[ 138 ] The Great Transformation
stituting an interference with the self-regulation of the market. The
crucial point is that goods used as money are not different from other
commodities; that their supply and demand is regulated by the market
like that of other commodities; and that consequently all notions in-
vesting money with any other character than that of a commodity be-
ing used as a means of indirect exchange are inherently false. It follows
also that if gold is used as money, banknotes, if such exist, must repre-
sent gold. It was in accordance with this doctrine that the Ricardian
school wished to organize the supply of currency by the Bank of En-
gland. Indeed, no other method was conceivable which would keep
the monetary system from being "interfered" with by the state, and
thus safeguard the self-regulation of the market.
Therefore, in respect to business a very similar situation existed as
in respect to the natural and human substance of society. The self-
regulating market was a threat to them all, and for essentially similar
reasons. And if factory legislation and social laws were required to pro-
tect industrial man from the implications of the commodity fiction in
regard to labor power, if land laws and agrarian tariffs were called into
being by the necessity of protecting natural resources and the culture
of the countryside against the implications of the commodity fiction
in respect to them, it was equally true that central banking and the
management of the monetary system were needed to keep manufac-
tures and other productive enterprises safe from the harm involved in
the commodity fiction as applied to money. Paradoxically enough, not
human beings and natural resources only but also the organization of
capitalistic production itself had to be sheltered from the devastating
effects of a self-regulating market.
Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can
be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society,
each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the sup-
port of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods.
The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the estab-
lishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the
trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its
methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the
conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization,
relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by
the deleterious action of the market—primarily, but not exclusively,
the working and the landed classes—and using protective legislation,
Man, Nature, and Productive Organization [ 139 ]
restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its
methods.
The emphasis on class is important. The services to society per-
formed by the landed, the middle, and the working classes shaped the
whole social history of the nineteenth century. Their part was cut out
for them by their availability for the discharge of various functions
that derived from the total situation of society. The middle classes
were the bearers of the nascent market economy; their business inter-
ests ran, on the whole, parallel to the general interest in regard to pro-
duction and employment; if business was flourishing, there was a
chance of jobs for all and of rents for the owners; if markets were ex-
panding, investments could be freely and readily made; if the trading
community competed successfully with the foreigner, the currency
was safe. On the other hand, the trading classes had no organ to sense
the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the
worker, the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighbor-
hoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers, the deteriora-
tion of craft standards, the disruption of folkways, and the general
degradation of existence including housing and arts, as well as the in-
numerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits.
The middle classes fulfilled their function by developing an all but sac-
ramental belief in the universal beneficence of profits, although this
disqualified them as the keepers of other interests as vital to a good life
as the furtherance of production. Here lay the chance of those classes
which were not engaged in applying expensive, complicated, or spe-
cific machines to production. Roughly, to the landed aristocracy and
the peasantry fell the task of safeguarding the martial qualities of the
nation which continued to depend largely on men and soil, while the
laboring people to a smaller or greater extent, became representatives
of the common human interests that had become homeless. But at one
time or another, each social class stood, even if unconsciously, for in-
terests wider than its own.
By the turn of the nineteenth century—universal suffrage was
now fairly general—the working class was an influential factor in the
state; the trading classes, on the other hand, whose sway over the legis-
lature went no longer unchallenged, became conscious of the political
power involved in their leadership in industry. This peculiar localiza-
tion of influence and power caused no trouble as long as the market
system continued to function without great stress and strain; but
[140] The Great Transformation
when, for inherent reasons, this was no longer the case, and tensions
between the social classes developed, society itself was endangered by
the fact that the contending parties were making government and
business, state and industry, respectively, their strongholds. Two vital
functions of society—the political and the economic—were being
used and abused as weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was
out of such a perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century the fas-
cist crisis sprang.
From these two angles, then, we intend to outline the movement
which shaped the social history of the nineteenth century. The one
was given by the clash of the organizing principles of economic liber-
alism and social protection which led to deep-seated institutional
strain; the other by the conflict of classes which, interacting with the
first, turned crisis into catastrophe.
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