about a position which is at once intolerable to majority, and easy of
capture by them. At this point the destruction of the small industries
has broken down most of the gradations which used to exist between the
large employer and the hired laborer, and has left in their place a
gulf across which a few capitalists and a huge and hungry proletariat
face each other. The denial of human sympathy by the employer in his
business relations with his “hands” has taught the “hands” to regard
the employer as outside the pale of their sympathy. The “respect of the
public conscience for the rights of property,” which was at bottom the
private interest of each in his own little property, has diminished
since the many lost their individual possessions, and saw property
accumulate in the hands of the few: it is now little more than a
tradition inherited from a former social state. The “public conscience”
will soon condone, nay, it will first approve, and then demand,
the expropriation of capital which is used antisocially instead of
socially, and which belongs to that impersonal abstraction, a company,
instead of to our next door neighbor. To the average person it is one
thing for the State to seize the little shop of James Smith who married
our sister, or the thriving business of our Sam who works early and
late for his living; and quite another when James and Sam, ruined by
a big Company made up of shareholders of whom nobody knows anything
but that they pay low wages and take high dividends, have been obliged
to become hired servants of the Company, instead of owning their own
shops and machinery. Whose interest will it be to protest against the
State taking over the capital, and transforming James and Sam from
wage-slaves at the mercy of a foreman, into shareholders and public
functionaries, with a voice in the management of the business in which
they are employed?
Let us suppose, then, that the evolution of the capitalist system has
proceeded but a little further along the present lines, concentrating
the control of industry, and increasingly substituting labor-saving
machinery for human beings. It is being accompanied, and must continue
to be accompanied, by a growth of the numbers of the unemployed. These
numbers may ebb and flow, as some of the waves of a rising tide run
forward some feet and then a few touch a lower level; but as the tide
rises despite the fluctuations of the ripples, so the numbers of the
unemployed will increase despite transient mountings and fallings. With
these, probably, will begin the tentative organisation of industry by
the State; but this organisation will soon be followed by the taking
over by the community of some of the great Trusts.
The division of the country into clearly defined areas, each with
its elected authority, is essential to any effective scheme of
organisation. It is one of the symptoms of the coming change, that,
in perfect unconsciousness of the nature of his act, Mr. Ritchie has
established the Commune. He has divided England into districts ruled
by County Councils, and has thus created the machinery without which
Socialism was impracticable. True, he has only made an outline which
needs to be filled in; but Socialists can fill in, whereas they had
no power to outline. It remains to give every adult a vote in the
election of Councillors; to shorten their term of office to a year; to
pay the Councillors, so that the public may have a right to the whole
of their working time; to give the Councils power to take and hold
land--a reform already asked for by the Liberal and Radical Union, a
body not consciously Socialist; and to remove all legal restrictions,
so as to leave them as free to act corporately as an individual is to
act individually. These measures accomplished, the rapidity with which
our institutions are socialised, depends on the growth of Socialism
among the people. It is essential to the stability of the changed
forms of industry that they shall be made by the people, not imposed
upon them; hence the value of Mr. Ritchie’s gift of Local Government,
enabling each locality to move swiftly or slowly, to experiment on a
comparatively small scale, even to blunder without widespread disaster.
The _mot d’ordre_ for Socialists now is “Convert the electors; and
capture the County Councils.” These Councils, administering local
affairs, with the national Executive, administering national affairs,
are all destined to be turned into effective industrial organisers; and
the unit of administration must depend on the nature of the industry.
The post, the telegraph, the railways, the canals, and the great
industries capable of being organised into Trusts, will, so far as we
can see now, be best administered each from a single centre for the
whole kingdom. Tramways, gasworks, water-works, and many of the smaller
productive industries, will be best managed locally. In marking the
lines of division, convenience and experience must be our guides. The
demarcations are of expediency, not of principle.
The first great problem that will press on the County Council for
solution will be that of the unemployed. Wisely or unwisely, it will
have to deal with them: wisely, if it organises them for productive
industry; unwisely, if it opens “relief works,” and tries, like an
enlarged Bumble, to shirk the difficulty by enforcing barren and
oppressive toil upon outlawed wretches at the expense of the rest
of the community. Many of the unemployed are unskilled laborers: a
minority are skilled. They must first be registered as skilled and
unskilled, and the former enrolled under their several trades. Then
can begin the rural organisation of labor on county farms, held by the
County Councils. The Council will have its agricultural committee,
charged with the administrative details; and this committee will choose
well-trained, practical agriculturists, as directors of the farm
business. To the County Farm will be drafted from the unemployed in the
towns, the agricultural laborers who have wandered townwards in search
of work, and many of the unskilled laborers. On these farms every
advantage of machinery, and every discovery in agricultural science,
should be utilised to the utmost. The crops should be carefully chosen
with reference to soil and aspect--cereals, fruit, vegetables--and the
culture adapted to the crop, the one aim being to obtain the largest
amount of produce with the least expenditure of human labor. Whether
land is most profitably cultivated in large or small parcels depends on
the crop; and in the great area of the County Farm, _la grande et la
petite culture_ might each have its place. Economy would also gain by
the large number of laborers under the direction of the head farmer,
since they could be concentrated when required at any given spot, as
in harvest time, and dispersed to work at the more continuous kinds of
tillage when the seasonal task was over.
To these farms must also be sent some skilled laborers from among the
unemployed, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, etc.; so that the
County Farm may be self-supporting as far as it can be without waste
of productive power. All the small industries necessary in daily life
should be carried on in it, and an industrial commune thus built up.
The democracy might be trusted to ordain that an eight hours’ day, and
a comfortable home, should be part of the life-conditions on the County
Farm. Probably each large farm would soon have its central store,
with its adjacent railway station, in addition to the ordinary farm
buildings; its public hall in the centre of the farm village to be used
for lectures, concerts, and entertainments of all sorts; its public
schools, elementary and technical; and soon, possibly from the outset,
its public meal-room, saving time and trouble to housewives, and, while
economising fuel and food, giving a far greater choice and variety of
dishes. Large dwellings, with suites of rooms, might perhaps replace
old-fashioned cottages; for it is worth noting, as showing the tendency
already existing among ourselves to turn from isolated self-dependence
to the advantages of associated living, that many modern flats are
being built without servants’ rooms, the house-cleaning, etc., being
done by persons engaged for the whole block, and the important meals
being taken at restaurants, so as to avoid the trouble and expense of
private cooking. It will surely be well in initiating new organisations
of industry to start on the most advanced lines, and take advantage of
every modern tendency towards less isolated modes of living. Socialists
must work hard to make municipal dealings with the unemployed avenues
to the higher life, not grudging utilisation of pauper labor. And as
they know their aim, and the other political parties live but from
hand to mouth, they ought to be able to exercise a steady and uniform
pressure, which, just because it is steady and uniform, will impress
its direction on the general movement.
The note of urban industrial organisation, as of all other, must be
that each person shall be employed to do what he can do best, not
what he does worst. It may be desirable for a man to have two trades;
but watch-making and stone-breaking are not convenient alternative
occupations. Where the skilled unemployed belong to trades carried on
everywhere, such as baking, shoemaking, tailoring, etc., they should be
employed at their own trades in municipal workshops, and their products
garnered in municipal stores. These workshops will be under the
direction of foremen, thoroughly skilled workmen, able to superintend
and direct as though in private employment. The working-day must be of
eight hours, and the wages, for the present, the Trades Union minimum.
Then, instead of tailors and shoemakers tramping the streets ragged
and barefoot, the tailors will be making clothes and the shoemakers
boots and shoes; and the shoemaker with the wages he earns will buy
the tailor’s products, and the tailor the shoemaker’s. Then, instead
of supporting the unemployed by rates levied on the employed they will
be set to work to supply their own necessities, and be producers of
the wealth they consume instead of consuming, in enforced idleness
or barren penal exercises in the stoneyard, the wealth produced by
others. Masons, bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, etc., might be set
to work in building decent and pleasant dwellings--in the style of
the blocks of flats, not of the barracks called model dwellings--for
the housing of the municipal industrial army. I lay stress on the
pleasantness of the dwellings. These places are to be dwellings for
citizens, not prisons for paupers; and there is no possible reason why
they should not be made attractive. Under Socialism the workers are to
be the nation, and all that is best is for their service; for, be it
remembered, our faces are set towards Socialism, and our organisation
of labor is to be on Socialist lines.
It is very likely that among the unemployed some will be found whose
trade can only be carried on by large numbers, and is not one of the
industries of the town into which their unlucky fate has drifted them.
These should be sent into municipal service in the towns where their
trade is the staple industry, there to be employed in the municipal
factory.
Concurrently with this rural and urban organisation of non-centralised
industries will proceed the taking over of the great centralised
industries, centralised for us by capitalists, who thus unconsciously
pave the way for their own supersession. Everything which has been
organised into a Trust, and has been worked for a time in the Trust
fashion, is ripe for appropriation by the community. All minerals
would be most properly worked in this centralised way; and it will
probably be found most convenient to work all the big productive
industries--such as the textile--in similar fashion. It is idle to
say that it cannot be done by the State when it is being done by a
ring of capitalists: a Local Board, an Iron Board, a Tin Board, can
be as easily held responsible to the nation as to a casual crowd of
shareholders. There need be no dislocation of production in making the
transference: the active organisers and directors of a Trust do not
necessarily, or even usually, own the capital invested in it. If the
State finds it convenient to hire these organisers and directors, there
is nothing to prevent its doing so for as long or as short a period
as it chooses. The temporary arrangements made with them during the
transition period must be governed by expediency.
Let us pause for a moment to estimate the position so far. The
unemployed have been transformed into communal workers--in the country
on great farms, improvements of the Bonanza farms in America--in the
towns in various trades. Public stores for agricultural and industrial
products are open in all convenient places, and filled with the goods
thus communally produced. The great industries, worked as Trusts,
are controlled by the State instead of by capitalist rings. The
private capitalist, however, will still be in business, producing
and distributing on his own account in competition with the communal
organisations, which at present will have occupied only part of the
industrial field. But apart from a pressure which will be recognised
when we come to deal with the remuneration of labor, these private
enterprises will be carried on under circumstances of ever-increasing
difficulty. In face of the orderly communal arrays, playing into
each other’s hands, with the credit of the country behind them, the
ventures of the private capitalist will be at as great a disadvantage
as the cottage industries of the last century in face of the factory
industries of our own period. The Trusts have taught us how to drive
competing capitals out of the market by associated capitals. The
Central Boards or County Councils will be able to utilise this power
of association further than any private capitalists. Thus the economic
forces which replaced the workshop by the factory, will replace the
private shop by the municipal store and the private factory by the
municipal one. And the advantages of greater concentration of capital
and of the association of labor will not be the only ones enjoyed by
the communal workers. All waste will be checked, every labor-saving
appliance utilised to the utmost, where the object is the production
of general wealth and not the production of profit to be appropriated
by a class; for in the one case it is the interest of the producers to
produce--inasmuch as their enjoyment depends on the productivity of
their labor--whereas in the other it is their interest to sterilise
their labor as far as they dare in order to render more of it necessary
and so keep up its price. As the organisation of the public industry
extends, and supplants more and more the individualist producer, the
probable demand will be more easily estimated, and the supply regulated
to meet it. The Municipalities and Central Boards will take the place
of the competing small capitalists and the rings of large ones; and
production will become ordered and rational instead of anarchical and
reckless as it is to-day. After awhile the private producers will
disappear, not because there will be any law against individualist
production, but because it will not pay. No one will care to face the
worries, the harassments, the anxieties, of individual struggling for
livelihood, when ease, freedom, and security can be enjoyed in the
communal services.
The best form of management during the transition period, and possibly
for a long time to come, will be through the Communal Councils,
which will appoint committees to superintend the various branches
of industry. These committees will engage the necessary manager and
foreman for each shop, factory, etc., and will hold the power of
dismissal as of appointment. I do not believe that the direct election
of the manager and foreman by the employees would be found to work
well in practice, or to be consistent with the discipline necessary
in carrying on any large business undertaking. It seems to me better
that the Commune should elect its Council--thus keeping under its own
control the general authority--but should empower the Council to select
the officials, so that the power of selection and dismissal within the
various sub-divisions should lie with the nominees of the whole Commune
instead of with the particular group immediately concerned.
There is no practical difficulty in the way of the management of
the ordinary productive industries, large or small. The Trusts and
Co-operation have, between them, solved, or put us in the way of
solving, all problems connected with these. But there are difficulties
in connexion with the industries concerned in the production of such
commodities as books and newspapers. During the transitional stage
these difficulties will not arise; but when all industries are carried
on by the Commune, or the Nation, how will books and newspapers be
produced? I only throw out the following suggestions. Printing, like
baking, tailoring, shoemaking, is a communal rather than a national
industry. Suppose we had printing offices controlled by the Communal
Council. The printing committee might be left free to accept any
publication it thought valuable, as a private firm to-day may take the
risk of publication, the arrangement with the author being purchase
outright, or royalty on copies sold, in each case so much to be put to
his credit at the Communal Bank. But there are many authors whose goods
are desired by no one: it would be absurd to force the community to
publish all minor poetry. Why not accept the principle that in every
case where the printing committee declines to print at the communal
risk, the author may have his work printed by transferring from his
credit at the Communal Bank to the account of the printing committee
sufficient to cover the cost of printing? The committee should have
no power to refuse to print, where the cost was covered. Thus liberty
of expression would be guarded as a constitutional right, while the
community would not be charged with the cost of printing every stupid
effusion that its fond composer might deem worthy of publicity.
Newspapers might be issued on similar terms; and it would always be
open to individuals, or to groups of individuals, to publish anything
they pleased on covering the cost of publication. With the comparative
affluence which would be enjoyed by each member of the community,
anyone who really cared to reach the public ear would be able to do so
by diminishing his expenditure in other directions.
Another difficulty which will meet us although not immediately, is the
competition for employment in certain pleasanter branches of industry.
At present an unemployed person would catch eagerly at the chance of
any well-paid work he was able to perform. If he were able both to set
type and to stitch coats, he would not dream of grumbling if he were
by chance offered the job he liked the less of the two: he would be
only too glad to get either. But it is quite possible that as the vast
amelioration of life-conditions proceeds, Jeshurun will wax fat and
kick if, when he prefers to make microscopic lenses, he is desired to
make mirrors. Under these circumstances, Jeshurun will, I fear, have
to accommodate himself to the demand. If the number of people engaged
in making lenses suffices to meet the demand for lenses, Jeshurun must
consent to turn his talents for the time to mirror-making. After all,
his state will not be very pitiable, though Socialism will have failed,
it is true, to make 2 + 2 = 5.
This, however, hardly solves the general question as to the
apportioning of laborers to the various forms of labor. But a solution
has been found by the ingenious author of “Looking Backward, from A.D.
2000.” Leaving young men and women free to choose their employments, he
would equalise the rates of volunteering by equalising the attractions
of the trades. In many cases natural bent, left free to develop itself
during a lengthened educational term, will determine the choice of
avocation. Human beings are fortunately very varied in their capacities
and tastes; that which attracts one repels another. But there are
unpleasant and indispensable forms of labor which, one would imagine,
can attract none--mining, sewer-cleaning, &c. These might be rendered
attractive by making the hours of labor in them much shorter than the
normal working day of pleasanter occupations. Many a strong, vigorous
man would greatly prefer a short spell of disagreeable work to a long
one at a desk. As it is well to leave the greatest possible freedom to
the individual, this equalising of advantages in all trades would be
far better than any attempt to perform the impossible task of choosing
an employment for each. A person would be sure to hate any work into
which he was directly forced, even though it were the very one he would
have chosen had he been left to himself.
Further, much of the most disagreeable and laborious work might be
done by machinery, as it would be now if it were not cheaper to exploit
a helot class. When it became illegal to send small boys up chimneys,
chimneys did not cease to be swept: a machine was invented for sweeping
them. Coal-cutting might now be done by machinery, instead of by a man
lying on his back, picking away over his head at the imminent risk of
his own life; but the machine is much dearer than men, so the miners
continue to have their chests crushed in by the falling coal. Under
Socialism men’s lives and limbs will be more valuable than machinery;
and science will be tasked to substitute the one for the other.
In truth the extension of machinery is very likely to solve many of
the problems connected with differential advantages in employment;
and it seems certain that, in the very near future, the skilled
worker will not be the man who is able to perform a particular set of
operations, but the man who has been trained in the use of machinery.
The difference of trade will be in the machine rather than in the man:
whether the produce is nails or screws, boots or coats, cloth or silk,
paper-folding or type-setting, will depend on the internal arrangements
of the mechanism and not on the method of applying the force. What we
shall probably do will be to instruct all our youth in the principles
of mechanics and in the handling of machines; the machines will be
constructed so as to turn the force into the various channels required
to produce the various articles; and the skilled workman will be the
skilled _mechanic_, not the skilled printer or bootmaker. At the
present time a few hours’ or a few days’ study will make the trained
mechanician master of any machine you can place before him. The line
of progress is to substitute machines for men in every department of
production: let the brain plan, guide, control; but let iron and steel,
steam and electricity, that do not tire and cannot be brutalised, do
the whole of the heavy toil that exhausts human frames to-day. There
is not the slightest reason to suppose that we are at the end of an
inventive era. Rather are we only just beginning to grope after the
uses of electricity: and machinery has before it possibilities almost
undreamed of now, the men produced by our system being too rough-handed
for the manipulation of delicate and complicated contrivances. I
suggest this only as a probable simplification of balancing the supply
and demand in various forms of labor in the future: our immediate
method of regulation must be the equalising of advantages in them.
One may guess that in each nation all the Boards and communal
authorities will ultimately be represented in some central Executive,
or Industrial Ministry; that the Minister of Agriculture, of Mineral
Industries, of Textile Industries, and so on, will have relations with
similar officers in other lands; and that thus, internationally as well
as nationally, co-operation will replace competition. But that end is
not yet.
We now approach a yet more thorny subject than the organisation of the
workers. What should be the remuneration of labor--what the share of
the product taken respectively by the individual, the municipality, and
the State?
The answer depends on the answer to a previous question. Is the
organisation of the unemployed to be undertaken in order to transform
them into self-supporting, self-respecting citizens; or is it to be
carried on as a form of exploitation, utilising pauper labor for the
production of profit for non-paupers? The whole matter turns on this
point; and unless we know our own minds, and fight for the right method
and against the wrong from the very beginning, the organisation of the
unemployed will be a buttress for the present system instead of a step
towards a better. Already there is talk of establishing labor colonies
in connexion with workhouses; and there is no time to be lost if we are
to take advantage of the good in the proposal and exclude the bad. The
County Councils also will lead to an increase of municipal employment;
and the method of that employment is vital.