Part 32 (1/2)

Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pa.s.s a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. Congress pa.s.sed a law, very carefully worded so that no one could be sure what it meant, and a few years later the Supreme Court nullified the law. But all through this political and legal controversy the status of labor remained exactly the same; there was a ”labor market,” consisting of those members of the community who, in the formula of Marx, had nothing but their labor power to sell. These competed for recognition at the factory gates, and highly skilled foremen selected those who offered the largest quant.i.ty of labor power for the stated wage.

So entirely impersonal is this process that there are great industries in America in which ninety per cent of the common labor force is hired and fired all over again in the course of a year. These men are put to work in gangs, under a system which enables one picked man to set the pace, and compel all the others to keep up with him, under penalty of being discharged. This process is known as ”speeding up,” and its purpose is to obtain from each worker the greatest quant.i.ty of energy in exchange for his daily wage. In the steel industry men work twelve hours a day for six days in the week, and then finish with a twenty-four-hour day. If they do not work so long in other industries, it is because experience has proven that the greatest quant.i.ty of energy can be obtained from them in a shorter time. There are very few men who can stand this pace for long. Those who are not crippled or killed in accidents are broken down at forty, and all the great corporations recognize this fact. Their foremen pick out the younger men, and practically all concerns have an age rule, and never hire men above forty or forty-five.

I shall not in this book go into details concerning the fate of the worker under the profit system. I have written two novels, ”The Jungle”

and ”King Coal,” in which the facts are portrayed in detail, and it seems the part of common sense to refer the reader to these text-books.

It will suffice here to set forth the main outlines of the situation. In every capitalist country of the world the ma.s.ses of the people are herded into industries, in whose profits they have no share, and in whose welfare they have no interest. They do not know the people for whom they work; they have no human relations.h.i.+p, either with their work or with their employers. They see the surplus of their product drawn off to maintain a cla.s.s of idlers, whose activities they know only through the scandals of the divorce courts and the luxury-love of the moving picture screen. They compete with one another for jobs, and bid down one another's wages; and if they attempt to organize and end this compet.i.tion, their efforts are broken by newspaper propaganda and policemen's clubs. At the same time they know that monopoly, open or secret, prevails in the fixing of prices, and so they find the struggle to ”get ahead” a losing one. In America it used to be possible for the young and energetic to ”go West”; but now the wave of capitalism has reached the Pacific coast and been thrown back, and there is no more frontier.

The man who works on the land has been through all the ages a solitary man. He is better friends with his horse and his cow than with his fellow humans. He is brutalized by incessant toil, he lives amid dirt and the filth of animals, he is, in the words of Edwin Markham:

”A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stunted and stunned, a brother to the ox.”

He is a victim of natural forces which he does not understand, and inevitably therefore he is superst.i.tious. Being alone, he is helpless against his masters, and only utter desperation drives him to revolt.

But consider the capitalist system--how different the conditions of its workers! Here they are gathered into city slums, and their wits are sharpened by continual contact with their fellows. The printing press makes cheap the spread of information, and the soap-box makes it even cheaper. Any man with a grievance can shout aloud, and be sure of an audience to listen, and he can get a great deal said before the company watchman or the policeman can throttle him. Moreover, the modern worker is not struggling with drought and tempest and hail; he does not see his labors wiped out by volcanic eruption or lightning stroke; he is dealing with machinery, something that he himself has made, and that he fully understands. If a machine gets out of order, he does not fall down upon his knees and pray to G.o.d to fix it. All the training of his life teaches him the relations.h.i.+p of cause and effect, the adjustment of means to ends. So the modern worker, as a necessary consequence of his daily work, is practical, skeptical, and unsentimental in his psychology. And what is more, he is making all the rest of society of the same temperament. He is building roads out into the country, and building machines to roll over them; he is running telephone lines and sending newspapers and magazines and moving picture shows to the peasant and the farmer; so the young peasants and farmers hunger for the city, and they learn to fix machinery instead of praying to G.o.d.

Such is the psychology of the modern working cla.s.s; and the supreme achievement of their sharpened wits is an understanding of the capitalist process. As a matter of fact they did not make this discovery for themselves; it was made for them by middle-cla.s.s men, lawyers and teachers and writers--Fourier, Owen, Marx, La.s.salle. The modern doctrine is called by various names: Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism, Collectivism. Later on I shall define these various terms, and point out the distinctions between them. For the moment I emphasize the factor they all have in common, and which is fundamental: they wish to break the power of cla.s.s owners.h.i.+p and control of the instruments and means of production; they wish to replace private capitalism by some system under which the instruments and means of production are collectively owned and operated; and they look to the non-owning cla.s.s, the proletarian, as the motive power by which this change is to be compelled. I shall in future refer to this as the ”social revolutionary”

doctrine; taking pains to explain that the word ”revolutionary” is to be divested of its popular meaning of physical violence. It is perfectly conceivable that the change may be brought about peaceably, and I shall try to show before long that in modern capitalist states the decision as to whether it is brought about peaceably or by violence rests with the present masters of industry.

CHAPTER LVI

THE CAPITALIST PROCESS

(How profits are made under the present industrial system and what becomes of them.)

We have next to examine the structure of the capitalist order, basing our argument on facts which are admitted by everyone, including the most ardent defenders of the present system.

All men have to have certain material things which we describe as goods.

As these goods do not produce themselves, it is necessary that some should work. The workers must have tools; also they must have access to the land and the sources of raw materials. These means of production are owned by some individuals in the community, and this owners.h.i.+p gives them power to direct the work of the rest. Those who own the land and the natural sources of wealth we call capitalists, or business men, and those who do not own these things, or whose share in them is insignificant, are the proletariat, or working cla.s.s.

If you state to the average American that there is a capitalist cla.s.s and a proletariat in this country, he will point out that many who are now members of the capitalist cla.s.s were originally members of the proletariat; they have worked hard and saved, and acc.u.mulated property.

But this is merely confusing the issue. The fact that some proletarians turn into capitalists and some capitalists into proletarians is important to the individuals concerned, but it does not alter the fact that there are two cla.s.ses, capitalist and proletarian. Consider, by way of ill.u.s.trating, a field with trees growing on it; we have earth, and we have trees, and the distinction between them is unmistakable. The roots of the trees go down into the earth, and take up portions of the earth and turn it into tree. The leaves and the dead branches fall, and in the course of time are turned once more to earth. There are all sorts of stages between earth and tree, and between tree and earth; but you would not therefore say that the word ”earth” and the word ”tree” are misnomers.

The working men go to the business man and apply for work. The business man gives them work, and takes their product, and offers it in the market at a price which allows him a profit above cost. If he can sell at a profit, he repeats the process, and the worker has a job. If he cannot sell at a profit, the worker is out of a job. Here and there may be a benevolent business man who, rather than turn his workers out of a job, will sell his goods at cost, or even for a short time at a loss; but if he keeps the factory going simply for the benefit of his workers, and with no expectation of ever making a profit, that is a form of charity, and not the common system under which our business is now carried on.

So it appears that the worker is dependent for his wages upon the ability of the business man to make a profit. The worker's life is inextricably bound up with the profit of the capitalist--no profit for the capitalist, no life for the worker. The capitalist, going out to look for markets for his goods, is seeking, not merely profit for himself, but life for his workers.

Now, the business man pays a certain percentage of his total receipts for labor, another percentage for raw materials, another percentage for his overhead charges, and the rest is profit in various forms, rent to the landlord, interest to the bondholder, dividends to the stockholder.

All this total sum goes to human individuals, and each has thus a certain amount of money to spend. They pay it over to other individuals for goods or services, and so the money keeps circulating, and business keeps going. That is as deep as the average mind probes into the process.

But let us probe a little deeper. It is evident that, in the course of all this exchanging of goods, some individuals get a larger share than other individuals. Our government collects an income tax, and thus we have statistics representing what people are willing to admit about the share they get. In 1917 it appeared that, speaking roughly, one family out of six had an income of over $1,000 a year, and one family out of twelve had an income of over $2,000. But there were 19,000 families which admitted incomes of over $50,000 a year, and 300 with over $1,000,000 a year.

Now the families that get less than a thousand dollars a year obviously have to spend the greater part of their income upon their immediate living expenses. But the families that get $50,000 a year do not need to spend everything, and most of them take the greater part of their income and reinvest it--that is, they spend it upon the creating of new machinery of production, railroads, mills, factories, office buildings, the whole elaborate structure of capitalist industry.