Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

156 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
just the opposite: that poverty is entirely artificial and unnecessary. Since
the capitalists have entirely captured what passes for economic science in
our age, it is worthwhile to look at the economic “facts” as Shaw saw them.
Economics
Political Economy
Like Undershaft, Shaw arrived at socialism through anarchism. He insisted
that the spirit must be freed, but the freedom of competitive anarchism
ensures that no man, even the richest, can be wholly free of the fear
of poverty. The freedom from want is the first and most necessary of freedoms.
“Liberty is an excellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has
paid its daily debt to Nature by first earning its living” (Perfect Wagnerite
69). The Life Force must master political economy.
Shaw’s economic ideas, unlike his purely philosophical and religious
beliefs, were largely borrowed from others, but they were important to the
implementation of his philosophy. 1 His socialism, like everything else, was
realistic rather than idealistic. Thus he recognized first that socialism is
“founded on sentimental dogma, and is quite unmeaning and purposeless
apart from it,” and second, that if socialism is to be successful it “must
come into the field as political science and not as sentimental dogma” (“Illusions”
412). These concepts are not contradictory; they simply acknowledge
that the goal of socialism stems from a nonrational and passionate
desire to change the way we distribute the national income but that the
means to achieve this redistribution must be based in fact and reason.
Shaw believed that socialist theory should be based on scientific economics,
and he argued that the theories of two laissez-faire economists,
David Ricardo (1772–1823) and William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), provide
a compelling case for socialism: Ricardo’s theory of rent and Jevons
theory of marginal utility. Silent testimony to the wisdom of Shaw’s observation
is that contemporary textbooks on economics (which have an
overwhelming right-wing, capitalist bias) rarely mention either of them,
although marginal utility is the basis of the law of supply and demand and
economic rent is the principal force determining how wealth is distributed.
Unfortunately, they are not simple to understand. Shaw insisted that
Marxist theory (although clearly wrong) was favored by socialists because
it is simple and dramatic, while the correct theory is technical and difficult.
His rejection of Marx’s theory of surplus value, which was based on the
labor theory of value promulgated by David Ricardo, was again realism