of distribution, and have begun to supply some of the necessities of
life on a wiser plan, as in our system of public education, where we
frankly reverse the position. We therein say: “Children are members of
Society. The maintenance and progress of Society require that its
members be educated to some degree. This degree of common education the
individual earning power of the parent cannot provide, but the
collective funds of the community can.” So we publicly distribute
education, and even enforce it—or try to—on the clear ground that the
output of the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and that
Society cannot afford to leave that income to be measured by a fraction
of a low-grade worker’s output.
Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do indeed object to
this free public education, maintaining that since effort is only made
to satisfy wants, therefore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you
decrease by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society.
The advocates of free public education, though still clinging to their
idols in other departments of life, maintain that education is a
different matter, and point with honest pride to the results, showing
that a publicly educated community does produce more and behave better
than one wherein each man must provide as he can for his children. But
in spite of this patent proof they still refuse to fairly admit the new
principle involved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one.
The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply of energy which he may
or may not discharge, but that he will not discharge it unless forced to
by necessity. If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy
whatever, he will not work. This does apply, fairly enough, to an
animal’s effort to take things, but does not apply to man’s effort to
make things. The fact is that a man has energy according to (_a_) his
physical well-being, and (_b_) his access to social stimulus; and that,
having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the forced retention. The
practical question before existing Society is how to supply the most
energy to its members and direct it to the most use.
In free education we do supply the young social factor with both energy
and direction, so that he grows up better able to work and to work
rightly than if left to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory,
that the way to make a man work is not to give him anything until he
does.
The real process of distribution is to circulate our stores of social
nourishment as widely and freely as possible, that we may be always more
and more able to work. We are quite consistent in this Pay theory of
ours. We carry it out even in regulating the amount of our payment. We
hold that not only shall a man have nothing unless he works, but that he
shall in no case have more than the equivalent of his work, that no
person shall receive anything unless he has “earned” it, given a full
equivalent. We are forced to admit that in the life about us this
principle is a conspicuous failure; we see those who work the most
getting the least; we see those who have the most working the least; and
we seek to explain this anomaly by a modification of the Pay concept to
this effect: that a man should be paid not only in regard to the amount,
but to the value of his work.
With this idea we thought we had reached the height of justice, yet we
are forced to admit that this does not serve, either: that the men who
do the most valuable work for Society are precisely those least paid,
sometimes most punished, and that the men receiving the largest rewards
are often the most ordinary functionaries and sometimes rascals. Does
anyone presume to claim that selling kerosene oil is so precious a
service to Society that the head pedlar should have more money than
anybody on earth? Is the maker of steel rails or huge cannon a nobler
servant than the maker of bread or the teacher of children? All these
are forms of social service truly, but are they fairly paid? The facts
do not bear out our theory at all, and we only attribute it to other
malign influences, never dreaming that our basic idea is wrong. In
sociological law there is no relation whatever, either in amount or
quality, between normal human work and any possible “pay,” any more than
there is between the work of an eye and a leg and the amount of blood
they get. Normal human work is organic action. It is a result of
previous good received, not an effort to obtain goods withheld.
That under the system of slave labour a man will work under fear of pain
is true. That under the system of wage labour a man will work under hope
of a reward is true. But both these systems are transient, superficial,
soon outgrown by any live society; neither of them affects in the least
the underlying organic law of human work. Our conscious minds have not
kept pace with social growth. We are trying to administer the processes
of an advanced society on lines of pre-social theories. If anyone seeks
to point out these great sociological facts, we cry, “These are Utopian
dreams, millennial visions; you are a thousand years ahead of your
times!”
Whereas it is we—we, the general public, with all these hereditary
heirlooms in our heads in place of facts—that are ten thousand years
behind them! We try to explain and assist the highly developed and
absolutely interdependent social processes by arguments from a
long-outgrown era of individualism. Theories of individual effort,
incentive, reward, competition, and “survival of the fittest,” we apply
to our own organic functions. If they do not fit, so much the worse for
the functions!
If we _were_ individuals, like the beasts, it would all hang together
well enough, thus: Here is a Bear. His business is the same old series,
maintenance, reproduction, and improvement; to be, to re-be, and to be
better. All of these ends he serves by the exercise of his own personal
abilities. These abilities, being _purely personal_, are only called
into exercise by personal wants or impulses. If the Bear found his food
on a plate before his cave every day he would indeed suffer from fatty
degeneration; his powers would decay, he would become less and less Bear
because he did less and less Bear-ing.
And conversely, if suitable difficulties (not too great) intervene
between him and his food, he develops the faculties to meet the
difficulties, and improves. If he is not a smart or strong Bear, and
cannot get much for himself and the little Bears, why, let them die;
better Bears will survive them, and the race improve by their absence.
If too much survival of the fittest left too much food for the
survivors, so that they became less fit, why up would pop others less
fit also to compete for the food, and thus a beautiful level of
Bearishness is maintained. This method of evolution we see plainly and
admire, perhaps unduly, as a “natural law.” All laws are natural. If not
natural—they are not laws; we only thought they were.
The essential difference between us and the Bears is in our _organic
relation_. The Bears have no common interests, common functions, common
good; we have. A perfect balance of highly superior Humans, muscular and
ferocious, with just food supply enough to keep up the fighting, and
just fighting enough to keep down the food supply, is scarcely a social
ideal. The social organism alters the matter completely. The human race
improves through production and exchange of products—Work. The work of
the human race improves under laws of organic evolution, of increasing
specialisation and interdependence. As society advances a man profits
less and less by what he does for himself, more and more by what others
do for him.
The improvement of a human being is not in his own hands, but in the
hands of other human beings. Our line of racial advance is in serving
one another, like any other group of organs. This common profit in a
common product leads us to wish to improve that product. The product of
human beings is improved by supplying the needed energy, stimulus,
direction; by _putting into the individual_ in order that we may get out
of him the pay first, the work afterwards.
This reverses the whole proposition. It is no longer a matter of the
individual workman seeking to satisfy his wants _à la_ Bear. It is
Society seeking to raise the productive value of its integers by
carefully supplying those forces which produce more and better work.
Quite without knowing it Society does this to a considerable extent,
hence the working value of a member of an advanced society is greater
than that of a member of a low society; but because we have not known
the real laws of human production, we have continued to interpret the
whole field of social activity in terms of individual competition.
The supply of a man’s needs we have tried to limit strictly to his
earning power, refusing to observe that there was no ratio whatever
between what a man needs and what he can do—unless, indeed, an inverse
one. The fact that a man, well started in lines of work suited to him,
will produce continuously long after all his needs are supplied we have
tried to account for by assuming new needs as the necessary incentives.
Nothing could be clearer—to our view. If a man works only in order to
supply his needs, then a given man who does work worth a thousand times
as much as another man’s must of course need a thousand times as much.
He _must_, because there is no other reason for his working. And if the
working power of the average man shows large and general increase, it is
only to be accounted for by shining ranks of hitherto undreamed-of
needs, which were evolved to lead him on!
So the missionary, acting on this theory, tries to rouse the contented
savage to want things, holding that attitude to be a productive one; and
the economist, satisfied with his theory, never looks to see if there is
any observable connection between want and work, in race, class, or
individual. In _reductio ad absurdum_ the Want theory comes to this. Man
works to supply wants. As the act of working does not supply wants, this
involves another clause; man works to get wealth to supply wants. And
this, if a real law of nature, involves some inevitable connection
between the clauses: work must produce wealth and wealth must supply
want. Also, if a real law, there must be some proportion between these
clauses, the less the want the less the work, the greater the want the
greater the work, with the same proportion in the “wealth” which is the
intermediate factor understood.
This would make the proposition: A given amount of want urges to an
equal amount of work which secures the desired wealth; or, Want equals
Work and Work equals Wealth.
If this be so we shall find in society those who want the most do the
most work, and those who do the most work have the most wealth. Poverty
would be a healthy state, inevitably developing into wealth. Is this the
fact? Hardly. What is the fact? This: that man does the most work who is
best able to do it, and likes it most.
The way to make people work is to make them able and willing, strong,
skilful, ambitious, enthusiastic. When we wish to develop horses to work
more and better than previous horses, we do not seek to attain that end
by cutting off their oats. The power to work comes from the energy
already supplied, not the hypothetic energy of a future reward.
The “pay” comes first; not as payment, but as investment. A man’s work
is his payment to Society for value received, and he has to receive it
before he can return it. The conscious attitude of the worker should be
that of gratitude, of a proud and lavish return for the rich supply
received from infancy; his unconscious attitude one of irresistible
pressure, discharge of energy. Each of us owes the world our best,
because to it we are indebted for all we are and have. In personal
intercourse we all know the difference between services done for love,
or from a sense of honourable obligation, and services done merely for
pay. We know the dignity and honour of the first attitude, the meanness
of the second. And yet we prefer to have the whole world’s vital
processes degraded and minimised to the level of that hireling service,
rather than elevated and multiplied as the limitless outpouring of
richly developed members of society.
To which the Want theorist replies: “It is not what we prefer, but what
is,” to which again I answer—It is not. The facts of sociology do not
bear out the Want theory. The true place of that theory is in the stage
next to primitive slavery. The first compulsion to co-ordinate effort
was force and fear and pain. Only the slave in danger of death could be
made to work. The next compulsion to the still unsocialised ego was that
of hireling self-restraint, of withheld food. Observe that this is a
purely arbitrary and social condition, involving the ownership of that
food by someone else. Primitive man ate without working for many
thousands of years, and does yet in many a favoured isle.
He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes for it, even
fights for it. But he does not work for it at that stage of social
evolution, much preferring starvation. Later on, being no longer a free
agent, the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why, work he
did, under the action of such pressure as he could then feel. In that
period of evolution when only cruel slavery made men work, the thought
that they would ever work in the comparative freedom of the contract
system would have been scouted as wildly visionary and Utopian. We can
see something of this among our own freedmen, members of a much earlier
social status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body and failing
to respond at once to the same stimuli.
Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no compulsion save
self-interest, they do not work as industriously as further advanced
races. This does not prove that self-interest is less powerful than
compulsion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour, but merely
that the negro race is less socialised than the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in
order to aid in his social development, are learning to supply him with
the social stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in economic
evolution, just as slave labour was, but the incentive of self-interest
is no more final than that of compulsion.
A man will work if you make him, but also, being further developed, he
will work if you do not make him, but merely pay him. A man will work if
you pay him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do
not pay him; that is, if he is not “paid” individually, through personal
advantage, but collectively, through social advantage. We must remember
that in the way of relating effort to result collective man must “work
for his living” as actually as individual. But it is _their_ living
which they work for; the effort and the result are in common, and to the
individual is supplied the great organic energy to work with. The normal
goal to labour for, in a highly socialised race, is the common interest,
a far stronger attraction than the personal interest.
See how our misbeliefs affect the course of a single industrial process.
Here is the wheat crop, for instance, one of the world’s most important
products. The human race, collectively, produces an enormous amount of
wheat. The same number of workers, without the support of a large
organised society, could not produce that crop, or in any way distribute
it. This amount of wheat, produced collectively, is for our collective
consumption. The individual producer raises a large surplus beyond his
own needs for the social needs. The line of economic advantage is plain:
To produce the most wheat with the least expense of social energy, and
to distribute the most wheat with the least expense of social energy to
the largest number of consumers. The social advantage lies in the
food-value of the wheat, in the ensuing increase in the productivity of
the race.
Now see how our wrong ideas work against this advantage. The individual
producer, shutting his eyes to the collectivity of the process,
considers that he “owns” the wheat, and that he “raised it himself.”
Therefore, instead of facilitating its distribution with the least
expense of social energy, he seeks to obstruct it by demanding as much
social energy as he can get,—_i. e._, the price,—the first step in the
exchange. Of course, being largely isolated, he does not succeed in
getting much, and, equally of course, he is at present not supplied with
his fair share of social energy beforehand; but admitting these facts,
it remains true that his mental attitude is the same as that of the
larger dealer: he looks on the world’s wheat as a source of profit to
him to any extent that he can reach.
Then come the great army of transporters. Thanks to the high
organisation of this social function, the distribution of the wheat goes
on with great facility and dispatch as far as mechanical convenience is
concerned, and, by the concentration of the business in a few hands,
much of the dribbling man-to-man subtraction is saved; but alas—the
little subtractions of many small private carriers are only exchanged
for the enormous subtractions of the few great public carriers.
Even at this extremely developed stage of evolution in the social
process, even in a business so public as to require public grants of
land and privilege, and designated as “a common carrier,” in the very
face of these flaring facts, this weird survival of a remote past, this
prehistoric Ego, with its Want theory, sits gobbling in the stream of
social distribution, like some dinotherium mysteriously preserved to do
mischief. This Common Carrier, managed by a few men, seriously believes
the distribution of the world’s wheat to be intended for the private
aggrandisement of the Carrier, and sucks from that life-giving stream as
large a supply of racial nourishment as “the traffic will
bear”—sometimes more! Of course the Carrier must be provided with his
share of social nutrition in order that he may carry, but why he should
claim this vastly disproportionate amount is not so clear. It is not
clear, that is, in the light of social laws to-day, but it is clear
enough as a logical deduction from the antique premisses so devoutly
believed in.
The stream of wheat, robbed of much of its value, pours on and reaches
the final stationary points of distribution, and there again the
dealers, wholesale and retail, imagine that this mass of food was
brought across the world for _their_ benefit, and proceed to extract
from it as much as they are able. Thus the food reaches fewer people in
smaller quantities, and those who get it are obliged to give back a
large proportion of its nourishing power in payment. The circulation of
the world is very seriously interfered with by this morbid action.
Conceive now for a moment of wheat as a means of promoting the social
good. Of a Bureau of Agriculture carefully posting from year to year the
amount needed in different localities. Of a Bureau of Transportation
carefully arranging from year to year for the most prompt and easy
transfer to those localities. And of a Bureau of Local Distribution
seeing to it that the wheat was as promptly and easily spread among the
consumers.
That would mean the greatest gain and the least waste and expense. That
would be business sense on the part of the world. To reduce the outlay
of effort and increase the income of nourishment, with a commensurate
increase in social productivity,—that is the line of economic advantage
for the Society of our time, as it was in the physical economy of the
Individual of the Palæolithic Past.
But this Palæolithic Individual with his pre-Palæolithic ideas is a
great nuisance to-day.
XIV: CONSUMPTION (I)
_Summary_
_Previous propositions. Alleged selfishness. Social instincts as natural
as individual. Root error on Consumption shown in Heaven, Utopia, etc.
Honour in acting. Contentment theory. Limit of happiness in getting,
limited; in doing, unlimited. Pleasure in eating, result of idea. Effect
of this concept on Society. Impression merely incentive to expression.
Transmitters, not vats. Collecting mania. Nature of ownership. Right of
property. Social relations psychic. Movable rights. Law of property
rights. Consumption means to production. Consumption must precede
production. Natural limits of Consumption. Cause of excesses. Ill effect
of morbid Consumption on producer. Must produce more than consume. Ten
houses. List of propositions. Existing economic concepts. Influence of
position of women. Women natural producers. Men natural destroyers. Men
have monopolised production. Women made purely consumers. Women’s
powers, confined to family, breed selfishness. Generosity bred outside
home. Feminine consumption become morbid. Vampire. Parasite. Hired
matrimony. Woman as excessive consumer came of “Society.” A disease not
a “function.” “Society columns,” medical bulletins. Effect on
consumption._
XIV
CONSUMPTION (I)
We have laid down certain propositions in the preceding chapters,
namely, that men are part of a great Social Organism; that as parts of
it they are continually supplied with its stimulus and nourishment; that
as parts of it so nourished and so stimulated, they must discharge the
swelling current of social energy in social action, which is Work; and
that the business of a conscious and intelligent Society is so to
produce and distribute social wealth as to maintain and increase this
flood of energy, the discharge of which in our highly specialised
industries is supreme delight. Against these propositions will be at
once erected that common bulwark of ancient superstition, man’s
selfishness. We generally believe, and as generally act on the belief,
that the individual selfishness of man is such that nothing would induce
him to act for the good of society, even though that good plainly
included himself.
This theory of our selfishness is not borne out either by the scientific
facts of our sociological position or the everyday facts of life about
us.
The theory dates from a time when men were still mainly individual
animals, when it was true. Being imbedded in that heavy, slow-going,
ancient brain, and hammered in by each subsequent generation, it has
remained with us until to-day. What we need to realise is that social
development has brought with it other feelings, quite the opposite of
selfishness, but equally natural, which are found in us all in varying
degree; which we see at work about us, and yet which we refuse to admit
into our “minds” as facts. On the contrary, we sturdily maintain in our
minds the false ideas and act upon them, working much evil thereby.
The organic connection of human beings develops among them those social
instincts which are necessary to promote their common good, a class
which we, seeing their pre-eminent value, have classed as “virtues,”
calling the disproportionate action of more primitive individual
instincts “vices.” Neither term is true. Egoism was a virtue in the
individual status; altruism, or rather, omniism, is a virtue in the
social status; both are natural. Our misinterpretation and false naming
have prevented our easy assumption of the new qualities, that is all,
the past concept being more potent to our minds than the present fact.
Among the group of root errors still retarding our development, none is
more mischievous than that wherein we assume pleasure to lie mainly in
impression rather than expression. We believe that what we get makes us
happy rather than what we do, and therefore consider our doing as a
means of getting. Perhaps this idea antedates even the Want theory; but
it is needless to grope too critically among the errors of the remote
past, they are all old enough.
The utmost extreme of this early error of ours is found in our general
scheme of Heaven or even of an earthly Utopia. When we give free rein to
fancy in seeking to portray happiness we arrange that an individual may
have everything he wants, and be provided with some eternal miracle in
the way of appetite, it is to be hoped, that he may keep on wanting it!