Letters to Judd, an American Workingman

by Upton Sinclair

Wall Street propagandists are fond of figuring how much goes to labor and how much to capital, and proving that to wipe out the capitalist would add only a small percentage, say ten per cent, to the share of each worker. This is a trick, for the reason that a great part of the capitalist’s share appears, not as profits, but as various forms of “fixed charges” against the industry: the interest on bonds, the rent of land, the royalties to owners of various privileges. To give just one illustration, the New York Central Railroad crosses a bridge near Albany, and a private concern owns that bridge, and the railroad pays one cent for every passenger, a small fortune every year. Our whole industrial system is a tangle of grafts such as that; the railroads are plundered by right-of-way companies, sleeping-car companies, refrigerator-car companies; industrial concerns are plundered by private railway lines, owned by “insiders,” or by companies having a “cinch” on repairs or materials or accessories. Just the bookkeeping on such rights is a vast industry, and the adjusting of them supplies a living for thousands of lawyers and their clerks. To wipe all that out will be to dump a mountain’s weight off the back of production.

But even suppose it was as the Wall Street propagandists argue—that capital got only ten per cent—would that be the only gain for labor? No, Judd, it would not; and here is the most important point that I have to get across to you in these letters. The proposition may seem difficult, but I beg you to put your mind on it and get it straight, for it is not too much to say that all freedom and happiness for the workingman in our time depend upon his understanding these matters, so that the clever hired writers of privilege cannot befuddle his mind.

Whatever may be the percentage that goes to capital—whether ten per cent, as Wall Street claims, or thirty or forty per cent, as I could prove—nevertheless it is this percentage which causes our industrial ills today. It is this surplus which, drawn off and re-invested in more means of production, causes the glut of goods which we know as “hard times”; it is this surplus which causes speculation and panics, and turns the worker out to join the ranks of the “unemployed,” and to beat down the wages of his fellows; it is this surplus which causes the search for foreign markets, and draws the great industrial nations into war. Figure to yourself a body having an iron ring riveted about it. At first this ring makes no difference, but as the body grows it causes strangulation, and the time comes when for all the agonies of that body there is but one remedy, to cut the ring.

Cutting the ring is simply this: to take the surplus product away from capital and give it to labor; so instantly you have remedied the evil and relieved the pain. How so? Because labor now becomes able to consume the entire product of industry. Labor can consume it, because labor has the money to buy it. Before this, as we have seen, labor got only part of the money, and so could buy only part of the product; the rest had to be either wasted by the rich, or sold abroad. But give labor the full value, the actual equivalent in purchasing power of the amount of goods produced, and so consumption balances production, and the factories can work merrily, as many hours as we desire, turning out for each and every one of us as much goods as we care to consume. The only restriction is the basic law of social justice—that before any man consumes anything he must render to the community an equivalent service.

The hired men of the exploiters do all they can to confuse this argument; I hear them laugh that I have some kind of deluded horror of a surplus. We ought to save, they insist, and provide against a “rainy day”! Yes, of course—and not merely against rain, but against famine and earthquake and tornado. I have no objection whatever to a surplus; the question is, who is to own that surplus—those who do the work, or those who live as parasites? That makes all the difference; for when a workingman has made too much wealth for his master, the workingman is out of a job; but when the workingman has made too much wealth for himself, the workingman is on a vacation.

Here is this great rich country of ours, with all its natural resources, its marvelous machines, its willing and clever workers; and when we have broken the iron ring we can produce goods for ourselves, and consume and enjoy them, and stay quietly within our own boundaries. No longer do we keep our workers on starvation wages, and ship all our surplus products abroad, to be consumed by Frenchmen and Italians and Turks and Chinamen and Hindoos, in return for paper promises to pay money to our capitalists! No longer do we have to go to war, to seize foreign markets from other capitalists! The workers now own the factories, and also they own the working capital, and they produce goods for use, and if we have foreign trade it is because we want things from abroad, and not because we have to get rid of our surplus product under penalty of starving. This is what I describe as a Free Society, Judd; I say that in such a society, with production rationally planned, and all wastes removed, we should produce wealth in such quantities, so quickly and so easily—well, you would think I was joking. But leading engineers have told us that we have, in our machine power, the constant labor of three billion slaves. In thirteen industries, figured by the capitalist, Mr. Babson, we have 88 times the productive power we used to have by hand labor. Just think what that ought to mean!

Or look at it another way. Twenty years ago Sidney A. Reeve, an engineering expert, calculated how much we wasted by the competitive production of goods, and in a big book full of tables and charts, he worked out the figure of 70 per cent waste. We have seen the Hoover Committee, considering merely the wastes inside each industry, giving figures as high as 60 per cent of waste. Mr. Stuart Chase, in his wonderful book, “The Tragedy of Waste,” figures 50 per cent as the minimum. Well, let us take the minimum, for a start. What does it mean? I answer:

In a free society what we now have will cost us four hours labor a day.

And more than that, Judd—something absolutely vital to every poor man in our country: