Back Aa

Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER LXII THE COST OF COMPETITION</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, those which are obvious and those which are hidden.) </div> The United States government is by far the largest single business enterprise in the United States; and a study of congressional appropriations in 1920, made by the United States Bureau of Standards, reveals the fact that ninety-three per cent of the total income of the government went to paying for past wars or preparing for future wars. We have shown that modern war is a product of the profit system, and if civilized nations would put their industry upon a co-operative basis, they could forget the very idea of war, and we should then receive fourteen times as much benefit from our government as we receive at present; we should have fourteen times as good roads, fourteen times as many schools, fourteen times as prompt a postoffice and fourteen times as efficient a Congress. What it would mean to industry to abolish war is something wholly beyond the power of our imagination to conceive; for along with ninety-three per cent of our government money there goes into military preparation the vast bulk of our intellectual energy and inventive genius, our moral and emotional equipment. Next, strikes and the losses incidental to strikes, and the costs of preparing against strikes. This includes, not merely the actual loss of working time, it includes police and militia, private armies of gunmen, and great secret service agencies, whose total income runs up into hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Industrial warfare is simply the method by which capitalists and workers determine the division of the product of industry; as if two men should co-operate in raising poultry, and then fall to quarrelling over the ownership of the eggs, and settle the matter by throwing the eggs at each other's heads. Next, bankruptcy. Statistics show that regularly some ten per cent of our business enterprises fail every year. Take any block occupied by little business men, grocers and haberdashers and "notions," and you will see that they are always changing. Each change represents a human tragedy, and the total is a frightful waste of human energy; it happens because we can think of no better way to distribute goods than to go through the work of setting up a business, and then discover that it cannot succeed because the neighborhood is already overstocked with that kind of goods. Next, fires which are a result of bankruptcy. You may laugh, perhaps, thinking that I am making a joke; but every little man who fails in business knows that he has a choice of going down in the social scale, or of setting fire to his stock some night, and having a big insurance company set him on his feet again. The result is that a certain percentage of bankrupts do regularly set fire to their stores. Some fifteen years ago there was published in "Collier's Weekly" a study of the costs to society of incendiary fires. The Fire Underwriters' Association estimated the amount as a quarter of a billion dollars a year; and all this cost, you understand, is paid out of the pockets of those who insure their homes and their stores, and do not burn them down. From this follows the costs of insurance, and the whole insurance industry, which is inevitable under the profit system, but is entire waste so far as true production is concerned. Big enterprises like the Steel Trust do not carry insurance, and neither does the United States Postoffice. They are wealthy enough to stand their own losses. A national co-operative enterprise would be in the same position, and the whole business of collecting money for insurance and keeping records and carrying on lawsuits would be forgotten. Next, advertising. It would be no exaggeration to say that seventy per cent of the material published in American newspapers and magazines today is pure waste; and therefore seventy per cent of the labor of all the people who cut down forests and manufacture and transport paper and set up type and print and distribute publications is wasted. There is, of course, a small percentage of advertising that is useful, but most of it is boasting and falsehood, and even where it tells the truth it simply represents the effort of a merchant to persuade you to buy in his store instead of in a rival store—an achievement which is profitable to the merchant, but utterly useless to society as a whole. This same statement applies to all traveling salesmen, and to a great percentage of middlemen. It applies also to a great part of delivery service. If you live in a crowded part of any city, you see a dozen milk wagons pass your door every morning, doing the work which could be done exactly as well by one. That is only one case out of a thousand I might name. Next, crime. I have already discussed the crime of arson, and I might discuss the crimes of pocket-picking, burglary, forgery, and a hundred others in the same way. I am aware of the fact that there may be a few born criminals; there may be a few congenital cheats, whom we should have to put in hospitals. But we have only to consult the crime records, during the war and after the war, in order to see that when jobs are hunting men there are few criminals, and when men are hunting jobs there are many criminals. I have no figures as to the cost of administering justice in the United States—policemen, courts and jails—but it must be hundreds of millions of dollars every year. I have discussed at great length the suppression of the productive power of society. I should not fail to mention the suppression of the inventive power of society, a factor less obvious, but probably in the long run even greater. Every one familiar with the inside of a big industry knows that hundreds and even thousands of useful processes are entirely suppressed, because it would not pay one particular concern to stand the expense of the changes involved. You know how, during the war, our government brought all the makers of engines together and perfected in triumph a "Liberty motor." But now we have gone back to private interest and competition, and each concern is jealously engaged in guarding its own secrets, and depriving industry as a whole of the benefit of everything that it learns. Each is spying upon the others, stealing the secrets of the others, stealing likewise from those who invent new ideas—and thus discouraging them from inventing any more. I use this word "discourage," and I might write a chapter upon it. What human imagination can conceive the amount of social energy that is lost because of the factor of discouragement, directly caused by the competitive method? Who can figure what it means to human society that a great percentage of the people in it should be haunted by fear of one sort or another—the poor in fear of unemployment, sickness and starvation, the little business man in fear of bankruptcy and suicide, the big business man in fear of hard times and treachery of his competitors, the idle rich in fear of robbery and blackmail, and the whole community in fear of foreign war and domestic tumult! Anyone might go on and elaborate these factors that I have named, and think of scores of others. Anyone familiar with business life or with industrial processes would be able to put his finger on this or that enormous saving which he would be able to make if he and all his rivals could combine and come to an agreement. This has been proven over and over again in large-scale industry; it is the fact which has made of large-scale industry an overwhelming power, sucking all the profits to itself, reaching out and taking in new fields of human activity, and setting at naught all popular clamor and even legal terrors. How can anyone, seeing these facts, bring himself to deny that if we did systematize production and make it one enterprise, precisely adapted to one end, we should enormously increase the results of human labor, and the benefit to all who do the world's work? A good deal of this waste we can stop when we get ready, and other parts of it our bountiful mother nature will replace. When in a world war we kill some ten or twenty millions of the flower of our young manhood, we have only to wait several generations, and our race will be as good as ever. But, on the other hand, there is some waste that can never be repaired, and this is the thing truly frightful to contemplate. When we dig the iron ore out of the bowels of the earth and rust it away in wars, we are doing something our race can never undo. And the same is true of many of our precious substances: phosphorus, sulphur, potash. When we cut down the forests from our mountain slopes, and lay bare the earth, we not merely cause floods and washouts, and silt up our harbors, we take away from the surface of our land the precious life-giving soil, and make a habitable land into a desert, which no irrigating and reforesting can ever completely restore. The Chinese have done that for many centuries, and we are following in their footsteps; more than six hundred million wagon-loads of our best soil are washed down to the sea every year! If you wish to know about these matters, I send you to a book, "On Board the Good Ship Earth," by Herbert Quick. It is one of the most heart-breaking books you ever read, yet it is merely a quiet statement of the facts about our present commercial anarchy. <h2>CHAPTER LXIII SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.) </div> Let us now assume that we desire to abolish the wastes of the competitive method, and to put our industry on a basis of co-operation. How should we effect the change, and how should we run our industry after it was done? Let us take the United States Steel Corporation. What change would be necessary to the socializing of this concern? United States Steel is owned by a group of stockholders, and governed by a board of directors elected by them. The owners are now to be bought out with government bonds, and the board of directors retired. It may also be necessary to replace a certain number of the higher executive officials, who are imbued entirely with the point of view of this board, and have to do with finance, rather than with production. Of course, some other governing authority would have to be put in control. What would this authority be? There are several plans before the world, several different schools of thought, which we shall consider one by one. First, the Socialist program. The Socialist says, "Consider the postoffice, how that is run. It is run by the President, who appoints a Postmaster-General as his executive. Let us therefore turn the steel industry over to the government, and let the President appoint another member of his cabinet, a Director of Steel; or let there be a commission, similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission, or the various war industry boards." Any form of management of the steel industry which provides for its control and operation by our United States government is Socialism of one sort or another. There has been, of late, a great deal of dissatisfaction with government, on the part of the general public, and also of labor. The postoffice clerks, for example, complain that they are inadequately paid and autocratically managed, deprived of their rights not merely as workers but as citizens. The steel workers complain that when they go on strike against their masters, the government sends in troops and crushes their strike, regardless of the rights or wrongs of it. In order to meet such tactics, labor goes into politics, and elects here and there its own representatives; but these representatives become mysteriously affected by the bureaucratic point of view, and even where they try hard, they do not accomplish much for labor. Therefore, labor becomes disgusted with the political process, and labor men do not welcome the prospect of being managed by government. If you ask such men, they will say: "No; the politicians don't know anything about industry, and can't learn. The people who know about industry are those who work in it. The true way to run an industry is through an organization of the workers, both of hand and brain. The true way to run the Steel Trust is for all the workers in it, men and women, high and low, to be recognized by law as citizens of that industry; each shop must elect its own delegates to run that shop, and elect a delegate to a central parliament of the industry, and this industry in turn must elect delegates to a great parliament or convention of all the delegates of all the industries. In such a central gathering every one would be represented, because every person would be a producer of some sort, and whether he was a steel worker or a street sweeper or a newsboy, he would have a vote at the place where he earns his living, and would have a say in the management of his job. The great central parliament would elect an executive committee and a president, and so we should have a government of the workers, by the workers, for the workers." This idea is known as Syndicalism, derived from the French word "syndicat," meaning a labor union. Since the Russian revolution it has come to be known as soviet government, "soviet" being the Russian word for trade council. Now, taking these two ideas of Socialism and Syndicalism, it is evident that they may be combined in various ways, and applied in varying degrees. It is perfectly conceivable, for example, that the people of the United States might elect a president pledged to call a parliament of industry, and to delegate the control of industry to this parliament. He might delegate the control to a certain extent, and provide for its extension, step by step; so our society might move into Syndicalism by the way of Socialism. You have only to put your mind on the possibilities of the situation to realize that one method shades into the other with a great variety of stages. Consider next the stages between capitalism and Socialism. We have in the United States some industries which are purely capitalistic; for example, the Steel Trust, which is privately owned, and has been powerful enough, not merely to suppress every effort of its workers to organize, but every effort of the government to regulate it. On the other hand, the United States Postoffice represents State Socialism; although the workers have been forbidden to organize, and the management of the industry is so arbitrary that I have always preferred to call it State Capitalism. Likewise the United States army and navy represent State Socialism. When we had the job of putting the Kaiser out of business, we did not hire Mr. Rockefeller to do it; it never once occurred to our advocates of "individualism," of "capitalist enterprise and initiative," to suggest that we should hire out our army and navy, or employ the Steel Trust or the Powder Trust to organize its own army and navy to do the fighting for us. Likewise, for the most part, we run the job of educating our children by the method of municipal Socialism. We run our libraries in the same way, and likewise our job of fire protection. It is interesting to note how in every country the line between capitalism and Socialism is drawn in a different place. In America we run practically all our libraries for ourselves, but it would seem to us preposterous to think of running our theatres. In Europe, however, they have state-owned theatres, which set a far higher standard of art than anything we know at home. Also, they have state-owned orchestras and opera-houses, something we Americans leave to the subscriptions of millionaires. In Europe it seems perfectly natural to the people that the state should handle their telegrams in connection with the postoffice; but if you urge government ownership of the telegraphs in the United States, they tell you that the proposition is "socialistic," and that saves the need of thinking about it. We take it for granted that our cities could run the libraries—even though we were glad when Carnegie came along and saved us the need of appropriating money for buildings. Just why a city should be able to run a library, and should not be able to run an opera-house, or a newspaper, is something which has never been made clear to me. Let us next examine the stages between capitalism and Syndicalism. A great many large corporations are making experiments in what they call "shop management," allowing the workers membership in the boards of directors and a voice in the conditions of their labor. This is Syndicalism so far as it goes. Likewise it is Syndicalism when the clothing workers and the clothing manufacturers meet together and agree to the setting up of a permanent committee to work out a set of rules for the conduct of the industry, and to fix wages from time to time. Obviously, these things are capable of indefinite extension, and in Europe they are being developed far more rapidly. For example, in Italy the agricultural workers are organized, and are gradually taking possession of the great estates, which are owned by absentee landlords. They wage war upon these estates by means of sabotage and strikes, and then they buy up the estates at bargain prices and develop them by co-operative labor. This has been going on in Italy for ten years, and has become the most significant movement in the country. It is a triumph of pure Syndicalism; and such is the power of pure capitalism in the United States that the American people have not been allowed to know anything about this change. Next, what are the stages between Socialism and Syndicalism? These also are infinite in number and variety. As a matter of fact, there are very few Socialists who advocate State Socialism without any admixture of Syndicalism. The regular formula of the Socialist party is "the social ownership and democratic control of the instruments and means of production;" and what the phrase "democratic control" means is simply that you introduce into your Socialist mixture a certain flavoring of Syndicalism, greater or less, according to your temperament. In the same way there are many Syndicalists who are inclined toward Socialism. In every convention of radical trade unionists, such as, for example, the I. W. W., you find some who favor political action, and these will have the same point of view as the more radical members of the Socialist party, who urge a program of industrial as well as political action. <h2>CHAPTER LXIV COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the idea of a society without compulsion, and how these ideas have fared in Russia.) </div> The Russian revolution has familiarized us with the word Communism. In the beginning of the revolutionary movement Communism denoted what we now call Socialism; for example, the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels became the platform of the Social-democratic parties. But because most of these parties supported their governments during the war, the more radical elements have now rejected the word Socialism, and taken up the old word Communism. In the Russian revolution the Communists went so far as to seize all the property of the rich, and so the word Communism has come to bear something of its early Christian significance. It is obvious that here, too, it is a question of degree, and Socialism will shade into Communism by an infinite variety of stages, depending upon what forms of property it is decided to socialize. The Socialist formula commonly accepted is that "goods socially used shall be socially owned, and goods privately used shall be privately owned." If you own a factory, it will be taken by the state, or by the workers, and made social property like the postoffice; but no Socialist wants to socialize your clothing, or your books, any more than he wants to socialize your toothbrush. But when you come to apply this formula, you run quickly into difficulties. Suppose you are a millionaire, and own a palace with one or two hundred rooms, and a hundred servants. Do you use that socially, or do you use it privately? And suppose there is a scarcity of houses, and thousands of children are dying of tuberculosis in crowded tenement rooms? You own a dozen automobiles, and do you use them all privately? I point out to you that in time of emergency the capitalist state does not hesitate over such a problem; it seizes your palace and turns it into a hospital, it takes all your cars and uses them to carry troops. It should be obvious that a proletarian state would be tempted by this precedent. The Communists also have a formula, which reads: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his necessity." I do not see how any sensitive person can deny that this is an extremely fine statement of an ideal in social life. We take it quite for granted in family life; if you knew a family in which that rule did not apply, you would consider it an unloving and uncivilized family. I believe that when once industry has been socialized, and we have a chance to see what production can become, we shall find ourselves quickly adopting that family custom as our law, for all except a few congenital criminals and cheats. We shall find that we can produce so much wealth that it is not worth while keeping count of unimportant items. If today you meet someone on the street and ask him for a match or a pin, you do not think of offering to pay him. This is an automatic consequence of the cheapness of matches and pins. Once upon a time you were stopped on the road every few miles and made to pay a few cents toll. I remember seeing toll-gates when I was a boy, but I don't think I have seen one for twenty years. 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 Class," in which these processes are studied. We shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the idea of class and of class 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 class oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the industries to be organized by free associations of the people who work in them. Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists: Jesus, for example, and Shelley and Thoreau 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 attitude shall we take to them? There are impassioned 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 association 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 class in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a workers' state, and what attitude 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 embarrassing 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.