The Acquisitive Society

his concern is dividends and production only as a means to dividends, he cannot be worked into an organization of industry which vests administration in a body representing all grades of producers, or producers and consumers together, for he has no purpose in common with them; so that while joint councils between workers and managers may succeed, joint councils between workers and owners or agents of owners, like most of the so-called Whitley Councils, will not, because the necessity for the mere owner is itself one of the points in dispute. The master builder, who owns the capital used, can be included, not qua capitalist, but qua builder, if he surrenders some of the rights of ownership, as the Building Industry Committee proposed that he should. But if the shareholder in a colliery or a shipyard abdicates the control and unlimited profits to which, qua capitalist, he is at present entitled, he abdicates everything that makes him what he is, and has no other standing in the industry. He cannot share, like the master builder, in its management, because he has no qualifications which would enable him to do so. His object is profit; and if industry is to become, as employers and workers in the building trade propose, an “organized public service,” then its subordination to the shareholder whose object is profit, is, as they clearly see, precisely what must be eliminated. The master builders propose to give it up. They can do so because they have their place in the industry in virtue of their function as workmen. But if the shareholder gave it up, he would have no place at all.

Hence in coal mining, where ownership and management are sharply separated, the owners will not admit the bare possibility of any system in which the control of the administration of the mines is shared between the management and the miners. “I am authorized to state on behalf of the Mining Association,” Lord Gainford, the chief witness on behalf of the mine-owners, informed the Coal Commission, “that if the owners are not to be left complete executive control they will decline to accept the responsibility for carrying on the industry.”2 So the mine-owners blow away in a sentence the whole body of plausible make-believe which rests on the idea that, while private ownership remains unaltered, industrial harmony can be produced by the magic formula of joint control. And they are right. The representatives of workmen and shareholders, in mining and in other industries, can meet and negotiate and discuss. But joint administration of the shareholders’ property by a body representing shareholders and workmen is impossible, because there is no purpose in common between them. For the only purpose which could unite all persons engaged in industry, and overrule their particular and divergent interests, is the provision of service. And the object of shareholders, the whole significance and métier of industry to them, is not the provision of service but the provision of dividends.

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In industries where management is divorced from ownership, as in most of the highly organized trades it is today, there is no obvious halfway house, therefore, between the retention of the present system and the complete extrusion of the capitalist from the control of production. The change in the character of ownership, which is necessary in order that coal or textiles and shipbuilding may be organized as professions for the service of the public, cannot easily spring from within. The stroke needed to liberate them from the control of the property-owner must come from without. In theory it might be struck by action on the part of organized workers, who would abolish residuary profits and the right of control by the mere procedure of refusing to work as long as they were maintained, on the historical analogy offered by peasants who have destroyed predatory property in the past by declining to pay its dues and admit its government, in which case Parliament would intervene only to register the community’s assent to the fait accompli. In practice, however, the conditions of modern industry being what they are, that course, apart from its other disadvantages, is so unlikely to be attempted, or, if attempted, to succeed, that it can be neglected. The alternative to it is that the change in the character of property should be affected by legislation in virtue of which the rights of ownership in an industry are bought out simultaneously.

In either case, though the procedure is different, the result of the change, once it is accomplished, is the same. Private property in capital, in the sense of the right to profits and control, is abolished. What remains of it is, at most, a mortgage in favor of the previous proprietors, a dead leaf which is preserved, though the sap of industry no longer feeds it, as long as it is not thought worth while to strike it off. And since the capital needed to maintain and equip a modern industry could not be provided by any one group of workers, even were it desirable on other grounds that they should step completely into the position of the present owners, the complex of rights which constitutes ownership remains to be shared between them and whatever organ may act on behalf of the general community. The former, for example, may be the heir of the present owners as far as the control of the routine and administration of industry is concerned: the latter may succeed to their right to dispose of residuary profits. The elements composing property, have, in fact, to be disentangled: and the fact that today, under the common name of ownership, several different powers are vested in identical hands, must not be allowed to obscure the probability that, once private property in capital has been abolished, it may be expedient to reallocate those powers in detail as well as to transfer them en bloc.

The essence of a profession is, as we have suggested, that its members organize themselves for the