to apply in its essentials to what we call competitive industry. Here
indeed certain new features come in. Not one employer but many produce
each kind of article. And, as far as each employer can see by looking at
his own horizon, what he does is merely to produce as much as he can
sell at a price that pays him. Since all the other employers are doing
this, there will be, under competition, a constant tendency to cut the
prices down to the lowest that is consistent with what the employer has
to pay as wages and interest. This point, which was called by the
orthodox economists the "cost," is not in any true and fundamental sense
of the words the "cost" at all. It is merely a limit represented by what
the other parties to the bargain are able to exact. The whole situation
is in a condition of unstable equilibrium in which the conflicting
forces represented by the interests of the various parties pull in
different directions. The employers in any one line of industry and all
their wage earners and salaried assistants have one and the same
interest as against the consumer. They want the selling price to be as
high as possible. But the employers are against one another as wanting,
each of them, to make as many sales as possible, and each and all the
employers are against the wage earners in wanting to pay as low wages as
possible. If all the employers unite, the situation turns to a monopoly,
and the price paid by the consumer is settled on the monopoly basis
already described. The employers can then dispute it out with their
working men as to how much wages shall be. If the employers are not
united, then at each and every moment they are in conflict both with
the consumer and with their wage earners. Thus the whole scene of
industry represents a vast and unending conflict, a fermentation in
which the moving bubbles crowd for space, expanding and breaking one
against the other. There is no point of rest. There is no real fixed
"cost" acting as a basis. Anything that any one person or group of
persons--worker or master, landlord or capitalist--is able to exact
owing to the existing conditions of demand or supply, becomes a "cost"
from the point of view of all the others. There is nothing in this
"cost" which proportions to it the quantity of labor, or of time, or of
skill or of any other measure physical or psychological of the effort
involved. And there is nothing whatever in it which proportions to it
social justice. It is the war of each against all. Its only mitigation
is that it is carried on under the set of rules represented by the state
and the law.
The tendencies involved may be best illustrated by taking one or two
extreme or exaggerated examples, not meant as facts but only to make
clear the nature of social and industrial forces among which we live.
What, for example, will be the absolute maximum to which wages in
general could be forced? Conceivably and in the purest and thinnest of
theory, they could include the whole product of the labor of society
with just such a small fraction left over for the employers, the owners
of capital and the owners of land to induce them to continue acting as
part of the machine. That is to say, if all the laborers all over the
world, to the last one, were united under a single control they could
force the other economic classes of society to something approaching a
starvation living. In practice this is nonsense. In theory it is an
excellent starting point for thought.
And how short could the hours of the universal united workers be made?
As short as ever they liked: An hour a day: ten minutes, anything they
like; but of course with the proviso that the shorter the hours the less
the total of things produced to be divided. It is true that up to a
certain point shortening the hours of labor actually increases the
total product. A ten-hour day, speaking in general terms and leaving out
individual exceptions, is probably more productive than a day of twelve.
It may very well be that an eight-hour day will prove, presently if not
immediately, to be more productive than one of ten. But somewhere the
limit is reached and gross production falls. The supply of things in
general gets shorter. But note that this itself would not matter much,
if somehow and in some way not yet found, the shortening of the
production of goods cut out the luxuries and superfluities first.
Mankind at large might well trade leisure for luxuries. The shortening
of hours with the corresponding changes in the direction of production
is really the central problem in social reform. I propose to return to
it in the concluding chapter of these papers, but for the present it is
only noted in connection with the general scheme of industrial
relations.
Now let us ask to what extent any particular section or part of
industrial society can succeed in forcing up wages or prices as against
the others. In pure theory they may do this almost to any extent,
provided that the thing concerned is a necessity and is without a
substitute and provided that their organization is complete and
unbreakable. If all the people concerned in producing coal, masters and
men, owners of mines and operators of machinery, could stand out for
their price, there is no limit, short of putting all the rest of the
world on starvation rations, to what they might get. In practice and in
reality a thousand things intervene--the impossibility of such complete
unity, the organization of the other parties, the existing of national
divisions among industrial society, sentiment, decency, fear. The
proposition is only "pure theory." But its use as such is to dispose of
any such idea as that there is a natural price of coal or of anything
else.
The above is true of any article of necessity. It is true though in a
less degree of things of luxury. If all the makers of instruments of
music, masters and men, capitalists and workers, were banded together in
a tight and unbreakable union, then the other economic classes must
either face the horrors of a world without pianolas and trombones, or
hand over the price demanded. And what is true of coal and music is true
all through the whole mechanism of industry.
Or take the supreme case of the owners of land. If all of them acted
together, with their legal rights added into one, they could order the
rest of the world either to get off it or to work at starvation wages.
Industrial society is therefore mobile, elastic, standing at any moment
in a temporary and unstable equilibrium. But at any particular moment
the possibility of a huge and catastrophic shift such as those described
is out of the question except at the price of a general collapse. Even a
minor dislocation breaks down a certain part of the machinery of
society. Particular groups of workers are thrown out of place. There is
no other place where they can fit in, or at any rate not immediately.
The machine labors heavily. Ominous mutterings are heard. The legal
framework of the State and of obedience to the law in which industrial
society is set threatens to break asunder. The attempt at social change
threatens a social revolution in which the whole elaborate mechanism
would burst into fragments.
In any social movement, then, change and alteration in a new direction
must be balanced against the demands of social stability. Some things
are possible and some are not; some are impossible to-day, and possible
or easy to-morrow. Others are forever out of the question.
But this much at least ought to appear clear if the line of argument
indicated above is accepted, namely, that there is no great hope for
universal betterment of society by the mere advance of technical
industrial progress and by the unaided play of the motive of every man
for himself.
The enormous increase in the productivity of industrial effort would
never of itself have elevated by one inch the lot of the working class.
The rise of wages in the nineteenth century and the shortening of hours
that went with it was due neither to the advance in mechanical power
nor to the advance in diligence and industriousness, nor to the advance,
if there was any, in general kindliness. It was due to the organization
of labor. Mechanical progress makes higher wages possible. It does not,
of itself, advance them by a single farthing. Labor saving machinery
does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil: it only
shifts it from one task to another.
Against a system of unrestrained individualism, energy, industriousness
and honesty might shatter itself in vain. The thing is merely a race in
which only one can be first no matter how great the speed of all; a
struggle in which one, and not all, can stand upon the shoulders of the
others. It is the restriction of individualism by the force of
organization and by legislation that has brought to the world whatever
social advance has been achieved by the great mass of the people.
The present moment is in a sense the wrong time to say this. We no
longer live in an age when down-trodden laborers meet by candlelight
with the ban of the law upon their meeting. These are the days when
"labor" is triumphant, and when it ever threatens in the overweening
strength of its own power to break industrial society in pieces in the
fierce attempt to do in a day what can only be done in a generation. But
truth is truth. And any one who writes of the history of the progress of
industrial society owes it to the truth to acknowledge the vast social
achievement of organized labor in the past.
And what of the future?
By what means and in what stages can social progress be further
accelerated? This I propose to treat in the succeeding chapters, dealing
first with the proposals of the socialists and the revolutionaries, and
finally with the prospect for a sane, orderly and continuous social
reform.
_V.--The Land of Dreams: The Utopia of the Socialist_
WHO is there that has not turned at times from the fever and fret of the
world we live in, from the spectacle of its wasted energy, its wild
frenzy of work and its bitter inequality, to the land of dreams, to the
pictured vision of the world as it might be?
Such a vision has haunted in all ages the brooding mind of mankind; and
every age has fashioned for itself the image of a "somewhere" or
"nowhere"--a Utopia in which there should be equality and justice for
all. The vision itself is an outcome of that divine discontent which
raises man above his environment.
Every age has had its socialism, its communism, its dream of bread and
work for all. But the dream has varied always in the likeness of the
thought of the time. In earlier days the dream was not one of social
wealth. It was rather a vision of the abnegation of riches, of humble
possessions shared in common after the manner of the unrealized ideal of
the Christian faith. It remained for the age of machinery and power to
bring forth another and a vastly more potent socialism. This was no
longer a plan whereby all might be poor together, but a proposal that
all should be rich together. The collectivist state advocated by the
socialist of to-day has scarcely anything in common with the communism
of the middle ages.
Modern socialism is the direct outcome of the age of machine production.
It takes its first inspiration from glaring contrasts between riches and
poverty presented by the modern era, from the strange paradox that has
been described above between human power and its failure to satisfy
human want. The nineteenth century brought with it the factory and the
factory slavery of the Lancashire children, the modern city and city
slum, the plutocracy and the proletariat, and all the strange
discrepancy between wealth and want that has disfigured the material
progress of the last hundred years. The rising splendor of capitalism
concealed from the dazzled eye the melancholy spectacle of the new
industrial poverty that lay in the shadow behind it.
The years that followed the close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 were in
many senses years of unexampled misery. The accumulated burden of the
war lay heavy upon Europe. The rise of the new machine power had
dislocated the older system. A multitude of landless men clamored for
bread and work. Pauperism spread like a plague. Each new invention threw
thousands of hand-workers out of employment. The law still branded as
conspiracy any united attempt of workingmen to raise wages or to shorten
the hours of work. At the very moment when the coming of steam power and
the use of modern machinery were piling up industrial fortunes undreamed
of before, destitution, pauperism and unemployment seemed more
widespread and more ominous than ever. In this rank atmosphere
germinated modern socialism. The writings of Marx and Engels and Louis
Blanc were inspired by what they saw about them.
From its very cradle socialism showed the double aspect which has
distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of
the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois"
society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting
was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with
gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the
revolutionary at the very moment when it was most wanted. To the men of
violence, socialism was the twin brother of anarchism, born at the same
time, advocating the same means and differing only as to the final end.
But to others, socialism was from the beginning, as it is to-day, a
creed of peace. It advocated the betterment of society not by violence
but by persuasion, by peaceful argument and the recognized rule of the
majority. It is true that the earlier socialists almost to a man
included, in the first passion of their denunciation, things not
necessarily within the compass of purely economic reform. As children of
misery they cried out against all human institutions. The bond of
marriage seemed an accursed thing, the mere slavery of women. The
family--the one institution in which the better side of human nature
shines with an undimmed light--was to them but an engine of class
oppression; the Christian churches merely the parasitic servants of the
tyrannous power of a plutocratic state. The whole history of human
civilization was denounced as an unredeemed record of the spoliation of
the weak by the strong. Even the domain of the philosopher was
needlessly invaded and all forms of speculative belief were rudely
thrown aside in favor of a wooden materialism as dogmatic as any of the
creeds or theories which it proposed to replace.
Thus seen, socialism appeared as the very antithesis of law and order,
of love and chastity, and of religion itself. It was a tainted creed.
There was blood upon its hands and bloody menace in its thoughts. It was
a thing to be stamped out, to be torn up by the roots. The very soil in
which it grew must be burned out with the flame of avenging justice.
Such it still appears to many people to-day. The unspeakable savagery of
bolshevism has made good the wildest threats of the partisans of
violence and fulfilled the sternest warnings of the conservative. To-day
more than ever socialism is in danger of becoming a proscribed creed,
its very name under the ban of the law, its literature burned by the
hangman and a gag placed upon its mouth.
But this is neither right nor wise. Socialism, like every other
impassioned human effort, will flourish best under martyrdom. It will
languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion.
For it must always be remembered in fairness that the creed of violence
has no necessary connection with socialism. In its essential nature
socialism is nothing but a proposal for certain kinds of economic
reform. A man has just as much right to declare himself a socialist as
he has to call himself a Seventh Day Adventist or a Prohibitionist, or a
Perpetual Motionist. It is, or should be, open to him to convert others
to his way of thinking. It is only time to restrain him when he proposes
to convert others by means of a shotgun or by dynamite, and by forcible
interference with their own rights. When he does this he ceases to be a
socialist pure and simple and becomes a criminal as well. The law can
deal with him as such.
But with socialism itself the law, in a free country, should have no
kind of quarrel. For in the whole program of peaceful socialism there is
nothing wrong at all except one thing. Apart from this it is a high and
ennobling ideal truly fitted for a community of saints. And the one
thing that is wrong with socialism is that it won't work. That is all.
It is, as it were, a beautiful machine of which the wheels, dependent
upon some unknown and uninvented motive power, refuse to turn. The
unknown motive force in this case means a power of altruism, of
unselfishness, of willingness to labor for the good of others, such as
the human race has never known, nor is ever likely to know. But the
worst public policy to pursue in reference to such a machine is to lock
it up, to prohibit all examination of it and to allow it to become a
hidden mystery, the whispered hope of its martyred advocates. Better far
to stand it out into the open daylight, to let all who will inspect it,
and to prove even to the simplest that such a contrivance once and for
all and for ever cannot be made to run.
Let us turn to examine the machine.
We may omit here all discussion of the historical progress of socialism
and the stages whereby it changed from the creed of a few theorists and
revolutionists to being the accepted platform of great political
parties, counting its adherents by the million. All of this belongs
elsewhere. It suffices here to note that in the process of its rise it
has chafed away much of the superfluous growth that clung to it and has
become a purely economic doctrine. There is no longer any need to
discuss in connection with it the justification of marriage and the
family, and the rightness or wrongness of Christianity: no need to
decide whether the materialistic theory of history is true or false,
since nine socialists out of ten to-day have forgotten, or have never
heard, what the materialistic theory of history is: no need to examine
whether human history is, or is not, a mere record of class
exploitation, since the controversy has long shifted to other grounds.
The essential thing to-day is not the past, but the future. The question
is, what does the socialist have to say about the conditions under which
we live and the means that he advocates for the betterment of them?
His case stands thus. He begins his discussion with an indictment of the
manifold weaknesses and the obvious injustices of the system under which
we live. And in this the socialist is very largely right. He shows that
under free individual competition there is a perpetual waste of energy.
Competing rivals cover the same field. Even the simplest services are
performed with an almost ludicrous waste of energy. In every modern
city the milk supply is distributed by erratic milkmen who skip from
door to door and from street to street, covering the same ground, each
leaving his cans of milk here and there in a sporadic fashion as
haphazard as a bee among the flowers. Contrast, says the socialist, the
wasted labors of the milkman with the orderly and systematic performance
of the postman, himself a little fragment of socialism. And the milkman,
they tell us, is typical of modern industrial society. Competing
railways run trains on parallel tracks, with empty cars that might be
filled and with vast executive organizations which do ten times over the
work that might be done by one. Competing stores needlessly occupy the
time of hundreds of thousands of employees in a mixture of idleness and
industry. An inconceivable quantity of human effort is spent on
advertising, mere shouting and display, as unproductive in the social
sense as the beating of a drum. Competition breaks into a dozen
inefficient parts the process that might conceivably be carried out,
with an infinite saving of effort, by a single guiding hand.
The socialist looking thus at the world we live in sees in it nothing
but waste and selfishness and inefficiency. He looks so long that a mist
comes before his eyes. He loses sight of the supreme fact that after
all, in its own poor, clumsy fashion, the machine does work. He loses
sight of the possibility of our falling into social chaos. He sees no
longer the brink of the abyss beside which the path of progress picks
its painful way. He leaps with a shout of exultation over the cliff.
And he lands, at least in imagination, in his ideal state, his Utopia.
Here the noise and clamor of competitive industry is stilled. We look
about us at a peaceful landscape where men and women brightly clothed
and abundantly fed and warmed, sing at their easy task. There is enough
for all and more than enough. Poverty has vanished. Want is unknown. The
children play among the flowers. The youths and maidens are at school.
There are no figures here bent with premature toil, no faces dulled and
furrowed with a life of hardship. The light of education and culture has
shone full on every face and illuminated it into all that it might be.
The cheerful hours of easy labor vary but do not destroy the pursuit of
pleasure and of recreation. Youth in such a Utopia is a very springtime
of hope: adult life a busy and cheery activity: and age itself, watching
from its shady bench beneath a spreading tree the labors of its
children, is but a gentle retrospect from which material care has passed
away.
It is a picture beautiful as the opalescent colors of a soap bubble. It
is the vision of a garden of Eden from which the demon has been
banished. And the Demon in question is the Private Ownership of the
Means of Production. His name is less romantic than those of the wonted
demons of legend and folklore. But it is at least suitable for the
matter-of-fact age of machinery which he is supposed to haunt and on
which he casts his evil spell. Let him be once exorcised and the ills of
humanity are gone. And the exorcism, it appears, is of the simplest.
Let this demon once feel the contact of state ownership of the means of
production and his baneful influence will vanish into thin air as his
mediæval predecessors did at the touch of a thimbleful of holy water.
This, then, is the socialist's program. Let "the state" take over all
the means of production--all the farms, the mines, the factories, the
workshops, the ships, the railroads. Let it direct the workers towards
their task in accordance with the needs of society. Let each labor for
all in the measure of his strength and talent. Let each receive from all
in the measure of his proper needs. No work is to be wasted: nothing is
to be done twice that need only be done once. All must work and none
must be idle: but the amount of work needed under these conditions will
be so small, the hours so short, and the effort so slight, that work
itself will no longer be the grinding monotonous toil that we know
to-day, but a congenial activity pleasant in itself.
A thousand times this picture has been presented. The visionary with
uplifted eyes, his gaze bent on the bright colors of the floating
bubble, has voiced it from a thousand platforms. The earnest youth
grinding at the academic mill has dreamed it in the pauses of his
studious labor. The impassioned pedant has written it in heavy prose
smothering its brightness in the dull web of his own thought. The
brilliant imaginative mind has woven it into romance, making its colors
brighter still with the sunlight of inspired phantasy.