Chapters on Socialism

 With the recent resurgence of interest in socialism on the American left, it's worth revisiting John Stuart Mill's Chapters on Socialism as probably one of the best attempts ever to think through systematically both the merits of the socialist critique of capitalist society and the viability of its proposed alternatives. 

Better than perhaps any writer in history on the topic, Mill performs the feat of holding multiple ideas in mind at the same time—and managing to distinguish between them. He is therefore the opposite of that individual William Hazlitt once identified as the great pest of all political life: "the person with one idea." 

Mill admits up front that the socialist moral critique of "winner take all and devil take the hindmost" laissez-faire capitalism is basically unanswerable. If economic life is a race, we can after all doubt whether everyone gets the same starting gun; it seems clear, after all, that some of us are rather given a bit of a handicap in this particular contest. 

And even if the race were run on entirely fair terms, and only the strongest and fastest prevailed, this too would not mend the matter. Mill writes: "If some Nero or Domitian was to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape."

But next, Mill says, we should be careful to guard against certain overstatements and exaggerations in the socialist brief against capitalist society. It is not actually quite true, he argues, that—as socialists are wont to claim—labor does "all the work" and the capitalist pockets all the proceeds "for doing nothing." Rather, the foundation of capitalism under ideal conditions rests on the concept of a basically fair bargain. 

The essence of the labor contract under capitalism, for Mill, is that the worker agrees to put in the manual effort, while the capitalist agrees to part with the temporary use of their capital—and to take on the risk of losing it entirely, in the event of default or that the concern goes under—in order to pay the workers for their efforts. 

The amount of profit the capitalist actually takes home at the end of this transaction, Mill argues, is actually quite small—little more, in most cases, than fair compensation for the temporary use of his capital and the risks of loss involved in its use. 

This is probably true, by and large. The average small store owner is eking out slim margins and taking on considerable burdens of anxiety and management that seem, if anything, too little compensated by the share of profit that is left over, after wages and business expenses. The company that makes an obscene fortune for its owners is the exception, rather than the rule. 

Okay, so far, capitalism is sounding defensible. 

But next, we have to ask: why do some people have the capital to bargain with in the first place? It may sound like a fair exchange on paper—"I will let you use my fortune for a time so long as you pay me back with interest for being willing to part with its use"—but why does one party have the fortune to lend in the first place, and the other party have only their bodies and muscles to sell? 

This, of course, gets into the origins of property, which I don't think anyone has ever been able adequately to defend. Mill certainly doesn't even attempt to do so. Anatole France is probably quite right, in his Penguin Island, when he suggests that it all started with nothing more noble and honorable than one big penguin clubbing another smaller penguin over the head and stealing his stuff.

As France sardonically puts it: "Take care [...] that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness. Reflect, above all, that in blaming the big penguin you are attacking property in its origin and in its source."

What Marx called "primitive accumulation" has never been pretty. To quote Robert Tressell on the subject of where property in land came from: "Possession of much of it was obtained by means of murder or theft perpetrated by the ancestors of the present holders." 

Certainly, we know this to be true in countries like the United States that were founded through "settler colonialism"—but it is true in England too, as Tressell observed, if one goes all the way back to the acts of enclosure, etc. (There is a reason Tressell calls the Tory MP in his novel "Sir Graball D'Encloseland.")

If it is possible to imagine in the abstract a fair system of exchange between equals, according to which capitalism could be justified, it is nonetheless necessary to first posit a society in which everyone really is starting from an equal position, in terms of property—or that any property people have at the front end of the exchange was acquired fairly and honestly in the first instance. But this is precisely what—in our society—we cannot honestly assert. 

The best argument for not immediately declaring the end of all private property, then, is not so much that people have some moral "right" to all they currently possess; it is—rather—to point to the likely consequences that would follow from decreeing its immediate and universal abolition. 

Simply asserting that no one has legal title to any of their property that they can vindicate in court would not end the human instinct for possessiveness. What is likely to happen instead is that people who already have something in their clutches would resort to "self-help" to defend their possessions by violence. And others in turn might try to wrest what they have from their hands by the same means. 

And if the latter succeeded in getting the stuff away from the first owners, they would then probably want to keep it, Mill observed. 

The result of abolishing property, then, would not be the reign of equality, but simply an even more extreme and deadly version of the "right of might" and the "law of the stronger" that already prevails under capitalism. 

As Mill observes: "For a long period to come the principle of individual property will be in possession of the field; and even if in any country a popular movement were to place Socialists at the head of a revolutionary government, in however many ways they might violate private property, the institution itself would survive, and would either be accepted by them or brought back by their expulsion, for the plain reason that people will not lose their hold of what is at present their sole reliance for subsistence and security until a substitute for it has been got into working order. Even those, if any, who had shared among themselves what was the property of others would desire to keep what they had acquired, and to give back to property in the new hands the sacredness which they had not recognised in the old."

But after pointing out in this way that simply announcing a free-for-all melee for property, with no legal rights or title that can be vindicated in court, would be likely to end in disaster, Mill also acknowledges a second crucial point that cuts in the other direction. Namely, he adds: as much as some notion of private property must survive, that does not mean that idea cannot be permitted to change over time. 

Indeed, he notes, the definition of property in society has many times radically altered over the course of human history. The concept of having legal property in human beings—for instance—was, Mill writes, thankfully abolished in the nineteenth century. 

It is possible to imagine that we might similarly decide as a society, someday, that we will not recognize the right to property transferred between generations. Or we could impose a Napoleonic system of forced division of property at death along preset lines, rather than allowing an unrestricted power of bequest. Or we might abolish the concept of having title to land.

None of these changes would be likely to result in the Hobbesian war of all against all that a total overnight elimination of property rights would effect. However, we would still have to watch for the impact of such changes on incentives. Thus, any change in property relations, as Mill observes, ought to be accomplished with fair compensation to the prior possessors. 

This is true not only as a matter of abstract justice, as I see it, but as a psychological prop to the functioning of a market economy. People have to believe, fundamentally, that their rights of ownership are secure, if they are going to bother investing and engaging in other productive behaviors. If we chip away at some forms of property too precipitously, and without adequate compensation, it would likely prompt counterproductive and anti-social behaviors instead, such as hoarding. 

A society in which people think whatever they possess may be taken from them the next day is not one in which anyone will bother to start a business or invest in an enterprise. This, more than any dubious defense of the moral "rights of property," is the true ultimate rationale for preserving some basic recognition of private ownership in society. 

But as much as Mill thinks private property is advisable, again, he appears perfectly open to such reforms of existing property relations as progressive taxation, redistribution (with compensation) of land titles, limitations on the powers of bequest, etc. 

Moreover, Mill is even willing to entertain gradualist communal experiments on socialist lines. 

He observes that egalitarian communes tend, admittedly, to display certain defects. Equal division of all the proceeds of the enterprise tends to decrease the incentive of any given member of the community to assume the burdens of leadership, and would probably lead to economic stagnation and routine. 

(It does not, however, Mill acknowledges—and you can see here what I mean about him being ever the fair-minded rationalist who can see both sides of the question—affect so much the incentives of the average member of the commune to labor, since the typical wage-earner under capitalism likewise can expect no more than their hourly wage, and has no more direct personal incentive to increase the profitability of the concern as a whole than would the member of any communist kibbutz. Indeed, Mill observes, this is a frequent subject of complaint among capitalist employers.)

Moreover, Mill argues, a socialist commune requires the majority to make decisions about matters—such as child-rearing and education—that are extremely prickly for individuals, but which in capitalist society we can generally leave to the choice of private individuals. Forcing a majority vote on these questions, he argues, is a recipe for endless conflict. 

(Though William Morris has an answer for this alleged "tyranny of the majority" by suggesting, at least in his utopia, that anyone who doesn't like the rules of his particular commune could simply pick up and find another. As he writes in News from Nowhere: "we live as we like, and we like to live as a rule with certain house-mates that we have got used to.  [...]  But you must understand therewith, that though separate households are the rule amongst us, and though they differ in their habits more or less, yet no door is shut to any good-tempered person who is content to live as the other house-mates do: only of course it would be unreasonable for one man to drop into a household and bid the folk of it to alter their habits to please him, since he can go elsewhere and live as he pleases.")

Ultimately, though, Mill suggests that none of his objections to the likely success of Fourierist experiments and the like are final. He says that people should be free to try out these experiments on a small basis and prove that they can succeed. He even wishes them well; as doubtless many of us still do today. We have no problem with people going out and starting a collective farm or cooperative store if they can make a go of it. 

The problem, Mill says, is simply with the "revolutionary" and totalizing variety of socialism that proposes to remake all of society in one go, without any prior experimental evidence for thinking that such a revolution can succeed. 

One often hears this sort of thing even today from the left. People say: "we first have to tear it all down before we can hope to rebuild." People say: "how could whatever emerges from the rubble be any worse than the way things are currently?" 

As was often said in the climate movement not so long ago: "this crisis is an opportunity for socialism, because capitalism must eventually break down under the impact of its own environmental destruction."

The Left has never been able to rid itself fully of the long-familiar delusion that if only capitalism would collapse, socialism would arise in its place. The possibility of something much worse than capitalism coming instead never seems to occur to them or to be treated as a real possibility—even though examples of societies in which market institutions have broken down without socialism taking root are all around us, and abound in the pages of human history. 

Mill reminds us that things can in fact always get a very great deal worse than they are right now—and that tearing things down generally, in human history, has no positive correlation whatsoever to subsequently building them up again in a better way. To the contrary, tearing down generally makes it harder to rebuild—for obvious reasons. 

This is probably the part of Mill's brief chapters that people still need to hear the most today, when one often encounters an omnidirectional populist rage about the state of society without any conscious thought as to how a better system would be possible. 

The past few weeks in France, for instance, protesters have been mobbing the streets, ransacking stores, and burning down iconic municipal buildings and symbols of the French republic in order to express their gloom and outrage over the cost of living. 

These protests have been remarkable for their lack of any concrete demands or workable program from the protesters. Instead, people seem to simply be angry about the cost of living and the country's current financial condition. But the government transfer payments they seek, in order to ameliorate the effects of both, could easily worsen the same problem, by stoking inflation and driving the already desperate state of France's public finances into an even more hopeless corner. 

Even that starry-eyed utopian William Morris, to his credit, seems to have anticipated this problem. "You were getting perilously near to the late Roman poor-rates," one of Morris's characters observes, "and the doling out of bread to the proletariat." To which the other replies: "So many said at the time, [...] and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it reaches the end[.]"

Doubtless, many of the protesters on France's streets believe that they are accomplishing something constructive by trying to "burn it all down." But Mill reminds us of all the reasons why merely destroying what we have is not the same thing as producing something better. (And if any conservatives pounce at this point and say, aha! even you liberals have been surprised into a Burkean insight, I reply that my attitude to Burke has always been the same as William Hazlitt's: it's not that Burke was wrong in principle, it's that he was over-broad in his application of principle.)

Let us end with Mill's words:

The result of our review of the various difficulties of Socialism has led us to the conclusion that the various schemes for managing the productive resources of the country by public instead of private agency have a case for a trial, and some of them may eventually establish their claims to preference over the existing order of things, but that they [...] have yet to prove their power of training mankind at large to the state of improvement which they presuppose. Far more, of course, may this be said of the more ambitious plan which aims at taking possession of the whole land and capital of the country, and beginning at once to administer it on the public account. [...] It is saying but little to say that the introduction of Socialism under such conditions could have no effect but disastrous failure, and its apostles could have only the consolation that the order of society as it now exists would have perished first, and all who benefit by it would be involved in the common ruin—a consolation which to some of them would probably be real, for if appearances can be trusted the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary Socialists is hate; a very excusable hatred of existing evils, which would vent itself by putting an end to the present system at all costs even to those who suffer by it, in the hope that out of chaos would arise a better Kosmos, and in the impatience of desperation respecting any more gradual improvement. They are unaware that chaos is the very most unfavorable position for setting out in the construction of a Kosmos, and that many ages of conflict, violence, and tyrannical oppression of the weak by the strong must intervene[....]

If the poorest and most wretched members of a so-called civilised society are in as bad a condition as every one would be in that worst form of barbarism produced by the dissolution of civilised life, it does not follow that the way to raise them would be to reduce all others to the same miserable state. On the contrary, it is by the aid of the first who have risen that so many others have escaped from the general lot, and it is only by better organization of the same process that it may be hoped in time to succeed in raising the remainder.