WAYS AND MEANS
I
If a society, a city or a territory were to guarantee the necessaries of
life to its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the
necessaries of life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would
be compelled to take possession of what is absolutely needed for
production; that is to say--land, machinery, factories, means of
transport, etc. Capital in the hands of private owners would be
expropriated, to be returned to the community.
The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned,
is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each
industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling themselves to live
without working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as
it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. There is
the reason why it must be condemned.
It is absolutely impossible that mercantile production should be carried
on in the interest of all. To desire it would be to expect the
capitalist to go beyond his province and to fulfil duties that he
_cannot_ fulfil without ceasing to be what he is--a private manufacturer
seeking his own enrichment. Capitalist organization, based on the
personal interest of each individual employer of labour, has given to
society all that could be expected of it: it has increased the
productive force of Labour. The capitalist, profiting by the revolution
effected in industry by steam, by the sudden development of chemistry
and machinery, and by other inventions of our century, has worked in his
own interest to increase the yield of human labour, and in a great
measure he has succeeded so far. But to attribute other duties to him
would be unreasonable. For example, to expect that he should use this
superior yield of labour in the interest of society as a whole, would be
to ask philanthropy and charity of him, and a capitalist enterprise
cannot be based on charity.
It now remains for society, first, to extend this greater productivity,
which is limited to certain industries, and to apply it to the general
good. But it is evident that to utilize this high productivity of
labour, so as to guarantee well-being to all, Society must itself take
possession of all means of production.
Economists, as is their wont, will not fail to remind us of the
comparative well-being of a certain category of young robust workmen,
skilled in certain special branches of industry which has been obtained
under the present system. It is always this minority that is pointed out
to us with pride. But even this well-being, which is the exclusive right
of a few, is it secure? To-morrow, maybe, negligence, improvidence, or
the greed of their employers, will deprive these privileged men of their
work, and they will pay for the period of comfort they have enjoyed with
months and years of poverty or destitution. How many important
industries--the textiles, iron, sugar, etc.--without mentioning all
sorts of short-lived trades, have we not seen decline or come to a
standstill on account of speculations, or in consequence of natural
displacement of work, or from the effects of competition amongst the
capitalists themselves! If the chief textile and mechanical industries
had to pass through such a crisis as they have passed through in 1886,
we hardly need mention the small trades, all of which have their periods
of standstill.
What, too, shall we say to the price which is paid for the relative
well-being of certain categories of workmen? Unfortunately, it is paid
for by the ruin of agriculture, the shameless exploitation of the
peasants, the misery of the masses. In comparison with the feeble
minority of workers who enjoy a certain comfort, how many millions of
human beings live from hand to mouth, without a secure wage, ready to
go wherever they are wanted; how many peasants work fourteen hours a day
for a poor pittance! Capital depopulates the country, exploits the
colonies and the countries where industries are but little developed,
dooms the immense majority of workmen to remain without technical
education, to remain mediocre even in their own trade.
This is not merely accidental, it is a _necessity_ of the capitalist
system. In order well to remunerate certain classes of workmen, peasants
_must_ become the beasts of burden of society; the country _must_ be
deserted for the town; small trades must agglomerate in the foul suburbs
of large cities, and manufacture a thousand little things for next to
nothing, so as to bring the goods of the greater industries within reach
of buyers with small salaries. That bad cloth may be sold to ill-paid
workers, garments are made by tailors who are satisfied with a
starvation wage! Eastern lands in a backward state are exploited by the
West, in order that, under the capitalist system, workers in a few
privileged industries may obtain certain limited comforts of life.
The evil of the present system is therefore not that the "surplus-value"
of production goes to the capitalist, as Rodbertus and Marx said, thus
narrowing the Socialist conception and the general view of the
capitalist system; the surplus-value itself is but a consequence of
deeper causes. The evil lies _in the possibility of a surplus-value
existing_, instead of a simple surplus not consumed by each generation;
for, that a surplus-value should exist, means that men, women and
children are compelled by hunger to sell their labour for a small part
of what this labour produces, and still more so, of what their labour is
capable of producing: But this evil will last as long as the instruments
of production belong to the few. As long as men are compelled to pay a
heavy tribute to property holders for the right of cultivating land or
putting machinery into action, and the owners of the land and the
machine are free to produce what bids fair to bring them in the largest
profits--rather than the greatest amount of useful
commodities--well-being can only be temporarily guaranteed to a very
few; it is only to be bought by the poverty of a large section of
society. It is not sufficient to distribute the profits realized by a
trade in equal parts, if at the same time thousands of other workers are
exploited. It is a case of PRODUCING THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF GOODS
NECESSARY TO THE WELL-BEING OF ALL, WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE WASTE OF
HUMAN ENERGY.
This generalized aim cannot be the aim of a private owner; and this is
why society as a whole, if it takes this view of production as its
ideal, will be compelled to expropriate all that enhances well-being
while producing wealth. It will have to take possession of land,
factories, mines, means of communication, etc., and besides, it will
have to study what products will promote general well-being, as well as
the ways and means of an adequate production.
II
How many hours a day will man have to work to produce nourishing food, a
comfortable home, and necessary clothing for his family? This question
has often preoccupied Socialists, and they generally came to the
conclusion that four or five hours a day would suffice, on condition, be
it well understood, that all men work. At the end of last century,
Benjamin Franklin fixed the limit at five hours; and if the need of
comfort is greater now, the power of production has augmented too, and
far more rapidly.
In speaking of agriculture further on, we shall see what the earth can
be made to yield to man when he cultivates it in a reasonable way,
instead of throwing seed haphazard in a badly ploughed soil as he mostly
does to-day. In the great farms of Western America, some of which cover
30 square miles, but have a poorer soil than the manured soil of
civilized countries, only 10 to 15 English bushels per English acre are
obtained; that is to say, half the yield of European farms or of
American farms in the Eastern States. And nevertheless, thanks to
machines which enable 2 men to plough 4 English acres a day, 100 men can
produce in a year all that is necessary to deliver the bread of 10,000
people at their homes during a whole year.
Thus it would suffice for a man to work under the same conditions for
_30 hours, say 6 half-days of five hours each, to have bread for a whole
year_; and to work 30 half-days to guarantee the same to a family of 5
people.
We shall also prove by results obtained nowadays, that if we took
recourse to intensive agriculture, less than 6 half-days' work could
procure bread, meat, vegetables, and even luxurious fruit for a whole
family.
Again, if we study the cost of workmen's dwellings, built in large towns
to-day, we can ascertain that to obtain, in a large English city, a
semi-detached little house, as they are built for workmen for £250, from
1400 to 1800 half-days' work of 5 hours would be sufficient. And as a
house of that kind lasts 50 years at least, it follows that 28 to 36
half-days' work a year would provide well-furnished, healthy quarters,
with all necessary comfort for a family. Whereas when hiring the same
apartment from an employer, a workman pays from 75 to 100 days' work per
year.
Mark that these figures represent the maximum of what a house costs in
England to-day, being given the defective organization of our societies.
In Belgium, workmen's houses in the _cités ouvrières_ have been built at
a much smaller cost. So that, taking everything into consideration, we
are justified in affirming that in a well-organized society 30 or 40
half-days' work a year will suffice to guarantee a perfectly comfortable
home.
There now remains clothing, the exact value of which is almost
impossible to fix, because the profits realized by a swarm of middlemen
cannot be estimated. Let us take cloth, for example, and add up all the
tribute levied on every yard of it by the landowners, the sheep owners,
the wool merchants, and all their intermediate agents, then by the
railway companies, mill-owners, weavers, dealers in ready-made clothes,
sellers and commission agents, and we shall get then an idea of what we
pay to a whole swarm of capitalists for each article of clothing. That
is why it is perfectly impossible to say how many days' work an overcoat
that you pay £3 or £4 for in a large London shop represents.
What is certain is that with present machinery it is possible to
manufacture an incredible amount of goods both cheaply and quickly.
A few examples will suffice. Thus in the United States, in 751 cotton
mills (for spinning and weaving), 175,000 men and women produce
2,033,000,000 yards of cotton goods, besides a great quantity of thread.
On the average, more than 12,000 yards of cotton goods alone are
obtained by a 300 days' work of nine and one-half hours each, say 40
yards of cotton in 10 hours. Admitting that a family needs 200 yards a
year at most, this would be equivalent to 50 hours' work, say _10
half-days of 5 hours each_. And we should have thread besides; that is
to say, cotton to sew with, and thread to weave cloth with, so as to
manufacture woolen stuffs mixed with cotton.
As to the results obtained by weaving alone, the official statistics of
the United States teach us that in 1870, if workmen worked 13 or 14
hours a day, they made 10,000 yards of white cotton goods in a year;
sixteen years later (1886) they wove 30,000 yards by working only 55
hours a week.
Even in printed cotton goods they obtained, weaving and printing
included, 32,000 yards in 2670 hours of work a year--say about 12 yards
an hour. Thus to have your 200 yards of white and printed cotton goods
_17 hours' work a year_ would suffice. It is necessary to remark that
raw material reaches these factories in about the same state as it comes
from the fields, and that the transformations gone through by the piece
before it is converted into goods are completed in the course of these
17 hours. But to _buy_ these 200 yards from the tradesman, a well-paid
workman must give _at the very least_ 10 to 15 days' work of 10 hours
each, say 100 to 150 hours. And as to the English peasant, he would
have to toil for a month, or a little more, to obtain this luxury.
By this example we already see that by working _50 half-days per year_
in a well-organized society we could dress better than the lower middle
classes do to-day.
But with all this we have only required 60 half-days' work of 5 hours
each to obtain the fruits of the earth, 40 for housing, and 50 for
clothing, which only makes half a year's work, as the year consists of
300 working-days if we deduct holidays.
There remain still 150 half-days' work which could be made use of for
other necessaries of life--wine, sugar, coffee, tea, furniture,
transport, etc., etc.
It is evident that these calculations are only approximative, but they
can also be proved in another way. When we take into account how many,
in the so-called civilized nations, produce nothing, how many work at
harmful trades, doomed to disappear, and lastly, how many are only
useless middlemen, we see that in each nation the number of real
producers could be doubled. And if, instead of every 10 men, 20 were
occupied in producing useful commodities, and if society took the
trouble to economize human energy, those 20 people would only have to
work 5 hours a day without production decreasing. And it would suffice
to reduce the waste of human energy which is going on in the rich
families with the scores of useless servants, or in the administrations
which occupy one official to every ten or even six inhabitants, and to
utilize those forces, to augment immensely the productivity of a nation.
In fact, work could be reduced to four or even three hours a day, to
produce all the goods that are produced now.
After studying all these facts together, we may arrive, then, at the
following conclusion: Imagine a society, comprising a few million
inhabitants, engaged in agriculture and a great variety of
industries--Paris, for example, with the Department of Seine-et-Oise.
Suppose that in this society all children learn to work with their hands
as well as with their brains. Admit that all adults, save women, engaged
in the education of their children, bind themselves to work _5 hours a
day_ from the age of twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, and
that they follow occupations they have chosen themselves in any one of
those branches of human work which in this city are considered
_necessary_. Such a society could in return guarantee well-being to all
its members, a well-being more substantial than that enjoyed to-day by
the middle classes. And, moreover, each worker belonging to this society
would have at his disposal at least 5 hours a day which he could devote
to science, art, and individual needs which do not come under the
category of _necessities_, but will probably do so later on, when man's
productivity will have augmented, and those objects will no longer
appear luxurious or inaccessible.