The Servile State Hilaire Belloc (ebook reader macos TXT) 📖

must see to the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done.

It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners.

So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of “slavery,” and avoiding a direct and conscious reestablishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole state, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or both.

The first model we call “socialism” or the collectivist state; the second we call the proprietary or distributive state.

With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as impracticable by our existing capitalist society, and why, therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a collectivist state.

I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all collectivist reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.

Have I made myself clear?

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The capitalist state breeds a collectivist theory which in action produces something utterly different from collectivism: to wit, the Servile State.

VII Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux

A contrast between the reformer making for distribution and the reformer making for socialism (or collectivism)⁠—The difficulties met by the first type⁠—He is working against the grain⁠—The second is working with the grain⁠—Collectivism a natural development of capitalism⁠—It appeals both to capitalist and proletarian⁠—None the less we shall see that the collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object⁠—To wit, the servile state.

I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a capitalist state to transform itself into a servile state.

I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a distributive but a collectivist solution is the easiest for a capitalist state to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attempting collectivism, what results is not collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few; that is, the servile state.

Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy of capitalism one of two reforms.

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the state were possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the distributive state. The second may be called the attempted establishment of the collectivist state.

Those who favour the first course are the conservatives or traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the state during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed today, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would reestablish, if possible, the distributive state in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their goal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the more practical in the sense that they deal more than do the collectivists (called also socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they propose.

The collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the less practical of the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): “On such and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history, collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in society.”

In this sense, therefore, the collectivist is far less practical than the reformer who desires well-distributed property.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this socialist is more practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock than it