And if we reason with the servant, saying: “Are you so sure that things are pink? It does not seem reasonable—it does not seem right,”—the servant loftily and unapproachably replies: “The Eye does not reason! There is no right or wrong to the Eye! I am an Eye, and I see as I like. If you differ with me, go blind!”
When we recognise production as a social process, for the social good, all work will change its standard of measurement. The worker, artist or scientist, inventor or teacher, must often differ with the purchasing public; must modify his work by his own reason and conscience, not by that of the other people; but the purpose to which he modifies it is social service. It may cost him his life at the time; he may have to set himself and his views against those of the past and present; but he should do so with unfaltering devotion to what he believes the social good; not in this lunatic position that he and his work are unique in the universe—that he owes no responsibility to anything—that “art is for art’s sake.”
When we are alive to the nature of our social processes, when we see that production is both duty and pleasure, personal good and social advantage, we shall bend our tremendous powers to develop and educate the productive energy in all our children, and provide the best conditions for its free exercise.
XIII: DISTRIBUTION
Summary
Distribution the field of most social disorders. Advantages of Distribution. Physical Avenues of Distribution. Mechanical means of Distribution. Social nourishment flowing around the world. Evils of local production and consumption. Social instincts developed by common interests. Love rests on service. International dependence means international peace. Long circuit, wide base, gives room for larger development. Present system of Distribution does not properly supply the world. Mysterious coagulations. False concepts again. Ego concept. Want theory. Working and eating, which comes first? Parent not competent to provide for child in society. Social parentage. Public education. Making and taking. How to supply social energy. Pay concept. Patent failure in application. Selling kerosene as a social service. No true relation between work and pay. Pay idea wrong. Nourishment first, work after. Heirlooms in our heads. The Bear. Competition and survival not useful among our vital organs. Our improvement mutual, collective, organic. How to raise the productive value of society. No ratio between want and work. Reductio ad absurdum of Want theory. Not “pay,” but investment. A man’s work is his payment to society for value received. Slave labour could not conceive of wage labour; wage labour fails to conceive of free labour. The normal “incentive” is pressure of social energy. See effect of false concepts on distribution of wheat. How it should be. Real “business sense” for society.
XIII
DISTRIBUTION
When we come to the subject of Distribution, we are facing what may be called the main field of our social disorders. Under this head, and that of the next chapter, Consumption, come all questions of property rights, with the vast structures of the civil law ensuing; the whole money question—laboriously complex; the demands of the labour movement; the protests of the “leisure class”—we are on the great battlefield of modern thought.
Let us approach it simply and naturally along the lines laid down in preceding chapters.
Distribution is a natural corollary of production. Society produces through its individual members in ever-growing surplus, and must distribute that surplus among its members to the best social advantage. What that advantage is needs no abstruse exposition; it is simply to have all the members of society supplied with what they need in order that they may so continue to serve society.
As social functions develop, the rate of production increases, as well as the relative distance of the consumers; and with them increases the necessity for an ever wider, swifter, and easier distribution of product. The circulation of our social supplies is as essential to social growth as the circulation of blood is to the growth of the body. This is seen plainly in the course of history. In the earliest times the young civilisations depend on great waterways for their life and prosperity as the easiest means of transportation; and water transportation remains one of our most important avenues of distribution. But seacoast and river bank were not enough for us, land transportation must develop too, and it has done so, wonderfully.