The Human Element

A WARNING

IT IS likely that many opponents of socialism will accept my result.

But their assent will mostly take the following form:

“Oh well, of course, if you had demigods to direct the socialist engine and archangels to man it, all that might well be so. But the point is that you have not and that, human nature being what it is, the capitalist alternative with its pattern of motivations and its distribution of responsibilities and rewards after all offers, though not the best conceivable, yet the best practicable arrangement.”

There is something to this reply.

On the one hand, we have now to guard not only against the dangers that lurk in any attempt to compare a given reality with an idea, but also against the error or trick inherent i0n any comparison of a given reality with an ideal. 1 On the other hand, though I think I have made it abundantly clear that in the nature of things there never can be a general case for socialism but only a case with reference to given social conditions and given historical stages, this relativity becomes much more important now than it was as long as we moved among blueprints.

I. The Historical Relativity Of The Argument

To illustrate this point by an analogy. In feudal society, much of what all of us, the staunchest supporters of private property included, now think of as 1 An idea or schema or model or blueprint also embodies an ideal, but only in the logical sense; such an ideal means only absence of non-essentials—the unadulterated design as we might say. Of course it remains a debatable question exactly what should be included in it and what should, in consequence, be regarded as deviation. Though this should be a question of analytic technique, love and hate may enter into it nevertheless: socialists will tend to include in the blueprint of capitalism as many traits as possible that are felt to be derogatory; anti- socialists will do the same to the socialist blueprint; and both parties will try to “whitewash” their own by listing as many “blemishes” as possible among unessential, hence by implication avoidable, deviations. Even if they agree in any given case to label certain phenomena as deviations, they may still disagree as to the degree to which their own system and that of their opponents are liable to deviate. For instance, bourgeois economists will tend to attribute to “political interference” whatever they themselves do not like about capitalism while socialists will hold that these politics are the inevitable outcome of capitalist processes and situations created by the way in which the capitalist engine works. Although I recognize all these difficulties, I do not think that they affect ray exposition which as the professional reader will notice, has been framed so as to avoid them.

the exclusive domain of public administration was managed by means of an arrangement that to us looks as if those public functions had been made the objects of private ownership and the sources of private gain; every knight or lord in a hierarchy of liege relations held his fief for profit and not as a payment for the services he rendered in managing it. The now so-called public functions connected with it were but a reward for services rendered to some superior liege. Even this does not quite express the matter: he held his fief because, being a knight or lord, he was entitled to hold one whatever he did or did not do.

This state of things people who lack the historical dimension are prone to look upon as a compound of “abuses.” But that is nonsense. Under the circumstances of its own epoch—like every bit of institutional framework, feudalism survived what was truly “its” epoch—this arrangement was the only feasible one and it embodied the only method by which those public functions could be discharged. If Karl Marx had put in appearance, say, in the fourteenth century and if he had been so foolish as to advocate another method of public administration, then he would have laid himself open to the reply that such a system was an admirable device for getting done what without it could not have been done at all and in particular that “human nature being what it is” the profit motive was indispensable for the functioning of public administration; its elimination would in fact have spelled chaos and could have been well described as an impracticable dream. Similarly, at the time when the English textile mill was the high spot of capitalist economy—up to 1850, say—socialism was not a practical proposition and no sensible socialist would hold now or did hold then that it was.

The master’s eye that makes the cattle fat and turns sand to gold, the goose that lays the golden eggs and other such homely phrases then were but the expression, by and for simple and slow-witted people, of an undeniable truth. I submit to socialist friends that there is a better way of encountering them than sneering—sneering in the hope that the opponent, a vain and touchy intellectual like themselves, will cease to argue as soon as he perceives that he may encounter ridicule: it is better to recognize the rightful claim of those geese within their proper historical setting and confine denial to other historical settings. We shall then at least face the relevant question—to wit, how much there is to them now—and still retain plenty of parking space for our disagreements.

Since we must visualize a definite pattern of capitalism if comparison of capitalist reality with socialist chances of success is to have any meaning, let us choose the capitalism of our own epoch, that is to say, big-business capitalism in fetters. And let us observe first, that though this defines an epoch and a pattern it does not define any particular date, not even in terms of decades, because the question how far the pattern of fettered capitalism has developed and stabilized its features at any given time, say at present, would still have to wait upon factual investigation; second, that for this part of our argument it becomes irrelevant whether those fetters, whatever they are, have been evolved by the capitalist process itself or may be looked upon as something imposed upon it by an agency that stands outside of it; third, that though we are now going to deal with somewhat more practical problems—namely, how far socialism can be expected to reap the harvest that is potentially present in its blueprint—we shall still be speaking of chances only and that assumptions will have to step in to remedy our ignorance about what kind of socialism will be our fate.