But the question, “What will you do with the man who will not work?” reveals a strange belief that is held by those who do not hold much of a clutch upon the facts of life. I have a very dear old aunt who believes from the bottom of her honest heart that the great mass of unemployed are either drunkards or loafers. In discussing the problem of the unemployed with gentlemen who are living upon the sunny side of the street, they almost invariably fire this question, “Why don’t those fellows get out into the country where the farmers are crying for help and can’t get any?”
I was brought up on a farm, and I still remember that not much farming was done in winter. The great demand for extra help comes in mid-summer, when the crops are harvested. During six or eight weeks there is a demand from the farms for more help than they can get. But what man who has a family in the tenements of New York or Chicago can afford to pay his railroad fare to Iowa, Nebraska, or even Ohio, to get six weeks’ work?
In the first place, they have not the money with which to pay their fare. These men live from hand to mouth in the city, running in debt during the week, and paying their debt with the wages they receive Saturday night. If their fares were advanced by the farmers who wanted to hire them they would have little or nothing left from what they might earn on the farms, and, in the meantime, their families in the cities would be starving. Furthermore, farm-work is a trade of which these city workers know nothing. They could learn the trade of farming, of course, but they could not learn it in six weeks. At any rate, in panic times there are more than 5,000,000 out of work in this country, and in no conceivable circumstances is it possible that any considerable part of this number could find work upon the farms even six weeks of the year.
The fact is that the conditions of modern industrial life are so hard that an increasing number of unorganized workers are barely able to live, even when they work. The constantly increasing cost of living, brought about by the trusts through their control of markets and prices, robs these men to the limit, and they have no labor unions to increase their wages. Still, they do not refuse to work, even for a bare, miserable living. On the contrary, they are eager to work. So are the great bulk of the unemployed eager to work for a miserable living.
If, under these horrible conditions, men are willing to work, what reason have we to suppose that any great number would refuse to work under a Socialist government for compensation that would enable each of them to live as well as the $5,000–a-year man now lives? Gentlemen who want to worry about this may worry about it. Socialists are not worrying. If, under Socialism, a few dyed-in-the-wool loafers should appear, Socialists are prepared to deal with them. They do not propose to cease their attempts to rid the world of poverty, merely because of the possibility of the appearance of an occasional loafer.
CHAPTER V
HOW THE PEOPLE MAY ACQUIRE THE TRUSTS
Most men are not interested in private profits, because they don’t get any. Profits are only for capitalists, and the number of capitalists bears but an insignificant proportion to the whole number of people. Most men are wage-workers, of one sort or another, or small farmers.
Yet we are living under a system that makes private profits the basis of business. If profits are good, business is good. If profits are only fair, business is only fair. If profits are bad, business is bad. And, when business is bad, the whole country suffers, though the country has the men, the machinery and the land with which business might be made good.
Socialists liken the present business edifice to an inverted pyramid resting upon its point—the point of private profits. Socialists have observed that the steadiest pyramids do not rest upon their points. They do not believe the pyramids of Egypt would have stood as long as they have if they had not been right side up. Socialists therefore propose that the pyramid of business shall be turned right side up. They believe it would stand more nearly steady if placed upon the broad basis of the people’s needs than it now does upon the pivot-point of private profits.
That is all that Socialists mean when they talk about the “revolutionary” character of their philosophy. They want to make a revolutionary change in the basis of business. They want goods produced solely to satisfy the public need for goods, rather than to satisfy any man’s greed for profits. They do not see how business can be thus revolutionized, so long as a few men own all of the great machinery with which goods are produced. Socialists, therefore, propose that the ownership of all the great machinery shall be acquired by the people, by purchase, and thus transferred from a few to all.