The Problem Stated

The problem with which we are faced is as follows: citizens politically free and politically equal do not possess the means of livelihood. The reserves of food and of clothing, of housing, of fuel and the rest, without which human life cannot be conducted, are in the possession of, and under the control of, men different from, and much smaller in number than, the mass of citizens.It is the mass of citizens who must do the work whereby their livelihood is produced. Yet the mass of citizens are dispossessed in great areas of the world, and particularly in those countries under what is called “Capitalist Organization.” The mass of citizens are the proletarians. Such of them as can be kept alive by the minority (whose motive in keeping them alive is to make profit out of their labor) have subsistence, though no proper security of that subsistence, and no voice in what shall be made nor any property in what they make. Meanwhile a margin for whom work cannot be found would starve to death were they not artificially supported by public funds under public officials.The free and equal citizen has political freedom, he has not economic freedom. Such a state of things cannot endure.Let us be dear on the two essential parts of this state of affairs: citizenship and destitution. Citizens without property, citizens with no safeguard for their livelihood, men politically free but deprived of economic freedom suffer in intolerable situation which we must set right.Where men are not free, where, by the whole organization of society, they are compelled to labor, where they are defined by law as slaves, they have a heavy grievance indeed. But they are not citizens. They are not conscious of an intolerable contrast between their admitted rights and their actual conditions. It is when the free man, the citizen, is reduced to economic subjection under other free men, that an impossible state of affairs arises. “You say I am free? And yet I cannot even live save by your leave! You say I am free? All your laws proclaim it, it is my proudest boast; yet I may not possess the thing which I make with my own labor! You say I am free? Yet the hours in which I am to work, and the conditions under which I have to work are imposed upon me by others. You say I am free? Yet the product of my labor does not belong to me, it belongs to another, for whose advantage I am constrained to drudgery. You say I am free? Yet I cannot choose what I will consume save within very narrow limits. I must take what is presented to me by a system of production which I did not create and which is indifferent to my desires. You say I am free and equal with my fellows? But in practice I am in thrall to those who hold that whereby men live; machines and the soil and the raw material and the necessary reserves of food and clothing and the rest which men, called my equals, have in their control and which I have not.”A freeman, finding himself in such circumstances necessarily becomes a rebel. It is the contrast between freedom and unfree conditions of life which has set up the intolerable conditions of the modern state. That is the main problem stated in simplest terms.Almost in living memory the mass of modern men lived in houses which were their own, produced food and clothing and the rest from land which was their own, possessed the fruits of their toil, decided what they would produce and what they would consume. Within living memory there still remained so large a proportion of men whose political freedom corresponded to an economic freedom that the old tradition survived. A society in which free men owned their farms, their stores, their blacksmith’s forges, their fishing craft, their carpenter shops and the rest, still continued though it was threatened and diminishing. Today the disproportion between the men economically free and the men economically unfree, has grown so hugely as to throw the whole State out of balance. To restore the balance is the chief task before us.Such is the main problem. There run intermixed with it and necessarily produced by it, other disadvantages: monotony of work which is not chosen by the worker; monopoly of produce into which craftsmanship does not enter; instability of every kind, insecurity and insufficiency. Vast numbers of men lacking proper sustenance and yet vaster numbers lacking all certitude for the morrow. There has grown up also a control over all human activities, by what we call “finance”- the reign of usury and of debt. Again, great numbers of men working for the profit of the few are a contradiction of what useful labor should be. It has become of advantage to the worker to produce as little as possible for as short time as possible, at as high a cost as possible. It has become of advantage to the actual producer of wealth to check and diminish or extinguish the production of wealth. We see that deadly paradox at work on every side.Worst of all perhaps, there has grown up that habit of destitution, that loss of the sense of ownership and of real responsibility through freedom, which we call the “proletarian mind.” With each of these points I will deal in their turn, but let us begin with the statement of the problem in its major form: we have fallen into a state where free men, equal citizens, are, in the mass, destitute, wholly dependent upon a minority of their more fortunate fellows and in acute antagonism. It cannot go on.