The Acquisitive Society

"To escape such inequality it is necessary to recognize that there is some principle which ought to limit the gains of particular classes and particular individuals, because gains drawn from certain sources or exceeding certain amounts are illegitimate. But such a limitation implies a standard of discrimination, which is inconsistent with the assumption that each man has a right to what he can get, irrespective of any service rendered for it."

"Property and inherited wealth and the apparatus of class institutions have made opportunities unequal. Inequality... leads to the mis-direction of production."

"Part of the goods which are annually produced, and which are called wealth, is, strictly speaking, waste, because it consists of articles which... either should not have been produced until other articles had already been produced in sufficient abundance, or should not have been produced at all. And some part of the population is employed in making goods which no man can make with happiness, or indeed without loss of self-respect, because he knows that they had much better not be made; and that his life is wasted in making them."

"As long as a minority has so large an income that part of it, if spent at all, must be spent on trivialities, so long will part of the human energy and mechanical equipment of the nation be diverted from serious work, which enriches it, to making trivialities, which impoverishes it."

"So to those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple question may be addressed:—"Produce what?" ...What can be more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is misapplied? Is not less production of futilities as important as, indeed a condition of, more production of things of moment?... Yet this result of inequality... cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and industrial activity."

"The true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true cause of international warfare. It is that if men recognize no law superior to their desires, then they must fight when their desires collide. For though groups or nations which are at issue with each other may be willing to submit to a principle which is superior to them both, there is no reason why they should submit to each other."

"It is true... of all classes in a society which conducts its affairs on the principle that wealth, instead of being proportioned to function, belongs to those who can get it: They are never satisfied... for as they make that principle the guide of their individual lives and of their social order, nothing short of infinity could bring them satisfaction."

"The prevalent insistence upon rights, and prevalent neglect of functions, brings men into a vicious circle which they cannot escape, without escaping from the false philosophy which dominates them. But it does something more. It makes that philosophy itself seem plausible and exhilarating... not only for industry... but for politics and culture and religion and the whole compass of social life."

"The possibility that one aspect of human life may be so exaggerated as to overshadow and... atrophy every other, has been made familiar... by... "Prussian militarism." ...political institutions and social arrangements and intellect and morality and religion are crushed into a mould made to fit one activity, which in a sane society is a subordinate activity... but which in a militarist state is a kind of mystical epitome of society itself."

"Militarism... is fetish worship. It is the prostration of men's souls before, and the laceration of their bodies to appease, an idol. ...Reverence for economic activity and industry and what is called business is also fetish worship, and in their devotion to that idol they torture themselves as needlessly, and indulge in the same meaningless antics."

"Industrialism is no more a necessary characteristic of an economically developed society than militarism is a necessary characteristic of a nation which maintains military forces. ...the idea that it is something inevitable... is itself a product of the perversion of mind which industrialism produces."

"Men may use what mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for their use. What kills their souls is when they allow their instruments to use them."

"The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place which it should occupy among human interests and activities into being the standard by which all other interests and activities are judged."

"When a Cabinet Minister declares that the greatness of this country depends upon the volume of its exports, so that France, with exports comparatively little, and Elizabethan England, which exported next to nothing, are presumably to be pitied as altogether inferior civilizations, that is Industrialism. ...When the Press clamours that the one thing needed to make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and yet more productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of means with ends."

"It is the social purpose of industry which gives it meaning and makes it worth while to carry it on at all."

"They destroy religion and art and morality... and having destroyed these, which are the end, for the sake of industry, which is a means, they make their industry itself what they make their cities, a desert of unnatural dreariness, which only forgetfulness can make endurable, and which only excitement can enable them to forget."

"To what can one compare such a society but to the international world, which also has been called a society and which also is social in nothing but name?"

"It is not a chance that the last two centuries, which saw the new growth of a new system of industry, saw also the growth of the system of international politics... Both... are the expression of the same spirit and move in obedience to similar laws. The... former was the repudiation of any authority superior to the individual reason. It left men free to follow their own interests or ambitions or appetites.... The... latter was the repudiation of any authority superior to the sovereign state."

"Nationalism is... the counterpart among nations of what individualism is within them. ...emphasis on the rights of separate units, not on their subordination to common obligations. ...it appeals to the self-assertive instincts, to which it promises opportunities of unlimited expansion. And.... pushed to its logical conclusion, it is self-destructive. ...condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few."

"They [nationalism and individualism] rose together. It is probable that, if ever they decline, they will decline together."

"The world reaps in war what it sows in peace."

"To expect that international rivalry can be exorcised as long as the industrial order within each nation is such as to give success to those whose existence is a struggle for self-aggrandizement, is a dream which has not even the merit of being beautiful."

"The perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of individualism is industrialism. ...because the principle is defective and reveals its defects as it reveals its power. For it asserts that the rights of nations and individuals are absolute, which is false. ...their sphere itself is contingent upon the part which they play in the community of nations and individuals... It constrains them to a career of indefinite expansion, in which they devour continents and oceans, law, morality and religion, and last of all their own souls, in an attempt to attain infinity by the addition to themselves of all that is finite."

"A balance of power... whether in international politics or in industry, is unstable, because it reposes not on the common recognition of a principle by which... nations and individuals are limited, but on an attempt to find an equipoise... without adjuring the assertion of unlimited claims. Thus... on this plane, there is no solution."

"We have been witnessing... both in international affairs and in industry... the breakdown of the organization of society on the basis of rights divorced from obligations."

"A right should not be absolute for the same reason that a power should not be absolute."

"It was the reaction against the abuses of absolute power by the State which led in the eighteenth century to the declaration of the absolute rights of individuals. ... Because Governments and the relics of feudalism had encroached upon the property of individuals it was affirmed that the right of property was absolute; because they had strangled enterprise, it was affirmed that every man had a natural right to conduct his business as he pleased."

"All rights... are conditional and derivative, because all power should be conditional and derivative. They are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist."

"If society is to be healthy, men must regard themselves not as the owners of rights, but as trustees for the discharge of functions and the instruments of a social purpose."

"The American Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man both treated property as one of the fundamental rights which Governments exist to protect. The English Revolution of 1688... had in effect done the same. The great individualists from Locke to Turgot, Adam Smith and Bentham all repeated... a similar conception. ...the dogma of the sanctity of private property was maintained as tenaciously by French as by English ; and the theory that property is an absolute, which is held by many modern Conservatives, is identical... with that not only of the men of 1789, but of the Convention itself."

"The general note of what may conveniently be called the Socialist criticism of property is what the word Socialism itself implies. ...that the economic evils of society are primarily due to the unregulated operation, under modern conditions of industrial organization, of the institution of private property."

"In most discussions of property the opposing theorists have usually been discussing different things."

"Property... covers a multitude of rights which have nothing in common except that they are exercised by persons and enforced by the State."

"It is idle... to present a case for or against private property without specifying the particular forms of property to which reference is made, and the journalist who says that "private property is the foundation of civilization" agrees with Proudhon, who said it was theft, in this respect at least that, without further definition, the words of both are meaningless."

"The course of wisdom is neither to attack private property in general nor to defend it in general; for things are not similar in quality, merely because they are identical in name. It is to discriminate between the various concrete embodiments of what, in itself, is, after all, little more than an abstraction."

"Property, it is argued, is a moral right, and not merely a legal right, because it insures that the producer will not be deprived by violence of the result of his efforts. The period from which that doctrine was inherited differed from our own in three obvious, but significant, respects."

"Before the rise of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industry, the ownership, or at any rate the secure and effective occupation, of land and tools by those who used them, was a condition precedent to effective work in the field or in the workshop. ...The interference... involved the sacrifice of those who carried on useful labour to those who did not. To resist... was to protect not only property but industry, which was indissolubly connected with it."

"The English Parliamentarians and the French philosophers who made the inviolability of property rights the centre of their political theory, when they defended those who owned, were incidentally, if sometimes unintentionally, defending those who laboured."

"The doctrine which found the justification of private property in the fact that it enabled the industrious man to reap where he had sown, was not a paradox, but, as far as the mass of the population was concerned, almost a truism."

"Property was defended as the most sacred of rights. ...a right which was not only widely exercised, but... indispensable to... providing food and clothing. For it consisted predominantly of... land or tools which were used by the owner for the purpose of production, and personal possessions which were the necessities or amenities of civilized existence."

"The typical workman was not a labourer but a peasant or small master... the moral justification of the title to property was self-evident. It was obviously, what theorists said that it was, and plain men knew it to be, the labour spent in producing, acquiring and administering it. Such property was not a burden upon society, but a condition of its health and efficiency, and indeed, of its continued existence. To protect it was to maintain the organization through which public necessities were supplied."

"Before the rise of a commercial civilization, it was the mark of statesmanship... to cherish the small property-owner even to the point of offending the great.... Popular sentiment idealized the yeoman—"the Joseph of the country who keeps the poor from starving"... [and] cursed the usurer who took advantage of his neighbour's necessities to live without labour."

"When Bacon, who commended Henry VII for protecting the tenant right of the small farmer, and pleaded in the House of Commons for more drastic land legislation, wrote "Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it be spread," he was expressing in an epigram that was the commonplace of every writer on politics from Fortescue at the end of the fifteenth century to Harrington in the middle of the seventeenth."

"It is not merely that the ownership of any substantial share in the national wealth is concentrated today in the hands of a few... and that at the end of an age which began with an affirmation of the rights of property, proprietary rights are, in fact, far from being widely distributed. Nor is it merely that what makes property insecure today is not the arbitrary taxation... or the privileges of an idle noblesse, but the insatiable expansion and aggregation of property itself, which menaces with absorption all property less than the greatest, the small master, the little shopkeeper, the country bank, and has turned the mass of mankind into a proletariat working under the agents and for the profit of those who own."

"The characteristic fact, which differentiates most modern property from that of the pre-industrial age, and which turns against it the very reasoning by which formerly it was supported, is that in modern economic conditions ownership is not active, but passive, that to most of those who own property today it is not a means of work but an instrument for the acquisition of gain or the exercise of power, and that there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or power to responsibility."

"In modern industrial societies the great mass of property consists, as the annual review of wealth passing at death reveals, neither of personal acquisitions such as household furniture, nor of the owner's stock-in-trade, but of rights of various kinds, such as royalties, ground-rents, and, above all, of course shares in industrial undertakings which yield an income irrespective of any personal service rendered by their owners."

"Ownership and use are normally divorced. The greater part of modern property... is normally valued precisely because it relieves the owner from any obligation to perform a positive or constructive function. Such property may be called passive property, or property for acquisition, for exploitation, or for power."

"It is questionable... whether economists shall call it "Property" at all, and not rather, as Mr. Hobson has suggested, "Improperty.""

"In [parts of] the United States... the population of peasant proprietors and small masters of the early nineteenth century were replaced in three generations by a propertyless proletariat and a capitalist plutocracy."

"The abolition of the economic privileges of agrarian feudalism, which, under the name of equality, was the driving force of the French Revolution, and which has taken place... in all countries touched by its influence, has been largely counter-balanced since 1800 by the growth of the inequalities springing from Industrialism."