Part 7 (1/2)
Indeed, the war through which England compelled China to purchase Indian opium looks like the greatest of international crimes; yet, when we understand this so-called crime of England, it turns out to have been a commercial necessity; for the remunerative prices obtained by the production of opium in India had so developed this branch of business that millions of Indians depended for their lives upon it, and either Chinese must poison themselves with opium, or Indians must die of hunger. The responsibilities of England were to her subjects first. The Chinese had to pay the price of this responsibility.
No better ill.u.s.tration of the wicked despotism that results from existing industrial conditions could be given than this; it brought about a condition of things under which England must commit a crime against China, or millions of her subjects must perish in Hindustan.
The millions that would starve in India if the opium market were suddenly closed remind us of the millions who are on the verge of starvation here in the United States,[33] and have been for two years past because of inherent and incurable defects in our industrial system. It is no answer to say that the evil results of overproduction are promptly remedied by the fluidity of capital to flow towards profitable and to withdraw from unprofitable manufactures. Every time such withdrawal takes place a corresponding number of workmen are thrown out of employment, are subjected to want and anguish of anxiety. The evil of this system cannot be explained away by pointing out that the capital withdrawn from one manufacture will soon be reinvested in another. A cotton-spinner cannot in a week or a month become a boilermaker. The commercial system which makes it easy for a capitalist to maintain income at cost of agony to the workingman does not recommend itself to the political student seeking the establishment of Justice in economic conditions. For, unfortunately, labor is not as ”fluid” or insensible as capital. The workingman is a human being with the capacity for pain and anxiety that characterizes our race; and every time that capital profits by its fluidity to flow from one industry to another, the lives of men, women, and children are threatened by want. Even in prosperous times memories of the last panic and the certainty of a recurring panic keep their hearts haunted by fear.
Overproduction is by no means the only cause for these periods of unemployment. Indeed, the panic of 1907 was not the result of overproduction, but of overinvestment, or what the French call the ”immobilization of capital.” Every nation has two very different uses for wealth: one for keeping its population alive and comfortable, the other for developing the resources of the country, e.g., building roads and railroads, exploiting mines and quarries, etc. If too much wealth is immobilized in the latter, there is not enough for the former. The important function of regulating this matter is in the hands of bankers who make money not only out of the prosperity of prosperous times, but out of the panic of panic periods. Thus in May, 1907, the bankers, knowing that there had been overinvestment, took care of themselves by selling securities at top-notch prices, occasioning what was called the ”rich man's panic,” because the rich men of leisure were its victims; so that when the poor man's panic came in October and stocks tumbled to one-half of May prices, the bankers were able to reinvest the proceeds of May sales at fifty per cent profit. One of the consequences of this operation was that in October, 1907, neither manufacturers nor railroad men could get money to keep their work going; gangs of five thousand men at a time were summarily dismissed by railroads, and manufactures shut down.
Of course, the bankers did not ”make the panic,” as has been sometimes ignorantly a.s.serted; they only made money out of it both ways--out of high prices in May and out of low prices in November. And this ill.u.s.trates one of the great defects of the compet.i.tive system--that it puts different sets of men in a position where they can make individual profit out of the misfortunes of their neighbors; bankers out of panics; distillers and liquor dealers out of drunkenness; manufacturers and retailers out of adulteration, and so down the whole gamut of production and distribution; and this is the process which the bourgeois approves because it ”makes character.”
But the unemployment that is the necessary result of all periods of depression, whether produced by overproduction or overinvestment, deserves more than pa.s.sing mention for its fruits in the shape of misery, pauperism, prost.i.tution and crime, are menacing and prejudicial to the race.
-- 2. UNEMPLOYMENT
The subject of Unemployment has just been treated by an expert in a book[34] hailed by the press as the final word on the subject. All the theories ever propounded as to the cause of unemployment have been reviewed in this book, from overproduction, underconsumption, compet.i.tion, to ”spots on the sun.” And the author concludes in favor of compet.i.tion.[35] As regards the facts and the explanation of these facts, there seems to be no essential disagreement between orthodox economists and Socialists. Both trace unemployment back to compet.i.tion. And in addition to the arguments given by Mr. Beveridge for tracing unemployment to compet.i.tion, I venture to add that compet.i.tion must be decided to be the primary cause, because it is itself the cause of the other so-called causes occasionally proposed--overproduction, underconsumption, underemployment, underpayment--in fact, all except ”spots on the sun,” which can, I think, except for purposes of hilarity be definitely abandoned.
But although we are agreed as to facts, we very much differ as to emphasis. Mr. Beveridge, and indeed all orthodox economists, pa.s.s lightly over the injustice, the immorality and the agony of unemployment. He refers to the ”cyclical fluctuation” which gives rise to unemployment as a mere failure of adjustment between demand and supply. ”No doubt,” he says, ”the adjustment takes time and may only[36] be accomplished with a certain amount of friction and loss.”
Now this ”friction and loss,” when expressed in money and wealth, seem to us socialists stupid because avoidable; but when expressed in human life and misery, they seem so intolerable that we are prepared if necessary to shatter to bits the whole system that underlies them, in order to ”remould it nearer to the heart's desire.” We are relieved then when we discover that by applying wisdom instead of temper to the solution of the problem, it is unnecessary to do any shattering, that we can remould it without violence, and that this is what Socialism proposes to do. Mr. Beveridge disposes of the Socialist solution in a sentence: ”To abolish the compet.i.tive stimulus,” he says, ”is to abolish 'either the possibility of, or the princ.i.p.al factor in material progress.'”[37] But these few words beg the whole question: Need we abolish the compet.i.tive stimulus in the adoption of the Socialist cure? Can we not confine ourselves to eliminating the gambling element in it? Can we not diminish the stakes without abandoning them altogether? Can we not take our a.r.s.enic in tonic instead of in fatal doses? These questions belong to our constructive chapters at the end of the book. I shall take up here only a few other points about unemployment which orthodox economists do not sufficiently emphasize, in order that there may be no doubt as to the magnitude of this evil and as to the duty upon us to eliminate it if we can.
Few things irritate the bourgeois more than to speak of workingmen as ”wage slaves.” I have seen college professors lose their temper over this word so often that they have served to suggest that in using it we are, as children say, getting ”warm.” We are very near the Negro we are looking for in the woodpile. Unemployment will help us in our search.
Not only the slave, but the savage, has a great advantage over the workingman, in that the former is never unemployed and the latter need never be so unless he chooses. Unemployment then is the peculiar product of our civilization. It is only under this compet.i.tive system of ours that a strong, hearty, able-bodied man, not only willing, but burning to work, with plenty of work to be done and with plenty of food to be eaten, is refused both. Although there are vacant lots in the heart of our cities and deserted farms within a few miles of them, the unemployed and the women and children dependent on them are to starve because owing to the ”failure of adjustment between supply and demand,” no one for two years past has been able to make money by employing them. Why this is so will more fully appear in Book II, Chapter III. It is only necessary here to point out the forces that tend to make the wage slave not only more unfortunate, but more dangerous to the community than the African slave.
The slave owner has the same interest in the welfare of his slaves as the cowboy in his cattle. G.o.d knows this is not much, but it is sufficient to keep slaves and cattle in good condition if only for the purpose of getting work out of the one and high prices out of the other. The interest that a slave owner has in the health of his slaves is a continuing one; it lasts during the working years of his slave.
The owner has paid a price or his slave has cost him a certain amount to raise. The interest of the owner, therefore, is to get the most work out of the slave during his working years. For this purpose he lengthens these working years to the utmost possible; and accordingly feeds and clothes his slave sufficiently and does not overwork him.
The interest of the factory owner is just the opposite. He has paid nothing out of his capital for what is called the ”free labor” he employs; and because free labor exacts a high wage and short hours, it is to the interest of the factory owner to get the greatest work possible out of his employee, regardless whether his employee is overworked. It is to his interest, not only to use his employee, but to use him up; and to this end he speeds up his machinery to the utmost point in order to force his employees to do the greatest work possible during the hours of employment, and has recourse to pacemakers. He does this with perfect security, because he has an unlimited amount of young labor always at his disposal to replace employees prematurely worn out from overwork and the diseases that come from overwork. The factory owner does not adopt these methods out of hardness of heart, but out of the necessity of the market. If he pays a workingman high wages for short hours, he must get the greatest work out of him if he is to compete successfully with other factory owners in the same line of business. Even the most merciful factory owners have to overwork their employees in order to sell goods at prices fixed by the merciless market. This system results in manifold evils. It creates a cla.s.s not only of unemployed, but of unemployables; men who cannot render efficient service because of disease and of the drunkenness to which overwork tends; for when a workingman feels his strength begin to wane he has recourse to stimulants to last his day out, and once the habit of stimulants is contracted, he loses his appet.i.te for nouris.h.i.+ng food and becomes thereby more and more confirmed in the use of intoxicants.
We have here, therefore, a perpetual and necessary production of unemployed and unemployable; the industrial town resembles a gigantic thres.h.i.+ng machine which produces its regular quota of unemployed and unemployables as certainly as a thres.h.i.+ng machine produces chaff.
This leads to another point to which I wish to attract special attention. Unemployment is generally regarded as a purely temporary evil. Indeed, the New York _Times_ took me to task for speaking of it as a permanent evil.[38] The reason for this widespread error is that permanent unemployment is a thing to which we have grown accustomed.
Charitable societies are familiar with it and know that it exists all the time; but it is only when unemployment adopts gigantic proportions so that the unemployed crowd our parks and streets and even indulge in public demonstrations, that the public becomes aware of it. And it is not only the regular operation of the industrial thres.h.i.+ng machine that produces the unemployed and unemployables; it is the character of certain industries and occupations such as seasonal industries--for example, carpentering and casual occupations, such as stevedores and longsh.o.r.emen. Mr. Beveridge gives a very graphic picture of the unemployment on the London docks:[39]
Most of us have heard of the great Dock Strike of 1889, and of the distinguished men who undertook to settle it. Efforts were made then to regulate work on the wharves, and while these efforts did improve the condition of the best of the men, as Mr. Beveridge says, ”it is seldom realized how small a proportion of the total field of dock and wharf labor is really covered by the reform.”[40]
He attributes the maintenance of evil conditions still prevailing on the docks to the ”separation of the interests of wharfingers, s.h.i.+powners, and contractors,” to our old enemy--compet.i.tion.
To appreciate the evil effects of casual or irregular employment, we have again but to quote Mr. Beveridge:
”The knowledge that any man, whatever his experience, however bad his antecedents, might get a job at the docks, attracted to their neighborhood a perpetual stream of blackguards, weaklings and failures from other every occupation. The experience, soon made, that regular attendance was not necessary to secure selection on days when work happened to be plentiful, and the daily alternations of hard exercise and idleness rapidly developed in those who came, if they had it not before, the greatest irregularity of habits, and physical or moral incapacity for continuous exertion. The low physique and half-starved condition of many of the laborers made their work dear at 4d. an hour.”[41]
Here he falls in with the evil feature of the compet.i.tive system which has been described as gambling with nothing less for stakes than life, health and happiness: ”Finally,” concludes Mr. Beveridge, ”the door is opened to abuse of patronage; convivial drinking and even direct bribery are not unknown as a means of securing employment.”[42]
The form of bribery paid by employees when of the female s.e.x is a still darker side of this dark subject.[43]
Another permanent cause of unemployment is underemployment and underpayment. In many occupations, such as coal mining, underemployment is averaged over a year so as to cause little unemployment but much distress; the high wages which the miners are able to stipulate for through their trade unions are reduced by diminis.h.i.+ng the days of work in the year. In other occupations underemployment and underpayment reduce employees to a state of starvation, which of course swells the rank of the unemployables.
Having seen how the pressure of the market forces factory owners to overwork their employees and to dismiss all who are not able to earn the wages they receive; how casual employment creates and keeps alive a cla.s.s of labor such as is described by Mr. Beveridge, and as must perpetually throw employees either upon charity or into the street; and having seen that this is a result of inherent and constant conditions of our industrial system, we are not surprised to find that statistics of unemployment indicate that it exists not only in periods of industrial depression, as is imagined by the New York _Times_ and others, but is, on the contrary, a permanent feature. For example, the September Report of the New York Commissioner of Labor shows that the average percentage of unemployment during the prosperous period between 1902 and 1907, was 16.1 per cent. We shall see later when we endeavor to calculate the amount of our population affected by unemployment, that 16.1 per cent, being derived entirely from trade union reports, does not fully represent the whole, because it is generally admitted that unemployment prevails in much larger proportion in unorganized labor than in organized.[44] The last United States Census sets down the number of factory hands at over 7,000,000.