From “The Cost of Competition”
THE COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
The Congressional Library
From “The Cost of Competition”
THE COMPETITIVE DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION
How, you ask, could Socialism guarantee every man permanent employment? Could there not be overproduction under Socialism? There could not; the surplus product being the property of the man who had produced it, and not, as now, the property of some other man, in a case of overproduction the workingman would be, not out of work, but on a vacation. As a matter of fact, only a reasonable surplus would be produced, because the workingman would stop when he had produced what he wanted—just as you stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger.
In the Industrial Republic there will be an administrative officer, a cabinet official with a bureau of clerks, whose task it will be to register the decrees of the law of supply and demand. It is found, let us assume, that the amount of coal needed by the community is represented by the labour of two million men, five days in the week, and six hours a day; the number of shoes is represented by the labour of half a million men the same time. The wages in each trade are ten dollars a day, and at this rate it is found that two million men go to the shoe factories to work and only half a million to the coal mines. The wages of coal mining are therefore made twelve dollars, and the wages of shoe-making eight dollars; if the balance still does not adjust itself, it will at the rate of thirteen to seven, or fourteen to six. Every week the government list shows the wages that can be earned in the various trades; stoking in a steamship is a painful and dangerous task—stokers in steamships are receiving twenty dollars a day, and still few takers, so that the steamships have to be fitted with stoking machinery at once. On the other hand, driving a rural-delivery mail-wagon is pleasant work, and is paying at present only five dollars a day, and with prospects of going still lower. And does all this seem fantastic to you? But it is exactly the way our employment problem is solved to-day, when it is solved at all; it is solved by means of “Help Wanted” advertisements and viva voce rumours—imperfectly, blindly and sluggishly, instead of instantly, intelligently and consciously by a universal government information bureau. Out in the country where I lived two years ago the farmers were unable to get help for love or money, while millions were out of work and starving in the cities; and that is only one of the thousands of illustrations one could give of “how much depends, when two men go out to catch a horse, upon whether they devote their time to catching him, or to preventing each other from catching him.”
The Independent recently published an article entitled “Poverty: Its Cause and Cure,” by Mr. James Mackaye, a Harvard graduate and technological chemist; in the course of its editorial comment the paper hailed his plan for the abolition of poverty as “nothing less than a very great invention.” “It adds something that was lacking in the older schemes of Socialism,” the Independent continued, “but absolutely necessary to any Socialism that would be practically workable.” This “something” is a device to increase the salaries of managers of the various industrial departments in proportion as they reduced the “producing time” of the commodity for which they were responsible. Mr. Mackaye is another student who, like Professor Reeve and Professor Veblen, have come into Socialism by their own routes. In his elaborate book, “The Economy of Happiness,” he shows so thorough a grasp of the whole subject that I cannot suppose him to share in the ignorance of the literature of modern proletarian Socialism, which leads the Independent to hail his plan as a “great invention.” As a matter of fact, I could name a score of Socialist books and pamphlets in which such plans are suggested and discussed. I personally have always rejected them as unsound in theory and unnecessary in practice. I have already suggested the likelihood of a continuance of present official salaries after the revolution; but there will be a strong tendency to reduce these, and I can see no ultimate result except equality of compensation by the State. I can see no theoretical basis for the State’s paying to any employee more than it pays to another in the same industry—hand labour being equally as necessary to the production of wealth as is superintendence. To my mind, the only necessary stimulus to efficiency is the community of interest of all the workers. The incentive to the manager is emulation, and the higher range of activity which goes with a position of command; and I should be very jealous of the introduction of any pecuniary motive into the struggle for promotion—as likely to continue the old evils of graft and favouritism to which we are now subject. I do not think that, when you have so organised industry that every man is working for himself, you will find it necessary to employ any outside force to impel him to work; and in fact I should consider it a violation of the rights of the worker to attempt anything of the sort. Of course if the workers themselves chose to offer a bonus to a manager to invent new methods, that would be another matter; but that would come under the head of intellectual production, which I shall consider later on.
In discussing the question of salaries, it is to be pointed out what a vast difference will be made in the amount of money which every individual needs, by the socialisation of all the leading industries. In the Industrial Republic a thousand dollars a year will buy more comfort and happiness than ten thousand in the world as at present organised. There will come, at the very outset, the great economic savings already outlined; and then, the whole power of the coöperative mind of man being applied to the elimination of waste and the making of beauty and joy, we shall have in a very short time a world in which few men will care to cumber themselves with possessions of any sort excepting the clothes upon their backs and the few tools of their intellectual trades,—books, music, etc. The abolition of privilege and class exploitation will of course wipe out at a stroke all that competition in ostentation which Professor Veblen has entitled “conspicuous consumption of goods.” In the Industrial Republic there will be no luxury, for there will be no slavery. There will be no menial service of any sort under Socialism. I believe that this gives one a key by which he can do a great deal of predicting as to what will be found in the world when the impending revolution has taken place. In the Industrial Republic no man will work for another man—except for love—because no other man will be able to pay the “prevailing rate of wages.”
It is the vision of this that makes the critics of Socialism cry out that it will destroy the home. What they mean is that it will destroy that kind of a home which exists upon a basis of butlers, cooks and kitchen maids, banquets and carriages, jewellery and fine raiment, sweat shops, and slums, prostitution, child-labour, war and crime. Unless I am very much mistaken, those people who now wear diamonds, and decorate their homes with all sorts of objects of “art,” would do a great deal less of it if they had to pay for it with their own toil—if they were not able to pay for it with money extracted from the toil of others. I imagine that those who now, in our restaurants and banquet halls, gorge themselves upon the contents of earth, sea, and sky, would dine very much more simply—and very much more wholesomely—if they had to wash the dishes. For this reason, I expect that in the Industrial Republic there will be very little of that pseudo-art which ministers to vanity and sensuality. Our houses and clothing will become simpler and more dignified, and the artist will turn his thoughts to public works—he will decorate the parks and public buildings, the theatres, concert halls and libraries, the great coöperative dining halls and apartment houses. In the cities and towns of the Industrial Republic there will of course be possibilities of beauty such as we cannot even dream of at present. Now our cities grow haphazard, and are typical of all our blindness, selfishness, and misery. At every turn in them one comes upon new and more painful signs of these things—filthy and horrible slums, blatant and vulgar advertisements, insolent rich people in carriages, wan and starving children in the gutters. In the Industrial Republic a city will be one thing, and a work of art. It will not be crowded, for the combination of poverty and the railroad trust will not make spreading out impossible. Intelligent, coöperative effort having become the rule, nearly all the things that are now done privately and selfishly will be done socially. Manual work will not be a disgrace, and poverty will not keep any man ignorant, filthy and repulsive. There will be no classes and no class feeling. There will be not only public schools and academies—there will be public playgrounds for all children, and clubs and places of recreation for men and women. In the Industrial Republic you will not mind going to such places and letting your children go. You will not be afraid of disease, because there will be public hospitals for all the sick; and you will not be afraid of rowdies, because the rowdy is a product of the slum, and there will not be any slum.
At present, we are all engaged in a struggle to beguile as much money out of each other as we can; and the State has nothing to do save to stand by and see fair play—and commonly finds that task too much for it! As a consequence, we find ourselves confronted with an infinite variety of little petty exactions—we have to spend money every time we turn around. Very soon after the Revolution, I fancy, men will begin to realise that these little exactions are more of a nuisance than a saving. For instance, I shall be very much surprised, if, a generation from now, the use of postage-stamps is not abolished. At present, with society wasting so immense a portion of its energy in competitive advertising, every piece of matter which goes into the mail has to be made to pay its way; but once do away with competition, and the only mail is government documents and personal letters—and the time it takes to stamp and cancel them will be many times greater than the cost of carrying the additional number of letters that a free mail service would bring forth. In the same way it will be found not worth while to employ conductors and spotters, and print tickets and transfers; after that we shall ride free on our street-cars, and perhaps ultimately in our government railroad trains. Similarly, all our places of recreation and of artistic expression would come to be free; and then some one would realise the waste incidental to our present system of book buying, and we should then have a universal national library, from which at frequent intervals delivery service would bring you any books then in existence. I have just witnessed in New York an exhibition of an invention which will make music as free as air. Bellamy was ridiculed for predicting “electric music” in the year 2000; and it is on sale in New York City in the year 1907. By this marvellous machine, the “telharmonium,” all previously existing musical instruments are relegated to the junk heap; and all music composed for them becomes out of date. At one leap the art of music is set free from all physical limitations, and the musician is given command of all possible tones, and may play to ten thousand audiences at once. It is worth while pointing out, that, living under the capitalist system as we are, the inventor had no recourse save to use his machine to make profits, and so the newspapers, which are also in business for profits, left it to make its own way. So it came about that the first public exhibition of an invention which means more to humanity than any discovery since the art of printing, received mention in only one New York paper, and that to the extent of three or four inches.
But to return to the Revolution, and the first steps which have to be taken.