LONDON LETTER
of fun has been exiled from their drab lives in this country of Virtue and
Gloom,
with
its mean, vindictive
WORK OR WANT
posters on every street–
corner: a slogan fit for a state orphanage or reformatory school, and
which makes every self-respecting worker's stomach turn in disgust.
And so the massacre of incentives continues.
And as the incentives
to work vanish, curious psychological symptoms make their appearance.
One is the wave of what one might call "psychological strikes." They
are neither economic strikes for higher wages, nor political strikes; they
are spontaneous outbursts of ill-temper and irritation, sometimes for
the silliest causes (as the recent hotel-strike), and frequently directed
against the inept bureaucracy of nationalized industries (as the recent
Yorkshire coal-strikes). A different symptom, but fed from the same
psychological sources, is that new social phenomenon, the "spiv"-an
English compromise between the harmless work-shy loafer and the
gangster-racketeer. According to official estimates, there are now more
than a quarter of a million spivs who evade registration at the Labour
Exchanges, run the black market, and keep the crime squads busy; and
their number is steadily growing. So is the black market; a year ago
Britain could be rightly proud of being the one belligerent country whose
black market was almost negligible. Today this is no longer the case;
the farmers have started illegally slaughtering their cattle, just as in
France, and the Ministry of Food has recently admitted that it was
unable to stop the racket. These and many other symptoms point to
a considerable slackening of the moral fiber of the country-a direct
consequence of its being starved of the morale vitamins of inspiration,
incentives, hope. Most curious among these psychological phenomena is
the unparalleled betting mania which sweeps the country; apart from
the traditional football pools, from horses and dogs, people bet on the
most idiotic subjects: the last digit on a tramway-card, the first letter in
the headline of the evening paper, etc. The stakes are negligible; it is
not the money which matters. It is the craving for a little fun and
excitement in this joy-starved country.
I am dwelling on these factors at such length, because I am con–
vinced that the problem of incentives is the most important and most
difficult problem of socialist economy. Elsewhere I have tried to show
that the breakdown of socialism in Russia is primarily due to the break–
down of the revolutionary incentives and the consequent necessity of
replacing them by the old incentives-chauvinism, panslavism, leader–
worship, forced labor, suppression of strikes, inheritance, class-privileges,
etc. To British socialism, which is reformist and gradualist, the problem
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