Functional socialism

STATUS 38

organized on the basis of status. Each civil servant is meticulously classed and graded, the upper division being almost closed to the lower. All hierarchies are founded on status. The whole structure of the churches, more particularly the national church, is hierarchical. Without inquiring too closely into what does not concern us, we may reasonably suspect that appointments in the ecclesiastical hierarchy evoke sentiments, if not criticisms, that are not always precisely Christian.

It is, however, in our economic life that stazus is at once most visible and most virulent. For status 1s so essential to capitalist organization that any fundamental change in our spiritual or social conception of status would inevitably and speedily disintegrate the system and compel a new way of economic life. The truth of this is surely beyond argument. For whilst we may recognize that Capitalism makes possible a certain mobility in the transfer and change of status, the broad fact remains that the vast majority of the workers are condemned to wage servitudethe lowest form of status. It might perhaps be said that slavery ranks lower than wage servitude. Not so; for slavery has long since been proved to be uneconomic. The essential difference lies in this: that whilst the slave-owner must buy and maintain the body of the slave, the capitalist employer buys only the labour power inherent in the body of the wage-earner. If he can substitute wage labour by machine power, the wage-earner may rot, body and bones, so far as the employer, gua employer, is

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