Vintage Distributism

On Direct Action
by G.K. Chesterton
July 7, 1928




The essential idea of Distributism is the idea of Directness. It concerns direct ownership, direct expression, direct creation and control. We do not say we are in favour of entirely abolishing indirect action. We do say that the modern world is entirely abolishing direct action. We do not say there ought to be no such thing as a cactus or an orchid grown in Kew Gardens, at the public expense for the public instruction. We do say that there will soon be no such thing as a cabbage really grown by private enterprise for private use, unless the whole trend of modern mechanical society can be turned. We do not say there ought not to be a national granary in case of a national famine. On the contrary, we say there ought to be; and we said it long ago, when it never crossed the minds of the capitalists and social reformers and practical people that there would ever need to be. But we do say that there very soon will not be such a thing as a normal barn, expressing normal personal thrift, if we continue in our present direction; which might rather be called an indirection, seeing that it is in the direction of everything that is not direct. We say that, though it is sometimes right and necessary to control things, or try to control them, indirectly, it can never be a substitute for controlling them directly; yet it is everywhere being substituted. It is assumed to be an intrinsic improvement that a man should grow a cabbage, cart a cabbage, sell a cabbage, and then take an omnibus to another town to buy another cabbage, instead of eating the cabbage he has grown. But we say that if everything depends on exchange, everything will depend on the rulers of exchange; and if everything depends on carting, we are putting the cart before the horse and the horse above man. It is only by the permanent potentiality of growing and eating the cabbages, that we may hope that the feeding of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

At present it is perishing from the earth. At least, it is perishing from our own small but not unimportant corner of the earth. And the evil is not so much that people do adopt indirect methods, which up to a point is rational enough; but that they deny that there is any disadvantage to indirect methods, and are therefore ready everywhere to substitute them for direct ones. The general principle of Directness, like all such, extends beyond its strict application in Distributism. The other day I wrote a note in this place on one or two of the thousand things of interest to be found in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s new book on Socialism. There was no space to note very much beyond the essential issue; that though his machine of State monopoly, with its centralized property and centrifugal salaries, sounds a beautifully simple process as set forth in his own neat and candid prose, it really is a very indirect process, and has the hitch in it that all indirect processes have. It is a process by which the cabbage is whirled away on a great wheel from the man who has grown it, and returns to him after having gone the whole round of the official process of taxation, public expenditure, and public trade. Some think that the cabbage looks a little forlorn, and even slightly soiled or damaged, when it comes back out of that far-reaching machinery. Anyhow, this is certainly true about any number of other things that pass thus through modern machinery. The name of Mr. Bernard Shaw reminds me that he recently made an extremely amusing gramophone record, which largely consisted in warning his hearers that they were probably hearing a voice entirely unlike his own, and hinting pretty broadly that they probably could not work their own gramophones. Most modern people would be satisfied with saying simply that the gramophone or the wireless installation could carry a person’s voice in a most wonderful manner across the world. It does carry it in a most wonderful manner; but it does not carry the person’s voice. I took Mr. Shaw’s advice and slowed down the machine until it bore a very considerable resemblance to his voice, but it was never the same thing, or a substitute for the same thing. To come in contact with Bernard Shaw through a gramophone or an earphone is not to come in contact with Bernard Shaw. It may be better than nothing, or a harmless amusement or a legitimate by-product of civilization. But it is not meeting Mr. Shaw, as we used to meet him when he towered buoyantly above the cultured riot of the Fabian Society, and distributed inspiring wit and infernal nonsense, like a man talking to men. And that difference will always remain to make a case for the smaller commonwealth, as does the truth about the cabbage for the smaller farm. No representation or report or official machinery is the same thing as a man and a mob; and as long as people trust to mere machinery, they will forget the nature of a mob as well as of a man.

Many other examples could be taken, of course, even in Mr. Shaw’s own case. It is an excellent jest, in his own style of an exuberant perversity, to ignore the existence of man and talk through the whole volume to an imaginary woman. But I rather wonder whether the woman represented on the coloured cover is the woman he had imagined. If she has really been listening to him, she looks as if the simple truths of Socialism had been a little too much for her. That sort of thing is inevitable but instructive: the instant a thing moves from home, out of the direct influence of its maker, it accumulates a dust or accretion of slightly alien things; and by the time it reaches its remote destination, it is not the thing that was sent forth. It is so with the voice; it is so with the vote; it is so with the return in mere money for effort or expenditure; it is so in a comparatively trivial matter like the writing of a book, as compared with the printing or binding of a book. This is not, of course, a reason for not binding books or completing ordinary processes of civilization. But it is a reason for remembering always that something is lost in the process, and that everything will be lost if that is the only sort of process. It is a reason for preserving deliberately a normal life that shall be more narrow and more genuine; in which we can argue with the men we have really met and enjoy the things we have really made.

Vintage Distributism

Are We Reactionary?
by G.K. Chesterton






In our last issue Sir Henry Slesser quoted at length from the debates of the House of Commons a perfectly lucid and logicial and solid criticism of the social policy which we pursue. It was by Mr. Montague, a Labour member; and apparently the only Labour member to maintain what many suppose to be the whole Labour policy. He criticised our conception from the point of view of the old Fabian intellectual; who did at least differ from many other intellectuals by the possession of an intellect. This criticism, being concerned with fundamental and essential questions of public policy, was very little reported in the press. Newspapers are necessarily limited in their space; and we who are beginners would be the last to deny the difficulties of making up a page. And if the newspapers were to admit into their columns any considerable discussion of what is to happen to the English land or the English labouring class, they would find it impossible to print at length the fourth housemaid's fifth reiteration, in the witness box, that she never saw anything particular about the demeanour of Captain Bingle towards Lady Brown. We should be driven to content ourselves with only five photographs of people paddling in the summer or ski-ing in the winter. We shall endeavour to provide Mr. Montague with an adequate reply, but we feel some pride in the fact that we are probably among the few who will give him even an adequate report.


It is necessary to deal here with the charge of being reactionary and what is really implied in it. It is popularly expressed, as our contributor has noted, in the common phrase about putting back the clock. It makes the brain reel to think how how many million times we have been told that we cannot put back the clock. It is strange that people should use the same mechanical metaphor in the sam mechanical spirit so many times without once seeing what is wrong with it. It looks rather as if their clocks, anyhow, had stopped. If there is one thing in the world that no sane man ought to connect with the idea of unlimited progress, it is a clock. A clock does not strike twelve and then go on to strike thirteen or fourteen. If a clock really proceeded on the progressive or evolutionary principle, we should find it was half-past a hundred in about a week. So far as the significance of the signs go, which is the only value of a clock, the case is altogether the other way. You do not need to put the clock back; because in that sense the clock always puts itself back. It always returns to its first principle and its primary purpose; and in that respect at nay rate it is really a good metaphor for a social scheme. The clock that had completely forgotten the meaning of one and two would be valueless; the commonwealth that has completely forgotten the meaning of individual dignity and direct ownership will never recover them by going blindly forward to an infinity of number; it must return to reality. It must be reactionary, if that is reaction.


But if that is reaction, a great many other things are reactionary. For instance, a Trade Union was and is utterly reactionary. Indeed, when it first appeared it was regarded as reactionary; especially by the people who then considered themselves most progressive. It was regarded by the Radical of the industrial revolution as a piece of unscientific sentimentalism and ignorant discontent. And so it was, upon the principles then counted scientific. The Trade Union was reactionary if the Manchester School was progressive. And the Manchester School was certainly thought itself progessive; and indeed everybody else thought so, too; it was not only praised as progressive but dreaded and denounced as progressive. What is the use, therefore, of Mr. Montague throwing the word "reactionary" at us, when his own grandfather might have thrown the word "reactionary" at him? The Trade Union reacted almost automatically towards the tradition of the Guild because individualism was driving on indefinitely to insanity; because that mechanical clock had gone mad, and was striking a million. We react towards the tradition of the peasant because the divorce between property and personality has become equally impossible; so that a man is not even a clock but one of the works of a clock.


If we can dispute with Mr. Montague over the term "reactionary" we might dispute with him still more over the term "medieval." About that we have a very simple thing to say. If Mr. Montague will get into a little boat and sail away from his native land in any direction whatever (short of the North Pole) he will probably land in a country where small ownership is a living, thriving, staring modern reality, in a greater or less degree according to the inroads of the last "progressive" fad of industrialism. If he goes west and lands in Ireland he will find it. If he goes east and lands in Denmark he will find it. If he goes almost anywhere he will find it much more fully developed than he will find it here. Everywhere doubtless it is modified or thwarted; everywhere doubtless it might be improved; but everywhere it is a thing of the present. If anything in the world is modern, small property is modern. He might as well say the decimel coinage is medieval; for almost every place which has a decimel coinage has some measure of small property. He might as well say Napoleon was a medieval figure; for this tendency has largely followed the code Napoleon. In a legal or strictly historical sense, indeed, Mr. Montague's implication is wildly correct. Medieval civilisation was indeed progressing towards private property for all, when it was split asunder by that strange earthquake whether economic or theological. But medieval civilisation started with the legal fiction of feudalism, by which the land belonged to the King; that is, to the State. In other words medieval civilisation started with the fiction of Socialism. It is Mr. Montague who is medieval. It is Mr. Montague who is reacting towards the first heraldic fictions of the feudal age. We hand him back the emblazoned escutcheon with a bow. Modern Europe, swarming with prosaic and practical peasants, is good enough for us.


Of course, we know what he really means, whether he knows it or not, by our being medieval. He means something that has many other euphemisms. He means something that has survived medievalism thought it made medievalism, just as it survived feudalism though it mitigated feudalism, just as it survived slavery though it dissolved slavery. We know its name if he does not; and we beg to inform him that this also is an exceedingly modern institution. If he will sail round the world in his little boat, he will find out how modern. But nobody expects him to argue on the assumption of Catholic Christianity, and therefore it is irrelevant to deal with that matter here. We will only say that, if he cares for a hint about the nature of the thing in its varied effects, he will find it in the notion of the Will which is at the root of all liberty. Because that philosophy favours voluntary association, it supports Guilds and Trades Unions; because it believes in a province for volition it favours property. And he will find this study more philosophical than playing with a clock and talking of politics in terms of time. It is bad enough when he merely calls that reactionary to-day which was reactionary yesterday.


We shall find an opportunity elsewhere of discussing in greater detail the practical criticisms involved in Mr. Montague's most interesting speech; here we are only concerned with the particular reproach of reaction. But in a general fashion we may say this. Mr. Montague's ideal society is one in which no man will ever have any real control; even over himself. The advantage of the plan he deprecated, the plan by which each worker in a factory might also be an independent worker on the land, is that each man would have something to fall back upon, and that is fundamental. Suppose, for instance, there is a strike; presumably in that case there will be a strike fund. We certainly have never indulged in the vulgar, grumbling, against strike funds or strikes. But after all a strike fund must be in the hands of officials; just as all the money of the Treasury is in the hands of officials. In theory we have control over the money in the Treasury. In practice, men may come to have as little control over the Trade Union fund as over the Treasury. Of course, this iwll not affect one who does not want the people to rule; who would uphold the Trade Union against the Trade Unionists. But the people we want to rule are people and not offices. Against the despotic thing called Supply we set the democratic thing called Demand.

Hillaire Belloc on the origins of Capitalism

by Athanasius

Why did the new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the name of industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of production, in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen into a poverty stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest of the nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with the capitalist state?
To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has been given. That answer is not only unintelligent, but false, and it will be my business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as a commonplace in our universities, is that the new methods of production-the new machinery, the new implements-fatally and of themselves developed a capitalist state in which a few should own the means of production and the mass should be proletarian. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on a vastly greater a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the small man could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them, ate up by his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner to that of a wage earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are told) the advantages of concentration were added in favor of the large owner against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost in proportion to their concentration in few places and under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the blast furnace, and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.

It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history, taught in our schools and universities today, were educated men familiar with the determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never have takenroot. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands fo a few owners and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began.

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.
When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing, the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.
To whom could the new industry turn for capitalization? The small owner had already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken to pieces by no "economic development," but by the deliberate action of the rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common life which once nourished his social sense and the cooperative arrangements which had once been his defense had disappeared. When you sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had already monopolized the bulk of the means of production in England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.
Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure "capitalized," that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, and glad enough if you would only keep it alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements, of houses and of land.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

Capitalism is not Catholic

by Athanasius

(From my own blog Athanasius Contra Mundum. This started my work on Distributism on the net)

For many years I have been a Free Market Capitalist. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is that it is just the conservative thing to do. One thing that unites the majority of conservatives both neo-cons like Sean Hannity and Bill Krystol as well as paleo-conservatives such as Thomas Woods and Pat Buchanan is capitalism and free market economic principles, or at least that mantle even if they read it slightly differently. Free market Capitalism basically means that if you keep markets unregulated in all arenas, business will keep itself well regulated and allow sufficient competition, so that a man with ingenuity and hard work can rise to the top and be a millionaire. How? By using capital at his disposal or in reality someone else's capital, and getting a bunch of wage slaves to produce it into goods for him while he works to manage it, until he either succeeds or fails. This happens on either a large scale or on a small scale. For years this made sense, but since the summer, I have finally called all of this into question, and at last have completely rejected it as a defective produce of the modern era, just as defective as ideas like unrestricted freedom of speech, relativistic morality and democracy. For one the business world working on the free market model has shown itself time and time again unwilling to discipline itself, and more interested in satisfying the bottom line. When the wage of the employee who is going to create wealth he will never see becomes too high, the company will either cut the position, cut the pay, or take its business over seas where it can exploit labor. The illegal immigration problem clearly demonstrates this. My number 2 problem with illegal immigration (after number 1 which is the flow of gangs, criminals and drugs uncontested across the border) is that people coming here to work hard for their family will be exploited by big business and have no legal protection.

I could go on, but rather than complain, it is necessary to show a vision for the future, and to do that it is necessary to point to one thing: Capitalism isn't it. In fact, growing up in America, we are conditioned to think Capitalism good, Communism bad, anything else bad. Outside the box there is no salvation. Suddenly the reader is no doubt pausing in horror, Athanasius, you are not becoming a Communist, are you? You're Communism series hasn't converted you has it? Certainly not. But if you say you are against Capitalism, the first thing that comes to mind is that you must be a Socialist or a Communist. However I feel it necessary to point out at this juncture that just as Communism is an anti-God and anti-Religious philosophy and economic science, Capitalism is equally against Catholic principles and the moral authority of Church teaching. Captialism represents every man for himself alone, the successful man is the one with the most cash philosophy. However measuring one's success in terms of wealth is directly related not to Catholicism, as such a system would seem grossly wicked to 1531 years of Catholics, but with Calvinism. Capitalism truly has its roots in the Protestant Reformation, both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, as Luther and Calvin had no intention of willing the oppression and suffering that occurred with Capitalism, and directly, as their attacks on a system that protected men's livelihood and kept capital concentrated in the hands of the many rather than the few. Luther of course had no economic vision whatsoever. His ideas concerning economics were still quite Catholic in spite of everything else. Calvinism on the other hand began measuring whether or not one was saved based on economic success, since that salvation was predetermined by God and as such unknowable. In the hands of classical economists, one bettered society by making as much money as he could, regardless of the human cost, and thus we arrive at the Free Market Economy. (This would also mean that the reformation is indirectly responsible for socialism, since it created the problem to which Socialism is the proposed solution and would not exist otherwise.

On the other hand there is the Catholic vision for economics, man's livelihood and the social kingship of Jesus Christ. It is not a terribly new system, as it was in practice from the period of the late Roman Empire until by and large after the Protestant and French Revolutions. It is a system which in modern times is called "Distributism", an exposition of Catholic social teaching most identified with Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, who formally introduced it in the early 1900's.

As I said Distributism is nothing new, but a predication of Medieval economic theory and practice. Some critics falsely maintain that it is the same as Socialism, but anyone who makes this objection only shows they do not know what they are talking about. Socialism is predicated on the denial of the right to private property, especially private productive property, whereas Distributism is predicated on the affirmation of the right to private productive property.

Hence the Late Romano-Medieval system, the right of a man to property by which he might take capital and produce it into goods for sale or consumption was paramount, far above the right to make money. This is because a Catholicized society did not see life as the necessity to amass wealth, but as a period to accomplish the salvation of our soul. This focus on the spiritual ends brings about a natural frugality with resources, money, and a modesty in the way one spends his time and engages in worldly goods. Belloc said

"It has been found in practice (that is, it is discoverable through history) that economic freedom thus somewhat limited satisfies the nature of man, and at the basis of it is the control of the means of production by the family unit. For though the family exchange its surplus, or even all its production, for the surplus of others, yet it retains its freedom, so long as the social structure, made up of families similarly free, exercises its effect through customs and laws consonant to its spirit: the Guild; a jealous watch against, and destruction of, monopoly; the safeguarding of inheritance, especially the inheritance of small patrimonies. The freehold miller, in such a society as ours [English] was ours not so long ago, though he had no arable or pasture, was a free man. The yeoman, though he got his flour from the miller, was a free man." -An Essay on the Restoration of Property, pg. 27)

To elaborate on guilds, some falsely maintain that a guild is essentially like our modern notion of a Union. A Union, is essentially a gathering of bureaucrats who live like leeches on the dues of its members under the promise of improving working conditions, a promise delivered 100 years ago, but not even thought about now since the bureaucrats who control unions have gotten a taste of the cash and fine living that comes with being a union president. A Guild never functioned that way. Guilds were a body of craftsmen in a given disciplines such as those of blacksmith, carpenter, cobbler, butcher, etc. Their purpose was to improve craftsmanship on the part of their members and to make sure that they were operating fairly. Dishonest workers would be thrown out of the guild and as such lose business due to a bad reputation. Guilds were inherently Catholic bodies, with their patron saints, celebrations, banners to process into Mass with, and protection from the Church. Its members and leaders were all craftsmen themselves employed in a given trade, not bureaucrats looking to spend the hard earned money of its workers for political gain. Always they defended the livelihood of the worker. Stealing the means by which a man feeds his family through monopolizing was no different than stealing the food itself from his children.

This brings us to the essence of distributism, that which the Guilds labored hard to defend. The name sounds funny, because we are unaccustomed to it. Distributism has nothing to do with government re-distribution, it merely refers to the fact of private productive property being well distributed (or diffused) amongst the people. Belloc notes:

"When so great a number of families in the state possess Private Property in a sufficient amount as to give its color to the whole, we speak of "widely distributed property. It has been found in practice, and the truth is witnessed to by the instincts in all of us, that such widely distributed property as a condition of Freedom is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature. In its absence general culture ultimately fails and so certainly does citizenship." -Ibid, pg. 28

Capitalism is also a slightly misleading word. Its name would suggest that it is just a system about the amassing of capital and the production of capital into wealth. However, this would accurately describe every economic arrangement human society has known, including Communism. Capitalism then (as practiced since it was forged by the big three revolutions of Protestantism, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution) is understood as a system where a minority controls the means of production, and the majority of the dispossessed must sell their labor, because that is all that they have left. The dispossessed are referred to as the "Proletariat" a term used today mostly by Marxists, which predates Marx by half a century. This accurately describes the situation in most of the world today. The alternative that Distributism offers is freedom. Instead of being required to sell our labor for a wage (wage slavery) in order to survive, we ourselves become the producers, consumers, on our own land on our own time. As wage slaves we must be present 9-5, or else risk the wrath of our employer. How many people would trade that to be self-sufficient? Come on, on one side you have life in a little cubicle, no windows, 3 bosses who harass you all day, and the best hours of your life spent not with your spouse and children but with your fat, balding boss, while on the other hand you have life on your terms, so long as you are willing to work hard. Which system seems more conducive to holiness? Distributism is the economics of the middle ages, and it is the only system that represents freedom. Anything else is a godless son of either protestantism or the enlightenment.

The New Distributist League Under Construction

At the moment, I am working to develop this blog before I advertise it, nevertheless you have arrived here anyhow.

For starters I am the only member of the New Distributist League, although more will join soon. Secondly you may be wondering what Distributism is. It is a 3rd way, an alternative to the godless materialist utopias of atheistic communism, and atheistic capitalism, regardless of whether the latter operates under economic liberal (libertarian) or merely industrial bigger is better mindsets.

Distributism is primarily a Catholic economic view, although one need not be a Catholic in order to appreciate it. It makes work the servant of man rather than man the servant of work, and aims at a wider distribution of property not through its elimination as in Communism/Socialism (which is re-distribution) but by achieving widespread ownership through government regulation of the market.