The Book of Life Part 32

Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pa.s.s a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. Congress pa.s.sed a law, very carefully worded so that no one could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a "labor market," consisting of those members of the community who, in the formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled foremen selected those who offered the largest quant.i.ty of labor power for the stated wage.

So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of being discharged. This process is known as "speeding up," and its purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quant.i.ty of energy in exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because experience has proven that the greatest quant.i.ty of energy can be obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above forty or forty-five.

I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, "The Jungle"

and "King Coal," in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books.

It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In every capitalist country of the world the ma.s.ses of the people are herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for whom they work; they have no human relationship, either with their work or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off to maintain a cla.s.s of idlers, whose activities they know only through the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this compet.i.tion, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle to "get ahead" a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the young and energetic to "go West"; but now the wave of capitalism has reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more frontier.

The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:

"A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox."

He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and inevitably therefore he is superst.i.tious. Being alone, he is helpless against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.

But consider the capitalist system--how different the conditions of its workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon his knees and pray to G.o.d to fix it. All the training of his life teaches him the relationship of cause and effect, the adjustment of means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city, and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to G.o.d.

Such is the psychology of the modern working cla.s.s; and the supreme achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery for themselves; it was made for them by middle-cla.s.s men, lawyers and teachers and writers--Fourier, Owen, Marx, La.s.salle. The modern doctrine is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms, and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish to break the power of cla.s.s ownership and control of the instruments and means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some system under which the instruments and means of production are collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning cla.s.s, the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the "social revolutionary"

doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word "revolutionary" is to be divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the present masters of industry.

CHAPTER LVI

THE CAPITALIST PROCESS

(How profits are made under the present industrial system and what becomes of them.)

We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist order, basing our argument on facts which are admitted by everyone, including the most ardent defenders of the present system.

All men have to have certain material things which we describe as goods.

As these goods do not produce themselves, it is necessary that some should work. The workers must have tools; also they must have access to the land and the sources of raw materials. These means of production are owned by some individuals in the community, and this ownership gives them power to direct the work of the rest. Those who own the land and the natural sources of wealth we call capitalists, or business men, and those who do not own these things, or whose share in them is insignificant, are the proletariat, or working cla.s.s.

If you state to the average American that there is a capitalist cla.s.s and a proletariat in this country, he will point out that many who are now members of the capitalist cla.s.s were originally members of the proletariat; they have worked hard and saved, and acc.u.mulated property.

But this is merely confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians turn into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is important to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter the fact that there are two cla.s.ses, capitalist and proletarian. Consider, by way of ill.u.s.trating, a field with trees growing on it; we have earth, and we have trees, and the distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots of the trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the earth and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches fall, and in the course of time are turned once more to earth. There are all sorts of stages between earth and tree, and between tree and earth; but you would not therefore say that the word "earth" and the word "tree" are misnomers.

The working men go to the business man and apply for work. The business man gives them work, and takes their product, and offers it in the market at a price which allows him a profit above cost. If he can sell at a profit, he repeats the process, and the worker has a job. If he cannot sell at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his workers out of a job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a short time at a loss; but if he keeps the factory going simply for the benefit of his workers, and with no expectation of ever making a profit, that is a form of charity, and not the common system under which our business is now carried on.

So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages upon the ability of the business man to make a profit. The worker's life is inextricably bound up with the profit of the capitalist--no profit for the capitalist, no life for the worker. The capitalist, going out to look for markets for his goods, is seeking, not merely profit for himself, but life for his workers.

Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his total receipts for labor, another percentage for raw materials, another percentage for his overhead charges, and the rest is profit in various forms, rent to the landlord, interest to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder.

All this total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to other individuals for goods or services, and so the money keeps circulating, and business keeps going. That is as deep as the average mind probes into the process.

But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the course of all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get a larger share than other individuals. Our government collects an income tax, and thus we have statistics representing what people are willing to admit about the share they get. In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family out of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family out of twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 19,000 families which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a year, and 300 with over $1,000,000 a year.

Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a year obviously have to spend the greater part of their income upon their immediate living expenses. But the families that get $50,000 a year do not need to spend everything, and most of them take the greater part of their income and reinvest it--that is, they spend it upon the creating of new machinery of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings, the whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry.

Exactly what proportion of the total product of industry is thus taken and reinvested no one can say; but this we know, our cities are growing at an enormous rate, our manufacturing power is increasing by leaps and bounds, we are perfecting processes which enable one man to do the work of a hundred men, which increase the product of one man's labor a hundredfold. All this goes on blindly, automatically; a Niagara of goods of all sorts is poured out, and we call it "prosperity."

But then suddenly a strange and bewildering thing happens. All at once, and without warning, orders fall off, values begin to drop, business collapses, factories are shut down, and millions of men are thrown out of jobs. Merchants look at one another with blanched faces; each one has been counting on paying his bills with the profits he was going to make, and now his profits are gone, and he can't pay. The newspapers and magazines keep insisting that it can't be true, that business is going to revive next week, that prosperity is just ahead. But the factories stay shut, and the millions of men stay idle.

This is the condition in which we find ourselves as I write this book.

It has been happening regularly in our history every ten years or so, ever since America started; we have had a hundred years to reflect upon it and to probe into the causes of it, and such is business intelligence in the most enlightened country in the world, you may search the pages of our newspapers from the first column of millionaire divorce suits to the last column of "situations wanted," and nowhere can you find one word to explain this mysterious calamity of "hard times"--how it comes to happen to our social system, or what could be done to prevent it! To supply this deficiency in present day thinking is our next task.

CHAPTER LVII

HARD TIMES

(Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing, and why abundant production brings distress instead of plenty.)

Let us picture a small island inhabited by six men. One of these men fishes, another hunts, another gathers cocoanuts, another raises goats for clothing, and so on. The six men among them produce by their labor all the necessities of their lives, and they exchange their products with one another. The island is productive, and each of the men is free, and makes his exchanges on equal terms; on that basis the industry of the island can continue indefinitely, and there will never be any trouble. There may sometimes be over-production, but it will not cause anyone to starve. If the fisherman is unusually lucky one day, he will be able to take a vacation for a few days, living on his fish and the products he exchanges for his fish. For the sake of convenience in future reference, I will describe this happy island as a "free" society; meaning that each of the members of this society has access on equal terms to the sources of wealth, and each owns the product of his own labor, without paying tribute to any one else for the right to labor, or to exchange his products.

But now let us suppose that one of the men on the island is strong and aggressive; he takes a club and knocks down the other five men, and compels them to sign a piece of paper agreeing that hereafter he is the president of the land development company of the island, the chief stockholder in the goat-raising company, and owner of the fishing concession and the cocoanut grove; also, that hereafter goods shall not be bartered in kind, but shall be exchanged for money, and that he is the banker, and also the government, with the right to issue money. In this society you will find that the real work, the actually productive work, is done by five men, instead of by six, and these five do not get the full value of their labor. The fisherman will fish, but his product will no longer belong to himself; he will get part of it as wages, while the "business man" takes charge of the balance. So when there is a lucky day, there will be prosperity in the fishing industry, but this prosperity will not benefit the fisherman; he will have only his wage, and when he has caught too many fish, he will not have a few days'

vacation, but will be out of a job.

And exactly the same thing will happen to the goat-herd. He will probably have work all the year round, because goats have to be tended, but he will get barely enough to keep him alive, and the surplus skins and milk will go to the owner of the no-longer-happy island. Perhaps it will occur to the owner that the man who raises cocoanuts might also keep an eye on the goats, and so the goat-herd will be permanently out of a job, and will turn into what is called a tramp, or vagrant.

Inasmuch as everything to eat on the island belongs to the owner, the ex-goat-herd will be tempted to become a criminal, and so it will be necessary for the owner to arm the cocoanut man with a club and make him into a policeman; or perhaps he will organize the fisherman and the hunter into a militia for the preservation of law and order. They will be glad to serve him, because, owing to the extreme productivity of the island, they will be out of jobs a great part of the time, and but for the generosity of the business man, would have no way of earning a living.

But suppose that the cocoanut man should invent a machine for gathering a year's supply of nuts in a week; suppose the fisherman should devise a scheme to fill his boat with fish in a few minutes; and suppose that as a result of these inventions the business man got so rich that he moved to Paris, and no longer saw his workers, or even knew their names. Under these conditions you can see that overproduction and unemployment might increase on the island; and also the business man might seem less human and lovable to his wage slaves, and might need a larger police force. It might even happen that he would discover the need of a propaganda department, in order to keep his police force loyal, and a secret service to make sure that agitators did not get into the schools.

The five islanders, having filled all the barns and storehouses, would be turned out to starve; and when they asked the reason, they would be told it was because they had produced a surplus of food. This may sound grotesque, but it is what is being said to 5,000,000 men in America as I write. There are clothing-workers who are going about in rags, and they are told it is because they have produced too much clothing. There are shoe-workers whose shoes are falling off their feet, and they are told it is because they have produced too many shoes. There are carpenters who have no homes, and they are told that a great many homes are needed, but unfortunately it doesn't pay the builders to go ahead just now. This may sound like a caricature, but it happens to be the most prominent single fact in the consciousness of 5,000,000 Americans at the close of the year 1921. No wonder they are discontented with the present order.

The solution of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 unemployed cannot be kept permanently from understanding it. The reason the five men on the island are starving is because one man owns the island and the others own nothing. If the island were community property, the five men would each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses, and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of America owned the productive machinery of America, then instantly the unemployment crisis would pa.s.s like an evil dream. The farm-workers who need shoes would exchange their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the starving shoe-workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, and so the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on all the way down the line. There is only one thing necessary to make this possible, and that is the thing which we have agreed to call the social revolution.

CHAPTER LVIII

THE IRON RING

(a.n.a.lyzes further the profit system, which strangles production, and makes true prosperity impossible.)

We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a surplus which is taken by the exploiter; and that under the modern system this surplus must be sold at a profit before production can continue. The vital fact in such a society is that the worker has not the money to buy back all that he produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product should acc.u.mulate. When this happens, production must be cut down, and during that period the worker is without a job, and without means of living. The fact that he needs the product does not help him; the point is that he has not the money to buy it. In such a society the productive machinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled by a profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make sales, and restricting production according to the prospect of sales. So the actual product bears no relationship to the possible product, and people who live in an exploiting society can form no conception of true prosperity.

For, you see, the market is limited by the compet.i.tive wage system. We have seen that in our own rich, prosperous country only one family out of six has more than $1,000 a year income; only one family out of twelve has $2,000 a year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses are bursting with goods; a family const.i.tutes a market of so many dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system is concerned, that family is non-existent; that family stops consuming, and the productive machinery is halted to that extent.

I have been accustomed to portray the profit system under the simile of an iron ring riveted about the body of a baby. That ring would cause the baby some discomfort at the beginning, but it would not be serious, and the baby would get used to it. But as the baby grew the trouble caused by the ring would increase, and finally there would come a time when the baby would be suffering from a whole complication of troubles, and for each of these troubles there would be but one remedy--break the ring. Does the baby cry all the time? Break the ring! Is its digestion defective? Break the ring! Is it threatened with convulsions or with blood poisoning? Break the ring!

Here is our industrial society, growing at a rate never equalled by any human baby; and here is this iron ring riveted about its middle. Here is poverty, here is unemployment, here is graft, here is crime, here is war and plague and famine; and for all these evils there is but one cause, and but one remedy. Break the ring! Set production free from the strangulation of the profit system.

I will admit that there may have been a time in the history of the social infant when this ring was necessary. I admit that if the great industrial machine was to be constructed, it was necessary that the ma.s.s of the people should consume only part of what they produced, and should allow the balance to be reinvested as capital. But now it has been done, and the process is complete. We have a machine capable of producing many times more than we can consume; shall we still go on building that machine? Shall we go on starving ourselves, to save the money, to multiply over and over again the products, in order that we may be thrown out of work, and be starved even more completely?

A few generations ago we had in colonial America a society that in part at least was "free." In that society everybody got the necessities of life. They did not have the modern Sunday supplement and the moving picture show, but they had bread and meat and good substantial clothing, and furniture so well made that we still preserve it. The children in those days grew up to be strong and st.u.r.dy men and women, who would have seen nothing to envy in the bodies or minds of the slum population of New York and Chicago. In short, they had all the true necessities of life; and yet their work was done by hand, the power process was unknown and undreamed of.