“Cut out the profits of the private owners,” they say. “Let the people own the trusts and make things because they want the things, instead of because somebody else wants a profit, and there will never again be in this country either want or the fear of want.”
This sounds like a nice, man-made program, cooked up late at night by some zealous gentleman intent upon saving his country. It may be a foolish program, but if it is, it is not that kind of a foolish program. It is not man-made, any more than Darwin’s theory of evolution is man-made. Darwin observed present animal life and thereby explained the past. Socialists observe past and present industrial life and thereby forecast the future. Paradoxically, then, the Socialist remedy is not a Socialist remedy. If it is anything, it is the remedy that evolution is bringing to us. Socialists see what evolution is bringing and proclaim it, much as a trainman announces the coming of a train that he already sees rounding a curve.
Let me tell a story to illustrate this point:
Seventy years ago, Socialist writers predicted and accurately described the trusts as they exist to-day. Nobody paid much attention to the predictions or the descriptions. Nowhere in the world was there a single trust. Nowhere in the world was any one thinking of forming one. The first trust was not formed until almost forty years later.
The trusts were predicted because the steam engine had been invented and brought with it machinery. The invention did not mean much to most people. It meant everything to these early Socialists. They saw its significance. They saw that it meant a transformed world. Never again would the world be as it had always been. Never again would the amount of wealth that man could create be limited by his weak muscles. Steam and machinery had come to do, not only what he had been doing, but what he had never dreamed of doing.
The only lesson that the rich men of the day learned from steam was that it meant more money for them. The rich men of the day, by the way, were in need of a new method of exploitation. Serfdom had just gone down in the Napoleonic wars, and some men were no longer able to exploit other men by claiming to own the other men’s bodies. Exploitation, through the private ownership of land, still continued, it is true, but a man working by hand cannot be much exploited because he cannot make much. What I mean by this is that he cannot be exploited of many dollars. Of course, he can be exploited of so great a percentage of his product that he is left starving, but the man who exploits him will not be much richer. That is why there were no great fortunes, as we now know them, in the days before the machinery age. Wealth was too difficult to make.
But, to return to our story. The invention of the steam engine gave the rich men of the early eighteenth century the opportunity of which they stood much in need. Factories cost money. The workers did not have any. The rich men did. The rich men built factories. That is to say, they thought they were only building factories. As a matter of fact, they were taking over, from the hands of evolution, the poor man’s tools. Never again were working men to own the tools of their trades. Their tools had gone down in the struggle in which the survivors must be the fittest. For centuries, the world had starved because of their old hand-tools. They could not, for a moment, exist after steam and machinery came. It was right that the hand-tools should go. It was unfortunate for the workers only that the successors of hand-tools were too expensive for individual ownership, and that they were also unsuited to such ownership. No man can run a whole shoe factory, even if he owns one. Many men are required to run many machines, and many machines are required to make the labor of men most productive.
All of this, the early Socialists saw or reasoned out. They saw the rich men of the day building factories. They saw those who were not quite so rich joining together to build factories. Little co-partnerships were springing up all over the world. Everybody competed with everybody else in his line. Manufactures multiplied, and it became the common belief that “competition was the life of trade.”
Stick a pin here. The roots of Socialism go down somewhere near this point.
The early Socialist writers who predicted the trusts did not believe competition was the life of trade. They believed the inevitable tendency of competition was to kill itself. Their reasoning took this form: