WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND WHY IT IS
The occupation of the scarlet woman is said to be “the oldest
profession.” If so, the robbery of man by man is the oldest trade. It is
as old as the human race. It had its origin in the difficulty of
producing enough of the material necessities of life. The earth was
lean. Man was weak. Never was there enough food for all. Many must
suffer. Some must starve.
What wonder that man robbed man? Self-preservation is the first law of
nature. We have always fought and shall always fight for those things
that are scarce and without which we should die. If water were scarce,
we should all be fighting by the brookside. If air were scarce, we
should all be straining our lungs to take in as much as we could.
But what wonder, also, that the robbed should resist those who robbed
them? The robbed, too, have the instinct of self-preservation. They,
too, want to live. All through the ages, they have fought for the right
to live. By the sheer force of numbers, they have driven their
exploiters from pillar to post. Again and again, they have compelled
their exploiters to abandon one method of robbery, only to see them take
up another. And, though some men no longer own other men’s bodies, some
men still live by the sweat of other men’s brows.
The question is: Must this go on forever? Must a few always live so far
from poverty that they cannot see it, while the rest live so close to it
that they cannot see anything else? Must millions of women work in
factories at men’s work, while millions of men walk the streets unable
to get any work? Must the cry of child-labor forever sound to high
heaven above the rumble of the mills that grind their bodies into
dividends? Must the pinched faces of underfed children always make some
places hideous?
No man in his senses will say that this situation must always exist.
Human nature revolts at it. The wrong of it rouses the feelings even
before it touches the intellect. Something within us tells us to cry out
and to keep crying out until we find relief. We have tried almost every
remedy that has been offered to us, but every remedy we have tried has
failed. The hungry children are still with us. The hungry women are
still with us. The hungry men are still with us. Never before was it so
hard for most people to live. Yet, we live at a time when men, working
with machinery, could make enough of everything for everybody.
Your radical Republican recognizes these facts and says something is the
matter. Your Democratic radical recognizes these facts and says
something is the matter. Your Rooseveltian Progressive also recognizes
these facts and says something is the matter. But if you will carefully
listen to these gentlemen, you will observe that none of them believes
much is the matter. None of them believes much need be done to make
everything right. One wants to loosen the tariff screw a little. The
others want to put a new little wheel in the anti-trust machine.
Socialists differ from each of these gentlemen. Socialists say much is
the matter with this country. Socialists say much is the matter with any
country, most of whose people are in want or in fear of want, and some
of whose people are where want never comes or can come. Some such
conditions might have been tolerated a thousand years ago. Socialists
will not tolerate them to-day. They say the time for poverty has passed.
They say the time for poverty passed when man substituted steam and
electricity for his muscles and machinery for his fingers.
But poverty did not go out when steam and electricity came in. On the
contrary, the fear of want became intensified. Now, nobody who has not
capital can live unless he can get a job. In the days that preceded the
steam engine, nobody had to look for a job. Everybody owned his own job.
The shoemaker could make shoes for his neighbors. The weaver could weave
cloth. Each could work at his trade, without anybody’s permission,
because the tools of their trades were few and inexpensive. Now, neither
of them can work at his trade, because the tools of his trade have
become numerous and expensive. The tools of the shoemaker’s trade are in
the great factory that covers, perhaps, a dozen acres. The tools of the
weaver’s trade are in another enormous factory. Neither the shoemaker
nor the weaver can ever hope to own the tools of his trade. Nor, with
the little hand-tools of the past centuries, can either of them compete
with the modern factories. The shoe trust, with steam, electricity and
machinery, can make a pair of shoes at a price that no shoemaker,
working by hand, could touch.
Thus the hand-workers have been driven to knock at the doors of the
factories that rich men own and ask for work. If the rich men can see a
profit in letting the poor men work, the poor men are permitted to work.
If the rich men cannot see a profit in letting the poor men work, then
the poor men may not work. Though there be the greatest need for shoes,
if those in need have no money, the rich men lock up their factories and
wave the workers away. The workers may starve, if they like. Their wives
and children may starve. The workers may become tramps, criminals or
maniacs; their wives and their little children may be driven into the
street—but the rich men who closed their factories because they could
see no profit in keeping them open—these rich men take no part of the
responsibility. They talk about the “laws of trade,” go to their clubs
and have a little smoke, and, perhaps, the next week give a few dollars
to “worthy charity” and forget all about the workers.
Now, the Socialists are extremely tired of all this. Their remedy may be
all wrong, but they are tired of all this. Put the accent upon the
_tired_ all the time. They say it is all wrong. Not only do they say it
is all wrong, but they say they know how to make it all right. They do
not propose to do any small job of tinkering, because they say that if
small jobs of tinkering were enough to cure the great evil of poverty,
we should have cured it long ago. They say we have been tinkering with
tariffs, income taxes and the money question for a hundred years without
reducing either want or the fear of want. They say we have made no
progress, during the last hundred years, in reducing want and the fear
of want, because we have never hit the grafters where they live. By
this, they mean that we have never cut the tap root upon which robbery
grows. The serfs cut off the tap root when they threw off chattel
slavery, but another tap root has grown and we have not yet discovered
where to strike.
The Socialists say they know where to strike.
“_Strike at the machinery of the country_,” they say, “_by having the
people, through the government, own the machinery of the country_.”
“_Cut out the profits of the private owners_,” they say. “_Let the
people own the trusts and make things because they want the things,
instead of because somebody else wants a profit, and there will never
again be in this country either want or the fear of want._”
This sounds like a nice, man-made program, cooked up late at night by
some zealous gentleman intent upon saving his country. It may be a
foolish program, but if it is, it is not that kind of a foolish program.
It is not man-made, any more than Darwin’s theory of evolution is
man-made. Darwin observed present animal life and thereby explained the
past. Socialists observe past and present industrial life and thereby
forecast the future. Paradoxically, then, the Socialist remedy is not a
Socialist remedy. If it is anything, it is the remedy that evolution is
bringing to us. Socialists see what evolution is bringing and proclaim
it, much as a trainman announces the coming of a train that he already
sees rounding a curve.
Let me tell a story to illustrate this point:
Seventy years ago, Socialist writers predicted and accurately described
the trusts as they exist to-day. Nobody paid much attention to the
predictions or the descriptions. Nowhere in the world was there a single
trust. Nowhere in the world was any one thinking of forming one. The
first trust was not formed until almost forty years later.
The trusts were predicted because the steam engine had been invented and
brought with it machinery. The invention did not mean much to most
people. It meant everything to these early Socialists. They saw its
significance. They saw that it meant a transformed world. Never again
would the world be as it had always been. Never again would the amount
of wealth that man could create be limited by his weak muscles. Steam
and machinery had come to do, not only what he had been doing, but what
he had never dreamed of doing.
The only lesson that the rich men of the day learned from steam was that
it meant more money for them. The rich men of the day, by the way, were
in need of a new method of exploitation. Serfdom had just gone down in
the Napoleonic wars, and some men were no longer able to exploit other
men by claiming to own the other men’s bodies. Exploitation, through the
private ownership of land, still continued, it is true, but a man
working by hand cannot be much exploited because he cannot make much.
What I mean by this is that he cannot be exploited of many dollars. Of
course, he can be exploited of so great a percentage of his product that
he is left starving, but the man who exploits him will not be much
richer. That is why there were no great fortunes, as we now know them,
in the days before the machinery age. Wealth was too difficult to make.
But, to return to our story. The invention of the steam engine gave the
rich men of the early eighteenth century the opportunity of which they
stood much in need. Factories cost money. The workers did not have any.
The rich men did. The rich men built factories. That is to say, they
thought they were only building factories. As a matter of fact, they
were taking over, from the hands of evolution, the poor man’s tools.
Never again were working men to own the tools of their trades. Their
tools had gone down in the struggle in which the survivors must be the
fittest. For centuries, the world had starved because of their old
hand-tools. They could not, for a moment, exist after steam and
machinery came. It was right that the hand-tools should go. It was
unfortunate for the workers only that the successors of hand-tools were
too expensive for individual ownership, and that they were also unsuited
to such ownership. No man can run a whole shoe factory, even if he owns
one. Many men are required to run many machines, and many machines are
required to make the labor of men most productive.
All of this, the early Socialists saw or reasoned out. They saw the rich
men of the day building factories. They saw those who were not quite so
rich joining together to build factories. Little co-partnerships were
springing up all over the world. Everybody competed with everybody else
in his line. Manufactures multiplied, and it became the common belief
that “competition was the life of trade.”
_Stick a pin here. The roots of Socialism go down somewhere near this
point._
The early Socialist writers who predicted the trusts did not believe
competition was the life of trade. They believed the inevitable tendency
of competition was to kill itself. Their reasoning took this form:
_Manufacturers engage in business, not because they want to
supply goods to the public, but because they want to make
profits for themselves._
_Inasmuch as the question of who shall make the profits depends
upon who shall sell the goods, manufacturers will compete with
each other to sell goods._
_Manufacturers will be able to compete and still make a profit
so long as the demand for goods far exceeds the supply._
_But the demand for goods will not always far exceed the supply.
The opportunity to make profits will tempt other capitalists to
create manufacturing enterprises. The market will become glutted
with goods, because more will have been produced than the people
can pay for._
_Competition among manufacturers will then become so fierce that
profits will first shrink and eventually disappear._
_Manufacturers, to regain their profits, will then cease to
compete. The strongest will buy out or crush the weakest.
Monopolies will be formed, primarily to end competition and save
the competitors from themselves, but, having been formed, they
will also be used to rob the people._
Mind you—this reasoning is not new. It is seventy years old. It sounds
new only because it has so recently come true. Nobody whose eyes are
open now believes that competition is the life of trade. The phrase has
died upon the lips of the very men who used to speak it. The late
Senator Hanna was one of the many who used to believe that good trade
could not be where competition was not. But, when the great trust
movement of 1898 was under way, Senator Hanna said: “It is not a
question of whether business men do or do not believe in trusts. It is a
question only of whether business men want to be killed by competition
or saved by coöperation.”
However, the existence of the trusts is ample verification of the
Socialist prophecy that they would come. And the trusts came in the way
that the early Socialists said they would come.
We may now proceed to consider what those early Socialist writers
thought of the trusts that they so accurately described before they
came, what they believed would become of them and what they believed
would supplant them.
No Socialist was ever heard finding fault with a trust simply for
existing. A Socialist would as soon find fault with a green apple
because it had been produced from a blossom. In fact, Socialists regard
the trusts as the green apples upon the tree of industrial evolution.
But they would no more destroy these industrial green apples that are
making the world sick than they would destroy the green apples that make
small boys sick. They pause, first because they are evolutionists, not
only in biology, but in everything; second, because they recall that the
green apples that make the boy sick will, if left to ripen, make the man
well. In short, Socialists regard trusts, or private monopolies, as a
necessary stage in industrial evolution; a stage that we could not have
avoided; a stage that in many respects, represents a great advance over
any phase of civilization that preceded it, yet a stage at which we
cannot stop unless civilization stops. Therefore, Socialists take this
position:
_It is flying in the face of evolution itself to talk about
destroying, or even effectually regulating the trusts._
_Private monopolies cannot be destroyed except as green apples
can be destroyed—by crushing them and staying the evolutionary
processes that, if left alone, will yield good fruit._
_Private monopolies cannot be effectually regulated because, so
long as they are permitted to exist, they will regulate the
government instead of permitting the government to regulate
them. They will regulate the government because the great
profits at stake will give them the incentive to do so and the
enormous capital at their command will give them the power to do
so._
In other words, Socialists say that the processes of evolution should go
on. What do they mean by this? They mean that the good elements of the
trust principle should be preserved and the bad elements destroyed. What
are the good elements? The economies of large, well-ordered production,
and the avoidance of the waste due to haphazard, competitive production.
And the bad elements? The powers that private monopoly gives, through
control of market and governmental policies, to rob the consumer.
Socialists contend that the good can be saved and the bad destroyed by
converting the private monopolies into public monopolies—in other words,
by letting the government own the trusts and the people own the
government. This may seem like what the foes of Socialism would call a
“patent nostrum.” It is nothing of the kind. It is no more a patent
nostrum than the trusts are patent nostrums. Socialists invented neither
private monopolies nor public monopolies. Socialists did not kill
competition. Competition killed itself. Socialists simply were able to
foresee that too much competition would end all competition and thus
give birth to private monopoly.
And, having seen thus far, they looked a little further and saw that
private monopoly would not be an unmixed blessing. They saw that under
it, robbery would be practised in new, strange and colossal forms. They
knew the people would not like robbery in any form. They knew they would
cry out against it as they are crying out against the trusts to-day. And
they believed that after having tried to destroy the trusts and failed
at that; after having tried to regulate the trusts and failed at that,
that the people would cease trying to buck evolution, and get for
themselves the benefits of the trusts by owning them.
This may be an absurd idea, but in part, at least, it has already been
verified. It has been demonstrated that private monopoly saves the
enormous sums that were spent in the competitive era to determine
whether this man or that man should get the profit upon the things you
buy. The consumer has absolutely no interest in the identity of the
capitalist who exploits him. But when capitalists were competing for
trade, the consumer was made to bear the whole cost of fighting for his
trade.
Private monopoly has largely done away with the cost of selling trust
goods, by doing away with the individual competitors who were once
struggling to put their goods upon the market. Private monopoly has also
reduced the cost of production by introducing the innumerable economies
that accompany large production.
What private monopoly has not done and will never do is to pass along
these savings to the consumers. The monopolists have passed along some
of the savings, but not many of them. What they have passed along bears
but a small proportion to what they have kept. That is what most of the
trouble is about now. The people find it increasingly difficult to live.
For a dozen years, it has been increasingly difficult to live.
Persistent and more persistent has been the demand that something be
done about the trusts.
The first demand was that the trusts be destroyed. Now, Mr. Bryan is
about the only man in the country to whom the conviction has not been
borne home that the trusts cannot be destroyed. The rest of the people
want the trusts regulated, and the worst of the trust magnates sent to
jail. Up to date, not a single trust has been regulated, nor a single
trust magnate sent to jail. Officially, of course, the Standard Oil
Company, the American Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have been
cleansed in the blue waters of the Supreme Court laundry and hung upon
the line as white as snow. But gentlemen who are not stone blind know
that this is not so. They know the Standard Oil Company, the American
Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have merely put on masks and gone on
with the hold-up business. Therefore, the Socialist predictions of
seventy years ago have all been verified up to and including the
inability of any government either to destroy or regulate the trusts.
So much for what Socialists believe Socialism, by reducing the prices of
commodities to cost, would do for the people as consumers. Socialists
believe Socialism would do even more for the people as workers. Behold
the present plight of the workingman. He has a right to live, but he has
not a right to the means by which he can live. He cannot live without
work, yet, ever he must seek work as a privilege—not as a right. The
coming of the age of machinery has made it impossible to work without
machinery. Yet the worker owns no machinery and can get access to no
machinery except upon such terms as he may be able to make with its
owners.
Socialists urge the people to consider the results of this unprecedented
situation. First, there is great insecurity of employment. No one knows
how long his job is destined to last. It may not last another day. A
great variety of causes exist, any one of which may deprive the worker
of his opportunity to work. Wall Street gentlemen may put such a crimp
in the financial situation that industry cannot go on. Business may slow
down because more is being produced than the markets can absorb. A
greedy employer may precipitate a strike by trying to reduce the wages
of his employees. Any one of many causes may without notice step in
between the worker and the machinery without which he cannot work.
But worse than the uncertainty of employment is the absolute certainty
that millions of men must always be out of work. Times are never so good
that there is work for everybody. Most persons do not know it, but in
the best of times there are always a million men out of work. In the
worst of times, the number of men out of work sometimes exceeds
5,000,000. The country cries for the things they might produce. There is
great need for shoes, flour, cloth, houses, furniture, and fuel. These
millions of men, if they could get in touch with machinery, could
produce enough of such staples to satisfy the public demand. If they
could but work, their earnings would vastly increase the amount of money
in circulation and thus increase the buying power of everybody. But they
cannot work, because they do not own the machinery without which they
cannot work, and the men who own it will not let it be used, because
they cannot see any profits for themselves in having it used.
Socialists say this is an appalling situation. They are amazed that the
nation tolerates it. They believe the nation would not tolerate it if it
understood it. Some things are more easily understood than others. If
5,000,000 men were on a sinking ship within swimming distance of the
Atlantic shore and the employing class were to prevent them from
swimming ashore for no other reason than that the employing class had no
use for their services—the people would understand that. Socialists
believe the people will soon understand the present situation.
Here is another thing that Socialists hope the people will soon
understand. The policy of permitting a few men to use the machinery with
which all other men must work or starve compels all other men to become
competitors for its use. If there were no more workers than the
capitalists must have, there would not be such competition. But there
must always be more workers than the capitalists can use. The fact that
the capitalist demands a profit upon the worker’s labor renders the
worker incapable of buying back the very thing he has made. Under
present conditions, trade must, therefore, always be smaller than the
natural requirements of the people for goods. And since, with machinery,
each worker can produce a vast volume of goods, it inevitably follows
that only a part of the workers are required to make all of the goods
that can be sold at a profit. That is why there is not always work for
all.
With more workers than there are jobs, it thus comes about that the
workers are compelled to compete among themselves for jobs. Only part of
the workers can be employed and the struggle of each is to become one of
that part. The workers who are out of employment are always willing to
work, if they can get no more, for a wage that represents only the cost
of the poorest living upon which they will consent to exist. It
therefore follows that wages are always based upon the cost of living.
If the cost of living is high, wages are high. If the cost of living is
low, wages are low. In any event, the worker has nothing left after he
has paid for his living.
Socialists say this is not just. They can understand the capitalist who
buys labor as he buys pig-iron, but they say labor is entitled to more
consideration than pig-iron. The price of labor, they declare, should be
gauged by the value of labor’s product, instead of by the direness of
labor’s needs. They say the present situation gives to the men who own
machinery most of its benefits and to the many who operate it none of
its hopes. Now. as of old, the average worker dare hope for no more than
enough to keep him alive. Again and again and again the census reports
have shown that the bulk of the people in this country are so poor that
they do not own even the roofs over their heads.
The purpose of Socialism is to give the workers _all_ they produce. And,
when Socialists say “workers” they do not mean only those who wear
overalls and carry dinner pails. They mean everybody who does useful
labor. Socialists regard the general superintendent of a railroad as
quite as much of a worker as they do the man on the section. But they do
not regard the owners of railway stocks and bonds as workers. They
regard them as parasites who are living off the products of labor by
owning the locomotives, cars and other equipment with which the workers
work. And, since the ownership of machinery is the club with which
Socialists say capitalists commit their robberies, Socialists also
declare that the only way to stop the robberies is to take away the
club. It would do no good to take the club from the men who now hold it
and give it even to the individual workers, because, with the principle
of private ownership retained, ownership would soon gravitate into a few
hands and robbery would go on as ruthlessly as ever. Socialists believe
the only remedy is to destroy the club by vesting the ownership of the
great machinery of production and distribution in the people, through
the government.
Such is the gist of Socialism—public ownership of the trusts, combined
with public ownership of the government. Gentlemen who are opposed to
Socialism—for what reasons it is now unnecessary to consider—lose no
opportunity to spread the belief that there are more kinds of Socialism
than there are varieties of the celebrated products of Mr. Heinz. This
is not so. There are more than 30,000,000 Socialists in the world. Not
one of them would refuse to write across this chapter: “That is
Socialism,” and sign his name to it. Every Socialist has his individual
conception of how mankind would advance if poverty were eliminated, but
all Socialists agree that the heart and soul of their philosophy lies in
the public ownership, under democratic government, of the means of life.
And, as compared with this belief, all other beliefs of Socialism are
minor and inconsequential. Public ownership is the rock upon which it is
determined to stand or fall.
Socialists differ only with regard to the means by which public
ownership may be brought about. A handful of Socialists, for instance,
believe that in order to bring it about it is necessary to oppose the
labor unions. All other Socialists work hand in hand with the labor
unions.
Also, there is a difference of opinion among Socialists as to how the
government should proceed to obtain ownership of the industrial trusts,
the railroads, telegraph, telephone and express companies and so forth.
Some Socialists are in favor of confiscating them, on the theory that
the people have a right to resort to such drastic action. In a way, they
have excellent authority for their position. Read what Benjamin Franklin
said about property at the convention that was called in 1776 to adopt a
new constitution for Pennsylvania:
“Suppose one of our Indian nations should now agree to form a civil
society. Each individual would bring into the stock of the society
little more property than his gun and his blanket, for at present he
has no other. We know that when one of them has attempted to keep a
few swine he has not been able to maintain a property in them, his
neighbors thinking they have a right to kill and eat them whenever
they want provisions, it being one of their maxims that hunting is
free for all. The accumulation of property in such a society, and its
security to individuals in every society, must be an effect of the
protection afforded to it by the joint strength of the society in the
execution of its laws.
“Private property is, therefore, a creature of society, and is subject
to the calls of that society whenever its necessities require it,
_even to the last farthing_.”
But one need quote only the law of self-preservation to prove that if
any people shall ever become convinced that their lives depend upon the
confiscation of the trusts that such confiscation will be justified.
When men reach a certain stage of hunger and wretchedness they pay scant
attention to every law except the higher law that says they have a right
to live.
I believe that most Socialists twenty years ago, were in favor of
confiscation. The trend now is all toward compensation. Not that
Socialists have changed their minds at all about the equities of the
matter. They have not. But they are coming to see that compensation is
the easier and quicker way. Victor Berger, the first Socialist
congressman, introduced in the House of Representatives an anti-trust
bill in which he proposed that the government should buy all of the
trusts that control more than forty per cent. of the business in their
respective lines, and pay therefor their full cash values—minus, of
course, wind, water and all forms of speculative inflation. In short the
differences in the Socialist party upon the question of compensation are
not unlike the differences which once existed with regard to the best
means by which the negroes might be emancipated. Years before the Civil
War, Henry Clay proposed that the government should buy the negroes at
double their market price and set them free. He said this would be the
cheapest and quickest way of settling the troubles between the North and
the South. The slave owners would not consent, and, eventually Lincoln
freed their slaves without paying for them.
When Socialists speak of buying the trusts, they naturally invite the
inquiry as to where they expect to get the money to pay for them. They
expect to get the money out of the profits of the trusts. That is the
way that Representative Berger provided in his bill. It is a poor trust
that does not pay dividends upon stock and interest upon bonds that do
not aggregate at least ten per cent. of the capital actually invested.
Most of them pay more, and some of the express companies occasionally
spring a fifty or a 100 per cent. dividend.
The Socialist proposal is that the government pay for the trusts with
two-per cent. bonds, and that each year, enough money be put into a
sinking fund to retire the bonds in not more than fifty years. The
burden of purchasing the trusts would thus be spread over a little more
than two generations, but Socialists say the burden would be a burden
only in name, since the prices of trust goods could be radically
reduced, even while the trusts were being paid for, and upon the
retirement of the bonds, all prices could be reduced to cost.
Those who know little or nothing about Socialism believe that Socialists
also differ as to the advisability of using violence to bring about
Socialism. Never was there a greater mistake. Above all others, the
Socialist party is the party of peace. When Germany and England, in
1911, were ready to fly at each other’s throats, it was the Socialist
party of Germany that assembled 200,000 men in Berlin one Sunday
afternoon and declared that if there were a war, the Socialists of
Germany would not help fight it. It was generally admitted, at the time,
that the attitude of the German Socialists, more than anything else, was
responsible for the avoidance of war.
Socialists are equally pacific when considering the best means by which
Socialism may be brought about. Socialists are, first, last and all the
time in favor only of political action and trade-union action. Wherever
there is a free ballot, they believe in using it, to the exclusion of
bombs and bullets. Socialists realize that they can win only by
converting a majority of the people to their belief. That is why they
begin one campaign the next morning after the closing of another. They
are busy with the printing press and their tongues all the while. For
them, there is no closed season.
Socialists realize that Socialism can be reared only upon understanding,
and that the use of dynamite would turn the minds of the people against
them for a hundred years. Any Socialist who believes otherwise is the
same sort of a potential criminal that can be found in any other
party—and equally as rare. The Republican party had its Guiteau and its
Czolgosz, but it repudiated neither of them more quickly than the
Socialist party would repudiate one of its own members who should commit
a great crime.
Socialists, as a party, stand for violence only in the same way that
Abraham Lincoln stood for it. If the Socialists should carry a national
election in this country, and, the capitalists, refusing to yield,
should turn the regular army at them, the Socialists would use all the
violence they could muster. While they are in a minority, they are
obeying the laws that the capitalists make, but when the Socialists
become a majority, they will insist, even with bullets, that the
capitalists obey the laws that the Socialists make.