employer, he could not make them work to gratify his wants. Personal
desire does not add to personal power, neither does it add to other
people’s power. Desire, want, hunger, may direct action; but it is not a
productive force, it is a tendency to segregate and consume, not to
produce and distribute.
Now see the effect of the position here laid down.
Consumption is but a means to production. Production is a natural
function of Society—organic, interdependent, instinctive. Production is
promoted by increasing social energy and social consciousness, besides
the self-evident condition of maintenance.
The organic action of Society necessarily involves a common nourishment,
as it is even now seen to involve a common defence, and beyond that it
requires a progressive increase in social stimulus. Our increased
consumption is an accompanying condition of our increased activity, as
the hard worker should eat more than the idle; but it is the
well-distributed nourishment that promotes the activity, activity does
not nourish. Now since the life and progress of Society depend on our
best production, it is the natural duty of Society to so distribute
nourishment and stimulus as to promote that production. A rich, strong,
free, intelligent, thoroughly educated society will produce far more
than a poor, weak, foolish, uneducated society.
The tremendous productivity of America does not result from our wanting
more than other people, as is popularly supposed, but from our having
more. Not only the great natural advantages of the country, not only the
independence which left men more free to work, but our public
institutions for wide distribution of social advantages, such as free
education,—these have combined to make the American not a greedier, but
an abler man. Note in small instance the difference between our custom
of free service of ice-water in the theatres, of programmes and the
like, of toilet conveniences in the great stores, and all such matters,
as compared with the twopence or fivepence you have to pay extra for so
much as a napkin in an eating house in England.
“But,” says the Englishman, “you have to pay in the end.” We are willing
to pay in the end. Any decent man is willing to pay for what he has had.
It is the difference between the “European plan” and the “American
plan.” So soon as a more enlightened society provides more and more
fully and freely for the needs of its citizens, so much the more
cheerfully will they be willing to pay for it.
Our personal work in the specialised service of the great social body
which maintains us is our payment for goods received. The slave works to
avoid the whip. His labour might be termed whip-dodging. The employee
works to obtain bread withheld. His labour is called “bread-winning.”
The free and socially conscious human being works because he likes to,
because he can’t help it, because it is his honourable return in small
degree for the immeasurable benefits he has received from infancy from
his supporting society. We have established a very binding sense of
“duty to parents” because we believed that the father by his unaided arm
supported the child; the mother by hers reared and trained it. The
parents unquestionably give the child its physical and mental endowment.
But if we proportioned our duty to parents to the value of our inherited
constitutions and temperaments, some parents would get short shrift.
Beyond the gifts of birth, the mother’s breast, and the tendency to
benefit of parental love, what else the child receives is from Society.
Parents were parents and did what they could in savage and pre-savage
eras. That parents are wiser and tenderer is due to our progress in
Socialisation. That they are richer and more powerful is not due to
parenthood, but to Society. The heaped-up increment of all the years,
the highly developed products of our industry and skill, the discoveries
in science, the masterpieces of art,—these are all social products not
parental.
The child needs to be supplied with all that he can healthfully consume
of this his social inheritance, his birthright as a human being. Some
children have more of the social products than others because their
parents have an arbitrary and unnatural “ownership” of these products;
but as a normal condition of sociology, all children have this claim
upon their great social entail, with no “right of primogeniture” or
other usurpation to interfere. So supplied, and so taught to recognise
the true supplier, it will be as easy to rear our children in a sense of
duty to Society as it is now to duty to parents, and more so, because
this later, larger claim is so indisputably true. With the full
productive power of the race finally set free and pouring out on normal
lines, there will be no lack of social benefit for all.
We have seen the economic advantage of wage labour over slave labour;
can we not see the even greater economic advantage of free labour over
wage labour?
XVI: OUR POSITION TO-DAY
_Summary_
_Fact and delusion. American advantages and possibilities. Possible
consciousness. Perverted Press. Falsely maintained position. Grade A and
grade G. Soul paradoxes. Old Adam. Arbitrarily opposed “Leisure Class”
and “Working Class.” Parasitism actual and potential. Dead matter in
live body. Sour grapes. Charity an evil. Helplessness of rich man trying
to establish right relation. Furnishing employment, i. e., furnishing
payment. Unhealthy secretions resultant from over-consumption. Law of
private servants. Doctor with a herald. Degraded art. Human value in
work. Painful result of social disconnection in leisure class. Working
Class suffers differently. Higher social position of Working Class. All
human labour collective. False classification. Economic relation of
sexes, result. Effect on child. What he should be taught. The round man
in the square hole. Extended ill effect of malposition in social
organism. Waste of energy, inferior workmanship, deterioration of social
tissue. Progressive mal-nutrition. Genius._
XVI
OUR POSITION TO-DAY
The difference between our real position in social development, and that
maintained in our minds, is very great. It is as if a strong, capable,
rich man suffered from mania, had a delusion that he was a puny, feeble,
evil-minded wretch, and acted like one. Could the delusion be removed,
he would act like what he really was and be happy.
Taking our own country as a type of social progress, what do we find to
be its real conditions? In the first place, it has every material
requisite for health and growth. It occupies a piece of the earth’s
surface big enough and varied enough to supply all the physical elements
of triumphant advance. It has, second, not only a base of the best human
stock, but a large and steady influx of all human stocks; it represents
the blended blood of all races, a world-people truly, prototype of that
cosmopolitan race which will ultimately cover the globe. This gives a
chance for all possible development in stock and manifests it. It allows
also all religions to contribute their best, all arts, all sciences;
every line of special usefulness known to man is known to us.
There is already sufficient intelligence to administer world-interests
competently, as shown in clear-headed captains of industry. There is
already sufficient “social instinct”—_i. e._, human love—to make
elaborate and costly provision for our defectives and degenerates, to
push earnestly for reforms and improvements in every direction. Yes,
there are quite enough ardent “homophiles,” warm lovers of the kind,
already in the field to do all of that sort of work we really need. The
reason they do not accomplish it all is partly the lack of intelligent
recognition on the part of the rest of us, and partly limitations and
errors of their own minds. They care enough, but do not know enough. So
here we are, in plain fact, rich, strong, intelligent, loving, quite
able to live in magnificent wealth, peace, and happiness.
In equally plain fact we are living quite otherwise.
We should manifest perfect physical health and beauty. We are, on the
contrary, nearly all sub-well, very many sick, and very few beautiful.
When we look at the possibilities of the human body, as shown in ancient
Greece, and then at the kind of cattle we are content to be now, it does
no credit to our intelligence. We should manifest a common grade of
education which would give to each mind an area of thought including the
earth and sky, plants, animals, and minerals, the wonders of science,
the powers of manufacture, the whole history of the human race. This
would be possible to practically all of us with right use of our
educational advantages. We do manifest, on the contrary, a universal
ignorance, even in this comparatively well-educated country, a feeble,
purblind, sticky little brain stiff with prejudice, shackled with
habits, blinded with superstitions, and narrow, narrow to the paltry
limits of one human animal’s own family!
Of course most of us know in a vague way that there are other peoples,
that there were other times; but these knowledges hang in the background
of our minds like faded wall-paper, lie far from us, disused and
unfamiliar. The occupied area of the brain, the part we think in and
feel in all the time, is the tiny spot of ego-consciousness. It is as
though a man owned the Waldorf-Astoria and was content to live in a
bushel-basket. It is quite possible for the average mind, properly
educated, to waken each morning to a consciousness as wide as the world,
full of light and air, with the facts of life seen in true distance and
proportion. This does not necessitate accurate, special knowledge of all
branches of human achievement, but a general knowledge that there are
branches, and how they branch. A rightly spent youth should easily give
this to every normal child.
But we, on the contrary, waken each morning to the cramped, overtrodden
field of our immediate personal consciousness only. The affairs of the
world, our world, loom vague and distorted about us, while our own,
forced upon us by night and day, are so absurdly magnified by being held
too near that they easily shut out the world. Our press, which should
give to each mind each day its world-view of current progress, is so
perverted in its function by the cramped minds of its egoistic
functionaries, that it gives instead a weird kinetoscope of what it
thinks will interest us! As if a general, waiting for dispatches from
the field, should be entertained by competing orderlies with funny
anecdotes! As if those anxiously waiting for bulletins from the sick
room should be provided with impressionist pictures of the patient’s
relatives!
We do not occupy a hundredth part of our mind-space, no, nor a
thousandth. And in this darkness, this cramping limitation, with but a
partial and restricted education and the false world-views of our
misguided press to relieve it, we blunderingly creep about in the great
world-functions we _must_ serve, each of us imagining that he is taking
care of himself. The difference between our real position and our false
and artificially maintained one is like this: If, for instance, certain
marked improvements in telegraphy have been invented, raising our social
efficiency in that line of distribution to grade G, that is our
legitimate condition; but if these improvements are destroyed by
misguided workmen, bought up and suppressed by misguided
property-owners, keeping our telegraphic efficiency back in grade A,
that is an illegitimate social condition. We are _really_ in grade G,
but artificially in grade A.
If, again, the machinery of democratic government is open to all, our
legitimate condition is that of full democracy; if a large proportion of
persons fail to exercise their political functions, preferring to remain
in a lower grade, or if an entire sex is forcibly prevented from
exercising them, that is an illegitimate condition.
The economic conditions of society to-day are confessedly paradoxical.
The gain in facility and speed of execution is million-fold, and yet men
are required to work almost as many hours as before their improvement.
The expressed wealth of the world is enormous, and the power to multiply
it not nearly used, yet a vast proportion of our members are not fully
supplied with the necessaries of life. In ways too commonly known to
need enumeration here we may observe this strange difference between our
_real_ period of social evolution, with its beneficent results, and the
existing state of Society.
The persistent survival of lower social forms, becoming more injurious
with each advancing age, is one conspicuous feature in the case. That
we, the foremost industrial nation, should have preserved that early
status of labour, chattel slavery, past the middle of the nineteenth
century is a historic anomaly; that we still preserve the yet lower
status of female domestic labour is a worse one. That we should maintain
side by side, in the same age, a democracy for men and a patriarchate
for women is a brain-splitting anachronism.
Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of social progress
furnish some ground, at least apparently, to those who assume it to be
extra-natural, and who postulate direct interference by Spirits of Good
and Evil to account for the peculiar facts. We need no such childish
hypothesis, the facts in the case are quite sufficient. Our painful and
irregular social development is due merely to the presence in a highly
organised body of the artificially maintained egoism of a previous
unorganised condition. The “old Adam” in us is simply the
individualistic animal, still protesting that he is an individual in the
face of centuries upon centuries of socialisation.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our position to-day is that of
the strangely distinguished “Leisure Class” and “Working Class.” Here is
a social body whose existence requires mutual service. Here is that
service performed by that majority of mankind known as the “Working
Class.” The Working Class is the world. However he prospers, the man who
works is he who keeps the world going. His labours are the social
processes, he is Society. The Leisure Class deliberately cuts itself off
from Society, refuses to take part in its processes, yet continues to
live on its products.
This is parasitism, pure and simple. That it is not so pure nor so
simple as would render it easy to handle, or as would warrant us in
ruthless excision of a diseased mass, is due to the resistless law of
social relation which holds us still connected even when we think
ourselves separate. Your wealthy social traitor, refusing social duty
and absorbing social gain, is no more to blame than the workman, _who
would do the same thing if he had the chance_, because he believes in
the same false principles of economics. But as they stand the leisure
class is doing incomparably more harm.
The mere extra drain on our material wealth as rich a social body as
ours could easily stand. The mere malingering, the refusal to work, we
could stand; the social energy is so abundant, there are so many to
serve the world. But the position of the overconsuming non-producing
class is not merely negative and cannot be. Withdrawing from normal
social processes, the leisure class forthwith becomes the seat of
abnormal social processes, which affect the whole body most injuriously.
Every recognised folly and vice of these conspicuous ex-members of
society spreads its corrupting influence around in the healthy structure
which supports them. A live body cannot maintain dead material in its
substance without injury.
Much deeper than the recognised follies and vices, though they alone
have blackened history, lies the influence of the falsehoods on which
the leisure class rests its position. Let no live member of the body
politic make the mistake of _blaming a disease_. If any part of Society
works wrong, it should be studied, not hated; cured, not punished. In
our great organic union any common error works out its natural result,
varying in accordance with the part affected. The callosities and
deformities of our social body, its sudden illnesses and slow, wasting
diseases, call for our utmost wisdom and for a change of conduct, but
they do not call for childish rage.
This mischievous by-product called the leisure class can be eliminated
by healthy action on the part of the real social body. It has no
existence except as we make and uphold it. Like the criminal class and
the pauper class it is an inevitable result of our imperfect social
action, and that imperfect social action springs from errors in all our
minds, not merely in the minds of the diseased portion. The attitude of
the non-productive consumer is the legitimate result of our general
economic fallacies; logically, if conditions allowed, we would all
cheerfully join their ranks. As it is, we all, or nearly all, try to,
and the successful, knowing this full well, are naturally not much moved
by the criticisms of unsuccessful competitors. The flavour of sour
grapes is clearly perceptible in most of our animadversion against the
rich.
Moreover, when a human being of our day, coming into some share of the
social consciousness proper to the time, feels that he has no right to
this mass of other men’s labour in money form, he can find no way out of
his position on any basis of strict political economy.
Charity we know to be evil, though we still fool ourselves by organising
it and putting great numbers of intermediaries between giver and givee.
The currents of human production, as forcibly modified by our laws
resting on false economics, do accumulate masses of capital; given
individuals find themselves on top of the heaps, and they cannot get
off! If they flatly abdicate it is only to let some other eager aspirant
mount after them. There is something genuinely pathetic in a modern rich
man or woman, striving to readjust what he recognises as a
disproportionate provision and absolutely unable to do so. Every step he
would take is cut off by some traditional error.
“I too will go to work!” cries the uneasy Crœsus. “I will not sit here
and live on the wealth made by others!” But all cry out against him.
“Stop! Go back! You ‘do not have to work’! Work is only to get money,
and you have got it; be satisfied and leave the field to us! If you work
for nothing you lower the scale of wages! If you work at ‘union rates’
you rob some poor man of the job!”
Hemmed in by these theories there is nothing for the rich man to do but
to keep on working for even more money, which is commonly allowed to be
excusable if not commendable, or to go and play. The true “Leisure
Class” only plays. Their playthings cost much money, but as this money
goes back to those who make the plaything they justify themselves by the
“furnishing employment” theory. This is a very old fallacy, and
impossible to refute while we believe that work is a thing done to get
wealth, and that wealth may be legitimately “owned” to an indefinite
amount by individuals.
As Society increases in productivity wealth increases, and by our
arbitrary apportionment it increases in the hands of individuals—it has
to. These individuals holding all the goods and other people needing the
goods, yet the Pay theory—no goods except for previous work—acting
sharply here, the only legitimate method of distributing these
individual congestions of wealth is by “employing” as many as possible.
And as we do not consider _the work_ as the important part of the
exchange, but the pay, so we do not care at what the beneficiary is
employed, so long as he is paid.
What we call “furnishing employment” we really esteem as “furnishing
Payment,”—looking at the good, the real good in question, to be the
holder of many things, making it possible for the worker to also get
things,—the “Pleasure-in-Impression” theory acting with the Want theory
and the Pay theory.
So every developing society raises its specially rich individuals who do
not produce. They, in the increase of their inordinate consumption,
demand more and more service from their fellows, till, instead of one
healthy human creature easily producing more wealth than he can consume,
we have this spot of local disease consuming more and more of the labour
of other people, thus depraving more and more of the substance of
Society. All these caterers to abnormal appetites cease to be producers
in a healthy sense; they do not add to the well-being of Society by
legitimate products for social distribution, but add to the ill-being of
Society by unhealthy secretions centered in one spot.
If the production of this mass of workers abnormally localised is in
itself legitimate; that is, if the “employer,” _i. e._, the consumer,
consumes only useful and beautiful things, even so the effect is
injurious if he consumes too much; it is still local congestion, though
of healthy blood; but that position is intrinsically untenable. No
leisure class ever contented itself with really useful and beautiful
things. You do not make a Vitellius on wholesome food. Consumption,
pursued as an end, naturally develops into morbid excess, and the
caterers to it must produce unhealthfully. This is the hole in the
“furnishing employment” theory.
It is not being employed that benefits a man. If I pay a man a hundred
dollars a day to sit in one spot and twirl his thumbs, or to climb up
and down one post continually, I am not benefiting him, I am injuring
him. If I subtract a human being from social service and add him to my
private service I degrade him, unless I do more work by virtue of his
service. Here is the law of private service:
A human being is entitled to as many servants as he can do the work of
better.
That is, if two men, working separately, can produce to a certain amount
each, but if the two, combining, one serving the other, can then produce
through the one served more than the previous amount of the product of
both, that is a legitimate social relation. For the doctor to have a
helper to take care of and drive his horse enables him to do more and
better doctoring; he can justify his having a servant. But for the
doctor to “employ” a driver, a footman, a page, two outriders, and a
herald, would not add to his efficiency as a doctor; that would be an
illegitimate relation.
The overconsuming rich do mischief first in withholding from the social
circulation an undue amount of social products, as a mere miser—social
congestion; second, by withdrawing from the social service an undue
amount of labour for their own aggrandisement—a social excrescence; and
third, by _perverting the product_ of their private commando of workers,
generating unhealthy secretions in the body politic—a social disease.
The miser merely robs society to a certain degree, the employer of much
labour for his own gratification robs it by so much more, and beyond
that comes the steady deterioration of an illegitimately directed
product, a true poison, with the progressive breakdown of the tissues
ensuing.
This effect on Art is quite plain in history. The artist doing great
work for the public grows and serves the world. The artist catering to
an employer does not grow, but deteriorates. The work is not only
withheld from Society, to which it belongs, but is lowered in kind. Art
is always corrupted and lowered by the patronage of luxurious wealth. So
is manufacture. No plea of “furnishing employment” to the artist can
cover this injury to the world.
The artist should be working for the world which made him instead of
putting his social product in one man’s hands, and the work he does
should be noble and should improve, as it cannot in that position of
personal dependence. The value of an artist to the world is that he
shall do as good work as he can for as many people as he can reach; it
is of no use to the world that he be “employed” on other lines, nor is
it good for him.