Читать книгу The Unfinished Programme of Democracy - Richard Roberts - Страница 6
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ОглавлениеIt may be with some reason pleaded that the defects of modern democracy spring from the conditions under which it emerged as a historical fact. It has appeared with an aspect altogether too negative, as though the abolition of monarchy or aristocracy or any form of privilege were sufficient to bring it to birth. The democratic principle has implications which are not exhausted with the destruction of autocracy or aristocracy or even with the formal affirmation of popular sovereignty and the institution of a universal and equal franchise. Historically, democracy is the product, direct or indirect, of popular risings against political privilege whether vested in a person or in a class. Probably we should have to seek a still anterior cause in the power of economic exploitation which political power confers upon him who holds it. The mainspring of revolution is the sense of disinheritance rendered intolerable by injustice and exploitation and the consequent demand of the disinherited class for its appointed share in the common human inheritance of light and life. But the tragedy of revolution (despite the conventional historical judgment) is that it has never gone far enough. The records of revolution are filled chiefly with its negative and destructive performances because its impulse, not having been sustained by an adequate social vision, ran out before it completed its work or before it could swing on to the business of construction. It was too readily assumed that the one thing needful was to break down the one palpable disabling barrier of privilege. That done, the rest would follow; the golden age would at once materialise. But it has never done so. It was not perceived that the logic of revolution required and pointed to a sequel of positive and creative social action.
This was essentially Lamennais’ plea in 1831. A revolution, he told his fellow countrymen, is only the beginning of things. You have cleared the ground; upon that cleared ground, you have to raise the fabric of a living society. France did, indeed, already provide the instance of the danger of an uncompleted revolution. The political equality established by the Revolution of 1789, was intended to give a fair field to every man; but because it went no further, in effect it opened the door to the strong man. The strong man appeared presently in the person of Napoleon; and with Napoleon came the Empire and all that that episode cost Europe in blood and treasure. The same kind of miscarriage (in another region and on a larger scale) has befallen the wider historical development of the French Revolution. Because it was not seen that the “natural right” of property might no less than the “divine right” of noble birth become a source of disinheritance, the door was opened to a movement which in the nineteenth century produced a new type of privilege and a new manner of disinheritance. That Jack’s vote has been declared to be as good as his master’s has not saved Jack from an exploitation as real and burdensome as that under which his father groaned. But it is of a different kind. The older disability was chiefly agrarian; the new is industrial. The doctrine of political liberty (interpreted in the light of Adam Smith) received an economic translation in the doctrine of “laissez-faire”; and this combined, first, with the restrictions imposed upon the power of the territorial aristocracy, second, with the new commercial civilisation which began at the Industrial Revolution, and third, with the advantage with which the propertied classes, especially the rich merchant class, started in the new order, has brought about a new kind of disability. The common people have exchanged the old master for a new, a feudal aristocracy for an industrial plutocracy, land barons for trade barons; they have been released from agrarian serfdom only to be tied to the wheel of industrial wage-slavery. Political emancipation did not bring with it real freedom.
It was characteristic of Lamennais’ insight that he saw that political liberty without safeguards against economic exploitation would prove a vain thing. Writing to the working men of Paris in 1847, he said that, with them he “should demand that in accordance with justice and reason, the question should be gone into, how it is possible, in the distribution of the fruits of labour, to do away with the revolting anomalies which crush under their weight the most numerous portion of the human family.”[1] Emile Faguet justly observes that Lamennais saw that the coming enemy was “le pouvoir d’argent,” and that he did what he could to choke it off before it could establish itself. Nor was Lamennais alone in his sense of the inadequacy of political change to meet the needs of the common people. Robert Owen reached a similar conclusion, and, indeed, was so sceptical of the value of political action for social improvement that during one period of his life he preached outright to the working classes a doctrine of political indifferentism. The working-class movements which came into being early in the nineteenth century—the Co-operative Societies and the Trade Unions—originated in the need of countervailing the economic disadvantage under which the new order had placed the worker and which the endeavour to establish political equality and liberty had been powerless to prevent. The growth of Socialism and Syndicalism represents a revolt from a social order in which the privilege of noble birth has been superseded by the privilege of property, and the disinherited class has but suffered a new disinheritance.
1. This view was shared by Mazzini, whose gospel was at many points identical with that of Lamennais. See The Duties of Man, ch. xi.
It is by now abundantly evident that the next stage in the evolution of democracy will consist of a movement of the proletarian masses to remove the economic disabilities under which they believe themselves to be suffering. The revolutionary movement in Europe is directed not only against the dynastic tradition but against the modern institution of private capitalism; and while the influences of change that have now overwhelmed Russia and Germany were afoot long before the war, it is not to be questioned that their liberation was due to the War. Beneath the outward calm of empire there was a seething mass of unrest; and once the crust of empire was cracked, this lava of human passion rushed through. The worker has come to believe that the origins of the war are to be traced to economic causes, direct products of the capitalist system of industry, which is also the source of his disabilities in times of peace; and whether in peace or in war, the worker has at last to pay the bill. It is not to the point here to discuss whether the premises from which the worker argues or the conclusions he has reached are valid or not. We are concerned only to note the state of the case at the present moment. We observe that the failure of dynastic imperialism has become the occasion of economic revolution; and in this circumstance we are to look for the clue to the course of the democratic movement in the immediate future.
The movement seems indeed to be historically due. The first great turning point in modern history was the Protestant Reformation with its insistence upon religious liberty as against ecclesiastical authority. The second turning point was the French Revolution, which was the first act in the drama of establishing political liberty as against the power of aristocracy. It may well turn out that the Russian Revolution marks the beginning of the third crisis in the modern period, the first act in the drama of economic emancipation. The Protestant Reformation affirmed the liberty of the layman against a privilege resting upon an alleged monopoly of the means of grace; the French Revolution affirmed the liberty of the citizen against privilege resting upon the fact of noble birth; the Revolution now in progress will affirm the liberty of the worker as against privilege resting upon the presumed rights of property. Perhaps we are about to realise the long delayed economic corollary of the French Revolution.
Several circumstances of war-experience have given a powerful stimulus to the movement for radical economic change. Before the war, men were still haunted by the fear that the revolutionary changes advocated by the more advanced spirits might turn out to be a transition from the frying pan into the fire. But the cynical readiness of the “big business” interests in all the belligerent countries to turn the nation’s necessity to their own advantage; and the now demonstrated incompetency and wastefulness of the system of private capitalist enterprise have served to remove from among the workers any lingering sense that the good of the nation is bound up with the existing industrial order. In Great Britain in particular the close industrial organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving “big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. The immense increase of output in all industries, through the proper co-ordination and standardisation of processes, the systematic use of scientific investigation, and the more adequate oversight of the physical condition of the workers has made it plain that private capitalism either would not or could not make proper use of the productive resources of the British people. For instance, the ignorant opposition of the average employer to the movement for reducing the hours of labour has convicted him of a stupid incapacity to handle men, especially in view of such findings as those recorded by Lord Henry Bentinck, who shows conclusively (from data drawn from the engineering, printing and textile trades) that “in every case in which experiments have been tried, the result in output has been favourable to a shortening of the working day.”[2]
2. Contemporary Review, February, 1918.
Moreover, the war-time emphasis upon the idea of democracy has greatly stimulated the demand for its extension into the field of industry. This demand was assuming definite shape before the war; but what was at that time the propaganda of a comparatively small group has now become the faith of a multitude; and this faith is becoming more and more articulate as a demand for a socially intensive as well as geographically extensive application of the democratic principle. The argument runs in some such fashion as this. Broadly speaking, the democratic idea has three notes; first, the institution of those conditions of equal opportunity which are within human control; second, the participation of the community as a whole in the creation of these conditions, which means a universal franchise and equal ungraded partnership in affairs; and third, the absence of any privileged class which is able to impose its will upon the rest or any part of the rest. Some rough approximation to this state of things has been made in the political region; there it is accounted good and right. Why, then should not the same process be good and right in other regions of life? For instance, the greater part of a man’s life gathers around and is governed by his work; yet this democratic principle which is so estimable in politics is taboo in industry. To begin with, there is no such thing as a condition of equal opportunity in the industrial region. Certain antecedent advantages of birth, possession, and education have created a privileged class; and the rest are under a corresponding handicap. There was a time when the ranker could rise out of the ranks and make a field for himself; but in these days of trusts, combines, chain-stores and the like, the opportunity of the ranker to quit the ranks has dwindled almost to vanishing point. In the second place, industry is under class government. The persons engaged in it are divided into masters and servants, employers and employees; and the hired man has hardly a word to say in determining the conditions of his work. The only freedom he possesses lies in the choice of a master; and even this, under the régime of large corporations, is steadily disappearing. For the rest, he is confined to a choice between working under conditions imposed by the employer and not working at all, which means starvation. In industry there is a rule of privilege as real as that of the old territorial aristocracy; and the modern practice of investment has served to perpetuate this privilege within the bounds of a single class by the simple operation of the accident of birth, just as feudal landownership in another age became the foundation of aristocratic power. The one qualification which requires to be made here is that the concentration of large multitudes of workers in urban centres, as the result of the machine industry, has enabled the workers to join together in self-defence; and the Trade Union has to some extent mitigated the insolence of plutocratic power.
The argument, however, does not end here. It proceeds to the analysis of the causes of this privilege; and it finds it in the doctrine of property-rights. It would take us too far afield to trace this doctrine to its origins. Apparently the French thinkers who laid the train of the Revolution believed that the “natural right” of property was the necessary check upon the natural right of freedom; but they could not foresee the developments of the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise it is questionable whether they would have found the solution of their problem so easy. For it is not open to argument that the presumed sanctity of property rights has, under the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution furnished the foundation of the modern capitalist order and its corollaries. The capitalist owes his power to his possession of property in the shape of industrial plant or of money. Yet it is plain to anyone who analyses the position with any degree of realism that the mere possession of a number of things should no more entitle or enable an individual to lord it over his fellows than an inheritance of blue blood. Nevertheless, in point of cold fact, that is the present position; there is, however, a prospect that the divine right of property may presently go the same way as the divine right of kings.
But it will go not under the pressure of a theory. It will disappear under the strain of economic necessity. In England the proposal of a “levy on capital” has been widely and seriously discussed. It is asserted that it will be impossible to raise by taxation a revenue sufficient to pay the interest on the war debt after providing for indispensable national services; and there appears to be no way out of this impasse save by making a levy upon the accumulated wealth of the country. A levy equal to the debt would require to take something like two-fifths of the estimated total of the private capital. The methods by which this might be done do not now concern us; nor does it matter very much for our argument that the industrial and commercial magnates, and the ancien régime economists are declaiming vehemently against it. Even the fact that the levy may not be carried out in the form now advocated is not of great moment. What is important is that the serious discussion evoked by the proposal has shown that the traditional doctrine of property-rights is in liquidation. There has not been, so far as the present writer has been able to discover, any lifting-up of hands in horror at this suggestion of a sacrilegious invasion upon this ancient sanctity; the discussion has been conducted on the plane of expediency and utility. This marks a very considerable movement—for to many, the Reform Bill of 1831 looked like the end of the world, since it was (as a politician of the time said) “a maxim that every government which tends to separate property from constitutional government must be liable to perpetual revolution.”[3] Property was the chief cornerstone of the social structure; and even as late as 1888, Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that he hears that “the skilled artisans of London are hostile to the clergy but not to property,” which latter circumstance he plainly regards as a sign of grace. Yet to-day, under the exigencies of public need, it is seriously discussed whether the state should not lay its hands on anything up to a half of the private wealth of the country.
3. Quoted in Laski, Problems of Sovereignty, p. 70—note.
This is essentially a return to the view of a saner age. The mediæval doctrine was that right in property was not absolute, but that it was of the nature of a trust. This is the view that underlies the project of a levy. Professor Hobhouse draws a distinction between “property for use” and “property for power.” The right to possess property can hardly be denied. It is essential to a man’s freedom and growth that he should have absolute control over a certain number of things. But it should be restricted to what is necessary for personal freedom and growth. A man may have, that is, property for use but not for power. He may not have so much property as would enable him to control or virtually to own the life and labour of others. It is to some such doctrine of property as this that the mind of progressive labour is tending. Property is in prospect of socialisation; and perhaps only such socialised property will in future be available as capital. Under economic pressure, the doctrine of property is being ethicised; and to ethicise the doctrine is simply to declare property to be wholly subordinate to social ends.
The first step in modern democracy was the socialisation of political power; the second without which the first cannot be complete, will be the socialisation of economic power.
