Twentieth Century Socialism Part 20

Capitalists often prefer to dispense with an improvement rather than go to the expense which improvements generally occasion. This was the unwritten motive for the opposition of England to the construction of the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and was believed by M. DeLesseps to be the motive of their opposition to the Panama Ca.n.a.l.[146] Again, no one who has had personal acquaintance with inventors can believe that their discoveries are to any material extent the result of financial motive.

It would be difficult to imagine the conditions under which Edison and Maxim would not invent. They cannot help inventing; they are as much under a necessity to invent as a hen to lay eggs. Undoubtedly there are certain environments which favor the production and utilization of inventing types, and others that disfavor the production and utilization of such types. And undoubtedly a motive for invention is a part of the environment which does contribute to invention; but would such a motive be wanting in a Socialist society? I think it can be shown that it would not only be present, but would be a stronger motive in the Socialist society than in our own; for under our own the reward which an inventor receives for an invention is a patent, and a patent is, as all lawyers will testify, merely a subject for litigation. In other words, every man who invents a useful thing has to overcome the objections of the patent office; the objections of infringers; the objections of owners of machines which would be superseded, all three obstacles of no small order. And not until they are all overcome, if indeed, they are, is the patent likely to be a source of income to the inventor. Under the Socialist order, however, every man is interested in increasing the productiveness of society to diminish the hours of labor; and nothing, moreover, would be easier than for a Socialist Society exceptionally to reward invention by diminis.h.i.+ng the hours of labor due to it by the inventor.

If an inventor by any one invention shortened the hours of labor in an aggregate amount equivalent to a lifetime of his own work for the community, he ought to be relieved of the necessity of himself doing further work. If the invention were clearly due to inventive skill and not to accident, it would be to the interest of the industry in which he was engaged to furnish him with a laboratory where he could experiment with a view to further invention, as the General Electric Company does for its inventors and Mr. Westinghouse for his. There is not one inventor in a hundred but would laboriously avail of such an opportunity; for the delight of an inventor is to invent. So inventors would const.i.tute one of the Honor group of the community. They would receive during their lives the consideration due to their inventiveness and industry. At present the enormous majority of inventors die poor and unknown. Of all the inventors in America only three that I know of are rich, Westinghouse, Bell, and Edison.

Practically all the rest have been victims of their own inventive faculty. Who knows the name of the inventor of the slot machine so much in vogue to-day? His name was Percival Everitt, and he died a pauper in the street.

But we need not have recourse to argument to demonstrate that pecuniary reward is not necessary to stimulate invention. There is one profession in which a germ of self-respect has established the rule that no discovery or invention shall receive pecuniary reward--the medical profession. No doctor who wants to keep or earn a standing patents a medicine or surgical instrument. Those who do so are at once ostracized. Medicine or surgical inventions are deemed by self-respecting doctors too important to the community for the inventor to limit their use by patent.

If this idea of social service to-day animates the medical profession, why should it not ultimately animate other professions, other industries, other occupations? Why should it not animate them all?

Another profession has furnished the elements for all invention and has never asked a pecuniary reward--I mean the teachers. If, for example, we take such a subject as electricity, it will be found that all the fundamental discoveries that enable the modern use of electricity are due entirely to the researches of men who, out of sheer love of the work, added research to the occupations for which they were paid. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to discover the use of gla.s.s as a non-conductor of electricity. Galvani and Volta, who gave their names--one to Galvanic, and the other to Voltaic electricity--were professors in Italy. The action of the electric current on a compa.s.s needle was discovered by Professor H.O. Oersted in Copenhagen; and the nature of electro-motive force, current strength and resistance, were determined by Professor G.S. Ohm in Holland. But the greatest discoveries of all were made by Faraday, who refused a t.i.tle in order to remain a professor all the days of his life. Is it possible that with the record of these men before us, we can maintain the theory that gain is the only stimulus to invention? If we think a little, we shall see how essentially childish this notion is.

There are three princ.i.p.al motives for invention:

The desire to make money is one, but my experience of inventors has persuaded me that it is the least, and is only perceptible in inventors of the smallest caliber.

The faculty of invention is itself the determining motive. A man who has a faculty _must_ exercise that faculty or suffer. The artist _must_ paint; the sculptor _must_ sculpt; the musician _must_ make music; the poet _must_ make rhymes. Lowell said that when he had no time to state a proposition carefully in prose, he stated it in rhyme.

No one who has worked with inventors would be guilty of the error that inventors need the stimulus of money reward. The mind of the inventor teems with inventions as a herring at sp.a.w.ning season teems with sp.a.w.n. And as the herring must relieve herself of her sp.a.w.n so must the inventor relieve himself of his inventions. One great inventor of the present day was in 1883 so fertile that the company who had secured his exclusive services paid him to go to Europe and stop inventing in order to avoid the ruinous expense of taking out his patents. The inventor is driven by two forces: a function that insists upon being exercised, and the pleasure which this exercise occasions.

Every man who can do a thing well loves doing that thing. To-day when athletics bring notoriety it is very natural to conclude that men row to get this notoriety. But in the old days when there was little or no notoriety, men who could row, rowed for the pleasure of it; men who could box, boxed for the pleasure of it. So to-day because a few inventors--a very few--have become wealthy, the conclusion is drawn that inventors invent only to make money. It is a pardonable fallacy, but one that it takes very little intellectual effort to explode.

A man gifted with curiosity and imagination will forget altogether the needs of the body in his effort to attain his end. Inventors are notoriously improvident. Bernard Palissy not only forgot to eat, but to furnish food to his wife and children. Nay, he not only starved himself and them, but burned his furniture to the last chair in his desperate efforts to get the glaze he was in search of. A chemist will forget mealtime and bedtime in his laboratory. There is no force in the world more compelling than the force of an idea; none to which the body is under a more complete subjection. An inventor in pursuit of a solution needs no more stimulus than a stag in the rutting season in pursuit of his doe. The theory that he does, and that it is the stimulus of money that he needs, is that of the amateur who has never seen an inventor at work, or of the bookkeeper who reduces everything--body, mind, soul, and heart--to dollars and cents.

An inventor may have been compelled to abandon research by the necessity of making money or by the difficulty of finding it. Many an one has been crushed by just such difficulties as these; and indeed it may justly be said that more inventions are lost to us by the money difficulty than are secured to us by the stimulus of a money reward.

A third motive is the desire for consideration which is at the bottom of many other desires--at the bottom even of the desire for money itself. For if we a.n.a.lyze the desire for money we shall perceive that it includes two very different motives: the motive of prudence--the desire to secure the comforts and luxuries of life; and the motive of ambition, or the desire for the consideration of others. Now the former is the first in time, for a man must begin by securing the material things of life. But once these are secured the motive that keeps men making money is desire for consideration. And this desire, though evil when excessive, is in moderation one of the greatest of human virtues; for it sets men upon deserving the affection of their neighbors and promotes unselfishness and self-sacrifice. One of the curses of the compet.i.tive system is that the desire for consideration, which in its essence is a virtue, is converted by our money system into a vice, because money is the chief instrument in securing consideration.[147] More will have to be said on this subject later. Here we may content ourselves with noting that in a Socialist society consideration will be secured not meretriciously through money, but deservedly through service. The inventor who shortens hours of labor for the community will belong to the Honor Roll. He will secure this recognition not after having forced his invention on the capitalist and fought its merits through the courts, created unemployment for his fellows, and crushed compet.i.tion out of the field his patent covers--but directly from the industry he has benefited, without the waste that attends the establis.h.i.+ng of patent rights to-day. The inventor under Socialism will have a stronger stimulus than he has to-day; for the chances of securing livelihood and consideration are certainly not more than one in a hundred, whereas under Socialism they will be a hundred to one. There will not be the opposition of invested capital to overcome; nor the hostility of his fellow-workman; nor the villainy of the infringer. If his invention can reduce the hours of labor or otherwise benefit the community, it will be hailed with delight and honor. And so even though he need no stimulus he will under Socialism have it; for his reward will be prompt and secure.

Moreover, as Professor Ely has pointed out, the tendency of invention in a Socialist state would be to replace work which now involves drudgery by machinery that would tend to lessen or eliminate it.

If it were conceivable that a law could be made or enforced requiring that millionaires, and none but millionaires, were to serve as stokers, there is no doubt that all the ingenuity in the land would at once be put to making the work of stoking less detestable than it now is; if necessary, naval architecture would be so reformed from top to bottom, as to reduce the work of stoking to that pressure of a finger upon a b.u.t.ton which is the only physical work imposed by modern conditions upon the millionaire to-day.

The improvements due to invention would in a Socialist society differ, perhaps, in character but not in quant.i.ty, for invention obeys the particular stimulus which gives rise to it. Thus Karl Marx points out[148] that mechanical traction was not introduced into mines until a law forbade the use of women and children there, and the "half-time system stimulated the invention of the piecing-machine," thereby replacing child labor in woolen-yarn manufacture. Again, immense improvements have been made in charging and drawing gas retorts, owing to labor troubles, and there is no doubt that all arduous work would soon be made less arduous if we all had to take a turn at it.

The objection that Socialism, would destroy the stimulus to invention has been treated at what may seem disproportionate length on account of its extreme importance. For it is owing to human inventiveness that production to-day tends to outstrip consumption. Of all the speculations upon the possible advantages of a new social order those which concern themselves with the shortening of the average working day are the most fascinating, yet the most dangerous. They are fascinating because, of the many afflictions of the present order it is the excessive workday that we feel most, for it is that which robs so many of us or our need of personal life; and we know that any reduction of the hours of labor would mean an immediate increase in the quant.i.ty, and an ultimate increase in the quality, of our life.

But they are dangerous speculations because they probe to the very heart of that wonderfully complicated economic process which we call Capitalism. To make any scientific estimate of the social labor time required to produce the commodities socially necessary for our health and happiness would require an elaborate and intimate investigation of the most secret details of industry, trade, and transportation, such as there is little likelihood of ever being made. Nevertheless, it is possible, in the light of some data already at our command, to get a suggestive glimpse into the probabilities of the situation.

The 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor is an exhaustive study of the actual time required to produce some 600 different commodities, ranging all the way from apple trees to loaves of bread and s.h.i.+ngles.

The princ.i.p.al object of this Report was to compare the cost of production by hand with the cost of production by machine; and it has demonstrated the enormous progress that has been made in the art of production by the subst.i.tution of machine for hand labor. For example, before the introduction of machine labor it took about sixty-three hours and a half to produce thirty bushels of barley; whereas to-day, with the use of machinery, the same amount can be produced in two hours and forty-two minutes (p. 24-5). The Report, in estimating the cost of producing, includes breaking the ground, sowing and covering seed and pulverizing topsoil, hauling water and fuel for engine, reaping, thres.h.i.+ng, measuring, sacking and hauling to the granary (p.

432-3).

Having these figures it would seem to be a very simple matter to ascertain the total time required to produce the various commodities consumed by the average workingman's family. It would seem as though all we had to do was to make out a list of these commodities, get the time cost of each from the Report and add these together to get the total. Unfortunately, however, the Report does not cover all the items which would have to be included in this list of necessaries; and to make an estimate from a single commodity or from two or three commodities would be a little dangerous, because some of the commodities have much higher time values than others and would therefore introduce many elements of uncertainty.

But we may approach the question from another standpoint. The Report does furnish the time value of ten of the princ.i.p.al crops and of bituminous coal. Let us, then, restate the problem in the following form:

_a.s.suming social owners.h.i.+p of land (including bituminous coal lands) and modern machinery, how many hours' labor per day would be required to produce enough of the princ.i.p.al crops to sell at farm or mine for a sum sufficient to buy the necessaries of existence for the average family?_

The first step, obviously, is to determine what const.i.tutes the necessaries of existence for the average American family. Here again we may resort to official statistics. In the year 1900-01 the U.S.

Bureau of Labor entered upon an investigation of the income and expenditure of the average American family. Agents were sent out all over the country to collect data at first hand. These agents got reports from some 25,440 families, and the figures are tabulated and summarized in the 18th Annual Report of this Bureau.[149]

These 25,000 families had the necessaries of existence, we know, simply because they managed to live, survive, and reproduce. Their average income was $749.50; their average expenditure, $699.24, thus representing a saving of $50 a year. But many of these families had boarders, many had grown-up children or wife at work, many had lodgers, so that the income was artificially increased or diminished by these factors. There were, however, 11,156 families among these which the report designates as "normal"; these were distinguished by the following characteristics: a husband at work; a wife at home; not more than five children--none over 14 years of age; no dependents, boarders, lodgers, or servants (p. 18). Good units, you see, from a statistical standpoint. Now, the average income of these normal families was $650.98; the average expenditure $617.80.[150]

Here, then, we have over 10,000 families, of five persons each, who manage to live on $617.80 a year, without resorting to crime or charity. That they live in straitened conditions is undoubtedly true, but they are by no means submerged, for in their cooperation with the agents of the Bureau of Labor they all displayed qualities of intelligence which are not to be found among the submerged. In short, they were average self-respecting American workingmen's families.

But let us a.s.sume that $617.80 is inadequate; let us provide a margin of safety by allowing $800 as the minimum for procuring the necessaries of existence.[151] Below is a table showing time cost per unit (bushels or pounds) of ten princ.i.p.al crops and of bituminous coal. This is derived from the tables on pages 24-25 of the 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor, which are a.s.sumed to be accurate.

------------+-------------+--------------+---------+----------- Time Cost. Time Cost Commodity. Quant.i.ty. +--------------+ Unit. in Hrs. Min. Minutes.

------------+-------------+------+-------+---------+----------- Barley 30 bush. 2 42.8 1 bush. 5.427 Wheat 40 " 6 17.4 1 " 9.435 Hay 2 tons 15 30.5 1 ton 465.25 Oats 40 bush. 7 5.8 1 bush. 10.645 Rice 60 " 17 2.5 1 " 17.042 Rye 25 " 25 10 1 " 60.40 Corn 80 " 42 38.1 1 " 31.97 Potatoes 220 " 38 ... 1 " 10.364 Tobacco 2,750 lbs. 606 5.1 1 lb. 13.22 Cotton 1,000 " 78 42 1 " 4.72 Bit. Coal 200 tons 379 36 1 ton 113.88 ------------+-------------+------+-------+---------+-----------

Having the time cost per unit of each of these commodities, let us now ascertain the time cost of the total crops of these produced in the United States. This is exhibited in the table on the next page, which is derived from the figures given in the Year Book of the Department of Agriculture, 1907, p. 668. These, too, are a.s.sumed to be accurate.

We see from this table that the total time cost of these princ.i.p.al crops, if produced with modern machinery on a large scale, would be 185,759,513,000 minutes, and that the money value of these commodities, sold at farm or mine, is $3,214,510,707.

If, then, it would require 185,759,513,000 minutes' labor to produce $3,214,510,707 worth of commodities, how much labor would be required to produce $800 worth of these commodities? This is a problem in simple proportion:

$800: $3,214,510,707:: _x_ minutes: 185,759,513,000 minutes. Working this out we find that _x_ equals 46,230 minutes or 770 hours and 30 minutes. Estimating 300 working days to the year, this would seem to indicate that a social work-day of 2- hours should be sufficient to procure the necessaries of existence, valuing these at $800.

----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+----------- Average Average Total Time Total Time Annual Value on Farm Cost in Cost in Commodity. Production Dec. 1, Minutes. Unit. Thousand 1898-1907. 1898-1907. Minutes.

----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+----------- Millions Barley 117 bush. $53,872,896 5.427 1 bush. 633,959 Wheat 642 " 444,206,221 9.435 1 " 6,057,270 Hay 59 tons 524,124,456 465.25 1 ton 27,449,750 Oats 841 bush. 265,595,639 10.645 1 bush. 8,952,445 Rice 18 " 14,594,913 17.042 1 " 305,756 Rye 29 " 16,527,099 60.40 1 " 1,751,600 Corn 2,309 " 953,158,114 31.977 1 " 73,834,893 Potatoes 255 " 134,236,563 10.364 1 " 2,642,820 Tobacco 743 lbs. 59,548,881 13.22 1 lb. 9,822,460 Cotton 5,233 " 457,787,442 4.72 1 " 24,699,760 Bit. Coal 260 tons 290,858,483 113.88 1 ton 29,608,800 +-------------- +----------- $3,214,510,707 185,759,513 ----------+-----------+--------------+---------+--------+-----------

Before accepting the above conclusion, however, it will be necessary to make proper allowances for some important factors. First, the figures quoted from the Report do not include time spent on bookkeeping, upkeep, and repair of machinery, the time cost of the raw material, of the machinery, etc. All these items are certainly important, but we may safely a.s.sume that, taken together, they would probably not increase the total by fifty per cent. If, then, we allow an additional 1- hours for these items, thus making the work-day 3- hours, we shall be well within reason.

Second, it is to be inferred that the ten crops for which the 13th Annual Report furnishes the time value were produced under unusually favorable conditions, if not actually on "bonanza" farms. It is true that the introduction (p. 12) affirms, in a blanket clause, "that the effort was made to ascertain, not the quant.i.ty of work that could be done under the most favorable conditions, but what was being accomplished steadily in everyday work"; nevertheless, in the absence of more specific information as to the actual conditions under which the units under discussion were farmed, we cannot ignore the doubt that arises in our minds. We may, however, offset this by two other factors which were quite conservative in our estimate: (1) In adopting the sum of $800 as a measure of the necessaries of existence, we have, as already shown, allowed nearly a third over and above the sum ($617.80) actually ascertained to be requisite in the years 1900-1901.

(2) The figures in the 13th Annual Report are based upon investigations made from fifteen to twenty years ago, between 1890-95.

The steady improvement in agricultural machinery which has been made since then would undoubtedly reduce the present time cost of these commodities very materially. It is not unreasonable, then, to urge that these factors counterbalance each other; but in order to be on the safe side let us add another quarter of an hour, thus making the probable work-day consist of a round four hours.

We seem, then, to have warrant for believing that if agricultural production were socialized to-day a 1200-hour work-year would suffice to produce the necessaries, and an 1800-hour year, many of the luxuries, of existence for the community. This, arranged to suit the exigencies of agricultural production, might mean a twelve-hour workday for four or six summer months, as the case may be.

Does this seem Utopian? Granted: all speculations of this sort must seem Utopian. And yet, if we look back a few centuries, we shall find, according to no less an authority than Thorold Rogers ("Six Centuries of Work and Wages"), that the English workman, during the fifteenth century and the first part of the sixteenth, lived, and lived well, on the product of an eight-hour-day. Is it, then, so fantastic to suppose that modern machinery, under a socialized system of production, could cut this day in two?

The objection may be raised that this estimate is one-sided because it is based on figures for agricultural production only, whereas industrial production is really the more important half of the modern economic process; and that therefore the generalization could not apply to the whole economic process in a cooperative commonwealth.

It is true, as already pointed out, that we do not have comprehensive data for all, or nearly all, the industrial products in actual use in the average household. But we have posited, hypothetically, a socialized agricultural community producing a quant.i.ty of goods which it can sell at the farm for an average $800 per family; this $800 sufficing, when brought to the village store or forwarded to the city, to buy the necessaries of existence for the family _at retail_. Now it is well known that under present conditions the retail price of any manufactured article comprises about one-third for actual cost of production, one-third for manufacturer's profits and accounting costs, and one-third for selling costs. In other words, every such article, when it reaches the ultimate consumer, is weighted down with a load of barnacles of trade-profits of innumerable middlemen, rents, dividends, cost of advertising, and other trade-getting devices, etc., etc. Part of this cost of distribution is undoubtedly legitimate and could not be dispensed with under any organization of society, no matter how scientific. The man engaged in producing the necessaries of life will always have to support the man engaged in transporting and distributing them, and the man engaged in manufacturing and repairing the machinery and other instruments of production necessary thereto.

But it is impossible to believe that this auxiliary corps will ever, in a rational system of production, consume two-thirds of the ultimate retail value of most goods, as it does to-day.

It would seem, therefore, that if the industrial community organized itself in the same fas.h.i.+on as our hypothetical agricultural community, the exchange value of its products, whether stated in terms of social labor, time, or money, or any other standard of value, would actually be lower than our estimate a.s.sumes. By how much our four-hour work-day would be reduced we have no means of determining, but it could hardly be increased.

Probably, therefore, four hours will const.i.tute the average daily labor in a cooperative commonwealth, and these ought to be sufficient to give to every citizen not only the necessaries and comforts now enjoyed by the middle cla.s.s, but some of the luxuries enjoyed only by the millionaire.

FOOTNOTES:

[133] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, p. 829.

[134] _Christian Socialist._

[135] Report of the Industrial Commission, Vol. I, Part I, p. 222.

[136] "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 121.

[137] "Socialism and Social Reform," p. 120.