The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
CHAPTER 2
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
ON FREE AND FORCED EXCHANGE
… Civilisation is based on
Exchange.
… All that we usually mean by
civilisation, every modern facility for comfort, transport, health,
education, amusement, all the conveniences of public and private
modern life, have been produced by steady co-operative toil, continued
and accumulated year after year. Even civilisation in its more refined
sense, the spread of humanising knowledge, the softening of popular
tastes and manners, this also is largely due to the handiwork of the
mass of men, who by their physical labour have made leisure and
concentrated thought possible for a small number.
… This labour we have been brought
up to think of as free, and to regard the civilisation which is built
upon and by it as the great work of a free race jointly striving
towards the good of mankind. Reflection throws a different light on
its nature.
… Our civilisation is built up by
subdivision of labour -- i.e. the exchange of different kinds of
labour, or of the goods which embody labour (replaced generally in
complex societies by money, which represents the surplus or storage of
goods embodying labour).
… If this exchange is free and
fair, then the community is industrially free and equal; but if the
exchanges are forced and not fair, then the community is founded in
servitude and injustice.
… Exchange depends on men's
willingness to part with something that they have for something which
they have not - with an ivory tusk for a pound of glass beads, or with
a week's work digging for the price of rent, food and clothing. The
freedom of exchange depends on each having an equal urgency to obtain
what the other possesses, or, to express it negatively, an equal
inconvenience in doing without it.
… Free Exchange.
… If a baker starving with cold and
a woodcutter starving with hunger were to exchange a loaf and a
faggot, the exchange would be free; without the other each would
perish. Or equally freely, the baker may supply bread to a seamstress
who in exchange sews him two coats, with one of which he gets in
exchange firing from the woodman. Or an arable farmer and a sheep
farmer might freely exchange help at seed and shearing times; or two
women may agree that one shall do both washings whilst the other minds
both babies.
… These forms of labour exchange
are obviously free: neither party is compelled, or both are alike
equally compelled to it. And such forms are often taken as the type of
the more complicated dealings of modern industry.
… Forced Exchange.
… But if a man falls down my well
and I bargain for 5s. to pull him out, then the exchange may be fair
enough, if my time is worth 5s., but it is certainly not free, since
his urgency to escape death is greater than mine to earn 5s.
… If an out-of-work joiner came to
me, an independent householder, and I supplied him with food and drink
on condition that he made me a table, the exchange would not be free,
because he is obliged to make my table or else lose his health and
working- power, whereas I, if I do not supply him with food, only lose
the table. If he is hungry enough and employment precarious enough, he
must make my table, or do practically anything else I want, or starve;
or he may go to the workhouse, and do exactly what they want there. So
this man during the time of his necessity is a slave to me or to the
guardians. And if we extend myself to be a whole class or a whole
community, and this one workless joiner into a whole class, then his
class will be enslaved to my class, or to the community. This will be
a worse slavery, because, by waiting longer or walking farther, the
one joiner might find a more merciful employer than I, who from
ignorance, or compassion, or because he was in more need of a table,
would give him better food and perhaps clothes also; whereas the class
of workless joiners cannot anyhow get outside the class, or community,
who alone have food to give and are willing to take tables in
exchange; and if, as is the real state of the case, the class of the
table-makers were numerically far greater than the class of the food
-givers, then it would be more hopelessly enslaved still, as each
man's chance of getting a table to make was diminished.
… This sort of exchange can no more
be called free, than the man is free who, cast destitute on a lonely
island, sells himself bodily to the possessor of the only
cocoanut-tree and fresh-water supply in the place.
… Of course the workless joiner
will not willingly be caught twice. If he realises the situation he
will go to the next neighbour and try him. But perhaps the next
neighbour does not want a table; or the two neighbours have a mutual
understanding that tramping joiners must be kept in their proper
places and at a low wage.
… Monopoly of the Sources of
Life and Labour.
… Then the joiner will give up
joinering, and will settle down to grow crops and cattle and make
bread and meat for himself and be beholden to no man. But supposing
the two neighbours singly or in compact get possession of all the
available land which the joiner might use for pasture or arable, and
besides that, of all the copse s also from which he must needs get his
wood for joinering; and supposing this proceeding, of seizing the only
means of life and labour, be extended from two vulnerable human beings
to a whole neuter and impersonal set of people, or to the trustees of
a whole community, then the enslavement of the joiner and all his
class is complete.
… This illustration is not a purely
fanciful one. Something like it must have occurred in bygone times in
all nations possessing a wealthy class and a proletariat. The actual
process goes on under our eyes in modern days in the colonies of
civilised countries, where the native is dispossessed of his land by
the white settler on the plea of trade development, and by this
landlessness forced to hire himself out for wages ; and if he takes
refuge in the native settlements and refuses to compete in the labour
market, a hut-tax or a poll-tax is employed to drive him into the net
of the recruiter.
… Accumulation of Capital.
… Now, suppose, further, that the
employer, instead of supplying the joiner with the produce of his own
labour, bread and meat of his own raising and cooking, saves up a
superfluity of coats, blankets, kettles, saws and other useful
articles, which he has got out of other workless artisans in a similar
awkward situation, and with these, or the money he has got by selling
them, pays the workless joiner's labour?
… Then it is clear that the
enslaved joiner and his fellows must not only work to supply the
employer (individual and class) with the tables, coats, beds, etc.,
that the employer himself needs, but with such a superfluity of them
(or their money's worth) as shall enable him to pay the services of
the automobile makers, upholsterers, picture-painters, book-writers,
wine-growers, domestic servants and others, whom he may desire to use.
The wages will go through the master's hands but are paid with the
surplus labour of the other artisans, after the employer (individual
or class) has secured that part of their labour which he needs for his
immediate personal use. The Master has then become a Capitalist and a
great Captain of Industry.
… Meanwhile the workman, having to
buy with his labour even the materials of that labour, works in dire
terror lest he should be forbidden to work at all.
… This, or something similar to it,
seems to be the industrial system which produces the flowers of modern
civilisation.
… And just as in the time of the
Roman Empire clever or fortunate slaves became wealthy and lived
insolently, buying and breeding slaves of their own, so the employers
of this forced labour may themselves be performing in similar bondage
some other form of enforced service ; until no one knows who can be
classed as master or who as serf - the whole company being in
servitude to those who have possession of the primary means of
existence, and who are thereby able to demand in exchange for the
necessaries of life any sort of luxury and service, or to put others
in a position to demand them. So that even the honest slave-driver,
who wishes to escape from his position, is in a dilemma, since he must
either continue to slave-drive, or be himself driven.
… The Flesh-pots of Egypt.
… No doubt even the bottom-most
worker has some share of the luxuries he and his fellows create in
their compulsory service. There is always gleaning to be done in the
wake of the sheaf-gatherers, and probably there were handsome pickings
for the slaves who built the pyramids as well as for the
slave-contractors who supplied the slave-labourers with food. The
meanest little milliner's girl is able to wear a smarter hat for the
labour of the thousands like herself who give a lifetime's practice to
the curling of ribbons and feathers.
… How Civilisation is fostered.
… For such a society is not only
the product of slavery, it is itself a creator of slavishness; and one
of the chief means of riveting the system on to the old- world
proletariat or on to savage and "uncivilised" tribes, is by
creating in them new wants and fashions - such as top-hats or
mechanical toys -- so that they may more readily exchange their
birthright for a gramophone and a mess of pottage.
… The land, then, that in his
uncivilised state he cultivated, having been taken from the worker,
his return is cut off, and, like the king of the fairy-tale, having
once laid hold of the ferryman's oar, he must remain at the task,
ferrying passengers to and fro for the rest of his life. If one of all
those hordes whose breaths are keeping up the air-ball of
civilisation, despising his task and refusing his service, desires to
return to his birthright and labour for himself, he finds it gone, and
that he has no longer the wherewithal to live, nor work, nor even die,
except under the conditions imposed by the social machine; so that he
must continue to feed it with his life and labour, not according as
his own conscience or wants demand, but as the inexorable automatic
mouths open or shut.
… Competition and Privileged
Slaves.
… The number of the workers, and
the consequent tense competition for employment, of course reduces
them to a far more miserable and precarious existence than if there
were only one foodless and homeless man with his labour to sell. So
long as there are more men of a trade than the work offered, each man
is beaten down to the lowest his society will tolerate. But if there
were only one joiner, although he were unable to get food unless
someone wanted a table, yet, as the only man who could make a table,
he would have a special value. He would be nourished, tended in
sickness, even cherished by the free and self-supporting employer who
foresaw a need of future tables.
… So any highly technical worker,
or any servant with specially convenient qualities, holds a
privileged, sometimes pampered, but still servile, position. So a
gifted slave-musician or slave-scribe in Rome or Alexandria would be
domestically petted. So it was with typists, chauffeurs, etc., until
the supply met the demand. So formerly those workers who could read
and write had a great advantage in the market, while schooling was
exceptional ; whereas at the present time in Western Europe the
universal elementary- teaching that is compulsorily received, and the
artificially fostered secondary education, are raising the level of
education so much as to bring mechanicians, draughtsmen, clerks, etc.,
out of their privileged position back into the circle of keen
competition; whilst, on the other hand, the price and status of
unskilled labour show signs of rising, as training and taste lead
young people into genteeler occupations, and lessen competition for
the rougher sorts of manual work. In past days the skilled trades,
appreciating their advantages, have always, and quite reasonably,
sought to form close guilds and to limit the number of their
apprentices so as to maintain their vantage ground. The
neo-Malthusians, too, of the modern labour movement seem partly
inspired by the same idea of improving their bargaining power by
limiting their numbers.
… Comfort is not identical with
Freedom., and may be a bar to it.
… But degrees of comfort have
nothing to do with degrees of servitude. A skilled artisan, or
specially gifted slave, does not become less servile because his wage
is higher and his humours studied. Indeed, in a way, the skilled
workman is in a more dependent condition than the unskilled, since,
his work being more specialised and his education more delicate, he is
less fitted to exist outside one particular kind of society.
… The free, occasionally insolent,
manners which are found in certain classes of labour (and which seem
to have characterised also the upper slaves of the Roman Empire) are
not, as is often assumed, a sign of "independence," merely
of a somewhat special position. That their condition is really
parasitic is manifest from the preference for propertied persons not
only shown, but unfeignedly felt, by persons of the profession of
policemen, chauffeurs, shopkeepers, butlers, etc. -- that is, by all
those whose trade has been invented for the wealthy. Even when such
workers call themselves and vote radical, it seems to be more as a
protest against mismanagement than from a desire to disturb the order
by which they live.
… And all the while both workers
and masters have some vague idea that the world is kept going by
labour of this parasitic sort, and that they and their work all form
an integral part of some huge social machine of vital human importance
-- quite forgetting that the whole population of the world is already
fed and clothed by the labour of a small percentage, and could very
well go on being so fed and clothed if all the lengthy, twisted line
that connects a man with his food were short-circuited.
… The Significance of
Industrial Slavery.
… But many people may think that
this is all much ado about nothing ; that industrial slavery has a
merely academic meaning ; that though theoretically it may be true,
yet that practically it would make no difference if only " fair "
conditions were secured to the workers ; that, provided they are
comfortable, the workers themselves do not care whether their work is
of a free or servile nature.
… To this the reply is: -
… (1) That there can be no really
fair treatment of the workers short of restoring to them the means of
production that have been taken from them and monopolised; and that,
when these are returned the liberty they lost with them will also
return, and they will then ensure fair treatment for themselves.
… (2) That even the barren
theoretic truth of the term Industrial Slavery would be of itself of
the utmost importance; for the most pragmatical utilitarian cannot
deny the motor force of ideas.
… (3) But to see the most direct,
tangible effects, one need only glance at the lives and aims of the
workers; not only at the poverty, and insecurity, for these might to
some extent exist in freedom among men working for themselves and not
for a master, but at the humiliation and the squalor, the stupid,
monotonous drudgery in performing tasks in which they can perceive no
benefit, and which no one would think worth while to do for
themselves. But, above all, the manifestation of their servitude is
seen in their attitude towards their work, and in the legislative
interference which they incessantly demand. Everywhere their cry is
for laws against long hours, for a legal wage above bare subsistence
level, for sanitary regulations, for a Royal Commission on some trade,
for a Labour Minister to set the whole tangle of life right -- for
some master, in short, above the other masters; or else for
transference of all employment to the supreme master, the Government,
forgetting that from that one there will be no appeal. No proof could
be more conclusive that their work is not free, that they have even no
conception nor hope that it might be free. No free man working for
himself and getting the full reward of his labour would tolerate the
by-laws and legislation that the proletariat clamour for. No crofter
or settler would endure, nor obey, enactments about his hours of work
; equally with the right of ceasing when he likes, he values the right
of going on as long as he pleases, not only from the
politico-economical motive of acquiring wealth, but because he is
interested in his work and views it as his creature, not his
taskmaster. And because such work is free, it is neither wearisome nor
unwholesome. To such free workers grandmotherly legislation is no
friend, but an enemy. It is only the weak and dependent who call for
leading- strings, and the leading-strings only perpetuate their
dependence.
CONTENTS
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