As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject, George Bernard Shaw was as insistent that
socialism is the universal panacea for all problems (as long as you don’t eat
meat or drink alcohol) and that distributism is just another name for Fabian
socialism* as G.K. Chesterton was adamant that Shaw was full of . . . nonsense.
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| Shaw: Marxism and Fabianism are the same |
*And that Fabian socialism and
Marxist communism are simply different words for the same thing. According to Shaw, “Under [Joseph Stalin] the
Soviet government has turned communism into Fabianism. But the Communists won’t take our name so we
must take theirs. After all, Russian
communism is nothing more than the program the Fabians have been preaching for
forty years.” (“Shaw’s Greatness Declared Vapid,” The Washington, DC Evening Star, November 27, 1931, B-11.)
The basic problem
was what to do about the alienation of the human person from society. Do we turn him (or her) into a dependent of
the State or community by guaranteeing all wants and needs, or do we structure
our institutions to make it possible for people to take care of themselves,
with an assist from others or the government only when necessary?
Distributism
developed as an antidote to a society that, while materially prosperous in many
ways, was increasingly inhuman, and obviously so. It was also a fundamentally different world
from the one that had always existed.
Prior to the
Industrial Revolution, human labor and land were the predominant factors of
production. Being wealthy meant someone
had more worldly goods than others or of better quality. Poverty meant someone had less.
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| Smith: "invisible hand" a metaphor for the system |
As Adam Smith
(1723-1790) pointed out, a rich man’s wants and needs were at that time
essentially no different from those of a poor man. Rich people found it much easier to satisfy
their desires, but regardless how luxurious their clothing or exquisite their
food, they could only wear one suit or dress at a time and their stomachs could
hold no more than anyone else’s.
Human labor was
the key to the system. Virtually nothing
could be produced without significant human input.
A rich man might
own a vast estate, but no corn could be grown unless he employed field hands to
care for the livestock, clear and plant the fields, and harvest the crops. He needed to employ someone to provide carriage
for the grain in order to get it to and from the mill, to pay the miller to
grind it into flour, the baker to turn it into bread, the cook to prepare it as
part of a meal, the butler to serve it, and the maids to clean up
afterwards. As Smith concluded,
The rich only select from the
heap what is most precious and agreeable.
They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural
selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though
the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they
employ, by the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they
divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make
nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been
made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants,
and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the
society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Part IV, Chapter I, §10.)
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| Machinery is more productive than human labor |
Obviously, the
flaw in the argument was Smith’s assumption that human labor was and would
always be an essential input into the production of marketable goods and
services. In 1759 when Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and even
a decade and a half later when he published The
Wealth of Nations in which he reiterated his “invisible hand” theory, he
could be excused for making that assumption.
The effects of advancing technology had not yet become noticeable,
except by machinery’s capacity to supply a greater abundance of goods at higher
quality and lower cost than could the artisan and craftsman.
Ordinary people
were being replaced by machinery at a tremendous rate as technology
advanced. Nor was it a one-to-one
replacement of machinery for people, for machinery is phenomenally more
productive than human beings.
Given the cost of
a machine less than or equal to the cost of people’s wages, human beings lost
out every time. Nor was this cruel
heartlessness on the part of employers, although there were certainly
all-too-frequent instances of that.
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| Belloc: "It's the (wage) system, stupid." |
The simple fact
is that someone who uses relatively inexpensive machinery to produce a loaf of
bread that sells for one dollar is going to sell more bread than someone who
employs relatively expensive human labor to produce a loaf of bread that sells
for two dollars. Ultimately, the
employer of labor will not be able to compete and will either purchase
machinery or go out of business.
Why did the
workers not purchase the new machinery?
Whether something is produced by means of one’s labor or by means of
one’s machinery, it is still a marketable good or service and the owner,
whether of labor or capital, is entitled to the full stream of income. As Belloc remarked,
There is no conceivable link in
reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with
the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed nonowners working at
a wage. Such great discoveries coming in a society like that of the thirteenth
century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral
conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.
(Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State. Indianapolis,
Indiana: Liberty Fund Classics, 1977, 100-101.)
Nor was there an
animus against machinery per se. The cosmic or mythical meaning assigned to
the revolt of the Luddites and their clones in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries is modern opinion superimposed on people who would have
been completely baffled by their status as “rebels against the future.” (See Kirkpatrick
Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The
Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,
1995.)
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| Aristotle: Free men without ownership are masterless slaves |
Luddites and
others were not rebelling against the future but fighting for it. They had no objection whatsoever to machinery
in and of itself. What they were
protesting was machinery that they did not own and that therefore deprived them
of their ability to be productive and generate an adequate income. Miners did not destroy the steam pumps that
made their work possible, but weavers did wreck the power looms that made their
work impossible.
Without access to
the means to be productive, more and more people were alienated from full
participation in the common good of society.
Like Aristotle’s nominally free but non-owning worker, the modern wage
worker had legal and, to a degree, political equality, but this was not
supported by social or, especially, economic equality. And that was a problem.
What was needed
was a realistic vision of a just society that presented a viable alternative to
capitalism, characterized by concentration of capital ownership in the hands of
a relatively small private sector élite,
and socialism, characterized by concentration of capital ownership in the hands
of a public bureaucracy. Distributism, a
policy of widely distributed private property with a preference for small,
family owned farms and artisan businesses, was one possibility.
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