way of conducting business, and one that will arouse in the workers
a sense, that by the control of capital, if he uses it properly,
a person benefits the whole community,--including the worker, as
a member of it. The above-board dealing, necessary to a willing
understanding on the part of others, will make the "enterpriser"
careful to keep his business methods above suspicion.
All this will not seem negligible to anyone with a sense for the
social effects of that inner community of feeling and experience,
which arises from the prosecution of a common task. Those who possess
this sense, will clearly perceive, how greatly it is to the benefit
of economic activity that the direction of economic affairs, based on
capital, should come from the spiritual life, and have its roots in
the spiritual domain. This preliminary condition must be fulfilled,
before people's present interest in capital and in increasing it
simply for the sake of profits, can give place to an interest in the
actual business of production and the doing of the job on hand.
Persons of a socialist turn of mind at the present day aim at bringing
the means of production under the control of the community. What is
right and desirable in their aims can only be achieved if this control
is exercised through the free spiritual domain. Such control through
the free spiritual domain will do away with all possibility of that
economic coercion, which brings with it such a sense of degradation,
and which the capitalist exerts when his capitalist activities are
born and bred of the forces of economic life; and it will also prevent
that crippling of men's individual abilities, which inevitably results
when these abilities are directed by the political State.
Earnings on everything done through capital and individual ability
must depend in a healthy social order, like all other spiritual work,
on the free initiative of the doer and on the free appreciation of
those who wish the work done. The estimate of what these earnings
should be, must, in this field, be in accordance with a man's own
free view--on what he is willing to regard as a suitable return
on his work, taking into consideration the preliminary training he
requires for it, the incidental expenses to which he is put, etc.,
etc. Whether he finds his claims gratified or not, will depend on
the appreciation his services meet with.
Social arrangements on the lines here proposed will lay the basis
for a really free contractual relation between the work-director
and the work-doer,--a relation resting not on barter of commodities
(or money) for labour-power, but on an agreement as to the share due
to each of the two joint authors of the commodity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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