CHAPTER XX. Reform of Industry Instead of Socialization

REFORM OF INDUSTRY INSTEAD OF SOCIALIZATION

The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers—Can and Ought they to be Satisfied?—The Vagueness of Labour’s Scheme of Reconstruction—The Recent Change in Labour’s Proposals—Reform of Industry v. Reconstruction.

The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers

The organization of industry cannot continue in its present state of instability; something must be done. The Socialist who would reconstruct industry, the anti-Socialist who would reform it, each assumes it to be necessary to satisfy aspirations of the workers that are not satisfied under conditions as they exist to-day. The three greatest aspirations animating the workers are, in their order of relative importance: first, removal of the ever-present menace of unemployment; secondly, recognition in industry of the worker’s human status; thirdly, distribution, as of moral right, of an equitable share of the product. Talk, as I did during the war on over three thousand occasions, to the ordinary working-man, those are the three basic sentiments you find swaying him. All the intricate schemes for reconstruction of industry which the fertile and fervid imaginations of the Labour intellectuals have evolved are largely unintelligible to him, and leave him unmoved and cold. He cares nothing about the delicate and subtle regimentation of industry and society as Guild Socialists would have it; he wholly fails to grasp, indeed, is acutely suspicious of, a Socialist commonwealth constructed and controlled on a vocational or functional basis. The test which he applies to such complex and conjectural conceptions is their efficacy in satisfying those three great fundamental aspirations. But that is too restricted a purview for an aspirant political party, and was astutely declared by the old parliamentary hands of the Labour movement to constitute too narrow a class-basis to support a popular appeal. Hence it was that all the non-industrial doctrinaires—and there are many of them attached to the Labour Party—were set to work to compile a new Social Contract. Scores of pamphlets have now been published descriptive of the policy of the Party on every conceivable topic—political, administrative, judicial, local government, social, and industrial—national, imperial and international. If formulation on paper of ideals of humanitarianism, and quixotic Utopianism, without any consideration of cost or practicability, is statesmanship, the Labour Party’s policy is truly admirable. It outlines in glowing splendour a wonderful new mechanism of politics, society and industry, in which every exterior part falls into place with the smoothness and precision of a model engine constructed out of a box of parts—but, like the toy, with no works inside. That this mysterious mechanism may provide in some subtle and not very obvious way, the means of securing the three fundamentals is its only recommendation in the eyes of the great mass of Labour.

If it is right to assume that the ordinary worker’s dominant desire is to obtain reasonable satisfaction of these three aspirations, and of the soundness of that assumption I entertain no doubt, for at my three thousand odd conferences and meetings with Labour during the war—at all of which accurate notes were taken of the subjects of discussion—these were the three foremost topics, two questions arise: Are these three aspirations proper ones to be satisfied? If so, how can they best be satisfied with due regard to the interests of the community?

Can and Ought they to be Satisfied?

There is in regard to unemployment but little difficulty in coming to a sound conclusion. Unemployment, and to a less extent under-employment, is on every ground—humanitarian, social, economic—a curse so great that no reasonable effort should be spared to reduce to a minimum the probability of its occurrence, and to mitigate as far as possible its dire effects when once it has supervened. Many will differ as to how far it is right to go in the provision of measures of alleviation, but that is a difference more in degree than in principle. In regard to the investiture of every worker in industry with “human status” there is a more radical cleavage in opinion. While few employers will contest the right of the workmen through their constitutional representatives to voice their demands for settling wages and conditions of employment, and such demands—backed up by the power to apply economic pressure—are effectively voiced by the Trade Unions, most employers will deny the right of the workers “to interfere in the management.” It would be quite impossible to have two sets of persons attempting to manage a factory, or to direct the conduct of the business on the commercial side. But between the fixing of wages and conditions of employment, in which it is admitted that Labour should have a real voice, and the actual executive direction of a business in which it is clear that Labour could not exercise a voice, if efficiency is to be preserved and discipline remain unimpaired, there is a wide sphere of matters which are proper to be discussed between employers and representatives of the workers, and which, when discussed and settled, can be left for executive action to the employers. There is ample room for compromise. The confusion surrounding the catchwords of “a voice in conditions,” “interference in the management,” wants to be cleared away before any more harm is done.

On the question of remuneration there is really, if the matter be closely examined, no difference whatever in principle. Most employers agree with the unions that the worker is entitled to a fair share of the product; they disagree as to what proportion of the product constitutes a fair share—a dispute not as to principle but as to quantum. No employer, so far as my experience goes, would contend that he was entitled in good times to pay his workers nothing more than a bare subsistence wage, and appropriate for himself as profit all the balance of revenue after payment of working expenses and the market rate on capital. What usually happens in bad times is that the workers in employment get, as a first charge on the product, wages much higher than subsistence rates, and the shareholders go without return, which results in great deprivation to many whose meagre incomes consist of such dividends. The more critically one examines the three fundamentals the more one is irresistibly driven to the conclusion that there are no issues between employers and the workers in regard to any of them which cannot form the subject of fair collective bargaining. But that is what is denied by the intellectuals of the Labour Party, entirely on their own a priori reasons. Happily their doctrinaire conclusions meet with scant respect from the general body of workers.

The Vagueness of Labour’s Scheme of Reconstruction

There are only two possible courses for the future—either to reconstruct industry on some entirely new basis, or to maintain the present system of organization and introduce reforms which will cover the three fundamentals as a first beginning. That really is the question on which a decision must sooner or later be taken by the nation, and far-reaching national consequences will turn upon it. Labour says: “Destroy the present industrial system, and replace it by something based on public, and not private, ownership of the means of production.” Did we know exactly what Labour’s scheme of reconstruction is, it could be critically examined in detail, and its practical effect on the prosperity of industry, the welfare of the worker and the good of the community dispassionately considered. But Labour with prudent reticence has not provided us with any official scheme. Different sections of Labour have tabled all kinds of variant and in many cases discordant schemes which agree in one respect only—the elimination of the private employer. All that the Labour Party tender in the way of constructive reorganization is the vague formula of “nationalization and democratic control,” Nor will the Party undertake to say what is the method and kind of industrial control—a matter on which depend the whole efficiency and success of industry—which it has in mind. The truth is, the Party has not succeeded in devising any scheme of industrial control on which it can agree, and the Executive Committee, though instructed to report on that question, has either been unable to do so, or have found it expedient to postpone committing itself (see p. 58). Yet the Party, after invoking fire from Heaven on the Government as retribution for its policy of opportunism in regard to industry, calls upon the country to witness that Labour has a considered and well-thought-out industrial policy, which it euphemistically calls “democratic control,” and announces with ingenuous naïveté that it is such a system as will always harmonize with the special circumstances and requirements of each industry! Who is the opportunist? The Government in adhering to continuance of the established organization of industry—on which the greatness of England’s trade and commerce has been built up—or the Labour Party, which, without any clear idea of what it would put in its place, would destroy the existing organization in the complacent expectation that by some process of abiogenesis a better system will soar like the Phoenix from the ashes? There would be a short and sharp retort from the members of any of the great Trade Unions, for example the Amalgamated Engineering Union, were the Labour Party to propose to reconstruct that proud organization on the basis of a resounding formula. The Executive Committee of that Union—supposing it, agreed to consider any such gratuitous suggestion from even a Labour source—would insist—at least it always did with me during the war—that general phrases should be reduced into clear, crisp and definite proposals, each one of which could be subjected to a microscopic scrutiny of the most searching kind, sufficient to reveal its true nature, its effects direct and indirect, and its remotest implications. Is not the nation entitled to similar information? In