These questions cannot be answered by saying that the world has always been run this way. In the first place, it is not true. Never, during all the years of the world, until less than a century ago, did a few men own the tools with which all other men work. In fact, it is only within the last 40 years that such ownership has divided the population into a small master class and a vast servant class. But even if the world had always been run as it is running, that, in itself, would not make it right. And anything that is wrong cannot be made right without changing it.
We Socialists are determined to change the laws relating to private property. We assert that the present laws are wrong. We are prepared to prove that they are wrong. We are eager to demonstrate that the poverty of the masses is the direct result of the ownership, by a few, of a certain kind of property that should not be privately owned. We refer, of course, to the industrial machinery of the country, which is owned by those who do not use it and used by those who do not own it.
Our proposal, therefore, is this: We say that all property that is collectively used should be collectively owned, and that all property that is individually used should be individually owned. The last clause should help out the gentleman who is afraid that Socialism would rob him of the ownership of his undershirt. The first clause will help him to own an undershirt.
Please take this suggestion: Distrust any man who advises you to distrust Socialism because of the fear that it would destroy the individual’s right to own property. Such a man is always either ignorant upon the subject of Socialism or crooked upon the subject of capitalism. There are no exceptions, for Socialism does not mean what he says it means and would not do what he says it would do.
Socialism would give such a meaning to the individual right to own property as it has never had in all the history of the world. Under Socialism, the individual would not only have the right to own property, but he would have the power to exercise the right. He would own property. If Socialism would not give every head of a family the power exclusively to control as good a house as the $5,000–a-year man now lives in, Socialists would have no use for Socialism. The actual ownership of the house might or might not rest with the individual. To prevent grafters from grabbing houses, it might be deemed advisable to let the state hold the title. But the state would protect the individual in the right exclusively to control the house as long as he wished to live in it, even if it were for a lifetime. If the people so desired, the state might even go further and give the children, after the death of their parents, the same right. But no Socialist government would permit a landlord class to fatten upon a homeless class.
Why? Because Socialists believe that no validity underlies a private title to property except the validity that is completed by the use of property. This statement, like any other, can be made ridiculous by construing it ridiculously. Socialists do not mean by this, for instance, that if a man should take his family to the country for the summer anybody would have a right to move into his house, merely because he had temporarily ceased to use it. But Socialists do mean that it is hostile to the interests of the community for a small class to own so much that they can never use.
Socialists believe that the needs of the community are so great that all of the resources of the community should be available to the community. Therefore, they would require occupancy, or use, as a pre-requisite to the perfection of a title. Not that if a man, in spring, were to hang up his winter underclothing for the summer, any neighbor gentleman would thereby be given the right to appropriate the same—nothing of the kind. This statement with regard to use, like all other statements made by Socialists, must be construed reasonably. We simply lay down the principle that it is wrong to perpetuate conditions under which a few are enabled to grab so much more than they can use. Such grabbing hurts. What a man cannot use he should not have. He thereby prevents others from getting what they need.
Besides, what is grabbing but a bad habit? Mr. Rockefeller’s $900,000,000, if expended exclusively for bologna sausages, might buy enough to supply him for a million years. If expended for golf balls, he might be able to play golf, without buying a new ball, until he had eaten the last sausage. If expended for clothing, he might be able to wear a new suit, every fifteen minutes, for the next 28,000,000 years. But what good do all of these figures do Rockefeller? His capacity for consuming wealth is extremely limited. It is only his capacity for appropriating the wealth created by others that is great. Every time Mr. Rockefeller’s watch ticks $2 drop into his till—but he never sees them. He hardly knows they are there. He has to hire a bookkeeper to know they are there. So far as certainties are concerned, Mr. Rockefeller knows only that when he wants bacon and eggs, with a little hashed brown potatoes on the side, he has the money to pay for them. In other words, the few wants of his slight physical body are never in danger of denial.
Mr. Rockefeller’s physical wants would be in no danger of denial if he were worth only $50,000. Why, then, does he want to own the rest of his $900,000,000 worth of property? Plainly, it is only because he is a victim of a bad habit. Some men want money because of the power it gives them, but Rockefeller has never seemed to care much about power. He simply has a mania for accumulation. The more he gets, the more he can get—therefore, he always wants to get more.
And, what does Rockefeller do with wealth, after he gets it? Why, he lets us use it. He invests it in railroads, or steel mills, or steamboats, or copper mines, or restaurants, or whatever seems likely to bring him more money. He does not use any of these properties much. The same freight train that brings him a package of breakfast food brings carloads of kitchen stoves and iron bedsteads to those whose watches have to tick all day to bring in $2. But the point is that while Mr. Rockefeller uses his properties little and we use them much, he is continuously charging us toll for their use and investing the toll in more iron, more steel or more copper. If he charged us no toll, we should have reason to be thankful to him. If he should invest the toll in the necessities of life and dole them out to us, we should, if we were beggars, also have reason to be thankful to him. But he invests his toll in more iron, more steel or more copper—toll that the men who made it need to put blood into their bodies and clothing on their families.