The Servile State

Introduction The Subject of this Book:--It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery.

--The sections into which the book will be divided

Section 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 re-establishment of status in the place of contract--That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind--Summary of these definitions.

Section II Our Civilisation was originally Servile:--The Servile institution in Pagan antiquity--Its fundamental character--A Pagan society took it for granted--The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church.

Section III How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:--The subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter--The main elements of Pagan economic society--The Villa--The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian _serf_--Next into the Christian _peasant_--The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the /_Distributive State_/--It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages--"It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind."

Section IV How the Distributive State Failed:--This failure original in England--The story of the decline from Distributive property to Capitalism--The economic revolution of the sixteenth century--The confiscation of monastic land--What might have happened had the State retained it--As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy--England is Capitalist before the advent of the industrial revolution--Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould.

Section V The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable:--It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society--The two internal strains which render it unstable--_(a)_ The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis--_(b)_ The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens--The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors--Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition among owners, and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners.

Section VI The Stable Solutions of this Instability:--The three stable social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable Capitalism--The Distributive solution, the Collectivist solution, the Servile solution--The reformer will not openly advocate the Servile solution--There remain only the Distributive and the Collectivist solution.

Section VII Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux:--A contrast between the reformer making for Distribution and the reformer making for Socialism (or Collectivism)--The difficulties met by the first type--He is working against the grain--The second is working with the grain--Collectivism a natural development of Capitalism--It appeals both to Capitalist and Proletarian--None the less we shall see that the Collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object--to wit, the Servile State.

Section VIII The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State:--There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance--These are the Socialist and the Practical Man--The Socialist again is of two kinds, The Humanist and the Statistician--The Humanist would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners--He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing servile conditions--He is forbidden to do the first--The Statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organise the poor--Both are canalised towards the Servile State and both are shepherded off their ideal Collectivist State--Meanwhile the great mass, the proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to private law much more than to the law of the Courts--This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse change from Slavery to Freedom--Private Law became stronger than Public at the beginning of the Dark Ages--The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue--to-day the non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them a wage-earning class but increases their wages and their security without insisting on the expropriation of the owners.

Appendix on "Buying-Out" An Appendix showing that the Collectivist proposal to "Buy-Out" the Capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is vain.

Section IX The Servile State Has Begun:--The manifestation of the Servile State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts--(a) Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work--(b) Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society--As to (a), we find it /already/ at work in measures such as the Insurance Act and proposals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforcement of Trades Union bargains and the erection of "Labour Colonies," etc., for the "unemployable"--As to the second, we find that so-called "Municipal" or "Socialist" experiments in acquiring the means of production have /already/ increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the Capitalist.