People’s thoughts in this respect will undergo a complete change, when once they come really to feel the full weight of this fact: That, in a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideologic role, common social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. What ails the body social to-day, is impotence of the spiritual life. And the disease is aggravated by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once the fact is acknowledged, there will then be a basis on which to develope the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.
At present, the worker thinks that he has struck a main force in his soul, when he talks about his “class-consciousness.” But the truth is, that ever since he was caught up into the capitalist economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that could sustain his soul and give him a “human-consciousness,”—a consciousness of his worth as man,—which there is no possibility of developing with a spiritual life that is felt as ideology. This “human-consciousness”—was what he was seeking. He could not find it; and so he replaced it with “class-consciousness” born of the economic life. His eyes are rivetted upon the economic life alone, as though some overpowering suggestive influence held them there. And he no longer believes that elsewhere, in the spirit or in the soul, there can be anywhere a latent force capable of supplying the impulse for what is needed in the social movement. All he believes is, that the evolution of an economic life, devoid of spirit and of soul, can bring about the particular state of things, which he himself feels to be the one worthy of man. Thus he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of economic life alone. He has been forced to the conviction, that with the mere transformation of economic life all those ills would disappear, that have been brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and through the individual employer’s powerlessness to do justice to the claims of human self-respect in the employee. And so the modern worker was led on to believe, that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of means of production into a communal concern, or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people’s eyes having been removed, as it were, from everything belonging to soul and spirit, and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.
Hence all the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes, that industrial economy, the economic life itself, will of necessity evolve all that will ultimately give him his rights as man. These rights of man in full are what he is fighting for. And yet, in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance,—something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone. It is a significant thing, which speaks most forcibly, that here, right at the centre of the many forms which the social question assumes under the needs of human life to-day, there is something that seems, in men’s belief, to proceed out of economic life, which, however, never could proceed from economic life alone,—something, that lies rather in the direct line of evolution; leading up through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labour. The circulation of commodities, of money, the system of capital, property-ownership, the land system, these may have taken no matter what form under modern life; but at the heart of modern life something else has taken place, never distinctly expressed, not consciously felt even by the modern worker, but which is the fundamental force actuating all his social purpose. It is this:—The modern capitalist system of economy recognises, at bottom, nothing but commodities within its own province. It understands the creation of commodity-values as a process in the body economic. And in the capitalistic processes of the modern age something has been turned into a commodity, which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity.
If it were only recognised what a fundamental force this is in the social movement amongst the modern workers: this loathing that the modern worker feels at being forced to barter his labour-power to the employer, as goods are bartered in the market,—loathing at seeing his personal labour-power play part as a factor in the supply and demand of the labour-market, just as the goods in the market are subject to supply and demand. When once people become aware what this loathing of the “labour-commodity” means for the modern social movement, when once they straightly and honestly recognise, that the thing at work there is not even emphatically and drastically enough expressed in socialist doctrines,—then they will have discovered the second of the two impulses which are making the social question to-day so urgent, one may indeed say so burning,—the first being that spiritual life that is felt as an ideology.
In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,—his labour-power,—is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economic life. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to find a way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it under social forces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,—in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will only make labour-power a commodity in some other manner. The labour question cannot find place in its true shape as part of the social question, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities, are not such whose competence should be extended to human labour-power.
New age thought has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life: i.e., on the one hand, labour-power, which is intimately bound up with the human-being himself; and, on the other hand, those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human-being, and which circulate along those paths that all commodities must take from their production to their consumption. Sound thinking on these lines will shew both the true form of the labour-power question, and the place that economic life must occupy in a healthily constituted society.
From this, it is obvious that the “social question” will divide itself into three distinct questions. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social; the second, the consideration of the position of labour-power, and the right way to incorporate it in the life of the community. Thirdly, it will be possible to deduce the proper place and function of economic life.