V.
What are the results of these revolutions in industrial methods, and what are their tendencies?
Machinery is more and more seizing upon all industries, and, instead of making use of his tool, the laborer is the servant of the machine. The relative ease of work of this kind makes it possible to substitute unskilled labor for skilled labor, women and children for men. By thus throwing men out of work, the instrument of labor lowers wages and expropriates the laborer from his means of existence. This machinery, thanks to which the genius of Aristotle foresaw the possibility of the emancipation of the slave, has as yet been merely a cause of enslavement, and just as man is moulded by the economic environment which is his own work, he is here enslaved by his own product.
With the extension of the system of mechanical industry, the product ceases more and more to be the work of an individual. The individual by himself alone no longer makes a product, but a fraction of a product, and the owner no longer works with his instrument of labor, or, in other words, uses his property himself, but turns this task over to a certain number of laborers, to a group of wage-slaves. Thus, when the possessor of a hand-saw works with it, the owner uses his own property; with the machine-saw, it is used not by the owner, but by the laborers, whom he has to employ to operate it. While the operation of the means of production so largely augmented requires the common action of a host of workers, the undertakings and establishments grow to such dimensions that the vast sums of capital necessary for their conduct are not to be found in the hands of a single capitalist. Having become too gigantic for a single capitalist, the title or nominal ownership of these means of production, and along with it the profits, passes from the individual capitalist to an association of capitalists, to a company of stockholders. This company actually has, considered as a collective body, a particular tangible property; but what does this property represent for each individual shareholder? A fiction. The individual stockholder cannot lay his finger upon any particular material object and say: that is mine.
While the means of production are thus ceasing to be in the strict sense private property, and require for their actual operation a collective body of laborers, while the product is becoming a social product, the owners of the means of production and the products, are becoming shareholders, and thus ceasing to perform any useful function, to have any real utility. The success of a business in former times depended upon the energy and skill of its proprietor, just as it sometimes does to-day in small manufacturing or mercantile establishments. Since the introduction of stock companies, the producing organism is no longer affected by the personal traits of those who own it; it does not know the shareholder, the present multiple proprietor, any more than the latter knows his property; it functions independently of him, and does not feel his influence, so that even a change of ownership has no effect upon it. The former functions of the proprietor are at the present time performed by wage-workers, trained engineers or managers, more or less well paid, but still wage-workers. In place of the managing proprietor, we have then a salaried manager, and he is a better manager because he is only a salaried employee, as M. de Molinari admits, when he writes: "All that is requisite is for him to possess the ability, knowledge and character demanded for his functions, and these are all qualities which are more easily and cheaply obtained on the market, divorced from capital than united to it."[5]
Not only is the proprietary class, "the haves," losing all social utility, but, more than this, it is becoming baneful through its exclusive pre-occupation with personal profits. Baneful it is henceforth for all branches of social production which the mad and unorganized pursuit of profits subjects to disastrous perturbations, to periodical crises swamping the market and lasting amid failures and shut-downs until the outlets for goods once more open up; baneful for all the workers, worked to utter exhaustion in periods of business activity and reduced to wretched poverty in periods of industrial depression, during which they suffer from want of everything, because there is, relatively to the purchasing power of the people, too much of everything—(here we see once more the creator dominated by the creation, the producers by their products, just as in the cases formerly noticed of the human intelligence and the economic environment, of the machine and the workman); baneful for all consumers, who are victims of the adulteration of products begotten by the mad strife for gain; baneful for the petty capitalists, the small producers in constant danger of bankruptcy and ruin through the intensity of the war of competition which always results in the victory of the great capitalists or the great combinations of capital (trusts, etc.).
To recapitulate, our economic movement tends toward labor in common, since the operation of the means of production is passing from the working-proprietor to a collective group of laborers, and toward the elimination of the mode or form of private or individual ownership of the means of production, since the nominal property in them is passing from the individual proprietor to a collective body of shareholders (stock-company or trust). It also tends to leave the proprietary class no useful role or function, thus making them for the future not only superfluous, but baneful.
At the same time that the organization of labor adapted to the present form and state of the productive forces is escaping from the hands of the proprietary class and is thus the signal that the close of its historic career is at hand, it is concentrating and organizing men everywhere in the same way that it concentrates material wealth. It brings the laborers together and leads them, through their identity in position and interests, to combine in groups or unions, it constitutes them into a class more and more conscious of its situation, disciplines their masses systematically arranged and graded in each industrial establishment, and fashions out of their own ranks an intellectual aristocracy upon which devolves the function of super-intending and managing all industries.
And while the individual form of their petty tools or instruments of labor, and their mode of production which keeps them in independent isolation, engender in the workers in petty industries ideas too individualistic and egoistic, wherever modern mechanical industry has already wrested from the laborer his tool and transformed it into a mechanical apparatus effacing individuality from the labor-process, wherever individual labor merges into and blends with collective labor, wherever the technical processes are such that the task of each is of service only through the participation (co-operation) of all, and is itself the condition of the performance of the collective task, the strictly individualistic tendencies of the producers in the petty industries are replaced by the spirit of solidarity, which, with the progress of industrial development, is leading—nay, forcing the working class every day more and more toward socialist ideas, ideas which spring from the material necessities which inexorably force their way into the minds of men.
These are facts against which our personal preferences are of no avail. The material and intellectual elements of the collective (or co-operative) form of production, elaborated by the capitalist regime, are thus developing more and more every day, and socialism is, you see, the natural consequence of existent conditions. It is not something imported from abroad and added to our social movement, neither is it an article of export good for any sort of economic environment; it is the rigorous consequence of a certain orderly sequence of facts, the result of a definite evolution whose progress it has noted, but which has taken place independently of it; it has not created it because it has been conscious of its existence.
And so, as M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu recognizes: "the field of modern mechanical industry is extending its boundaries more and more, and it is difficult to see what limits can be set to its possible extension." Now it is modern industry which lays bare the antagonisms immanent in capitalist production, and at the same time renders their destruction possible. The historic role of capital has been the development of the productive powers, and, in the process of developing them, it has created the weapons which are destined to kill it. Necessary during a certain stage of economic development, it is not eternal, but inevitably comes to an end with a change in the relations of the means of production to the producers.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] L'Evolution économique, p. 38.