Part 36

We do not occupy a hundredth part of our mind-space, no, nor a thousandth. And in this darkness, this cramping limitation, with but a partial and restricted education and the false world-views of our misguided press to relieve it, we blunderingly creep about in the great world-functions we must serve, each of us imagining that he is taking care of himself. The difference between our real position and our false and artificially maintained one is like this: If, for instance, certain marked improvements in telegraphy have been invented, raising our social efficiency in that line of distribution to grade G, that is our legitimate condition; but if these improvements are destroyed by misguided workmen, bought up and suppressed by misguided property-owners, keeping our telegraphic efficiency back in grade A, that is an illegitimate social condition. We are really in grade G, but artificially in grade A.

If, again, the machinery of democratic government is open to all, our legitimate condition is that of full democracy; if a large proportion of persons fail to exercise their political functions, preferring to remain in a lower grade, or if an entire sex is forcibly prevented from exercising them, that is an illegitimate condition.

The economic conditions of society to-day are confessedly paradoxical. The gain in facility and speed of execution is million-fold, and yet men are required to work almost as many hours as before their improvement. The expressed wealth of the world is enormous, and the power to multiply it not nearly used, yet a vast proportion of our members are not fully supplied with the necessaries of life. In ways too commonly known to need enumeration here we may observe this strange difference between our real period of social evolution, with its beneficent results, and the existing state of Society.

The persistent survival of lower social forms, becoming more injurious with each advancing age, is one conspicuous feature in the case. That we, the foremost industrial nation, should have preserved that early status of labour, chattel slavery, past the middle of the nineteenth century is a historic anomaly; that we still preserve the yet lower status of female domestic labour is a worse one. That we should maintain side by side, in the same age, a democracy for men and a patriarchate for women is a brain-splitting anachronism.

Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of social progress furnish some ground, at least apparently, to those who assume it to be extra-natural, and who postulate direct interference by Spirits of Good and Evil to account for the peculiar facts. We need no such childish hypothesis, the facts in the case are quite sufficient. Our painful and irregular social development is due merely to the presence in a highly organised body of the artificially maintained egoism of a previous unorganised condition. The “old Adam” in us is simply the individualistic animal, still protesting that he is an individual in the face of centuries upon centuries of socialisation.

Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of our position to-day is that of the strangely distinguished “Leisure Class” and “Working Class.” Here is a social body whose existence requires mutual service. Here is that service performed by that majority of mankind known as the “Working Class.” The Working Class is the world. However he prospers, the man who works is he who keeps the world going. His labours are the social processes, he is Society. The Leisure Class deliberately cuts itself off from Society, refuses to take part in its processes, yet continues to live on its products.

This is parasitism, pure and simple. That it is not so pure nor so simple as would render it easy to handle, or as would warrant us in ruthless excision of a diseased mass, is due to the resistless law of social relation which holds us still connected even when we think ourselves separate. Your wealthy social traitor, refusing social duty and absorbing social gain, is no more to blame than the workman, who would do the same thing if he had the chance, because he believes in the same false principles of economics. But as they stand the leisure class is doing incomparably more harm.

The mere extra drain on our material wealth as rich a social body as ours could easily stand. The mere malingering, the refusal to work, we could stand; the social energy is so abundant, there are so many to serve the world. But the position of the overconsuming non-producing class is not merely negative and cannot be. Withdrawing from normal social processes, the leisure class forthwith becomes the seat of abnormal social processes, which affect the whole body most injuriously. Every recognised folly and vice of these conspicuous ex-members of society spreads its corrupting influence around in the healthy structure which supports them. A live body cannot maintain dead material in its substance without injury.

Much deeper than the recognised follies and vices, though they alone have blackened history, lies the influence of the falsehoods on which the leisure class rests its position. Let no live member of the body politic make the mistake of blaming a disease. If any part of Society works wrong, it should be studied, not hated; cured, not punished. In our great organic union any common error works out its natural result, varying in accordance with the part affected. The callosities and deformities of our social body, its sudden illnesses and slow, wasting diseases, call for our utmost wisdom and for a change of conduct, but they do not call for childish rage.

This mischievous by-product called the leisure class can be eliminated by healthy action on the part of the real social body. It has no existence except as we make and uphold it. Like the criminal class and the pauper class it is an inevitable result of our imperfect social action, and that imperfect social action springs from errors in all our minds, not merely in the minds of the diseased portion. The attitude of the non-productive consumer is the legitimate result of our general economic fallacies; logically, if conditions allowed, we would all cheerfully join their ranks. As it is, we all, or nearly all, try to, and the successful, knowing this full well, are naturally not much moved by the criticisms of unsuccessful competitors. The flavour of sour grapes is clearly perceptible in most of our animadversion against the rich.

Moreover, when a human being of our day, coming into some share of the social consciousness proper to the time, feels that he has no right to this mass of other men’s labour in money form, he can find no way out of his position on any basis of strict political economy.

Charity we know to be evil, though we still fool ourselves by organising it and putting great numbers of intermediaries between giver and givee.

The currents of human production, as forcibly modified by our laws resting on false economics, do accumulate masses of capital; given individuals find themselves on top of the heaps, and they cannot get off! If they flatly abdicate it is only to let some other eager aspirant mount after them. There is something genuinely pathetic in a modern rich man or woman, striving to readjust what he recognises as a disproportionate provision and absolutely unable to do so. Every step he would take is cut off by some traditional error.

“I too will go to work!” cries the uneasy Crœsus. “I will not sit here and live on the wealth made by others!” But all cry out against him. “Stop! Go back! You ‘do not have to work’! Work is only to get money, and you have got it; be satisfied and leave the field to us! If you work for nothing you lower the scale of wages! If you work at ‘union rates’ you rob some poor man of the job!”

Hemmed in by these theories there is nothing for the rich man to do but to keep on working for even more money, which is commonly allowed to be excusable if not commendable, or to go and play. The true “Leisure Class” only plays. Their playthings cost much money, but as this money goes back to those who make the plaything they justify themselves by the “furnishing employment” theory. This is a very old fallacy, and impossible to refute while we believe that work is a thing done to get wealth, and that wealth may be legitimately “owned” to an indefinite amount by individuals.

As Society increases in productivity wealth increases, and by our arbitrary apportionment it increases in the hands of individuals—it has to. These individuals holding all the goods and other people needing the goods, yet the Pay theory—no goods except for previous work—acting sharply here, the only legitimate method of distributing these individual congestions of wealth is by “employing” as many as possible. And as we do not consider the work as the important part of the exchange, but the pay, so we do not care at what the beneficiary is employed, so long as he is paid.

What we call “furnishing employment” we really esteem as “furnishing Payment,”—looking at the good, the real good in question, to be the holder of many things, making it possible for the worker to also get things,—the “Pleasure-in-Impression” theory acting with the Want theory and the Pay theory.

So every developing society raises its specially rich individuals who do not produce. They, in the increase of their inordinate consumption, demand more and more service from their fellows, till, instead of one healthy human creature easily producing more wealth than he can consume, we have this spot of local disease consuming more and more of the labour of other people, thus depraving more and more of the substance of Society. All these caterers to abnormal appetites cease to be producers in a healthy sense; they do not add to the well-being of Society by legitimate products for social distribution, but add to the ill-being of Society by unhealthy secretions centered in one spot.

If the production of this mass of workers abnormally localised is in itself legitimate; that is, if the “employer,” i. e., the consumer, consumes only useful and beautiful things, even so the effect is injurious if he consumes too much; it is still local congestion, though of healthy blood; but that position is intrinsically untenable. No leisure class ever contented itself with really useful and beautiful things. You do not make a Vitellius on wholesome food. Consumption, pursued as an end, naturally develops into morbid excess, and the caterers to it must produce unhealthfully. This is the hole in the “furnishing employment” theory.

It is not being employed that benefits a man. If I pay a man a hundred dollars a day to sit in one spot and twirl his thumbs, or to climb up and down one post continually, I am not benefiting him, I am injuring him. If I subtract a human being from social service and add him to my private service I degrade him, unless I do more work by virtue of his service. Here is the law of private service:

A human being is entitled to as many servants as he can do the work of better.

That is, if two men, working separately, can produce to a certain amount each, but if the two, combining, one serving the other, can then produce through the one served more than the previous amount of the product of both, that is a legitimate social relation. For the doctor to have a helper to take care of and drive his horse enables him to do more and better doctoring; he can justify his having a servant. But for the doctor to “employ” a driver, a footman, a page, two outriders, and a herald, would not add to his efficiency as a doctor; that would be an illegitimate relation.

The overconsuming rich do mischief first in withholding from the social circulation an undue amount of social products, as a mere miser—social congestion; second, by withdrawing from the social service an undue amount of labour for their own aggrandisement—a social excrescence; and third, by perverting the product of their private commando of workers, generating unhealthy secretions in the body politic—a social disease.

The miser merely robs society to a certain degree, the employer of much labour for his own gratification robs it by so much more, and beyond that comes the steady deterioration of an illegitimately directed product, a true poison, with the progressive breakdown of the tissues ensuing.

This effect on Art is quite plain in history. The artist doing great work for the public grows and serves the world. The artist catering to an employer does not grow, but deteriorates. The work is not only withheld from Society, to which it belongs, but is lowered in kind. Art is always corrupted and lowered by the patronage of luxurious wealth. So is manufacture. No plea of “furnishing employment” to the artist can cover this injury to the world.

The artist should be working for the world which made him instead of putting his social product in one man’s hands, and the work he does should be noble and should improve, as it cannot in that position of personal dependence. The value of an artist to the world is that he shall do as good work as he can for as many people as he can reach; it is of no use to the world that he be “employed” on other lines, nor is it good for him.

Every worker stands in this same social relation. The value of a workman to the world is that he do the best work for the most people, not that he be “employed” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an ostentatious livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human being is to be measured by his value to society, and the value is in his work, not in his being “employed”—or paid.

Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to return to a healthy place in the world. He cannot work because he “does not have to,” and his efforts to re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious activity.