This tendency, then, to larger and larger industrial organization, with its wasteful warfare and other attendant evils, implies a certain advance. It indicates competition working out to its last expression and final breakdown. It points to the supersession of the individualistic industrial system by a collectivist industrial system requiring democratic state-ownership of land and the means of production and distribution of all commodities.
In process of civilizing man has made himself acquainted with many laws of nature, and has learnt so to handle matter as to direct its forces into channels carrying benefit to himself. He has thus become the controller of natural forces in as far as they lie within reach of his mental comprehension and physical activities. It is by this method, and no other, that our advance along the line of material civilization has been accomplished, and all further extension of the comforts and amenities of economic and social life is certain to be obtained through persistence in this available and satisfactory course.
Now, throughout the domain of non-material civilization, man has never constituted himself controller of natural forces, although, in orders of life inferior to his own, he has guided many vital forces. For instance, there are vegetable and animal forces—all subject to natural law—that he has enlisted in his service and made submissive to his dominion. The forms of vegetable life around us to-day—cereals, fruit-trees, plants, and flowers of infinitely varied tint—bear witness to the art and skill of man; and the animal kingdom, ruled by mysterious biological laws, has provided him with faithful servants obedient to his will, in a life which to dogs and horses is largely artificial.
In the order of his own social life man’s position is wholly different. What we behold, if we take an objective view of a so-called civilized society, is a marvellous variety of complicated movements. These are the outcome of forces pursuing an unbridled course; and that course is always the path of least resistance. As yet there is no intervening force of a collective, mental nature to adapt that course to an ultimate definite aim and purpose, or to harmonize broadly those lines of least resistance with the line of permanent and universal advantage to mankind. As Professor Lester F. Ward expresses it, “Man has made the winds, the waters, fire, steam and electricity do his bidding. All nature, both animate and inanimate, has been reduced to his service.... One class of natural forces still remains the play of chance, and from it, instead of aid, he is constantly receiving the most serious checks. This field is that of society itself, these unreclaimed forces are the social forces of whose nature man seems to possess no knowledge, whose very existence he persistently ignores, and which he consequently is powerless to control.” (Dynamic Sociology, vol. I. p. 35.) These unreclaimed social forces—selfishness, rapacity, pride—give activity to the competitive system, and run riot on the basis of private property in land and the means of production. But the present condition of things cannot much longer persist, and a new industrial system, the outcome of far more elevated social forces, is shaping itself rapidly in many minds throughout Europe, America, and the whole civilized world; that system of co-operative industry we have now to consider.
CHAPTER II
ORGANIZED INDUSTRY
The true organic formula of political as of economic justice is—
“From each according to his powers,
To each according to his needs.”
J. A. Hobson.
Whilst bearing in mind that the present economic system—a system unconsciously produced through the play of selfish forces—was a necessary stage of evolution, and tended to progress so long as savage proclivities in the mass of the people made a closer social union impossible, we have also to recognize the changes, outward and inward, occurring under that system. First, a rise of co-operation, both voluntary and involuntary—in factories and throughout business generally—has taken place, causing evolution to proceed on wider lines. Second, a slow, silent, unstudied, half-unconscious movement has advanced, and in these days eventuated in the conception of a new system which purports to be the form that industrial evolution must assume in the near future. And inasmuch as this new system is less egoistic and more social than any system of competition, it will move on ethical lines of progress.