Socialism As It Is Part 13

There are still other improvements in education which have already been tested and found to produce the most valuable results. Perhaps the most important ones besides those demanded by Dr. Eliot are the providing of free or cheap lunches for undernourished children, and the system, already widespread in England and the other countries, of furnishing scholarships to carry the brighter children of the impecunious cla.s.ses through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this policy of scholarships would lead us to full democracy in education only if by its means the child of the poorest individual had exactly the same opportunities as those of the richest. _It is not enough that a few children only should be so advanced; but that of impecunious children, who const.i.tute 90 per cent of the population, a sufficient number should be advanced to fill 90 per cent of those positions, in industry, government, and society, which require a higher education._

There is no doubt that this actual equality in the "battle of life" was the expectation and intention of those who settled and built up the western part of the United States, as it has been that of all the democracies of new countries. But this reform alone would certainly require not one but several billion dollars a year; as much as all the other improvements mentioned by Dr. Eliot put together. We may estimate, then, that the application of the principle of democracy or equality of opportunity to education in accordance with the present national income, would require the immediate expenditure of three or four billion dollars on the nation's children of school age, or ten times the sum we now expend, and a corresponding increase as the wealth of the nation develops. This would be a considerable proportion of the nation's income, but not too much to spend on the children, who const.i.tute nearly half the population and are at the age where the money spent is most productive.

Here is a program for the coming generation which would be indorsed by a very large part of the democrats of the past. But nothing could make it more clear that political democracy is bankrupt even in its new collective form, that it has no notion of the method by which its own ideals are to be obtained. For no reformer dreams that this perfectly sensible and practicable program will be carried out until there has been some revolutionary change in society. "I know that some people will say that it is impossible to increase public expenditure in the total, and therefore impossible to increase it for the schools," says Dr.

Eliot. "I deny both allegations. Public expenditure has been greatly increased within the last thirty years, and so has school expenditure"

(written in 1902). But Dr. Eliot doubtless realizes that what he advocates for the present moment, the expenditure of five times as much as we now invest in public schools, at the present rate of progress, might not be accomplished in a century, and that by that time society might well have attained a degree of development which would demand five or ten times as much again. Dr. Eliot is well aware of the opposition that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest indication how it is to be overcome. The well-to-do usually feel obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and even where public inst.i.tutions are at their disposal they are forced to support these children through all the years of study. This is expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they are the chief taxpayers, to _pay for_ the extension of these same opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?

In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school system into three cla.s.ses: that for the upper cla.s.s, that for the middle cla.s.s, and that for the ma.s.ses of the people--and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one cla.s.s to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed _easy_, but that he be given an _equal_ opportunity with the child of the rich as far as all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.

Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position of the upper cla.s.ses as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that this pa.s.sage from one cla.s.s to another does occasionally take place, and is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual, as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions.

This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower cla.s.ses may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system.

All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling cla.s.s promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that suits it will only be augmented--and universal equality of opportunity will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers "State Socialism"

will take up from the ma.s.ses and equip for higher positions will constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few have been in any way equal to those of the higher cla.s.ses, nor will even such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority.

Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of cla.s.s schools stand as an isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of private inst.i.tutions. The very cla.s.ses of taxpayers who control city and other local governments and school boards are educating their own children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete with the children of the middle cla.s.ses are now subjected to the necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true there.

In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some of the primary schools, _though supported wholly or largely by public funds, charge a tuition fee_. The fact that a very small per cent of the children of the poor are given scholarships which relieve them of this fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle cla.s.ses, without in any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are attended chiefly by the children of the "lower middle cla.s.ses," salaried employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the children of the professional cla.s.ses on the one hand or of the best-paid workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New York City also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower middle from the working cla.s.ses, and to charge fees in all secondary schools so as to bring a new source of income and _decrease_ the number of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether automatic or consciously stimulated, towards cla.s.s (or caste) education--such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or indirectly encourage--usually under the cloak of industrial education.

The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people, this would mean that the latter have only a _hundredth part_ of the former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools, and of these but 6 complete the course.

The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the ma.s.ses, owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the well-to-do, the compet.i.tion becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or girl who must struggle not only against this excessive compet.i.tion, but also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task.

It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises _more rapidly_ than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never happened except when the ma.s.ses obtained political power and made full use of it _against_ the cla.s.s in control of industry and government.

No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the cla.s.ses might be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention, not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their progress _when compared with that of the capitalist cla.s.ses, i.e._ when measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords.

_No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._ Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or cla.s.s hatred. But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed.

It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous cla.s.s of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day.

Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to counteract it. The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less--a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible a.s.surance of the maximum of progress.

FOOTNOTES:

[83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol. II, p. 515.

[84] John Mitch.e.l.l, "Organized Labor" (Preface).

[85] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 100.

[86] For this and later quotations from Dr. Eliot in this chapter, see his little book ent.i.tled "More Money for the Public Schools."

[87] See article by Dr. Eliot in the _School Review_, April, 1909.

[88] "Knowledge and Education," the _Independent_, 1910.

[89] Dexter, "History of Education in the United States," p. 173.

CHAPTER VIII

THE "FIRST STEP" TOWARDS SOCIALISM

"State Socialism" as I have described it will doubtless continue to be the guiding policy of governments during a large part, if not all, of the present generation. Capitalism, in this new collectivist form, must bring about extremely deep-seated and far-reaching changes in society.

And every step that it takes in the nationalization of industry and the appropriation of land rent would also be a step in Socialism, _provided_ the rents and profits so turned into the coffers of the State were not used entirely for the benefit either of industry or of the community as a whole, as it is now const.i.tuted, but were reserved in part _for the special benefit of the less wealthy, less educated, and less advantageously placed, so as gradually to equalize income, influence, and opportunity_.

But what, as matter of fact, are the ways in which the new revenues are likely to be used before the Socialists are either actually or practically in control of the government? First of all, they will be used for the further development of industry itself and of schemes which aid industry, as by affording cheaper credit, cheaper transportation, cheaper lumber, cheaper coal, etc., which will chiefly benefit the manufacturers, since all these raw materials and services are so much more largely used in industry than in private consumption.

Secondly, the new sources of government revenue will be used to relieve certain older forms of taxation. The very moderately graduated income and inheritance taxes which are now common, small capitalists have tolerated princ.i.p.ally on the ground that the State is in absolute need of them for essential expenses. We may soon expect a period when the present rapid expansion of this form of taxation as well as other direct taxes on industry, building, corporations, etc., will be checked somewhat by the new revenues obtained from the profits of government enterprises and the taxation of ground values. Indirect taxation of the consuming public in general, through tariffs and internal revenue taxes, will also be materially lightened. As soon as new and larger sources of income are created, the cry of the consumers for relief will be louder than ever, and since a large part of consumption is that of the capitalists in manufacture, the cry will be heard. This will mean lower prices. But in the long run salaries and wages accommodate themselves to prices, so that this reform, beneficial as it may be, cannot be accepted as meaning, for the ma.s.ses, more than a merely temporary relief. A third form of tax reduction would be the special exemption of the poorer cla.s.ses from even the smallest direct taxation. But as employers and wage boards, in fixing wages, will take this reduction into account, as well as the lower prices and rents, such exemptions will effect no great or lasting change in the division of the national income between capitalists and receivers of salaries and wages.

A third way in which the new and vastly increased incomes of the national and local governments can be expended is the communistic way, as in developing commercial and technical education, in protecting the public health, in building model tenements, in decreasing the cost of traveling for health or business, and in promoting all measures that are likely to increase industrial efficiency and profits without too great cost.

A fourth way in which the new revenue may be expended, before the Socialists are in actual or practical control, would be in somewhat increasing the wages and somewhat shortening the hours of the State and munic.i.p.al employees, who will soon const.i.tute a very large proportion of the community. Here again it is impossible to expect any but a Socialist government to go very far. As I have shown, it is to be questioned whether any capitalistic administration, however advanced, would increase real wages (wages measured by their purchasing power), except in so far as the higher wages will result in a corresponding or greater increase in efficiency, and so in the profits made from labor. And the same law applies to most other governmental (or private) expenditures on behalf of labor, whether in shortened hours, insurance, improved conditions, or any other form.

The very essence of capitalist collectivism is that the share of the total profits which goes to the ruling cla.s.s should not be decreased, and if possible should be augmented. In spite of material improvements the economic gulf between the cla.s.ses, during the period it dominates, will either remain as it is, or become wider and deeper than before. On the ground of the health and ultimate working efficiency of the present and future generation, hours may be considerably shortened, and the labor of women and children considerably curtailed. Insurance against death, old age, sickness, and accident will doubtless be taken over by the government. Mothers who are unable to take care of their children will probably be pensioned, as now proposed in France, and many children will be publicly fed in school, as in a number of the British and Continental places. The most complete code of labor legislation is practically a.s.sured; for, as government ownership extends, the State will become to some extent the model employer.

A quarter of a century ago, especially in Great Britain and the United States, but also in other countries, the method of allaying discontent was to distract public attention from politics altogether by stimulating the chase after private wealth. But as private wealth is more and more difficult to attain, this policy is rapidly replaced by the very opposite tactics, to keep the people absorbed in the political chase after the material benefits of economic reform. For this purpose every effort is being used to stimulate political interest, to popularize the measures of the new State capitalism, to foster public movements in their behalf, and finally to grant the reforms, not as a new form of capitalism, but as "concessions to public opinion." At present it is only the most powerful of the large capitalists and the most radical of the small that have fully adapted themselves to the new policies. But this will cause no serious delay, for among policies, as elsewhere, the fittest are surely destined to survive.

Ten years ago it would have been held as highly improbable that we would enter into such a collectivist period in half a century. Already a large part of the present generation expect to see it in their lifetime. And the constantly accelerated developments of recent years justify the belief of many that we may find ourselves far advanced in "State Socialism" before another decade has pa.s.sed.

The question that must now be answered by the statesman as opposed to the mere politician, by the publicist as opposed to the mere journalist, is, not how soon the program of "State Socialism" will be put into effect, but what is going to be the att.i.tude of the ma.s.ses towards it. A movement exists that is already expressing and organizing their discontent with capitalism in whatever form. It promises to fill this function still more fully and vigorously in proportion as collectivist capitalism develops. I refer to the international revolutionary movement that finds its chief expression in the federated Socialist parties. The majority of the best-known spokesmen of this movement agree that social reform is advancing; yet most of them say, with Kautsky, that control of the capitalists over industry and government is advancing even more rapidly, partly by means of these very reforms, so that the _Machtverhaeltnisse_, or distribution of political and economic power between the various social cla.s.ses, is even becoming less favorable to the ma.s.ses than it was before. The one thing they feel is that no such capitalist society will ever be willing to ameliorate the condition of the non-capitalists to such a degree that the latter will get an increasing _proportion_ of the products of industry or of the benefits of legislation, or an increased influence over government. The capitalists will never do anything to disturb radically the existing balance of power.

While Socialists have not always conceded that the capitalists will themselves undertake, without compulsion, large measures of political democracy and social reform,--even of the capitalistic variety,--nearly all of the most influential are now coming to base their whole policy on this now very evident tendency, and some have done so for many years past. For instance, it has been clear to many from the time of Karl Marx that it would be necessary for capitalist society itself to nationalize or munic.i.p.alize businesses that become monopolized, without any reference to Socialism or the Socialists.

"These private monopolies have become unbearable," says Kautsky, "not simply for the wage workers, but for all cla.s.ses of society who do not share in their ownership," and he adds that it is only the weakness of the bourgeois (the smaller capitalist) as opposed to capital (the large capitalist) that hinders him from taking effective action. Indeed, one of the chief respects in which history has pursued a somewhat different course from that expected by Marx has been in the failure of capitalist society to attempt _immediately_ this solution of the trust problem through government ownership. Marx expected that this attempt would necessarily be made as soon as the monopolies reached an advanced state, and that the resulting economic revolution would develop into a Socialist revolution. But this monopolistic period has come, the trusts are rapidly dominating the whole field of industry and government, and yet it seems improbable that they will be forced to any final compromise with the small capitalist investors and consumers for some years to come. In the meanwhile, no doubt, the process of nationalization will begin, but too late to fulfill Marx's expectation, for the large and small capitalists will have time to become better united, and their combined control over government will have had time to grow more secure than ever. The new partnership of capitalism and the State will, no doubt, represent the small capitalists as well as the large, but there is no sign that the working people will be able to take advantage of the coming transformation for any non-capitalist purpose. Nor did Marx expect national ownership to increase the relative strength of the workers _unless it was accompanied by a political revolution_.

Another vast capitalist reform predicted by Socialists since the Communist Manifesto (1847) is nationalization or munic.i.p.alization of the ground rent or unearned increment of land. At first Kautsky and others were inclined to expect that nothing would be done in this direction until the working cla.s.ses themselves achieved political power, but it has always been seen from the days of Marx that the industrial capitalists had no particular reason for wishing to be burdened with a parasitic cla.s.s of landlords that weighed on their shoulders as much as on those of the rest of the people. Not only do industrial capitalists pay heavy rents to landlords, but the rent paid by the wage worker also has to be paid indirectly and in part by the industrial capitalist: "The quant.i.ty of wealth that a landlord can appropriate from the capitalist cla.s.s becomes larger in proportion as the general demand for land increases, in proportion as population grows, in proportion as the capitalist cla.s.s needs land, _i.e._ in proportion as the capitalist system of production expands. In proportion with all this, rent rises; that is to say, the aggregate amount of wealth increases which the landlord cla.s.s can slice off--either directly or indirectly--from the surplus that would otherwise be grabbed by the capitalist cla.s.s alone."[90]

The industrial capitalists, then, have very motive to put an end to this kind of parasitism, and to use the funds secured, through confiscatory taxation of the unearned increment of land, to lessen their own taxation, to nationalize those fundamental industries that can only be made in this way to subserve the interests of the capitalist cla.s.s as a whole (instead of some part of it merely), and to undertake through government those costly enterprises which are needed by all industry, but which give too slow returns to attract the capitalist investor.

This enormous reform, in land taxation, which alone would put into the hands of governments ultimately almost a third of the capital of modern nations, was considered by Marx, in all its early stages, as purely capitalistic, "_a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of capitalism, and to establish it in fact on a still larger foundation at present_."[91] Indeed, I have shown in a previous chapter that radical reformers who advocated this single-tax idea, along with the nationalization and munic.i.p.alization of monopolies, do so with the conscious purpose of reviving capitalism and making it more permanent, precisely as Marx says. The great Socialist wrote the above phrase in 1881 (in a recently published letter to Sorge of New York) after reading Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," which had just appeared. He calls attention to the fact that James Mill and other capitalistic economists had long before recommended that land rent should be paid to the State so as to serve as a subst.i.tute for taxes, and that he, himself, had advocated it in the Manifesto of 1847--among _transitional measures_.

Marx says that he and Engels "inserted this appropriation of ground rent by the State among many other demands," which, as also stated in the Manifesto, "are self-contradictory and must be such of _necessity_." He explains what he means by this in the same letter. In the very year of the Manifesto he had written (in his book against Proudhon) that this measure was "a frank statement of the hatred felt by the industrial capitalist for the landowner, who seems to him to be a useless, unnecessary member in the organism of Capitalist society." Marx demanded "the abolition of property in land, and the application of all land rents to public purposes," _not because this is in any sense the smallest installment of Socialism, but because it is a progressive capitalistic measure_. While it strengthens capitalism by removing "a useless, unnecessary member," and by placing it "on a still larger foundation than it has at the present," it also matures it and makes it ready for Socialism--ready, that is to say, as soon as _the working people capture the government and turn the capitalists out, but not a day sooner_.[92] Until that time even the most grandiose reform is merely "a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of capitalism."

Other "transitional measures" mentioned by Marx and Engels in 1847, some of which had already been taken up as "Socialistically-fringed attempts to save the rule of capitalism" even before their death were:--

The heavily graduated income tax.

The abolition of inheritance.

A government bank with an exclusive monopoly.

A partial nationalization of factories.

(No doubt, the part they would select would be that operated by the trusts.) Government cultivation of waste lands.

Here we have a program closely resembling that of "State capitalism." It omits the important labor legislation for increasing efficiency, since this was unprofitable under compet.i.tive and extra-governmental capitalism, and in Marx's time had not yet appeared; _e.g._ the minimum wage, a shorter working day, and workingmen's insurance. As Marx and Engels mention, however, the subst.i.tution of industrial education for child labor (one of the most important and typical of these reforms), they would surely have included other measures of the same order, had they been practicable and under discussion at the time.