artificially
restricted that there are “not enough jobs to go around.”
Certain direct consequences of the economic inferiority of women might
be expected to disappear when that inferiority no longer existed.
Foremost among these is the demoralizing temptation to get their
living by their sex. Prostitution would disappear from a society which
offered women ample opportunity to earn their living without doing
violence to their selective sexual disposition. Marriage would no
longer be degraded to the level of a means of livelihood, as it is
today for a great many women; for economic security would no longer
in any wise depend upon it. This being the case, the expectation now
put upon women to undertake marriage as a profession would disappear,
and marriage would come to be regarded in the light of a condition,
freely and voluntarily assumed by both sexes, who would jointly and
equally undertake its responsibilities. Under such circumstances, one
might confidently expect a further modification of institutionalized
marriage which would remove all those privileges and disabilities
now legally enforced on either party by virtue of the contract. The
idea that woman’s place is the home--which implies that marriage,
for her, necessarily involves acquiescence in a traditional sexual
division of labour and a traditional mode of life--with all its
disabling economic and psychological consequences, would disappear
from a society in which she was able freely to choose her occupation
according to her abilities. Thus, from the status of a class regarded
as being divinely ordained to be the world’s housekeepers, women would
emerge into the status of human beings, free to consult their interests
and inclinations in the ordering of their lives, without regard to
traditional expectations which, being no longer enforced by economic or
legal sanctions, would have no longer any power over them.
2. Psychological: Those prejudices and superstitions which now hamper
women in their development and in the ordering of their lives, might
be expected to disappear from a free society. In so far as they are
the consequences of woman’s subjection, they would yield before her
emergence into the status of a human being, sharing equally with man in
the freedom of opportunity that would result from the establishment of
economic justice, and the increased cultural advantages that freedom
of opportunity would bring. In so far as they are the outgrowth of
primitive ignorance and superstition, they would yield before the
increased intelligence and enlightenment which might be expected to
result from the abundance and leisure afforded to every human being
by economic freedom. Thus those artificial differentiations between
the sexes which have been built up by fear, by superstitions, and by
masculine dominance, would tend to disappear. Women would no longer
be regarded as extra-human beings endowed with superhuman powers for
good or ill; they would no longer be regarded exclusively or chiefly
as a function, being no longer forced to occupy that status; theories
of their mental and spiritual inferiority based on the results of
centuries of subjection would yield before a more humane and scientific
attitude; and as freedom promoted individuation among women, it would
become evident that the traditional notions concerning the feminine
nature were drawn from qualities which, having been bred by their
subjection, should have been regarded as characteristics not of a sex
but of a class.