INDUSTRY RETURNS TO THE HOME
An influential factor in the development of manufacturing was the
invention of steam power. The industries that use machines were forced
out of the homes and into the factories. There was no alternative.
The steam driven machines produced goods so cheaply that the hand
power, or home machine could not earn its owner a livelihood. Thus the
factory system developed, partly because of the mechanical necessity
of concentration where the power from one engine could by the use of
shafts and belts be made to run a great number of machines, and partly
because of the natural tendency of the man with the most money to
acquire possession of the factory and have others work for him.
Later the invention and perfection of the electric generator and
motor made possible the distribution of power and the machine, with
its motor attached, again became feasible for individual ownership.
Difficulties, however, exist. These difficulties are the present
capitalistic ownership of the material and machines, a lack of
properly organized coöperatively conducted sources of power, present
land ownership, house arrangement, and of getting this power to the
worker; and what is of much more moment, the complete possession by
capitalistic interests of the entire system of trade or distribution
from the great railway combination to the retail shop, through which
the individual worker must market his products.
_Wage-slavery Doomed._
The ideal--and as I believe--an attainable ideal in a large number
of Roadtown manufacturing industries is coöperation in the use of
land, machines, power supply and transportation of products, and
individualism in the actual operation of the machines and working the
land. This will forever solve the labor question by abolishing the
wage-system. Let us look at the details as they will be worked out in
the Roadtown.
The first essential in such a system of coöperative individual
producers is power. For this the Roadtown will have to compete in the
markets of the world.
Roadtown will possess great advantages in this respect where it passes
water power and coal fields and can buy them. Roadtown power plants,
coöperative stores and cooking plants, will be located where railroads,
canals or rivers cross the Roadtown, when practicable, to save the
double handling and freight on coal. Otherwise the coal will be loaded
into Roadtown cars by steam shovel and hauled at night to the power
houses where the monorail coal cars will be dumped directly into the
stoker reservoirs. The same heat will be used for generating power,
heating the building, cooking the food and for whatever other purpose
heat is required and the chimneys of Roadtown will be miles apart.
There will be no wagon haulage of fuel in Roadtown life. Other sources
of power, such as water, wind or waves, when developed will become
available for the Roadtown.
The transmission of Roadtown power will involve none of the losses from
which exposed transmission systems suffer because of the weather. The
actual cost per horse power used will be far less than in present city
distribution.
_A Work Room in Every Home._
Every room in Roadtown will be wired for light and power, but the
general building plan will presume that all regular industrial
operations are to be conducted in a room on the lower floor of the
house which will be equipped with power sockets and bolt plates in the
floor and a non-vibrating foundation installed for machines. This room
will be located where it will have ready access to the transportation
lines, probably by a trap through the floor through which a case of
goods can be dropped to a position where it can be automatically swung
aboard a slowly moving “pick-up” car at night, something after the
manner a mail-bag is now snatched from a post beside the railway track.
This work room will be separated from the rest of the house by
sound-proof walls. Of course no room can be made absolutely sound
proof, for where fresh air goes sound goes also. Very noisy industries
as well as those that deal in bulky or malodorous substances must of
necessity be out of and at a safe distance from the resident portion
of Roadtown. The Roadtown work room, like the coöperative cook shop,
though it is there to be used and will be equipped for a work room, yet
its use as such is not obligatory. The power socket may be plugged, a
rug thrown over the bolt plates and the work room used for a children’s
play-room, a sun parlor, a palm garden, or a living-room. It is rented
with the house, equipped to receive suitable machines, but if the
tenants have other uses for their time, it is their affair.
The following industries will come early to the Roadtown: clothing
manufactures, knitting, lace and needle work, millinery, artificial
flowers and other decorative work, including all art and the so-called
art crafts, jewelry, toilet articles and small household notions of
all sorts; wood and cold metal workings, toys, hats, gloves, shoes,
book-binding, and many similar types of light manufacturing.
The Roadtown corporation will have machines for suitable Roadtown
industries made of certain standard sizes to fit the workroom
described. These machines will be for sale or to rent to the tenant.
Under the old system of industry, men, constantly fraught with the
fear of losing their jobs, are always anxious to buy and own the tools
of production. In Roadtown practice there will be nothing to gain by
private ownership over publicly owned machines. The corporation will
charge just enough rental to maintain and repair the machinery and
replace with new ones when the old are out of commission. The operator
of the machine will find it more profitable to invest his savings in
the bonds of the corporation than to make his own repairs or to replace
his own machines. Another advantage of renting your machine is the
option you have at all times, that of exchanging it for some other kind
of machine.
Whether the factory is brought into the home, or the man induced to go
to the factory will, of course, depend upon the nature of his work.
Sometimes it will be cheaper to move the product, sometimes cheaper to
move the man. In either case the perfected system of transportation is
of equal importance.
The selling of farm products coöperatively is practical, as is being
abundantly proven in the United States and to a greater extent abroad.
There is no valid argument that can be put up against coöperative
buying of the raw material and selling of the finished product of the
Roadtown workers. Such coöperative buying and selling should not for
a moment be classed with the graft tempting work of the municipal or
government buyer. In the case of the government the money which is
used to buy cavalry horses, for instance, is raised by revenues upon
diamonds or cigars. There is here no relation whatsoever between the
man who pays the taxes and the buyer of the goods. In coöperative
buying the connection between the man who pays and the price that is
paid will be close indeed. The buyer of leather for Roadtown glove
makers would be held even more closely responsible for honest buying
by the consumers of the leather than by the stockholders of a present
corporate glove factory, for in the corporation factory there is a
chance to hide poor buying behind good selling in the final report
to the stockholders. Every move of the buyer and seller of Roadtown
workers is then and there made known to the Roadtown workman or group
of workmen who has the immediate right to recall the blundering
representative. The trouble with government officials is that they are
too far removed from the people who supply the money which they spend.
In Roadtown that connection will be close and quick in action. It will
be corporate industry with interest to small or large investors, but
control and profits for and by the workers.
The bondholders will have an ever vigilant and directly interested
army of workers who must of necessity safeguard their mutual welfare.
The worker cannot avoid this service to the bondholder, hence he is
the best protected bondholder in all the world. I do not here refer to
values; that is covered elsewhere.
_A New Type of Factory._
I believe there will develop in Roadtown a form of factory that is
intermediate between the large privately owned factory as it exists
to-day and the individual work room of Roadtown. I refer to the small
coöperative factory, organized by a band of workers whose separate
operations are needed to complete a single article. For illustration,
suppose a group of employés of a shoe factory are dissatisfied. Instead
of going on a strike they would organize a coöperative Roadtown
Association and move into Roadtown. They could arrange for houses
adjoining and throw their individual work room into a continuous work
room large enough to accommodate them. They could elect their own
foreman and decide the proportion of profits to go to different grades
of work and embody these conditions in their charter. These inner
coöperators would buy and sell through the central organization of
the Roadtown, as will the individual workers. Here we will have the
mechanical saving of the combination of the several operations--the
commercial saving of centralized buying and selling, and the profits
going to the workers, not the least of which would be the satisfaction
of independence.
Once Roadtown becomes an established fact, single workers, little
groups of workers, and whole armies of workers will be seen leaving
the old system for the new. It will be a strike for all time, a strike
from which the hiring of strike breakers will be an empty retaliation,
for the Roadtown worker will not only work better but his products will
be less destroyed in the mill of competitive selling--he can undersell
the strike breaker, being employer, and because the food and house and
things he buys of the other workers will cost him less and serve him
better; the workman who joins this final general strike can work and
live better, yet cheaper, than his successor in the old factories.
It is the beginning of the end of the barbarous so-called “factory
system”--and the end is that each work will be performed in a way that
is most economical to society as a whole.
_A Special Message to Women._
The Roadtown has a message not only for men, but for women, and most
especially for young unmarried women who are looking forward to the
time when they can fulfill their highest mission on earth, that of
establishing a home and raising a family. You need not put off the
wedding any longer than the time when you can pay a couple of months’
rent on a Roadtown home, a deposit on a machine, enough to buy raw
material to keep you and the machine busy for a couple of weeks and
enough seed to plant the garden. If “John” has a position he can retain
it and commute without leaving you to stare out the window of a city
apartment with nothing to do all day or frightened and lonely in an
isolated farm house. If he hasn’t a job he may run a machine and work
the garden also. If he is good to you, you will be happy, and he is apt
to be, for he knows you are not dependent upon him for a living now
that you are freed from household drudgery and can earn as much as he.
The Roadtown will enable you to marry the man of your choice regardless
of his ability to thrive in the present unfair struggle for a marriage
portion and enable you at all times to free yourself from him on
account of your economic independence, if he proves to be the wrong man.
The saving in coöperative buying and selling is going to be the means
of throwing many men out of employment, just as has been the case with
the inventions of all labor saving machinery and methods. When a man
in middle life has to fill a new occupation it is indeed a serious
matter, but one against which it is useless to fight. If a man had
been sent down the track swinging a lantern to warn an approaching
train of a broken rail, we would hardly countenance the holding up of
traffic after the rail was repaired, because the man wished to continue
swinging the lantern. The Roadtown makes no apologies to the workers
whose services it will render useless. When we get well, we dismiss
the doctor. It is said that some doctors keep us sick to keep their
jobs. Be that as it may, certainly there is no denying that he who
opposes coöperation, in an attempt to preserve wasteful or unnecessary
operations is a malpracticing economic physician. To the man Roadtown
throws out of a job, it offers a chance to engage in productive labor
where one cannot get out of a job, because so long as men receive
the full fruits of their toil, with free and untaxed exchange,
over-production as an economic calamity is an absolute impossibility.
_The End of Monotonous Labor._
Thus far we have discussed agriculture and manufacturing as industries
to be engaged in by different sets of workers. In practice, I believe
they will be bountifully intermingled. A man may work at a shoe
stitcher for three hours, turn off the power and go out and hoe
potatoes. Likewise his wife may run the same machine, or a lace machine
for a while, and for a change of occupation operate the electric hoe
(something on the order of a dentist’s drill, only much larger) in the
vegetable or flower garden. Not only will Roadtown free the factory
worker from wage slavery, but it will free both farmer and machine
worker from long hours of toil at monotonous work. It will free our
civilization from the curse of making machines out of men; it will
sift out the indolent and place them at the bottom of the scale of
life’s good things. It will reward the industrious as much as man can
be rewarded without being given power to enslave his fellows. It will
make men free; it will abolish machine men, factory and sweat shops,
and child labor and woman’s economic dependence on man that makes her a
sexual slave. And such work, such making of children into men and women
instead of automatons, may lessen the speed at which some machines are
fed, and may even make tissue paper flowers on hats dearer, but it will
certainly make cow butter and big red apples cheaper and real flowers
more abundant and raise the per capita valuation of human life.