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 then:

Such is the scheme I design for this book.

The Servile State

I

Definitions

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 men we call a “proletariat.”

“Property” is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the “property” of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the state, meaning that those who “own” such property are guaranteed by the laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use. “Private property” signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations other than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state, or is only a part of the state (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr. Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as Mr. Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr. Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life of the town.

An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community we call “collectivist,” or more generally “socialist.”1

A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the state, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian, we call “capitalist”; and the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion.

The two marks, then, defining the “capitalist state” are: (1) That the citizens thereof are politically free: i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the state as a whole is not characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or even to a small minority. Such a capitalist state is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other propertyless or proletarian.