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

Nor are the courts enforcing such contracts or quasi-contracts (as they will come to be regarded) the only inducement.

A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a government official. “Here is work offered you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it you certainly shall not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall still stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money: not otherwise.” Dovetailing in with this machinery of compulsion is all that mass of registration and docketing which is accumulating through the use of labour exchanges. Not only will the official have the power to enforce special contracts, or the power to coerce individual men to labour under the threat of a fine, but he will also have a series of dossiers by which the record of each workman can be established. No man, once so registered and known, can escape; and, of the nature of the system, the numbers caught in the net must steadily increase until the whole mass of labour is mapped out and controlled.

These are very powerful instruments of compulsion indeed. They already exist. They are already a part of our laws.

Lastly, there is the obvious bludgeon of “compulsory arbitration”: a bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed, I know of no civilised European state which has succumbed to so gross a suggestion. For it is a frank admission of servitude at one step, and for good and all, such as men of our culture are not yet prepared to swallow.12

So much, then, for the first argument and the first form in which compulsory labour is seen to be a direct and necessary consequence of establishing a minimum wage and of scheduling employment to a scale.

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 today 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