Underdevelopment

“ In so far as the present economic life was planned, it was planned locally, by the directors of one industry, by the chamber of commerce of some city, by a far-sighted banker or financier who insisted upon thinking in terms of the coming business generation. For the most part the system grew, however, like stalks of corn in a field, each stalk drawing its own nourishment from the soil and making what progress it could along its own path toward the zenith.
Another serious drawback in the growth of the present economic system is that much of it was developed as an underground organization. ”

“ Old work-places are closed, production is regulated and organised, profits are guaranteed when works are idle, economies in management are effected, processes of manufacture are specialised and differentiated. The waste involved in competitive industry is enormous, and the sheer force of circumstances is tending to eliminate it.
4. Waste of Labour.
One further consideration must be noted. We have seen that the private ownership of land and capital is a serious drain upon national wealth and a heavy burden upon national production. ”

“ The appropriation of the public lands, the practical closing of opportunity, the degradation of the crafts in face of the consolidation of industry, all tend not only to shut the avenue of escape for the unskilled laborer but to greatly increase his numbers. ”

“ Some of these things, like the growth of cities, seem inseparable from modern industrial development. The problem must be, therefore, how to overcome the evil effect of these tendencies in industry upon the home. There is no reason for believing that such evil effects cannot be overcome, although the problem is a difficult one. Our aim should be, not to stop industrial development, but to guide it and control it in the interest of the higher development of the family. ”

“ The development of the system leads necessarily to a condition in which each individual would require only so much land as he alone, or with the help of his family, could successfully cultivate. The unnatural development of manufacturing industries at the expense of the agricultural, would thus be prevented. ”

“ The working of the large over-capitalised properties is one thing, and the development of low-grade properties, on which large sums have been spent and for which no profits have yet been earned, is quite another. ”

“ We say, glibly, that there are too many towns for the population, and too large a part of the population in towns; therefore, let us place the people all on farms, each settler to work out his own salvation. The result would be a generation spent in lonely toil, and no market provided for the products of farming. Is not the modern way of letting capital do the work of development, of building up cities to furnish a thousand employments for the one of agriculture, and of furnishing buyers of the farm productions of the country at good prices, a better one? ”

“ In every direction have the laws of matter been revealed; in every department of industry have arisen arms of iron and fingers of steel,548 whose effect upon the production of wealth has been precisely the same as an increase in the fertility of nature. What has been the result? Simply that land owners get all the gain. The wonderful discoveries and inventions of our century have neither increased wages nor lightened toil. The effect has simply been to make the few richer; the many more helpless! ”

“ Each form of industry, as it is developed by division of labor, springs from and rises out of the others, and all rest ultimately upon land; for, without land, labor is as impotent as would be a man in void space. To make the illustration closer to the condition of a progressive country, imagine a pyramid composed of superimposed layers—the whole constantly growing and expanding. Imagine the growth of the layer nearest the ground to be checked. ”

“ This great good, among others—that the stagnant weight of unemployed population in these insulated realms is never likely again to accumulate to the dangerous amount which there was sometimes cause to apprehend that, from unforeseen revulsions in industry or foreign trade, it might have done. A natural vent is now so thoroughly opened, and so certain to grow wider and clearer everyday, that the overflow will pass off whenever a moderate degree of pressure recurs. Population, skill, and capital, also, will no longer wait in consternation till they are half spent with watching and fear. ”

“ The Problem of the Nation
So, it seems to me, in this new crude continental commonwealth, there is going on the same economic process, on a grander scale, indeed, than has gone so far in our own island. There is a great concentration of wealth above, and below, deep and growing is the abyss, that sunken multitude on the margin of subsistence which is a characteristic and necessary feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming abyss where children have no chance, where men and women dream neither of leisure nor of self-respect. ”

“ We have put too much emphasis on industries. Just as we have said , ‘Without money there can be no development’, we also seem to say, ‘Industries are the basis of development, without industries there is no development’. ”

“ Great portions, therefore, of the actual producers or producing classes are on the margin of subsistence, while the rest of the wealth of the country is absorbed by those trading and dividend-consuming classes of whom I have spoken more than once in previous pages. There is over-population certainly, but it is an over-population (as any one may see who walks through the West End of London or the corresponding quarters of any of our large towns) of idlers and futile people, who are a burden to the nation. ”

“ The first perceptions of men seem always to be that land is common property; but the rude devices by which this is at first recognized—such as annual partitions or cultivation in common—are consistent with only a low stage of development. The idea of property, which naturally arises with reference to things of human production, is easily transferred to land, and an institution which when population is sparse merely secures to the improver and user the due reward of his labor, finally, as population becomes dense and rent arises, operates to strip the producer of his wages. ”

“ A dominant class, who concentrate power in their hands, will likewise soon concentrate ownership of the land. To them will fall large partitions of conquered land, which the former inhabitants will till as tenants or serfs, and the public domain, or common lands, which in the natural course of social growth are left for awhile in every country, and in which state the primitive system of village culture leaves pasture and woodland, are readily acquired, as we see by modern instances. And inequality once established, the ownership of land tends to concentrate as development goes on. ”

“ To fail to apprehend the tendency of one's age, and to fail to adapt the conditions of an industry to it, is to leave that industry ill-adjusted and belated on the economic side, and out of line ethically. ”

“ Apart from this trifling matter, we cannot but admire the shapely pyramidal construction, the harmonious and flowing movement of the book, which, passing from the most subtle disquisitions upon the algebra of value, deals with the complexities of factory life and machine production, plunges into the inferno of workshops and mines and into the infamous stews of unspeakable poverty, to conclude with a description of the tragic expropriation of a suffering population. ”

“ Chapter XIII The primary cause of industrial depressions There is a cause, not yet adverted to, that must be taken into consideration to explain fully the influence of material progress upon the distribution of wealth. That cause is the confident expectation of the future enhancement of land values which arises in all progressive countries from the steady increase of rent and which leads to speculation, or the holding of land for a higher price than it would otherwise bring. ”

“ The progress is frequently so gradual, that, at near periods, the improvement is not only not sensible, but, from the declension either of certain branches of industry, or of certain districts of the country, things which sometimes happen, though the country in general is in great prosperity, there frequently arises a suspicion, that the riches and industry of the whole are decaying. ”

“ Everywhere land values have been steadily increasing with material progress, and everywhere this increase begot a speculative advance. The impulse of the primary cause not only radiated from the newer sections of the Union to the older sections, and from the United States to Europe, but everywhere the primary cause was acting. And, hence, a world-wide depression of industry and commerce, begotten of a world-wide material progress. ”

“ On social and moral grounds, also, apart from dry considerations of political economy, progress intelligence and a higher standard of life are more likely to be found with large cities, manufactures, and a variety of industrial occupations than with a dead level of a few millionaires and a few shepherds, or of a few landlords and a dense population of poor peasants. ”

“ Independently of all imperfection in the bulwarks which society purposely throws round what it recognises as property, there are various other modes in which defective institutions impede the employment of the productive resources of a country to the best advantage. ”

“ Outside capital will take the risk for the prize, will employ the labor, will create the transportation, the markets, and the interchange of commodities that make foundations for modern civilization. Natural wealth outside the path of development has no value. ”

“ The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property upon which it is built. The endeavor to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay—a decay that is accompanied by the most painful convulsions. ”

“ Instead, then, of the stagnation, both of industry and of benevolence, which would follow the universal and equable distribution of property, some men, by superior advantages of birth, or intellect, or patronage, come into possession of a great amount of capital. ”

“ That there is a common cause, and that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness. ”

“ If land in large bodies can be cultivated more cheaply than land in small bodies, to restrict ownership to small bodies will reduce the aggregate production of wealth, and, in so far as such restrictions are imposed and take effect, will they tend to diminish the general productiveness of labor and capital. ”

“ As has been said before, there are to be included in the improvements which increase the value of land not only the improvements which directly increase productive power, but also such improvements in government, manners and morals as indirectly increase it. Considered as material forces, the effect of all these is to increase productive power and, like improvements in the productive arts, their benefit is ultimately monopolized by the possessors of the land. ”

“ The new class of wealthy factory owners, (I dislike the word "bourgeoisie" which has been used to death by the apostles of a new social order,) slowly increased its hold upon the government, and the conditions of industrial life in the large cities continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheat-land into dreary slums, which guard the approach of every modern European town. ”

“ These problems of job control, of wealth and income distribution, of industrial inter-relations and of the relation between the state and industry are pressing for solution in every important centre of modern economic life. Each constitutes a disturbing element and contributes its mite to the aggregate of social instability and unrest that are racking the economic world. ”

“ We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private property in land. We have seen that so long as this institution exists no increase in productive power can permanently benefit the masses ”

“ Then would the resumption of land as common property in nowise interfere with the proper use and improvement of land.
What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, “this land is yours,” in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, “whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours.” Give a man security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he wants to build, and he will build it. ”

“ The primary and fundamental occupations, which create a demand for all others, are evidently those which extract wealth from nature, and, hence, if we trace from one exchange point to another, and from one occupation to another, this check to production, which shows itself in decreased purchasing power, we must ultimately find it in some268 obstacle which checks labor in expending itself on land. And that obstacle, it is clear, is the speculative advance in rent, or the value of land, which produces the same effects, as in fact, it is, a lock-out of labor and capital by land owners. ”