drafted for a certain amount of service in the army of peace; the hoof of governmental tyranny shows under the hem of that idea. It is enough to recognize that society debases some kinds of work which might be disposed of cheerfully and expeditiously, and that there is no task, however disagreeable in itself, which any healthy man would not tackle with a smile, provided his fellow-workers did their parts and regarded him as their equal. The capitalistic method of production is wasteful of labor and wasteful of laborers. It condemns millions of men to unemployment or semi-employment and sends women and children into the mills. It violates the commandments of its own new god, Efficiency, and it has always been unfaithful to the minor god of its lip worship, Humanity. It cannot afford to tear down all rotten tenements and unsanitary factories and rebuild them, but it can afford hundreds of millions for battleships. The capitalist method of production works without foresight in a fever of competition, piling up masses of goods to which the masses of workers have but a limited access. One result of competition in production is the armed competition of governments, and whether or not war is the inevitable result of that competition, so inevitable that the capitalist rulers cannot prevent it, whether or not capitalism is the sole or chief cause of war, certain it is that the world plunges periodically into a chaos of carnage which seems but a hideous exaggeration of the warfare of competitive production. Socialism accuses capitalism of incompetence, of doing bad work with an unnecessary expenditure of effort. And it offers to get things better done and more easily done by substituting coöperative production for competitive. More serious than the failure of capitalism to direct human effort to abundant and wellplanned production is its failure to distribute the results of production with anything like equity. The present equipment and the present methods of work, stupid as they are, could produce enough and to spare of the necessities of life. The appalling thing is that the workers, on whose backs the other classes sit, do not enjoy the very goods which would not exist without their labor. Consider the wages in two of the great industries; the figures have been worked out by Dr. Scott Nearing, whose statistics are not of the lying sort. In 1910, 60 per cent. of the iron and steel workers received less than $750. In Lawrence half the men and four fifths of the women re ceived less than $500. These figures are likely to be as true for other textile cities. In all industries only one tenth of the men receive more than $1,000 and only one eighth of the women more than $500. Other classes than the wageworkers must be receiving the difference between the total value of the product and the wages paid the producer. That difference takes the form of dividends, profits, rent, interest. The reformer proposes that this difference shall be diminished in favor of the wage-earner. The Socialist idea, simplified, is that this difference shall be abolished, that the total value of production shall revert to the producer. Anything less than this is less than Socialism. The history of Socialist thought in the past contains much more than this, and its history in the future must be a continuous elaboration and reconsideration of what is here so baldly stated. A revolution in the relation between the worker and property disturbs all other relations of life. But whatever other changes take place, nine tenths of Socialism lie in the one great change, the establishment of a new, hitherto unrealized unity between production and ownership. The epic of the future, whether bloody or peaceful, will be the story of the Worker and His Work. |