For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken over? Is it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for, even at an exaggerated price? Far from it! Over and above the rails and the cars, there are all the commissions that have been made, all the champagne luncheons, all the lawyers’ fees, all the compensations to this man and to that man, all the bribes. Nor does this exhaust the argument. Tramways represent a productive investment. What about pleasure gardens, wash-houses, baths, libraries, monuments, and the rest? The greater part of these things are the product of “loans.” When you put up a public institution you borrow the bricks and the mortar and the iron and the wood and the tiles from Capitalists, and you pledge yourself to pay interest, and to produce a sinking fund precisely as though a town hall or a bath were a piece of reproductive machinery.
To this must be added the fact that a considerable proportion of the purchases are failures: purchases of things just before they are driven out by some new invention; while on the top of the whole business you have the fact that the borrowing goes on at a far greater rate than the repayment.
In a word, all these experiments up and down Europe during our generation, municipal and national, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital increasing rather more than twice, but not three times, as fast as the rate of repayment. The interest which capital demands with a complete indifference as to whether the loan is productive or non-productive amounts to rather more than 1½ per cent. excess over the produce of the various experiments, even though we count in the most lucrative and successful of these, such as the state railways of many countries, and the thoroughly successful municipal enterprises of many modern towns.
Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner and not a loser by this form of sham Socialism, as by every other. And the same forces which in practice forbid confiscation see to it that the attempt to mask confiscation by purchase shall not only fail, but shall turn against those who have not had the courage to make a frontal attack upon privilege.
With these concrete examples showing how Collectivism, in attempting its practice, does but confirm the Capitalist position, and showing how our laws have already begun to impose a Servile Status upon the Proletariat, I end the argumentative thesis of this book.
I believe I have proved my case.
The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society, left to its own direction, is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile. At the same time, the Owners will be guaranteed in their profits, the whole machinery of production in the smoothness of its working, and that stability which has been lost under the Capitalist phase of society will be found once more.
The internal strains which have threatened society during its Capitalist phase will be relaxed and eliminated, and the community will settle down upon that Servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the Christian faith, from which that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in the decay of that faith it naturally returns.