An Introduction to Distributism

by John Médaille

Distributivism, also known as Distributism, is an economic theory formulated by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton largely in response to the principles of Social Justice laid down by Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. Its key tenet is that ownership of the means of production should be as widespread as possible rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few owners (Capitalism) or in the hands of state bureaucrats (Socialism). Belloc did not believe that he was developing a new economic theory, but rather expounding an old and widespread one against the novelties of both Capitalism and Socialism.

Belloc believed that Capitalism could never achieve economic equilibrium on its own. It is an unstable system for two reasons: divergence from its own moral theory and from insecurity of two kinds. The moral theory of Capitalism is based on freedom, but it tends to accumulate property in the hands of a few owners; as ownership becomes more and more limited, more and more power passes to a small capitalist class. The state increasingly becomes a tool to protect “wage contracts” which are increasingly leonine, that is, based on inequality. One side may refuse the contract (the employer), but the other side, the worker, generally has no choice but to accept it because the alternative is starvation. The state can no longer be a neutral arbiter between classes but becomes a defender of one class upon whom jobs and growth are increasingly dependent.

In addition to this moral problem,Capitalism also has two kinds of insecurity: insecurity for the workers and even insecurity for the capitalists. There is insecurity for the workers because the wage fetches less in old age, nothing in sickness, and jobs themselves are at the discretion of capitalists3 (e.g., “outsourcing”). But Capitalism also produces insecurity for the capitalist.

Competitive anarchy makes the system as unstable to owners as it is to workers and results in gluts and underselling. Capitalism responds by becoming less capitalistic; it uses the law to raise barriers to competition and to limit liability; the corporation itself is an adjustment to the inherent instability of Capitalism that allows investors to limit liability. The ardent socialist does not fear a pure Capitalism nearly as much as does the ardent capitalist.

Given its instabilities, Capitalism must, perforce, find some way of stabilizing itself. Belloc argues that there are only three stable solutions: slavery, socialism, or wide-spread ownership of property, (or some mixture of the three.) “To solve Capitalism you must either get rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both.” Of the three solutions, slave societies have shown themselves to be highly stable over long periods of time, but this solution is precluded by our Christian heritage. But the third solution, what Belloc calls the “proprietary state,” is regarded as untenable by the intellectual and political elites, which leaves only the second solution, some sort of socialism. Thus in practice Capitalism breeds a collectivist theory which leads to a servile state. The transition to socialism follows the line of least resistance because nothing really changes when the state buys up the waterworks or the rail lines. But socialist practice does not really mean socialism. In practice, socialism merely means increased regulation, a solution that appeals to both corporate interests and socialist “reformers.” Although the rhetoric is different, the results are the same. The “socialist” reformer continues to pile regulations on top of big business, a situation big business is more than content to see, because in return these regulations serve as entry barriers to potential competitors and thereby guarantee greater security from competition and hence greater security of profits. In turn, the capitalist becomes increasingly responsible for the welfare of the workers in return for a greater security of property and profits. In the end, you have neither socialism nor Capitalism, but servility, the servile state. The practical result of all of this is an increasing dependence of workers on the government and corporatist solutions. Health care, unemployment insurance, and retirement benefits pass from control by the individual to control by the corporation or the state.

The servile system has already begun. Indeed, it is already here. The differences between a “socialist” Europe and a “capitalist” America are merely differences of degree rather than of kind.
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Both depend on the same bureaucratic organization and social welfare systems. This state of affairs did not come about by way of conspiracy but by way of necessity; Belloc seems to have been absolutely correct in his predictions. Until the 1940’s, Capitalism was a highly unstable system suffering ever increasing cycles of economic euphoria and depression, culminating in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The system needed help to stabilize itself exactly as Belloc said it would. The real change came with the introduction of Keynesian economics, which made the government responsible not just for this or that social welfare program, but for making up shortages in aggregate demand by redistributive taxes. In other words, Keynesianism is itself “distributist,” or rather “re-distributist”; but it redistributes income rather than property. Therefore the debate, in practical terms, is not between Distributivism and its opposite, but between kinds of Distributivism, between redistribution of income and distribution of property. But one way or another, economic liberalism cannot provide stability on its own; it needs the help of distributists of one sort or another. Income redistribution, being a constant and ongoing process, will always require a vast state apparatus to assess the funds on the one hand and determine eligibility on the other.

Keynesianism has been adopted by nearly every modern regime, whether of the right or left, because it seemed to work. As a result, the inherent instabilities of Capitalism have been rendered less extreme, with depressions rendered much milder than the convulsion which shook this country and Europe at the end of the 1920’s. But Keynesianism enlarged state power, taxes, and the size of government to previously unimagined levels. We have become accustomed to having the government solve all problems and do so at the highest possible level. Even right wing administrations have dropped all pretense of “federalism” and seek to intrude more and more on daily life; the teacher in his classroom, the cop on the beat, the shopkeeper in her store become increasingly the objects of federal concern and less of local regulation.

But today the future of the Keynesian arrangement seems in doubt. In both Europe and America, the costs of government seem ready to outstrip the ability of society to support them. Further, the willingness of corporate interests to continue the arrangement is ending; they have invested great sums and great energies in seeking an end to the system and their efforts are paying off. Corporations are seeking to externalize social costs that have theretofore been part of the wage system, such as medical insurance, pensions, and unemployment costs. However, it is doubtful that shifting these responsibilities can be accomplished without introducing the very insecurities that occasioned the arrangements in the first place. Thus the Keynesian system seems to be caught in a conundrum, the very conundrum pointed out by Belloc. It cannot continue its Keynesian bargain (and this is especially so in the face of global competition), and it cannot drop it without risking chaos.

The economic theory of Distributivism is based on the distinction between distributive justice and corrective justice found in Aristotle. Distributive justice deals with how society distributes its “common goods.” Aristotle defines these as “things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1130b, 31-33). This refers to the common goods of a state, a partnership, corporation, or some cooperative enterprise. For Aristotle, these things should be divided by “merit” based on contributions, but what constitutes this merit will be a matter that is determined culturally, “for democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or with noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence” (Ethics, 1131a, 25-29). Corrective justice, on the other hand, deals with “justice in exchange”; that is with transactions between individual men. In this case, justice consists in exchanging equal values, in “having an equal amount before and after the transaction" (Ethics, 1132b, 19-21). Corrective justice is properly the subject of economic science per se, while distributive justice is irreducibly cultural and involves decisions about what constitutes a just distribution.

Modern economics tends to treat distributive justice in one of two ways. For the socialist or the Keynesian, it is primarily a political question and necessitates control of the economy by the state. For the orthodox neoclassical economist, distributive justice will be the unintentional result of the achievement of equilibrium under conditions of perfect competition (cf. John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth); in other words, equity would be an automatic by-product of equilibrium. Hence distributive justice is swallowed up, as it were, by corrective justice and accomplished without anyone intending it, the very essence of the “invisible hand” theory. However, this has never happened and is never likely to happen. It is not only that the necessary conditions (e.g., “perfect” competition) can never be satisfied, nor even that justice, a virtue, cannot be divorced from human intentionality. Rather, the problem is with the very nature of corrective justice, which is “equality in exchange.” Thus corrective justice tends to perpetuate whatever division of property existed before the exchange; distributive equity cannot therefore result from exchanges (Cf. Pareto optimality). But for the Distributivist, distributive justice is prior to corrective justice (as it was for Aristotle and Aquinas), just as production is prior to exchange. Thus equity is prior to equilibrium, and equity will depend on the distribution of the means of production. Equity is not the by-product of equilibrium but its cause; indeed, equity and equilibrium are practically the same word and very nearly the same thing.

Distributivism is often viewed as a romantic “back to the land” movement, or even a desire to return to the Middle Ages. But this criticism is unjustified. Indeed, well-divided property has both a long history and a current presence. Two examples should suffice: the “land to the tiller” programs of Korea and Taiwan, and the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation. In Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War, the estates were broken up and sold to the peasants at a rate well below market values. The resulting increase in purchasing power of the previously penniless peasants spurred the growth of business and industry and catapulted these nations from backward and oppressive societies to modern industrial states in only one generation. In the Mondragón Cooperative, 77,000 worker-owners do $16 Billion/year in sales making everything from muzzle loading hunting guns to modern built-to-order factories. They also operate an extensive network of social programs, schools, colleges, training institutes and research facilities. In addition, we can cite an impressive number of successful ESOP’s and other employee owned businesses. Thus Distributivism would seem to be perfectly adaptable to the modern world and even confers competitive advantages.

Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum viewed the just wage as the means of spreading ownership; Belloc reversed that by finding that wider ownership was the means of achieving the just wage. In this, Belloc appears to be correct, as John Paul II acknowledged when he called for associating the worker with the ownership of the workbench at which he labored. It should be clear that the only way to reduce the size of government and increase the range of freedom and justice is to eliminate the need for big government. But as long as there are great imbalances in wealth and poverty, there will be great bureaucracies in government and industry.

©John C. Médaille
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.html
john@medaille.com

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The Reformers And The Reformed Are Alike/2

by Hilaire Belloc

What of the second factor, the gambling chance which the Capitalist system, with its necessary condition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain fully, and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping from his proletariat surroundings?

Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon men's minds we may say that, while it has not disappeared, it has very greatly lost in force during the last forty years. One often meets men who tell one, whether they are speaking in defence of or against the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the proletarian to any common consciousness of class, because the proletarian still has the example before him of members of his class, whom he has known, rising (usually by various forms of villainy) to the position of capitalist. But when one goes down among the working men themselves, one discovers that the hope of such a change in the mind of any individual worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men in great groups of industry, notably in the transport industry and in the mines, have quite given up such an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exaggerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds is extinguished. The proletarian now regards himself as definitely proletarian, nor destined within human likelihood to be anything but proletarian.

These two factors, then, the memory of an older condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a hope individuals might entertain of escaping from the wage-earning class, the two factors which might act most strongly against the acceptation of the Servile State by that class, have so fallen in value that they offer but little opposition to the third factor in the situation which is making so strongly for the Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It is this third factor alone which need be seriously considered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the material upon which social reform is working, that is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept the change.

The thing may be put in many ways. I will put it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all.

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom: a life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, coterminous and coincident with his power to labour. It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if such a right exists) to the surplus values created by his labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or rather how many families, would prefer freedom(with its accompaniments of certain insecurity and possible insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny that the answer is: "Very few would refuse it." That is the key to the whole matter.

What proportion would refuse it no one can determine; but I say that even as a voluntary offer, and not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this sort which would for the future destroy contract and re-erect status of a servile sort would be thought a boon by the mass of the proletariat to-day.

Now take the truth from another aspect by considering it thus from one point of view and from another we can appreciate it best. Of what are the mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State? Not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a Court of Law, but of "the sack."

You may ask a man why he does not resist such and such a legal infamy; why he permits himself to be the victim of fines and deductions from which the Truck Acts specifically protect him; why he cannot assert his opinion in this or that matter; why he has accepted, without a blow, such and such an insult.

Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public Courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him. To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments, which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private powers involves to-day a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out.

Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law is passed (let us suppose) which increases the total revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him against the insecurity of his position in some small degree. The administration of that law requires, upon the one hand, a close inquisition into the man's circumstances by public officials, and, upon the other hand, the administration of its benefits by that particular Capitalist or group of Capitalists whom the wage-earner serves to enrich. Do the Servile conditions attaching to this material benefit prevent a proletarian in England to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom? It is notorious that they do not.

No matter from what angle you approach the business, the truth is always the same. That great mass of wage-earners upon which our society now reposes understands as a present good all that will increase even to some small amount their present revenue and all that may guarantee them against those perils of insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. They understand and welcome a good of this kind, and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good the corresponding price of control and enregimentation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by those who are their paymasters.

It would be easy by substituting superficial for fundamental things, or even by proposing certain terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms and phrases now current it would be easy, I say, by such methods to ridicule or to oppose the prime truths, which I am here submitting. They nonetheless remain truths.

Substitute for the term " employee " in one of our new laws the term "serf," even do so mild a thing as to substitute the traditional term " master " for the word "employer," and the blunt words might breed revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a Servile State upon modern England, and it would certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the contrary, there is acquiescence and for the most part gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unaccompanied by property, they see, at the expense of losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.

All forces, then, are making for the Servile State in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society in England. The generous reformer is canalised towards it; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror of his ideal; the herd of "practical" men meet at every stage in its inception the "practical " steps which they expected and demanded; while that proletarian mass upon whom the experiment is being tried have lost the tradition of property and of freedom which might resist the change, and are most powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive benefits which it confers.

It may be objected that however true all this may be, no one can, upon such theoretical grounds, regard the Servile State as something really approaching us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be told) until we see the first effects of its action.

To this I answer that the first effects of its action are already apparent The Servile State is, in industrial England to-day, no longer a menace but something in actual existence. It is in process of construction. The first main lines of it are already plotted out; the cornerstone of it is already laid.

To see the truth of this it is enough to consider laws and projects of law, the first of which we already enjoy, while the last will pass from project to positive statute in due process of time.

APPENDIX ON "BUYING-OUT'

There is an impression abroad among those who propose to expropriate the Capitalist class for the benefit of the State, but who appreciate the difficulties in the way of direct confiscation, that by spreading the process over a sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain fashion bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, the expropriation could be effected without the consequences and attendant difficulties of direct confiscation. In other words, there is an impression that the State could "buy-out " the Capitalist class without their knowing it, and that in a sort of painless way this class can be slowly conjured out of existence.

The impression is held in a confused fashion by most of those who cherish it, and will not bear a clear analysis. It is impossible by any jugglery to "buy-out" the universality of the means of production without confiscation. To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the problem in the simplest terms:

A community of twenty-two families lives upon the produce of two farms, the property of only two families out of that twenty-two.

The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The two families, with their ploughs, stores, land, etc., are Capitalist,

The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to the land and capital of these two capitalist families produces 300 measures of wheat, of which 200 measures, or 10 measures each, form the annual support of the twenty proletarian families ; the remaining 100 measures are the surplus value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the two Capitalist families, each of which has thus a yearly income of 50 measures.

The State proposes to produce, after a certain length of time, a condition of affairs such that the surplus values shall no longer go to the two Capitalist families, but shall be distributed to the advantage of the whole community, while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed owner of both farms.

Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain return as the reward of accumulation. Instead of spending his money, a man saves it with the object of retaining as the result of that saving a certain yearly revenue. The measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a particular time below a certain level. In other words, if a man cannot get a certain minimum reward for his accumulation, he will not accumulate but spend.

What is called in economics "The Law of Diminishing Returns" acts so that continual additions to capital, other things being equal (that is, the methods of production remaining the same), do not provide a corresponding increase of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a particular area of natural forces will produce, for instance, 40 measures yearly, or 4 per cent. ; but 2000 measures applied in the same fashion will not produce 80 measures. They will produce more than the thousand measures did, but not more in proportion; not double. They will produce, say, 60 measures, or 3 per cent., upon the capital. The action of this universal principle automatically checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached such a point that the proportionate return is the least which a man will accept. If it falls below that he will spend rather than accumulate. The limit of this minimum in any particular society at any particular time gives the measure to what we call "the Effective Desire of Accumulation." Thus in England to-day it is a little over 3 per cent. The minimum which limits the accumulation of capital is a mimimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the "E.D.A." of our society at the present time.

When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value of his possessions, he counts them in "so many years' purchase."* And that means that he is willing to take in a lump sum down for his possessions so many times the yearly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is *By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage of the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls (which need no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy of his capital, and will part with them at "so many years' purchase." It is by taking advantage of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to the advantage of the dispossessed.

So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in our example to have an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They will sell to the State if the State can put up 3000 measures of wheat.

Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. The accumulations of wheat being already in the hands of the Capitalists, and those accumulations amounting to much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing appears to be a deadlock.

But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The State can go to the Capitalists and say: "Hand me over your farms, and against them I will give you guarantee that you shall be paid rather more than 100 measures of wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you half as much again until these extra payments amount to a purchase of your original stock."

Out of what does this extra amount come ? Out of the State's power to tax.

The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Capitalists A and B, and pay them the extra with their own money.

In so simple an example it is evident that this "ringing of the changes" would be spotted by the victims, and that they would bring against it precisely the same forces which they would bring against the much simpler and more straightforward process of immediate confiscation.

But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are dealing with myriads of individual Capitalists and thousands of particular forms of profit, the process can be masked.

There are two ways in which the State can mask its action (according to this policy). It can buy out first one small area of land and capital out of the general taxation and then another, and then another, until the whole has been transferred ; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain trades which the rest who are left immune will abandon to their ruin, and with the general taxation plus this special taxation buy out those unfortunate trades which will, of course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack.

The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any society, however complex; for after one unpopular trade had been selected for attack the trying on of the same methods in another less unpopular field will at once rouse suspicion.*

The first method, however, might have some chance of success, at least for a long time after it was begun, in a highly complex and numerous society were it not for a certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the fact that the Capitalist only takes more than his old yearly revenue with the object of reinvesting the surplus.

I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, yielding me 3 per cent. : 30(pounds) a year. The Government asks me to exchange my bit of paper against another bit of paper guaranteeing the payment of (pounds)50 a year, that is, an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent over and above the regular interest paid a purchase of my stock. The Government's bit of paper promises to pay to the holder 50pounds a year for, say, thirty-eight years. I am delighted to make the exchange, not because I am such a fool as to enjoy the prospect of my property being extinguished at the end of thirty-eight years, but because I hope to be able to reinvest the extra 20 every year in something else that will bring me in 3 per cent. Thus, at the end of the thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be better off than I was at the beginning of the transaction, and I shall have enjoyed during its maturing my old 30 pounds a year all the same.

The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsidising purchase out of the general taxation. It can, therefore, play this trick over a small area and for a short time with success. But the moment this area passes a very narrow limit the " market for investment " is found to be restricted, Capital automatically takes alarm, the State can no longer offer its paper guarantees save at an enhanced price. If it tries to turn the position by further raising taxation to what Capital regards as "confiscatory" rates, there will be opposed to its action just the same forces as would be opposed to frank and open expropriation.

The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by the complex mechanism of "finance" can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to less than 180 degrees.* In fine: if you desire to confiscate, you must confiscate.

You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city and sharpers on the race-course outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the general process of expropriation upon a muddle-headed hope that somehow or other something will come out of nothing in the end.

There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could expropriate without meeting the resistance that must be present against any attempt at confiscation. But the first of these ways is precarious, the second insufficient.

They are as follows :

(i) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly revenue than he is getting in the expectation that it, the State, can manage the business better than the Capitalist, or that some future expansion will come to its aid. In other words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing than the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private individual with a similar business proposition can buy him out.

But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated badly, or has bad luck, it would find itself endowing the Capitalists of the future instead of gradually extinguishing them.

In this fashion the State could have "socialised " without confiscation the railways of this country if it had taken them over fifty years ago, promising the then owners more than they were then obtaining. But if it had socialised the hansom cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in perpetuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his children for ever) at the expense of the community.

The second way in which the State can expropriate without confiscation is by annuity. It can say to such Capitalists as have no heirs or care little for their fate if they have: "You have only got so much time to live and to enjoy your 30, will you take 50 until you die?" Upon the bargain being accepted the State will, in process of time, though not immediately upon the death of the annuitant, become an unembarrassed owner of what had been the annuitant's share in the means of production. But the area over which this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not of itself a sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any considerable field.

I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called "Socialist" and confiscatory measures of our time have nothing to do with the problem here discussed. The State is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many cases in such a fashion as to impoverish the tax-payer and is lessening his capital rather than shearing his income. But it is not putting the proceeds into the means of production. It is either using them for immediate consumption in the shape of new official salaries or handing them over to another set of Capitalists.*

But these practical considerations of the way in which sham Socialist experiments are working belong rather to my next section, in which I shall deal with the actual beginnings of the Servile State in our midst.

* Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of wood -palings from the Baltic not exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used to be the squire's hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of production in the hands of the Sassoons.

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The Reformers And The Reformed Are Alike/1

by Hilaire Belloc

(i) Of the Socialist Reformer:

I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capitalist State find themselves drifting not towards a Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State.

The Socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly.

These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole Socialist movement.

Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?

(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the State. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is what most men would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is a right), and what all men would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.

To take a very simple case: Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure credit of our community. In a word, the thing is, in the conversational use of that term, impossible. So your best type of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I will here only mention as it must be separately considered at length later on account of its fundamental importance the expedient of "buying out" the present owner.

It is enough to say in this place that the attempt to "buy out" without confiscation is based upon an economic error. This I shall prove in its proper place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to the rest of my reformer's action. He does not confiscate, then; at the most he "buys out" (or attempts to "buy out") certain sections of the means of production.

But this action by no means covers the whole of his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist society. He is out to cure the destitution, which it causes in great multitudes and the harrowing insecurity, which it imposes upon all. He is out to substitute for Capitalist society a society in which men shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their housing, clothing, and food.

Well, there is a way of achieving that without confiscation.

This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership of the means of production by a few has caused the evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they have only been so caused on account of a combination of such limited ownership with universal freedom. The combination of the two is the very definition of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so difficult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with the mass whom these changes will principally affect) to modify the factor of freedom.

You can say to the Capitalist: "I desire to dispossess you, and meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives." The Capitalist replies: "I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position. Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capitalist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully see that they are obeyed; I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure."

This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the current of his demand canalised. As to one part of it, confiscation, it is checked and barred: as to the other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there will it scour and deepen its channel; there will the main stream learn to run.

To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true Socialist's demand, which are compatible with the Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first steps towards them are already achieved. They are of such a nature that upon them can be based a further advance in the same direction, and the whole Capitalist State can be rapidly and easily transformed into the Servile State, satisfying in its transformation the more immediate claims and the more urgent demands of the social reformer whose ultimate objective indeed may be the public ownership of capital and land, but whose driving power is a burning pity for the poverty and peril of the masses.

When the transformation is complete there will be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for public ownership. The reformer only asked for it in order to secure security and sufficiency: he has obtained his demand.

Here are security and sufficiency achieved by another and much easier method, consonant with and proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately preceding it: there is no need to go further.

In this way the Socialist whose motive is human good and not mere organisation is being shepherded in spite of himself away from his Collectivist ideal and towards a society in which the possessors shall remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dispossessed, in which the mass of men shall still work for the advantage of a few, and in which those few shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, but in which the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have been eliminated by the destruction of freedom.

At the end of the process you will have two kinds of men, the owners economically free, and controlling to their peace and to the guarantee of their livelihood the economically unfree non-owners. But that is the Servile State.

(b) The second type of socialist reformer may be dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is not of a type to which indignation or any other lively passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact framework for life these afford him the food that satisfies his moral appetite; the occupation most congenial to him is the "running" of men: as a machine is run.

To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly appeals.

It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and organic complexity which is the colour of any vital society offends him by its infinite differentiation. He is disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled and appointed to certain simple schemes deriving from the coordinate work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments gives his small stomach a final satisfaction.

Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin with public property in capital and land, and upon that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said that in his vision of a future society he conceives of himself as the head of at least a department and possibly of the whole State but that is by the way.) But while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty Socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the best he will "buy out" the Capitalist.

Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human Socialist, "buying out" is, as I shall show in its proper place, a system impossible of general application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production tabulation, detailed administration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his Department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will be achieved.

To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alternative to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves "Socialists" are now less concerned with any scheme for socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable schemes actually existing, some of them possessing already the force of laws, for regulating, "running," and drilling the protelariat without trenching by an inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land enjoyed by the small Capitalist class.

The so-called "Socialist" of this type has not fallen into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.

So much for the Socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our Capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. Today their ideal has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not Socialist at all but Servile.

(2) Of the Practical Reformer:

There is another type of Reformer, one who prides himself on not being a socialist, and one of the greatest weight to-day. He also is making for the Servile State. This second factor in the change is the “Practical Man” ; and this fool, on account of his great numbers and determining influence in the details of legislation, must be carefully examined.

It is your "Practical Man" who says: "Whatever you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard to this proposal (which I support), though it may offend some abstract dogma of yours, yet you must admit that it does good. If you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones' family, or had done practical work yourself in Pudsey, you would have seen that a practical man," etc.

It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man whereever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and his first principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of social reform. The two things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and insecurity. When he was "working" in the slums of Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones's from the secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy man most was "unemployment" and "destitution”: that is, insecurity and insufficiency in flesh and blood.

Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism and towards the Servile State by the force of modern things in England, how much more easily do you not think the "Practical Man" will be conducted towards that same Servile State, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and short-sighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevitable ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get him work "under our unorganised and wasteful system, etc.,"he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practical experience, are often unemployable. Then there are "the ravages of drink": more fatal still the dreadful habit mankind has of forming families and breeding children. The worthy fellow notes that "as a practical matter of fact such men do not work unless you make them."

He does not, because he cannot, co-ordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative and instinctive institutions for the protection of ownership, which such a society spontaneously breeds. He "takes the world as he finds it" and the consequence is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit with different degrees of reluctance the general principles of the Servile State, the Practical Man, positively gloats on every new detail in the building up of that form of society. And the destruction of freedom by inches (though he does not see it to be the destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or suspect the process.

It has been necessary to waste so much time on this deplorable individual because the circumstances of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time. Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The Practical Man left to himself would not produce the Servile State. He would not produce any thing but a welter of anarchic restrictions, which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but the ally or flanking party of great forces which he does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able and prepared for the work of general change, who use him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so numerous in modern England, and, under the extraordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economically powerful, I would have neglected him in this analysis. As it is, we may console ourselves by remembering that the advent of the Servile State, with its powerful organisation and necessity for lucid thought in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him.

Our reformers, then, both those who think and those who do not, both those who are conscious of the process and those who are unconscious of it, are making directly for the Servile State.

(3) What of the third factor? What of the people about to be reformed? What of the millions upon whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who are the subject of the great experiment? Do they tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transformation from free proletarianism to servitude which is the argument of this book?

The question is an important one to decide, for upon whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the work to which it is subjected, depends the success of every experiment making for the Servile State.

The mass of men in the Capitalist State is proletarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number of the proletariat and the proportion that number bears to the total number of families in the State may vary, but must be sufficient to determine the general character of the State before we can call that State Capitalist.

But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of society. It has proved ephemeral; and upon that very account the proletariat in any Capitalist State retains to a greater or less degree some memories of a state of society in which its ancestors were possessors of property and economically free.

The strength of this memory or tradition is the first element we have to bear in mind in our problem, when we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the Servile State, which would condemn it to a perpetual loss of property and of all the free habit which property engenders.

Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cunning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently common in the first development of Capitalism to be a standing feature in society and to impress the imagination of the general. Such recruitment is still possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole proletariat, the chance which each member of the proletariat may think he has of escaping from his proletarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the problem.

The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and sufficiency of which Capitalism, with its essential condition of freedom, has deprived them.

Now let us consider the interplay of these three factors in the English proletariat as we actually know it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the, great mass of the State: it covers about nineteen twentieths of the population if we exclude Ireland, where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against its development towards a Servile State, is already successful.

As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly within the memory of men now living. The traditional rights of property are still strong in the minds of the English poor. All the moral connotations of that right are familiar to them. They are familiar with the conception of theft as a wrong; they are tenacious of any scraps of property which they may acquire. They could all explain what is meant by ownership, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even by contract. There is not one but could put himself in the position, mentally, of an owner.

But the actual experience of ownership, and the effect, which that experience has upon character and upon one's view of the State is a very different matter. Within the memory of people still living a sufficient number of Englishmen were owning (as small freeholders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who could still bear living testimony to the relics of a better state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a boy, to old labourers in the neighbourhood of Oxford who had risked their skins in armed protest against the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as the reward of their courage; and I have my self spoken in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, either from their personal experience the last phases of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time when small and well-divided ownership in cottage looms was actually common.

All that has passed. The last chapter of its passage has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct. use, and meaning of property is lost to it: and this has had two very powerful effects, each strongly inclining our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers which lay between a condition of servitude and a condition of freedom. The first effect is this: that property is no longer what they seek, nor what they think obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, and sometimes hate; whose moral right to so singular a position most of them would hesitate to concede, and many of them would now strongly deny, but whose position they, at any rate, accept as a known and permanent social fact, the origins of which they have forgotten, and the foundations of which they believe to be immemorial.

To sum up: The attitude of the proletariat in England to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming majority, that is, of English families) towards property and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable through property is no longer an attitude of experience or of expectation. They think of themselves as wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreciate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage-earner is an object that would seem to them entirely outside the realities of life.

Taken from Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State

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Hilaire Belloc

by G.K. Chesterton

WHEN I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the night; and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely bons mots, I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men of my time.

We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about King John, who, he positively assured me, was not (as was often asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were allowances to be made for him ; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming from the same source.

The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. M0st of us were writing on the Speaker, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond , with an independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloe himself was writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number, probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the wisest "were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmpolitan war; and it was hard to say whether we more despised those who praised war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it. Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr. F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hahmmond himself, with a careful magnanimity, always attacked Imperialism as a false religion and not merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future, was for him a fact of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there entered with him the smell of danger.

There was in him another element of importance, which clarified itself in this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against another. The unique attitude of the little group was summed up in him supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but that he hated as heartily what England seemed trying to become. Out of this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen; something that occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing. It is marked, for instance, in the fine break in the middle of the happy song of cameraderie called "To the Balliol Men Still in South Africa."

I have said it before, and I say it again, There was treason done and a false word spoken, And England under the dregs of men, And bribes about and a treaty broken.

It is supremely characteristic of the time that a weighty and respectable weekly gravely offered to publish the poem if that central verse was omitted. This conflict of emotions has an even higher embodiment in that grand and mysterious poem called "The Leader," in which the ghost ot the nobler militarism passes by to rebuke the baser-

And where had been the rout obscene was an army straight with pride, A hundred thousand marching men, Of squadrons twenty score, And after them all the guns, the guns, But She went on before.

Since that slnall riot of ours he may be said without exaggeration to ha we worked three revolutions: the first in all that ,was represented by the Eyewitness, now the New Witncss, the repudiation of both Parliamentary parties for common and detailed corrupt practices; second, the alarum against the huge and silent approach of the Servile State, using Socialists and Anti- Socialists alike as its tools; and third, his recent campaign of public education in military afiairs. In all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety, and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic and, in the literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild things, the things must not be too wild. A wild Englishman like Blake or Shelley is content with dreaming them. How Latin is this combination between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often restrained; it is the substance that is violent. There is many a paragraph of accusation he has written which might almost be called dull but for the dynamite of its meaning.

It is probable that I have dealt too much in this phase of him, for it is the one in which he appears to me as something different, and therefore dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic guidebooks which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom Keats conceived as supping at a celestial "Mermaid." But the "Mermaid " was English-and so was Keats. And though Hilaire Belloc may have a French name, I think that Peter Wanderide is an Englishman.

I have said nothing of the most real thing about Belloc, the religion, because it is above this purpose, and nothing of the later attacks on him by the chief Newspaper Trust, because they are much below it. There are, of course, many other reasons for passing such matters over here, including the argument of space; but there is also a small reason of my own, which if not exactly a secret is at least a very natural ground of silence. It is that I entertain a very intimate confidence that in a very little time humanity will be saying, "Who was this so- and-so with whom Belloe seems to have debated?"

Taken from "Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work" by C.Creighton Mandall and Edward Shanks

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Chesterton's Response to Shaw (Part Two)

Among the bewildering welter of fallacies which Mr. Shaw has just given us, I prefer to deal first with the simplest. When Mr. Shaw refrains from hitting me over the head with his umbrella, the real reason--apart from his real kindness of heart, which makes him tolerant of the humblest of the creatures of God--is not because he does not own his umbrella, but because he does not own my head. As I am still in possession of that imperfect organ, I will proceed to use it to the confutation of some of his other fallacies.

I should like to say now what I ought perhaps to have said earlier in the evening, that we are enormously grateful to Mr. Shaw for his characteristic generosity in consenting to debate with a humble movement like our own. I am so conscious of that condescension on his part that I should feel it a very unfair return to ask him to read any of our potty little literature or cast his eye over our little weekly paper or become conscious of the facts we have stated a thousand times. One of these facts, with which every person who knows us is familiar, is our position with regard to the coal question. We have said again and again that in our human state of society there must be a class of things called exceptions. We admit that upon the whole in the very peculiar case of coal it is desirable and about the best way out of the difficulty that it should be controlled by the officials of the State, just in the same way as postage stamps are controlled. No one says anything else about postage stamps. I cannot imagine that anyone wants to have his own postage stamps, of perhaps more picturesque design and varied colours. I can assure you that Distributists are perfectly sensible and sane people, and they have always recognized that there are institutions in the State in which it is very difficult to apply the principle of individual property, and that one of these cases is the discovery under the earth of valuable minerals. Socialists are not alone in believing this. Charles I, who, I suppose, could not be called a Socialist, pointed out that certain kinds of minerals ought to belong to the State, that is, to the Commons. We have said over and over again that we support the nationalization of the coal-mines, not as a general example of Distribution but as a common-sense admission of an exception. The reason why we make it an exception is because it is not very easy to see how the healthy principle of personal ownership can be applied. If it could we should apply it with the greatest pleasure. We consider personal ownership infinitely more healthy. If there were a way in which a miner could mark out one particular piece of coal and say, "This is mine, and I am proud of it," we should have made an enormous improvement upon State management. There are cases in which it is very difficult to apply the principle, and that is one of them. It is the reverse of the truth for Mr. Shaw to say that the logic of that fact will lead me to the application of the same principle to other cases, like the ownership of the land. One could not illustrate it better than by the case of coal. It may be true for all I know that if you ask a miner if he would like to manage the mine he would say, "I do not want to manage it; it is for my betters to manage it." I had not noticed that meek and simple manner among miners. I have even heard complaints of the opposite temper in that body. I defy Mr. Shaw to say if you went to the Irish farmers, or the French farmers, or the Serbian or the Dutch farmers, or any of the millions of peasant owners throughout the world, I defy him to say if you went to the farmer and said, "Who controls these farms?'" he would say, "It is not for the likes of me to control a farm." Mr. Shaw knows perfectly well it is nonsense to suggest that peasants would talk that way anywhere. It is part of his complaints against peasants that they claim personal possessions. I am not likely to be led to the denial of property in land, for I know ordinary normal people who feel property in land to be normal. I fully agree with Mr. Shaw, and speak as strongly as he would speak, of the abomination and detestable foulness and sin of landlords who drove poor people from their land in Scotland and elsewhere. It is quite true that men in possession of land have committed these crimes; but I do not see why wicked officials under a socialistic state could not commit these crimes. But that has nothing to do with the principle of ownership in land. In fact these very Highland crofters, these very people thus abominably outraged and oppressed, if you asked them what they want would probably say, "I want to own my own croft; I want to own my own land."

Mr. Shaw's dislike of the landlord is not so much a denial of the right to private property. not so much that he owns the land, but that the landlord has swallowed up private property. In the face of these facts of millions and millions of ordinary human beings who have private property, who know what it is like to own property, I must confess that I am not overwhelmed and crushed by Mr. Shaw's claim that he knows all about men and women as they really are. I think Mr. Shaw knows something about certain kinds of men and women; though he sometimes makes them a little more amusing than they really are. But I cannot agree with his discovery that peasants do not like peasant property, because I know the reverse is the fact.

Then we come to the general point he raised about the State. He raised a very interesting question. He said that after all the State does command respect, that we all do accept laws even though they are issued by an official group. Up to a point I willingly accept his argument. The Distributist is certainly not an anarchist. He does not believe it would be a good thing if there were no such laws. But the reason why most of these laws are accepted is because they correspond with the common conscience of mankind. Mr. Shaw and Bishop Barnes might think it would be an inadequate way of explaining it, but we might call attention to an Hebraic code called the Ten Commandments. They do, I think, correspond pretty roughly to the moral code of every religion that is at all sane. These all reverence certain ideas about "Thou shalt not kill." They all have a reverence for the commandment which says, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods." They reverence the idea that you must not covet his house or his ox or his ass. It should be noted, too, that besides forbidding us to covet our neighbour's property, this commandment also implies that every man has a right to own some property.

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I am sure Mr. Shaw is very welcome to as many minutes as I can offer him, or anything else, for his kindness in entertaining us this evening. It is rather late now and there is not much time left for me. He has been rather slow in discovering what Distributism is and what the whole question is about. If this were the beginning of the discussion I could do over our system completely. I could tell him exactly what we think about property in towns. It is absurd to say it does not exist.

In rural ownership different problems have to be faced. We are not cutting a thing up into mathematical squares. We are trying to deal with human beings, creatures quite outside the purview of Mr. Shaw and his political philosophy. We know town people are a little different from country people; business of one kind is different from business of another kind; difficulties arise about family, and all the rest of it. We show man's irrepressible desire to own property and because some landlords have been cruel, it is no use talking of abolishing, denying, and destroying property, saying no one shall have any property at all. It is characteristic of his school, of his age. The morality he represents is above all the morality of negations. Just as it says you must not drink wine at all as the only solution to a few people drinking too much: just as it would say you must not touch meat or smoke tobacco at all. Let us always remember, therefore, that when Mr. Shaw says he can persuade all men to give up the sentiment of private property, it is in exactly the same hopeful spirit that he says he will get all of you to give up meat, tobacco, beer, and a vast number of other things. He will not do anything of the sort and I suspect he himself suspects by this time that he will not do it. It is quite false to say you must have a centralised machinery, even in towns. It is quite false to say that all forces must be used, as they are in monopolies, from the centre. It is absurd to say that because the wind is a central thing you cannot separate windmills. How am I to explain all that in five minutes? I could go through a vast number of fallacies into which he has fallen. He said, ironically, he would like to see me go down a mine. I have no difficulty in imagining myself sinking in such a fashion in any geological deposit. I really should like to see him doing work on a farm, because he would find out about five hundred pieces of nonsense he has been speaking to be the nonsense they are.

It is absolutely fallacious to suggest that there is some sort of difficulty in peasantries whereby they are bound to disappear. The answer to that is that they have not disappeared. It is part of the very case against peasantry, among those who do not like them, that they are antiquated, covered with hoary superstition. Why have they remained through all these centuries, if they must immediately break up and become impossible? There is an answer to all that and I am quite prepared to give it at some greater length than five minutes. But at no time did I say that we must make the whole community a community of agricultural peasants. It is absurd. What I said was that a desire for property which is universal, everywhere, does appear in a perfect and working example in the ownership of land. It only remains for me to say one thing. Mr. Shaw said, in reference to the State owning the means of production, that men and women are the only means of production. I quite accept the parallel of the phrase. His proposition is that the government, the officials of the State, should own the men and women: in other words that the men and women should be slaves.

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On Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc

by G.K. Chesterton

"Moses may be a man and Mr. Wells may be a man; and it may, therefore, be interesting to hear Mr. Wells on Moses; perhaps more interesting to hear Moses on Mr. Wells" - Chesterton

Being forced to cut down this paper, we are forced unfortunately to cut out reviews and things not relevant to our special cause. This must by my apology to many, including those who have suggested that we ought at least to review Mr. Belloc's critique of Mr. Wells, touching both the two large books and the two smaller pamphlets. Another difficulty is, of course, that I cannot review it impartially -whatever that may mean. And by this I do not imply that I always agree with all Mr. Belloc says, by that when I do I should always say it as he says it. Friends, thank God, are not so much alike as that; and fellow-Catholics can include the widest contrasts in the world. On a point of detail, for instance; Mr. Belloc is learned in the matter and I am not; but I should doubt whether he is right in speaking quite so contemptuously of the idea that Arianism was a simplification. That Arian theologians stated it in a hair-splitting style I can well believe, for all the early Trinitarian controversy was like that; but it might still be a subconscious relapse towards a facila simplification; as was Islam afterwards. And, more generally, I should not so fiercely accuse Mr. Wells of ignorance, for the simple reason that he is really ignorant. It is clear from the "Eden" correspondence in this paper that he really does not know any Catholic philosophy; and, therefore, ought to be given the chance of liking a thing so entirely new to him.

But, allowing for differences in detail and method, what is the sense of a reviewer pretending not to see the truth when he sees it? The main truth about The Outline of History seems to be this. Every man has an interesting part of his mind, which comes from God and himself, and an uninteresting part, which comes from accident and convention. If I talk about machinery, say about motoring, I can only utter platitudes; as that inventions are wonderful or that motoring too fast is missing the scenery. But Mr. Wells can take that matter of machinery and project out of it, by combining technicalities and imagination, a vision like The War of the Worlds. Mr. Wells writing fictions about the future is Mr. Wells; a person and a poet. Mr. Wells writing facts about the past is not Mr. Wells, but the leavings of all Mr. Wells' most worthless teachers and taskmasters, far away back in the worst period of English elementary teaching. This is what Mr. Belloc substantially says; and this is what he quite clearly proves. The particular case of Darwinian Natural Selection only stands out as a very startling example of stubbornness in such a dowdy and dusty Victorian loyalty. As Mr. Belloc points out, if Mr. Wells simply said, "The Darwinian hypothesis still convinces me, in spite of all that has been said against it," he would be talking sense on one particular side, on which doubtless there are still sensible scientific people. But that he should pretend that nothing particular has been said against it, that no sensible scientific people are now writing against it, is simply astounding and stupefying; and I cannot understand it. I am no biologist; but biologists to whom I have talked have made no disguise about the revolt against Darwin. It is just as if I (in defending private property against Mr. Well's Collectivism) were to shout louder and louder, in furious obstinacy, that there had never been any Socialist movement or Fabian Society, or any sort of reaction against the pure individualism of Herbert Spencer. Darwin and Spencer are of the same date - and equally dated.

But, as I say, that is only a stubborn outstanding example, it is the same stale stuff all through. The man who wrote the medieval Church founded schools not to educate the people, but only to impose her dogmas, is not the Herbert George Wells who used to think. Not even he who used to think about thinkingl; as in a delicate piece of destruction like "Doubts of the Instruments." It is simply cant and slaptrap sixty years old; and it means nothing. I might equally well say that he writes history; not to educate people, but to impose his theories about peace and progress. What the devil should a man impose, except what he thinks is the truth; and how can he be expected to regard anything else as education? I disagreed with his old "relative" scepticism, but I did not despise it. Despising this latter sort of thing is not despising Mr. Wells, but only some cheap atheist in a billycock hat whom he had the bad luck to meet when he was a boy.

If I were reviewing the books in detail, I should remark that Mr. Wells says little in defence of what seems to some of us the most indefensible assertions; e.g., those about the psychology of early man. The two most astonishing statements in his book, I think, were, first, that there seemed "no room" in the lives of the Cro-Magnan artists and hunters for speculation and philosophy; and second, and still more staggering, the suggestion that men buried a rotting corpse with careful rites regarding weapons and other provision, because they did not know that the corpse was dead! Touching the first, we can only recall the man who said he had no time, and was told he had all there is. A man intelligent enough to draw and paint, wandering alone between earth and sky, may or may not have enough room for philosophical speculation; but he has all there is. Touching the second, it is almost impossible to know what to say. In a world without undertakers, without clothes, without coffins, how long did it take humanity to discover that a dead body decays? Of course, as Mr. Belloc remarks, those who say such crazy things can always cover them by saying that men were not men, that there are no such things as men, but only mutable transition types. But those who say this seldom seem to see what it involves. Among other things it involves throwing The Outline of History into the fire even faster than in the course of nature. For it renders all history intrinsically and totally impossible. Moses may be a man and Mr. Wells may be a man; and it may, therefore, be interesting to hear Mr. Wells on Moses; perhaps more interesting to hear Moses on Mr. Wells. But if Mr. Wells can impute anything whatever to Moses, because he was not a man and nobody knows what he was, it is obvious that nobody can make any remark of the smallest interest about him. Anybody is free to suggest anything; and we have no test of the truth of anything. If I choose to say that men walked about on their hands because they liked to think they were walking on the sky, I have as much authority for saying it as anybody has for saying anything else. Under these conditions the School of History does not flourish.

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Distributism: The Neglected Tradition

by Damian Wyld

Distributism - a political creed popularised last century by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton - is a decentralist alternative to monopoly capitalism and state socialism. It favours a "society of owners" - that is, one with a more widespread distribution of wealth, property and economic enterprises. Damian Wyld looks at Distributism's origins, its continuing appeal and its lessons for today.

The Industrial Revolution was a time of profound change in many different ways. In 19th-century Britain, as in other Western nations, the race of rapid industrialisation precipitated the growth of urban centres, matched by a corresponding decline in rural life as people left the land to look for work in the factories. Increasing work hours, coupled with decreasing pay, conditions and the general standard of living, resulted in a widened gap between rich and poor.

A variety of socialist groups came into existence to propose remedies to these social evils. Among them were various Christian Socialist groups; followers of thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx and William Morris; and of course the well-known Fabian Society which numbered among its leaders famous figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and H.G. Wells.

Alternatives

We know, with the benefit of hindsight, what an abject failure socialism turned out to be. So it is interesting to look at other proposals which offered an alternative to the extremes of both state-run socialism and unbridled capitalism.

One such example was Guild Socialism. Originally developed by two Fabians, A.R. Orage and A.J. Penty, it was concerned not merely with material things, but rather that the substitution of machines for individual craftsmanship had led to a loss of spiritual well-being in the community.

Guild Socialism never gained much support, however, and it gradually faded from the ideological scene between the world wars.

Another important response to the problems of 19th-century industrialism came from the rich tradition of social and political thought contained within Catholic social teaching. Although its contribution has tended to be relatively neglected in political debate, it nevertheless has great significance and continues to have ramifications today.

In fact, even in the 19th-century, Catholic social teaching had a direct effect on some important ideas and movements which were still in their embryonic stages.

A number of papal encyclicals, such as Pope Gregory XVI's Mirari Vos (1832) and Bl. Pius IX's On Current Errors (Quanta Cura) (1864), tackled the twin errors of extreme individualism and collectivism.

Possibly the greatest papal pronouncement on these issues was Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, On the Condition of the Working Classes (Rerum Novarum). It not only built on its predecessors' condemnations of false ideas, but took the radical step of supporting trade unions and offering practical guidelines for alleviating social evils.

Two men who took up the challenge to devise a political program based on these principles were the well-known writers, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert ("G.K.") Chesterton.

Belloc was born in France in 1870, shortly before he and his family fled from Paris to escape the invading Prussians. Despite the Belloc family's emigration to England, Hilaire still returned to France for national service and throughout his life remained loyal to the ideal of French - and Catholic - culture.

At Oxford, he had a distinguished career as a history student, become president of the Oxford Union and made a name as a public speaker.

He was elected to parliament in 1906, first as a Liberal and for a short time as an independent before retiring in 1910. His growing disillusionment with party politics, economics and society in general led him to write in 1912 possibly the greatest work of his long literary career - a work which led directly to the emergence of the Distributist movement - namely, The Servile State. He later expanded on these ideas in other notable works such as The Crisis of Civilisation (1937).

Chesterton was born in London in 1872 to a middle-class family. During his childhood, his parents were unfortunately caught up in the then society craze of spiritualism. Although nominally an Anglican, G.K.'s early life was plagued by a sort of "spiritual crisis" – perhaps a mirror to the widespread "fin de siècle" attitude of despair prevalent among British intellectuals at the time.

In matters of politics, he initially joined the Liberal Party while his younger brother Cecil became a socialist.

In matters of religion, he went through stages of scepticism before settling for a time on an acceptance of the general truth of Christianity. It would take several decades and major events in his life - and probably the influence of his good friend Belloc - to finally convert him to Catholicism.

It was during his time as a "wandering" Fleet Street journalist that he was first introduced to Belloc. They immediately became good friends and had much in common in their manner of thinking. George Bernard Shaw was later to collectively name them the "Chesterbelloc": a sort of two-headed creature formed of two distinct, yet inseparable parts.

While Belloc's influence over Chesterton's social thinking is probably undeniable, Chesterton was sometimes ahead of his friend in progressing towards definite goals. For example, his very influential What's Wrong With the World - published two years before The Servile State - pre-empts many of Belloc's ideas, although in a different guise. His book also tackles the deeper issues of property, proprietorship and the state of the common man.

Wage slavery

At the root of Distributism lies the conviction that there is (to paraphrase Chesterton) something wrong with the world. Modern man may be politically free, but he is certainly not economically free. The modern worker has been subjected to a form of economic servitude and is now a "wage slave" (a term known to us, and used by Belloc).

According to Belloc, the process began in the last days of the Roman Empire when the then widespread practice of usury destabilised society.

The decline of Roman institutions stood in stark contrast to the continuing spread of Christianity throughout the period. However, while critics like Edward Gibbon argue that this was not a coincidence (in other words, that pagan Rome was supposedly weakened by the influence of Christianity), Belloc argued that Rome was already doomed and that Christian culture actually salvaged what it could.

The new society which subsequently emerged was gradually influenced by Christian social thought with the result that slavery, whilst not forbidden, came to be viewed as being incompatible with a free Christian society. Through the Dark and early Middle Ages, according to Belloc, the serfs' social and economic condition slowly improved until there was a recognised status between worker and landlord.

The serf worked so many days a week on his lord's lands, but then had the remainder of the week to work his own land for a profit. During these times one of the most important institutions (in the eyes of the Distributists) arose - the guild.

It seemed as though, through improvement in the conditions and social standing of the worker and the establishment of regulatory bodies such as these guilds, the economic and social stability of Christendom was assured.

The Distributist analysis is not socialistic. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The socialist's solution is to make the problem even worse by confiscating all private property and giving it to the state. Chesterton wrote:

"The Socialist says that property is already concentrated in Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and return; the only step forward is the step backward."

He added:

"We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property we must distribute property ... If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionise the nation."

Neither Belloc nor Chesterton ever presented their ideas as a utopia - they were far too commonsensical for that. They also acknowledged that realising a Distributist State would be a long and arduous process, only achievable by the firm commitment of long-term government policy and the will of a majority of society.

Mondragon

The greatest existing example of how Distributist ideas can and have been put into practice is the famous Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain.

While not avowedly Distributist itself in name, its governing principles certainly are. It saw its beginnings in 1956 when a Basque priest, Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, inspired five young engineering graduates to borrow money and begin an enterprise producing oil stoves and paraffin heaters. Rapid success and the need for further investment saw them establish a cooperative bank which, in turn, saw the multiplication of associated cooperatives.

Today it consists of 160 flourishing cooperatives, owned and managed by the workers employed in them. Together they form the largest business group in the Basque region and their annual sales total more than US$6.5 billion.

Mondragon's remarkable track record explodes the myth of the limited capabilities of the smaller unit and of individuals acting in cooperation rather than competition.

It moreover shows Distributist principles (in the words of one US commentator) "[flying] in the face of the Hobbes-Smith tradition which holds that the 'rational' economic person acts out of pure self-interest" - and furthermore proves that these principles can be applied to industrial concerns of any scale.

Where does this leave us today? Of what possible relevance to us are the common ideas of a century-old papal encyclical, two eccentric Englishmen and an obscure Basque priest?

I believe that each has a great deal to offer us:

(i) Leo XIII proposed the principles - a set of guidelines for a more just social and economic order.
(ii) Belloc and Chesterton are often said to be the prophet and missionary respectively of their creed.
(iii) Fr Arizmendiarrieta was a man of similar thinking who took up the challenge and proved through the establishment of the Mondragon cooperatives that it is indeed possible to live without complete dependence on either market or state for one's livelihood.

Damian Wyld is vice-president of the Thomas More Centre of South Australia. This article is an edited extract of a paper he delivered at the recent TMC Autumn School in Adelaide.

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