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CHAPTER VII.

THE COLLECTIVISATION OF CAPITAL.

THE proposal to nationalise the land may seem sufficiently bold, and it is certainly one which it would be difficult to carry into practice. Yet it obviously does not go nearly far enough to satisfy socialistic demands and expectations. The collectivisation of capital is, from the socialistic point of view, a far more thorough and consistent scheme. Those who advocate it propose to do away with all private property in the means of production. They would have the State to expropriate the owners not only of land but of all machines, tools, raw materials, ships, railways, buildings, stocks, &c.; and to appropriate the whole mass of these things for the common good. They aim at setting aside capitalistic competition in every sphere, substituting for it corporate organisation, and dividing the collective products of all kinds of labour among the workmen according to the quantity and worth of their work. They do not seek, indeed, to destroy or dispense with capital; but they contend for the abolition of all private capital, for the transference of all capital from individuals to the State, which would thus become the sole capitalist.

This, it will be perceived, is a truly gigantic

scheme. What it contemplates is a tremendous revolution. It is difficult, indeed, even to imagine the amount of change in the constitution and arrangements of society which must follow from making the State not only the sole landlord, but also the sole employer of labour, the sole producer and distributer of commodities, the sole director of the wills and supplier of the wants of its members.

But must not those who advocate such a scheme be lacking in ability to distinguish between the possible and the impossible? Is the preliminary objection to it of impracticability not insuperable? One can conceive the wealthier classes of the nation, on pressure of a great necessity, buying out the landowners and nationalising the land. But to

suppose that the poorer classes may buy up all the

property employed as capital in production, and so create the Collectivist State, is inherently absurd. Those who are without capital cannot acquire by purchase all the capital of those who possess it, so as to transfer it from individuals to the community, unless they are endowed for the occasion with a power of creation ex nihilo which has hitherto been denied to human beings. Collectivism, if it is to start with purchase, or, in other words, with the honest acquisition of the capital of individuals, presupposes that a stupendous miracle will be wrought to bring it into existence.

Some Collectivists fancy that they can parry this objection by vague discourse to the effect that society is passing into the Collectivist stage by a natural or necessary process of evolution. They

dwell on such facts as the growth of governmental intervention, the extension of the public service and public departments, the absorption of small by large industries, the increase of co-operative enterprise, and the multiplication of limited liability companies, as evidences and phases of a development of individual capitals into collective capital. These facts are plainly, however, nothing of the kind. The association of capitals in' large industries, in co-operative societies, in joint-stock companies, is in no case the slightest step towards rendering them not private but public, not individual but common. Associated capitals are not more easily bought up than separate capitals. While, therefore, history does undoubtedly show a process of social evolution which obviously tends to the enlargement of industrial and commercial enterprise through extension of the association of resources and energies, such evolution is essentially different from an evolution towards the realisation of Collectivism. Of the latter kind of evolution there are happily no traces yet visible; nor is there the least probability that capitalists will ever be so foolish as to cast themselves into any stream of evolution which will transfer their property to the community without compensation.*

In some respects the proposals of Collectivism are obviously at variance with the course of historical development. Says Professor J. S. Nicholson, "Let any one try to imagine how the business of a great country is to be carried on without money and prices, how the value to the society of various species of labour is to be estimated, and how the relative utilities of consumable commodities and transient services are to be calculated, and he will soon discover that the abolition of money would logically end in the abolition of division of labour. This prospect throws a strong light on the claims of the Socialists to base their doctrines on

The majority of Collectivists, however, do not imagine that the State will or can purchase the property which they desire to see transferred from individuals to the community. They look to its being taken without payment. The real leaders of Collectivism in England-the chiefs of the Social Democratic Federation-do not attempt to conceal that this is what is aimed at. They tell us quite plainly that they are aware that it is most improbable that Collectivism will be established otherwise than by revolution and force; and at the same time that they are determined to work for its establish

ment.

I shall say nothing as to the morality of this resolution. And it is unnecessary to do more than merely call attention to the short-sightedness and folly of it. What chance could there be of benefit resulting from it? Attempts to realise Collectivism by force are only likely to lead some unhappy and misguided men to outbursts of riot as contemptible as deplorable, and from which they must be themselves the chief sufferers. Were such attempts to become gravely dangerous they would discredit democracy in the eyes of the majority of the community and cause them to throw themselves for protection into the arms of despotism. It would thus

the tendencies of history and the actual processes of evolution, for, as already shown in detail, the principal characteristic of industrial progress has been the continuous extension of the use of money. In reality, however, Socialism is still more vitally opposed to historical development, since it aims at reversing the broadest principle of progress, the continuous substitution, namely, of contract for status." ("Principles of Political Economy," 1893, vol. i. p. 433.)

destroy democracy without establishing Socialism. To those who would attempt to reach Collectivism through revolution these words of J. S. Mills are exactly applicable: "It must be acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of their own private opinion unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification-who would forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of their only present means of preserving it, and would brave the frightful bloodshed and misery that would ensue if the attempt was resisted -must have a serene confidence in their own wisdom, on the one hand, and a recklessness of other people's sufferings on the other, which Robespierre and Saint-Just, hitherto the typical instances of these united attributes, scarcely came up to."

Suppose, however, Collectivism to be established. Is it probable that it could be maintained? Is it a kind of system which would be likely to endure? No. Its entire character precludes our reasonably entertaining the hope. Collectivists have as false a notion of what social organisation is, or ought to be, as had their socialist predecessors, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and so many others. They conceive of it not as natural, organic, and free, but as artificial, mechanical, and compulsory. They would manipulate and mould society from without into conformity with an ideal of their own imaginations, but to the disregard of its inherent forces and laws, the constitutional tendencies and properties of human nature.

All notions of this kind are foolish; all efforts

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