 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. The Survial State by Hilaire Belock. Section 8. To whom could the new industry turn for capitalization? The small owner had already disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken to pieces by no economic development but by the deliberate action of the rich. 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 cooperative arrangements which had once been his defense had disappeared. When you saw an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry, when you looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had already monopolized the bulk of the means of production in England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies. Nor was this all. The supplies once found, and the adventure capitalized, that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, ready to produce for you upon almost any terms, and glad enough if you would only keep it alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created when in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation they had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements of houses and of land. The rich class adopting some new process of production for its private gain worked it upon those lines of mere competition which its avarice had already established. Cooperative tradition was dead. Where would it find its cheapest labor? Obviously among the proletariat, not among the remaining small owners, what class would increase under the new wealth? Obviously the proletariat again, without responsibilities, with nothing to leave to its progeny, and as they swelled the capitalist gain they enabled him with increasing power to buy out the small owner and send him to swell by another tributary the proletarian mass. It was upon this account that the industrial revolution, as it is called, took in its very origins the form which has made it an almost unmixed curse for the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The rich already possessed of the accumulations by which that industrial change could alone be nourished inherited all its succeeding accumulations of implements and all its increasing accumulations of subsistence. The factory system, starting upon a basis of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mold which had determined its origins. With every new advance the capitalist looked for proletariat grist to feed the productive mill, every circumstance of that society, the form in which the laws that governed ownership and profit were cast. The obligations of partners, the relations between master and man, directly made for the indefinite expansion of a subject formless wage-earning class controlled by a small body of owners, which body would tend to become smaller and richer still, and to be possessed to power ever greater and greater as the bad business unfolded. The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, and not in industry alone. The great landlords destroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to their own advantage the common rights over common land. The small plutocracy with which they were knit up and with whose mercantile elements they were now fused directed everything to its own ends. That strong central government which should protect the community against the rapacity of a few had gone generations before. Capitalism triumphant wielded all the mechanisms of legislation and of information. It still holds them, and there is not an example of so-called social reform today which is not demonstrably, though often subconsciously, directed to the further entrenchment and confirmation of an industrial society in which it is taken for granted that a few shall own, that the vast majority shall live at a wage under them, and that all the bulk of Englishmen may hope for is the amelioration of their lot by regulations and by control from above, not by property, not by freedom. We all feel, and those few of us who have analyzed the matter not only feel but know, that the capitalist society thus gradually developed from its origins in the capture of the land four hundred years ago has reached its term. It is almost self-evident that it cannot continue in the form which now three generations have known, and it is equally self-evident that some solution must be found for the intolerable and increasing instability with which it has poisoned our lives. But before considering the solutions variously presented by various schools of thought, I shall in my next section show how and why the English capitalist industrial system is thus intolerably unstable, and consequently presents an acute problem which must be solved under pain of social death. It must be noted that modern industrialism has spread to many other centers from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its origin in this country. From the historical digression which I have introduced by a way of illustrating my subject in the last two sessions, I now return to the general discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may be established, the capitalist state is unstable, and indeed, more properly, a transitory phase lying between two permanent and stable states of society. In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the capitalist state. A society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to a body of free citizens, not large enough to make up properly a general character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of production and are therefore proletarian. We call capitalist. Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private ownership, but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands, and thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the great majority dispossessed, but at the same time citizens, that is men politically free to act though economically impotent. Again, though it is but an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that there will be under capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned exploitation of the majority, the free citizens who do not own by the minority who are owners. For wealth must be produced, the whole of that community must live, and the possessors can make such terms with the non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors. A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is subject to two very severe strains, strains which increase in severity and proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly capitalist. The first of these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon which the state reposes and the social facts which those moral theories attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which capitalism condemns the great mass of society and the general character of anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular upon the majority, which consists under capitalism of dispossessed free men. Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long present. The two combined make that destruction certain, and there is no longer any doubt that capitalist society must transform itself into some other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to discover what that stable arrangement will probably be. We say that there is a moral strain already intolerably severe and growing more severe with every perfection of capitalism. This moral strain comes from a contradiction between the realities of capitalist and the moral base of our laws and tradition. The moral base upon which our laws are still administered and our conventions raised presupposes a state composed of free citizens. Our laws defend property as a normal institution with which all citizens are acquainted and which all citizens respect. It punishes theft as an abnormal incident only occurring when through evil motives one free citizen acquires the property of another without his knowledge and against his will. It punishes fraud as another abnormal incident in which from evil motives one free citizen induces another to part with his property upon false representations. It enforces contract, the sole moral base of which is the freedom of the two contracting parties and the power of either. If it so, please him not to enter into a contract which once entered into must be enforced. It gives to an owner the power to leave his property by will under the conception that such ownership and such passage of property to natural heirs as a rule but exceptionally to any other whom the testator may point out is the normal operation of a society generally familiar with such things and finding them part of the domestic life lived by the mass of its citizens. It casts one citizen in damages if by any willful action he has caused loss to another for it presupposes him able to pay. The sanction upon which social life reposes is in our moral theory. The legal punishment enforceable in our courts and the basis presupposed for the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence of action in the midst of our fellow men. Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still perilously conducted, the moral theory to which capitalism itself turns for succor when it is attacked. Contrast I say its formula and its presuppositions with the social reality of a capitalist state such as England today. Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens as an experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One hundred forms of fraud the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive of controlling production are not or cannot be punished. Petty forms of violence and theft and of cunning and fraud the law can deal with, but they cannot deal with these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatreds of the masses of their dispossessed fellow citizens. The vast bulk of so-called free contracts are today Leonine contracts, arrangements which one man was free to take or leave, but which the other man was not free to take or leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation. Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far more important than any security afforded by law or than any machinery which the state can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the courts, but the withholding of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true master of the Englishman today is not the sovereign, nor the officers of the state, nor save indirectly the laws. His true master is the capitalist. Of these main truths, everyone is aware, and anyone who sets out to deny them does so today at the peril of his reputation, either for honesty or for intelligence. If it be asked why things have come to a head so late, capitalism having been in growth for so long, the answer is that England, even now, the most completely capitalist state of the modern world, did not itself become a completely capitalist state until the present generation. Within the memory of men now living, half England was agricultural, with relations domestic rather than competitive between the various human factors to production. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Servile State by Hilaer Bellach Section 9 This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our laws and moral phrases pretend and what our society actually is, makes of that society an utterly unstable thing. The spiritual thesis is a far greater gravity than the narrow materialism of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful of instability in the state than conflict of any other kind, and there is acute spiritual conflict. Conflict in every man's conscience and ill-ease throughout the Commonwealth, when the realities of society are divorced from the moral base of its institution. The second strain, which we have noted in capitalism, its second element of instability, consists in the fact that capitalism destroys security. Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our matter, but even without experience we could reason with absolute certitude from the very nature of capitalism, that its chief effect would be the destruction of security in human life. Combined these two elements, the ownership of the means of production by very few, the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike, there follows immediately from that combination a competitive market, where in the labor of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the capitalist. It fetches nothing when the laborer cannot work more in proportion to the pace at which he has driven, less in middle age than in youth, less in old age than in middle age, nothing in sickness, nothing in despair. A man in a position to accumulate the normal result of human labor, a man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form, is no more productive in his non-productive moments than is a proletarian, but his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the flywheel balancing the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With the proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect from capital, looks at a human being whose labor it proposes to purchase, cuts right across that normal aspect of human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties and character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security, along the line of his own individual existence, from birth to death. 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. As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production, perfectly free political conditions are impossible. A perfect capitalist state cannot exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and more fortunate nations had thought possible. 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. If you left men completely free under a capitalist system, there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labor in a very short time. Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to consider nothing whatever except the buying of their labor in the cheapest market, and the system would break down from the death of children and of our works and of women. You would not have a state in mere decline, such as ours is. You would have a state manifestly and patently perishing. As a fact, of course, capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme. So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted, the freedom of the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many non-possessors to strike any bargain at all lest they lack it, to exercise such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and the despairing to death. 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 in an increasing extent as it got a stronger and stronger grip upon the English people. Elizabeth's poor law, at the beginning of the business, the poor law of 1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip of capitalism, are original and primitive instances. There are today a hundred others. Though this cause of insecurity, the fact the possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive, is logically the most obvious and always the most enduring under a capitalist system. There is another cause more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of production, where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motives 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. If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of implements and stores, each will effectively watch his market, attempt to undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra demand for his article. Thus glut the market only to suffer a period of depression afterwards and so forth. Again the capitalist free individual director of production will miscalculate. Sometimes he will fail and his work will be shut down. Again a massive isolated imperfectly instructed competing units cannot but direct their clashing efforts at an enormous waste and that waste will fluctuate. Most commissions, most advertisements, most parades are examples of this waste. If this waste of effort could be made a constant, the parasitical employment it afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a most inconstant thing and the employment it affords is therefore necessarily precarious. The concrete translation of this is the insecurity of the commercial traveler, the advertising agent, the insurance agent, and every form of touting and cosening which competitive capitalism carries with it. Now here again as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and sickness, capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion and it is the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted to an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors, the company especially in this country by the ruin of the smaller competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men and supported by the secret political forces of the state. In a word, capitalism, proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners, is tending towards stability by losing its essential character of political freedom. No better proof of the instability of capitalism as a system could be desired. Take any one of the numerous trusts which now control English industry and have made of modern England the type quoted throughout the continent of artificial monopolies. If the full formula of capitalism were accepted by our courts and our executive statesmen, any one could start a rival business, undersell those trusts, and shatter the competitive security they afforded to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is political freedom. Before any trust is established in this country, the first step is to interest one of our politicians, the telephones, the South Wales coal trust, the happily defeated soap trust, the soda, fish and fruit trusts are examples in point. Freedom is not as a fact protected here by the courts and commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great English trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might bow the spirit of Europe law for centuries and dite those who would ruin him, citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Of this conspiracy he would find the judge and the politicians most hardly in support. But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of trade, which are the mark of modern England, are in themselves a mark of the transition from the true capitalist phase to another. Under the essential conditions of capitalism, under a perfect political freedom, such conspiracies would be punished by the courts for what they are, to wit a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any contract he chooses with any laborer, and offers the produce at such price as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the punishment of any conspiracy that may have monopoly for its object. If such perfect freedom is no longer attempted, if monopolies are permitted and fostered, it is because the unnatural strain to which freedom, coupled with restricted ownership, gives rise to the insecurity of its mere competition. The anarchy of its productive methods have at last proved intolerable. I have already delayed more than was necessary in this section upon the causes which render a capitalist state essentially unstable. I might have treated the matter empirically, taking for granted the observation which all my readers must have made, that capitalism is as a fact doomed, and that the capitalist state has already passed into its first phase of transition. We are clearly no longer possessed of that absolute political freedom which true capitalism essentially demands. The insecurity involved, coupled with the divorce between our traditional morals and the facts of society, have already introduced such novel features as the permission of conspiracy among both possessors and non-possessors, the compulsion provision of security through state action, and all these reforms implicit or explicit, the tendency of which I am about to examine. Section 6. The Stable Solutions of this Instability Given a capitalist state of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability by some method or another. It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid balanced upon its apex is in an unstable equilibrium which simply means that a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be an unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity for one another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives. If the capitalist state is in an unstable equilibrium, this only means that it is seeking a stable equilibrium and that capitalism cannot but be transformed into some other arrangement wherein society may repose. There are but three social arrangements which can replace capitalism, slavery, socialism, and property. I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but each is a dominant type and from the very nature of the problem no fourth arrangement can be devised. The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production. Capitalism means that his control is vested in the hands of a few, while political freedom is the appendage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two factors are the ownership of the means of production by a few and the freedom of all. To solve capitalism you must get rid of restricted ownership or freedom or of both. Now there is only one alternative to freedom which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work backed by the forces of the state. In the first he is a free man, in the second he is, by definition, a slave. We have therefore so far as this factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery and place of freedom. Such a solution, the direct immediate and conscious re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problem which capitalism offers. It would guarantee under workable regulations sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution as I shall show is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle, 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. All theories of a reformed society will therefore attempt at first to leave untouched the factor of freedom among the elements which make up capitalism, and will concern themselves with some change in the factor of property. Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of capitalism by remitting that one of its two factors, which consists in an ill distribution of property, you have two and only two courses open to you. The end of Section 9. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. The Survile State by Hilaire Belock. Section 10. If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that factor in the problem, either by putting property into the hands of many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course. In the concrete, to put property in the hands of none means to vest it as a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding from capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private possession of the means of production by any particular, and by which word property is meant, of course, property in the means of production. The private part of the community. But someone must control the means of production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the management of the means of production by those who are the public officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves controlled by the community, or know, has nothing to do with this solution on its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to the plowing and must control the plows, otherwise no plowing will be done. 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. So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of slavery and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called collectivism, that is the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. Second is the wider distribution of the property, until that institution shall become the mark of the whole state, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital, or land, or both. The first model we call socialism, or the collectivist state, the second we call the proprietary, or distributive state. With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model involving the redistribution of property is rejected as impractical by our existing capitalist society, and why therefore the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a collectivist state. I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all collectivist reform is necessarily deflected and evolves in the place of what had been intended a new thing, a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude. Have I made myself clear? If not, I will repeat for the third time and in its briefest terms the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis. The capitalist state breeds a collectivist theory which in action produces something utterly different from collectivism to wit the servile state. Section 7. Socialism. The Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux. I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a capitalist state to transform itself into a servile state. I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a distributive but a collectivist solution is the easiest for a capitalist state to aim at, and that yet in the very act of attempting collectivism what results is not collectivism at all but the servitude of the many and the confirmation in their present privilege of a few. That is the servile state. Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy of capitalism one of two reforms. Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the state were possessed of the means of production, or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community to be held in trust for the advantage of all. 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 favor the first horse 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 today you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would reestablish, 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 experiences tested improved 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 the 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 the 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 today as a railway or a harbor company with public funds, continuing its administration by publicly paid officials, and converting its revenue to public use, is the 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 collective 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 affected 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, an 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 imperiled by the power of the new and many owners to sell again to a few. In a word, the man who desires to reestablish 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, is 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 place, even in England, of that capitalism which is now no longer either stable or tolerable, but for the purpose of contrast and to emphasize my argument, I will proceed before showing how the collectivist unconsciously makes for the survival 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. 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 non-shallown and to confiscate is one thing. To say all shouldown and appropriation 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 particular to the smaller interests indirectly affected in a society such as ours, a catastrophe falling upon the state from the 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 canalize 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 today 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 today. It is far easier to save one hundred out of a revenue of one thousand than to save ten out of a revenue of one hundred. It is infinitely easier to save ten out of a revenue of one hundred than five out of a revenue of fifty. To build up small property through thrift when once the mass have fallen into the proletariat trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidize 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 penalized undertakings with few owners of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidizing with a produce small holders in proportion to the smallest 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 sword 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 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 cooperative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organizers 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 state 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 agent. The end of Section 10 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Surveiled State by Hilaer Bellach Section 11 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 whenever the blight of it has spread. So true is all this that the stupider kind of collectivist will often talk a capitalist phrase 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-organized industrial capitalist unit, like one of our airways, can give through a system of pensions, regular promotions, 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 today. 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 organized 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 four percent, and believes that under state management it will make the trust pay five percent, then the transference takes a 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 a great credit and longevity can, it would seem, buy out any existing capitalist body upon favorable 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 interest to date. 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. That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later page vigorous personalities discern 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 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 shopkeeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary in part engaged in the old works 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 the onerous petty taxation. They are very fairly used to both. This picture of the national transition from capitalism to collectivism seems so obvious that many collectivists in a generation immediately passed believe that nothing stood between them and the realization of their ideals saved 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 realized. I say of the last generation, today 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 had 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 attempt of transformation of capitalism to 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 survival 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. 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 8 The reformers and the reformed are alike making for the survival 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 survival 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 lines of least resistance Secondly the practical man who as a practical reformer depends on his shortness of sight is therefore today a powerful factor while the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the change is being affected 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. 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 survival state. The socialist movement the first of the three factors in this drift is itself made up of two kinds of men. There is 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 and the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also 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 the land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them in 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 in attempting to transform it along what line of these resistance will either be led. The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production and the residence 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 concede for a moment how many small freeholds what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions what thousands of exchanges and purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck. It is conceivable for in the moral sphere a 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 the term impossible. So your best type of socialist reformer is led to an expedient as we mentioned 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 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 and security which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed and housed and in which men shall not live in 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 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 employee 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. 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 canalized 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 it will scour and deepen its channel. There will the mainstream learn to run. To drop the metaphor these things in the true socialist demand which are compatible with the survival state can certainly be achieved. The first steps toward 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 survival state satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer the 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. End of section 11. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org The Survile State by Hilaer Bellach section 12. 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 and proceeding it. There is no need to go further. In this way the socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organization is being shepherded in spite of himself away from his collectivist ideal and towards a society in which the possessors shall remain possessed the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed in which the masses of men shall still work for the advantage of a few and in which those few shall enjoy the surplus values produced by labor but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency in the main the product of freedom have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom. At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men the owners economically free and controlling to their peace and to their guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree not owners but that is the state. The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly in him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation indeed he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar tables, statistics and exact framework for life these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite the occupation most congenial to him is the running of men to such a man the collectivist ideal particularly appeals it is orderly in the extreme all that human and organic complexity which is the color of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation he is disturbed by multitudinous things and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshaled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction now this man like the other would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament it need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least the department and possibly of the whole state but that is by the way but while he would prefer to begin with a collectivist scheme ready made he finds in practice that he cannot do so he would have to confiscate just as the more hearty socialist would and if that act is very difficult the man burning at the side of human wrongs how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation he cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate at the best he will buy out the capitalist now in his case as in the case of the more human socialist buying out is as I shall show in its proper place a system impossible of general application but all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialization of the means of production tabulation detailed administration of men the coordination of many efforts under one schedule the elimination of all private power to react against his department all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society with him precisely as with the other socialist what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors he has but to secure the registration of the proletariat next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom nor the employer in the exercise of his can produce insufficiency or insecurity and he is content let laws exist which make the proper housing feeding clothing and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class and the observance of such rules be imposed by inspection and punishment upon those whom he pretends to benefit and who he really cares for will be achieved to such a man the survival state is hardly a thing towards which he drifts it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal collectivist state which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regard favorably already the greater part of such reformers who a generation ago would have called themselves socialists are now less concerned with any scheme for socializing capital and land there are considerable schemes actually existing some of them possessing already the force of laws for regulating, running and drilling the proletariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements stores and land enjoyed by the small capitalist class the so-called socialist of this type has not fallen into the survival state by a miscalculation he has fathered it he welcomes its birth he foresees his power over its future so much for the socialist movement which a generation ago proposed to transform our capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage today their ideal has failed and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded the one is reluctantly acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not socialist at all but survival of the practical reformer there is another type of reformer one who prides himself on not being a socialist and one of the greatest weight today he also is making for the survival state this second factor in the change is the practical man and this fool on account of his great numbers and determining influence on the details of legislation must be carefully examined it is your practical man who says whatever you theorists and doctrineaires may hold with regard to this proposal which I support though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours yet you must admit that it does good if you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones family or had done practical work yourself in pudsy you would have seen etc it is not difficult to discern that the practical man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the practical man in every other department of human energy and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamped the practical man wherever found these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence the inability to think let us help the practical man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him as a social reformer he has of course, though he does not know it first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us and his first principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform the two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen though a very stupid human being are insufficiency and insecurity when he was working in the slums of pudsy or raiding the proletarian Jones from the secure base of Toynbee Hall what shocked the worthy man most was unemployment and destitution that is insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood now if the socialist who has thought out his case whether as a mere organizer or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice is led away from socialism and towards the survival state by the force of modern things in England how much more easily do you think the practical man will be conducted toward that same survival state like any donkey to his grazing ground to those dull and short-sighted eyes the immediate solution the beginnings of the survival state propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter the piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity and the practical man lollips from capitalism to the survival state with the same inevitable ease Jones has not got enough if you give him something in charity that something will soon be consumed and then Jones will again not have enough Jones has been seven weeks out of work if you get him work under our unorganized and wasteful system etc he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs the slums of pudsy as the practical man knows by practical experience are often unemployable then there are the ravages of drink more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children the worthy fellow notes as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them he does not because he cannot coordinate all these things he knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners nor of the cooperative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership which such a society spontaneously breeds he takes the world as he finds it and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the survival state the practical man positively glottes on every detail in the building up of that form of society and the destruction of freedoms by inches though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process it has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages he is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own possessed of wealth and political as ever was any such citizen until our time of history with all his lessons of the great schemes of philosophy and religion of human nature itself he is blank the practical man who left to himself would not produce the survival state he would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which would lead at last to some kind of revolt unfortunately he is not left to himself he is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose and of particular men able and prepared for the work of general change who use him with gratitude were he not so numerous in modern England and under the extraordinary conditions of a capitalist state so economically powerful I would have neglected him in this analysis as it is we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the survival state with its powerful organization and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern will certainly eliminate him our reformers then both those who think and those who do not both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it are making directly for the survival state what of the third factor what of the people about to be reformed what of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work and who are the subject of the great experiment do they tend as material to accept or reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book the question is an important one to decide for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected depends the success of every experiment making for the survival state 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 but as we have seen the capitalist state is not a stable and therefore not a permanent condition of society it has proved ephemeral and upon that very account 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 the strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem when we examine how far a particular proletariat such as the English proletariat today is ready to accept the survival state which would condemn it to perpetual loss of property and all the free habit of property in genders next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general such recruitment is still possible the proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in that particular phase of capitalism such as is ours today is the second factor in the problem the third factor and by far the greatest of all is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which capitalism with its essential condition of freedom has deprived them let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment that proletariat is certainly the great mass of the state it covers about 1920 of the population if we exclude Ireland whereas I shall point out in my concluding pages the reactions against capitalism and therefore against its development towards the survival state is already successful end of section 12 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the Servile State by Hilaire Belock section 13 as to the first factor it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living the traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor all the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them they are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire they could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy by exchange and by gift and even by contract there is not one but could put himself in the position but the actual experience of ownership and the effect which that experience has upon character and upon one's view of the state is a very different matter within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning as small free holders small masters etc to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind more than this there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things 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 myself 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 time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common all that has passed the last chapter of its passage has been regularly rapid roughly speaking it is the generation brought up under the education acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian the present instinct use and meaning of property is lost to it and this has two very powerful effects each strongly inclining our modern wage earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude 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 to sum up the attitude of the proletariat in England today the attitude of the overwhelming majority that is of English families towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation they think of themselves as wage earners to increase the weekly stipend of the wage earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue to make him cease to be a wage earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life what of the second factor the gambling chance which the capitalist system with its necessary condition of freedom and of the legal power to bargain fully and so forth permits to the proletariat of escaping from his proletariat surroundings of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say that while it has not disappeared it has very greatly lost in force during the last 40 years one often meets men who tell one whether they are speaking in defense or against the capitalist system but one still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class because 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 millions of men in great groups of industry notably in the transport industry and in the minds have quite given up such an expectation tiny as the chance ever was exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished the proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian these two factors then the memory of an older condition of economic freedom and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage earning class the two factors which might act most strongly against the accepting of the survival state by that class have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so strongly for the survival state and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security it is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered today when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working that is the masses of the people may be ready to accept the change the thing may be put in many ways I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all if you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage with a proposal for a contract of service for life guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded at his usual full wage how many would refuse such a contract would of course involve a loss of freedom a life contract of the kind is to be accurate no contract at all it is the negation of contract and the accepting of status it would lay the man that undertook it under an obligation of forced labor coterminius and coincident with his power to labor it would be a permanent renunciation of his right if such a right exists to the surplus values created by his labor if we ask ourselves how many men or rather how many families would prefer freedom with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and possibly insufficiency to such a life contract no one can deny that the answer is very few would refuse it that is the key to the whole matter what proportion would refuse it no one can determine but I can say that even as a voluntary offer and not as a compulsory obligation a contract of this sort which would for the future re-irreg status of a survival sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat today now take the truth from another aspect by considering it thus from one point of view and from another we can appreciate it best of what are the mass of men now most afraid in a capitalist state not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a court of law but of the sack you may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the truck acts specifically protect him why he cannot assert his opinion in this or that matter why he has accepted without a blow such and such an insult some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he foreswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was at the hands of the law today he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment private law as for the second time in our long European history 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 17th century a man feared to go to mass lest the judges should punish him today 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 to deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments which most men dreaded though some stood out to deny the rule of private powers involves today a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out look at the matter from yet another aspect a law is passed let us suppose which increases the total revenue of wage earner or guarantees him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree the administration of that law requires upon the one hand a close inquisition into the man's circumstances by public officials and upon the other hand the administration of its benefits by that particular capitalist or group of capitalists whom the wage earner serves to enrich do the servile conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent the proletarian in England today from preferring the benefit to freedom it is notorious that they do not no matter from what angle you approach the business the truth is always the same that the great mass of wage earners upon which our society now reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some small amount and all that may guarantee them against those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject they understand and welcome a good of this kind and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and in regimentation exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters it would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things or even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and phrases now current it would be easy I say by such methods to ridicule or oppose the prime truths which I am here submitting they nonetheless remain truths substitute for the term employee in one of our new laws the term surf even do so mild a thing as substitute the traditional term master for the word employer and the blunt words might breed revolt impose of a sudden the full conditions of a survival state upon modern England and it would certainly breed revolt but my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken there is no revolt on the contrary there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor after the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property they see at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it all forces then are making for the survival state in this final phase of our evil capitalist society in England the generous reformer is canalized towards it the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal the herd of practical men meet at every stage in its inception the practical steps which they expected and demanded while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of property and of freedom which might resist the change and are most powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it confers it may be objected that however true all this may be no one can upon such theoretical grounds regard the survival state as something really approaching us we need not believe in its advent we shall be told until we see the first effects of its action to this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent the survival state is in industrial England today no longer a menace but some thing in actual existence it is in process of construction the first main lines of it are already plotted out the cornerstone of it is already laid to see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law the first of which we already enjoy while the last will pass from project to positive statute in the due process of time the end of section 13 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org the survival state by Hilaire Belock section 14 appendix on buying out there is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the capitalist class for the benefit of the state but who appreciate the difficulties in the way of direct confiscation that by spreading the process over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain fashion bearing all the outward appearance of a purchase the expropriation could be affected without the consequences and attendant difficulties of direct confiscation in other words there is an impression that the state could buy out the capitalist class without their knowing it or the painless way this class can be slowly conjured out of existence the impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish it and will not bear a clear analysis it is impossible by any jugglery to buy out the universality of the means of production without confiscation to prove this consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the simplest terms a community of 22 families lives upon the produce of two farms the property of only two families out of that 22 the remaining 20 families are proletarian the two families with their plows stores, land, etc are capitalists the labor of the 20 proletarian families applied to the land and the capital of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat 200 measures or 10 measures each form the annual support of the 20 proletarian families the remaining 100 measures are the surplus value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two capitalist families each of which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures the state proposes to produce after a certain length of time a condition of affairs such that the surplus value shall no longer go to the two capitalist families but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole community while it the state shall itself become the unembarrassed owner of both farms now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the reward of accumulation instead of spending his money a man saves it with the object of retaining as a result of that saving a certain yearly revenue the measure of this will fall in a particular society at a particular time below a certain level in other words if a man cannot get a certain minimum reward for his accumulation he will not accumulate but spend what is called in economics the law of diminishing returns acts so that continual additions to capital other things being equal that is the methods of production remaining the same increasing increase of revenue a thousand measures of capital applied to a particular area of natural forces will produce for instance 40 measures yearly or 4% but 2,000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce 80 measures they will produce more than the thousand measures did but not more in proportion not double they will produce say 60 measures or 3% upon the capital the action of this universal principle automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it is reached such a point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept if it falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate the limit of this minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the measure to what we call the effective desire of accumulation thus in England today it is a little over 3% the minimum which limits the accumulation of capital is a minimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly upon such capital and this we may call for shortness the EDA of our society at the present time when therefore the capitalist estimates the full value of his possessions he counts them in so many years purchase and that means that he is willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many times the yearly revenue which he at present enjoys by an illusion which clever a statesmanship could use to the advantage of the community he even estimates the natural forces he controls which need no accumulation but are always present on the analog of his capital and will part with him at so many years purchase by taking advantage of this illusion that land purchase schemes as in Ireland happily work to the advantage of the dispossessed one-thirtieth he will take a lump sum representing thirty times his annual revenue so far so good let us suppose the two capitalists in our example to have an EDA of one-thirtieth they will sell to the state if the state can put up three thousand measures of wheat now of course the state can do nothing of the kind the accumulations of wheat being already in the hands of the capitalist and those accumulations amounting to much less than three thousand measures of wheat the thing appears to be a deadlock but it is not a deadlock if the capitalist is a fool the state can go to the capitalist and say hand me over your farms and against them I will give you a guarantee that you should be paid rather than three thousand dollars of wheat for a year for the thirty years in fact I will pay you half as much again until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original stock out of what does this extra amount come out of the state's power to tax the state can levy attacks upon the profits of both capitalist A and B and pay them the extra with their own money so simple an example it is evident that this ringing of the changes would be spotted by the victims and that they would bring against it precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation but it is argued that in a complex state where you are dealing with myriads of individual capitalists and thousands of particular forms of profit the process can be masked there are two ways in which the state can mask its action according to this policy it can buy out first one small area of land and capital out of the general taxation and then another and then another until the whole land has been transferred or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades which the rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin and with the general taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate trades which will of course have sunk heavily in value under the attack the second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society however complex for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once arouse suspicion the first method however might have some chance of success at least for a long time after it was begun a highly complex and numerous society were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself that check is the fact that the capitalists only takes more than his old yearly revenue with the object of reinvesting the surplus I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock yielding me three percent thirty a year the government asked me to exchange my bit of paper against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of fifty a year is an extra rate a year for so many years as will represent over and above the regular interest paid a purchase of my stock the government's bit of paper promises to pay to the holder fifty a year for say thirty eight years I am delighted to make the exchange not because I am such a fool is to enjoy the prospect of my property being extinguished at the end of thirty eight years but because I hope thus you can raid the brewers in a society half puritan where brewing is thought immoral by many but proceed to railway stock and it will be a very different matter to be able to reinvest the extra twenty every year in something else that will bring me in three percent thus at the end of the thirty eight years I shall or my hairs be better off than I was at the beginning of the transaction and I shall have enjoyed during its maturing my old thirty a year all the same the state can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidizing purchase out of the general taxation it can therefore play this trick over a small area and for a short time with success but the moment this area passes a very narrow limit the market for investment is found to be restricted capital automatically takes alarm the state can no longer offer its paper guarantee save at an enhanced price if it tries to turn the position by further raising taxation to what capital regards as confiscatory rates there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be opposed to frank and open expropriation the matter is one of plain arithmetic and all the confusion introduced by the complex mechanism of finance can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an ordinance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to less than 180 degrees in fine if you desire to confiscate you must confiscate you cannot outflank the enemy as financiers in the city and sharpers on the racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind nor can you conduct the general process of expropriation upon a muddleheaded hope that somehow or other something will come out of nothing in the end there are indeed two ways in which the state could expropriate without meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at confiscation but the first of these ways is precarious and the second insufficient in using this metaphor I have once record my apologies to those who believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes and confess myself an old-fashioned parabolist further I admit that the triangles in question are spherical they are as follows the state can promise the capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is getting in the expectation that it the state can manage the business better than the capitalist or that some future expansion will come to its aid in other words if the state makes a bigger profit out of the thing than the capitalist it can buy out the capitalist just as a private individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out but the converse of this is that if the state has calculated badly or has bad luck it would find itself endowing the capitalist of the future instead of gradually extinguishing them in this fashion the state could have socialized without confiscation the railways of this country if it had taken them over 50 years ago promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining but if it had socialized the handsome cab in the 90s it would now be supporting in perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab owner and his children forever at the expense of the community the second way in which the state can expropriate without confiscation is by annuity it can say to such capitalist as have no heirs or care little for their fate if they have you have only got so much time to live and to enjoy your 30 you will take 50 until you die upon the bargain being accepted the state will in process of time though not immediately upon the death of the annuitant become an unembarrassed owner of what had been the annuitant share in the means of production but the area over which this method can be exercised is a very small one it is not of itself sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called socialist and confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here discussed the state is indeed confiscating that is it is taxing in many cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the taxpayer and is lessening his capital rather than shearing his income but it is not putting the proceeds into the means of production it is either using them for immediate consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to another set of capitalists but these practical considerations of the way in which sham socialist experiments are working belong rather to my next section in which I shall deal with the actual beginnings of the survival state in our midst thus the money livid upon the death of some not very wealthy squire and represented by say locomotives in the Argentine turns into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under the inebriates bill or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the prudential under the insurance act in the first case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine and after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of wood palings from the Baltic, not exactly reproductive wealth in the second case the locomotives which used to be the squire's hands become or their equivalent becomes means of production in the hands of the sissoons and a section 14