A New Type of Factory.
I believe there will develop in Roadtown a form of factory that is intermediate between the large privately owned factory as it exists to-day and the individual work room of Roadtown. I refer to the small coöperative factory, organized by a band of workers whose separate operations are needed to complete a single article. For illustration, suppose a group of employés of a shoe factory are dissatisfied. Instead of going on a strike they would organize a coöperative Roadtown Association and move into Roadtown. They could arrange for houses adjoining and throw their individual work room into a continuous work room large enough to accommodate them. They could elect their own foreman and decide the proportion of profits to go to different grades of work and embody these conditions in their charter. These inner coöperators would buy and sell through the central organization of the Roadtown, as will the individual workers. Here we will have the mechanical saving of the combination of the several operations—the commercial saving of centralized buying and selling, and the profits going to the workers, not the least of which would be the satisfaction of independence.
Once Roadtown becomes an established fact, single workers, little groups of workers, and whole armies of workers will be seen leaving the old system for the new. It will be a strike for all time, a strike from which the hiring of strike breakers will be an empty retaliation, for the Roadtown worker will not only work better but his products will be less destroyed in the mill of competitive selling—he can undersell the strike breaker, being employer, and because the food and house and things he buys of the other workers will cost him less and serve him better; the workman who joins this final general strike can work and live better, yet cheaper, than his successor in the old factories. It is the beginning of the end of the barbarous so-called “factory system”—and the end is that each work will be performed in a way that is most economical to society as a whole.
A Special Message to Women.
The Roadtown has a message not only for men, but for women, and most especially for young unmarried women who are looking forward to the time when they can fulfill their highest mission on earth, that of establishing a home and raising a family. You need not put off the wedding any longer than the time when you can pay a couple of months’ rent on a Roadtown home, a deposit on a machine, enough to buy raw material to keep you and the machine busy for a couple of weeks and enough seed to plant the garden. If “John” has a position he can retain it and commute without leaving you to stare out the window of a city apartment with nothing to do all day or frightened and lonely in an isolated farm house. If he hasn’t a job he may run a machine and work the garden also. If he is good to you, you will be happy, and he is apt to be, for he knows you are not dependent upon him for a living now that you are freed from household drudgery and can earn as much as he. The Roadtown will enable you to marry the man of your choice regardless of his ability to thrive in the present unfair struggle for a marriage portion and enable you at all times to free yourself from him on account of your economic independence, if he proves to be the wrong man.
The saving in coöperative buying and selling is going to be the means of throwing many men out of employment, just as has been the case with the inventions of all labor saving machinery and methods. When a man in middle life has to fill a new occupation it is indeed a serious matter, but one against which it is useless to fight. If a man had been sent down the track swinging a lantern to warn an approaching train of a broken rail, we would hardly countenance the holding up of traffic after the rail was repaired, because the man wished to continue swinging the lantern. The Roadtown makes no apologies to the workers whose services it will render useless. When we get well, we dismiss the doctor. It is said that some doctors keep us sick to keep their jobs. Be that as it may, certainly there is no denying that he who opposes coöperation, in an attempt to preserve wasteful or unnecessary operations is a malpracticing economic physician. To the man Roadtown throws out of a job, it offers a chance to engage in productive labor where one cannot get out of a job, because so long as men receive the full fruits of their toil, with free and untaxed exchange, over-production as an economic calamity is an absolute impossibility.
The End of Monotonous Labor.
Thus far we have discussed agriculture and manufacturing as industries to be engaged in by different sets of workers. In practice, I believe they will be bountifully intermingled. A man may work at a shoe stitcher for three hours, turn off the power and go out and hoe potatoes. Likewise his wife may run the same machine, or a lace machine for a while, and for a change of occupation operate the electric hoe (something on the order of a dentist’s drill, only much larger) in the vegetable or flower garden. Not only will Roadtown free the factory worker from wage slavery, but it will free both farmer and machine worker from long hours of toil at monotonous work. It will free our civilization from the curse of making machines out of men; it will sift out the indolent and place them at the bottom of the scale of life’s good things. It will reward the industrious as much as man can be rewarded without being given power to enslave his fellows. It will make men free; it will abolish machine men, factory and sweat shops, and child labor and woman’s economic dependence on man that makes her a sexual slave. And such work, such making of children into men and women instead of automatons, may lessen the speed at which some machines are fed, and may even make tissue paper flowers on hats dearer, but it will certainly make cow butter and big red apples cheaper and real flowers more abundant and raise the per capita valuation of human life.