Effect of distribution on the quality of people as human bei_The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE

TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

[Illustration]

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE

TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

BY BERNARD SHAW

[Illustration]

BRENTANO’S PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

1928

_First printing, June, 1928_

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

MY SISTER-IN-LAW

MARY STEWART CHOLMONDELY

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO WHOSE QUESTION

THIS BOOK IS THE BEST ANSWER I CAN MAKE

A FOREWORD FOR AMERICAN READERS

I have never been in America; therefore I am free from the delusion,

commonly entertained by the people who happen to have been born there,

that they know all about it, and that America is their country in the

same sense that Ireland is my country by birth, and England my country

by adoption and conquest. You, dear madam, are an American in the sense

that I am a European, except that the American States have a language

in common and are federated, and the European states are still on the

tower of Babel and are separated by tariff fortifications. When I hear

people asking why America does not join the League of Nations I have

to point out to them that America _is_ a League of Nations, and sealed

the covenant of her solidity as such by her blood more than sixty years

ago, whereas the affair at Geneva is not a League of Nations at all,

but only a so far unsuccessful attempt to coax Europe to form one at

the suggestion of a late American President, with the result that the

British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs makes occasional trips

to Geneva, and, on returning, reassures the British House of Commons by

declaring that in spite of all Woodrow-Wilsonic temptations to combine

with other nations he remains an Englishman first, last, and all the

time; that the British Empire comes before everything with him; and

that it is on this understanding and this alone that he consents to

discuss with foreigners any little matters in which he can oblige them

without detriment to the said reserved interests. And this attitude

seems to us in England so natural, so obvious, so completely a matter

of course, that the newspapers discuss the details of Mr Chamberlain’s

report of his trip without a word about the patriotic exordium which

reduces England’s membership of the League to absurdity.

Now your disadvantage in belonging to a league of nations instead of

to a nation is that if you belong to New York or Massachusetts, and

know anything beyond the two mile radius of which you are the centre,

you probably know much more of England, France, and Italy than you do

of Texas or Arizona, though you are expected, as an American, to know

all about America. Yet I never met an American who knew anything about

America except the bits she had actually set eyes on or felt with her

boots; and even of that she could hardly see the wood for the trees.

By comparison I may be said to know almost all about America. I am

far enough off to get a good general view, and, never having assumed,

as the natives do, that a knowledge of America is my intuitional

birthright, I have made enquiries, read books, availed myself of the

fact that I seem to be personally an irresistible magnet for every

wandering American, and even gathered something from the recklessly

confidential letters which every American lady who has done anything

unconventional feels obliged to write me as a testimony to the ruinous

efficacy of my books and plays. I could and should have drawn all the

instances in this book from American life were it not that America

is such a fool’s paradise that no American would have believed a

word of them, and I should have been held up, in exact proportion

to my accuracy and actuality, as a grossly ignorant and prejudiced

Britisher, defaming the happy West as ludicrously as the capitalist

West defames Russia. What I tell you of England you will believe. What

I could tell you of America might provoke you to call on me with a

gun. Also it would lead you to class me as a bitter enemy to America,

whereas I assure you that though I do not adore your country with the

passion professed by English visitors at public banquets when you have

overwhelmed them with your reckless hospitality, I give it a good deal

of my best attention as a very interesting if still very doubtful

experiment in civilization.

But this much I will permit myself to say. Do not imagine that because

at this moment certain classes of American workmen are buying bathtubs

and Ford cars, and investing in building societies and the like the

money that they formerly spent in the saloons, that America is doing

as well as can be expected. If you were at this moment a miner’s wife

in South Wales you would be half starving; but the wife of a Colorado

miner might think you very lucky in having nothing more violent than

half starving to endure. The sweated women workers in the tenements

of your big cities are told that in America anyone can make a fortune

who wants to. Here we spare them that mockery, at least. You must take

it from me, without driving me to comparisons that between nations

wound as personalities do between individuals, that Capitalism is the

same everywhere, and that if you look for its evils at home you will

miss nothing of them except perhaps some of the socialistic defences

which European States have been forced to set up against their worst

extremities.

In truth it is odd that this book should not have been written by an

American. Its thesis is the hopelessness of our attempts to build up a

stable civilization with units of unequal income; and it was in America

that this inequality first became monstrous not only in money but in

its complete and avowed dissociation from character, rank, and the

public responsibility traditionally attached to rank. On the eastern

shores of the Atlantic the money makers formed a middle class between

the proletariat, or manual working class, and the aristocracy, or

governing class. Thus labor was provided for; business was provided

for; and government was provided for; and it was possible to allow and

even encourage the middle class to make money without regard to public

interests, as these were the business of the aristocracy.

In America, however, the aristocracy was abolished; and the only

controlling and directing force left was business, with nothing to

restrain it in its pursuit of money except the business necessity for

maintaining property in land and capital and enforcing contracts, the

business prudence which perceives that it would be ruinous to kill

outright the proletarian goose that lays the golden eggs, and the

fear of insurrection. There was no longer a king and an aristocratic

governing class to say to the tradesman “Never mind the public

interest: that is our business: yours is to get as rich as you can,

incidentally giving employment to the proletariat and increasing our

rent rolls”. All that remained was the tradition of unscrupulous

irresponsibility in business; and when the American millionaires first

began to astonish Europe with their wealth it was possible for the most

notorious of them, in the course of an enquiry into the proceedings

of a Trust with which he was connected, to reply to a criticism as to

the effect of his business policy on the public with a simple “Damn

the public!”. Had he been a middle class man in a country where there

was a governing class outside and above business, or a monarch with

a council in the same position, or even a State Church, his answer

would have been entirely in order apart from its verbal profanity. Duly

bowdlerized it would have run “I am a man of business, not a ruler and

a lawgiver. The public interest is not my job: I do not presume to

meddle with it. My sole function is to make as much money as I can”.

Queen Elizabeth would have applauded such an attitude as socially

sound and highly becoming: nothing angered her more than presumptuous

attempts on the part of common persons to concern themselves with _her_

business of high politics.

When America got rid of monarchs and prelates and popes and British

cabinets and the like, and plunged into the grand republican experiment

which has become the rule instead of the exception in Europe since the

war swept all the emperors into the dustbin of history, she raised the

middle classes to the top of the social structure and thus delivered

its civilization into their hands without ennobling their traditions.

Naturally they raced for money, for more money, and still more money,

and damned the public when they were not doping it with advertisements

which were by tacit agreement exempted from the law against obtaining

money by false pretences or practising medicine without qualifications.

It is true that they were forced to govern as well by the impossibility

of maintaining civilization without government; but their government

was limited and corrupted by their principle of letting nothing stand

in the way of their getting rich quickly. And the ablest of them at

that game (which has no attraction for the ability that plays the

higher games by which finally civilization must live) soon became rich

at a rate that made the European middle classes envious. In my youth I

heard little of great men arising in America--not that America did not

produce them, but that her money masters were more apt to persecute

than to advertize them--but I heard much of the great fortunes that

were being made there. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller

became famous by bringing our civilization to the point to which

Crassus and the other millionaire contemporaries of Sulla and Julius

Cæsar brought the civilization of ancient republican Rome just before

it set up Emperor idolatry as a resting place on the road to ruin.

Nowadays we have multimillionaires everywhere; but they began in

America; and that is why I wonder this book of mine was not written

in America by an American fifty years ago. Henry George had a shot at

it: indeed it was his oratory (to which I was exposed for fortyfive

minutes fortyfive years ago by pure chance) that called my attention

to it; but though George impressed his generation with the outrageous

misdistribution of income resulting from the apparently innocent

institution of private property in land, he left untouched the positive

problem of how else income was to be distributed, and what the nation

was to do with the rent of its land when it was nationalized, thus

leaving the question very much where it had been left a century earlier

by the controversy between Voltaire and the elder Mirabeau, except for

the stupendous series of new illustrations furnished by the growth of

the great cities of the United States. Still, America can claim that in

this book I am doing no more than finishing Henry George’s job.

Finally, I have been asked whether there are any intelligent women

in America. There must be; for politically the men there are such

futile gossips that the United States could not possibly carry on

unless there were some sort of practical intelligence back of them.

But I will let you into a secret which bears on this point. By this

book I shall get at the American men through the American women. In

America as in England every male citizen is supposed to understand

politics and economics and finance and diplomacy and all the rest of

a democratic voter’s business on the strength of a Fundamentalist

education that excites the public scorn of the Sioux chiefs who have

seen their country taken from them by palefaced lunatics. He is ashamed

to expose the depths of his ignorance by asking elementary questions;

and I dare not insult him by volunteering the missing information.

But he has no objection to my talking to his wife as to one who knows

nothing of these matters: quite the contrary. And if he should chance

to overhear----!!!

G. B. S.

CONWAY, NORTH WALES

_17th April 1928_

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

Socialism is an opinion as to how the income of the country should be

distributed. Its distribution is not a natural phenomenon: it is a

matter for arrangement, subject to change like any other arrangement.

It has been changed within living memory to an extent that would have

seemed incredible and scandalous to Queen Victoria, and is still being

changed from year to year. Therefore what we have to consider is not

whether our distribution shall be altered or not, but what further

changes are desirable to attain a prosperous stability. This is the

closed question which re-opened in the nineteenth century under the

banner of Socialism; but it is one on which everyone should try to

form an original personal opinion without prompting from Socialists.

PAGE 1

DIVIDING-UP

Dividing-up is neither a revolutionary novelty nor a Mosaic jubilee:

it is a necessary and unpostponable daily and hourly event of

civilized life. As wealth consists of food that becomes uneatable

unless immediately consumed, and of articles that wear out in use and

perish if kept unused, it must be divided-up and consumed at once.

Saving is impossible: the things will not keep. What is called saving

is a bargain whereby a person in possession of spare food allows

another to consume it in return for an undertaking to reverse the

transaction at some future time. Between the two nothing is saved, as

one consumes what the other saves. A proposal that everybody should

save is pure nonsense. A nation which stopped working would perish

within a fortnight even if every member of it had “saved” a million. 6

HOW MUCH FOR EACH?

This question does not settle itself. It has to be settled by law

and enforced by the police. If the shares are to be altered the law

must be altered. Examples of existing distribution. This has today

become so repugnant to the general moral conception of fairness and so

incompatible with the public health that there is a general revulsion

of feeling against it. But the revulsion can have no political effect

until it becomes arithmetically precise. It cannot be dealt with in

terms of more or less: the question of how much more or less must be

exactly determined. And as wealth is measured in money, distribution

must be dealt with in terms of income. 7

NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK

As a nation lives from hand to mouth there must be continuous

productive labor or there will be no food to distribute. But though

everyone must eat, everyone need not work, because under modern

conditions each of us can produce much more than enough to support

one person. If everyone worked everyone would have a good deal of

leisure. But it is possible to arrange that some people shall do all

the work and have no leisure in order that others should have all

leisure and no work. These two extremes are represented by complete

Socialism and complete Slavery. Serfdom and Feudalism and Capitalism

are intermediate stages. The continual struggle of persons and classes

to alter the allotment of the labor task and the distribution of

wealth and leisure in their own favor is the key to the history of

revolutions. Enormous increase of the stakes in this game through

modern discoveries and inventions. 9

COMMUNISM

Communism must be considered without personal, political, or religious

prejudice as a plan of distribution like any other. It was the plan

of the apostles, and is universally practised in the family. It is

indispensable in modern cities. All services and commodities which

are paid for by a common fund and are at the disposal of everyone

indiscriminately are examples of communism in practice. Roads and

bridges, armies and navies, street lighting and paving, policemen,

dustmen, and sanitary inspectors are familiar and obvious instances. 11

LIMITS TO COMMUNISM

Communism is so satisfactory and unquestioned as far as it has gone

that those who are conscious of it may ask why everything should

not be communized. Reasons why this cannot be done. Communism is

applicable only to commodities and services which, being necessary or

useful to everybody, enjoy general moral approval. It can be extended

to matters in which the citizens are willing to give and take, as

when the oarsman pays rates for a cricket pitch in consideration of

the cricketer paying rates for the lake. But services as to which

there is any serious difference of opinion, such as church services,

and commodities which some people believe to be deleterious, such

as alcoholic liquors, are excluded from the scope of Communism.

Surreptitious communism is necessary in the case of science, and of

learning generally, because the ordinary citizen does not understand

their importance sufficiently to be willing to pay for their

endowment. Governments are therefore obliged to endow them without

consulting the electors, who are left to believe that Greenwich

Observatories, National Galleries, British Museums and the like are

provided gratuitously by Nature. 14

SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED

Seven plans of distribution are at present advocated or practised. 1.

To each what he or she produces. 2. To each what he or she deserves.

3. To each what he or she can get and hold. 4. To the common people

enough to keep them alive whilst they work all day, and the rest to

the gentry. 5. Division of society into classes, the distribution

being equal or thereabouts within each class, but unequal as between

the classes. 6. Let us go on as we are. 7. Socialism: an equal share

to everybody. 19

TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES

Apparent fairness of this plan. Two fatal objections to it: (_a_)

it is impossible to ascertain how much each person produces even

when the product is a material object; and (_b_) most people’s work

consists, not in the production of material objects, but in services.

The clearest case of individual production is that of a baby by its

mother; but a baby is an expense, not a source of income. In practice

production and service are made commensurate by paying the workers

according to the time taken in producing the commodity or rendering

the service; but this does not carry out the plan, as, when the time

spent in qualifying the worker is taken into account, the calculation

becomes impossible. Illustrative cases. Case of the married woman

keeping a house and bringing up a family. The plan is impossible, and,

at bottom, nonsensical. 21

TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES

Tendency of those who are comfortably off to believe that this is

what is actually happening. Circumstances which support this view.

Facts which reduce it to absurdity. Proposals to adopt the principle

and make it happen in future. The first and final objection is that

it cannot be done. Merit cannot be measured in money. The truth

of this can be ascertained at once by taking any real case of two

human beings, and attempting to fix the proportion of their incomes

according to their merits or faults. 26

TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

This plan postulates equal grabbing power as between children, old

people, invalids, and ablebodied persons in the prime of life. That

is, it presupposes a state of things that does not exist. Otherwise

it is simple amorality, which even pirates find impossible if they are

to hold together for any length of time. It is, however, tolerated at

present in trade. Lawless robbery and violence are barred; but the

tradesman may get as much and give as little for it as he can; and the

landlord may even use legalized violence to get the utmost for the

use of his land. The results of this limited toleration of grab are

so unsatisfactory that laws are continually being made to palliate

them. The plan, which is really no plan at all, must be dismissed as

disastrous. 29

OLIGARCHY

The plan of making the few rich and the many poor has worked for a

long time and is still working. The advantages claimed for it. The

rich class as a preserve of culture. The incomes of the rich as

a reservoir of money which provides by its overflow the socially

necessary fund of spare money called capital. The privileges of the

rich as a means of securing a governing class. Efficacy of the plan

when organized as the Feudal System. How it works in villages and

Highland clans. How it fails in cities. Modern urbanized civilization

has no use for it, all our governing work being done by paid public

servants. This leaves it with only one pretension: that of providing

capital by satiation and overflow. But the satiation is too costly

even when it is achieved. There is no guarantee that the rich will use

any part of their income as capital, or that when they do so they will

invest it at home where it is most needed. The accumulation of capital

can be provided for in other ways. The plan is breaking under the

weight of its enormous abuses. 30

DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

This happens to some extent at present. We are accustomed to think

that monarchs, as a class, should receive more than manual laborers;

and as a rule they do. But monarchs receive much less than Steel

Kings and Pork Barons; and unskilled laborers receive more than

great mathematicians, who, as such, receive nothing, and have to

live by poorly paid professorships. Clergymen get very little; and

racing bookmakers get a good deal. Nobody can determine what they

ought to get; yet nobody can defend what they do get on any rational

ground. Those who think it a matter of course that scavengers should

receive less than bank managers cannot say how much less, without

which determination their opinion can have no effect in a political

settlement of distribution. The main argument for enriching a class is

that it enabled them to produce an idolatrous illusion of superiority

which gives them authority, which is necessary in organizing society.

But in modern society the persons in authority are often much poorer

in money than those whom they command. Illustrative cases. Real

authority has nothing to do with money. 35

LAISSER-FAIRE

Letting things alone is now called letting them slide: an admission

that they will not stay where they are. Change is a law of nature; and

when parliaments neglect it and Churches try to ignore it, the effect

is not to avert the changes but to make them hasty, ill-considered,

and often catastrophic. Unless laws and Articles of Religion change

as often and as quickly as the activities they control, a strain is

set up which, if not relieved by the prevalence of up-to-date ideas in

government and the Churches, must wreck civilization. 38

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

The study of poverty. Poverty does not produce unhappiness: it

produces degradation: that is why it is dangerous to society. Its

evils are infectious, and cannot be avoided by any possible isolation

of the rich. The attractions of poverty. The folly of tolerating it as

a punishment. We cannot afford to have the poor always with us. The

statute of Elizabeth. What constitutes poverty. The sufferings of the

rich. They are avoidable only by voluntarily foregoing idleness and

gluttony: that is, foregoing the only privileges that riches confer.

Poor and rich being equally objectionable, the question arises how

much is enough? What is enough for savage life. What was enough for

our grandmothers is not enough for ourselves. There is no limit to the

higher requirements of mankind. The question is therefore unanswerable

as applied to civilized life. The problem of distribution cannot be

solved by giving everyone enough: nobody can ever have enough of

everything. But it is possible to give everybody the same. 41

WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

The effect of distribution on industry. Political economy, or the art

of spending the national income to the greatest general advantage.

Importance of the order in which goods are produced. Those which are

wanted most should be produced first. Food, clothes, and houses should

come before scent and jewellery, babies’ needs before the needs of

lapdogs. Nothing but equality of purchasing power can preserve this

vital order in the industries which cater for purchasers. Inequality

of income upsets it hopelessly: the labor which should feed starving

children is expended in the production of trivial luxuries. This is

excused on the ground that the purchasers give employment. Absurdity

of this plea. 49

EUGENICS

Effect of distribution on the quality of people as human beings. The

problem of breeding the nation. In breeding animals the problem is

simple though the art is uncertain and difficult, because the animal

is bred for some single specific purpose, such as the provision of

food or for racing or haulage. The stockbreeder knows exactly what

sort of animal is wanted. Nobody can say what sort of human being is

wanted. It is not enough to say that certain sorts are not wanted.

The stockbreeders’ methods are therefore not applicable: the keeper

of a human stud farm, if such a thing were established by a mad

professor of eugenics, would not know what to aim at or how to begin.

We are therefore thrown back on natural sexual attraction as our only

guide. Sexual attraction in human beings is not promiscuous: it is

always specific: we choose our mates. But this choice is defeated by

inequality of income, which restricts our choice to members of our own

class: that is, persons with similar incomes or no incomes. Resultant

prevalence of bad breeding and domestic unhappiness. The most vital

condition of good distribution is that it shall widen the field

of sexual selection to the extent of making the nation completely

intermarriageable. Only equality of income can do this. 53

THE COURTS OF LAW

Though Justice should not be a respecter of persons, the courts must

respect persons if they have different incomes. Trial by jury is

trial by a jury of peers, not only the peers of the accused but of

the accusers and of the whole body of citizens. This is in practice

impossible in a civilized society of persons with unequal incomes,

as the person with a large income has not the same interests and

privileges as the person with a small one. As access to the courts of

justice costs money the poor are cut off from them by their poverty or

terrorized by the threats of the rich to drag them there. The abuses

of divorce and alimony. Sale of husbands and wives. Blackmail. Abuses

in the criminal courts. Corruption of the law itself at its source in

Parliament by the rich majority there. Severity of the laws against

theft practised by the poor on the rich. Complete exemption of the

crime of rich idling, which is the form of theft practised by the rich

on the poor. Inequality of income thus effects a divorce of law from

justice, leading to an anarchic disrespect for the law and a general

suspicion of the good faith of lawyers. 56

THE IDLE RICH

Idleness does not mean inactivity. Over-exertion and “rest cures” of

the rich. Their dangerous and exhausting sports. The flapper dances

harder than the postman walks. Spartan training of the old rich.

It is soon acquired by the new rich, who begin by trying to loaf.

The diplomatic and military services as preserves for the energetic

rich. The unpaid magistry. Estate management. Parliament. Effect

of contraception and hotel life in service flats in extending the

possibilities of complete uselessness and self-indulgence. Exceptional

cases of eminent workers with unearned incomes. Florence Nightingale

and John Ruskin. Not inactivity but consuming without producing is

what is meant by economic idleness. Ironic vanity of the attempt to

secure happiness and freedom by having plenty of money and nothing to

do. 59

CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

The Church school in the village. Deference to the rich taught as

loyalty and religion. Persecution of schoolmasters for teaching

equalitarian morality. Corruption of the universities and of the

newspapers. Difficulty of separating the mass of falsehood inculcated

and advertized in the interest of the rich from the genuine learning

and information in which rich and poor have a common interest. 63

WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

We endure misdistribution and even support it because it is associated

with many petty personal benefits and amusements which come to us

by way of charity and pageantry, and with the chance of winning the

Calcutta Sweep or inheriting a fortune from an unknown relative.

These pageants and prizes are apprehensible by the narrowest minds in

the most ignorant classes, whereas the evils of the system are great

national evils, apprehensible only by trained minds capable of public

affairs. Without such training the natural supply of broad minds

is wasted. Poverty, by effecting this waste on an appalling scale,

produces an artificial dearth of statesmanlike brains, compelling

us to fill up first-rate public posts with second-rate and often

sixth-rate functionaries. We tolerate the evils of inequality of

income literally through want of thought. 65

POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

Equal division has been tested by long experience. Practically all

the work of the world has been done and is being done by bodies

of persons receiving equal incomes. The inequality that exists is

between classes and not between individuals. This arrangement is

quite stable: there is no tendency for the equality to be upset

by differences of individual character. Here and there abnormal

individuals make their way into a better paid class or are thrown

out into an unpaid vagrancy; but the rule is that each class either

keeps its economic level or rises and falls as a class, its internal

equality being maintained at every level. As people are put so they

will stay. Equality of income, far from being a novelty, is an

established practice, and the only possible one as between working

individuals in organized industry. The problem is therefore not one of

its introduction, but of its extension from the classes to the whole

community. 68

MERIT AND MONEY

Equality of income has the advantage of securing promotion by merit.

When there is inequality of income all merits are overshadowed by

the merit of having a large income, which is not a merit at all.

Huge incomes are inherited by nincompoops or made by cunning traders

in vice or credulity; whilst persons of genuine merit are belittled

by the contrast between their pence and the pounds of fools and

profiteers. The person with a thousand a year inevitably takes

precedence of the person with a hundred in popular consideration, no

matter how completely this may reverse their order of merit. Between

persons of equal income there can be no eminence except that of

personal merit. Hence the naturally eminent are the chief preachers of

equality, and are always bitterly opposed by the naturally ordinary or

inferior people who have the larger shares of the national income. 70

INCENTIVE

It is urged against equality that unless a person can earn more than

another by working harder she will not work harder or longer. The

reply is that it is neither fair nor desirable that she should work

harder or longer. In factory and machine industry extra exertion is

not possible: collective work goes on at the engine’s speed and stops

when the engine stops. The incentive of extra pay does not appeal

to the slacker, whose object is to avoid work at any cost. The cure

for that is direct compulsion. What is needed is an incentive to the

community as a whole to choose a high standard of living rather than

a lazy and degraded one, all standards being possible. Inequality of

income is not merely useless for this purpose, but defeats it. The

problem of the Dirty Work. On examination we discover that as it is

done mostly by the worst paid people it is not provided for at present

by the incentive of extra pay. We discover also that some of the

very dirtiest work is done by professional persons of gentle nurture

without exceptional incomes. The objection to dirty work is really an

objection to work that carries a stigma of social inferiority. The

really effective incentive to work is our needs, which are equal, and

include leisure. 72

THE TYRANNY OF NATURE

The race must perish through famine if it stops working. Nobody

calls this natural obligation to work slavery, the essence of which

is being compelled to carry another ablebodied person’s burden of

work as well as one’s own. Pleasurable toil and toilsome pleasure.

General ignorance of the art of enjoying life. The imposture of our

commercially provided amusements. Working for fun is more recreative

than wasting time and money. Monotonous work makes even a painful

change welcome: hence our hideous excursion train holidays. Labor is

doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest, or doing

nothing, is a necessity imposed by work, and is not leisure. Work can

be so absorbing that it can become a craze like the craze for drink.

Herbert Spencer’s warning. 80

THE POPULATION QUESTION

To every proposal for a general increase of incomes it is objected

that its benefits will be swallowed up by married people having too

many children. It is also alleged that existing poverty is due to

the world being too small to produce food enough for all the people

in it. The real cause is that there are too many people living as

parasites on their fellows instead of by production. Illustrations

from domestic service. Increase of population, leading to division of

labor, enriches the community instead of impoverishing it. Limits to

this law of increasing return. Possibilities of human multiplication.

The question is not one of food alone but of space. The speed at which

population increases has to be considered as well as the ultimate

desirability of the increase. Too many unproductive children may

starve a family though the country as a whole may have unlimited

employment for adults; therefore the cost of bearing and bringing up

children should be borne by the State. Checks to population. War,

pestilence, and poverty. Contraception, or artificial birth control.

Exposure of female infants. Mahomet’s view of it. Capitalism, by

producing parasitism on an enormous scale has produced premature

overpopulation, kept under by excessive infant mortality and the

diseases of poverty and luxury. Equality of income can get rid of

this, and place population on its natural basis. University teaching

on the subject, which alleges that a natural law of diminishing return

is now in operation, is merely one of the corruptions of political

science by Capitalism. Possibility of local overpopulation in an

underpopulated world. Examples. 83

THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

Socialism entirely independent of Socialists or their writings and

utterances. “Joining the Socialists”. Many professed Socialists

are so because they believe in a delusion called Equality of

Opportunity, and would recant if they discovered that Socialism

means unconditional equality of income for everyone without regard

to character, talent, age, or sex. This is the true diagnostic of

Socialism, and the touchstone by which Socialists may be distinguished

from Philanthropists, Liberals, Radicals, Anarchists, Nationalists,

Syndicalists, and malcontents of all sorts. Henri Quatre’s

prescription of “a chicken in the pot for everybody” is amiable and

kindly; but it is not Socialism. 92

PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Amateur reformers who believe that the world can be made good by

individual effort. Ordering the servants to dine with you. Inequality

is not the fault of the rich. Poverty is not the fault of the poor.

Socialism has nothing to do with almsgiving or personal generosity or

kindness to the poor. Socialism abhors poverty and the poor, and has

no more to do with relieving them than with relieving riches and the

rich: it means to abolish both ruthlessly. Questionableness of the

virtues that feed on suffering. Doles and almsgiving are necessary

at present as an insurance against rebellion; but they are dangerous

social evils. _Panem et circenses._ Government cannot suppress this

abuse until it possesses the powers of employment now in private

hands. It must become the national landlord, employer, and financier.

It is not enough to know the object of Socialism and to be convinced

of its possibility. Commandments are no use without laws; and

Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law and not of personal

righteousness. 95

CAPITALISM

Capitalism might more properly be called Proletarianism. Its

abolition does not involve the destruction of capital. The social

theory of Capitalism. The Manchester School. Property, private or

real, and personal. Powers of landlords. Distinction between private

property and personal possession. Private property an integral part

of Capitalism. Incompatible with Socialism. Conservative and Labor

parties are at bottom parties for the maintenance and abolition

respectively of private property. Literary property. 100

YOUR SHOPPING

Incidence of unequal distribution in the shop. Nothing obtainable at

cost price: every price is loaded with a tribute to private property.

Averaging the cost of production of the entire national supply gives

the real cost price. This is the price aimed at by Socialism. Under

Capitalism the cost of production of that part of the supply which is

produced under the most unfavorable circumstances fixes the price of

the entire supply. The coal supply. By nationalizing the coal industry

the public can be supplied at the averaged cost price per ton.

Examples from our numerous existing nationalizations. 105

YOUR TAXES

Grumbling about the taxes. Government gives value at the cost price

to itself; but this includes loaded prices paid by it to profiteers

and landlords for materials, services, and sites. Taxation of unearned

income as a method of avoiding these overcharges and even of providing

the service at the cost of the landlords and capitalists. Income tax,

supertax, and death duties. The National Debt. Taxation as a means of

redistributing income. The War Loan. The failure of private enterprise

and the success of National Factories during the war. 111

YOUR RATES

The method of rating makes every rate a roughly graduated income tax.

How the ratepayers are exploited. Illustrations: the charwoman, the

Dock Companies, and the Drink Trade. The Poor Law, Municipal trading,

and the Post Office as instruments of exploitation. 117

YOUR RENT

Rent is the most simple and direct form of exploitation. Difference

between house rent and cost of house. Ground rents in great cities.

Powers of life and death and of exile enjoyed by landlords. Sheep

runs. Deer forests. The value of all improvements is finally

appropriated by the landlords. The Single Tax. 122

WHAT CAPITAL IS

Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of

Capitalist civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor.

Capital, being perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing

in the process. Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values.

Inflation. Debasing the currency. Constant expenditure necessary. 127

INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE

The nature of investment. Not deferred consumption, but transferred

and postponed claim to be fed. Exploitation of the hungry by the

intelligent. Estate Development. Illustrative case of a country house

and park developed into a suburb. Proprietors without the necessary

business ability can hire it. Big business. The magic of capital. 131

LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private

appropriation is finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order

of its application. Examples: Distilleries _versus_ lighthouses and

harbors. Error of assuming that low prices with large sales are more

profitable than high prices with restricted sales. Cases in point:

telegraph and telephone services. Snowball letters. Commercial profit

is no index to social utility. 113

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Capital, though beginning at the wrong end, is driven finally to

the right end. Invention and inventors. Labor-saving machinery.

Power: water, steam, and electric. Handmade and machine-made goods.

Cheapness. The industrial revolution, though it has wrought evil, is

not evil in itself. Retrogression is neither possible nor desirable.

137

SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

Capital has no country, being at home everywhere. Restrictions on

trade at home, however beneficial, drive it abroad. Example: the

trade in intoxicating drink may be driven to Africa by high excise in

England and prohibition in America. Superior attraction of the slave

trade. Suppression of slave trading followed by indirect enforcement

of compulsory labor by means of hut taxes and the like. Development

of other countries by English capital accompanied by neglect of home

industrial resources and of the improvement of our towns. The foreign

competition of which capitalists complain is often created by their

own exports of capital. 140

DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

Investments of our capital abroad bring in gratuitous imports as

interest. The expenditure of this tribute gives employment. It is,

however, parasitic employment. The employees may be more pampered than

productive employees; and this, combined with the disappearance of

manufacturing towns and their replacement by attractive residential

resorts, may produce an air of increased prosperity and refinement

in all classes; but it does not provide suitable employment for the

rougher workers discharged by the discarded factories, who have to

be got rid of by Assisted Emigration or kept quiet by doles. If the

process were unchecked England would become a country of luxurious

hotels and pleasure cities inhabited by wealthy hotel guests and

hotel servants with their retinue of importers and distributors, all

completely dependent on foreign tribute from countries which might at

any moment tax the incomes of absentee capitalists to extinction, and

leave us to starve. 145

FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

Only freshly saved capital can be exported. The capital consumed in

the establishment of mines, railways, and fixed industrial plant

cannot be shipped abroad. When the home market supplied by them dries

up through change or exhaustion of demand, the plant must either close

down or seek markets abroad. This is the beginning of foreign trade.

Trade with civilized nations is hampered by foreign protective duties

or by the competition of the manufacturers on the spot. Undeveloped

countries which have no tariffs and no manufactures are the most

lucrative markets; but the ships’ crews and cargoes must be defended

against massacre and plunder by the natives. This leads to the

establishment of trading stations where British law is enforced. The

annexation of the station makes it an outpost of the British Empire;

and its boundary becomes a frontier. The policing of the frontier

soon necessitates the inclusion of the lawless district beyond the

frontier; and thus the empire grows without premeditation until its

centre shifts to the other side of the earth. 150

EMPIRES IN COLLISION

Collision of the expanding empires. Fashoda incidents. The German

demand for a place in the sun. The war of 1914-18. Expansion of

professional soldiering into conscription. The strains set up

automatically by the pressure of capitalistic commerce, and not the

depravity of human nature, are the causes of modern wars. Its horrors

are therefore not a ground for despair of political mankind. We

celebrate the end of the Great War, not the beginning of it. The real

origin of the mischief. 152

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

Foreign trade not objectionable as such. Need for international

institutions as well as national ones. Supernational federations

and Commonwealths highly desirable: the fewer frontiers the better.

Combination obstructed by the hard fact that Capitalism creates

universal rivalry, seeking, not to combine for the common benefit, but

to appropriate for the individual benefit. Its resistance to national

self-determination and independence arises from its reluctance to

relinquish its booty. Our colonies and our conquests. Being by its

nature insatiable Capital cannot stop fighting until it is killed.

Hence the comparison of our civilization to the magician’s apprentice

who set demons to work for him, but could not stop them when his life

depended on his getting rid of them. 157

HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

Personal helplessness produced by division of labor. Illustration from

pin manufacture. Optimism of Adam Smith. The various qualifications

and accomplishments of the complete individual craftsman. The relative

incompetence and ignorance of the employed through division of labor.

Total technical ignorance of the machine minder. Misgivings of Oliver

Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Morris. The remedy not retrogression but

equal distribution of the leisure made possible by mass production.

Ignorance and helplessness as great in the modern household as in the

factory. 161

DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

As the disablement does not extend to the workers’ leisure it is

important that they should have plenty of it. Unfortunately it is

as ill distributed as income, the tendency of Capitalism being to

separate the population into a class doing all the work with no

leisure and a class doing no work and having all the leisure. The

feudal system avoided this by placing all the public services on

the shoulders of the landlords. The transfer of these services to

a bureaucracy leaves the proprietary or capitalist class even more

completely disabled than the proletariat for the conduct of industry.

This disablement increases with the development of capitalist

civilization, and maybe regarded as a function of it. 164

THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

The industrial disablement of the proletariat and the proprietariat

necessitates the intervention of a middle class to direct industrial

operations and transact the business they involve. How this

necessity was met. Primogeniture. The propertyless younger sons. The

professions. The men of business. The clerks. The breakdown of the

monopoly of education by the middle class now opens it to capable

proletarians as well as to younger sons and their descendants. The

resultant hardening of the lot of the younger sons. The propertyless

daughters. Opening of the professions to them. Woman’s natural

monopoly of housekeeping. It creates not only a Woman Question but a

Man Question. 168

DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER

The employer was master of the situation in the days of small

firms with modest capitals. Modern big business has outgrown their

resources. Joint stock companies have succeeded to firms, and

Trusts to joint stock companies. Multiple shops are conquering the

retail trade. Enormous capitals now required. Resultant rise of the

financier, whose special function it is to procure such capitals and

promote companies to exploit them. Thus the owner-employer becomes the

employed employer, and, as an employee, falls into the proletariat.

His son cannot succeed him, as he could when the employer was also the

owner. This disappearance of the old nepotism in business is a public

advantage, but abolishes heredity in the business class. “The Middle

Station in Life” so highly praised by Defoe is now the least eligible

in the community. 177

THE PROLETARIAT

The slogan of Karl Marx. The reduction of the middle class employer

to a proletarian employee produces Socialism. The Fabian Society.

Its success as a middle class society. Failure of its Socialist

rivals as working class societies. Working class organization against

Capitalism. Trade Unionism, or the Capitalism of the working class

proletariat. 183

THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS