THE REFUGES OF EFFICIENCY.
Will efficiency then, you may well ask, when driven out of all public
employment, find refuge somewhere? Certainly it will. In private
employments and in employments paid by public companies. Barristers,
solicitors, doctors, business men, manufacturers and authors are not
paid by the state, nor are engineers, mechanics, railway employees; and
so far from their efficiency being a bar to their employment, it is
their most valuable asset. When a man consults his lawyer or his medical
adviser he obviously has no interest in their politics, and when a
railway company chooses an engineer, it enquires into his qualifications
and ability and is quite indifferent as to whether his political views
coincide with the general mentality of the people.
It is for this reason, or at least partly for this reason, that
democracy tries to nationalise all employment, as a step in the
direction of the nationalisation of everything. For instance it can
partly nationalise the medical profession by establishing appointments
for doctors, at relief offices, schools, and _lycees_. It can also
partly nationalise the legal profession by appointing state-paid
professors of law.
Already the State has considerable control over this class of person,
for most of them have relations in government employment, whom they do
not wish to bring into bad odour by seeming hostile to the opinions of
the majority. The State, however, wants to hold them in still tighter
control by seizing every opportunity of nationalising and socialising
them more completely.
The State wants also to destroy all large associations, and to absorb
their activities. The state purchase of a railway, for instance, is, in
the first place, a means of exploiting the company; for there is always
a hope that the State will be able to filch something out of the
transaction; but its chief recommendation lies in the fact that it
suppresses a whole army of the company's officials and employees, who
were under no obligation to please the Government, and who had no other
interest but to do their work properly. The State will thus transform
this free population into government employees, whose primary duty is to
be docile and subservient.
Under the extreme form and under the complete form of this regime, that
is to say under socialism, everyone will be a government official.
Consequently, say the Socialist theorists, all the alleged drawbacks
above mentioned will disappear. The State, the democracy, the dominant
party, whatever you choose to call it, will no longer be obliged to
select its servants, as you say it does, by reason of their subservience
and their incompetence, because every citizen will be an official. Thus
too will disappear that dual social system, under which half the
population lives on the State, while the other half is independent, and
prides itself on its superiority in character, in intelligence and in
efficiency. Socialism solves the problem.
I do not agree. Under socialism, the electoral system, and, therefore,
the party system will still exist. The citizens will choose the
legislators, the legislators will choose the Government, and the
Government will choose the directors of labour and the distributors of
the means of subsistence. Parties, that is, combinations of interests,
will still exist, and each party will want to capture the legislature in
order to secure the election, from its own number, of the directors of
labour and the distributors of the means of subsistence. These directors
and distributors will be the new aristocrats of socialism, and they will
be expected to arrange "soft jobs" and ampler rations for the members of
their own group or party.
Except that wealth and the last vestiges of liberty have been
suppressed, nothing has been changed, and all the objections above
mentioned still hold. There is no solution here.
If it were a solution, then the socialist government could not long
remain elective. It would have to reign by divine right, like the
Jesuits in Paraguay. It would have to be a despotism, not only in its
policy but in its origin, in fact a monarchy. No intelligent king has
any inducement to choose incompetent men as his officials. His interest
would lead him to do exactly the opposite. You will say that an
intelligent king is a very rare, even an abnormal thing. I readily
agree. Except in a very few instances, which history records with
amazement, a king has exactly the same reasons as the people for
selecting as his favourites men who will not eclipse nor contradict him,
and who consequently seldom turn out to be the best of citizens either
in respect of intelligence or character. Elective socialism and despotic
socialism have the same faults as democracy as we understand the term.
Besides, in truth, the drift of democracy towards socialism is nothing
but a reversion to despotism. If socialism were established, it would
begin by being elective, and as every elective system lives and breathes
and has its being in the party system, the dominant party would elect
the legislature, consequently it would constitute the Government and
would extort from that Government, simply because it has the power to
extort it, every conceivable form of privilege. Exploitation of the
country by the majority would result, as in every country where elective
government prevails.
A socialist government therefore is primarily an oligarchy of directors
of labour and distributors of subsistence. It is a very close oligarchy,
for those beneath it are quite defenceless, levelled down to an
equality of poverty and misery. It is a form of government very
difficult to replace, for it holds in its hands the threads of such an
intricate organisation that it must be protected against crude attempts
to change it, and so it tends to be a permanent oligarchy. It would
therefore concentrate very quickly round a leader, or at any rate,
relegate to the second rank the national representatives and the
electorate.
Such a course of events would be very similar to what occurred under the
First Empire in France, when the military caste eclipsed and domineered
over everything. It became continuously necessary to the State, and
though that necessity passed away, it was soon recalled. The caste then
closed its ranks round the leader who gave it unity, and the strength of
unity.
* * * * *
So under socialism, more slowly and perhaps after the lapse of a
generation, the directors of labour and the distributors of food,
peaceful Janissaries of the new order, would form themselves into a
caste, very close, very coherent, and (unlike legislators for whom an
executive council can always be substituted), quite indispensable, and
would close their ranks round a chief who would give them unity and the
strength of unity.
Before we knew socialism, we used to say that democracy tended naturally
to despotism. The situation seems somewhat changed, and we might now say
that it tends to socialism: really nothing has changed. For in tending
towards socialism it is towards despotism that it tends. Socialism is
not conscious of this, for it imagines that it is journeying towards
equality, but out of these utopias of equality it is ever despotism that
emerges.
But this is a digression which refers to the future; let us return to
the matter in hand.