Capitalism, as we have said, tends in the course of its development to produce a kind of ‘Socialism’ out of itself, destroying itself in the desperate attempts of the capitalists to save the system from the worst effects of its own contradictions. But there is an opposite tendency, a drift, not only by the capitalists but by those who suffer from capitalist crises, towards a village economy.
This cannot be dismissed as fantastic. Complicated civilisations have, before now, returned to the village, the very memory of their achievements forgotten, left to be unearthed by the archaeologists centuries later. Though, at the moment, the pull to the village economy is not as strong as the development towards a planned machine economy, it cannot be denied that it is there. Marx said that capitalism must either develop into Socialism or relapse into barbarism – which, as he hated the country, was his way of describing village economy. But this ‘barbarism’ can also be expressed as:
Back to the clean earth, and the old faiths, out from the poisoned air of cities and the corruption of politics. Back to simplicity, and the days when man struggled with nature as a man, and not merely as a cog in one of his own machines.
This is not an extract from a Fascist speech, but it might well be. It is a view that is securing an increasing amount of sympathy. Only, its most ardent advocates do not seem quite to have taken in all that village economy means. It is not the life of the week-end cottage or the farm which, with its tractors and perhaps even electricity, is practically an adjunct of the town. Village economy means the destruction of the heavy industries on which so many of the amenities of our modern life have been built. With that comes the decay of roads, the falling in of bridges, the big cities derelict, and a population one-fifth or one-tenth of what it is now. Those who are left subsist on the farms or on the village crafts, their needs restricted to what can be bought by the barter of their products at the nearest market town.
Such a tendency may take three centuries to develop. The seeds of it were sown in the Roman Empire from tendencies inherent in the Roman economy before the empire came into existence. Are such tendencies at work in capitalism as we know it? Are they likely to prove stronger than the pull towards a Socialist economy, that Socialists who have not remembered the warning words of Marx have regarded as inevitable?
What are the causes operating in the direction of a village economy?
War: The obvious one seems to be war, which is a direct consequence of Fascism. The smashing of the heavy industry of a country during the hostilities might hasten the process. But actually every modern war has extended the technical equipment of the industrial countries concerned. War actually seems to supply a stimulus to capitalist technical development. War, as waged on the modern scale, could also mean the physical destruction of a great part of the population of the fighting nations, thus producing the second condition of village economy. But statistics show that after such destruction the birth-rate rises phenomenally. Incidentally, great destruction of population such as occurred after the Black Death because of the resultant shortage of labour may lead to a development of machinery, and consequently of capitalism.
But however destructive war may be, it is hardly possible that the greater part of the machine industry and population of both sides would be wiped out simultaneously. Presumably the apparatus of the victor would suffer less, and still maintain the traditions of capitalist production until the world had recovered ready for the next war.
Nor is such destruction likely to take place over the whole earth at the same time. There would still be people to take over the vacant places from other parts of the world even if it were actually possible to wipe out whole civilised populations by new and terrible forms of gas and chemical war.
It is in the recurrence of war, which is a necessity to capitalism, rather than in the results of any special war, that the tendency to return to the village economy can be found. That the people would revolt against too frequent recurrence of the senseless slaughter and its attendant horrors, has already been demonstrated by the psychological effects of the last war. Another war, and yet another, remains a possibility, but the limit of the patience of the people is obviously near. The revolt of the populace against war can lead to Socialism if a strong party, such as Lenin built up, exists, and can lead the masses in the right direction. But if the revolting masses are leaderless, modern civilisation could be smashed by their blind fury. Out of such chaos a village economy would be the easiest and obvious type to build. It would grow as the weeds would grow in the streets of the derelict cities of the hated capitalism.
Technical Stagnation: There is also a further possibility. The muddle created by capitalist conditions becomes so great, that the machine appears to be the real enemy, and is destroyed... not by some infuriated groups of workers as in the nineteenth century, but by general consent; or even as part of the plan of the big capitalists for dealing with that muddle.
The crack in the very foundations of capitalism is the gap between the technical possibility of producing as much or more than is required by everyone, and the impossibility of selling the goods owing to the profit system, and the low wages that the necessity of making profit entails. ‘Low’ here has nothing to do with the actual rate paid. A high money wage would still be ‘low’ in this sense if it did not enable the mass of the people to buy back what is produced.
This contradiction in capitalism produces the periodical crises of unemployment which are progressively more severe. To the man out of a job, the work of himself and a dozen of his mates being done by a new labour-saving machine, that machine appears the enemy. To him it is the technical progress, not the condition of private ownership and the existence of the profit system.
A mentality of machine-wrecking is thus created. It spreads through all classes. In peasant countries there is the hatred of the small farmer and the small artisans against the encroaching machine, and its accompanying shadow of debt. We have seen in modern Germany the revolt against the art of the machine age, with its straight lines and stark simplicity. ‘Art must be built on blood and soil, not on the cold dead steel of the machine’, say the new Nazi intellectuals.
Technical progress during the last two centuries was made possible only by the general enthusiasm for it. Science in the nineteenth century seemed to be the deliverer of mankind from drudgery. Inventions were the new gifts of God to man. Men of science were highly honoured. The cream of the intellect of the day was devoted to it. But in Germany this is no longer the case. The scientist is under suspicion. Posts are given on the basis rather of political enthusiasm than scientific attainments. The élite of German science has had to leave the country or has been dismissed with a none-too-polite intimation that its loss will not be felt. Where the highest rewards are given to the warrior, the best brains will tend to concentrate on the art and science of war. The slackening of technical progress, except in those branches which are directly useful for war purposes, is already to be seen in Germany, for this tendency did not begin only in the month of Hitler’s accession to power.
It is an error to suppose that science cannot disappear from the world, because learning is written in books... and not even the Nazis can burn all these books, though they made a symbolic gesture indicative of their desires in this direction. Somebody must understand the books, and the more complicated the science, the longer the training needed for their comprehension. Einstein has said that if for only one generation no sufficient number of good scientists existed, the books of modern physicists would become unintelligible to the next generation. The equations of the quantum theory would have to the next generation about as much sense or meaning as the Etruscan inscriptions have had to succeeding generations since the key to the language has been lost.
Much scientific knowledge has already been lost. Ancient India had a column of rustless steel. For thousands of years no one knew how to reproduce it, until the secret was again discovered in Western Europe. Science needs an atmosphere of social encouragement, but today the French chemist Berthelot can even propose to discourage it by putting a tax instead of a premium on new inventions. An English bishop can seriously urge in sermon and article that ‘a holiday should be taken from inventing things’.
We have a precedent for this sinking of technical progress into village economy in the history of Rome. By about AD 50 there existed a high degree of civilisation, with a rather complicated economic system based largely on exchange and division of labour. Five hundred years later all the triumphs of its technical and organisational skill had been forgotten, and the peace of a village reigned in the avenues of its argument.
But the destruction of technical progress may be the work of the capitalists themselves, carried through in the teeth of the opposition of the unemployed workers, who see in this destruction their last hopes of getting work ended. The characteristic feature of the years of the deflation has been the wholesale burning of crops and raw material. It has been part of the Roosevelt New Era Policy to subsidise such destruction and restriction of output by state aid. In March 1934, the Cotton Weaving Employers’ Association of Lille decided to buy 40,000 weaving looms in order to destroy them, in face of the hot protests of the workers. In Great Britain, National Shipping Securities Ltd was formed with the backing of the Bank of England to buy up ‘redundant shipyards’, and sterilise them for ship-building for 40 years. At a demonstration of workers held to protest against this policy in Jarrow-on-Tyne, a highly skilled ships’ fitter said bitterly: ‘The only job I shall now have a chance of getting is cutting the grass in the shipyard where I served my time.’
Mr Ernest Bevin, the leader of the British Transport Workers, said in South Wales, in June 1934:
The so-called masters of industry are allowing whole districts to become derelict, and not only that, but they create conditions which prevent these districts from saving themselves. Works are being bought up, and the assistance of the banks is secured to prevent anyone else starting them and using the skill existent in the area. The shareholders of these idle works are drawing a very large amount per box of tinplates produced elsewhere in interest on idle capital.
This policy of restriction, as Mr Bevin pointed out, is carried through ‘without giving any consideration to labour at all’. What then happens to the labour thus displaced and prevented from using its skill? For a time it draws the dole. The government in Britain maintains ‘labour camps’, for reconditioning the unemployed where, in fact, they are taught ‘subsistence industry’ – the industry of the village. They are taught primitive agriculture to enable them to go on farms – how to cobble their own shoes. The Society of Friends, with government assistance, teaches them the village crafts, wrought iron work, simple blacksmith work, all those things that would be useful in a village economy, but which have been taken over by large-scale industry. The Labour government of 1929-31 gave considerable grants of money to get as many unemployed back on the land, either through small-holdings, or on allotments. The drift to the towns is being arrested in so far as administrative action can arrest it. The democratic state forces as many of its unemployed as it feels inclined to spend money on, to return to the land in Britain or in colonial settlement, where the colonies are willing to take them. The Fascist state uses its power to make men go on to the land at any terms they can get. But the anxiety of both to get the unemployed men back to the safety of the land where possible is undeniable.
If capitalism itself loses interest in technical progress then capitalism has begun its own destruction. It must not be forgotten that the very existence of such an enormous surplus of labour induces this lack of interest in further technical development. In pre-capitalist times, the fact that labour was cheap and plentiful was so obvious that no one felt any inducement to invent ways of economising it. The Greeks invented machines and worked out the mathematical formulæ for very complicated ones, but nothing practical was done with this thinking because they had so many slaves that there was no purpose in making machines to do their work. Not until 1400, after a series of the great plagues had killed two-thirds to three-quarters of the working population, was this urge felt, and machines were actually built on the basis of the calculations of the ancient Greeks. Modern America led the way in labour-saving devices for the home because no domestic servants were available except for the well-to-do. Not until a similar shortage was felt in England after the war could these implements be sold to any great extent here. How many patent vacuum cleaners will be sold in Germany during the working of the Nazi scheme of inducing German housewives to take girls for domestic service in return for their keep?
With a surplus of labour and the tendency towards monopoly diminishing the competition among the capitalists themselves, the incentive towards technical progress inevitably slackens. Already the Nazi state has restricted the use of machinery in certain industries. Glass-making machines are restricted in Thuringia. Certain processes in cigarette-making once done very rapidly by machinery are now ordered to be done by hand. The economic and technological preparation for the return to a village economy in Europe has already begun.
Fascism has made least headway among the organised industrial workers, who are recognised by the Fascist leaders to be their chief enemy. Necessarily, therefore, all the Fascist dictatorships have a tendency to diminish the weight of the proletariat as a class by transferring as many workers as possible to the country, and favouring the country as against the towns. But Fascism cannot cut the throat of the proletariat as a class without at the same time cutting the tap-root of capitalism. The middle-class support of the Fascists gives them the relative independence for this anti-capitalist action.
There are strong forces in the Nazi movement which see the ideal Germany as a mainly agricultural country. Not that that is new in German politics. Bismarck, himself virtually a dictator, had much the same attitude to the proletariat. He once remarked that he would rejoice if the big towns were destroyed. The Nazis have solid Junker support in this. The great landowners and peasants would like to see Germany an agricultural country governed by the gentry. The same tendency exists in Russia in the strong undercurrent towards making it a kulak country, but where a Socialist government rules this is counteracted by the Soviet policy of building up a big industry.
Autarchy: Dr Scott Nearing, in his valuable study of Fascism, maintains that the policy of autarchy, if developed as an alternative to Socialism, must in itself lead to the village economy. He says that:
Fascism must discover an area in which economic self-sufficiency is workable. Modern large-scale profit economy knows no such area, therefore the search for a self-sufficient economic unit will lead the Fascists to a splitting up of economy unit, until they reach the village, the manor and the market town.
But this is not true of the self-sufficient units as they are being actually worked out. Big political and financial changes are taking place at present with a view to getting just these self-sufficient units. The British Empire is trying to make the economic empire fit in with her political empire. Germany, if she gets the Balkans under influence, could, as we have shown, form such a unit in Europe, for her great industrial markets would help to solve the agrarian crisis in South-Eastern Europe while providing markets for her machine products. Japan, if she succeeds in adding Manchukuo, North Sakhalin and part of the Far Eastern Republic to her dominions, would have a compact unit that might well prove to be economically self-sufficient. These units contain sufficient non-capitalistic space to provide scope for investment for some time. In these cases the search for the autarchic area leads to the extension rather than the splitting up of the unit.
To sum up this argument, we have tried to show that there are three tendencies in Fascism, the tendency towards capitalism, the tendency towards Socialism, and a third possibility, the tendency to return to the village. The last is the weakest of the ‘pulls’, and is held in check by the counter-tendency of war preparation and the necessity of heavy war industries. The question of interest is whether this tendency will be strengthened in the future, and whether, if we do not achieve Socialism, the present chaos will, in fact, end in a return to a more primitive form of existence.
Marx said that capitalism must necessarily collapse, but no real proof of this exists. Lenin said that the capitalists will always find a way out. Marx could not possibly foresee that they might hit on the ingenious idea of getting an extra lease of life through Fascism.