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| ISBN-13: | 9781605700304 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | IHS Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Sales rank: | 317,662 |
| File size: | 663 KB |
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An Essay on the Restoration of Property
By Hilaire Belloc
IHS Press
Copyright © 2002 IHS PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60570-030-4
CHAPTER 1
Man, to live, must transform his environment from a state in which it is less to a state in which it is more useful to himself. This process is called "The Production of Wealth."
Moreover, if a man is to live conformably to his nature, there must be available for his consumption a certain amount of wealth, in a certain variety, for a certain unit of time. For instance, in our society, he must have so much bread, so much meat, so much of a number of different foods every day, so much beer or wine or spirits (or, if he be too weak to consume these) so much tea or coffee or what not; a sufficient amount of somewhat complicated clothing, all to last over such and such an amount of time; and a sufficiency of fuel, housing and all the rest of it, also to last a certain time.
Now this transformation of environment called "The Production of Wealth" is obviously only possible through the use of the instruments of production. A family can only live conformably to its human nature (that is, without undue suffering) in a given civilization on condition that it receive securely and constantly so much of this varied wealth for its consumption. But the wealth can only come into existence through the manipulating of natural forces by certain instruments; and there must also be an existing store of food and clothing and housing and the rest of it so that human beings may carry on during the process of production. These stores of wealth, these instruments and these natural forces are the Means of Production.
It is obvious that whoever controls the means of production controls the supply of wealth. If, therefore, the means for the production of that wealth which a family needs are in the control of others than the family, the family will be dependent upon those others; it will not be economically free.
The family is ideally free when it fully controls all the means necessary for the production of such wealth as it should consume for normal living.
But such an ideal is inhuman and, therefore, not to be fixedly attained, because man is a social animal. It is not impossible of achievement for a short time, and has been briefly achieved whenever a lonely settler has fixed himself with his family and his stores in an isolated spot. But such complete economic freedom for each family cannot be permanent, because the family increases and divides into further numerous families, forming a larger community. Moreover, even were the isolated free family to endure, it would fall below the requirements of human nature, its isolation stunting and degrading it. For men cannot fulfill themselves save through a diversity of interests and ideas. Multiplicity is essential to life, and man to be truly human must be social.
Society being necessary to man, there arise in the economic field these two limitations to economic freedom: —
First, Difference of Occupation: Each in a society will concentrate upon what he has the best opportunity for producing and, by exchanging his surplus of it for that which another has the best opportunity of producing, will increase the wealth of all: or what comes to the same thing, lessen the burden of labour for all. Thus men live more happily in an agricultural village if there be a miller to grind the wheat instead of every family grinding it under their own roof, a cobbler to mend and make boots — and so on.
Second, A Principle of Unity: There must exist in some form the State. A sufficiently large unit for the development of the Arts and the better complexities of life must be organized. Its power must be appealed to for the satisfaction of justice, the prevention of internal disorder and for the arrangement of defence against external aggression. In general the State must exercise some restraint upon the ideal economic freedom of the family or freedom itself cannot be guaranteed.
But, while difference of occupation restricts the ideal independence of the family, it does not destroy freedom until one or another differentiated (and necessary) occupation can withhold its necessary function and thus impose its will. If the miller can refuse to supply flour to the rest, who have lost their instruments and aptitude for grinding wheat, he will be their master. So with the unifying authority of the State. If the State can cut off livelihood from the family, it is their master, and freedom has disappeared.
Therefore, there is a test of the limit after which such restriction of freedom is hostile to our aims and that test lies in the power of the family to react against that which limits its freedom. There must be a human relation between the family and those forces which, whether through the division of labour or the action of the State, restrict the family's liberty of choice in action. The family must have not only power to complain against arbitrary control external to it, but power to make its complaint effective.
It has been found in practice (that is, it is discoverable through history) that economic freedom thus somewhat limited satisfies the nature of man, and at the basis of it is the control of the means of production by the family unit. For though the family exchange its surplus, or even all its production, for the surplus of others, yet it retains its freedom, so long as the social structure, made up of families similarly free, exercises its effect through customs and laws consonant to its spirit: the Guild; a jealous watch against, and destruction of, monopoly; the safeguarding of inheritance, especially the inheritance of small patrimonies. The freehold miller, in such a society as was ours not so long ago, though he had no arable or pasture, was a free man. The yeoman, though he got his flour from the miller, was a free man.
The name for control of the Means of Production is "Property." When that control is exercised severally by individual units we call it "Private Property" to distinguish it from property vested in public bodies. When so great a number of families in the State possess Private Property in a sufficient amount as to give its colour to the whole, we speak of "widely distributed property."
It has been found in practice, and the truth is witnessed to by the instincts in all of us, that such widely distributed property as a condition of freedom is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature. In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship. The cells of the body politic are atrophied and the mass of men have not even, at last, an opinion of their own, but are moulded by the few who retain ownership of land and endowments and reserves. So property is essential to a full life, though it is debatable whether a full life is to be aimed at. There may be some who dislike freedom for themselves. There are certainly many who dislike it for others, but, at any rate, freedom involves property.
Today in England, and to a less degree in many other countries, widespread property has been lost. Ownership is not a general feature of society, determining its character. On the contrary, absence of ownership, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society and determines its character.
The family does not possess that freedom which is necessary for its full moral health and that of the State of which it is the unit. Hence our society has fallen into the diseased condition known as "Industrial Capitalism." In this state the control of the Means of Production is vested in a comparatively small number; consequently economic freedom has ceased to be the note, giving its tone to society.
"Capitalism" does not mean a state of society in which capital has been accumulated, its accumulations protected, and itself put to use in producing wealth. Capital so accumulated, protected and used must exist in any human society whatsoever, including, of course, a Communist one. Nor does "Capitalism" mean a state of society in which capital is owned as private property by the citizens. On the contrary, such a society of free owners is the opposite of Capitalism as the word is here used. I use the term "Capitalism" here to mean a state of society in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of the citizens dispossessed. Such a dispossessed body of citizens is called a "Proletariat."
Industrial Capitalism has in its present phase other grave evils attached to it besides the loss of freedom, for the twin evils of Insecurity and Insufficiency are attached to it. The main body of citizens, the Proletariat, are not sufficiently clothed, housed and fed, and even their insufficient supply is unstable. They live in a perpetual anxiety.
Now those two evils of insecurity and insufficiency might be eliminated and yet economic freedom be absent from the mass of society.
There are two ways in which they could be eliminated without the restoration of freedom: —
The first way is through that which I have called elsewhere "The Servile State." In this form of society the minority controlling the means of production supports all the vast majority of the dispossessed, even those whom it does not use in exploitation, and thus forms a stable society though one from which freedom is eliminated. That is the direction in which we are drifting today. The capitalists keep men alive by exploiting them at a wage, and when they cannot do this, still keep them alive in idleness by some small subsidy.
The second way is Communism — of its nature unstable but practicable at a heavy strain though, presumably, for only a comparatively short space of time. Under this second system the means of production are controlled by the officers of the State, who are the masters of all the workers (slaves of the State), and the wealth produced is distributed, at the discretion of the State officials, among the families, or, if an attempt be made to abolish even the family, then among the individuals of the community.
There is a third form of society, and it is the only one in which sufficiency and security can be combined with freedom, and that form is a society in which property is well distributed and so large a proportion of the families in the State severally OWN and therefore control the means of production as to determine the general tone of society; making it neither Capitalist nor Communist, but Proprietary. If, then, we regard economic freedom as a good, our object must be thus to restore property. We must seek political and economic reforms which shall tend to distribute property more and more widely until the owners of sufficient Means of Production (land or capital or both) are numerous enough to determine the character of society.
But is economic freedom a good?
Unless we regard it as a good the search for methods by which property may be restored is futile or harmful. Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, unless a sufficient number of our fellow citizens feel with a sufficient degree of intensity that economic freedom is a good, economic freedom (that is, well-divided property) can never be restored.
So it behoves us at the outset to consider this question, whether or not economic freedom is a good.
Economic freedom can only be a good if it fulfills some need in our nature.
Now there is discoverable in man, Freewill. His actions are of moral value to him if they are undertaken upon his own initiative; not if they are undertaken under compulsion. Therefore the use of choice is necessary to human dignity. A man deprived of choice is by that the less a man, and this we all show through the repugnance excited in us by unauthorized restraint and subjection, through coercion rather than authority, to another's will. We cannot do good, or even evil, unless we do it freely; and if we admit the idea of good at all in human society, freedom must be its accompaniment.
Next, economic freedom is a good because man's actions are multiple, both his desires and his creative faculties; but it is only in the possession of economic freedom that this multiplicity can be effective. Deprived of economic freedom the units of society, the family and in some degree the individual, lack the power to express that diversity which is life. In the absence of economic freedom there must weigh upon any human society a dead and mechanical uniformity, increasingly leaden, and heavy and stifling, in proportion to the absence of freedom.
To all this two answers may be given by those who dread that restoration of property, or those who regard it as impossible.
First, it may be said that men do have economic freedom under State ownership. Secondly, it may be said that economic freedom, though a good, is of no moment in comparison with material satisfaction.
As to the first answer: It has been widely said in the recent past that economic freedom can exist without the institution of property, because, under a Communist system, men own though they own corporately: they can dispose of their own lives, though such disposition be indirect and through delegates. This false argument is born of the dying Parliamentary theory of politics; it proceeds from the false statement which deceived three generations of Europe, from the French Revolution to our own day, that corporate action may be identified with individual action. So men speak of their so-called "Representatives" as having been "chosen" by themselves. But in experienced reality there is no such thing as this imagined permanent corporate action through delegation. On some very simple and universal point, which all understand, in which all are interested and on which all feel strongly, the desire of the bulk of people may be expressed for a brief moment by delegation. Men voting under strong emotion on one single clear issue, may instruct others to carry out their wishes; but the innumerable acts of choice and expression which make up human life can never work through a system of delegation. Even in the comparatively simple field of mere political action, delegation destroys freedom. Parliaments have everywhere proved irreconcilable with democracy. They are not the people. They are oligarchies, and those oligarchies are corrupt because they pretend to a false character and to be, or to mirror, the nation. They are in reality, and can only be, cliques of professional politicians; unless, indeed, they are drawn from an aristocratic class which the community reveres. For class government, the product of the aristocratic spirit, is the condition of oligarchies working successfully and therefore of a reasonably efficient Parliament. Such an instrument is not to be found save in the hands of a governing class.
If this be true of mere politics it is obviously true of that millioned affair, our daily lives. Ownership by delegation is a contradiction in terms.
When men say, for instance (by a false metaphor), that each member of the public should feel himself an owner of public property — such as a Town Park — and should therefore respect it as his own, they are saying something which all our experience proves to be completely false. No man feels of public property that it is his own; no man will treat it with the care or the affection of a thing which is his own; still less can a man express himself through the use of a thing which is not his own, but shared in common with a mass of other men.
As to the second answer: It is said by many today that the satisfaction of man's immediate material necessities is on a different and infinitely more important plane than the satisfaction of his need for freedom. Economic freedom, if indeed it be a good at all, is (they say) a good of a much lesser sort, intangible, and something which men can well do without; therefore, since the enjoyment of it imperils the obtaining of material necessities, it must give way to that much greater good: a secure sufficiency of livelihood.
There is in this reply a measure of truth which gives it all its strength. It is half true; but the falsehood attached to the half truth vitiates the whole statement.
Where urgent material necessities are unsatisfied they must be satisfied first. Shipwrecked men on a raft at sea must live, exceptionally, under Communism. The dispossessed in a capitalist society must at least be kept alive. But it is not true that, such exceptional remedies for an unnatural evil having been used, we must go on to destroy the good of economic freedom for the advantage of enjoying greater material wealth.
This last argument is one of the many which we find in common to those who defend the Capitalist system and those who defend the Communist system: for Socialism and Capitalism are twin successive products of the same false philosophy.
The defenders of Capitalism tell us that it may have destroyed men's economic freedom; under Capitalism a man can less and less choose what he wants nor express his personality and character in the arts; but at least Capitalism has given him in far greater numbers a far greater mass of material goods than he had before it arose. The Communist goes one better. He says, "Yes: and under my system, by suppressing economic freedom altogether we shall give him yet more material goods, and we shall see that everybody gets them in almost unlimited amount."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Essay on the Restoration of Property by Hilaire Belloc. Copyright © 2002 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
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