So by the time the new inventions revolutionised the economy, it was already capitalist; that is, the majority of men did not own a share of the means of production, and were thus compelled to labour for a wage for the few who did. The horrors which followed were the result of an already established structure, they were not the results of industrialisation and the consequent creation of the often truly wonderful modern world per se.
The Real Alternative
We have already seen how the exploitation and alienation of capitalism led to a powerful socialist reaction. But it also produced a strong opposition from those who stood by the institution of property, condemning its perversion rather than the original concept itself. In England the tradition began in the eighteenth century with William Cobbett, the radical champion of the small man against the tyranny of the landed oligarchy.
Throughout the industrialised west of Europe, this line of thought received a tremendous boost from the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, at the end of the nineteenth century. This was an outspoken criticism of capitalism and a staunch defence of private property as the basis of a healthy and moral society. It had a powerful effect upon several generations of thinkers and authors, of whom the most important in England was Hilaire Belloc, one time Liberal MP, friend and close colleague of G.K. Chesterton, and the man who first coined the phrase “distributist”, to describe a society whose determining stamp was the widespread private ownership of the means of production and distribution.
Creation of the Distributist League
Belloc and Chesterton refined their ideas and set about promoting them through the Distributist League, an organisation which attracted many other first-rate minds to the service of the ideal of private ownership with its attendant rights and responsibilities.
They were by no means the only people from the traditionalist side of political thought to campaign for property and a return to the land and to craftsmanship (there was an articulate and varied non-socialist, non-Catholic critique of capitalism in English literature from at least the time of William Cobbett’s classic Cottage Economy, running through 1930’s thinkers such as H.J. Massingham and Henry Williamson) but their approach was undoubtedly the most effective. Three books in particular by these two giants of English literature stand to this day as masterpieces of non-socialist anti-capitalism: The Servile State and An Essay on the Restoration of Property by Belloc, and Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity.
These added up to a devastating exposé of the yawning gap between the theory of capitalism (ownership) and its practice (monopoly). But they appeared at a point in history where the different brands of the socialist “answer” to the old system had captured the hearts and minds of intellectuals and idealists all over Europe.
They were ahead of their time, for there was no chance of the Distributist position emerging victorious in the war of ideas until the mania for socialism had run its course. This had still not happened when Pope Pius XII issued another vitally important Encyclical on social doctrine, Quadrigesimo Anno, which further developed the traditional critique of capitalism.
The message of the Distributists was summed up by Belloc in an article entitled The Alternative, written before the Great War:
“What they (the Distributists) say is, that if you could make a society in which the greater part of citizens owned capital and land in small quantities, that society would be happy and secure. They say (as everyone must) that such a subdivision is quite possible with regard to land; but they also believe it to be possible with regard to shares in industrial concerns.”
“When they are told that such a high division of this sort would necessarily and soon drift again into a congested state of ownership, with a few great capitalists on the one hand and a wretched proletariat upon the other, they answer that, as a matter of fact, in the past, when property was thus well divided, it did not drift into that condition, but that the highly divided state of property was kept secure for centuries by public opinion translating itself into laws and customs, by a method of guilds, of mutual societies, by an almost religious feeling of the obligation not to transgress certain limits of competition, etc.”
“When they are told that a state in which property was highly divided would involve more personal responsibility and personal anxiety than would the socialist state, they freely admit this, but they add that such responsibilities and anxieties are natural to freedom in any shape and are the price one must pay for it.”
Any socialist tract written at the beginning of the twentieth century is today obviously, painfully, even pathetically out of date. But the writings of the early Distributists are as valuable and incisive today as they were a lifetime ago. This is a clear indication of their accuracy and truth.
Influence of Distributist ideas
Even through the long years when political debate was overshadowed by the sham fight between capitalism and state capitalist socialism, these distributist ideas had a great impact. Their influence can be traced in the massive expansion of home ownership in Britain since the Second World War. However imperfect and burdened with debt this trend may be, at least it has made the private ownership of valuable assets an experience shared by over two thirds of the adult population.
A small but significant number of writers and economists have also been swayed by them. For example, Schumacher’s widely read and influential attack on giantism in production and social organisation, Small is Beautiful, was written under the title “An Essay in Chestertonian Economics”.
For all that, the impact of this line of thought has been strictly limited up until now. But now that the socialist dream has crumbled into dust, everything is changing. The Distributist vision is now the only possible challenge to the global victory of capitalism [it will also play a vital role in the long recovery from the demographic catastrophe that will destroy liberalism – APF Ed 2016]. Distributism now will be discussed and implemented, for its time has come at last.
Distributism for today
As the earlier quotation from Belloc points out, it is easy to see how land can be held in small privately owned parcels, but it is not quite so easy to see how the ownership of industrial concerns could be so similarly subdivided. Yet since the whole of Europe is (even after years of globalisation and ‘off-shoring’) heavily industrialised, a society whose general tone is distributist can only be created if private property is extended to the majority of industrial concerns.
The most obvious way in which this can be done is by physically breaking up large concerns into a greater number of smaller ones. Opponents of such a change will argue that this would be at odds with fundamental “economic laws” which dictate that larger units are always more efficient. In certain circumstances this is true, but in many more it is a myth.
There is, for example, no economic reason why beer can be brewed any cheaper or any better in large breweries than in smaller ones. Yet the brewing industry in England has been steadily centralised over much of the twentieth century, so that today the great majority of pub ownership and brewing is in the hands of six giant capitalist corporations. Their hostile take-over attempts directed at the few remaining smaller independent breweries, their price-fixing, and their heavily advertised promotions of inferior quality chemically-doctored beers, all point to the fact that this monopolistic concentration of ownership has nothing to do with any physical law of nature. But it certainly does have everything to do with greed.2
Even where huge scale production can be shown to be economically the best system, there remains the question of the materially unquantifiable factors, including job satisfaction and self esteem among the workforce.
How much material benefit do we need to justify condemning men and women to put the same bolt in the same piece of equipment as the conveyor belt brings the same unfinished item in front of them for the same few seconds, the same number of times a day? What price a lifetime of drudgery and bored
om?
Of course, there are cases where the large unit is clearly necessary. Mines and railways, for instance, cannot be started without large accumulations of capital. But even here, the distributist principle should be to prevent the unit being larger than sense and circumstance dictate.
Physical fact necessitates a considerable concentration of economic power to work one coal mine; but physical fact does not necessitate the nationalisation of mines. It is quite possible to devise a scheme wherein the mines could be owned by chartered guilds of the miners who work them.
Even where there is a strong case for nationalisation and centralised control, as, for example, there is with the railways, this should be viewed only as a last resort. The State has sufficient indirect power over life without giving it direct power into the bargain.
Success in practice: The Mondragon schemes
Since the early distributists pointed out the potential for a revived guild system to assist in the spreading of ownership within industry, the rapid growth of the producers’ co-operative movement has shown another, closely related way forward.
In this regard, further study of the co-op movement around Mondragon in the Basque country in Spain, is particularly recommended. From tiny beginnings in the 1950’s, a network of co-operative ventures has grown to involve tens of thousands of workers/owners in a major and successful experiment in the destruction of the old division between capital and labour. In addition to this showpiece of producer co-operation, there are a growing number of less well-known ventures in many European countries, such as those in Britain aided and stimulated by the Industrial Common Ownership Movement.
Also of interest are the growing number of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), which trade, to as high a degree as possible, outside the conventional monetary system, also as co-operative organisations.
Retailing co-operatives handling the distribution rather than the production of goods have been the subject of even more widespread experiments in Britain and other countries. Unfortunately, the initial impetus for most of these came from the socialist camp, which tended to push them right from the start towards a mini-capitalist approach, rather than a genuinely distributist one.
There are, however, a number of associations of independent shopkeepers who, though each owns and controls his or her own shop, stock, etc, nevertheless buy in a block in order to pay the lowest prices to the wholesalers. Such co-operatives, taken together with outright independent ownership and operation of a multitude of small shops, could offer a real alternative to both the empty shelves of socialism and the manipulative monopolies of the supermarket chains.
Pernicious supermarkets
Huge impersonal supermarkets are among the most noticeable features of the modern capitalist economy. They are also among the most pernicious, driving out smaller shops by cut-throat competition, using their resources to cut prices as far as is necessary, but only for just as long as is necessary, to force their smaller private rivals out of business.
The huge out-of-town supermarkets now so popular in the West are the retail equivalent of the giant factories favoured by capitalist production. Their workers, even the shop managers, have no stake in the ownership of their workplace. Pensioners and those families too poor to have cars often cannot get to them. Elderly individuals who would be known to an independent local shopkeeper as absent-minded have been arrested and charged with shop-lifting on leaving supermarkets having forgotten to pay for an item they have picked up. People, such as pensioners or the unemployed, who do not have enough money to pay for food until their next benefit payment, are unable to get even a loaf of bread or bottle of milk on credit for a day or so, for naturally enough, no-one working in a huge place has a chance of getting to know and trust any customer in this way, even if the company did not forbid such a commonplace little gesture of humanity.
There is no denying that the clever advertising and in-store layouts of modern supermarkets make them seductive places in which to spend money. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, is where the future is in the hands of the ordinary customer. For supermarkets do not destroy their smaller competitors overnight, so all of us have a choice. We can opt for the packaged, glossy sophistication of the chainstore, or we can use the cornershop, the butcher or greengrocer. The survival or extinction of the small shopkeeper is decided by the customer — by each of us as individuals.
Bigger is not always better
While the overall tendency in the retail trades is still towards massive monopolisation by a few big firms, the situation with regards to agriculture may have already been reversed. There is a widespread and growing realisation that capitalist agriculture, with its reliance on dangerous chemical fertilisers and pesticides, is proving to be a disaster.
The producers of organic foodstuffs in Britain have seen a massive increase in demand for their goods with every fresh revelation about the unhygienic or downright dangerous practices of capitalist “agri-business”. While surplus food mountains pile up, organic farmers find that they cannot produce enough to meet the demand for healthy food grown without damage to the environment. This is encouraging more farms to switch to more natural methods of production, and since these are more labour intensive, the average size of an organically-run holding is smaller than the ordinary chemically-soaked modern farm.
This tendency towards a wider distribution of land ownership is being reinforced, in Britain at least, by a shift away from the big cities in favour of the countryside. There are two main groups involved here. The main one is the huge number of people taking early retirement from their city jobs and moving out to the country to combine working a small-holding with running some sort of business from a spare room or workshop. The second are those young people, who in spite of the incredibly high price of land, also manage to find ways to make a living in the countryside and also to buy a little plot of land from which to provide healthy food for their children.
White Flight to rural idyll
While there are negative factors involved, such as the soaring urban crime-rate, these positive moves towards a wider distribution of land ownership help to explain the fact that the population of sprawling London fell by at least eight percent in the nineteen eighties, and has only risen since because of a huge influx of immigrants from overseas. By the turn of the century native Londoners were joining a ‘white flight’ exodus of 100,000 every year.
It is surely significant that England, the first country in the world to witness industrialism’s mass exodus from the land to the cities, is now the first to see a reversal of this process. Our people have seen life in the conurbations, now they are turning their backs on them in ever-increasing numbers.
The revitalisation of the countryside and the re-establishment of sustainable and environmentally friendly farming practice is being done in Britain through the efforts of tens of thousands of isolated individuals, families and small communities. As such it is a slow and halting process. But it could be done far more quickly if the popular desire for land was matched by determination on the part of a decent government to see that this demand be satisfied.
New land reform needed
Such a government in the West could, for example, take over land owned by foreigners or by big capitalist property speculators, and give or sell it in manageable and useful parcels to young people who had completed training courses at agricultural college or who had experience of farm work, but who would otherwise be unable to afford to acquire the land they so desperately want.
What is to stop this newly re-distributed land from again falling into the hands of fewer and fewer people? And how could the large holdings of existing big landowners be broken up without the injustice of expropriation or the impossible cost of compensation?
These things could in fact be done very simply. The land immediately available for distribution, such as that owned by foreigners, absentee landlords or speculators, should
be given or sold at a fair price, without interest, to those who are able to use it productively. There should be no tax on the profits from the crops they produce, but all land over a certain minimum size of holding should be taxed. The amount payable would obviously depend upon the quality and productive potential of the land in question.
The harder the farmer and his family worked on the land, the greater their income would be. And equally, if they had more than their fair share of land, they would not be able to work it at maximum efficiency, so would see their smaller profit on the less well-used land being swallowed up in land tax. They would quickly sell off the surplus land, which would thereby remain or become divided between a large number of small family farms.
New land tax to prevent monopolisation
In this way a land tax would not only stimulate maximum production, but would also act as a permanent, non-bureaucratic check on any tendency towards monopolistic land ownership. There would be ample scope for personal and family satisfaction and a good standard of life in exchange for hard work, but there would be no opportunity for wealth to accumulate beyond that and become power over others or deny others the same right to a piece of land of their own.
Such a system would not only re-establish the small privately-owned family farm as the dominant factor in agricultural production. It would also, by allowing people to retain the fruits of their own labour, provide the best possible incentive towards maximising agricultural production without the huge inputs of machinery and chemicals which would be required to achieve similar levels of productivity from land owned by a few capitalists or the State.
Further rewards would accrue over the years to come. There is no need for rural life to be isolated from culture and learning. Just as electricity makes it possible to have light and power wherever they are required, so the growth of modern telecommunications and computer and information technology makes it possible for small village communities to have access to the contents of great university libraries hundreds of miles away, to communicate instantly with all the similar groups in their area, to play an active and direct rôle in making decisions and governing the country.
Winds of Change Page 3
