The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the legal punishment enforceable in our courts, and the basis presupposed for the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence of action in the midst of our fellowmen.
Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still perilously conducted, the moral theory to which capitalism itself turns for succour when it is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulae and its presuppositions with the social reality of a capitalist state such as is England today.
Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of so-called “free” contracts are today leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.
Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery which the state can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the courts, but the withholding of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true master of the Englishman today is not the Sovereign nor the officers of state, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the capitalist.
Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny them does so today at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or for intelligence.
If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (capitalism having been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most completely capitalist state of the modern world, did not itself become a completely capitalist state until the present generation. Within the memory of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic rather than competitive between the various human factors to production.
This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of that society an utterly unstable thing.
This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful of instability in the state than conflict of any other kind, and there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in every man’s conscience and ill-ease throughout the commonwealth when the realities of society are divorced from the moral base of its institutions.
The second strain which we have noted in capitalism, its second element of instability, consists in the fact that capitalism destroys security.
Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our matter. But even without experience we could reason with absolute certitude from the very nature of capitalism that its chief effect would be the destruction of security in human life.
Combine these two elements: the ownership of the means of production by a very few; the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike. There follows immediately from that combination a competitive market wherein the labour of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer cannot work, more in proportion to the pace at which he is driven; less in middle age than in youth; less in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness; nothing in despair.
A man in a position to accumulate (the normal result of human labour), a man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form is no more productive in his nonproductive moments than is a proletarian; but his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the flywheel balancing the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With a proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect whence capital looks at a human being whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts right across that normal aspect of human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties, and character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security along the line of his own individual existence from birth to death. Capital purchasing his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must fend for himself; but to fend for yourself when
