Also, the railroad brotherhoods have started their own bank, in Cleveland, Ohio, and it is proving an enormous success. Make note of this point; every large labor union can have its own bank, to finance its industries and its propaganda. Stop and consider how preposterous it is that the five million organized workers of the United States should deposit their hundreds of millions of savings in capitalist banks, to be used to finance private undertakings which crush unions and hold labor in bondage. Let every big labor union have its own building, its own banking and insurance business, its own vacation camp in the country, its own school for training its future leaders. Also, let every labor council in every big city start a labor daily, to tell the workers the truth and point the way to freedom. Let every farmers' organization follow suit; and let these groups get together, to exchange their products upon a co-operative basis. Already the railway men are arranging with the farmers, to buy the farm products and distribute them co-operatively; they are getting together with the clothing workers, to have the latter make clothing for them, and with the shoe-workers to make shoes.
This is the co-operative movement, which has become the largest single industry in Great Britain, and is the backbone of industrial democracy and sound radicalism. It is spreading rapidly in America now. It is taking the money of the people out of the control of the profit system, and diverting it into channels of public service. It is training men to believe in brotherhood instead of in greed. It is giving them business experience, so that when the time comes the taking over of our industrial machine will not have to be done by amateurs, but by men who know what co-operation is, and how to make a success of it.
This work will go on more rapidly yet when the workers have united politically, and brought into power a government which will assist them instead of assisting the bankers. A most interesting program for the development of working-class financial credit is known as the "Douglas plan," which is advocated by a London weekly, the "New Age," and is explained in two books, called "Economic Democracy" and "Credit Power and Democracy," by Douglas and Orage. This program is in brief that the furnishing of credit shall become a function of organized labor, based upon the fact that the true and ultimate basis of all credit is the power of hand and brain labor to produce wealth. The labor unions, or "guilds," shall pay the management of industry and pay capital for the use of the industrial plant, and shall finance production and new industrial development out of their "credit power," their ability to promise production and to keep their promises.
This "Douglas plan" seeks to break the Money Trust by the method of Syndicalism. Another method of breaking it, through state regulation of bank loans, you will find most completely set forth in an extremely able book, "The Strangle Hold," by H. C. Cutting, an American business man, whom you may address at San Lorenzo, California. Another method, utilizing the third factor in industry, the consumer, is the method of banking by consumers' unions. Such are the Raffeisen banks, widely known in Germany, and a specimen of which exists in the single tax colony at Arden, Delaware. Those who wish to know about the co-operative bank, or other forms of co-operation, may apply to the Co-operative League of America, 2 West 13th Street, New York, whose president is Dr. James P. Warbasse. Information concerning public ownership may be had from the Public Ownership League, 127 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago; also from the Socialist party, 220 South Ashland Boulevard, Chicago, and from the Bureau of Social Research of the Rand School of Social Science, New York.
Also, I ought to mention the very interesting plan for social reconstruction set forth by Mr. King C. Gillette, inventor of the safety razor. This plan you may find in your public library in two encyclopedic volumes, "Gillette's Social Redemption," and "Gillette's World Solution." The politician seeks to solve the industrial problem by means of the state, and the labor leader seeks to solve it by the unions; it is to be expected that Mr. Gillette, a capitalist, should seek to solve it by means of the corporation. He points out that the modern "trust" is the greatest instrument of production yet invented by man; and he asks why the people should not form their own "trust," to handle their own affairs, and to purchase and take over the industries from their present private masters. It is interesting to note that Mr. Gillette's solution is fully as radical and thorough-going as those of the State Socialists or the Syndicalists. The "People's Corporation" which he projects and plans some day to launch upon the world would be a gigantic "consumers' union," whose "credit power" would speedily dominate and absorb all other powers in modern society; it would make us all stockholders, and give us our share of the benefits of social productivity.
CHAPTER LXXI
THE NEW WORLD
(Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)
It has been indicated that the new society will be different in different countries and in different parts of the same country, in different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I set forth my ideas.
One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to society an equivalent amount of service.
When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get, if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the only question society will ask is, Have you performed services equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?" Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.