Socialism As It Is

W >> William English Walling >> Socialism As It Is

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45

Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such
trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously
hampered by the competition of the "sweaters" than they are by that of
foreign employers. "I cannot believe," he concludes, "that the process
of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to
the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is
conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and
interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of
the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better
methods."[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the
other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put
into effect, the legislation against "sweating" being already in force
in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat
different form.

But the most striking of the British labor reforms has yet to be
mentioned. Not only were the present old age pensions established by the
common consent of all the political parties, but a law has now been
enacted--also with the approval of all parties (and only twenty-one
negative votes in Parliament)--to apply the same methods of state
insurance of workingmen to sickness, accidents, and even to
unemployment. The old age pensions were already more radical than those
of Prussia in that the workingmen do not have to contribute under the
British law, while the National Insurance Bill as now enacted surpasses
both the former British measure and the German precedent in everything,
except that it demands a lesser total sum from the government. In the
insurance against accidents, sickness, and unemployment the government,
instead of contributing the whole amount, gives from two ninths to one
third, one third to one half being assessed against employers and one
sixth to four ninths against employees. At first this reform, it is
expected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years
before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the
measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks,
domestic servants, and many other classes usually not reached by
measures of the kind,--a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides
$5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and
creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people
in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured,
thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as
far as the masses are concerned.

In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to
aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an
automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health,
strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the
increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in
the _Daily Mail_: "I want to make the nation more healthy than it is.
The great mass of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily
preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him
so much a week when he is ill."

Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that
the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good
investment:--

"When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German
Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the
organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their
families against the worst evils arising from these common
accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an
incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and
possibly millions of people.

"Wherever I went in Germany, north or south, and whomever I met,
whether it was an _employer_ or a workman, a _Conservative_ or a
Liberal, a Socialist or a Trade-union Leader--men of all ranks,
sections and creeds, with one accord joined in lauding the benefits
which have been conferred upon Germany by this beneficent policy.
Several wanted extensions, but there was not one who wanted to go
back. The employers admitted that at first they did not quite like
the new burdens it cast upon them, _but they now fully realized the
advantages which even they derived from the expenditure_, for it
had raised the standard of the workman throughout Germany." (My
italics.)[63]

It is not only worry and anxiety that were removed, but definite and
irregular sums that workers or their employers had formerly set aside
for insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were now
calculated and regulated on a business basis more profitable to both
parties to the labor contract. It is true that in Germany the employers
only pay part of the cost, the rest being borne almost entirely by
employees, while in Great Britain--as far as the old age pensions
go--the government pays all, and is likely to pay a considerable part,
perhaps a third, in the other insurance schemes. But the plan by which
the government pays all may prove even less costly to the employing
class, since landlords and inactive capitalists on the one hand and the
working people on the other, pay the larger part of the taxes--so that
state insurance in this thoroughgoing form is perhaps destined to be
even more popular than the German kind.

The most radical provision of the new bill is that which deals with
unemployment. Though applying only to the engineering and building
trades, it reaches 2,400,000 people. It proposes to give a weekly
allowance to every insured person who loses employment through no fault
of his own, though nothing is given in strikes and lockouts. And it is
intended to extend this measure to other employments. This is only the
first installment.

It is probable that Mr. Churchill's project that the State should
undertake to abolish unemployment altogether is the most radical of all
the proposed policies, excepting only that to gradually expropriate all
the future unearned increment of land.

"An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the
great cities of this country," says Mr. Churchill, "presents itself
to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of
crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindoo
cultivator. The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and
ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly
in the face. That is a contingency which seems to fall within the
most primary and fundamental obligations of any organization of
government. I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages
that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here and
now, in this wealthy country and in this _scientific_ age, it does
in my opinion exist, is not discharged, and will have to be
discharged."[64]

Mr. Churchill proposes not only to guard against periods of unemployment
which extend to all industries in the case of industrial crises, but
also to provide more steady employment for those who are unoccupied
during the slack seasons of the year or while passing from one employer
to another. Above all he plans that the youth of the nation shall not
waste their strength entirely in unremunerative employment or in
idleness, but that every boy or girl under eighteen years of age should
be learning a trade as well as making a living. Few will deny that the
program of Mr. Churchill and his associates in this direction marks a
great step towards that "more complete or elaborate social organization"
which he advocates.

One of the most significant of all the measures by which Mr. Churchill
plans to lend the aid of the State to the raising of the level of the
working classes is his "Development" Act. The object of this bill, in
the language of Mr. Churchill, is "to provide a fund for the economic
development of our country, for the encouragement of agriculture, for
afforestation, for the colonization of England (the settlement of
agricultural land), and for the making of roads, harbors, and other
public works." Stated in these terms, the Development Act is a measure
of "State Socialism" for the general industrial advance of the country,
but the main argument in its behalf lies in that clause of the bill
which provides, to quote from Mr. Churchill again: "that the prosecution
of these works shall be regulated, as far as possible, by the conditions
of the labor market, so that in a very bad year of unemployment they can
be expanded, so as to increase the demand for labor at times of
exceptional slackness, and thus correct and counterbalance the cruel
fluctuations of the labor market."[65]

We have seen that Mr. Churchill has justified these measures, not as
increasing the relative share of the working classes, but as adding to
the total product. They are to add to the industrial efficiency of the
nation as a whole, and so incidentally to bring a greater income to
all,--but in much the same proportions as wealth now distributes itself.

In this country Mr. Roosevelt has advocated a typical "State Socialist"
program of labor reforms including:--

"A workday of not more than eight hours."

"The abolition of the sweat-shop system."

"Sanitary inspection of factory, workshop, mine, and home."

"Liability of employers for injury to body and loss of life" and
"an automatically fixed compensation."

"The passage and enforcement of rigid anti-child-labor laws which
will cover every portion of this country."

"Laws limiting woman's labor."

All these measures except the first were adopted long ago, in
considerable part at least, by the reactionary government of Prussia and
are being introduced generally in monarchical and aristocratic Europe,
and I have shown that the eight-hour day has been instituted for miners
in Great Britain and that Mr. Winston Churchill proposed to extend it.
Mr. Roosevelt himself concedes that "we are far behind the older and
poorer countries" in such matters. But an examination of the action of
State legislatures during the year just past will show that we are
making rapid progress in the same direction.

"Social" or "industrial" efficiency, promoted by the government, is
already the central idea in American labor reform. Government insurance
against old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment is regarded, not
as the "workingmen's compensation" for injuries done them by society,
but as an automatic means of forcing backward employers to economize the
community's limited supply of labor power--not to wear it out too soon,
not to overstrain it, not to damage it irreparably or lay it up
unnecessarily for repairs, and not to leave it idle. Mr. Louis Brandeis
points out that mutual fire insurance has appealed to certain
manufacturers because in twenty years it has resulted in measures that
have prevented more than two thirds of the expected losses by fire.
Similarly, he says, "if society and industry and the individual were
made to pay from day to day the actual cost of sickness, accident,
invalidity, premature death, or premature old age consequent upon
excessive hours of labor, of unhygienic conditions of work, of
unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would
be rapidly reduced."[66]

This, as Mr. Brandeis says, is undoubtedly on the "road to social
efficiency" and its practical application will convince employers better
than "mere statements of cost, however clear and forceful." It will
remove a vast sea of human misery, and the process will immensely enrich
society. But like the other State Capitalist reforms (until they are
supplemented by some more radical policy) it will at the same time
automatically bring about an increase of existing inequalities of income
and an intensification of social injustice.

Mr. William Hard in a study of workingmen's compensation for
_Everybody's Magazine_ has reached a similar conclusion to that of Mr.
Brandeis: "Far from attacking the present relationship between employer
and employee, automatic compensation specifically recognizes it. The
backbone of the present so-called 'capitalism'; namely, the hiring of
the unpropertied class by the propertied class to do work for wages, is
not caused by automatic compensation to lose a single vertebra, and
automatic compensation has nothing whatever to do with Socialism except
that it is accomplished under the supervision of the State." If
compulsory insurance against accidents "has nothing whatever to do with
Socialism," neither have compulsory insurance against sickness, against
old age, against certain phases of unemployment.

The social reformers propose a labor policy that is _for_ the people
whether they like it or not; the only "rights" it gives them are "the
right to live" and "the right to work." Its first object is to produce
more efficient and profitable laborers, its second to have the
government take control of organized charity, to which aspect I must now
turn. Most of the labor reforms, enacted to secure for the laborer "what
for the Nation's sake even the poorest of its subjects should have,"
have been urged more strongly by philanthropists and political
economists than by representatives of the workers. In America "the
minimum wage," for example, is being worked up by a special committee
consisting almost exclusively of this class, while workmen's
compensation has been indorsed by the most varied political and social
elements, from the chief organ of American philanthropists, and Theodore
Roosevelt, to the Hearst newspapers.

With "the national efficiency" in view, Mr. Webb asks the British
government to take up the policy of a "national minimum," including not
only a minimum below which wages are not to fall, but also a similar
minimum of leisure, sanitation, and education.[67] Mr. Edward Devine,
editor of the leading philanthropic and reform journal in America, the
_Survey_, outlines an identical policy and also insists like Mr. Webb
that the Socialist can lay no exclusive claim to it.

"The social economist [_i.e._ reformer]," writes Mr. Devine, "is
sometimes confused with the Utopian [_i.e._ Socialist]. They are,
however, very distinct types of reformers. The Utopian dreams of
ideals. The social economist seeks to establish the normal.... The
social worker is primarily concerned, _not_ with the lifting of
humanity to a higher level, but with eradicating the maladjustments
and abnormalities, the needless inequalities, which prevent our
realizing our own reasonable standards."

Speaking in the name of American reformers in general, Mr. Devine
demands for the lower levels of society "normal standards" of life,
which are equivalent to Mr. Webb's national minimum, and definitely
denies the applicability of "the question-begging epithet of Socialism
which is hurled at all the reformers engaged in such work."

"Whether it belongs to the Socialist program," Mr. Devine objects, "is a
question so far as we can see of interest only to the Socialists. Our
advocacy of such laws as we enumerate has no Socialist origin." He
claims that the "expenditures legitimately directed towards the removal
of adverse social conditions, are not uneconomic and unproductive," and
that "they do not represent a mere indulgence of altruistic sentiment,"
but are "investments"; of which prison reforms and the expenditures for
the prevention of tuberculosis are examples.[68]

Another phrase for the proposed saving of the national labor resources
and the introduction of minimum standards in its philanthropic aspect is
"the abolition of poverty." When he speaks of this as a definite and by
no means a distant reform, the reformer refers to _that extreme form of
poverty_, so widely prevalent to-day, which results in the physical
deterioration and the industrial inefficiency of a large part of the
population.

This sort of poverty is a burden on industry and the capitalists, and
Mr. Lloyd George was widely applauded when he said that it can and must
be done away with. He has calculated, too, that this abolition can be
accomplished _at half the cost of the annual increase in armaments_.

"This is a War Budget," said Mr. Lloyd George in presenting the
reform program of 1910. "It is for waging implacable war against
poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that
before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a
great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and
the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as
remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once
infested its forests."

Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been a leading figure in the British reform
world and in the Fabian Society for many years, speaks on this reform
movement not merely as a keen outside observer. As an advocate of more
radical measures, he argues that there is nothing Socialistic about "the
national minimum." This "philanthropic administrative Socialism," as Mr.
Wells calls it, is very remote, he says, from the spirit of his own.[69]
Yet, critical as Mr. Wells is, he also advocates a policy that could be
summed up in the single phrase, "industrial efficiency." "The advent of
a strongly Socialistic government would mean no immediate revolutionary
changes at all," he says. "There would be no doubt an educational
movement to increase the economic value and productivity of the average
citizen of the next generation, and legislation _upon the lines laid
down by the principle of the 'minimum wage'_ to check the waste of our
national resources by destructive employment. Also a shifting of the
burden of taxation of enterprise to rent would begin." (My italics.) The
Liberals who are already setting these reforms on foot disclaim any
connection whatever with Socialism, but Mr. Wells argues that they do
not realize the real nature of their policy.

The establishment of this paternal "State Socialism," whether based on a
philanthropic "national minimum" or a scientific policy of "industrial
efficiency," many other "Socialists" besides those of Great Britain
consider to be the chief task of Socialism itself in our generation.
Among the latter was the late Edmond Kelly, a member of the Socialist
party in this country at the time of his death, who, in his posthumous
work, "Twentieth Century Socialism," has summed up his political faith
in much the same way as the anti-Socialist reformer might have done. He
says that three of the four chief objects of Socialism are the
organization of society, first "to prevent that overwork and
unemployment which lead to drunkenness, pauperism, prostitution, and
crime"; second, "to preserve the resources of the country"; and third,
"to produce with the greatest economy, with the greatest
efficiency."[70] Yet Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, as well as Mr.
Roosevelt, agree to all three of these policies. They are precisely what
the leading Socialists have called "State Socialism."

A part of the working people, also, are disposed to subordinate their
own conceptions of what is just, in spite of their own better judgment,
to an exclusive longing for an immediate trial of this kind of State
benevolence. This is expressed in the widely used phrase, "every man to
have the right to work and live,"--employed editorially, for example, by
Mr. Berger, now Socialist Congressman. What is demanded by this
principle is _not a greater proportion of the national income or an
increasing share of the control over the national government, but the
"State Socialist" remedies, employment, and the minimum wage_. In its
origin this is the begging on the part of the economically lowest
element, a class which Henry George well remarks has been degraded by
poverty until it considers that "the chance to labor is a boon."

Some years ago the municipal platform of the Milwaukee Socialists said
that it must be borne in mind "that the famine-stricken is better
served with a piece of bread than with the most brilliant program of the
future" and that "in view of the hopelessness of an immediate radical
betterment in the position of the working class" it is necessary to
emphasize the importance of attaining "the next best."[71] Here again
was admitted complete dependence on those who own the bread and have the
disposition of "the next best" in political reforms. When capitalism is
a little better organized, the working people will be guaranteed "the
next best": steady work and the food, conditions, and training necessary
to make that work efficient--just as surely as valuable slaves were
given these rights by intelligent masters or as valuable horses even are
given care and kindly treatment to-day.

"A Socialist Social Worker" has published anonymously in the _Survey_ a
letter which presents in a few words the whole Socialist position as to
this type of reform. The writer claims that the very fact that he is a
social worker shows that even as a Socialist he welcomes "every addition
to the standard of living that may be wrested or argued from the
Capitalist class," since all Socialists recognize that "no
undernourished class ever won a fight against economic exploitation, but
that the more is given the more will be demanded and secured." But he
does not feel that the material betterments have any closer relation to
Socialism.

"The new feudalism," he says, "will care for and conserve the powers of
the human industrial tool as the lord of the manor looked after the
human agricultural implement...." Here is the essential point: the
efficiency of the human industrial tool is to be improved with or
without his consent.

"Unrestrained Capitalism," says the same writer in explanation of
his prediction, "has hitherto invariably meant the physical
deterioration of the working class and the marginal disintegration
of society--the loosening of social ties and the pushing of
marginal members of society over the brink into poverty, pauperism,
vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, wife desertion and crime, _but
this deterioration is not the main indictment against capitalism_,
and will be remedied by the wiser capitalists themselves. The main
indictment of capitalism is that it selfishly and stupidly blocks
the road of orderly and continuous progress for the race."

The proposal of the social reformers, as far as the workers are
concerned aims to put an end to this deterioration, to standardize
industry or to establish a minimum of wages, leisure, health, and
industrial efficiency. The writer says that the Socialists aim at
something more than this.

"The criterion of social justice in every civilized community," he
writes, "is, and always has been, not how large or how intense is
the misery of the social debtor class, but what is done with the
social surplus of industry? It was formerly used to build pyramids,
to create a landed or ecclesiastical or literary aristocracy, to
conduct wars, or to provide the means of a sensuous life for the
majority of a privileged class, and the means of dilettantism for
the minority of it. _The difference between the near Socialist and
the true Socialist is principally that the main attention of the
former is given to the negative side of the social problem--the
condition of the submerged classes, while that of the latter is
given to the positive side of the problem--the wonderful
development, power, and life that would come to that race and the
individual if a wise and social use were to be made of the surplus
of industry._"

FOOTNOTES:

[46] "Fabianism and Empire," p. 62.

[47] Articles by Hyman Strunsky on Welfare Work, _The Coming Nation_,
1910.

[48] do, do.

[49] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 93.

[50] Lloyd George, _op. cit._, p. 81.

[51] Winston Churchill, _op. cit._, p. 101.

[52] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 3.

[53] Professor Simon Patten, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, July, 1908.

[54] Speech of President Hadley before the Brooklyn Institute of Art and
Sciences (1909).

[55] A more democratic and truthful view of the German educational
system is that of Dr. Abraham Flexner (see the _New York Times_, October
1, 1911). He says that the Germans have to solve the following kind of
an educational problem:--

"What sort of educational program can we devise that will subserve all
the various national policies--that will enable Germany to be a great
scientific nation, that will enable it to carry on an aggressive
colonial and industrial policy, and yet not throw us into the arms of
democracy? Their present educational system is their highly effective
reply.

"Our problem is a very different one," Dr. Flexner remarks. "Our
historic educational problem has been and is quite independent of any
position we might be able to achieve in the world. That problem has
always been: How can we frame conditions in which individuals can
realize the best that is in them?"