The new order has made each family in an industrial district doubly dependent—dependent on a job which it can in no wise control, and dependent on the economic mechanism for the supply of goods and services without which mass city life is quite impossible. The rural family had a supplementary source of living in its chickens, pigs, cows, goats, bees and garden. Fuel was cheap and nature provided berries, nuts and game. Life was rough, but the means of maintaining it were relatively abundant. City life has cut away almost all of these forms of supplementary income, at the same time that it has imposed upon the family the need to pay for practically all goods and services. The city breadwinner must get and hold a job, if his family is to live.
Mass life in cities, mass work in factories, job-dependence—all of these experiments are being made in a field that up to the present time has been virtually untouched by the human race. Mankind has gone into these experiments hopefully, trustingly, blindly, without any guarantee of their workability.
A casual examination of the premises on which the capitalist experiment is built will show the extremely precarious position in which the people who are dependent upon it now find themselves.
The capitalist experiment is built on the assumption that competition rather than co-operation is the effective means of promoting social well-being. Acting under this theory, each man is to forage for himself. This individual activity was relied upon to promote initiative and to stimulate ambition. In practice, capitalist society has been compelled to abandon competition in many of its aspects. Monopoly is the opposite of competition, yet the modern capitalist world is full of monopoly because monopoly pays better than competition—it is a more workable economic scheme.
Following out the assumption that competition is the life of economic society, one arrives at a necessary corollary to the general theory. The purpose of competition is to injure, wipe out and dispose of the competitor. Therefore the misfortune of our competitors is our good fortune. This would lead, as applied to the actual conditions of life, to some such formula as:
1. Bankrupt your competitor and you will profit.
2. Impoverish your neighbor and you will benefit.
3. Injure your fellow-man and you will gain.
Stated thus baldly and harshly, these three propositions sound incredibly silly, particularly in view of the example the world has just had of large scale competition—the World War—yet they are a fair picture of the line of thought and conduct accepted as rational by modern economic society. The normal processes of competition are directed to the destruction of competitors. War is a frankly avowed means of smashing rivals. Nationalism is built on the theory that "our" nation is superior to all other nations, and that, in the long run, it is capable of defeating (injuring) them.
The practice of such ideas render an effective organization of society virtually impossible, and it renders social catastrophe almost inevitable. Bankruptcy breeds bankruptcy. Impoverishment is a contagious economic plague. Injury leads to bitterness, hatred and further injury. These logical fruits of competition once admitted into the economic body, threaten its very life.