第137章 THE SOCIAL WILL AS AN ECONOMIC FORCE(2)

This power of the social will has never yet been tested.For a society with arrangements based on manifest principles of justice and reason has never yet been set in operation.But though our organic law of distribution may never attain a perfect application, so far as it is applied it may surely be expected to act in the way here described, appealing to the springs of honour, equity, comradeship and respect for public opinion, with a force immeasurably greater than is possible in a system of industry and property where reason and fair play in the apportionment of work and its rewards are so imperfectly apparent.

§3.These conditions of organic welfare in the apportionment of work and wealth do not imply a conception of industrial society in which the individual and his personal desires and ends are impaired or sacrificed to the interests of the community.They do imply a growth of the social-economic structure in which the impulses of mutual aid, which from the earliest times have been civilising mankind, shall work with a clearer consciousness of their human value.As the individual perceives more clearly how intimately his personal efforts and effects are, in process and in product, linked with those of all the other members of society, that perception must powerfully influence his feelings.He will come consciously to realise his personal freedom in actions that are a willing contribution to the common good.

This consciousness will make it more difficult for him to defend in himself or others economic conduct or institutions in which individual, class or national conflicts are involved.Thus a better social consciousness and a better economic environment will react on one another for further mutual betterment.The unity of this social-industrial life is not a unity of mere fusion in which the individual virtually disappears, but a federal unity in which the rights and interests of the individual shall be conserved for him by the federation.The federal government, however, conserves these individual rights, not, as the individualist maintains, because it exists for no other purpose than to do so.It conserves them because it also recognises that an area of individual liberty is conducive to the health of the collective life.Its federal nature rests on a recognition alike of individual and social ends, or, speaking more accurately, of social ends that are directly attained by social action and of those that are realised in individuals.

I regard such a federation as an organic union because none of the individual rights or interests is absolute in its sanction.Society in its economic as in its other relations is a federal state not a federation of states.

The rights and interests of society are paramount: they override all claims of individuals to liberties that contravene them.

§4.So far as industry is concerned, we perceive how this harmony between individual and social rights and interests is realised in the primary division of productive activities into Art and Routine.The impulses and desires which initiate, sustain and direct what we term art, including all the creative activities in industry, flow freely from the individual nature.We recognise that productive activities in which these elements are of paramount importance form an economic field which society, guided by its intelligent self-interest, will safely and profitably leave to individuals and private enterprise.Industries which are essentially of a routine character, affording little scope for creative activities of individuals, must pass under direct social administration.For free individual initiative and desires will not support them.They can only be worked under private enterprise on condition that great gains are procurable for the entrepreneurs and an unfree body of proletarian labour is available for compulsory service.

The routine services of society cannot properly be secured by appeals to the separate self-interests of individuals.So administered, they involve the waste of vast unearned gains accruing to a private caste of masters, the injury and degradation of economic servitude in the workers, and a growing insecurity and irregularity of service to the consumers.The only volume of free-will and voluntary enterprise that can support those routine industries is the free-will and enterprise of Society.If we can bring ourselves to regard the great normal currents of routine industry, engaged in supplying the common daily needs, from the standpoint of a real live Society, we shall recognise that to that Society this industrial activity and its achievements are full of interest and variety.What to the individual is dull routine is to Society creative art, the natural employment of social productive energies for the progressive satisfaction of social needs.Though the individual will soon flags before demands for work so irksome and repellent to its nature, the social will gladly responds to work in which that will finds its free natural expression.

This is the ultimate argument in favour of the socialisation of the routine industries, viz., the release of the individual will from work that is costly, repellent and ill-done, in order to enable the social will to find in that work its healthy, interesting, educative self-realisation.