Signs of Change
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William Morris >> Signs of Change
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12 SIGNS OF CHANGE
Contents:
How we Live and How we Might Live
Whigs, Democrats, and Socialists
Feudal England
The Hopes of Civilization
The Aims of Art
Useful Work versus Useless Toil
Dawn of a New Epoch
HOW WE LIVE AND HOW WE MIGHT LIVE
The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use,
has a terrible sound in most people's ears, even when we have
explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change
accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a
change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of
men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the
moment. Even when we explain that we use the word revolution in its
etymological sense, and mean by it a change in the basis of society,
people are scared at the idea of such a vast change, and beg that you
will speak of reform and not revolution. As, however, we Socialists
do not at all mean by our word revolution what these worthy people
mean by their word reform, I can't help thinking that it would be a
mistake to use it, whatever projects we might conceal beneath its
harmless envelope. So we will stick to our word, which means a
change of the basis of society; it may frighten people, but it will
at least warn them that there is something to be frightened about,
which will be no less dangerous for being ignored; and also it may
encourage some people, and will mean to them at least not a fear, but
a hope.
Fear and Hope--those are the names of the two great passions which
rule the race of man, and with which revolutionists have to deal; to
give hope to the many oppressed and fear to the few oppressors, that
is our business; if we do the first and give hope to the many, the
few MUST be frightened by their hope; otherwise we do not want to
frighten them; it is not revenge we want for poor people, but
happiness; indeed, what revenge can be taken for all the thousands of
years of the sufferings of the poor?
However, many of the oppressors of the poor, most of them, we will
say, are not conscious of their being oppressors (we shall see why
presently); they live in an orderly, quiet way themselves, as far as
possible removed from the feelings of a Roman slave-owner or a
Legree; they know that the poor exist, but their sufferings do not
present themselves to them in a trenchant and dramatic way; they
themselves have troubles to bear, and they think doubtless that to
bear trouble is the lot of humanity, nor have they any means of
comparing the troubles of their lives with those of people lower in
the social scale; and if ever the thought of those heavier troubles
obtrudes itself upon them, they console themselves with the maxim
that people do get used to the troubles they have to bear, whatever
they may be.
Indeed, as far as regards individuals at least, that is but too true,
so that we have as supporters of the present state of things, however
bad it may be, first those comfortable unconscious oppressors who
think that they have everything to fear from any change which would
involve more than the softest and most gradual of reforms, and
secondly those poor people who, living hard and anxiously as they do,
can hardly conceive of any change for the better happening to them,
and dare not risk one tittle of their poor possessions in taking any
action towards a possible bettering of their condition; so that while
we can do little with the rich save inspire them with fear, it is
hard indeed to give the poor any hope. It is, then, no less than
reasonable that those whom we try to involve in the great struggle
for a better form of life than that which we now lead should call on
us to give them at least some idea of what that life may be like.
A reasonable request, but hard to satisfy, since we are living under
a system that makes conscious effort towards reconstruction almost
impossible: it is not unreasonable on our part to answer, "There are
certain definite obstacles to the real progress of man; we can tell
you what these are; take them away, and then you shall see."
However, I purpose now to offer myself as a victim for the
satisfaction of those who consider that as things now go we have at
least got something, and are terrified at the idea of losing their
hold of that, lest they should find they are worse off than before,
and have nothing. Yet in the course of my endeavour to show how we
might live, I must more or less deal in negatives. I mean to say I
must point out where in my opinion we fall short in our present
attempts at decent life. I must ask the rich and well-to-do what
sort of a position it is which they are so anxious to preserve at any
cost? and if, after all, it will be such a terrible loss to them to
give it up? and I must point out to the poor that they, with
capacities for living a dignified and generous life, are in a
position which they cannot endure without continued degradation.
How do we live, then, under our present system? Let us look at it a
little.
And first, please to understand that our present system of Society is
based on a state of perpetual war. Do any of you think that this is
as it should be? I know that you have often been told that the
competition, which is at present the rule of all production, is a
good thing, and stimulates the progress of the race; but the people
who tell you this should call competition by its shorter name of WAR
if they wish to be honest, and you would then be free to consider
whether or no war stimulates progress, otherwise than as a mad bull
chasing you over your own garden may do. War or competition,
whichever you please to call it, means at the best pursuing your own
advantage at the cost of some one else's loss, and in the process of
it you must not be sparing of destruction even of your own
possessions, or you will certainly come by the worse in the struggle.
You understand that perfectly as to the kind of war in which people
go out to kill and be killed; that sort of war in which ships are
commissioned, for instance, "to sink, burn, and destroy;" but it
appears that you are not so conscious of this waste of goods when you
are only carrying on that other war called COMMERCE; observe,
however, that the waste is there all the same.
Now let us look at this kind of war a little closer, run through some
of the forms of it, that we may see how the "burn, sink, and destroy"
is carried on in it.
First, you have that form of it called national rivalry, which in
good truth is nowadays the cause of all gunpowder and bayonet wars
which civilized nations wage. For years past we English have been
rather shy of them, except on those happy occasions when we could
carry them on at no sort of risk to ourselves, when the killing was
all on one side, or at all events when we hoped it would be. We have
been shy of gunpowder war with a respectable enemy for a long while,
and I will tell you why: It is because we have had the lion's-share
of the world-market; we didn't want to fight for it as a nation, for
we had got it; but now this is changing in a most significant, and,
to a Socialist, a most cheering way; we are losing or have lost that
lion's share; it is now a desperate "competition" between the great
nations of civilization for the world-market, and to-morrow it may be
a desperate war for that end. As a result, the furthering of war (if
it be not on too large a scale) is no longer confined to the honour-
and-glory kind of old Tories, who if they meant anything at all by it
meant that a Tory war would be a good occasion for damping down
democracy; we have changed all that, and now it is quite another kind
of politician that is wont to urge us on to "patriotism" as 'tis
called. The leaders of the Progressive Liberals, as they would call
themselves, long-headed persons who know well enough that social
movements are going on, who are not blind to the fact that the world
will move with their help or without it; these have been the Jingoes
of these later days. I don't mean to say they know what they are
doing: politicians, as you well know, take good care to shut their
eyes to everything that may happen six months ahead; but what is
being done is this: that the present system, which always must
include national rivalry, is pushing us into a desperate scramble for
the markets on more or less equal terms with other nations, because,
once more, we have lost that command of them which we once had.
Desperate is not too strong a word. We shall let this impulse to
snatch markets carry us whither it will, whither it must. To-day it
is successful burglary and disgrace, to-morrow it may be mere defeat
and disgrace.
Now this is not a digression, although in saying this I am nearer to
what is generally called politics than I shall be again. I only want
to show you what commercial war comes to when it has to do with
foreign nations, and that even the dullest can see how mere waste
must go with it. That is how we live now with foreign nations,
prepared to ruin them without war if possible, with it if necessary,
let alone meantime the disgraceful exploiting of savage tribes and
barbarous peoples, on whom we force at once our shoddy wares and our
hypocrisy at the cannon's mouth.
Well, surely Socialism can offer you something in the place of all
that. It can; it can offer you peace and friendship instead of war.
We might live utterly without national rivalries, acknowledging that
while it is best for those who feel that they naturally form a
community under one name to govern themselves, yet that no community
in civilization should feel that it had interests opposed any other,
their economical condition being at any rate similar; so that any
citizen of one community could fall to work and live without
disturbance of his life when he was in a foreign country, and would
fit into his place quite naturally; so that all civilized nations
would form one great community, agreeing together as to the kind and
amount of production and distribution needed; working at such and
such production where it could be best produced; avoiding waste by
all means. Please to think of the amount of waste which they would
avoid, how much such a revolution would add to the wealth of the
world! What creature on earth would be harmed by such a revolution?
Nay, would not everybody be the better for it? And what hinders it?
I will tell you presently.
Meantime let us pass from this "competition" between nations to that
between "the organizers of labour," great firms, joint-stock
companies; capitalists in short, and see how competition "stimulates
production" among them: indeed it does do that; but what kind of
production? Well, production of something to sell at a profit, or
say production of profits: and note how war commercial stimulates
that: a certain market is demanding goods; there are, say, a hundred
manufacturers who make that kind of goods, and every one of them
would if he could keep that market to himself; and struggles
desperately to get as much of it as he can, with the obvious result
that presently the thing is overdone, and the market is glutted, and
all that fury of manufacture has to sink into cold ashes. Doesn't
that seem something like war to you? Can't you see the waste of it--
waste of labour, skill, cunning, waste of life in short? Well, you
may say, but it cheapens the goods. In a sense it does; and yet only
apparently, as wages have a tendency to sink for the ordinary worker
in proportion as prices sink; and at what a cost do we gain this
appearance of cheapness! Plainly speaking, at the cost of cheating
the consumer and starving the real producer for the benefit of the
gambler, who uses both consumer and producer as his milch cows. I
needn't go at length into the subject of adulteration, for every one
knows what kind of a part it plays in this sort of commerce; but
remember that it is an absolutely necessary incident to the
production of profit out of wares, which is the business of the so-
called manufacturer; and this you must understand, that, taking him
in the lump, the consumer is perfectly helpless against the gambler;
the goods are forced on him by their cheapness, and with them a
certain kind of life which that energetic, that aggressive cheapness
determines for him: for so far-reaching is this curse of commercial
war that no country is safe from its ravages; the traditions of a
thousand years fall before it in a month; it overruns a weak or semi-
barbarous country, and whatever romance or pleasure or art existed
there, is trodden down into a mire of sordidness and ugliness; the
Indian or Javanese craftsman may no longer ply his craft leisurely,
working a few hours a day, in producing a maze of strange beauty on a
piece of cloth: a steam-engine is set a-going at Manchester, and
that victory over nature and a thousand stubborn difficulties is used
for the base work of producing a sort of plaster of china-clay and
shoddy, and the Asiatic worker, if he is not starved to death
outright, as plentifully happens, is driven himself into a factory to
lower the wages of his Manchester brother worker, and nothing of
character is left him except, most like, an accumulation of fear and
hatred of that to him most unaccountable evil, his English master.
The South Sea Islander must leave his canoe-carving, his sweet rest,
and his graceful dances, and become the slave of a slave: trousers,
shoddy, rum, missionary, and fatal disease--he must swallow all this
civilization in the lump, and neither himself nor we can help him now
till social order displaces the hideous tyranny of gambling that has
ruined him.
Let those be types of the consumer: but now for the producer; I mean
the real producer, the worker; how does this scramble for the plunder
of the market affect him? The manufacturer, in the eagerness of his
war, has had to collect into one neighbourhood a vast army of
workers, he has drilled them till they are as fit as may be for his
special branch of production, that is, for making a profit out of it,
and with the result of their being fit for nothing else: well, when
the glut comes in that market he is supplying, what happens to this
army, every private in which has been depending on the steady demand
in that market, and acting, as he could not choose but act, as if it
were to go on for ever? You know well what happens to these men:
the factory door is shut on them; on a very large part of them often,
and at the best on the reserve army of labour, so busily employed in
the time of inflation. What becomes of them? Nay, we know that well
enough just now. But what we don't know, or don't choose to know,
is, that this reserve army of labour is an absolute necessity for
commercial war; if OUR manufacturers had not got these poor devils
whom they could draft on to their machines when the demand swelled,
other manufacturers in France, or Germany, or America, would step in
and take the market from them.
So you see, as we live now, it is necessary that a vast part of the
industrial population should be exposed to the danger of periodical
semi-starvation, and that, not for the advantage of the people in
another part of the world, but for their degradation and enslavement.
Just let your minds run for a moment on the kind of waste which this
means, this opening up of new markets among savage and barbarous
countries which is the extreme type of the force of the profit-market
on the world, and you will surely see what a hideous nightmare that
profit-market is: it keeps us sweating and terrified for our
livelihood, unable to read a book, or look at a picture, or have
pleasant fields to walk in, or to lie in the sun, or to share in the
knowledge of our time, to have in short either animal or intellectual
pleasure, and for what? that we may go on living the same slavish
life till we die, in order to provide for a rich man what is called a
life of ease and luxury; that is to say, a life so empty,
unwholesome, and degraded, that perhaps, on the whole, he is worse
off than we the workers are: and as to the result of all this
suffering, it is luckiest when it is nothing at all, when you can say
that the wares have done nobody any good; for oftenest they have done
many people harm, and we have toiled and groaned and died in making
poison and destruction for our fellow-men.
Well, I say all this is war, and the results of war, the war this
time, not of competing nations, but of competing firms or capitalist
units: and it is this war of the firms which hinders the peace
between nations which you surely have agreed with me in thinking is
so necessary; for you must know that war is the very breath of the
nostrils of these fighting firms, and they have now, in our times,
got into their hands nearly all the political power, and they band
together in each country in order to make their respective
governments fulfil just two functions: the first is at home to act
as a strong police force, to keep the ring in which the strong are
beating down the weak; the second is to act as a piratical body-guard
abroad, a petard to explode the doors which lead to the markets of
the world: markets at any price abroad, uninterfered-with privilege,
falsely called laissez-faire, {1} at any price at home, to provide
these is the sole business of a government such as our industrial
captains have been able to conceive of. I must now try to show you
the reason of all this, and what it rests on, by trying to answer the
question, Why have the profit-makers got all this power, or at least
why are they able to keep it?
That takes us to the third form of war commercial: the last, and,
the one which all the rest is founded on. We have spoken first of
the war of rival nations; next of that of rival firms: we have now
to speak of rival men. As nations under the present system are
driven to compete with one another for the markets of the world, and
as firms or the captains of industry have to scramble for their share
of the profits of the markets, so also have the workers to compete
with each other--for livelihood; and it is this constant competition
or war amongst them which enables the profit-grinders to make their
profits, and by means of the wealth so acquired to take all the
executive power of the country into their hands. But here is the
difference between the position of the workers and the profit-makers:
to the latter, the profit-grinders, war is necessary; you cannot have
profit-making without competition, individual, corporate, and
national; but you may work for a livelihood without competing; you
may combine instead of competing.
I have said war was the life-breath of the profit-makers; in like
manner, combination is the life of the workers. The working-classes
or proletariat cannot even exist as a class without combination of
some sort. The necessity which forced the profit-grinders to collect
their men first into workshops working by the division of labour, and
next into great factories worked by machinery, and so gradually to
draw them into the great towns and centres of civilization, gave
birth to a distinct working-class or proletariat: and this it was
which gave them their MECHANICAL existence, so to say. But note,
that they are indeed combined into social groups for the production
of wares, but only as yet mechanically; they do not know what they
are working at, nor whom they are working for, because they are
combining to produce wares of which the profit of a master forms an
essential part, instead of goods for their own use: as long as they
do this, and compete with each other for leave to do it, they will
be, and will feel themselves to be, simply a part of those competing
firms I have been speaking of; they will be in fact just a part of
the machinery for the production of profit; and so long as this lasts
it will be the aim of the masters or profit-makers to decrease the
market value of this human part of the machinery; that is to say,
since they already hold in their hands the labour of dead men in the
form of capital and machinery, it is their interest, or we will say
their necessity, to pay as little as they can help for the labour of
living men which they have to buy from day to day: and since the
workmen they employ have nothing but their labour-power, they are
compelled to underbid one another for employment and wages, and so
enable the capitalist to play his game.
I have said that, as things go, the workers are a part of the
competing firms, an adjunct of capital. Nevertheless, they are only
so by compulsion; and, even without their being conscious of it, they
struggle against that compulsion and its immediate results, the
lowering of their wages, of their standard of life; and this they do,
and must do, both as a class and individually: just as the slave of
the great Roman lord, though he distinctly felt himself to be a part
of the household, yet collectively was a force in reserve for its
destruction, and individually stole from his lord whenever he could
safely do so. So, here, you see, is another form of war necessary to
the way we live now, the war of class against class, which, when it
rises to its height, and it seems to be rising at present, will
destroy those other forms of war we have been speaking of; will make
the position of the profit-makers, of perpetual commercial war,
untenable; will destroy the present system of competitive privilege,
or commercial war.
Now observe, I said that to the existence of the workers it was
combination, not competition, that was necessary, while to that of
the profit-makers combination was impossible, and war necessary. The
present position of the workers is that of the machinery of commerce,
or in plainer words its slaves; when they change that position and
become free, the class of profit-makers must cease to exist; and what
will then be the position of the workers? Even as it is they are the
one necessary part of society, the life-giving part; the other
classes are but hangers-on who live on them. But what should they
be, what will they be, when they, once for all, come to know their
real power, and cease competing with one another for livelihood? I
will tell you: they will be society, they will be the community.
And being society--that is, there being no class outside them to
contend with--they can then regulate their labour in accordance with
their own real needs.
There is much talk about supply and demand, but the supply and demand
usually meant is an artificial one; it is under the sway of the
gambling market; the demand is forced, as I hinted above, before it
is supplied; nor, as each producer is working against all the rest,
can the producers hold their hands, till the market is glutted and
the workers, thrown out on the streets, hear that there has been
over-production, amidst which over-plus of unsaleable goods they go
ill-supplied with even necessaries, because the wealth which they
themselves have created is "ill-distributed," as we call it--that is,
unjustly taken away from them.
When the workers are society they will regulate their labour, so that
the supply and demand shall be genuine, not gambling; the two will
then be commensurate, for it is the same society which demands that
also supplies; there will be no more artificial famines then, no more
poverty amidst over-production, amidst too great a stock of the very
things which should supply poverty and turn it into well-being. In
short, there will be no waste and therefore no tyranny.
Well, now, what Socialism offers you in place of these artificial
famines, with their so-called over-production, is, once more,
regulation of the markets; supply and demand commensurate; no
gambling, and consequently (once more) no waste; not overwork and
weariness for the worker one month, and the next no work and terror
of starvation, but steady work and plenty of leisure every month; not
cheap market wares, that is to say, adulterated wares, with scarcely
any GOOD in them, mere scaffold-poles for building up profits; no
labour would be spent on such things as these, which people would
cease to want when they ceased to be slaves. Not these, but such
goods as best fulfilled the real uses of the consumers, would labour
be set to make; for profit being abolished, people could have what
they wanted, instead of what the profit-grinders at home and abroad
forced them to take.
For what I want you to understand is this: that in every civilized
country at least there is plenty for all--is, or at any rate might
be. Even with labour so misdirected as it is at present, an
equitable distribution of the wealth we have would make all people
comparatively comfortable; but that is nothing to the wealth we might
have if labour were not misdirected.
Observe, in the early days of the history of man he was the slave of
his most immediate necessities; Nature was mighty and he was feeble,
and he had to wage constant war with her for his daily food and such
shelter as he could get. His life was bound down and limited by this
constant struggle; all his morals, laws, religion, are in fact the
outcome and the reflection of this ceaseless toil of earning his
livelihood. Time passed, and little by little, step by step, he grew
stronger, till now after all these ages he has almost completely
conquered Nature, and one would think should now have leisure to turn
his thoughts towards higher things than procuring to-morrow's dinner.
But, alas! his progress has been broken and halting; and though he
has indeed conquered Nature and has her forces under his control to
do what he will with, he still has himself to conquer, he still has
to think how he will best use those forces which he has mastered. At
present he uses them blindly, foolishly, as one driven by mere fate.
It would almost seem as if some phantom of the ceaseless pursuit of
food which was once the master of the savage was still hunting the
civilized man; who toils in a dream, as it were, haunted by mere dim
unreal hopes, borne of vague recollections of the days gone by. Out
of that dream he must wake, and face things as they really are. The
conquest of Nature is complete, may we not say? and now our business
is, and has for long been, the organization of man, who wields the
forces of Nature. Nor till this is attempted at least shall we ever
be free of that terrible phantom of fear of starvation which, with
its brother devil, desire of domination, drives us into injustice,
cruelty, and dastardliness of all kinds: to cease to fear our
fellows and learn to depend on them, to do away with competition and
build up co-operation, is our one necessity.
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