IX

THE FUTURE OF LABOUR. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

CONTROVERSIAL HALLUCINATIONS

A correspondent in America writes to suggest an article on the struggle

between Capital and Labour, and what it is coming to. To-morrow in the

United States is the legal holiday for the celebration of Labour, and

it seems an appropriate date for some general remarks that have been

accumulating in my mind about this indisputable struggle.

I am afraid I shall disappoint my correspondent. From some phrases

in his letter I am inclined to think he expects me to be violently

partisan in this issue, to foretell the doom of the capitalist system

and the great days when Labour alone shall rule the earth. This shows

a lamentable ignorance of my voluminous and--I am told--correctly

I think--reiterative works. I cannot hope for the abolition of the

capitalist system, because I do not believe there is a capitalist

system, and my only aspiration for Labour is that it should get right

off the earth. I believe this conflict between Capital and Labour is

like that great struggle between Arianism and Trinitarianism, which

tore the Roman world to pieces thirteen or fourteen centuries ago; that

is to say, I regard it as a struggle about theoretical definitions

having only the remotest relationship to any fundamental realities

in life. Most Christians nowadays, I remark, are Arians professing a

Trinitarian creed, and much the same effacement may overtake this false

antagonism of Capital and Labour. We may come to a world of capitalist

professing to be a Labour community. Or we may follow quite other and

more rational lines of development.

Most of the issues upon which men are antagonized in crowds--because of

the uniformity of our intelligences and the eagerness of our minds--are

false issues. Throughout all history most human conflicts have turned

on false issues. The issue of patriotism, for example, is so false that

it is indelicate almost to the treasonable pitch to say so.

But, braving the indelicacy, can any intelligent person argue to-day

that patriotism nowadays has anything whatever to do with race, or

thought? Take a concrete example to illustrate this current insanity.

My distant cousin and namesake at Chicago, Professor H. G. Wells,

the eminent physiologist, living under the stresses of his local

patriotism, is obliged to pay for the construction of cruisers and

aeroplanes to protect himself, the American Constitution, and the

Standard Oil Company against me, and I am obliged to pay for the

construction of cruisers and aeroplanes to protect the House of

Windsor, the Anglo-Dutch Oil people, and this Wembley Exhibition

Empire of ours, against him, when, as a matter of the most obvious

common sense, we are so much akin and so much after the same ends,

that what we both need is mutual protection from these monsters of the

imagination that have got hold of us, and which are quite likely to

gas us or blow us to shreds before they have done with us. Clearly we

two are parts of the same biological, intellectual, and moral strain,

we belong to the same civilization, we are of one outlook, blood, and

name, and our chief real political interest is to get rid of these

people in uniform, these diplomatists, and the difference of our flags,

which may in the end waste most of the good of both our lives in a

fatuous war.

And it is equally false to imagine that because the evil passions of

men can be involved to the pitch of judicial murder--at least in such

barbaric countries as Soviet Russia or Italy or Massachusetts--there

is any profound matter involved in this century-old conflict between

Capital and Labour that muddles our minds and devastates our public

affairs to-day. It is a conflict embodying certain easy misconceptions

of social, and particularly of economic, life. It is an incidental

squabble exaggerated to the dimensions of a fundamental process. But it

rules a huge proportion of current political activity. It is another

of the great hallucinations which make history in our time and prepare

infinite perplexity for the historians of the days to come.

This “capitalist system” has never been defined; it has merely been

indicted. Try to define it. “Labour” is equally undefined. According to

a Communist informant, “Labour” is the proletariat, that is to say, the

people who produce offspring for whose education and upbringing they

have made no provision. It is the propertyless class which works for

wages and breeds so that it keeps those wages down to the subsistence

level.

There certainly is such a class in most countries where there are towns

and cities, but it is a residual class. It is much more in evidence

in a mediæval city like Hankow than in a modern city like New York.

In China the brigand armies now prevalent are drawn largely from that

class. It supplies the gang labour which under recent conditions

took the place of gang slavery. The pressure of its hunger exercises

a degrading influence upon life in general. So far it justifies the

“proletarian” legend. But it is absurd to project its characteristics

and limitations over the great multitude of workers in a modern

community. It is preposterous to present economic life as substantially

the exploitation of this class by a hard-minded minority.

In the United States the actual proletariat, as we have defined it,

must be a very small proportion of the population. There is less of

such exploitation of degraded propertyless people now than there was a

hundred years ago, and it is a diminishing factor in economic life.

If we abandon this romantic, this Victor Hugoesque conception of

“Labour” as living in rags and slums, and begin to incorporate

semi-skilled and skilled workers with savings, insurances, and

other property and a certain minimum of education, and peasants

with leases or owning land, we shall cease to have any definite

boundary to stop us, and before we know where we are we shall find

ourselves in perplexity whether in this or that case we are dealing

with a capitalist or a worker, “exploiter” or exploited. We may draw

our social boundaries, we shall find, anywhere. If we draw them

sufficiently high we may arrive at last at the proposition that every

activity in the State is “Labour,” and that nothing lies outside that

term except a few usurers, gamblers, criminals, official parasites, and

the heirs of rich men.

The economic processes of the modern community and the psychology of

these processes are, as a matter of fact, extraordinarily complex and

still largely unmapped, and they yield to no such elementary antagonism

as the Capital and Labour picture assumes. Human beings carry on by use

and wont. They are imitative, habitual, mechanical, lazy, greedy, and

afraid; there is no such simple, shark-like consumption of the honest

toiling community by highly intelligent property owners as the legend

suggests. Property in excess does not make most people either active

or aggressive; generally it makes them indolent, insolent, evasive,

and wasteful. Property in small quantities brings out much inherent

meanness and causes much anxiety. It terrifies more often than it

stimulates. Want of any possessions leaves people spiritless, driven,

or desperate. A sense of secure earning-power is at the same time the

basis for the satisfaction of most people who are satisfied in the

modern State, and the thing most conducive to activity.

It is across the seething, swarming stir of miscellaneous modern

life that these great collective hallucinations of patriotism and of

class assertion sweep. We are worried or out-of-sorts, and suddenly,

under their influence, we see ourselves threatened or oppressed and

the victims of a malignant conspiracy to keep us down. If we get the

patriotic delusion, this inclines us to war; if the Capital and Labour

notion, to revolution. When Labour Days and Labour holidays come round,

a certain number of us gather in meetings and processions to menace the

phantoms that we suppose afflict or threaten us and our kind.

Menaces find a billet somewhere. A number of rich and well-off people,

secretly conscious of a poor contribution to the general well-being,

struggle not only against their consciences, but against a gnawing fear

of retribution and expropriation. They have a lingering and troublesome

belief that God may be righteous, and that these vague threatenings of

the uncomfortable and limited may foreshadow the method of His judgment.

They are probably wrong upon the latter count, at any rate. I do not

believe that under modern conditions, in a modern mechanicalized State,

common low-grade labour is capable of carrying through a revolution,

much less a big social reconstruction. Something like a world

revolution may occur in the smash that may follow another great war, a

greater Soviet experiment, for example; but it will not be in reality

a constructive revolution, but merely a phase in the process of that

human collapse to which war must surely bring us all, if we do not head

off war. There will be no Labour-ruled world because, as I have said,

“Labour” so conceived is a phantom form imposed upon a great complex of

forces.

But these rich and well-off idle people do believe that phantom

is real, and a multitude of politicians, journalists, and

organization-running rogues prey on their fears to extract subsidies

for political groups, newspapers, and “anti-Socialist” propaganda,

and to conduct a persecution of “Left” opinion. They embody the

“Capitalist” antagonism to “Labour,” and give it a voice and a

countervailing crazy group of ideas, fears, loyalties, and motives.

They “frame up” cases to murder talkative fish pedlars and the like,

and feel much safer for a bit after such squalid acts of defence

against these absurd but impotent threats to their comfort and

self-complacency.

Meanwhile the mills of God are grinding against them in a manner

they do not understand nor suspect. They really believe they are a

beneficent “Capitalist System” malignantly pursued by the unsuccessful,

and as sincerely do a great multitude of excellent people believe that

they are “Labour” implacably oppressed by a “Capitalist System.” It is

just as though we classified all the colour in the world as either pink

or green.

The more we clear our minds of this prevalent hallucination about

Capitalism versus Labour the more we shall be able to distinguish the

real processes at work in our world now. So far from there having

been a progressive enslavement of the masses of mankind during the

past hundred years, there has been a great release from toil. In the

civilizations of the ancient world, slavery or serfdom seems to have

been a necessity in the economic process. The only source of power,

except for a slight use of wind and water mills, was human or animal

muscle.

The most fundamental facts in human history during the past two

centuries have been, first, the rapid progressive replacement of human

toil, not merely of muscular toil, but of toilsome skilled effort, by

a magnificent development of mechanism; and, secondly, an enormous

increase of the amount of energy available for human purposes. A

certain fraction of this increase has no doubt been consumed in

reckless breeding; a much larger part has been and is being wasted in

the traditional fooleries and cruelties of war and war preparation,

due to our continued toleration of the uniform and title-worshipping

classes. And the increase in prosperity itself has been, and is,

much less rapid than was possible, because of the vague but powerful

traditions of proprietary method which have hampered the development of

new larger-scale dealing with national resources. The enlargement of

the machine has outrun the lawyer, the legislator, and the banker, and

they have still to come up to its enlarged possibilities. Until they

do, the machinery of modern life clogs, drags, and is dangerous.

But when all these deductions have been made, there remains in hand a

huge achievement of welfare, freedom, and hope in the last two hundred

years due entirely to inventions and discovery, science and common

sense. The facts of material advance are altogether more important in

the history of the past two centuries than the amount of subjection

and human frustration that has occurred during this period. The former

are new phenomena, the latter are old conditions of life that have, if

anything, diminished.

The line of progress lies not in these disputes about proprietary

rights and claims upon the ever more bountiful gifts of science and

invention, but in the search for the most efficient means of turning

these gifts to the general advantage. There is a growing science of

industrial psychology and industrial efficiency. It is, I believe,

likely to develop into a very powerful group of ideas and realizations.

At present it concerns itself mainly with the question of how to

secure the most effective labour. We discover that long hours are

often less profitable to every one concerned than reasonably short

hours; that air, light, and cheerful conditions for the worker are good

investments. The investigations spread to an inquiry into the worker’s

home. Presently we shall realize that the waste of strikes, unwilling

service, sabotage, and other forms of industrial friction is largely

due to the want of reasonable hope in the worker’s life. It will be

good business and good politics to give the worker hope and security.

And it will be impossible to study industrial efficiency in the mine

and field and workshop, we shall find, and ignore the bearing of the

country house and the director’s home upon the quality of the economic

services rendered. In other words, we shall bring the social system to

the touchstone of efficiency instead of to the bar of justice.

Few people nowadays defend or attack private property on grounds of

abstract morality and justice. Ownership is not an institution of the

order of primary right. Ownership is an institution that has to be

justified. The case of individualism against collectivism stands or

falls almost entirely upon the assertion that competitive individualism

gives a larger and better product always than any non-competitive

system. The case of the socialist is that this is untrue. Without

limitation it is a very incredible assertion that the individualist

makes. Neither case has ever been proved, but the study of the

psychology of economic life, as it extends, is bound to turn what are

at present mere wranglings for a greater share in the economic output

into a search for the most productive arrangements for work and living.

Then mankind may find that while the administration of transport,

credit, land, and natural resources are far better taken out of the

domain of private proprietorship into the collective control either

of public authorities or _quasi_-public trusts, there are other

directions, householding, many forms of cultivation and construction

and artistic work, for example, in which a great increase in

independent proprietorship is desirable. While socialization progresses

in some directions, individualism will assert itself in others. And

always machinery and mechanical organization will be dispensing

with toil. In the long run it seems probable that the sort of thing

we understand by “Labour” now will dwindle to a small, minor, and

unimportant class in the community, and that simultaneously there may

be an absorption of much privately owned wealth by a scientifically

conducted collective administration. While we are representing

life in melodramatic colours as a struggle between the “Haves” and

the “Have-nots,” the less romantic but infinitely more subtle and

interesting reality of a struggle between scientific organization on

the one hand and the alliance of personal greed with chaotic stupidity

on the other may be undermining all the grounds of our melodrama.

Such being my convictions, I do not find myself excited by the

advent of a Labour Day to any demonstrations against the Capitalist

System. I refrain with perfect ease from gathering in mass meetings or

pouring in my myriads, with banners and bands and red flags, through

the streets of great cities. I do not believe Labour is marching to

triumph; I believe it is soaking away towards absorption in a modern

mechanicalized community of a middle-class type. A day will come when

Labour Day will be a quaint and interesting anniversary, like fireworks

in November in London or beating the bounds of some old English borough.

_4 September, 1927._

X

WHAT IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE WORTH TO MANKIND?

MEDITATIONS OF AN EMPIRE CITIZEN

The other day I was turning out the drawers of a bureau, and I came

upon a little collection of printed cards and papers, the agenda and

minutes of a dinner-discussion club of which I was a member far back in

the days of good King Edward, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was raising

the banner of Tariff Reform. It was a small club of thirteen, and I

was the least in it; never a government then or since that has not

contained a member or so of it; and the aim of all our talks was to

sharpen our ideas about the Empire to which we belonged and to come to

some sort of agreement, if we could, about what we wanted to do with

it and how we had to serve it. We never came to any agreement; Tariff

Reform cleft us from the beginning, but I doubt if any one of us failed

to give something or to learn much in these agreeable encounters.

I sat recalling these old discussions and linking them with writings

of mine that preceded and followed them. I have been writing and

thinking and talking about the Empire for thirty years. My ideas have

changed and expanded; my knowledge has grown, I have moved with the

times. Except that I have put more of it on record and so checked my

steps more exactly, my thoughts and feelings about the Empire have

probably been very like the thoughts and feelings of thousands of

mediocre liberal Englishmen. It is interesting to recall some of the

chief phases of the story.

I have had a phase of disillusionment about the Empire since 1919

so intense that I have come near to a complete antagonism to

“Imperialism.” But as I sit over these papers and think not merely

of my own reactions, but of some of the “Empire builders” and Empire

rulers I have known--Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Hugh Clifford, Lord

Olivier, for example--I find myself still reluctant to turn against all

the dreams of that liberal Imperialism of twenty years ago. For twenty

years ago I was a firm believer in the great importance of the British

Empire to mankind, and as hostile as I am to-day to the Nationalisms

that set themselves up against it.

I am still--I am even more--anti-nationalist to-day. I see no good

at all in people getting together into groups to exaggerate and

overvalue their own peculiarities and run down, exclude, and injure

the rest of mankind. I find nothing charming in the faked-up national

costumes--which are all alike all over Europe, women in muslin caps

and bits of red and black stuff, and men in pearl buttons--national

arts--thumby bits of wood carving, pottery, and lace that are

even more the same thing everywhere--national dialects, national

literatures, and national symbols, which pretend to discursiveness

but really aim to pickle a dismal uniformity of petty localism,

conceit, narrow-mindedness, and customary tyranny, throughout the

continent. I am all for Cosmopolis and the high-road, and when I find

nationalism rising to intricate interferences with trade and money,

the free movement of men and goods about this none too large a planet,

boastings, hostilities, armies, and the strangulation of the general

welfare in the interests of the gangs exploiting patriotic instincts,

my lack of enthusiasm deepens to positive hatred.

I think I was born cosmopolitan. I could never sympathize completely,

though I realized the reality of their peculiar grievances, with the

preference of the southern Irish to be lords upon their own dunghills

rather than partners of the Ulstermen, the English, Scotch, and Welsh

in the world adventure of the Empire, and, though I had qualms about

the aims and methods of Cecil Rhodes and Dr. Jameson, I thought it

was better to keep South Africa united and part of a great world

system than to permit two illiberal republics to monopolize the Kaffir

vitality and mineral wealth of a great region that should benefit all

humanity. I have never found Nationalism even a plausible excuse for

the sterilization of some great area of potential wealth because a

backward people happened to live upon it. The whole earth is for the

whole race.

But even in those dinner-club discussions of twenty years ago very

marked divergencies of opinion and spirit became manifest. Our opening

discussion was upon the possibility of an Imperial Zollverein, and that

question, we found, went to the very root of our ideas. Did we want to

unite the Empire, economically, financially, politically, militarily,

against the rest of the world or not? Was it to be a closed fist in

imitation of the Teutonic Zollverein, or an open hand to all the world?

I recall with satisfaction that it was I who appealed to geography and

introduced the figure of the open hand. Our British fingers, I argued,

spread over the whole keyboard of the world. We could never sound a

uniform note. Canada, India, New Zealand, were incurably divergent,

except in the idea of a common peace, and that uniformity in diversity

was our asset. We had the confidence of foreign states in our tropical

and other “raw-product” possessions, because we stood--in those

days--not for monopolization, but the open door. The less assertive

we were, the more possible it would be for other kindred powers to

work with us and work out forms of co-operation with us in our task of

coalescing and evolving into a world-wide civilization.

That sort of idea about the empire was very prevalent in those

days of twenty years ago. Kipling went about calling upon Americans

and Germans, and indeed all Europe, to take up the “White Man’s

Burthen”--and at the time of its first issue that memorable burden was

intended to be something quite other than a mere bundle of loot. The

Rhodes scholarships are another fossil good intention which remains to

us from that age of potential incorporation. Americans and Germans at

least were to be made like-minded with the British at Oxford! The idea

of the eventual amalgamation of the Empire with other Powers in some

comprehensive world control was, indeed, constantly cropping up. This

involved no more thought of overcoming or conquering other competitors

than did the big series of bank and industrial amalgamations that have

occurred in Great Britain since the war. It was a pool we had in mind.

The Empire was seen as the pacific precursor of a practical world

State. Our “raw-material” possessions were seen as part of the common

estate of the human race, our share in a trusteeship; our Navy as a

world police that might be at last as denationalized as the Knights

Templars. These expansive possibilities were what attracted me to that

club, and that, if I may name him, was what attracted Mr. Bertrand

Russell, who was also one of our thirteen.

But against us we found from the outset a group of Empire patriots,

who were all for the Empire of the clenched fist. They were fierce

fellows who believed that life was a violent struggle and that what

one had in the world had to be held savagely against all comers. They

did not want to unite the world, they wanted to subdue it to their

conception of what was British. Whatever was British was right--kings,

Lords and Commons, our remarkable orthography, Ascot and the Derby,

cricket and the Boat Race, the faithful Sikh and Simla, and the Navy.

The outer world had to admire us, serve our purposes, and carry itself

humbly towards us. They were, in fact, glorified Nationalists; their

Imperialism was merely Nationalism distended, arrogant, intolerant of

rivalry. Our fiercest member at every feast prepared our minds for war

with Germany. He saw things quite simply: we had the best place in

the world, and Germany wanted to take it, and we had to prepare for a

fight. Education, efficiency of production, these Imperialists of the

clenched fist saw only as necessary evils forced upon us by German

competition. Their attitude to the Empire was what one might call the

United Services attitude, a pose of unquestioning devotion. It is the

exact parallel of the devotion that surrounded the German Kaiser in his

glorious days. “The Empire right or wrong,” they said, “whatever it

was, whatever it became, whatever it did.”

Naturally and logically they wanted a tariff wall and indeed

every sort of wall about this divine reserve of earth, great

armies and an overwhelming fleet, and outside it nations as

poor, divided, and incapable of disturbing it as possible.

That was the Nationalist-Imperialist idea as distinct from the

Cosmopolitan-Imperialist idea that Russell and I embodied.

One evening when I was absent and the attendance was exceptionally

low, there was a great dispute between Russell and four of the

Nationalist-Imperialists. They were ready, they said, to die for the

Empire, or commit any informality to serve it. Russell said there

were quite a number of things on which he put a higher value than

the Empire, and that if it came to a choice on these cases he would

be against the Empire. This opinion I share. But that night the talk

grew heated, and Russell, without waiting for the next meeting and

reinforcements, resigned, and we saw him no more. Which was a pity,

because one great charm of those discussions was the depth of the

crevasses we found between us, and Russell was certainly the centre of

the deepest crevasse system of all.

This incident, however, did pose for me quite plainly what is after

all the essential question for all of us so far as our political lives

go, whether the political system we live in is to be regarded as an

end in itself, a divine unquestionable thing, or whether it is to be

considered merely a transitory means to a greater end, to be judged on

its merits, to be used, altered, and in the end gradually or completely

replaced by something better. The Roman citizen was compelled to

worship the Empire like a god, the Empire indivisible and eternal.

Many people in Europe and America would impose the same uncritical

abjection towards the American Constitution or the British Empire. You

must salute, you must stand, stiff and stupid. Behind this personal

abjection lurks moral corruption, a sort of collective scoundrelism.

You must not trade fair and square, you must favour “Empire” goods. You

must not publish scientific truth, but make whatever you discover an

“Empire” secret. You may spy, you may lie for the “Empire’s” sake. Such

“loyalty” I repudiate as an insult to humanity. I refuse my pinch of

incense on that altar.

And I will go on to say that a British Empire which does not seem

to me to be realizing the wide and generous dreams of the liberal

imperialism with which the century began is of no use to me, and I do

not believe the Universe will suffer it to continue. For ten years I

have seen the Empire going heavily and dully about its business; I

have seen it made an excuse for much meanness and clumsy violence.

It suffers in credit and direction by the hard “loyalty” of stupid

adherents and stupid representatives who do not understand how gracious

and mighty a civilizing organization it could be. They control it

and they cripple it. It carries a vast crowd of parasites who snatch

monopolies and profits in its name. It has lost moral prestige in

Ireland, in India, in China, and before all the world. Enormously.

Perhaps even fatally. To-day, what is it doing? Officially, I mean.

Is it showing any intelligent sympathy for the efforts of the more

progressive Chinese to found a modern State amid the ruins of the

antiquated Manchu system, or is it just bullying and blustering in the

confusion? Is it displaying the slightest generosity to the struggles

of its fallen and shattered ally and helper, Russia, to reconstruct its

economic life? Is it building up a free and friendly modern India? In

the past it did great things for Japan, and it gave unity and freedom

to and won the fellowship of Canada and South Africa. Is it doing

anything to compare with these former feats to-day? Why is it engaging

in a childish wrangle with the equally reprehensible Government of the

United States about which is to have the biggest navy? For what on

earth are these navies wanted now? It is improving its tanks, I gather;

is it improving its educational machinery? What is it doing with its

manhood? What chance has a boy of distinguished gifts born son of a

miner under the shadow of the Duke of Northumberland?

How much of its tremendous resources is at the disposal of scientific

research? In the measure of the available wealth and man-power, which

is doing the most for scientific work to-day--Moscow or London? Has the

British Empire made, indeed, one fine, great, and ennobling gesture

towards the future unity of mankind for the past ten years? Wembley!

Rodeos and military tattoos! Immeasurable things could be done with

the vast opportunity of the British Empire, but are they being even

attempted?