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Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER LXV SOCIAL REVOLUTION</h2> <div class="blockquot">(How the great change is coming in different industries, and how we may prepare to meet it.) </div> From a study of the world's political revolutions we observe that a variety of governmental forms develop, and that different circumstances in each country produce different institutions. 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 constitution would be fluid; while in America, supposed to be a democracy, the constitution 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 shipping and coal. In the United States shipping 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 class, while in the United States there is practically nothing but middle class; the rich have been rich for such a short while that they still look middle class and act middle class, in spite of all their efforts, while the working class hopes to be middle class and is persuaded that it can become middle class. 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 class 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 classes, 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 class 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 dictatorship 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 stewardship. 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 dictatorship and a terror, you will have a constitutional monarchy, gradually evolving into a democratic republic. <h2>CHAPTER LXVI CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they afford to do it, and what will be the price?) </div> The problem of whether the social revolution shall be violent or peaceable depends in great part upon our answer to the question of confiscation versus compensation. We are now going to consider, first, the abstract rights and wrongs of the question, and, second, the practical aspects of it. There is a story very popular among single taxers and other advocates of freedom of the land. An English land-owner met a stranger walking on his estate, and rebuked him for trespassing. Said the stranger, "You own this land?" Said the other, "I do." "And how did you get it?" "I inherited it from my father." "And how did your father get it?" "He inherited it from his father." So on for half a dozen more ancestors, until at last the Englishman answered, "He fought for it." Whereupon the stranger took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and said, "I'll fight you for it." This is all there is to say on the subject of the abstract rights of land titles. There is no title to land which is valid on a historical basis. Everything rests upon fraud and force, continued through endless ages of human history. We in the United States took most of our land from the Indians, and in the process our guiding rule was that the only good Injun was a dead Injun. We first helped the English kings to take large sections of our country from the French and Spanish, and then we took them from the English king by a violent revolution. We purchased our Southwestern states from Mexico, but not until we had taken the precaution of killing some thousands of Mexicans in war, which had the effect of keeping down the purchase price. It would be a simple matter to show that all public franchises are similarly tainted with fraud. Proudhon laid down the principle that "property is theft," and from this principle it is an obvious conclusion that society has the right to scrap all paper titles to wealth, and to start the world's industries over again on the basis of share and share alike. But stop and consider for a moment. "Property is theft," you say. But go to your corner grocery, and tell the grocer that you deny his title to the sack of prunes which he exhibits in front of his counter. He will tell you that he has paid for them; but you answer that the prunes were raised on stolen land, and shipped to him over a railroad whose franchise was obtained by bribery. Will that convince the grocer? It will not. Neither will it convince the policeman or the judge, nor will it convince the voters of the country. Most people have a deeply rooted conviction that there are rights to property now definitely established and made valid by law. If you have paid taxes on land for a certain period, the land "belongs" to you; and I am sure you might agitate from now to kingdom come without persuading the American people that New Mexico ought to be returned to Mexico, or the western prairies to the Indian tribes. Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation, embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pass a law," says the Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the government." At once to every owner comes one single thought—are you going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional; and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action, or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter course, you have before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery of your elected officials. The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government, and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and class domination all at once." What are we to say to these different programs? Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel, and issue to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money from the United States government, instead of from the United States Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same—the product, not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class. The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at present. So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched, its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war, steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and accumulated enormous surpluses besides. The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations. According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say, the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. Assuming that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under our present private property system as they would have got under a system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries more than six per cent on the market value of the investment; and from what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are getting at present. We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are, amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so change the face of our country that a return to the system of private ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like the crumbs left over from a feast. <h2>CHAPTER LXVII EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for success in the United States.) </div> I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque than barricades and councils of action. In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not getting what we pay for? Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market. And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast? Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners? If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so I say, with all the energy and conviction I possess, pay them! Pay them anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social readjustment! "Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very beautiful, but it's the old Utopian dream of brotherhood and class co-operation. That will never happen on this earth, until you have first abolished capitalism." My answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had sufficient intelligence to make it happen. That it does not happen is simply absence of intelligence. And will anyone maintain that it is the part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he knows? What is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are blind and destructive and wasteful? We may see a great vessel going on the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor? We have had the Russian revolution before us for four years. Mankind will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain before our eyes. Russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a modern war, and it broke her down. She had practically no middle class, and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their chance, and they seized it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that they came to the rescue of Russia, saving her from the hands of those who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted and incapable of fighting. Anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. It turned out all the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without them. And of course these engineers and managers sabotaged the revolution—every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside Russia and outside. You denounced this, and protested against this, but all the same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where you attempt the social revolution by minority action. They have got power in Russia, and they dream of getting power in America in the same way. But there is no such disorganization in our country as there was in Russia, and it would take a generation of civil strife to bring us to such a condition. We have a middle class, powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. Moreover, this class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. All that the leaders of Moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible revolution, and they will discover in American society sufficient power of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of business for a generation. A hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the industrial system of one-half of these United States. To far-seeing statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system, and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. There was a great American, Henry Clay, who came forward with a proposition that the people of the United States, through their government, should raise the money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the slaves and set them free. For most of his lifetime Henry Clay pleaded for that plan. But the masters of the South were making money fast; they knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. On the other side of Mason and Dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. There is a stanza by Emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus compensation: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">Pay ransom to the owner</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And fill the bag to the brim.</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Who is the owner? The slave is owner,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And ever was. Pay him.</td></tr> </table> This, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it is reckless and unsound. The abolitionists of the North took up this poem, and the slave power of the South answered with a battle-song: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">War to the hilt,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Theirs be the guilt,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!</td></tr> </table> And so the issue had to be fought out. It cost a million human lives and five billions of treasure, and it set American civilization back a generation. And now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and are coming to exactly the same method of solution. We have white wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it convenient and pleasant. They are going to fight it out in a civil war, and which side is going to win I am not sure. But when the historians come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful strife! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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