I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.
On the other hand, the collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread.
So true is all this that the stupider kind of collectivist will often talk of a “capitalist phase” of society as the necessary precedent to a “collectivist phase.” A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it “furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership.” collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and well-organised industrial capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security vastly increased through the fact that it is the state and not a mere unit of the state which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine—and all the rest of it—exactly as the capitalist state does today. The proletarian, when the collectivist (or socialist) state is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, coal and railways, were handed over to the state tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?
The whole scheme of collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a capitalist state is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.
To that small minority of a capitalist society which owns the means of production, collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the state proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 percent, and believes that under state management it will make the trust pay 5 percent, then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the state is no harder to the capitalists taken over than was Mr. Yerkes to the Underground. Again, the state, having greater credit and longevity, can (it would seem)5 “buy out” any existing capitalist body upon favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the state would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests today.
There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the capitalist into the collectivist state no element of reaction, the use of no term with which a capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a capitalist community is not amply familiar.
In general, if modern capitalist England were made by magic a state of small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. But if this modern capitalist England could, by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual interests, be transformed into a collectivist state, the apparent change at the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the state would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure incomes; and such small owners as were left, of boats, of farms, even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly used to both.
This picture of the natural transition from capitalism to collectivism seems so obvious that many collectivists in a generation immediately past believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to be realised.
I say, “of the last generation.” Today that simple and superficial judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of collectivists cannot but note that the practical
