The Servile State: The Scourge of Economic Slavery

“. . . If we do not restore the Institution of Property, we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”                  Hilaire Belloc – 1912

 

I have just about had it with intrusive governmental regulations (such as building permits, construction codes, city ordinances, impact fees, and the like) on private property.

When I say “private,” I mean a personal residence or land that is controlled by a person or family to which the general public has no open or invited access.

I understand that companies who own their buildings and the land upon which they sit can be private as well, but I am only referring to “non-public-none-of-your-business-what-I-build-or-what -I-do-on-my own-property,” private property.

This post is a simple but compelling introduction to one of the most private property-oriented writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hilaire Belloc.

Belloc has some very revealing things to say about property and the means of production.  I have only included a selection from Section One, but it should be enough to arouse your concern if you will but compare what he says, to our current status as the dying bred called “property owners.”

The Servile State

Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs.

That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment, which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man, we call the Production of Wealth.

Wealth is matter, which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need.

Without Wealth man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human society there is a certain kind and a certain amount of wealth without which human life can not be lived: as, for instance, in England today, certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth, and habitation.

Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself.  To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material, which those forces inform.

This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call Labour.

As for that material and those natural forces, we will call them for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted, term Land.

It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production of wealth, and all discussions thereupon, involve but two principal original factors, to wit, Labour and Land.

But it so happens that the conscious, artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third factor of the utmost importance.

Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often increasing complexities, and aids himself by the construction of implements.  These soon become in each new department of the production as truly necessary to that production as Labour and Land.  Further, any process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it.

There must therefore be an Accumulation of Wealth created in the past, and reserved with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the future.

Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of a store of provisions, labour applied to land for either purpose is not producing wealth for immediate consumption.

It is setting aside and reserving somewhat, and that somewhat is always necessary in varying proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic society to the production of wealth.

To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour during the process of production, we give the name of Capital.

There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which we may conventionally term Land, Capital, and Labour.

When we talk of the means production we signify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say that a man is “dispossessed of the means of production,” or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who “possesses the means of production,” we mean that he is the master only of his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital, or land, or both combined.

A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the means of production, we call proletarian, and any considerable class composed of such men we call a proletariat.

Property is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the means of production, is vested in some person or corporation.

Thus we may say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that is the “property” of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the state, meaning that those who “own” such property are guaranteed by the laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use.

Private property signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations other than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members.

What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part of the State (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions.

Thus Mr. Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as Mr. Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr. Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life of the town.

An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community we call Collectivist, or more generally Socialist.

A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian, we call Capitalist; and the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such  fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the Proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion.

The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the citizens thereof are politically free: i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not characterised by the institution of  ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction  of ownership to a section markedly less than the  whole, or even to a small minority.

Such a Capitalist State is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other property-less or proletarian.

My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only establish but expand its definition.  The definition of the Servile State is as follows: “That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour we call THE SERVILE STATE.” 

 

[When he says “labor for the advantage of other families and persons,” he means being an employee. In other words, when the vast majority of the population works for someone else, that he is calling a “Servile State.”  This is a topic of huge discussion at Monticello College and has a lot to do with our unique campus environment.]