As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production perfectly free political conditions are impossible. A perfect capitalist state cannot exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and more fortunate nations had thought possible. In the perfect capitalist state there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement. If you left men completely free under a capitalist system, there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labour in a very short time.
Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the cheapest market—and the system would break down from the death of children and of out-o’-works and of women. You would not have a state in mere decline such as ours is. You would have a state manifestly and patently perishing.
As a fact, of course, capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme. So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted [the freedom of the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it]: to exercise such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and the despairing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non capitalist methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to death; and that is what capitalism was careful to do to an increasing extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people. Elizabeth’s Poor Law at the beginning of the business, the Poor Law of 1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip of capitalism, are original and primitive instances: there are today a hundred others.
Though this cause of insecurity—the fact that the possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive—is logically the most obvious, and always the most enduring under a capitalist system, there is another cause more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or “profit.”
If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of implements and stores, each will actively watch his market, attempt to undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra demand for his article, thus glut the market only to suffer a period of depression afterwards—and so forth. Again, the capitalist, free, individual director of production, will miscalculate; sometimes he will fail, and his works will be shut down. Again, a mass of isolated, imperfectly instructed competing units cannot but direct their clashing efforts at an enormous waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most commissions, most advertisements, most parades, are examples of this waste. If this waste of effort could be made a constant, the parasitical employment it afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a most inconstant thing, and the employment it affords is therefore necessarily precarious. The concrete translation of this is the insecurity of the commercial traveller, the advertising agent, the insurance agent, and every form of touting and cozening which competitive capitalism carries with it.
Now here again, as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and sickness, capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion, and it is the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted to an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors, accompanied, especially in this country, by the ruin of the smaller competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and supported by the secret political forces of the state.3 In a word, capitalism, proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners, is tending towards stability by losing its essential character of political freedom. No better proof of the instability of capitalism as a system could be desired.
Take any one of the numerous trusts which now control English industry, and have made of modern England the type, quoted throughout the Continent, of artificial monopolies. If the full formula of capitalism were accepted by our courts and our executive statesmen, anyone could start a rival business, undersell those trusts and shatter the comparative security they afford to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the courts in commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great English trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might, by all the spirit of European law for centuries, indict those who would ruin him, citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; of this conspiracy he would find the judge and the politicians most heartily in support.
But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the transition from the true capitalist phase to another.
Under the essential conditions of capitalism—under a perfect political freedom—such conspiracies would be punished by the courts for what they are: to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any contract he chooses with any labourer and offer the produce at such prices as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the punishment of
