Twentieth Century Socialism Part 28

And the fact that the hours of work will be shorter will give to every human being leisure throughout his his entire life in which to develop talents of which no trace may be observable during attendance at school or university. The cooperative commonwealth, therefore, without changing the existing forms of education, will furnish to every man, woman, and child an opportunity for educational development during the whole of life instead of confining it as now to the very first few years of it.

It is important to note that, under this system, every industry will be free to work as few hours as it chooses, subject only to the condition of working long enough to pay taxes, to furnish the minimum required by the state, and to create a fund to provide for sickness, accident, and old age.

Citizens in this respect will divide themselves into different categories:

Some will want to work the least possible and devote the rest of their time to idleness or pleasure. Others will want to work at the particular industries in which they are engaged the least possible and devote the rest of their time to such things as will more interest them--to literature, art, music, or even to some other industry--even to industries competing with the state. Others, instead of working the short hours required in a cooperative commonwealth, will prefer to work long hours so as to have a longer vacation than that enjoyed by the majority; others, on the contrary, will prefer to work long hours at the industry to which they belong, not with a view to earning a longer vacation, but for the purpose of earning more wages applicable to the increase of their comforts, luxuries, and amus.e.m.e.nts.

It would not be difficult for every industry to take account of these various contingencies: A certain number of hours those engaged in a particular industry will have to work, but they will be far shorter than the hours of to-day. Those who volunteer to work longer hours will be allowed to work longer hours. The work of the factory will naturally be divided into two shifts: the one, a morning shift; and the other, an afternoon shift, so that one shift can put in all their work in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Who shall work in each shift will be determined primarily by choice and, wherever choice cannot be resorted to, by lot.

Such a condition of things as the foregoing would give to every industry the greatest opportunity for transfer from one industry to another. One who desired to exchange steel working for garment making, could work during the morning shift at the steel trade and during the afternoon shift at the garment trade; and when he had become proficient in the garment trade, he would be able to abandon the steel trade altogether and devote all his working hours to garment making.

Still more important, the system would give an opportunity to every man to develop his peculiar talents, however late in life. It is well known that men of genius often show no trace of their genius at school. It is impossible to calculate how much human ability is lost to the race by the fact that, not being observable in the few school years during which children are subject to observation, it is crushed out altogether in the compet.i.tive mill. The fact that the number of hours we have to work in a cooperative commonwealth would be small, would give to every man the rest of the day in which to develop his undeveloped talents.

-- 2. CHURCHES

There is no reason why churches should not be supported in a cooperative commonwealth under exactly the same conditions as to-day.

It is probable, however, that there will be a tendency to modify public worship so as to render it less subject to obvious objections than to-day.

At the present time, children animated with a desire to preach are encouraged to join the ministry; and it sometimes happens that men of vast business and political experience are made by the convention of respectability to sit every Sabbath Day under a boy in the pulpit reading crude theological essays. Few men are equipped in a manner usefully to instruct or advise their fellow creatures in matters so intimate as those of religion until they have attained years which, while they unfit them for the hard work of industrial life, do by acc.u.mulated experience peculiarly fit them for the work of the pulpit.

The divinity school and the divinity student will tend to diminish and our pulpits will be filled by men who have shown themselves during fifty or sixty years of active work in the community to be best fitted to fill them. And these men, having at that age earned a retiring pension, will not be at the expense of the community nor will they be required by economic conditions as at present, to preach doctrines as to the truth of which some are in doubt and others absolutely disbelieve.

-- 3. POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION

Let us see now whether we can come to some conclusion regarding the political construction of government under a cooperative commonwealth.

The idea prevails that Socialism involves an extreme centralization of government. This, however, is quite contrary to modern notions of Socialism. Indeed, in one sense of the word, Socialism upon the plan already proposed would deprive the federal government of much of its power. Nor do I see any reason why our present federal form of government should be materially changed. For example, the present state governments would be maintained with practically all the rights they now enjoy, and the federal government would continue to operate with less than the enumerated powers given it by our present const.i.tution. For example, instead of having as at present the right to regulate commerce, to coin money, and to make patent laws, these powers would be delegated to the industrial parliament subject only to the approval of Congress. And although the t.i.tle of all such properties as railroads, mines, etc., would be vested in the United States, the effectual control and administration of these properties would be left to the industrial parliament, so that real power as regards these matters would be exercised not by the federal government, but by the industrial parliament, elected not upon the geographical basis of Congress, but by the industries respectively wheresoever situated, as explained in the previous chapter.[197]

It would be well to give the right of appeal to Congress because the industrial parliament would consist of producers and each would have an interest in securing for his industry the largest price possible.

It may be feared that a few powerful industries might, by the number of votes they control in the chamber elected proportionately to numbers, secure for itself privileges not fair to other industries.

This power would be restrained by the fact that the other chamber, elected according to industries, not numbers, would exercise a wholesome check upon any such attempt, and an appeal to Congress may therefore not be necessary. Nevertheless, Congress would represent the whole ma.s.s of the nation and would be, as it were, the consumers'

parliament in its relation to the industrial parliament. And it would seem proper to give to Congress the right to reconsider and discuss all new departures in connection with the business of the country, not only out of consideration of the rights of consumers, but also for the dignity of Congress.

What under these circ.u.mstances would be the special functions of Congress? Congress would continue to exercise the powers it now exercises as regards collecting taxes, establishing rules of naturalization, providing for the punishment of counterfeiting, establishing postoffices and postroads, organizing federal courts, punishing piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations, declaring war, and providing for and maintaining the army, navy, and militia.

The States would enjoy all the rights they now enjoy as regards the federal government; but the cities would enjoy much larger powers of government than they now do. There seems to be no reason why the question whether the city of New York should own its own subway should be referred to farmers sitting in Albany, who have no interest and little, if any, knowledge of the needs and resources of the city of New York. It is probable, therefore, that on the whole the effect of Socialism would be to decentralize rather than to centralize.

The parties in a cooperative commonwealth would probably be determined by the main issue between cooperation and compet.i.tion, and we find here a reason for leaving to Congress the last word as regards the decisions of the industrial parliament. For the latter would be a parliament of cooperative industries and disposed, in protecting these industries, to perpetually invade the territory of compet.i.tion. So long as humanity needs the stimulus of compet.i.tion, it is essential that this element be fairly represented in the political organization of the state. All measures tending to restrain compet.i.tion ought therefore to be subject to the approval of the whole nation represented in Congress.

One princ.i.p.al bourgeois objection to Socialism is that, under compet.i.tive conditions the men best fitted to run an enterprise are those to whom business enterprises are to-day confided upon the principle of the survival of the fittest; whereas under a cooperative commonwealth, the selection of those who are to manage industries must be left to the doubtful intrigues of politics. This objection cannot be seriously taken into consideration. There is probably nothing more difficult for the bourgeois to understand than the difference that would exist between the politics of a cooperative and those of a compet.i.tive commonwealth. In the latter, the field of politics is inevitably a cesspool of corruption, because every business man has something to lose or gain through politics. The tariff law just enacted presents one of the most recent ill.u.s.trations of this. Not only so, but the men appointed to office and elected to Congress in our compet.i.tive commonwealth are selected by business interests, and not appointed because of special fitness for the task.

In a cooperative commonwealth this situation would be reversed. When all our comforts in life and the necessaries of existence are furnished by our munic.i.p.alities and our guilds, the management of these munic.i.p.alities and guilds will be of the utmost importance to every one of us. Our citizens, instead of being interested in bad government, will become interested in good government, in good management and in good administration. Here the public will benefit by the power of recall which, though it may work very imperfectly under compet.i.tive, ought to work well under cooperative conditions. For every man is interested in his munic.i.p.al bakery furnishing good bread, his munic.i.p.al gas plant furnishing good gas; and citizens will be so deeply interested in matters that touch them as nearly as this that they will not be influenced by political cabals to put in a bad man as superintendent of the munic.i.p.al bakery, or to replace a good one by a bad one for purely political reasons.

One reason why our politics are bad to-day is that hardly any of us have time to give to making them good even if we wanted them good. The workingman who works ten or more hours in the factory and travels two or more hours to reach his work in the morning and return home when his work is done, can hardly have much vitality left to attend to politics. Indeed, the complaint of the trade unions is that he has not vitality enough left to attend to matters so important to him as those of his own trade union. But when the workingman in the first place is thoroughly trained by an education that will last not less than eighteen years--when he is not called upon to work more than four or five hours a day, he will have the knowledge necessary to understand his political needs, and the leisure to organize political movements when necessary to remove a bad administrator and put a good administrator in his place.

Indeed, popular government is impossible under capitalism for the reasons just stated; those of us who want good government have not the time to secure it. Popular government is only possible when the people are sufficiently educated to understand their rights and have leisure enough to organize with a view to enforcing them.

In the foregoing two chapters ent.i.tled, respectively, The Economic Construction of the Cooperative Commonwealth, and The Political Aspect of Socialism, I have endeavored to draw a picture of a cooperative commonwealth in which capitalism is eliminated from the production and distribution of all the necessaries and many of the comforts of life; leaving, however, full play to the existing compet.i.tive system as regards the luxuries, some of its comforts, and even as regards necessaries wherever the cooperative commonwealth fails to do its work up to the standard of taste of the community.

This picture has been drawn not because it is possible at this time to forecast exactly what this economic and political construction will be, but because many persons find it impossible to form to themselves any idea how things can be produced and distributed without the help of capitalism. No more is claimed for these chapters than that they do present a scheme by means of which necessaries and many comforts can be produced and distributed without the evils of capitalism, of unemployment, of pauperism, of prost.i.tution, and of economic crime.

Obviously, the two foregoing chapters suggest a thousand questions to an inquiring mind, but I hope that the missing details cannot be cla.s.sed amongst those details which Gladstone characterized as organic. In other words, I hope that they present a picture giving sufficient details to make it clear that Socialism, as regards the production and distribution of the necessaries and most of the comforts of life, is not only beneficial, but practical and economical; that, in a word, it puts an end to the waste and the anarchy which jointly characterize the capitalistic system of to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[196] Book III, Chapter II.

[197] Book III, Chapter II.

CHAPTER IV

SCIENTIFIC ASPECT OF SOCIALISM

Herbert Spencer has contributed more than any other modern writer to emphasize the effect of environment upon life, whether vegetable, animal, or human; yet, singularly enough, in applying his scientific conclusions to sociology, he entirely failed to take account of the essential difference which exists between natural environment and human environment; between the effect of evolution upon life prior to the advent of man, and its effect upon life subsequent to the advent of man. He applied to human development the laws of evolution which he found working prior to man, though man has reversed the natural process of development so that evolution, under the environment created by man, is taking and must continue to take a direction entirely opposite to that which it took under the dominion of Nature alone. Into what errors Mr. Spencer was led by his failure to recognize the difference between human and animal evolution may be gathered from the fact that he denounced governmental effort to prevent disease as "sanitary dictation";[198] he denounced also munic.i.p.al ownership of gas and water, the building by the state of houses for the poor, free libraries, free local museums, free education, and generally all that he includes in the expression "coercive philanthropy."[199]

He a.s.sumed that the predatory system which he saw prevailing in the domain of Nature must prevail also in the domain of Man; and thus became an apostle of _laissez faire_ and of the compet.i.tive system. As such he advocated the utmost limitation of state interference and opposed the Socialistic trend of modern legislation on the ground that man is, as it were, doomed to perfection by the principles of evolution, and that any effort of his to modify evolution can only result in r.e.t.a.r.ding it. He was led by the a.n.a.logy between society and organism into the theory that human inst.i.tutions must be allowed to grow as organisms _grow_, and that efforts on the part of man to construct his own inst.i.tutions produce more evil than good.

Mr. Huxley demolished the whole sociological structure which Herbert Spencer built up on these errors in three essays, to which the reader is referred.[200] The subject is also fully treated in the first volume of "Government or Human Evolution."[201] The effort will be made here to condense the argument and conclusions therein drawn by a short study of environment--natural and human--with a view to demonstrating the control which man has acquired over his environment and thereby over his ultimate destiny. This leads to a study of the effect of the compet.i.tive and cooperative systems on type respectively, how far society is a growth and how far a construction, and how far human nature can be modified by the conscious, deliberate purpose of Man; all this to demonstrate that human happiness can be best attained by subst.i.tuting cooperation for compet.i.tion to the extent necessary to put an end to the evils resulting from the compet.i.tion of to-day, without for that reason eliminating wholesome compet.i.tion altogether.

There are two kinds of environment: the environment we find in Nature, and the environment made by Man.

We shall study first the environment of Nature, and begin by distinguishing therein two systems: the compet.i.tive, or so-called struggle for life; and the cooperative or community system; confining ourselves to facts observed in Nature prior to or outside of the intervention of Man.

-- 1. THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

(_a_) _The Struggle for Life, or the Compet.i.tive System_

Beasts of the field are necessary products of their environment.

The study of the crust of the earth reveals that upon the central ma.s.s there have been laid layer upon layer of sand, clay, and limestone by successive seas, which have successively rested on now buried continents. Nearly every layer contains fragments of sh.e.l.l, scale, or bone belonging to the beasts that have succeeded to one another upon the earth during millions of years.

These layers of sand, clay, and limestone are the leaves of a gigantic book, the earliest of which are burned by fire, the next scarred by it, and the most recent ill.u.s.trated by pictures so vivid that we can read the story there of the development of Man from the lowest of all forms of life.

The rocks are charts painted by the hand of Nature herself.

In these charts we read the story of Evolution. We learn the geography of the world millions of years before the age of history; we know that this land upon which we live has not only once, but often been sunk beneath a deep sea; that during the earliest period of which there is any record unburned, there was no living thing more highly organized than a crab; not a fish nor any animal possessing the backbone that distinguishes the vertebrates to which Man belongs from the invertebrates to which belong the lowest kinds of living thing. We know that later the whole face of the world was changed, and then followed a warm period called Carboniferous, and that just before and during this Carboniferous period there slowly developed fish possessing the backbone that marks one of the great strides in animal development. But at this time we see no trace of the four-footed mammalia which immediately preceded Man.

In the marshes in which forests grew and died during the Carboniferous period, there were piled, one upon another, layers of vegetation that hardened into coal; this coal sank slowly beneath a deepening sea. In this so-called cretaceous sea were deposited, in its deepest parts, huge ma.s.ses of chalk acc.u.mulated from countless sh.e.l.ls; and upon its sh.o.r.es crept four-footed things resembling fish, as the seal and the sea-lion resemble them to-day, closely allied to them and clearly developed from them, as if fish stranded upon the shallows had used their fins for motion upon the banks, and out of fins made legs. And from the gigantic lizards of the cretaceous period we find in the overlying tertiary beds the infinite variety of four-legged animals which people our continents to-day.

All this knowledge, full of profound interest to the student of Man, comes from a study of the earth--Geology.

And next comes Zoology, telling how this amazing development of life from lower to higher forms proceeded. For centuries Man studied the living things on the earth, and added fact to fact till at last, a few years ago, Darwin, Wallace, and others demonstrated the law according to which this development takes place, the law of Evolution.