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attached to the industries where scientific knowledge is important-science, treated not as the handmaiden of capital, but as the brains of industry, can again revolutionize production, both in process and in output, as it revolutionized it by the application of steam. When the complete co-ordination which Socialism aims at takes place, science will have room to work, it will have opportunities to work. What is now waste will be wealth. In the treatment of coal alone, there will be imperial revenues in smoke, and gold mines in rubbish heaps. The competition between workplace and workplace will not go on the lines of cheapness because everything will be as cheap as possible (concentration and organization having eliminated all but natural differences in costs of production), but in quality, in suitability, in economy. And whereas, under capitalist combinations the consumer is at the mercy of the producer, under Socialist combinations the consumer will control the producer. The consumer will have to be studied, because he will be enfranchized to make effective demands upon a production managed for his enjoyment. So soon as results on the market have revealed the will of the user, the whole machinery of production will be made to respond to it. Experience, scientific knowledge, artistic achievement, statistics, economizing devices can be exchanged throughout, for they will then be the property of the whole function, and not of private interests working in it for their own profit. The will of the consumer will come into direct contact with the object of the producer.

Thus on its purely mechanical side Socialism completes the tentative and limited transformation of Capitalism. The economic combinations of

Capitalism establish the accuracy of Socialist theoretical forecasts. When the world was poohpoohing the architecture which the Socialist was putting before it, Capitalism was silently building a structure of the scouted type.

I can now complete the organization which I left at the workshop. According to the idea now developed, the workshop is but a unit in a great organization and has to fit into that organization. It will be controlled by the co-operation of brain work and hand work, of organizers and labourers, and their unity will be complete. It will be grouped in districts of varying size with kindred workplaces, and its management will be co-ordinated accordingly. It will not, therefore, suffer from too much centralization so that no mind or committee can control it, because the people in actual touch with the processes will have freedom and authority to be real managers and not merely agents. It will have all the information necessary to make it effective and precise in its work, and all about its working will be known to its district group. It, therefore, cannot fall behind and cannot stagnate. It must do its required work or cease and its workpeople be absorbed elsewhere. The interests of all are involved in the product of each. Each must come up to a standard in quantity, quality and price. Moreover, the workshop must respond to the trade, and the directors of the trade will not be only workmen and managers, or capitalists with interests as at present, but representatives of the producers, of the scientists and technicians, and the consumers. The total production required can be estimated and safe margins always provided for; the capacity of factories will be known; scientific and technical experts will represent the

ideas of development and change, and will decide the questions of expansion, re-organization, re-distribution of effort. The trade will provide its own capital, make its own insurances for accidents and unemployment, and thus save, what is now lost to production, the large staffs and financial operations now involved in numerous insurance enterprises. It will be equipped on the one hand with a buying organization, either used by itself or in common with others as circumstances determine, and on the other with a selling and marketing organization which will be international as well as domestic in its activities.

Thus will production reach its maximum efficiency, be freed from the control of special interests and become a true communal concern; thus the true motive to work will be provided, and labour be freed from a servitude that not only kept it inefficient, unhappy and antagonistic but, thereby, damaged the commonwealth.

CHAPTER V

DISTRIBUTION

HEN thinking of distribution we have two

W things in mind. There is the division of

wealth in Society, and then the system by which products find their way to the user.

THE FUNDAMENTAL LAW

The distribution of wealth in capitalist Society is regulated by the economic power possessed by the various classes that own the factors entering into production. The share of the relatively strong is large, of the relatively weak is small. Distribution depends upon the power to take, not the power to make. That is the main rule, but the individual cannot be left out of account, as he can sometimes bring to bear his own influences in determining his personal share, and a very important factor is also State policy as regards property. The main rule explains rent from land, profit and dividends from capital, and wages and salaries from labour power and ability. The last is in some of its features so economically akin to the toll which land can impose upon production, by reason of land being a natural monopoly, that it is sometimes called "the rent of ability."

RENT

All income from land is not rent, because part of it is derived from improvements made by capital, and is therefore interest. Nor is the "rent" of

It is, at any rate,
Rent is payment

houses rent in the economic sense. partly the reward of capital in use. made for being allowed to use a monopoly, and its typical and purest form is the toll exacted by the owners of land by which they are induced to allow their lands to be used for housing, mining, and so on.* The amount of the rent of land depends upon the value of the land bargained about in relation to land in competition with it which is so situated, or is of such a kind, that it barely pays to be used at all. In agriculture, if it just pays without a rent burden to cultivate land yielding x amount of product per acre, according to pure economic theory, lands yielding x + y and x + z would be rented at y and z per acre, respectively, if they were in competition, and the total costs of production and marketing were approximately equal. When land is built upon, the pressure of population determines the ground rents to be paid on residential property, and the business values of different parts of the town for shops, warehouses, banks and so on, fix the ground rents for business premises. I have said that all income from land is not rent, but, on the other hand, when a monopoly or a scarcity is created, as in the overcrowded warren of offices in the city of London, capital can exact a true rent as well as interest. Ability whilst scarce is also able to exact a rent as well as a salary. Therefore, as rent is an equalizing economic weight and does not represent service, in an economically controlled State no rent would be paid to private individuals, but would be part of the communal income.

*Thus mining royalties may not be rents if they represent the wastage of property in minerals, but, on the other hand, wayleaves are pure rent.

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