The Servile State Has Begun:—The manifestation of the Servile State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts—(a) Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work—(b) Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society—As to (a), we find it already at work in measures such as the Insurance Act and proposals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades Union bargains and the erection of “Labour Colonies,” etc., for the “unemployable”—As to the second, we find that so-called “Municipal” or “Socialist” experiments in acquiring the means of production have already increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the Capitalist.
Introduction
The Subject of This Book
This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:—
That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.
Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that form of society called Capitalist, and men would be satisfied to accept, and to continue in, such a settlement.
To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described in the next section, the title of The Servile State.
I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent social provisions which show that it has actually begun.
This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by implication the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard such a distinction with ill favour or with dread.