Chapter X. The Economics of the Free Society

CHAPTER X The Economics of the Free Society History within nations consists of the struggle of the individual against government j and between nations, of the free economy against the closed economy. These are two aspects of the same process. The primitive life of humanity is a unique phase of natural history, being occupied with the effort of man to master his environment instead of merely adapting himself to it. The use of fire, of hunting weapons, and the taming of animals, come under this head. When he has succeeded in such direct contacts, the next step is to begin changing his environment, by cultivation of the soil, by building permanent shelter and storage, and finally by contriving mechanism for the conversion of energy 5 these call for timespace organization by delegating authority. But since such authority can only be prohibitive, the problem is to keep this repressive agency subordinate to the creative faculty. The difficulty is enormous; an advanced understanding of engineering principles is required for its solution. In default, the class system developed, an order which places the whole community under arrest,* estops energy at the source, and restricts it to a local circuit. Original thought therefore becomes a crime, because it would release energy.

Even in a high culture with a class system, the repressive principle exhibits its character by imposing the death penalty for unauthorized opinion, as heresy or treason. *As lately as the reign of Louis XIV in France it was advisable for a noble about the court to ask leave even to go to his own estate, because he could be imprisoned at the king's pleasure indeterminately without charge or trial by lettre de cachet. Or he might instead be forbidden to quit his estate, or to return to Paris. 94 THE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY 95 We see this system returning now, first by degrees and then by blanket orders preventing movement or herding people into concentration camps. Before the world war of 1914, this medieval condition of general arrest had been largely thrown off and half forgotten almost everywhere except in Czarist Russia, which remained a muddle of barbarism, absolutism, and anarchy. The more civilized nations did not require passports, but issued them on request of their citizens merely because they might be called for in such backward regions. The reactionary drift toward status government is also signalized by the persistent discrediting of reason, and the deliberate corruption of language, to prevent communication.

Misuse of language is the means by which the Marxist cult of Communism has done the most serious injury to intelligence. There is a natural obstacle to progress in abstract thought which has often delayed rational inquiry 5 an erroneous concept or theory may be expressed in terms which embody the error, so that thinking is blocked until the misleading words are discarded from the given context. The ancient classification of earth, air, fire, and water as "elements" was such an error, which had to be abandoned before the elements could be distinguished and denominated as such. The theory of elements was a correct and penetrating guess; but the phenomena assigned were wrong. On the other hand, the notion of the four "humors" of the body was an erroneous theory, which seriously hindered the science of medicine. Likewise the Cartesian theory of "vortices," and the assumption of the existence of a kind of essence of fire or heat, called "phlogiston," were verbal obstacles to extension of knowledge of physics. These are unfortunate fixations of language which the keenest intellects may establish on the borders of the unknown. As they cannot be refuted until something further really is known, while they tend to prevent the advance, they are a more serious handicap than statements which are simply and demonstrably false 5 yet 96 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE they occur in the nature of things, and are not immune to reason in the long run.

But the Marxist terminology reduces verbal expression to literal nonsense on the basis of fact and usage 5 this is not obvious gibberish, nor the humorous nonsense which will sometimes elucidate an intrinsic difficulty of expression or indicate a gap in knowledge, but arrangements of words according to the rules of grammar, in which each word taken separately has a customary meaning, but which in the given sequence, the sentence, mean nothing at all. For example, let it be said that: "An isosceles triangle is green." The several words are in common use, and as parts of speech they are placed in proper order 5 but the whole statement is absurd. That is bad enough, but it would be rather worse if one spoke of the "roundness of a triangle." The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" is like the "roundness of a triangle," a contradiction in terms. It has no meaning. The theory of "dialectical materialism" is a misuse of terms of the same type as the statement that an isosceles triangle is green. It posits an inevitable succession of a thesis producing its opposite or antithesis and the fissiparous abstraction reuniting into a synthesis. As nothing in nature does go through any such transmogrification, endless and senseless debate may be carried on by which social relations are said to exhibit in various phases a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, each credited with "producing" its "opposite" and merging again into something else, like the Squidgicum Squee that swallers itself. Fools might argue solemnly that an isosceles triangle is not green but blue, or that a green isosceles triangle will produce a blue circle and the two will then synthesize into a purple cow or rhomboid 5 still these statements are empty.

This is specifically the language of fools; for the deficiency which is indicated by the word fool is the incapacity to understand categories and the relation of things and qualities. Marx was a fool with a large vocabulary of long words. Yet he did have an unacknowledged need to adopt the nonTHE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY 97 sensical "dialectic" of Hegel. A parasitical pedant, shiftless and dishonest, he wanted to put in a claim on "society" solely as a consumer. He embraced Communism because no other theory can be stretched even on paper into promising "to each according to his needs." Only a presumed "common stock" into which all production is expropriated can be imagined as available for the nonproducer to grab what he wants from it, although this is pure imagination, the dream of the incompetent and vicious or of the child mind unschooled in production. On the other hand, Marx was confronted by the historic fact that in Communism as a general order production never rises above a bare subsistence level. How was he then to even imagine abundant production into Communism?

He could only assume that the "means of production" brought to a high standard with private property and free individual enterprise, which is capitalism, could be expropriated and kept going by a successor regime of Communism. True, no such thing had ever happened 5 the nearest approach to Communism as the social norm was always very primitive; but if he first imagined "dialectical materialism," and then arbitrarily called capitalism the thesis j and then designated the unpropertied as the proletarian antithesis, he might further assert that the two would "merge" by conflict and produce a "synthesis" which would have to be Communism if he said so. Since it had never happened, he could say that it was inevitably going to happen. He could also, quite as easily, while he was about it, call the capitalist society of contract the class system although it positively was not. Marx's theory of class war is utter nonsense by its own definition 5 it has no reference to either class or war, if it relates to "capital" and "labor." It is physically impossible for "labor" and "capital" to engage in war on each other.

Capital is property; labor is men. All that can occur is sporadic rioting and possibly destruction of property, for the very weapons of war in an industrial society can be produced 98 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE and maintained only by "capital" and "labor" in combination. In a true class society, classes are the several layers of a stratified order 5 class is nothing but horizontal relative 'position. Therefore one class cannot displace another, nor abolish it by action as a class. When and if classes exist, the persons occupying a given relative position belong to the denominated class. Conceivably the particles might be transposed, but the classes would remain as before—whatever is at the top is at the top, and whatever is below is below. Though invaders might depose the members of an indigenous upper class and occupy the position, neither would this alter the system 5 and such invasion is not a class war.

But since the class system is imposed on the creative energy to check its flow, it is inevitably liable to internal disturbance. The energy may cause a cleavage between the upper and lower strata, by which they break into violent opposition; this is a genuine class war, and frequently occurred. Nevertheless, as such, a class war can effect no change, and has never done so. Even the transposition of persons as particles from one class to another rarely occurred by violent means. The repeated revolts or jacqueries in feudal society were abortive by their nature—being true class conflicts. It has been implied—by the statement that gunpowder abolished the Middle Ages—that the peasant was defenseless against the knight. On the contrary, the knight was hopelessly vulnerable to the peasant. A man in armor relying for mobility on a horse in armor could be put out of action, the horse hamstrung, the rider brought down, by one or two quick-footed men with scythes and pitchforks. The knight could scarcely mount unaided; on the ground he was clumsy; if he fell, he could not spring up nimbly. A human tortoise, the knight was equipped only to encounter another knight.

He was no less dependent economically. His armor had to be forged by the smith, his food and clothes supplied and his horse maintained by the labor of the peasant. The knight THE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY 99 knew no useful art, and was wholly an endproduct of a rigid system. If the system were interrupted for more than a very short time, the knight must perish anyhow.* And in many instances the jacqueries gained an immediate victory by violence. Over considerable localities the peasants slaughtered their lords and took their castles, which they looted and wrecked. Yet they could get no further, and were presently subdued again; nothing could come of it except more severe repression. The majority of the peasants would have no inducement to raise a few of their number to the rank of seigneurs, while all could not attain to it because the order of chivalry necessitated peasants to support it.

Acting as a class, the peasants could have no other than the class principle upon which to re-institute society. Hence the jacqueries were bound to be crushed, by the very class principle which united them in their rebellion. When the society of contract began to emerge again and dissolve the class system, members of all classes and groups fought on both sides, individuals taking part for or against the order. In the French Revolution, the most stubborn defense of the old regime was made in rural Brittany, by the peasants of the Vendee, under a peasant commander. Their stand was unavailing because the weapons of a class society belong to a lower mode of conversion of energy than the weapons of a society of contract. This was the significance of gunpowder; it is the product of a free economy, which does not debar inquiry and invention. It is an instrument or effect, not a cause. The invention of productive machinery and its continued use is possible only in a free economy, being consonant with * In recent years, it has been asserted that revolution becomes impossible when a government has machine technology at its disposal, because the unarmed populace is helpless against high-power weapons. On the contrary, the technically equipped army depends absolutely on the uninterrupted free functioning of the civil order for its weapons and supplies. Airplanes and tanks are even more immediately dependent on factory production than the knight was on the blacksmith. And machine production cannot be maintained efficiently by forced labor.

IO0 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE its axioms in relation to energy. The equivalent of the feudal order in the set-up of a machine would be to load the motor with dead-weight so that it could not operate until some of the weight were removed; and to set the brake so that it should be applied whenever the motor started, or rather, immediately before the start. Probably the popular notion today of the medieval economy is that under it the common people were compelled to work very hard. They were certainly subject to forced labor, and their work was performed by slow, exhausting, and unproductive methods j but the real hardship was that they were not allowed to work otherwise. Working could be punished as a crime. For example, it was illegal to make, own, or use a handmill at home. (Essentially the same type of penalty has lately been reintroduced with the farm quota tax and the processing tax.) Even the medieval oxyoke was so ill-designed that when the animal pulled it was somewhat choked. So it was with men 5 competence and thrift were penalized. The one who tilled the land could never hope to own it 5 improvements reverted to the seigneur and would be more than likely to ensue additional dues. Further, on the death of a serf, the seigneur seized part of the goods and chattels, as heriot, always taking the best, no matter how little remained for the widow and children. (The reintroduction of death duties, estate taxes, is a reversion to the medieval heriot. At first falling only on large estates, it is rapidly reaching down to the least scrap of inheritance.

Heriot was recognized as the mark of the serf.) In feudal society, when men spoke of rights or liberties, they claimed them as by charter or usage, in either case referring back to a permissive grant in the past, which they must show they had not forfeited by failure to render dues or service. The principle was that a man must pay for license to work or leave to walk about. Finally, restriction of trade limited available materials j people hadn't much to work with. When the productive element at length regained a measTHE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY IOI ure of natural freedom, they indulged in something like an orgy of work, satisfying a theretofore thwarted craving. Free men drove themselves harder than any seigneur had ever managed to drive his serfs, and produced three times as much even with manual labor, simultaneously devising productive machinery. This unparalleled outburst of energy was beneficial by the increase of goods and of knowledge. But it got under way in Europe while part of the aristocratic structure remained in land tenure. Goods and labor were in the free market, the society of contract; a great deal of the land was not, being entailed and under long lease for ground rents.

The landless laborer had nothing to stand on, and was caught, so to speak, between a motor car and a stone wall, or thrown against a rock by a rushing stream. The wagelaborer has never gained a solid footing in Europe. The "mixed economy" invariably includes the onerous features of both status and contract, worsened by combination. In the field of industry, during the early industrial era, the exceptionally shrewed, tough, and capable individuals set the pace for the less able and weaker ones. An employer who got his start by driving himself expected the utmost exertions from the wage-workers he hired. (The margin of compensation was presumed to lie in the chances of the future—but the work was done in the present, and the employer could give no guarantees for the future.) Moreover, the hours of employment were a holdover from the medieval and rural economy, in which men worked from dawn till dark} but the medieval pace was comparatively slow, with slack seasons and as many holidays as the tenants and serfs could win through the church. The free economy quickened the pace, cut down holidays, and kept the long working day, even extending it by artificial light. Yet both the speed-up and low wages were still partly exacted by pressure from the aristocracy, the remains of status. In the full feudal society the seigneurs had to raise and subsist the fighting forces and meet other political costs locally; and the king was supposed 102 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE co live at his own expense, from his landed property. In the transition period the army and civil list became a national charge, supported by general taxation, while the nobility not only took lucrative offices but drew on industry for ground rents without releasing land to the market for improvement by competitive building. Lord Shaftesbury, the celebrated reformer, admitted privately that he accused the manufacturers though he knew the blame rested equally on the land-owners, because he needed a party to pass his laws.

What he did not realize was that he also was acting as an aristocrat, for the "reform" laws he framed, however wellmeant, were status law in a new guise. The gentry also abused their position by grabbing and enclosing the common lands, which had given villagers a modicum of independence, a physical base. In general, while sneering at the profit motive of industry, the gentry never let a penny get by them, whether it came from a slum tenement or a shepherd's hut or even a soldier's food allowance. Thus the upper class absorbed most of the material benefit of the emerging contract society, and was at the same time relieved of its main duties. The only good which accrued at first to the average workingman was that the door was openj and America existed. (If America had not existed, it is impossible to know whether or not the door would have been forced open.) The free workingman could change his employment, his residence, even his country, if he had courage for the venture.

Yet this possibility was enough, a sufficient number of persons availing themselves of it, in the course of a century, to raise the level of wages and opportunity, of cleanliness and comfort and convenience, to a standard which would have seemed fabulous to the medieval seigneur. Working hours were likewise shortened 5 the drive was transferred to machinery 5 freedom yielded its fruits. Now, with the contemporary decrease of liberty, hours are already lengthening THE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY 103 even in America; production is lessening; and the speed-up is being re-imposed on men instead of machines. The deadlock of class can be broken either by reverting through barbarism (leadership) to savagery, or by advancing to the political organization appropriate to the society of contract. But the advance could not be made until a structure had been erected to accommodate the mechanism, including the type of control which is used in motor mechanics by the various applications known as safety devices, whether brakes, governors, or stabilizers. The essential feature of such appliances is that they do not and cannot take effect until the actual need arises. They are set to operate only if the motor and transmission goes wrong. A railway airbrake locks the wheels if the coupling gives way; a safety valve opens at the danger point of steam pressure; a fuse blows out with an overload of current, saving the wires; a gyroscope is neutral while the plane is in balance. What must be borne in mind is that these are not preventive controls, but corrective; they are not primary but secondary.

Contract law is the same type of mechanism in the political organization. The legal restriction does not occur until after individuals have made a voluntary contract and one of the parties fails to carry out its terms. Contract law has no primary authority, no jurisdiction unless invoked by the individual; and then it can take cognizance only of the point at issue, which is determined by the previous agreement of individuals. It is indisputably nothing but an agency, initiative being vested in the individual. It is the only method of organization which leaves the creative faculty and corollary productive processes their inherent and necessary freedom. The political instrument must be of a secondary character. But any type of organization predicates a permanent base. It must have fixed locality for its structure. This is true even of mechanisms expressly designed for mobility; an airplane requires a base no less than an old-fashioned grist-mill. The 104 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE landing-field is the base of the plane j but in a larger view, the plane is part of the transmission line of a very longcircuit energy system which rests on the base of private property as an institution. It has to be individual private property j neither group property nor state communism can generate such a high potential of energy. The collectivist nations of today (Russia, Italy, Germany, Japan) are operating airplanes on energy taken off at the end of a longcircuit of energy generated in free economies in the recent past.

The problem of structure for a political organization delayed the founding of a full Society of Contract for thousands of years. The first political structure men were able to find or devise was that of an aristocracy. Though it must have begun as an extension of the family (unwarranted in nature), it was later supposed to be validated by a concept or theory which had even less relation to fact. The noble came to be regarded, or regarded himself, as of a superior species, elevated to his position by a semi-mystical, semi-physical difference from the peasant or commoner, a difference of "blood" confirmed by divine ordinance. Biology can discover no evidence to bear out this theory; for though a noble family may have been founded by some person of exceptional talent, it does not breed true 5 the descendants revert to the average. Furthermore, the line was frequently broken, and the blood mixed with that of recruits from the presumedly inferior lower ranks. Finally, aristocracies have been disestablished, and no mystical divinity intervened in their favor. It is impossible to define in rational terms just what the aristocratic quality was thought to be. That epitome of the order, the Duke de Saint-Simon, who "believed" in it fanatically, described many of his fellow nobles as scoundrels, imbeciles, lunatics, cowards, liars, toadies, pimps, wastrels, and profligates, deformed, diseased, ugly, feeble, disloyal, and otherwise useless or detrimental 5 yet his faith remained unshaken.

And there was a fact beneath the fantasy. Though it was obsolete in France when observed by Saint-Simon, and so THE ECONOMICS OF THE FREE SOCIETY 105 doubly corrupted, aristocracy in its time had a practical use. It delimited the fixed bases for a political structure, by local sovereignty of territorial subdivisions. The original titles, privileges, and offices of the great nobles were attached to particular areas of land and inseparable from them. It was not the class solidarity of an aristocracy which enabled it to serve as structure, but the separateness of the units, a system of decentralization. The bitter indictments of aristocracies were true enough; the order is oppressive not merely by abuse but in principle. However romancers may prettify the picture in retrospect, the seigneur was not above extorting cash to permit a girl to get married or a boy to learn to read, or taking the bereaved widow's one cow and best bed; a regular perquisite of the lord of the manor was the manure from the livestock of the tenantry. The aristocracy blocked out light and air. It was bound to evoke hatred, the emotional expression of frustrated energy. The mechanism of government it used, status law, is that of the preventive clutch. Its social atmosphere is tinged with despair; during the Dark Ages, when aristocracy prevailed, men had visions of death and hell and the end of the world, misery here and hereafter. But men tolerated it sullenly because they did not know what to put in its place. If they pulled down the pillars of the structure, the roof fell on them. They had to have some local form to resist both the barbarians and the centralized bureaucracy which had delivered them to the barbarians. Complete stagnation was obviated by the flow of energy channeled through the modified contract society of the church, with some concurrent trade; and it is no accident that commerce was carried on in the shelter of the cathedral. The church also preserved learning, since the written word is indispensable to a longcircuit energy system.

So the forces of static and of kinetic energy effected an uneasy accommodation, though in constant peril from within and without.