The Servile State quotes

and I have shown that attempts to mask the capitalist character of such operations by the machinery of sinking funds and the rest are logically worthless.

You cannot “buy out” capitalism.

I need not point out what steps have been taken, even in the very short time since this book first appeared, in the direction which it is intended to explain. We already have wages boards in one great industry;

Again, examples of state regulation and of state or municipal economic enterprise increasing rapidly among us obviously do not affect my argument.

Unless or until these are based upon a policy of confiscation they are no more an example of socialism than the explosion of gunpowder is an example of warfare.

They are no more “socialistic efforts” or “beginnings” or “experiments in socialism” than fireworks at the Crystal Palace are “military” efforts or “beginnings” or “experiments in militarism.” Socialism would indeed involve such regulations and such municipal enterprise just as war involves the explosion of gunpowder;

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.

and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the observation of contemporary civilised pagans enables us to judge.

It was poverty that made the slave.

Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the selling of them in the slave markets of the South.

nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the pagan world.

Slavery is irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.

You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air which pagan antiquity breathed.

nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the pagan world. Slavery is irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.

You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air which pagan antiquity breathed.

Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its reserves of power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of the servile state.

But capitalism—that is, the ownership by a few of the springs of life—was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a good into an evil thing.

It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind.

the Church was therefore the “lord” of something over 25 percent, say 28 percent, or perhaps nearly 30 percent, of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce.

The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 percent of the demesne land in the villages

, and the receiver of something like 30 percent, of the customary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners to the greater.

petty forms of violence in theft and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with these alone.

Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.

The vast bulk of so-called “free” contracts are today leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.

Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens.

The vast bulk of so-called “free” contracts are today leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.

Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery which the state can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of the possessors.

The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the courts, but the withholding of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors.

Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal.

The true master of the Englishman today is not the Sovereign nor the officers of state, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the capitalist.

Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal.

The true master of the Englishman today is not the Sovereign nor the officers of state, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the capitalist.

Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny them does so today at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or for intelligence.

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The capitalist state breeds a collectivist theory which in action produces something utterly different from collectivism: to wit, the Servile State.

… is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed.

It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.

On the other hand, the collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the capitalist society which it proposes to replace.

these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.

Let us help the practical man in his weakness and do a little thinking for him.

As a social reformer he has of course (though he does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all the rest of us, and his first principles and dogmas are exactly the same as those which his intellectual superiors hold in the matter of …

To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution which even the beginnings of the servile state propose are what a declivity is to a piece of brainless matter.

The piece of brainless matter rolls down the declivity, and the practical man lollops from capitalism to the servile state with the same inevitable ease.

Jones has not got enough. If you give him something in charity, that something will be soon consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. Jones has been seven weeks out of work.

Under the conditions of modern exchange a man of that sort enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he never was in any other society before our own, possessed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen until our time.

Of history with all its lessons; of the great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank.

The practical man left to himself would not produce the servile state. He would not produce anything but a welter of anarchic restrictions which would lead at last to some kind of revolt.

today he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment.

Private law has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. Today a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

… has for the second time in our long European story overcome public law, and the sanctions which the capitalist can call to the aid of his private rule, by the action of his private will, are stronger than those which the public courts can impose.

In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to Mass lest the judges should punish him. Today a man fears to speak in favour of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

To deny the rule of public powers once involved public punishments which most men dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of private powers involves today a private punishment against the threat of which very few indeed dare to stand out.

… arithmetic, and all the confusion introduced by the complex mechanism of “finance” can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical principles involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest triangle to less than 180 degrees.

In fine: if you desire to confiscate, you must confiscate.

You cannot outflank the enemy, as financiers in the city and sharpers on the racecourse outflank the simpler of mankind, nor can you conduct the general process of expropriation upon a muddleheaded hope that somehow or other something will come out of nothing in the …

The point is subtle, but, as I say, fundamental. It involved no distinction of status between employer and employed.

Citizen A offered citizen B a sack of wheat down if citizen B would plough for him a piece of land which might or might not produce more than a sack of wheat.

Of course citizen A expected it would produce more, and was awaiting a surplus value, or he would not have made the contract with citizen B.

Hence he is necessarily a subject for forced labour. We have not yet in this country, established by force of law, the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable consequence of those other reforms which have just been reviewed.

The “labour colony” (a prison so called because euphemism is necessary to every transition) will be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of compulsion will crown the edifice of these reforms.

They will then be complete so far as the subject classes are concerned, and even though this particular institution of the “labour colony” (logically the last of all) precede in time other forms of compulsion, it will make the advent of those other forms of …

the fact that the implements are always sold at much more than their true value; the fact that the purchase includes nonproductive things; and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the rate of repayment.

These three adverse conditions lead in practice to nothing but the riveting of capitalism more securely round the body of the state.

For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken over? Is it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for, even at an exaggerated price? Far from it!