Mr. Berger's maiden speech also summed up excellently the general policy of Socialist "reformism."
"When the white man is sick or when he dies," he said, "the employer usually loses nothing." Mr. Berger does not understand that, in modern countries, employers as a class are seeing that the laborers as a class are, after all, their chief asset: and are therefore organizing to care for them through governmental action, as working animals, even more systematically and infinitely more scientifically than slaves were ever cared for. He is exhausting his efforts to persuade, or perhaps he would say to compel, the government to the very action that the interests of its capitalist masters most strongly demand.
Curiously enough, Mr. Berger expressed the "reformist," the revolutionary, and the State capitalist principle in this same speech, without being in the least troubled with the contradictions. He spoke of industrial crises, irregular employment and unemployment as if they were permanent features of capitalism:—
"These new inventions, machines, improvements, and labor devices, displace human labor and steadily increase the army of unemployed, who, starved and frantic, are ever ready to take the places of those who have work, thereby still further depressing the labor market."
The collectivist capitalists have already set themselves aggressively to work to abolish unemployment, to make employment regular, to connect the worker that needs a job with the job that needs a worker, and to put an end to industrial crises, and with every promise of success.
Immediately afterward, Mr. Berger made a correct statement of the Socialist position:—
"The average of wages, the certainty of employment, the social privileges, and the independence of the wage-earning and agricultural population, when compared with the increase of wealth and social production, are steadily and rapidly decreasing."
The Socialist indictment is not that unemployment, irregularity of employment, or any other social evil is increasing absolutely, or that it is beyond the reach of capitalist reform; but that the share of the constantly increasing total of wealth and prosperity that goes to the laborers is constantly growing less.
A few minutes later in the same speech, Mr. Berger indorsed pure "State Socialism." Legislation, he said, that does not tend to an increased measure of control on the part of society as a whole is not in line with the trend of economic evolution and cannot last. This formulates capitalistic collectivism with absolute distinctness. What it demands is not a new order, but more order. What it opposes is not so much the rule of capitalists, as the disorder of capitalism—which capitalists themselves are effectively remedying. It is not only our present government that is capitalistic but our present society, also. Increased control over industry, over legislation and government, on the part of the present society as a whole, would be but a step toward the achievement of State capitalism. The purpose of Socialism is to overcome and eliminate the power of capitalism whether in society or in government, and not to establish it more firmly. Increased control by society as a whole, far from being a Socialist principle, is not necessarily even radical or progressive. In fact the most far-seeing conservatives to-day demand it, for "control by society as a whole" means, for the present, control by society as it is.