134 DANGEROUS THOUGHTS

industrialism produces the things men need most than with
demanding that everyone should have access to any trash it is
capable of producing.

In view of the rising popularity of Fascist doctrines, it is
important to emphasize that the distribution of purchasing power
to increase the volume of effective demand is essentially different
from the view held by the pioneers of Socialism fifty or a hundred
years ago, and it would have been regarded by them as a
capitulation to the prevailing doctrine of laisser-faire, against
which they revolted. Men like Owen and Morris were far less
taken in by the glamour of capitalism than ourselves. They were
not content to criticize it because it distributed its products
unjustly, or because it was incapable of producing as large a
quantity of goods as a planned economy could deliver. They
also, and more especially, attacked it because it was not producing
the kind of goods which are good for people to want and to
strive for, and they were not hypnotized by the liberal delusion
that things people have been educated to demand by capitalist
advertisement are necessarily the things they need most.

To-day we are apt to dismiss their lament on the ugliness
which capitalist enterprise has bequeathed us as mere aestheticism
with no significance for a realistic political programme. In this
context realism implies a servile acceptance of the three cardinal
errors of early capitalist ideology. The first is the assumption that
the greatest good of the greatest number is achieved by producing
the greatest number of saleable goods and ensuring that the
greatest number of people can take their choice. The second is
that the large community is a necessary condition of high pro-
ductive capacity. The third is that peace between nations can
only be ensured by maximum division of labour with free trade.
I believe that each of these postulates is biologically false, and
that the results of acting as if they were true will be biologically
disastrous. If Socialism accepts the distribution of purchasing
power as its primary and sole concern, its success will merely
aggravate the tendencies which have made capitalism a biological
failure. Meanwhile it will not disarm criticism by capitulating to