The Common Sense of Socialism Part 9

But now suppose, friend Jonathan, that while I have the dollar, representing my "abstinence," in my pocket, a man who has not a dollar comes to me and says, "I really must have a dollar to get food for my wife and baby, or they will die. Lend me a dollar until next week and I will pay you back two dollars." If I lend him the dollar and next week take his two dollars, that is what is called the reward of my abstinence. But in truth it is something quite different. It is usury.

Just because I happen to have something the other fellow has not got, and which he must have, he is compelled to pay me interest. If he also had a dollar in his pocket, I could get no interest from him.

It would be just the same if I had not abstained from anything. If, for example, I had found the dollar which some other careful fellow had lost, I could still get interest upon it. Or if I had inherited money from my father, it might happen that, so far from being abstemious and thrifty, I had been most extravagant, while the fellow who came to borrow had been very thrifty and abstemious, but still unable to provide for his family. Yet I should make him pay me interest.

As a matter of fact, my friend, the rich have not abstained from anything. They have not acc.u.mulated riches out of their savings, through abstaining from buying things. On the contrary, they have bought and enjoyed the costliest things. They have lived in fine houses, worn costly clothing, eaten the choicest food, sent their sons and daughters to the most expensive schools and colleges.

From all of these things the workers have abstained, Jonathan. They have abstained from living in fine houses and lived in poor houses; they have abstained from wearing costly clothes and worn the cheapest and poorest clothes; they have abstained from choice food and eaten only food that is coa.r.s.e and cheap; they have abstained from sending their sons and daughters to expensive schools and colleges and sent them only to the lower grades of the public schools. If abstinence were a source of wealth, the working people of every country would be rich, for they have abstained from nearly everything that is worth while.

There is one thing the rich have abstained from, however, which the poor have indulged in freely--and that is _work_. I never heard of a man getting rich through his own labor.

Even the inventor does not get rich by means of his own labor. To begin with, there is no invention which is purely an individual undertaking. I was talking the other day with one of the world's great inventors upon this subject. He was explaining to me how he came to invent a certain machine which has made his name famous. He explained that for many years men had been facing a great difficulty and other inventors had been trying to devise some means of meeting it. He had, therefore, to begin with, the experience of thousands of men during many years to give him a clear idea of what was required. And that was a great thing to start with, Jonathan.

Secondly, he had the experiments of all the numerous other inventors to guide him: he could profit by their failures. Not only did he know what to avoid, because that great fund of others' experience, but he also got many useful ideas from the work of some of the men who were on the right line without knowing it. "I could not have invented it if it were not for the men who went before me," he said.

Another point, Jonathan: In the wonderful machine the inventor was discussing there are wheels and levers and springs. Somebody had to invent the wheel, the lever and the spring before there could be a machine at all. Who was it, I wonder! Do you know who made the first wheel, or the first lever? Of course you don't! n.o.body does. These things were invented thousands of years ago, when the race still lived in barbarism. Each age has simply extended their usefulness and efficiency. So it is wrong to speak of any invention as the work of one man. Into every great invention go the experience and experiments of countless others.

So much for that side of the question. Now, let us look at another side of the question which is sometimes lost sight of. A man invents a machine: as I have shown you, it is as much the product of other men's brains as of his own. It is really a social product. He gets a patent upon the machine for a certain number of years, and that patent gives him the right to say to the world "No one can use this machine unless he pays me a royalty." He does not use the machine himself and keep what he can make in compet.i.tion with others' means of production. If no one chooses to use his machine, then, no matter how good a thing it may be, he gets nothing from his invention. So that even the inventor is no exception to my statement that no man ever gets rich by his own labor.

The inventor is not the real inventor of the machine: he only carries on the work which others began thousands of years ago. He takes the results of other people's inventive genius and adds his quota. But he claims the whole. And when he has done his work and added his contribution to the age-long development of mechanical modes of production, he must depend again upon society, upon the labor of others.

To return to the question of abstinence: I would not attempt to deny that some men have saved part of their income and by investing it secured the beginnings of great fortunes. I know that is so. But the fortunes came out of the labor of other people. Somebody had to produce the wealth, that is quite evident. And if the person who got it was not that somebody, the producer, it is as clear as noonday that the producer must have produced something he did not get.

No, my friend, the notion that profits are the reward of abstinence and thrift is stupid in the extreme. The people who enjoy the profit-incomes of the world, are, with few exceptions, people who have not been either abstemious or thrifty.

But perhaps you will say that, while this may be true of the people who to-day are getting enormous incomes from rent, interest or profit, we must go further back; that we must go back to the beginning of things when their fathers or their grandfathers began by investing their savings.

To that I have no objection whatever, provided only that you are willing to go back, not merely to the beginning of the individual fortune, but to the beginning of the system. If your grandfather, or great-grandfather, had been what is termed a thrifty and industrious man, working hard, living poor, working his wife and little ones in one long grind, all in order to save money to invest in business, you might now be a rich man; that is, supposing you were heir to their possessions.

That is not at all certain, for it is a fact that most of the men who have h.o.a.rded their individual savings and then invested them have been ruined and fooled. In the case of our railroads, for example, the great majority of the early investors of savings went bankrupt. They were swallowed up by the bigger fish, Jonathan. But a.s.sume it otherwise, a.s.sume that the grandfather of some rich man of the present day laid the foundation of the family fortune in the manner described, don't you see that the system of robbing the worker of his product was already established; that you must go back to the beginning of the _system_?

And when you trace capital back to its origin, my friend, you will always come to war or robbery. You can trace it back to the forcible taking of the land away from the people. When the machine came, bringing with it an industrial revolution, it was by the wealthy and the ruthless that the machine was owned, not by the poor toilers. In other words, my friends, there was simply a continuance of the old rule of a cla.s.s of overlords, under another name.

If the abstinence theory is foolish, even more foolish is the notion that profits are the reward of managing ability, the wages of superintendence. Under primitive capitalism there was some justification for this view.

It was impossible to deny that the owner of a factory did manage it, that he was the superintendent, ent.i.tled as such to some reward. It was easy enough to say that he got a disproportionate share, but who was to decide just what his fair share would be?

But when capitalism developed and became impersonal that idea of the nature of profits was killed. When companies were organized they employed salaried managers, _whose salaries were paid before profits were reckoned at all_. To-day I can own shares in China and Australia while living all the time in the United States. Even though I have never been to those countries, nor seen the property I am a shareholder in, I shall get my profits just the same. A lunatic may own shares in a thousand companies and, though he is confined in a madhouse, his shares of stock will still bring a profit to his guardians in his name.

When Mr. Rockefeller was summoned to court in Chicago last year, he stated on oath that he could not tell anything about the business of the Standard Oil Company, not having had anything to do with the business for several years past. But he gets his profits just the same, showing how foolish it is to talk of profits as being the reward of managing ability and the wages of superintendence.

Now, Jonathan, I have explained to you pretty fully what Socialism is when considered as a philosophy of social evolution. I have also explained to you what Socialism is when considered as a system of economy. I could sum up both very briefly by saying that Socialism is a philosophy of social evolution which teaches that the great force which has impelled the race onward, determining the rate and direction of social progress, has come from man's tools and the mode of production in general: that we are now living in a period of transition, from capitalism to Socialism, motived by the economic forces of our time. Socialism is a system of economics, also. Its substance may be summed up in a sentence as follows: Labor applied to natural resources is the source of the wealth of capitalistic society, but the greatest part of the wealth produced goes to non-producers, the producers getting only a part, in the form of wages--hence the paradox of wealthy non-producers and penurious producers.

I have explained to you also that Socialism is not a scheme. There remains still to be explained, however, another aspect of Socialism, of more immediate interest and importance and interest. I must try to explain Socialism as an ideal, as a forecast of the future. You want to know, having traced the evolution of society to a point where everything seems to be in transition, where a change seems imminent, just what the nature of that change will be.

I must leave that for another letter, friend Jonathan, for this is over-long already. I shall not try to paint a picture of the future for you, to tell you in detail what that future will be like. I do not know: no man can know. He who pretends to know is either a fool or a knave, my friend. But there are some things which, I believe, we may premise with reasonable certainty These things I want to discuss in my next letter. Meantime, there are lots of things in this letter to think about.

_And I want you to think, Jonathan Edwards!_

IX

WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT

(_Continued_)

And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fattling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the basilisk's den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.--_Isaiah._

But we are not going to attain Socialism at one bound. The transition is going on all the time, and the important thing for us, in this explanation, is not to paint a picture of the future--which in any case would be useless labor--but to forecast a practical programme for the intermediate period, to formulate and justify measures that shall be applicable at once, and that will serve as aids to the new Socialist birth.--_W. Liebknecht._

At the head of this letter I have copied two pa.s.sages to which I want you to give particular attention, Jonathan. The first consists of a part of a very beautiful word-picture, in which the splendid old Hebrew prophet described his vision of a perfect social state. In his Utopia it would no longer be true to speak of Nature as being red of tooth and claw. Even the lion would eat straw like the ox, so that there might not be suffering caused by one animal preying upon another. Whenever I read that chapter, Jonathan, I sit watching the smoke-wreaths curl out of my pipe and float away, and they seem to bear me with them to a land of seductive beauty. I should like to live in a land where there was never a cry of pain, where never drop of blood stained the ground.

There have been lots of Utopias besides that of the old Hebrew prophet. Plato, the great philosopher, wrote _The Republic_ to give form to his dream of an ideal society. Sir Thomas More, the great English statesman and martyr, outlined his ideal of social relations in a book called _Utopia_. Mr. Bellamy, in our own day, has given us his picture of social perfection in _Looking Backward_. There have been many others who, not content with writing down their ideas of what society ought to be like, have tried to establish ideal conditions. They have established colonies, communities, sects and brotherhoods, all in the earnest hope of being able to attain the perfect social state.

The greatest of these experimental Utopians, Robert Owen, tried to carry out his ideas in this country. It would be well worth your while to read the account of his life and work in George Browning Lockwood's book, _The New Harmony Communities_. Owen tried to get Congress to adopt his plans for social regeneration. He addressed the members of both houses, taking with him models, plans, diagrams and statistics, showing exactly how things would be, according to his idea, in the ideal world. In Europe he went round to all the reigning sovereigns begging them to adopt his plans.

He wanted common owners.h.i.+p of everything with equal distribution; money would be abolished; the marriage system would be done away with and "free love" established; children would belong to and be reared by the community. Our concern with him at this point is that he called himself a Socialist and was, I believe, the first to use that word.

But the Socialists of to-day have nothing in common with such Utopian ideas as those I have described. We all recognize that Robert Owen was a beautiful spirit, one of the world's greatest humanitarians. He was, like the prophet Isaiah, a dreamer, a visionary. He had no idea of the philosophy of social evolution upon which modern Socialism rests; no idea of its system of economics. He saw the evils of private owners.h.i.+p and compet.i.tion in the fiercest period of compet.i.tive industry, and wanted to replace them with co-operation and public owners.h.i.+p. But his point of view was that he had been inspired with a great idea, thanks to which he could save the world from all its misery. He did not realize that social changes are produced by slow evolution.

One of the princ.i.p.al reasons why I have dwelt at this length upon Owen is that he is a splendid representative of the great Utopia builders.

The fact that he was probably the first man to use the word Socialism adds an element of interest to his personality also. I wanted to put Utopian Socialism before you so clearly that you would be able to contrast it at once with modern, scientific Socialism--the Socialism of Marx and Engels, upon which the great Socialist parties of the world are based; the Socialism that is alive in the world to-day. They are as opposite as the poles. It is important that you should grasp this fact very clearly, for many of the criticisms of Socialism made to-day apply only to the old utopian ideals and do not touch modern Socialism at all. In the letter you wrote me at the beginning of this discussion there are many questions which you could not have asked had you not conceived of Socialism as a scheme to be adopted.

People are constantly attacking Socialism upon these false grounds.

They remind me of a story I heard in Wales many years ago. In one of the mountain districts a miner returned from his work one afternoon and found that his wife had bought a picture of the crucifixion of Jesus and hung it against the wall. He had never heard of Jesus, so the story goes, and his wife had to explain the meaning of the picture. She told the story in her simple way, laying much stress upon the fact that "the wicked Jews" had killed Jesus. But she forgot to say that it all happened about two thousand years ago.

Now, it happened not long after that the miner saw a Jew peddler come to the door of his cottage. The thought of the awful suffering of Jesus and his own Welsh hatred of oppression sufficed to fill him with resentment toward the poor peddler. He at once began to beat the unfortunate fellow in a terribly savage manner. When the peddler, between gasps, demanded to know why he had been so ill-treated, the miner dragged him into his kitchen and pointed to the picture of the crucifixion. "See what you did to that poor man, our Lord!" he thundered. To which the Jew very naturally responded: "But, my friend, that was not me. That was two thousand years ago!" The reply seemed to daze the miner for a moment. Then he said: "Two thousand years! Two thousand years! Why, I only heard of it last week!"

It is just as silly to attack the Socialism of to-day for the ideas held by the earlier utopian Socialists as beating that poor Jew peddler was.

Now then, friend Jonathan, turn back and read the second of the pa.s.sages I have placed at the head of this letter. It is from the writings of one of the greatest of modern Socialists, the man who was the great political leader of the Socialist movement in Germany, Wilhelm Liebknecht.

You will notice that he says the transition to Socialism is going on all the time; that we are not to attain Socialism at one bound; that it is useless to attempt to paint pictures of the future; that we can forecast an immediate programme and aid the Socialist birth. These statements are quite in harmony with the outline of the Socialist philosophy of the evolution of society contained in my last letter.

So, if you ask me to tell you just what the world will be like when all people call themselves Socialists except a few reformers and "fanatics," earnest pioneers of further changes, I must answer you that I do not know. How they will dress, what sort of pictures artists will paint, what sort of poems poets will write, or what sort of novels men and women will read, I do not know. What the income of each family will be I cannot tell you, any more than I can tell you whether there will be any intercommunication between the inhabitants of this planet and of Mars; whether there will be an amba.s.sador from Mars at the national capital.

I do not expect that the lion will eat straw like the ox; I do not expect that people will be perfect. I do not suppose that men and women will have become so angelic that there will never be any crime, suffering, anger, pain or sorrow; I do not expect disease to be forever banished from life in the Socialist regime. Still less do I expect that mechanical genius will have been so perfected that human labor will be no longer necessary; that perpetual motion will have been harnessed to great indestructible machines and work become a thing of the past. That dream of the German dreamer, Etzler, will never be realized, I hope.

I suppose that, under Socialism, there will be some men and women far wiser than others. There may be a few fools left! I suppose that some will be far juster and kinder than others. There may be some selfish brutes left with a good deal of hoggishness in their nature! I suppose that some will have to make great mistakes and endure the tragedies which men and women have endured through all the ages. The love of some men will die out, breaking the hearts of some women, I suppose, and there will be women whose love will bring them to ruin and death.

I should not like to think of jails and brothels existing under Socialism, Jonathan, but for all I know they may exist. Whether there will be churches and paid ministers under Socialism, I do not know. I do not pretend to know.

I suppose that, under Socialism, there will be some people who will be dissatisfied. I hope so! Men and women will want to move to a higher plane of life, I hope. What they will call that plane I do not know; what it will be like I do not know. I suppose they will be opposed and persecuted; that they will be mocked and derided, called "fanatics"

and "dreamers" and lots of other ugly and unpleasant names. Lots of people will want to stay just as they are, and violently oppose the men who say, "Let us move on." But I don't believe that any sane person will want to go back to the old conditions--back to our conditions of to-day.

You see, I have killed lots of your objections already, my friend!

Now let me tell you briefly what Socialists want, and what they believe will take place--_must_ take place. In the first place, there must be political changes to make complete our political democracy.