Chapter 7

PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS

How are the men fittest for posts of industrial power to be selected from the less fit?

This problem solved automatically by the existing system of private and separate capitals.

The fusion of all private capitals into a single state capital would make this solution impossible, and would provide no other. The only machinery by which the more efficient directors of labour could be discriminated from the less efficient would be broken. Case of the London County Council's steamboats.

Two forms which the industrial state under socialism might conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions prevalent among the majority.

Estimate of the results which would arise in the former case. Illustrations from actual bureaucratic enterprise.

Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case. The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses, brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise. Illustrations.

The state as sole printer and publisher. State capitalism would destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop.

But behind the question of whether socialism could provide ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any adequate stimulus.