On the other hand, it is equally foolish to exclude from effective social regulation or state organisation entire professions, such as teaching, law, or medicine, on the ground that they are essentially 'creative.' For they are not.The very name profession implies the adoption of prescribed and accepted methods for dealing with large ordinary classes of cases, that is to say routine procedure.Though, as we recognise, such procedure may never reach the same degree of mechanical routine as prevails in ordinary processes of manufacture, the common factors may be so predominant as to bring them properly under the same public regimen.Though, for example, class-teaching will always carry some element of originality and personal skill, a true regard for public interests establishes close public control of curriculum and method in those branches of instruction in which it is convenient to give the same teaching to large numbers of children at the same time.In education, as in medicine and in every other skilled calling, there are grades of practice rightly classed as regular or routine.Where it is important for members of the public to be able to obtain such services, in reliable qualities upon known and reasonable terms, effective social control of them must be secured.For, otherwise, a power of private tyranny or of extortion or neglect is vested in the producers of such services.
The inadequate public control over the medical and legal services in this country is raising a crop of grave practical problems for early solution.
So in every industry or occupation the relatively routine work requires direct social organisation while the preponderantly creative work should be left to 'private' enterprise.The former class contains the great bulk of those industries which, concentrated in large businesses for the profitable supply of the prime needs and conveniences of ordinary men and women, breed combinations and monopolies.Whereas in the creative industries there exists a natural harmony of interests between producer and consumer that will secure to society the best fruits of individual effort, this is not the case in the routine industries.There the operation of the human law of distribution can only be secured by direct social organisation.Only thus can excessive private surplus, involving a tyranny over labour on the one hand, the consumer on the other, be prevented.In no other way can the main organs of industry be infused with the human feelings of solidarity and cooperation essential to the stability and progress of social industries.
§6.For to this vital point we must return.The substitution of direct social control for the private profit-seeking motive in the normal processes of our industries is essential to any sound scheme of social reconstruction.For not otherwise can we get the social meaning of industry represented consciously in the cooperative will of the human factors of production.It is not too much to say that the pace of civilisation for nations, of moral progress for individuals, depends upon this radical reconstruction of common industry.For the existing structure of ordinary business life inhibits the realisation of its social meaning by the stress it lays upon the discordant and the separatist interests.The struggle to keep or to improve one's hold upon some place in the industrial system, to win a livelihood, to make some gain that involves a loss to someone else, derationalises the intelligence and demoralises the character of all of us.
This derationalisation and demoralisation are seen to be rooted in the defective structure and working of industrialism itself.
If industry were fairly apportioned among all, according to the capability of each, if Property were allotted to each according to his needs, by some natural process of distribution as regular and certain as the process of the planets, persons would not need to think or feel very keenly about such things as Industry and Property: their intellects and hearts would be free for other interests and activities.
But the insecurity, irregularity and injustice of economic distribution keep Industry and Property continually in the foreground of the personal consciousness.
Here comes into terrible relief the moral significance of the unearned Surplus the term which gathers all the bad origins of Property into the focus of a single concept.
At present much industry is conducted, much Property is acquired, by modes which are unjust, irrational and socially injurious.Legal privilege, economic force, natural or contrived scarcity, luck, personal favour, inheritance -- such are the means by which large quantities of property come to be possessed by persons who have not contributed any considerable productive effort to their making.
Such property stands in the eye of the law, and in the popular regard, upon precisely the same footing as that owned by those who have earned it by the sweat of their brow, or the effort of their brain.The failure of so many thoughtful men and women to appreciate the vital bearing of the issue of origins upon the validity of property is the supreme evidence of the injurious reactions of the present property system upon the human mind.The crucial moral fallacy which it evokes is the contention, seriously put forth by certain social philosophers, as well as by social reformers, that property acquired in the ways I have just indicated is validated in reason and morality by the good uses to which it may be put by its owners.
