THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC
And now let us imagine that society has abolished exploitation and the
competitive wage-system, and got its breath and found leisure to examine
itself under the new régime. How will it find things proceeding?
One of the first objections that you will run up against, if ever you
start out to agitate Socialism, is your lack of definiteness. Give us
your program, people will say—we want to know what sort of a world you
expect to make, and how you are going to make it. And they will grow
angry when they find that you have not a cut-and-dried scheme of society
in your pocket—that you have stirred them up all to no purpose. And yet
that is just what you have to go on doing. There used to be Utopian
Socialists—Plato was the first of them and Bellamy was the last—who knew
the coming world from its presidents to its chimneysweeps; who could
tell you the very colour of its postage-stamps. But nowadays all
Socialists are scientific. They say that social changes are the product
of the interaction of innumerable forces, and cannot be definitely
foretold; they say that the new organism will be the result of the
strivings of millions of men, acted upon by various motives, ideals,
prejudices and fears. And so they call themselves no longer builders of
systems, but preachers of righteousness; their answer to objectors is
that I once heard given by Hanford, recent candidate for vice-president
on the Socialist ticket, to a lawyer with whom he was debating: “Do you
ask for a map of Heaven before you join the Church?”
This much we may say, however. The Industrial Republic will be an
industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Exactly as political sovereignty is the property of the community, so
will it be with industrial sovereignty—that is, capital. It will be
administered by elected officials and its equal benefits will be the
elemental right of every citizen. The officials may be our presidents
and governors and legislatures, or they may be an entirely separate
governing body, corresponding to our present directors and presidents of
corporations. In countries where the revolution is one of violence they
will probably be trade-union committees. The governing power may be
chosen separately in each trade and industry, by those who work in it,
just as the officials of a party are now chosen by those who vote in it;
or they may be appointed, as our postmasters and colonial governors are
appointed, by some central authority, perhaps by the President. All of
these things are for the collective wisdom of the country to decide when
the time comes; meanwhile it is only safe to say that there will be as
little change as possible in the business methods of the country—and so
little that the man who should come back and look at it from the
outside, would not even know that any change had taken place. I have
heard a distinguished Republican orator, poking fun at Socialism in a
public address, picture women disputing in the public warehouses as to
whether each had had her fair share of shoes and fish. In the Industrial
Republic the workingman will go to the factory, will work under the
direction of his superior officer, and will receive his wages at the end
of the week in exactly the same way as to-day. He will spend his money
exactly as he spends it to-day—he will go to a store, and if he gets a
pair of shoes he will pay for them. The farmer will till his land
exactly as he does to-day, and when he takes his grain to market he will
be paid for it in money, and will put it in the bank and will draw a
check upon it to pay for the suit of clothes he has ordered by express.
The only difference in all these various operations will be that the
factories will be public property, and the wages the full value of the
product, with no deductions for dividends on stock; and that the street
cars, the banks and the stores will be public utilities, managed exactly
as our post office is managed, charging what the service costs, and
making no profits. In the year 1901 the U. S. Steel Corporation paid one
hundred and twenty-five million dollars and employed one hundred and
twenty-five thousand men; under Socialism the wages of each employee of
the U. S. Steel Corporation would therefore be increased one thousand
dollars a year, which is two or three hundred per cent. In the same way,
the wages of an employee of the Standard Oil Company would be increased
four thousand dollars, which is from eight to ten hundred per cent. The
fare upon the government-owned street railroads in the City of Berlin is
two and a half cents, which would mean that our workingman’s car-fare
bill would be cut by fifty per cent. The toll of the government-owned
telephone of Sweden is three cents, which would mean that the
workingman’s telephone bill would be cut seventy per cent. The
elimination of the speculator and the higher piracy of Wall Street would
raise the price of the farmer’s grain by fifty per cent.; the
elimination of the millers’ trust and the railroad trust would lower the
price of bread by an equal sum. The elimination of the tariff on wool,
of the sweater and the jobber, the department store and the express
trust, would probably lower the price of the farmer’s suit of clothes
sixty per cent; the elimination of the sweatshop and the slum might
raise it to its original level, while decreasing the farmer’s doctor’s
bills correspondingly. Of course I do not mean to say that the gains
from the abolition of exploitation will be distributed in exactly the
ratios outlined above. They will be distributed so as to equalise the
rewards of labour. The point is that there will be a saving at every
point—because at every point there is exploitation.
I have sketched in “The Jungle” (Chapter 36) a few of the social savings
incidental to the abolition of competition. The reader who cares for a
thorough and scientific study of the subject is referred to a recently
published book, “The Cost of Competition,” by Sidney A. Reeve. I had
never heard of Professor Reeve until his publishers sent me his book.
They say that he worked on it for seven years; and when I read it I
counted myself that many years to the good, for I had meant to try to do
the task myself. Professor Reeve has done it in a way which leaves not a
word to be said. It is a marvellous analysis of the whole of our present
productive system; and best of all, it is free from the jargon of the
schools—it is the work of a man who has kept in touch with actual life,
and has moral feeling as well as scientific training.
Professor Reeve analyses, not merely the “economic costs” of
competition, but also the “ethical costs,” which after all are the most
important. The difference to the workingman will be, not merely that his
wages will be several times as great, but that he himself will no longer
be a wage-slave, obliged to serve another man for his bread, to cringe
and grovel for a a job, to toil all day for another man’s profit, and
save up his little hoard and live in dread of the next wage reduction,
the next strike, or the next closing down of the factory. He will be a
free and independent member of a coöperative State. He will be delivered
from the necessity of getting the better of his neighbour, because his
neighbour will no longer be able to get the better of him. He will be
certain of permanent employment, without possibility of loss or failure
of payment—certain that so long as he works he will receive just what he
produces, that in case of accident or old age he will be maintained, and
that in case of death his children will be cared for and brought up to
become coöperative partners in the great Industrial Republic.
[Illustration:
_From “The Cost of Competition_”
THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
The Congressional Library
]
[Illustration:
_From “The Cost of Competition_”
THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
]
How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee every man permanent employment?
Could there not be overproduction under Socialism? There could not; the
surplus product being the property of the man who had produced it, and
not, as now, the property of some other man, in a case of overproduction
the workingman would be, not out of work, but on a vacation. As a matter
of fact, only a reasonable surplus would be produced, because the
workingman would stop when he had produced what he wanted—just as you
stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger.
In the Industrial Republic there will be an administrative officer, a
cabinet official with a bureau of clerks, whose task it will be to
register the decrees of the law of supply and demand. It is found, let
us assume, that the amount of coal needed by the community is
represented by the labour of two million men, five days in the week, and
six hours a day; the number of shoes is represented by the labour of
half a million men the same time. The wages in each trade are ten
dollars a day, and at this rate it is found that two million men go to
the shoe factories to work and only half a million to the coal mines.
The wages of coal mining are therefore made twelve dollars, and the
wages of shoe-making eight dollars; if the balance still does not adjust
itself, it will at the rate of thirteen to seven, or fourteen to six.
Every week the government list shows the wages that can be earned in the
various trades; stoking in a steamship is a painful and dangerous
task—stokers in steamships are receiving twenty dollars a day, and still
few takers, so that the steamships have to be fitted with stoking
machinery at once. On the other hand, driving a rural-delivery
mail-wagon is pleasant work, and is paying at present only five dollars
a day, and with prospects of going still lower. And does all this seem
fantastic to you? But it is exactly the way our employment problem is
solved to-day, when it is solved at all; it is solved by means of “Help
Wanted” advertisements and viva voce rumours—imperfectly, blindly and
sluggishly, instead of instantly, intelligently and consciously by a
universal government information bureau. Out in the country where I
lived two years ago the farmers were unable to get help for love or
money, while millions were out of work and starving in the cities; and
that is only one of the thousands of illustrations one could give of
“how much depends, when two men go out to catch a horse, upon whether
they devote their time to catching him, or to preventing each other from
catching him.”
The _Independent_ recently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its
Cause and Cure,” by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard graduate and
technological chemist; in the course of its editorial comment the paper
hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty as “nothing less than a
very great invention.” “It adds something that was lacking in the older
schemes of Socialism,” the _Independent_ continued, “but absolutely
necessary to any Socialism that would be practically workable.” This
“something” is a device to increase the salaries of managers of the
various industrial departments in proportion as they reduced the
“producing time” of the commodity for which they were responsible. Mr.
Mackaye is another student who, like Professor Reeve and Professor
Veblen, have come into Socialism by their own routes. In his elaborate
book, “The Economy of Happiness,” he shows so thorough a grasp of the
whole subject that I cannot suppose him to share in the ignorance of the
literature of modern proletarian Socialism, which leads the
_Independent_ to hail his plan as a “great invention.” As a matter of
fact, I could name a score of Socialist books and pamphlets in which
such plans are suggested and discussed. I personally have always
rejected them as unsound in theory and unnecessary in practice. I have
already suggested the likelihood of a continuance of present official
salaries after the revolution; but there will be a strong tendency to
reduce these, and I can see no ultimate result except equality of
compensation by the State. I can see no theoretical basis for the
State’s paying to any employee more than it pays to another in the same
industry—hand labour being equally as necessary to the production of
wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, the only necessary stimulus to
efficiency is the community of interest of all the workers. The
incentive to the manager is emulation, and the higher range of activity
which goes with a position of command; and I should be very jealous of
the introduction of any pecuniary motive into the struggle for
promotion—as likely to continue the old evils of graft and favouritism
to which we are now subject. I do not think that, when you have so
organised industry that every man is working for himself, you will find
it necessary to employ any outside force to impel him to work; and in
fact I should consider it a violation of the rights of the worker to
attempt anything of the sort. Of course if the workers themselves chose
to offer a bonus to a manager to invent new methods, that would be
another matter; but that would come under the head of intellectual
production, which I shall consider later on.
In discussing the question of salaries, it is to be pointed out what a
vast difference will be made in the amount of money which every
individual needs, by the socialisation of all the leading industries. In
the Industrial Republic a thousand dollars a year will buy more comfort
and happiness than ten thousand in the world as at present organised.
There will come, at the very outset, the great economic savings already
outlined; and then, the whole power of the coöperative mind of man being
applied to the elimination of waste and the making of beauty and joy, we
shall have in a very short time a world in which few men will care to
cumber themselves with possessions of any sort excepting the clothes
upon their backs and the few tools of their intellectual trades,—books,
music, etc. The abolition of privilege and class exploitation will of
course wipe out at a stroke all that competition in ostentation which
Professor Veblen has entitled “conspicuous consumption of goods.” In the
Industrial Republic there will be no luxury, for there will be no
slavery. There will be no menial service of any sort under Socialism. I
believe that this gives one a key by which he can do a great deal of
predicting as to what will be found in the world when the impending
revolution has taken place. In the Industrial Republic no man will work
for another man—except for love—because no other man will be able to pay
the “prevailing rate of wages.”
It is the vision of this that makes the critics of Socialism cry out
that it will destroy the home. What they mean is that it will destroy
that kind of a home which exists upon a basis of butlers, cooks and
kitchen maids, banquets and carriages, jewellery and fine raiment, sweat
shops, and slums, prostitution, child-labour, war and crime. Unless I am
very much mistaken, those people who now wear diamonds, and decorate
their homes with all sorts of objects of “art,” would do a great deal
less of it if they had to pay for it with their own toil—if they were
not able to pay for it with money extracted from the toil of others. I
imagine that those who now, in our restaurants and banquet halls, gorge
themselves upon the contents of earth, sea, and sky, would dine very
much more simply—and very much more wholesomely—if they had to wash the
dishes. For this reason, I expect that in the Industrial Republic there
will be very little of that pseudo-art which ministers to vanity and
sensuality. Our houses and clothing will become simpler and more
dignified, and the artist will turn his thoughts to public works—he will
decorate the parks and public buildings, the theatres, concert halls and
libraries, the great coöperative dining halls and apartment houses. In
the cities and towns of the Industrial Republic there will of course be
possibilities of beauty such as we cannot even dream of at present. Now
our cities grow haphazard, and are typical of all our blindness,
selfishness, and misery. At every turn in them one comes upon new and
more painful signs of these things—filthy and horrible slums, blatant
and vulgar advertisements, insolent rich people in carriages, wan and
starving children in the gutters. In the Industrial Republic a city will
be one thing, and a work of art. It will not be crowded, for the
combination of poverty and the railroad trust will not make spreading
out impossible. Intelligent, coöperative effort having become the rule,
nearly all the things that are now done privately and selfishly will be
done socially. Manual work will not be a disgrace, and poverty will not
keep any man ignorant, filthy and repulsive. There will be no classes
and no class feeling. There will be not only public schools and
academies—there will be public playgrounds for all children, and clubs
and places of recreation for men and women. In the Industrial Republic
you will not mind going to such places and letting your children go. You
will not be afraid of disease, because there will be public hospitals
for all the sick; and you will not be afraid of rowdies, because the
rowdy is a product of the slum, and there will not be any slum.
At present, we are all engaged in a struggle to beguile as much money
out of each other as we can; and the State has nothing to do save to
stand by and see fair play—and commonly finds that task too much for it!
As a consequence, we find ourselves confronted with an infinite variety
of little petty exactions—we have to spend money every time we turn
around. Very soon after the Revolution, I fancy, men will begin to
realise that these little exactions are more of a nuisance than a
saving. For instance, I shall be very much surprised, if, a generation
from now, the use of postage-stamps is not abolished. At present, with
society wasting so immense a portion of its energy in competitive
advertising, every piece of matter which goes into the mail has to be
made to pay its way; but once do away with competition, and the only
mail is government documents and personal letters—and the time it takes
to stamp and cancel them will be many times greater than the cost of
carrying the additional number of letters that a free mail service would
bring forth. In the same way it will be found not worth while to employ
conductors and spotters, and print tickets and transfers; after that we
shall ride free on our street-cars, and perhaps ultimately in our
government railroad trains. Similarly, all our places of recreation and
of artistic expression would come to be free; and then some one would
realise the waste incidental to our present system of book buying, and
we should then have a universal national library, from which at frequent
intervals delivery service would bring you any books then in existence.
I have just witnessed in New York an exhibition of an invention which
will make music as free as air. Bellamy was ridiculed for predicting
“electric music” in the year 2000; and it is on sale in New York City in
the year 1907. By this marvellous machine, the “telharmonium,” all
previously existing musical instruments are relegated to the junk heap;
and all music composed for them becomes out of date. At one leap the art
of music is set free from all physical limitations, and the musician is
given command of all possible tones, and may play to ten thousand
audiences at once. It is worth while pointing out, that, living under
the capitalist system as we are, the inventor had no recourse save to
use his machine to make profits, and so the newspapers, which are also
in business for profits, left it to make its own way. So it came about
that the first public exhibition of an invention which means more to
humanity than any discovery since the art of printing, received mention
in only one New York paper, and that to the extent of three or four
inches.
But to return to the Revolution, and the first steps which have to be
taken.
There are some industries which anyone can see are all ready for public
ownership; and when the people have once found out the way, they will be
very impatient with all remaining forms of rent, interest, profit and
dividends. Also, the exploiters will soon learn to give way. Just as
soon as the proprietors of department stores find that the people
seriously intend to open a public store in every city, and to sell goods
at cost, they will be glad to sell out for a few cents on the dollar;
just as soon as the bankers find out that there is really to be a
national bank, charging no interest, and incapable of failing, they will
do the same with their buildings and outfits. To quote a paragraph from
“The Jungle” (page 405), “The coöperative Commonwealth is a universal
automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its members.
Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by all and
made up by all. The bank is the universal government credit account, the
ledger in which every individual’s earnings and spendings are balanced.
There is also a universal government bulletin, in which are listed and
precisely described everything which the Commonwealth has for sale. As
no one makes any profit by the sale, there is no longer any stimulus to
extravagance, and no misrepresentation, no cheating, no adulteration or
imitation, no bribery, no ‘grafting.’”
There remains only one other great problem to be mentioned—that of
agriculture. I think no one will want to interfere with the farmer, any
more than with the cobbler, the small storekeeper, the newsman or any
other petty business. The farmer will stay on his land, and make
money—and study the situation. He will find in the first place that
coöperation is a success, and has come to stay. He will find that while
he is working with his hands, the rest of society is working with steam
and electricity, and leaving him far behind. He will find that he can no
longer hire help—that his hired man is employed as a coöperative worker,
and receiving several times more than the farmer himself. He will
understand that to get his share of all the good things of the new
civilisation, he will have to put his land into the common fund, and
work for the commonwealth and not for his own wealth. In this case, of
course, all the risks and losses of his trade will be shared by the
whole community—the result of a bad crop in Maine being made up by a
good crop in California, so that the farmer who works will be as certain
of gain and as free from care as the factory hand.
And now let us consider the effect of this new system upon certain of
the leading features of our civilisation. What, for instance, will be
the effect of Socialism upon crime? The man who becomes a criminal at
present finds himself in a world where he is compelled to work for some
other man’s profit, and to have flaunted in his face every hour the
wealth which has been exacted from his toil. But now he will find
himself in a world from which luxury and pauperism have been banished,
and in which coöperation and mutual fellowship is the law. He will find
that he gets just what he produces, and that he can produce in a day
more than he can steal in a month. Don’t you think that the criminal may
find these powerful motives to become a worker? He may be a degenerate,
of course, in which case we shall put him in a hospital; we should do
that now, if we did not feel dimly that it would be of no use, because
our social system is making criminals faster than we can pen them up,
and makes the life of the majority of the working-class so horrible that
men have been known to steal on purpose to get into jail.
I have tried in “The Jungle” to give a picture of the process whereby
the forces of commercialism turn honest workingmen into criminals and
tramps. There is also another story to which I would refer the reader
who cares to have more acquaintance with such conditions—“An Eye for an
Eye,” by Clarence Darrow.—And also, while we are considering this
subject, let us not forget how the change would affect the criminals of
the future, the wretched children of the slums and gutters, who will now
be cared for by the State, and made into decent citizens in public
asylums and hospitals, training schools and playgrounds.
What will be the effect of Socialism upon prostitution? Any young girl
can go to the public factories or stores, to the coöperative boarding
houses and hotels, the schools and nursery playgrounds, and secure
employment for the asking, and support herself by a couple of hours’
work a day in decent and attractive surroundings. She will, moreover, be
able to marry the man who loves her, because the problem of a living
will no longer enter into the question of marriage. She will be able to
restrict her family to as many as she and her husband care to support,
because she will be as intelligent and sensible as the women of our
present upper classes.
The question of the relationship of the system of wage-slavery to the
lives of women is too vast a one to be even outlined here; suffice it to
say that the Socialist battle is the battle of woman, even more than it
is the battle of the workingman. I cannot do better than to refer the
reader to another book in which the whole question of the effects which
age-long conditions of economic inferiority has wrought in the minds and
bodies of women is discussed in scientific and yet fascinating form—Mrs.
Gilman’s “Woman and Economics.”
What will be the effect of Socialism upon drunkenness? Under Socialism
the workingman will have a decent home, and attractive clubs, reading
rooms, and places of entertainment of all sorts, with plenty of time to
frequent them. He will have steady employment, wholesome food, a
pleasant place to work in, and—railroad fares being almost nothing—a
trip to the country when he fancies it. His wife will not be an
overworked, repulsive drudge, and his children will not be starving
brats. When he wants a drink he will go to a public drinking-place and
get it; what he gets will be pure, and will be sold him by a man who has
no interest in getting him drunk. On the contrary, the attendant may be
getting a royalty upon all nonintoxicating drinks he sells, and the
drinker will quite certainly be paying a big tax upon all the
intoxicating drinks he buys. Do you not think that all this may have
some effect upon the nation’s drink bill, which now is doubling itself
every decade?
Recently I was invited by the _Christian Herald_ to contribute to a
symposium upon the question of prohibition. I wrote as follows: “In my
opinion the drink evil is primarily an effect, and not a cause; it is a
by-product of wage-slavery. The working classes are to-day organised as
the bond slaves of capital. The conditions under which they live are
such as to brutalise and degrade them and drive them to drink. As I have
phrased it in “The Jungle,” if a man has to live in hell, he would a
great deal rather be drunk than sober. The solution of the drink evil
waits upon the coming of Socialism.
“As a part of the capitalist system, you have liquor sold for profit,
and the liquor interests are one of the forces which dominate the land.
Therefore, you are unable to effect any legislation to correct the evil.
Liquor is sold in order to make money out of the victim, therefore every
inducement and temptation is laid before him. Under Socialism, the only
barkeeper would be the community, and the community would have every
object in limiting the traffic. The children of the masses would be
taken in hand and taught the secret of right living; and when they grew
up they would have enough to eat and the means of keeping in working
condition, and would know other sources of happiness than drunkenness.
At present, attempts to reform the evil are attempts to sweep back the
tide. Moreover, it is to be noticed that many of those who are most
active in the work are themselves busily engaged in exploiting the
working-class in their private business, and are therefore directly
identified with the cause of the evil they are attempting to combat.”
What will be the effect of Socialism upon war? The New York _Sun_
recently expressed the opinion that the end of war will come only with
the Golden Age. If so, the Golden Age is within sight of all of us.
Socialism will abolish war as inevitably, as naturally and serenely, as
the sunrise abolishes the night. The cause of war is foreign markets;
and under Socialism the markets will all be at home. Under Socialism the
existence of the workers of the United States, of England, Germany, and
Japan, will not be dependent upon the ability of their masters to sell
their surplus products for profit to Chinamen. Under Socialism an
international Congress will take in hand the backward nations, will
clean out their sewers and wipe out their plagues and famines, their
kings and their capitalists, their ignorance, their superstition and
their wars. It will do these things because they need to be done—it will
not do them as a mere pretence to cover greed for gold mines and
markets. Outside of mines and markets there is no longer any cause of
war, save the old race hatreds which these have begotten; and race
hatreds are not known among Socialists. In their last International
Congress a Russian and a Japanese shook hands upon the platform, while
their countrymen were flying at each other’s throats in Manchuria. The
Socialist movement is a world movement—it has brought under its banners,
working shoulder to shoulder, men and women of all religions, races and
colours. With their victory, and only with their victory, will the
efforts of “Peace Congresses” bear fruit.
Finally, what will be the effect of Socialism upon the “System”? It is
important to distinguish between corruption as a sporadic event, an
accident here and there, and corruption as a national institution. In
the Industrial Republic a worker might of course bribe his foreman to
let him cheat the community; but that would be every man’s loss, and
there would be every inducement to find it out and make it known, and no
hindrance whatever to its punishment. At present, however, we have
corruption organised in town, county, city, state, and nation, with
every inducement to keep it hidden, and almost no possibility of
punishing it. Everybody understands that we have corporations, and that
the corporations rule us; all that everybody does not yet understand is
that the continuance of their rule would mean the ruin of free
institutions in America, and ultimately the downfall of civilisation
itself.
I have outlined the economic and political conditions which I believe
will prevail in the Industrial Republic; there remains to consider what
influences these will exert upon the moral and intellectual life of men.
When people criticise the Socialist programme they always think about
government censors and red tape, and limitations upon free endeavour;
and so they say that Socialism would lead to a reign of tameness and
mediocrity. They tell us that under the new régime we should all have to
wear the same kind of coat and eat the same kind of pie. They argue that
if all the means of production are owned by the Government there will be
no way for you to get your own kind of pie; failing to perceive that
government control of the means of production no more implies government
control of the product, than government control of the post office means
government control of the contents of your letters. Said a good
clergyman friend of mine: “What possible place, for instance, would
there be for _me_ in your Socialist society.” And I answered, “There
would be just exactly the same place for you that there is at present.
How is it that you get your living and your freedom? You are maintained
by an association of people who want the work you can do. Every
clergyman in the country is maintained in that way—and so are thousands
upon thousands of editors, authors, artists, actors—so are all our
clubs, societies, restaurants, theatres and orchestras. The Government
has absolutely nothing to do with them at present—and the Government
need have absolutely nothing to do with them under Socialism. The people
who want them subscribe and pay for them. Under our present system they
pay the cost to private profit-seekers; under Socialism they would pay
the State.”
In the Industrial Republic a man will be able to order anything he
wishes, from a flying machine to a seven-legged spider made of diamonds;
and the only question that anyone will ever dream of asking him will be:
“Have you got the money to pay for it?” There remains only to add that,
the system of wealth-distribution being now one of justice, that
question will mean: “Have you performed for society the equivalent of
the labour-time of the article you desire society to furnish you?”
Nine-tenths of the argument against Socialism dissolves into mist the
moment one states that single all-important fact, that Socialism is a
science of _economics_. For instance, Mr. Bryan has recently published
in the _Century Magazine_ an article entitled “Individualism versus
Socialism;” and here is the way he contrasts the two: “The individualist
believes that competition is not only a helpful but a necessary force in
society, to be guarded and protected; the Socialist regards competition
as a hurtful force, to be entirely exterminated.” Now there are endless
varieties of competition with which Socialism could in no conceivable
way interfere: the competition of love, and of friendship; the
competition of political life; the competition of ideals, of music and
books, of philosophy and science. It is the claim of the Socialists that
by setting men free from the money-greed and the money-terror—from the
need of struggling to deprive other men of the necessities of life in
order to prevent them from depriving you of these necessities—the mind
of the race would be set free for more vigorous competition in these
other fields, and thus the development of real individuality would be
for the first time made possible. This being the desire of the
Socialist, it should be clear how fundamental is the misconception of
Mr. Bryan, indicated by the bare title of his article—“Individualism
versus Socialism.” Socialism is not opposed to Individualism, and to set
the two in opposition is like the attempt to imagine a fight between an
elephant and a whale.
Socialism is a proposition for an economic re-organisation; as such, the
only thing to which it can logically and intelligently be opposed is
Capitalism. Mr. Bryan indicates that he discerns this, in another
portion of his article. He says; “For the purpose of this discussion
Individualism will be defined as the private ownership of the means of
production and distribution where competition is possible, leaving to
public ownership those means of production and distribution in which
competition is practically impossible; and Socialism will be defined as
the collective ownership, through the State, of all the means of
production and distribution.” For general unfairness this statement
makes me think of the story of a man who was riding through the country
and stopped to admire a fine pair of turkeys, and after praising them
with enthusiasm, remarked to the farmer: “I will match you for them!
Heads they are mine, and tails they stay yours.” Mr. Bryan has composed
a subtly worded definition of Individualism which takes all the kernels
from the Socialist ear, and leaves to the Socialist only the husk.
“Leaving to public ownership those means of production and distribution
in which competition is practically impossible!” What a beautiful field
for controversy, and what endless opportunities for compromise and
concession, for advance or retreat! Ten years ago Mr. Bryan would not
have appreciated the necessity of inserting this clause; industrial
evolution had not proceeded quite so far, and all our radicals were
bending their efforts to destroying the trusts. It was only after the
last presidential election, unless I am mistaken, that Mr. Bryan
definitely committed himself to the public ownership “of those means of
production and distribution in which competition is practically
impossible.”
If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a really authoritative treatise
upon modern scientific Socialism (say Vandervelde’s “Collectivism and
Industrial Evolution”) he would understand that his programme is so
close to that of the Socialists that the difference would require a
microscope to discern. In fact, I imagine that the majority of modern
proletarian thinkers would be willing to subscribe to the programme of
“Individualism” exactly as Mr. Bryan states it: “the private ownership
of the means of production and distribution where competition is
possible, leaving to public ownership those means of production and
distribution in which competition is practically impossible.”
The one point to be made absolutely clear in this matter is that the
Industrial Republic will be an organisation for the supplying of the
_material necessities_ of human life. With the moral and intellectual
affairs of men it can have very little to do. What Socialism proposes to
organise and systematise is industry, not thought. The difference
between the products of industry and those of thought is a fundamental
one. The former are strictly limited in quantity, and the latter are
infinite. No man can have more than his fair share of the former without
depriving his neighbour; but to a thought there is no such limit—a
single poem or symphony may do for a million just as well as for one.
With the former it is possible for one man to gain control and oppress
others; but it is not possible to monopolise thought. And it is in
consequence of this fact that laws and systems are necessary with the
things of the body, which would be preposterous with the things of the
mind. The bodily needs of men are pretty much all alike. Men need food,
clothing, shelter, light, air, and heat; and they need these of pretty
nearly the same quality and in pretty nearly the same quantity—so that
they can be furnished methodically year in and year out, according to
order. This is being done by our present industrial masters for profit;
in the Industrial Republic it will be done by the State, for use.
Quite otherwise is it with things in which men are not alike—their
religions and their arts and their sciences. The only conditions under
which the State can with any justice or efficiency have to do with
production in these fields, is after men have come to agreement—when
opinion has given place to knowledge. For instance, we have, in certain
fields of science, methods which we can consider as agreed upon; it
would be perfectly possible for the State to endow astronomical
investigators, and seekers of the North Pole, and inventors of flying
machines, and pioneers in all the technical arts. In the same way we
come to agree, within certain limits, what is a worth-while play or
book; in so far as we agree, we can have government theatres and
publishing houses, government newspapers and magazines. If ever science
should discover the rationale of the phenomenon of genius, so that we
could analyse and judge it with precision, we should then have the whole
problem solved.
You are a writer, perhaps; and you say that you would not relish the
idea of bringing your book to a government official to be judged. Ask
yourself, however, if some of your prejudice may not be due to your
conception of a government official as the representative of a class,
and of the interests of a class. In the Industrial Republic there will
be no classes, and the officers of the coöperative publishing house will
have no one to serve but the people. If they are not satisfactory to the
people, the people can get rid of them—something the people cannot do
anywhere in the world to-day. You think, perhaps, that you choose your
own governors in this country—but you do not. What you do is to go to
the polls and choose between two sets of candidates, both of whom have
been selected by your economic rulers as being satisfactory to them.
While I do not profess to be certain, I imagine that an author who
wanted his book published by the Government would have to pay the
expenses of the publication. This would not be any hardship, for wages
in the Industrial Republic could not be less than ten dollars for a day
of six hours’ work. With the rapid improvement in machinery and methods
that would follow, they would probably soon be double that—and of course
it would rest with the people who were doing the work to see that it was
done in an attractive place, with plenty of fresh air and due safeguards
against accidents. Under these conditions a man of refinement could go
to a factory to work for pleasure and exercise, instead of pulling at
ropes in a gymnasium, as he commonly does nowadays. And when a young
author had earned the cost of making his book, he would have done all
that he had to do. He would not have to enter into a race in vulgar
advertising with exploiting private concerns; nor would the public form
its ideas of his work from criticisms in reviews which were run to
secure advertisements, and which gave their space to the books that were
advertised the most. Neither would his critics be employed by a class,
to maintain the interests of a class, and to keep down the aspirations
of some other class. Also, the book-reading public would no longer
consist—as our present society so largely consists—of idle and unfeeling
rich, and ignorant, debased and hunger-driven poor.
And then, as I said, there is a second method—the method of the churches
and clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four years ago, a man who thought
there ought to be more Socialist books published than there were. He had
no money; but he drew up a programme for a coöperative publishing house,
to furnish Socialist literature at cost to those who wanted it. He got
some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar shares, and since then he has
been turning out half a million pieces of Socialist literature every
year. That seems to me a perfect illustration of what would happen in
the new society, the second way in which books would be published. Such
concerns—free associations, as they are termed in the Socialist
vocabulary—would spring up literally by the thousands. They would cover
every field that the liberated soul of man might be interested in, they
would care for every type of thinker and artist, no matter how
eccentric; they would offer encouragement to every man who showed the
slightest sign of power in any field. The only reason we do not have
many times as many of these associations as we have now, is simply that
those people who really care about the higher things of life are almost
invariably poor and helpless.
One of the curious things which I have observed about those who pick
flaws in the suggestions of the Socialist, is how seldom it ever occurs
to them to apply their own tests to the present system of things. How is
it with art and literature production now—are all the conditions quite
free from objection? Is the man of genius always encouraged and
protected, and set free to develop his powers?
In the _North American Review_ a couple of years ago there appeared an
article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set forth her opinion
that “American literature to-day is the most timid, the most anæmic, the
most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois, that any country
has ever known.” This seemed to perplex Mrs. Atherton very much—she
could not comprehend why such a very great country should have a
“bourgeois” literature. I replied to her in a paper which was published
in _Collier’s Weekly_, in which I maintained that “American literature
is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known, simply because
American life is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.” I
shall quote a few paragraphs from the essay, which began with an attempt
to define the word “bourgeois”:
It signifies, in a sentence, that type of civilisation, of law and
convention, which was made necessary by the economic struggle, and which
is now maintained by the economic victors for their own comfort and the
perpetuation of their power. The _bourgeoisie_, or middle class, is that
class which, all over the world, takes the sceptre of power as it falls
from the hands of the political aristocracy; which has the skill and
cunning to survive in the free-for-all combat which follows upon the
political revolution. Its dominion is based upon wealth; and hence the
determining characteristic of the bourgeois society is its regard for
wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is the end and goal of things. The
aristocrat knew nothing of the possibility of revolution, and so he was
bold and gay. The bourgeois _does_ know about the possibility of
revolution, and so it is that Mrs. Atherton finds that our literature is
“timid.” She finds it “anæmic,” simply because the bourgeois ideal knows
nothing of the spirit, and tolerates intellectual activity only for the
ends of commerce and material welfare. She finds also that it “bows
before the fetich of the body,” and she is much perplexed by the
discovery. She does not seem to understand that the bourgeois represents
an achievement of the body, and that all that he knows in the world is
body. He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are
fine and vigorous. He lives in a big house, and wears the latest thing
in clothes; his civilisation furnishes these to every one—at least to
every one who amounts to anything; and beyond that he understands
nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. It is for entertainment
that he buys books, and as entertainment that he regards them; and hence
another characteristic of the bourgeois literature is its lack of
seriousness. The bourgeois writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of
course—the seriousness of a hungry man seeking his dinner; but the
seriousness of the artist he does not know. He will roar you as gently
as any sucking dove, he will also wring tears from your eyes or thrill
you with terror, according as the fashion of the hour suggests; but he
knows exactly why he does these things, and he can do them between chats
at his club. If you expected him to act like his heroes, he would think
that you were mad.
The basis of a bourgeois society is cash payment; it recognises only the
accomplished fact. To be a Milton with a “Paradise Lost” in your pocket
is to be a tramp: to be a great author in the bourgeois literary world
is to have sold a hundred thousand copies, and to have sold them within
memory—that is, a year or two. With the bourgeois, success is success,
and there is no going behind the returns; to discriminate between
different kinds of success would be to introduce new and dangerous
distinctions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once phrased it: “A big man is a
big man, it don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” Mr.
John L. Sullivan is a big man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, and so
was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all
honourable men, and when you look up in “Who’s Who,” you find that they
are there.
The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite and concrete one: it has
mostly all been attained—there are only a few small details left to be
attended to, such as the cleaning of the streets and the suppressing of
the labour unions. Thus there is no call for perplexity, and no use for
anything hard to understand. Originality is superfluous, and
eccentricity is anathema. The world is as it always has been, and human
nature will always be as it is; the thing to do is to find out what the
public likes. The public likes pathos and the homely virtues; and so we
give it “Eben Holden” and “David Harum.” The public likes high life, and
so we give it Richard Harding Davis and Marie Corelli. The public does
_not_ like passion; it likes sentiment, however—it even likes heroics,
provided they are conventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn all
history into a sugar-coated romance. The public’s strong point is love,
and we lay much stress upon the love-element—though with limitations,
needless to say. The idea of love as a serious problem among men and
women is dismissed, because the social organisation enables us to
satisfy our passions with the daughters of the poor. Our own daughters
know nothing about passion, and we ourselves know it only as an item in
our bank accounts. To the bourgeois young lady—the Gibson girl, as she
is otherwise known—literary love is a sentiment, ranking with a box of
bonbons, and actual love is a class marriage with an artificially
restricted progeny.
These which have been described are the positive and more genial aspects
of the bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terrible remain to be
mentioned. For it must be understood that this civilisation of comfort
and respectability furnishes its good things only to a class, and to an
exceedingly small class. The majority of mankind it pens up in filthy
hovels and tenements, to feed upon husks and rot in misery. This was
once easy, but now it is growing harder—and thus little by little the
_bourgeoisie_ is losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat poodle by
a stove—you think it is asleep and venture to touch it, when quick as a
flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone.
The bourgeois civilisation is, in one word, an organised system of
repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the
bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the
political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and
literature. The bourgeois controls these things precisely as he controls
the labour of society, by his control of the purse-strings. Unless
proper candidates are named by political parties, there are no campaign
funds; unless proper teachers and college presidents are chosen, there
are no endowments. Thus it happens that our students are taught a
political economy carefully divorced, not merely from humanity, but also
from science, history, and sense; any other kind of political economy
the student sometimes despises—more commonly he does not even know that
it exists. And it is just the same with the churches and with theology.
We have at present established in this land a religion which exists in
the name of the world’s greatest revolutionist, the founder of the
Socialist movement; this man denounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois
ideal more vehemently than ever it has since been denounced—declaring in
plain words that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; and yet his church
is to-day, in all its forms, and in every civilised land, the main
pillar of bourgeois society!
With the press the bourgeois has a still more direct method than
endowment; the press he owns. All the daily newspapers in New York, for
instance, are the property of millionaires, and are run by them in their
own interests, exactly the same as their stables or their _cuisine_.
That does not mean, of course, that many of their journalistic menials
are not sincere—it does not mean that the college presidents and
clergymen may not be sincere. One of the quaintest things about the
bourgeois editor, the bourgeois college president, the bourgeois
clergyman, is the whole-souled naïveté with which he takes it for
granted that just as all civilisation exists for the comfort of the
bourgeois, so also all truth must necessarily be such as the bourgeois
would desire it to be.
And then there is literature. The bourgeois recognises the novelist and
the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and
about on a level with the music-hall artist; he recognises the essayist,
the historian, and the publicist as agents of bourgeois repression
equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of them he
grants the good things of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with
servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and
obsequious waiters. They may even, on state occasions, become acquainted
with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the
magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it
hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life
from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least
restriction; the novelist, for instance, may roam the whole of space and
time—there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that
he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with
noble dames and gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He
may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with
visions of high society in all its splendours, may awe us with the
wonders of modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, the flying
machine and the automobile. He may thrill us with battle, murder, and
Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears to our eyes at the thought of the
old folks at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility, and
sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the
ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in
that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. In any of
these fields the author, if he is worth his salt, may be
“entertaining”—and so the royalties will come in. If there is any one
whom this does not suit—who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not
please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the
bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois
reviewer, and bludgeon him into silence; or better yet, we simply leave
him alone, and he moves into a garret. The bourgeois garrets resemble
the bourgeois excursion steamers. They are never so crowded that there
is not room for as many more as want to come on board; and any young
author who imagines that he can bear to starve longer than the world can
bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. Letting things starve is
the specialty of the bourgeois society—the vast majority of the
creatures in it are starving all the time.
So much for things as they are. The Revolution will, of course, not
change our present bourgeois people—except that it will scare them
thoroughly, and make them teachable. But it will bring to the front an
enormous class of people to whom life is a new and wondrous thing; and
their children also will grow up in a different world, and with a
different ideal; and so a generation from now there will be a new art
public. The people who compose it will not have been forced to consider
money the only thing in life, the sole test of excellence and power;
they will not have been brought up on the motto, “Do others or they will
do you.” They will have been brought up in a world in which no man is
able to “do” another man, and in which all men stand as equals as
regards money. They will have been brought up in a world in which work
and a decent life are the right and duty of every man, and are taken for
granted with every man; in which influence, reputation, and command are
given for other things than money. If it be true that faith, hope, and
charity are greater things than wealth, it is perhaps not altogether
Utopian to suppose that these will be the things that the new public
will honour and will contrive to promote. The best way in which one can
be sure about this is to study the writers who are shaping the ideals of
Socialism—such men as Whitman and Thoreau, Ruskin and William Morris,
Kropotkin and Carpenter and Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be the
cause of the reader’s looking into one book, in which one of the
master-spirits of our time has made an attempt to picture this beautiful
world that is to be. When I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not
read any of his books; so he sent me a copy of his “Modern Utopia,”
graciously inscribing it: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the
next most hopeful!” Afterward, I was asked by _Life_ to name the book
which had given me the most pleasure during the last year, and I named
this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the great works of our
literature; it is worthy to be placed with the visions of Plato and Sir
Thomas More. It has three great virtues which are rarely, if ever, found
in combination. In the first place, it is characterised by a nobility
and loftiness of spirit which makes its reading a religious exercise. In
the second place, it is the work of an engineer, a man with the modern
sense of reality and acquainted with the whole field of scientific
achievement. In the third place, it is written in a a literary style
which makes the reading of each paragraph a delight in itself. It is a
book to love and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and strengthened,
to wait with patience and cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change.