but the ratepayer was exploited by the workers. A man on strike has no
right to outdoor relief; but his wife and children have. Consequently
a married miner with two children could depend on receiving a pound a
week at the expense of the ratepayers whilst he was refusing to work.
This development of parochial Communism really knocks the bottom out
of the Capitalist system, which depends on the ruthless compulsion
of the proletariat to work on pain of starvation or imprisonment
under detestable conditions in the workhouse. Thus you have had the
Government first giving outdoor relief (the ten million subsidy) to the
owners at the expense of the taxpayers, and then the local authorities
giving outdoor relief to the proletariat at the expense of the
ratepayers, the Government being manned mostly by capitalists and the
local authorities by proletarians.
It was in the proletarian quarters of London, notably in Poplar,
that the Poor Law Guardians first claimed the right to give outdoor
relief at full subsistence rates to all unemployed persons, thereby
freeing their proletarian constituents from “the lash of starvation”,
and enabling them to hold out for the highest wages their trades could
afford. The mining districts followed suit during the coal strike
of 1926. This right was contested by the Government, which tried to
supplant the parochial authorities by the central Ministry of Health.
The Ministry, through the auditors of public accounts, surcharged the
Guardians with the part of the outdoor relief which they considered
excessive; but as the Guardians could not have paid the surcharge even
if the proceedings taken against them had not failed, the Government
took the administration of the Poor Law into its own hands, and
passed Acts to confirm its powers to do so. This was essentially an
attempt by the Capitalist central Government to recover the weapon of
starvation which the proletarian local authorities had taken out of
the owners’ hands. But the day had gone by for the ultra-capitalist
relief rules of the nineteenth century, when, as I well recollect, the
Registrar-General’s returns of the causes of the deaths during the year
always included starvation as a matter of course. The lowest scale
of relief which the Government ventured to propose would have seemed
ruinously extravagant and demoralizing to the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys
denounced by Dickens in 1854.
As to the demoralization, they would not have been very far wrong.
If mine-owners, or any other sort of owners, find that when they get
into difficulties through being lazy, or ignorant, or too grasping,
or behind the times, or all four, they can induce the Government to
confiscate the taxpayers’ incomes for subsidies to get them out of
their difficulties, they will go from bad to worse. If miners, or any
other sort of workers, find that the local authorities will confiscate
the incomes of the ratepayers to feed them when they are idle, their
incentive to pay their way by their labor will be, to say the least,
perceptibly slackened. Yet it is no use simply refusing to make these
confiscations. If the nation will not take its industries out of the
hands of private owners it must enable them to carry them on, whether
they can make them pay or not. If the owners will not pay subsistence
wages the nation must; for it cannot afford to have its children
undernourished and its civil and military strength weakened, though it
was fool enough to think it could in Queen Victoria’s time. Subsidies
and doles are demoralizing, both for employers and proletarians; but
they stave off Socialism, which people seem to consider worse than
pauperized insolvency, Heaven knows why!
Still, governments need not be so shamelessly unbusinesslike as
they are when subsidies are in question. The subsidizing habit was
acquired by the British Government during the war, when certain firms
had to be kept going at all costs, profit or no profit, because
their activities were indispensable. It was against all Capitalist
principles; but in war economic principles are thrown to the wind like
Christian principles; and the habits of war are not cured instantly
by armistices. In 1925, when the Government was easily blackmailed
into paying the mine-owners ten millions of the money of the general
taxpayer (your money and mine), it might at least have secured for us
an equivalent interest in the mines. It might have obliged the owners
to mortgage their property to the nation for the means to carry on, as
they would have had to do if they had raised the money in the ordinary
commercial way. As to the miners, they felt no responsibility, because,
as the owners bought labor in the market exactly as they bought
pit props, there was no more excuse for asking the miners to admit
indebtedness for the subsidy than the dealers in pit props. On every
principle of Capitalism the Government should either have refused to
interfere, and have let the comparatively barren mines which could not
afford to pay the standard wage for the standard working day go smash,
or else it should have advanced the millions by way of mortgage, not
on the worthless security of the defaulting mines, but on that of all
the coal mines, good and bad. The interest on the mortgage would in
that case have been paid to the nation by the good mines, which would
thus have been compelled to make up the deficits of the bad ones; and
if the interest had not been paid, the Government could finally have
nationalized the mines by simple foreclosure instead of by purchase.
But capitalists are by no means in favor of having Capitalist
principles applied to themselves in their dealings with the State.
Besides, why should the fortunate owners of solvent mines subsidize the
owners of insolvent ones? If the Government chooses to subsidize bad
mines, let it be content with the security of the bad mines. It ended
in the Government making the owners a present of the ten millions. The
owners had to pass it on to the miners as wages: at least that was the
idea; and it was more or less the fact also. But whether we regard it
as a subsidy to the miners or to the owners or to both, it was none
the less confiscated from the general taxpayer and handed as alms to
favored persons.
The people who say that such subsidies are Socialistic, whether with
the object of discrediting them or recommending them, are talking
nonsense: they might as well say that the perpetual pensions conferred
by Charles II on his illegitimate children were Socialistic. They
are frank exploitations of the taxpayer by bankrupt Capitalism and
its proletarian dependents. Socialist agitators, far from supporting
such subsidies, will shout at you that you are paying part of the
men’s wages whilst the mine-owners take all the profits; that if you
will stand that, you will stand anything; that you are paying for
nationalization and not getting it; that you are being saddled with a
gigantic system of outdoor relief for the rich in addition to their
rents, their dividends, and the doles they have left you to pay to
their discarded employees; that the capitalists, having plundered
everything else, land, capital, and labor, are now plundering the
Treasury; that, not content with overcharging you for every article you
buy, they are now taxing you through the Government collector; and that
as they will have to hand over a share of what they take from you in
this way as wages, the Trade Unions are taking good care to make the
Labor Party support the subsidies in Parliament.
Meanwhile you hear from all quarters angry denunciations of Poplarism
as a means by which the rate collector robs you of your possibly
hardearned money, often to the tune of twentyfour shillings for every
pound of the value of your house, to keep idle ablebodied laborers
eating their heads off at a higher rate of expenditure than you,
perhaps, can afford in your own house.
All this, with due allowance for platform rhetoric, is true. The
attempt to maintain a failing system by subsidies plus Poplarism burns
the candle at both ends, and makes straight for industrial bankruptcy.
But you will not, if you are wise, waste your forces in resentful
indignation. The capitalists are not making a conscious attempt to
rob you. They are the flies on the wheel of their own system, which
they understand as little as you did before we sat down to study it.
All they know is that Trade Unionism is playing their own game against
them with such success that more and more of the overcharges (to you)
that formerly went to profit are now going to wages. They cry to the
Government to save them, and it saves them (at your expense) partly
because it is afraid of a big strike; partly because it wants to put
off the alternative of nationalization as long as possible; partly
because it has to consider the proletarian vote at the next general
election; and mostly because it can think of nothing better to do
in the rare moments when it has time to think at all. The British
employers, the British Trade Unionists, and the British Government have
no deep designs: so far it is just hand to mouth with them; and you
need not waste any moral indignation on them. But please note the word
British, thrice repeated in the last sentence, and also the words “so
far”. The American employers and financiers are far more self-conscious
than our business men and working men are; and the Americans are
teaching our people their methods. Modern scientific discoveries have
set them dreaming of enormously increased production; and they have
found out that as the world depends on the people who work, whether
with head or hand, they can by combining prevent idle and incapable
owners of land and capital from getting too much of the increase. They
know that they can neither realize their dream nor combine properly
by using their own brains; and they are now paying large salaries to
clever persons whose sole business is to think for them. Suppose you
were the managing head of a big business, and that you were determined
not to tolerate Trade Unionism among your workpeople, and therefore
had to treat them well enough to prevent them feeling the want of a
union. In England your firm would be called “a rat house”, in America
simply a non-union house. Imagine yourself visited by a well-dressed
lady or gentleman with the pleasant nonchalance of a person of proved
and conscious ability and distinction. She (we will assume that she is
a lady) has called to suggest that you should order all your workpeople
to join the union of their trade, of which she is the pampered
representative. You gasp, and would order her out if you dared; but
how can one shew the door to a superior and perfectly self-confident
person. She proceeds to explain whilst you are staring at her. She says
it will be worth your while: that her union is prepared to put some
new capital into your business, and that it will come to a friendly
arrangement with you as to the various trade restrictions to which you
so much object. She points out that if instead of working to increase
the dividends of your idle shareholders you were just to give them
what they are accustomed to expect, and use the rest of the profit for
bettering the condition of the people who are doing the work (including
yourself), the business would receive a fresh impulse, and you and all
the really effective people in it make much more money. She suggests
ways of doing it that you have never dreamt of. Can you see any reason
except stupid conservatism for refusing such a proposal?
This is not a fancy picture. It has actually occurred in America as
the result of the Trade Unions employing first-rate business brains
to think for them, and not grudging them salaries equal to the wages
of a dozen workmen. When English Trade Unions become Americanized as
English big business is becoming Americanized they will do the same.
Our big businesses are already picking out brainy champions from the
universities and the public services to do just such jobs for them.
Both big business and skilled labor will presently be managing their
affairs scientifically, instead of dragging heavily and unimaginatively
through the old ruts. And when this is accomplished they will enslave
the unskilled, unorganized proletariat, including, as we have seen,
the middle-class folk who have no aptitude for money making. They will
enslave the Government. And they will do it mostly by the methods of
Socialism, effecting such manifest improvements in the condition of
the masses that it will be inhuman to stop them. The organized workers
will live, not in slums, but in places like Port Sunlight, Bournville,
and the Garden Cities. Employers like Mr Ford, Lord Leverhulme and
Mr Cadbury will be the rule and not the exception; and the sense of
helpless dependence on them will grow at the expense of individual
adventurousness. The old communal cry of high rates and a healthy city
will be replaced by Mr Ford’s cry of high wages and colossal profits.
Those profits are the snag in the stream of prosperity. If they are
unequally distributed they will wreck the system that has produced
them, and involve the nation in the catastrophe. In spite of all the
apparent triumphs of increased business efficiency the Socialists will
still have to insist on public control of distribution and equalization
of income. Without that, capitalist big business, in league with
the aristocracy of Trade Unionism, will control the Government for
its private ends; and you may find it very difficult, as a voter,
to distinguish between the genuine Socialism that changes private
into public ownership of our industries, and the sham Socialism that
confiscates the money of one set of citizens without compensation only
to hand it over to another set, not to make our incomes more equal, but
to give more to those who have already too much.
67
CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION
And now, learned lady reader (for by this time you know much more about
the vital history and present social problems of your country and of
the world than an average Capitalist Prime Minister), do you notice
that in these ceaseless activities which keep all of us fed and clothed
and lodged, and some of us even pampered, NOTHING STAYS PUT? Human
society is like a glacier: it looks like an immovable and eternal field
of ice; but it is really flowing like a river; and the only effect of
its glassy rigidity is that its own unceasing movement splits it up
into crevasses that make it frightfully dangerous to walk on, all the
more as they are beautifully concealed by natural whitewash in the
shape of snow. Your father’s bankruptcy, your husband’s, or your own
may precipitate you at any moment into a little crevasse. A big one may
suddenly swallow a whole empire, as three of them were swallowed in
1918. If, as is most likely, you have been brought up to believe that
the world is a place of permanent governments, settled institutions,
and unchangeable creeds in which all respectable people believe, to
which they all conform, and which are unalterable because they are
founded for all eternity on Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the
Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments, what you have gathered here
of the continual and unexpected changes and topsy-turvy developments
of our social order, the passing of power from one class to another,
the changes of opinion by which what was applauded as prosperity and
honor and piety at the beginning of the nineteenth century came to be
execrated as greedy villainy at the end of it, and what were prosecuted
as criminal conspiracies under George IV are legalized and privileged
combinations, powerful in Parliament, under George V, may have driven
you to ask, what is the use of your drudging through all these
descriptions and explanations if by the time you have reached the end
of the book everything will have changed? I can only assure you that
the way to understand the changes that are going on is to understand
the changes that have gone before, and warn you that many women have
spoilt their whole lives and misled their children disastrously by not
understanding them.
Besides, the things I have been describing have not passed wholly
away. There are still old-fashioned noblemen who lord it over the
countryside as their ancestors have done for hundreds of years,
sometimes benevolently, sometimes driving the inhabitants out to make
room for sheep or deer at their pleasure. There are still farmers,
large and small. There are still many petty employers carrying on small
businesses singly or in firms of two or three partners. There are still
joint stock companies that have not been merged in Trusts. There are
still multitudes of employees who belong to no Trade Union, and are
as badly sweated as the woman who sat in unwomanly rags and sang the
Song of the Shirt. There are still children and young persons who are
cruelly over-worked in spite of the Acts of Parliament that reach only
the factories and workshops. The world at large, though it contains
London and Paris and New York, also contains primitive villages where
gas, electric light, tap water and main drainage are as unknown as they
were to King Alfred. Our famous universities and libraries and picture
galleries are within travelling distance of tribes of savages and
cannibals, and of barbarian empires. Thus you can see around you living
examples of all the stages of the Capitalist System I have described.
Indeed, if you come, or your parents came (like mine) from one of those
families of more than a dozen children in the genteel younger-son
class which were more common formerly than they are today, you are
certain to have found, without going further than your parents, your
brothers and sisters, your uncles and aunts, your first cousins, and
perhaps yourself, examples of every phase of the conditions produced by
Capitalism in that class during the last two centuries, to say nothing
of the earlier half medieval phases in which most women, especially
respectable women, are still belated.
Beside the Changing and the Changed stand the Not Yet Changed; and
we have to deal with all three in our daily business. Until we know
what has happened to the Changed we shall not understand what is
going to happen to the Not Yet Changed, and may ourselves, with the
best intentions, effect mischievous changes, or oppose and wreck
beneficial ones. If we look for guidance to the articles in our party
newspapers (all living on profiteers’ advertisements) or the speeches
of party politicians, or the gossip of our politically ignorant and
class-prejudiced neighbors and relatives, which is unfortunately just
what most of us do, we are sure to be either misguided and corrupted or
exasperated.
Take, as a warning, those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of
profits which I sketched for you in Chapter 37 and the few following
ones. They are always described to you in books and newspapers as the
history of the British race, or (in France) the French nation, or (in
Germany or Italy) the grand old German or Latin stock, dauntlessly
exercising its splendid virtues and talents in advancing civilization
at home and establishing it among the heathen abroad. Capitalism
can be made to look very well on paper. But beware of allowing your
disillusion to disable you by plunging you into disgust and general
cynical incredulity. Our thrilling columns of national self-praise
and mutual admiration must not be dismissed as mere humbug. Without
great discoverers and inventors and explorers, great organizers and
engineers and soldiers, hardy and reckless sailors, great chemists and
mathematicians, devoted missionaries and desperate adventurers, our
capitalists would be no better off today than they would have remained
in Greenland or Thibet. But the extraordinary men whose exploits have
made the capitalists rich were not themselves capitalists. The best
of them received little or no encouragement from capitalists, because
there was seldom any prospect of immediate profit from their labors
and adventures. Many of them were and are not only poor but persecuted.
And when the time comes, mostly after their deaths, to bring their
discoveries and conquests into everyday use, the work is done by the
hungry ones: the capitalists providing only the spare food they have
neither sown nor reaped, baked nor brewed, but only collected from
the hungry as rent or interest, and appropriated under laws made by
capitalist legislators for that purpose. British brains, British
genius, British courage and resolution have made the great reputation
of Britain, as the same qualities in other nations have made the other
great national reputations; but the capitalists as such have provided
neither brains, genius, courage, nor resolution. Their contribution
has been the spare food on which the geniuses have lived; and this
the capitalists did not produce: they only intercepted it during its
transfer from the hungry ones who made it to the hungry ones who
consumed it.
Note that I say the capitalists _as such_; for the accident of a person
being both a capitalist and a genius may happen just as easily as the
accident of being both a genius and a pauper. Nature takes no notice of
money. It is not likely that a born capitalist (that is, the inheritor
of a fortune) will be a genius, because it is not likely that anybody
will be born a genius, the phenomenon being naturally rare; but it
may happen to capitalists occasionally, just as it has happened to
princes. Queen Elizabeth was able to tell her ministers that if they
put her into the street without anything but her petticoat she could
make her living with the best of them. At the same time Queen Mary of
Scotland was proving that if she had been put into the street with a
hundred millions of money and an army of fifty thousand men she would
have made a mess of it all somehow and come to a bad end. But their
being queens had nothing to do with that: it was their personal quality
as women that made the difference. In the same way, when one born
capitalist happens to be a genius and another a waster, the capital
produces neither the ability nor the worthlessness. Take away their
capital, and they remain just the same: double it, and you double
neither their ability nor their imbecility. The stupidest person in the
country may be the richest: the cleverest and greatest may not know
where tomorrow’s dinner is to come from. I repeat, capitalists as such
need no special ability, and lose nothing by the lack of it. If they
seem able to feed Peter the Laborer it is only because they have taken
the food from Paul the Farmer; and even this they have not done with
their own hands: they have paid Matthew the Agent to do it, and had
his salary from Mark the Shopkeeper. And when Peter is a navvy, Paul
an engineer, Matthew the manager of a Trust, and Mark a banker, the
situation remains essentially unchanged. Peter and Paul, Matthew and
Mark, do all the work: the capitalist does nothing but take as much of
what they make as she can without starving them (killing the goose that
lays the golden eggs).
Therefore you may disregard both the Capitalist papers which claim
all the glories of our history as the fruit of Capitalist virtue
and talent, and the anti-Capitalist papers which ascribe all our
history’s shames and disgraces to the greed of the capitalists. Waste
neither your admiration nor your indignation. The more you understand
the system, the better you will see that the most devout personal
righteousness cannot evade it except by political changes which will
rescue the whole nation from it.