60
REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT
BUT there is an objection to it; and that objection may be learnt from the stupidest woman you ask in the street. She will tell you that you must not take away the property of the rich, because “they give employment”. Now, as we have seen, it is quite true that fundamentally it is nonsense to say that an unproductive rich person can give employment in any other sense than as a lunatic gives employment to her keeper. An idle rich woman can give no productive employment: the employment she gives is wasteful. But wasteful or not, she gives it and pays for it. She may not have earned the money she pays with; but it will buy as good bread and clothes for her employee as the most honestly earned money in the kingdom. The idler is a parasite: and the idler’s employee, however industrious, is therefore a parasite on a parasite; but if you leave the parasite destitute you leave the parasite’s parasites destitute; and unless you have productive employment ready for them they will have to starve or steal or rebel; and as they will certainly not choose to starve, their choice of the remaining two alternatives (which they will probably combine) may upset the Government if they are numerous enough. And they are, as a matter of fact, very numerous, as you may see by counting the Conservative votes that are given at every General Election by people who work for weekly wages in wholly or partly parasitic occupations. The plunder of the proletariat is shared handsomely by the plunderers with the proletarians. If our capitalists could not plunder our proletarians, our proletarians and their middle class organizers, from the Bond Street art dealers and jewellers to the errand boys of Bournemouth, could not live on the custom of our capitalists. That is why neither Bond Street nor Bournemouth can be persuaded to vote for uncompensated expropriation, and why, if it came to fighting instead of voting, they would fight against it.
The trouble would begin, not with the nationalized industries, but with the others. As we have seen, the mines and banks and railways, being already organized as going concerns, and managed by directors elected by the votes of the shareholders, could be confiscated by taxing the shareholders heavily enough to oblige them to transfer their shares to the Government in payment of the tax. But the income derived from these shares would therefore go into the pocket of the Government instead of into the pockets of the shareholders. Thus the purchasing power of the shareholders would pass to the Government; and every shop or factory that depended on their custom would have to shut up and discharge all its employees. The saving power of the shareholders, which means, as we now understand, the power of supplying the spare money needed for starting new industrial enterprises or extending old ones to keep pace with civilization, would also pass to the Government. These powers, which must be kept in action without a moment’s interruption, operate by continual expenditure (mainly household expenditure) and continual investment of the enormous total of all our private incomes.
What could the Government do with that total? If it simply dropped it into the national till, and sat on it, most of it would perish by natural decay; and meanwhile a great many of the people would perish too. There would be a monster epidemic of bankruptcy and unemployment. The tide of calamity would sweep away any Government unless it proclaimed itself a Dictatorship, and employed, say, a third of the population to shoot down another third, whilst the remaining third footed the bill with its labor. What could the Government do to avert this, short of handing back the confiscated property to the owners with apologies for having made a fool of itself?