for banking and insurance only, came into business generally, the
situation of the employers began to change. In a joint stock concern
you have, instead of one or two capitalists, hundreds of capitalists,
called shareholders, each contributing what spare money she or he
can afford. It began with £100 shares, and has gone on to £10 and
£1 shares; so that a single business today may belong to a host of
capitalist proprietors, many of them much poorer people than could ever
have acquired property in pre-company days. This had two results. One
was that a woman with a £5 note to spare could allow a company to spend
it, and thereby become entitled to, say, five shillings a year out of
the gains of that company as long as it lasted. In this way Capitalism
was strengthened by the extension of property in industry from rich
people with large sums of spare money to poor people with small ones.
But the employers were weakened, and finally lost their supremacy and
became employees.
It happened in this way. The joint stock company system made it
possible to collect much larger capitals to start business with than
the old separate firms could command. It was already known that the
employer with a thousand pounds worth of machinery and other aids
to production (called plant) could be undersold and driven out of
the market by the employer with twenty thousand pounds worth. Still,
employers could get twenty thousand pounds lent to them easily enough
if it was believed that they could handle it profitably. But when
companies came into the field equipped with hundreds of thousands of
pounds, and these companies began to combine into Trusts equipped with
millions, the employers were outdone. They could not raise such sums
among their acquaintances. No bank would allow them to overdraw their
accounts on such a gigantic scale. To get more capital, they had to
turn their businesses into joint stock companies.
This sounds simple; but the employers did not find it so. You, I hope,
would not buy shares in a new company unless you saw what are called
good names on the prospectus, shewing that half a dozen persons whom
you believe to be wealthy, trustworthy, good judges of business, and
in responsible social stations were setting you the example. If ever
you do you will regret it, possibly in the workhouse. Now the art
of getting at the people with the good names, and interesting them,
is one at which practical employers are for the most part incurably
unskilled. Therefore when they want to raise capital on the modern
scale they are forced to go to persons who, having made a special
profession of it, know where to go and how to proceed. These persons
are called Promoters, though they usually call themselves financiers.
They naturally charge a very high commission for their services; and
the accountants and solicitors whose reputations inspire confidence
put a high price on their names also. They all find that they can
make so much by raising large capitals that it is not worth their
while to trouble themselves with small ones; and the quaint result
of this is that an employer finds it easier to raise large sums than
small ones. If he wants only £20,000, the promoters and financiers
shew him the door contemptuously: the pickings on so small a sum are
beneath their notice. If, however, he wants £100,000, they will
listen superciliously, and perhaps get it for him. Only, though he
has to pay interest on £100,000, and stand indebted in that amount,
he is very lucky if he receives £70,000 in cash. The promoters and
financiers divide the odd £30,000 among themselves for their names
and their trouble in raising the money. The employers are helpless in
their hands: it is a case of take it or leave it: if they refuse the
terms they get no capital. Thus the financiers and their go-betweens
are now masters of the situation; and the men who actually conduct and
order the industry of the country, who would have been great commercial
magnates in Queen Victoria’s reign, are now under the thumbs of men who
never employed an industrial workman nor entered a factory or mine in
their lives, and never intend to.
And that is not all. When an employer turns his business into a joint
stock company he becomes an employee. He may be the head employee who
orders all the other employees about, engaging and dismissing them as
he thinks fit; but still he is an employee, and can be dismissed by
the shareholders and replaced by another manager if they think he is
taking too much for his services. Against this possibility he usually
protects himself by selling his establishment to the company at first
for a number of shares sufficient to enable him to outvote all the
discontented shareholders (each share carries a vote); and in any case
his position as the established head who has made a success of the
business, or at least persuaded the shareholders that he has, is a
strong one. But he does not live for ever. When he dies or retires, a
new manager must be found; and this successor is not his heir, but a
stranger entering as a removable employee, managing the concern for a
salary and perhaps a percentage of the profits.
Now an able employee-manager can command a high salary, and have a
good deal of power, because he is felt to be indispensable until he is
worn out. But he can never be as indispensable as the old employers
who invented their own methods, and clung to their “trade secrets”
jealously. Their methods necessarily resolved themselves into an office
routine which could be picked up, however unintelligently, by those
employed in it. The only trade secret that really counted was the new
machinery, which was not secret at all; for all the great mechanical
inventions are soon communized by law: that is, instead of the
inventor of a machine being allowed to keep it as his private property
for ever and make all the employers who use it pay him a royalty, he is
allowed to monopolize it in this way under a patent for fourteen years
only, after which it is at everybody’s disposal.
You can guess the inevitable result. It may take a genius to invent,
say a steam-engine, but once it is invented a couple of ordinary
workmen can keep it going; and when it is worn out any ordinary
engineering firm can replace it by copying it. Also, though it may
need exceptional talent, initiative, energy, and concentration to set
up a new business, yet when it is once set up, and the routine of
working it established, it can be kept going by ordinary persons who
have learnt the routine, and whose rule is “When in doubt as to what
to do, see what was done the last time, and do it over again”. Thus
a very clever man may build up a great business, and leave it to his
quite ordinary son to carry on when he is dead; and the son may get on
very well without ever really understanding the business as his father
did. Or the father may leave it to his daughter with the certainty
that if she cannot or will not do the directing work herself, she can
easily hire employee-employers who can and will, for a salary plus a
percentage. The famous Krupp factory in Germany belongs to a lady.
I will not go so far as to say that managerial ability has become a
drug in the market, though, in the little businesses which are still
conducted in the old way in the poorer middle class, the employer often
has to pay his more highly skilled employees more than he gets out of
the business for himself. But the monopoly of business technique which
made the capitalist-employer supreme in the nineteenth century has
gone for ever. Employers today are neither capitalists nor monopolists
of managerial ability. The political and social power which their
predecessors enjoyed has passed to the financiers and bankers, who
monopolize the art of collecting millions of spare money. That monopoly
will be broken in its turn by the communization of banking, to which we
shall come presently.
Meanwhile you, putting all these developments together in your mind,
can now contemplate the Middle Class understandingly. You know now
how it sprang from the propertied class as an educated younger-son
class without property, and supported itself by practising the
professions, and by doing the business of the propertied class. You
know how it rose to supreme power and riches when the development of
modern machinery (called the Industrial Revolution) made business so
big and complicated that neither the propertied class nor the working
class could understand it, and the middle class men who did (called
generally employers), became masters of the situation. You know how,
when the first generations of employers had found out how to do this
work, and established a routine of doing it which any literate man
could learn and practise, and when all that remained was to find more
and more capital to feed it as its concerns grew bigger and bigger,
the supremacy passed from the employers to the financiers who hold it
at present. You know also that this last change has been accompanied
by a change in the status of the employer, who instead of hiring the
land and capital of the propertied classes for a fixed payment of rent
and interest, and taking as his profit all that remains, is now simply
employed to manage for companies and trusts, the shareholders taking
everything that is left after they have paid rent and wages (including
his salary). You see that in applying for such posts he has to meet the
competition not only of other middle class men as of old, but of clever
sons of the working class, raised into the middle class by education at
the public expense by our system of scholarships, which act as ladders
from the elementary school to the University or the Polytechnic. You
see that this applies not only to employers, but much more to their
clerks. Clerking was formerly a monopoly of the less energetic sons of
the middle class. Now that everybody has to go to school the middle
class monopoly of reading, writing, and ciphering is gone; and skilled
manual workers are better paid than clerks, being scarcer. As to
parlormaids, what ordinary typist does not envy their creature comforts?
The Middle Station in Life no longer justifies the pæan in its praise
which Daniel Defoe raised in Robinson Crusoe. For those who possess no
special talent of a lucrative kind, it is now the least eligible class
in the community.
46
THE PROLETARIAT
We have disposed of the Middle Classes: let us turn to the Lower
Classes, the Hungry Ones, the Working Classes, the Masses, the Mob,
or whatever else you call them. Classical culture has invented a
general name for all people, of whatever nation, color, sex, sect,
or social pretension, who, having no land nor capital (no property),
have to hire themselves out for a living. It calls them proletarians,
or, in the lump, The Proletariat. Karl Marx, who was born in Rhenish
Germany in 1818, and died in London in 1883, after spending the last
thirty-four years of his life in England making a special study of the
development of Capitalism among us, was, and still is, the most famous
champion of the Proletariat as the really organic part of civilized
society to which all the old governing and propertied classes must
finally succumb. When Marx raised his famous slogan, “Proletarians of
all lands: unite”, he meant that all who live by the sale or hire of
their labor should combine to do away with private property in land and
capital, and to make everyone do her or his bit of the labor of the
world, and share the product without paying toll to any idler.
The difficulty at that time was that the employers, without whom the
proletarians could do nothing, were, as we have seen, strong, rich,
independent, and masterful. They not only owned a good deal of land and
capital themselves, but fully intended to become propertied country
gentlemen when they retired. It was not until they began to slip down
into a salaried, or proletarian class, that they also began to listen
to Karl Marx. You see, they were losing their personal interest in
private property with its rents and dividends, and were becoming
interested solely in the price that could be got out of the landlords
and capitalists for active services: that is, for labor of hand and
brain. Instead of wanting to give Labor as little as possible and get
as much out of it as possible, they wanted property to get as little
as possible, and the sort of labor they themselves did to get as much
as possible. They found that skilled manual work, and even unskilled
manual strength, was coming more and more to be better paid than
bookkeeping work and routine managing and professional work.
Now it is no use pretending to be better than other people when you are
poorer. It only leads to keeping up more expensive appearances on less
money, and forbidding your children to associate with most people’s
children whilst they forbid their children to speak to yours. If the
parents do not realize the vanity of such pretension the children do.
I remember thinking when I was a boy how silly it was that my father,
whose business was wholesale business, should consider himself socially
superior to his tailor, who had the best means of knowing how much
poorer than himself my father was, and who had a handsome residence,
with ornamental grounds and sailing-boats, at the seaside place where
we spent the summer in a six-roomed cottage-villa with a small garden.
The great Grafton Street shopkeepers of Dublin outshone the tailor
with their palaces and yachts; and their children had luxuries that I
never dreamt of as possible for me, besides being far more expensively
educated. My father’s conviction that they were too lowly to associate
with me, when it was so clear that I was too poor to associate with
them, may have had some sort of imaginary validity for him; but for me
it was snobbish nonsense. I lived to see those children entertaining
the Irish peerage and the Viceroy without a thought of the old social
barriers; and very glad the Irish peers were to be entertained by them.
I lived to see those shops become multiple shops managed by salaried
employees who have less chance of entertaining the peerage than a
baked-potato man of entertaining the King.
My father was an employer whose whole capital added to that of his
partner would not have kept a big modern company in postage stamps for
a fortnight. But at my start in life I found it impossible to become
an employer like him: I had to become a clerk at fifteen. I was a
proletarian undisguised. Therefore, when I began to take an interest
in politics, I did not join the Conservative Party. It was the party
of the landlords; and I was not a landlord. I did not join the Liberal
Party. It was the party of the employers; and I was an employee. My
father voted Conservative or Liberal just as the humor took him,
and never imagined that any other party could exist. But I wanted a
proletarian party; and when the Karl Marx slogan began to take effect
in all the countries in Europe by producing proletarian political
societies, which came to be called Socialist societies because they
aimed at the welfare of society as a whole as against class prejudices
and property interests, I naturally joined one of these societies, and
so came to be called, and was proud to call myself, a Socialist.
Now the significant thing about the particular Socialist society which
I joined was that the members all belonged to the middle class. Indeed
its leaders and directors belonged to what is sometimes called the
upper middle class: that is, they were either professional men like
myself (I had escaped from clerkdom into literature) or members of
the upper division of the civil service. Several of them have since
had distinguished careers without changing their opinions or leaving
the Society. To their Conservative and Liberal parents and aunts and
uncles fifty years ago it seemed an amazing, shocking, unheard-of
thing that they should become Socialists, and also a step bound to
make an end of all their chances of success in life. Really it was
quite natural and inevitable. Karl Marx was not a poor laborer: he was
the highly educated son of a rich Jewish lawyer. His almost equally
famous colleague, Friedrich Engels, was a well-to-do employer. It
was precisely because they were liberally educated, and brought up
to think about how things are done instead of merely drudging at the
manual labor of doing them, that these two men, like my colleagues in
The Fabian Society (note, please, that we gave our society a name that
could have occurred only to classically educated men), were the first
to see that Capitalism was reducing their own class to the condition
of a proletariat, and that the only chance of securing anything more
than a slave’s share in the national income for anyone but the biggest
capitalists or the cleverest professional or business men lay in a
combination of all the proletarians without distinction of class or
country to put an end to Capitalism by developing the communistic side
of our civilization until Communism became the dominant principle
in society, and mere owning, profiteering, and genteel idling were
disabled and discredited. Or, as our numerous clergymen members put
it, to worship God instead of Mammon. Communism, being the lay form of
Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack
of chaplains.
I may mention, as illustrating the same point, that The Fabian Society,
when I joined it immediately after its foundation in 1884, had only
two rival Socialist Societies in London, both professing, unlike the
Fabian, to be working-class societies. But one of them was dominated
by the son of a very rich man who bequeathed large sums to religious
institutions in addition to providing for his sons, to whom he had
given a first-rate education. The other was entirely dependent on one
of the most famous men of the nineteenth century, who was not only a
successful employer and manufacturer in the business of furnishing and
decorating palaces and churches, but an eminent artistic designer, a
rediscoverer of lost arts, and one of the greatest of English poets
and writers. These two men, Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris,
left their mark on the working-class proletariat as preachers of
Socialism, but failed in their attempts to organize a new working-class
Socialist Party in their own upper middle class way under their own
leadership and in their own dialect (for the language of ladies and
gentlemen is only a dialect), because the working classes had already
organized themselves in their own way, under their own leaders,
and in their own dialect. The Fabian Society succeeded because it
addressed itself to its own class in order that it might set about
doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for
all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the
existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the
Socialist conception of human society.
The existing form of working-class organization was Trade Unionism.
Trade Unionism is not Socialism: it is the Capitalism of the
Proletariat. This requires another chapter of explanation, and a
very important one; for Trade Unionism is now very powerful, and
occasionally leaves the Intelligent Woman without coals or regular
trains for weeks together. Before we can understand it, however, we
must study the Labor Market out of which it grew; and this will take
several preliminary chapters, including a somewhat grim one on the
special position of women as sellers in that market.
47
THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS
The workwoman working for weekly wages is like her employer in one
respect. She has something to sell; and she has to live on the price
of it. That something is her labor. The more she gets for it the
better-off she is: the less she gets for it the worse-off she is: if
she can get nothing for it she starves or becomes a pauper. When she
marries, she finds her husband in the same position; and he has to pay
for the upkeep of her domestic labor out of the price of his industrial
labor. Under these circumstances they are both naturally keen on
getting as much for his industrial labor as possible, and giving as
little for its price as the purchaser (the employer) will put up with.
This means that they want the highest wages and the shortest hours of
work they can get. Unless they are exceptionally thoughtful and public
spirited persons, their ideas are limited to that.
The employer is in the same predicament. He does not sell labor: he
has to buy it: what he sells are the goods or services produced under
his direction; and if he, as mostly happens, is neither thoughtful nor
public spirited, his ideas are limited to getting as much for what he
sells as possible and giving as little for the money as the purchaser
will put up with. In buying labor his interest and policy are to pay as
little and get as much as he can, being thus precisely the opposites of
the workers’ interest and policy.
This not only produces that unhappy and dangerous conflict of feeling
and interest between employers and employed called Class War, but
leads to extremities of social wickedness that are hardly credible of
civilized people. The Government has been forced again and again to
interfere between the buyers and sellers of labor to compel them to
keep their bargains within the barest limits of common humanity. To
begin with, all the employers want is labor, and whether the labor
is done by a child or a woman or a man is nothing to them: they buy
whatever labor is cheapest. Also the effect of the work on the health
and morals of the employed is nothing to the employer except in so far
as they may make a difference in his profit; and when he takes them
into consideration with this in view he may conclude that an inhuman
disregard of all natural kindness will pay him better than any attempt
to reconcile his interest with the welfare of his employees.
To illustrate this I may cite the case of the London tramways when the
cars were drawn by horses, and of certain plantations in America before
negro slavery was abolished there. The question to be decided by the
tramway managers was, what is the most moneymaking way of treating
tramway horses? A well-cared-for horse, if not overworked, may live
twenty years, or even, like the Duke of Wellington’s horse, forty. On
the other hand, reckless ill-usage will kill a horse in less than a
year, as it will kill anyone else. If horses cost nothing, and a new
horse could be picked up in the street when the old one died, it would
be more profitable commercially to work horses to death in six months,
say, than to treat them humanely and let them retire to the salt
marshes of Norfolk at the age of eighteen or so. But horses cost money;
and the tramway managers knew that if they wore out a horse too quickly
he would not pay for his cost. After figuring it out they decided that
the most profitable way of treating tram horses was to wear them out
in four years. The same calculation was made on the plantations. The
slave, like the horse, cost a substantial sum of money; and if he were
worked to death too soon his death would result in a loss. The most
businesslike planters settled that the most paying plan was to wear out
their slaves in seven years; and this was the result they instructed
their overseers to aim at.