The truth about socialism

It is an old saying that the tree that bears the best apples has the most clubs under it. Enough clubs are under the tree of Socialism to stock a wood-yard. Some of the clubs bear the imprints of honest men. Some do not. The great grafters of the present day are the most persistent foes of Socialism. The great grafters say, not only that Socialism is anti-religious, but that it would destroy the family. The grafters also say that Socialism stands for free love.

It may be amusing to hear a grafter oppose Socialism on the ground that it is against religion. It may be diverting to hear gentlemen with Reno reputations charge that Socialism would establish free love and thus destroy the family. But such charges cannot be dismissed by laughing at those who make them. Honest men and women want to know the truth.

The truth is that there is no truth in the charge that Socialism is against religion. Socialism is purely an economic matter. It has no more to do with religion than it has to do with astronomy. It is no more against religion than it is against astronomy. Men of all religious denominations are Socialists, and men of no religious denomination are Socialists. Nor is there any reason why this should not be so. The very pith and marrow of Socialism is the contention that the people, through the government, should own and operate, for their exclusive benefit, the great machinery of production and distribution that is now owned and operated by the trusts. Either this contention is sound or it is not. Whether it is sound or not, a man’s religious beliefs cannot possibly have anything to do with what he thinks of it.

But while Socialism is in no sense anti-religious, it is in one sense pro-religious. So good an authority as the Encyclopedia Britannica declares that “the ethics of Socialism and the ethics of Christianity are identical.” One of the concerns of Christianity is to establish justice upon earth. The only concern of Socialism is to establish justice upon earth. Socialism seeks to establish justice by giving each human being an equal opportunity to labor, while depriving each human being of the power to appropriate any part of the product of another human being’s labor. If the Socialist program contains a word of comfort for either grafters or loafers, neither the grafters nor the loafers have found it.

Nor does the Socialist program contain a word of comfort for the Reno gentlemen. Socialists beg leave frankly to doubt the sincerity of certain wealthy men who profess to believe that Socialism would destroy the family by bringing about free love. Socialists say the best proof that these men believe nothing of the kind is that they do not make application to join the Socialist party. The wives of some of them certainly make enough applications for divorce.

Addressing themselves to the members of the capitalist class, Socialists therefore speak as follows:

“If the preservation of the family depends upon you, God help the family. If the preservation of womanly women depends upon you, God help the women. You are not all bad, but you are all doing bad. Some of you are doing bad without knowing it; some of you are doing bad though knowing it. But, whether you know it or not, all of you are doing bad because your capitalist system is bad. Your system makes those of you who would do good do bad. It makes you fatten upon the labor of children, because your competitors are fattening upon the labor of children. It makes you fatten upon the labor of women, because your competitors are fattening upon the labor of women. It makes you fatten upon the labor of men because your competitors are fattening upon the labor of men. It makes you keep men, women and children poor, because in no other way could you become rich.

“And you are the ones who are so fearful lest Socialism shall destroy the home. Why do you not worry a little lest the poverty caused by capitalism shall destroy the home? Why are you so slightly stirred by the spectacle of little children torn from their firesides and their schools to work for starvation wages in factories and department stores? Why are you so well able to control your grief when the census reports tell you that more than 5,000,000 women and girls have been compelled to become wage earners because their husbands and fathers receive so little wages that they cannot support their families? Why are you so well able to bear up when the white-slave dealer gets the little girl from the department store?

“None of these facts, nor all of these facts seem to suggest to you wealthy gentlemen who are opposing Socialism that the conditions under which you have become rich are doing anything to disrupt the family or to bring about free love. But you profess to be stunned to a stare when Socialists present a program that is devoted to the single purpose of preventing you, who do no useful labor, from robbing those who do it all. If you have other grounds for opposing Socialism, state them. But in the name of common decency, don’t come forward as the protectors of women and children. Your hands are not clean.”

Socialists contend that Socialism would do more to purify, glorify and vivify the family than capitalism has ever done or can do. Their reasoning takes this form:

Unless poverty is good for the family, capitalism is not good for the family, because capitalism means poverty or the fear of poverty for all but a few and can never mean anything else. Capitalism can never mean anything else because capitalism is essentially parasitical in its nature. It lives and can live only by preying upon the working class.

If plenty for everybody, without too much or too little for anybody will purify, glorify and vivify the family, Socialism will purify, glorify and vivify it. Socialism will place all of the great machinery of modern production in the hands of the people, to be used fully and freely for nobody’s advantage but their own.

Of course, the family cannot be improved without changing it. Upon this obvious fact is based the whole capitalist attack upon Socialism as a destroyer of the home. Socialists believe that freedom from poverty would have a profound effect upon domestic relationships. And Socialist writers have tried to picture the world as it will be when all of the hot hoops of want have been removed from the compact little group that is called the family.

They have pictured woman standing firmly upon her feet, with the ballot in one hand and the power under the law to live from her labor with comfort and self-respect, either inside or outside of her home. But no Socialist has ever pictured a world in which woman would be compelled to work outside her home if she did not want to. Such a picture is reserved for capitalism in the present day. Socialists merely contend that Socialism would make women economically independent, by guaranteeing to them the full value of their labor. No woman would be compelled to marry to get a home. No woman who had a home would be compelled by poverty to stay in it if she were badly treated. For the sake of her children, she might do so if she wished, but she could not be compelled to do so. She would simply be free to act as her judgment might dictate—to profit from a wise choice or to suffer from an unwise one.

Briefly, such is the Socialist picture of the Socialist world for women. No Socialist contends that it is a picture of a perfect world. A perfect world could contain neither fools, hotheads, nor vicious persons. The hard conditions of the present world, and the harder conditions of those long past have created too many fools, hotheads and vicious persons to justify the hope that all such persons can quickly be made wise, cool and good. Socialists, with all their optimism, are not so optimistic as that. They have absolutely no program, patented or otherwise, for making people good.

Their only contention is that they have a program under which people can be good if they want to. They know, only too well, that with the coming of Socialism, everybody will not suddenly want to be good. They expect to have to deal with the bad man and the bad woman. But they do not expect to have to deal with so many bad men and bad women as we now have to deal with. They do not expect to have to deal with any men or women who have been made bad by poverty or the fear of poverty. They do not expect to have to deal with women who have been forced into prostitution because there seemed to be no other way to keep soul and body together. Socialists say that if there are any prostitutes under Socialism they will be women who deliberately choose prostitution as a vocation. Perhaps women, better than men, can judge how many such women there are likely to be.

It is this picture of economically independent womanhood that is hailed by the wealthy detractors of Socialism as the sign that the Socialists plan to destroy the home and supplant it with free love. Socialists say that such conclusions can be based only upon these assumptions:

That nothing but poverty keeps women from being “free-lovers.”

That if women were given the power to support themselves decently and comfortably outside of the home, they would at once desert their children, their husbands and “destroy the family.”

Socialists believe women can safely be trusted with enough money to live on. Yet the word “trust,” as here used, is not quite the word. Socialists do not believe it is within their province either to trust or to distrust women. Socialists believe economic independence is a right that women should demand and get, rather than a privilege that man should grant or deny, as he may see fit. If women do well with economic independence, well and good. If they do ill with it, still well and good. If they have not yet learned to use economic independence, they cannot begin learning too quickly, nor can they learn except by trying to use it.

In any event, Socialists do not claim the right of guardianship over women. They do not believe any human being, regardless of sex, has a right to coerce another when that other is not invading the rights of some other. They believe that women to-day are being coerced. Coerced by poverty. Coerced by fear of poverty. Coerced by men who presume upon their own economic independence and the economic dependence of women. They cite, as proof of their beliefs, the growing number of divorces, together with the fact that women are the applicants for most of the divorces.

And, the astounding circumstance about all of this is that because Socialists hold these views, they are denounced by rich grafters and their retainers as “destroyers of the family,” and “free-lovers.”

The Socialists have said no more than Herbert Spencer said about the folly of trying to promote happiness with coercion. They say that weakness pitted against strength and dependence against independence invite coercion—no more in a family of nations than in a family of individuals; that a woman whose economic dependence prevents her from doing what all of her instincts call upon her to do is coerced. Here is what Herbert Spencer says in Social Statics (p. 76):

“Command is a blight to the affections. Whatsoever of beauty—whatsoever of poetry there is in the passion that unites the sexes, withers up and dies in the cold atmosphere of authority. Native as they are to such widely-separated regions of our nature, Love and Coercion cannot possibly flourish together. Love is sympathetic; Coercion is callous. Love is gentle; Coercion is harsh. Love is self-sacrificing; Coercion is selfish. How then can they co-exist? It is the property of the first to attract, while it is that of the last to repel; and, conflicting as they do, it is the constant tendency of each to destroy the other. Let whoever thinks the two compatible imagine himself acting the master over his betrothed. Does he believe that he could do this without any injury to the subsisting relationship? Does he not know rather that a bad effect would be produced upon the feelings of both by the assumption of such an attitude? And, confessing this as he must, is he superstitious enough to suppose that the going through of a form of word will render harmless that use of command which was previously hurtful?”

Nobody ever called Spencer a “destroyer of the home,” or a “free-lover” for that. Yet, if Spencer meant anything, he meant that coercion is primarily wrong because it deprives the individual of the right to be guided by his own judgment. Socialists contend that women have a right to be guided by their own judgment, even if they make mistakes. Men do so. Women rebel against the denial of their equal right. They rebel against the coercion that is worked against them by their inability to earn decent, comfortable livings outside of their homes. Socialists say the family can never be what it might be or what it should be so long as this warfare continues. They say that since the weak never coerce the strong, there should be no economically weak members of the community. Men and women should both be economically independent. Each is likely to treat the other better if they are so.

Francis G. Peabody, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, has been as fortunate as Spencer in escaping the charge of being a “destroyer of the family” and a “free-lover.” The professor is quoted in the press as follows:

“One thing is certain, the family is rapidly becoming disorganized and disintegrated.... Divorces are being granted at an ever-increasing rate. It may be computed that if the present ratio of increase in population and in separation is maintained, the number of separations of marriage by death would at the end of the twentieth century be less than the number of separations by divorce....

“Owing to industrial life, the importance of the family is already enormously lessened. Once every form of industry went on within the family circle, but as the methods of the great industry are substituted for work done in the home, the economic usefulness of the family is practically outgrown.”

Then, painting a picture of the world to come, as he sees it, the professor said:

“Thus with the coming of the social state, family unity will be for a higher end. The wife, being no longer doomed to household drudgery, will have the greater blessing of economic equality. Children will be cared for by the community under healthful and uniform conditions, and we shall arrive at what has been called the happy time when continuity of society no longer depends upon the private nursery.”

But what Professor Peabody has said, or what Socialists have said with regard to the next step in the evolution of the family is a little beside the point, and is mentioned so at length only because the detractors of Socialism make so much of it. The point is: Ought the world if it can, to get rid of poverty, and will Socialism do it? If Socialism will rid the world of poverty, ought we to retain poverty to keep women good? Who knows that economic independence would make women bad? The grafters intimate that they know. But who believes the grafters? The grafters say the present status of the family is so good that we should be content to remain poor in order to preserve it. Professor Peabody says the present status of the family is so bad that it is falling to pieces. The professor has proof of his statement in every divorce court. The grafters have proof of their statement in no court, nor anywhere else.

Besides, the testimony of the grafters is properly subject to suspicion. If Socialism would remove poverty it would also remove the grafters. If Socialism would not remove poverty or the grafters, but would bring about free love, do you believe the grafters would oppose it? Is it not more likely that the grafters believe Socialism would remove both poverty and themselves and that they are trying to throw a scare into the people by howling about the threatened destruction of the family? If not, why do not the grafters themselves do something to stop their own destruction of the family? A $100 bill will make more happiness in a home than a sermon against Socialism. Why don’t they give up their dividends and let the workers have what they produce? Why don’t they drum Professor Peabody out of Harvard? If the Socialists are free-lovers, Professor Peabody is a free-lover. Why don’t they put him out? Is it because he does not also advocate Socialism?

“Ah,” say the grafters, “but the lives of Socialists do not bear out their protestations of devotion to the family. Look at the ‘affinities’ that some of them have had.”

“Quite true,” say the Socialists, “but one affinity does not make a fire, nor do two make a forest. What if one or two Socialists of more or less prominence have been divorced? Are affinities and divorces unknown among Democrats and Republicans? Is the percentage of divorces greater in Socialist families than it is in Democratic or Republican families? Where is your proof? What have you got on Debs? What have you got on Berger? What have you got on Seidel, the former Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee? These men are in the limelight. If they should make a mismove, you would blazon it. What do you know against them?”

The foregoing pretty well sums up the situation, so far as the free-love and destroying-the-family charges are concerned. There is nothing in them. Socialists are trying to eradicate poverty now. They have no other immediate concern. If the eradication of poverty should send the world to hell, the Socialists, if they can, will send the world to hell. They do not believe anything that can be kept only with poverty is worth keeping. Their observation has taught them that poverty is always and everywhere a curse. They believe no other curse is nearly so great except the curse of excessive riches.

Let us now pass to objections to Socialism that are both pertinent and honest. It is the common belief of those who do not understand Socialism that, under a Socialist form of government, the government would do everything and the people could therefore do nothing; that “everybody would be held down to a dead level,” and that as a consequence of the individual’s inability to rise, nobody would have an incentive to work.

Here are several kindred objections rolled into one. Let us pick them to pieces and see what is in them.

Let it be conceded that under Socialism the government would own and operate all of the great industries. What of it? The people would do precisely what they are doing now, except that they would do it through the government for themselves, instead of through capitalists for themselves and the capitalists. The people are now engaged in useful labor. A small body of parasites are appropriating much that the people produce. Under Socialism, the parasites will have to go to work. The people will simply continue to work, though under better conditions and for a greater return than they now receive.

Now, let us see just what is meant by “keeping everybody upon a dead level.” As the world stands to-day, people differ chiefly as to wealth and to intellect. If one person is not on a “dead level” with another it is because he is more intelligent or more stupid than that other, or because he is richer or poorer. Nobody, of course, believes that Socialism or anything else could put Edison on a dead level with the boss of Tammany Hall. If Socialism is to establish a dead level, it must therefore be by establishing equality as to wealth.

Capitalism has pretty nearly done that already. The great bulk of the world is poor, living from hand to mouth, worrying about the increased cost of living, and going to the grave as empty-handed as when it came into the world. Only a few have any money, beyond their immediate needs, and as a rule that few is composed of men who perform no useful labor. Here and there is a man who combines a little useful labor with a great deal of cogitation as to how he can appropriate something that somebody else has produced. He may have enough to cause him to mortgage his house to buy an automobile, and to make a little pretence of affluence. But financially he is a faker and he knows it. On the other hand, the men who are not financial fakers are not workers. That is to say, either they do no work that is useful to society, or the work they do that is useful justifies but a small part of their incomes.

To illustrate: The owner of a great industry devotes his time to the management of that industry. So far as his managerial activities pertain to the production and distribution of his product, they are socially useful. So far as they pertain to obtaining a profit for himself upon that product they are not socially useful. The value of the socially useful part of his activities may be approximately measured by what he would pay another man for managing the manufacturing and distributing end of his business. The extent to which he is a parasite upon the community may be approximately measured by the difference between his net income from the industry and the sum he would pay another man to manage the manufacturing and distributing end of his business. A hired manager might receive $5,000 a year. The capitalist proprietor may receive $50,000 a year or he may receive nothing—he is in a gambler’s game and must take a gambler’s chances. If he receives $50,000 a year $45,000 of it is because he owns the machinery. If he did not own the machinery, he himself would be compelled to hire out as a manager at $5,000 a year. In other words, $45,000 a year is the price that the workers pay the capitalist for the privilege of working with his machinery. Socialists therefore contend that we are already on a dead level of wealth, except as to the fact that we have permitted a few who do little or no useful labor to rise above those who do nothing else.

Socialists, however, are not opposed in principle to the economic dead level, and they do not believe anybody else is. If it were desirable that each human being should have a billion dollars, and, by pressing a button, each human being could have a billion dollars, Socialists do not believe there would be an extended Alphonse and Gaston performance over the ceremony of pressing the button. Socialists are opposed only to a dead level that is so nearly level with the hunger line. They want to raise the level to the point where it will comfort, not alone the stomach, but the heart and the brain.

Now, mind you, Socialists have no patented wage scales that they intend to force upon the people. If Socialism stands for anything, it stands for the expression of popular will, and therefore it will be for the people to say, when Socialism comes, whether the manager of a railway system shall receive greater compensation than a train conductor on that system. I do not fear contradiction when I say almost every Socialist believes extraordinary ability should be rewarded with extraordinary compensation—not $10,000 a month for the manager of a railway system that pays its conductors $100 a month, but enough more than the conductor to show that the manager’s services are appreciated at their worth. Socialists would also give garbage men and sewer diggers extraordinary wages, on the theory that their work is vitally necessary to everybody else and extremely disagreeable to themselves.

But to satisfy those who want the dead level objection analyzed to the bone, suppose everybody were to receive equal compensation? Should we not have less injustice in the world than we have now? Should we have any suffering from hunger and cold? Should we have so many crimes due to poverty? Should we have any women forced into prostitution by poverty? Should we have a single human being upon the face of the earth haunted by the constant fear that he could not get work and could not get food?

We have all of these evils now. Are they worth thinking about? Are they serious enough to justify us in trying to be rid of them? Granted, for the sake of argument, that we cannot get rid of them without doing an injustice to the railroad manager who would be paid no more than a conductor—is it not better to do injustice to an occasional person who would still be treated as well as any of the others, than to compel all the others to endure present conditions? If not, the “good of the greatest number” is a fallacy, and majority rule is a crime.

But would anyone question either the right or the expediency of such action if the situation were reversed? Suppose that the present system under which a few men own almost everything had made almost everybody rich. Suppose the few who were not rich—corresponding in numbers to the present capitalist class—were to demand that the rules of the game be so changed that they could be made rich by making everyone else poor. Let us suppose, even, that the few were to say that the present system, while it worked satisfactorily for everybody else, worked an injustice to them. Let us go farther and say that the mere handful of objectors were right in such contention. Would the 95 per cent. of the people who were prospering under the system nevertheless voluntarily overturn it and impoverish themselves merely that 5 per cent. might become wealthy?

But there is still another side to the “dead level” objection. Is not enough enough? Who but a glutton wants more food than he should eat? Who but a fop wants more clothing than he needs to wear? Who but a man who has been pampered with riches, or spoiled by the envy that riches so often produce, wants more than a comfortable, roomy, sanitary house in which to live? Does the possession of more things than these make the few who have them happier?

Socialists doubt it. If they did not doubt it, they would still be against conditions that give such advantages to a few who are not socially useful while denying even ordinary comforts to everyone else. And, right here, Socialists again ask these questions: “Even if such luxuries be conceded as advantages, are we not paying too great a price to give them to a few? Is it well that so many should have no home in order that a few should have many homes? And, if there is to be any difference in homes, ought not the difference to be in favor of those who are most useful instead of those who are the most predatory?”

Socialists contend that under Socialism, everybody could not only have work all the time, but that everybody could live as well as now does the man whose income is $5,000 a year. They point to the fact that the man who now spends $5,000 a year on his living, does not consume the products of very much human labor. He has a comfortable house, but comfortable, sanitary houses are not hard to build. Machinery makes almost all of the materials that go into them, and makes them cheaply. And a house properly built lasts a lifetime.

The $5,000–a-year man and his family also eat some food. But the flour is made with machinery at low cost, as are also many other articles. The raw materials come from the earth at the cost of human labor, but the profits that are added to them by capitalists represent no sort of labor.

So is it with clothing, furniture and everything else that the $5,000–a-year man and his family consume. Everything is made cheaply and rapidly with machinery. The workers who make these things get little. The consumer pays much. The difference between the cost of making and the selling price is what eats up a large part of the $5,000. Socialists believe that by cutting out all of this difference and cutting out enforced idleness, everybody could live as well as the $5,000–man now lives. This is only an approximation, of course.

Now we come to the question of rising. What chance would a man have to rise under Socialism?

Let us see, first, what is meant by rising. A man can rise with his fellows or he can rise without them. I am speaking now, of course, only of rising in the financial scale. Habits of thought have been inculcated in us which too often prevent us from thinking of rising in any other way. When we think of bettering our condition, we usually think in terms of money. We seldom think in terms of greater leisure and greater freedom to do the things that make life really worth while; knowing that rich men are usually the slaves of their money, we nevertheless want to be slaves.

Socialism is not intended to help the man who wants to rise financially above his fellows. It throws out no bait to him. A few men will undoubtedly rise a little above their fellows during the early stages of Socialism, but they will not rise very much and there will not be very many of them. Socialism is for all, not for a few. It is devoted to the task of raising the financial standing of everybody who does useful labor and lowering the financial standing of everybody who does not. Socialists say that if Socialism were otherwise, it would be no better than the lottery which is provided by the capitalist system. Socialists do not believe in the lottery principle. They have observed that the gentlemen who run lotteries, rather than the ones who play them, wear the diamonds. Nor does the fact that an occasional washerwoman draws $22,000 with which she knows not what to do, change their minds about the game.

See what a game it is that we are now playing. We teach our small boys that this is a country of glorious opportunities. In picturing the possibilities before them, we know no bounds. We go even to the brink of the ultimate and look over. Away in the distance, we see the White House, and point to it. “There,” we say to our boys, “there is where you may some day be. Each of you has a chance to be President. And, if you should not be President, each of you has a chance to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. Carnegie began as a bobbin boy. Rockefeller began as a clerk in an oil store. If you are honest and industrious, perhaps you can do as much.”

Now, what are the facts? Not one of those boys has much more chance of becoming the President than a ring-tailed monkey has of becoming Caruso. It is not that the boys are worthless—they may have in them better timber than any past President ever contained. But unless we shorten the Presidential term, and shorten it a good deal, we cannot accommodate very many of the lads with the use of the White House. During the next eighty years, even if no President shall serve more than one term, there can be no more than twenty Presidents. During the same time—if we go on repeating such foolishness—perhaps a billion boys will be solemnly assured that each of them has a chance to be President, though, as a matter of fact, only twenty boys can cash in on their chances.

Do we never consider how ridiculous we make ourselves? Do we never fear the crushing question that some bright boy some day will ask: “Dad, just how much do you think twenty chances in a billion are worth?”

I mention this only to show at what an early age we begin to hold out to our boys false hopes of the future. I cannot attempt to explain the fact that no boy asks his father why, in such a country of glorious possibilities as this, he contents himself with driving a truck—but that does not matter. The point is that we go on fooling the boys until they are old enough to know better. They are not very old when this time comes. The world teaches them young. It is the exceptionally stupid young man who does not know, at the age of twenty-five, that the chances against him in playing for a Presidency, a Rockefellership, or a Carnegieship are infinitely greater than would have been the chances against him, if he had lived two generations earlier and played the Louisiana Lottery. Beside such a prospect, the chance of winning a fortune at the race track looks like a certainty. Yet we drove the Louisiana Lottery from the country because it was such a delusion that it amounted to a swindle, and we are beginning to drive the race tracks out of the country for the same reason.

Socialists believe it would be better not to promise so much and to perform more. They believe it would be better to promise each industrious man approximately the present comfort-equivalent of $5,000 a year and give it to him, than to hold out to him the hope of great riches and give him, instead, great poverty or great uneasiness because of the fear of poverty.

The Socialists may be wrong in all of this, but they cheerfully place the burden of proof that the world is well upon those who make the claim that it is well. They ask the capitalists to find more than the exceptional, rare man who has realized more than a fraction of the promises that were held out to him in his youth. For every such man that the capitalists may produce, the Socialists will undertake to find twenty men who are living from hand to mouth, either in poverty or in the fear of poverty.

Such is the Socialist position with regard to “rising” in the world. So far as Socialists are able to discover, all of the rising that most persons do is done in the early morning—about an hour before the 7 o’clock whistle blows.

“Early to bed and early to rise” is not in violation of the Socialist constitution, but Socialists respectfully contend that the rising should be made worth while. And, they also contend that if the people must be promised something to make them rise, it is better, in the long run, to promise something and give it to them than to promise more and not give it to them. The best that can be said for the latter plan is that it has been a long time tried and until recently has worked satisfactorily for those who made the promises they failed to keep.