The truth about socialism

The occupation of the scarlet woman is said to be “the oldest profession.” If so, the robbery of man by man is the oldest trade. It is as old as the human race. It had its origin in the difficulty of producing enough of the material necessities of life. The earth was lean. Man was weak. Never was there enough food for all. Many must suffer. Some must starve.

What wonder that man robbed man? Self-preservation is the first law of nature. We have always fought and shall always fight for those things that are scarce and without which we should die. If water were scarce, we should all be fighting by the brookside. If air were scarce, we should all be straining our lungs to take in as much as we could.

But what wonder, also, that the robbed should resist those who robbed them? The robbed, too, have the instinct of self-preservation. They, too, want to live. All through the ages, they have fought for the right to live. By the sheer force of numbers, they have driven their exploiters from pillar to post. Again and again, they have compelled their exploiters to abandon one method of robbery, only to see them take up another. And, though some men no longer own other men’s bodies, some men still live by the sweat of other men’s brows.

The question is: Must this go on forever? Must a few always live so far from poverty that they cannot see it, while the rest live so close to it that they cannot see anything else? Must millions of women work in factories at men’s work, while millions of men walk the streets unable to get any work? Must the cry of child-labor forever sound to high heaven above the rumble of the mills that grind their bodies into dividends? Must the pinched faces of underfed children always make some places hideous?

No man in his senses will say that this situation must always exist. Human nature revolts at it. The wrong of it rouses the feelings even before it touches the intellect. Something within us tells us to cry out and to keep crying out until we find relief. We have tried almost every remedy that has been offered to us, but every remedy we have tried has failed. The hungry children are still with us. The hungry women are still with us. The hungry men are still with us. Never before was it so hard for most people to live. Yet, we live at a time when men, working with machinery, could make enough of everything for everybody.

Your radical Republican recognizes these facts and says something is the matter. Your Democratic radical recognizes these facts and says something is the matter. Your Rooseveltian Progressive also recognizes these facts and says something is the matter. But if you will carefully listen to these gentlemen, you will observe that none of them believes much is the matter. None of them believes much need be done to make everything right. One wants to loosen the tariff screw a little. The others want to put a new little wheel in the anti-trust machine.

Socialists differ from each of these gentlemen. Socialists say much is the matter with this country. Socialists say much is the matter with any country, most of whose people are in want or in fear of want, and some of whose people are where want never comes or can come. Some such conditions might have been tolerated a thousand years ago. Socialists will not tolerate them to-day. They say the time for poverty has passed. They say the time for poverty passed when man substituted steam and electricity for his muscles and machinery for his fingers.

But poverty did not go out when steam and electricity came in. On the contrary, the fear of want became intensified. Now, nobody who has not capital can live unless he can get a job. In the days that preceded the steam engine, nobody had to look for a job. Everybody owned his own job. The shoemaker could make shoes for his neighbors. The weaver could weave cloth. Each could work at his trade, without anybody’s permission, because the tools of their trades were few and inexpensive. Now, neither of them can work at his trade, because the tools of his trade have become numerous and expensive. The tools of the shoemaker’s trade are in the great factory that covers, perhaps, a dozen acres. The tools of the weaver’s trade are in another enormous factory. Neither the shoemaker nor the weaver can ever hope to own the tools of his trade. Nor, with the little hand-tools of the past centuries, can either of them compete with the modern factories. The shoe trust, with steam, electricity and machinery, can make a pair of shoes at a price that no shoemaker, working by hand, could touch.

Thus the hand-workers have been driven to knock at the doors of the factories that rich men own and ask for work. If the rich men can see a profit in letting the poor men work, the poor men are permitted to work. If the rich men cannot see a profit in letting the poor men work, then the poor men may not work. Though there be the greatest need for shoes, if those in need have no money, the rich men lock up their factories and wave the workers away. The workers may starve, if they like. Their wives and children may starve. The workers may become tramps, criminals or maniacs; their wives and their little children may be driven into the street—but the rich men who closed their factories because they could see no profit in keeping them open—these rich men take no part of the responsibility. They talk about the “laws of trade,” go to their clubs and have a little smoke, and, perhaps, the next week give a few dollars to “worthy charity” and forget all about the workers.

Now, the Socialists are extremely tired of all this. Their remedy may be all wrong, but they are tired of all this. Put the accent upon the tired all the time. They say it is all wrong. Not only do they say it is all wrong, but they say they know how to make it all right. They do not propose to do any small job of tinkering, because they say that if small jobs of tinkering were enough to cure the great evil of poverty, we should have cured it long ago. They say we have been tinkering with tariffs, income taxes and the money question for a hundred years without reducing either want or the fear of want. They say we have made no progress, during the last hundred years, in reducing want and the fear of want, because we have never hit the grafters where they live. By this, they mean that we have never cut the tap root upon which robbery grows. The serfs cut off the tap root when they threw off chattel slavery, but another tap root has grown and we have not yet discovered where to strike.

The Socialists say they know where to strike.

“Strike at the machinery of the country,” they say, “by having the people, through the government, own the machinery of the country.”

“Cut out the profits of the private owners,” they say. “Let the people own the trusts and make things because they want the things, instead of because somebody else wants a profit, and there will never again be in this country either want or the fear of want.”

This sounds like a nice, man-made program, cooked up late at night by some zealous gentleman intent upon saving his country. It may be a foolish program, but if it is, it is not that kind of a foolish program. It is not man-made, any more than Darwin’s theory of evolution is man-made. Darwin observed present animal life and thereby explained the past. Socialists observe past and present industrial life and thereby forecast the future. Paradoxically, then, the Socialist remedy is not a Socialist remedy. If it is anything, it is the remedy that evolution is bringing to us. Socialists see what evolution is bringing and proclaim it, much as a trainman announces the coming of a train that he already sees rounding a curve.

Let me tell a story to illustrate this point:

Seventy years ago, Socialist writers predicted and accurately described the trusts as they exist to-day. Nobody paid much attention to the predictions or the descriptions. Nowhere in the world was there a single trust. Nowhere in the world was any one thinking of forming one. The first trust was not formed until almost forty years later.

The trusts were predicted because the steam engine had been invented and brought with it machinery. The invention did not mean much to most people. It meant everything to these early Socialists. They saw its significance. They saw that it meant a transformed world. Never again would the world be as it had always been. Never again would the amount of wealth that man could create be limited by his weak muscles. Steam and machinery had come to do, not only what he had been doing, but what he had never dreamed of doing.

The only lesson that the rich men of the day learned from steam was that it meant more money for them. The rich men of the day, by the way, were in need of a new method of exploitation. Serfdom had just gone down in the Napoleonic wars, and some men were no longer able to exploit other men by claiming to own the other men’s bodies. Exploitation, through the private ownership of land, still continued, it is true, but a man working by hand cannot be much exploited because he cannot make much. What I mean by this is that he cannot be exploited of many dollars. Of course, he can be exploited of so great a percentage of his product that he is left starving, but the man who exploits him will not be much richer. That is why there were no great fortunes, as we now know them, in the days before the machinery age. Wealth was too difficult to make.

But, to return to our story. The invention of the steam engine gave the rich men of the early eighteenth century the opportunity of which they stood much in need. Factories cost money. The workers did not have any. The rich men did. The rich men built factories. That is to say, they thought they were only building factories. As a matter of fact, they were taking over, from the hands of evolution, the poor man’s tools. Never again were working men to own the tools of their trades. Their tools had gone down in the struggle in which the survivors must be the fittest. For centuries, the world had starved because of their old hand-tools. They could not, for a moment, exist after steam and machinery came. It was right that the hand-tools should go. It was unfortunate for the workers only that the successors of hand-tools were too expensive for individual ownership, and that they were also unsuited to such ownership. No man can run a whole shoe factory, even if he owns one. Many men are required to run many machines, and many machines are required to make the labor of men most productive.

All of this, the early Socialists saw or reasoned out. They saw the rich men of the day building factories. They saw those who were not quite so rich joining together to build factories. Little co-partnerships were springing up all over the world. Everybody competed with everybody else in his line. Manufactures multiplied, and it became the common belief that “competition was the life of trade.”

Stick a pin here. The roots of Socialism go down somewhere near this point.

The early Socialist writers who predicted the trusts did not believe competition was the life of trade. They believed the inevitable tendency of competition was to kill itself. Their reasoning took this form:

Manufacturers engage in business, not because they want to supply goods to the public, but because they want to make profits for themselves.

Inasmuch as the question of who shall make the profits depends upon who shall sell the goods, manufacturers will compete with each other to sell goods.

Manufacturers will be able to compete and still make a profit so long as the demand for goods far exceeds the supply.

But the demand for goods will not always far exceed the supply. The opportunity to make profits will tempt other capitalists to create manufacturing enterprises. The market will become glutted with goods, because more will have been produced than the people can pay for.

Competition among manufacturers will then become so fierce that profits will first shrink and eventually disappear.

Manufacturers, to regain their profits, will then cease to compete. The strongest will buy out or crush the weakest. Monopolies will be formed, primarily to end competition and save the competitors from themselves, but, having been formed, they will also be used to rob the people.

Mind you—this reasoning is not new. It is seventy years old. It sounds new only because it has so recently come true. Nobody whose eyes are open now believes that competition is the life of trade. The phrase has died upon the lips of the very men who used to speak it. The late Senator Hanna was one of the many who used to believe that good trade could not be where competition was not. But, when the great trust movement of 1898 was under way, Senator Hanna said: “It is not a question of whether business men do or do not believe in trusts. It is a question only of whether business men want to be killed by competition or saved by coöperation.”

However, the existence of the trusts is ample verification of the Socialist prophecy that they would come. And the trusts came in the way that the early Socialists said they would come.

We may now proceed to consider what those early Socialist writers thought of the trusts that they so accurately described before they came, what they believed would become of them and what they believed would supplant them.

No Socialist was ever heard finding fault with a trust simply for existing. A Socialist would as soon find fault with a green apple because it had been produced from a blossom. In fact, Socialists regard the trusts as the green apples upon the tree of industrial evolution. But they would no more destroy these industrial green apples that are making the world sick than they would destroy the green apples that make small boys sick. They pause, first because they are evolutionists, not only in biology, but in everything; second, because they recall that the green apples that make the boy sick will, if left to ripen, make the man well. In short, Socialists regard trusts, or private monopolies, as a necessary stage in industrial evolution; a stage that we could not have avoided; a stage that in many respects, represents a great advance over any phase of civilization that preceded it, yet a stage at which we cannot stop unless civilization stops. Therefore, Socialists take this position:

It is flying in the face of evolution itself to talk about destroying, or even effectually regulating the trusts.

Private monopolies cannot be destroyed except as green apples can be destroyed—by crushing them and staying the evolutionary processes that, if left alone, will yield good fruit.

Private monopolies cannot be effectually regulated because, so long as they are permitted to exist, they will regulate the government instead of permitting the government to regulate them. They will regulate the government because the great profits at stake will give them the incentive to do so and the enormous capital at their command will give them the power to do so.

In other words, Socialists say that the processes of evolution should go on. What do they mean by this? They mean that the good elements of the trust principle should be preserved and the bad elements destroyed. What are the good elements? The economies of large, well-ordered production, and the avoidance of the waste due to haphazard, competitive production. And the bad elements? The powers that private monopoly gives, through control of market and governmental policies, to rob the consumer.

Socialists contend that the good can be saved and the bad destroyed by converting the private monopolies into public monopolies—in other words, by letting the government own the trusts and the people own the government. This may seem like what the foes of Socialism would call a “patent nostrum.” It is nothing of the kind. It is no more a patent nostrum than the trusts are patent nostrums. Socialists invented neither private monopolies nor public monopolies. Socialists did not kill competition. Competition killed itself. Socialists simply were able to foresee that too much competition would end all competition and thus give birth to private monopoly.

And, having seen thus far, they looked a little further and saw that private monopoly would not be an unmixed blessing. They saw that under it, robbery would be practised in new, strange and colossal forms. They knew the people would not like robbery in any form. They knew they would cry out against it as they are crying out against the trusts to-day. And they believed that after having tried to destroy the trusts and failed at that; after having tried to regulate the trusts and failed at that, that the people would cease trying to buck evolution, and get for themselves the benefits of the trusts by owning them.

This may be an absurd idea, but in part, at least, it has already been verified. It has been demonstrated that private monopoly saves the enormous sums that were spent in the competitive era to determine whether this man or that man should get the profit upon the things you buy. The consumer has absolutely no interest in the identity of the capitalist who exploits him. But when capitalists were competing for trade, the consumer was made to bear the whole cost of fighting for his trade.

Private monopoly has largely done away with the cost of selling trust goods, by doing away with the individual competitors who were once struggling to put their goods upon the market. Private monopoly has also reduced the cost of production by introducing the innumerable economies that accompany large production.

What private monopoly has not done and will never do is to pass along these savings to the consumers. The monopolists have passed along some of the savings, but not many of them. What they have passed along bears but a small proportion to what they have kept. That is what most of the trouble is about now. The people find it increasingly difficult to live. For a dozen years, it has been increasingly difficult to live. Persistent and more persistent has been the demand that something be done about the trusts.

The first demand was that the trusts be destroyed. Now, Mr. Bryan is about the only man in the country to whom the conviction has not been borne home that the trusts cannot be destroyed. The rest of the people want the trusts regulated, and the worst of the trust magnates sent to jail. Up to date, not a single trust has been regulated, nor a single trust magnate sent to jail. Officially, of course, the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have been cleansed in the blue waters of the Supreme Court laundry and hung upon the line as white as snow. But gentlemen who are not stone blind know that this is not so. They know the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company and the Coal Trust have merely put on masks and gone on with the hold-up business. Therefore, the Socialist predictions of seventy years ago have all been verified up to and including the inability of any government either to destroy or regulate the trusts.

So much for what Socialists believe Socialism, by reducing the prices of commodities to cost, would do for the people as consumers. Socialists believe Socialism would do even more for the people as workers. Behold the present plight of the workingman. He has a right to live, but he has not a right to the means by which he can live. He cannot live without work, yet, ever he must seek work as a privilege—not as a right. The coming of the age of machinery has made it impossible to work without machinery. Yet the worker owns no machinery and can get access to no machinery except upon such terms as he may be able to make with its owners.

Socialists urge the people to consider the results of this unprecedented situation. First, there is great insecurity of employment. No one knows how long his job is destined to last. It may not last another day. A great variety of causes exist, any one of which may deprive the worker of his opportunity to work. Wall Street gentlemen may put such a crimp in the financial situation that industry cannot go on. Business may slow down because more is being produced than the markets can absorb. A greedy employer may precipitate a strike by trying to reduce the wages of his employees. Any one of many causes may without notice step in between the worker and the machinery without which he cannot work.

But worse than the uncertainty of employment is the absolute certainty that millions of men must always be out of work. Times are never so good that there is work for everybody. Most persons do not know it, but in the best of times there are always a million men out of work. In the worst of times, the number of men out of work sometimes exceeds 5,000,000. The country cries for the things they might produce. There is great need for shoes, flour, cloth, houses, furniture, and fuel. These millions of men, if they could get in touch with machinery, could produce enough of such staples to satisfy the public demand. If they could but work, their earnings would vastly increase the amount of money in circulation and thus increase the buying power of everybody. But they cannot work, because they do not own the machinery without which they cannot work, and the men who own it will not let it be used, because they cannot see any profits for themselves in having it used.

Socialists say this is an appalling situation. They are amazed that the nation tolerates it. They believe the nation would not tolerate it if it understood it. Some things are more easily understood than others. If 5,000,000 men were on a sinking ship within swimming distance of the Atlantic shore and the employing class were to prevent them from swimming ashore for no other reason than that the employing class had no use for their services—the people would understand that. Socialists believe the people will soon understand the present situation.

Here is another thing that Socialists hope the people will soon understand. The policy of permitting a few men to use the machinery with which all other men must work or starve compels all other men to become competitors for its use. If there were no more workers than the capitalists must have, there would not be such competition. But there must always be more workers than the capitalists can use. The fact that the capitalist demands a profit upon the worker’s labor renders the worker incapable of buying back the very thing he has made. Under present conditions, trade must, therefore, always be smaller than the natural requirements of the people for goods. And since, with machinery, each worker can produce a vast volume of goods, it inevitably follows that only a part of the workers are required to make all of the goods that can be sold at a profit. That is why there is not always work for all.

With more workers than there are jobs, it thus comes about that the workers are compelled to compete among themselves for jobs. Only part of the workers can be employed and the struggle of each is to become one of that part. The workers who are out of employment are always willing to work, if they can get no more, for a wage that represents only the cost of the poorest living upon which they will consent to exist. It therefore follows that wages are always based upon the cost of living. If the cost of living is high, wages are high. If the cost of living is low, wages are low. In any event, the worker has nothing left after he has paid for his living.

Socialists say this is not just. They can understand the capitalist who buys labor as he buys pig-iron, but they say labor is entitled to more consideration than pig-iron. The price of labor, they declare, should be gauged by the value of labor’s product, instead of by the direness of labor’s needs. They say the present situation gives to the men who own machinery most of its benefits and to the many who operate it none of its hopes. Now. as of old, the average worker dare hope for no more than enough to keep him alive. Again and again and again the census reports have shown that the bulk of the people in this country are so poor that they do not own even the roofs over their heads.

The purpose of Socialism is to give the workers all they produce. And, when Socialists say “workers” they do not mean only those who wear overalls and carry dinner pails. They mean everybody who does useful labor. Socialists regard the general superintendent of a railroad as quite as much of a worker as they do the man on the section. But they do not regard the owners of railway stocks and bonds as workers. They regard them as parasites who are living off the products of labor by owning the locomotives, cars and other equipment with which the workers work. And, since the ownership of machinery is the club with which Socialists say capitalists commit their robberies, Socialists also declare that the only way to stop the robberies is to take away the club. It would do no good to take the club from the men who now hold it and give it even to the individual workers, because, with the principle of private ownership retained, ownership would soon gravitate into a few hands and robbery would go on as ruthlessly as ever. Socialists believe the only remedy is to destroy the club by vesting the ownership of the great machinery of production and distribution in the people, through the government.

Such is the gist of Socialism—public ownership of the trusts, combined with public ownership of the government. Gentlemen who are opposed to Socialism—for what reasons it is now unnecessary to consider—lose no opportunity to spread the belief that there are more kinds of Socialism than there are varieties of the celebrated products of Mr. Heinz. This is not so. There are more than 30,000,000 Socialists in the world. Not one of them would refuse to write across this chapter: “That is Socialism,” and sign his name to it. Every Socialist has his individual conception of how mankind would advance if poverty were eliminated, but all Socialists agree that the heart and soul of their philosophy lies in the public ownership, under democratic government, of the means of life. And, as compared with this belief, all other beliefs of Socialism are minor and inconsequential. Public ownership is the rock upon which it is determined to stand or fall.

Socialists differ only with regard to the means by which public ownership may be brought about. A handful of Socialists, for instance, believe that in order to bring it about it is necessary to oppose the labor unions. All other Socialists work hand in hand with the labor unions.

Also, there is a difference of opinion among Socialists as to how the government should proceed to obtain ownership of the industrial trusts, the railroads, telegraph, telephone and express companies and so forth. Some Socialists are in favor of confiscating them, on the theory that the people have a right to resort to such drastic action. In a way, they have excellent authority for their position. Read what Benjamin Franklin said about property at the convention that was called in 1776 to adopt a new constitution for Pennsylvania:

“Suppose one of our Indian nations should now agree to form a civil society. Each individual would bring into the stock of the society little more property than his gun and his blanket, for at present he has no other. We know that when one of them has attempted to keep a few swine he has not been able to maintain a property in them, his neighbors thinking they have a right to kill and eat them whenever they want provisions, it being one of their maxims that hunting is free for all. The accumulation of property in such a society, and its security to individuals in every society, must be an effect of the protection afforded to it by the joint strength of the society in the execution of its laws.

“Private property is, therefore, a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society whenever its necessities require it, even to the last farthing.”

But one need quote only the law of self-preservation to prove that if any people shall ever become convinced that their lives depend upon the confiscation of the trusts that such confiscation will be justified. When men reach a certain stage of hunger and wretchedness they pay scant attention to every law except the higher law that says they have a right to live.

I believe that most Socialists twenty years ago, were in favor of confiscation. The trend now is all toward compensation. Not that Socialists have changed their minds at all about the equities of the matter. They have not. But they are coming to see that compensation is the easier and quicker way. Victor Berger, the first Socialist congressman, introduced in the House of Representatives an anti-trust bill in which he proposed that the government should buy all of the trusts that control more than forty per cent. of the business in their respective lines, and pay therefor their full cash values—minus, of course, wind, water and all forms of speculative inflation. In short the differences in the Socialist party upon the question of compensation are not unlike the differences which once existed with regard to the best means by which the negroes might be emancipated. Years before the Civil War, Henry Clay proposed that the government should buy the negroes at double their market price and set them free. He said this would be the cheapest and quickest way of settling the troubles between the North and the South. The slave owners would not consent, and, eventually Lincoln freed their slaves without paying for them.

When Socialists speak of buying the trusts, they naturally invite the inquiry as to where they expect to get the money to pay for them. They expect to get the money out of the profits of the trusts. That is the way that Representative Berger provided in his bill. It is a poor trust that does not pay dividends upon stock and interest upon bonds that do not aggregate at least ten per cent. of the capital actually invested. Most of them pay more, and some of the express companies occasionally spring a fifty or a 100 per cent. dividend.

The Socialist proposal is that the government pay for the trusts with two-per cent. bonds, and that each year, enough money be put into a sinking fund to retire the bonds in not more than fifty years. The burden of purchasing the trusts would thus be spread over a little more than two generations, but Socialists say the burden would be a burden only in name, since the prices of trust goods could be radically reduced, even while the trusts were being paid for, and upon the retirement of the bonds, all prices could be reduced to cost.

Those who know little or nothing about Socialism believe that Socialists also differ as to the advisability of using violence to bring about Socialism. Never was there a greater mistake. Above all others, the Socialist party is the party of peace. When Germany and England, in 1911, were ready to fly at each other’s throats, it was the Socialist party of Germany that assembled 200,000 men in Berlin one Sunday afternoon and declared that if there were a war, the Socialists of Germany would not help fight it. It was generally admitted, at the time, that the attitude of the German Socialists, more than anything else, was responsible for the avoidance of war.

Socialists are equally pacific when considering the best means by which Socialism may be brought about. Socialists are, first, last and all the time in favor only of political action and trade-union action. Wherever there is a free ballot, they believe in using it, to the exclusion of bombs and bullets. Socialists realize that they can win only by converting a majority of the people to their belief. That is why they begin one campaign the next morning after the closing of another. They are busy with the printing press and their tongues all the while. For them, there is no closed season.

Socialists realize that Socialism can be reared only upon understanding, and that the use of dynamite would turn the minds of the people against them for a hundred years. Any Socialist who believes otherwise is the same sort of a potential criminal that can be found in any other party—and equally as rare. The Republican party had its Guiteau and its Czolgosz, but it repudiated neither of them more quickly than the Socialist party would repudiate one of its own members who should commit a great crime.

Socialists, as a party, stand for violence only in the same way that Abraham Lincoln stood for it. If the Socialists should carry a national election in this country, and, the capitalists, refusing to yield, should turn the regular army at them, the Socialists would use all the violence they could muster. While they are in a minority, they are obeying the laws that the capitalists make, but when the Socialists become a majority, they will insist, even with bullets, that the capitalists obey the laws that the Socialists make.