This statement sounds all right, but it overlooks the essential factor in our business situation—that “iron ring” I have been telling you about. At the present time not one per cent of our factories are run at full capacity all the year round; but when we get possession for the workers, we break the iron ring, and can run them all day and all night. We have five million unemployed—the average of good years and bad, you remember—five million men to go to work, to turn out more goods for themselves and for all. We cut out the wastes and reduplication; and according to the lowest estimate, we double our production of goods.
The plant we propose to buy is worth, roughly, one hundred billion dollars, and its annual product is twenty billions, possibly thirty; let us say twenty, to be safe. We pay for it with five per cent bonds, which means the former owners get five billions a year. If we double production, we have forty billions a year, which leaves thirty-five billions for us. In other words, Judd:
We can work half an hour a day for the owners, and four hours a day for ourselves, and be twice as rich as at present.
So you see why I am in favor of compensation! Not because I love the owners, but because, as a matter of cold cash, we shall do better that way. I will go so far as to argue that if we try to pay nothing, we shall really pay more. If we try to kick the bosses out, and seize the factories, and run them by workers’ councils—obviously, that may mean civil war. The bosses have the factories, and they have machine-guns and airplanes and poison gas—a system for wiping out the lives of thousands of workers, if necessary. One of the embarrassments of physical force revolution is that it may fail, and the workers, instead of getting the factories, may get castor oil and Fascist clubs. There is a big group of our masters who think that is what the workers need, and would take delight in administering it.
I know some young revolutionists who are prepared to die for the proletariat, in a fine spirit of martyrdom. They are impatient of talk about money, but I beg them to pause and consider the balance sheet of Compensation versus Confiscation. Even though they succeed in their revolution, they surely cannot do it without industrial waste. They will have to stop the machines while they are fighting; they may shoot holes in the factories, and even burn some of them down. And just what will that cost? We are reckoning, you understand, on our possible double production—forty billions a year. The interest we pay the owners is five billions a year. So now:
If in the course of our revolution we destroy one-eighth of our industrial plant, it would have been cheaper to pay the owners for the whole thing.
Or, suppose we have the good luck to get by without much fighting—what then? Well, the present management, which knows the industry, and is keeping the plant going—this management is hired by the owners, and is loyal to the owners, and will have to be booted out the back door, which will certainly stop production, cripple it for months, perhaps years. But if our government comes to the owners in a business deal, and buys the plant, the management will stay on, as it did when we took over the railroads during the war. On that basis, we shall not lose an hour of the plant’s time, nor will the workers lose an hour of their wages. And how does this figure up, in the balance sheet of Compensation versus Confiscation? Listen:
If our industrial plant is idle for six weeks, we have lost what would have paid the owners for a year.
And again, an obvious consequence: