Tories, Capitalism, the Poor

Conservatives are today almost invariably defenders of capitalism.  It was not always so.  As Phillip Blond argues in Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it , “In the eighteenth century it was the Anglican Tory gentry who often defended the prosperity of the poor, their education and even their religious enthusiasm against modish Whig aristocrats.”  In the following century, it was the Tories who were “critics of republican authoritarianism and statism as well as denouncers of a self-serving capitalism.  As conservatives they vehemently hated the cultural consequences of industrialization – the creation of a landless dispossess mass forced to work at subsistence levels in factories for the benefit of others, an cut off from any cultural enrichment.  They decried the loss of a settled and happy economy of the self-sufficient – and despised the slavish dependency now forced upon the poor.  Economically they linked pauperisation with an original act of dispossession.”

Hillaire Belloc’s The Servile State is the most vigorous expression of this form of conservatism.   He denounced the welfare state because it instituted “a form of slavery in which the workers exchange their freedom and property for security and welfare.”  He hated socialism because it dispossessed “the populace in the name of general ownership and a communal monopoly.”  This did not make him an advocate of capitalism.  According to Belloc, capitalism as much as socialism “institute master-slave relations” and relies on dispossession: “The capitalist monopolises land, ownership and capital, thereby dispossessing the self-sufficient who are then forced to work for subsistence wages with no prospect of elevation.”  To the peasant or worker, Belloc thought, capitalism and socialism are indistinguishable: “both rely on dispossession, both deliver subsistence wages and both make the worker passive and dependent.”