Chapter III: Inequality in Personal Freedom

There is another inequality in the capitalist state, which is perhaps more intensely resented by the modern artisan, and is more difficult to bring to the comprehension of the governing class than the inequality of income; namely, the disparity in personal freedom. Freedom is, of course, an elusive term, with various and conflicting meanings. To some simple minds freedom appears only a negation of slavery. To them any one is free who is not the chattel of some other person. The shipwrecked mariner on a barren island and the destitute vagrant wandering among property owners protected by an all-powerful police, are "free men," seeing that they "call no man master." But this sort of freedom is little more than freedom to die. In the modern industrial community, in which no man is able to produce for himself all that he needs for life, personal freedom is necessarily bound up with the ability to obtain commodities and services produced by other persons. Translated into the terms of daily life, personal freedom means, in fact, the power of the individual to buy sufficient food, shelter and clothing to keep his body in good health, and to gain access to sufficient teaching and books to develop his mind from its infantile state. Moreover, as we cannot regard as a free man any one with none but vegetative experiences, freedom involves the command at some time, of at least some money to spend on holidays and travel, on social intercourse and recreation, on placing one's self in a position to enjoy nature and art. We can, in fact, best define personal freedom as the possession of opportunity to develop our faculties and satisfy our desires. Professor Graham Wallas suggests the definition of "the possibility of continuous initiative." In this sense freedom is a relative term. It is only the very rich man who has freedom to consume all that he desires of the services and commodities produced by other persons, and also the freedom to abstain from all personal toil that would stand in the way of his "continuous initiative," and stop it by absorbing his energy and his time. Any poor man has a very limited freedom. To the property-less wage-earner freedom may mean nothing more than the freedom, by dint of perpetual toil, to continue to exist on the very brink of starvation. Hence inequality in income in itself entails inequality in personal freedom.

"Equal Before the Law"

We have grown so accustomed, under the reign of capitalism, to the grossest disparity in personal freedom among nominally free citizens, that we fail to recognize how gross and how cruel is the inequality even where we profess to have adopted equality as a principle. Both Britain and America are proud of having made all men equal before the law. Yet no one can even ask for justice in the law-courts without paying fees which (though the statesmen and the wealthy refuse to credit the fact) do, in actual practice, prevent the great mass of the population from obtaining legal redress for the wrongs that are constantly being done to them. The very object with which the legal tribunals are established is to give men security for their personal freedom—to prevent this being impaired by assaults, thefts, extortions, defalcations and failure to fulfill contracts and pay debts. In every city of Britain and America the vast majority of the population never appear as plaintiffs in the civil courts, not because they are not assaulted and robbed, cheated and denied payment of what is due to them—every one must know that these evils happen much more frequently and, at one time or another, much nearer universally, to the poor and friendless than to the rich—but because they cannot afford, out of their scanty earnings, even the court fee, let alone that of the lawyer. But the disparity in personal freedom between the rich and the poor is seen most glaringly when the one and the other are charged in the criminal court with an offense against the law. The rich man, except in extreme cases such as murder, practically always receives a summons; the poor man is still often, for the same offense, peremptorily arrested, as was formerly always the case, and taken to prison to await trial. On a remand, the rich man easily procures bail, whilst quite a large proportion of property-less defendants find themselves returned to the prison cells, a procedure which, coupled with their lack of means, does not, to say the least, facilitate their hunting up of witnesses who might prove their innocence, or their obtaining help in their defense. It is needless to recount the further advantages of the rich man in engaging the ablest lawyers and expert witnesses; in obtaining a change of venue, and successive remands, or in dragging the case from court to court. When sentence is imposed, it is, in the vast majority of cases, a pecuniary fine, which means practically nothing to the rich man, while to the poor man it may spell ruin for himself, his little business and his household. To the average police magistrate or clerk to the justices, it is quite a matter of course that a positive majority of those whom they sentence to small fines go to prison for one, two or six weeks, in default of payment. Ruinous as prison is known to be to the family of the prisoner as well as to the prisoner himself, the poor are sent to prison, in the United States as in Britain, by thousands every year, merely because they cannot immediately produce the few shillings or dollars that they are fined for minor offenses, which rich men commit daily with practical impunity. No inequality in personal freedom could be more scandalous than this practical inequality of rich and poor before the law courts, which characterizes every capitalist community, and which, though known to every judge and every practicing lawyer for a century, has remained un-redressed.¹

The Psychological Reaction

But all this springs directly from the disparity in incomes, a material interpretation of personal freedom which does not exhaust the question. There is a psychological aspect of personal freedom which arises merely from the relation between one man and another. Even when the wage-earner is getting what he calls "good money" and steady work, he resents the fact that he, like the machine with which he works, is bought as an instrument of production; that his daily life is dealt with as a means to another's end. Why should he and his class always obey orders, and another, and a much smaller class, always give them? It is this concentration of the function of command in one individual, or in one class, with the correlative concentration of the obligation to obey in other individuals of another class, which constitutes the deepest chasm between the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor. In one of his novels Mr. Galsworthy vividly describes the contrast between the daily life of the English country house and the daily life of the laborer's cottage. The rich man, and his wife and children, get up in the morning at any time they please; they eat what they like; they "work" and they play when they like and how they like; their whole day is controlled by the promptings of their own instinct or impulse, or is determined by their own reason or will. From morning till night they are perpetually doing what is pleasant to them. They fulfill their personality, and they exercise what Professor Graham Wallas rightly calls their "continuous initiative," by giving, day in day out, year in year out, orders to other people. The laborer and his family are always obeying orders; getting up by order, working by order, in the way they are ordered, leaving off work by order, occupying one cottage rather than another by order of the farmer, being ejected from home by order of the landowner, attending school by order, sometimes even going to church by order; relying for medical attendance on the "order" of the Poor Law Relieving Officer, and in some cases ordered into the workhouse to end a life which, under the British Constitution, has always been legally and politically that of a freeman. From morning till night—save in rare hours of "expansion" usually expiated painfully—the "working class" find themselves doing what is irksome or unpleasant to them. What is called in Britain the governing class (which includes a great many more persons than are engaged in political government), is, typically, the class that passes its life in giving orders. What are called the "lower classes" are those that live by obeying orders.

When Authority Is Acceptable

Now let no one imagine that these lower classes, or the socialists who champion them, or indeed any persons with common sense, object to one man exercising authority over another. What is resented in the capitalist organization of industry is both the number and the kind of the orders given by the rich to the poor, by the owners of land and capital to the persons who gain their livelihood by using these instruments of production. The authority of the capitalist and the landlord has invidious characteristics. It is continuous over the lives of the individuals who are ordered; it is irresponsible and cannot be called to account; it is not in any way reciprocal; it does not involve the selection of the person in command for his capacity to exercise authority either wisely or in the public interest: above all, it is designed to promote, not the good of the whole community, but the personal pleasure or private gain of the person who gives the order. No one but an anarchist objects to the authority of the policeman regulating the traffic in the crowded street; to the authority of the sanitary inspector compelling the occupier of the house to connect his domestic pipe with the main drain; to the authority of the Medical Officer of Health enforcing the isolation of an infectious person; or even to the demand note of the tax - collector. No one resents the commands of the railway guard—"take your seats" or "all change here." All these orders are given in respect of particular occasions in the citizen's life, and by persons assumed to be selected for their fitness for the duty of giving these particular orders. The persons exercising command are themselves under orders; they are responsible to superior authority; and they may be called to account for bad manners or for "exceeding their powers." Moreover, their orders are, in the best sense, disinterested, and have no connection with their personal gain or convenience. We may complain that the official is going beyond his function or is unmannerly in his methods. We may object to the policy of the national executive, or deplore the legislation enacted by Parliament. But in obeying these orders all men are equal before the law; and all men have the same right of appeal to the superior authority. Finally, in political democracy, the persons who are subject to the authority are exactly the persons who have created it; and they can, if and when they choose, sweep it away. In their capacity of citizen-electors they may exercise collectively, through the Parliament and the government of the day, an ultimate control over the stream of orders they are called upon as individuals to obey.

In this connection it is interesting to notice the socialist interpretation of a phrase much in vogue in the twentieth century. We often hear at labor meetings of the desirability of a man "controlling his own working life." But this does not mean that each man or woman is to be free to work at starvation wages, or for excessive hours, or under the most unpleasant conditions. This is the freedom demanded for the worker by the capitalist. Against it the socialists and the organized workers have carried on a war of attrition for a century, the victories in that war being factory laws, mines and railways regulation laws, minimum wage laws, and the like. What the insurgent worker means by "the worker's control over his own life" is, on the contrary, the sort of control exercised by means of his trade union, through an executive council and officials, whom he and his fellows have elected, and can depose. These agents of the workers stand or fall, paradoxical as it may sound to those who still ignorantly regard trade unions as tyrannies, according to their ability to maintain and increase the personal freedom of the persons who elect them. The revolt of the workers is not against authority as such, but against the continuous and irresponsible authority of the profit-making employer. Where is the warrant, he asks, for the power of the owners of factories and mines, land and machinery, to dictate the daily life and the weekly expenditure of hundreds of their fellowmen, and even, at their pleasure, to withdraw from them the means of life itself? This power is not derived from popular election. It has no relation to the ascertained merit or capacity of those who wield it. It is, in many cases, not even accompanied by any consciousness of responsibility for the moral or material well-being of those over whom it is exercised. Not only is there no necessary connection between the particular orders which the workers find themselves compelled to obey, and the security or prosperity of the commonwealth: there is often a great and patent contradiction, orders to adulterate and cheat being quite common. From the standpoint of labor the authority of the capitalist and landlord is used for a corrupt end—to promote the pecuniary gain of the person in command.

Dictation as to Environment

Few persons who have not deliberately analyzed the way in which the wage-system is organized have any adequate conception of the continuity and the dictatorial character of the stream of orders by which the workman is called upon to direct his life. But this stream of orders is not the only way in which the property-owning class directs the daily life of those who are dependent on their toil. Even more dangerous, because more subtle, and less obviously an outcome of the inequality in wealth, is the power possessed by the propertied class to determine, for many years at a stretch, what shall be the physical and mental environment, not only of the manual laborer, but of all the local inhabitants. The most striking manifestation of this power is the steadily increasing "industrializing" of a countryside, ending in the creation of an urban slum area, by the continuous pollution of the water and the atmosphere, the destruction of vegetation, the creation of nuisances, the erection of "back to back" dwellings, in row after row of mean streets. The devastation wrought in this way, in some of the most fertile and most beautiful parts of England and Scotland, as also in the United States, is, as we now know, comparable only to that effected by a long-drawn-out modern war. In peace times the community as a whole fails to realize, in time, the catastrophe that is being caused by the private ownership of land and capital in the establishment and growth of an industrial center. By the time that the evil is recognized, the health and happiness of whole generations have been vitally affected. Belated statutes and tardy by-laws may then, at best, lessen the pollution, abate the darkening of the atmosphere by noxious gases and coal smoke, perhaps even save the last surviving vegetation. But nothing can bring back the lives the dictatorship of the capitalist has wasted. The leisured rich are able to escape from the noise, the gloom, the dirt, the smoke, the smells that their power has created; but the wage-earners, the industrial brain-workers, and all their retinue of professional men and shopkeepers find themselves compelled to dwell, and to rear their families, in the graceless conditions unconsciously determined for them by the industrial and financial organizers in their pursuit of private gain. When the city dweller escapes into the still unspoilt countryside on a scanty holiday, it comes as a new insult to find himself and his children barred from the pleasant park, excluded from the forest, and warned off the mountain and the moor by the property rights of the very class of persons who have rendered his place of abode abhorrent to him. In the end he is forced in self-defense to form a perverse habit of liking grimy streets, blackened skies, and the deafening clatter of drayhorses' shoes on stone sets, on the principle that if you cannot have what you like you must like what you have.

Dictation of the Mental Environment

Nor is even this unconscious determination by the property-owning class of the material environment of the mass of the community, for the sake of its own private gain, the worst form taken by the inequality in personal freedom. It has been reserved to our own time for the profit-making capitalist to determine also the mental environment. Who can estimate the effect on the mind of the incessantly reiterated advertisements that hem us in on every side? It is, moreover, the capitalist who directs the character of the recreation afforded to the mass of people. It is the brewery company and the distillery that give us the public house; other capitalists, controlling the music hall and the cinematograph, may say, with Fletcher of Saltoun, that they care not who makes the laws as long as they provide the songs and films. But the most glaring instance of the capitalist direction of our mentality, and perhaps, ultimately, the most pernicious, is the modern system of ownership of the newspaper press. Here we have even a double capitalist control, first by the millionaire proprietors of whole series of journals, daily, weekly, and monthly under autocratic control, and secondly, by the great dispensers of lucrative advertisements to these journals. The combination of the colossal expense involved in the successful conduct of a modern daily newspaper, and the natural reluctance of the wealthy advertisers to support any publication adverse to the system, if not even to the particular business, by which they obtain their own fortunes, have made it almost impossible for the property-less wage-earner, even in coöperation with each other, to establish, either in Britain or the United States, any organ of their own at all comparable in circulation and influence with those of the millionaire proprietors. Thus, the mass of the population is quite unable to protect itself against the stream of suggestion, biased information, and corruptly selected news that is poured on them by the giant circulation of the press.²

Lastly, we have the control insidiously exercised by the owners and organizers of the instruments of production, by means of their wealth, over the working of municipal government and parliamentary institutions.

Dictation in Government

Of this control, the direct power of the proprietors of the newspaper press—which, in Britain, goes far to make a Prime Minister, and in the United States not only to elect a President but also to go far to select his chief ministers—is only the most obvious example. The influence, not only upon elections and legislatures, but also upon national and municipal executives, of the great financial, shipping, manufacturing, and trading amalgamations and combinations, in which the power of wealth is cast defiantly into the scale as the sword of Brennus, has, in recent decades, become notorious and scandalous. It is, we suggest, to the suspicion, followed by the detection of this far-reaching coercive guidance of national and local government by the property-owners and profit-makers, large and small, more than to any other cause, that is to be ascribed the sudden and rapid decay of the confidence of the wage-earning class in these institutions, manifested not in this country alone, but throughout the Continent of Europe and North America. Unfortunately, one invidious feature of the Great War, so far as the United Kingdom is concerned, has been the extension of a similar capitalist control to the national executive, in ways not previously open. The temporary handing over of various government departments to leading representatives of the business interests concerned, and the shameless use of the influence thus acquired for the promotion of the private profits of those branches of business, represents, so it is felt by the British workman, the final degradation of the state to be the handmaid and accomplice of the profiteer.

The Brain-Workers in Capitalist Service

This control of the physical and mental environment, which, in a capitalist society, the property-owning class progressively and almost automatically accomplishes (for all those effects are mere incidents in the pursuit of private gain, and are no more consciously aimed at than the devastation caused by the trampling of a herd in pursuit of food), brings into prominence the instrument of its far-reaching dominance. The deep-seated intolerance by the more ignorant manual workers of the very existence of the professional brain-workers is not due solely to the difficulty a navvy finds in believing that a man who sits in a comfortable chair by a cheerful fire in a carefully sound-proofed room is doing any work at all, much less work that will leave him hungry and exhausted in three or four hours. Many wage-workers are sufficiently educated to know better; and others are employed in occupations quite as sedentary and even less apparently active than those of the financier or mathematician. Their share in the prejudice is explained, if not justified, by the fact that the brain-workers, in every capitalist state, find themselves attracted, and economically compelled, to take service under the property-owners. Historically the professions emerge as the hirelings of the governing class for the time being. In the modern industrial system they naturally serve the proprietors of the instruments of production, who alone can insure to the vast majority of them a secure and ample livelihood, with some prospect of climbing up to the eminence of "living by owning." The lawyers, the engineers, the architects, the men of financial and administrative ability, the civil servants, the authors and journalists, the teachers of the schools beyond the elementary grade, the whole class of managers, the inventors, even the artists and the men of science—not altogether excluding, in spite of their long charitable service of the poor, the medical profession and the ministers of religion, nor yet, for all their devotion to the children of the masses, even the elementary school teachers—are almost inevitably retained, consciously or unconsciously, in the maintenance and defense of the existing social order, in which the private ownership of the instruments of production is the corner-stone. Is it surprising that the manual workers of the world should be tempted to regard, not science, art or religion (as is often ignorantly asserted), but the brain-workers who have been trained under the capitalist system, and enlisted in its service, as being as much the "enemies of the people" as the "idle rich"? But this is not all. The brain-workers themselves, especially those who are poorly paid and socially segregated, are beginning to rebel openly against this all-pervading coercive guidance of national policy and national culture by wealthy men and a wealthy class. As school teachers, as municipal officials, as civil servants, as scientific workers, as journalists and editors, sometimes even (notably in the United States as under the German Empire) as university lecturers and professors, they find their freedom of thought and expression strangled by the fear of dismissal, or at any rate by that of losing all chance of promotion, should they dare to oppose not merely the political party or the pecuniary interests of influential patrons, but even the current principles of social organizations to which nearly all rich men cling. Moreover, the majority of the situations of authority and affluence are still habitually reserved, in most countries, either by administrative devices or through personal influence, for persons who have qualified as brain-workers though belonging to the class of those who live by owning or organizing the instruments of production, irrespective of their inferiority of attainments or inability to render, in the posts to which they are assigned, the highest service to the community. It is here that we find the fundamental cause of the prevailing unrest in all countries in practically all the brain-working professions, leading in many cases to the adherence of the younger professionals to the socialist movement, and nowadays even inclining some of the professional organizations to make common cause with the trade unions and the labor and socialist parties in resisting the dominance of the property-owners.

Why Liberalism Decayed

We may suggest that the foregoing analysis incidentally reveals the root-cause of the universal failure of the political parties styled Liberal, which were so typical of the advanced thought of European nations during the nineteenth century—notably at the zenith of unrestrained capitalism—to retain, in the twentieth century, their hold of a wage-earning class that has become conscious of its citizenship. To the political Liberals, personal freedom actually meant the personal power of the man of property; just as political progress meant the abolition of feudal, ecclesiastical and syndicalist restrictions upon the right of the property-owner, small as well as large, to do what he liked "with his own"—his own land and capital no less than his own personality. Down to the present day the unrepentant Liberal refuses to recognize—cannot even be made to understand—that, in the modern industrial state, a man who is divorced from the instruments of production cannot, as we have shown, even live his own life, let alone do what he likes with his own personality. Even to the political Liberal who is not a capitalist, such as the young barrister or doctor, artist or author, the conception that the laborers' engagement for hire is of the nature of "wage-slavery" is unintelligible. To him it seems, on the contrary, that the typical engagement for hire of the property-less professional, "calling no man master" but earning his livelihood by fees from a succession of clients, upon no one of whom is he specially dependent, constitutes the very perfection of honorable service which is perfect freedom. What even this highly educated Liberal fails to understand is that, whatever may once have been the case, the industrial revolution has made anything like the freedom of professional life impossible for the artisan or the factory operative, the laborer or the clerk. The fact that the ordinary manual worker or minor clerical employee has not the ownership, and, therefore, not the control of the instruments of production, or of the complicated industrial or financial organization by which he can earn a livelihood, and cannot support himself on a succession of fees from a multitude of clients, compels him, whether or not he desires this, to obtain his food by placing himself under a master whom he cannot call to account; whose orders he has to obey; whose interests he has to serve; who, in fact, possesses him and uses him, during the greater part of his waking life, for ends which are not his own. He cannot choose where he will live, and in what environment his children will grow up. He finds himself restricted in the amusements and even in the literature to which he has access, to that which it suits the pecuniary interests of the capitalist class to supply. He finds, as it seems to him, nearly every professional brain-worker retained against him and his class. And through this control over his working life and his leisure hours, over his physical and mental environment, the property-less worker, by hand or by brain—though conscious that he and his fellows constitute a majority of the electorate—discover that even with the widest suffrage he is unable, in fact, to control the government of his state. Accordingly, once he has been admitted to voting citizenship, the liberty which Liberalism offers him seems a hypocritical pretense. He finds in the creed of Liberalism no comprehension either of the nature of the servitude in which the capitalist system has engulfed the great bulk of every industrial community, or of the need for an application to industrial organization of the first principles of democracy. Now this comprehension is the very atmosphere of socialism. The socialist is out to destroy the dictatorship of the capitalist. And as that dictatorship is the grievance which the worker is never allowed to forget for a single working day from his cradle to his grave he naturally turns to socialism the moment he begins to connect politics with his personal affairs and perceives that his vote is an instrument of political power.

A Liberal Apology for Capitalism

The honest defenders of capitalism admit, in substance, the truth of this criticism; but they allege, in reply, that without the potent stimulus of private profit it would have been impossible to have effected the Industrial Revolution, or to have secured the vast increase in the production of commodities and services, on which, it is suggested, modern civilization depends. It was not merely that there was, even in the foremost nations, between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century, no practicable alternative to the dictatorship of the capitalist. The very inequality in riches and in personal freedom, by the prospect of which he was incited and stimulated, seemed to have an economic advantage of its own which obscured its social drawbacks. As it has been well put by a contemporary economist, in the course of the nineteenth century, "Europe was so organized socially and economically as to secure the maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some continuous improvement in the daily conditions of life of the mass of the population, society was so framed as to throw a great part of the increased income into the control of the class least likely to consume it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the capitalist system. If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a régime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.

"The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a society where wealth was divided equitably. The railways of the world, which that age built as a monument to posterity, were, not less than the pyramids of Egypt, the work of labor which was not free to consume in immediate enjoyment the full equivalent of its efforts.

"Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of society into accepting, a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake, that they and nature and the capitalists were cooperating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue, and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated."³

We need not demur to this candidly realistic apologia for nineteenth century capitalism. Of course it was not the whole, or even the bulk of their vast share of the national income that the capitalist classes abstained from consuming year by year, in order to transform it into new instruments of wealth production; but only a fraction of their share—in the United Kingdom of the nineteenth century, scarcely a quarter of it! And of this quarter, how much was invested in instruments for the production of what Ruskin called illth, of gluttony, extravagance, waste and demoralization? For, under capitalism, wealth is counted in a false currency. But it may be freely admitted that, with all its drawbacks, the dictatorship of the capitalist scored an initial success. It delivered the goods. It created the highly efficient machinery of ever-increasing production. And, gruesome as were the accompanying social results, we may, perhaps, allow that, on balance, down to a certain date, the advantages exceeded the drawbacks. With this initial success we deal in the next chapter.

Notes

1. See The Law and the Poor, by E. A. Parry, 1914. ↩
2. For accounts of the manner and extent to which the newspaper press, and behind it the possessors of wealth, now control the mental environment, as well as the local and central government of the United States and Britain, the student should consult The Press and the Organization of Society, by Norman Angell, 1922; and Liberty and the News, 1920, and Public Opinion, 1922, both by Walter Lippman, himself the editor of a great New York newspaper; the more lurid descriptions given from personal experience as journalists, on the one hand, by Hilaire Belloc in The Free Press, 1918, and by Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check, 1919; and, incidentally, in the technical account of how modern newspaper is run, by G. B. Dibblee in The Newspaper, 1913 (London), and by John La P. Given in Making a Newspaper, 1913 (New York).↩
3. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, by John M. Keynes, 1920, pp. 16-17. ↩