Defining one’s values in opposition to the conditions of life of poor people has numerous advantages, especially when merely to admit to a knowledge of such conditions is compromising. One can experience the difference between oneself and those less fortunate as the difference between virtue and vice, and that is comforting. It reinforces the old faith that poverty is the consequence of a degraded character. A more efficient justification of an existing order can hardly be found than the notion that those who enjoy its advantages are, in fact, better, not through any special attainment, though these are extravagantly admired where they occur — but simply as the repository of a particular experience.
The “clever” of Britain, whose distinguishing marks are verbal first of all, consider themselves their culture’s ornament and justification. Therefore they are very poor critics of the system that has created them or, more precisely, that has decreated the skeptics and competitors who might have dashed their self-confidence or the confidence of others in them. It is the convenient faith of Britain that it is a pure organic growth, whose gifts are for referring great questions to custom and intuition. This belief peripheralizes thinking. Among the whole class of the verbally clever there is a fluency which is social rather than intellectual — though the tendency of the culture is to suppress this distinction. Beatrice Webb declared herself “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world,” and her faith made her prolific. It also led her to retail and recodify the pet theories of that cleverest class and nation. These theories, whether capitalist or Malthusian or Social Darwinist, have always had the public good as their first object. The problem, of course, is one of definitions. For example, historically and at present the British have seen little benefit in wasting education on the non-clever. Malthus, weary of being seen as an enemy of the poor, advocated education as a means of encouraging religion and sexual abstinence among them. William Hazlitt dismissed his suggestion, pointing out that workers in the North were often literate and religious and it only made them unruly. Cleverness has always been a rationed commodity.
Since cleverness is overwhelmingly class-associated, certain habits of thought, angles of vision, and styles of articulation have authority without reference to their implications or their consequences. Naturally any reform of the institutions of society will reflect the thinking of its best minds, its “cleverest class,” and this is certainly the case with the British Welfare State. This accounts for the tenaciousness of primitive social ideas, such as the positive value of class itself, and the tendency of the poor to be corrupted by the alleviation of their poverty, and the assumption that the state, in accepting any practical responsibility for the general welfare, has taken on a killing burden, and must decline, and should be honored and venerated in its consequent mediocrity — that is, in the shabbiness of public provision which, on a sort of lifeboat analogy, is taken to reflect the precipitous decline in value of aid extended too generally. There is such a profound bias against generosity in British culture that it is entirely possible for them to argue that where misery is achieved a too melting generosity must have lain behind it. It has been characteristic of British social theorists, from Defoe to Malthus to the writers of the New Poor Law to Herbert Spencer to the Webbs to Mrs. Thatcher, to cry out for an end to generosity on humanitarian grounds.
All this moaning and groaning creates the impression that some dreadful sacrifice is being made, the pelican is plucking flesh from its breast to feed its children, and these children, cosseted wretches, never see any point in leaving the nest. As a matter of objective fact, ordinary British people have always enjoyed a very small portion of the wealth of the British community. Subsistence has always been considered an appropriate description of well-being as it applied to the general British public. It is the noise these people make — the mandrake groans, the Carlylean tirades and tears — that has led the world to believe a powerful spirit of justice was at work on that island, like Jehovah at Sinai, producing out of darkness and thunder the very tablets of righteous law.
This great coherency of theory and practice should not be taken to imply that the British world picture could not accommodate another vision of society and economy. As I have said, Adam Smith argued that the wealth of nations should be measured by the productivity of their people, which was enhanced by liberal wages and by relaxation, even “dissipation and diversion,” and by education, to moderate the stultifying effects of the division of labor. Capital accumulated through monopolies and other policies that depressed consumption while raising profits therefore diminished wealth. Foreign trade and manufacturing had created new opportunities for the powerful to engross profits, rather than to share them, and Smith remarks, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Why, or by what means, Adam Smith has been made to seem the apologist for capitalism par excellence I cannot tell. The economy of colonialism, mercantilism, and monopoly which he criticizes at such length clearly corresponds to Marx’s capitalism, in which the worst potentialities Smith described are fully realized. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith used the wealth of the American colonies, elsewhere called their “happiness,” to demonstrate his argument that high wages were consistent with low prices and with productivity. He compares the prodigious growth of population in the American colonies, for him the sign as well as the source of wealth and productivity, with Europe and Britain, where “it is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive.”
Marx repeats, more explicitly, the distinction Smith had made almost a century before between an economy designed to promote the concentration of capital in the hands of merchants and industrialists and one characterized by the welfare of the general population, also using America as the example of the second type. While the distinction these writers make is not without complication, it is not particularly subtle either. And yet it has been wholly lost.
Chapter 33 of Capital is an attack on E. G. Wakefield’s book England and America, published in 1833. Marx is emphatically determined to establish a distinction between capitalism, an economic system in which the working class is wretched and dependent, and its “direct anti-thesis.” Wakefield describes America as retarded in its development by the high cost and status of labor. He calls the wealth of Americans “capital,” and Marx replies: