Chapter VII — Would Modern Socialism Abolish All Property?
§ 1
Having in the previous chapter cleared up a considerable mass of misconception and possibility of misrepresentation about the attitude of Socialism to the home, let us now devote a little more attention to the current theory of property and say just exactly where Modern Socialism stands in that matter.
The plain fact of the case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to or no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of one’s personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable instinct there is no excuse for repletion. The position of the modern Socialist is that the contemporary idea of personal property is enormously exaggerated and improperly extended to things that ought not to be “private”; not that it is not a socially most useful and desirable idea within its legitimate range.
There can be no doubt that many of those older writers who were “Socialists before Socialism,” Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in More’s Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one hadn’t even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully communistic in every respect for many years. But the modern Socialist is not a communist; the modern Socialist, making his scheme of social reconstruction for the whole world and for every type of character, recognizes the entire impracticability of such dreams, recognizing, too, it may be, the sacrifice of human personality and distinction such ideals involve.
The word “property,” one must remember, is a slightly evasive word. Absolute property hardly exists—absolute, that is to say, in the sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxation. Even now property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind. It can be defined as something one may do “what one likes with,” subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its use.
In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools, as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go. The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little boys of five and three have the keenest sense of mine and (almost, if not quite so vividly) thine in the matter of toys and garments. The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in a man’s pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.
All such property Socialism will ungrudgingly sustain, and it will equally sustain property in books and objects of æsthetic satisfaction, in furnishing, in the apartments or dwelling-house a man or woman occupies and in their household implements. It will sustain far more property than the average working-class man has to-day. Nor will it prevent savings or accumulations, if men do not choose to expend their earnings—nor need it interfere with lending. How far it will permit or countenance usury is another question altogether. There will no doubt remain, after all the work-a-day needs of the world have been met by a scientific public organization of the general property in Nature, a great number of businesses and enterprises and new and doubtful experiments outside the range of legitimate State activity. In these, interested and prosperous people will embark their surplus money as shareholders in a limited liability company, making partnership profits or losses in an entirely proper manner. But whether there should be debentures and mortgages or preference shares, or suchlike manipulatory distinctions, or interest in any shape or form, I am inclined to doubt. A money-lender should share risk as well as profit—that is surely the moral law in lending that forbids usury; he should not be allowed to bleed a failing business with his inexorable percentage and so eat up the ordinary shareholder or partner any more than the landlord should be allowed to eat up the failing tenant for rent. That was once the teaching of Christianity, and I do not know enough of the history or spiritual development of the Catholic Church to tell when she became what she now appears to be—the champion of the rent-exacting landlord and the usurer against Socialism. It is the present teaching of Socialism. If usury obtains at all under the Socialist State, if inexorable repayments are to be made in certain cases, it will, I conceive, be a State monopoly. The State will be the sole banker for every hoard and every enterprise, just as it will be the universal landlord and the universal fire and accident and old age insurance office. In money matters as in public service and administration, it will stand for the species, the permanent thing behind every individual accident and adventure.
Posthumous property, that is to say the power to bequeath and the right to inherit things, will also persist in a mitigated state under Socialism. There is no reason whatever why it should not do so. There is a strong natural sentiment in favour of the institution of heirlooms, for example; one feels a son might well own—though he should certainly not sell—the intimate things his father desires to leave him. The pride of descent is an honourable one, the love for one’s blood, and I hope that a thousand years from now some descendant will still treasure an obsolete weapon here, a picture there, or a piece of faint and faded needlework from our days and the days before our own. One may hate inherited privileges and still respect a family tree.
Widows and widowers again have clearly a kind of natural property in the goods they have shared with the dead; in the home, in the garden close, in the musical instruments and books and pleasant home-like things. Now, in nine cases out of ten, we do in effect bundle the widow out; she remains nominally owner of the former home, but she has to let it furnished or sell it, to go and live in a boarding-house or an exiguous flat.
Even perhaps a proportion of accumulated money may reasonably go to friend or kin. It is a question of public utility; Socialism has done with absolute propositions in all such things, and views these problems now as questions of detail, matters for fine discriminations. We want to be quit of pedantry. All that property which is an enlargement of personality, the modern Socialist seeks to preserve; it is that exaggerated property that gives power over the food and needs of one’s fellow-creatures, property and inheritance in land, in industrial machinery, in the homes of others and in the usurer’s grip upon others, that he seeks to destroy. The more doctrinaire Socialists will tell you they do not object to property for use and consumption, but only to property in “the means of production,” but I do not choose to resort to over-precise definitions. The general intention is clear enough, the particular instance requires particular application. But it is just because we modern Socialists want every one to have play for choice and individual expression in all these realities of property that we object to this monstrous property of a comparatively small body of individuals expropriating the world.