people to be rich, and calling a policeman when the law is broken. It
means an active interference in the production and distribution of the
nation’s income; and every step of it will require a new department
or extension of the civil service or the municipal service to execute
and manage it. If we had sense enough to make a law that every baby,
destitute or not, should have plenty of bread and milk and a good
house to shelter it, that law would remain a dead letter until all the
necessary bakeries and dairies and builders’ yards were ready. If we
made a law that every ablebodied adult should put in a day’s work for
his or her country every day, we could not carry out that law until
we had a job ready for everybody. All constructive and productive
legislation is quite different from the Ten Commandments: it means the
employment of masses of men, the establishing of offices and works, the
provision of large sums of money to start with, and the services of
persons of special ability to direct. Without these, all the Royal or
Dictatorial Proclamations, all the Commandments, and all the Communist
Manifestoes are waste paper as far as the establishment of practical
Socialism is concerned.
You may therefore take it that the change from inequality to
equality of income, though it will be made by law and cannot be
made in any other way, will not be made by simply passing a single
Act of Parliament ordering everybody to have the same income, with
arithmetical exactness in every case. Dozens of extensions of the civil
and municipal services, dozens of successive nationalizations, dozens
of annual budgets, all warmly contested on one ground or another, will
take us nearer and nearer to Equality of Income until we are so close
that the evil of such trifling inequalities as may be left is no longer
serious enough to be worth bothering about. At present, when one baby
has a hundred thousand a year, and a hundred other babies are dying of
insufficient nourishment, equality of income is something to be fought
for and died for if necessary. But if every baby had its fill, the fact
that here and there a baby’s father or mother might get hold of an
extra five shillings or five pounds would not matter enough to induce
anyone to cross the street to prevent it.
All social reforms stop short, not at absolute logical completeness or
arithmetical exactness, but at the point at which they have done their
work sufficiently. To a poor woman the difference between a pound a
week and a guinea a week is very serious, because a shilling is a large
sum of money to her. But a woman with twenty pounds a week would not
engage in a civil war because some other woman had twenty guineas. She
would not feel the difference. Therefore we need not imagine a state of
society in which we should call the police if somebody made a little
extra money by singing songs or selling prize chrysanthemums, though we
might come to consider such conduct so sordidly unladylike that even
the most impudent woman would not dare do it openly. As long as we were
all equally well off, so that anybody’s daughter could marry anybody
else’s son without any question of marrying above or beneath her, we
should be contented enough not to haggle over halfpence in the division
of the national income. For all that, equality of income should remain
a fundamental principle, any noticeable departure from which would be
jealously watched, and tolerated, if at all, with open eyes. There are
no limits to the possibility of its enforcement.
This does not mean that there are no limits to any device of Socialism:
for example, to the process of nationalizing industry and turning
private employees into Government employees. We could not nationalize
everything even if we went mad on nationalization and wanted to. There
will never be a week in which the Sunday papers will report that
Socialism was established in Great Britain last Wednesday, on which
occasion the Queen wore a red silk scarf fastened on the shoulder with
a circlet of rubies consecrated and presented to her by the Third
International, and containing a portrait of Karl Marx with the famous
motto, “Proletarians of All Lands: Unite”. It is far more likely that
by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise
the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the
business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a
fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century.
Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the
sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the
practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete
a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty
years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the
Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help
me to get the thing.
What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was
that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not
realize that they cannot do everything at once.
77
SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
Whilst we are nationalizing the big industries and the wholesale
businesses we may have to leave a good many unofficial retailers to
carry on the work of petty distribution much as they do at present,
except that we may control them in the matter of prices as the Trusts
do, whilst allowing them a better living than the landlords and
capitalists allow them, and relieving them from the continual fear of
bankruptcy inseparable from the present system. We shall nationalize
the mines long before we nationalize the village smithy and make
the village blacksmith a public official. We shall have national or
municipal supplies of electric power laid on from house to house
long before we meddle with the individual artists and craftsmen and
scientific workers who will use that power, to say nothing of the
housemaids who handle the vacuum cleaners. We shall nationalize land
and large-scale farming without simultaneously touching fancy fruit
farming and kitchen gardening. Long after Capitalism as we know it
shall have passed away more completely than feudalism has yet passed
away there may be more men and women working privately in businesses of
their own than there ever can be under our present slavish conditions.
The nationalization of banking will make it quite easy for private
businesses to be carried on under Socialism to any extent that may
be found convenient, and will in fact stimulate them vigorously. The
reduction of the incomes derived from them to the common level could be
effected by taxing them if they were excessive. But the difficulty is
more likely to be the other way: that is, the people in the private
businesses might find themselves, as most of them do at present,
poorer than they would be in public employment. The immense fortunes
that are made in private businesses to-day are made by the employment
of workers who, as they cannot live without access to the products
of land and capital, must either starve or consent to work for the
landlords and capitalists for much less than their work creates. But
when everybody could get a job in one of the nationalized industries,
and receive an income which would include his or her share of the rent
of the nationalized land, and the interest on the nationalized capital,
no private employer could induce anyone to come and work for wages
unless the wages were big enough to be equivalent to the advantages
of such public employment; therefore private employment could not
create poverty, and would in fact become bankrupt unless the employers
were either clever and useful enough to induce the public to pay them
handsomely for their products or services, or else were content, for
the sake of doing things in their own way, to put up with less than
they could make in some national establishment round the corner.
To maintain their incomes at the national level some of them might
actually demand and receive subsidies from the Government. To take a
very simple instance: in an out-of-the-way village or valley, where
there was not enough business to pay a carrier, the Government or local
authority might find that the most economical and sensible plan was to
pay a local farmer or shopkeeper or innkeeper a contribution towards
the cost of keeping a motor lorry on condition that he undertook the
carrying for the district.
In big business, as we have seen, this process has actually begun. When
Trade Unionism forced up the wages of the coal miners to a point at
which the worst coal mines could not afford to continue working, the
owners, though devout opponents of Socialism, demanded and obtained
from a Conservative Government a subsidy of £10,000,000 to enable
them to make both ends meet. But it was too ridiculous to tax the
general public to keep a few bad mines going, and incidentally to keep
up the monstrous prices charged for coal, when the mines as a whole
were perfectly well able to pay a decent living wage, which was all
the Trade Unions asked for. The subsidy was stopped; and a terrific
lock-out ensued. All this could have been prevented by nationalizing
the coal mines and thus making it possible to keep up wages and reduce
the price of coals to the public simultaneously. However, that is
not our point at present. What comes in here is that the capitalists
themselves have established the Socialistic practice of subsidizing
private businesses when they do not yield sufficient profit to support
those engaged in them, though they are too useful to be dispensed with.
The novelty, by the way, is only in subsidizing common industries.
Scientific research, education, religion, popular access to rare books
and pictures, exploration, carriage of mails oversea, and the like
are partly dependent on Government grants, which are subsidies under
another name.
What is more, capitalists are now openly demanding subsidies to enable
them to start their private enterprises. The aeroplane lines, for
instance, boldly took it as a matter of course that the Government
should help them, just as it had helped the dye industry during the war
(and been sorry for it afterwards). I draw your attention specially to
this new capitalistic method because by it you are not only invited to
throw over the Capitalist principle of trusting to unaided competitive
private enterprise for the maintenance of our industries, but taxed to
take all the risks of it whilst the capitalists take all the profits
and keep prices as high as possible against you, thus fleecing you both
ways. They cannot consistently object (though they do object) when
workmen ask the Government to guarantee them a living wage as well as
guaranteeing profits and keeping up prices for their employers.
When Socialism is the order of the day these capitalistic exploitations
of the taxpayer will have provided plenty of precedents for subsidizing
experimental private ventures in new industries or inventions and
new methods, or, as in the case of the village carrier, making it
worth somebody’s while to undertake some necessary service that is
not for the moment worth nationalizing. In fact this will be the most
interesting part of Socialism to clever business people. Direct and
complete nationalizations will be confined mostly to well established
routine services.
There are doctrinaire Socialists who will be shocked at the suggestion
that a Socialist Government should not only tolerate private
enterprise, but actually finance it. But the business of Socialist
rulers is not to suppress private enterprise as such, but to attain
and maintain equality of income. The substitution of public for
private enterprise is only one of several means to that end; and if
in any particular instance the end can be best served for the moment
by private enterprise, a Socialist Government will tolerate private
enterprise, or subsidize private enterprise, or even initiate private
enterprise. Indeed Socialism will be more elastic and tolerant than
Capitalism, which would leave any district without a carrier if no
private carrier could make it pay.
Note, however, that when a private experiment in business has been
financed by the State, and has been successful in establishing some
new industry or method or invention as part of the routine of national
production and service, it will then be nationalized, leaving private
enterprise to return to its proper business of making fresh experiments
and discovering new services, instead of, as at present, wallowing
in the profits of industries which are no longer experimental. For
example, it has for many years past been silly to leave railways
in the hands of private companies instead of nationalizing them,
especially as the most hidebound bureaucrat could not have been more
obsoletely reactionary, uninventive, and obstructive than some of our
most pretentious railway chairmen have been. Everything is known about
railway locomotion that need be known for nationalization purposes.
But the flying services are still experimenting, and may be treated as
State-aided private enterprises until their practice becomes as well
established and uniform as railway practice.
Unfortunately this is so little understood that the capitalists,
through their agents the employers and financiers, are now persuading
our Conservative governments into financing them at the taxpayers’
expense without retaining the taxpayers’ interest in the venture. For
instance, the £10,000,000 subsidy to the coalowners should clearly have
been given by way of mortgage on the mines. For every £100 granted to
private enterprise the Government should demand a share certificate.
Otherwise, if and when it subsequently nationalizes the enterprise,
it will be asked to compensate the proprietors for the confiscation
of its own capital; and though this, as we have seen in our study of
compensation, does not really matter, it does matter very seriously
that the State should not have at least a shareholder’s control. To
make private adventurers an unconditional present of public money is to
loot the Treasury and plunder the taxpayer.
So, you see, the difference between Capitalist and Socialist
governments is not as to whether nationalization should be tolerated;
for neither could get on for a day without it: the difference is
as to how far it should be carried and how fast pushed. Capitalist
governments regard nationalization and municipalization as evils
to be confined to commercially unprofitable works; so as to leave
everything profitable to the profiteers. When they acquire land for
some temporary public purpose, they sell it to a private person
when they have done with it, and use the price to reduce the income
tax. Thereby a piece of land which was national property becomes
private property; and the unearned incomes of the income taxpayers
are increased by the relief from taxation. Socialist governments,
on the other hand, push the purchase of land for the nation at the
expense of the capitalists as hard and as fast as they can, and oppose
its resale to private individuals fiercely. But they are often held
back and even thrown back, just as the Russian Soviet was, by the
inexorable necessity for keeping land and capital in constant and
energetic use. If the Government takes an acre of fertile land or a
ton of spare subsistence (capital) that it is not prepared instantly
to cultivate or feed productive labor with, then, whether it likes or
not, it must sell it back again into private hands and thus retrace
the step towards Socialism which it took without being sufficiently
prepared for it. During the war, when private enterprise broke down
hopelessly, and caused an appalling slaughter of our young soldiers
in Flanders by leaving the army without shells, the munitions had to
be made in national factories. When the war was over, the Capitalist
Government of 1918 sold off these factories as fast as it possibly
could for an old song, in spite of the protests of the Labor Party.
Some of the factories were unsaleable, either because they were in
such out-of-the-way places (lest they should be bombarded) that
private enterprise thought it could do better elsewhere, or because
private enterprise was so wretchedly unenterprising. Yet when a Labor
Government took office it, too, had to try to sell these remaining war
factories because it could not organize enough new public enterprises
to employ them for peace purposes.
This was another object-lesson in the impossibility of taking over land
from the landlords and capital from the capitalists merely because
doing so is Socialistic, without being ready to employ it productively.
If you do, you will have to give it back again, as the Moscow Soviet
had. You must take it only when you have some immediate use for it, and
are ready to start on the job next morning. If a Capitalist Government
were forced by a wave of successful Socialist propaganda to confiscate
more property than it could administer, it might quite easily be forced
to reissue it (not at all unwillingly, and with triumphant cries of “I
told you so”) to private employers on much worse terms for the nation
than those on which it is held at present.
78
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?
Then as to the rate at which the change can take place. If it be put
off too long, or brought about too slowly, there may be a violent
revolution which may produce a dismal equality by ruining everybody
who is not murdered. But equality produced in that way does not
last. Only in a settled and highly civilized society with a strong
Government and an elaborate code of laws can equality of income be
attained or maintained. Now a strong Government is not one with
overwhelming fighting forces in its pay: that is rather the mark of
a panicky Government. It is one that commands the moral approval of
an overwhelming majority of the people. To put it more particularly,
it is one in which the police and the other executive officers of the
Government can always count on the sympathy and, when they need it,
the co-operation of the citizens. A morally shocking Government cannot
last, and cannot carry out such changes as the change from our present
system to Socialism, which are matters of long business arrangements
and extensions of the Civil Service. They must be made thoughtfully,
bit by bit; and they must be popular enough to establish themselves too
solidly for changes of Government to shake them, like our postal system
or our Communism in roads, bridges, police, drainage, and highway
lighting.
It is a great pity that the change cannot be made more quickly; but
we must remember that when Moses delivered the Israelites from their
bondage in Egypt, he found them so unfitted for freedom, that he had to
keep them wandering round the desert for forty years, until those who
had been in bondage in Egypt were mostly dead. The trouble was not the
distance from Egypt to the Promised Land, which was easily walkable in
forty weeks, but the change of condition, and habit, and mind, and the
reluctance of those who had been safe and well treated as slaves to
face danger and hardship as free adventurers. We should have the same
trouble if we attempted to impose Socialism all in a lump on people not
brought up to it. They would wreck it because they could not understand
it nor work its institutions; and some of them would just hate it.
The truth is, we are at present wandering in the desert between the
old Commercialism and the new Socialism. Our industries and our
characters and our laws and our religions are partly commercialized,
partly nationalized, partly municipalized, partly communized; and the
completion of the change will take place like the beginning of it:
that is, without the unintelligent woman knowing what is happening,
or noticing anything except that some ways of life are getting harder
and some easier, with the corresponding exclamations about not knowing
what the world is coming to, or that things are much better than they
used to be. Mark Twain said “It is never too late to mend: there is no
hurry”; and those who dread the change may comfort themselves by the
assurance that there is more danger of its coming too slowly than too
quickly, even though the more sloth the more suffering. It is well that
we who are hopelessly unfitted for Socialism by our bringing-up will
not live for ever. If only it were possible for us to cease corrupting
our children our political superstitions and prejudices would die
with us; and the next generation might bring down the walls of
Jericho. Fortunately, the advantages to be gained by Socialism for the
proletariat, and the fact that proletarian parents are a huge majority
of the electorate, may be depended on to bias moral education more and
more in favor of the movement towards Socialism.
I purposely avoid anticipating any moral pressure of public opinion
against economic selfishness. No doubt that will become part of the
national conscience under Socialism, just as under Capitalism children
are educated to regard success in life as meaning more money than
anyone else and no work to do for it. But I know how hard it is for
you to believe that public opinion could change so completely. You may
have observed that at present, although people do not always choose
the occupation at which they can make the most money, and indeed will
give up lucrative jobs to starve at more congenial ones, yet, when
they have chosen their job, they will take as much as they can get
for it; and the more they can get the better they are thought of. So
I have assumed that they will continue to do so as far as they are
allowed (few of them have any real liberty of this kind now), though
I can quite conceive that in a Socialist future any attempt to obtain
an economic advantage over one’s neighbors, as distinguished from an
economic advantage for the whole community, might come to be considered
such exceedingly bad form that nobody could make it without losing her
place in society just as a detected card-sharper does at present.
79
SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY
The dread of Socialism by nervous people who do not understand it, on
the ground that there would be too much law under it, and that every
act of our lives would be regulated by the police, is more plausible
than the terrors of the ignorant people who think it would mean the
end of all law, because under Capitalism we have been forced to impose
restrictions that in a socialized nation would have no sense, in
order to save the proletariat from extermination, or at least from
extremities that would have provoked it to rebellion. Here is a little
example. A friend of mine who employed some girls in an artistic
business in which there was not competition enough to compel him to do
his worst in the way of sweating them, took a nice old riverside house,
and decorated it very prettily with Morris wall-papers, furnishing
it in such a way that the girls could have their tea comfortably in
their workrooms, which he made as homelike as possible. All went well
until one day a gentleman walked in and announced himself to my
friend as the factory inspector. He looked round him, evidently much
puzzled, and asked where the women worked. “Here” replied my friend,
with justifiable pride, confident that the inspector had never seen
anything so creditable in the way of a factory before. But what the
inspector said was “Where is the copy of the factory regulations which
you are obliged by law to post up on your walls in full view of your
employees?” “Surely you dont expect me to stick up a beastly ugly thing
like that in a room furnished like a drawing room” said my friend.
“Why, that paper on the wall is a Morris paper: I cant disfigure it by
pasting up a big placard on it.” “You are liable to severe penalties”
replied the inspector “for having not only omitted to post the
regulations, but for putting paper on your walls instead of having them
limewashed at the intervals prescribed by law.” “But hang it all!” my
friend remonstrated, “I want to make the place homely and beautiful.
You forget that the girls are not always working. They take their tea
here.” “For allowing your employees to take their meals in the room
where they work you have incurred an additional penalty” said the
inspector. “It is a gross breach of the Factory Acts.” And he walked
out, leaving my friend an abashed criminal caught redhanded.