Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

One of the next things that is going to happen is that the managing and creating minds of the world to-day are going to organize, are going to see suddenly their real power and use it. The brains are about to have, as labour and capital already have, a class consciousness.

I would not claim that there is going to be an international strike of the brains of the world, but it will not be long before the managing class as a class will be organized so that they can strike if they want to.

The Artists or Organizers and Managers of business will not need probably, in order to accomplish their purpose, to strike against the uncreative millionaires. They will make a stand (which the best of them have already made now) for the balance of power in any business that they furnish their brains to. The brains that create the profits for the owners and that create the labour for the labourers, will make terms for their brains and will withhold their brains if necessary to this end. But it is far more likely that they will accomplish their purpose sooner by using their brains for the millionaires and for the labourers—by coöperating with the millionaires and labourers than they will by striking against them or keeping their brains back.

They are in a position to make the millionaires see how little money they can make without them even in a few days. They will let them try. A very little trying will prove it.

Where hand labour would have to strike for weeks and months to prove its value, brain labour would have to strike hours and days.

This is what is going to be done in modern business in one business at a time, the brains insisting in each firm upon full control.

Then, of course, the firms that have the brains in most full control will drive the firms in which brains are in less control out of competition.

Then brains will spread from one business to another. The Managers, Artists, and Organizers of the world will have formed at last a Brain Syndicate, and they will put themselves in a position to determine in their own interests and in the interests of society at large the terms on which all men—all men who have no brains to put with their money—shall be allowed to have the use of theirs. They will monopolize the brain supply of the world.

Then they will act. Under our present régime money hires men; under the régime of the Brain Syndicate men will hire money. Money—i.e., saved up or canned labour, is going to be hired by Managers, Organizers, and Engineers with as much discrimination and with as deep a study of its efficiency, as new labour is hired. The millionaires are going to be seen standing with their money bags and their little hats in their hands like office boys asking for positions for their money before the doors of the really serious and important men, the men who toil out the ideas and the ways and the means of carrying out ideas—the men who do the real work of the world, who see things that they want and see how to get them—the men of imagination, the inventors of ideas, organizers of facts, generals and engineers in human nature.

It is these men who are going to allow people who merely have thoughtless labour and people who merely have thoughtless money to be let in with them. The world's quarrel with the rich man is not his being a rich man, but his being rich without brains, and its quarrel with the poor labourer is not his being a poor labourer, but his being a poor labourer without brains. The only way that either of these men can have a chance to be of any value is in letting themselves be used by the man who will supply them with what they lack. They will try to get this man to see if he cannot think of some way of getting some good out of them for themselves, and for others.