Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

Mr. Debs's attitude toward Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Gompers is by no means exceptional among Socialists. Mr. Gompers visited Europe in 1909, spoke at length in Paris and Berlin, and was viewed by the majority of the European Socialists and unionists almost exactly as he is by Mr. Debs. Among other things he said there, was that the very kernel of the difference between the European and the American labor movement and the reason why the wages are so much better in America than in Europe was the friendlier relations between the government and the working people in this country—this after all the recent court decisions against the unions, decisions which, even when outwardly milder, have precisely the same effect as the hostile legislation and administration of the Continent. Mr. Gompers, while in Europe, said that it was unnecessary that governments and the working people should misunderstand one another, and asked, "Is there not for us all the common ground of the fatherland, of common interest and the wish that we feel to make our people more prosperous, happier and freer?" "I do not know what I will see there [in Hungary]," he continued, "but this much I will say, that I know that nothing will convince me that this readiness of the workingmen to fight against the government and of the government to fight against the workingmen can bring anything good to either side."[247]

Such expressions naturally aroused the European Socialist and Labor press, and Kautsky even devoted a special article to Gompers in the Neue Zeit.[248] It was not necessary in a Socialist periodical to say anything against Gompers's preaching of the common interests of capital and labor, since there is practically no Socialist who would not agree that such a belief amounts to a total blindness to industrial and political conditions. But Kautsky feared that the German workingmen might give some credit to Gompers's claim that the non-Socialist policy of the American unions was responsible for the relatively greater prosperity of the working people in America. "The workingmen," he explained, referring to this country, "have not won their higher wages in the last decade, but have inherited them from their forefathers. They were principally a result of the presence of splendid lands from which every man who wanted to become independent got as much as he needed."

Then he proceeded to show by the statistics of the Department of Labor that daily real wages, measured in terms of what they would buy, had actually decreased for the majority of American workingmen during the last decade. It is true, as Mr. Gompers replied, that the hours have become somewhat less, and that therefore the amount of real wages received per hour of work has slightly increased, though there are few working people who will count themselves very fortunate in a decrease of hours if it is paid for even in a part by a decrease of the real wages received at the end of the day. And even if we compare the early nineties with the last years of the recent decade, we find that the slight increase in the purchasing power of the total wages received (i.e. real wages) amounted at the most to no more than two or three per cent in these fifteen years. In a word, the disproportion between the prosperity of the wage earning and capitalist classes has in the past two decades become much greater than ever before.

The basis of the Socialist economic criticism of existing society—and one that appeals to the majority of the world's labor unionists also—is that while the proportion of the population that consists of wage earners is everywhere increasing, the share of the national income that goes to wages is everywhere growing less. There is no more striking, easily demonstrable, or generally admitted fact in modern life. The whole purpose of Socialism—in so far as it can be expressed in terms of income, is to reverse this tendency and to keep it reversed until private capital is reduced to impotence, as far as the control of industry is concerned.

Contrast with the position of Gompers and Mitchell the chief official of the German unions, Karl Legien, a relatively conservative representative of Continental unionism.

"The unions," he says, "are based on the conviction that there is an unbridgeable gulf between capital and labor. This does not mean that the capitalists and laborers may not, as men, find points of contact; it means only that the accumulation of capital, resting as it does on keeping from the laborer a part of the products of his labor, forces a propertyless proletariat to sell its labor at any price it can get. Between those who wish to maintain these conditions and the propertyless laborers there is a wall which can be done away with only by the abolition of wage labor. Here the views prevailing in the unions are at one with those of the Social Democratic Party."

"The unions are chiefly occupied in the effort to use their power to shape the labor contract in their favor, and do not consider it as their task to propagate this view, but holds the propaganda as being the task rather of the Social Democratic Party and its organizations."

Even the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours carried on by the unions, Legien says, is fought in the consciousness that it will make labor "more capable of the final solution of the social problem." He reminds us that the overwhelming majority of the German unionists are Socialists, and says that the labor conflict itself must have led to this result, though he does not want the unions to support the party as unions. In other countries of the Continent, unionists go even farther. In Austria, Belgium, and elsewhere the two organizations act as a single body, and in France, not satisfied with working for Socialism as members of the party, unionists also make it a declared end of their unions, independently of all political action, and shape their everyday policies accordingly.

It is only when we come to Great Britain that we find the unions in a conciliatory relation with employers such as has hitherto prevailed in the United States. The relation between the unions and capitalistic "State Socialists" of Great Britain has been friendly. As I have already noted, the enthusiasm of the British unions for the social reforms of the Liberal Party and government has hitherto been so great that they consented that the increase of the taxation needed to pay for these reforms should fall on their shoulders, while the wealthy classes made the world ring with epithets of "revolution" because a burden of almost exactly the same weight was placed on them to pay for the Dreadnoughts they demanded, and because land was nationally taxed for the first time, Mr. Churchill himself conceded that his social reform budget "draws nearly as much from the taxation of tobacco and spirits, which are the luxuries of the working classes, who pay their share with silence and dignity, as it does from those wealthy classes upon whose behalf such heart-rending outcry is made."[249]

Perhaps the fact that the labor unions of Great Britain up to 1910 spent less than a tenth part of their income on strikes was a still stronger ground for Mr. Churchill's admiration, since he had to deal with the strikers as President of the Board of Trade. While the national income of the country has been increasing enormously in the past two decades, and the higher or taxed incomes have more than doubled (which is a rate of increase far greater than the rise in prices), the income even of unionized workers has not kept up with this rise. In a word, the propertied classes are getting a larger and larger share of the national income (see Mr. Churchill's language in preceding chapter). Now should the unions continue in the moderation of their demands,—or even should they obtain a 10 or 20 per cent increase (as some have done since the railway and seamen's strike of 1911),—the propertied classes would still have been getting a larger and larger share of the national income. From 1890 to 1899 prices in England are estimated to have fallen 5 per cent, while wages of organized working-men rose 2 per cent; from 1900 to 1908 prices rose 6 per cent, while these wages fell 1 per cent. A 7 per cent improvement in the first decade was followed by a 7 per cent retrogression in the second—among organized workers.[250] There is then no probability that the British unions will check the constant decrease in the share of the total wealth of the country that goes to the wage earner, until they have completed the reversal of older policies now in progress. That this may soon occur is indicated by the great strikes of 1911 (which I shall consider in the next chapter).