Part 3 (1/2)

CHAPTER VII

PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS

For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we will a.s.sume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will merely consider how, a mult.i.tude of such men being given, the most efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner in which the problem is solved now.

Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say, invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely, two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd s.h.i.+llings of the guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages; and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them, the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages, on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that n.o.body cares to buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's implement of direction pa.s.ses out of his hands altogether; and the simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means of directing or of misdirecting it again.

But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a mult.i.tude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own industrial failure.

Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure, on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminis.h.i.+ng the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less than it would be otherwise.[10]

Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats, the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as they would be under the regime of socialism, were reduced to specific fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the community would lose the cus.h.i.+ons which in that case would have been made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the b.u.t.ter which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore, to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such goods and such quant.i.ties of them as would satisfy from moment to moment the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a regime of socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return, the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased.

It is impossible to ill.u.s.trate in detail the situation which would thus arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is an inst.i.tution which imaginably might take various forms; and socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have refrained from committing themselves to any detailed programme. The socialistic state, however, having to perform a double function--namely, that of political governor and universal director of industry--would necessarily be divided into two distinct bodies. One of these, consisting of statesmen and legislators, would, we may a.s.sume, be elected by the votes of the people. But the other, consisting of industrial experts--the inventors, the chemists, the electricians, the naval engineers, the organisers of labour--might conceivably be in the first or the second of the two following positions: They might either be left free, as they are under the existing system, to do severally the best they can, according to their own lights, in estimating what goods or services the population wants, and in satisfying these wants with such increasing economy that new goods and services might be continually added to the old. They might be left free to promote or dismiss subordinates, to fill up vacancies, and take new men into partners.h.i.+p, very much as the heads of private firms do now. Or else they might be liable, in greater or less degree, to removal or supersession, and interference with their technical operations, on the part of the political body, whose members, while representing the general ideas of the community, would presumably not be experts in the direction of its particular industries.

Now, let us suppose first that the official directors of labour are left practically free to follow their own devices. The situation which will arise may be ill.u.s.trated by the following imaginary case: The nation, let us say, requires two sister s.h.i.+ps. They are built in different yards, under two different directors, and a thousand labourers are employed in the construction of each; but while the labourers who work under one director take a year to complete their task, those who work under the other complete theirs within ten months. This would mean for the community that, through the inferiority of the former of these two officials, two months' labour of the national s.h.i.+pwrights had been lost; and the public interest would require that the industrial regiment commanded by him should as quickly as possible pa.s.s out of his control into that of an official who could render it more efficient than he. And under the existing system this, as we have seen already, is precisely what sooner or later would be brought about automatically. The inefficient director, in proportion to his relative inefficiency, loses his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor of s.h.i.+ps wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available.

There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are a.s.suming that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in money, we must necessarily a.s.sume that they will value their posts for some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical superiority to both.

Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch as that to which it could be raised by the compet.i.tion of to-day. But the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical development of any compet.i.tion from without.

That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.

The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit letters with a prompt.i.tude which the post-office still declined to emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the inst.i.tution of the Boy Messengers.

Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France, where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle, would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture, are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state itself would have made by selling an equal quant.i.ty of its own inferior articles.

The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself against the compet.i.tion of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.

And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend them, to the activities of the entire community.

We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of socialised industry on the a.s.sumption that they would be free to follow the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely coincide with fact. This is the a.s.sumption that the official directors of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the great ma.s.s of the people.

Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency, embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and consciously approved of by the lowest.

And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we can turn to historical facts for ill.u.s.trations of its substantial truth.

For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations, the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two patrons who, resembling in this respect far-seeing investors of to-day, dared to be original, and provided him with the necessary s.h.i.+ps and control over the necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of governments left them without defence; and had governments then represented public opinion completely, and had also controlled all labour and capital, the discovery in question, which was r.e.t.a.r.ded for three generations, would in all probability have never been made at all.

Arkwright's experience with regard to his spinning-frame was similar.

His epoch-making invention was in danger of being altogether lost, because the general opinion of the capitalists of his day was against it; and if all capital had been vested in a representative state, to the exclusion of the far-seeing individuals who eventually came to his a.s.sistance, its loss would have been almost certain. The successful development of the automobile did not take place till yesterday--and why? A steam-driven vehicle ran in Cornwall before the end of the eighteenth century; but the state and public opinion both condemned it as dangerous; and all further progress in the matter was checked for more than twenty years. Then again private enterprise a.s.serted itself, but only to suffer precisely the same fate. Steam-driven omnibuses plied between Paddington and Westminster. Steam-driven stage-coaches plied on the Bath road. But the state and public opinion were again in obstinate opposition; these vehicles were crushed out of existence by the imposition of monstrous tolls; and progress was checked a second time and for a longer period still. An instance yet more modern is that supplied by the electric lighting of London. The electric lighting of London was r.e.t.a.r.ded for ten years solely by the att.i.tude which the state a.s.sumed towards private enterprise.

It is needless to multiply ill.u.s.trations of this kind further; for my object is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever, the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole determiner of the forms which such implements shall a.s.sume in the future, and also of the kinds and quant.i.ties of the consumable goods which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day produce.

But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state, being controller of all the implements of production, a private press would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. n.o.body could issue a book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What would happen under these circ.u.mstances to purely imaginative literature we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publis.h.i.+ng business were managed by the College of Cardinals.

And what, under a regime of socialism, would be true of human thought, a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities.

Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the maximum which is at the time obtainable.

This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its machinery of private compet.i.tion, and of independent capitals, which automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism, with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive ability, or, in other words, the necessity for compet.i.tion among able men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such compet.i.tion can be made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it within the narrowest limits.