Part 20
Here, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, arises the true law of ownership, and ownership as natural as that of the beast of his teeth and claws, a true social law. It has no individual basis. Individuals carry their property on their bodies, it grows there. Society evolves detachable material adjuncts, the made things, the social medium. So far as this social medium is usable by all, it should be free to all. So far as it is peculiar to the specialised social functionary, it must be guaranteed to him. Society must guarantee to the individual those things which are essential to his social service. The civilised man has given up his power of caring for himself in order the better to serve Society. Society, to profit by this service, must insure right provision for the individual. In a clumsy, unjust, ill-managed way, it already does so, has always done so, it could not live else. But it has not done so fairly, or well, and, therefore, it is ill served, it suffers and sickens, and in repeated instances has died.
Again and again in history we may see the process: the nascent society developing, growing more and more specialised and interdependent, that development reducing the power of individual constituents to take care of themselves, self-interest weakening in the mass as social interest became increasingly necessary; and then the most primitive members of Society, those still most actuated by pre-social instincts, the surviving savages in civilisation, taking advantage of the immense social productivity, and claiming for themselves the social wealth.
They are not the world’s best servants. Their power is not the power of highly specialised talent or genius. It is a truism that the more ability a man has to serve Society in its advanced needs, as in the arts and sciences, the less ability he has to “make money,” as we call the process of individual absorption.
The gold miners and the mint “make money,” all productive labour makes wealth; but those who secure the most of it for themselves are of quite another class. The verb “to make” and the verb “to take” have not the same root.
This illegitimate development of ownership is injurious to Society. Wealth, in normal circulation, is productive, is a social advantage. Wealth, in abnormal secretion, is not only unproductive of good, but absolutely evil in its influence. Yet, the whole process, with all its mischievous results, is conditioned upon our false concept as to personal property and the right of ownership. Its glaring heights of evil are most conspicuous; but the mischief lies not in the special extreme instance, but in the general condition.
See the effect of a belief in unchecked polygamy. Under economic pressure, the mass of the people have but one wife, and so are saved the worst effects. But the crowded harems of the great show most shameful results—sensuality, cruelty, idleness, physical deterioration, conspiracy, murder. Are we then to blame the polygamist in proportion to the number of his wives; or merely to recognise the principle as wrong,—and the one-wived believer as much in error as Solomon? It is our common concept of ownership that is to blame, not Carnegie and Rockefeller.
See how the true principle would work out. Society is a unit, we are but parts. Social life develops the power to make things—the things which are essential to social life. Increase in these things is increase in social wealth and social power—a ceaseless line of development. The good of Society requires the best development of all its parts—that they may so produce more. The best development of all the parts requires the full supply of social goods.
The social goods belong to Society, are made by Society, for Society; and should be distributed to Society as widely, swiftly, and freely as possible; so adding to the social good. Now this line of talk, to the general mind, means a wallowing sea of communism. We see visions of a flat and uniform world, of no ambition, no distinction, no privacy, no private property, and therefore no life worth having. This is because we do not know what private property really is.
Legitimate private property includes all that the individual needs to consume. All the food he needs, all the clothes he needs, all the education he needs, all the tools he needs; to each person what he separately needs, and to each group what they separately need of the great fund of social advantages. Is not that property enough? All that a man can legitimately consume is his own, but not what he produces. That is his return to Society. What he produces is of no use to him, his dentistry, or surgery, or masonry, his teaching or acting, his manufacturing or transporting,—this belongs to Society.
We have erred in attaching the claim of ownership to the goods produced. It belongs only to the goods consumed. The property rights of the individual to his own food, his own shelter, his own clothing, his own tools of production,—be they paint brushes, books, or chisels,—need never be questioned. So fast as production becomes collective, the means of production become collective. Where a separate weaver had a right to own the separate loom with which he produced cloth, now the group of operators, from “hand” to “head,” have a right to own the mill with which they produce cloth, but not the cloth.
To whom then does the cloth belong, if not the maker? To the wearer, of course. Cloth, as we have shown before, is a social tissue, it is evolved for social advantage. It has to be worn by members of Society. We recognise this so clearly as to have laws commanding people to wear clothes, punishing them if they do not. Such laws might be justly applied to silkworms, but hardly to human beings, unless their clothes are also provided. No doubt a position like this seems impossible to our minds, so used are we to the other, to the present belief that a man owns what he produces, and no one has a right to it; but that he has no right whatever to the necessities of life—to the means of production.
Let us think fairly and courageously about it. Here is a man born. This product of his is yet potential, he cannot produce until he is grown. What he produces when he is grown, in kind and quantity, depends on what he consumes as a baby, boy, and youth. Now since Society needs his product,—not _he_, mind you, he has no use for the bricks or the books he will make,—since Society needs his product, and since that product is conditioned upon his previous consumption of previous product, Society, in its own interests, must see that he is supplied with all proper provision,—he has a right to it.
“A right” means an essential condition. Human rights are all social, conferred by social consent, and resting upon the social good. The right to individual liberty, the right to justice, any right of any time rests on the general acceptance of social benefit involved in those rights. We have seen long ago that the good of Society rested on the best human productivity; but because we believed that productivity to be conditioned upon subsequent reward, instead of previous supply, we defined our rights accordingly.
Our position was like this: Society needs our best product. Man will not produce, except to gratify his own wants. What he produces is his own, because it is essential to the gratification of his wants. Therefore, Society must guarantee to each man the product of his own labour.
The effect of the position is this: Conceiving ourselves to be independent units, conceiving our end to be the gratification of our wants, conceiving our product to be a personal possession, and only produced in order to gratify wants—we necessarily seek to limit the output of our work to the measure of our wants. The consuming capacity of the man is made the measure of his production, and under such a standard we see no way to increase production, except by increasing the consuming capacity, the wants. This is held by our existing economists to work well, but they overlook certain essential elements in the position.
The free production of the world is obviously not that of the persons who want the most or who get the most. No one can show that a man’s social value depends on his greediness. To want all things, to want them intensely, to want them continually, to want them to be of the best,—this does not add to a man’s industry, or intelligence, to his skill, ability, talent, or genius. The best and most work comes from those who have the most ability and inclination to work, though they may be, and often are, the most modest of consumers. But—and here is the neglected element in the case—if production is not free—if productive labour is under any compulsion, then truly those who want the most will, if they have the power, _compel other men to work the most_. That is, if you do not make things, but merely take them, it is obvious that the more you want the more you will take.
To recur to the status of slave labour. In this system productivity is under direct compulsion. It is proportioned to punishment. The owner of the slave labour, if he wanted things, took from the slaves the product of their labour, and the more he wanted the more he took. In this case the greediness of the owner is productive, his slaves produce more because he wants more. But if their labour were really free, his wants would not affect their productivity.
Again, in wage labour, we have the employer and the employee. What is an employer? He is one who “owns” what other men want. They cannot get what they want unless he gives it to them. Since these things which they want are the necessities of life, they must work for pay, they are not free.
The employer, if he wants things, takes from the employee the product of his labour; and, as before, the more he wants the more he takes. Since he must, in order to gratify his wants, keep these men alive and productive, he must return them something; but the action of his wants upon their labour tends to keep their share at a minimum. This we call the “iron law of wages.” We hold that it stands to reason that a man will give as little as he can to get what he wants. This is quite true, want does not promote productivity.
But these employees are not free. If they were independent of the 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.