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“. . . If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind.
THE CAPITALIST STATE IN PROPORTION AS IT GROWS PERFECT GROWS UNSTABLE
The reformer will not openly advocate the Servile solution. There remain only the Distributive and the Collectivist solution.
(a) Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work. (b) Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society.
I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organization of our modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent social provisions which show that it has actually begun.
There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which we may conventionally term Land, Capital, and Labor.
The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (i) That the citizens thereof are politically free: i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labor, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not characterized by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or even to a small minority. Such a Capitalist State is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other propertyless or
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The definition of the Servile State is as follows: - “That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor we call THE SERVILE STATE.”
First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to indigence.
Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those centuries we find no organized effort, nor (what is still more significant) do we find any complaint of conscience against the institution which condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labor.
Slavery is irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.
Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called The Faith, which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.
What turned an England economically free into the England which we know today, of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?
Capitalism that is, the ownership by a few of the springs of life was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind.
During the eighteenth century England came to be finally, though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other.
The lands and the accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown but they passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of England.
The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied.
The low-timbered place with its steadings and outbuildings, only a larger farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned after the Reformation and thenceforward into a palace.
in 1660, you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet.
He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common life which once nourished his social sense and the co-operative arrangements which had once been his defense had disappeared.
Capital purchasing his labor (and not the man himself) purchases but a cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must fend for himself; but to fend for yourself when you have nothing is to starve.
In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement.
Capitalism must keep alive, by non-Capitalist methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to death; and that is what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people.
Consider what is involved by the very process of production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or “profit.”
A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our civilization compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no prophet dares take it as yet for granted.
It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners.
The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which in action produces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the SERVILE STATE.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 labor 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.
The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number Of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that State Capitalist.
the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.
I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old laborers in the neighborhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have my self spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.
The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.
the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote.
Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public Courts can impose.
In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a, man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.
Substitute for the term “employee” in one of our new laws the term “serf,” even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term “master” for the word “employer,” and the blunt words might breed revolt.
A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official.