Front matter

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM BY BERNARD SHAW

BRENTANO’S PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

1928

COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY BRENTANO’S INC.

First printing, June, 1928

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY SISTER-IN-LAW MARY STEWART CHOLMONDELY THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO WHOSE QUESTION THIS BOOK IS THE BEST ANSWER I CAN MAKE

A FOREWORD FOR AMERICAN READERS

I have never been in America; therefore I am free from the delusion, commonly entertained by the people who happen to have been born there, that they know all about it, and that America is their country in the same sense that Ireland is my country by birth, and England my country by adoption and conquest. You, dear madam, are an American in the sense that I am a European, except that the American States have a language in common and are federated, and the European states are still on the tower of Babel and are separated by tariff fortifications. When I hear people asking why America does not join the League of Nations I have to point out to them that America is a League of Nations, and sealed the covenant of her solidity as such by her blood more than sixty years ago, whereas the affair at Geneva is not a League of Nations at all, but only a so far unsuccessful attempt to coax Europe to form one at the suggestion of a late American President, with the result that the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs makes occasional trips to Geneva, and, on returning, reassures the British House of Commons by declaring that in spite of all Woodrow-Wilsonic temptations to combine with other nations he remains an Englishman first, last, and all the time; that the British Empire comes before everything with him; and that it is on this understanding and this alone that he consents to discuss with foreigners any little matters in which he can oblige them without detriment to the said reserved interests. And this attitude seems to us in England so natural, so obvious, so completely a matter of course, that the newspapers discuss the details of Mr Chamberlain’s report of his trip without a word about the patriotic exordium which reduces England’s membership of the League to absurdity.

Now your disadvantage in belonging to a league of nations instead of to a nation is that if you belong to New York or Massachusetts, and know anything beyond the two mile radius of which you are the centre, you probably know much more of England, France, and Italy than you do of Texas or Arizona, though you are expected, as an American, to know all about America. Yet I never met an American who knew anything about America except the bits she had actually set eyes on or felt with her boots; and even of that she could hardly see the wood for the trees. By comparison I may be said to know almost all about America. I am far enough off to get a good general view, and, never having assumed, as the natives do, that a knowledge of America is my intuitional birthright, I have made enquiries, read books, availed myself of the fact that I seem to be personally an irresistible magnet for every wandering American, and even gathered something from the recklessly confidential letters which every American lady who has done anything unconventional feels obliged to write me as a testimony to the ruinous efficacy of my books and plays. I could and should have drawn all the instances in this book from American life were it not that America is such a fool’s paradise that no American would have believed a word of them, and I should have been held up, in exact proportion to my accuracy and actuality, as a grossly ignorant and prejudiced Britisher, defaming the happy West as ludicrously as the capitalist West defames Russia. What I tell you of England you will believe. What I could tell you of America might provoke you to call on me with a gun. Also it would lead you to class me as a bitter enemy to America, whereas I assure you that though I do not adore your country with the passion professed by English visitors at public banquets when you have overwhelmed them with your reckless hospitality, I give it a good deal of my best attention as a very interesting if still very doubtful experiment in civilization.

But this much I will permit myself to say. Do not imagine that because at this moment certain classes of American workmen are buying bathtubs and Ford cars, and investing in building societies and the like the money that they formerly spent in the saloons, that America is doing as well as can be expected. If you were at this moment a miner’s wife in South Wales you would be half starving; but the wife of a Colorado miner might think you very lucky in having nothing more violent than half starving to endure. The sweated women workers in the tenements of your big cities are told that in America anyone can make a fortune who wants to. Here we spare them that mockery, at least. You must take it from me, without driving me to comparisons that between nations wound as personalities do between individuals, that Capitalism is the same everywhere, and that if you look for its evils at home you will miss nothing of them except perhaps some of the socialistic defences which European States have been forced to set up against their worst extremities.

In truth it is odd that this book should not have been written by an American. Its thesis is the hopelessness of our attempts to build up a stable civilization with units of unequal income; and it was in America that this inequality first became monstrous not only in money but in its complete and avowed dissociation from character, rank, and the public responsibility traditionally attached to rank. On the eastern shores of the Atlantic the money makers formed a middle class between the proletariat, or manual working class, and the aristocracy, or governing class. Thus labor was provided for; business was provided for; and government was provided for; and it was possible to allow and even encourage the middle class to make money without regard to public interests, as these were the business of the aristocracy.

In America, however, the aristocracy was abolished; and the only controlling and directing force left was business, with nothing to restrain it in its pursuit of money except the business necessity for maintaining property in land and capital and enforcing contracts, the business prudence which perceives that it would be ruinous to kill outright the proletarian goose that lays the golden eggs, and the fear of insurrection. There was no longer a king and an aristocratic governing class to say to the tradesman “Never mind the public interest: that is our business: yours is to get as rich as you can, incidentally giving employment to the proletariat and increasing our rent rolls”. All that remained was the tradition of unscrupulous irresponsibility in business; and when the American millionaires first began to astonish Europe with their wealth it was possible for the most notorious of them, in the course of an enquiry into the proceedings of a Trust with which he was connected, to reply to a criticism as to the effect of his business policy on the public with a simple “Damn the public!”. Had he been a middle class man in a country where there was a governing class outside and above business, or a monarch with a council in the same position, or even a State Church, his answer would have been entirely in order apart from its verbal profanity. Duly bowdlerized it would have run “I am a man of business, not a ruler and a lawgiver. The public interest is not my job: I do not presume to meddle with it. My sole function is to make as much money as I can”. Queen Elizabeth would have applauded such an attitude as socially sound and highly becoming: nothing angered her more than presumptuous attempts on the part of common persons to concern themselves with her business of high politics.

When America got rid of monarchs and prelates and popes and British cabinets and the like, and plunged into the grand republican experiment which has become the rule instead of the exception in Europe since the war swept all the emperors into the dustbin of history, she raised the middle classes to the top of the social structure and thus delivered its civilization into their hands without ennobling their traditions. Naturally they raced for money, for more money, and still more money, and damned the public when they were not doping it with advertisements which were by tacit agreement exempted from the law against obtaining money by false pretences or practising medicine without qualifications. It is true that they were forced to govern as well by the impossibility of maintaining civilization without government; but their government was limited and corrupted by their principle of letting nothing stand in the way of their getting rich quickly. And the ablest of them at that game (which has no attraction for the ability that plays the higher games by which finally civilization must live) soon became rich at a rate that made the European middle classes envious. In my youth I heard little of great men arising in America—not that America did not produce them, but that her money masters were more apt to persecute than to advertize them—but I heard much of the great fortunes that were being made there. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller became famous by bringing our civilization to the point to which Crassus and the other millionaire contemporaries of Sulla and Julius Cæsar brought the civilization of ancient republican Rome just before it set up Emperor idolatry as a resting place on the road to ruin. Nowadays we have multimillionaires everywhere; but they began in America; and that is why I wonder this book of mine was not written in America by an American fifty years ago. Henry George had a shot at it: indeed it was his oratory (to which I was exposed for fortyfive minutes fortyfive years ago by pure chance) that called my attention to it; but though George impressed his generation with the outrageous misdistribution of income resulting from the apparently innocent institution of private property in land, he left untouched the positive problem of how else income was to be distributed, and what the nation was to do with the rent of its land when it was nationalized, thus leaving the question very much where it had been left a century earlier by the controversy between Voltaire and the elder Mirabeau, except for the stupendous series of new illustrations furnished by the growth of the great cities of the United States. Still, America can claim that in this book I am doing no more than finishing Henry George’s job.

Finally, I have been asked whether there are any intelligent women in America. There must be; for politically the men there are such futile gossips that the United States could not possibly carry on unless there were some sort of practical intelligence back of them. But I will let you into a secret which bears on this point. By this book I shall get at the American men through the American women. In America as in England every male citizen is supposed to understand politics and economics and finance and diplomacy and all the rest of a democratic voter’s business on the strength of a Fundamentalist education that excites the public scorn of the Sioux chiefs who have seen their country taken from them by palefaced lunatics. He is ashamed to expose the depths of his ignorance by asking elementary questions; and I dare not insult him by volunteering the missing information. But he has no objection to my talking to his wife as to one who knows nothing of these matters: quite the contrary. And if he should chance to overhear——!!!

G. B. S.

Conway, North Wales 17th April 1928

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

Socialism is an opinion as to how the income of the country should be distributed. Its distribution is not a natural phenomenon: it is a matter for arrangement, subject to change like any other arrangement. It has been changed within living memory to an extent that would have seemed incredible and scandalous to Queen Victoria, and is still being changed from year to year. Therefore what we have to consider is not whether our distribution shall be altered or not, but what further changes are desirable to attain a prosperous stability. This is the closed question which re-opened in the nineteenth century under the banner of Socialism; but it is one on which everyone should try to form an original personal opinion without prompting from Socialists. PAGE 1

2

DIVIDING-UP

Dividing-up is neither a revolutionary novelty nor a Mosaic jubilee: it is a necessary and unpostponable daily and hourly event of civilized life. As wealth consists of food that becomes uneatable unless immediately consumed, and of articles that wear out in use and perish if kept unused, it must be divided-up and consumed at once. Saving is impossible: the things will not keep. What is called saving is a bargain whereby a person in possession of spare food allows another to consume it in return for an undertaking to reverse the transaction at some future time. Between the two nothing is saved, as one consumes what the other saves. A proposal that everybody should save is pure nonsense. A nation which stopped working would perish within a fortnight even if every member of it had “saved” a million. 6

3

HOW MUCH FOR EACH?

This question does not settle itself. It has to be settled by law and enforced by the police. If the shares are to be altered the law must be altered. Examples of existing distribution. This has today become so repugnant to the general moral conception of fairness and so incompatible with the public health that there is a general revulsion of feeling against it. But the revulsion can have no political effect until it becomes arithmetically precise. It cannot be dealt with in terms of more or less: the question of how much more or less must be exactly determined. And as wealth is measured in money, distribution must be dealt with in terms of income. 7

4

NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK

As a nation lives from hand to mouth there must be continuous productive labor or there will be no food to distribute. But though everyone must eat, everyone need not work, because under modern conditions each of us can produce much more than enough to support one person. If everyone worked everyone would have a good deal of leisure. But it is possible to arrange that some people shall do all the work and have no leisure in order that others should have all leisure and no work. These two extremes are represented by complete Socialism and complete Slavery. Serfdom and Feudalism and Capitalism are intermediate stages. The continual struggle of persons and classes to alter the allotment of the labor task and the distribution of wealth and leisure in their own favor is the key to the history of revolutions. Enormous increase of the stakes in this game through modern discoveries and inventions. 9

5

COMMUNISM

Communism must be considered without personal, political, or religious prejudice as a plan of distribution like any other. It was the plan of the apostles, and is universally practised in the family. It is indispensable in modern cities. All services and commodities which are paid for by a common fund and are at the disposal of everyone indiscriminately are examples of communism in practice. Roads and bridges, armies and navies, street lighting and paving, policemen, dustmen, and sanitary inspectors are familiar and obvious instances. 11

6

LIMITS TO COMMUNISM

Communism is so satisfactory and unquestioned as far as it has gone that those who are conscious of it may ask why everything should not be communized. Reasons why this cannot be done. Communism is applicable only to commodities and services which, being necessary or useful to everybody, enjoy general moral approval. It can be extended to matters in which the citizens are willing to give and take, as when the oarsman pays rates for a cricket pitch in consideration of the cricketer paying rates for the lake. But services as to which there is any serious difference of opinion, such as church services, and commodities which some people believe to be deleterious, such as alcoholic liquors, are excluded from the scope of Communism. Surreptitious communism is necessary in the case of science, and of learning generally, because the ordinary citizen does not understand their importance sufficiently to be willing to pay for their endowment. Governments are therefore obliged to endow them without consulting the electors, who are left to believe that Greenwich Observatories, National Galleries, British Museums and the like are provided gratuitously by Nature. 14

7

SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED

Seven plans of distribution are at present advocated or practised. 1. To each what he or she produces. 2. To each what he or she deserves. 3. To each what he or she can get and hold. 4. To the common people enough to keep them alive whilst they work all day, and the rest to the gentry. 5. Division of society into classes, the distribution being equal or thereabouts within each class, but unequal as between the classes. 6. Let us go on as we are. 7. Socialism: an equal share to everybody. 19

8

TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES

Apparent fairness of this plan. Two fatal objections to it: (a) it is impossible to ascertain how much each person produces even when the product is a material object; and (b) most people’s work consists, not in the production of material objects, but in services. The clearest case of individual production is that of a baby by its mother; but a baby is an expense, not a source of income. In practice production and service are made commensurate by paying the workers according to the time taken in producing the commodity or rendering the service; but this does not carry out the plan, as, when the time spent in qualifying the worker is taken into account, the calculation becomes impossible. Illustrative cases. Case of the married woman keeping a house and bringing up a family. The plan is impossible, and, at bottom, nonsensical. 21

9

TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES

Tendency of those who are comfortably off to believe that this is what is actually happening. Circumstances which support this view. Facts which reduce it to absurdity. Proposals to adopt the principle and make it happen in future. The first and final objection is that it cannot be done. Merit cannot be measured in money. The truth of this can be ascertained at once by taking any real case of two human beings, and attempting to fix the proportion of their incomes according to their merits or faults. 26

10

TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

This plan postulates equal grabbing power as between children, old people, invalids, and ablebodied persons in the prime of life. That is, it presupposes a state of things that does not exist. Otherwise it is simple amorality, which even pirates find impossible if they are to hold together for any length of time. It is, however, tolerated at present in trade. Lawless robbery and violence are barred; but the tradesman may get as much and give as little for it as he can; and the landlord may even use legalized violence to get the utmost for the use of his land. The results of this limited toleration of grab are so unsatisfactory that laws are continually being made to palliate them. The plan, which is really no plan at all, must be dismissed as disastrous. 29

11

OLIGARCHY

The plan of making the few rich and the many poor has worked for a long time and is still working. The advantages claimed for it. The rich class as a preserve of culture. The incomes of the rich as a reservoir of money which provides by its overflow the socially necessary fund of spare money called capital. The privileges of the rich as a means of securing a governing class. Efficacy of the plan when organized as the Feudal System. How it works in villages and Highland clans. How it fails in cities. Modern urbanized civilization has no use for it, all our governing work being done by paid public servants. This leaves it with only one pretension: that of providing capital by satiation and overflow. But the satiation is too costly even when it is achieved. There is no guarantee that the rich will use any part of their income as capital, or that when they do so they will invest it at home where it is most needed. The accumulation of capital can be provided for in other ways. The plan is breaking under the weight of its enormous abuses. 30

12

DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

This happens to some extent at present. We are accustomed to think that monarchs, as a class, should receive more than manual laborers; and as a rule they do. But monarchs receive much less than Steel Kings and Pork Barons; and unskilled laborers receive more than great mathematicians, who, as such, receive nothing, and have to live by poorly paid professorships. Clergymen get very little; and racing bookmakers get a good deal. Nobody can determine what they ought to get; yet nobody can defend what they do get on any rational ground. Those who think it a matter of course that scavengers should receive less than bank managers cannot say how much less, without which determination their opinion can have no effect in a political settlement of distribution. The main argument for enriching a class is that it enabled them to produce an idolatrous illusion of superiority which gives them authority, which is necessary in organizing society. But in modern society the persons in authority are often much poorer in money than those whom they command. Illustrative cases. Real authority has nothing to do with money. 35

13

LAISSER-FAIRE

Letting things alone is now called letting them slide: an admission that they will not stay where they are. Change is a law of nature; and when parliaments neglect it and Churches try to ignore it, the effect is not to avert the changes but to make them hasty, ill-considered, and often catastrophic. Unless laws and Articles of Religion change as often and as quickly as the activities they control, a strain is set up which, if not relieved by the prevalence of up-to-date ideas in government and the Churches, must wreck civilization. 38

14

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

The study of poverty. Poverty does not produce unhappiness: it produces degradation: that is why it is dangerous to society. Its evils are infectious, and cannot be avoided by any possible isolation of the rich. The attractions of poverty. The folly of tolerating it as a punishment. We cannot afford to have the poor always with us. The statute of Elizabeth. What constitutes poverty. The sufferings of the rich. They are avoidable only by voluntarily foregoing idleness and gluttony: that is, foregoing the only privileges that riches confer. Poor and rich being equally objectionable, the question arises how much is enough? What is enough for savage life. What was enough for our grandmothers is not enough for ourselves. There is no limit to the higher requirements of mankind. The question is therefore unanswerable as applied to civilized life. The problem of distribution cannot be solved by giving everyone enough: nobody can ever have enough of everything. But it is possible to give everybody the same. 41

15

WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

The effect of distribution on industry. Political economy, or the art of spending the national income to the greatest general advantage. Importance of the order in which goods are produced. Those which are wanted most should be produced first. Food, clothes, and houses should come before scent and jewellery, babies’ needs before the needs of lapdogs. Nothing but equality of purchasing power can preserve this vital order in the industries which cater for purchasers. Inequality of income upsets it hopelessly: the labor which should feed starving children is expended in the production of trivial luxuries. This is excused on the ground that the purchasers give employment. Absurdity of this plea. 49

16

EUGENICS

Effect of distribution on the quality of people as human beings. The problem of breeding the nation. In breeding animals the problem is simple though the art is uncertain and difficult, because the animal is bred for some single specific purpose, such as the provision of food or for racing or haulage. The stockbreeder knows exactly what sort of animal is wanted. Nobody can say what sort of human being is wanted. It is not enough to say that certain sorts are not wanted. The stockbreeders’ methods are therefore not applicable: the keeper of a human stud farm, if such a thing were established by a mad professor of eugenics, would not know what to aim at or how to begin. We are therefore thrown back on natural sexual attraction as our only guide. Sexual attraction in human beings is not promiscuous: it is always specific: we choose our mates. But this choice is defeated by inequality of income, which restricts our choice to members of our own class: that is, persons with similar incomes or no incomes. Resultant prevalence of bad breeding and domestic unhappiness. The most vital condition of good distribution is that it shall widen the field of sexual selection to the extent of making the nation completely intermarriageable. Only equality of income can do this. 53

17

THE COURTS OF LAW

Though Justice should not be a respecter of persons, the courts must respect persons if they have different incomes. Trial by jury is trial by a jury of peers, not only the peers of the accused but of the accusers and of the whole body of citizens. This is in practice impossible in a civilized society of persons with unequal incomes, as the person with a large income has not the same interests and privileges as the person with a small one. As access to the courts of justice costs money the poor are cut off from them by their poverty or terrorized by the threats of the rich to drag them there. The abuses of divorce and alimony. Sale of husbands and wives. Blackmail. Abuses in the criminal courts. Corruption of the law itself at its source in Parliament by the rich majority there. Severity of the laws against theft practised by the poor on the rich. Complete exemption of the crime of rich idling, which is the form of theft practised by the rich on the poor. Inequality of income thus effects a divorce of law from justice, leading to an anarchic disrespect for the law and a general suspicion of the good faith of lawyers. 56

18

THE IDLE RICH

Idleness does not mean inactivity. Over-exertion and “rest cures” of the rich. Their dangerous and exhausting sports. The flapper dances harder than the postman walks. Spartan training of the old rich. It is soon acquired by the new rich, who begin by trying to loaf. The diplomatic and military services as preserves for the energetic rich. The unpaid magistry. Estate management. Parliament. Effect of contraception and hotel life in service flats in extending the possibilities of complete uselessness and self-indulgence. Exceptional cases of eminent workers with unearned incomes. Florence Nightingale and John Ruskin. Not inactivity but consuming without producing is what is meant by economic idleness. Ironic vanity of the attempt to secure happiness and freedom by having plenty of money and nothing to do. 59

19

CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

The Church school in the village. Deference to the rich taught as loyalty and religion. Persecution of schoolmasters for teaching equalitarian morality. Corruption of the universities and of the newspapers. Difficulty of separating the mass of falsehood inculcated and advertized in the interest of the rich from the genuine learning and information in which rich and poor have a common interest. 63

20

WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

We endure misdistribution and even support it because it is associated with many petty personal benefits and amusements which come to us by way of charity and pageantry, and with the chance of winning the Calcutta Sweep or inheriting a fortune from an unknown relative. These pageants and prizes are apprehensible by the narrowest minds in the most ignorant classes, whereas the evils of the system are great national evils, apprehensible only by trained minds capable of public affairs. Without such training the natural supply of broad minds is wasted. Poverty, by effecting this waste on an appalling scale, produces an artificial dearth of statesmanlike brains, compelling us to fill up first-rate public posts with second-rate and often sixth-rate functionaries. We tolerate the evils of inequality of income literally through want of thought. 65

21

POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

Equal division has been tested by long experience. Practically all the work of the world has been done and is being done by bodies of persons receiving equal incomes. The inequality that exists is between classes and not between individuals. This arrangement is quite stable: there is no tendency for the equality to be upset by differences of individual character. Here and there abnormal individuals make their way into a better paid class or are thrown out into an unpaid vagrancy; but the rule is that each class either keeps its economic level or rises and falls as a class, its internal equality being maintained at every level. As people are put so they will stay. Equality of income, far from being a novelty, is an established practice, and the only possible one as between working individuals in organized industry. The problem is therefore not one of its introduction, but of its extension from the classes to the whole community. 68

22

MERIT AND MONEY

Equality of income has the advantage of securing promotion by merit. When there is inequality of income all merits are overshadowed by the merit of having a large income, which is not a merit at all. Huge incomes are inherited by nincompoops or made by cunning traders in vice or credulity; whilst persons of genuine merit are belittled by the contrast between their pence and the pounds of fools and profiteers. The person with a thousand a year inevitably takes precedence of the person with a hundred in popular consideration, no matter how completely this may reverse their order of merit. Between persons of equal income there can be no eminence except that of personal merit. Hence the naturally eminent are the chief preachers of equality, and are always bitterly opposed by the naturally ordinary or inferior people who have the larger shares of the national income. 70

23

INCENTIVE

It is urged against equality that unless a person can earn more than another by working harder she will not work harder or longer. The reply is that it is neither fair nor desirable that she should work harder or longer. In factory and machine industry extra exertion is not possible: collective work goes on at the engine’s speed and stops when the engine stops. The incentive of extra pay does not appeal to the slacker, whose object is to avoid work at any cost. The cure for that is direct compulsion. What is needed is an incentive to the community as a whole to choose a high standard of living rather than a lazy and degraded one, all standards being possible. Inequality of income is not merely useless for this purpose, but defeats it. The problem of the Dirty Work. On examination we discover that as it is done mostly by the worst paid people it is not provided for at present by the incentive of extra pay. We discover also that some of the very dirtiest work is done by professional persons of gentle nurture without exceptional incomes. The objection to dirty work is really an objection to work that carries a stigma of social inferiority. The really effective incentive to work is our needs, which are equal, and include leisure. 72

24

THE TYRANNY OF NATURE

The race must perish through famine if it stops working. Nobody calls this natural obligation to work slavery, the essence of which is being compelled to carry another ablebodied person’s burden of work as well as one’s own. Pleasurable toil and toilsome pleasure. General ignorance of the art of enjoying life. The imposture of our commercially provided amusements. Working for fun is more recreative than wasting time and money. Monotonous work makes even a painful change welcome: hence our hideous excursion train holidays. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest, or doing nothing, is a necessity imposed by work, and is not leisure. Work can be so absorbing that it can become a craze like the craze for drink. Herbert Spencer’s warning. 80

25

THE POPULATION QUESTION

To every proposal for a general increase of incomes it is objected that its benefits will be swallowed up by married people having too many children. It is also alleged that existing poverty is due to the world being too small to produce food enough for all the people in it. The real cause is that there are too many people living as parasites on their fellows instead of by production. Illustrations from domestic service. Increase of population, leading to division of labor, enriches the community instead of impoverishing it. Limits to this law of increasing return. Possibilities of human multiplication. The question is not one of food alone but of space. The speed at which population increases has to be considered as well as the ultimate desirability of the increase. Too many unproductive children may starve a family though the country as a whole may have unlimited employment for adults; therefore the cost of bearing and bringing up children should be borne by the State. Checks to population. War, pestilence, and poverty. Contraception, or artificial birth control. Exposure of female infants. Mahomet’s view of it. Capitalism, by producing parasitism on an enormous scale has produced premature overpopulation, kept under by excessive infant mortality and the diseases of poverty and luxury. Equality of income can get rid of this, and place population on its natural basis. University teaching on the subject, which alleges that a natural law of diminishing return is now in operation, is merely one of the corruptions of political science by Capitalism. Possibility of local overpopulation in an underpopulated world. Examples. 83

26

THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

Socialism entirely independent of Socialists or their writings and utterances. “Joining the Socialists”. Many professed Socialists are so because they believe in a delusion called Equality of Opportunity, and would recant if they discovered that Socialism means unconditional equality of income for everyone without regard to character, talent, age, or sex. This is the true diagnostic of Socialism, and the touchstone by which Socialists may be distinguished from Philanthropists, Liberals, Radicals, Anarchists, Nationalists, Syndicalists, and malcontents of all sorts. Henri Quatre’s prescription of “a chicken in the pot for everybody” is amiable and kindly; but it is not Socialism. 92

27

PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Amateur reformers who believe that the world can be made good by individual effort. Ordering the servants to dine with you. Inequality is not the fault of the rich. Poverty is not the fault of the poor. Socialism has nothing to do with almsgiving or personal generosity or kindness to the poor. Socialism abhors poverty and the poor, and has no more to do with relieving them than with relieving riches and the rich: it means to abolish both ruthlessly. Questionableness of the virtues that feed on suffering. Doles and almsgiving are necessary at present as an insurance against rebellion; but they are dangerous social evils. Panem et circenses. Government cannot suppress this abuse until it possesses the powers of employment now in private hands. It must become the national landlord, employer, and financier. It is not enough to know the object of Socialism and to be convinced of its possibility. Commandments are no use without laws; and Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law and not of personal righteousness. 95

28

CAPITALISM

Capitalism might more properly be called Proletarianism. Its abolition does not involve the destruction of capital. The social theory of Capitalism. The Manchester School. Property, private or real, and personal. Powers of landlords. Distinction between private property and personal possession. Private property an integral part of Capitalism. Incompatible with Socialism. Conservative and Labor parties are at bottom parties for the maintenance and abolition respectively of private property. Literary property. 100

29

YOUR SHOPPING

Incidence of unequal distribution in the shop. Nothing obtainable at cost price: every price is loaded with a tribute to private property. Averaging the cost of production of the entire national supply gives the real cost price. This is the price aimed at by Socialism. Under Capitalism the cost of production of that part of the supply which is produced under the most unfavorable circumstances fixes the price of the entire supply. The coal supply. By nationalizing the coal industry the public can be supplied at the averaged cost price per ton. Examples from our numerous existing nationalizations. 105

30

YOUR TAXES

Grumbling about the taxes. Government gives value at the cost price to itself; but this includes loaded prices paid by it to profiteers and landlords for materials, services, and sites. Taxation of unearned income as a method of avoiding these overcharges and even of providing the service at the cost of the landlords and capitalists. Income tax, supertax, and death duties. The National Debt. Taxation as a means of redistributing income. The War Loan. The failure of private enterprise and the success of National Factories during the war. 111

31

YOUR RATES

The method of rating makes every rate a roughly graduated income tax. How the ratepayers are exploited. Illustrations: the charwoman, the Dock Companies, and the Drink Trade. The Poor Law, Municipal trading, and the Post Office as instruments of exploitation. 117

32

YOUR RENT

Rent is the most simple and direct form of exploitation. Difference between house rent and cost of house. Ground rents in great cities. Powers of life and death and of exile enjoyed by landlords. Sheep runs. Deer forests. The value of all improvements is finally appropriated by the landlords. The Single Tax. 122

33

WHAT CAPITAL IS

Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of Capitalist civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor. Capital, being perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing in the process. Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values. Inflation. Debasing the currency. Constant expenditure necessary. 127

34

INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE

The nature of investment. Not deferred consumption, but transferred and postponed claim to be fed. Exploitation of the hungry by the intelligent. Estate Development. Illustrative case of a country house and park developed into a suburb. Proprietors without the necessary business ability can hire it. Big business. The magic of capital. 131

35

LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private appropriation is finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order of its application. Examples: Distilleries versus lighthouses and harbors. Error of assuming that low prices with large sales are more profitable than high prices with restricted sales. Cases in point: telegraph and telephone services. Snowball letters. Commercial profit is no index to social utility. 113

36

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Capital, though beginning at the wrong end, is driven finally to the right end. Invention and inventors. Labor-saving machinery. Power: water, steam, and electric. Handmade and machine-made goods. Cheapness. The industrial revolution, though it has wrought evil, is not evil in itself. Retrogression is neither possible nor desirable. 137

37

SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

Capital has no country, being at home everywhere. Restrictions on trade at home, however beneficial, drive it abroad. Example: the trade in intoxicating drink may be driven to Africa by high excise in England and prohibition in America. Superior attraction of the slave trade. Suppression of slave trading followed by indirect enforcement of compulsory labor by means of hut taxes and the like. Development of other countries by English capital accompanied by neglect of home industrial resources and of the improvement of our towns. The foreign competition of which capitalists complain is often created by their own exports of capital. 140

38

DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

Investments of our capital abroad bring in gratuitous imports as interest. The expenditure of this tribute gives employment. It is, however, parasitic employment. The employees may be more pampered than productive employees; and this, combined with the disappearance of manufacturing towns and their replacement by attractive residential resorts, may produce an air of increased prosperity and refinement in all classes; but it does not provide suitable employment for the rougher workers discharged by the discarded factories, who have to be got rid of by Assisted Emigration or kept quiet by doles. If the process were unchecked England would become a country of luxurious hotels and pleasure cities inhabited by wealthy hotel guests and hotel servants with their retinue of importers and distributors, all completely dependent on foreign tribute from countries which might at any moment tax the incomes of absentee capitalists to extinction, and leave us to starve. 145

39

FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

Only freshly saved capital can be exported. The capital consumed in the establishment of mines, railways, and fixed industrial plant cannot be shipped abroad. When the home market supplied by them dries up through change or exhaustion of demand, the plant must either close down or seek markets abroad. This is the beginning of foreign trade. Trade with civilized nations is hampered by foreign protective duties or by the competition of the manufacturers on the spot. Undeveloped countries which have no tariffs and no manufactures are the most lucrative markets; but the ships’ crews and cargoes must be defended against massacre and plunder by the natives. This leads to the establishment of trading stations where British law is enforced. The annexation of the station makes it an outpost of the British Empire; and its boundary becomes a frontier. The policing of the frontier soon necessitates the inclusion of the lawless district beyond the frontier; and thus the empire grows without premeditation until its centre shifts to the other side of the earth. 150

40

EMPIRES IN COLLISION

Collision of the expanding empires. Fashoda incidents. The German demand for a place in the sun. The war of 1914-18. Expansion of professional soldiering into conscription. The strains set up automatically by the pressure of capitalistic commerce, and not the depravity of human nature, are the causes of modern wars. Its horrors are therefore not a ground for despair of political mankind. We celebrate the end of the Great War, not the beginning of it. The real origin of the mischief. 152

41

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

Foreign trade not objectionable as such. Need for international institutions as well as national ones. Supernational federations and Commonwealths highly desirable: the fewer frontiers the better. Combination obstructed by the hard fact that Capitalism creates universal rivalry, seeking, not to combine for the common benefit, but to appropriate for the individual benefit. Its resistance to national self-determination and independence arises from its reluctance to relinquish its booty. Our colonies and our conquests. Being by its nature insatiable Capital cannot stop fighting until it is killed. Hence the comparison of our civilization to the magician’s apprentice who set demons to work for him, but could not stop them when his life depended on his getting rid of them. 157

42

HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

Personal helplessness produced by division of labor. Illustration from pin manufacture. Optimism of Adam Smith. The various qualifications and accomplishments of the complete individual craftsman. The relative incompetence and ignorance of the employed through division of labor. Total technical ignorance of the machine minder. Misgivings of Oliver Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Morris. The remedy not retrogression but equal distribution of the leisure made possible by mass production. Ignorance and helplessness as great in the modern household as in the factory. 161

43

DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

As the disablement does not extend to the workers’ leisure it is important that they should have plenty of it. Unfortunately it is as ill distributed as income, the tendency of Capitalism being to separate the population into a class doing all the work with no leisure and a class doing no work and having all the leisure. The feudal system avoided this by placing all the public services on the shoulders of the landlords. The transfer of these services to a bureaucracy leaves the proprietary or capitalist class even more completely disabled than the proletariat for the conduct of industry. This disablement increases with the development of capitalist civilization, and maybe regarded as a function of it. 164

44

THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

The industrial disablement of the proletariat and the proprietariat necessitates the intervention of a middle class to direct industrial operations and transact the business they involve. How this necessity was met. Primogeniture. The propertyless younger sons. The professions. The men of business. The clerks. The breakdown of the monopoly of education by the middle class now opens it to capable proletarians as well as to younger sons and their descendants. The resultant hardening of the lot of the younger sons. The propertyless daughters. Opening of the professions to them. Woman’s natural monopoly of housekeeping. It creates not only a Woman Question but a Man Question. 168

45

DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER

The employer was master of the situation in the days of small firms with modest capitals. Modern big business has outgrown their resources. Joint stock companies have succeeded to firms, and Trusts to joint stock companies. Multiple shops are conquering the retail trade. Enormous capitals now required. Resultant rise of the financier, whose special function it is to procure such capitals and promote companies to exploit them. Thus the owner-employer becomes the employed employer, and, as an employee, falls into the proletariat. His son cannot succeed him, as he could when the employer was also the owner. This disappearance of the old nepotism in business is a public advantage, but abolishes heredity in the business class. “The Middle Station in Life” so highly praised by Defoe is now the least eligible in the community. 177

46

THE PROLETARIAT

The slogan of Karl Marx. The reduction of the middle class employer to a proletarian employee produces Socialism. The Fabian Society. Its success as a middle class society. Failure of its Socialist rivals as working class societies. Working class organization against Capitalism. Trade Unionism, or the Capitalism of the working class proletariat. 183

47

THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS

Employers and employed alike buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest markets open to them. Resultant opposition of interest between the buyer of labor and the seller of it. The Class War. Its atrocities. Slaves better cared for than “free” vendors of their own labor. Exposures by Karl Marx. Restraints imposed by factory legislation. Opposition by employers. Their apprehension not justified by the effect of the Acts. Opposition of the proletariat. Its parental interest in child labor. The parish apprentices. Prices in the labor market. The value of labor falls to zero. The theory of Capitalism. The Manchester school. Failure of the Capitalist system to make good its guarantees. The reserve army of unemployed. The Statute of Elizabeth. The workhouse. Child sweating practically compulsory on parents. 187

48

WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET

Men’s wages are family wages, women’s wages individual wages. The effect is to make the proletarian married woman the slave of a slave, and to establish conventions that the man is the breadwinner; that the woman’s work in the home being apparently gratuitous, is not work at all; and that women, when they are directly paid for their work, should be paid less than men. Protection of women in the propertied class by marriage settlements, and in the middle class by the Married Women’s Property Acts. The sweating of daughters living partly on their father’s wages enables one trade to sweat another, and produces a class of women who work for less than subsistence wages without starving. Their competition brings down the wages of all women of their class below subsistence level, with the result that women who have neither husband nor father to make up the shortage must make it up by prostitution or suffer the extremity of excessive toil and insufficient food. The wages of sin often much higher than the wages of virtue. The affiliation laws and the advantages of having illegitimate children. The Song of the Shirt and the Mind The Paint Girl. Male prostitution: dancing partners, barristers, clerks, journalists, parliamentary careerists, doctors, etc. Difference in quality between the physical prostitution forced on the woman and the mental prostitution forced on the man. 196

49

TRADE UNION CAPITALISM

Resistance of the proletariat to the capitalists. Combination the first condition of effective resistance. Combination difficult or impossible as between segregated workers (domestic servants and agricultural laborers) and workers differing greatly in class (actors). Easy as between factory operatives, miners, and railway workers. The weapon of the combinations is the strike: that of the employers’ counter-combinations the lock-out. The warfare at its worst. Rattening. The Manchester and Sheffield outrages. “Ca’ canny”, and “restricting output”. The cost of this warfare to the community. Capitalism cannot check it because Trade Unionism is only the application of the Capitalist principle to labor as well as to land and capital. Resistance of the employers. Attempt to suppress the Unions as criminal conspiracies. Refusal to employ unionists. Combinations of employers into employers’ federations. Victimization. The disablement of labor by machinery obliges the Unions to insist on piecework wages instead of time wages. Machine minding by girls’ and women’s Unions. Failure of the proletariat to secure any considerable share of the increase in the national output produced by machinery. 204

50

DIVIDE AND GOVERN

The impermanence of the concessions wrested by the Unions from the employers by strikes makes it necessary for the proletariat to have them established as laws (Factory Acts, etc.): hence the appearance in Parliament of Labor members, and finally of an Independent Labor Party. The Factory Acts, beginning with the protection of children and women, acted as a protection for the men also. In factories, when the women and children stop the engine stops; and when the engine stops the men must stop. How these concessions were wrung from Parliament through a split in the Capitalist ranks whilst Labor was in a negligible minority there. The manufacturers in 1832 break the monopoly of Parliament by the landlords. The Factory Acts as the revenge of the landlords. These two Capitalist parties compete for popular support by bribing the proletariat with votes. Final complete enfranchisement of the proletariat. Meanwhile Socialism, having sprung into existence under middle class leadership, had undertaken the political education of the proletariat. Romantic illusions of the middle class about the industrial proletariat. Failure of the Socialist societies to supplant Trade Unionism. Success of the Fabian Society as a middle class body permeating all existing political organizations. Establishment of the Labor Party in Parliament as a political federation of Socialist societies and Trade Unions. Its history up to 1927. On the Trade Union side the tendency is not to Socialism but to Capitalism controlled by Labor, with the middle and propertied classes reduced to subjection in the interest of the proletariat. As the proletariat has the advantage of numbers this arrangement would profit the majority; but it would be so unpalatable to the propertied and learned classes that they may conceivably be driven to clamor for Socialism to save them from it. 213

51

DOMESTIC CAPITAL

The conversion of capital into machines, vehicles, and other aids to labor. The delusion that this operation can be reversed, and the machines and vehicles converted into spare ready money. Why this impossible operation seems to practical business men to be not only possible but an everyday occurrence. The real nature of the transactions which delude them. As these transactions can be effected only by a few people at a time, an attempt to force them on the whole Capitalist class simultaneously by a tax on capital must fail. The income of the capitalist is real: her capital, once invested, is imaginary, as it has been consumed in the act of converting it into aids to labor. Death Duties, nominally taxes on capital, are not really so, and are as objectionable in practice as they are unsound in theory. Insanity of estimates of the wealth of the country in terms of capital values. 225

52

THE MONEY MARKET

The Money Market is not a market for the sale and purchase of spare money, but for its hire. Difference between hiring and borrowing. Payment for the hire of spare money is called in business interest, and in old-fashioned economic treatises “the reward of abstinence”. In the case of spare cash in the money market the obligation of the owner to the hirer is as great as that of the hirer to the owner, since capital not hired perishes by natural decay. Negative interest. The real business of the money market is to sell incomes for lump sums of spare ready money. Enormous rates of interest paid by the poor. The Bank Rate. Lending to companies. Limited liability. Varieties of shares and debentures. Jobbers and brokers. The connection of Stock Exchange transactions with industry is mostly only nominal. Warnings. Bogus companies. Genuine companies which are smoked out. “Coming in on the third reconstruction.” Perils of enterprise, of public spirit, of conscience, and of imaginative foresight. 231

53

SPECULATION

Risk of becoming a gambler’s wife. Selling and buying imaginary shares for phantom prices. How this is possible. Settling day on the Stock Exchange. Fluctuations. Bulls, bears, and stags. Contango and Backwardation. Cornering the bears. The losses risked are only net, not gross. Cover. Bucket shops. Unreality of the transactions. An extraordinary daily waste of human energy, audacity, and cunning. 239

54

BANKING

Spare money for business purposes is mostly hired from bankers. Overdrafts. Discounted bills of exchange. The Bank Rate. How the bankers get the spare money they deal in. Customers must not draw their balances simultaneously. The word credit. Credit is not capital: it is a purely abstract opinion formed by a bank manager as to the ability of a customer to repay an advance of goods. Credit, like invested capital, is a phantom category. Its confusion with real capital is a dangerous delusion of the practical business man. “Bubbles” founded on this delusion. The Bank Rate depends on the supply and demand of spare subsistence available. Effective demand. Proposals to tax invested capital and credit. A hypothetical example. 243

55

MONEY

Money as a tool for buying and selling. As a measure of value. As material available for other purposes and therefore valuable apart from its use as money. The latter a guarantee against the dishonesty of governments. Debasing the currency. Paper money. Inflation. Post-war examples. Deflation. Stability the main desideratum. How to maintain this. Fluctuations in the value of money indicated by a general rise or fall of prices. Cheques and clearing houses as economisers of currency. Communism dispenses with pocket money. The Bank of England as the bankers’ bank. An intrinsically valuable coinage the safest and most stable. 251

56

NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING

The nationalization of minting is necessary because only a Government can establish a legal tender currency. Cheques and the like, circulating as private currency, are not legal tender money but only private and insecure title deeds to such money; but legal tender money is a Government title deed to goods. Cheques and bills of exchange are senseless unless expressed in terms of money. The nationalization of the manufacture of money is a matter of course. The case for nationalization of banking, though less obvious, is equally strong. Profiteering in spare money. Municipal banks. There is no mystery about banking; and those who now conduct it are as available for public as for private employment. 264

57

COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION

The fate of the shareholder when the banks are nationalized. Purchase of their shares no expense to the nation if the cost be levied on the whole body of capitalists. The apparent compensation is really distributed confiscation. The process a well established and familiar one. Candidates who advocate expropriation without compensation do not know their business and should not be voted for. Alternative of Government entering competitively into industries and beating private enterprises out of them. Objections. Wastefulness of competition. A competing State enterprise would have to allow competition with itself, which is often inadmissible in the case of ubiquitous services. The private competitor is indifferent to the ruin of a defeated rival; but the State must avoid this. 268

58

PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION

Nationalization, though theoretically sound, and its expense a bogey, is practically an arduous undertaking, involving the organization of a central department with local services throughout the country. It is possible only in stable and highly organized States. Revolutions and proclamations cannot by themselves nationalize anything. Governments may plunder and wreck State industries to avoid imposing unpopular direct taxes. 274

59

CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION

There is always a clamor by indignant idealists for direct retributive confiscation without compensation. Its possibilities. Taxation of capital as a means of forcing defaulters to surrender their title deeds and share certificates to the Government is plausible and not physically impossible. 276

60

REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT

The expropriation of the rich is objected to on the ground that the rich give employment. The sense in which this is true. The parasitic proletariat. Bond Street and Bournemouth. All transfers of purchasing power from the rich to the Government depress the parasitic trades and their employees. A sudden wholesale transfer would produce an epidemic of bankruptcy and unemployment. Governments must immediately expend the incomes they confiscate. 277

61

SAFETY VALVES

Doles. Throwing the confiscated money into nationalized banks. Raising wages in confiscated industries. War. Would these act quickly enough? An uninterrupted circulation of money is as necessary to a nation as an uninterrupted circulation of blood to an animal. Any general and simultaneous confiscation of income would produce congestion in London. Grants-in-aid to municipalities an important safety valve. Public works. Roads, forests, water power, reclamation of land from the sea, garden cities. Examination of these activities shews that none of them would act quickly enough. They would provoke a violent reaction which would give a serious set-back to Socialism. Nationalizations must be effected one at a time, and be compensated. 279

62

WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO

Direct confiscation of income without compensation is already in vigorous operation. Income tax, super tax, and estate duties. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his budget. Gladstone’s attitude towards income tax. General agreement of Capitalist parties that all other means of raising money shall be exhausted before levying taxes on income. Contrary assumption of the proletarian Labor Party that the Capitalists should pay first, not last. This issue underlies all the Budget debates. Estate duties (“death duties”), though unsound economically, and often cruel and unfair in operation, succeed in carrying Socialistic confiscation further in England under Conservative Governments than some avowedly Socialistic ones have been able to carry it abroad. The success of the operation is due to the fact that the sums confiscated, though charged as percentages on capital values, can be paid out of income directly or indirectly (by insuring or borrowing), and are immediately thrown back into circulation by Government expenditure. Thus income can be safely confiscated if immediately redistributed; but the basic rule remains that the Government must not confiscate more than it can spend productively. This is the Socialist canon of taxation. 284

63

HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR

War must be paid for on the nail: armies cannot be fed nor slaughtered by promissory notes. Men are obtained by conscription, and money partly by direct taxation and inflation, but mainly by borrowing from the capitalists in spite of the protests of the Labor Party against the exemption of capital from conscription. The quaint result is that in order to pay the capitalists the interest on their loans, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has to tax them so heavily that, as a class, they are losing by the transaction. Robbing Peter, who did not lend, to pay Paul, who did. As the property owners who hold War Loan Stock gain at the expense of those who do not, a unanimous Capitalist protest is impossible. An illustration. But the Labor contention that it would pay the propertied class as a whole to cancel the National Debt is none the less sound. Financing war by “funded” loans. As capital invested in war is utterly and destructively consumed it does not, like industrial capital, leave the nation better equipped for subsequent production. The War Loan, though registered in the books of the Bank of England as existing capital, is nothing but debt. The country is therefore impoverished to meet interest charges on 7000 millions of non-existent capital. There are reasons for not repudiating this debt directly; but as the war produced an enormous consumption of capital and yet left the world with less income to distribute than before, a veiled repudiation of at least part of the debt is inevitable. Our method of repudiation is to redistribute income as between the holders of War Loan and the other capitalists. But as the huge borrowing and confiscation of capital that was feasible when the Government had war employment ready for an unlimited number of proletarians leaves them destitute now that the Government has demobilized them without providing peace employment, the capitalists have now to pay doles in addition to finding the money to pay themselves their own interest. 289

64

NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES

Though taxation of capital is nonsensical, all proposals in that form are not necessarily impracticable. A Capitalist Government could, without requiring ready money or disturbing the Stock Exchange or the Bank Rate, cancel the domestic part of the National Debt to relieve private industry from taxation by veiling the repudiation as a levy on capital values and accepting loan and share scrip at face value in payment. Illustration. The objection to such a procedure is that levies, as distinguished from established annual taxes, are raids on private property. As such, they upset the sense of security which is essential to social stability, and are extremely demoralizing to Governments when once they are accepted as legitimate precedents. A raiding Chancellor of the Exchequer would be a very undesirable one. The regular routine of taxation of income and compensated nationalizations is available and preferable. 294

65

THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED

Recapitulation. The difficulty of applying the constructive program of Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part of the business: the will to equality. When the Government finally acquires a virtually complete control of the national income it will have the power to distribute it unequally; and this possibility may enlist, and has to a certain extent already enlisted, the most determined opponents of Socialism on the side of its constructive political machinery. Thus Socialism ignorantly pursued may lead to State Capitalism instead of to State Socialism, the same road leading to both until the final distributive stage is reached. The solution of the constructive problem of Socialism does not allay the terrors of the alarmists who understand neither problem nor solution, and connect nothing with the word Socialism except red ruin and the breaking up of laws. Some examination of the effect of Socialism on institutions other than economic must therefore be appended. 297

66

SHAM SOCIALISM

The War, by shewing how a Government can confiscate the incomes of one set of citizens and hand them over to another set with or without the intention of equalizing distribution or nationalizing industries or services, shewed also how any predominant class, trade, or clique which can nobble our Cabinet Ministers can use the power of the State for selfish ends by measures disguised as reforms or political necessities. All retrogressions and blunders, like all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so never lack plausible advocates. Illustrative cases of exploitation of the rates and taxes and of private benevolence by Capitalism and Trade Unionism. Public parks, endowed schools, garden cities, and subsidies. The Government subsidy to the coal owners in 1925 not Socialistic nor even Capitalistic, but simply unbusinesslike. Poplarism. Mischief done by subsidies and doles. Subsidies plus Poplarism burn the candle at both ends. The danger of conscious and deliberate exploitation of the coercive and confiscatory powers of the Government by private or sectional interests is greatly increased by the modern American practice of employing first-rate brains as such in industrial enterprise. The American Trade Unions are following this example. Surprising results. What its adoption by English Trade Unions will mean. Socialists will still have to insist on equalization of income to prevent Capitalist big business and the aristocracy of Trade Unionism controlling Collectivist Governments for their private ends. 299

67

CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION

Nothing stays put. Literal Conservatism impossible. Human society is like a glacier, apparently stationary, always in motion, always changing. To understand the changes that are happening, and the others that are coming, it is necessary to understand the changes that have gone before. Examples of every phase in economic evolution still survive and can be studied from life. Without such study we are liable to be misguided and corrupted or exasperated. Those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of profits which took the form of thrilling exploits by extraordinary individuals with no sordid aims are narrated as the splendid history of our race. On the other hand, the more shameful episodes in that pursuit may be imputed to the greed of capitalists instead of to the ferocity and bigotry of their agents. Both views may be discounted as special pleadings. A capitalist may accidentally be a genius just as she may be a fool or a criminal. But a capitalist as such is only a person with spare money and a legal right to withhold it from the hungry. No special ability or quality of any sort beyond ordinary prudence and selfishness is involved in the capitalist’s function: the solicitor and stockbroker, the banker and employer, will carry the capital to the proletarians and see that when consuming it they replace it with interest. The most intelligent woman can do no better than invest her money, which does far more good when invested than when spent in charity. But the employers and financiers who exploit her capital are pressed by the exhaustion of home markets and old industries to finance adventurous and experimental geniuses who explore and invent and conquer. They cannot concern themselves with the effect of these enterprises on the world or even on the nation provided they bring back money to the shareholders. Capital, to save itself from rotting, has to be ruthless in its ceaseless search for investment; and mere Conservatism is of no avail against this iron necessity. Its chartered companies. It adds India, Borneo, Rhodesia to the white Englishman’s burden of its naval and military defence. It may yet shift our capital from Middlesex to Asia or West Africa. Our helplessness in such an event. No need to pack up yet; but we must get rid of static conceptions of civilization and geography. 308

68

THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM

Controlled motion is a good thing; but the motion of Capital is uncontrollable and dangerous. As the future of civilization depends on Governments gaining control of the forces that are running away with Capitalism an understanding of them is necessary. Very few people do understand them. The Government does not: neither do the voters. The difference between Governments and governed. The Governments know the need for government and want to govern. The governed have no such knowledge: they resent government and desire freedom. This resentment, which is the central weakness of Democracy, was not of great importance when the people had no votes, as under Queen Elizabeth and Cromwell. But when great extensions of government and taxation came to be required to control and supplant Capitalism, bourgeois Democracy produced an increase of electoral resistance to government; and proletarian Democracy has continued the bourgeois tradition. The resultant paralysis of Parliament has produced a demand for dictatorships; and Europe has begun to clamor for political disciplinarians. Between our inability to govern well and our unwillingness to be governed at all, we furnish examples of the abuses of power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of either. 314

69

THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

We are not born free: Nature is the supreme tyrant, and in our latitudes a hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root nothing more than inventing ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor: in short, saving labor and winning leisure. Some examples. Actually Liberty is Leisure. Political liberations cannot add to liberty unless they add to leisure. For example: woman’s daily routine. Sleep, feeding, resting, and locomotion are not leisure: they are compulsory. A seven hour working day gives at most six hours leisure out of the seventeen non-working hours. The woman of property. Leisure is the incentive to attain her position. All wage workers value leisure more than money. Property coveted because it confers the maximum of leisure. Nevertheless, as leisure brings freedom, and freedom brings responsibility and self-determination, it is dreaded by those accustomed to tutelage: for instance, soldiers and domestic servants. The national fund of leisure. Its present misdistribution. Description of a hypothetical four hours working day. Exceptions to intermittent labor at regular hours. Pregnancy and nursing. Artistic, scientific, and political work. Fixed daily hours only a basis for calculation. A four hours day may mean in practice six days a month, two months a year, or an earlier retirement. Difference between routine work and creative work. Complete freedom impossible even during leisure. Legislative restraints on religion, sport, and marriage. The Inhibition Complex and the Punch baby. The contrary or Anarchic Complex. The instinctive resistance to Socialism as slavery obscures its aspect as a guarantee of the maximum possible of leisure and therefore of liberty. 319

70

RENT OF ABILITY

The proper social use of brains. Methods of making exceptional personal talents lucrative. When the talents are popular, as in the case of artists, surgeons, sports champions and the like, they involve hard work and confer no political or industrial power. As their lucrativeness is a function of their scarcity their power to enrich their possessors is not formidable and is controllable by taxation. Occasional freak incomes would not matter if equality of income were general. Impossibility of living more expensively than the richest class. Millionaires give away money for this reason. Special case of the talent for exploitation, which is a real social danger. Its forms. Administrative ability. The ability to exercise authority and enforce discipline. Both are indispensable in industry and in all organized activities. When tactfully exercised they are not unpopular, as most of us like to be saved the trouble of thinking for ourselves and so are not averse from being directed. Authority and subordination in themselves are never unpopular; but Capitalism, by creating class differences and associating authority with insolence, destroys the social equality which is indispensable to voluntary subordination. Scolding, slave driving, cursing, kicking, and slacking. Reluctance to obey commanders who are trusted and liked is less likely to give trouble than reluctance to command. Fortunately, persons of exceptional ability do not need any special inducement to exercise it. Instances of their failure in subordinate employment. In our socialized services they do not demand excessive incomes. The demand of the real lady or gentleman. Both are compelled to act as cads in capitalist commerce, in which organizers and financiers, by reason of their special cunning, are able to extort prodigious shares of the country’s output as “rent of ability.” The meaning of rent. It cannot be abolished but it can be nationalized. Futility of recriminations as to indispensability between employers and employed. The talent of the exploiter is as indispensable to the landlord and capitalist as to the proletarian. Directed labor is indispensable to all three. Nationalization and equalization socializes rent of ability as well as rent of land and capital by defeating its private appropriation. 331

71

PARTY POLITICS

The steps to Socialism will not necessarily be taken by Socialist Governments. Many of them may be taken, as some already have, by anti-Socialist Cabinets. The growth of the Labor Party and the enormous electoral preponderance of the proletarian electorate promises a complete Labor conquest of the House of Commons. In that case the victorious Labor Party would split into several irreconcilable groups and make parliamentary government impossible unless it contained a unanimous Socialist majority of members really clear in their minds as to what Socialism exactly means. Precedent in the Long Parliament. The danger is not peculiar to Labor. Any political party obtaining complete possession of Parliament may go to pieces and end in a dictatorship. The Conservative triumph produced by the anti-Russian scare of 1924 made it almost impossible to hold the party together. Large majorities in Parliament, far from enabling Cabinets to do what they like, destroy their cohesion and enfeeble their party. Demoralization of Parliament during the period of large majorities brought in by the South African war. Concealment of preparations for the war of 1914-18. Parliamentary value of the fact that Socialism cannot be shaken by political storms and changes. 343

72

THE PARTY SYSTEM

Popular ignorance of what the term Party System really means. Enslavement of voters by the system, in and out of Parliament. Its advantage is that if the House of Commons has good leaders the quality of the rank and file does not matter. How it was introduced as a war measure by William III. Under it the upshot of the General Elections is determined not by the staunch party voters but by the floating body of independent electors who follow their impulses without regard to the Party System. The system is essentially a two-party system of solid majority Government party versus solid minority Opposition party. When independence prevails, groups form, each in a minority in the House; and only by combining enough groups to form a majority can any leader form a Cabinet and carry on. Such combinations are called Blocks. They have little cohesion, and do not last. The French Chamber exhibits this phenomenon. Possibility of its occurring in the House of Commons. Alternative systems. Government by committees without a Cabinet as practised by our municipalities. This is a local survival of the old system of separate King’s cabinets upon which the Party System was imposed. The non-party methods of local government are quite efficient. Increasing tendency to lessen the rigidity of the Party System in Parliament by declaring more and more questions non-party. Tendency of Governments to resign on defeated votes of confidence only. Inadequacy of our two Houses of Parliament for the work put upon them by modern conditions. Need for changes involving the creation of new chambers. The Webb proposals. 348

73

DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY

Questions on which the present apparent unanimity in the parliamentary Labor Party is delusive: for instance, the Right to Strike. Socialism and Compulsory Social Service versus Trade Unionism and Freedom of Contract. A Bill to enforce social service and penalize strikes would split the party. Magnitude of modern strikes through the extension of Trade Unionism from crafts to industries. Modern strikes tend to become devastating civil wars. Arguments for Compulsory Labor. Military and civil service. When the issue is joined the non-Socialist Trade Unionists will combine with the Conservatives against the Socialists. 354

74

RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

The nation’s children. Religious teaching in public schools. Impossibility of expressing the multifarious conflict of opinions on this subject by a two-party conflict in the House of Commons. Sectarian private schools. Roman Catholic and Nonconformist scruples. Passive resistance. Impracticable solutions. Cowper-Templeism. The Bible and Copernican astronomy. Modern physics and evolutional biology. Men professing science are as bigoted as ecclesiastics. Secular education impossible because children must be taught conduct, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are metaphysical. Weakness of the punishment system. Conceptions of God. Personifications of God as the Big Papa and the Roman Catholic Big Mamma needed for children. Voltaire and Robespierre anticipated in the nursery. Comte’s law of the three stages of belief. Tendency of parents, voters, elected persons, and governments to impose their religions, customs, names, institutions, and even their languages on everyone by force. Such substitutions may be progressive. Toleration is incompatible with complete sectarian conviction: the historic tolerations were only armistices or exhaustions after drawn battles. Examples of modern bigotry. Toleration is impossible as between Capitalism and Socialism. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert it by exterminating the Socialists. 359

75

REVOLUTIONS

Difference between revolutions and elections or ordinary reforms. Revolutions transfer political power from one faction or leader to another by violence or the threat of violence. Examples from English history. The transfer of political power from our capitalists to our proletarians has already taken place in form but not in substance, because, as our proletariat is half parasitic on Capitalism, and only half productive and self-supporting, half the proletarians are on the side of Capitalism. “Ye are many: they are few” is a dangerously misleading slogan. Consciousness of their formidable proletarian backing may embolden the capitalists to refuse to accept a parliamentary decision on any issue which involves a serious encroachment of Socialism on Private Property. The case of Ireland, and the simultaneous post-war repudiations of parliamentary supremacy in several continental countries forbid us to dismiss this possibility as unlikely. But whether our political decisions are made by votes or by blood and iron the mere decisions to make changes and the overruling of their opponents cannot effect any changes except nominal ones. The Russian Revolution effected a complete change from absolute monarchy to proletarian republicanism and proclaimed the substitution of Communism for Capitalism; but the victorious Communists found themselves obliged to fall back on Capitalism and do their best to control it. Their difficulties were greatly increased by the destruction involved by violent revolution. Communism can spread only as a development of existing economic civilization and must be thrown back by any sudden overthrow of it. “The inevitability of gradualness” does not imply any inevitability of peaceful change; but Socialists will be strongly opposed to civil war if their opponents do not force it on them by repudiating peaceful methods, because though civil war may clear the way it can bring the goal no nearer. The lesson of history on this point. The French Revolution and the mot of Fouquier Tinville. Socialism must therefore be discussed on its own merits as an order of society apart from the methods by which the necessary political power to establish it may be attained. 370

76

CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY

As peaceful settlement of the struggle for political supremacy between the Capitalists and the Socialists cannot be guaranteed we must resign ourselves to the unpleasant possibilities of our sedulously glorified pugnacity. But as destructive quarreling must be followed by constructive co-operation if civilization is to be maintained the consummation of Socialism can proceed when the fighting is over. A civil war can therefore be only an interruption and need not be further considered. Socialism in Parliament. How a series of properly prepared and compensated nationalizations may be voted for by intelligent politicians who are not Socialists, and carried out without disturbing the routine to which the unthinking masses are accustomed. Importance of the preparations: every nationalization will require extensions of the civil and municipal services. Socialism at one stroke is impossible. How far it must stop short of its logical completion. 380

77

SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

Private commercial enterprise will not be completely superseded by nationalization; but it may become bankrupt; and in that case it may demand and receive subsidies from the Government. A simple instance. This process, long familiar in cultural institutions, has now begun in big business: for example the Government subsidy to coal owners in 1925, the Capitalists thus themselves establishing the practice, and providing precedents for the subsidizing of private experimental ventures by Socialist Governments. Direct industrial nationalizations must be confined to well-established routine services. When State-financed private ventures succeed, and thereby cease to be experimental, they can be nationalized, throwing back private enterprise on its proper business of novelty, invention, and experiment. The objections of doctrinaire nationalizers. The Socialist objective is not nationalization but equalization of income, nationalization being only a means to that end. The abuse of subsidies. Looting the taxpayer. Subsidies as mortgages. The national war factories. Their sale to private bidders after the war as an illustration of the impossibility of nationalizing or retaining anything for which the Government cannot find immediate use. 386

78

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization. Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled and highly civilized society under a Government with a highly trained civil service and an elaborate code of laws, fortified by general moral approval. The process of its establishment will necessarily be dangerously slow rather than dangerously quick; for we are not educated to be Socialists: we teach children that Socialism is wicked. The material advantages of the steps towards Socialism are, however, biassing proletarian parents, who are in a huge majority, more and more in favor of the movement towards Socialism. This tendency is helped by the moral revolt against the cruelty of Capitalism in its operation and the sordidness of its principle. In a Socialist State economic selfishness would probably stand on the moral level now occupied by cardsharping instead of being held up as the key to social eminence. 391

79

SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY

Nervous dread of over-regulation produced by the endless inspections and restrictions needed to protect the proletariat from unbridled Capitalist exploitation. These would have no sense in a Socialist state. Examples. Preoccupation of the police with the enforcement of private property rights and with the crimes and disorder caused by poverty. The drink question. Drink the great anæsthetic. Artificial happiness indispensable under Capitalism. Dutch courage. Drugs. Compulsory prophylactics as substitutes for sanitation. Direct restrictions of liberty by private property. “The right to roam.” Deer forests and sheep runs. Existing liberties which Socialism would abolish. The liberty to be idle. Nonsense about capital and not labor being source of wealth. The case of patents and copyrights. Unofficial tyrannies. Fashion. Estate rules. The value of conventionality. 393

80

SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE

Socialists apt to forget that people object to new liberties more than to new laws. Marriage varies from frontier to frontier. Civil marriage. Religious and communist celibacy, or the negation of marriage. Socialism has nothing to do with these varieties, as equality of income applies impartially to them all. Why there is nevertheless a rooted belief that Socialism will alter marriage. The legend of Russian “nationalization of women”. Where women and children are economically dependent on husbands and fathers marriage is slavery for wives and home a prison for children. Socialism, by making them economically independent, would break the chain and open the prison door. Probable results. Improvement in domestic manners. The State should intervene to divorce separated couples, thus abolishing the present power of the parties to enforce a broken tie vindictively or religiously. Clash of Church and State on marriage. The State must intervene to control population. As Socialism would clear away the confusion into which Capitalism, with its inevitable result of parasitic labor and premature overpopulation, has plunged the subject, a Socialist state is more likely to interfere than a Capitalist one. Expedients. Limitation of families. Encouragement of families. Polygamy. Experience of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) on this point. Bounties for large families plus persecution of birth control. State endowment of parentage. Compulsory parentage. Monogamy practicable only when the numbers of the sexes are equal. Case of a male-destroying war. Conflicting domestic ideals affecting population. The Bass Rock ideal. The Boer ideal. The bungalow ideal. The monster hotel ideal. 406

81

SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN

The State school child. Need for the protection of children against parents. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The new Adoption Act. Need for the organization of child life as such. Schools essentially prisons. General ignorance after nine years of enforced elementary schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real nature and purpose of education. Our stupidities about it. Injury done by forcing children to learn things beyond their capacity or foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory Beethoven. Boys and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by forbidding play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be tamed by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for the Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed. Typical case of assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between teachers and children. Schools, though educationally disastrous, have the incidental advantage of encouraging promiscuous social intercourse. University manners. Middle class manners. Garden City and Summer School manners. Need for personal privacy and free choice of company not supplied by the snobbery and class segregations of Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score. Technical education for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on the ground that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist state could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British religions. Original sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need protection more than their bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary to citizenship. Certain prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an official second nature. Limits to State proselytizing. Beyond the irreducible minimum of education the hand should be left to find its own employment and the mind its own food. 412

82

SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES

Will a Socialist State tolerate a Church? This question must be discussed objectively. Survey of the age-long struggle between Church and State for the control of political and social institutions. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber. Theocracy has not lost its power. Mormon Theocracy. Christian Science. Both have come into conflict with the secular government. New Churches capture secular Governments by denying that they are Churches. The persecutions and fanaticisms of today rage in the name of Science. The avowed Church of Christ Scientist versus the masked Church of Jenner and Pasteur, Scientists. Tests for public office, governing bodies, and professions. Church of England tests broken by the English people refusing to remain in one Church. The Quakers. Admission to Parliament of Dissenters, then of Jews, finally of Atheists, leading to civil marriage and burial and the substitution of civil registration of birth for baptism, leaves the State in the grip of pseudo-scientific orthodoxy. Extravagances of this new faith in America and the new European republics. The assets of religion are also the assets of science. The masses, indifferent to both, are ungovernable without an inculcated faith (the official second nature). Modern conflicts between secular authority and Church doctrine. Cremation. Rights of animals. Use of cathedrals. The Russian situation: the State tolerating the Church whilst denouncing its teaching as dope. Such contemptuously tolerant anti-clericalism is necessarily transient: positive teaching being indispensable. Subjective religion. Courage. Redskin ideals. Man as hunter-warrior with Woman as everything else. Political uselessness of ferocity and sportsmanship. Fighting men cowardly and lazy as thinkers. Women anxious lest Socialism should attack their religion. It need not do so unless inequality of income is part of their religion. But they must beware of attempts to constitute Socialism as a Catholic Church with an infallible prophet and Savior. The Moscow Third International is essentially such a Church, with Karl Marx as its prophet. It must come into conflict with the Soviet and be mastered by it. We need not, however, repudiate its doctrine and vituperate its prophet on that account any more than we need repudiate the teaching of Christ and vilify his character when we insist that the State and not the Church shall govern England. The merits of Marx. 429

83

CURRENT CONFUSIONS

The Intelligent Woman must resist the impulse to intervene in conversational bickerings and letters to the Press about Socialism and Capitalism by people who understand neither. Meaningless vituperation and general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname themselves as well as oneanother. Self-contradictory names such as Communist-Anarchist. Real distinctions. Direct Action versus Fabianism. Poor Man’s Capitalism: its forms. It often masquerades as Socialism. The assumption of the name Communist by the cruder sort of Direct-Actionists produces the anomaly of a Labor Party expelling Communists whilst advocating Communist legislation. Fascism, produced by impatient disgust with Parliament as an institution, is common to the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Methods of Direct Action. The General Strike. Its absurdity. Its futility as a preventive of war. Pacifism. Supernational social organization. Empires and Commonwealths. Confusions as to Democracy. Proletarian jealousy of official power. Resultant autocracy in the Trade Unions. Labor leaders more arbitrary than Peers, and much more cynical as to working class political capacity than middle class and aristocratic idealists. Democracy in practice has never been democratic; and the millennial hopes based on every extension of the franchise, from the Reform Bill of 1832 to Votes for Women, have been disappointed. The reaction. Discipline for everybody and votes for nobody. Why women should stick resolutely to their votes. Proportional Representation opposed by the Labor Party. Need for a scientific test of political capacity. Those who use democracy as a stepping stone to political power oppose it as a dangerous nuisance when they get there. Its real object is to establish a genuine aristocracy. To do this we must first ascertain which are the aristocrats; and it is here that popular voting fails. Mrs Everybody votes for Mrs Somebody only to discover that she has elected Mrs Noisy Nobody. 443

84

PERORATION

A last word. Danger of discouragement through excessive sympathy. Public evils are fortunately not millionfold evils. Suffering is not cumulative; but waste is; and the Socialist revolt is against waste. Honor, health, and joy of heart are impossible under Capitalism: rich and poor are alike detestable: both must cease to exist. Our need for neighbors whose interests do not compete with ours is against the principle of Capitalism. Waiting for dead men’s shoes. The professions. Husband hunting. The social friction is intense: Capitalism puts sand instead of oil in all the bearings of our machinery. The remonstrance of the optimist. Natural kindliness. Capitalism itself was better-intentioned in its inception than early Christianity. Goodwill is not enough: it is dangerous until it finds the right way. Unreasoning sentiment an unsafe guide. We believe what we want to believe: if a pecuniary bias is given to our activities it will corrupt them in institution, teaching, and practice until the best intentioned citizens will know no honest methods and doctrines. In our search for disinterested service we come up against profiteering and Trade Unionism at every turn. Resultant cynicism and pessimism. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide. Equality of income would make these terrible books mere clinical lectures on an extinct disease. The simple and noble meaning of gentility. 455

APPENDIX

Instead of a bibliography. The technical literature of Capitalism and Socialism mostly abstract, inhuman, and written in an academic jargon which only specialists find readable. Failure to define either capital or Socialism. The early Capitalist economists: their candor. Ricardo, De Quincey, and Austin. The Socialist reaction: Proudhon and Marx. The academic reaction: John Stuart Mill, Cairnes, and Maynard Keynes. The artistic reaction: Ruskin, Carlyle, and Morris. The reaction of the novelists: Dickens and Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. The reaction in the theatre: Ibsen and Strindberg. Henry George and Land Nationalization. Literature of the conversion of Socialism from an insurrectionary movement in the Liberal tradition to a constitutional one. Fabian Essays. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The author’s contributions. 465

Index 471

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM