Part 6
The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the /Distributive State/. The second may be called the attempted establishment of the /Collectivist State/.
Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the more _practical_ in the sense that they deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they propose.
The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the _less_ practical of the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): "On such and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history, Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in society."
In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the reformer who desires well-distributed property.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.
For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds, continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction, disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to the society in which it takes place.
Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners to sell again to a few.
In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens in the State is _working against the grain_ of our existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism--that is Collectivism--is working _with_ the grain of that society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs were partially atrophied from disuse: "Do this and that, take such and such exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs." The second is like a physician who should say: "You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease." The Physician is the Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.
It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.
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If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?
I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that would attach to general redistributions? To say "none shall own" and to confiscate is one thing; to say "all should own" and apportion ownership is another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his own cause.
If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work to-day in a Capitalist society!
If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards. Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners, of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid for the smallest share.
One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of "employment," and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery of administration?
I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.
On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread.
So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk of a "Capitalist phase" of society as the necessary precedent to a "Collectivist phase." A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it "furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership." Collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine--and all the rest of it--exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?
The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.
To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent. and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it would seem)[5] "buy out" any existing Capitalist body upon favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.
There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a Capitalist community is not amply familiar.
In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could, by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms, even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly used to both.
This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to be realised.
I say, "of the last generation." To-day that simple and superficial judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that with every new reform--and those reforms commonly promoted by particular Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general--another state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third thing is the /Servile/ State: a State, that is, in which the mass of men shall be constrained _by law_ to labour to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.
Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in general show that this new form of the State is upon us?
To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding divisions of this book.
Section Eight The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State
I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the Servile State.
Of these three interests the first two represent the Reformers--the third the people to be Reformed.
These three interests are, first, the _Socialist_, who is the theoretical reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the "_Practical Man_" who as a "practical" reformer depends on his shortness of sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom it is being imposed. What _they_ are most likely to accept, the way in which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of all, for _they_ are the material with and upon which the work is being done.
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(1) Of the _Socialist_ Reformer:
I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.
The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (_a_) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (_b_) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of _their_ vice, ignorance, and folly.
These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.
Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?
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(_a_) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is what _most_ men would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is a _right_), and what _all_ men would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.
To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention--as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance--the expedient of "_buying out_" the present owner.
It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer's action.
He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to "buy out") certain sections of the means of production.
But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.
Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.
This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.
You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure."
This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred; as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.
To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.
When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.
Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.