The Servile State

"... If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course."

T.N. Foulis London & Edinburgh 1912

TO E.S.P. Haynes

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Synopsis of the Servile State

Introduction The Subject of this Book:--It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery.

--The sections into which the book will be divided

Section I Definitions:--What wealth is and why necessary to man--How produced--The meaning of the words Capital, Proletariat, Property, Means of Production--The definition of the Capitalist State--The definition of the /Servile State/--What it is and what it is not--The re-establishment of status in the place of contract--That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind--Summary of these definitions.

Section II Our Civilisation was originally Servile:--The Servile institution in Pagan antiquity--Its fundamental character--A Pagan society took it for granted--The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church.

Section III How the Servile Institution was for a Time Dissolved:--The subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter--The main elements of Pagan economic society--The Villa--The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian serf--Next into the Christian peasant--The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the /Distributive State/--It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages--"It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind."

Section IV How the Distributive State Failed:--This failure original in England--The story of the decline from Distributive property to Capitalism--The economic revolution of the sixteenth century--The confiscation of monastic land--What might have happened had the State retained it--As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy--England is Capitalist before the advent of the industrial revolution--Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a Capitalist mould.

Section V The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable:--It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society--The two internal strains which render it unstable--(a) The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis--(b) The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens--The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors--Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition among owners, and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners.

Section VI The Stable Solutions of this Instability:--The three stable social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable Capitalism--The Distributive solution, the Collectivist solution, the Servile solution--The reformer will not openly advocate the Servile solution--There remain only the Distributive and the Collectivist solution.

Section VII Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux:--A contrast between the reformer making for Distribution and the reformer making for Socialism (or Collectivism)--The difficulties met by the first type--He is working against the grain--The second is working with the grain--Collectivism a natural development of Capitalism--It appeals both to Capitalist and Proletarian--None the less we shall see that the Collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object--to wit, the Servile State.