Part 34 (1/2)
Consider the situation before the war. We were all of us at work under the compet.i.tive system, and with the exception of a few parasites, everybody was occupied pretty close to the limit of his energy. If any one had said that it would be possible for our community to pitch in and double or treble our output, you would have laughed at him. But suddenly we found ourselves at war, and in need of a great increase in output, and we resolved one and all to achieve this end. We did not waste any time in theoretical discussions about the rights of private capital, or the dangers of bureaucracy and the destruction of initiative. Our government stepped in and took control; it took the railroads and systematized them, it took the big factories and told them exactly what to make, it took the raw materials and allotted them, where they were needed, it fixed the prices of labor, and ordered millions of men to this or that place, to this or that occupation. It even seized the foodstuffs and directed what people should eat. In a thousand ways it suppressed compet.i.tion and replaced it by order and system. And what was the result?
We took five million of our young men, the very cream of our industrial force, and withdrew them from all productive activities; we put them into uniforms, and put them through a training which meant that they were eating more food and wearing more clothing and consuming more goods than nine-tenths of them had ever done in their lives before. We built camps for them, and supplied them with all kinds of costly products of labor, such as guns and cartridges, automobiles and airplanes. We treated two million of them to an expensive trip to Europe, and there we set them to work burning up and destroying the products of industry, to the value of many billions of dollars. And not only did we supply our own armies, we supplied the armies of all our allies. We built millions of dollars worth of s.h.i.+ps, and we sent over to Europe, whether by private business or by government loans, some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods--more than ten years of our exports before the war.
All the labor necessary to produce all this wealth had to be withdrawn from industry, so far as concerned our domestic uses and needs. It would not be too much to say that from domestic industry we withdrew a total of ten million of our most capable labor force. I think it would be reasonable to say that two-thirds of our productive energies went to war purposes, and only one-third was available for home use. And yet, we did it without a particle of real suffering. Many of us worked hard, but few of us worked harder than usual. Most of us got along with less wheat and sugar, but n.o.body starved, n.o.body really suffered ill health, and our poor made higher wages and had better food than ever in their lives before. If this argument is sound, it proves that our productive machinery is capable, when properly organized and directed, of producing three times the common necessities of our population. a.s.suming that our average working day is nine hours, we could produce what we at present consume by three hours of intelligently directed work per day.
Let us look at the matter from another angle. Just at present the hero of the American business man is Herbert Hoover; and Mr. Hoover recently appointed a committee, not of Socialists and ”Utopians,” but of engineering experts, to make a study of American productive methods. The report showed that American industry was only thirty-five or forty per cent efficient. Incidentally, this ”Committee on Waste” a.s.sessed, in the case of the building industry, sixty-five per cent of the blame against management and only twenty-one per cent against labor; in six fundamental industries it a.s.sessed fifty per cent of the blame against management and less than twenty-five per cent against labor. Fifteen years ago a professor of engineering, Sidney A. Reeve by name, made an elaborate study of the wastes involved in our haphazard and planless industrial methods, and embodied his findings in a book, ”The Cost of Compet.i.tion.” His conclusion was that of the total amount of energy expended in America, more than seventy per cent was wasted. We were doing one hundred per cent of work and getting thirty per cent of results. If we would get one hundred per cent of results, we should produce three and one-third times as much wealth, and the income of our workers would be increased one or two thousand dollars a year.
Robert Blatchford in his book, ”Merrie England,” has a saying to the effect that it makes all the difference, when half a dozen men go out to catch a horse, whether they spend their time catching the horse or keeping one another from catching the horse. Our next task will be to point out a few of the ways in which good, honest American business men and workingmen, laboring as intelligently and conscientiously as they know how, waste their energies in keeping one another from producing goods.
CHAPTER LXII
THE COST OF COMPEt.i.tION
(Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine, those which are obvious and those which are hidden.)
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 owners.h.i.+p 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'
a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.s 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 compet.i.tion, 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 compet.i.tive 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 compet.i.tors, 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 s.h.i.+p 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.
CHAPTER LXIII
SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM
(Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.)