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.