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

164 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
grateful to property owners for “creating jobs.” The pernicious effects of
this system are not obvious to most of us as long as the ownership of property
is widely distributed. Then there are usually many opportunities, at
least for those with cultural and educational advantages. There are times,
however, when its evil effects become especially obvious and disruptive:
when the owners of property realize that they can use their resources
more profitably with less labor. That happened in England in the fifteenth
century, when expanding trade increased the demand for wool. Landlords
“inclosed” their land, drove off the peasants who farmed it, and converted
it to sheep pastures. Thousands of people were left without a livelihood.
Many became vagrants or outlaws. The authorities did what they always
do when their relentless robbing of the poor leaves a class of dangerous
people who have nothing to lose: they passed laws against the poor, in this
case laws against vagrancy or “masterless” men. In our day we build more
prisons and demand mandatory sentencing. The recent much touted “economic
miracles” of Latin America actually left the poor in those countries
(who were wretched to begin with) worse off than they had been. Why?
Because land was converted to the production of high-profit, low-cost export
goods that enriched both local owners and foreign “investors” while
displacing those who traditionally eked their existence from the land.
The simple truth that the right to withhold valuable resources from the
community is legal theft was at the heart of Shaw’s socialist convictions.
This is what he meant when he said that the power of the property owner
is like that of the “highwayman who puts a pistol to your head and demands
your money or your life” (Intelligent Woman’s Guide 71). When
society is divided into those who own the means of production and those
who do not, the owners can—and do—say to the proletarians: “We will
allow you to live, if, and only if, you make yourselves useful to us.” Since
the proletarian cannot produce without land and capital, he must work for
the owners of these things, who regard this as a perfectly fair and natural
transaction. If you regard the right to produce so that you might consume
to be as sacred as the right to life, the transaction is like that offered by the
highwayman. Goods and services must be produced daily by labor; the
landlord forces the laborer to yield his labor in the same way the thief
takes money at the point of his gun.
This situation is obvious only when labor is so abundant that its price is
driven down to subsistence—as it was in the nineteenth century. (Shaw
maintained that as long as there are more workers than are needed the
actual price of labor is nothing—which is technically true, for the subsis-