Introduction

It is one of the illusions of each generation that the social institutions in which it lives are, in some peculiar sense, "natural," unchangeable and permanent. Yet for countless thousands of years social institutions have been successively arising, developing, decaying and becoming gradually superseded by others better adapted to contemporary needs. This book shows how we, the nations claiming to be the most advanced in civilization, are no less subject than our predecessors to this process of perpetual change. Just as the Sumerian, the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman and the Christian medieval civilizations have passed away, our present capitalist civilization, as mortal as its predecessors, is dissolving before our eyes, not only in that "septic dissolution" diagnosed by the Dean of St. Paul's, brought upon us by war, and curable by genuine peace, but in that slower changing of the epochs which war may hasten, but which neither we nor anything else can hinder. The question, then, is not whether our present civilization will be transformed, but how it will be transformed. It may, by considerate adaptation, be made to pass gradually and peacefully into a new form. Or, if there is angry resistance instead of adaptation, it may crash, leaving mankind painfully to build up a new civilization from the lower level of a stage of social chaos and disorder in which not only the abuses but also the material, intellectual and moral gains of the previous order will have been lost.

Unfortunately many who assent to this general proposition of inevitable change, fail to realize what the social institutions are to which this law of change applies. To them the basis of all possible civilization is private property in a sense in which it is so bound up with human nature, that whilst men remain men, it is no more capable of decay or supersession than the rotation of the earth on its axis. But they misunderstand the position. I It is not the sanction and security of personal possessions that forms the foundation of our capitalist system, but the institution of private ownership of the means by which the community lives.

At the risk of pedantry we define our meaning. By the term capitalism, or the capitalist system, or as we prefer, the capitalist civilization, we mean the particular stage in the development of industry and legal institutions in which the bulk of the workers find themselves divorced from the ownership of the instruments of production, in such a way as to pass into the position of wage-earners, whose subsistence, security and personal freedom seem dependent on the will of a relatively small proportion of the nation; namely, those who own, and through their legal ownership control, the organization of the land, the machinery and the labor-force of the community, and do so with the object of making for themselves individual and private gains.

That the land and the other instruments of wealth production should be the private property of a relatively small class of individuals, with hardly more public responsibility attached to it than to the possession of a watch or walking-stick; that this private ownership should constitute the basis of the arrangement on which the rest of the community obtain their livelihood; and that it should carry with it the control and organization of the production and distribution of the commodities and services that are the very life of the nation—and this is what is meant by capitalism—this amazing arrangement, far from being eternal and ubiquitous throughout human history, has become the characteristic feature of the civilization of the United States only within three or four generations; and of Europe only within the last few centuries, through the (unregulated squattings of commercial adventure on the derelict sites left by the gradual failure of the feudal system of land tenure and agriculture in the country, and of a relatively less important gild organization of manufacture and trading in the towns. We know that, in Europe, before the feudal system and the craft gilds existed, civilizations were based on different forms of slavery or serfdom, the family or the caste. These in their times seemed as rooted in human nature and as unchangeable as capitalism does. What is more, they lasted many centuries, and were thought out and organized in States and Churches as divine orders of society in which every man, from Emperor and Pope to serf and slave, was responsible to God for the use he made of his opportunities. The commercial squatting which, though it began in England under Henry VII., did not come into power until George III. was king, has never been authorized and organized politically and religiously in the old enduring fashion. The sages who thought it out as political economists declared that it had no concern with the Churches, and that the lawgivers must not meddle with it: its operations were to be godless and they were to be lawless. On these frankly buccaneering terms it undertook to secure the livelihood of the people, not as its aim, but as an incident of its devotion on principle to the art of getting rich quickly. Its sole claim to toleration was its success in fulfilling that cardinal condition.

It is the thesis of this book that though it never fulfilled the condition completely, and in many places violated it with every circumstance of outrage, yet there was a moment, roughly placeable at the middle of the nineteenth century, when it could claim that, in a hundred years, it had produced, on balance, a surprising advance in material civilization for greatly increased populations. But we must add that from that moment to the present it has been receding from defeat to defeat, beaten ever more and more hopelessly by the social problems created by the very civilization it has built up and the very fecundity it has encouraged. In short, that it began to decay before it reached maturity, and that history will regard capitalism, not as an epoch but as an episode, and in the main a tragic episode, or Dark Age, between two epochs. And, seeing that no individual owner recognizes himself as a dictator, let it be at once added that, as will presently be explained, the dictatorship is a class dictatorship, and each separate capitalist is as helpless in the face of the institution of ownership for private profit as are the wage-earners themselves. His control of the forces of competitive capitalism is, at bottom, no greater than a sailor's control of the wind. But as the institution makes each owner a member of a privileged class, and could be superseded by more advantageous arrangements if the class would give up its privileges, it is not altogether unfair to hold each and every member of the class responsible for the results of these privileges.

The labor and socialist movement of the world is essentially a revolt against the capitalist system of society.

We believe that the most advanced races are to-day, in knowledge, character and intelligence ripe for dispensing with this relation; for the supersession of industrial oligarchy by industrial democracy, and of the motive of pecuniary self-interest by that of public service. We realize that there have been, and over the greater part of the globe still are, other dictatorships more vicious in their motives and more disastrous in their results than the dictatorship of the owners of the instruments of production over the wage-earners. Such are the coercion of slaves by their proprietors, of vanquished races by their conquerors, of whole peoples by autocrats or oligarchies, basing themselves on a monopoly of political power by an individual or by a restricted aristocracy or other minority of race, class or creed. Running in and out of all these systems of oppression, sometimes waning, sometimes waxing, are the domestic tyrannies of the man over the woman, and of the parent over the child. Each of these separate and distinct forms of coercion of one human being by another has been embodied in peculiar economic, political or social laws and conventions: each has provoked, among virile races, its complementary movement of revolt and reform. Socialists, so long as they are true to the democracy in which socialism is rooted, are in sympathy with all these movements and are desirous of promoting them. They realize that, in the normal development of society, the abolition of chattel slavery, the establishment of political democracy, and the emancipation of women, must precede any general adoption of democracy in industry. The existence of one or other of these more obvious despotisms masks the despotism of the owners of the instruments of production over those who are dependent for their livelihood on being permitted to use them, and necessarily diverts attention from the specific evils of capitalism.) But the primary purpose of the socialist is to focus attention on the peculiar kind of tyranny now exercised even in the most advanced political democracies, by a relatively small class of rich men over a mass of poor men.

The socialist indictment of the capitalist system of industry, and the society based upon it, has four main counts. History proves that, whilst national poverty may have other causes, whenever and wherever the greater part of the population are divorced from the ownership of the instruments of production, even where the aggregate production is relatively enormous, the bulk of the people live in penury, and large numbers of them are perpetually threatened by starvation. In the second place, this penury and its accompanying insecurity are rendered more hideous and humiliating by the relative comfort and luxury of the proprietary class, and by the shameless idleness of some of its members. The worst circumstance of capitalism is, however, neither the poverty of the wage-earner nor the luxury of the property owner, but, thirdly, the glaring inequality in personal freedom between the property-less man and the member of the class that "lives by owning." Hour by hour, day by day, year in and year out, the two-thirds of the nation who depend for their daily or weekly housekeeping on gaining access to the instruments of production find themselves working under the orders of the relatively restricted class of those who own these instruments. The The sanction for the orders is not legal punishment, but, ultimately, a starvation which is supposed to be optional. That is what is meant by the wage-earners when they complain of "wage slavery." Fourthly, the socialist believes that the very basis of the capitalist system is scientifically unsound, as a means of organizing the production and distribution of commodities and services, and fundamentally inconsistent with the spiritual advancement of the race.

We shall examine successively the four distinct evils that socialists believe to be demonstrably inherent in the capitalist organization of society. We shall deal first with three of them: the poverty of the poor, the inequality of incomes, and the disparity in personal freedom, all of which are invariably found associated with the divorce of the mass of the people from the ownership of the instruments of production. We shall then show that, whilst the capitalist system achieved an initial success in increasing the wealth of the nation, it has been eventually found to fail even in maximizing the production of commodities and services; and thus not only to defeat its own professed object but also, by its exclusive reliance on the motive of pecuniary gain to individual owners, to be inimical to national morality and international peace; in fact, to civilization itself.