The Unfinished Programme of Democracy. Richard Roberts
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private capitalism; and while the influences of change that have now overwhelmed Russia and Germany were afoot long before the war, it is not to be questioned that their liberation was due to the War. Beneath the outward calm of empire there was a seething mass of unrest; and once the crust of empire was cracked, this lava of human passion rushed through. The worker has come to believe that the origins of the war are to be traced to economic causes, direct products of the capitalist system of industry, which is also the source of his disabilities in times of peace; and whether in peace or in war, the worker has at last to pay the bill. It is not to the point here to discuss whether the premises from which the worker argues or the conclusions he has reached are valid or not. We are concerned only to note the state of the case at the present moment. We observe that the failure of dynastic imperialism has become the occasion of economic revolution; and in this circumstance we are to look for the clue to the course of the democratic movement in the immediate future.
The movement seems indeed to be historically due. The first great turning point in modern history was the Protestant Reformation with its insistence upon religious liberty as against ecclesiastical authority. The second turning point was the French Revolution, which was the first act in the drama of establishing political liberty as against the power of aristocracy. It may well turn out that the Russian Revolution marks the beginning of the third crisis in the modern period, the first act in the drama of economic emancipation. The Protestant Reformation affirmed the liberty of the layman against a privilege resting upon an alleged monopoly of the means of grace; the French Revolution affirmed the liberty of the citizen against privilege resting upon the fact of noble birth; the Revolution now in progress will affirm the liberty of the worker as against privilege resting upon the presumed rights of property. Perhaps we are about to realise the long delayed economic corollary of the French Revolution.
Several circumstances of war-experience have given a powerful stimulus to the movement for radical economic change. Before the war, men were still haunted by the fear that the revolutionary changes advocated by the more advanced spirits might turn out to be a transition from the frying pan into the fire. But the cynical readiness of the “big business” interests in all the belligerent countries to turn the nation’s necessity to their own advantage; and the now demonstrated incompetency and wastefulness of the system of private capitalist enterprise have served to remove from among the workers any lingering sense that the good of the nation is bound up with the existing industrial order. In Great Britain in particular the close industrial organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving “big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. The immense increase of output in all industries, through the proper co-ordination and standardisation of processes, the systematic use of scientific investigation, and the more adequate oversight of the physical condition of the workers has made it plain that private capitalism either would not or could not make proper use of the productive resources of the British people. For instance, the ignorant opposition of the average employer to the movement for reducing the hours of labour has convicted him of a stupid incapacity to handle men, especially in view of such findings as those recorded by Lord Henry Bentinck, who shows conclusively (from data drawn from the engineering, printing and textile trades) that “in every case in which experiments have been tried, the result in output has been favourable to a shortening of the working day.”[2]
2. Contemporary Review, February, 1918.
Moreover, the war-time emphasis upon the idea of democracy has greatly stimulated the demand for its extension into the field of industry. This demand was assuming definite shape before the war; but what was at that time the propaganda of a comparatively small group has now become the faith of a multitude; and this faith is becoming more and more articulate as a demand for a socially intensive as well as geographically extensive application of the democratic principle. The argument runs in some such fashion as this. Broadly speaking, the democratic idea has three notes; first, the institution of those conditions of equal opportunity which are within human control; second, the participation of the community as a whole in the creation of these conditions, which means a universal franchise and equal ungraded partnership in affairs; and third, the absence of any privileged class which is able to impose its will upon the rest or any part of the rest. Some rough approximation to this state of things has been made in the political region; there it is accounted good and right. Why, then should not the same process be good and right in other regions of life? For instance, the greater part of a man’s life gathers around and is governed by his work; yet this democratic principle which is so estimable in politics is taboo in industry. To begin with, there is no such thing as a condition of equal opportunity in the industrial region. Certain antecedent advantages of birth, possession, and education have created a privileged class; and the rest are under a corresponding handicap. There was a time when the ranker could rise out of the ranks and make a field for himself; but in these days of trusts, combines, chain-stores and the like, the opportunity of the ranker to quit the ranks has dwindled almost to vanishing point. In the second place, industry is under class government. The persons engaged in it are divided into masters and servants, employers and employees; and the hired man has hardly a word to say in determining the conditions of his work. The only freedom he possesses lies in the choice of a master; and even this, under the régime of large corporations, is steadily disappearing. For the rest, he is confined to a choice between working under conditions imposed by the employer and not working at all, which means starvation. In industry there is a rule of privilege as real as that of the old territorial aristocracy; and the modern practice of investment has served to perpetuate this privilege within the bounds of a single class by the simple operation of the accident of birth, just as feudal landownership in another age became the foundation of aristocratic power. The one qualification which requires to be made here is that the concentration of large multitudes of workers in urban centres, as the result of the machine industry, has enabled the workers to join together in self-defence; and the Trade Union has to some extent mitigated the insolence of plutocratic power.
The argument, however, does not end here. It proceeds to the analysis of the causes of this privilege; and it finds it in the doctrine of property-rights. It would take us too far afield to trace this doctrine to its origins. Apparently the French thinkers who laid the train of the Revolution believed that the “natural right” of property was the necessary check upon the natural right of freedom; but they could not foresee the developments of the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise it is questionable whether they would have found the solution of their problem so easy. For it is not open to argument that the presumed sanctity of property rights has, under the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution furnished the foundation of the modern capitalist order and its corollaries. The capitalist owes his power to his possession of property in the shape of industrial plant or of money. Yet it is plain to anyone who analyses the position with any degree of realism that the mere possession of a number of things should no more entitle or enable an individual to lord it over his fellows than an inheritance of blue blood. Nevertheless, in point of cold fact, that is the present position; there is, however, a prospect that the divine right of property may presently go the same way as the divine right of kings.
But it will go not under the pressure of a theory. It will disappear under the strain of economic necessity. In England the proposal of a “levy on capital” has been widely and seriously discussed. It is asserted that it will be impossible to raise by taxation a revenue sufficient to pay the interest on the war debt after providing for indispensable national services; and there appears to be no way out of this impasse save by making a levy upon the accumulated wealth of the country. A levy equal to the debt would require to take something like two-fifths of the estimated total of the private capital. The methods by which this might be done do not now concern us; nor does it matter very much for our argument that the industrial and commercial magnates, and the ancien régime economists are declaiming vehemently against it. Even the fact that the levy may not be carried out in the form now advocated is not of great moment. What is important is that the serious discussion evoked by the proposal has shown that the traditional doctrine of property-rights is in liquidation. There has not been, so far as the present writer has been able to discover, any lifting-up of hands in horror at this suggestion of a sacrilegious invasion upon this