Part 35 (1/2)
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 Cla.s.s,” in which these processes are studied. We shall, of course, have to raise up a new generation, unaccustomed to the idea of cla.s.s and of cla.s.s 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 dictators.h.i.+p 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 dictators.h.i.+p 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 dictators.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s oppression, and has no other reason for being. He wishes the industries to be organized by free a.s.sociations of the people who work in them.
Some of the greatest of the world's moral teachers have been Anarchists: Jesus, for example, and Sh.e.l.ley and Th.o.r.eau 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 att.i.tude shall we take to them? There are impa.s.sioned 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, wis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sociation 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 cla.s.s in Russia. Here was a new form of state set up in society, a workers' state, and what att.i.tude 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 embarra.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 establis.h.i.+ng real democracy in industry.
CHAPTER LXV
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
(How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we may prepare to meet it.)
From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circ.u.mstances in each country produce different inst.i.tutions. Suppose that back in the days of the French monarchy some one asked you how France was going to be governed as a political republic; how would elections be held, what would be the powers of the deputies, who would choose the premier, who would choose the president, what would be the duties of each? Who can explain why in France and England the executive is responsible to the parliament and must answer its questions, while in the United States the executive is an autocrat, responsible to no one for four years? Who could have foreseen that in England, supposed to remain a monarchy, the const.i.tution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a democracy, the const.i.tution would be rigid, and the supreme power of rejecting changes in the laws would be vested in a group of reactionary lawyers appointed for life? There will be similar surprises in the social revolution, and similar differences between what things pretend to be and what they are.
I used to compare the social revolution to the hatching of an egg. You examine it, and apparently it is all egg; but then suddenly something begins to happen, and in a few minutes it is all chicken. If, however, you investigate, you discover that the chicken had been forming inside the egg for some time. I know that there is a chicken now forming inside our social egg; but having realized the complexity of social phenomena, I no longer venture to predict the exact time of the hatching, or the size and color of the chicken.
Perhaps it is more useful to compare the social revolution to a child-birth. A good surgeon knows what is due to happen, but he knows also that there are a thousand uncertainties, a thousand dangerous possibilities, and all he can do is to watch the process and be prepared to meet each emergency as it arises. The birth process consists of one pang after another, but no one can say which pang will complete the birth, or whether it will be completed at all. Karl Marx is author of the saying that ”force is the midwife of progress,” so you may see that I am not the inventor of this simile of child-birth.
There are three factors in the social revolution, each of which will vary in each country, and in different parts of the country, and at different periods. First, there is the industrial condition of the country, a complex set of economic factors. The industrial life of England depends primarily on s.h.i.+pping and coal. In the United States s.h.i.+pping is of less importance, and railroads take the place. In the United States the eastern portion lives mainly by manufacture, the western by agriculture, while the south is held a generation behind by a race problem. In France the great estates were broken up, and agriculture fell into the hands of peasant proprietors, who are the main support of French capitalism. In Prussia the great estates were held intact, and remained the basis of a feudal aristocracy. In America land changes hands freely, and therefore one-third of our farms are mortgaged, and another third are worked by tenants. In Russia there was practically no middle cla.s.s, while in the United States there is practically nothing but middle cla.s.s; the rich have been rich for such a short while that they still look middle cla.s.s and act middle cla.s.s, in spite of all their efforts, while the working cla.s.s hopes to be middle cla.s.s and is persuaded that it can become middle cla.s.s. Such varying factors produce in each country a different problem, and make inevitable a different process of change.
The second factor is the condition of organization and education of the workers. This likewise varies in every country, and in every part of every country. There is a continual struggle on the part of the workers to organize and educate themselves, and a continual effort on the part of the ruling cla.s.s to prevent this. In some industries in America you find the workers one hundred per cent organized, and in other industries you find them not organized at all. It is obvious that in the former case the social change, when it comes, will be comparatively simple, involving little bloodshed and waste; in the latter case there will be social convulsions, rioting and destruction of property, disorganization of industry and widespread distress.
The third factor is the state of mind of the propertied cla.s.ses, the amount of resistance they are willing to make to social change. I have done a great deal of pleading with the masters of industry in my country; I have written appeals to Vincent Astor and John D.
Rockefeller, to capitalist newspapers and judges and congressmen and presidents. I have been told that this is a waste of my time; that these people cannot learn and will not learn, and that it is foolish to appeal either to their hearts or their understanding. But I perceive that the cla.s.s struggle is like a fraction; it has a numerator and a denominator, and you can increase the fraction just as well by decreasing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To vary the simile, here are two groups of men engaged in a tug of war, and you can affect the result just as decisively by persuading one group to pull less hard, as by persuading the other group to pull harder.
Picture to yourself two factories. In factory number one the owner is a hard-driving business man, an active spirit in the so-called ”open-shop”
campaign. He believes in his divine right to manage industry, and he believes also in the gospel of ”all that the traffic will bear.” He prevents his men from organizing, and employs spies to weed out the radicals and to sow dissensions. When a strike comes, he calls in the police and the strike-breaking agencies, and in every possible way he makes himself hated and feared by his workers. Then some day comes the unemployment crisis, and a wave of revolt sweeping over the country. The workers seize that factory and set up a dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat and a ”red terror.” If the owner resists, they kill him; in any case, they wipe out his interest in the business, and do everything possible to destroy his power over it, even to his very name. They run the business by a shop committee, and you have for that particular factory a Syndicalist, or even Anarchist form of social reconstruction.
Now for factory number two, whose owner is a humane and enlightened man, studying social questions and realizing his responsibility, and the temporary nature of his stewards.h.i.+p. He gives his people the best possible working conditions, he keeps open books and discusses wages and profits with them, he educates the young workers, he meets with their union committees on a basis of free discussion. When the unemployment crisis comes and the wave of revolt sweeps the country, this man and his workers understand one another. He says: ”I can no longer pay profits, and so I can no longer keep going under the profit system; but if you are ready to run the plant, I am ready to help you the best I can.”
Manifestly, this man will continue the president of the corporation, and if he trains his sons wisely, they will keep his place; so, instead of having in that factory a dictators.h.i.+p and a terror, you will have a const.i.tutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic.
CHAPTER LXVI
CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION