of the exercise of other people’s talents, the case becomes gravely
different. To allow Cleopatra to make money out of her charms is one
thing: to allow a trader to become enormously rich by engaging five
hundred Cleopatras at ten pounds a week or less, and hiring them
out at ten pounds a day or more, is quite another. We may forgive a
burglar in our admiration of his skill and nerve; but for the fence
who makes money by purchasing the burglar’s booty at a tenth of its
value it is impossible to feel any sympathy. When we come to reputable
women and honest men we find that they are exploited in the same way.
Civilization makes matters worse in this respect, because civilization
means division of labor. Remember the pin makers and pin machines. In a
primitive condition of society the maker of an article saves the money
to buy the materials, selects them, purchases them, and, having made
the article out of these materials, sells it to the user or consumer.
Today the raising of the money to buy the materials is a separate
business; the selection and purchasing is another separate business;
the making is divided between several workers or else done by a machine
tended by a young person; and the marketing is yet another separate
business. Indeed it is much more complicated than that, because the
separate businesses of buying materials and marketing products are
themselves divided into several separate businesses; so that between
the origin of the product in raw material from the hand of Nature
and its final sale across the counter to you there may be dozens of
middlemen, of whom you complain because they each take a toll which
raises the price to you, and it is impossible for you to find out how
many of them are really necessary agents in the process and how many
mere intercepters and parasites.
The same complication is found in that large part of the world’s work
which consists, not in making things, but in service. The woman who
once took the wool that her husband had just shorn from their sheep,
and with her own hands transformed it into a garment and sold it to the
wearer, or clothed her family with it, is now replaced by a financier,
a shipper, a woolbroker, a weaving mill, a wholesaler, a shopkeeper,
a shop assistant, and Heaven knows how many others besides, each able
to do her own bit of the process but ignorant of the other bits, and
unable to do even her own bit until all the others are doing their bits
at the same time. Any one of them without the others would be like an
artillery man without a cannon or a shop assistant with nothing to sell.
Now if you go through all these indispensable parties to any industry
or service, you will come on our question of exceptional ability in
its most pressing and dangerous form. You will find, for instance,
that whereas any ablebodied normal woman can be trained to become a
competent shop assistant, or a shorthand typist and operator of a
calculating machine (arithmetic is done by machines nowadays), or
a factory hand, or a teacher, hardly five out of every hundred can
manage a business or administer an estate or handle a large capital.
The number of persons who can do what they are told is always greatly
in excess of the number who can tell others what to do. If an educated
woman asks for more than four or five pounds a week in business, nobody
asks whether she is a good woman or a bad one: the question is, is
there a post for her in which she will have to make decisions, and if
so, can she be trusted to make them. If the answer is yes, she will be
paid more than a living wage: if not, no.
Even when there is no room for original decisions, and there is nothing
to do but keep other people hard at their allotted work, and maintain
discipline generally, the ability to do this is an exceptional gift
and has a special value. It may be nothing more admirable than the
result of a combination of brute energy with an unamiable indifference
to the feelings of others; but its value is unquestionable: it makes
its possessor a forewoman or foreman in a factory, a wardress in a
prison, a matron in an institution, a sergeant in the army, a mistress
in a school, and the like. Both the managing people and the mere
disciplinarians may be, and often are, heartily detested; but they are
so necessary that any body of ordinary persons left without what they
call superiors, will immediately elect them. A crew of pirates, subject
to no laws except the laws of nature, will elect a boatswain to order
them about and a captain to lead them and navigate the ship, though
the one may be the most insufferable bully and the other the most
tyrannical scoundrel on board. In the revolutionary army of Napoleon
an expeditionary troop of dragoons, commanded by an officer who became
terrified and shammed illness, insisted on the youngest of their
number, a boy of sixteen, taking command, because he was an aristocrat,
and they were accustomed to make aristocrats think for them. He
afterwards became General Marbot: you will find the incident recorded
in his memoirs. Every woman knows that the most strongminded woman in
the house can set up a domestic tyranny which is sometimes a reign of
terror. Without directors most of us would be like riderless horses in
a crowded street. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, though a very clever
man, had the amiable trait in his character of an intense dislike to
coercion. He could not bring himself even to coerce his horse; and the
result was that he had to sell it and go on foot, because the horse,
uncoerced, could do nothing but stop and graze. Tolstoy, equally a
professed humanitarian, tamed and managed the wildest horses; but he
did it by the usual method of making things unpleasant for the horse
until it obeyed him.
However, horses and human beings are alike in that they very seldom
object to be directed: they are usually only too glad to be saved
the trouble of thinking and planning for themselves. Ungovernable
people are the exception and not the rule. When authority is abused
and subordination made humiliating, both are resented; and anything
from a mutiny to a revolution may ensue; but there is no instance on
record of a beneficially and tactfully exercised authority provoking
any reaction. Our mental laziness is a guarantee of our docility:
the mother who says “How dare you go out without asking my leave?”
presently finds herself exclaiming “Why cant you think for yourself
instead of running to me for everything?” But she would be greatly
astonished if a rude motor car manufacturer said to her, “Why cant you
make a car for yourself instead of running to me for it?”
I am myself by profession what is called an original thinker, my
business being to question and test all the established creeds and
codes to see how far they are still valid and how far worn out or
superseded, and even to draft new creeds and codes. But creeds and
codes are only two out of the hundreds of useful articles that make
for a good life. All the other articles I have to take as they are
offered to me on the authority of those who understand them; so that
though many people who cannot bear to have an established creed or
code questioned regard me as a dangerous revolutionary and a most
insubordinate fellow, I have to be in most matters as docile a creature
as you could desire to meet. When a railway porter directs me to
number ten platform I do not strike him to earth with a shout of “Down
with tyranny!” and rush violently to number one platform. I accept
his direction because I want to be directed, and want to get into the
right train. No doubt if the porter bullied and abused me, and I, after
submitting to this, found that my train really started from number
seven platform and that the number ten train landed me in Portsmouth
when my proper destination was Birmingham, I should rise up against
that porter and do what I could to contrive his downfall; but if he
had been reasonably civil and had directed me aright I should rally
to his defence if any attempt were made to depose him. I have to be
housekept-for, nursed, doctored, and generally treated like a child
in all sorts of situations in which I do not know what to do; and far
from resenting such tutelage I am only too glad to avail myself of it.
The first time I was ever in one of those electric lifts which the
passengers work for themselves instead of being taken up and down by a
conductor pulling at a rope, I almost cried, and was immensely relieved
when I stepped out alive.
You may think I am wandering from our point; but I know too well by
experience that there is likely to be at the back of your mind a notion
that it is in our nature to resent authority and subordination as such,
and that only an unpopular and stern coercion can maintain them. Have
I not indeed just been impressing on you that the miseries of the
world today are due in great part to our objection, not merely to bad
government, but to being governed at all? But you must distinguish.
It is true that we dislike being interfered with, and want to do as
we like when we know what to do, or think we know. But when there is
something that obviously must be done, and only five in every hundred
of us know how to do it, then the odd ninetyfive will not merely be
led by the five: they will clamor to be led, and will, if necessary,
kill anyone who obstructs the leaders. That is why it is so easy for
ambitious humbugs to get accepted as leaders. No doubt competent
leadership may be made unpopular by bad manners and pretension to
general superiority; and subordination may be made intolerable by
humiliation. Leaders who produce these results should be ruthlessly
cashiered, no matter how competent they are in other respects, because
they destroy self-respect and happiness, and create a dangerous
resentment complex which reduces the competence and upsets the tempers
of those whom they lead. But you may take it as certain that authority
and subordination in themselves are never unpopular, and can be trusted
to re-establish themselves after the most violent social convulsion.
What is to be feared is less their overthrow than the idolization of
those who exercise authority successfully. Nelson was idolized by his
seamen; Lenin was buried as a saint by revolutionary Russia; Signor
Mussolini is adored in Italy as The Leader (Il Duce); but no anarchist
preaching resistance to authority as such has ever been popular or ever
will be.
Now it is unfortunately one of the worst vices of the Capitalist system
that it destroys the social equality that is indispensable to natural
authority and subordination. The very word subordination, which is
properly co-ordination, betrays this perversion. Under it directing
ability is sold in the market like fish; and, like sturgeon, it is dear
because it is scarce. By paying the director more than the directee
it creates a difference of class between them; and the difference
of class immediately changes a direction or command which naturally
would not only not be resented but desired and begged for, into an
assertion of class superiority which is fiercely resented. “Who are you
that you should order me about? I am as good as you”, is an outburst
that never occurs when Colonel Smith gives an order to Lieutenant the
Duke of Tencounties. But it very often rises to the lips of Mrs Hicks
(though she may leave it unspoken out of natural politeness or fear
of consequences), who lives in a slum, when she receives from Mrs
Huntingdon Howard, who lives in a square, an order, however helpful to
her, given in a manner which emphasizes, and is meant to emphasize, the
lady’s conviction that Mrs Hicks is an inferior sort of animal. And Mrs
Howard sometimes feels, when Lady Billionham refuses to know her, that
Lord Billionham’s rank is but the guinea’s stamp: her man Huntingdon’s
the gowd for a’ that. Nothing would please her better than to take
her super-incomed neighbor down a peg. Whereas if Mrs Hicks and Mrs
Huntingdon Howard and Lady Billionham all had equal incomes, and their
children could intermarry without derogation, they would never dream
of quarrelling because they (or their husbands) could tell oneanother
what to do when they did not know themselves. To be told what to do is
to escape responsibility for its consequences; and those who fear any
dislike of such telling between equals know little of human nature.
The worst of it is that Capitalism produces a class of persons so
degraded by their miserable circumstances that they are incapable of
responding to an order civilly given, and have to be fiercely scolded
or cursed and kicked before any work can be got out of them; and these
poor wretches in turn produce a class of slavedrivers who know no other
methods of maintaining discipline. The only remedy is not to produce
such people. They are abortions produced by poverty, and will disappear
with it.
Reluctance to command is a more serious difficulty. When a couple of
soldiers are sent on any duty one of them must be made a corporal for
the occasion, as there must be someone to make the decisions and be
responsible for them. Usually both men object: each trying to shove the
burden on to the other. When they differ in this respect the Platonic
rule is to choose the reluctant man, as the probability is that the
ambitious one is a conceited fool who does not feel the responsibility
because he does not understand it. This kind of reluctance cannot be
overcome by extra pay. It may be overcome by simple coercion, as in
the case of common jurors. If you are a direct ratepayer you may find
yourself at any moment summoned to serve on a jury and make decisions
involving the disgrace or vindication, the imprisonment or freedom,
the life or death of your fellowcreatures, as well as to maintain the
rights of the jury against the continual tendency of the Bench to
dictate its decisions. You are not paid to do this: you are forced to
do it, just as men were formerly pressed into the navy or forced to sit
in Parliament against their will and that of their constituents.
But though in the last resort coercion remains available as a means of
compelling citizens to undertake duties from which they shrink, it is
found in practice that fitness for special kinds of work carries with
it a desire to exercise it, even at serious material disadvantages.
Mozart could have made much more money as a valet than he did as the
greatest composer of his time, and indeed one of the greatest composers
of all time; nevertheless he chose to be a composer and not a valet.
He knew that he would be a bad valet, and believed that he could be
a good composer; and this outweighed all money considerations with
him. When Napoleon was a subaltern he was by no means a success. When
Nelson was a captain he was found so unsatisfactory that he was left
without a ship on half pay for several years. But Napoleon was a great
general and Nelson a great admiral; and I have not the smallest doubt,
nor probably have you, that if Napoleon and Nelson had been forced to
choose between being respectively a drummer boy and a cabin boy and
being a general and an admiral for the same money, they would have
chosen the job in which their genius had full scope. They would even
have accepted less money if they could have secured their proper job
in no other way. Have we not already noted, in Chapter 6, how the
capitalist system leaves men of extraordinary and beneficent talent,
poor whilst making nonentities and greedy money hunters absurdly rich?
Let us therefore dismiss the fear that persons of exceptional ability
need special inducements to exercise that ability to the utmost.
Experience proves that even the most severe discouragements and
punishments cannot restrain them from trying to do so. Let us return to
the real social problem: that of preventing them from taking advantage
of the vital necessity and relative scarcity of certain kinds of
ability to extort excessive incomes.
In socialized services no difficulty arises. The civil servant, the
judge, the navy captain, the field marshal, the archbishop, however
extraordinary able, gets no more than any routineer of his rank and
seniority. A real gentleman is not supposed to sell himself to the
highest bidder: he asks his country for a sufficient provision and a
dignified position in return for the best work he can do for it. A
real lady can say no less. But in capitalist commerce they are both
forced to be cads: that is, to hold up to ransom those to whom their
services are indispensable, and become rich at their expense. The mere
disciplinarian cannot extort very much because disciplinarians of one
sort or another are not very scarce. But the organizer and financier
is in a strong position. The owner of a big business, if his employees
ask for anything more than a subsistence wage as their share of its
product, can always say “Well, if you are not satisfied, take the
business and work it yourself without me”. This they are unable to do.
The Trade Union to which his employees belong may be tempted to take
him at his word; but it soon finds itself unable to carry on, that sort
of management not being its job. He says in effect, and often in so
many words, “You cannot do without me; so you must work on my terms”.
They reply with perfect truth “Neither can you do without us: let us
see you organize without any workers to organize”. But he beats them;
and the reason is not that he can do without them any more than they
can do without him (or her), but that his bargain for the use of his
ability is not really made with them but with the landlords whose land
he is using and the capitalists who have lent him the capital for his
enterprise. It is to them that he can say unanswerably “You cannot
do without me”. They may say “Yes we can. We can tell the workers
that unless they give up everything they can make out of our land
and capital to us except what is enough to keep them alive and renew
themselves from generation to generation they shall starve; because
they cannot produce without land and capital, and we own all there
is available of both”. “That is true” retorts the able organizer and
financier; “but please to remember that without an elaborate scientific
organization of their labor they can produce no more than a mob of
allotment holders, or of serfs on a tenth century manor, whereas if
I organize them for you industrially and financially I can multiply
their product a thousandfold. Even if you have to pay me a large
share of the increase due to my ability you are still far richer than
if you did without me.” And to this there is no reply. In this way
there arises under Capitalism not only a rent of land and a rent of
capital (called interest), but a rent of ability (called profit); and
just as in order to secure equality of income it becomes necessary to
nationalize land and capital, so it becomes necessary to nationalize
ability. We already do this in part by taxing profits. But we do it
completely only when, as in the public services, we give it direct
national or municipal employment.
Note that rent of ability is a form of rent of labor. Rent is a word
that it is very necessary to understand, and that very few people
do understand: they think it is only what they have to pay to their
landlord. But technically rent is a price that arises whenever there
are differences in the yield of any particular source of wealth. When
there is a natural difference between the yield of one field and
another, or one coal-mine and another, or between the advantages of
one building site and another, people will pay more for the better
than for the worse; and that extra price is rent. Similarly, when
there is a difference between the business ability of one person and
another, the price of that difference is rent. You cannot abolish
rent, because you cannot abolish the natural difference between one
cornfield and another, one coal-field and another, or one person and
another; but you can nationalize it by nationalizing the land, the
mines, and the labor of the country either directly or by national
appropriation of their product by taxation, as to which latter method,
as we have seen, there are limits. Until this is done, rent of ability
in profiteering will make its possessors rich enough to make their
children idle landlords and capitalists and destroy economic equality.
Great astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers,
explorers, discoverers, teachers, preachers, sociologists, and saints
may be so poor that their wives are worn-out in a constant struggle
to keep up appearances and make both ends meet; but the business
organizers pile millions on millions whilst their unfortunate daughters
carry about diamonds and sables to advertize their parent’s riches,
and drink cocktails until they feel so bad inside that they pay large
sums to surgeons to cut them open and find out what is the matter with
them. If you reproach these organizers for their inordinate gains, they
tell you--or they would tell you if they understood their own position
and could express it intelligibly--that every penny they make is made
by making money for other people as well; that before they can spend
a farthing on themselves they must provide rent for the landlord,
interest for the capitalist, and wages for the proletarian on a scale
that would be impossible without them; and that England can support
five times the number of people she could a hundred years ago because
her industries are better organized and more amply financed by them
and their like. This is true; but you need not be abashed by it; for
which of us has not to provide rent for the landlord, interest for the
capitalist, and wages for the laborer before we can spend a penny on
ourselves? And why should the organizer and financier be paid more for
the exercise of his particular faculty than we who have to co-operate
with him by the exercise of our particular faculties before he can
produce a loaf of bread or a glass of milk? It is not natural necessity
but the capitalist system that enables him to snatch more than his
fellow workers from the welter of competitive commerce; and while this
lasts we shall have the financier’s daughter saying to the scavenger’s
daughter “What would your common dirty father do without my father, who
is going to be made a lord?” and the scavenger’s daughter retorting
“What would your greedy robber of a father do if my father did not keep
the streets clean for him?” Of course you have never heard a lady or
a young person talk like that. And probably you never will. They are
too polite and too thoughtless to discuss their father’s positions.
Besides, they never speak to oneanother. But if they did, and anything
upset their tempers, their last words before they came to blows would
be just those which I have imagined. If you doubt it, read what the
capitalist papers say about Trade Unionists and Socialists, and what
the proletarian papers say about landlords and capitalists and bosses.
Do you suppose that the charwoman, who has worked in her own necessary
way all her life as hard as or harder than any financier, and in the
end has nothing to leave to her daughter but her pail and scrubbing
brush, really believes, or ever will believe, that Lady Billionham,
inheriting a colossal income from her father the financier, has any
moral right to her money? Or, if your father had discovered and worked
out the theory of relativity, and was acknowledged throughout the
world to have the greatest mind since Newton’s, would you consider it
morally satisfactory to be obliged to jump at an offer of marriage from
a Chicago pork king to enable your illustrious parent to have more
than one presentable suit of clothes, knowing all the time that if
it had not been for the work of men like your father in pure science
not a wheel in the whole vast machinery of modern production would
be turning, nor a bagman be able to travel faster than Marco Polo?
Privately appropriated rent, whether of land, capital, or ability,
makes bad blood; and it is of bad blood that civilizations die. That
it is why it is our urgent business to see that Lord Billionham gets
no more than Einstein, and neither of them more than the charwoman.
You cannot equalize their abilities, but fortunately you can equalize
their incomes. Billionham’s half-crown is as good as Einstein’s
two-and-sixpence; and the charwoman’s thirty pennies will buy as much
bread as either. Equalize them in that respect, and their sons and
daughters will be intermarriageable, which will be a very good thing
for them, and lead to an enormous improvement of our human stock, the
quality of which is the most important thing in the world.
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PARTY POLITICS