The Book of Life Part 35

In exactly the same way, under socialized industry, we shall probably make street-car traffic free, and then railroad traffic; we shall abolish water meters and gas meters and electric light meters, also telephone charges, except perhaps for long distances, and telegraph tolls for personal messages. Then, presently, we shall find ourselves with such a large wheat crop that we shall make bread free; and then music and theatres and clothing and books. At present we use furniture and clothing as a means of manifesting our economic superiority to our fellowmen. One of the most charming books in our language is Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s," in which these processes are studied. We shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the idea of cla.s.s and of cla.s.s distinction, before we could undertake to supply people with all the clothing they wanted free of charge.

The Russian theorists made haste to carry out these ideas all at once; they tried to leap several centuries in the evolution of Russian society. They ordained complete Communism in land; but the peasants would have nothing to do with such notions--each wanted his own land, and what he produced on it. The Soviets have now been forced to give way, not merely to the peasants, but to the traders; and so we see once again that it is better to take one step forward than to take several steps forward and then several steps backward. The Russian revolution is not yet completed, so no one can say how many steps backward it will be forced to take.

This revolution was an interesting combination of the ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism. The trade unionists seized the factories, and made an effort at democratic control of industry. At the same time the state was overthrown by a political party, the Bolsheviks, who set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Because of civil war and outside invasion, the democratic elements in the experiment have been more and more driven into the background, and the authority of the state has correspondingly increased. This causes us to think of the Soviet system as necessarily opposed to democracy, but this is not in any way a necessary thing. There is no inevitable connection between industrial control by the workers and a dictatorship over the state. In Germany the state is proceeding to organize a national parliament of industry, and to provide for management of the factories by the labor unions. The Italian government has promised to do the same thing. These, of course, are capitalist governments, and they will keep their promises only as they are made to; but it is a perfectly possible thing that in either of these countries a vote of the people might change the government, and put in authority men who would really proceed to turn industry over to the control of the workers. That would be the Soviet or Syndicalist system, brought about by democratic means, without dictatorship or civil war.

Another group of revolutionary thinkers whose theories must be mentioned are the Anarchists. The word Anarchy is commonly used as a synonym for chaos and disorder, which it does not mean at all. It means the absence of authority; and it is characteristic of people's view of life that they are unable to conceive of there being such a thing as order, unless it is maintained by force. The theory of the Anarchist is that order is a necessity of the human spirit, and that people would conform to the requirements of a just order by their own free will and without external compulsion. The Anarchist believes that the state is an instrument of cla.s.s oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the industries to be organized by free a.s.sociations of the people who work in them.

Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists: Jesus, for example, and Sh.e.l.ley and Th.o.r.eau and Tolstoi, and in our time Kropotkin. These men voiced the highest aspirations of the human spirit, and the form of society which they dreamed is the one we set before us as our final goal. But the world does not leap into perfection all at once, and meantime here we have the capitalist system and the capitalist state, and what att.i.tude shall we take to them? There are impa.s.sioned idealists who refuse to make any terms with injustice, or to submit to compulsion, and these preach the immediate destruction of capitalist government, and capitalist government responds with prison and torture, and so we have some Anarchists who throw bombs.

There are those who call themselves "philosophic" Anarchists, wishing to indicate thereby that they preach this doctrine, but do not attempt to carry it into action as yet. Some among these verge toward the Communist point of view, and call themselves Communist-anarchists; such was Kropotkin, whose theories of social organization you will find in his book "The Conquest of Bread." There are others who call themselves Syndicalist-anarchists, finding their centers of free a.s.sociation in the radical labor unions.

After the Russian revolution, the Anarchists found themselves in a dilemma, and their groups were torn apart like every other party and cla.s.s in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a workers' state, and what att.i.tude should the Anarchists take toward that? Many of them stood out for their principles, and resisted the Bolshevik state, and put the Bolsheviks under the embarra.s.sing necessity of throwing them into jail. We good orthodox Americans, who are accustomed to dump Socialists and Communists and Syndicalists and Anarchists all together into one common kettle, took Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and shipped them over to Russia, where we thought they belonged. Now our capitalist newspapers find it strange that these Anarchists do not like the Russian government any better than they like the American government!

On the other hand, a great many Anarchists have suddenly found themselves compelled by the Russian situation to face the facts of life.

They have decided that a government is not such a bad thing after all--when it is your own government! Robert Minor, for example, has recanted his Anarchist position, and joined the Communists in advocating the dropping of all differences among the workers, all theories as to the future, and concentrating upon the immediate task of overthrowing capitalist government and keeping it overthrown. In every civilized nation the Russian revolution has had this effect upon the extreme revolutionists. It has given them a definite aim and a definite program upon which they can unite; it has presented to capitalist government the answer of force to force; it has shown the masters of industry in precise and definite form what they have to face--unless they set themselves immediately and in good faith to the task of establishing real democracy in industry.

CHAPTER LXV

SOCIAL REVOLUTION

(How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we may prepare to meet it.)

From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circ.u.mstances in each country produce different inst.i.tutions. Suppose that back in the days of the French monarchy some one asked you how France was going to be governed as a political republic; how would elections be held, what would be the powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who would choose the president, what would be the duties of each? Who can explain why in France and England the executive is responsible to the parliament and must answer its questions, while in the United States the executive is an autocrat, responsible to no one for four years? Who could have foreseen that in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the const.i.tution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a democracy, the const.i.tution would be rigid, and the supreme power of rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of reactionary lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar surprises in the social revolution, and similar differences between what things pretend to be and what they are.

I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an egg. You examine it, and apparently it is all egg; but then suddenly something begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all chicken. If, however, you investigate, you discover that the chicken had been forming inside the egg for some time. I know that there is a chicken now forming inside our social egg; but having realized the complexity of social phenomena, I no longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the size and color of the chicken.

Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution to a child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, but he knows also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a thousand dangerous possibilities, and all he can do is to watch the process and be prepared to meet each emergency as it arises. The birth process consists of one pang after another, but no one can say which pang will complete the birth, or whether it will be completed at all. Karl Marx is author of the saying that "force is the midwife of progress," so you may see that I am not the inventor of this simile of child-birth.

There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which will vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, and at different periods. First, there is the industrial condition of the country, a complex set of economic factors. The industrial life of England depends primarily on shipping and coal. In the United States shipping is of less importance, and railroads take the place. In the United States the eastern portion lives mainly by manufacture, the western by agriculture, while the south is held a generation behind by a race problem. In France the great estates were broken up, and agriculture fell into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main support of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In America land changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of our farms are mortgaged, and another third are worked by tenants. In Russia there was practically no middle cla.s.s, while in the United States there is practically nothing but middle cla.s.s; the rich have been rich for such a short while that they still look middle cla.s.s and act middle cla.s.s, in spite of all their efforts, while the working cla.s.s hopes to be middle cla.s.s and is persuaded that it can become middle cla.s.s. Such varying factors produce in each country a different problem, and make inevitable a different process of change.

The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part of the ruling cla.s.s to prevent this. In some industries in America you find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple, involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization of industry and widespread distress.

The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied cla.s.ses, the amount of resistance they are willing to make to social change. I have done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D.

Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the cla.s.s struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator, and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by persuading the other group to pull harder.

Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called "open-shop"

campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he believes also in the gospel of "all that the traffic will bear." He prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The workers seize that factory and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat and a "red terror." If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case, they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.

Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man, studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the temporary nature of his stewardship. He gives his people the best possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his workers understand one another. He says: "I can no longer pay profits, and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you are ready to run the plant, I am ready to help you the best I can."

Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of having in that factory a dictatorship and a terror, you will have a const.i.tutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.

CHAPTER LXVI

CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION

(Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do it, and what will be the price?)

The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first, the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the practical aspects of it.

There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his estate, and rebuked him for trespa.s.sing. Said the stranger, "You own this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors, until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll fight you for it."

This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of land t.i.tles. There is no t.i.tle to land which is valid on a historical basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud.

Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to sc.r.a.p all paper t.i.tles to wealth, and to start the world's industries over again on the basis of share and share alike.

But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his t.i.tle to the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the Indian tribes.

Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation, embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pa.s.s a law," says the Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the government." At once to every owner comes one single thought--are you going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconst.i.tutional; and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action, or to amend the const.i.tution. If you adopt the latter course, you have before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery of your elected officials.

The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government, and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and cla.s.s domination all at once." What are we to say to these different programs?

Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel, and issue to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money from the United States government, instead of from the United States Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same--the product, not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged cla.s.s.

The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at present.

So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched, its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war, steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and acc.u.mulated enormous surpluses besides.

The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations.

According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say, the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. a.s.suming that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under our present private property system as they would have got under a system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries more than six per cent on the market value of the investment; and from what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are getting at present.

We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are, amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so change the face of our country that a return to the system of private ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like the crumbs left over from a feast.

CHAPTER LXVII

EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS

(Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for success in the United States.)

I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and other places, so many ill.u.s.trations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque than barricades and councils of action.

In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not getting what we pay for?

Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies.

Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.

And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the ma.s.s of the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast?

Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?