Our newspapers a few years ago were quite wild with delight over a phenomenon called the “American Invasion.” They told how we were conquering all over the world—how Europe stood shuddering with fright—how our exports were mounting by leaps and bounds! How prosperous we were! What ocean-tides of wealth were coming in to us! It seemed so strange to read it all, and to understand that this “Invasion” which the editors were celebrating, was in reality the last death-kick of the industrial system which they had been taught to consider the foundation of all society!
It will be more convenient to consider the whole question of foreign markets at a later stage; suffice it here to say, that if my analysis of the overproduction of capital be correct, then the first signal of danger will be what is commonly hailed as a “favourable balance of trade”—the existence of a surplus product which must be sold abroad. You must distinguish, of course, between a mere exchange of goods, where exports are balanced by imports, and selling, which is sending out goods and taking in gold, or promises to pay gold. In 1893 our exports were eight hundred and forty-seven million dollars and our imports were eight hundred and sixty-six millions. But in 1901, our exports had leaped to one billion, four hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, and our imports had sunk to eight hundred and twenty-three millions; and during the next four years the excess of exports over imports amounted to a total of over a billion and a half of dollars! According to an estimate made public on January 6, 1907, by the Secretary of the Treasury, the figures for 1906 will be: Imports, one billion, two hundred million dollars, and exports, one billion, eight hundred million dollars. And for how many more years does anyone imagine that the world will be able to pay us six hundred million dollars in cash, for those surplus products which we are compelled to sell?
Do not fail to mark the word “compelled.” If we cannot sell them, we cannot make profits; and if we cannot make profits, we cannot pay dividends. “I am a great clamourer for dividends,” said Mr. Rockefeller; and other captains of industry share in his weakness. And when a few years ago they found that foreign markets were beginning to fail, they set to work to remedy the evil in the only other possible way—by combining, and limiting the product, and raising prices. And that brings us to the other great symptom of the approach of the breakdown—the organising of the trusts. For six or eight years the process has been going on, irresistibly, automatically—while the country raged and stormed, and poured out its wrath upon the greedy capitalist. And yet the capitalist was no more to blame than a steam-engine that turns aside when it comes to a switch. The capitalist was making profits; and he saw, by the cessation of his profits, that the industrial machine of the country was getting too big for the country’s use. Unless he, and the machine also, were to go to smash, competition in that particular industry must be ended.
The work is done now; we have only to sit by and wait until the people get through trying to undo it. I never realise more keenly the naïve and touching incompetence of our so-called intellectual classes, than when I reflect that while our men of action have been accomplishing this mighty work—one of the greatest labours ever wrought for civilisation—our benevolent editors and college presidents have gone right on with their prattling of “freedom of contract” and “laissez faire.” And actually, civilisation must sit by and wait ten years, until our people have got through butting their heads against the granite wall of this accomplished fact!
But we Socialists have to take the world as we find it, and cultivate a cheerful disposition; and so behold our great national spectacle, the morality-play of the terrible hundred-headed monster of Competition! The terrible monster has killed and destroyed himself, according to the nature of him; but now by Congressional statute and Supreme Court decree he has been patched together again, and will be compelled to go on fighting! Or at least he shall be stuffed and mounted, and shall look as if he were fighting! He shall have wires attached to his joints and electric lights to gleam from his eyes; he shall be taken out in the gorgeous Presidential campaign chariot, drawn by the Grand Old Party elephant, and all the people shall see him, and marvel at his ferocity, and at the deadly conflict he wages among his various heads! Come now, O people!—come editors and statesmen and judges and bishops—come and see how the terrible hundred-headed monster rends and tears himself, and shout for four years more of the “full dinner-pail.”
But surely we must destroy the trusts! you say. Why must we destroy the trusts? The trusts are marvellous industrial machines, of power the like of which was never known in the world before; they are the last and most wonderful of the products of civilisation—and we must destroy them! We have been a century building them—you, and I, and the balance of the American people have toiled for three generations night and day, stinting and starving ourselves, so that we might get these trusts finished; we have taxed ourselves ten, twenty, thirty per cent. of our incomes, under the disguise of a protective tariff, to maintain and develop them; and now that they are complete, we must destroy them!
But they belong to Rockefeller! you protest to me. They belong to Rockefeller in precisely the same way and to precisely the same extent as the Kingdom of France belonged to Louis XIV, or the North American colonies to George III. They belong to the people of the United States, who made them, who contributed every plank of them, and drove every nail of them, and who paid Mr. Rockefeller and his family ample living wages while they superintended the job.
But you only answer again—we must destroy the trusts! Go ahead then, and have your try! Have it out with them! War to the hilt with them!—and see which is the stronger, two corporations which are resolved not to cut each other’s throats, or you with your law that they shall cut each other’s throats! Two railroad systems which know that they cannot continue to exist separately, or you who are resolved that they shall not exist together!—It makes one think of the scene in “Twelfth Night,” where Sir Toby has engineered a bloody duel between two terror-stricken antagonists. “Pox on’t, I’ll not meddle with him!” cries Sir Andrew Aguecheek. “Come, Sir Andrew,” says Sir Toby. “There’s no remedy. Come on, to’t.” But poor Sir Andrew will not to’t, he fights with his back to the enemy.
Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine
A SOCIALIST VIEW OF THE TRUSTS