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

Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly supporting the reestablishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to reformers: (1) a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or the “distributive state”; (2) an attempt to achieve the ideal “collectivist state.”

It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and easily to a society already capitalist on account of the difficulty which such a society has to discover the energy, the will, and the vision requisite for the first solution.

I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal collectivist state which is bred of capitalism leads men acting upon a capitalist society not towards the collectivist state nor anything like it, but to that third utterly different thing⁠—the “servile state.”

To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to achieve collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an illusion.

Recognising that theoretical argument of this kind, though intellectually convincing, is not sufficient to the establishment of my thesis, I shall conclude by giving examples from modern English legislation, which examples prove that the servile state is actually upon us.

Such is the scheme I design for this book.

What “wealth” is and why necessary to man⁠—How produced⁠—The meaning of the words “capital,” “proletariat,” “property,” “means of production”⁠—The definition of the “capitalist state”⁠—The definition of the “Servile State”⁠—What it is and what it is not⁠—The reestablishment of status in the place of contract⁠—That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind⁠—Summary of these definitions.

Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs.

That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we call the “production of wealth.”

“Wealth” is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need.

Without wealth man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human society there is a certain kind and a certain amount of wealth without which human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England today, certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth, and habitation.

Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which those forces inform.

This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call “labour.” As for that material and those natural forces, we will call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted, term “land.”

It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production of wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original factors, to wit, labour and land. But it so happens that the conscious, artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third factor of the utmost importance.

Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of “implements.” These soon become in each new department of the production as truly necessary to that production as labour and land. Further, any process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must therefore be an “accumulation of wealth” created in the past, and reserved with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the future.

Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of a store of provisions, labour applied to land for either purpose is not producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and reserving somewhat, and that somewhat is always necessary in varying proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic society to the production of wealth.

To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour during the process of production, we give the name of “capital.”

There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which we may conventionally term land, capital, and labour.

When we talk of the “means of production” we signify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say that a man is “dispossessed of the means of production,” or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who “possesses the means of production,” we mean that he is the master only of his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital, or land, or both combined.

A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the means of production, we call “proletarian,” and any considerable class composed of such