Part 30

The improvement of a human being is not in his own hands, but in the hands of other human beings. Our line of racial advance is in serving one another, like any other group of organs. This common profit in a common product leads us to wish to improve that product. The product of human beings is improved by supplying the needed energy, stimulus, direction; by putting into the individual in order that we may get out of him the pay first, the work afterwards.

This reverses the whole proposition. It is no longer a matter of the individual workman seeking to satisfy his wants à la Bear. It is Society seeking to raise the productive value of its integers by carefully supplying those forces which produce more and better work. Quite without knowing it Society does this to a considerable extent, hence the working value of a member of an advanced society is greater than that of a member of a low society; but because we have not known the real laws of human production, we have continued to interpret the whole field of social activity in terms of individual competition.

The supply of a man’s needs we have tried to limit strictly to his earning power, refusing to observe that there was no ratio whatever between what a man needs and what he can do—unless, indeed, an inverse one. The fact that a man, well started in lines of work suited to him, will produce continuously long after all his needs are supplied we have tried to account for by assuming new needs as the necessary incentives. Nothing could be clearer—to our view. If a man works only in order to supply his needs, then a given man who does work worth a thousand times as much as another man’s must of course need a thousand times as much. He must, because there is no other reason for his working. And if the working power of the average man shows large and general increase, it is only to be accounted for by shining ranks of hitherto undreamed-of needs, which were evolved to lead him on!

So the missionary, acting on this theory, tries to rouse the contented savage to want things, holding that attitude to be a productive one; and the economist, satisfied with his theory, never looks to see if there is any observable connection between want and work, in race, class, or individual. In reductio ad absurdum the Want theory comes to this. Man works to supply wants. As the act of working does not supply wants, this involves another clause; man works to get wealth to supply wants. And this, if a real law of nature, involves some inevitable connection between the clauses: work must produce wealth and wealth must supply want. Also, if a real law, there must be some proportion between these clauses, the less the want the less the work, the greater the want the greater the work, with the same proportion in the “wealth” which is the intermediate factor understood.

This would make the proposition: A given amount of want urges to an equal amount of work which secures the desired wealth; or, Want equals Work and Work equals Wealth.

If this be so we shall find in society those who want the most do the most work, and those who do the most work have the most wealth. Poverty would be a healthy state, inevitably developing into wealth. Is this the fact? Hardly. What is the fact? This: that man does the most work who is best able to do it, and likes it most.

The way to make people work is to make them able and willing, strong, skilful, ambitious, enthusiastic. When we wish to develop horses to work more and better than previous horses, we do not seek to attain that end by cutting off their oats. The power to work comes from the energy already supplied, not the hypothetic energy of a future reward.

The “pay” comes first; not as payment, but as investment. A man’s work is his payment to Society for value received, and he has to receive it before he can return it. The conscious attitude of the worker should be that of gratitude, of a proud and lavish return for the rich supply received from infancy; his unconscious attitude one of irresistible pressure, discharge of energy. Each of us owes the world our best, because to it we are indebted for all we are and have. In personal intercourse we all know the difference between services done for love, or from a sense of honourable obligation, and services done merely for pay. We know the dignity and honour of the first attitude, the meanness of the second. And yet we prefer to have the whole world’s vital processes degraded and minimised to the level of that hireling service, rather than elevated and multiplied as the limitless outpouring of richly developed members of society.

To which the Want theorist replies: “It is not what we prefer, but what is,” to which again I answer—It is not. The facts of sociology do not bear out the Want theory. The true place of that theory is in the stage next to primitive slavery. The first compulsion to co-ordinate effort was force and fear and pain. Only the slave in danger of death could be made to work. The next compulsion to the still unsocialised ego was that of hireling self-restraint, of withheld food. Observe that this is a purely arbitrary and social condition, involving the ownership of that food by someone else. Primitive man ate without working for many thousands of years, and does yet in many a favoured isle.

He simply picks his food off trees, or hunts and fishes for it, even fights for it. But he does not work for it at that stage of social evolution, much preferring starvation. Later on, being no longer a free agent, the food being forcibly detained until he worked, why, work he did, under the action of such pressure as he could then feel. In that period of evolution when only cruel slavery made men work, the thought that they would ever work in the comparative freedom of the contract system would have been scouted as wildly visionary and Utopian. We can see something of this among our own freedmen, members of a much earlier social status, forcibly incorporated with our advanced body and failing to respond at once to the same stimuli.

Under compulsion they worked. Free, and under no compulsion save self-interest, they do not work as industriously as further advanced races. This does not prove that self-interest is less powerful than compulsion, or that slave labour is better than wage labour, but merely that the negro race is less socialised than the Anglo-Saxon. And we, in order to aid in his social development, are learning to supply him with the social stimuli he needs. Wage labour was a useful stage in economic evolution, just as slave labour was, but the incentive of self-interest is no more final than that of compulsion.

A man will work if you make him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not make him, but merely pay him. A man will work if you pay him, but also, being further developed, he will work if you do not pay him; that is, if he is not “paid” individually, through personal advantage, but collectively, through social advantage. We must remember that in the way of relating effort to result collective man must “work for his living” as actually as individual. But it is their living which they work for; the effort and the result are in common, and to the individual is supplied the great organic energy to work with. The normal goal to labour for, in a highly socialised race, is the common interest, a far stronger attraction than the personal interest.

See how our misbeliefs affect the course of a single industrial process. Here is the wheat crop, for instance, one of the world’s most important products. The human race, collectively, produces an enormous amount of wheat. The same number of workers, without the support of a large organised society, could not produce that crop, or in any way distribute it. This amount of wheat, produced collectively, is for our collective consumption. The individual producer raises a large surplus beyond his own needs for the social needs. The line of economic advantage is plain: To produce the most wheat with the least expense of social energy, and to distribute the most wheat with the least expense of social energy to the largest number of consumers. The social advantage lies in the food-value of the wheat, in the ensuing increase in the productivity of the race.

Now see how our wrong ideas work against this advantage. The individual producer, shutting his eyes to the collectivity of the process, considers that he “owns” the wheat, and that he “raised it himself.” Therefore, instead of facilitating its distribution with the least expense of social energy, he seeks to obstruct it by demanding as much social energy as he can get,—i. e., the price,—the first step in the exchange. Of course, being largely isolated, he does not succeed in getting much, and, equally of course, he is at present not supplied with his fair share of social energy beforehand; but admitting these facts, it remains true that his mental attitude is the same as that of the larger dealer: he looks on the world’s wheat as a source of profit to him to any extent that he can reach.

Then come the great army of transporters. Thanks to the high organisation of this social function, the distribution of the wheat goes on with great facility and dispatch as far as mechanical convenience is concerned, and, by the concentration of the business in a few hands, much of the dribbling man-to-man subtraction is saved; but alas—the little subtractions of many small private carriers are only exchanged for the enormous subtractions of the few great public carriers.

Even at this extremely developed stage of evolution in the social process, even in a business so public as to require public grants of land and privilege, and designated as “a common carrier,” in the very face of these flaring facts, this weird survival of a remote past, this prehistoric Ego, with its Want theory, sits gobbling in the stream of social distribution, like some dinotherium mysteriously preserved to do mischief. This Common Carrier, managed by a few men, seriously believes the distribution of the world’s wheat to be intended for the private aggrandisement of the Carrier, and sucks from that life-giving stream as large a supply of racial nourishment as “the traffic will bear”—sometimes more! Of course the Carrier must be provided with his share of social nutrition in order that he may carry, but why he should claim this vastly disproportionate amount is not so clear. It is not clear, that is, in the light of social laws to-day, but it is clear enough as a logical deduction from the antique premisses so devoutly believed in.

The stream of wheat, robbed of much of its value, pours on and reaches the final stationary points of distribution, and there again the dealers, wholesale and retail, imagine that this mass of food was brought across the world for their benefit, and proceed to extract from it as much as they are able. Thus the food reaches fewer people in smaller quantities, and those who get it are obliged to give back a large proportion of its nourishing power in payment. The circulation of the world is very seriously interfered with by this morbid action.

Conceive now for a moment of wheat as a means of promoting the social good. Of a Bureau of Agriculture carefully posting from year to year the amount needed in different localities. Of a Bureau of Transportation carefully arranging from year to year for the most prompt and easy transfer to those localities. And of a Bureau of Local Distribution seeing to it that the wheat was as promptly and easily spread among the consumers.

That would mean the greatest gain and the least waste and expense. That would be business sense on the part of the world. To reduce the outlay of effort and increase the income of nourishment, with a commensurate increase in social productivity,—that is the line of economic advantage for the Society of our time, as it was in the physical economy of the Individual of the Palæolithic Past.

But this Palæolithic Individual with his pre-Palæolithic ideas is a great nuisance to-day.

XIV: CONSUMPTION (I) Summary

Previous propositions. Alleged selfishness. Social instincts as natural as individual. Root error on Consumption shown in Heaven, Utopia, etc. Honour in acting. Contentment theory. Limit of happiness in getting, limited; in doing, unlimited. Pleasure in eating, result of idea. Effect of this concept on Society. Impression merely incentive to expression. Transmitters, not vats. Collecting mania. Nature of ownership. Right of property. Social relations psychic. Movable rights. Law of property rights. Consumption means to production. Consumption must precede production. Natural limits of Consumption. Cause of excesses. Ill effect of morbid Consumption on producer. Must produce more than consume. Ten houses. List of propositions. Existing economic concepts. Influence of position of women. Women natural producers. Men natural destroyers. Men have monopolised production. Women made purely consumers. Women’s powers, confined to family, breed selfishness. Generosity bred outside home. Feminine consumption become morbid. Vampire. Parasite. Hired matrimony. Woman as excessive consumer came of “Society.” A disease not a “function.” “Society columns,” medical bulletins. Effect on consumption.

XIV CONSUMPTION (I)

We have laid down certain propositions in the preceding chapters, namely, that men are part of a great Social Organism; that as parts of it they are continually supplied with its stimulus and nourishment; that as parts of it so nourished and so stimulated, they must discharge the swelling current of social energy in social action, which is Work; and that the business of a conscious and intelligent Society is so to produce and distribute social wealth as to maintain and increase this flood of energy, the discharge of which in our highly specialised industries is supreme delight. Against these propositions will be at once erected that common bulwark of ancient superstition, man’s selfishness. We generally believe, and as generally act on the belief, that the individual selfishness of man is such that nothing would induce him to act for the good of society, even though that good plainly included himself.

This theory of our selfishness is not borne out either by the scientific facts of our sociological position or the everyday facts of life about us.

The theory dates from a time when men were still mainly individual animals, when it was true. Being imbedded in that heavy, slow-going, ancient brain, and hammered in by each subsequent generation, it has remained with us until to-day. What we need to realise is that social development has brought with it other feelings, quite the opposite of selfishness, but equally natural, which are found in us all in varying degree; which we see at work about us, and yet which we refuse to admit into our “minds” as facts. On the contrary, we sturdily maintain in our minds the false ideas and act upon them, working much evil thereby.

The organic connection of human beings develops among them those social instincts which are necessary to promote their common good, a class which we, seeing their pre-eminent value, have classed as “virtues,” calling the disproportionate action of more primitive individual instincts “vices.” Neither term is true. Egoism was a virtue in the individual status; altruism, or rather, omniism, is a virtue in the social status; both are natural. Our misinterpretation and false naming have prevented our easy assumption of the new qualities, that is all, the past concept being more potent to our minds than the present fact.

Among the group of root errors still retarding our development, none is more mischievous than that wherein we assume pleasure to lie mainly in impression rather than expression. We believe that what we get makes us happy rather than what we do, and therefore consider our doing as a means of getting. Perhaps this idea antedates even the Want theory; but it is needless to grope too critically among the errors of the remote past, they are all old enough.