The truth about socialism

by Allan L. Benson

Socialists contend that under Socialism, everybody could not only have work all the time, but that everybody could live as well as now does the man whose income is $5,000 a year. They point to the fact that the man who now spends $5,000 a year on his living, does not consume the products of very much human labor. He has a comfortable house, but comfortable, sanitary houses are not hard to build. Machinery makes almost all of the materials that go into them, and makes them cheaply. And a house properly built lasts a lifetime.

The $5,000–a-year man and his family also eat some food. But the flour is made with machinery at low cost, as are also many other articles. The raw materials come from the earth at the cost of human labor, but the profits that are added to them by capitalists represent no sort of labor.

So is it with clothing, furniture and everything else that the $5,000–a-year man and his family consume. Everything is made cheaply and rapidly with machinery. The workers who make these things get little. The consumer pays much. The difference between the cost of making and the selling price is what eats up a large part of the $5,000. Socialists believe that by cutting out all of this difference and cutting out enforced idleness, everybody could live as well as the $5,000–man now lives. This is only an approximation, of course.

Now we come to the question of rising. What chance would a man have to rise under Socialism?

Let us see, first, what is meant by rising. A man can rise with his fellows or he can rise without them. I am speaking now, of course, only of rising in the financial scale. Habits of thought have been inculcated in us which too often prevent us from thinking of rising in any other way. When we think of bettering our condition, we usually think in terms of money. We seldom think in terms of greater leisure and greater freedom to do the things that make life really worth while; knowing that rich men are usually the slaves of their money, we nevertheless want to be slaves.

Socialism is not intended to help the man who wants to rise financially above his fellows. It throws out no bait to him. A few men will undoubtedly rise a little above their fellows during the early stages of Socialism, but they will not rise very much and there will not be very many of them. Socialism is for all, not for a few. It is devoted to the task of raising the financial standing of everybody who does useful labor and lowering the financial standing of everybody who does not. Socialists say that if Socialism were otherwise, it would be no better than the lottery which is provided by the capitalist system. Socialists do not believe in the lottery principle. They have observed that the gentlemen who run lotteries, rather than the ones who play them, wear the diamonds. Nor does the fact that an occasional washerwoman draws $22,000 with which she knows not what to do, change their minds about the game.

See what a game it is that we are now playing. We teach our small boys that this is a country of glorious opportunities. In picturing the possibilities before them, we know no bounds. We go even to the brink of the ultimate and look over. Away in the distance, we see the White House, and point to it. “There,” we say to our boys, “there is where you may some day be. Each of you has a chance to be President. And, if you should not be President, each of you has a chance to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. Carnegie began as a bobbin boy. Rockefeller began as a clerk in an oil store. If you are honest and industrious, perhaps you can do as much.”

Now, what are the facts? Not one of those boys has much more chance of becoming the President than a ring-tailed monkey has of becoming Caruso. It is not that the boys are worthless—they may have in them better timber than any past President ever contained. But unless we shorten the Presidential term, and shorten it a good deal, we cannot accommodate very many of the lads with the use of the White House. During the next eighty years, even if no President shall serve more than one term, there can be no more than twenty Presidents. During the same time—if we go on repeating such foolishness—perhaps a billion boys will be solemnly assured that each of them has a chance to be President, though, as a matter of fact, only twenty boys can cash in on their chances.

Do we never consider how ridiculous we make ourselves? Do we never fear the crushing question that some bright boy some day will ask: “Dad, just how much do you think twenty chances in a billion are worth?”

I mention this only to show at what an early age we begin to hold out to our boys false hopes of the future. I cannot attempt to explain the fact that no boy asks his father why, in such a country of glorious possibilities as this, he contents himself with driving a truck—but that does not matter. The point is that we go on fooling the boys until they are old enough to know better. They are not very old when this time comes. The world teaches them young. It is the exceptionally stupid young man who does not know, at the age of twenty-five, that the chances against him in playing for a Presidency, a Rockefellership, or a Carnegieship are infinitely greater than would have been the chances against him, if he had lived two generations earlier and played the Louisiana Lottery. Beside such a prospect, the chance of winning a fortune at the race track looks like a certainty. Yet we drove the Louisiana Lottery from the country because it was such a delusion that it amounted to a swindle, and we are beginning to drive the race tracks out of the country for the same reason.