It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism." G.K. Chesterton in "Three Foes of the Family" found in the collection of his essays The Well and the Shallows.

This statement should be approached by a modern American thinker in the same way one drives to the top of Pike's Peak: gradually in sprirals, ever higher around the mountain. In my first post on this quotation, I gave a brief introduction to Chesterton the man. Today I want to introduce briefly his political/social thought. I'll begin with some quotations from his writings.

First, from the Father Brown story "The Crime of the Communist" Father Brown speaking:

. . . I told you that heresies and false doctrines had become common and conversational; that everybody was used to them; that nobody really noticed them. Did you think I meant Communism when I said that? Why, it was just the other way. You were all as nervous as cats about Communism; and you watched Craken like a wolf. Of course, Communism is a heresy; but it isn't a heresy that you people take for granted. It is Capitalism you take for granted; or rather the vices of Capitalism disguised as a dead Darwinism. Do you recall what you were all saying in the Common Room, about life being only a scramble, and nature demanding the survival of the fittest, and how it doesn't matter whether the poor are paid justly or not? Why that is the heresy that you have grown accustomed to, my friends; and its every bit as much a heresy as Communism. That's the anti-Christian morality or immorality that you take quite naturally. . . . (more below)



From the poem "Song Against Grocers":

His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out ‘Cash!’ and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day
And makes her count and calls her ‘Miss’
Until she fades away.

From the Father Brown story "The Quick One" Father Brown speaking:

". . . He was one of a great line of some half dozen men who might have saved England. They stand up stark and dark like disregarded sign-posts, down all that smooth descending road which has ended in this swamp of merely commercial collapse. . . ."

The biographical sketch quoted in the first post summarizes his political understaning thusly.

His politics fitted with his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power of any sort. Along with his friend Hilaire Belloc and in books like the 1910 What's Wrong with the World he advocated a view called "Distributism" that is best summed up by his expression that every man ought to be allowed to own "three acres and a cow." Though not known as a political thinker, his political influence has circled the world. Some see in him the father of the "small is beautiful" movement and a newspaper article by him is credited with provoking Gandhi to seek a "genuine" nationalism for India.

The economic system of Distributism is defined at Distributism.com as:
Distributism is an economic system in which private property, (especially the 'means of production'), is well distributed, in which as many people as possible are actual owners.



What is 'The Means of Production'?

According to Belloc, wealth (in the form of valued goods or services) are possible only by the combination of all three of:

a raw resource

labor

the 'means of production'

The 'means of production' is the capital, land, and/or equipment that is necessary for labor to process a raw resource into a state of higher value to society (e.g. wheat is the raw resource and a grind mill is the means of production.)

One is only the master of one's fate,
if one owns one's own means of production.

Property and all external goods are considered necessary because they are necessary for the welfare and support of the family. It is the decent support of the family that is sought, not the maximization of income. The property will be so intimately connected with a man and his family that he will have a fiercely protective attitude toward it and resist attack. But under capitalism, property is viewed simply as something with a money value, which is to be sold if a good price comes along.

In capitalism, while theoretically any man may own the means of production (or the raw resource), only men of exceptional talent and/or opportunity ever have a chance at this. Most men will look for employment among the increasingly fewer owners, selling the only commodity they have to offer the market: their labor.

A 'Wage-Slave' is someone who is hopelessly dispossessed of both raw resources and means of production, whose only value they have to bring to the market is their labor.

In practice this would mean a system which is dominated by--small land-owners farming their own lands, primarily with their family labor, eating from their own labor and selling or bartering their produce and craftsmen with their own shops primarily selling directly to those needing their products. Most people would not work for wages, but own their own means of production.

The American Chesterton Society provides this list of G.K. writings on the subject.

Gilbert Magazine has this article differentiating between Distributism and Socialism.