"STATE SOCIALISM" AND LABOR
State Capitalism has a very definite principle and program of labor
reform. It capitalizes labor, views it as the principal resource and
asset of each community (or of the class that controls the community),
and undertakes every measure that is not too costly for its
conservation, utilization, and development--_i.e._ its development to
fill those positions ordinarily known as _labor_, but not such
development as might enable the laborers or their children to compete
for higher social functions on equal terms with the children of the
upper classes.
On the one hand is the tendency, not very advanced, but unmistakable and
almost universal, to invest larger and larger sums for the scientific
development of industrial efficiency--healthy surroundings in childhood,
good food and healthy living conditions, industrial education, model
factories, reasonable hours, time and opportunity for recreation and
rest, and on the other a rapidly increasing difficulty for either the
laborer or his children to advance to other social positions and
functions--and a restriction of the liberty of laborers and of labor
organizations, lest they should attempt to establish equality of
opportunity or to take the first step in that direction by assuming
control over industry and government. From the moment it approaches the
labor question the "Socialist" part of "State Socialism" completely
falls away, and nothing but the purest collectivist capitalism remains.
Even the plausible contention that it will result in the maximum
efficiency and give the maximum product breaks down. For no matter how
much the condition of the laborers is improved, or what political rights
they are allowed to exercise, if they are deprived of all initiative and
power in their employments, and of the equal opportunity to develop
their capacities to fill other social positions for which they may prove
to be more fit than the present occupants, then the human resources of
the community are not only left underdeveloped, but are prevented from
development.
In the following chapters I shall deal successively with the plans of
the "State Socialists" to develop the productive powers of the laboring
people and their children--_as laborers_, together with the accompanying
tendencies towards compulsory labor, and formation of a class society.
"Our Home policy," says a manifesto of the Fabian Society (edited by
Bernard Shaw), "must include a labor policy, _whether the laborer wants
it or not_, directed to securing _for him, what, for the nation's sake
even the poorest_ of its subjects should have." (Italics mine.)[46]
Here is the basis of the attitude of the "State Socialist" towards
labor. Labor is to be given more and more attention and consideration.
But the governing is to be done by other classes, and the foundation of
the new policy is to be the welfare of society as these other classes
conceive it,--and not the welfare of the masses of the people as
conceived by the masses themselves.
Indeed, a government official has recently pleaded with capital in the
name of labor that the time has come when it pays to treat labor as well
as valuable horses and cattle. George H. Webb, Commissioner of Labor of
Rhode Island, begins his report on Welfare Work by assuring the
manufacturers that it is profitable. He says: "Mankind, at least that
portion of it that has to do with horseflesh, discovered ages ago that a
horse does the best service when it is well fed, well stabled, and well
groomed. The same principle applies to the other brands of farm stock.
They one and all yield the best results when their health and comforts
are best looked after. It is strange, though these truths have been a
matter of general knowledge for centuries, that it is only quite
recently that it has been discovered that the same rule is applicable to
the human race. We are just beginning to learn that the employer who
gives steady employment, pays fair wages, and pays close attention to
the physical health and comfort of his employees gets the best results
from their labor."[47]
Mr. George W. Perkins, recently retired from the firm of J. P. Morgan
and Company, who has managed the introduction of pensions, profit
sharing, and other investments in labor for the International Harvester
Company, has also expressed the view that these measures were profitable
"from a pecuniary standpoint." A good illustration is the calculation of
the Dayton Cash Register Company, which has led in this "welfare work,"
that "the luncheons given each girl costs three cents, and that the
woman does five cents more of work each day." Some such calculation will
apply to the whole colossal system of governmental labor reforms now
favored so widely by far-sighted employers.[48]
In order that the private policy of the more enlightened of the large
corporations should become the policy of governments, which employers as
a class know they can control, only two conditions need to be filled.
Since all employers must to some degree share the burdens of the new
taxes needed for such governmental investments in the improvement of
labor, there must be some assurance, first, that all capitalists shall
share in the opportunity to employ this more efficient and more
profitable labor; and second, that the supply of cheap labor, which has
cost almost nothing to produce, is either exhausted or, on account of
its inefficiency, is less adapted to the new industry than it was to the
old. The impending reorganization of governments to protect the smaller
capitalists from the large (through better control over the banks,
railroads, trusts, tariffs, and natural resources) will furnish the
first condition, the natural exhaustion or artificial restriction of
immigration now imminent together with the introduction of "scientific
management," the second. From a purely business standpoint the greatest
asset of the capitalists' government, its chief natural resource, the
most fruitful field for conservation, and the most profitable place for
the investment of capital will then undoubtedly be in the labor supply.
In presenting the British Budget of 1910 to Parliament, Mr. Lloyd George
argued that the higher incomes and fortunes ought to bear a greater than
proportionate share of the taxes, because present governmental
expenditures were largely on their behalf, and because the new labor
reforms were equally to their benefit.
"What is it," he said, "that enabled the fortunate possessors of
these incomes and these fortunes to amass the wealth they enjoy or
bequeath? The security insured for property by the agency of the
State, the guaranteed immunity from the risks and destruction of
war, insured by our natural advantages and our defensive forces.
This is an essential element even now in the credit of the country;
and, in the past, it means that we were accumulating great wealth
in this land, when the industrial enterprises of less fortunately
situated countries were not merely at a standstill, but their
resources were being ravaged and destroyed by the havoc of war.
"What, further, is accountable for this growth of wealth? The
spread of intelligence amongst the masses of the people, the
improvements in sanitation and in the general condition of the
people. These have all contributed towards the efficiency of the
people, _even as wealth-producing machines_. Take, for instance,
such legislation as the Educational Acts and the Public Health
Acts; they have cost much money, but they have made infinitely
more. That is true of all legislation which improves the conditions
of life for the people. An educated, well-fed, well-clothed,
well-housed people _invariably leads to the growth of a numerous
well-to-do class_. If _property_ were to grudge a substantial
contribution towards proposals which insure the security which is
one of the essential conditions of its existence or toward keeping
from poverty and privation the old people whose lives of industry
and toil have either created that wealth or made it productive,
then _property_ would be not only shabby, but shortsighted."
(Italics mine.)[49]
The property interests should be far-sighted enough to support the
present economic and labor reforms, not because there is any fear in
Great Britain either from a revolutionary Socialist movement or from an
organized political or labor union upheaval, for Mr. Lloyd George
ridicules both these bogeys, but because such reforms _contribute
towards the efficiency of the people, even as wealth-producing
machines_--and increase the incomes of the wealthy and the well-to-do.
Mr. Lloyd George continued:--
"We have, more especially during the last 60 years, in this country
accumulated wealth to an extent which is almost unparalleled in the
history of the world, but we have done it at _an appalling waste of
human material_. We have drawn upon the robust vitality of the
rural areas of Great Britain, and especially Ireland, and spent its
energies recklessly in the devitalizing atmosphere of urban
factories and workshops as if the supply were inexhaustible. We are
now beginning to realize that we have been spending _our capital_,
at a disastrous rate, and it is time we should take a real,
concerted, national effort to replenish it. I put forward this
proposal, not a very extravagant one, _as a beginning_." (My
italics.)[50]
In order to do away with the economic waste of profitable "human
material" and the still more serious exhaustion of the supply, the
propertyless wage earner or salaried man for the first time obtains a
definite status in the official political economy; he becomes the
property of the nation viewed "as a business firm," a part of "our"
capital. His position was much like a peasant or a laborer during the
formation of the feudal system. To obtain any status at all, to become
half free he had to become somebody's "man." Now he is the "man," the
industrial asset, of the government. This paternal attitude towards the
individual, however, is not at all similar to the paternalist attitude
towards capital. While the individual capitalist often does not object
to having his capital reckoned as a part of the resources of a
government which capitalists as a class control,--roughly speaking in
proportion to their wealth,--we can picture his protests if either _his_
personal activity or ability or _his_ private income were similarly
viewed as dependent for their free use and development on the benevolent
patronage of the State. However, for the _workers_ to become an asset of
the State, even while the latter is still viewed primarily as a
commercial institution and remains in the hands of the business class,
is undoubtedly a revolutionary advance.
Mr. Winston Churchill also gives, as the basis for the whole program,
the need of putting an end to that "waste of earning power" and of "the
stamina, the virtue, safety, and honor of the British race," that is due
to existing poverty and economic maladjustment.[51] Mr. John A. Hobson,
a prominent economist and radical, shows that the purpose of the "New
Liberalism" is the full development of "the productive resources of our
land and labor,"[52] and denies that this broad purpose has anything to
do with Socialist collectivism.
Professor Simon Patten of the University of Pennsylvania writes very
truly about the proposed labor reforms, that "they can cause poverty to
disappear and can give a secure income to every family," without
requiring any sacrifice on the part of the possessing classes. No one
has shown more clearly or in fewer words how intimately connected are
the advance of the worker and the further increase of profits. "Social
improvement," Professor Patten says, "takes him [the workman] from
places where poverty and diseases oppress, and introduce him to the full
advantage of a better position.... It gives to the city workman the air,
light, and water that the country workman has, but without his
inefficiency and isolation. It gives more working years and more working
days in each year, with more zeal and vitality in each working day;
health makes work pleasant, and pleasant work becomes efficiency when
the environment stimulates men's powers to the full.... The unskilled
workman must be transformed into an efficient citizen; children must be
kept from work, and women must have shorter hours and better
conditions."[53]
Professor Patten has even drawn up a complete scientific program of
social reforms which lead _necessarily_ to the economic advantage of
_all_ elements in a community without any decrease of the existing
inequalities of wealth. "The incomes and personal efforts of those
favorably situated," says Professor Patten, "can reduce the evils of
poverty without the destruction of that _upon which their wealth and the
progress of society depend_." (Italics mine.)
The reform program begins with childhood and extends over every period
of the worker's life. Ex-President Eliot of Harvard and President Hadley
of Yale and other leading educators propose that its principles be
applied to the nation's children. Dr. Eliot insists that greater
emphasis should be laid on vocational and physical training and the
teaching of hygiene and the preservation of the health, which will
secure the approval of every "State Socialist." Anything that can be
done to elevate the health of the nation, and to increase its industrial
efficiency by the teaching of trades, will pay the nation, considered as
a going concern, a business undertaking of all its capitalists. It might
not improve the opportunity of the wage earners to rise to better-paid
positions, because it would augment competition among skilled laborers;
while it would probably improve wages somewhat, it might not advance
them proportionately to the general increase of wealth; it might leave
the unequal distribution of wealth, political power, and opportunity
even more unequal than they are to-day, but as long as the nation as a
whole is richer and the masses of the people better off, "State
Socialists" will apparently be satisfied.
President Hadley is even more definite than Dr. Eliot. The new
educational policy so thoroughly in accord with the interests of the
business and capitalist classes demands "for the people" every
opportunity in education that will make the individual a better
_worker_, while it allows his development as a _man_ and a _citizen_ to
take care of itself. President Hadley urges that we follow along German
lines in public education. What he feels we still lack, and ought to
take from Germany, are the "industrial training and the military
training of the people": the children are forced to go to the elementary
schools for a time, and during that part of their education they are
kept out of the shops and the factories. They, however, receive
instructions in the rudiments of shop and factory work."[54] In other
words, the children are kept out of the factory, but the shop and the
factory are permitted to enter the school. Doubtless an improvement, but
not yet the sort of education any business or professional man would
desire for his own children at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of
age.[55]
"State Socialism" looks at the individual, and especially the
workingman, almost wholly from the standpoint of what the community, as
_at present organized_, the capitalists being the chief shareholders, is
able to make out of him. Each newborn child represents so much cost to
the community for his education. If he dies, the community loses so and
so much. If he lives, he brings during his life such and such a sum to
the community, and it is worth while to spend a considerable amount both
to prevent his early death or disablement and to increase his industrial
efficiency while he lives. According to this view, Professor Irving
Fisher of Yale has calculated that the annual child crop in the United
States is worth about seven billion dollars per annum, a sum almost
equal to the annual value of our agricultural crops. In both cases great
economies are possible. Professor Fisher has estimated that 47 per cent
of the children who die in America less than five years old could be
saved at an average cost of $20 per child, which means an annual loss to
the nation of $576,000,000, according to Professor Fisher's calculation
of what would have been the future value of all the children now lost
(above their cost of maintenance).
"We have counted it our good fortune," says Professor Fisher, "to
dwell in a land where nature has been so prodigal that we have not
needed to fear want. We are only beginning to realize that this
very prodigality of nature has produced a spirit of prodigality in
men.
"It is the purpose of the conservation movement to rebuke and
correct this national trait, and the resources of science are now
concentrated in this mighty effort in that direction.
"The conservation of human life will, I believe, constitute the
grandest movement of the twentieth century.
"Not only do human beings constitute by far the greatest part of
our natural resources, but the waste of human life and strength is
by far the greatest of all wastes. In the report of President
Roosevelt's conservation commission, although his commission was
primarily appointed to conserve our natural rather than our vital
resources, it was pointed out that _human beings, considered as
capitalized working power, are worth three to five times all our
other capital_, and that, even on a very moderate estimate, the
total waste and unnecessary loss of our national vitality amounts
to _one and one half billions of dollars per year_."[56]
When the "State Socialist" policy has taken possession of the world,
which may be in the very near future, or, more correctly speaking, when
the world's business and politics are so organized as to give this
policy a chance for a full and free application, is it not evident that
every advanced nation will consider it as being to its business interest
to put an end to this vast, unnecessary loss of life? And if half a
billion a year is lost through unnecessary deaths of very young
children, is it not probable that an equal sum is lost through death
later in childhood or early youth, another similar sum through
underfeeding in later life, or through lack of sufficient exercise,
rest, recreation, and outdoor life, and a far larger amount through lack
of industrial training? Is it not certain that unnecessary industrial
accidents, sickness due to overwork and early old age due to overstrain,
are responsible for another enormous loss? And, finally, is not
unemployment costing a billion a year to the "nation, considered as a
business firm"? This last-named loss has been calculated, for the United
States alone, as 1,300,000 years of labor time annually. If a round
million of these years are saved--if we estimate their value in profits
at the low figure of $1000 each,--we have another billion (even
allowing for 300,000 unemployable).[57]
Is it not clear that nearly every element in the community will soon
combine to do all that is humanly possible to put an end to such costly
abuses and neglect; and that conscientious and wholesale efforts to
preserve the public health and to secure industrial efficiency cannot be
a matter of the distant future, when movements in that direction have
already been initiated in Great Britain, Australia, Germany, and some
other countries? Sir Joseph Ward, Premier of New Zealand, says that the
people of that country have already calculated the value of each
child--and, on this basis, made it the subject of certain governmental
investments. He says:--
"To return to the annuity fund, apart from the assistance it gives
to the wife and children if the father is sick, it also contributes
the services of a medical man for a woman at childbirth, and the
State pays $30 for that purpose. If all of this is not needed to
pay the physician, the rest may be used for carrying on the home.
This has all been done with the view to helping the birth rate and
bringing into the world children under the most healthy conditions
possible, so that they may have a free chance of attaining man's or
woman's estate.
"We assess the value of an adult in our country as $1500. So, _from
a business standpoint and on national grounds_, we regard the
expenditure of a sum up to $30 as judicious, when the value of the
infant to the country may be fifty times that sum. Thus the small
wage earner's wife and children are provided for, and his fear
about being able to provide for a large family is decreased."
(Italics mine.)[58]
"I am of the opinion," declares Mr. Churchill, "that the State should
increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labor," and
that "the State must increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the
care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children." He looks
forward "to the universal establishment of the _minimum standards_ of
life and labor, and their progressive elevation as the increasing
energies of production may permit."[59]
Mr. Churchill rejects the supposition that the government intends to
stop with the extension of the eight-hour law to miners. "I welcome and
support this measure, not only for its own sake," he said, "but more
because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement
which is in progress, all over the world, and in other industries
besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labor with the
well-ascertained laws of science and health."[60]
It might be supposed that this measure would prove costly to employers,
but this is only a short-sighted view. In the first place, working for
less hours, the miners will produce somewhat more per hour, but an even
more important ultimate benefit comes from the fact that the most
experienced miners, those who are most profitable, being subject to less
overstrain, will have a longer working life.
Another measure already enacted towards establishing "a national
minimum" applies to the wages in ready-made tailoring and some less
important industries, to which shirt-waist making is soon to be added.
These are known as the "sweated" trades, "where the feebleness and
ignorance of the workers and their isolation from each other render them
an easy prey to the tyranny of bad masters and middlemen one step above
them upon the lowest rungs of the ladder, and themselves held in the
grip of the same relentless forces,"--where "you have a condition not of
progress but of progressive degeneration." Mr. Churchill asked
Parliament to regard these industries as "sick and diseased," and "to
deal with them in exactly the same mood and temper as we should deal
with sick people," and accordingly boards were established for the
purpose of setting up a minimum wage.[61]
But if employers are forced to pay higher wages, it may be thought that
they will lose from the law. This Mr. Churchill effectively denies.
"In most instances," he says, "the best employers in the trade are
already paying wages equal or superior to the probable minimum
which the Trade Board will establish. The inquiries I have set on
foot in the various trades scheduled have brought to me most
satisfactory assurances from nearly all the employers to whom my
investigations have addressed themselves.... But most of all I have
put my faith in the practical effect of a powerful band of
employers, perhaps a majority, who, whether from high motives or
self-interest, or from a combination of the two--they are not
necessarily incompatible ideas--will form a vigilant and instructed
police, knowing every turn and twist of the trade, and who will
labor constantly to protect themselves from being undercut by the
illegal competition of unscrupulous rivals."
Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such
trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously
hampered by the competition of the "sweaters" than they are by that of
foreign employers. "I cannot believe," he concludes, "that the process
of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to
the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is
conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and
interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of
the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better
methods."[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the
other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put
into effect, the legislation against "sweating" being already in force
in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat
different form.
But the most striking of the British labor reforms has yet to be
mentioned. Not only were the present old age pensions established by the
common consent of all the political parties, but a law has now been
enacted--also with the approval of all parties (and only twenty-one
negative votes in Parliament)--to apply the same methods of state
insurance of workingmen to sickness, accidents, and even to
unemployment. The old age pensions were already more radical than those
of Prussia in that the workingmen do not have to contribute under the
British law, while the National Insurance Bill as now enacted surpasses
both the former British measure and the German precedent in everything,
except that it demands a lesser total sum from the government. In the
insurance against accidents, sickness, and unemployment the government,
instead of contributing the whole amount, gives from two ninths to one
third, one third to one half being assessed against employers and one
sixth to four ninths against employees. At first this reform, it is
expected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years
before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the
measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks,
domestic servants, and many other classes usually not reached by
measures of the kind,--a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides
$5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and
creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people
in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured,
thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as
far as the masses are concerned.
In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to
aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an
automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health,
strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the
increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in
the _Daily Mail_: "I want to make the nation more healthy than it is.
The great mass of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily
preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him
so much a week when he is ill."
Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that
the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good
investment:--
"When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German
Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the
organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their
families against the worst evils arising from these common
accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an
incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and
possibly millions of people.
"Wherever I went in Germany, north or south, and whomever I met,
whether it was an _employer_ or a workman, a _Conservative_ or a
Liberal, a Socialist or a Trade-union Leader--men of all ranks,
sections and creeds, with one accord joined in lauding the benefits
which have been conferred upon Germany by this beneficent policy.
Several wanted extensions, but there was not one who wanted to go
back. The employers admitted that at first they did not quite like
the new burdens it cast upon them, _but they now fully realized the
advantages which even they derived from the expenditure_, for it
had raised the standard of the workman throughout Germany." (My
italics.)[63]
It is not only worry and anxiety that were removed, but definite and
irregular sums that workers or their employers had formerly set aside
for insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were now
calculated and regulated on a business basis more profitable to both
parties to the labor contract. It is true that in Germany the employers
only pay part of the cost, the rest being borne almost entirely by
employees, while in Great Britain--as far as the old age pensions
go--the government pays all, and is likely to pay a considerable part,
perhaps a third, in the other insurance schemes. But the plan by which
the government pays all may prove even less costly to the employing
class, since landlords and inactive capitalists on the one hand and the
working people on the other, pay the larger part of the taxes--so that
state insurance in this thoroughgoing form is perhaps destined to be
even more popular than the German kind.
The most radical provision of the new bill is that which deals with
unemployment. Though applying only to the engineering and building
trades, it reaches 2,400,000 people. It proposes to give a weekly
allowance to every insured person who loses employment through no fault
of his own, though nothing is given in strikes and lockouts. And it is
intended to extend this measure to other employments. This is only the
first installment.
It is probable that Mr. Churchill's project that the State should
undertake to abolish unemployment altogether is the most radical of all
the proposed policies, excepting only that to gradually expropriate all
the future unearned increment of land.
"An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the
great cities of this country," says Mr. Churchill, "presents itself
to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of
crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindoo
cultivator. The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and
ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly
in the face. That is a contingency which seems to fall within the
most primary and fundamental obligations of any organization of
government. I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages
that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here and
now, in this wealthy country and in this _scientific_ age, it does
in my opinion exist, is not discharged, and will have to be
discharged."[64]
Mr. Churchill proposes not only to guard against periods of unemployment
which extend to all industries in the case of industrial crises, but
also to provide more steady employment for those who are unoccupied
during the slack seasons of the year or while passing from one employer
to another. Above all he plans that the youth of the nation shall not
waste their strength entirely in unremunerative employment or in
idleness, but that every boy or girl under eighteen years of age should
be learning a trade as well as making a living. Few will deny that the
program of Mr. Churchill and his associates in this direction marks a
great step towards that "more complete or elaborate social organization"
which he advocates.
One of the most significant of all the measures by which Mr. Churchill
plans to lend the aid of the State to the raising of the level of the
working classes is his "Development" Act. The object of this bill, in
the language of Mr. Churchill, is "to provide a fund for the economic
development of our country, for the encouragement of agriculture, for
afforestation, for the colonization of England (the settlement of
agricultural land), and for the making of roads, harbors, and other
public works." Stated in these terms, the Development Act is a measure
of "State Socialism" for the general industrial advance of the country,
but the main argument in its behalf lies in that clause of the bill
which provides, to quote from Mr. Churchill again: "that the prosecution
of these works shall be regulated, as far as possible, by the conditions
of the labor market, so that in a very bad year of unemployment they can
be expanded, so as to increase the demand for labor at times of
exceptional slackness, and thus correct and counterbalance the cruel
fluctuations of the labor market."[65]
We have seen that Mr. Churchill has justified these measures, not as
increasing the relative share of the working classes, but as adding to
the total product. They are to add to the industrial efficiency of the
nation as a whole, and so incidentally to bring a greater income to
all,--but in much the same proportions as wealth now distributes itself.
In this country Mr. Roosevelt has advocated a typical "State Socialist"
program of labor reforms including:--
"A workday of not more than eight hours."
"The abolition of the sweat-shop system."
"Sanitary inspection of factory, workshop, mine, and home."
"Liability of employers for injury to body and loss of life" and
"an automatically fixed compensation."
"The passage and enforcement of rigid anti-child-labor laws which
will cover every portion of this country."
"Laws limiting woman's labor."
All these measures except the first were adopted long ago, in
considerable part at least, by the reactionary government of Prussia and
are being introduced generally in monarchical and aristocratic Europe,
and I have shown that the eight-hour day has been instituted for miners
in Great Britain and that Mr. Winston Churchill proposed to extend it.
Mr. Roosevelt himself concedes that "we are far behind the older and
poorer countries" in such matters. But an examination of the action of
State legislatures during the year just past will show that we are
making rapid progress in the same direction.
"Social" or "industrial" efficiency, promoted by the government, is
already the central idea in American labor reform. Government insurance
against old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment is regarded, not
as the "workingmen's compensation" for injuries done them by society,
but as an automatic means of forcing backward employers to economize the
community's limited supply of labor power--not to wear it out too soon,
not to overstrain it, not to damage it irreparably or lay it up
unnecessarily for repairs, and not to leave it idle. Mr. Louis Brandeis
points out that mutual fire insurance has appealed to certain
manufacturers because in twenty years it has resulted in measures that
have prevented more than two thirds of the expected losses by fire.
Similarly, he says, "if society and industry and the individual were
made to pay from day to day the actual cost of sickness, accident,
invalidity, premature death, or premature old age consequent upon
excessive hours of labor, of unhygienic conditions of work, of
unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would
be rapidly reduced."[66]
This, as Mr. Brandeis says, is undoubtedly on the "road to social
efficiency" and its practical application will convince employers better
than "mere statements of cost, however clear and forceful." It will
remove a vast sea of human misery, and the process will immensely enrich
society. But like the other State Capitalist reforms (until they are
supplemented by some more radical policy) it will at the same time
automatically bring about an increase of existing inequalities of income
and an intensification of social injustice.
Mr. William Hard in a study of workingmen's compensation for
_Everybody's Magazine_ has reached a similar conclusion to that of Mr.
Brandeis: "Far from attacking the present relationship between employer
and employee, automatic compensation specifically recognizes it. The
backbone of the present so-called 'capitalism'; namely, the hiring of
the unpropertied class by the propertied class to do work for wages, is
not caused by automatic compensation to lose a single vertebra, and
automatic compensation has nothing whatever to do with Socialism except
that it is accomplished under the supervision of the State." If
compulsory insurance against accidents "has nothing whatever to do with
Socialism," neither have compulsory insurance against sickness, against
old age, against certain phases of unemployment.
The social reformers propose a labor policy that is _for_ the people
whether they like it or not; the only "rights" it gives them are "the
right to live" and "the right to work." Its first object is to produce
more efficient and profitable laborers, its second to have the
government take control of organized charity, to which aspect I must now
turn. Most of the labor reforms, enacted to secure for the laborer "what
for the Nation's sake even the poorest of its subjects should have,"
have been urged more strongly by philanthropists and political
economists than by representatives of the workers. In America "the
minimum wage," for example, is being worked up by a special committee
consisting almost exclusively of this class, while workmen's
compensation has been indorsed by the most varied political and social
elements, from the chief organ of American philanthropists, and Theodore
Roosevelt, to the Hearst newspapers.
With "the national efficiency" in view, Mr. Webb asks the British
government to take up the policy of a "national minimum," including not
only a minimum below which wages are not to fall, but also a similar
minimum of leisure, sanitation, and education.[67] Mr. Edward Devine,
editor of the leading philanthropic and reform journal in America, the
_Survey_, outlines an identical policy and also insists like Mr. Webb
that the Socialist can lay no exclusive claim to it.
"The social economist [_i.e._ reformer]," writes Mr. Devine, "is
sometimes confused with the Utopian [_i.e._ Socialist]. They are,
however, very distinct types of reformers. The Utopian dreams of
ideals. The social economist seeks to establish the normal.... The
social worker is primarily concerned, _not_ with the lifting of
humanity to a higher level, but with eradicating the maladjustments
and abnormalities, the needless inequalities, which prevent our
realizing our own reasonable standards."
Speaking in the name of American reformers in general, Mr. Devine
demands for the lower levels of society "normal standards" of life,
which are equivalent to Mr. Webb's national minimum, and definitely
denies the applicability of "the question-begging epithet of Socialism
which is hurled at all the reformers engaged in such work."
"Whether it belongs to the Socialist program," Mr. Devine objects, "is a
question so far as we can see of interest only to the Socialists. Our
advocacy of such laws as we enumerate has no Socialist origin." He
claims that the "expenditures legitimately directed towards the removal
of adverse social conditions, are not uneconomic and unproductive," and
that "they do not represent a mere indulgence of altruistic sentiment,"
but are "investments"; of which prison reforms and the expenditures for
the prevention of tuberculosis are examples.[68]
Another phrase for the proposed saving of the national labor resources
and the introduction of minimum standards in its philanthropic aspect is
"the abolition of poverty." When he speaks of this as a definite and by
no means a distant reform, the reformer refers to _that extreme form of
poverty_, so widely prevalent to-day, which results in the physical
deterioration and the industrial inefficiency of a large part of the
population.
This sort of poverty is a burden on industry and the capitalists, and
Mr. Lloyd George was widely applauded when he said that it can and must
be done away with. He has calculated, too, that this abolition can be
accomplished _at half the cost of the annual increase in armaments_.
"This is a War Budget," said Mr. Lloyd George in presenting the
reform program of 1910. "It is for waging implacable war against
poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that
before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a
great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and
the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as
remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once
infested its forests."
Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been a leading figure in the British reform
world and in the Fabian Society for many years, speaks on this reform
movement not merely as a keen outside observer. As an advocate of more
radical measures, he argues that there is nothing Socialistic about "the
national minimum." This "philanthropic administrative Socialism," as Mr.
Wells calls it, is very remote, he says, from the spirit of his own.[69]
Yet, critical as Mr. Wells is, he also advocates a policy that could be
summed up in the single phrase, "industrial efficiency." "The advent of
a strongly Socialistic government would mean no immediate revolutionary
changes at all," he says. "There would be no doubt an educational
movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average
citizen of the next generation, and legislation _upon the lines laid
down by the principle of the 'minimum wage'_ to check the waste of our
national resources by destructive employment. Also a shifting of the
burden of taxation of enterprise to rent would begin." (My italics.) The
Liberals who are already setting these reforms on foot disclaim any
connection whatever with Socialism, but Mr. Wells argues that they do
not realize the real nature of their policy.
The establishment of this paternal "State Socialism," whether based on a
philanthropic "national minimum" or a scientific policy of "industrial
efficiency," many other "Socialists" besides those of Great Britain
consider to be the chief task of Socialism itself in our generation.
Among the latter was the late Edmond Kelly, a member of the Socialist
party in this country at the time of his death, who, in his posthumous
work, "Twentieth Century Socialism," has summed up his political faith
in much the same way as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done. He
says that three of the four chief objects of Socialism are the
organization of society, first "to prevent that overwork and
unemployment which lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and
crime"; second, "to preserve the resources of the country"; and third,
"to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest
efficiency."[70] Yet Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, as well as Mr.
Roosevelt, agree to all three of these policies. They are precisely what
the leading Socialists have called "State Socialism."
A part of the working people, also, are disposed to subordinate their
own conceptions of what is just, in spite of their own better judgment,
to an exclusive longing for an immediate trial of this kind of State
benevolence. This is expressed in the widely used phrase, "every man to
have the right to work and live,"--employed editorially, for example, by
Mr. Berger, now Socialist Congressman. What is demanded by this
principle is _not a greater proportion of the national income or an
increasing share of the control over the national government, but the
"State Socialist" remedies, employment, and the minimum wage_. In its
origin this is the begging on the part of the economically lowest
element, a class which Henry George well remarks has been degraded by
poverty until it considers that "the chance to labor is a boon."
Some years ago the municipal platform of the Milwaukee Socialists said
that it must be borne in mind "that the famine-stricken is better
served with a piece of bread than with the most brilliant program of the
future" and that "in view of the hopelessness of an immediate radical
betterment in the position of the working class" it is necessary to
emphasize the importance of attaining "the next best."[71] Here again
was admitted complete dependence on those who own the bread and have the
disposition of "the next best" in political reforms. When capitalism is
a little better organized, the working people will be guaranteed "the
next best": steady work and the food, conditions, and training necessary
to make that work efficient--just as surely as valuable slaves were
given these rights by intelligent masters or as valuable horses even are
given care and kindly treatment to-day.
"A Socialist Social Worker" has published anonymously in the _Survey_ a
letter which presents in a few words the whole Socialist position as to
this type of reform. The writer claims that the very fact that he is a
social worker shows that even as a Socialist he welcomes "every addition
to the standard of living that may be wrested or argued from the
Capitalist class," since all Socialists recognize that "no
undernourished class ever won a fight against economic exploitation, but
that the more is given the more will be demanded and secured." But he
does not feel that the material betterments have any closer relation to
Socialism.
"The new feudalism," he says, "will care for and conserve the powers of
the human industrial tool as the lord of the manor looked after the
human agricultural implement...." Here is the essential point: the
efficiency of the human industrial tool is to be improved with or
without his consent.
"Unrestrained Capitalism," says the same writer in explanation of
his prediction, "has hitherto invariably meant the physical
deterioration of the working class and the marginal disintegration
of society--the loosening of social ties and the pushing of
marginal members of society over the brink into poverty, pauperism,
vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, wife desertion and crime, _but
this deterioration is not the main indictment against capitalism_,
and will be remedied by the wiser capitalists themselves. The main
indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks
the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race."
The proposal of the social reformers, as far as the workers are
concerned aims to put an end to this deterioration, to standardize
industry or to establish a minimum of wages, leisure, health, and
industrial efficiency. The writer says that the Socialists aim at
something more than this.
"The criterion of social justice in every civilized community," he
writes, "is, and always has been, not how large or how intense is
the misery of the social debtor class, but what is done with the
social surplus of industry? It was formerly used to build pyramids,
to create a landed or ecclesiastical or literary aristocracy, to
conduct wars, or to provide the means of a sensuous life for the
majority of a privileged class, and the means of dilettantism for
the minority of it. _The difference between the near Socialist and
the true Socialist is principally that the main attention of the
former is given to the negative side of the social problem--the
condition of the submerged classes, while that of the latter is
given to the positive side of the problem--the wonderful
development, power, and life that would come to that race and the
individual if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus
of industry._"
FOOTNOTES:
[46] "Fabianism and Empire," p. 62.
[47] Articles by Hyman Strunsky on Welfare Work, _The Coming Nation_,
1910.
[48] do, do.
[49] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 93.
[50] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 81.
[51] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 101.
[52] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 3.
[53] Professor Simon Patten, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, July, 1908.
[54] Speech of President Hadley before the Brooklyn Institute of Art and
Sciences (1909).
[55] A more democratic and truthful view of the German educational
system is that of Dr. Abraham Flexner (see the _New York Times_, October
1, 1911). He says that the Germans have to solve the following kind of
an educational problem:--
"What sort of educational program can we devise that will subserve all
the various national policies--that will enable Germany to be a great
scientific nation, that will enable it to carry on an aggressive
colonial and industrial policy, and yet not throw us into the arms of
democracy? Their present educational system is their highly effective
reply.
"Our problem is a very different one," Dr. Flexner remarks. "Our
historic educational problem has been and is quite independent of any
position we might be able to achieve in the world. That problem has
always been: How can we frame conditions in which individuals can
realize the best that is in them?"
Dr. Flexner is then reported to have quoted the following from a
Springfield Republican editorial:--
"Germany could readily train her masses with a view to industrial
efficiency, whereas our industrial efficiency is only one of the
efficiencies we care about; the American wishes to develop in many other
ways, and to have his educational system help him to do it."
[56] _New York Times_, Nov. 12, 1911.
[57] F. H. Streightoff, "The Standard of Living among the Industrial
People of America."
[58] Interview with Sir Joseph Ward, New York, April 15, 1911.
[59] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 325.
[60] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 186.
[61] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 240, 243.
[62] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, pp. 250, 252.
[63] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, pp. 68-69.
[64] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 197.
[65] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 197.
[66] The _Outlook_, June, 1911.
[67] Sidney Webb, the _Contemporary Review_ (1908) and "Basis and Policy
of Socialism," pp. 83, 84.
[68] The _Survey_ (New York), 1910, pp. 81-82, 466, 731-732.
[69] H. G. Wells, "First and Last Things," p. 133.
[70] Edmond Kelly, "Twentieth-Century Socialism," p. 314.
[71] _Vorwaerts_ (Milwaukee), Feb. 3, 1898.