The provision of positive incentives to
work in the new society will not be an easy task. But the most difficult task of
all is to devise the ultimate and final sanction to replace the ultimate
sanction of hunger--the economic whip of the old dispensation. Moreover, in a
society which rightly rejects the pretence of separating economies from politics
and denies the autonomy of the economic order, that sanction can be found only
in some conscious act of society. We can no longer ask the invisible hand to do
our dirty work for us. I confess that I am less horror-struck
than some people at the prospect, which seems to me unavoidable, of an ultimate
power of what is called direction of labor resting in some arm of society,
whether in an organ of state or of trade unions. I should indeed be horrified if
I identified this prospect with a return to the conditions of the pre-capitalist
era. The economic whip of laissea-faire undoubtedly represented an advance on
the serf-like conditions of that period: in that relative sense, the claim of
capitalism to have established for the first time a system of "free" labour
deserves respect But the direction of labour as exercised in Great Britain in
the Second World War seems to me to represent as great an advance over the
economic whip of the heyday of capitalist private enterprise as the economic
whip represented over pre-capitalist serfdom, Much depends on the
effectiveness of the positive incentives, much, too, on the solidarity and
self-discipline of the community. After all, under the system of laissea-faire
capitalism the fear of hunger remained an ultimate sanction rather than a
continuously operative force. It would have been intolerable if the worker had
been normally driven to work by conscious fear of hunger; nor, except in the
early and worst days of the Industrial Revolution, did that normally happen.
Similarly in the society of the future the power of direction should be regarded
not so much as an instrument of daily used but rather as an ultimate sanction
held in reserve where voluntary methods fail It is inconceivable that, in any
period or in any conditions that can now be foreseen, any organ of state in
Great Britain would be in a position, even if it had the will, to marshal and
deploy the labour force over the whole economy by military discipline like an
army in the field. This, like other nightmares of a totally planned economy, can
be left to those who like to frighten themselves and others with
scarecrows.
The last sentence of the text indicates the author’s
