The second is equally clear. In the production of wheat the healthy and skilled man who can produce ten measures of wheat is compelled to work for six measures, and the Capitalist is compelled to remain content with four measures for his share. The law will punish him if he tries to get out of his legal obligation and to pay his workmen less than six measures of wheat during the year. What of the man who is not sufficiently strong or skilled to produce even six measures? Will the Capitalist be constrained to pay him more than the values he can produce? Most certainly not. The whole structure of production as it was erected during the Capitalist phase of our industry has been left intact by the new laws and customs. Profit is still left a necessity. If it were destroyed, still more if a loss were imposed by law, that would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which all these reforms are being undertaken. They are being undertaken with the object of establishing stability where there is now instability, and of “reconciling,” as the ironic phrase goes, “the interests of capital and labour.” It would be impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital to lose upon the man who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall that element of insecurity and instability be eliminated? To support the man gratuitously because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of the commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be taught, if possible, to produce those economic values, which are regarded as the minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work even if he cannot produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free labourer should imperil the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for forced labour. We have not yet in this country, established by force of law, the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable consequence of those other reforms which have just been reviewed. The “Labour Colony” (a prison so called because euphemism is necessary to every transition) will be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of compulsion will crown the edifice of these reforms. They will then be complete so far as the subject classes are concerned, and even though this particular institution of the “Labour Colony” (logically the last of all) precede in time other forms of compulsion, it will make the advent of those other forms of compulsion more certain, facile, and rapid.
There remains one last remark to be made upon the concrete side of my subject. I have in this last section illustrated the tendency towards the Servile State from actual laws and actual projects with which all are to-day familiar in English industrial society, and I have shown how these are certainly establishing the proletariat in a novel, but to them satisfactory, Servile Status.
It remains to point out in a very few lines the complementary truth that what should be the very essence of Collectivist Reform, to wit, the translation of the means of production from the hands of private owners to the hands of public officials, is nowhere being attempted. So far from its being attempted, all so-called “Socialistic” experiments in municipalisation and nationalisation are merely increasing the dependence of the community upon the Capitalist class. To prove this, we need only observe that every single one of these experiments is effected by a loan.
Now what is meant in economic reality by these municipal loans and national loans raised for the purpose of purchasing certain small sections of the means of production?
Certain Capitalists own a number of rails, cars, etc. They put to work upon these certain Proletarians, and the result is a certain total of economic values. Let the surplus values obtainable by the Capitalists after the subsistence of the proletarians is provided for amount to £10,000 a year. We all know how a system of this sort is “Municipalised.” A “loan” is raised. It bears “interest.” It is saddled with a “sinking fund.”
Now this loan is not really made in money, though the terms of it are in money. It is, at the end of a long string of exchanges, nothing more nor less than the loan of the cars, the rails, etc., by the Capitalists to the Municipality. And the Capitalists require, before they will strike the bargain, a guarantee that the whole of their old profit shall be paid to them, together with a further yearly sum, which after a certain number of years shall represent the original value of the concern when they handed it over. These last additional sums are called the “sinking fund”; the continued payment of the old surplus values is called the “interest.”
In theory certain small sections of the means of production might be acquired in this way. That particular section would have been “socialised.” The “Sinking Fund” (that is, the paying of the Capitalists for their plant by instalments) might be met out of the general taxation imposed on the community, considering how large that is compared with any one experiment of the kind. The “interest” may by good management be met out of the true profits of the tramways. At the end of a certain number of years the community will be in possession of the tramways, will no longer be exploited in this particular by Capitalism, will have bought out Capitalism from the general taxes, and, in so far as the purchase money paid has been consumed and not saved or invested by the Capitalists, a small measure of “socialisation” will have been achieved.
As a fact things are never so favourable.
In practice three conditions militate against even these tiny experiments in expropriation: the fact that the implements are always sold at much more than their true value; the fact that the purchase includes non-productive things; and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the rate of repayment. These three adverse conditions lead in practice to nothing but the riveting of Capitalism more securely round the body of the State.