THE PROLETARIAN knows that his work enriches not himself but somebody else. He cannot, by saving in a proletarian society acquire independence as a small owner, for in a proletarian society the small owner is ruined. An exceptional man can rise out of the proletariat into the privileged owning class, but he does so at the expense of his fellows. The mass of him can never be other than proletarian, or at least the proletarian mind gets into that mood and is fixed in it.
The proletarian mind feels every incentive to spending what it earns and no incentive to saving, just as it has no direct incentive to work save for the necessity of keeping alive: and livelihood which is, in social justice, no more than his due. Is not the product of his own choice and effort, but is doled out to him by another.
His ideal can only be to get as much as possible for as little effort as possible. In pursuing that ideal his capitalist master set him the example; for the owners who in a capitalist state (that is, a proletarian society) are a privileged minority. They live by profit and by obtaining as much as possible for as little effort as possible—often with no effort beyond the gambler’s effort.
The proletarian mind is not conscious of duties to the commonwealth, save, still, in one particular, that of patriotism; and even that is growing weaker with the proletariat as proletarian conditions grow weaker with the proletariat as proletarian conditions grow more hopelessly permanent.
Far worse spiritual consequences follow. The proletarian mind loses the sense of home. For a proletariat has no roots. It drifts from place to place. Its habitation is “the labor market.” It inherits nothing and has no hope of handing on anything to posterity. To tell the plain truth, the proletarian mind despairs. So do the minds of its masters, for the evil we do others bears fruit in ourselves.
The proletarian mind cannot but fall into hatred of its oppressor and that hatred is enhanced by the contempt of which it feels itself to be unjustly the victim.
In such a mood how is it possible for men to enjoy leisure, to keep their sense of beauty and to exercise the Arts? The whole thing is inhuman.
Meanwhile the privileged owners live in dread of falling into the proletarian condition. That catastrophe lies before them on every occasion and this dread affects especially those who think wrongfully to benefit by the suffering of their fellow men.
The proletarian mind easily adheres to the profession of democracy. It will acclaim leaders who talk of democracy. But it is incapable of democratic action. It has forgotten what it was to be free. That is why modern industrial capitalism, as it is called (but we know that its true name is “proletarianism”) more and more in one country after another accepts a despot and under whatever name the despot is labeled looks to it for salvation from its misery.
There has never been such a mood before in the history of the world and of it nature it cannot endure, but in passing it may breed something worse still. Never before has there been a social system based upon destitution combined with political freedom; upon free citizens lacking economic freedom.
Note particularly that the worst feature in the whole affair is the lack of human bonds. To a man who has not experience of anything but the modern social injustice and who is filled with bitterness, the strength and value of a human bond, of loyalty, affection, neighborly custom between the poorer and the wealthier man can mean nothing. But to those who have experience of such human bonds, they mean everything.
It is not too late now to attempt a restoration of the old loyalties and personal contacts and long domestic familiarity which humanized and modified and made tolerable the older inequalities among men. When we come to speak of restoring better things we shall not begin by taking the proletarian mind for granted, we shall rather begin by aiming at destroying that mind and substituting for it conditions of economic freedom and the free mind of the free man.
~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out, excerpt from Chap. 10.
THERE is an elementary truth which has been repeated over and over again in this paper and elsewhere. The repetition must be continued because it is only thus that even obvious truths can be made to pierce in the days through which we are now living. The excuse for repeating it and hammering it in is that the very highest political consequences depend upon its appreciation. That truth may be formalized as follows: “Under capitalism the producer has every motive for not producing wealth.”
Another defect from which our time suffers is lack of definition. Words are used in all manner of different senses, and to hardly any one of those senses is the exact meaning adapted. In such an atmosphere it is impossible to reason or to analyse without clearly defining the terms one is using.
Let me repeat therefore that definition without which all discussion is meaningless: “We mean by capitalism a system under which wealth is produced by a mass of citizens, politically free but dispossessed, and these working for the profit of a far smaller number of effective owners and controllers of the means of production.”
It is no objection to this definition that a great number of dispossessed who are occupied in the production of wealth own something; they nearly own the clothes they wear, and most of them own a few sticks of furniture. Great numbers own small units of capital, a few certificates, or a few shares, or a policy; but the governing condition of their lives is that they are working for the profit of other men and, further, or under the inhuman control of those other men.
Now, that word “inhuman” is of first importance. Human servile relations, domestic control, are tolerable things. Mere mechanical control exercised by anonymous wealth impersonally is not tolerable. It will kill itself and the society which it governs. Meanwhile it is an increasing plague.
The typical unit of production under modern capitalism is a factory or a transport system in which citizens of the disposed kind (commonly call proletariat) work at a wage, on the reception of which at comparatively small intervals depends their existence. This wage must be less than the total amount they produce by their labour; that is, there must be a margin of profit (normally) between the wage paid by the capitalist to the proletarian worker and the value of what the latter makes: for if there were no such profit, actual or prospective, there would be no reason for the capitalist to set the machinery of production in motion. For instance, if a capitalist body hires ten thousand men to dig out of the earth a million tons of coal in a given unit of time, the mine cannot be carried on unless the values received in that unit of time, as wages by the miners, is worth a good deal less than the million tons of coal which they have extracted by their labour from the earth.
Under these conditions of work undertaken for the advantage of another, it is necessary and self-evident that the less the wage of the worker the greater the profit to his employer. It is further necessary and self-evident, that the advantage of the worker is to do as little work as possible for as much money as possible, and the advantage of his capitalist master is to give the worker as little money as possible for the wage he receives. Whatever form the question takes, that is the truth which it expresses. The proletarian worker may be aiming at shorter hours or less pressure during those hours or for an equal number of hours at a larger wage, but it is all a form of producing as little as possible.
In whatever way you put it, it always comes out to the same thing. The man who is producing the wealth tends to produce as little wealth as possible per unit of time. It is of no advantage to him to produce as much as possible, it is of every advantage to him to produce as little as possible, short of losing the wage upon which he lives. The worker is necessarily out to kill profit, and yet is the motive whereby the whole system is kept going!
It is no answer to this clear truth to say that organization and scientific work and all the rest of it bear their part in production quite as much as manual labour or the tending of machines. Of course they do. But vastly the greater part of the organization and scientific work and the rest is done at a wage just as much as manual labour or the tending of machines is done at a wage. The man who looks after his own individual business in which he exploits a number of proletarians and successfully directs their labour himself is an exception to-day; and even he, as a rule, in proportion to his success, takes less and less direct action as his life proceeds. The mass of all work, intellectual as well as manual, even in a successful individual business, proletarian; in company business it is all proletarian.
The direct consequence of this paradoxical state of affairs, in which he who produces wealth is, by every economic motive, driven not to produce wealth, is the necessary breakdown of the whole system. There comes a point after which it cannot carry on, but must, in order that society shall survive, be transformed into one of the two alternative types, the one fully servile, the other based on property. Either the mass of the proletarian workers must be compelled to work by force for the profit of others and under the control of wills not their own, or the motive of property must be restored whereby the man who works can profit from his own labour.
The intermediate or preliminary stage which may be called “the formative period” of capitalism is a lure. Men who have lived under it, and especially those who have prospered under it were vaguely of a mood that it could last indefinitely. It could not so last, for plain arithmetic forbade its endurance. So long as there was an indefinite supply of unorganized proletarian labour or so long as the proletarian worker inherited the traditions of a better time when his ancestry were possessed of small property, capitalism could expand and flourish. But those conditions were of their nature ephemeral, and they are now passing away so rapidly that the effects of their departure are already threatening the whole body of our civilization.
Attempts to reconcile capitalism and contented industrial labour have in them self-contradiction. They are often called “palliatives,” but they are worse than that. They are the attempt, or the pretence, at reconciling contradictories.
We have a very fine example of such folly in the French “Social Laws” as they are called. The hours of labour are shortened by compulsion. The scale of wages is raised by compulsion. What follows? What obviously and necessarily follows under a capitalist system of production is an increase in the cost of production, and therefore in the price the worker himself has to pay for the things he consumes. Finding that the price of these things has risen the worker again organizes to demand a further rise of wages which, if, the profit is to be maintained, means a further cost added to the produce—and so on indefinitely.
It is a good thing that this particular “experiment” (as its author called it) has broken down so quickly and so thoroughly, for it has exposed the radical error which vitiates all such policies. You cannot be and not be at the same time. Not even the most muddle-headed fool, enamoured of what he calls “compromise” or “gradualness,” can be such an ass as to conceive that being and not being are simultaneously possible. Hard and strenuous work cannot be—cannot exist—at the same time as slack work and little of it. High production of wealth cannot be coincident with low production of wealth.
There are no issues from the situation (whether you call it a vicious cycle or a blind alley or whatever metaphor you choose) save servitude or the restoration of property. You may restore property collectively through the guild, the corporation, or individually or by families, where the method of production makes that possible. But if you don’t restore property, you restore slavery.
You may compel men to work, and the servile compulsion is of the same character and effect whether it is exercised by an individual, or the State itself; or you may leave a man free from such compulsion and give him citizenship. You cannot do both at the same time. The whole of our civilization has now to make up its mind, and that quickly, whether it will take the road to civic freedom or the road to servitude.
~Hilaire Belloc
From One Thing and Another: A Miscellany from His Uncollected Essays, chosen by Patrick Cahill. First published 1955.
Thousands of Independent Dealers Now Work as Managers for a Small Salary
The phrase “small distributor” is a pompous but accurate way of saying “small store-keeper.” He also was an economically free man as was the unencumbered farmer of his own land. The small store-keeper was an independent citizen under no master. He is threatened with disappearance like his brother the small owner: the craftsman, the farmer. He is more menaced than the small owner and is in danger of disappearing altogether sooner even than the small owner will.
There are two sets of causes for his misfortune. A moral set and a material set.
On the moral side, there is the lack of natural excuse for, and natural sympathy with the small craftsman or farmer. The craftsman or farmer produces directly things which are necessary to our lives: food and clothing and furniture and the rest. When we think of him, we think of work necessary and useful for everybody. But the store-keeper is only a middle-man. He passes on what the small owner has made or, nowadays, what the big manufactory has made, to the consumer; and there is not apparent natural argument for his function of “passing on the goods” being in the hands of small business more than big business. Indeed, if we could get the necessaries of life direct, without having recourse to the middle-man at all we should think it a good thing.
Then there is the fact that the wage-earners have no special sympathy with the small store-keeper. Some few of them may have the sense to feel rather vaguely that they are all in the same boat together against the big capitalist. But the wage earning masses will buy what they need wherever they can get it cheapest and do not trouble particularly about supporting the small dealer.
As for the wealthier people, they find the small store-keeper inconvenient, compared to the large store. It seems to them squalid, compared to the comfort and luxury to which they are accustomed, and it is necessarily less able to provide at a moment’s notice what they happen to want.
Now this last point: the opinion of the wealthier people is very important, for they have a great deal to do with the making of general opinion.
So much for the moral forces working against small business. The material forces are even stronger. You have among these material forces some that are working against small business for the same reasons that they are working against small ownership. Small business has less information than big business. It has less variety or perhaps none, selling only one thing, where the big store sells a number of different things, therefore it cannot make up for the loss on one kind of sales by profits on another. It has no “spread over.” Then again, like small ownership, small business has less command of credit than large business. Very often the bank will not listen to it at all and when it does it charges more in proportion for a small loan than it does for a large one.
In all these ways small business is handicapped in its struggle to live, precisely as small ownership is handicapped.
But there are special enemies to small distributors which attack them as distributors and from which the small owner is free.
Big business has proportionately smaller “overhead” than small business, even the rent it pays is often heavier “in proportion to the turn-over” than the rent paid by the big stores; while the clerical expenses and pretty well all the running expenses are proportionately heavier.
Then there is the cost of advertisement, which has become enormously important in modern capitalist distribution. A hundred thousand dollars spent in a given time on large advertisements has far more than a hundred times the effect of a thousand spent on petty advertisement. In practice, small business hardly advertises at all, while big business shouts at us everywhere.
Then there is the giving of contracts. For instance in the catering trade. A big catering firm will get the order for banquets or the feeding of great numbers of men in institutions, or the armed forces; a small catering firm will not, and a little store can never find anything of the sort coming its way.
Then there is the extra cost of supply: small business has to pay far more in proportion for getting its petty stock delivered to it than has big business.
Meanwhile, every added facility for rapid transport and rapid communication of orders, increases the power of the chain-stores. So all along the line. Under free competition small business goes to the wall. The small distributor is sinking fast. The human instinct for independence desperately maintains his hopeless struggle, but hopeless it is as things are, and he is going under.
All the observers in his own line of life, especially the big distributors, see this clearly. It is most instructive to listen to the conversation of big business men on the shortcomings and misfortunes of the old-fashioned single store-keeper. The newspapers (with whom the small man cannot advertise) are equally certain of his doom.
Now, as in the case of the small owner, the loss of economic independence means that the man and his family have become proletarian. A friend in the trade assures me that within his own lifetime some 40,000 independent grocers in one European country are now replaced by 40,000 salaried managers living on a wage, the servants of one big company, and at its mercy. This flood of proletarianism grows and grows, and with it there come to color the whole community what may be called “the proletarian mind.” This proletarian mind is, as I have said, the real danger of our time. Capitalism is but a product thereof.
~Hilaire Belloc: In Social Justice, April 4, 1938.
"CONSIDER in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was "already" an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was "already" an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand."
~Hilaire Belloc: The Servile State.
