Social Justice Without Socialism

by John Bates Clark

When we differ, it is in deciding on the means to carry out our common purpose; and here we differ very widely. Some would use the power of the State to correct and improve our system of industry, and these constitute a party of reform. Others would abolish that system and substitute something untried. For private capital they would put public capital and for private management, public management—either in the whole field of industry or in that great part of it where large capital rules. These are Socialists in the modern and current sense of the term.

One difference of view which was formerly very sharp is now scarcely traceable. Every one knows that we must invoke the aid of the State in order to make industry what it should be. The rule that would bid the State keep its hands off the entire field of business, the extreme laissez-faire policy once dominant in literature and thought, now finds few persons bold enough to advocate it or foolish enough to believe in it. In a very chastened form, however, the spirit that would put a reasonable limit on what the State shall be asked to do happily does survive and is powerful. It seeks a golden mean between letting the State do nothing and asking it to do everything. It is this plan of action that I shall try to outline, and it will appear that even this plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert government the industrial system would suffer irreparably.

The thing first to be rescued is competition—meaning that healthful rivalry between different producers which has always been the guaranty of technical progress. That such progress has gone on with bewildering rapidity since the invention of the steam engine is nowhere denied; and neither is it denied that competition of the normal kind—the effort of rivals to excel in productive processes—has caused it. It has multiplied the product of labor here tenfold, there, twentyfold, and elsewhere a hundredfold and more.

This increased power to produce has rescued us from an appalling evil. Without it, such a crowding of population as some countries have experienced would have carried their peoples to and below the starvation level. Machinery now enables us to live; and if world-crowding were to go on in the future as it has done, and the technical progress should cease, many of us could not live. Poverty would increase till its cruelest effects would be realized and lives enough would be crushed out to enable the survivors to get a living. Of all conditions of human happiness, the one which is most underestimated is progress in power to produce. Hardly any of those who would revolutionize the industrial State, and not all of those who would reform it, have any conception of the importance of this progress. It is the sine qua non of any hopeful outlook for the future of mankind.

I am to speak, however, of justice in the business relations of life, and it might seem that this shut out the mere question of general prosperity. The most obvious issue between different social classes concerns the division of whatever income exists. Whatever there is, be it large or small, may be divided rightly or wrongly; but I am not able to see that the mere division of it exhausts the application of the principle of justice. While it is clearly wrong for one party to plunder another, it is almost as clearly wrong for one party to reduce the general income and so, in a sense, rob everybody. A party that should systematically hinder production and reduce its fruits would rob a myriad of honest laborers who are ill prepared to stand this loss and have a perfect right to be protected from it.

Every man, woman, and child has a right to demand that the powers that be remove hindrances in the way of production, and not only allow the general income to be large and grow larger, but do everything that they possibly can do to make it grow larger. It is an unjust act to reduce general earnings, even though no one is singled out for particular injury. On this ground we insist on trust legislation, tariff reform, the conservation of natural resources, etc. I am prepared to claim that it is in this spirit that we demand that private initiative, which has given us the amount of prosperity that we have thus far obtained, shall be enabled to continue its work without being supplanted by monopoly. In a general way I should include public monopoly as well as private among the things which would put a damper on the progress of improvement and lessen the income on which the comfort of laborers in the near future will be dependent. Monopoly of any sort is hostile to improvement, and in this chiefly lies the menace which it holds for mankind.

It is a fairly safe prediction that, if a public monopoly were to exist in every part of the industrial field, the per capita income would grow less, and that it would be only a question of time, and a short time at that, when the laborers would be worse off than they are now. Though, at the outset, they might absorb the entire incomes of the well-to-do classes, the amount thus gained would shrink in their hands until their position would be worse than their present one. They would have pulled down the capitalists without more than a momentary benefit for themselves and with a prospect of soon sinking to a lower level than as a class they have thus far reached.

The impulse to revolutionize the system comes from the belief that it is irreclaimably bad. The first thing to be done is to see how much reclaiming the system is capable of; and the only sure way to test this question is to use all our power in the effort to improve it. When all such efforts shall have failed, it will be time for desperate measures.

Our industrial system has many faults:—here we are happily agreed. It is the inferences we draw from this fact that are different. The one that I draw is like one which is recorded in a famous case in antiquity. When the Macedonian armies seemed about to overwhelm Greece, Demosthenes encouraged the Athenians by this very sound bit of philosophy: "The worst fact in our past affords the brightest hope for our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of our own faults. If they had come when we were doing our best, there would be no hope for us." Now the evils of our own social system which result from mistakes or faults are just such a ground of hope. Every such evil which can be cited describes one possible reform, and the longer the list of evils, the greater is the sum total of gain which we can make by doing away with them. If we cite them all seriatim, what impression shall we get? Will it merely show how badly off we are? Will it make us despair for our future? On the contrary, it should fill us with hope for the future. We start from the fact that we have thus far survived in spite of the faults. The worst off among us is above starvation and most of us are in a tolerable state. If we can remove the evils that exist, we shall make our state very much more than tolerable. The greatness of the evils measures the gain from removing them. Every single one that is removed improves the status of our people. We can take, as it were, a social account of stock, measure our present state, measure the extent to which we can improve it by putting an end to one bad influence, count the number of such bad influences, and so get an estimate of the gains of carrying out a complete reformatory programme. It will show an enormous possibility of improvement.

In the struggle for reforms we have the great middle class with us. All honest capitalists, great and small alike, are natural allies of honest labor, and they are interested mainly in the same reforms as are the members of the working-class. If we recognize a necessity for a struggle of classes, it is not one that marshals labor against all wealth. The contention is rather between honest wealth allied with honest labor, on the one hand, and dishonest wealth on the other; and in a contest so aligned, victory for the former party means social justice.