Part 21
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.
Every worker stands in this same social relation. The value of a workman to the world is that he do the best work for the most people, not that he be “employed” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an ostentatious livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human being is to be measured by his value to society, and the value is in his work, not in his being “employed”—or paid.
Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to return to a healthy place in the world. He cannot work because he “does not have to,” and his efforts to re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious activity.
Now see the pitiful results. Cut off from normal connection with the living world by failure to produce, and only generating disease in his efforts to consume, the unfortunate ex-human begins to die. He may, if sufficiently wise and self-restrained, keep his body alive; members of the leisure class frequently live to a great age; but this well-preserved animal existence only allows more time to suffer from the unnatural exile. He is not part of the living world, and so falls victim to various hideous abnormalities. He dwindles and shrivels in social usefulness till, instead of a vigorous, valuable man or woman, you have the futile, inadequate creature which cannot even wait upon its own wants; or, keeping up animal health by caring for the body, he shows the deformity of his position in furious and senseless activities.
The most conspicuous feature of our leisure class is the elaborate round of purely arbitrary and unnatural activities in which they ceaselessly whirl. The only natural activities open to them, the physical, become abused and perverted in vicious excesses, and their other activities are a series of arduous games and sports, changing from age to age and year to year, the purposeless and hopeless spasms of social energy misused.
The working class, on the other hand, suffer differently. That they are underpaid is plain, that they are overworked is plain; we hear much of this of late years; what we do not hear so much of is that they suffer most from the same misunderstanding of what work is. Looking always at the Pay as the end, the Work only as a means, they labour drearily on like a blind horse in a treadmill, never seeing their real position in Society, their real duties, nor their real power. That the unproductive consumer should believe the absurdities on which his absurd position rests is comprehensible; but that the producer, not properly supplied with social nourishment, and overtaxed in the production of the very supplies he does not get enough of, should accept the basic fallacies which hold him in his even more absurd position,—this is not so comprehensible.
Perhaps what does account for it is this: that with all his labour and suffering the worker after all _is_ Society; he is in the main performing great service; he has a right to be more contented than the ex-man who does not work. He is in the more normal position, though he does not know it; and the sociological laws are always stronger in their action than our notions. As a matter of fact the working class, which does not mean merely the “labouring class” of our present terminology, but which includes all workers with hand and brain, is the world. They are the acting factors in those processes which constitute social life.
Through all these centuries of unbelief and misbelief they have done the things which kept the world alive. They have clothed the world, fed the world, housed the world, taught the world, beautified and improved the world; yes, and have lifted it from savagery to its present level. To-day in our democracy they need only enlightenment to see a further duty to the world in a better organisation of its economic processes. Thrilled as they are by the swiftly growing current of social consciousness, conscious as they are that things are wrong, anxious as they are to set things right, they are still hindered by these economic errors of us all.
Under the Ego concept they speak of “every man’s right to the product of his own labour,” a sociological absurdity. In the first place no member of Society has any “own” labour, our labour is all collective and co-ordinate. In the second place it is not the product of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, but the product of the labour of many other persons, of all times and places. In the third place it is not even “the equivalent” of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, it is a previous supply of the social product bearing no relation to his subsequent output except that of nourishment and stimulus.
In short, there is no true class-distinction in acceptance of those deep-seated errors which together modify the conduct of mankind so injuriously. The false classification we are treating is _the product of those errors_. With right economic belief and action there would be no division of Producer and Consumer, no Leisure Class, no Working Class, no serried ranks of Capital and Labour. All would produce, all would consume; all would work and all would have leisure; all would share in the social capital and the social labour,—both elements of social advantage.
The economic relation of the sexes is of enormous importance in our present-day problems, as I have endeavored to point out in my previous book, “Women and Economics.” The economic dependence of the female on the male, her food being obtained, not in industrial relation with society, but in the sex relation with the individual male, affects the race not only through the ensuing overdevelopment of sex, but through an artificial maintenance of primitive ideas and feelings in economics. The woman’s artless attitude of taking all that is given her and frequently asking for more, without ever entertaining the idea of return in kind, of paying for her keep, maintains in the race, as we have previously shown, the tendency to inordinate consumption, the quenchless appetite of a parasite. This parasitic appetite is the invariable result of economic dependence. We need not wonder at the evolution of a parasitic class when we maintain, or seek to maintain, a parasitic sex.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, another effect of this condition is, by its resultant exaggeration of the sex nature of the male, to maintain in him the belligerent and destructive tendencies which belong to a remote period of race improvement through sex competition, a period of animal individualism, and which work much evil in a period of constructive and co-ordinate industry. Where wealth and progress depend on the cordial intelligent interdependence of the group, it is most deteriorating to have maintained this primitive attitude of sex combat. Again, the male, being obliged to provide goods for several persons besides himself, and yet being limited in goods to the amount he can himself produce, the natural desires of the individual are augmented by the accumulated desires of the whole family, yet gratified only through him; and each man faces the world, with the output of one, yet requiring the income to support six—or whatever number he represents! According to the Want theory this is a beautiful provision of nature for augmenting the man’s output. In the light of fact it does nothing of the kind. It simply augments his desire to get—in no way adding to his power to give. That moving mirror of life, our literature, is one long picture of the effects of this incarnate appetite at home, dragging ever at the man’s purse strings, and pushing hard against social honour, social duty, all the high traits of citizenship.
The child, most important of all, reared in this atmosphere of continual demand, seeing his father looking on the world as a place to hunt for prey for his mate and young, seeing his mother do nothing whatever but minister to the family needs, inevitably grows up to look at life in the same way. To his growing soul, the world appears to be a number of houses with families in them. The business of life appears to be to keep house for these families. The mother does this in a life of personal service. The father does it in mulcting “the world” as far as he is able.
If, on the contrary, a young human being grew up to see his father regarding his work for humanity as the chief duty in life, his mother with the same attitude, both regarding the consumption of goods as but a means to further and better work, and those goods always explained to him to come, not from the individual exertions of his father “wrestling with the world,” but from the combined exertions of that world—that great, rich, kind, ever-fruitful, and generous world of willing workers which feeds all its children so well,—but I stray into consideration of future conditions instead of present.
At present we have for the common lot of humanity that painful exhibition known as “the round man in the square hole.” Of all human troubles, none is so universal as this—a man’s work does not fit him. His income is insufficient, his output is insufficient, and he does not healthfully enjoy the process of living. A general condition of misadaptation, with necessary results of mal-nutrition and mal-production,—that is the prominent and visible symptom of our deep-lying psychological errors.
Consider the life of a typical average man.
He is misborn, misfed, mistaught, mis-clothed, misgoverned, to a varying degree. Instead of having a clear view of the social life and his place in it, he has a false and distorted view of his personal life, and only sees the social action as it infringes on him. He is surrounded from infancy with poor workmanship, the grudging product of those unhappy, misplaced men in square holes. The education which should be his introduction to the great and beautiful facts and laws of life, is too often a “bread-winning” process, practised by celibate women, as being more respectable than other work, and introducing him merely to a mass of unrelated facts and old ideas. The higher the field of social service, the less does “whip-dodging” or “bread-winning” help, and none is higher than teaching.
Thus mishandled, the boy grows up without the aid of that subtle discernment and delicately applied special training which would have brought out his best faculties. He is a blurred, indeterminate, self-contradicting group of faculties, he has no unerring organic preference to lead him to his work. He is the nearest approach we can make to that “all-round man” we hear so much of; but the intricate duties of social service do not furnish us with one-sized cylindrical holes for our machine-made pegs. Into some hole he must go, we will not feed him else; so in he pops, and “settles down for life.”
That is our common phrase for a permanent establishment in the active service of Society, otherwise known as “self-support,” “earning one’s living,” “maintaining a family.” Our average man is not expected to love his work, to enjoy it, to grow continually through it. He does all this sometimes, but too rarely. Our methods of education have been specially esteemed, not because they taught the child to like what he did, but taught him to do what he did not like. We take it for granted that he will not like his life work, and so seek to fit him for continued application to distasteful service.
In such work as this, there is a continuous waste of nerve force. Compelled attention, and action that is not led by interest and fed by the natural discharge of energy along preferred lines, are suicidally wasteful. In Nature’s effort to reduce this steady leakage of life force, she transfers the action to the domain of habit as rapidly as possible; and the sufferer experiences that much relief. Dislike, the exhausting effort of enforced attention and the plunging and kicking of more normal impulses toward other activities, give way at length to a dull contentment, a patient submission to monotonous routine, and some pale pleasure in its monotony.
There are three large distinct evils to Society in such an artificial misplacement of its members. First, the work done is not as good nor as plentiful as if it were done on lines of true organic relation, by the men specialised in power and preference for that work. In the second place, the man is weakened and worn out prematurely by the unnatural effort to do what he does not like, what he is not fitted for, what is not his own special work; thus further reducing the output. And in the third place, the overtaxed and unhappy worker requires all manner of extra inducements and palliations to keep him at his unsuitable task. He has to have rest, more and more vacations and changes, or breaks down sooner. He has to have various fictitious excitements in his work—making it a game, a race, or a fight; to make up for its lack of normal interest.