Such are the facts; now let us apply them to the right of exploitation, embodied in the ownership of a certain number of bonds or shares of stock in the United States Steel Corporation. "Pass a law," says the Socialist, "providing for the taking over of United States Steel by the government." At once to every owner comes one single thought—are you going to buy this stock, or are you going to confiscate it? If you attempt confiscation, the courts will declare the law unconstitutional; and you either have to defy the courts, which is revolutionary action, or to amend the constitution. If you adopt the latter course, you have before you a long period of agitation; you have to carry both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority, and the legislatures of three-fourths of the States. You have to do this in the face of the most bitter and infuriated opposition of those who are defending what they regard as their rights. You have to meet the arguments of the entire capitalist press of the country, and you have the certainty of widespread bribery of your elected officials.
The prospect of doing all this under the forms of law seems extremely discouraging; so come the Syndicalists, saying, "Let us seize the factories, and stop the exploitation at the point of production." So come the Communists, saying, "Let us overthrow capitalist government, and break the net of bourgeois legality, and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will put an end to privilege and class domination all at once." What are we to say to these different programs?
Suppose we buy out the stockholders of United States Steel, and issue to them government bonds, what have we accomplished? Nothing, say the advocates of confiscation; we have changed the form of exploitation, but the substance of it remains the same. The stockholders get their money from the United States government, instead of from the United States Steel Corporation; but they get their money just the same—the product, not of their labor, but of the labor of the steel workers. Suppose we carried out the same procedure all along the line; suppose the government took over all industries, and paid for their securities with government bonds. Then we should have capitalism administered by a capitalist government, instead of by our present masters of industry; we should have a state capitalism, instead of a private capitalism; we should have the government buying and selling products, and exploiting labor, and paying over the profits to an hereditary privileged class. The capitalist system would go on just the same, except that labor would have one all-powerful tyrant, instead of many lesser tyrants, as at present.
So argue the advocates of confiscation. And the advocates of purchase reply that in buying the securities of United States Steel, we should fix the purchase price at the present market value of the property, and that price, once fixed, would be permanent; all future unearned increment of the steel industry would belong to the government instead of to private owners. Consider, for example, what happened during the world war. When I was a boy, soon after the Steel Trust was launched, its stock was down to something like six dollars, and I knew small investors who lost every dollar they had put in. But during the war, steel stock soared to a hundred and thirty-six dollars per share; it paid dividends of some thirty per cent per year, and accumulated enormous surpluses besides.
The same thing was true of practically all the big corporations. According to Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, there were coal companies which paid as high as eight hundred per cent per year; that is to say, the profits in one year were eight times the total investment. Assuming that our government bonds paid five per cent, it appears that the owners of these coal companies got one hundred and sixty times as much under our present private property system as they would have got under a system of state purchase. Even completely dominated by capitalism as our courts are today, they would not dare require us to pay for industries more than six per cent on the market value of the investment; and from what I know of the inside graft of American big business that would be restricting the private owners to less than one-fourth of what they are getting at present.
We have already pointed out the economies that can be made by putting industry under a uniform system. But all these, important as they are, amount to little in comparison with the one great consideration, which is that by purchasing large scale industry, we should break the "iron ring"; we should thenceforth be able to do our manufacturing for use instead of for profit, and so we should put an end to unemployment. Our cheerful workers would throng into the factories, to produce for themselves instead of for masters; and in one year of that we should so change the face of our country that a return to the system of private ownership would be unthinkable. In one year we could raise production to such a point that the interest on the bonds we had issued would be like the crumbs left over from a feast.
CHAPTER LXVII
EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS
(Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for success in the United States.)
I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque than barricades and councils of action.
In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not getting what we pay for?