PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS
For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we
will assume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary
reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them
with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt
them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will
merely consider how, a multitude of such men being given, the most
efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors
of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either
dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in
this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner
in which the problem is solved now.
Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic
process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he
must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much
wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in
proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a
subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the
direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say,
invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of
twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely,
two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the
engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in
paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this
metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he
pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the
guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages;
and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if
the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them,
the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas
added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages,
on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the
engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently
can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the
raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole
wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any
further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of
private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an
unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to
buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's
implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the
simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means
of directing or of misdirecting it again.
But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly
changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts
with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a
multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings
about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which
automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in
actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able
to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs
are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as
would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a
single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this
fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to
replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing
his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his
incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its
loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really
different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling
these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long
its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour
thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed
for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily
consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any
private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked
by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with
the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the
industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own
industrial failure.
Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many
of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's
steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure,
on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain
travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest
means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the
ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were
plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some
men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely
inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under
which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a
common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must
surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever
diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the
fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be
equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of
any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more
articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as
they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing
the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less
than it would be otherwise.[10]
Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats,
the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that
the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the
services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they
spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide
them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend
on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and
obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as
they would be under the régime of socialism, were reduced to specific
fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the
efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a
diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten
men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the
contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it
might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might
have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the
community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been
made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its
productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character
of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty
loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the
remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the butter
which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore,
to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour
directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise
it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such
goods and such quantities of them as would satisfy from moment to moment
the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a régime of
socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present
day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return,
the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased.
It is impossible to illustrate in detail the situation which would thus
arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is
an institution which imaginably might take various forms; and
socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have
refrained from committing themselves to any detailed programme. The
socialistic state, however, having to perform a double
function--namely, that of political governor and universal director of
industry--would necessarily be divided into two distinct bodies. One of
these, consisting of statesmen and legislators, would, we may assume, be
elected by the votes of the people. But the other, consisting of
industrial experts--the inventors, the chemists, the electricians, the
naval engineers, the organisers of labour--might conceivably be in the
first or the second of the two following positions: They might either be
left free, as they are under the existing system, to do severally the
best they can, according to their own lights, in estimating what goods
or services the population wants, and in satisfying these wants with
such increasing economy that new goods and services might be continually
added to the old. They might be left free to promote or dismiss
subordinates, to fill up vacancies, and take new men into partnership,
very much as the heads of private firms do now. Or else they might be
liable, in greater or less degree, to removal or supersession, and
interference with their technical operations, on the part of the
political body, whose members, while representing the general ideas of
the community, would presumably not be experts in the direction of its
particular industries.
Now, let us suppose first that the official directors of labour are left
practically free to follow their own devices. The situation which will
arise may be illustrated by the following imaginary case: The nation,
let us say, requires two sister ships. They are built in different
yards, under two different directors, and a thousand labourers are
employed in the construction of each; but while the labourers who work
under one director take a year to complete their task, those who work
under the other complete theirs within ten months. This would mean for
the community that, through the inferiority of the former of these two
officials, two months' labour of the national shipwrights had been lost;
and the public interest would require that the industrial regiment
commanded by him should as quickly as possible pass out of his control
into that of an official who could render it more efficient than he. And
under the existing system this, as we have seen already, is precisely
what sooner or later would be brought about automatically. The
inefficient director, in proportion to his relative inefficiency, loses
his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct
it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as
he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the
results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common
source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible
authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor
of ships wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor
would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to
insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an
official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available.
There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are assuming
that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the
utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in
money, we must necessarily assume that they will value their posts for
some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest
emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to
vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best
to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the
labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable
privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be
hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be
inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least
efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact
of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his
authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of
his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing
to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged
ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical
superiority to both.
Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the
ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise
the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch
as that to which it could be raised by the competition of to-day. But
the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to
self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but
would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least
able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively
oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical
development of any competition from without.
That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We
may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The
inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London
provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.
The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this
enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from
doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do
themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit
letters with a promptitude which the post-office still declined to
emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter
carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it
carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the
institution of the Boy Messengers.
Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France,
where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state
monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is
unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle,
would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the
products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at
the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly
suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture,
are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are
artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or
every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state
itself would have made by selling an equal quantity of its own inferior
articles.
The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of
public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself
against the competition of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of
the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing
industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and
also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the
development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.
And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in
state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and
strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more
formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend
them, to the activities of the entire community.
We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of
socialised industry on the assumption that they would be free to follow
the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical
interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the
alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely
coincide with fact. This is the assumption that the official directors
of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the
control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the
great mass of the people.
Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some
of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead
to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively
inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it
would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while
the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency,
embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political
officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would
embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the
many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature
of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which
appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least
intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial
improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the
highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and
consciously approved of by the lowest.
And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for
it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we
can turn to historical facts for illustrations of its substantial truth.
For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and
the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which
represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations,
the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of
possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two
patrons who, resembling in this respect far-seeing investors of to-day,
dared to be original, and provided him with the necessary ships and
control over the necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron
industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern
developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a
method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The
completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning
with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later
with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their
contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through
private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of
governments left them without defence; and had governments then
represented public opinion completely, and had also controlled all
labour and capital, the discovery in question, which was retarded for
three generations, would in all probability have never been made at all.
Arkwright's experience with regard to his spinning-frame was similar.
His epoch-making invention was in danger of being altogether lost,
because the general opinion of the capitalists of his day was against
it; and if all capital had been vested in a representative state, to the
exclusion of the far-seeing individuals who eventually came to his
assistance, its loss would have been almost certain. The successful
development of the automobile did not take place till yesterday--and
why? A steam-driven vehicle ran in Cornwall before the end of the
eighteenth century; but the state and public opinion both condemned it
as dangerous; and all further progress in the matter was checked for
more than twenty years. Then again private enterprise asserted itself,
but only to suffer precisely the same fate. Steam-driven omnibuses plied
between Paddington and Westminster. Steam-driven stage-coaches plied on
the Bath road. But the state and public opinion were again in obstinate
opposition; these vehicles were crushed out of existence by the
imposition of monstrous tolls; and progress was checked a second time
and for a longer period still. An instance yet more modern is that
supplied by the electric lighting of London. The electric lighting of
London was retarded for ten years solely by the attitude which the state
assumed towards private enterprise.
It is needless to multiply illustrations of this kind further; for my
object is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is
necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it
has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are
so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial
enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with
such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and
magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on
the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the
individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their
own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever,
the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole
determiner of the forms which such implements shall assume in the
future, and also of the kinds and quantities of the consumable goods
which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day
produce.
But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any
general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of
productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we
turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording
the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts
played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional
ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed
publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged
in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no
literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot
do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state,
being controller of all the implements of production, a private press
would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. Nobody could issue a
book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press
were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of
the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that
the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the
service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in
print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic
kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What
would happen under these circumstances to purely imaginative literature
we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing
controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially
social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able
to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything
which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were
predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected
the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on
errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they
owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they
would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they
would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In
short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior
person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the
same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged
self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent
thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by
book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at
an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than
the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as
completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the
only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publishing
business were managed by the College of Cardinals.
And what, under a régime of socialism, would be true of human thought,
a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be
equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to
embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities.
Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with
the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of
how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable
powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to
raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power
to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their
talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the
maximum which is at the time obtainable.
This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its
machinery of private competition, and of independent capitals, which
automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and
concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism,
with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the
rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary
emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive
ability, or, in other words, the necessity for competition among able
men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such competition can be
made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest
ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it
within the narrowest limits.
In this chapter, however, we have been dealing with the machinery only.
We have been assuming the unabated activity of the powers by which the
machinery is to be driven. That is to say, we have been assuming that
every man who possesses, or imagines himself to possess, any exceptional
gift for directing labour--whether as an inventor, a man of science, an
organiser, or in any other capacity--would be no less eager, under the
circumstances with which socialism would surround him, to develop and
exert his faculties than he is at the present day. We will now pass on
to the question of how far this assumption is correct. The question of
machinery is secondary. It is a question of detail only; for if there is
no power in the background by which the machinery may be driven, it will
not make much difference in the result whether the machinery be bad or
good.
And here once more we shall find that the socialists of to-day agree
with us; and in passing on to the question now before us, we shall be
quitting a region of speculations which can be only of a general kind
(for they refer to social arrangements whose details are not definitely
specified), and we shall find ourselves confronted by a variety of ideas
and principles which, however confused they may be in the minds of those
who enunciate them, we shall have no difficulty ourselves in reducing to
logical order.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] That such is the case can be seen easily enough by imagining a
socialistic community consisting of twenty men, who require and consume
only one article, bread. Each man, to keep him alive, requires one loaf
daily; but to eat two would be a comfort to him, and to eat three would
be luxury. The community is divided into two groups of ten men each, one
man in each group directing the labour of the others. We will start with
supposing that these two directors are men of equal and also of the
highest ability, and that each of the groups, under these favourable
conditions, is enabled to produce daily an output of thirty loaves. The
total output of both in this case amounts to sixty, which equally
divided yields to everybody the luxurious number of three. Let us next
suppose that the director of one group dies, that his place is taken by
a man of inferior powers, and that this group, as a consequence of his
less efficient direction, instead of producing thirty loaves can produce
no more than ten. Now, although this falling off in production has
occurred in one group only, the loss which results from it is felt by
the entire community. The total output has sunk from sixty loaves to
forty; and the members of the group which retains its old efficiency, no
less than those of the group which has lost so much of it, have to be
content, with a dividend, not of three loaves, but two. Finally, let us
suppose that, owing to a continued deterioration in management, the ten
men of whom the first group is composed are able to produce daily, not
ten loaves, but only five. That is to say, the number of loaves which
they produce comes to no more than half of the minimum they are obliged
to eat. Here it is obvious that, unless one-half of the population is to
die, it can only be kept alive by being given a supply of loaves which,
in consequence of its own inefficiency, must be taken out of the mouths
of others.
[11] A similar drama enacted itself in London more than two centuries
ago. Private enterprise established a penny post. The state killed it,
and deprived the metropolis of this service for a hundred and fifty
years.