Functional socialism

BRAINS 93

a rentier isa businessman. For instance, I produce opera and market it. But in almost every industry to-day the producer and even the merchant are of secondary importance. International currency thwarts their efforts and plays pitch-and-toss with their profits. I had a good example of that when I was over in Germany at the time when the mark was moving merrily between 300 to the £ and 300,000.

So the markets disgusted him. “I turned from the foolish haphazard of them to the serene logic of art.”

If our business leaders really have brains, how on earth do they permit finance “to play pitch-and-toss with their profits’? The answer is that they prefer the hazards of finance, of the gambling that finance compels or impels, to “the serene logic’ of function.

None the less these business men are perpetually complaining that their voice is not sufficiently heard in the counsels of the nation. Some years ago they agitated for a “Business Man’s Government”. They did not get it; but their silver-voiced champion, whom they implicitly trusted, went to penal servitude and died in penury.

An important fact emerges: business brains and functional brains are fundamentally different. Business brains are, in essence, devoted to the sordid pursuit of profits and so maintain financial control, without which they would immediately be submerged by brains moved by purely functional considerations. This distinction between business and functional brains has yet to be grasped by the labour leaders.