The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc (books under 200 pages .txt) 📕

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, coordinate all these things. He knows nothing of a society in which free men were once owners, nor of the cooperative 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, he, 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 anything 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 today, 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 today, 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