Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had
intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein
the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.
* * * * *
Have I made myself clear?
If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the
formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.
The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which _in action_
produces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the
/Servile State/.
Section Seven
Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux
I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a
Capitalist State to transform itself into a Servile State.
I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a
_Distributive_ but a _Collectivist_ solution is the easiest for a
Capitalist State to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attempting
_Collectivism_, what results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude
of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few;
that is, the Servile State.
* * * * *
Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy
of Capitalism one of two reforms.
Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing
land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were
possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of
production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be
held in trust for the advantage of all.
The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the
/Distributive State/. The second may be called the attempted establishment
of the /Collectivist State/.
Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists.
They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of
Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed
throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they
also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater
social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would
re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a
remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with
known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which
experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of
the two schools of reformers, the more _practical_ in the sense that they
deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things
which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less
practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that
the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend
itself to such a reaction as they propose.
The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into
the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the
understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the
advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing
with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that
has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can
furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the _less_ practical of
the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and
recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual
working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): "On such
and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history,
Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in
society."
In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the
reformer who desires well-distributed property.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more
practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of
the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with
less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.
For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private
ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds,
continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its
revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which
seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such
transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a
Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any
fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway
line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the
public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction,
disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to
the society in which it takes place.
Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in
such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed
throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original
few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse
opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great
friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners
to sell again to a few.
In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution
normal to most citizens in the State is _working against the grain_ of our
existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish
Socialism--that is Collectivism--is working _with_ the grain of that
society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs
were partially atrophied from disuse: "Do this and that, take such and such
exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs." The second is like a
physician who should say: "You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are
atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they
were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be
wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease." The Physician is the
Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.
It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties
a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the
place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either
stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my
argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously
makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the
Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals
so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.
* * * * *
If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in
some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?
I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process
should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some
machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how
could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that
would attach to general redistributions? To say "none shall own" and to
confiscate is one thing; to say "all should own" and apportion ownership is
another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic
relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and
particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society
such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might
indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one
working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without
ruining his own cause.
If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the
economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up
within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work
to-day in a Capitalist society!
If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must
reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits
to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to
save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out
of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small
property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian
trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings,
offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and
to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards.
Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners,
of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the
produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here
again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even
bid for the smallest share.
One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest
force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated
with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to
own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the
power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for
instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public
money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I
count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent
their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the
co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers
to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve
rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided
between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of
"employment," and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery
of administration?
I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because
it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will
and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident
that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own
a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other
social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any
such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.
On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in
appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to
replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and
thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites
which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of
just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed
among men wherever the blight of it has spread.
So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk
of a "Capitalist phase" of society as the necessary precedent to a
"Collectivist phase." A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it "furnishes
a mode of transition from private to public ownership." Collectivism
promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms
of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and
well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can
give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that
security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a
mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer,
would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine--and all the
rest of it--exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian,
when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives
nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position.
Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and
Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men
organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives,
save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of
earnings?
The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass
of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise
of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.
To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of
production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so,
it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat
in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the
State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent.
and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per
cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the
State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the
Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it
would seem)[5] "buy out" any existing Capitalist body upon favourable
terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules
upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which
the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.
There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist
into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with
which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct,
whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a
Capitalist community is not amply familiar.
In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of
small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel
at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the
strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities
discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could,
by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual
interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at
the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and
the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can
discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks
of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind:
we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties
to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger,
involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries.
The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under
public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution
at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms,
even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which
they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the
irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are
already fairly used to both.
This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism
seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past
believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal
save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound
patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become
possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last
to be realised.
I say, "of the last generation." To-day that simple and superficial
judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded
of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their
propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but
towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that
with every new reform--and those reforms commonly promoted by particular
Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general--another
state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain
that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is
resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the
Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third
thing is the /Servile/ State: a State, that is, in which the mass of men
shall be constrained _by law_ to labour to the profit of a minority, but,
as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old
Capitalism did not give them.
Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform
diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and
institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in
general show that this new form of the State is upon us?
To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding
divisions of this book.
Section Eight
The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State
I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between
them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in
modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.
Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers--the third
the people to be Reformed.
These three interests are, first, the _Socialist_, who is the theoretical
reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the
"_Practical Man_" who as a "practical" reformer depends on his shortness of
sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that
great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom
it is being imposed. What _they_ are most likely to accept, the way in
which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of
all, for _they_ are the material with and upon which the work is being
done.
* * * * *
(1) Of the _Socialist_ Reformer:
I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the
remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not
towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.
The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is
itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (_a_) the man who regards the
public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion
of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only
feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (_b_) the man
who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much
because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered
and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to
consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by
public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from
the consequences of _their_ vice, ignorance, and folly.
These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and
between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.
Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of
Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least
resistance will either be led?
* * * * *
(_a_) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means
of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of
them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard
thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation
a stony moral barrier. It is what _most_ men would call the moral basis of
property (the instinct that property is a _right_), and what _all_ men
would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have
behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.
To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so
late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very
moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many
small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over
millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the
difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is
conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society;
but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved
and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the
conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist
reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention--as it must
be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental
importance--the expedient of "_buying out_" the present owner.
It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without
confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its
proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my
reformer's action.
He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to
"buy out") certain sections of the means of production.
But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition
the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of
Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in
great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He
is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall
all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual
jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.
Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.
This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production
by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But
they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited
ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very
definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess
the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when
we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to
modify the factor of freedom.
You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I
am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The
Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of
catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the
relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular
responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a
proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me,
the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with
special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they
are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake
the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I
will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps
larger and certainly more secure."
This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand
canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as
to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are
open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and
that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will
run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen
its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.
To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand which
are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first
steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that
upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the
whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the
Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims
and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective
indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving
power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.
When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any
demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it
in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.
Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier
method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately
preceding it: there is no need to go further.
In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere
organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself _away_ from his
Collectivist ideal and _towards_ a society in which the possessors shall
remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the
mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those
few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which
the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product
of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.
At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners
economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of
their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the
Servile State.
* * * * *
(_b_) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly.
In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is
not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar.
Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life--these afford him the food
that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is
the "running" of men: as a machine is run.
To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.
It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which
is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite
differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect
of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and
appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of
public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his
small stomach a final satisfaction.
Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in
capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so
suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision
of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a
department and possibly of the whole State--but that is by the way.) But
while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he
finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as
the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the
man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to
a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense
than a mechanical appetite for regulation?
He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will "buy out"
the Capitalist.
Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, "buying out"
is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general
application.
But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he
does for the socialisation of the means of production--tabulation, detailed
administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one
schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his
Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the
existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other
socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the
few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the
proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their
freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency
or insecurity--and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper
housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be
incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be
imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to
benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.
To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts,
it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which
alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already
the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called
themselves "Socialists" are now less concerned with any scheme for
socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually
existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for
regulating, "running," and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an
inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the
small Capitalist class.
The so-called "Socialist" of this type has not fallen into the Servile
State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he
foresees his power over its future.
So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to
transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the
universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its
tutelage. To-day their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence
their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly,
acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but
Servile.
* * * * *
(2) Of the _Practical_ Reformer:
There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on _not_ being a
socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the
Servile State. This second factor in the change is the "Practical Man"; and
this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the
details of legislation, must be carefully examined.
It is your "Practical Man" who says: "Whatever you theorists and
doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support),
though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet _in practice_ you
must admit that it does good. If you had _practical_ experience of the
misery of the Jones' family, or had done _practical_ work yourself in
Pudsey, you would have seen that a _practical_ man," etc.
It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is
exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of
human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin
disabilities which stamp the Practical Man where-ever found: these twin
disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an
inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both
these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of
impotence, the inability to think.
Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for
him.
As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first
principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and _his_ first principles
and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors
hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a
decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are _insufficiency_ and
_insecurity_. When he was "working" in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the
proletarian Jones's from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the
worthy man most was "unemployment" and "destitution": that is, insecurity
and insufficiency in flesh and blood.
Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere
organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away
from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things
in England, how much more easily do you not think the "Practical Man" will
be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his
grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution
which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity
is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down
the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile
State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give
him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then
Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work.
If you get him work "under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.," he
may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the
Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then
there are "the ravages of drink": more fatal still the dreadful habit
mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow
notes that "as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you
make them."
He does not, because he cannot, coordinate all these things. He knows
nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the
co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership
which such a society spontaneously breeds. He "takes the world as he finds
it"--and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit
with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile
State, _he_, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in
the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by
inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the
one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or
suspect the process.
It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual
because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power.
Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great
advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before
our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen
until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of
philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.
The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He
would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which
would lead at last to some kind of revolt.
Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking
party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular
men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with
gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and,
under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically
powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may
console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with
its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who
govern, will certainly eliminate him.
* * * * *
Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those
who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are
making directly for the Servile State.
* * * * *
(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What
of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are
the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept
or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude
which is the argument of this book?
The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material
is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends
the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.
The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of
definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that
number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but
must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before
we can call that State _Capitalist_.
But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore
not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon
that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a
greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its
ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.
The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to
bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular
proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the
Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and
of all the free habit which property engenders.
Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may
be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat
class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the
first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to
impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible.
The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which
each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his
proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours
to-day, is the second factor in the problem.
The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the
dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with
its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.
Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English
proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is
certainly the great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen-twentieths
of the population--if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my
concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against
its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.
* * * * *
As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of
men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the
minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are
familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a
wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire.
They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange,
and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself
in the position, mentally, of an owner.
But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect which that
experience has upon character and upon one's view of the State is a very
different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient
number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters,
etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very
vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living
tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living
testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken,
when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had
risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain
commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as
the reward of their courage; and I have myself spoken in Lancashire to old
men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the
last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their
fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided
ownership in cottage looms was actually common.
All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly
rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the
Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and
hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct, use, and meaning of property
is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly
inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay
between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first
effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they
think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the
possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately
obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a
position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now
strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and
permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the
foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.
To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude
of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards
property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through
property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They
think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the
wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make
him cease to be a wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely
outside the realities of life.
What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system,
with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain
fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his
proletariat surroundings?
Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say
that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force
during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they
are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still
blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the
proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom
he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position
of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one
discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual
worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of
industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite
given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as
the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the
general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a
lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as
definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything
but proletarian.
* * * * *
These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic
freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping
from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly
_against_ the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so
fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor
in the situation which is making so strongly _for_ the Servile State, and
which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and
for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously
considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which
social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready
to accept the change.
The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be
the most conclusive of all.
If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage,
with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them
employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would
refuse?
Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a
life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the
negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man
that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and
coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation
of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his
labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families,
would prefer freedom (with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and
possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the
answer is: "Very few would refuse it." That is the key to the whole matter.
What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even
as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of
this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status
of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat
to-day.
Now take the truth from another aspect--by considering it thus from one
point of view and from another we can appreciate it best--Of what are the
mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments
that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of "the sack."
You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why
he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the
Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in
this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an
insult.
Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his
manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was
because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell
you that it is because he fears unemployment.
Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome
public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of
his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than
those which the public Courts can impose.
In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges
should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social
theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish
him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments
which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private
powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which
very few indeed dare to stand out.
Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us
suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees
him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The
administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition
into the man's circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand,
the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group
of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile
conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in
England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that
they do not.
No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always
the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now
reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some
small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against
those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They
understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing
to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and
enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are
their paymasters.
* * * * *
It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or
even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of
terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to
ridicule or to oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting. They
none the less remain truths.
Substitute for the term "employee" in one of our new laws the term "serf,"
even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term "master" for
the word "employer," and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a
sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it
would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of
the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no
revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part
gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon
them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense
of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of _having enough_
and _not losing it_.
All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase
of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is
canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his
ideal; the herd of "practical" men meet at every stage in its inception the
"practical" steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian
mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of
property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most
powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it
confers.
It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such
theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really
approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until
we see the first effects of its action.
To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent.
The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but
something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first
main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already
laid.
To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law,
the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project
to positive statute in due process of time.
Appendix on "Buying-Out"
There is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the
Capitalist class for the benefit of the State, but who appreciate the
difficulties in the way of direct confiscation, that by spreading the
process over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain
fashion bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, the
expropriation could be effected without the consequences and attendant
difficulties of direct confiscation. In other words, there is an impression
that the State could "buyout" the Capitalist class without their knowing
it, and that in a sort of painless way this class can be slowly conjured
out of existence.
The impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish
it, and will not bear a clear analysis.
It is impossible by any jugglery to "buyout" the universality of the means
of production without confiscation.
To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the
simplest terms:--
A community of twenty-two families lives upon the produce of two farms, the
property of only two families out of that twenty-two.
The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The two families, with their
ploughs, stores, land, etc., are Capitalist.
The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to the land and
capital of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat, of
which 200 measures, or 10 measures each, form the annual support of the
twenty proletarian families; the remaining 100 measures are the surplus
value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two Capitalist
families, each of which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures.
The State proposes to produce, after a certain length of time, a condition
of affairs such that the surplus values shall no longer go to the two
Capitalist families, but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole
community, while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed owner
of both farms.
Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the
reward of accumulation. Instead of spending his money, a man saves it with
the object of retaining as the result of that saving a certain yearly
revenue. The measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a
particular time below a certain level. In other words, if a man cannot get
a certain minimum reward for his accumulation, he will not accumulate but
spend.
What is called in economics "The Law of Diminishing Returns" acts so that
continual additions to capital, other things being equal (that is, the
methods of production remaining the same), do not provide a corresponding
increase of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a particular
area of natural forces will produce, for instance, 40 measures yearly, or 4
per cent.; but 2000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce
80 measures. They will produce more than the thousand measures did, but not
more in proportion; not double. They will produce, say, 60 measures, or 3
per cent., upon the capital. The action of this universal principle
automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached such a
point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept.
If it falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate. The limit of
this minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the
measure to what we call "_the Effective Desire of Accumulation_." Thus in
England to-day it is a little over 3 per cent. The minimum which limits the
accumulation of capital is a minimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly
upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the "E.D.A." of our
society at the present time.
When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value of his
possessions, he counts them in "so many years' purchase."[6] And that means
that he is willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many
times the yearly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is
one-thirtieth, he will take a lump sum representing thirty times his annual
revenue.
So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in our example to have
an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They will sell to the State if the State can
put up 3000 measures of wheat.
Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. The accumulations of
wheat being already in the hands of the Capitalists, and those
accumulations amounting to much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing
appears to be a deadlock.
But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The State can go to
the Capitalists and say: "Hand me over your farms, and against them I will
give you guarantee that you shall be paid _rather more than_ 100 measures
of wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you half as much
again until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original
stock."
Out of what does this extra amount come? Out of the State's power to tax.
The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Capitalists A and B, and
pay them the extra with their own money.
In so simple an example it is evident that this "ringing of the changes"
would be spotted by the victims, and that they would bring against it
precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler
and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation.
But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are dealing with
myriads of individual Capitalists and thousands of particular forms of
profit, the process can be masked.
There are two ways in which the State can mask its action (according to
this policy). It can buy out first one small area of land and capital out
of the general taxation and then another, and then another, until the whole
has been transferred; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades
which the rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin, and with the
general taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate
trades which will, of course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack.
The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society, however
complex; for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the
trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once
rouse suspicion.[7]
The first method, however, might have some chance of success, at least for
a long time after it was begun, in a highly complex and numerous society
were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the
fact that the Capitalist only takes _more than_ his old yearly revenue with
the object of reinvesting the surplus.
I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, yielding me 3 per
cent.: £30 a year. The Government asks me to exchange my bit of paper
against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of £50 a year, that
is, an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent over and
above the regular interest paid a purchase of my stock. The Government's
bit of paper promises to pay to the holder £50 a year for, say,
thirty-eight years. I am delighted to make the exchange, not because I am
such a fool as to enjoy the prospect of my property being extinguished at
the end of thirty-eight years, but because I hope to be able to reinvest
the extra £20 every year in something else that will bring me in 3 per
cent. Thus, at the end of the thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be
better off than I was at the beginning of the transaction, and I shall have
enjoyed during its maturing my old £30 a year all the same.
The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of
the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area
and for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very
narrow limit the "market for investment" is found to be restricted, Capital
automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper
guarantees save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by
further raising taxation to what Capital regards as "confiscatory" rates,
there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be
opposed to frank and open expropriation.
The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by
the complex mechanism of "finance" can no more change the fundamental and
arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in
an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to
less than 180 degrees.[8] In fine: _if you desire to confiscate, you must
confiscate_.
You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on
the racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the
general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow or
other something will come out of nothing in the end.
There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without
meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at
confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second
insufficient.
They are as follows:--
(1) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is
getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business
better than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its
aid. In other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing
than the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private
individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out.
But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has
bad luck, it would find itself _endowing_ the Capitalists of the future
instead of gradually extinguishing them.
In this fashion the State could have "socialised" without confiscation the
railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago,
promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had
socialised the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in
perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for
ever) at the expense of the community.
(2) The second way in which the State can expropriate without confiscation
is by annuity. It can say to such Capitalists as have no heirs or care
little for their fate if they have: "You have only got so much time to live
and to enjoy your £30, will you take £50 until you die?" Upon the bargain
being accepted the State will, in process of time, though not immediately
upon the death of the annuitant, become an unembarrassed owner of what had
been the annuitant's share in the means of production. But the area over
which this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not of itself
a sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field.
I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called "Socialist" and
confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here
discussed. The State is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many
cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the taxpayer and is lessening his
capital rather than shearing his income. But it is not putting the proceeds
into the means of production. It is either using them for immediate
consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to
another set of Capitalists.[9]
But these practical considerations of the way in which sham Socialist
experiments are working belong rather to my next section, in which I shall
deal with the actual beginnings of the Servile State in our midst.
Section Nine
The Servile State Has Begun
In this last division of my book I deal with the actual appearance of the
Servile State in certain laws and proposals now familiar to the Industrial
Society of modern England. These are the patent objects, "laws and projects
of laws," which lend stuff to my argument, and show that it is based not
upon a mere deduction, but upon an observation of things.
Two forms of this proof are evident: first, the laws and proposals which
subject the _Proletariat_ to Servile conditions; next, the fact that the
_Capitalist_, so far from being expropriated by modern "Socialist"
experiments, is being confirmed in his power.
I take these in their order, and I begin by asking in what statutes or
proposals the Servile State first appeared among us.
A false conception of our subject might lead one to find the origins of the
Servile State in the restrictions imposed upon certain forms of
manufacture, and the corresponding duties laid upon the Capitalist in the
interest of his workmen. The Factory Laws, as they are in this country,
would seem to offer upon this superficial and erroneous view a starting
point. They do nothing of the kind; and the view _is_ superficial and
erroneous because it neglects the fundamentals of the case. What
distinguishes the Servile State is not the interference of law with the
action of any citizen even in connection with industrial matters. Such
interference may or may not indicate the presence of a Servile status. It
in no way indicates the presence of that status when it forbids a
particular kind of human action to be undertaken by the citizen as a
citizen.
The legislator says, for instance, "You may pluck roses; but as I notice
that you sometimes scratch yourself, I will put you in prison unless you
cut them with scissors at least 122 millimetres long, and I will appoint
one thousand inspectors to go round the country seeing whether the law is
observed. My brother-in-law shall be at the head of the Department at
£2,000 a year."
We are all familiar with that type of legislation. We are all familiar with
the arguments for and against it in any particular case. We may regard it
as onerous, futile, or beneficent, or in any other light, according to our
various temperaments. But it does not fall within the category of servile
legislation, because it establishes no distinction between two classes of
citizens, marking off the one as legally distinct from the other by a
criterion of manual labour or of income.
This is even true of such regulations as those which compel a Cotton Mill,
for instance, to have no less than such and such an amount of cubic space
for each operative, and such and such protection for dangerous machinery.
These laws do not concern themselves with the nature, the amount, or even
the existence of a contract for service. The object, for example, of the
law which compels one to fence off certain types of machinery is simply to
protect human life, regardless of whether the human being so protected is
rich or poor, Capitalist or Proletarian. These laws may in effect work in
our society so that the Capitalist is made responsible for the Proletarian,
but he is not responsible _qua_ Capitalist, nor is the Proletarian
protected _qua_ Proletarian.
In the same way the law may compel me, if I am a Riparian owner, to put up
a fence of statutory strength wherever the water of my river is of more
than a statutory depth. Now it cannot compel me to do this unless I am the
owner of the land. In a sense, therefore, this might be called the
recognition of my _Status_, because, by the nature of the case, only
landowners can be affected by the law, and landowners would be compelled by
it to safeguard the lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of
land.
But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and
method of the law do not concern themselves with a distinction between
citizens.
A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the Factory laws,
details and phrases, which did distinctly connote the existence of a
Capitalist and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a
whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general
motive and expressions governing each main statute, in order to judge
whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not.
The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in
any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in
the place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile.
Neither are those laws servile which in practice attach to the poor and not
to the rich. Compulsory education is in legal theory required of every
citizen for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy
exempts of course all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But
the law does apply to the universality of the commonwealth, and all
families resident in Great Britain (not in Ireland) are subject to its
provisions.
These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes
later. The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the
Statute Book is that which establishes the present form of _Employer's
Liability_.
I am far from saying that that law was passed, as modern laws are beginning
to be passed, with the direct object of establishing a new status; though
it was passed with some consciousness on the part of the legislator that
such a new status was in existence as a social fact. Its motive was merely
humane, and the relief which it afforded seemed merely necessary at the
time; but it is an instructive example of the way in which a small neglect
of strict doctrine and a slight toleration of anomaly admit great changes
into the State.
There had existed from all time in every community, and there was founded
upon common sense, the legal doctrine that if one citizen was so placed
with regard to another by contract that he must in the fulfilment of that
contract perform certain services, and if those services accidentally
involved damages to a third party, not the actual perpetrator of the
damage, but he who designed the particular operation leading to it was
responsible.
The point is subtle, but, as I say, fundamental. It involved no distinction
of status between employer and employed.
Citizen A offered citizen B a sack of wheat down if citizen B would plough
for him a piece of land which might or might not produce more than a sack
of wheat.
Of course citizen A expected it would produce more, and was awaiting a
surplus value, or he would not have made the contract with citizen B. But,
at any rate, citizen B put his name to the agreement, and as a free man,
capable of contracting, was correspondingly bound to fulfil it.
In fulfilling this contract the ploughshare B is driving destroys a pipe
conveying water by agreement through A's land to C. C suffers damage, and
to recover the equivalent of that damage his action in justice and common
sense can only be against A, for B was carrying out a plan and instruction
of which A was the author. C is a third party who had nothing to do with
such a contract and could not possibly have justice save by his chances of
getting it from A, who was the true author of the unintentional loss
inflicted, since he designed the course of work.
But when the damage is not done to C at all, but to B, who is concerned
with a work the risks of which are known and willingly undertaken, it is
quite another matter.
Citizen A contracts with citizen B that citizen B, in consideration of a
sack of wheat, shall plough a bit of land. Certain known risks must attach
to that operation. Citizen B, if he is a free man, undertakes those risks
with his eyes open. For instance, he may sprain his wrist in turning the
plough, or one of the horses may kick him while he is having his
bread-and-cheese. If upon such an accident A is compelled to pay damages to
B, a difference of status is at once recognised. B undertook to do work
which, by all the theory of free contract, was, with its risks and its
expense of energy, the equivalent in B's own eyes of a sack of wheat; yet a
law is passed to say that B can have more than that sack of wheat if he is
hurt.
There is no converse right of A against B. If the employer suffers by such
an accident to the employee, _he_ is not allowed to dock that sack of
wheat, though it was regarded in the contract as the equivalent to a
certain amount of labour to be performed which, as a fact, has not been
performed. A has no action unless B has been _culpably_ negligent or
remiss. In other words, the mere fact that one man is _working_ and the
other not is the fundamental consideration on which the law is built, and
the law says: "You are not a free man making a free contract with all its
consequences. You are a worker, and therefore an inferior: you are an
_employee_; and that _status_ gives you a special position which would not
be recognised in the other party to the contract."
The principle is pushed still further when an employer is made liable for
an accident happening to one of his employees at the hands of another
employee.
A gives a sack of wheat to B and D each if they will dig a well for him.
All three parties are cognisant of the risks and accept them in the
contract. B, holding the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If they
were all three men of exactly equal status, obviously D's action would be
against B. But they are not of equal status in England to-day. B and D are
_employees_, and are therefore in a special and inferior position before
the law compared with their employer A. D's action is, by this novel
principle, no longer against B, who accidentally injured him by a personal
act, however involuntary, for which a free man would be responsible, but
against A, who was innocent of the whole business.
Now in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar duties not because he
is a citizen, but because he is something more: an employer; and B and D
have special claims on A, not because they are citizens, but because they
are something less: _viz. employees_. They can _claim protection_ from A,
as inferiors of a superior in a State admitting such distinctions and
patronage.
It will occur at once to the reader that in our existing social state the
employee will be very grateful for such legislation. One workman cannot
recover from another simply because the other will have no goods out of
which to pay damages. Let the burden, therefore, fall upon the rich man!
Excellent. But that is not the point. To argue thus is to say that Servile
legislation is necessary if we are to solve the problems raised by
Capitalism. It remains servile legislation none the less. It is legislation
that would not exist in a society where property was well divided and where
a citizen could normally pay damages for the harm he had himself
caused.[10]
This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable
historical interest as a point of departure, is not of very definite moment
to our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of
which are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which
definitely recognise the Servile State, the re-establishment of status in
the place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two
categories of employers and employed.
* * * * *
These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to
history the conscious and designed entry of Servile Institutions into the
old Christian State. They are not "origins," small indications of coming
change which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are
the admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few,
confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and stable
society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of
Capitalism.
They fall roughly into three categories:--
(1) Measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved
through the action of the employing class, or of the proletariat itself
acting under compulsion.
(2) Measures by which the employer shall be compelled to give not less than
a certain minimum for any labour he may purchase, and
(3) Measures which compel a man lacking the means of production to labour,
though he may have made no contract to that effect.
The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are complementary one of
another.
As to the first: Measures to palliate the insecurity of the proletariat.
We have of this an example in actual law at this moment. And that law the
Insurance Act (whose political source and motive I am not here discussing)
follows in every particular the lines of a Servile State.
(a) Its fundamental criterion is employment. In other words, I am compelled
to enter a scheme providing me against the mischances of illness and
unemployment not because I am a citizen, but only if I am:
(1) Exchanging services for goods; and either
(2) Obtaining less than a certain amount of goods for those services, or
(3) A vulgar fellow working with his hands. The law carefully excludes from
its provisions those forms of labour to which the educated and therefore
powerful classes are subject, and further excludes from compulsion the mass
of those who are for the moment earning enough to make them a class to be
reckoned with as economically free. I may be a writer of books who, should
he fall ill, will leave in the greatest distress the family which he
supports. If the legislator were concerned for the morals of citizens, I
should most undoubtedly come under this law, under the form of a compulsory
insurance added to my income tax. But the legislator is not concerned with
people of my sort. He is concerned with a new status which he recognises in
the State, to wit, the proletariat. He envisages the proletariat not quite
accurately as men either poor, or, if they are not poor, at any rate vulgar
people working with their hands, and he legislates accordingly.
(b) Still more striking, as an example of status taking the place of
contract, is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the
proletariat and of seeing that the law is obeyed _not_ upon the proletariat
itself, but upon the _Capitalist class._
Now this point is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated.
The future historian, whatever his interest in the first indications of
that profound revolution through which we are so rapidly passing, will most
certainly fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of our times.
The legislator surveying the Capitalist State proposes as a remedy for
certain of its evils the establishment of two categories in the State,
compels the lower man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of it, and
further compels the upper man to be the instrument in enforcing that
registration and in collecting that tax. No one acquainted with the way in
which any one of the great changes of the past has taken place, the
substitution of tenure for the Roman proprietary right in land, or the
substitution of the mediaeval peasant for the serf of the Dark Ages, can
possibly misunderstand the significance of such a turning point in our
history.
Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction will destroy it is
another matter. Its mere proposal is of the greatest possible moment in the
inquiry we are here pursuing.
Of the next two groups, the fixing of a Minimum Wage and the Compulsion to
Labour (which, as I have said, and will shortly show, are complementary one
to the other), neither has yet appeared in actual legislation, but both are
planned, both thought out, both possessed of powerful advocates, and both
upon the threshold of positive law.
* * * * *
The fixing of a Minimum Wage, with a definite sum fixed by statute, has not
yet entered our laws, but the first step towards such a consummation has
been taken in the shape of giving legal sanction to some hypothetical
Minimum Wage which shall be arrived at after discussion within a particular
trade. That trade is, of course, the mining industry. The law does not say:
"No Capitalist shall pay a miner less than so many shillings for so many
hours' work." But it does say: "Figures having been arrived at by local
boards, any miner working within the area of each board can claim by force
of law the minimum sum established by such boards." It is evident that from
this step to the next, which shall define some sliding scale of
remuneration for labour according to prices and the profits of capital, is
an easy and natural transition. It would give both parties what each
immediately requires: to capital a guarantee against disturbance; to labour
sufficiency and security. The whole thing is an excellent object lesson in
little of that general movement from free contract to status, and from the
Capitalist to the Servile State, which is the tide of our time.
The neglect of older principles as abstract and doctrinaire; the immediate
need of both parties immediately satisfied; the unforeseen but necessary
consequence of satisfying such needs in such a fashion--all these, which
are apparent in the settlement the mining industry has begun, are the
typical forces producing the Servile State.
Consider in its largest aspect the nature of such a settlement.
The Proletarian accepts a position in which he produces for the Capitalist
a certain total of economic values, and retains out of that total a portion
only, leaving to the Capitalist all surplus value. The Capitalist, on his
side, is guaranteed in the secure and permanent expectation of that surplus
value through all the perils of social envy; the Proletarian is guaranteed
in a sufficiency and a security for that sufficiency; but by the very
action of such a guarantee there is withdrawn from him the power to refuse
his labour and thus to aim at putting himself in possession of the means of
production.
Such schemes definitely divide citizens into two classes, the Capitalist
and the Proletarian. They make it impossible for the second to combat the
privileged position of the first. They introduce into the positive laws of
the community a recognition of social facts which already divide Englishmen
into two groups of economically more free and economically less free, and
they stamp with the authority of the State a new constitution of society.
Society is recognised as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely
for their labour or any other commodity in their possession, but of two
contrasting status, owners and non-owners. The first must not be allowed to
leave the second without subsistence; the second must not be allowed to
obtain that grip upon the means of production which is the privilege of the
first. It is true that this first experiment is small in degree and
tentative in quality; but to judge the movement as a general whole we must
not only consider the expression it has actually received so far in
positive law, but the mood of our time.
When this first experiment in a minimum wage was being debated in
Parliament, what was the great issue of debate? Upon what did those who
were the most ardent reformers particularly insist? _Not_ that the miners
should have an avenue open to them for obtaining possession of the mines;
not even that the State should have an avenue open to it for obtaining such
possession; _but that the minimum wage should be fixed at a certain
satisfactory level_! That, as our recent experience testifies for all of
us, was the crux of the quarrel. And that such a point should be the crux,
not the socialisation of the mines, nor the admission of the proletariat to
the means of production, but only a sufficiency and a security of wage, is
amply significant of the perhaps irresistible forces which are making in
the direction for which I argue in this book.
There was here no attempt of the Capitalist to impose Servile conditions
nor of the Proletarian to resist them. Both parties were agreed upon that
fundamental change. The discussion turned upon the minimum limit of
subsistence to be securely provided, a point which left aside, because it
took for granted, the establishment of _some_ minimum in any case.
Next, let it be noted (for it is of moment to a later part of my argument)
that experiments of this sort promise to extend piecemeal. There is no
likelihood, judging by men's actions and speech, of some grand general
scheme for the establishment of a minimum wage throughout the community.
Such a scheme would, of course, be as truly an establishment of the Servile
State as piecemeal schemes. But, as we shall see in a moment, the extension
of the principle piecemeal has a considerable effect upon the forms which
compulsion may take.
The miners' refusal to work, with the exaggerated panic it caused, bred
this first tentative appearance of the minimum wage in our laws. Normally,
capital prefers free labour with its margin of destitution; for such an
anarchy, ephemeral though it is of its nature, while it lasts provides
cheap labour; from the narrowest point of view it provides in the still
competitive areas of Capitalism a better chance for profits.
But as one group of workmen after another, concerned with trades
immediately necessary to the life of the nation, and therefore tolerating
but little interruption, learn the power which combination gives them, it
is inevitable that the legislator (concentrated as he is upon momentary
remedies for difficulties as they arise) should propose for one such trade
after another the remedy of a minimum wage.
There can be little doubt that, trade by trade, the principle will extend.
For instance, the two and a half millions now guaranteed against
unemployment are guaranteed against it for a certain weekly sum. That
weekly sum must bear some relation to their estimated earnings when they
are in employment.
It is a short step from the calculation of unemployment benefit (its being
fixed by statute at a certain level, and that level determined by something
which is regarded as the just remuneration of labour in that trade); it is
a short step, I say, from that to a statutory fixing of the sums paid
during employment.
The State says to the Serf: "I saw to it that you should have so much when
you were unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to
your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I
further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed,
yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to work, or to
make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to this."
The provision of a fixed schedule during unemployment thus inevitably leads
to the examination, the defining, and at last the imposition of a minimum
wage during employment; and every compulsory provision for unemployed
benefits is the seed of a minimum wage.
Of still greater effect is the mere presence of State regulation in such a
matter. The fact that the State has begun to gather statistics of wages
over these large areas of industry, and to do so not for a mere statistical
object, but a practical one, and the fact that the State has begun to immix
the action of positive law and constraint with the older system of free
bargaining, mean that the whole weight of its influence is now in favour of
regulation. It is no rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our
industrial society will see a gradually extending area of industry in which
from two sides the fixing of wages by statute shall appear. From the one
side it will come in the form of the State examining the conditions of
labour in connection with its own schemes for establishing sufficiency and
security by insurance. From the other side it will come through the
reasonable proposals to make contracts between groups of labour and groups
of capital enforceable in the Courts.
* * * * *
So much, then, for the Principle of a Minimum Wage. It has already appeared
in our laws. It is certain to spread. But how does the presence of this
introduction of a Minimum form part of the advance towards the Servile
State?
I have said that the principle of a minimum wage involves as its converse
the principle of compulsory labour. Indeed, most of the importance which
the principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry lies in that converse
necessity of compulsory labour which it involves.
But as the connection between the two may not be clear at first sight, we
must do more than take it for granted. We must establish it by process of
reason.
There are two distinct forms in which the whole policy of enforcing
security and sufficiency by law for the proletariat produce a corresponding
policy of compulsory labour.
The first of these forms is the compulsion which the Courts will exercise
upon either of the parties concerned in the giving and in the receiving of
the minimum wage. The second form is the necessity under which society will
find itself, when once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded,
coupled with the principle of sufficiency and security, to maintain those
whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment.
As to the first form:--
A Proletarian group has struck a bargain with a group of Capitalists to the
effect that it will produce for that capital ten measures of value in a
year, will be content to receive six measures of value for itself, and will
leave four measures as surplus value for the Capitalists. The bargain is
ratified; the Courts have the power to enforce it. If the Capitalists by
some trick of fines or by bluntly breaking their word pay out in wages less
than the six measures, the Courts must have some power of constraining
them. In other words, there must be some sanction to the action of the law.
There must be some power of punishment, and, through punishment, of
compulsion. Conversely, if the men, having struck this bargain, go back
upon their word; if individuals among them or sections among them cease
work with a new demand for seven measures instead of six, the Courts must
have the power of constraining and of punishing _them_. Where the bargain
is ephemeral or at any rate extended over only reasonable limits of time,
it would be straining language perhaps to say that each individual case of
constraint exercised against the workmen would be a case of compulsory
labour. But extend the system over a long period of years, make it normal
to industry and accepted as a habit in men's daily conception of the way in
which their lives should be conducted, and the method is necessarily
transformed into a system of compulsory labour. In trades where wages
fluctuate little this will obviously be the case. "You, the agricultural
labourers of this district, have taken fifteen shillings a week for a very
long time. It has worked perfectly well. There seems no reason why you
should have more. Nay, you put your hands to it through your officials in
the year so and so that you regarded that sum as sufficient. Such and such
of your members are now refusing to perform what this Court regards as a
contract. They must return within the limits of that contract or suffer the
consequences."
Remember what power analogy exercises over men's minds, and how, when
systems of the sort are common to many trades, they will tend to create a
general point of view for all trades. Remember also how comparatively
slight a threat is already sufficient to control men in our industrial
society, the proletarian mass of which is accustomed to live from week to
week under peril of discharge, and has grown readily amenable to the threat
of any reduction in those wages upon which it can but just subsist.
Nor are the Courts enforcing such contracts or quasi-contracts (as they
will come to be regarded) the only inducement.
A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as
insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such
sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in
the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the
hands of a Government official. "Here is work offered you at twenty-five
shillings a week. If you do not take it you certainly shall not have a
right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take
it the sum shall still stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment
your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I
will permit you to have some of your money: not otherwise." Dovetailing in
with this machinery of compulsion is all that mass of registration and
docketing which is accumulating through the use of Labour Exchanges. Not
only will the Official have the power to enforce special contracts, or the
power to coerce individual men to labour under the threat of a fine, but he
will also have a series of _dossiers_ by which the record of each workman
can be established. No man, once so registered and known, can escape; and,
of the nature of the system, the numbers caught in the net must steadily
increase until the whole mass of labour is mapped out and controlled.
These are very powerful instruments of compulsion indeed. They already
exist. They are already a part of our laws.
Lastly, there is the obvious bludgeon of "compulsory arbitration": a
bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed, I
know of no civilised European state which has succumbed to so gross a
suggestion. For it is a frank admission of servitude at one step, and for
good and all, such as men of our culture are not yet prepared to
swallow.[11]
So much, then, for the first argument and the first form in which
compulsory labour is seen to be a direct and necessary consequence of
establishing a minimum wage and of scheduling employment to a scale.
* * * * *
The second is equally clear. In the production of wheat the healthy and
skilled man who can produce ten measures of wheat is compelled to work for
six measures, and the Capitalist is compelled to remain content with four
measures for his share. The law will punish him if he tries to get out of
his legal obligation and to pay his workmen less than six measures of wheat
during the year. What of the man who is not sufficiently strong or skilled
to produce even six measures? Will the Capitalist be constrained to pay him
more than the values he can produce? Most certainly not. The whole
structure of production as it was erected during the Capitalist phase of
our industry has been left intact by the new laws and customs. Profit is
still left a necessity. If it were destroyed, still more if a loss were
imposed by law, that would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which
all these reforms are being undertaken. They are being undertaken with the
object of establishing stability where there is now instability, and of
"reconciling," as the ironic phrase goes, "the interests of capital and
labour." It would be impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital
to lose upon the man who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall that
element of insecurity and instability be eliminated? To support the man
gratuitously because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of
the commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium
upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be taught,
if possible, to produce those economic values, which are regarded as the
minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work even if he cannot
produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free labourer should imperil
the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a
continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for
forced labour. We have not yet in this country, established by force of
law, the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable
consequence of those other reforms which have just been reviewed. The
"Labour Colony" (a prison so called because euphemism is necessary to every
transition) will be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of
compulsion will crown the edifice of these reforms. They will then be
complete so far as the subject classes are concerned, and even though this
particular institution of the "Labour Colony" (logically the last of all)
precede in time other forms of compulsion, it will make the advent of those
other forms of compulsion more certain, facile, and rapid.
* * * * *
There remains one last remark to be made upon the concrete side of my
subject. I have in this last section illustrated the tendency towards the
Servile State from actual laws and actual projects with which all are
to-day familiar in English industrial society, and I have shown how these
are certainly establishing the proletariat in a novel, but to them
satisfactory, Servile Status.
It remains to point out in a very few lines the complementary truth that
what should be the very essence of Collectivist Reform, to wit, the
translation of the means of production from the hands of private owners to
the hands of public officials, is nowhere being attempted. So far from its
being attempted, all so-called "Socialistic" experiments in
municipalisation and nationalisation are merely increasing the dependence
of the community upon the Capitalist class. To prove this, we need only
observe that every single one of these experiments is effected by a loan.
Now what is meant in economic reality by these municipal loans and national
loans raised for the purpose of purchasing certain small sections of the
means of production?
Certain Capitalists own a number of rails, cars, etc. They put to work upon
these certain Proletarians, and the result is a certain total of economic
values. Let the surplus values obtainable by the Capitalists after the
subsistence of the proletarians is provided for amount to £10,000 a year.
We all know how a system of this sort is "Municipalised." A "loan" is
raised. It bears "interest." It is saddled with a "sinking fund."
Now this loan is not really made in money, though the terms of it are in
money. It is, at the end of a long string of exchanges, nothing more nor
less than the loan of the cars, the rails, etc., by the Capitalists to the
Municipality. And the Capitalists require, before they will strike the
bargain, a guarantee that the whole of their old profit shall be paid to
them, together with a further yearly sum, which after a certain number of
years shall represent the original value of the concern when they handed it
over. These last additional sums are called the "sinking fund"; the
continued payment of the old surplus values is called the "interest."
In theory certain small sections of the means of production might be
acquired in this way. That particular section would have been "socialised."
The "Sinking Fund" (that is, the paying of the Capitalists for their plant
by instalments) might be met out of the general taxation imposed on the
community, considering how large that is compared with any one experiment
of the kind. The "interest" may by good management be met out of the true
profits of the tramways. At the end of a certain number of years the
community will be in possession of the tramways, will no longer be
exploited in this particular by Capitalism, will have bought out Capitalism
from the general taxes, and, in so far as the purchase money paid has been
consumed and not saved or invested by the Capitalists, a small measure of
"socialisation" will have been achieved.
As a fact things are never so favourable.
In practice three conditions militate against even these tiny experiments
in expropriation: the fact that the implements are always sold at much more
than their true value; the fact that the purchase includes non-productive
things; and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the
rate of repayment. These three adverse conditions lead in practice to
nothing but the riveting of Capitalism more securely round the body of the
State.
For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken
over? Is it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for,
even at an exaggerated price? Far from it! Over and above the rails and the
cars, there are all the commissions that have been made, all the champagne
luncheons, all the lawyers' fees, all the compensations to this man and to
that man, all the bribes. Nor does this exhaust the argument. Tramways
represent a productive investment. What about pleasure gardens,
wash-houses, baths, libraries, monuments, and the rest? The greater part of
these things are the product of "loans." When you put up a public
institution you borrow the bricks and the mortar and the iron and the wood
and the tiles from Capitalists, _and you pledge yourself to pay interest,
and to produce a sinking fund precisely as though a town hall or a bath
were a piece of reproductive machinery_.
To this must be added the fact that a considerable proportion of the
purchases are failures: purchases of things just before they are driven out
by some new invention; while on the top of the whole business you have the
fact that the borrowing goes on at a far greater rate than the repayment.
In a word, all these experiments up and down Europe during our generation,
municipal and national, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital
increasing rather more than twice, but not three times, as fast as the rate
of repayment. The interest which capital demands with a complete
indifference as to whether the loan is productive or non-productive amounts
to rather more than 1 1/2 per cent. _excess_ over the produce of the
various experiments, even though we count in the most lucrative and
successful of these, such as the state railways of many countries, and the
thoroughly successful municipal enterprises of many modern towns.
Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner and not a loser by this
form of sham Socialism, as by every other. And the same forces which in
practice forbid confiscation see to it that the attempt to mask
confiscation by purchase shall not only fail, but shall turn against those
who have not had the courage to make a frontal attack upon privilege.
* * * * *
With these concrete examples showing how Collectivism, in attempting its
practice, does but confirm the Capitalist position, and showing how our
laws have already begun to impose a Servile Status upon the Proletariat, I
end the argumentative thesis of this book.
I believe I have proved my case.
The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society,
left to its own direction, is a future in which subsistence and security
shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the
expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that
Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile. At the same
time, the Owners will be guaranteed in their profits, the whole machinery
of production in the smoothness of its working, and that stability which
has been lost under the Capitalist phase of society will be found once
more.
The internal strains which have threatened society during its Capitalist
phase will be relaxed and eliminated, and the community will settle down
upon that Servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the
Christian faith, from which that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in
the decay of that faith it naturally returns.
Conclusion It is possible to portray a great social movement of the past
with accuracy and in detail if one can spare to the task the time necessary
for research and further bring to it a certain power of co-ordination by
which a great mass of detail can be integrated and made one whole.
Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not exceed the powers of
history.
With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one can say even in its
largest aspect or upon its chief structural line what that future will be.
He can only present the main tendencies of his time: he can only determine
the equation of the curve and presume that that equation will apply more or
less to its next developments.
So far as I can judge, those societies which broke with the continuity of
Christian civilisation in the sixteenth century--which means, roughly,
North Germany and Great Britain--tend at present to the re-establishment of
a Servile Status. It will be diversified by local accident, modified by
local character, hidden under many forms. But it will come.
That the mere Capitalist anarchy cannot endure is patent to all men. That
only a very few possible solutions to it exist should be equally patent to
all. For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not believe there are
more than two: a reaction towards well-divided property, or the
re-establishment of servitude. I cannot believe that theoretical
Collectivism, now so plainly failing, will ever inform a real and living
society.
But my conviction that the re-establishment of the Servile Status in
industrial society is actually upon us does not lead me to any meagre and
mechanical prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The force of
which I have been speaking is not the only force in the field. There is a
complex knot of forces underlying any nation once Christian; a smouldering
of the old fires.
Moreover, one can point to European societies which will most certainly
reject any such solution of our Capitalist problem, just as the same
societies have either rejected, or lived suspicious of, Capitalism itself,
and have rejected or lived suspicious of that industrial organisation which
till lately identified itself with "progress" and national well-being.
These societies are in the main the same as those which, in that great
storm of the sixteenth century,--the capital episode in the story of
Christendom--held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of morals.
Chief among them should be noted to-day the French and the Irish.
I would record it as an impression and no more that the Servile State,
strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will
be modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its
attempt to establish itself completely, by the strong reaction which these
freer societies upon its flank will perpetually exercise.
Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our generation has seen the
solid foundation of that institution laid. In France the many experiments
which elsewhere have successfully introduced the Servile State have been
contemptuously rejected by the populace, and (most significant!) a recent
attempt to register and to "insure" the artisans as a separate category of
citizens has broken down in the face of an universal and a virile contempt.
That this second factor in the development of the future, the presence of
free societies, will destroy the tendency to the Servile State elsewhere I
do not affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, certainly
by example and perhaps by direct attack. And as I am upon the whole hopeful
that the Faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of
Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original Paganism (for
the tendency to the Servile State is nothing less) will in due time be
halted and reversed.
_Videat Deus_.
Endnotes
[1] Save in this special sense of "Collectivist," the word "Socialist" has
either no clear meaning, or is used synonymously with other older and
better-known words.
[2] The purchasing power of money fell during this century to about a third
of its original standard. £3 (say) would purchase under Charles I the
necessities which £1 would have purchased under Henry VIII. Nearly all the
_receipts_ of the Crown were customary. Most of its _expenses_ were
competitive. It continued to get but £1 where it was gradually compelled to
pay out £3.
[3] Before any trust is established in this country, the first step is to
"interest" one of our politicians. The Telephones, the South Wales Coal
Trust, the happily defeated Soap Trust, the Soda, Fish, and Fruit Trusts,
are examples in point.
[4] By which word "_property_" is meant, of course, property in the means
of Production.
[5] That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later page.
[6] By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage of
the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls (which need
no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy of his capital, and
will part with them at "so many years' purchase." It is by taking advantage
of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to
the advantage of the dispossessed.
[7] Thus you can raid the brewers in a society half-Puritan where brewing
is thought immoral by many, but proceed to railway stock and it will be a
very different matter.
[8] In using this metaphor I at once record my apologies to those who
believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes, and confess myself an
old-fashioned parabolist. Further, I admit that the triangles in question
are spherical.
[9] Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire
and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles
of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under
the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the
Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have
been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have
been bartered against a great number of wood-palings from the Baltic not
exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used
to be the squire's hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of
production in the hands of the Sassoons.
[10] How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legislation can
easily be tested by taking parallel cases, in one of which working men are
concerned, in the other the professional class. If I contract to write for
a publisher a complete History of the County of Rutland, and in the pursuit
of that task, while examining some object of historical interest, fall down
a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher. But if I
dress in mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives me a month's
work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am wounded in that
occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted to my advantage, and that
roundly.
[11] But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a Bill in
Parliament!