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

more. We already have the registration of the proletariat with name, address, movement from place to place, nature of illness when illness is incurred, supposed or real “malingering,” indulgence in this or that vice (such as drink), domestic habits, nature of employment, and all the rest of it very nearly complete, and imposed by the wealthier classes who are the actual gatherers of the Poll Tax upon which this registration is based. We have through the labour exchanges a system which will soon be equally complete and by which every member of the proletariat will ultimately be similarly registered as a worker, his tendencies to rebellion against capital known and their frequency set down, how far he is willing to serve capitalism, whether and when he has refused service, and if so where and why.

The reader will be interested to note amid the accidents and reactions of the years immediately before us the slow perfection of this system: registration and control of the proletariat, with its necessary and fatal approach towards the term of compulsory labour. But I think in justice to my book I should point out to that same reader the meaning of its concluding pages. No change in European society arrives at completion unless it is universal throughout Europe. Capitalism is not thus universal; it is developed in very different degrees in different parts of Europe; the advent of servitude is therefore a probability differing in degree with different portions of European society. It is evident that the example of economic freedom elsewhere may in the future transform, and will certainly limit, such sections of European life as are drifting towards the reestablishment of slavery. But the tendency to the reestablishment of slavery as a necessary development of capitalism is patent wherever capitalism has power, and nowhere more than in this country.

H. Belloc.

Kings Land, Shipley,

Horsham, Sussex.

Introduction The Subject of This Book

It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the reestablishment of slavery.

This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth:⁠—

That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets: the first economically free and politically free, possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.

Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable: that is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that form of society called “capitalist,” and men would be satisfied to accept, and to continue in, such a settlement.

To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons which will be described in the next section, the title of The Servile State.

I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organisation of our modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent social provisions which show that it has actually begun.

This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by implication the reestablishment among us of a difference of status between possessor and non-possessor: it will be distasteful to those who regard such a distinction with ill favour or with dread.

My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two types of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that which the one favours and the other would fly is upon them.

I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial society of Great Britain, including that small, alien, and exceptional corner of Ireland, which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions today.

I shall divide the matter thus:⁠—

I shall lay down certain definitions.

Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery and The Servile State of which it is the basis, as these were in the ancient world.

I shall then:

Sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries, and whereby the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the means of production, was

wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion, and had substituted for it, in practice though not in legal theory, a society based upon capitalism.

Next, I shall show how capitalism was of its nature unstable, because its social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems of law, and because its effects in denying sufficiency and security were intolerable to men; how being thus unstable, it consequently presented a problem which demanded a solution: to wit, the establishment of some stable form of society whose law and social practice should correspond, and whose economic results, by providing sufficiency and security, should be tolerable to human nature.

I shall next present the only three possible solutions:⁠—

Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands of the political officers of the community.

Property, or the reestablishment of a distributive state in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production.

Slavery, or a servile state in which those who do not own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive in exchange