George Bernard Shaw on socialism

This forceful, almost hortatory essay by George Bernard Shaw first appeared in the 13th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1926), the same year Shaw received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” (Shaw, by the way, was proud to point out that in his youth he had read the ninth edition [1875] in its entirety, excepting only the scientific articles.) Shaw wrote superbly, and he was critical of capitalism but also of leftist institutions such as trade unionism. Though his essay concludes on a hopeful note, his analysis is mostly pessimistic: while modern society and civilization itself have fallen prey to unfettered capitalism, the “loss of popular faith in it,” Shaw lamented, “has gone much further than the gain of any widespread or intelligent faith in socialism.” Shaw’s article is nearly as interesting read between the lines, for there is much suggested about the general state of the world in the 1920s. This text, written in an age when the socialist movement was “alive and militant,” may, in view of socialism’s current state of disarray, offer insights different than those originally envisioned by Shaw.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population. Thus it reverses the policy of Capitalism, which means establishing private or “real” property to the utmost physically possible extent, and then leaving distribution of income to take care of itself. The change involves a complete moral volte-face. In Socialism private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

I. Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer. The distribution which results under such circumstances presents no wider departures from a rough equality than those made morally plausible by their association with exceptional energy and ability at the one extreme, and with obvious defects of mind and character or accidental hard luck, at the other. This phase, however, does not last long under modern conditions. All the more favourable sites are soon privately appropriated; and the later comers (provided by immigration or the natural growth of the population), finding no eligible land to appropriate, are obliged to live by hiring it at a rent from its owners, transforming the latter into a rentier class enjoying unearned incomes which increase continually with the growth of the population until the landed class becomes a money-lending or capitalist class also, capital being the name given to spare money. The resource of hiring land and spare money is open to those only who are sufficiently educated to keep accounts and manage businesses, most of whom spring from the proprietary class as younger sons. The rest have to live by being hired as labourers and artisans at weekly or daily wages; so that a rough division of society into an upper or proprietary class, a middle or employing and managing class, and a wage proletariat is produced. In this division the proprietary class is purely parasitic, consuming without producing. As the inexorable operation of the economic law of rent makes this class richer and richer as the population increases, its demand for domestic servants and for luxuries of all kinds creates parasitic enterprise and employment for the middle class and the proletariat, not only withdrawing masses of them from productive industry, but also fortifying itself politically by a great body of workers and employers who vote with the owners because they are as dependent on the owners’ unearned incomes as the owners themselves.

Meanwhile the competition of employers for custom, which leads to the production of a dozen articles to satisfy the demand for one, leads to disastrous crises of feverish overproduction alternated with periods of bad trade (“booms” and “slumps”), making continuous employment of the proletariat impossible. When wages fall to a point at which saving also is impossible, the unemployed have no means of subsistence except public relief during the slumps.

It is in this phase of capitalistic development, attained in Great Britain in the 19th century, that socialism arises as a revolt against a distribution of wealth that has lost all its moral plausibility. Colossal wealth is associated with unproductiveness, and sometimes with conspicuous worthlessness of character; and lifetimes of excessive toil beginning in early childhood leave the toiler so miserably poor that the only refuge left for old age is a general workhouse, purposely made repulsive to deter proletarians from resorting to it as long as they have strength enough left for the most poorly paid job in the labour market. The inequalities become monstrous: hardworking men get four or five shillings a day (post-War rates) in full view of persons who get several thousands a day without any obligation to work at all, and even consider industrial work degrading. Such variations in income defy all attempts to relate them to variations in personal merit. Governments are forced to intervene and readjust distribution to some extent by confiscating larger and larger percentages of incomes derived from property (income tax, supertax, and estate duties) and applying the proceeds to unemployment insurance and extensions of communal services, besides protecting the proletariat against the worst extremities of oppression by an elaborate factory code which takes the control of workshops and factories largely out of the hands of their proprietors, and makes it impossible for them to exact grossly excessive hours of labour from their employees or to neglect their health, physical safety, and moral welfare with complete selfishness.

This confiscation of private property incomes for public purposes without any pretence of compensation, which is now proceeding on a scale inconceivable by Victorian ministers, has destroyed the integrity of private property and inheritance; and the success with which the confiscated capital has been applied to communal industries by the municipalities and the central Government, contrasted with the many failures and comparative costliness of capitalist industrial adventure, has shaken superstition that private commercial management is always more effective and less corrupt than public management. In particular, the British attempt to depend on private industry for munitions during the War of 1914–8 nearly led to defeat; and the substitution of national factories was so sensationally successful, and the post-War resumption of private enterprise, after a brief burst of illusory prosperity, was followed by so distressing a slump, that the reversal of the relative efficiency prestige of socialism and capitalism was vigorously accelerated, leaving capitalism unpopular and on the defensive, whilst confiscation of private capital, communal enterprise, and nationalisation of the big industries, grew steadily in popularity in and out of Parliament.

This change in public opinion had already deeply penetrated the middle class, because of the change for the worse in the position of the ordinary employer. He, in the 19th century, was admittedly master of the industrial, and, after the Reform of 1832, of the political situation. He dealt directly and even domineeringly with the proprietary class, from which he hired his land and capital either directly or through agents who were his servants and not his masters. But the sums required to set on foot and develop modern industrial schemes grew until they were out of reach of ordinary employers. The collection of money to be used as capital became a special business, conducted by professional promoters and financiers. These experts, though they had no direct contact with industry, became so indispensable to it that they are now virtually the masters of the ordinary routine employers. Meanwhile the growth of joint-stock enterprise was substituting the employee-manager for the employer, and thus converting the old independent middle class into a proletariat, and pressing it politically to the left.

With every increase in the magnitude of the capital sums required for starting or extending large industrial concerns comes the need for an increase in the ability demanded by their management; and this the financiers cannot supply: indeed they bleed industry of middle class ability by attracting it into their own profession. Matters reach a point at which industrial management by the old-fashioned tradesman must be replaced by a professionally trained and educated bureaucracy; and as Capitalism does not provide such a bureaucracy, the industries tend to get into difficulties as they grow by combination (amalgamation), and thus outgrow the capacity of the managers who were able to handle them as separate units. This difficulty is increased by the hereditary element in business.

An employer may bequeath the control of an industry involving the subsistence of thousands of workers, and requiring from its chief either great natural ability and energy or considerable scientific and political culture, to his eldest son without being challenged to prove his son’s qualifications, whilst if he proposes to make his second son a doctor or a naval officer he is peremptorily informed by the Government that only by undergoing an elaborate and prolonged training, and obtaining official certificates of qualification, can his son be permitted to assume such responsibilities. Under these circumstances, much of the management and control of industry gets divided between routine employers who do not really understand their own businesses, and financiers, who, having never entered a factory nor descended a mine shaft, do not understand any business except the business of collecting money to be used as capital, and forcing it into industrial adventures at all hazards, the result being too often reckless and senseless over-capitalisation, leading to bankruptcies (disguised as reconstructions) which reveal the most astonishing technical ignorance and economic blindness on the part of men in high repute as directors of huge industrial combinations, who draw large fees as the remuneration of a mystical ability which exists only in the imagination of the shareholders.

II. All this steadily saps the moral plausibility of capitalism. The loss of popular faith in it has gone much further than the gain of any widespread or intelligent faith in socialism. Consequently the end of the first quarter of the 20th century finds the political situation in Europe confused and threatening: all the political parties diagnosing dangerous social disease, and most of them proposing disastrous remedies. National governments, no matter what ancient party slogans they raise, find themselves controlled by financiers who follow the slot of gigantic international usuries without any public aims, and without any technical qualifications except their familiarity with a rule-of-thumb city routine quite inapplicable to public affairs, because it deals exclusively with stock exchange and banking categories of capital and credit. These, though valid in the money market when conducting exchanges of future incomes for spare ready money by the small minority of persons who have these luxuries to deal in, would vanish under pressure of any general political measure like—to take a perilously popular and plausible example—a levy on capital. Such a levy would produce a money market in which there were all sellers and no buyers, sending the Bank Rate up to infinity, breaking the banks, and bringing industry to a standstill by the transfer of all the cash available for wages to the national treasury. Unfortunately the parliamentary proletarian parties understand this as little as their capitalist opponents. They clamour for taxation of capital; and the capitalists, instead of frankly admitting that capital as they reckon it is a phantom, and that the assumption that a person with an income of £5 a year represents to the state an immediately available asset of £100 ready money, though it may work well enough as between a handful of investors and spendthrifts in a stockbroker’s office, is pure fiction when applied to a whole nation, ignorantly defend their imaginary resources as if they really existed, and thus confirm the proletariat in its delusion instead of educating it.

The financiers have their own ignis fatuus, which is that they can double the capital of the country, and thus give an immense stimulus to industrial development and production, by inflating the currency until prices rise to a point at which goods formerly marked £50 are marked £100, a measure which does nothing nationally but enable every debtor to cheat his creditor, and every insurance company and pension fund to reduce by half the provision for which it has been paid. The history of inflation in Europe since the War of 1914–8, and the resultant impoverishment of pensioners and officials with small fixed incomes, forces the middle classes to realise the appalling consequences of abandoning finance and industry direction to the unskilled, politically ignorant, unpatriotic “practical business men.”

Meanwhile, the nobility of capital leads to struggles for the possession of exploitable foreign territories (“places in the sun”) produces war on a scale which threatens not only civilisation but human existence; for the old field combats between bodies of soldiers, from which women were shielded, are now replaced by attacks from the air on the civil population, in which women and men are slaughtered indiscriminately, making replacement of the killed impossible. The emotional reaction after such wars takes the form of acute disillusion, which further accelerates the moral revolt against capitalism, without unfortunately, producing any workable conception of an alternative. The proletarians are cynically sulky, no longer believing in the disinterestedness of those who appeal to them to make additional efforts and sacrifices to repair the waste of war. The moral mainspring of the private property system is broken; and it is the confiscations of unearned income, the extensions of municipal and national communism, above all, the new subsidies in aid of wages extorted from governments by threats of nationally disastrous lock-outs and strikes, which induce the proletariat to continue operating the capitalist system now that the old compulsion to work by imposing starvation as the alternative, fundamental in capitalism, has had to be discarded in its primitive ruthlessness. The worker who refuses to work can now quarter himself on public relief (which means finally on confiscated property income) to an extent formerly impossible.

Democracy, or votes for everybody, does not produce constructive solutions of social problems; nor does compulsory schooling help much. Unbounded hopes were based on each successive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women. These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures, (b) loathe taxation as such, (c) dislike being governed at all, and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty. Compulsory schooling, far from enlightening them, inculcates the sacredness of private property, and stigmatises a distributive state as criminal and disastrous, thereby continually renewing the old public opinion against socialism, and making impossible a national education dogmatically inculcating as first principles the iniquity of private property, the paramount social importance of equality of income and the criminality of idleness.

Consequently, in spite of disillusion with capitalism, and the growing menace of failing trade and falling currencies, our democratic parliamentary Oppositions, faced with the fact that the only real remedy involves increased taxation, compulsory reorganisation or frank nationalisation of the bankrupt industries, and compulsory national service in civil as in military life for all classes, dare not confront their constituents with such proposals, knowing that on increased taxation alone they would lose their seats. To escape responsibility, they look to the suppression of parliamentary institutions by coups d’état and dictatorships, as in Italy, Spain and Russia. This despair of parliamentary institutions is a striking novelty in the present century; but it has failed to awaken the democratic electorates to the fact that, having after a long struggle gained the power to govern, they have neither the knowledge nor the will to exercise it, and are in fact using their votes to keep Government parochial when civilisation is bursting the dikes of nationality in all directions.

A more effective resistance to property arises from the organisation of the proletariat in trade unions to resist the effect of increase of population in cheapening labour and increasing its duration and severity. But trade unionism is itself a phase of capitalism, inasmuch as it applies to labour as a commodity that principle of selling in the dearest market, and giving as little as possible for the price, which was formerly applied only to land, capital and merchandise. Its method is that of a civil war between labour and capital in which the decisive battles are lock-outs and strikes, with intervals of minor adjustment by industrial diplomacy. Trade unionism now maintains a Labour party in the British Parliament. The most popular members and leaders are socialists in theory; so that there is always a paper programme of nationalisation of industries and of banking, taxation of unearned incomes to extinction, and other incidentals of a transition to socialism; but the trade union driving force aims at nothing more than capitalism with labour taking the lion’s share, and energetically repudiates compulsory national service, which would deprive it of its power to strike. In this it is heartily seconded by the proprietary parties, which, though willing enough to make strikes illegal and proletarian labour compulsory, will not pay the price of surrendering its own power to idle. Compulsory national service being essential in socialism, it is thus deadlocked equally by organised labour and by capitalism.

It is a historic fact, recurrent enough to be called an economic law, that capitalism, which builds up great civilisations, also wrecks them if persisted in beyond a certain point. It is easy to demonstrate on paper that civilisation can be saved and immensely developed by, at the right moment, discarding capitalism and changing the private property profiteering state into the common property distributive state. But though the moment for the change has come again and again it has never been effected, because capitalism has never produced the necessary enlightenment among the masses, nor admitted to a controlling share in public affairs the order of intellect and character outside which Socialism, or indeed politics, as distinguished from mere party electioneering, is incomprehensible. Not until the two main tenets of socialism: abolition of private property (which must not be confused with personal property), and equality of income, have taken hold of the people as religious dogmas, as to which no controversy is regarded as sane, will a stable socialist state be possible. It should be observed, however, that of the two tenets, the need for equality of income is not the more difficult to demonstrate, because no other method of distribution is or ever has been possible. Omitting the few conspicuous instances in which actual earners of money make extraordinary fortunes by exceptional personal gifts or strokes of luck, the existing differences of income among workers are not individual but corporate differences. Within the corporation no discrimination between individuals is possible; all common labourers, like all upper division civil servants, are equally paid. The argument for equalising the class incomes are that unequal distribution of purchasing power upsets the proper order of economic production, causing luxuries to be produced on an extravagant scale whilst the primitive vital needs of the people are left unsatisfied; that its effect on marriage, by limiting and corrupting sexual selection, is highly dysgenic; that it reduces religion, legislation, education and the administration of justice to absurdity as between rich and poor; and that it creates an idolatry of riches and idleness which inverts all sane social morality.

Unfortunately, these are essentially public considerations. The private individual, with the odds overwhelmingly against him as a social climber, dreams even in the deepest poverty of some bequest or freak of fortune by which he may become a capitalist, and dreads that the little he has may be snatched from him by that terrible and unintelligible thing, state policy. Thus the private person’s vote is the vote of Ananias and Sapphira; and democracy becomes a more effective bar to socialism than the pliant and bewildered conservatism of the plutocracy. Under such conditions the future is unpredictable. Empires end in ruins: commonwealths have hitherto been beyond the civic capacity of mankind. But there is always the possibility that mankind will this time weather the cape on which all the old civilisations have been wrecked. It is this possibility that gives intense interest to the present historic moment, and keeps the Socialist movement alive and militant.