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W3139996743 abstract "That Bernard Shaw, on the outbreak of what would become known as World War I, retreated in early September 1914 to the Hydro Hotel in Torquay to write his controversial anti-militarist tract Common Sense about the War is well known. What seems to have escaped the notice of commentators on Shaw is that Common Sense was, in fact, only one of two great tasks he had set for himself in Torquay; the other, which had been planned from much earlier in the year, was to prepare for the Fabian Society a series of lectures “On Redistribution of Income” to be delivered at the Kingsway Hall, London, over a period of six weeks at the end of 1914, on “Wednesdays, 28th October, 4th, 11th, 18th and 25th November, and 2nd December, 1914, at 8:30 p.m.”1Thus, when Common Sense was published to some uproar in the press on 14 November, Shaw was right in the middle of this well-publicized and highly successful—both financially and in terms of publicity—Fabian Society series of public lectures.Shaw gave hundreds, if not thousands of such lectures in his lifetime, and this series on redistribution of income may well form the apex of his platform career. Retrospectively, its importance has been obscured by the impact on Shaw and the Fabians, as well as on everyone else, of the Great War and what followed in its wake. They may, however, provide the key to this most misunderstood period in his oeuvre, the most difficult to judge since he appeared to be shooting without any fixed purpose off in all directions, producing a huge variety of short and long plays, substantial prefaces on such diverse major social issues as medicine, divorce laws, and education, as well as letters to the editor on a vast array of topics, not to mention tracts against stage censorship, while coordinating that campaign. In other lectures of the period, he turned more to those religious implications raised by his three great plays of the beginning of the century, Man and Superman (1901–3), John Bull's Other Island (1904), and Major Barbara (1905), which, in fact, underpinned the core notion of human equality that provided the foundations for this lecture series.2In Major Barbara, Shaw foregrounded for the first time what he saw as the greatest social and political, and above all human, problem: poverty, especially the poverty characteristic—even today—of slums in the great industrial conurbations. For whatever reason, as a middle-class child in the middle of the nineteenth century he had become acutely aware of the atrocious poverty in the tenements of Dublin, which seems to have left him with a burning desire to work politically to bring about a world where such poverty could not exist: it motivated his lifelong efforts as a Fabian Socialist.At the same time as Major Barbara had its opening run at the Court Theatre toward the end of 1905, Shaw's Fabian colleague Beatrice Webb was appointed to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Poor Law. In 1909, the Commission issued not one, but two reports: a Majority Report and what has since become familiarly known as Beatrice Webb's Minority Report, jointly written with Sidney Webb, and generally recognized, including by Sir William Beveridge—author of the 1942 Beveridge Report—as the first blueprint in Britain for what is called the welfare state.3The Minority Report proved a great success when published independently by the Fabian society in two large volumes. In June 1909, Shaw wrote to Webb, who, following her Report, was setting up a public Campaign for the Prevention of Destitution independent of the Fabian Society to agitate for implementation of its proposals. He explained that among other obstacles her campaign would be accused and dismissed, like every other progressive campaign, of being out-and-out socialism. Determined to deflect such accusations, Shaw proposed to agitate for a much more radical, if practicable (as opposed to Utopian) end goal for socialism that he had begun to think through, to wit, that in order to give social and political recognition to the notion of human equality in an industrialized democracy with much surplus capital, the national income would be distributed equally, to be achieved in true Fabian fashion gradually over time primarily by raising minimum conditions of welfare step-by-step at the lower end (the object of the Minority Report), but also through progressive taxation and appropriation at the upper end.4 This radical proposal became Shaw's postulate of equal incomes, developed between 1910 and 1914 in several major lectures on equality, which culminated with “On Redistribution of Income” at the end of 1914.5The war completely knocked off course any notion of practical implementation of either the Webbs' Campaign Against Destitution or Shaw's postulate of Equal Incomes, while his hopes of writing a political tract detailing the arguments advanced both in his notes and the lectures themselves were quashed. When in 1928 he finally published his political magnum opus, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, detailing in full the argument for equal incomes, its origins in his and the Webbs' campaigns against poverty and inequality in the ten years leading up to the Great War had been largely forgotten.6Shaw's postulate of equal incomes went further than collectivization, which the Fabians had primarily campaigned for since its foundation in 1884. Collectivization might nationalize industries and municipalize utilities in order to transfer private capital into public capital that could then be used for the common good, but that did not imply equal distribution. As James Alexander has pointed out, equal incomes were Shaw's unique contribution to socialist thought, even though never formally adopted by the Fabians—or any other socialist group. Indeed, Shaw is one of the very few socialists to propose a practicable end goal for socialism.7 No one, not even Marx, had considered what a socialist society should be in practical social, economic, and political terms. Shaw insisted it should be based on what was for him practically a religious belief in human equality. Men and women, especially working men and women, should be treated not as mere instruments of production, whose labor is rewarded in terms of supply and demand, but rather on the basis of human needs and values. This strand of thinking, which he argued for in his lectures on religion, culminated in “On the Prospects of Christianity,” the preface to Androcles and the Lion written in 1915, soon after these lectures.At the same time, the full social implications of this practically religious belief in human equality, it might be argued, formed a thematic kernel in each of a series of major plays: Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1909–10), Fanny's First Play (1911), Androcles and the Lion (1912), and Pygmalion (1912), the last foregrounding—as had Major Barbara—urban poverty, this time in the characters of dustman Alfred Doolittle and his flower-seller daughter Eliza. And indeed, the audience for the 1914 lectures overlapped with that new theater audience initially built up by the Court Theatre seasons of 1904–7, comprising especially that younger generation who held out so much hope—instilled into them by the writings of Shaw and H. G. Wells—for the future. Many of these Young Fabians would later on in the century become highly influential in English political life, and play their part in building the welfare state.The major subjects covered in the lectures might be labeled the five “I”s: Incomes, arguments for and against equal incomes; Idolatry, why a class-ridden society of unequal incomes needs what Marx called ideology, a superstructure to enforce a social class tradition of systemic subordination; Incentives, what would be the incentive to work in a society of equal incomes, and indeed what are the incentives to work in a society of unequal incomes; Idleness, where the idle are shown to be the rich rather than the poor working men, constantly accused of idleness by the monied class; and Instruments of production, where working men and women in a society of unequal incomes are treated in purely economic terms irrespective of human values. In contrast, recognition of fundamental human equality would form the basis of a society of equal incomes.While in Torquay during September and October 1914, Shaw prepared a series of extensive notes for the lecture series, and these have been published as the long chapter “Redistribution of Income” in The Road to Equality (1971), Louis Crompton's edition of Shaw's unpublished political manuscripts in the British Library (then the British Museum); Crompton's introduction remains a useful guide to Shaw's economics of equality.8 During the lectures themselves, Shaw spoke ex tempore, as he usually did, drawing on the notes only as he saw fit. Thus there is no exact correlation between the lectures and the notes, where the ideas are more fully considered and worked out, if incomplete even there.9 Shaw seems to have delighted in changing his examples for those various arguments where dramatic oppositions serve dialectical purposes. Thus the example of the porter and the stationmaster in the notes becomes the bank director and the shepherd in the third of these lectures and, eventually, the captain and the cabin boy in the Androcles preface. Interestingly, Shaw's comments on Adam Smith's Canons of Taxation, which might have been expected to be in the notes rather than the lectures, are, in fact, discussed in the first lecture.In England, the lecture series was reported, in the third person, week by week in the Christian Commonwealth, which had previously published some of Shaw's lectures on religious themes.10 Shaw himself lightly revised these reports for an American readership, which were then published in William Randolph Hearst's New York American as six articles between November 1914 and January 1915.11 Although carefully printed and handsomely laid out, as with practically all published reports of Shaw's lectures and speeches, the New York American articles were error-strewn. As Dan Laurence observed when editing Platform and Pulpit, his collection of Shaw's lectures and speeches, “Bernard Shaw's custom of speaking extemporaneously resulted, not infrequently, in the publication of corrupt reports of his utterances.”12Sometimes a mere transcription error is involved; Ibsen's play Little Eyolf, for instance, is printed as “Little Isle.” In other places Shaw's meaning is garbled, but can be inferred either from its own context or from other texts written during the same period. The practice followed for this lightly corrected text, therefore, is to add in square brackets within the main text minimal clarifying words or phrases; and, where the actual text has been modified from the original New York American articles, note how it differs.So, for the first time since their appearance in the New York American in 1914–15, Shaw's Fabian “Redistribution of Income” lectures are presented here as a series of six short essays. What, finally, should be borne in mind, and indeed lends them some of their fascination, is precisely that they are transcriptions of spoken lectures rather than finished written texts, and give a good indication of Shaw's rhetorical style as an orator. Rebecca West, who admittedly preferred Shaw the literary artist over the political thinker, described, in lyrical terms, Shaw delivering one of these lectures: The passing of middle age has wiped the aggressive strangeness from his face, by mitigating with silver the redness of his hair and the pirate twist of his eyebrows, and has revealed a predominant quality of noble and unhysteric sensitiveness…. And when he began to speak, and the Irish accent shivered over his musical voice like the wind over a lake, one perceived another reason why he should not enter into politics.13 The lectures, however, lack the rigor of Shaw's written prose style, containing frequent repetition of words and phrases—one typical example of this rhetorical technique comes when describing Wagner composing Parsifal (“… and the notes have to be written down for everyone. Every one of those has to be written down carefully from beginning to end”)—presumably so as to carry his audience along with him, rather than to promote a fully developed argument. He also makes much use of conversational redundant word fillers—for example, “To begin with, suppose, for instance, that instead of …”—which would be ruthlessly expunged in written texts like the prefaces, or even the notes prepared for the lectures, but may well have been rhetorically effective when spoken.14Yet, paradoxically, nowhere else does Shaw seem more like the Socratic inquirer, the Socrates of Plato's dialogues constantly making often surprising distinctions to convey and carry along his argument. Like that of Socrates, Shaw's dialectical technique not only propels his own thesis forward in certain, often unexpected directions, as for example in his discussion of Idolatry in the second lecture, but also, and perhaps more importantly, provokes his receptive audience to critical thinking. His startling antitheses consistently turn received opinions on their head so as to challenge his intelligent and interested listeners, those very people who would make better the society of the future. These lectures, he hoped, would make his listeners think through more thoroughly the social implications of human equality.(New York American, Sunday, 15 November 1914)The thing we are all talking about at the present moment I will call the “bankruptcy of civilization,” because we are seeming rather near to that. It is a bankruptcy we shall get through.It has been frequently asserted that the war is being waged to preserve what is called “the balance of power.”15 I want to point out the rather curious thing that the redistribution of income really lies at the bottom of the balance of power. If income had been better distributed than it has, if it had been, say, for the last twenty years better distributed in Germany, in France, in England, in Russia, in Servia, there would not be this bankruptcy of civilization going on at the present time.When I say that the balance of power is largely a question of distribution of income, I mean that no State can possibly bring about a suitable balance of external power as between one state and another with any stability unless they have a pretty good internal balance of power. And no state of much power at the present time has got that. Every state is liable at any moment to be taken in the rear by a portion of its own population owing to the lack of distribution of income.There is a point that can possibly be reached in all modern wars at which the pressure of a particular part of the population may be more severe before it reaches another part, and it is possible in every state now at war, with the exception of Servia perhaps, where the war is prolonged, that a section to a certain extent might come between the two sides—between the external and the internal. The reason I except Servia is a that Servia is a democratic State, consisting of almost altogether peasant proprietors, in which on the whole there is a very pleasant distribution of income as compared with any that exists in the other western parts. Now clearly under these circumstances as we are engaged in war it is just as well we should consider wherein a decent distribution of income may be said to consist.When you go to war you generally say you fight for the Fatherland. The German always says that. We say it. I rather like the term “Fatherland” because it gives me the opportunity of saying you have to be particularly careful to see your Fatherland is not a stepfatherland for anybody, or you might get into difficulties.All discontent at the present time is discontent with income. It is not discontent with status. Even if you take the case of the discontent of the women with their disenfranchisement, it is even that is at the root—a revolt against economic dependence. I think most women say if they were more economically independent they should be very well able to look after themselves; they would be able to look after the rest of the business for themselves. And you find in the case of America, for instance, where everybody is supposed to be about the same, the discontent in America is discontent with income.Everywhere in difficulties you find the difficulty is a pecuniary difficulty, and it is a sort of difficulty that has been a deal intensified in recent years. For instance, the invention of the cinematograph has had a good deal of effect in making people discontented, because the motion picture is shown everywhere and everybody can go and see cinematograph pictures. I see in some parts of London you can go and see three motion pictures for a cent, and an appreciable number more for two cents.If you happen to be poor and live in a squalid way you will see on the cinematograph, at least we invariably see it, people dressed in very elegant materials and vey exquisite dresses. And the laborer who takes his young woman to see the show has previously been contented with his lot. He has always been contented with his personal appearance, and no doubt so has his sweetheart. But having seen in that cinematograph show what a properly creased pair of trousers is like, that laborer's sweetheart suddenly finds the young man she is keeping company with has not perhaps a tasteful crease in his trousers.In fact she thinks he is ill-dressed; and he thinks the same about her. He sees things he did not see before. What he saw in the streets did not bring things completely home to him. There are lots of things, much more than the invention of the press, that have brought such things home to him.Now the existing distribution of income—in connection with that topic I want to point out that that has a more important effect. The existing distribution of income is like the geographical situation of the country. It is a fact: it is not a thing that has been brought about by any human instinct or by ethical theory. It is a state of things into which you have all been born, and it is a thing without any sort of reason. It is quite true if you meet a foolish person and you ask him to explain the existing distribution of income, he may try to explain it. But the thing is not to be explained; it has happened. As the explanations given are all wrong I will try and put those foolish persons in a position to give the right explanation.I do not know anybody, not matter what party, what religion or what class they belong to, who defends the distribution of income as it exists at the present time. You may possibly find in a village somewhere a person who will tell you that if people are idle they must expect to be poor and if people are industrious they must become rich. It is wrong, by the way, but it is natural for people who live in such places to think that in the ordinary course of events industrious people will prosper and the others will do the other thing.But that is not what happens; the industrious man does not prosper. The persons whose lives are made intolerable by excess of industry are often also the persons whose lives are made unlivable. And those who make a science of idleness, who have invented a line of idle activity, if I may put it that way, those are the people who get a very large share of income and who do not suffer from poverty in the least.The causes which have brought it about are still operating, and in the same direction. The rich are always getting richer, and the poor are always getting poorer; that tendency is still going on except insofar as it has been deliberately checked in certain parts by the deliberate action of the community. But so far as those things in which you do not interfere are concerned, that state of things is getting worse and worse. The tendency of riches is constantly to get in[to] the hands of idle people, and they are content to get richer while the poor people get poorer and poorer and [the] gulf gets wider between class and class.If the thing is to be altered it has to be altered by us consciously. I want to do all I can to clear out of the people's minds this relic of Nineteenth Century utopianism, and modern Twentieth Century laziness. If you could make some fundamental new arrangement, if you could nationalize land, or do away with the franchise, and trust the entire government of the country to some intelligent person—say Lord Roberts—enjoying the confidence of the people; or if you could get rid of free trade or tariff reform, or something of that kind, you might start afresh.16 You might think there is something in that idea. Well I want you to put that out of your heads for good and all. Things will not get right unless you put them right, and will not stay right unless you hold them right from day to day.Now this has always been recognized to some extent, because if you take, for instance, the question of taxation—taxation, of course, in modern times is beginning to concern itself very startlingly with the question of redistribution of income—and the latest canons of taxation are the canons laid down by Adam Smith.17 And his canons of taxation were not at all very important. If I recollect them aright, the first one was the important one in which Adam Smith laid down that taxation must really bear some relation to the ability of the person to pay taxes. And he put it in rather a curious way; he said the persons who have the largest revenue, who are to be protected by the state, should naturally pay the largest sums to be protected by the state.At any rate Adam Smith's first canon was an inequality of taxation; that there should be more taxation on the rich than on the poor. That is a violation of the first principle that the industrious man should flourish and the lazy man should enjoy the benefit of his idleness. If you do not go so far as to tax the poor man more heavily because it serves him right to be poor, at any rate you should not tax the poor rich man because he is rich.What you would resort to in ordinary and true justice would be a poll tax [applied to everybody irrespective of income]. And yet throughout the whole history of scientific taxation it has always been recognized that a poll tax is out of the question.18 It has been out of all existence, but it was reintroduced the other day in the form of the insurance act.19The consequence of the reintroduction of that poll tax has been enough to justify the old economists. Adam Smith's other canons were simple enough. His canons were that a tax should be definite, and that it should be certain; that you should know what you had to pay. That is an advantage which we do not enjoy at the present time. We do not know what we shall pay—except that we shall pay more than we want to.People generally know what they will be prepared for if they have an enlightened government, which they seldom have, and if they refrain from the luxury of war. But at any rate Adam Smith said let it be certain, as far as it can be, let it be levied in a manner convenient to the person paying it. And the only other thing he had to say was this, he said he thought it was desirable there should be as little difference as possible between the sum paid by the taxpayer and the sum that eventually reaches the government. It was very necessary to say that in Adam Smith's time, and it is also very necessary to say it at the present time.As we get on from Adam Smith up to our own time, the question becomes very serious because you have a whole series of Chancellors of the Exchequer. You have Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith, and Sir William Harcourt, and they have begun in a fashion to take money from the rich people and spend it on poor people with an idea of redistribution of income.20It has been pointed out that the particular incidence of that, most interesting to my mind, is the incidence of old age pensions[.] [I]t is not a question of taking money from a rich man and building a school with it for the poor man. You give the poor man something in kind. It really is taking money out of the rich man's pocket and putting it in the form of income in the poor man's pocket. That is likely to be carried a good deal further.Again, I want to point out that when your chancellors of the exchequer enter into proceedings of that kind, it becomes necessary for them as least to begin to justify their proceedings on some sort of principle. I know the horror with which the demand to do something on principle inspires a politician at any time. In my lifetime of fifty-eight years I have never been able to discover a government that would do anything on principle, except when it did not know the principles on which it was doing it. The fact remains that the persons whose pockets are being denuded are calling the chancellor names with Welsh rhymes and so on.To the ordinary man that method is brigandage. If you are merely doing it to catch voters, if you say to a constituency the majority of whom are working men, and who will want old age pensions, and the minority of whom are rich people—if you say in that constituency that old age pensions are wanted, the majority will back up the minority in order to benefit the majority.Whatever the effect, that I repeat is brigandage.In the present day money has become power. If people have no money they have no power—unless they are persons of extraordinary ability. People who realize the power and independence that money gives them are annoyed and aggravated by the want of money. It is the redistribution of incom[e] which, lying at the bottom of the balance of power, will make for permanent peace.Perhaps the most pointed way of putting the truth to the average man is: is it not true that pride gives to every other vice the extra touch of the intolerable? Whether or not it be the one thing that is unpardonable, is it not in practice the one thing that is unpardoned? I think the instinct of mankind against pride, as the ultimate human evil, can be proved from the most prosaic details or the most babyish beginnings. We do not specially resent a schoolboy being in love with a different girl every week, nor even his being in love with all of them in the course of the same week. Our dim yet divine desire to kick him only comes when he says that they are all in love with him. Even at the early and innocent stage the egoism is more revolting that the appetite. It is even more so, of course, when the double sin has sprung to maturity. Profligacy might well be pathetic, if the pathos were not killed by the pride. The sort of sensual passion that ends in suicide has about it something of the sacred madness of a marriage. It is at least irrevocable. But what we all hate is the Lothario, the lady killer. And we hate the murderer, not for the number of times he has killed a lady, but for the number of times he has failed to kill himself.Even from this casual case of the common dandy and professional seducer the practical point could be proved: that pride is the poison in every other vice. It is just as true in the case of the opposite fault. Nobody ever hated a miser. Fundamentally everybody pitied him. And if you do not understand how throwing pebbles, pulling coat-tails, and firing pea-shooters can be expressions of pity, then I can only tell you (what will doubtless distress you very much) that you are something smaller than mankind. The real miser was so public that he was almost popular. So long as the rich man dressed like a poor man he received something of that unconscious respect that all Christendom has given to the poor man. The rags of the miser were reverenced like the rags of the saint. And this was on the noble and unreasonable ground that both were voluntary. There was this much truth in the comparison: that neither the saint nor the miser minded looking like a fool. Therefore men have always joked about the miser, as they have about the hermit, as they have about the friar and the monk. The real beggar was funny: the false beggar was even funnier. And the usurers and princes of avarice were never killed (strangely enough) until there had been added to them that dynamite detail which we call pride.The modern rich began to be hunted by the modern hatred when they had abandoned the wise precautions of the misers. The misers hid their wealth. The millionaires displayed it. In both cases the common sense of the public pierced through the presence. But in the old case it found only a harmless eccentricity; in the new case it discovers a harmful concentration. When all is said and done, however, the difference between the two types of money getting is not difficult to state. The fact is that a man was ashamed of being a miser; a man is not ashamed of being a millionaire. This amazing truth can only be explained as the insolence of the profligate has been explained. The usurer, the man-killer, can, like the lady killer, stun and strengthen himself with the small drug of pride. The moment he can sincerely admire himself, all other men will admire him.I believe this malady of a small pride will be found almost everywhere to be the reason of wrong and of the rending of human fellowship. Gluttony is a great fault; but we do not necessarily dislike a glutton. We only dislike the glutton when he becomes the gourmet—that is, we only dislike him when he not only wants the best for himself, but knows what is best for other people. It is the poison of pride that has made the difference. Sloth is a great fault; but we do not necessarily dislike the sluggard. We only dislike the sluggard when he becomes the aesthete—the man who need not do anything, but need only “exist beautifully.” It is the poison of pride that has made the difference. Passions that can be respected as passions, weaknesses that can be reverenced as weaknesses, can all be" @default.
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W3139996743 title "Six Fabian Lectures on Redistribution of Income" @default.
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