70
RENT OF ABILITY
HAVING cleared up the Liberty question by a digression (which must have been a relief) from the contemplation of capital running away with us, perhaps another digression on the equally confused question of the differences in ability between one person and another may not be out of place; for the same people who are in a continual scare about losing the liberty which they have mostly not got are usually much troubled about these differences. Years ago I wrote a small book entitled Socialism and Superior Brains which I need not repeat here, as it is still accessible. It was a reply to the late William Hurrell Mallock, who took it as a matter of course, apparently, that the proper use of cleverness in this world is to take advantage of stupid people to obtain a larger share than they of the nation’s income. Rascally as this notion is, it is too common to be ignored. The proper social use of brains is to increase the amount of wealth to be divided, not to grab an unfair share of it; and one of the most difficult of our police problems is to prevent this grabbing, because it is a principle of Capitalism that everyone shall use not only her land and capital, but her cunning, to obtain as much money for herself as possible. Capitalism indeed compels her to do so by making no other provision for the clever ones than what they can make out of their cleverness.
Let us begin by taking the examples which delight and dazzle us: that is, the possessors of some lucrative personal talent. A lady with a wonderful voice can hire a concert room to sing in, and admit nobody who does not pay her. A gentleman able to paint a popular picture can hang it in a gallery with a turnstile at the door, passable only on payment. A surgeon who has mastered a dangerous operation can say to his patient, in effect, “Your money or your life”. Giants, midgets, Siamese twins, and two-headed singers exhibit themselves for money as monsters. Attractive ladies receive presents enough to make them richer than their plainer or more scrupulous neighbors. So do fascinating male dancing partners. Popular actresses sometimes insist on being pampered and allowed to commit all sorts of follies and extravagances on the ground that they cannot keep up their peculiar charm without them; and the public countenances their exactions fondly.
These cases need not worry us. They are very scarce: indeed if they became common their power to enrich would vanish. They do not confer either industrial power or political privilege. The world is not ruled by prima donnas and painters, two-headed nightingales and surgical baronets, as it is by financiers and industrial organizers. Geniuses and monsters may make a great deal of money; but they have to work for it: I myself, through the accident of a lucrative talent, have sometimes made more than a hundred times as much money in a year as my father ever did; but he, as an employer, had more power over the lives of others than I. A practical political career would stop my professional career at once. It is true that I or any other possessor of a lucrative talent or charm can buy land and industrial incomes with our spare money, and thus become landlords and capitalists. But if that resource were cut off, by Socialism or any other change in the general constitution of society, I doubt whether anyone would grudge us our extra spending money. An attempt by the Government to tax it so as to reduce us to the level of ordinary mortals would probably be highly unpopular, because the pleasure we give is delightful and widespread, whilst the harm we do by our conceit and tantrums and jealousies and spoiltness is narrowly limited to the unfortunate few who are in personal contact with us. A prima donna with a rope of pearls ten feet long and a coronet of Kohinoors does not make life any worse for the girl with a string of beads who, by buying a five shilling ticket, helps to pay for the pearls: she makes it better by enchanting it.
Besides, we know by our own experience, not only of prima donnas but of commercial millionaires, that regular daily personal expenditure cannot be carried beyond that of the richest class to be found in the community. Persons richer than that, like Cecil Rhodes, Andrew Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite (to name only the dead), cannot spend their incomes, and are forced to give away money in millions for galleries and museums which they fill with magnificent collections and then leave to the public, or for universities, or churches, or prizes, or scholarships, or any sort of public object that appeals to them. If equality of income were general, a freak income here and there would not enable its possessor to live differently from the rest. A popular soprano might be able to fill the Albert Hall for 100 nights in succession at a guinea a head for admission; but she could not obtain a lady’s maid unless ladies’ maids were a social institution. Nor could she leave a farthing to her children unless inheritance were a social institution, nor buy an unearned and as yet unproduced income for them unless Capitalism were a social institution. Thus, though it is always quite easy for a Government to checkmate any attempt of an individual to become richer than her neighbors by supertaxing her or directly prohibiting her methods, it is unlikely that it will ever be worth while to do so where the method is the exercise of a popular personal talent.
But when we come to that particular talent which makes its money out of the exercise of other people’s talents, the case becomes gravely different. To allow Cleopatra to make money out of her charms is one thing: to allow a trader to become enormously rich by engaging five hundred Cleopatras at ten pounds a week or less, and hiring them out at ten pounds a day or more, is quite another. We may forgive a burglar in our admiration of his skill and nerve; but for the fence who makes money by purchasing the burglar’s booty at a tenth of its value it is impossible to feel any sympathy. When we come to reputable women and honest men we find that they are exploited in the same way. Civilization makes matters worse in this respect, because civilization means division of labor. Remember the pin makers and pin machines. In a primitive condition of society the maker of an article saves the money to buy the materials, selects them, purchases them, and, having made the article out of these materials, sells it to the user or consumer. Today the raising of the money to buy the materials is a separate business; the selection and purchasing is another separate business; the making is divided between several workers or else done by a machine tended by a young person; and the marketing is yet another separate business. Indeed it is much more complicated than that, because the separate businesses of buying materials and marketing products are themselves divided into several separate businesses; so that between the origin of the product in raw material from the hand of Nature and its final sale across the counter to you there may be dozens of middlemen, of whom you complain because they each take a toll which raises the price to you, and it is impossible for you to find out how many of them are really necessary agents in the process and how many mere intercepters and parasites.
The same complication is found in that large part of the world’s work which consists, not in making things, but in service. The woman who once took the wool that her husband had just shorn from their sheep, and with her own hands transformed it into a garment and sold it to the wearer, or clothed her family with it, is now replaced by a financier, a shipper, a woolbroker, a weaving mill, a wholesaler, a shopkeeper, a shop assistant, and Heaven knows how many others besides, each able to do her own bit of the process but ignorant of the other bits, and unable to do even her own bit until all the others are doing their bits at the same time. Any one of them without the others would be like an artillery man without a cannon or a shop assistant with nothing to sell.
Now if you go through all these indispensable parties to any industry or service, you will come on our question of exceptional ability in its most pressing and dangerous form. You will find, for instance, that whereas any ablebodied normal woman can be trained to become a competent shop assistant, or a shorthand typist and operator of a calculating machine (arithmetic is done by machines nowadays), or a factory hand, or a teacher, hardly five out of every hundred can manage a business or administer an estate or handle a large capital. The number of persons who can do what they are told is always greatly in excess of the number who can tell others what to do. If an educated woman asks for more than four or five pounds a week in business, nobody asks whether she is a good woman or a bad one: the question is, is there a post for her in which she will have to make decisions, and if so, can she be trusted to make them. If the answer is yes, she will be paid more than a living wage: if not, no.
Even when there is no room for original decisions, and there is nothing to do but keep other people hard at their allotted work, and maintain discipline generally, the ability to do this is an exceptional gift and has a special value. It may be nothing more admirable than the result of a combination of brute energy with an unamiable indifference to the feelings of others; but its value is unquestionable: it makes its possessor a forewoman or foreman in a factory, a wardress in a prison, a matron in an institution, a sergeant in the army, a mistress in a school, and the like. Both the managing people and the mere disciplinarians may be, and often are, heartily detested; but they are so necessary that any body of ordinary persons left without what they call superiors, will immediately elect them. A crew of pirates, subject to no laws except the laws of nature, will elect a boatswain to order them about and a captain to lead them and navigate the ship, though the one may be the most insufferable bully and the other the most tyrannical scoundrel on board. In the revolutionary army of Napoleon an expeditionary troop of dragoons, commanded by an officer who became terrified and shammed illness, insisted on the youngest of their number, a boy of sixteen, taking command, because he was an aristocrat, and they were accustomed to make aristocrats think for them. He afterwards became General Marbot: you will find the incident recorded in his memoirs. Every woman knows that the most strongminded woman in the house can set up a domestic tyranny which is sometimes a reign of terror. Without directors most of us would be like riderless horses in a crowded street. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, though a very clever man, had the amiable trait in his character of an intense dislike to coercion. He could not bring himself even to coerce his horse; and the result was that he had to sell it and go on foot, because the horse, uncoerced, could do nothing but stop and graze. Tolstoy, equally a professed humanitarian, tamed and managed the wildest horses; but he did it by the usual method of making things unpleasant for the horse until it obeyed him.
However, horses and human beings are alike in that they very seldom object to be directed: they are usually only too glad to be saved the trouble of thinking and planning for themselves. Ungovernable people are the exception and not the rule. When authority is abused and subordination made humiliating, both are resented; and anything from a mutiny to a revolution may ensue; but there is no instance on record of a beneficially and tactfully exercised authority provoking any reaction. Our mental laziness is a guarantee of our docility: the mother who says “How dare you go out without asking my leave?” presently finds herself exclaiming “Why cant you think for yourself instead of running to me for everything?” But she would be greatly astonished if a rude motor car manufacturer said to her, “Why cant you make a car for yourself instead of running to me for it?”
I am myself by profession what is called an original thinker, my business being to question and test all the established creeds and codes to see how far they are still valid and how far worn out or superseded, and even to draft new creeds and codes. But creeds and codes are only two out of the hundreds of useful articles that make for a good life. All the other articles I have to take as they are offered to me on the authority of those who understand them; so that though many people who cannot bear to have an established creed or code questioned regard me as a dangerous revolutionary and a most insubordinate fellow, I have to be in most matters as docile a creature as you could desire to meet. When a railway porter directs me to number ten platform I do not strike him to earth with a shout of “Down with tyranny!” and rush violently to number one platform. I accept his direction because I want to be directed, and want to get into the right train. No doubt if the porter bullied and abused me, and I, after submitting to this, found that my train really started from number seven platform and that the number ten train landed me in Portsmouth when my proper destination was Birmingham, I should rise up against that porter and do what I could to contrive his downfall; but if he had been reasonably civil and had directed me aright I should rally to his defence if any attempt were made to depose him. I have to be housekept-for, nursed, doctored, and generally treated like a child in all sorts of situations in which I do not know what to do; and far from resenting such tutelage I am only too glad to avail myself of it. The first time I was ever in one of those electric lifts which the passengers work for themselves instead of being taken up and down by a conductor pulling at a rope, I almost cried, and was immensely relieved when I stepped out alive.
You may think I am wandering from our point; but I know too well by experience that there is likely to be at the back of your mind a notion that it is in our nature to resent authority and subordination as such, and that only an unpopular and stern coercion can maintain them. Have I not indeed just been impressing on you that the miseries of the world today are due in great part to our objection, not merely to bad government, but to being governed at all? But you must distinguish. It is true that we dislike being interfered with, and want to do as we like when we know what to do, or think we know. But when there is something that obviously must be done, and only five in every hundred of us know how to do it, then the odd ninetyfive will not merely be led by the five: they will clamor to be led, and will, if necessary, kill anyone who obstructs the leaders. That is why it is so easy for ambitious humbugs to get accepted as leaders. No doubt competent leadership may be made unpopular by bad manners and pretension to general superiority; and subordination may be made intolerable by humiliation. Leaders who produce these results should be ruthlessly cashiered, no matter how competent they are in other respects, because they destroy self-respect and happiness, and create a dangerous resentment complex which reduces the competence and upsets the tempers of those whom they lead. But you may take it as certain that authority and subordination in themselves are never unpopular, and can be trusted to re-establish themselves after the most violent social convulsion. What is to be feared is less their overthrow than the idolization of those who exercise authority successfully. Nelson was idolized by his seamen; Lenin was buried as a saint by revolutionary Russia; Signor Mussolini is adored in Italy as The Leader (Il Duce); but no anarchist preaching resistance to authority as such has ever been popular or ever will be.
Now it is unfortunately one of the worst vices of the Capitalist system that it destroys the social equality that is indispensable to natural authority and subordination. The very word subordination, which is properly co-ordination, betrays this perversion. Under it directing ability is sold in the market like fish; and, like sturgeon, it is dear because it is scarce. By paying the director more than the directee it creates a difference of class between them; and the difference of class immediately changes a direction or command which naturally would not only not be resented but desired and begged for, into an assertion of class superiority which is fiercely resented. “Who are you that you should order me about? I am as good as you”, is an outburst that never occurs when Colonel Smith gives an order to Lieutenant the Duke of Tencounties. But it very often rises to the lips of Mrs Hicks (though she may leave it unspoken out of natural politeness or fear of consequences), who lives in a slum, when she receives from Mrs Huntingdon Howard, who lives in a square, an order, however helpful to her, given in a manner which emphasizes, and is meant to emphasize, the lady’s conviction that Mrs Hicks is an inferior sort of animal. And Mrs Howard sometimes feels, when Lady Billionham refuses to know her, that Lord Billionham’s rank is but the guinea’s stamp: her man Huntingdon’s the gowd for a’ that. Nothing would please her better than to take her super-incomed neighbor down a peg. Whereas if Mrs Hicks and Mrs Huntingdon Howard and Lady Billionham all had equal incomes, and their children could intermarry without derogation, they would never dream of quarrelling because they (or their husbands) could tell oneanother what to do when they did not know themselves. To be told what to do is to escape responsibility for its consequences; and those who fear any dislike of such telling between equals know little of human nature.
The worst of it is that Capitalism produces a class of persons so degraded by their miserable circumstances that they are incapable of responding to an order civilly given, and have to be fiercely scolded or cursed and kicked before any work can be got out of them; and these poor wretches in turn produce a class of slavedrivers who know no other methods of maintaining discipline. The only remedy is not to produce such people. They are abortions produced by poverty, and will disappear with it.
Reluctance to command is a more serious difficulty. When a couple of soldiers are sent on any duty one of them must be made a corporal for the occasion, as there must be someone to make the decisions and be responsible for them. Usually both men object: each trying to shove the burden on to the other. When they differ in this respect the Platonic rule is to choose the reluctant man, as the probability is that the ambitious one is a conceited fool who does not feel the responsibility because he does not understand it. This kind of reluctance cannot be overcome by extra pay. It may be overcome by simple coercion, as in the case of common jurors. If you are a direct ratepayer you may find yourself at any moment summoned to serve on a jury and make decisions involving the disgrace or vindication, the imprisonment or freedom, the life or death of your fellowcreatures, as well as to maintain the rights of the jury against the continual tendency of the Bench to dictate its decisions. You are not paid to do this: you are forced to do it, just as men were formerly pressed into the navy or forced to sit in Parliament against their will and that of their constituents.
But though in the last resort coercion remains available as a means of compelling citizens to undertake duties from which they shrink, it is found in practice that fitness for special kinds of work carries with it a desire to exercise it, even at serious material disadvantages. Mozart could have made much more money as a valet than he did as the greatest composer of his time, and indeed one of the greatest composers of all time; nevertheless he chose to be a composer and not a valet. He knew that he would be a bad valet, and believed that he could be a good composer; and this outweighed all money considerations with him. When Napoleon was a subaltern he was by no means a success. When Nelson was a captain he was found so unsatisfactory that he was left without a ship on half pay for several years. But Napoleon was a great general and Nelson a great admiral; and I have not the smallest doubt, nor probably have you, that if Napoleon and Nelson had been forced to choose between being respectively a drummer boy and a cabin boy and being a general and an admiral for the same money, they would have chosen the job in which their genius had full scope. They would even have accepted less money if they could have secured their proper job in no other way. Have we not already noted, in Chapter 6, how the capitalist system leaves men of extraordinary and beneficent talent, poor whilst making nonentities and greedy money hunters absurdly rich?
Let us therefore dismiss the fear that persons of exceptional ability need special inducements to exercise that ability to the utmost. Experience proves that even the most severe discouragements and punishments cannot restrain them from trying to do so. Let us return to the real social problem: that of preventing them from taking advantage of the vital necessity and relative scarcity of certain kinds of ability to extort excessive incomes.
In socialized services no difficulty arises. The civil servant, the judge, the navy captain, the field marshal, the archbishop, however extraordinary able, gets no more than any routineer of his rank and seniority. A real gentleman is not supposed to sell himself to the highest bidder: he asks his country for a sufficient provision and a dignified position in return for the best work he can do for it. A real lady can say no less. But in capitalist commerce they are both forced to be cads: that is, to hold up to ransom those to whom their services are indispensable, and become rich at their expense. The mere disciplinarian cannot extort very much because disciplinarians of one sort or another are not very scarce. But the organizer and financier is in a strong position. The owner of a big business, if his employees ask for anything more than a subsistence wage as their share of its product, can always say “Well, if you are not satisfied, take the business and work it yourself without me”. This they are unable to do. The Trade Union to which his employees belong may be tempted to take him at his word; but it soon finds itself unable to carry on, that sort of management not being its job. He says in effect, and often in so many words, “You cannot do without me; so you must work on my terms”. They reply with perfect truth “Neither can you do without us: let us see you organize without any workers to organize”. But he beats them; and the reason is not that he can do without them any more than they can do without him (or her), but that his bargain for the use of his ability is not really made with them but with the landlords whose land he is using and the capitalists who have lent him the capital for his enterprise. It is to them that he can say unanswerably “You cannot do without me”. They may say “Yes we can. We can tell the workers that unless they give up everything they can make out of our land and capital to us except what is enough to keep them alive and renew themselves from generation to generation they shall starve; because they cannot produce without land and capital, and we own all there is available of both”. “That is true” retorts the able organizer and financier; “but please to remember that without an elaborate scientific organization of their labor they can produce no more than a mob of allotment holders, or of serfs on a tenth century manor, whereas if I organize them for you industrially and financially I can multiply their product a thousandfold. Even if you have to pay me a large share of the increase due to my ability you are still far richer than if you did without me.” And to this there is no reply. In this way there arises under Capitalism not only a rent of land and a rent of capital (called interest), but a rent of ability (called profit); and just as in order to secure equality of income it becomes necessary to nationalize land and capital, so it becomes necessary to nationalize ability. We already do this in part by taxing profits. But we do it completely only when, as in the public services, we give it direct national or municipal employment.
Note that rent of ability is a form of rent of labor. Rent is a word that it is very necessary to understand, and that very few people do understand: they think it is only what they have to pay to their landlord. But technically rent is a price that arises whenever there are differences in the yield of any particular source of wealth. When there is a natural difference between the yield of one field and another, or one coal-mine and another, or between the advantages of one building site and another, people will pay more for the better than for the worse; and that extra price is rent. Similarly, when there is a difference between the business ability of one person and another, the price of that difference is rent. You cannot abolish rent, because you cannot abolish the natural difference between one cornfield and another, one coal-field and another, or one person and another; but you can nationalize it by nationalizing the land, the mines, and the labor of the country either directly or by national appropriation of their product by taxation, as to which latter method, as we have seen, there are limits. Until this is done, rent of ability in profiteering will make its possessors rich enough to make their children idle landlords and capitalists and destroy economic equality. Great astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, explorers, discoverers, teachers, preachers, sociologists, and saints may be so poor that their wives are worn-out in a constant struggle to keep up appearances and make both ends meet; but the business organizers pile millions on millions whilst their unfortunate daughters carry about diamonds and sables to advertize their parent’s riches, and drink cocktails until they feel so bad inside that they pay large sums to surgeons to cut them open and find out what is the matter with them. If you reproach these organizers for their inordinate gains, they tell you—or they would tell you if they understood their own position and could express it intelligibly—that every penny they make is made by making money for other people as well; that before they can spend a farthing on themselves they must provide rent for the landlord, interest for the capitalist, and wages for the proletarian on a scale that would be impossible without them; and that England can support five times the number of people she could a hundred years ago because her industries are better organized and more amply financed by them and their like. This is true; but you need not be abashed by it; for which of us has not to provide rent for the landlord, interest for the capitalist, and wages for the laborer before we can spend a penny on ourselves? And why should the organizer and financier be paid more for the exercise of his particular faculty than we who have to co-operate with him by the exercise of our particular faculties before he can produce a loaf of bread or a glass of milk? It is not natural necessity but the capitalist system that enables him to snatch more than his fellow workers from the welter of competitive commerce; and while this lasts we shall have the financier’s daughter saying to the scavenger’s daughter “What would your common dirty father do without my father, who is going to be made a lord?” and the scavenger’s daughter retorting “What would your greedy robber of a father do if my father did not keep the streets clean for him?” Of course you have never heard a lady or a young person talk like that. And probably you never will. They are too polite and too thoughtless to discuss their father’s positions. Besides, they never speak to oneanother. But if they did, and anything upset their tempers, their last words before they came to blows would be just those which I have imagined. If you doubt it, read what the capitalist papers say about Trade Unionists and Socialists, and what the proletarian papers say about landlords and capitalists and bosses. Do you suppose that the charwoman, who has worked in her own necessary way all her life as hard as or harder than any financier, and in the end has nothing to leave to her daughter but her pail and scrubbing brush, really believes, or ever will believe, that Lady Billionham, inheriting a colossal income from her father the financier, has any moral right to her money? Or, if your father had discovered and worked out the theory of relativity, and was acknowledged throughout the world to have the greatest mind since Newton’s, would you consider it morally satisfactory to be obliged to jump at an offer of marriage from a Chicago pork king to enable your illustrious parent to have more than one presentable suit of clothes, knowing all the time that if it had not been for the work of men like your father in pure science not a wheel in the whole vast machinery of modern production would be turning, nor a bagman be able to travel faster than Marco Polo? Privately appropriated rent, whether of land, capital, or ability, makes bad blood; and it is of bad blood that civilizations die. That it is why it is our urgent business to see that Lord Billionham gets no more than Einstein, and neither of them more than the charwoman. You cannot equalize their abilities, but fortunately you can equalize their incomes. Billionham’s half-crown is as good as Einstein’s two-and-sixpence; and the charwoman’s thirty pennies will buy as much bread as either. Equalize them in that respect, and their sons and daughters will be intermarriageable, which will be a very good thing for them, and lead to an enormous improvement of our human stock, the quality of which is the most important thing in the world.