The Common Sense of Socialism / A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg

by John Spargo

When there is a glut in the market, Jonathan, you know what happens. Shops and factories are shut down, the number of workers employed is reduced, the army of the unemployed grows and there is a rise in the tide of poverty and misery. Yet why should it be so? Why, simply because there is a superabundance of wealth, should people be made poorer? Why should little children go without shoes just because there are loads of shoes stacked away in stores and warehouses? Why should people go without clothing simply because the warehouses are bursting with clothes? The answer is that these things must be so because we produce for profit instead of for use. All these stores of wealth belong to the class of profit-takers, the capitalist class, and they must sell and make profit.

So you see, friend Jonathan, so long as this system lasts, people must have too little because they have produced too much. So long as this system lasts, there must be periods when we say that society cannot afford to have men and women work to maintain themselves decently! But under any sane system it will surely be considered the maddest kind of folly to keep men in idleness while saying that it does not pay to keep them working. Is there any more expensive way of keeping either an ass or a man than in idleness?

The root of evil, the taproot from which the evils of modern society develop, is the profit idea. Life is subordinated to the making of profit. If it were only possible to embody that idea in human shape, what a monster ogre it would be! And how we should arraign it at the bar of human reason! Should we not call up images of the million of babes who have been needlessly and wantonly slaughtered by the Monster Idea; the images of all the maimed and wounded and killed in the wars for markets; the millions of others who have been bruised and broken in the industrial arena to secure somebody's profit, because it was too expensive to guard life and limb; the numberless victims of adulterated food and drink, of cheap tenements and shoddy clothes? Should we not call up the wretched women of our streets; the bribers and the vendors of privilege? We should surely parade in pitiable procession the dwarfed and stunted bodies of the millions born to hardship and suffering, but we could not, alas! parade the dwarfed and stunted souls, the sordid spirits for which the Monster Idea is responsible.

I ask you, Jonathan Edwards, what you really think of this "buy cheap and sell dear" idea, which is the heart and soul of our capitalistic system. Are you satisfied that it should continue?

Yet, my friend, bad as it is in its full development, and terrible as are its fruits, this idea once stood for progress. The system was a step in the liberation of man. It was an advance upon feudalism which bound the laborer to the soil. Capitalism has not been all bad; it has another, brighter side. Capitalism had to have laborers who were free to move from one place to another, even to other lands, and that need broke down the last vestiges of the old physical slavery. That was a step gained. Capitalism had to have intelligent workers and many educated ones. That put into the hands of the common people the key to the sealed treasuries of knowledge. It had to have a legal system to meet its requirements and that has resulted in the development of representative government, of something approaching political democracy; even where kings nominally rule to-day, their power is but a shadow of what it once was. Every step taken by the capitalist class for the advancement of its own interests has become in its turn a stepping-stone upon which the working-class has raised itself.

Karl Marx once said that the capitalist system provides its own gravediggers. I have cited two or three things which will illustrate his meaning. Later on, I must try and explain to you how the great "trusts" about which you complain so loudly, and which seem to be the very perfection of the capitalist ideal, lead toward Socialism at a pace which nothing can very seriously hinder, though it may be quickened by wise action on the part of the workers.

For the present I shall be satisfied, friend Jonathan, if you get it thoroughly into your mind that the source of terrible social evils, of the poverty and squalor, of the helpless misery of the great mass of the people, of most of the crime and vice and much of the disease, is the "buy cheap and sell dear" idea. The fact that we produce things for sale for the profit of a few, instead of for use and the enjoyment of all.

Get that into your mind above everything else, my friend. And try to grasp the fact, also, that the system we are now trying to change was a natural outgrowth of other conditions. It was not a wicked invention, nor was it a foolish blunder. It was a necessary and a right step in human evolution. But now it has in turn become unsuitable to the needs of the people and it must give place to something else. When a man suffers from such a disease as appendicitis, he does not talk about the "wickedness" of the vermiform appendix. He realizes, if he is a sensible man, that long ago, that was an organ which served a useful purpose in the human system. Gradually, perhaps in the course of many centuries, it has ceased to be of any use. It has lost its original functions and become a menace to the body.

Capitalism, Jonathan, is the vermiform appendix of the social organism. It has served its purpose. The profit idea has served an important function in society, but it is now useless and a menace to the body social. Our troubles are due to a kind of social appendicitis. And the remedy is to remove the useless and offending member.