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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Socialism, by John Spargo
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Socialism
+       A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles
+
+Author: John Spargo
+
+Release Date: September 23, 2007 [EBook #22733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIALISM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Afra Ullah, Martin Pettit
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+http://www.pgdp.net
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+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
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+TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+SOCIALISM
+
+A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF
+SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN SPARGO
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN," "THE
+COMMON SENSE OF THE MILE QUESTION," "CAPITALIST
+AND LABORER," "THE SOCIALISTS, WHO THEY ARE
+AND WHAT THEY STAND FOR," "THE SPIRITUAL
+SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN SOCIALISM,"
+ETC., ETC.
+
+_NEW AND REVISED EDITION_
+
+
+New York
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1913
+
+_All rights reserved_
+
+
+COPYRIGHT 1906, 1909,
+BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
+
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1906. Reprinted
+November, 1906; December 1908.
+
+New and revised edition, February, 1909; January, 1910;
+May 1912; March, 1913.
+
+
+Norwood Press
+J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
+Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+To
+
+ROBERT HUNTER
+
+WITH ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
+
+
+A new edition of this little volume having been rendered necessary, I
+have availed myself of the opportunity thus afforded me by the
+publishers to revise it. Some slight revision was necessary to correct
+one or two errors which crept unavoidably into the earlier edition. By
+an oversight, an important typographical blunder went uncorrected into
+the former edition, making the date of the first use of the word
+"Socialism" 1835 instead of 1833. That error, I regret to say, has been
+subsequently copied into many important publications. Even more
+important were some errors in the biographical sketch of Marx, in
+Chapter III. These were not due to any carelessness upon the part of the
+present writer, but were reproduced from standard works, upon what
+seemed to be good authority--that of his youngest daughter and his
+intimate friend, the late Wilhelm Liebknecht. It is now known with
+certainty that the father of Karl Marx embraced Christianity of his own
+free choice, and not in obedience to an official edict.
+
+These and some other minor changes having to be made, I took the time to
+rewrite large parts of the volume, making such substantial changes in
+it as to constitute practically a new book. The chapter on Robert Owen
+has been recast and greater emphasis placed upon his American career and
+its influence; in Chapter IV the sketch of the Materialistic Conception
+of History has been enlarged somewhat, special attention being given to
+the bearing of the theory upon religion. All the rest of the book has
+been changed, partly to meet the requirements of many students and
+others who have written to me in reference to various points of
+difficulty, and partly also to state some of my own ideas more
+successfully. I venture to hope that the brief chapter on "Means of
+Realization," which has been added to the book by way of postscript,
+will, in spite of its brevity, and the fact that it was not written for
+inclusion in this volume, prove helpful to some who read the book.
+
+The thanks of the writer are due to all those friends--Socialists and
+others--whose kindly efforts made the earlier edition of the book a
+success.
+
+YONKERS, N.Y.,
+  December, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+PREFACE                                                              vii
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Changed attitude of the public mind toward Socialism--Growth of
+the movement responsible for the change--Unanimity of friends and
+foes concerning the future triumph of Socialism--Herbert Spencer's
+pessimistic belief--Study of Socialism a civic duty--Nobility of
+the word "Socialism"--Its first use--Confusion arising from its
+indiscriminate use--"Socialism" and "Communism" in the _Communist
+Manifesto_--Unfair tactics of opponents--Engels on the
+significance of the word in 1847--Its present significance             1
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT
+
+Utopian Socialism and Robert Owen--Estimates of Owen by Liebknecht
+and Engels--His early life--Becomes a manufacturer--The industrial
+revolution in England--Introduction of machinery--"Luddite" riots
+against machinery--Early riots against machinery--Marx's
+views--Owen as manufacturer--As social reformer--The New Lanark
+experiment--He becomes a Socialist--The New Harmony
+experiment--Abraham Lincoln and New Harmony--Failure of New
+Harmony--Owen compared with Saint-Simon and Fourier--Emerson's
+tribute to Robert Owen a fair estimate of the Utopists                16
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT
+
+The _Communist Manifesto_ called the birth-cry of modern
+Socialism--Conditions in 1848 when it was issued--Communism of the
+working class--Weitling and Cabet--Marx's parents become
+Christians--Marx and Engels--Religious spirit of Marx--Note upon
+the confusion of Marx with Wilhelm Marr--The _Manifesto_ as the
+first declaration of a working-class movement--Literary merit of
+the _Manifesto_--Its fundamental proposition stated by
+Engels--Socialism becomes scientific--The authorship of the
+_Manifesto_--Engels' testimony                                        53
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
+
+Socialism a theory of social evolution--Not economic
+fatalism--Leibnitz and the savage--Ideas and progress--Value of
+the materialistic conception of history--Foreshadowings of the
+theory--What is meant by the term "materialistic
+conception"--Results of overemphasis: Engels'
+testimony--Application of the theory to religion--Influence of
+social conditions upon religious forms--The doctrine of "free
+will"--Darwin and Marx--Application of the theory, specific and
+general--Columbus and the discovery of America--General view of
+historical progress--Antiquity of communism--Coöperation and
+competition--Slavery--Serfdom--Class struggles--The rise of
+capitalism and the wage system                                        75
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CAPITALISM AND THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION
+
+A new form of class division arises in the first stage of
+capitalism--The second stage of capitalism begins with the great
+mechanical inventions--The development of foreign and colonial
+trade--Theoretic individualism and practical collectivism--The law
+of capitalist concentration formulated by Marx--Competition,
+monopoly, socialization--Trustification, interindustrial and
+international--Criticisms of the Marxian theory--Engels on the
+attempts to make a "rigid orthodoxy" of the Marx theory--The small
+producers and traders--Concentration in production--Failure of the
+bonanza farms and persistence of the small farms--Other forms of
+agricultural concentration--Farm ownership and farm mortgages--The
+factory and the farm--The concentration of wealth--European and
+American statistics--Concentration of the control of wealth
+independent of actual ownership--Growth of immense
+fortunes--General summary                                            113
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY
+
+Opposition to the doctrine--Misrepresentations by the opponents of
+Socialism--Socialists not the creators of the class
+struggle--Antiquity of class struggles--The theory as stated in
+the _Communist Manifesto_--Fundamental propositions in the
+statement--Slavery the first system of class divisions--Class
+divisions in feudalism--Rise of the capitalist class and its
+triumph--Inherent antagonism of interests between employer and
+employee--Commonality of general interests and antagonism of
+special class interests--Adam Smith on class
+divisions--Individuals _versus_ classes--Analysis of the class
+interests of the population of the United States--Class interests
+as they affect thoughts, opinions, and beliefs--Varying ethical
+standards of economic classes--Denial of class divisions in
+America--Our "untitled nobility"--Class divisions real though not
+legally established--They tend to become fixed and
+hereditary--Consciousness of class divisions new in
+America--Transition from class to class becoming more
+difficult--No hatred of individuals involved in the
+theory--Socialism _versus_ Anarchism--The labor struggle in the
+United States--Not due to misunderstandings, but to antagonism of
+interests--The reason for trade unionism--Trade union
+methods--Dual exploitation of the workers--Government and the
+workers--Capitalistic use of police and military--Judicial
+injunctions--"Taff Vale" law--Political rising of the
+workers--Triumph of the working class will liberate all mankind
+and end class rule                                                   151
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM
+
+First comprehensive statement of the materialist conception of
+history by Marx--_La Misère de la Philosophie_, a criticism of
+Proudhon--Marx's first essay in economic science--His frank
+recognition of the Ricardians--Marx in England becomes familiar
+with the work of the Ricardians from whom he is accused of
+"pillaging" his ideas--Criticisms of Menger and others--Marx
+expelled from Germany and France--Removal to London--The struggle
+with poverty--Domestic life--_Capital_ an English work in all
+essentials--The Ricardians and their precursors--Superior method
+and insight of Marx--The sociological viewpoint in economics--Mr.
+W. H. Mallock's criticisms of Marx based upon misrepresentation
+and misstatement--Marx on the Gotha Programme of the German Social
+Democracy--Marx on the "ability of the directing few"--No ethical
+deductions in the Marxian theory--"Scientific Socialism,"
+criticisms of the term                                               201
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+OUTLINES OF SOCIALIST ECONOMIC THEORY
+
+The sociological viewpoint pervades all Marx's work--Commodities
+defined--Use-values and economic values--Exchange of commodities
+through the medium of money--The labor theory of value in its
+crude form--Marx and Benjamin Franklin--Some notable statements by
+the classic economists--Scientific development of the labor theory
+of value by Marx--"Unique values"--Price and value--Money as a
+price-expression and as a commodity--The theory of supply and
+demand as determinants of value--The "Austrian" theory of final
+utility as the determinant of value--The Marxian theory not
+necessarily exclusive of the theory of final, or marginal,
+utility--Labor-power as a commodity--Wages, its price, determined
+as the prices of all other commodities are--Wherein labor-power
+differs from all other commodities--"Surplus Value": why Marx used
+the term--The theory stated--The division of surplus value--No
+moral judgment involved in the theory--Other theories of the
+source of capitalist income--Wherein they fail to solve the
+problem--Fundamental importance of the doctrine                      235
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE
+
+Detailed specifications impossible--Principles which must
+characterize it--Man's egoism and sociability--Socialism and
+Individualism not opposites--The idea of the Socialist state as a
+huge bureaucracy--Mr. Anstey's picture and Herbert Spencer's
+fear--Justification of this view in Socialist propaganda
+literature--Means of production, individual and social--Professor
+Goldwin Smith's question--The Socialist ideal of individual
+liberty--Absolute personal liberty not possible--Spencer's
+abandonment of _laissez faire_--Political organization of
+Socialist régime must be democratic--Automatic democracy
+unattainable--The need of eternal vigilance--Delegated
+authority--The rights of the individual and of society briefly
+stated--Private property and industry not incompatible with
+Socialism--Public ownership not the end, but only a means to an
+end--Economic structure of the Socialist state--Efficiency the
+test for private or public industry--The application of democratic
+principles to industry--The right to labor guaranteed by society,
+and the duty to labor enforced by society--Free choice of
+labor--Mode of remuneration--Who will do the dirty work?--The
+"abolition of wages"--Approximate equality attainable by free play
+of economic law under Socialism--Hoarded wealth--Inheritance--The
+security of society against the improvidence of its members--The
+administration of justice--Education completely free--The question
+of religious education--The state as protector of the
+child--Strict neutrality upon religious matters--A maximum of
+personal liberty with a minimum of restraint                         277
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MEANS OF REALIZATION
+
+Impossible to tell definitely how the change will be brought
+about--Possible only to point out tendencies making for Socialism,
+and to show how the change _can_ be brought about--Marx's
+"catastrophe theory" a lapse into Utopian methods of thought--His
+deeper thought--Testimony of Liebknecht--Socialism not to be
+reached through a _coup de force_--The political changes necessary
+for Socialism--Tendencies making for socialization of
+industry--Monopolies, coöperative societies, the vast extension of
+collectivism within the capitalist system--Confiscation or
+compensation?--Change to Socialism to be legal and gradual--Engels
+and Marx favored compensation--The widow's savings--Elimination of
+unearned incomes--Violence not necessary                             323
+
+INDEX                                                                339
+
+
+
+
+SOCIALISM
+
+A SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION OF
+
+SOCIALIST PRINCIPLES
+
+SOCIALISM
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I
+
+
+It is not a long time since the kindest estimate of Socialism by the
+average man was that expressed by Ebenezer Elliott, "the Corn-Law
+Rhymer," in the once familiar cynical doggerel:--
+
+
+     "What is a Socialist? One who is willing
+     To give up his penny and pocket your shilling."
+
+
+There was another view, brutally unjust and unkind, expressed in
+blood-curdling cartoons representing the Socialist as a bomb-throwing
+assassin. According to the one view, Socialists were all sordid, envious
+creatures, yearning for the
+
+
+     "Equal division of unequal earnings,"
+
+
+while the other view represented them as ready to enforce this selfish
+demand by means of the cowardly weapons of the assassin.
+
+Both these views are now, happily, well-nigh extinct. There is still a
+great deal of misconception of the meaning of Socialism; the ignorance
+concerning it which is manifested upon every hand is often
+disheartening, but neither of these puerile misrepresentations is
+commonly encountered in serious discussion. It is true that the average
+newspaper editorial confounds Socialism with Anarchism, often enlisting
+the prejudice which exists against the most violent forms of Anarchism
+in attacking Socialism, though the two systems of thought are
+fundamentally opposed to each other; it is likewise true that Socialists
+are not infrequently asked to explain their supposed intention to have a
+great general "dividing-up day" for the equal distribution of all the
+wealth of the nation. The Chancellor of a great American university
+returns from a sojourn in Norway, and naïvely hastens to inform the
+world that he has "refuted" Socialism by asking the members of some
+poor, struggling sect of Communists what would happen to their scheme of
+equality if babies should be born after midnight of the day of the equal
+division of wealth!
+
+Recognizing it to be the supreme issue of the age, the Republican Party,
+in its national platform,[1] defines Socialism as meaning equality of
+ownership as against equality of opportunity, notwithstanding the fact
+that every recognized exponent of Socialism would deny that Socialism
+means equality of ownership, or that it goes beyond equality of
+opportunity; that the voluminous literature of Socialism teems with
+unequivocal and unmistakable disavowals of any desire for the periodic
+divisions of property and wealth which alone could make equality of
+ownership possible for brief periods.
+
+Still, when all this has been said, it must be added that these
+criticisms do not represent the attitude of the mass of people toward
+the Socialist movement to the same extent as they once did. In serious
+discussions of the subject among thinking people it is becoming quite
+rare to encounter either of the two criticisms named. Most of those who
+seriously and honestly discuss the subject know that modern Socialism
+comprehends neither assassination nor the equal division of wealth. The
+enormous interest manifested in Socialism during recent years and the
+steady growth of the Socialist vote throughout the world bear witness to
+the fact that the views expressed in the satirical distich of the poet's
+fancy and the blood-curdling cartoon of the artist's invention are no
+longer the potent appeals to prejudice they once were.
+
+The reason for the changed attitude of the public toward the Socialist
+movement and the Socialist ideal lies in the growth of the movement
+itself. There are many who would change the order of this proposition
+and say that the growth of the Socialist movement is a result of the
+changed attitude of the public mind toward it. In a sense, both views
+are right. Obviously, if the public mind had not revised its judgments
+somewhat, we should not have attained our present strength and
+development; but it is equally obvious that if we had not grown, if we
+had remained the small and feeble band we once were, the public mind
+would not have revised its judgments much, if at all. It is easy to
+enlist prejudice against a small body of men and women when they have no
+powerful influence, and to misrepresent and vilify them.
+
+But it is otherwise when that small body has grown into a great body
+with far-reaching influence and power. So long as the Socialist movement
+in America consisted of a few poor workingmen in two or three of the
+largest cities, most of them foreigners, it was very easy for the
+average man to accept as true the wildest charges brought against them.
+But when the movement grew and developed a powerful organization, with
+branches in almost every city, and a well-conducted press of its own, it
+became a very different matter. The sixteen years from 1888 to 1904 saw
+the Socialist vote in the United States grow steadily from 2068 in the
+former year to 442,402 in the latter. Europe and America together had in
+1870 only about 30,000 votes, but by 1906 the number had risen to
+considerably over 7,000,000. These figures constitute a vital challenge
+to the thoughtful and earnest men and women of the world.
+
+It is manifestly impossible for a great world-wide movement, numbering
+its adherent by millions, and having for its advocates many of the
+foremost thinkers, artists, and poets of the world, to be based upon
+either sordid selfishness or murderous hate and envy. If that were true,
+if it were possible for such a thing to be true, the most gloomy
+forebodings of the pessimist would fall far short of the real measure of
+Humanity's impending doom. It is estimated that no less than thirty
+million adults are at present enrolled in the ranks of the Socialists
+throughout the world, and the number is constantly increasing. This vast
+army, drawn from every part of the civilized world, comprising men and
+women of all races and creeds, is not motivated by hate or envy, but by
+a consciousness that in their hands and the hands of their fellows rests
+the power to win greater happiness for themselves. Incidentally, their
+unity for this purpose is perhaps the greatest force in the world to-day
+making for international peace.
+
+Still, notwithstanding the millions enlisted under the banner of
+Socialism, the word is spoken by many with the pallid lips of fear, the
+scowl of hate, or the amused shrug of contempt; while in the same land,
+people of the same race, facing the same problems and perils, speak it
+with glad voices and hopelit eyes. Many a mother crooning over her babe
+prays that it may be saved from the Socialism to which another, with
+equal mother love, looks as her child's heritage and hope. And with
+scholars and statesmen it is much the same. With wonderful unanimity
+agreeing that, in the words of Herbert Spencer, "Socialism will come
+inevitably, in spite of all opposition," they yet differ in their
+estimates of its character and probable effects upon the race quite as
+much as the unlearned. One welcomes and another fears; one envies the
+unborn generations, another pities. To one the coming of Socialism means
+the coming of Human Brotherhood, the long, long quest of Humanity's
+choicest spirits; to another it means the enslavement of the world
+through fear.
+
+Many years ago Herbert Spencer wrote an article on "The Coming Slavery,"
+which conveyed the impression that the great thinker saw what he thought
+to be signs of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. All over the world
+Socialists were cheered by this admission from their implacable enemy.
+In this connection it is worthy of note that Spencer continued to
+believe in the inevitability of Socialism. In October, 1905, a
+well-known Frenchman, M. G. Davenay, visited Mr. Spencer and had a long
+conversation with him on several subjects, Socialism among them. Soon
+after his return, he received a letter on the subject from Mr. Spencer,
+written in French, which was published in the Paris _Figaro_ a few days
+after Mr. Spencer's death in December, 1905, two months or thereabouts
+from the time of the interview which called it forth.[2] After some
+brief reference to his health, Mr. Spencer wrote: "The opinions I have
+delivered here before you, and which you have the liberty to publish,
+are briefly these: (1) Socialism will triumph inevitably, in spite of
+all opposition; (2) its establishment will be the greatest disaster
+which the world has ever known; (3) sooner or later, it will be brought
+to an end by a military despotism."
+
+Anything more terrible than this black pessimism which clouded the
+latter part of the life of the great thinker, it would be difficult to
+imagine. After living his long life of splendid service to the cause of
+intellectual progress, and studying as few men have ever done the
+history of the race, he went down to his grave fully believing that the
+world was doomed to inevitable disaster. How different from the
+confidence of the poet,[3] foretelling:--
+
+
+     "A wonderful day a-coming when all shall be better than well."
+
+
+The last words of the great French Utopist, Saint-Simon, were, "The
+future is ours!" And thousands of times his words have been echoed by
+those who, believing equally with Herbert Spencer that Socialism must
+come, have seen in the prospect only the fulfillment of the age-long
+dream of Human Brotherhood. Men as profound as Spencer, and as sincere,
+rejoice at the very thing which blanched his cheeks and filled his heart
+with fear.
+
+There is, then, a widespread conviction that Socialism will come and, in
+coming, vitally affect for good or ill every life. Millions of earnest
+men and women have enlisted themselves beneath its banner in various
+lands, and their number is steadily growing. In this country, as in
+Europe, the spread of Socialism is one of the most evident facts of the
+age, and its study is therefore most important. What does it mean, and
+what does it promise or threaten, are questions which civic duty
+prompts. The day is not far distant when ignorance of Socialism will be
+regarded as a disgrace, and neglect of it a civic wrong. No man can
+faithfully discharge the responsibilities of his citizenship until he is
+able to give an answer to these questions, to meet intelligently the
+challenge of Socialism to the age.
+
+
+II
+
+The word "Socialism" is admittedly one of the noblest and most inspiring
+words ever born of human speech. Whatever may be thought of the
+principles for which it is the accepted name, or of the political
+parties which contend for those principles, no one can dispute the
+beauty and moral grandeur of the word itself. I refer not merely, of
+course, to its etymology, but rather to its spiritual import. Derived
+from the Latin word, _socius_, meaning a comrade, it is, like the word
+"mother," for instance, one of those great universal speech symbols
+which find their way into every language.
+
+Signifying as it does faith in the comradeship of man as the basis of
+social existence, prefiguring a social state in which there shall be no
+strife of man against man, or nation against nation, it is a verbal
+expression of a great ideal, man's loftiest aspirations crystallized
+into a single word. The old Hebrew prophet's dream of a
+world-righteousness that shall give peace, when nations "shall beat
+their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,"[4]
+and the Angel-song of Peace and Goodwill in the legend of the Nativity,
+mean no more than the word "Socialism" in its best usage means. Plato,
+spiritual son of the Socrates who for truth's sake drained the hemlock
+cup to its dregs, dreamed of such social peace and unity, and the line
+of those who have seen the same vision of a love-welded world has never
+been broken: More and Campanella, Saint-Simon and Owen, Marx and Engels,
+Morris and Bellamy--and the end of the prophetic line is not yet.
+
+But if the dream, the hope itself, is old, the word is comparatively
+new. It is hard to realize that the word which means so much to
+countless millions of human beings, and which plays such a part in the
+vital discussions of the world, in every civilized country, is no older
+than many of those whose lips speak it with reverence and hope. Yet such
+is the fact. Because it will help us to a clearer understanding of
+modern Socialism, and because, too, it is little known, notwithstanding
+its intensely interesting character, let us linger awhile over that page
+of history which records the origin of this noble word.
+
+Some years ago, anxious to settle, if possible, the vexed question of
+the origin and first use of the word "Socialism," the present writer
+devoted a good deal of time to an investigation of the subject, spending
+much of it in a careful survey of all the early nineteenth-century
+radical literature. It soon appeared that the generally accepted account
+of its introduction, by the French writer, L. Reybaud, in 1840, was
+wrong. Indeed, when once fairly started on the investigation, it seemed
+rather surprising that the account should have been accepted,
+practically without challenge, for so long. Finally the conclusion was
+reached that an anonymous writer in an English paper was the first to
+use the word in print, the date being August 24, 1833.[5] Since that
+time an investigation of a commendably thorough nature has been made by
+three students of the University of Wisconsin,[6] with the result that
+they have been unable to find any earlier use of the word. It is
+somewhat disappointing that after thus tracing the word back to what may
+well be its first appearance in print, it should be impossible to
+identify its creator.
+
+The letter in which the term is first used is signed "A Socialist," and
+it is quite evident that the writer uses it as a synonym for the
+commonly used term "Owenite," by which the disciples of Robert Owen were
+known. It is most probable that Owen himself had used the word, and, to
+some extent, made it popular; and that the writer of the letter had
+heard "our dear social father," as Owen was called, use it, either in
+some of his speeches or in conversation. This is the more likely as Owen
+was fond of inventing new words. At any rate, one of Owen's associates,
+now dead, told the present writer that Owen often specifically claimed
+to have used the word at least ten years before it was adopted by any
+other writer.
+
+The word gradually became more familiar in England. Throughout the years
+1835-1836, in the pages of Owen's paper, _The New Moral World_, there
+are many instances of the word occurring. The French writer, Reybaud, in
+his "Reformateurs Modernes," published in 1840, made the term equally
+familiar to the reading public of Continental Europe. By him it was
+used to designate the teachings not merely of Owen and his followers,
+but those of all social reformers and visionaries--Saint-Simon, Charles
+Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others. By an easy transition, it soon came
+into general use as designating all altruistic visions, theories, and
+experiments, from the "Republic" of Plato onward through the centuries.
+
+In this way much confusion arose. The word became too vague and
+indefinite to be distinctive. It was applied--frequently as an
+epithet--indiscriminately to persons of widely differing, and often
+conflicting, views. Every one who complained of social inequalities,
+every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The
+enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices
+of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming
+religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper,
+who would extol Law, and spread the net of government over the whole of
+life, and the iconoclastic Anarchist, who would destroy all forms of
+social authority, have all alike been dubbed Socialists, by their
+friends no less than by their opponents.
+
+The confusion thus introduced has had the effect of seriously
+complicating the study of Socialism from the historical point of view.
+Much that one finds bearing the name of Socialism in the literature of
+the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, is not at all
+related to Socialism as that term is understood to-day. Thus the
+Socialists of the present day, who do not advocate Communism, regard as
+a classic presentation of their views the famous pamphlet by Karl Marx
+and Friederich Engels, _The Communist Manifesto_. They have circulated
+it by millions of copies in practically all the languages of the
+civilized world. Yet throughout it speaks of "Socialists" with
+ill-concealed disdain, and always in favor of Communism and the
+Communist Party. The reason for this is clearly explained by Engels
+himself in the preface written by him for the English edition, but that
+has not prevented many an unscrupulous opponent of Socialism from
+quoting the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels against the
+Socialists of the Marx-Engels school.[7] In like manner, the utterances
+and ideas of many of those who formerly called themselves Socialists
+have been quoted against the Socialists of to-day, notwithstanding that
+it was precisely on account of their desire to repudiate all connection
+with, and responsibility for, such ideas that the founders of the modern
+Socialist movement took the name "Communists."
+
+Nothing could be clearer than the language in which Engels explains why
+the name Communist was chosen, and the name Socialist discarded. He
+says: "Yet, when it (the _Manifesto_) was written, we could not have
+called it a _Socialist Manifesto_. By Socialists, in 1847, were
+understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian
+systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of these
+already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out;
+on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all
+manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital
+and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside of
+the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes
+for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced
+of the insufficiency of mere political revolution and had proclaimed the
+necessity of a total social change, that portion, then, called itself
+Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of
+Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough
+among the working class to produce the Utopian Communism, in France, of
+Cabet, and in Germany, of Weitling. Thus Socialism was, in 1847, a
+middle-class movement; Communism a working-class movement. Socialism
+was, on the Continent at least, 'respectable'; Communism was the very
+opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that the
+'emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class
+itself,' there could be no doubt as to which of the names we must take.
+Moreover, we have ever since been far from regretting it."[8]
+
+There is still, unfortunately, much misuse of the word "Socialism," even
+by some accredited Socialist exponents. Writers like Tolstoy, Ibsen,
+Zola, and many others, are constantly referred to as Socialists, when,
+in fact, they are nothing of the sort. Still, the word is now pretty
+generally understood as defined by the Socialists--not the "Socialists"
+of sixty years ago, who were mostly Communists, but the Socialists of
+to-day, whose principles find classic expression in the _Communist
+Manifesto_, and to the attainment of which they have directed their
+political parties and programmes. In the words of Professor Thorstein
+Veblen: "The Socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the
+school of Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called
+Socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or
+refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of 'Socialists.'"[9]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Republican National Platform, 1908.
+
+[2] I quote the English translation from the London _Clarion_, December
+18, 1905.
+
+[3] William Morris.
+
+[4] Isaiah ii. 4.
+
+[5] See _Socialism and Social Democracy_, by John Spargo. _The Comrade_,
+Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1903.
+
+[6] In _The International Socialist Review_, Vol. VI, No. 1, July, 1905.
+
+[7] As an instance of this I note the following example: "No severer
+critic of Socialists ever lived than Karl Marx. No one more bitterly
+attacked them and their policy toward the trade unions than he.... And
+yet Socialists regard him as their patron saint." Mr. Samuel Gompers, in
+_The American Federationist_, August, 1905.
+
+[8] Preface to _The Communist Manifesto_, by F. Engels, Kerr edition,
+page 7.
+
+[9] _Quarterly Journal of Economics._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ROBERT OWEN AND THE UTOPIAN SPIRIT
+
+I
+
+
+As a background to modern, or scientific, Socialism there is the
+Socialism of the Utopians, which the authors of the _Manifesto_ so
+severely criticised. It is impossible to understand the modern Socialist
+movement, the Socialism which is rapidly becoming the dominant issue in
+the thought and politics of the world, without distinguishing sharply
+between it and the Utopian visions which preceded it. Failure to make
+this distinction is responsible for the complete misunderstanding of the
+Socialism of to-day by many earnest and intelligent persons.
+
+It is not necessary that we study the Utopian movements which flourished
+and declined prior to the rise of scientific Socialism in detail. It
+will be sufficient if we consider the Utopian Socialism of Owen, which
+is Utopian Socialism at its best and nearest approach to the modern
+movement. Thus we shall get a clear view of the point of departure which
+marked the rise of the later scientific movement with its revolutionary
+political programmes. Incidentally, also, we shall get a view of the
+great and good Robert Owen, whom Liebknecht, greatest political leader
+of the movement, has called, "By far the most embracing, penetrating,
+and practical of all the harbingers of scientific Socialism."[10]
+
+Friederich Engels, a man not given to praising overmuch, has spoken of
+Owen with an enthusiasm which he rarely showed in his descriptions of
+men. He calls him, "A man of almost sublime and childlike simplicity of
+character," and declares, "Every social movement, every real advance in
+England on behalf of the workers, links itself on to the name of Robert
+Owen."[11] And even this high praise from the part-author of _The
+Communist Manifesto_ who for so many years was called the "Nestor of the
+Socialist movement," falls short, because it does not recognize the
+great influence of the man in the United States at a most important
+period of our history.
+
+Robert Owen was born of humble parentage, in a little town in North
+Wales, on the fourteenth day of May, 1771. A most precocious child, at
+seven years of age, so he tells us in his "Autobiography," he had
+familiarized himself with Milton's "Paradise Lost," and by the time he
+was ten years old he had grappled with the ages-old problems of Whence
+and Whither and become a skeptic! It is doubtful whether his
+"skepticism" really consisted of anything more than the consciousness
+that there were apparent contradictions in the Bible, a discovery which
+many a precocious lad has made at quite as early an age, and the failure
+of the usual theological subterfuges to satisfy a boy's frank spirit.
+Still, it is worthy of note as indicating his inquiring spirit.
+
+The great dream of his childhood was that he might become an educated
+man. He thirsted for knowledge and wanted above all things a university
+education. A passion for knowledge was the controlling force of his
+life. But his parents were too poor to gratify his desire for an
+extensive education. He was barely ten years old when his scanty
+schooling ended, and he set out to fight the battle of life for himself
+in London.
+
+He was apprenticed to a draper, named McGuffeg, who seems to have been a
+rather superior type of man. From a small peddling business he had built
+up one of the largest and wealthiest establishments in that part of
+London, catering to the wealthy and the titled nobility. Above all,
+McGuffeg was a man of books, and in his well-stocked library young Owen
+could read several hours each day, and thus make up in a measure for his
+early lack of educational opportunities. During the three years of his
+apprenticeship he read prodigiously, and laid the foundations of that
+literary culture which characterized his whole life and added
+tremendously to his power.
+
+This is not in any sense a biographical sketch of Robert Owen.[12] If it
+were, the story of the rise of this poor, strange, strong lad, from
+poverty to the very pinnacle of industrial and commercial power and
+fame, as one of the leading manufacturers of his day, would lead through
+pathways of romance as wonderful as any in our biographical literature.
+We are concerned, however, only with his career as a social reformer and
+the forces which molded it. And that, too, has its romantic side.
+
+
+II
+
+The closing years of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of a
+great and far-reaching industrial revolution. The introduction of new
+mechanical inventions enormously increased the productive powers of
+England. In 1770 Hargreaves patented his "spinning jenny," and in the
+following year Arkwright invented his "water frame," a patent spinning
+machine which derived its name from the fact that it was worked by water
+power. Later, in 1779, Crompton invented the "mule," which was really a
+combination of the principles of both machines. This was a long step
+forward, and greatly facilitated the spinning of the raw material into
+yarn. The invention was, in fact, a revolution in itself. Like so many
+other great inventors, Crompton died in poverty.
+
+Even now, however, the actual weaving had to be done by hand. Not until
+1785, when Dr. Cartwright, a parson, invented a "power loom," was it
+deemed possible to weave by machinery. Cartwright's invention, coming in
+the same year as the general introduction of Watt's steam engine in the
+cotton industry, made the industrial revolution. Had the revolution come
+slowly, had the inventors of the new industrial processes been able to
+accomplish that, it is most probable that much of the misery of the
+period would have been avoided. As it was, terrible poverty and hardship
+attended the birth of the new industrial order. Owing to the expense of
+introducing the machines, and the impossibility of competing with them
+by the old methods of production, the small manufacturers themselves
+were forced to the wall, and their misery, compelling them to become
+wage-workers in competition with other already far too numerous
+wage-workers, added greatly to the woe of the time. William Morris's
+fine lines, written a hundred years later, express vividly what many a
+manufacturer must have felt at that time:--
+
+
+     "Fast and faster our iron master,
+     The thing we made, forever drives."
+
+
+But perhaps the worst of all the results of the new régime was the
+destruction of the personal relations which had hitherto existed between
+the employers and their employees. No attention was paid to the
+interests of the latter. The personal relation was forever gone, and
+only a hard, cold cash nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarming
+rate, as might be expected; the housing conditions became simply
+inhuman. Now it was discovered that a child at one of the new looms
+could do more than a dozen men had done under the old conditions, and a
+tremendous demand for child workers was the result. At first, as H. de
+B. Gibbins[13] tells us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of
+parents to sending their children into the factories. It was, in fact,
+considered a disgrace to do so. The term "factory girl" was an insulting
+epithet, and it was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a
+factory to obtain other employment. She could not look forward to
+marriage with any but the very lowest of men, so degrading was factory
+employment considered to be. But the manufacturers had to get children
+somehow, and they got them. They got them from the workhouses.
+Pretending that they were going to apprentice them to a trade, they
+arranged with the overseers of the poor regular days for the inspection
+of these workhouse children. Those chosen were conveyed to their
+destination, packed in wagons or canal boats, and from that moment were
+doomed to the most awful form of slavery.
+
+"Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
+manufacturer," says Gibbins,[14] "and transfer a number of children to a
+factory district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
+till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands, who
+would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily capacities,
+exactly as did the slave owners in the American markets. After that the
+children were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as
+apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages and whom it
+was not worth while even to feed and clothe properly, because they were
+so cheap and their places could be so easily supplied. It was often
+arranged by the parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles,
+that one idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane
+children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than that of
+the others. The secret of their final end has never been disclosed, but
+we can form some idea of their awful sufferings from the hardships of
+the other victims to capitalist greed and cruelty. The hours of their
+labor were only limited by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had
+been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Children were often
+worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night."
+
+Terrible as this summary is, it does not equal in horror the account
+given by "Alfred,"[15] in his "History of the Factory System": "In
+stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirl of a thousand wheels,
+little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced
+into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the
+merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments
+of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable
+selfishness." The children were fed upon the cheapest and coarsest food,
+often the same as that served to their master's pigs. They slept by
+turns, and in relays, in filthy beds that were never cool. There was
+often no discrimination between the sexes, and disease, misery, and vice
+flourished. Some of these miserable creatures would try to run away, and
+to prevent them, those suspected had irons riveted on their ankles, with
+long links reaching up to the hips, and were compelled to sleep and work
+with them on, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this
+brutal treatment. The number of deaths was so great that burials took
+place secretly, at night, lest an outcry should be raised. Many of the
+children committed suicide.
+
+These statements are so appalling that, as Mr. R. W. Cooke-Taylor
+says,[16] they would be "absolutely incredible" were they not fully
+borne out by evidence from other sources. It is not contended, of
+course, that conditions in all factories were as bad as those described.
+But it must be said emphatically that there were worse horrors than any
+here quoted, and equally emphatically that the very best factories were
+only a little better than those described. Take, for instance, the
+account given by Robert Owen of the conditions which obtained in the
+"model factory" of the time, the establishment at New Lanark, Scotland,
+owned by Mr. David Dale, where Owen himself was destined to introduce so
+many striking reforms. Owen assumed control of the New Lanark mills on
+the first day of the year 1800. In his "Autobiography,"[17] he gives
+some account of the conditions which he found there, in the "best
+regulated factory in the world," at that time. There were, says Owen,
+about five hundred children employed, who "were received as early as six
+years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later
+age." They worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening,
+and _then their education began_. They hated their slavery, and many
+absconded. Many were dwarfed and stunted in stature, and when they were
+through their "apprenticeship," at thirteen or fifteen years of age,
+they commonly went off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, with no guardians,
+ignorant and ready--"admirably suited," is Owen's phrase--to swell the
+great mass of vice and misery in the towns. The people in New Lanark
+lived "almost without control, in habits of vice, idleness, poverty,
+debt, and destitution. Thieving was general." With such conditions
+existing in a model factory, under a master whose benevolence was
+celebrated everywhere, it can be very readily believed that conditions
+elsewhere must have been abominable.
+
+As a result of the appalling poverty which developed, it soon became
+necessary for poor parents to permit their children to go into the
+factories. The mighty machines were far too powerful for the prejudices
+of parental hearts. Child wage-workers became common. They were
+subjected to little better conditions than the parish apprentices had
+been; in fact, they were often employed alongside of them. Fathers were
+unemployed and frequently took meals to their little ones who were at
+work--a condition which sometimes obtains in some parts of the United
+States even to this day. Michael Sadler, a member of the House of
+Commons and a fearless champion of the rights of the poor and
+oppressed, described this aspect of the evil in touching verse.[18]
+
+During all this time, let it be remembered, the English philanthropists,
+and among them many capitalists, were agitating against negro slavery in
+Africa and elsewhere, and raising funds for the emancipation of the
+slaves. Says Gibbins,[19] "The spectacle of England buying the freedom
+of black slaves by riches drawn from the labor of her white ones affords
+an interesting study for the cynical philosopher."
+
+As we read the accounts of the distress which followed upon the
+introduction of the new mechanical inventions, it is impossible to
+regard with surprise or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the
+misguided "Luddites" who went about destroying machinery in their blind
+desperation. Ned Lud, after whom the Luddites were named, was an idiot,
+but wiser men, finding themselves reduced to abject poverty through the
+introduction of the giant machines, could see no further than he. It was
+not to be expected that the masses should understand that it was not the
+machines, but the institution of their private ownership, and use for
+private gain, that was wrong. And just as we cannot regard with surprise
+the action of the Luddites in destroying machinery, it is easy to
+understand how the social unrest of the time produced Utopian movements
+with numerous and enthusiastic adherents.
+
+The Luddites were not the first to make war upon machinery. In 1758, for
+example, Everet's first machine for dressing wool, an ingenious
+contrivance worked by water power, was set upon by a mob and reduced to
+ashes. From that time on similar outbreaks occurred with more or less
+frequency; but it was not until 1810 that the organized bodies of
+Luddites went from town to town, sacking factories and destroying the
+machines in their blind revolt. The contest between the capitalist and
+the wage-worker, which, as Karl Marx says, dates back to the very origin
+of capital, took on a new form when machinery was introduced.
+Henceforth, the worker fights not only, nor even mainly, against the
+capitalist, but against the machine, as the material basis of capitalist
+exploitation. This is a distinct phase of the struggle of the
+proletariat everywhere.
+
+In the sixteenth century the ribbon loom, a machine for weaving ribbon,
+was invented in Germany. Marx quotes an Italian traveler, Abbé
+Lancellotti, who wrote in 1579, as follows: "Anthony Müller, of Danzig,
+saw about fifty years ago, in that town, a very ingenious machine, which
+weaves four to six pieces at once. But the mayor, being apprehensive
+that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the
+streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned."[20]
+In 1629 this ribbon loom was introduced into Leyden, where the riots of
+the ribbon weavers forced the town council to prohibit it. In 1676 its
+use was prohibited in Cologne, at the same time that its introduction
+was causing serious disturbances in England. "By an imperial Edict of
+the 19th of February, 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all
+Germany. In Hamburg it was burned in public, by order of the Senate. The
+Emperor Charles VI, on the 9th of February, 1719, renewed the Edict of
+1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of
+Saxony. This machine, which shook all Europe to its foundations, was in
+fact the precursor of the mule and power loom, and of the industrial
+revolution of the eighteenth century. It enabled a totally inexperienced
+boy to set the whole loom, with all its shuttles, in motion by simply
+moving a rod backward and forward, and in its improved form produced
+from forty to fifty pieces at once."[21]
+
+The introduction of machinery has universally caused the workers to
+revolt. Much futile denunciation has been poured upon the blind, stupid
+resistance of the workers, but in view of the misery and poverty which
+they have suffered, it is impossible to judge them harshly. Their
+passionate, futile resistance to the irresistible moves to pity rather
+than to condemnation. As Marx justly says, "It took both time and
+experience before the work people learned to distinguish between
+machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks,
+not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode
+in which they are used."[22]
+
+
+III
+
+Under the new industrial régime, Robert Owen, erstwhile a poor draper's
+apprentice, soon became one of the most successful manufacturers in
+England. At eighteen years of age we find him entering into the
+manufacture of the new cotton-spinning machines, with a borrowed capital
+of $500. His partner was a man named Jones, and though the enterprise
+was successful from a financial point of view, the partnership proved to
+be most disagreeable. Accordingly it was dissolved, Owen taking three of
+the "mules" which they were making as a reimbursement for his
+investment. With these and some other machinery, Owen entered the cotton
+manufacturing industry, employing at first only three men. He made $1500
+as his first year's profit.
+
+Erelong Owen ceased manufacturing upon his own account, and became
+superintendent of a Manchester cotton mill, owned by a Mr. Drinkwater,
+and employing some five hundred work people. A most progressive man, in
+his new position Owen was always ready to introduce new machinery, and
+to embark upon experiments, with a view to improving the quality of the
+product of the factory.[23] In this he was so successful that the goods
+manufactured at the Drinkwater mill soon commanded a fifty per cent
+advance above the regular market prices. Drinkwater, delighted at
+results like these, made Owen his partner. Thus when he was barely
+twenty years of age Owen had secured an eminent position among the
+cotton manufacturers of the time. It is interesting to recall that Owen,
+in that same year, 1791, used the first cotton ever brought into England
+from the United States. "American sea island cotton," as it was called
+from the fact that it was then grown only upon the islands near the
+southern coast of the United States, was not believed to be of any value
+for manufacture on account, chiefly, of its poor color. But when a
+cotton broker named Spear received three hundred pounds of it from an
+American planter, with the request that he get some competent spinner to
+test it, Owen, with characteristic readiness, undertook the test and
+succeeded in making a much finer product than had hitherto been made
+from the French cotton, though inferior to it in color. That was the
+first introduction of American cotton, destined soon to furnish English
+cotton mills with the greater part of their raw material.
+
+Owen did not long remain with Mr. Drinkwater. He accepted another
+profitable partnership in Manchester, and it was at this time that he
+became active in social reform work. As a member of an important
+literary and philosophical society, he was thrown much into the company
+of men distinguished in all walks of life, one of his friends and
+admirers being the poet Coleridge. Here he began that agitation which
+led to the passing of the very first factory act of Sir Robert Peel, in
+1802. The suffering of the children moved his great humane heart to
+pity. He well knew that his own wealth and the wealth of his
+fellow-capitalists had been purchased at a terrible cost in child life.
+He was only a philanthropist as yet; he saw only the pitiful waste of
+life involved, and sought to impress men of wealth with what he felt.
+His mind was constantly occupied with plans for practical, constructive
+philanthropy upon a scale never before attempted.
+
+On the first day of the nineteenth century, Owen entered upon the
+wonderful philanthropic career at New Lanark, which attracted universal
+attention, and ultimately led him to those social experiments and
+theories which won for him the title of "Father of Modern Socialism."
+We have already seen what the conditions were in the "model factory"
+when Owen assumed control. His influence was at once directed to the
+task of ameliorating the condition of the work people. He shortened the
+hours of labor, introduced sanitary reforms, protected the people
+against the exploitation of traders through a vicious credit system,
+opening a store and supplying them with goods at cost, and established
+infant schools, the first of their kind, for the care and education of
+children from two years of age and upward. Still, the workers themselves
+were suspicious of this man who, so different from other employers, was
+zealous in doing things for them. He really knew nothing of the working
+class, and it had never occurred to him that they might do anything for
+themselves. New Lanark under Owen was, to use the phrase which Mr. Ghent
+has adopted from Fourier, "a benevolent feudalism." Owen complains
+pathetically, "Yet the work people were systematically opposed to every
+change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my
+object."[24]
+
+Opportunity to win the affection and confidence of his employees came to
+Owen at last, and he was not slow to embrace it. In 1806 the United
+States, in consequence of a diplomatic rupture with England, placed an
+embargo upon the shipment of raw cotton to that country. Everywhere
+mills were shut down, and there was the utmost distress in consequence.
+The New Lanark mills, in common with most others, were shut down for
+four months, during which time Owen paid every worker his or her wages
+in full, at a cost of over $35,000. Forever afterward he enjoyed the
+love and trust of his work people. In spite of all his seemingly
+reckless expenditure upon purely philanthropic work, the mills yielded
+an enormous profit. But Owen was constantly in conflict with his
+business associates, who sought to restrict his philanthropic
+expenditures, with the result that he was compelled again and again to
+change partners, always securing their interests and returning them big
+profits upon their investments, until finally, in 1829, he left New
+Lanark altogether.
+
+During twenty-nine years he had carried on the business with splendid
+commercial success and at the same time attracted universal attention to
+New Lanark as the theater of the greatest experiments in social
+regeneration the modern world had known. Every year thousands of persons
+from all parts of the world, many of them statesmen and representatives
+of the crowned heads of Europe, visited New Lanark to study these
+experiments, and never were they seriously criticised or their success
+challenged. It was a wonderful achievement. Had Owen's life ended in
+1829, he must have taken rank in history as one of the truly great men
+of the nineteenth century.
+
+
+IV
+
+Let us now consider briefly the forces which led this gentle
+philanthropist onward to the goal of Communism. His experiences at New
+Lanark had convinced him that human character depends in large part
+upon, and is shaped by, environment. Others before Owen had perceived
+this, but he must ever be regarded as one of the pioneers in the spread
+of the idea, one of the first to give it definite form and to
+demonstrate its truth upon a large scale. In the first of those keen
+"Essays on the Formation of Human Character," in which he recounts the
+results of his New Lanark system of education, Owen says, "Any general
+character from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most
+enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large,
+by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at
+the command and under the control of those who have influence in the
+affairs of men."
+
+We may admit that there is a good deal of overemphasis in this
+statement, but the doctrine itself does not seem strange or sensational
+to-day. It might be promulgated in any fashionable church, or in any
+ministerial conference, without exciting more than a languid, passing
+interest. But in Owen's time it was far otherwise. Such a doctrine
+struck at the very roots of current theology and all that organized
+Christianity consciously stood for. It denied the doctrine of the
+freedom of the will, upon which the elaborate theology of the church
+rested. No wonder, then, that it brought much bitter denunciation upon
+the heads of its promulgators. A poet of the period, in a poem dedicated
+to Owen, aptly expresses the doctrine in somewhat prosaic verse:--
+
+
+     "We are the creatures of external things,
+     Acting on inward organs, and are made
+     To think and do whate'er our tutors please.
+     What folly, then, to punish or reward
+     For deeds o'er which we never held a curb!
+     What woeful ignorance, to teach the crime
+     And then chastise the pupil for his guilt!"[25]
+
+
+Owen learned other things at New Lanark besides the truth that character
+is formed largely by environment. Starting out with no other purpose
+than to ameliorate the conditions of his work people, he realized before
+many years had passed that he could never do for them the one essential
+thing--secure their real liberty. "The people were slaves of my mercy,"
+he writes.[26] He saw, though but dimly at first, that no man could be
+free who depended upon another for the right to earn his bread, no
+matter how good the bread-master might be. The hopelessness of expecting
+reform from the manufacturers themselves was painfully forced upon him.
+First of all, there was the bitter hostility of those of his class who
+had no sympathy with his philanthropic ideas, manifested from the
+beginning of his agitation at Manchester. Then there was the incessant
+conflict with his own associates, who, though they represented the
+noblest and best elements of the manufacturing class, constantly opposed
+him and regarded as dangerous and immoral his belief in the inherent
+right of every child to the opportunities of sound physical, mental, and
+moral culture. Class consciousness had not yet become a recognized term
+in sociological discussions, but class consciousness, the instinctive
+conformity of thought and action with class interests, was a fact which
+confronted Owen at every step.
+
+The Luddite riots of 1810-1811 awakened England to the importance of the
+labor question, and Owen, who since 1805 had been devoting much time to
+its study, secured a wider audience and a much more serious hearing than
+ever before. Then came the frightful misery of 1815, due to the crisis
+which the end of the great war produced. Every one seemed to think that
+when the war was over and peace restored, there would be a tremendous
+increase in prosperity. What happened was precisely the opposite; for a
+time at least things were immeasurably worse than before. Peace did not
+bring with it plenty, but penury.
+
+Owen, more clearly than any other man of the time, explained the real
+nature of the crisis. The war had given an important spur to industry
+and encouraged many new inventions and chemical discoveries. "The war
+was the great and most extravagant customer of farmers, manufacturers,
+and other producers of wealth, and many during this period became very
+wealthy.... And on the day on which peace was signed, the great customer
+of the producers died, and prices fell as the demand diminished, until
+the prime cost of the articles required for war could not be
+obtained.... Barns and farmyards were full, warehouses loaded, and such
+was our artificial state of society that this very superabundance of
+wealth was the sole cause of the existing distress. _Burn the stock in
+the farmyards and warehouses, and prosperity would immediately
+recommence, in the same manner as if the war had continued._ This want
+of demand at remunerating prices compelled the master producers to
+consider what they could do to diminish the amount of their productions
+and the cost of producing until these surplus stocks could be taken out
+of the market. To effect these results, every economy in producing was
+resorted to, and men being more expensive machines for producing than
+mechanical and chemical inventions and discoveries so extensively
+brought into action during the war, the men were discharged and the
+machines were made to supersede them--while the numbers of the
+unemployed were increased by the discharge of men from the army and
+navy. Hence the great distress for want of work among all classes whose
+labor was so much in demand while the war continued. This increase of
+mechanical and chemical power was continually diminishing the demand
+for, and value of, manual labor, and would continue to do so, and would
+effect great changes throughout society."[27]
+
+In this statement there are several points worthy of attention. In the
+first place, the analysis of the crisis of 1815 is very like the later
+analyses of commercial crises by the Marxists; secondly, the antagonism
+of class interests is clearly developed, so far as the basic interests
+of the employers and their employees are concerned. The former, in order
+to conserve their interests, have to dismiss the workers, thus forcing
+them into the direst poverty. Thirdly, the conflict between manual labor
+and machine production is frankly stated. Owen's studies were leading
+him from mere philanthropism to Socialism.
+
+During the height of the distress of 1815, Owen called together a large
+number of cotton manufacturers at a conference, held in Glasgow, to
+consider the state of the cotton trade and the prevailing distress. He
+proposed (1) that they should petition Parliament for the repeal of the
+revenue tariff on raw cotton; (2) that they should call upon Parliament
+to shorten the hours of labor in the cotton mills by legislative
+enactment, and otherwise seek to improve the condition of the working
+people. The first proposition was carried with unanimity, but the
+second, and to Owen the more important, did not even secure a
+seconder.[28] The conference plainly showed the power of class
+interests. The spirit in which Owen faced his fellow-manufacturers is
+best seen in the following extract from the address delivered by him,
+with copies of which he afterward literally deluged the kingdom:--
+
+"True, indeed, it is that the main pillar and prop of the political
+greatness and prosperity of our country is a manufacture which, as now
+carried on, is destructive of the health, morals, and social comfort of
+the mass of people engaged in it. It is only since the introduction of
+the cotton trade that children, at an age before they had acquired
+strength or mental instruction, have been forced into cotton
+mills,--those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human
+skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect, where, as the business is often
+now conducted, they linger out a few years of miserable existence,
+acquiring every bad habit which they may disseminate throughout society.
+It is only since the introduction of this trade that children and even
+grown people were required to labor more than twelve hours in a day, not
+including the time allotted for meals. It is only since the introduction
+of this trade that the sole recreation of the laborer is to be found in
+the pot-house or ginshop, and it is only since the introduction of this
+baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and
+fearful strides throughout the community.
+
+"Shall we then go unblushingly and ask the legislators of our country to
+pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the
+death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of thousands of
+our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the
+evils which it creates? If such shall be your determination, I, for one,
+will not join in the application,--no, I will, with all the faculties I
+possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in
+name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery in
+the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as I am interested in
+the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power
+of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and
+in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted,
+inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say:
+_Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our
+country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall
+be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life._"[29]
+
+This conference doubtless had much to do with Owen's acceptance of a
+communistic ideal approaching that of modern Socialism in many important
+respects. It certainly intensified the hatred and fear of those
+manufacturers whose interests he had so courageously attacked. In 1817
+we find him proposing to the British government the establishment of
+communistic villages, as the best means of remedying the terrible
+distress which prevailed at that time. From this time onward his
+interest in mere surface reforms such as he had been carrying on at New
+Lanark seemed to wane. He became at this juncture an apostle of
+Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Socialism. His ideal was a
+coöperative world, with perfect equality between the sexes. He had
+completely demonstrated to his own mind that private property was
+incompatible with social well-being. Every month of his experience at
+New Lanark had deeply impressed him with the conviction that to make it
+possible for all people to live equally happy and moral lives they must
+have equal material resources and conditions of life, and he could not
+understand why it had never occurred to others before him.
+
+Here we have the essential characteristic of Utopian Socialism as
+distinguished from modern, or scientific, Socialism. The Utopians regard
+human life as something plastic and capable of being shaped and molded
+according to systems and plans. All that is necessary is to take some
+abstract principle as a standard, and then prepare a plan for the
+reorganization of society in conformity with that principle. If the plan
+is perfect, it will be enough to demonstrate its advantages as one would
+demonstrate a sum in arithmetic. The scientific Socialists, on the other
+hand, are evolutionists. Society, they believe, cannot take leaps at
+will; social changes are products of the past and the present. They
+distrust social inventors and schemes. Socialism is not an ingenious
+plan for the realization of abstract Justice, or Brotherhood, but a
+necessary outgrowth of the centuries. Owen, then, was a Utopian. He
+regarded himself as one inspired, an inspired inventor of a new social
+system, and believed that it was only necessary for him to demonstrate
+the truth of his contentions and theories, by argument and practical
+experiment, to bring about the transformation of the world. He
+conducted a tremendous propaganda, by means of newspapers, pamphlets,
+lectures, and debates, and established various communities in England
+and this country. In face of a bitter opposition and repeated failure,
+he kept on with sublime faith and unbounded courage which nothing could
+shake.
+
+In 1825 Owen began the greatest and most splendid of his social
+experiments in the village of Harmonie, Indiana, in the beautiful valley
+of the Wabash. The place had already been the theater of an interesting
+experiment in religious communism, Owen having bought the property from
+the Rappites. In February and March, 1825, the brave reformer addressed
+two of the most distinguished audiences ever gathered in the Hall of
+Representatives at the national capital. In the audiences were the
+President of the United States, the Judges of the Supreme Court, several
+members of the cabinet, and almost the entire membership of both houses
+of Congress. Owen explained his plans for the regeneration of society in
+detail, exhibiting a model of the buildings to be erected. It is almost
+impossible to realize at this day the tremendous interest which his
+appeal to Congress awakened. His vision of a re-created world caught the
+popular imagination.
+
+Among those whose minds were fired was a boy of sixteen, tall, lank,
+uncouth, and poor. Word had come to him of Owen's splendid undertaking,
+and he had caught something of the enthusiasm of the great dreamer.
+Above all, it was said that New Harmony was to be a wonderful center of
+learning, that the foremost educators of the world would establish great
+schools there, fully equipped with books and all sorts of appliances. To
+be a scholar had been the boy's one great ambition, so he yearned
+wistfully for an opportunity to join the new community. But his father
+forbidding, claiming his services, the boy suffered grievous
+disappointment. One wonders what effect residence at New Harmony would
+have had upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon the history of
+America! And how much, one wonders, was that splendid life influenced by
+that boyish interest in the regeneration of the world?
+
+That the influence of New Harmony was felt by Lincoln we know. It was a
+child of New Harmony, Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, who, when
+emancipation seemed to hang in the balance, penned his remarkable letter
+to President Lincoln, dated September seventeenth, 1862. "Its perusal
+thrilled me like a trumpet call," said the great President. Five days
+after its receipt the Preliminary Proclamation was issued. "Your letter
+to the President had more influence on him than any other document which
+reached him on the subject--I think I might say than all others put
+together. I speak of that which I know from personal conference with
+him," wrote Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury.
+
+New Harmony failed. Other communities established by Owen failed, but
+the story of their failure is nevertheless full of inspiration. The
+world has long since written the word "Failure" as an epitaph for Robert
+Owen. But what a splendid failure that life was! Standing by his grave
+one day, in the picturesque little churchyard at Newton, by a bend of
+the winding river, not far from the ruins of the ancient castle home of
+the famous Deist, Lord Herbert, the writer said to an old Welsh laborer,
+"But his life was a failure, was it not?" The old man gazed awhile at
+the grave, and then with a voice of unforgettable reverence and love
+answered, "I suppose it was, sir, as the world goes; a failure like
+Jesus Christ's. But I don't call it failure, sir. He established infant
+schools; he founded the great coöperative movement; he helped to make
+the trade unions;[30] he helped to give us the factory acts; he worked
+for peace between two great countries. His Socialism has not been
+realized yet, nor has Christ's--but it will come!"
+
+
+V
+
+Owen was not the only builder of Utopias in his time. In the same year
+that Owen launched his New Harmony venture, there died in Paris another
+dreamer of social millenniums, a gentle mystic, Henry de Saint-Simon,
+and in 1837, the year of Owen's third Socialist congress, another great
+Utopist died in the French capital, Charles Fourier. Each of these
+contributed something to the development of the theories of Socialism,
+each has a legitimate place in the history of the Socialist movement.
+But this little work is not intended to give the history of
+Socialism.[31] I have taken only one of the three great Utopists, as
+representative of them all: one who seems to me to be much nearer to the
+later scientific movement pioneered by Marx and Engels than any of the
+others. In the Socialism of Owen, we have Utopian Socialism at its best.
+
+What distinguishes the Utopian Socialists from their scientific
+successors we have already noted. Engels expresses the principle very
+clearly in the following luminous passage: "One thing is common to all
+three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of
+that proletariat which historical development had ... produced. Like the
+French philosophers,[32] they do not claim to emancipate a particular
+class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to
+bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as
+they see it, is as far as heaven from earth from that of the French
+philosophers.
+
+"For, to our three social reformers, the bourgeois world, based upon the
+principles of these philosophers, is quite as irrational and unjust,
+and, therefore, finds its way to the dust hole quite as readily, as
+feudalism and all the earlier stages of society. If pure reason and
+justice had not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only
+because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the
+individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the
+truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly
+understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the
+chain of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might
+just as well have been born five hundred years earlier, and might then
+have spared humanity five hundred years of error, strife, and
+suffering."[33]
+
+Neither of these great Utopists had anything like the conception of
+social evolution, determined by economic conditions and the resulting
+conflicts of economic classes, which constitutes the base of the
+philosophy of the scientific Socialists. Each of them had some faint
+comprehension of isolated facts, but neither of them developed his
+knowledge very far, nor could the facts appear to them as correlated
+later by Marx. Saint-Simon, as we know, recognized the class struggle in
+the French Revolution, and saw in the Reign of Terror only the momentary
+reign of the non-possessing masses;[34] he saw, too, that the political
+question was fundamentally an economic question, declaring that politics
+is the science of production, and prophesying that politics would be
+absorbed by economics.[35] Fourier, we also know, applied the principle
+of evolution to society. He divided the history of society into four
+great epochs--savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, and
+civilization.[36] But just as Saint-Simon failed to grasp the
+significance of the class conflict, and its relation to the fundamental
+character of economic institutions, which he dimly perceived, so Fourier
+failed to grasp the significance of the evolutionary process which he
+described, and, like Saint-Simon, he halted upon the brink, so to speak,
+of an important discovery. His concept of social evolution meant little
+to him and possessed only an academic interest. And Owen, in many
+respects the greatest of the three, realized in a practical manner that
+the industrial problem was a class conflict. Not only had he found in
+1815 that pity was powerless to move the hearts of his
+fellow-manufacturers when their class interests were concerned, but
+later, in 1818, when he went to present his famous memorial to the
+Congress of Sovereigns at Aix-la-Chapelle, he had another lesson of the
+same kind. At Frankfort, Germany, he tarried on his way to the Congress,
+and was invited to attend a notable dinner to meet the Secretary of the
+Congress, M. Gentz, a famous diplomat of the day, "who enjoyed the full
+confidence of the leading despots of Europe." After Owen had outlined
+his schemes for social amelioration, M. Gentz was asked for his reply,
+and Owen tells us that the diplomat answered, "We know very well that
+what you say is true, but how could we govern the masses, if they were
+wealthy, and so, independent of us?"[37] Lord Lauderdale, too, had
+exclaimed on another occasion, "Nothing [_i.e._ than Owen's plans] could
+be more complete for the poor and working classes, but what will become
+of us?"[38] Scattered throughout Owen's writings and speeches are
+numerous evidences that he at times recognized the class antagonisms in
+industrial society as the heart of the industrial problem,[39] but to
+him, also, the germ of an important truth meant practically nothing. He
+saw only the facts in their isolation, and made no attempt to discover
+their meaning or to relate them to his teaching.
+
+Each of the three men regarded himself as the discoverer of the truth
+which would redeem the world; each devoted himself with magnificent
+faith and heroic courage to his task; each failed to realize his hopes;
+and each left behind him faithful disciples and followers, confident
+that the day must come at last when the suffering and disinherited of
+earth will be able to say, in Owen's dying words, "Relief has come."
+Perhaps no better estimate of the value of the visions of these great
+Utopists has ever been penned than that by Emerson in the following
+tribute to Owen:[40]--
+
+"Robert Owen of New Lanark came hither from England in 1845 to read
+lectures or hold conversations wherever he could find listeners--the
+most amiable, sanguine, and candid of men. He had not the least doubt
+that he had hit on the plan of right and perfect Socialism, or that
+mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked,
+'Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? how many men are there possessed
+of your views who will remain after you are gone to put them in
+practice?' 'Not one,' was the reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old
+age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth that he had. The
+rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a visionary.
+Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men
+made us forget his 'three errors.' His charitable construction of men
+and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his
+controversies with Christians.
+
+"And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the
+magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have
+been urged. They appeared inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached
+his doctrine of labor and reward with the fidelity and devotion of a
+saint in the slow ears of his generation.
+
+"One feels that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely,
+life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up
+or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid
+or gas at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which,
+though now a very poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and
+exposure be in time produced--and skip the faculty of life which spawns
+and spurns systems and system makers; which eludes all conditions; which
+makes or supplants a thousand Phalanxes and New Harmonies with each
+pulsation....
+
+"Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and
+cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and
+generous proportions; there is an intellectual courage and strength in
+it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so
+much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.
+
+"I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age in
+which they live, in common with so many other good facts the
+efflorescence of the period and predicting the good fruit that ripens.
+They were not the creators that they believed themselves to be; but they
+were unconscious prophets of the true state of society, one which the
+tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for
+the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it."
+
+
+     "Our visions have not come to naught,
+     Who saw by lightning in the night;
+     The deeds we dreamed are being wrought
+     By those who work in clearer light;
+     In other ways our fight is fought,
+     And other forms fulfill our thought
+     Made visible to all men's sight."[41]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 101.
+
+[11] _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, by F. Engels, London, 1892,
+pages 20-25.
+
+[12] For good accounts of the life of Owen the reader is referred to the
+Biography, by Lloyd Jones, in _The Social Science Series_, 1890,
+published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, and the _Life of Robert
+Owen_, by Frank Podmore, 2 vols., New York, 1907.
+
+[13] _The Industrial History of England_, by H. de B. Gibbins, London,
+Methuen and Co.
+
+[14] _Industrial History of England_, page 179.
+
+[15] This anonymous historian is now known to have been Mr. Samuel Kydd,
+barrister-at-law (_vide_ Cooke-Taylor).
+
+[16] _The Factory System and the Factory Acts_, by R. W. Cooke-Taylor,
+London, 1894.
+
+[17] In two volumes: London, Effingham Wilson, 1857 and 1858. Vol. I
+contains the Life; Vol. II is a Supplementary Appendix. Quotations are
+from Vol. I.
+
+[18] See _Songs of Freedom_, by H. S. Salt, pages 81-83.
+
+[19] _Industrial History of England_, page 181.
+
+[20] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, page 467, Kerr edition.
+
+[21] _Idem_, Vol. I, page 468.
+
+[22] _Capital_, Vol. I, page 468.
+
+[23] For instance, he so improved the machinery and increased the
+fineness of the threads that, instead of spinning seventy-five thousand
+yards of yarn to the pound of cotton, he spun two hundred and fifty
+thousand! At that time a pound of cotton, which in its raw state was
+worth $1.25, became worth $50 when spun.--_Life of Robert Owen_,
+Philadelphia, 1866.--_Anonymous._
+
+[24] _Autobiography._
+
+[25] _The Force of Circumstances_, a poem, by John Garwood, Birmingham,
+1808.
+
+[26] Quoted by Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 22
+(English edition, 1892).
+
+[27] Quoted by H. M. Hyndman, _The Economics of Socialism_, page 150.
+
+[28] _The New Harmony Communities_, by George Browning Lockwood, page
+71.
+
+[29] Quoted by Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_, pages 71-72.
+
+[30] Owen presided at the first organized Trade Union Congress in
+England.
+
+[31] For the history of these and other Utopian Socialist schemes, the
+reader is referred to Professor Ely's _French and German Socialism_
+(1883); Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (1900); and Hillquit's _History
+of Socialism in the United States_ (1903).
+
+[32] The Encyclopædists.
+
+[33] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, pages 6-7.
+
+[34] Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 15.
+
+[35] _Idem._
+
+[36] _Idem_, page 18.
+
+[37] _Autobiography._
+
+[38] _Idem._
+
+[39] See, for instance, _The Revolution in Mind and Practice_, by Robert
+Owen, pages 21-22.
+
+[40] _Essay on Robert Owen._
+
+[41] Gerald Massey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT
+
+I
+
+
+The _Communist Manifesto_ has been called the birth-cry of the modern
+scientific Socialist movement. When it was written, at the end of 1847,
+little remained of those great movements which in the early part of the
+century had inspired millions with high hopes of social regeneration and
+rekindled the beacon fires of faith in the world. The Saint-Simonians
+had, as an organized body, disappeared; the Fourierists were a dwindling
+sect, discouraged by the failure of the one great trial of their system,
+the famous Brook Farm experiment, in the United States; the Owenite
+movement had never recovered from the failures of the experiments at New
+Harmony and elsewhere, and had lost much of its identity through the
+multiplicity of interests embraced in Owen's later propaganda. Chartism
+and Trade Unionism on the one hand, and the Coöperative Societies on the
+other, had, between them, absorbed most of the vital elements of the
+Owenite movement.
+
+There was a multitude of what Engels calls "social quacks," but the
+really great social movements, Owenism in England, and Fourierism in
+France, were utterly demoralized and rapidly dwindling away. One thing
+only served to keep the flame of hope alive--"the crude, rough-hewn,
+purely instinctive sort of Communism" of the workers. This Communism of
+the working class differed very essentially from the Socialism of
+Fourier and Owen. It was Utopian, being based, like all Utopian
+movements, upon abstract ideas. It differed from Fourierism and Owenism,
+however, in that instead of a universal appeal based upon Brotherhood,
+Justice, Order, and Economy, its appeal was, primarily, to the laborer.
+Its basis was the crude class doctrine of "the rights of Labor." The
+laborer was appealed to as one suffering from oppression and injustice.
+It was, therefore, distinctly a class movement, and its
+class-consciousness was sufficiently developed to keep its leaders from
+wasting their lives in abortive appeals to the master class. The leading
+exponents of this Communism of the workers were Wilhelm Weitling, in
+Germany, and Étienne Cabet, in France.
+
+Weitling was a man of the people. He was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in
+1808, the illegitimate child of a humble woman and her soldier lover. He
+became a tailor, and, as was the custom in Germany at that time,
+traveled extensively during his apprenticeship. In 1838 his first
+important work, "The World As It Is, and As It Might Be," appeared,
+published in Paris by a secret revolutionary society consisting of
+German workingmen of the "Young Germany" movement. In this work Weitling
+first expounded at length his communistic theories. It is claimed[42]
+that his conversion to Communism was the result of the chance placing of
+a Fourierist paper upon the table of a Berlin coffeehouse, by Albert
+Brisbane, the brilliant friend and disciple of Fourier, his first
+exponent in the English language. This may well be true, for, as we
+shall see, Weitling's views are mainly based upon those of the great
+French Utopist. In 1842 Weitling published his best-known work, the book
+upon which his literary fame chiefly rests, "The Guaranties of Harmony
+and Freedom." This work at once attracted wide attention, and gave
+Weitling a foremost place among the writers of the time in the
+affections of the educated workers. It was an elaboration of the
+theories contained in his earlier book. Morris Hillquit[43] thus
+describes Weitling's philosophy and method:--
+
+"In his social philosophy, Weitling may be said to have been the
+connecting link between primitive and modern Socialism. In the main, he
+is still a Utopian, and his writings betray the unmistakable influence
+of the early French Socialists. In common with all Utopians, he bases
+his philosophy exclusively upon moral grounds. Misery and poverty are to
+him but the results of human malice, and his cry is for 'eternal
+justice' and for the 'absolute liberty and equality of all mankind.' In
+his criticism of the existing order, he leans closely on Fourier, from
+whom he also borrowed the division of labor into three classes of the
+Necessary, Useful, and Attractive, and the plan of organization of
+'attractive industry.'
+
+"His ideal of the future state of society reminds us of the
+Saint-Simonian government of scientists. The administration of affairs
+of the entire globe is to be in the hands of the three greatest
+authorities on 'philosophical medicine,' physics, and mechanics, who are
+to be reënforced by a number of subordinate committees. His state of the
+future is a highly centralized government, and is described by the
+author with the customary details. Where Weitling, to some extent,
+approaches the conception of modern Socialism, is in his recognition of
+class distinctions between employer and employee. This distinction never
+amounted to a conscious indorsement of the modern Socialist doctrine of
+the 'class struggle,' but his views on the antagonism between the 'poor'
+and the 'wealthy' came quite close to it. He was a firm believer in
+labor organizations as a factor in developing the administrative
+abilities of the working class; the creation of an independent labor
+party was one of his pet schemes, and his appeals were principally
+addressed to the workingmen."
+
+Weitling visited the United States in 1846, a group of German exiles,
+identified with the Free Soil movement, having invited him to become the
+editor of a magazine, the _Volkstribun_, devoted to the principles of
+the movement. By the time he reached America, however, the magazine had
+suspended publication. He stayed little more than a year, hastening back
+to the fatherland to share in the revolutionary activities of 1848. He
+returned to America again in 1849, after the failure of the "glorious
+revolution," and for many years thereafter was an active and tireless
+propagandist. He died in Brooklyn in 1871.
+
+Étienne Cabet was, in many ways, a very different type of man from
+Weitling, but their ideas were not so dissimilar. Cabet, born in Dijon,
+France, in 1788, was the son of a fairly prosperous cooper, and received
+a good university education. He studied both medicine and law, adopting
+the profession of the latter and early achieving marked success in its
+practice. He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830 as a member
+of the "Committee of Insurrection," and upon the accession of Louis
+Philippe was "rewarded" by being made Attorney-General for Corsica.
+There is no doubt that the government desired to remove Cabet from the
+political life of Paris, quite as much as to reward him for his services
+during the Revolution; his strong radicalism, combined with his sturdy
+independence of character, being rightly regarded as dangerous to Louis
+Philippe's régime. His reward, therefore, took the form of practical
+banishment. The wily advisers of Louis Philippe used the gloved hand.
+But the best-laid schemes of mice and courtiers "gang aft agley." Cabet,
+in Corsica, joined the radical anti-administration forces, and became a
+thorn in the side of the government. Removed from office, he returned to
+Paris, whereupon the citizens of Dijon, his native town, elected him as
+their deputy to the lower chamber in 1834. Here he continued his
+opposition to the administration, and was at last tried on a charge of
+_lèse majesté_, and given the option of choosing between two years'
+imprisonment and five years' exile.
+
+Cabet chose exile, and took up his residence in England, where he fell
+under the influence of Owen's agitation and became a convert to his
+Socialistic views. During this time of exile, too, he became acquainted
+with the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More and was fascinated by it. The idea
+of writing a similar work of fiction to propagate his Socialist belief
+impressed itself upon his mind, and he wrote "a philosophical and social
+romance," entitled "Voyage to Icaria," which was published soon after
+his return to Paris, in 1839. In this novel Cabet follows closely the
+method of More, and describes "Icaria" as "a Promised Land, an Eden, an
+Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise." The plot of the book is simple in
+the extreme, and its literary merit is not very great. The writer
+represents that he met, in London, a nobleman, Lord William Carisdall,
+who, having by chance heard of Icaria and the wonderful and strange
+customs and form of government of its inhabitants, visited the country.
+Lord William kept a diary in which he described all that he saw in this
+wonderland. This record, we are told, the traveler had permitted to be
+published through the medium of his friend, and under his editorial
+supervision. The first part of the book contains an attractive account
+of the coöperative system of the Icarians, their communistic government,
+equality of the sexes, and high standard of morality. The second part is
+devoted to an account of the history of Icaria, prior to and succeeding
+the revolution of 1782, when the great national hero, Icar, established
+Communism.
+
+The book created a tremendous furore in France. It appealed strongly to
+the discontented masses, and it is said that by 1847 Cabet had no less
+than four hundred thousand adherents among the workers of France. The
+numerical strength of revolutionary movements is almost invariably
+greatly exaggerated, however, and it is not likely that the figures
+cited are exceptional in this regard. It is possible, _cum grano
+salis_, to accept the figures only by remembering that a very
+infinitesimal proportion of these were adherents in the sense of being
+ready to follow Cabet's leadership, as subsequent events showed. When
+the clamor rose for a practical test of the theories set forth so
+alluringly, Cabet visited Robert Owen in England and sought advice as to
+the best site for such an experiment. Owen recommended Texas, then
+recently admitted into the union of states and anxious for settlers.
+Cabet accepted Owen's advice and called for volunteers to form the
+"advance guard" of settlers, the number responding being pitifully,
+almost ludicrously, small. Still, the effect of the book was very great,
+and it served to fire the flagging zeal of those workers for social
+regeneration whose hearts must otherwise have become deadly sick from
+long-deferred hopes.
+
+The confluence of these two streams of Communist propaganda represented
+by Weitling and Cabet constituted the real Communist "movement" of
+1840-1847. Its organized expression was the Communist League, a secret
+organization with its headquarters in London. The League was formed in
+Paris by German refugees and traveling workmen, and seems to have been
+an offspring of Mazzini's "Young Europe" agitation of 1834. At different
+times it bore the names, "League of the Just," "League of the
+Righteous," and, finally, "Communist League."[44] For many years it
+remained a mere conspiratory society, exclusively German, and existed
+mainly for the purpose of fostering the "Young Germany" ideas. Later it
+became an International Alliance with societies in many parts of Europe.
+
+In 1847 Karl Marx was residing in Brussels. During a prior residence in
+Paris he had come into close association with the leaders of the League
+there, and had agreed to form a similar society in Brussels. Engels was
+in Paris in 1847, and it was probably due to his activities that the
+Paris League officially invited both him and Marx to join the
+international organization, promising that a congress should be convened
+in London at an early date. We may, in view of the after career of
+Engels as the politician of the movement, surmise so much. Be that how
+it may, the invitation, with its promise to call a congress in London,
+was extended and accepted. The reason for the step, the object of the
+proposed congress, is quite clear. Marx himself has placed it beyond
+dispute. During his stay in Paris he and Engels had discussed the
+position of the League with some of its leaders, and he had, later,
+criticised it in the most merciless manner in some of his pamphlets.[45]
+Marx desired a revolutionary working class political party with a
+definite aim and policy. Those leaders of the League who agreed with him
+in this were the prime movers for the congress, which was held in
+London, in November, 1847.
+
+At the congress, Marx and Engels presented their views at great length,
+and outlined the principles and policy which their famous pamphlet later
+made familiar. Perhaps it was due to the very convincing manner in which
+they argued that the emancipation of the working class must be the work
+of that class itself, that there was some opposition to them, on the
+part of a few delegates, on the ground that they were "Intellectuals"
+and not members of the proletariat, a criticism which pursued them all
+through their lives. Their views found general favor, however, as might
+be expected from such an inchoate mass of men, revolutionaries to the
+core, and waiting only for effective leadership. A resolution was
+adopted requesting Marx and Engels to prepare "a complete theoretical
+and working programme" for the League. This they did. It took the form
+of the _Communist Manifesto_, published in the early part of January,
+1848.
+
+
+II
+
+The authors of the _Manifesto_ were men of great intellectual gifts.
+Either of them alone must have won fame; together, they won immortality.
+Their lives, from the date of their first meeting in Paris, in 1844, to
+the death of Marx, almost forty years later, are inseparably interwoven.
+The friendship of Damon and Pythias was not more remarkable.
+
+Karl Heinrich Marx was born on the fifth day of May, 1818, at Treves,
+the oldest town in Germany, dating back to Roman times. His parents were
+both people of remarkable character. His mother--_née_ Pressburg--was
+the descendant of Hungarian Jews who in the sixteenth century had
+settled in Holland. Many of her ancestors had been rabbis. Marx was
+passionately devoted to his mother, always speaking of her with reverent
+admiration. On his father's side, also, Marx boasted of a long line of
+rabbinical ancestors, and it has been suggested that he owed to this
+rabbinical ancestry some of his marvelous gift of luminous exposition.
+The true family name was Mordechia, but that was abandoned by his
+grandfather, who took the name of Marx, which the grandson was destined
+to make famous. The father of Karl was a lawyer of some prominence and
+considerable learning, and a man of great force of character. In 1824,
+the boy Karl being then six years old, he renounced the Jewish religion
+and embraced Christianity, all the members of the family being baptized
+and received into the Church.
+
+There is a familiar legend that this act was the result of compulsion,
+being taken in response to an official edict.[46] He held at the time
+the position of notary public at the county court, and it is claimed
+that the official edict in question required all Jews holding official
+positions to forego them, and to abandon the practice of law, or to
+accept the Christian faith. Many writers, including Liebknecht[47] and
+one of the daughters of Karl Marx,[48] have given this explanation of
+the renunciation of Judaism by the elder Marx. It seems certain,
+however, that the act was purely voluntary, and that there was no such
+edict.[49] It may be that social ambitions had something to do with it,
+that he hoped to attain, as a Christian, a measure of success not
+possible to an adherent of the Hebrew faith. Whatever the motive, the
+act was a voluntary one. A great admirer of the eighteenth-century
+"materialists," and a disciple of Voltaire, he believed in God, he said,
+as Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz had done before him. He discussed
+religious and philosophical questions very freely and frankly with his
+son, and read Voltaire and Racine with him. As for the mother of Marx,
+she also believed in God--"not for God's sake, but for my own," she
+explained when asked about it.
+
+At the earnest behest of his father, Marx studied law at the
+universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. But "to please himself" he
+studied history and philosophy, winning great distinction in these
+branches of learning. He graduated in 1841, as a Doctor of Philosophy,
+with an essay on the philosophy of Epicurus, and it was his purpose to
+settle at Bonn as a professor of philosophy. The plan was abandoned,
+partly because he had already discovered that his bent was toward
+political activity, and partly because the Prussian government had made
+scholastic independence impossible, thus destroying the attractiveness
+of an academic career. Accordingly, Marx accepted the editorship of a
+democratic paper, the _Rhenish Gazette_, in which he waged bitter,
+relentless war upon the government. Time after time the censors
+interfered, but Marx was too brilliant a polemicist, even thus early in
+his career, and far too subtle for the censors. Finally, at the request
+of his managers, who hoped thus to avoid being compelled to suspend the
+publication, Marx retired from the editorship. This did not serve to
+save the paper, however, and it was suppressed by the government in
+March, 1843.
+
+Soon after this Marx went to Paris, with his young bride of a few
+months, Jenny von Westphalen, the playmate of his childhood. The Von
+Westphalens were of the nobility, and a brother of Mrs. Marx afterward
+became a Prussian Minister of State. The elder Von Westphalen was half
+Scotch, related, on his maternal side, to the Argyles. He was a lineal
+descendant of the Duke of Argyle who was beheaded in the reign of James
+II. His daughter tells an amusing story of how Marx, many years later,
+having to pawn some of his wife's heirlooms, especially some heavy,
+antique silver spoons which bore the Argyle crest and motto, "Truth is
+my maxim," narrowly escaped arrest on suspicion of having robbed the
+Argyles![50] To Paris, then, Marx went, and there met, among others,
+Heinrich Heine, many of whose poems he suggested, Arnold Ruge, the poet,
+P. J. Proudhon, and Michael Bakunin, the Anarchist philosopher, and,
+above all, the man destined to be his very _alter ego_, Friedrich
+Engels, with whom he had already had some correspondence.[51]
+
+The attainments of Engels have been somewhat overshadowed by those of
+his friend. Born at Barmen, in the province of the Rhine, November 28,
+1820, he was educated in the gymnasium of that city, and after serving
+his period of military service, from 1837 to 1841, was sent, in the
+early part of 1842, to Manchester, England, to look after a
+cotton-spinning business of which his father was principal owner. Here
+he seems to have at once begun a thorough investigation of social and
+industrial conditions, the results of which are contained in a book,
+"The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844," which remains
+to this day a classic presentation of the social and industrial life of
+the period. From the very first, already predisposed, as we know, he
+sympathized with the views of the Chartists and the Owenite Socialists.
+He became friendly with the Chartist leaders, notably with Feargus
+O'Connor, to whose paper, the _Northern Star_, he became a contributor.
+He also became friendly with Robert Owen, and wrote for his _New Moral
+World_.[52] His linguistic abilities were very great; it is said that he
+had thoroughly mastered no less than ten languages--a gift which helped
+him immensely in his literary and political associations with Marx.
+
+When the two men met for the first time, in 1844, they were drawn
+together by an irresistible impulse. They were kindred spirits. Marx had
+gone to Paris mainly for the purpose of studying the Socialist movement
+of the time. During his editorship of the _Rhenish Gazette_ several
+articles had appeared on the subject, and he had refused to attack the
+Socialists in any manner. He had gone to Paris with a considerable
+reputation already established as a leader of radical thought, and at
+once sought out the Saint-Simonians, under whose influence he was led to
+declare himself definitely a Socialist. At first this seems difficult to
+explain, so wide is the chasm which yawns between the "New Christianity"
+of Saint-Simon and the materialism of Marx. There seems to be no bond of
+sympathy between the religious mysticism of the French dreamer and the
+scientific thought of the German economist and philosopher.
+
+Marx has been described as being "rigidly mathematical,"[53] and the
+picture of the man one gets from his writings is that of a cold,
+unemotional philosopher, dealing only with facts and caring nothing for
+idealism. But the real Marx was a very different sort of man. His life
+was itself a splendid example of noble idealism, and underlying all his
+materialism there was a great religious spirit, using the word
+"religious" in its noblest and best sense, quite independent of dogmatic
+theology. All his life he was a deep student of Dante, the _Divine
+Comedy_ being his constant companion, so that he knew it almost
+completely by heart. Some of his attacks upon Christianity are very
+bitter, and have been much quoted against Socialism, but they are not
+one whit more bitter than the superb thunderbolts of invective which
+the ancient Hebrew prophets hurled against an unfaithful Church and
+priesthood. For the most part, they are attacks upon religious hypocrisy
+rather than upon Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an
+atheist, but he was full of sympathy with the underlying ethical
+principles of all the great religions. Always tolerant of the religious
+opinions of others, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the
+blatant dogmatic atheism of his time, and vigorously opposed committing
+the Socialist movement to atheism as part of its programme.[54] In
+short, he was a man of fine spiritual instincts, splendidly religious in
+his irreligion.
+
+This spiritual side of Marx must be considered if we would understand
+the man. It is not necessary, however, to ascribe the influence of
+Saint-Simonian thought upon him to a predisposing spiritual temperament.
+Marx, with his usual penetration, saw in Saint-Simonism the hidden germ
+of a great truth, the embryo of a profound social theory. Saint-Simon,
+as we have seen, had vaguely indicated the two ideas which were
+afterward to be cardinal doctrines of the Marx-Engels _Manifesto_--the
+antagonism of classes, and the economic foundation of political
+institutions. Not only so, but Saint-Simon's grasp of political
+questions, instanced by his advocacy, in 1815, of a triple alliance
+between England, France, and Germany,[55] appealed to Marx, and
+impressed him alike by its fine perspicacity and its splendid courage.
+Engels, in whom, as stated, the working-class spirit of Chartism and
+the ideals of Owenism were blended, found in Marx a twin spirit. They
+were, indeed,--
+
+
+     "Two souls with but a single thought,
+     Two hearts that beat as one."
+
+
+III
+
+The _Communist Manifesto_ is the first declaration of an International
+Workingmen's Party. Its fine peroration is a call to the workers to
+transcend the petty divisions of nationalism and sectarianism: "The
+proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to
+win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" These concluding phrases of
+the _Manifesto_ have become the shibboleths of millions. They are
+repeated with fervor by the disinherited workers of all the lands. Even
+in China, lately so rudely awakened from the slumbering peace of the
+centuries, they are voiced by an ever increasing army of voices. No
+sentences ever coined in the mint of human speech have held such magic
+power over such large numbers of men and women of so many diverse races
+and creeds. As a literary production, the _Manifesto_ bears the
+unmistakable stamp of genius.
+
+But it is not as literature that we are to consider the historic
+document. Its importance for us lies, not in its form, but in its
+fundamental principle. And the fundamental principle, the essence or
+soul of the declaration, is contained in this pregnant summary by
+Engels:--
+
+"In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production
+and exchange, and the _social organization necessarily following from
+it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be
+explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch_, that
+consequently the whole history of mankind (since primitive tribal
+society holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class
+struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and
+oppressed classes."[56]
+
+Thus Engels summarizes the philosophy--as apart from the proposals of
+immediate measures to constitute the political programme of the
+party--of the _Manifesto_; the basis upon which the whole superstructure
+of modern, scientific Socialist theory rests. This is the materialistic,
+or economic, conception of history which distinguishes scientific
+Socialism from all the Utopian Socialisms which preceded it. Socialism
+is henceforth a theory of social evolution, not a scheme of
+world-building; a spirit, not a thing. Thus, twelve years before the
+appearance of "The Origin of Species," nearly twenty years after the
+death of Lamarck, the authors of the _Communist Manifesto_ formulated a
+great theory of social evolution as the basis of the mightiest
+proletarian movement in history. Socialism had become a science instead
+of a dream.
+
+
+IV
+
+Naturally, in view of its historic rôle, the joint authorship of the
+_Manifesto_ has been much discussed. What was the respective share of
+each of its creators? What did Marx contribute, and what Engels? It may
+be, as Liebknecht says, an idle question, but it is a perfectly natural
+one. The pamphlet itself does not assist us. There are no internal signs
+pointing now to the hand of the one, now to the hand of the other. We
+may hazard a guess that most of the programme of ameliorative measures
+was the work of Engels, and perhaps the final section. It was the work
+of Engels throughout his life to deal with present social and political
+problems in the light of the fundamental theories to the systematization
+and elucidation of which Marx was devoted.
+
+Beyond this mere conjecture, we have the word of Engels with regard to
+the basal principle which he has summarized in the passage already
+quoted. "The _Manifesto_ being our joint production," he says, "I
+consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which
+forms its nucleus belongs to Marx.... This proposition, which, in my
+opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done
+for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some
+years before 1845. How far I had progressed toward it is best shown by
+my 'Condition of the Working Class in England.'[57] But when I again met
+Marx at Brussels, in spring, 1845, he had it ready worked out, and put
+it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it
+here."[58]
+
+Engels has lifted the veil thus far, but the rest is hidden. Perhaps it
+is well that it should be; well that no man should be able to say which
+passages came from the mind of Marx and which from the mind of Engels.
+In life they were inseparable, and so they must be in the Valhalla of
+history. The greatest political pamphlet of all time must forever bear,
+with equal honor, the names of both. Their noble friendship unites them
+even beyond the tomb.
+
+
+     "Twin Titans! Whom defeat ne'er bowed,
+     Scarce breathing from the fray,
+     Again they sound the war cry loud,
+     Again is riven Labor's shroud,
+     And life breathed in the clay.
+     Their work? Look round--see Freedom proud
+     And confident to-day."[59]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[42] Cf. _Social Democracy Red Book_, edited by Frederic Heath (1900),
+page 79.
+
+[43] _History of Socialism in the United States_, by Morris Hillquit,
+pages 161-162.
+
+[44] E. Belfort Bax, article on _Friederich Engels_, in _Justice_
+(London), No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895.
+
+[45] _Disclosures about the Communists' Process, Herr Vogt_, etc.
+
+[46] Cf. G. Adler, _Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der
+bestehenden Volkswirthschaft_ (1887), page 226.
+
+[47] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 14.
+
+[48] _Idem_, page 164.
+
+[49] Cf. F. Mehring's _Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx,
+Friederich Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle_, 1902; the _Neue Beitrage zur
+Biographie von Karl Marx und Friederich Engels, in Die Neue Zeit_, 1907,
+and Mehring's _Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie_, 1903.
+
+[50] _Memoirs of Marx_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, page 164.
+
+[51] Karl Kautsky, article on F. Engels, _Austrian Labor Almanac_, 1887.
+
+[52] E. Belfort Bax, article on _Friederich Engels_, in _Justice_
+(London), No. 606, Vol. XII, August 24, 1895.
+
+[53] Cf. _Reminiscences of Karl Marx_, by W. Harrison Riley, in _The
+Comrade_, Vol. III, No. 1, pages 5-6.
+
+[54] Marx opposed the "Alliance de la Démocratic Socialiste," formed by
+Bakunin, with its headquarters at Geneva, almost as vigorously for its
+atheistic plank as for its denial of political methods. The first plank
+in the programme of the "Alliance" was as follows:--
+
+"The Alliance declares itself Atheist; it demands the abolition of all
+worship, the substitution of science for faith, and of human justice for
+Divine justice; the abolition of marriage, so far as it is a political,
+religious, juridical, or civil institution."
+
+This programme is frequently quoted against the Socialist
+propaganda,--as, for example, by George Brooks, in _God's England or the
+Devil's_?--in spite of the fact that the "Alliance" was an Anarchist
+organization, bitterly opposed by Marx, and, in turn, bitterly opposing
+him.
+
+In this connection, it may be well to call attention to an alleged
+"quotation from Marx" which is frequently used by the opponents of
+Socialism. It appears in the work of Brooks, quoted above, and in
+Professor Peabody's _Jesus Christ and the Social Question_ (1907), page
+16. Used in a public discussion by a New York labor union official, in
+April, 1908, it was widely discussed by the press, and, according to
+that same press, drew from the President of the United States
+enthusiastic praise of the labor-union official in question. The passage
+reads: "The idea of God must be destroyed. It is the keystone of a
+perverted civilization. The true root of liberty, of equality, of
+culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human
+mind." Had the opponents of Socialism been familiar with the teachings
+of Marx, they would have known that he could not have said anything like
+this, that it is absolutely at variance with all his teaching. The man
+who formulated the materialist conception of history could not by any
+possibility utter such balderdash. The fact is, the quotation is not
+from Karl Marx at all, but from a very different writer, an Anarchist,
+Wilhelm Marr, who was _a most bitter opponent of Socialism_. As given,
+the quotation is a free translation of a passage contained in Marr's
+_Das junge Deutschland in der Schweiz_, pages 131-134. Marr's programme,
+as given in the _Report of the Royal Commission on Labor_ (Vol. V,
+Germany), was the abolition of Church, State, property, and marriage,
+with the one positive tenet of "a bloody and fearful revenge upon the
+rich and powerful."
+
+[55] See F. Engels, _Socialism, Utopian and Scientific_, page 16 (London
+edition, 1892).
+
+[56] F. Engels, Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_ (English
+translation, 1888). The italics are mine. J. S.
+
+[57] F. Engels, _The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_.
+See, for instance, pages 79, 80, 82, etc.
+
+[58] Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_ (English edition, 1888).
+
+[59] From _Friederich Engels_, a poem by "J. L." (John Leslie), in
+_Justice_ (London), August 17, 1895.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY
+
+
+I
+
+Socialism, then, in the modern, scientific sense, is a theory of social
+evolution. Its hopes for the future rest, not upon the genius of some
+Utopia-builder, but upon the inherent forces of historical development.
+The Socialist state will never be realized except as the result of
+economic necessity, the culmination of successive epochs of industrial
+evolution. Thus the existing social system appears to the Socialist of
+to-day, not as it appeared to the Utopians and as it still must appear
+to mere ideologist reformers, as a triumph of ignorance or wickedness,
+the reign of false _ideas_, but as the result of an age-long
+evolutionary process, determined, not wholly indeed, but mainly, by
+certain methods of producing the necessities of life in the first place,
+and secondly, of effecting their exchange.
+
+Not, let it be understood, that Socialism has become a mere mechanical
+theory of economic fatalism. The historical development, the social
+evolution, upon the laws of which the theories of Socialism are based,
+is a human process, involving all the complex feelings, emotions,
+aspirations, hopes, and fears common to man. To ignore this fundamental
+fact, as they must who interpret the Marx-Engels theory of history as a
+doctrine of economic fatalism, is to miss the profoundest significance
+of the theory. While it is true that the scientific spirit destroys the
+idea of romantic, magic transformations of the social system and the
+belief that the world may be re-created at will, rebuilt upon the plans
+of some Utopian architect, it still, as we shall see, leaves room for
+the human factor. Otherwise, indeed, it would only be a new kind of
+Utopianism. They who accept the theory that the production of the
+material necessities of life is the main impelling force, the _geist_,
+of human evolution, may rightly protest against social injustice and
+wrong just as vehemently as any of the ideologists, and aspire just as
+fervently toward a nobler and better state. The Materialistic Conception
+of History does not involve the fatalist resignation summed up in the
+phrase, "Whatever is, is natural, and, therefore, right." It does not
+involve belief in man's helplessness to change conditions.
+
+
+II
+
+The idea of social evolution is admirably expressed in the fine phrase
+of Leibnitz, "The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent
+of the future."[60] The great seventeenth-century philosopher was not
+the first to postulate and apply to society that doctrine of flux, of
+continuity and unity, which we call evolution. In all ages of which
+record has been preserved to us, it has been sporadically, and more or
+less vaguely, expressed. Even savages seem to have dimly perceived it.
+The saying of the Bechuana chief, recorded by the missionary, Casalis,
+was probably, judging by its epigrammatic character, a proverb of his
+people. "One event is always the son of another," he said--a saying
+strikingly like that of Leibnitz.
+
+Since the work of Lyell, Darwin, Wallace, Spencer, Huxley, Youmans, and
+their numerous followers--a brilliant school embracing the foremost
+historians and sociologists of Europe and America--the idea of evolution
+as a universal law has made rapid and certain progress. Everything
+changes; nothing is immutable or eternal. Whatever is, whether in
+geology, astronomy, biology, or sociology, is the result of numberless,
+inevitable, related changes. Only the law of change is changeless. The
+present is a phase only of a great transition process from what was,
+through what is, to what will be.
+
+The Marx-Engels theory is an exploration of the laws governing this
+process of evolution in the domain of human relations: an attempt to
+provide a key to the hitherto mysterious succession of changes in the
+political, juridical, and social relations and institutions of mankind.
+Whence, for instance, arose the institution of chattel slavery, so
+repugnant to our modern ideas of right and wrong, and how shall we
+explain its defense and justification in the name of religion and
+morality? How account for the fact that what Yesterday regarded as
+righteous, To-day condemns as wrong; that what at one period of the
+world's history is regarded as perfectly natural and right--the practice
+of polygamy, for example--becomes abhorrent at another period; or that
+what is regarded with horror and disgust in one part of the world is
+sanctioned by the ethical codes, and freely practiced elsewhere? Ferri
+gives two examples of this kind: the cannibalism of Central African
+tribes, and the killing of parents, as a religious duty, in Sumatra.[61]
+To reply "custom" is to beg the whole question, for customs do not exist
+without reason, however difficult it may be to discern the reason for
+any particular custom. To reply that these things are mysteries, as the
+old theologians did when the doctrine of the Trinity was questioned, is
+to leave the question unanswered and to challenge doubt and
+investigation. The human mind abhors a mystery as nature abhors a
+vacuum. Despite Spencer, the human mind has never admitted the existence
+of the _Unknowable_. To explore the _Unknown_ is man's universal
+impulse; and with each fresh discovery the _Unknown_ is narrowed by the
+expansion of the _Known_.
+
+The theory that ideas determine progress, that, in the words of
+Professor Richard T. Ely, "all that is significant in human history may
+be traced back to ideas,"[62] is only true in the sense that a half
+truth is true. It is true, nothing but the truth, but it is less than
+the whole truth. Truly all that is significant in human history may be
+traced back to ideas, but in like manner the ideas themselves can be
+traced back to material sources. For ideas have histories, too, and the
+causation of an idea must be understood before the idea itself can serve
+fully to explain anything. We must go back of the idea to the causes
+which gave it birth if we would interpret anything by it. We may trace
+the American Revolution, for example, back to the revolutionary ideas of
+the colonists, but that will not materially assist us to understand the
+Revolution. For that, it is necessary to trace the ideas themselves to
+their source, the economic discontent of an exploited people. This is
+the spirit which illumines the works of historians like Green, McMaster,
+Morse Stephens, and others of the modern school, who emphasize social
+forces rather than individual facts, and find the _geist_ of history in
+social experiences and institutions.
+
+What has been called the "Great Man theory," the theory according to
+which Luther created the Protestant Reformation, to quote only one
+example, and which ignored the great economic changes consequent upon
+the break-up of feudalism and the rise of a new industrial order, long
+dominated our histories. According to this theory, an idea, developed in
+the mind of Luther, independent of external circumstances, changed the
+political and social life of Europe. Had there been no Luther, there
+would have been no Reformation; or had Luther died before giving his
+idea to the world, the Reformation would have been averted. The student
+who seeks in the bulk of the histories written prior to, say, 1870, what
+he has a legitimate reason for seeking, namely, a picture of the actual
+life of the people at any period, will be sadly disappointed. He will
+find records of wars and treaties of peace, royal genealogies and
+gossip, wildernesses of names and dates. But he will not find such
+careful accounts of the jurisprudence of the period, nor any hint of the
+economical conditions of its development. He will find splendid accounts
+of court life, with its ceremonials, scandals, intrigues, and follies;
+but no such pictures of the lives of the people, their social
+conditions, and the methods of labor and commerce which obtained. He
+will be unable to visualize the life of the period. In other words, the
+histories lack realism; they are unreal, and, therefore, deceptive. The
+new spirit, in the development of which the materialist conception of
+Marx and Engels has been an important creative influence, is concerned
+less with the chronicle of notable events and dates than with their
+underlying causes and the manner of life of the people. Had it no other
+bearing, the Marx-Engels theory, considered solely as a contribution to
+the science of history, would have been one of the greatest intellectual
+achievements of the nineteenth century. By emphasizing the importance of
+the economic factors in social evolution, it has done much for economics
+and more for history.[63]
+
+
+III
+
+While the Materialistic Conception of History bears the names of Marx
+and Engels, as the theory of organic evolution bears the names of Darwin
+and Wallace, it is not claimed that the idea had never before been
+expressed. Just as thousands of years before Darwin and Wallace the
+theory which bears their names had been dimly perceived, so the idea
+that economic conditions dominate historical developments had its
+foreshadowings. The famous dictum of Aristotle, that only by the
+introduction of machines would the abolition of slavery ever be made
+possible, is a conspicuous example of many anticipations of the theory.
+It is true that "In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to
+guard against reading modern meanings into writings produced in ages
+whose limitations of knowledge were serious, whose temper and standpoint
+are wholly alien to our own,"[64] but the Aristotelian saying admits of
+no other interpretation. It is clearly a recognition of the fact that
+the supreme politico-social institution of the time depended upon hand
+labor.
+
+In later times, the idea of a direct connection between economic
+conditions and legal and political institutions reappears in the works
+of various writers. Professor Seligman[65] quotes from Harrington's
+"Oceana" the argument that the prevailing form of government depends
+upon the conditions of land tenure, and the extent of its
+monopolization. Saint-Simon, too, as already stated, taught that
+political institutions depend upon economic conditions. But it is to
+Marx and Engels that we owe the first formulation into a definite theory
+of what had hitherto been but a suggestion, and the beginnings of a
+literature, now of considerable proportions, dealing with history from
+its standpoint. No more need be said concerning the "originality" of the
+theory.
+
+A word as to the designation of the theory. Its authors gave it the name
+"historical materialism," and it has been urged that the name is, for
+many reasons, unfortunately chosen. Two of the leading exponents of the
+theory, Professor Seligman and Mr. Ghent, the former an opponent, the
+latter an advocate of Socialism, have expressed this conviction in very
+definite terms. The last-named writer bases his objection to the name on
+the ground that it is repellent to many persons who associate the word
+materialism with the philosophy "that matter is the only substance, and
+that matter and its motions constitute the universe."[66] That is an old
+objection, and undoubtedly contains much truth. It is interesting in
+connection therewith to read the sarcastic comment of Engels upon it in
+the introduction to his "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific." The
+objection of Professor Seligman is based upon another ground entirely.
+He impugns its accuracy. "The theory which ascribes all changes in
+society to the influence of climate, or to the character of the fauna
+and flora, is materialistic," he says, "and yet has little in common
+with the doctrine here discussed. The doctrine we have to deal with is
+not only materialistic, but also economic in character; and the better
+phrase is ... the 'economic interpretation' of history."[67] For this
+reason he discards the name given to the theory by its authors and
+adopts the luminous phrase of Thorold Rogers, without credit to that
+writer.
+
+By French and Italian writers the term "economic determinism" has long
+been used, and it has been adopted to some extent in this country by
+Socialist writers. But this term, as Professor Seligman points out, is
+objectionable, because it exaggerates the theory, and gives it, by
+implication, a fatalistic character, conveying the idea that economic
+influence is the _sole_ determining factor--a view which its authors
+specifically repudiated. While the reasoning of Professor Seligman in
+the argument quoted against the name "historical materialism" is neither
+very profound nor conclusive, since climate and fauna and flora are
+included in the term "economic" as clearly as in the term
+"materialistic," much may be said in favor of his choice of the term he
+borrows from Thorold Rogers, and it is used by many Socialist writers in
+preference to that used by Marx and Engels.
+
+Many persons have doubtless been deceived into believing that the theory
+involves the denial of all influence to idealistic or spiritual factors,
+and the assumption that economic forces _alone_ determine the course of
+historical development. Much of the criticism of the theory, especially
+by the Germans, rests upon that assumption. The theory is attacked,
+also, as being sordid and brutal upon the same false assumption that it
+implies that men are governed solely by their economic _interests_, that
+individual conduct is never inspired by anything higher than the
+economic interest of the individual. These are misconceptions of the
+theory, due, no doubt, to the overemphasis placed upon it by its
+authors--a common experience of new doctrines--and, above all, the
+exaggerations of too zealous, unrestrained disciples. There is a wise
+saying of Schiller's which suggests the spirit in which these
+exaggerations of a great truth--exaggerations by which it becomes
+falsehood--should be regarded: "Rarely do we reach truth, except through
+extremes--we must have foolishness ... even to exhaustion, before we
+arrive at the beautiful goal of calm wisdom."[68] When it is contended
+that the "Civil War was at bottom a struggle between two economic
+principles,"[69] we have the presentation of an important truth, the key
+to the proper understanding of a great historical event. But when that
+important fact is exaggerated and torn from its legitimate place to suit
+the propaganda of a theory, and we are asked to believe that Garrison,
+Lovejoy, and other abolitionists were inspired solely by economic
+motives, that the urge and passion of human freedom did not enter into
+their souls, we are forced to reject it. But let it be clearly
+understood that it forms no part of the theory, that it is even
+expressly denied in the very terms in which Marx and Engels formulated
+the theory, and that its authors repudiated such perversions of it.
+
+In no respect has the theory been more grossly exaggerated and
+misrepresented than in its application to religion. True philosopher
+that he was, Marx realized the absurdity of attempting "to abstract
+religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by
+itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's
+effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover an
+interpretation of, the forces of the universe. The more incomprehensible
+those forces, the greater man's need of an explanation of them. He could
+not fail to see that the religion of a people always bears a marked
+relation to their mental development and their special environment. He
+knew that at various stages the Yahve of the Hebrews represented very
+different conceptions, answering to changes in the social and political
+conditions of the people. To the primitive Israelitish tribes, Yahve
+was, as Professor Rauschenbusch remarks,[71] a tribal god, fortunately
+stronger than the gods of the neighboring tribes, but not fundamentally
+different from them, and the way to win his favor was to sacrifice
+abundantly. Later, with the development of a national spirit, the
+religious ideal became a theocracy, and Yahve became a King and Supreme
+Lord. In times of oppression and war Yahve was a God of War, but under
+other conditions he was a God of Peace. At every step the conception of
+Yahve bears a very definite relation to the material life.[72]
+
+Marx knew that primitive religions have often a celestial pantheon
+fashioned after the existing social order, kings being gods, aristocrats
+being demigods, and common mortals occupying a celestial rank equal to
+their terrestrial one. The celestial hierarchy of the Chinese, for
+example, is an exact reproduction of the earthly hierarchy, and all the
+privileges of rank are observed celestially as on earth. So in India we
+find the religions reproducing in their concepts of heaven the degrees
+and divisions of the various castes,[73] while our own American Indian
+conceived of a celestial hunting ground, with abundant reward of game,
+as his Paradise. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real
+world," said Marx,[74] and the phrase has been used, both by disciples
+and critics, as an attack upon religion itself; as showing that the
+Marxian philosophy excludes the possibility of religious belief.
+Obviously, however, the passage will not bear such an interpretation. To
+say that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" is
+by no means to deny that men have been benefited by seeking an
+interpretation of the forces of the universe, or to assert that the
+quest for such an interpretation is incompatible with rational conduct.
+In his scorn for Bakunin's "Alliance" programme with its dogmatic
+atheism[75] Marx was perfectly consistent. The passage quoted simply
+lays down, in bare outline, a principle which, if well founded, enables
+us to study comparative religion from a new viewpoint.
+
+It is not a denial of religion, then, which the famous utterance of Marx
+involves, but a recognition of the fact that, even as all religions may
+be traced to the same fundamental instinct in mankind, so the different
+forms which the religious conception assumes are, or may be, reflexes of
+the material life of those making them. Thus man makes religion for
+himself under the urge of his deepest instincts. The application of the
+theory to religion is analogous to its application to historical events.
+To say that a given religion assumes the form it does as an unconscious
+reflex of the environment in which it is produced, is no more a denial
+of that religion than to say that the Reformation arose out of economic
+and social conditions, and not out of an idea in Luther's mind, is a
+denial of the fact that there was a Reformation, or that the
+Reformation benefited the people. The value of the theory to the study
+of religions and religious movements is not less than to the study of
+history. Does anybody pretend that we can understand Christianity
+without taking into account the Roman Empire; or that we can understand
+Catholicism without knowing something of the economic life of medieval
+Europe; or Methodism without knowing the social condition of England in
+Wesley's day?[76]
+
+In one of the very earliest of his writings upon the subject, some
+comments upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, and intended to form
+the basis of a separate work, we find Marx insisting that man is not a
+mere automaton, driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says:
+"The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products of conditions and
+education, different men, therefore, the products of other conditions
+and changed education, _forgets that circumstances may be altered by
+men, and that the educator has himself to be educated_."[77] Thus early
+we see the master taking a position entirely at variance with those of
+his disciples who would claim that the human factor has no influence
+upon historical development, that man is without power over his own
+destiny. From that position Marx never departed. Both he and Engels
+recognized the human character of the problem, and the futility of
+attempting to reduce all the processes of history and human progress to
+one sole basic cause. And in no case, so far as I am aware, has either
+of them attempted to do this.
+
+In another place, Marx contends that "men make their own history, but
+they make it not of their own accord or under self-chosen conditions,
+but under given and transmitted conditions. The tradition of all dead
+generations weighs like a mountain upon the brain of the living."[78]
+Here, again, the influence of the human will is not denied, though its
+limitations are indicated. This is the application to social man of the
+theory of limitations of the will commonly accepted as applying to
+individuals. Man is only a freewill agent within certain sharp and
+relatively narrow bounds. In a given contingency, I may be "free" to act
+in a certain manner, or to refrain from so acting. I may take my choice,
+in the one direction or the other, entirely free, to all appearances,
+from restraining or compelling influences. Thus, I have acted upon my
+"will." But what factors formed my will? What circumstances determined
+my decision? Perhaps fear, or shame, or pride; perhaps tendencies
+inherited from my ancestors.
+
+Engels admits that the economic factor in evolution has sometimes been
+unduly emphasized. He says: "Marx and I are partly responsible for the
+fact that the younger men have sometimes laid more stress on the
+economic side than it deserves. In meeting the attacks of our opponents,
+it was necessary for us to emphasize the dominant principle denied by
+them; and we did not always have the time, place, or opportunity to let
+the other factors which were concerned in the mutual action and reaction
+get their deserts."[79] In another letter,[80] he says: "According to
+the materialistic view of history, the factor which is in _last
+instance_ decisive in history is the production and reproduction of
+actual life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. But
+when any one distorts this so as to read that the economic factor is the
+sole element, he converts the statement into a meaningless, abstract,
+absurd phrase. The economic condition is the basis; but the various
+elements of the superstructure,--the political forms of the class
+contests, and their results, the constitutions,--the legal forms, and
+also all the reflexes of these actual contests in the brains of the
+participants, the political, legal, philosophical theories, the
+_religious views_ ... all these exert an influence on the development of
+the historical struggles, and, in many instances, determine their form."
+
+It is evident, therefore, that the doctrine does not imply economic
+fatalism. It does not deny that ideals may influence historical
+developments and individual conduct. While, as we shall see in a later
+chapter, it is part of the doctrine that classes are formed upon a basis
+of unity of material interests, it does not deny that men may, and often
+do, act in accordance with the promptings of noble impulses and
+humanitarian ideals, when their material interests would lead them to do
+otherwise. We have a conspicuous example of this in the life of Marx
+himself; in his splendid devotion to the cause of the workers through
+years of terrible poverty and hardship when he might have chosen wealth
+and fame. It is known, for example, that Bismarck made the most
+extravagant offers to enlist the services of Marx, who declined them at
+the very time when he was suffering awful privations. Marx himself has
+noted more than one instance of individual idealism triumphing over
+material interests and class environment, and, by a perversity that is
+astonishing, and not wholly disingenuous, some of his critics, notably
+Ludwig Slonimski,[81] have used these instances as arguments against his
+theory, claiming that they disprove it! We are to understand the
+materialistic theory, then, as teaching, not that history is determined
+by economic forces only, but that in human evolution the chief factors
+are social factors, and that these factors in turn are _mainly_ molded
+by economic circumstances.[82]
+
+This, then, is the basis of the Socialist philosophy, which Engels
+regarded as "destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done
+for biology." Marx himself made a similar comparison.[83] Marx was, so
+Liebknecht tells us, one of the first to recognize the importance of
+Darwin's investigations to sociology. His first important treatment of
+the materialistic theory, in "A Contribution to the Critique of
+Political Economy," appeared in 1859, the year in which "The Origin of
+Species" appeared. "We spoke for months of nothing else but Darwin, and
+the revolutionizing power of his scientific conquests,"[84] says
+Liebknecht. Darwin, however, had little knowledge of political economy,
+as he acknowledged in a letter to Marx, thanking the latter for a copy
+of "Das Kapital." "I heartily wish that I possessed a greater knowledge
+of the deep and important subject of economic questions, which would
+make me a more worthy recipient of your gift," he wrote.[85]
+
+
+IV
+
+The test of such a theory must lie in its application. Let us, then,
+apply the materialistic principle, first to a specific event, and then
+to the great sweep of the historic drama. Perhaps no single event has
+more profoundly impressed the imaginations of men, or filled a more
+important place in our histories, than the discovery of America by
+Columbus. In the schoolbooks, this great event figures as a splendid
+adventure, arising out of a romantic dream. But the facts are, as we
+know, far otherwise.[86] In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there
+were numerous and well-frequented routes from Hindustan, that vast
+storehouse of treasure from which Europe drew its riches. Along these
+routes cities flourished. There were the great ports, Licia in the
+Levant, Trebizond on the Black Sea, and Alexandria. From these ports,
+Venetian and Genoese traders bore the produce over the passes of the
+Alps to the Upper Danube and the Rhine. Here it was a source of wealth
+to the cities along the waterways, from Ratisbon and Nuremburg, to
+Bruges and Antwerp. Even the slightest acquaintance with the history of
+the Middle Ages must suffice to give the student an idea of the
+importance of these cities.
+
+When all these routes save the Egyptian were closed by the hordes of
+savages which infested Central Asia, it became an easy matter for the
+Moors in Africa and the Turks in Europe to exact immense revenues from
+the Eastern trade, solely through their monopoly of the route of
+transit. Thus there developed an economic parasitism which crippled the
+trade with the East. The Turks were securely seated at Constantinople,
+threatening to advance into the heart of Europe, and building up an
+immense military system out of the taxes imposed upon the trade of
+Europe with the East--a military power, which, in less than a quarter of
+a century, enabled Selim I to conquer Mesopotamia and the holy towns of
+Arabia, and to annex Egypt.[87] It became necessary, then, to find a new
+route to India; and it was this great economic necessity which set
+Columbus thinking of a pathway to India over the Western Sea. It was
+this same great problem which engaged the attention of all the
+navigators of the time; it was this economic necessity which induced
+Ferdinand and Isabella to support the adventurous plan of Columbus. In a
+word, without detracting in any manner from the splendid genius of
+Columbus, or from the romance of his great voyage of discovery, we see
+that, fundamentally, it was the economic interest of Europe which gave
+birth to the one and made the other possible. The same explanation
+applies to the voyage of Vasco da Gama, six years later, which resulted
+in finding a way to India over the southeast course by way of the Cape
+of Good Hope.
+
+Kipling asks in his ballad, "The British Flag"--
+
+
+     "And what should they know of England, who only England know?"
+
+
+There is a profound truth in the defiant line, a truth which applies
+equally to America or any other country. The present is inseparable from
+the past. We cannot understand one epoch without reference to its
+predecessors; we cannot understand the history of the United States
+unless we seek the key in the history of Europe--of England and France
+in particular. At the very threshold, in order to understand how the
+heroic navigator came to discover the vast continent of which the United
+States is part, we must pause to study the economic conditions of Europe
+which impelled the adventurous voyage, and led to the discovery of a
+great continent stretching across the ocean path. Such a view of history
+does not rob it of its romance, but rather adds to it. Surely, the
+wonderful linking of circumstances--the demand for spices and silks to
+minister to the fine tastes of aristocratic Europe, the growth of the
+trade with the East Indies, the grasping greed of Moor and Turk--all
+playing a rôle in the great drama of which the discovery of America is
+but a scene, is infinitely more fascinating than the latter event
+detached from its historical setting!
+
+It is not easy to give in the compass of a few pages an intelligent view
+of the main currents of history. The sketch here introduced--not without
+hesitation--is an endeavor to state the Socialist concept of the course
+of social evolution in a brief outline and to indicate the principal
+economic causes which have operated to determine that course.
+
+It is now generally admitted that primitive man lived under Communism.
+Lewis H. Morgan[88] has calculated that if the life of the human race be
+assumed to have covered one hundred thousand years, at least ninety-five
+thousand years were spent in a crude, tribal Communism, in which private
+property was practically unknown, and in which the only ethic was
+devotion to tribal interests, and the only crime antagonism to tribal
+interests. Under this social system the means of making wealth were in
+the hands of the tribes, or _gens_, and distribution was likewise
+socially arranged. Between the different tribes warfare was constant,
+but in the tribe itself there was coöperation and not struggle. This
+fact is of tremendous importance in view of the criticisms which have
+been directed against the Socialist philosophy from the so-called
+Darwinian point of view, according to which competition and struggle is
+the law of life; that what Professor Huxley calls "the Hobbesial war of
+each against all" is the normal state of existence.
+
+This is described as "the so-called Darwinian" theory advisedly, for the
+struggle for existence as the law of evolution has been exaggerated out
+of all likeness to the conception of Darwin himself. In "The Descent of
+Man," for instance, Darwin raises the point under review, and shows how,
+in many animal societies, the _struggle_ for existence is replaced by
+_coöperation_ for existence, and how that substitution results in the
+development of faculties which secure to the species the best conditions
+for survival. "Those communities," he says, "which included the greatest
+number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the
+greatest number of offspring."[89] Despite these instances, and the
+warning of Darwin himself that the term "struggle for existence" should
+not be too narrowly interpreted or overrated, his followers, instead of
+broadening it according to the master's suggestions, narrowed it still
+more. Thus the theory has been exaggerated into a mere caricature of the
+truth. This is almost invariably the fate of theories which deal with
+human relations, perhaps it would be equally true to say of all
+theories. The exaggerations of Malthus's law of population is a case in
+point. The Marx-Engels theory of the materialistic conception of history
+is, as we have seen, another.
+
+Kropotkin, among others, has developed the theory along the lines
+suggested by Darwin. He points out that "though there is an immense
+amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various classes of
+animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of
+mutual support, mutual aid, mutual defense, amidst animals belonging to
+the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as
+much a law of nature as mutual struggle.... If we resort to an indirect
+test, and ask nature: 'Who are the fittest: those who are continually at
+war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see
+that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly
+the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in
+their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and
+bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought
+forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say
+that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but
+that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater
+importance, inasmuch as it favors the development of such habits and
+characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the
+species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of
+life for the individual, with the least waste of energy."[90]
+
+From the lowest forms of animal life up to the highest, man, this law
+proves to be operative. It is not denied that there is competition for
+food, for life, within the species, human and other. But that
+competition is not usual; it arises out of unusual and special
+conditions. There are instances of hunger-maddened mothers tearing away
+food from their children; men drifting at sea have fought for water and
+food as beasts fight, but these are not normal conditions of life.
+"Happily enough," says Kropotkin again, "competition is not the rule
+either in the animal world or in mankind. It is limited among animals to
+exceptional periods.... Better conditions are created by the
+_elimination of competition_ by means of mutual aid and mutual
+support."[91] This is the voice of science now that we have passed
+through the extremes and arrived at the "beautiful goal of calm wisdom."
+Competition is not, in the verdict of modern science, the law of life,
+but of death. Strife is not nature's way of progress.
+
+Anything more important to our present inquiry than this verdict of
+science it would be difficult to imagine. Men have for so long believed
+and declared struggle and competition to be the "law of nature," and
+opposed Socialism on the ground of its supposed antagonism to that law,
+that this new conception of nature's method comes as a vindication of
+the Socialist position. The naturalist testifies to the universality of
+the principle of coöperation throughout the animal world, and the
+historian and sociologist to its universality throughout the greatest
+part of man's history. Present economic tendencies toward combination
+and away from competition, in industry and commerce, appear as the
+fulfilling of a great universal law. And the vain efforts of men to stop
+that process, by legislation, boycotts, and divers other methods, appear
+as efforts to set aside immutable law. Like so many Canutes, they bid
+the tides halt, and, like Canute's, their commands are vain and mocked
+by the unheeding tides.
+
+Under Communism, then, man lived for many thousands of years. As far
+back as we can go into the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find evidences
+of this. All the great authorities, Morgan, Maine, Lubbock, Taylor,
+Bachofen, and many others, agree in this. And under this Communism all
+the great fundamental inventions were evolved, as Morgan and others have
+shown. The wheel, the potter's wheel, the lever, the stencil plate, the
+sail, the rudder, the loom, were all evolved under Communism in its
+various stages. So, too, the cultivation of cereals for food, the
+smelting of metals, the domestication of animals,--to which we owe so
+much, and on which we still so largely depend,--were all introduced
+under Communism. Even in our day there have been found many survivals of
+this Communism among primitive peoples. Mention need only be made here
+of the Bantu tribes of Africa, whose splendid organization astonished
+the British, and the Eskimos. It is now possible to trace with a fair
+amount of certainty the progress of mankind through various stages of
+Communism, from the unconscious Communism of the nomad to the
+consciously organized and directed Communism of the most highly
+developed tribes, right up to the threshold of civilization, when
+private property takes the place of common, tribal property, and
+economic classes appear.[92]
+
+
+V
+
+Private property, other than that personal ownership and use of things,
+such as weapons and tools, which involves no class or caste domination,
+and is an integral feature of all forms of Communism, first appears in
+the ownership of man by man. Slavery, strange as it may seem, is
+directly traceable to tribal Communism, and first appears as a tribal
+institution. When one tribe made war upon another, its efforts were
+directed to the killing of as many of its enemies as possible. Cannibal
+tribes killed their foes for food, rarely or never killing their
+fellow-tribesmen for that purpose. Non-cannibalistic tribes killed their
+foes merely to get rid of them. But when the power of mankind over the
+forces of external nature had reached that point in its development
+where it became relatively easy for a man to produce more than was
+necessary for his own maintenance, the custom arose of making captives
+of enemies and setting them to work. A foe captured had thus an economic
+value to the tribe. Either he could be set to work directly, his surplus
+product enriching the tribe, or he could be used to relieve some of his
+captors from other necessary duties, thus enabling them to produce more
+than would otherwise be possible, the effect being the same in the end.
+The property of the tribe at first, slaves become at a later stage
+private property--probably through the institution of the tribal
+distribution of wealth. Cruel, revolting, and vile as slavery appears to
+our modern sense,--especially the earlier forms of slavery before the
+body of legislation, and, not less important, sentiment, which
+surrounded it later arose,--it still was a step forward, a distinct
+advance upon the older customs of cannibalism and wholesale slaughter.
+
+Nor was it a progressive step only on the humanitarian side. It had
+other, profounder consequences from the evolutionary point of view. It
+made a leisure class possible, and provided the only conditions under
+which art, philosophy, and jurisprudence could be evolved. The secret of
+Aristotle's saying, that only by the invention of machines would the
+abolition of slavery ever be made possible, lies in his recognition of
+the fact that the labor of slaves alone made possible the devotion of a
+class of men to the pursuit of knowledge instead of to the production of
+the primal necessities of life. The Athens of Pericles, for example,
+with all its varied forms of culture, its art and its philosophy, was a
+semi-communism of a caste above, resting upon a basis of slave labor
+underneath. Similar conditions prevailed in all the so-called ancient
+democracies of civilization.
+
+The private ownership of wealth producers and their products made
+private exchange inevitable; individual ownership of land took the place
+of communal ownership, and a monetary system was invented. Here, then,
+in the private ownership of land and laborer, private production and
+exchange, we have the economic factors which caused the great revolts of
+antiquity, and led to that concentration of wealth into few hands, with
+its resulting mad luxury on the one hand and widespread proletarian
+misery upon the other, which conspired to the overthrow of Greek and
+Roman civilization. The study of those relentless economic forces which
+led to the break-up of Roman civilization is important as showing how
+chattel slavery became modified and the slave to be regarded as a serf,
+a servant bound to the soil. The lack of adequate production, the
+crippling of commerce by hordes of corrupt officials, the overburdening
+of the agricultural estates with slaves, so that agriculture became
+profitless, the crushing out of free labor by slave labor, and the rise
+of a wretched class of freemen proletarians, these, and other kindred
+causes, led to the breaking up of the great estates; the dismissal of
+superfluous slaves, in many cases, and the partial enfranchisement of
+others by making them hereditary tenants, paying a fixed share of their
+product as rent--here we have the embryonic stage of feudalism. It was a
+revolution, this transformation of the social system of Rome, of
+infinitely greater importance than the sporadic risings of a few
+thousand slaves. Yet, such is the lack of perspective which the
+historians have shown, it is given a far less important place in the
+histories than the risings in question. Slavery, chattel slavery, died
+because it had ceased to be profitable; serf labor arose because it was
+more profitable. Slave labor was economically impossible, and the labor
+of free men was morally impossible; it had, thanks to the slave system,
+come to be regarded as a degradation. In the words of Engels, "This
+brought the Roman world into a blind alley from which it could not
+escape.... There was no other help but a complete revolution."[93]
+
+The invading barbarians made the revolution complete. By the poor
+freemen proletarians who had been selling their children into slavery,
+the barbarians were welcomed. Misery, like opulence, has no patriotism.
+Many of the proletarian freemen had fled to the districts of the
+barbarians, and feared nothing so much as a return to Roman rule. What,
+then, should the proletariat care for the overthrow of the Roman state
+by the barbarians? And how much less the slaves, whose condition,
+generally speaking, could not possibly change for the worse? The free
+proletarian and the slave could join in saying, as men have said
+thousands of times in circumstances of desperation:--
+
+
+     "Our fortunes may be better; they can be no worse."
+
+
+VI
+
+Feudalism is the essential politico-economic system of the Middle Ages.
+Obscure as its origin is, and indefinite as the date of its first
+appearances, there can be no doubt whatever that the break-up of the
+Roman system, and the modification of the existing form of slavery,
+constituted the most important of its sources. Whether, as some writers
+have contended, the feudal system of land tenure and serfdom is
+traceable to Asiatic origins, being adopted by the ruling class of Rome
+in the days of the economic disintegration of the empire, or whether it
+rose spontaneously out of the Roman conditions, matters little to us.
+Whatever its archæological interest, it does not affect the narrower
+scope of our present inquiry whether economic necessity caused the
+adoption of an alien system of land tenure and agricultural production,
+or whether economic necessity caused the creation of a new system. The
+central fact is the same in either case.
+
+That period of history which we call the Middle Ages covers a span of
+well-nigh a thousand years. If we arbitrarily date its beginning from
+the successful invasion of Rome by the barbarians in the early part of
+the fifth century, and its ending with the final development of the
+craft guilds in the middle of the fourteenth century, we have a
+sufficiently exact measure of the time during which feudalism developed,
+flourished, and declined. There are few things more difficult than the
+bounding of epochs in social evolution by exact dates. Just as the
+ripening of the wheat fields comes almost imperceptibly, so that the
+farmer can say when the wheat is ripe, yet cannot say when the ripening
+occurred, so with the epochs into which social history divides itself.
+There is the unripe state and the ripe, but no chasm yawns between them;
+they are merged together. We speak of the "end" of chattel slavery, and
+the "rise" of feudalism, therefore, in a wide, general sense. As a
+matter of fact, chattel slavery survived to some extent for centuries,
+existing alongside of the new form of servitude; and its disappearance
+took place, not simultaneously throughout the civilized world, but at
+varying intervals. Likewise, there is a vast difference between the
+first, crude, ill-defined forms of feudalism and its subsequent
+development.
+
+The theory of feudalism is the "divine right of kings." God is the
+Supreme Lord of all the earth, the kings are His vice-regents, devolving
+their authority in turn upon whomsoever they will. All land is held as
+belonging to the king, God's chosen representative. He divides the realm
+among his barons, to rule over and defend. For this they pay tribute to
+the king--military service in times of war and, at a later period,
+money. In turn, the barons divide the land among the lesser nobility,
+receiving tribute from them. By these divided among the freemen, who
+also pay tribute, the land is tilled by the serfs, who pay service to
+the freeman, the lord of the manor. The serf pays no tribute directly to
+the king, only to his liege lord; the liege lord pays to his superior,
+and so on, up to the king. This is the economic framework of feudalism;
+with its ecclesiastical side we are not here concerned.
+
+At the base of the whole superstructure, then, was the serf, his
+relation to his lord differing only in degree, though in material
+degree, from that of the chattel slave. He might be, and often was, as
+brutally ill-treated as the slave before him had been; he might be
+ill-fed and ill-housed; his wife or daughters might be ravished by his
+master or his master's sons. Yet, withal, his condition was better than
+that of the slave. He could maintain his family life in an independent
+household; he possessed some rights, chief of which perhaps was the
+right to labor for himself. Having his own allotment of land, he was in
+a much larger sense a human being. Compelled to render so many days'
+service to his lord, tilling the soil, clearing the forest, quarrying
+stone, and doing domestic work, he was permitted to devote a certain,
+often an equal, number of days to work for his own benefit. Not only so,
+but the service the lord rendered him, in protecting him and his family
+from the lawless and violent robber hordes which infested the country,
+was considerable.
+
+The feudal estate, or manor, was an industrial whole, self-dependent,
+and having few essential ties binding it to the outside world. The
+barons and their retainers, lords, thanes, and freemen, enjoyed a
+certain rude plenty, some of the richer barons enjoying a considerable
+amount of luxury and splendor. The _villein_ and his sons tilled the
+soil, reaped the harvests, felled trees for fuel, built the houses,
+raised the necessary domestic animals, and killed the wild animals; his
+wife and daughters spun the flax, carded the wool, made the homespun
+clothing, brewed the mead, and gathered the grapes which they made into
+wine. There was little real dependence upon the outside world except
+for articles of luxury.
+
+Such was the basic economic institution of feudalism. But alongside of
+the feudal estate with its serf labor, there were the free laborers, no
+longer regarding labor as shameful and degrading. These free laborers
+were the handicraftsmen and free peasants, the former soon organizing
+themselves into guilds. There was a specialization of labor, but, as
+yet, little division. Each man worked at a particular craft and
+exchanged his individual products. The free craftsman would exchange his
+product with the free peasant, and sometimes his trade extended to the
+feudal manor. The guild was at once his master and protector; rigid in
+its rules, strict in its surveillance of its members, it was strong and
+effective as a protector against the impositions and invasions of feudal
+barons and their retainers. Division of labor first appears in its
+simplest form, the association of independent individual workers for
+mutual advantage, sharing their products upon a basis of equality. This
+simple coöperation involved no fundamental, revolutionary change in
+society. That came later with the development of the workshop system,
+and the division of labor upon a definite, predetermined plan. Men
+specialized now in the making of _parts_ of things; no man could say of
+a finished product, "This is _mine_, for I made it." Production had
+become a social function.
+
+
+VII
+
+At first, in its simple beginnings, the coöperation of many producers in
+one great workshop did not involve any general or far-reaching changes
+in the system of exchange. But as the new methods spread, and it became
+the custom for one or two wealthy individuals to provide the workshop
+and necessary tools and materials for production, the product of the
+combined laborers being appropriated in its entirety by the owners of
+the agencies of production, who paid the workers a money wage
+representing less than the actual value of their product, and based upon
+the cost of their subsistence, the whole economic system was once more
+revolutionized. The custom of working for wages, hitherto rare and
+exceptional, became general and customary; individual production for
+use, either directly or through the medium of personal exchange, was
+superseded by social production for private profit. The wholesale
+exchange of social products for private gain took the place of the
+personal exchange of commodities. The difference between the total cost
+of the production of commodities, including the wages of the producers,
+and their exchange value--determined at this stage by the cost of
+producing similar commodities by individual labor--constituted the share
+of the capitalist, his profit, and the objective of his investment.
+
+The new system did not spring up spontaneously and full-fledged. Like
+feudalism, it was a growth, a development of existing forms. And just as
+chattel slavery lingered on after the rise of the feudal régime, so the
+old methods of individual production and direct exchange of commodities
+for personal use lingered on in places and isolated industries long
+after the rise of the system of wage-paid labor and production for
+profit. But the old methods of production and exchange gradually became
+rare and almost obsolete. In accordance with the stern economic law that
+Marx afterward developed so clearly, the man whose methods of
+production, including his tools, are less efficient and economical than
+those of his fellows, thereby making his labor more expensive, must
+either adapt himself to the new conditions or fall in the struggle which
+ensues. The triumph of the new system of capitalist production, with its
+far greater efficiency arising from associated production upon a plan of
+specialized division of labor, was, therefore, but a question of time.
+The class of wage-workers thus gradually increased in numbers; as men
+found that they were unable to compete with the new methods, they
+accepted the inevitable and adapted themselves to the new conditions.
+The industrial revolution which established capitalism was, like the
+great revolutions which ushered in preceding social epochs, the product
+of man's tools.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[60] Edward Clodd, _Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, page
+1.
+
+[61] _Socialism and Modern Science_, by Enrico Ferri, page 96.
+
+[62] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by R. T. Ely,
+page 3.
+
+[63] Cf. Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_.
+
+[64] Clodd, _Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, page 8.
+
+[65] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 50.
+
+[66] _Mass and Class_, by W. J. Ghent, page 9.
+
+[67] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 4.
+
+[68] Schiller, _Philosophical Letters_, Preamble.
+
+[69] Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 86.
+
+[70] Karl Marx, _Notes on Feuerbach_ (written in 1845), published as an
+Appendix to _Feuerbach, The Roots the Socialist Philosophy_, by
+Friederich Engels. English translation by Austin Lewis (1903).
+
+[71] _Christianity and the Social Crisis_, by Walter Rauschenbusch
+(1907), page 4.
+
+[72] For a very scholarly discussion of this subject, the reader is
+referred to the series of articles by my friend, M. Beer, on _The Rise
+of Jewish Monotheism_, in the _Social Democrat_ (London), 1908.
+
+[73] Cf. _The Economic Foundations of Society_, by Achille Lorio, page
+26.
+
+[74] _Capital_, by Karl Marx (Kerr edition). Vol. I, page 91.
+
+[75] Cf. _Karl Marx on Sectarianism and Dogmatism_ (A letter written to
+his friend, Bolte), in the _International Socialist Review_, March,
+1908, page 525.
+
+[76] Very significant of the possibilities of a study of religious
+movements from this economic and social viewpoint is Professor Thomas C.
+Hall's little book, _The Social Meaning of Modern Religious Movements in
+England_ (1900).
+
+[77] Appendix to F. Engels' _Feuerbach, the Roots of the Socialist
+Philosophy_, translated by Austin Lewis, 1903.
+
+[78] _The Eighteenth Brumaire._
+
+[79] Quoted from _The Sozialistische Akademiker_, 1895, by Seligman,
+_The Economic Interpretation of History_, page 142.
+
+[80] _Idem_, page 143.
+
+[81] _Karl Marx's Nationaloekonomische Irrlehren_, von Ludwig Slonimski,
+Berlin, 1897.
+
+[82] I have not attempted to give a history of the development of the
+theory. For a more minute study of the theory, I must refer the reader
+to the writings of Engels, Seligman, Ferri, Ghent, Bax, and others
+quoted in these pages.
+
+[83] _Capital_, Vol. I, page 406 n. (Kerr edition).
+
+[84] Liebknecht, _Memoirs of Karl Marx_, page 91.
+
+[85] _Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, A Comparison_, by Edward Aveling,
+London, 1897.
+
+[86] See Thorold Rogers, _The Economic Interpretation of History_,
+second edition, 1891, pages 10-12.
+
+[87] For various reasons, chief of which is that it would take me too
+far away from my present purpose, I do not attempt to develop the
+serious consequences of these events to Europe. See _The Economic
+Interpretation of History_, Chapter I, for a brief account of this.
+
+[88] _Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from
+Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization_, by Lewis H. Morgan. New
+edition, Chicago, 1907.
+
+[89] Darwin, _The Descent of Man_, second edition, page 163.
+
+[90] _Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_, by Peter Kropotkin, pages 5-6.
+
+[91] _Idem_, page 74.
+
+[92] Cf. _Ancient Society_, by Lewis H. Morgan, and _The Origins of the
+Family, Private Property, and the State_, by Friederich Engels.
+
+[93] Engels, _Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State_, p.
+182.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CAPITALISM AND THE LAW OF CONCENTRATION
+
+
+I
+
+Such was the mode of the development of capitalistic production in its
+first stage. In this stage a permanent wage-working class was formed,
+new markets were developed, many of them by colonial expansion and
+territorial conquest, and production for sale and profit became the
+rule, instead of the exception as formerly when men produced primarily
+for use and sold only their surplus products. A new form of class
+division thus arose out of this economic soil. Instead of being bound to
+the land as the serfs had been under feudalism, the wage-workers were
+bound to their tools. They were not bound to a single master, they were
+not branded on the cheek, but they were, nevertheless, dependent upon
+the industrial lords. Economic mastery gradually shifted from the
+land-owning class to the class of manufacturers. The political and
+social history of the Middle Ages is largely the record of the struggle
+for supremacy which was waged between these two classes. That struggle
+is the central fact of the Protestant Reformation and the Cromwellian
+Commonwealth.
+
+The second stage of capitalism begins with the birth of the machine age;
+the introduction of the great mechanical inventions of the latter half
+of the seventeenth century, and the resulting industrial revolution, the
+salient features of which we have already traced. That revolution
+centered in England, whose proud but, from all other points of view than
+the commercial, foolish boast for a full century it was to be "the
+workshop of the world." The new methods of production, and the
+development of trade with India, and the colonies and the United States
+of America, providing a vast and apparently almost unlimited market, a
+tremendous rivalry was created among the people of England, tauntingly,
+but with less originality than bitterness, designated "a nation of
+shopkeepers" by Napoleon the First. Competition flourished and commerce
+grew under its mighty urge. Quite naturally, therefore, competition came
+to be regarded as "the life of trade," and the one supreme law of
+progress by British economists and statesmen. The economic conditions of
+the time fostered a sturdy individualism on the one hand, expressing
+itself in a policy of _laissez faire_, which, paradoxically, they as
+surely destroyed. The result was the paradox of a nation of theoretic
+individualists becoming, through its poor laws, and more especially
+through the vast body of industrial legislation which developed in
+spite of theories of _laissez faire_, a nation of practical
+collectivists.
+
+The third and last stage of capitalism is characterized by new forms of
+industrial ownership, administration, and control. Concentration of
+industry and the elimination of competition are the distinguishing
+features of this stage. When, more than half a century ago, the
+Socialists predicted an era of industrial concentration and monopoly as
+the outcome of the competitive struggles of the time, their prophecies
+were mocked and derided. Yet, at this distance of time, it is easy to
+see what they were foresighted enough to envisage in the future; easy
+enough to see that competition carries in its bosom the germs of its own
+inevitable destruction. In words which, as Professor Ely says,[94] seem
+to many, even non-Socialists, like a prophecy, Karl Marx argued that the
+business units in production would continuously increase in magnitude,
+until at last monopoly emerged from the competitive struggle. This
+monopoly becoming a shackle upon the system under which it has grown up,
+and thus becoming incompatible with capitalist conditions, socialization
+must, according to Marx, naturally and necessarily follow.[95] In this
+as in all the utterances of Marx upon the subject we are reminded of
+the distinction which must be made between Socialism as he conceived it
+and the Socialism of the Utopians. We never get away from the law of
+economic interpretation. Socialism, according to Marx, will develop out
+of capitalist society, and follow capitalism necessarily and inevitably.
+It is not a plan to be adopted, but a stage of social development to be
+reached.
+
+
+II
+
+For the moment, we are not concerned with the prediction that Socialism
+must follow the full development of capitalism. The important point for
+our present study is the predicted growth of monopoly out of
+competition, and the manner in which that prediction has been realized.
+Concerning the manner and extent of the fulfillment of this prediction,
+there have been many keen controversies, both within and without the
+ranks of the followers of Marx. While Marx and Engels are properly
+regarded as the first scientific Socialists, having been the first to
+postulate Socialism as the outcome of evolution, and to explore the laws
+of that evolution, they were not wholly free from the failings of the
+Utopists. It would be unreasonable to expect them to be absolutely free
+from the spirit of their age and their associates. There is, doubtless,
+something Utopian in the very mechanical conception of capitalist
+concentration which Marx held; the process is too simple and sweeping,
+the revolution too imminent. Still, by followers and critics alike, it
+is generally conceded that the _control_ of the means of production is
+being concentrated into the hands of small and ever smaller groups of
+capitalists. In recent years the increase in the number of industrial
+establishments has not kept pace with the increase in the number of
+workers employed, the increase of capital, or the value of the products
+manufactured. Not only do we find small groups of men controlling
+certain industries, but a selective process is clearly observable,
+giving to the same groups of men control of various industries otherwise
+utterly unrelated.
+
+In the early stages of the movement toward concentration and
+trustification, it was possible to classify the leading capitalists
+according to the industries with which they were identified. One set of
+capitalists, "Oil Kings," controlled the oil industry; another set,
+"Steel Kings," controlled the iron and steel industry; another set,
+"Coal Barons," controlled the coal industry, and so on throughout the
+industrial and commercial life of the nation. To-day all this has been
+changed. An examination of the "Directory of Directors" shows that the
+same men control varied enterprises. The Oil King is at the same time a
+Steel King, a Coal Baron, a Railway Magnate, and so on. The men who
+comprise the Standard Oil group, for instance, are found to control
+hundreds of other companies. They include in the scope of their
+directorate, banking, insurance, milling, real estate, railroad and
+steamship lines, gas companies, sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco
+companies, and a heterogeneous host of other concerns. Not only so, but
+these same men are large holders of investments in all the great
+European countries, as well as India, Australia, Africa, Asia, and the
+South American countries, while foreign capitalists similarly, but to a
+less extent, hold large investments in American companies. Thus, the
+concentration of industrial control, through its finance, has become
+interindustrial and is rapidly becoming international. The predictions
+of Marx are being fulfilled, even though not in the precise manner
+anticipated by him.
+
+
+III
+
+During recent years there have been many criticisms of the Marxian
+theory, aiming to show that this concentration has been, and is, much
+more apparent than real. Some of the most important of these criticisms
+have come from within the ranks of the Socialist movement itself, and
+have been widely exploited as portending the disintegration of the
+Socialist movement. _Inter alia_, it may be remarked here that a certain
+fretfulness of temper characterizes most of the critics of Socialism.
+Strict adherence to the letter of Marx is pronounced as a sign of
+intellectual bondage of the movement and its leaders to the "Marxian
+fetish," and, on the other hand, every recognition of the human
+fallibility of Marx by a Socialist thinker is hailed as a sure portent
+of a split in the movement. Yet the most serious criticisms of Marx have
+come from the ranks of his followers--perhaps only another sign of the
+intellectual bankruptcy of the academic opposition to Socialism.
+
+Of course, Marx was human and fallible. If "Capital" had never been
+written, there would still have been a Socialist movement, and if it
+could be destroyed by criticism, the Socialist movement would remain.
+Socialism is the product of economic conditions, not of a theory or a
+book. "Capital" is the intellectual explanation of the genesis of
+Socialism, and neither its cause nor an argument for it by which it must
+be judged. Hence the futility of such missions as that undertaken by Mr.
+W. H. Mallock, for example, based upon the assumption that attacks upon
+the text of Marx will serve to destroy or seriously hinder the living
+movement. Like a prophet's rebuke to these critics, as well as to those
+within the ranks of the Socialist movement who would make of the words
+of Marx and Engels fetters to bind the movement to a dogma, come the
+words of Engels, published recently, letters in which he writes
+vigorously to his friend Sorge concerning the working-class movement in
+England and America. Of his compatriots, the handful of German Socialist
+exiles in America, who sought to make the American workers swallow a
+mass of ill-digested Marxian theory, he writes, "The Germans have never
+understood how to apply themselves from their theory to the lever which
+could set the American masses in motion; to a great extent they do not
+understand the theory itself and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic
+fashion.... It is a credo to them, not a guide to action." And again,
+"Our theory is not a dogma, but the exposition of a process of
+evolution, and that process involves several successive phases." Of the
+English movement he writes, "And here an instinctive Socialism is more
+and more taking possession of the masses which, _fortunately_, is
+opposed to all distinct formulation according to the dogmas of one or
+the other so-called organizations," and again, he condemns "the bringing
+down of the Marxian theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy."[96] The
+critics who hope to destroy the Socialist movement of to-day by
+stringing together mistaken predictions of Marx and Engels, or who think
+that Socialism is losing its grip because it is adjusting its
+expressions to the changed conditions which the progress of fifty years
+has brought about, utterly mistake the character of the movement. In
+its abandonment of the errors of Marx it is most truly Marxian--because
+it is expressing life instead of repeating dogma.
+
+Doubtless Marx anticipated a much more complete concentration of capital
+and industry than has yet taken place; doubtless, too, he underrated the
+powers of endurance of some petty industries, and saw the breakdown of
+capitalism in a cataclysm, whereas modern Socialists see its merging
+into a form of socialization. But, when all this is admitted, it cannot
+be fairly said that the sum of criticism has seriously affected the
+general Marxian theory, as apart from its particular exposition by Marx
+himself. So far as the criticism has touched the subject of capitalist
+concentration, it has been pitifully weak, and the furore it has created
+seems almost pathetic. The main results of this criticism may be briefly
+summarized as follows: First, in industry, the persistence, and, in some
+cases, even increase, of petty industries; second, in agriculture, the
+failure of large-scale farming, and the decrease of the average farm
+acreage; third, in retail trade, the persistence of the small stores,
+despite the growth in size and number of the great department stores;
+fourth, the fact that concentration of industry does not imply a like
+concentration of wealth, the number of shareholders in a great
+industrial combination being frequently greater than the number of
+owners in the units of industry prior to the combination. At first
+sight, and stated in this manner, it would seem as if these conclusions,
+if justified by the facts, involved a serious and far-reaching criticism
+of the Socialist theory of a universal tendency toward the concentration
+of industry and commerce into units of ever increasing magnitude.
+
+But upon closer examination, these conclusions, their accuracy admitted,
+are seen to involve no very damaging criticism of the theory. To the
+superficial observer, the mere increase in the number of industrial
+establishments seems a much more important matter than to the careful
+student, who is not easily deceived by appearances. The student sees
+that while some petty industries undoubtedly do increase in number, the
+increase of large industries employing many more workers and much larger
+capitals is vastly greater. Furthermore, he sees what the superficial
+observer constantly overlooks, namely, that these petty industries are,
+for the most part, unstable and transient, being continually absorbed by
+the larger industrial combinations or crushed out of existence, as soon
+as they have obtained sufficient vitality and strength to make them
+worthy of notice, either as tributaries to be desired or potential
+competitors to be feared. Petty industries in a very large number of
+cases represent a stage in social descent, the wreckage of larger
+industries whose owners are economically as dependent as the ordinary
+wage-workers, or even poorer and more to be pitied. Where, on the
+contrary, it is a stage in social ascent, the petty industry is,
+paradoxical as the idea may appear, frequently part of the process of
+industrial concentration. By independent gleaning, it endeavors to find
+sufficient business to maintain its existence. If it fails in this, its
+owner falls back to the proletarian level from which, in most instances,
+he arose. If it succeeds only to a degree sufficient to maintain its
+owner at or near the average wage-earner's level of comfort, it may pass
+unnoticed and unmolested. If, on the other hand, it gleans sufficient
+business to make it desirable as a tributary, or potentially dangerous
+as a competitor, the petty business is pounced upon by its mightier
+rival and either absorbed or crushed, according to the temper or need of
+the latter. Critics of the Marxian theory have for the most part
+completely failed to recognize this significant aspect of the subject,
+and attached far too much importance to the continuance of petty
+industries.
+
+
+IV
+
+What is true of petty industry is true in even greater measure of retail
+trade. Nothing could well be further from the truth than the hasty
+generalization of some critics, that an increase in the number of retail
+business establishments invalidates the theory of a progressive
+concentration of capital. In the first place, many of these
+establishments have no independence whatsoever, but are merely agencies
+of larger enterprises. Mr. Macrosty has shown that in London the cheap
+restaurants are in the hands of four or five firms, and this is a branch
+of business which, because it calls for relatively small capital, shows
+in a marked manner the increase of establishments. Much the same
+conditions exist in connection with the trade in milk and bread.[97]
+Similar conditions prevail in almost all the large cities of this
+country. Single companies are known to control hundreds of saloons,
+restaurants, cigar stores, shoe stores, bake shops, coal depots, and the
+like. A multitude of other businesses are subject to this rule, and it
+is doubtful whether, after all, there has been the real increase of
+individual ownership which Mr. Ghent concedes.[98] However that may be,
+it is certain that a very large number of the business establishments
+which figure as statistical units in the argument against the Socialist
+theory of the concentration of capital might very properly be regarded
+as so many evidences in its favor.
+
+A very large number of small businesses, moreover, are really
+manipulated by speculators, and serve only as a means of divesting
+prudent and thrifty artisans and others of their little savings.
+Whoever has lived in the poorer quarters of a great city, where small
+stores are most numerous, and has watched the changes constantly
+occurring in the stores of the neighborhood, will realize the
+significance of this observation. The writer has known stores on the
+upper East Side of New York, where for several years he resided, change
+hands as many as six or seven times in a single year. What happened was
+generally this: A workingman having been thrown out of employment, or
+forced to give up his work by reason of age, sickness, or accident,
+decided to attempt to make a living in "business." In a few weeks, or a
+few months at most, his small savings were swallowed up, and he had to
+leave the store, making place for the next victim. An acquaintance of
+the writer owns six tenement houses in different parts of New York City,
+the ground floors of which are occupied by small stores. These stores
+are rented by the month just as other portions of the buildings are, and
+the owner, on going over his books for a period of five years, found
+that the average duration of tenancy in them had been less than eight
+months.
+
+During the past few years in the United States, as a result of the
+development of the many inventions for the production of "moving
+pictures," a new kind of cheap, popular theater has become common.
+Usually the charge of admission is five cents, whence the name
+"Nickelodeon"; the entertainment consists usually of a number of more or
+less dramatic incidents portrayed by means of the pictures, and a few
+songs, generally illustrated by pictures, and sung to the accompaniment
+of a mechanical piano. In almost every town in the United States these
+cheap pictorial theaters have appeared and their number will, doubtless,
+considerably swell the total of business establishments. In the small
+towns of the State of New York, the writer made an investigation and
+found that there were frequently several such places in the same town;
+that they were practically all built by the same persons, started by
+them, and then leased to others. These were generally people with small
+savings who, in the course of a few weeks, lost all their money and
+retired, their places being taken by other victims of the speculators.
+What seemed to the casual observer an admirable and conspicuous example
+of an increase in petty business, proved, upon closer study, to be a
+very striking example of concentration, disguised for purposes of
+speculation.
+
+Thus reduced, the increase of small industries and retail establishments
+affects the contention that there is a general tendency to concentration
+very little. It does perhaps seriously weaken, or even destroy, some
+extreme statements of the theory, contending that the process of
+monopolization must be a direct, simple process of continuous absorption
+and elimination, leaving each year fewer small units than before. Small
+stores do exist; they have not been put out of existence by the big
+department stores as was at one time confidently predicted. They serve a
+real social need by supplying the minor commodities of everyday use in
+small quantities, just as the petty industries serve a real social need.
+Many of them are conducted by married women to supplement the earnings
+of their husbands, or by widows; others by men unable to work, whose
+income from them is less than the wages of artisans. Together, these
+probably constitute a majority of the small retail establishments which
+show any tendency to increase.[99]
+
+The effect of this increase is still further lessened when it is
+remembered that only the critics of Socialism interpret the Marxian
+theory to mean that _all_ petty industry and business must disappear,
+that all must be concentrated into large industrial and commercial
+units, to make Socialism possible. If we are to judge Marxism as the
+basis of the Socialist movement, we must judge it by the interpretation
+given to it by the Socialists, and not otherwise. There is no Socialist
+of note to-day who does not realize that many small industrial and
+business enterprises will continue to exist for a very long time, even
+continuing to exist under a Socialist régime. Kautsky, perhaps the
+ablest living exponent of the Marxian theories, leader of the "Orthodox"
+Marxists, admits this. He has very ably argued that the ripeness of
+society for Socialism, for social production and control, depends, not
+upon the number of little industries that still remain, but upon the
+number of great industries which already exist.[100] The ripeness of
+society for Socialism is not disproved by the number of ruins and relics
+abounding. "Without a developed great industry, Socialism is
+impossible," says this writer. "Where, however, a great industry exists
+to a considerable degree, it is easy for a Socialist society to
+_concentrate production, and to quickly rid itself of the little
+industry_."[101] It is the increase of large industries, then, which
+Socialists regard as the essential preliminary condition of Socialism.
+
+Far more important than the increase or decrease of the number of units
+is their relative significance in the total production, a phase of the
+subject which is rather disingenuously avoided by most critics of
+Marxism. Mr. Lucien Sanial, a Socialist statistician of repute, and one
+of the profoundest Marxian students in America, has shown this in a
+number of suggestive tables. For example, he takes twenty-seven typical
+manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1900, and 1905, and
+compares the number of establishments in each year with the total amount
+of capital invested and workers employed. In 1880 the number of
+establishments was 63,233; in 1900 the number was 51,912, and in 1905 it
+was only 44,142. From 1880 to 1905 there had been a decrease in the
+number of establishments of 35.3 per cent, of which 15 per cent took
+place within the last five years. But within the same period there had
+been an increase in the amount of capital invested in these twenty-seven
+industries as follows: from $1,276,600,000 in 1880 to $3,324,500,000 in
+1900 and to $4,628,800,000 in 1905--a total increase from 1880 to 1905
+of 262.6 per cent. On the other hand, the number of wage-workers
+increased in the same period only 60.2 per cent, the number in 1905
+being 1,731,500, as against 1,611,000 in 1900 and 1,080,200 in 1880.
+
+In another table, forty-seven industries are taken. These forty-seven
+industries comprised 29,800 establishments in 1900; five years later
+there were but 26,182. In 1900 the total capital invested in these
+industries was $1,005,400,000, and in 1905 it had increased to
+$1,339,500,000. In the same five years the number of wage-workers
+increased only from 618,000 to 749,000. Thus, in the group of larger
+industries and the group of smaller ones we find the same evidences of
+concentration: less establishments, larger capitals, and an increase of
+wage-workers not equal to the increase in capitalization.[102]
+
+In connection with these figures, the following table may be profitably
+studied, as showing the relative insignificance of the small producer in
+the total volume of manufacture. It will be seen that the two largest
+classes of establishments have only 24,163 establishments, 11.2 per cent
+of the total number. But they have $10,333,000,000, or 81.5 per cent of
+the total manufacturing capital, and employ 71.6 per cent of all
+wage-workers in manufacturing industries. It may be added that they turn
+out 79.3 per cent of the total product. Of the petty industries proper,
+those having a capital of less than $5000, it will be observed that they
+number 32.9 per cent of the total number of establishments, but employ
+only 1.3 per cent of the capital invested, and only 1.9 per cent of the
+wage-workers. It is clear, therefore, that our manufacturing industry in
+very highly concentrated, and that the petty industries are, despite
+their number, a very insignificant factor.
+
+
+TABLE OF MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS, 1905[103]
+
+CAPITALS   NUMBER    PER   TOTAL CAPITAL    PER     NO. OF          PER
+                     CENT                   CENT    WAGE-WORKERS    CENT
+
+
+Less than
+$5,000      71,162   32.9   $165,300,000     1.3       106,300       1.9
+
+$5,000 to
+$20,000     72,806   33.7    531,100,000     4.2       419,600       7.7
+
+$20,000 to
+$100,000    48,144   22.2  1,655,800,000    13.0     1,027,700      18.8
+
+$100,000 to
+$1,000,000  22,281   10.0  5,551,700,000    43.8     2,537,550      46.4
+
+Over
+$1,000,000   1,882    0.9  4,782,300,000    37.7     1,379,150      25.2
+
+
+When we turn to agriculture, the criticisms of the Socialist theory
+appear more substantial and important. A few years ago we witnessed the
+rise and rapid growth of the great bonanza farms in this country. It was
+shown that the advantages of large capital and the consolidation of
+productive forces resulted, in farming as in manufacture, in greatly
+cheapened production.[104] The end of the small farm was declared to be
+imminent, and it seemed for a while that concentration in agriculture
+would even outrun concentration in manufacture. This predicted
+absorption of the small farms by the larger, and the average increase of
+farm acreage, has not, however, been fulfilled to any great degree. An
+increase in the number of small farms, and a decrease in the average
+acreage, is shown in almost all the states. The increase of great
+estates shown by the census figures probably bears little or no relation
+to real farming, consisting mainly of great stock grazing ranches in the
+West, and unproductive gentlemen's estates in the East.
+
+Apparently, then, the Socialist theory that "the big fish eat up the
+little ones, and are in turn eaten by still bigger ones," is not
+applicable to agriculture. On the contrary, it seems that the great
+farms cannot compete successfully with the smaller farms. It is
+therefore not surprising that writers so sympathetic to Socialism as
+Professor Werner Sombart and Professor Richard T. Ely should claim that
+the Marxian system breaks down when it reaches the sphere of
+agricultural industry, and that it seems to be applicable only to
+manufacture. This position has been taken by a not inconsiderable body
+of Socialists in recent years, and is one of the tenets of that critical
+movement within the Socialist ranks which has come to be known as
+"Revisionism." Nothing is more delusive than statistical argument of
+this kind, and while these conclusions should be given due weight, they
+should not be too hastily accepted. An examination of the statistical
+basis of the argument is necessary.
+
+In the first place, small agricultural holdings do not necessarily
+imply economic independence, any more than do petty industries or
+businesses. When we examine the census figures carefully, the first
+important fact which challenges attention is that, whereas of the farms
+in the United States in 1880, 71.6 per cent were operated by their
+owners, in 1900 the _proportion_ had declined to 64.7 per cent. In 1900,
+of the 5,739,657 farms in the United States, no less than 2,026,286 were
+operated by tenants. Concerning the ownership of these rented farms
+little investigation has been made, and it is likely that careful
+inquiry would elicit the fact that this is a not unimportant phase of
+agricultural concentration, though not revealed by the figures in the
+census reports. It remains to be said concerning these figures, however,
+that they do not lend support to the theory that the small farms are
+being swallowed up by the larger ones, for in the same period there was
+a very decided increase in the _number_ of farms operated by their
+owners. Thus we have the same set of figures used to support both sides
+of the controversy--one side calling attention to the decreased
+_proportion_ of farms operated by their owners, the other to the
+increased _number_.
+
+A similar difficulty presents itself in connection with the subject of
+mortgaged farm holdings. In 1890, the mortgaged indebtedness of the
+farmers of the United States amounted to the immense sum of
+$1,085,995,960, a sum almost equal to the value of the entire wheat
+crop. Now, while a mortgage is certainly not suggestive of independence,
+it may be either a sign of decreasing or increasing independence. It may
+be a step toward the ultimate loss of one's farm or a step toward the
+ultimate ownership of one. Much that has been written by Populist and
+Socialist pamphleteers and editors upon this subject has been based upon
+the entirely erroneous assumption that a mortgaged farm meant loss of
+economic independence, whereas it often happens that it is a step toward
+it. The fact is that we know very little concerning the ownership of
+these mortgages, which is the crux of the question. It is known that
+many of the insurance, banking, and trust companies have invested
+largely in farm mortgages. This is another phase of concentration which
+the critics of the theory have overlooked almost entirely. One thing
+seems certain, namely, that farm ownership is not on the decline. It is
+not being supplanted by tenantry; the small farms are not being absorbed
+by larger ones. It seems a fair deduction from the facts, then, that the
+small farmer will continue to be an important factor--indeed, the most
+important factor--in American agriculture for a long time to come,
+perhaps permanently. If the Socialist movement is to succeed in America,
+it must recognize this fact in its propaganda.
+
+
+V
+
+Most of the criticism of the Marxian theory of concentration is based
+upon a very unsatisfactory definition of what is meant by concentration.
+The decrease of small units and their absorption or supercession by
+larger units is generally understood when concentration is spoken of.
+But concentration may take other, very different forms. There may be a
+concentration of _control_, for example, without concentration of actual
+ownership, or there may be concentration of actual ownership disguised
+by mortgages, as already suggested. The sweated trades are a familiar
+example of the former method of concentration. It has been shown over
+and over again that while small establishments remain a necessary
+condition of sweated industry, there is almost always effective
+concentration of control. To all appearances an independent manufacturer
+on a small scale, the sweater is generally nothing more than the agent
+of some big establishment, which finds it more economical to let the
+work be done in sweatshops than in its own factories. The same thing
+holds good of the retail trades, many of the apparently independent
+retail stores being simply agencies for big wholesale houses, controlled
+by them in every way. In an even larger measure, agriculture is subject
+to a control that is quite independent of actual or even nominal
+ownership of the farm. Manifestly, therefore, we need a more accurate
+and comprehensive definition of concentration than the one generally
+accepted. Mr. A. M. Simons, in an admirable study of the agricultural
+question from the Socialist viewpoint, defines concentration as "a
+movement tending to give a continually diminishing minority of the
+persons engaged in any industry, a constantly increasing control over
+the essentials, and a continually increasing share of the total value of
+the returns of the industry."[105] It is no part of the purpose of this
+chapter to discuss this definition at length. It is sufficient to have
+thus emphasized that concentration may be quite as effective when it is
+limited to control as when it embraces ownership.
+
+There are, then, other forms of concentration than the physical one, the
+amalgamation of smaller units to form larger ones, and very often these
+forms of concentration go on unperceived and unsuspected. There can be
+no doubt that this is especially true of agricultural industry. Many
+branches of farming, as the industry was carried on by our fathers and
+their fathers before them, have been transferred from the farmhouse to
+the factory. Butter and cheese making, for example, have largely passed
+out of the farm kitchen into the factory. The writer recalls a visit to
+a large farm in the Middle West. The sound of a churn is never heard
+there, notwithstanding that it is a "dairy farm," and all the butter
+and cheese consumed in that household is bought at the village store.
+Doubtless this farm but presented an exaggerated form of a condition
+that is becoming more and more common. The invention of labor-saving
+machinery and its application to agriculture leads to a division of the
+industry and the absorption by the factory of the parts most influenced
+by the new processes. When we remember the tremendous rôle which complex
+agencies outside of the farm play in modern agricultural industry, we
+see the subject of concentration as it applies to that industry in a new
+light. The grain elevators, cold-storage houses, creameries, and even
+railroads, are part of the necessary equipment of production, but they
+are owned and operated independently of the farm. There is a good deal
+of concentration of production in agriculture which takes the form of
+the absorption of some of its processes by factories instead of by other
+farms.
+
+
+VI
+
+We must also distinguish between the concentration of industry and the
+concentration of wealth. While there is a natural relation between these
+two phenomena, they are by no means identical. The trustification of a
+given industry may bring together a score of industrial units in one
+gigantic concern, so concentrating capital and production, but it is
+conceivable that every one of the owners of the units which compose the
+trust may have a share in it equal to the capital value of his
+particular unit, but more profitable. In that case, there can obviously
+be no concentration of wealth. What occurs is that all are benefited by
+certain economies, in exact proportion to their holdings in the capital
+stock. It may even happen that a larger number of persons participate,
+as shareholders, in the amalgamation than were formerly concerned in the
+ownership of the units of which the amalgamation is composed. Assuming,
+for the purposes of our argument, that these persons are represented by
+new capital, that the former owners of independent units share upon an
+equitable basis, there will be increased diffusion of wealth instead of
+its concentration. As Professor Ely says, "If the stock of the United
+States Steel Corporation were owned by individuals holding one share
+each, the concentration in industry would be just as great as it is now,
+but there would be a wide diffusion in the ownership of the wealth of
+the corporation."[106]
+
+Obvious as this distinction may seem, it is very often lost sight of,
+and when recognized it presents difficulties which are almost
+insurmountable. It is well-nigh impossible to present statistically the
+relation of the concentration of capital to the concentration or
+diffusion of wealth, important as the point is in its bearings upon
+modern Socialist theory. While the distinction does not affect the
+argument that the concentration of capital and industry makes their
+socialization possible, it is nevertheless an important matter. If, as
+some writers, notably Bernstein,[107] the Socialist, have argued, the
+concentration of capital and industry really leads to the
+decentralization of wealth, and the diffusion of the advantages of
+concentration among the great mass of the people, especially by creating
+a new class of salaried dependents, then, instead of creating a class of
+exploiters ever becoming less numerous, and a class of proletarians ever
+becoming more numerous, the tendency of modern capitalism is to
+distribute the gains of industry over a widening area--a process of
+democratization in fact. It is very evident that if this contention is a
+correct one, there must be a softening rather than an intensifying of
+class antagonisms; a tendency away from class divisions, and to greater
+satisfaction with present conditions, rather than increasing discontent.
+If this theory can be sustained, the advocates of Socialism will be
+obliged to change the nature of their propaganda from an appeal to the
+economic interest of the proletariat to the general ethical sense of
+mankind. There can be no successful movement based upon the interests
+of one class if the tendency of modern capitalism is to democratize the
+life of the world and diffuse its wealth over larger social areas than
+ever before.
+
+The exponents of this theory have based their arguments upon statistical
+data chiefly relating to: (1) The number of taxable incomes in countries
+where incomes are taxed; (2) the number of investors in industrial and
+commercial countries; (3) the number of savings bank deposits. As often
+happens when reliance is placed upon the direct statistical method, the
+result of all the discussion and controversy upon this subject is
+extremely disappointing and confusing. The same figures are used to
+support both sides of the argument with equal plausibility. The
+difficulty lies in the fact that the available statistics do not include
+all the facts essential to a scientific and conclusive result.
+
+It is not intended here to add to the Babel of voices in this
+discussion, but to present the conclusions of two or three of the most
+careful investigators in this field. Professor Ely[108] quotes a table
+of incomes in the Grand Duchy of Baden, based upon the income tax
+returns of that country, which has formed the theme of much dispute. The
+table shows that in the two years, 1886 and 1896, less than one per cent
+of the incomes assessed were over 10,000 marks a year, and from this
+fact it has been argued that wealth in that country has not been
+concentrated to any very great extent. In like manner, the French
+economist, Leroy-Beaulieu, has argued that the fact that in 1896 only
+2750 persons in Paris had incomes of over 100,000 francs a year betokens
+a wide diffusion of wealth and an absence of concentration.[109] But the
+important point of the discussion, the _proportion of the total wealth
+owned by these classes_, is entirely lost sight of by those who argue in
+this manner. Further, it must always be borne in mind that there is a
+decided tendency in all income tax schedules to understate the amount of
+incomes above a certain size, the larger the income the more likelihood
+of its being understated in the returns. The psychology of this fact
+needs no elaborate demonstration. Taking the figures for the Grand Duchy
+of Baden as they are given, we have no particulars at all concerning the
+number of incomes under 500 marks, but of the persons assessed upon
+incomes of 500 marks and over, in 1886, the poorest two thirds had about
+one third of the total income, and the richest 0.69 per cent had 12.78
+per cent of the total income. So far, the figures show a much greater
+concentration of wealth than appears from the simple fact that less than
+one per cent of the incomes assessed were over 10,000 marks a year.
+
+Going further, we compare the two years, 1886 and 1896, and find that
+this concentration increased during the ten-year period as follows: In
+1886, there were 2212 incomes of more than 10,000 marks assessed, being
+0.69 per cent of the total number. In 1896, there were 3099 incomes of
+more than 10,000 marks assessed, being 0.78 per cent of the total
+number. In 1886, 0.69 per cent of the incomes assessed amounted to
+51,403,000 marks, representing 12.77 per cent of the total assessed
+wealth; while in 1896, 0.78 per cent of the incomes assessed amounted to
+81,986,000 marks, representing 15.02 per cent of the total wealth so
+assessed. In 1886 there were 18 incomes of over 200,000 marks a year,
+aggregating 6,864,000 marks, 1.70 per cent of the total value of all
+incomes assessed; in 1896, there were 28 such incomes, aggregating
+12,481,000 marks, or 2.29 per cent of the total value of all incomes
+assessed. The increase of concentration shown by these figures is not
+disputable, it seems to the present writer, when they are thus carefully
+analyzed, notwithstanding the fact that the table from which they are
+drawn is sometimes used to support the opposite contention.
+
+According to the late Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith,[110] seventy per
+cent of the population of Prussia have incomes below the income tax
+standard, their total income representing only one third of the total
+income of the population. An additional one fourth of the population
+enjoys one third of the total income, while the remaining one third goes
+to about four per cent of the people. The significance of these figures
+is clearly shown by the following diagram:--
+
+[Illustration:
+
+                             DIAGRAM
+
+     SHOWING THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME BY CLASSES IN PRUSSIA]
+
+In Saxony the statistics show that "two thirds of the population possess
+less than one third of the income, and that 3.5 per cent of the upper
+incomes receive more than 66 per cent at the lower end." From a table
+prepared by Sir Robert Giffen, a notoriously optimistic statistician,
+always the exponent of an ultra-roseate view of social conditions,
+Professor Mayo-Smith concludes that in England, "about ten per cent of
+the people receive nearly one half of the total income."[111] These
+figures are rather out of date, it is true, but they err in understating
+the amount of concentration rather than otherwise, as the researches of
+Mr. Chiozza Money, M.P., and others show.[112]
+
+In this country, the absence of income tax figures makes it impossible
+to get direct statistical evidence as to the distribution of incomes.
+The most careful estimate of the distribution of wealth in the United
+States yet made is that by the late Dr. Charles B. Spahr.[113] Written
+in 1895, Dr. Spahr's book cannot be regarded as an accurate presentation
+of conditions as they exist at the present moment, yet here again there
+is every reason to believe that the process of concentration has gone on
+unchecked since he wrote. It is not necessary for our present purpose,
+however, to accept the estimate of Dr. Spahr as authoritative and
+conclusive. The figures are quoted here simply as the result reached by
+the most patient, conscientious, and scientific examination of the
+distribution of wealth in this country yet made. Dr. Spahr's conclusion
+was that in 1895 less than one half of the families in the United States
+were property-less; but that, nevertheless, seven eighths of the
+families owned only one eighth of the national wealth, while one per
+cent of the families owned more than the remaining ninety-nine per cent.
+
+Mr. Lucien Sanial, in a most careful analysis of the census for 1900,
+shows that, classified according to occupations, 250,251 persons
+possessed $67,000,000,000, out of a total of $95,000,000,000 given as
+the national wealth; that is to say, 0.9 per cent of the total number in
+all occupations owned 70.5 per cent of the total national wealth. The
+middle class, consisting of 8,429,845 persons, being 29.0 per cent of
+the total number in all occupations, owned $24,000,000,000, or 25.3 per
+cent of the total national wealth. The lowest class, the proletariat,
+consisting of 20,393,137 persons, being 70.1 per cent of the total
+number in all occupations, owned but $4,000,000,000, or 4.2 per cent of
+the total wealth. To recapitulate: Of the 29,073,233 persons ten years
+old and over engaged in occupations,
+
+
+      0.9 per cent own    70.5 per cent of total wealth.
+     29.0 per cent own    25.3 per cent of total wealth.
+     70.1 per cent own     4.2 per cent of total wealth.
+
+
+Startling as these figures are, it will be evident upon reflection that
+they do not adequately represent the amount of wealth concentration. The
+occupational basis is not quite satisfactory as applied to the richest
+class. It serves for the proletarian class, of course, and for a very
+large part of the middle class. In these classes, as a rule, the
+_occupied_ persons represent wealth ownership. But this is by no means
+true of the richest class. In this class we have a very considerable
+proportion of the wealth owned by _unoccupied_ persons, such as the
+wives rich in their own right, children and other unoccupied members of
+families rich by inheritance. Mr. Henry Laurens Call, in a paper read
+before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at
+Columbia University, at the end of 1906, made these figures the basis of
+the startling estimate that one per cent of our population own not less
+than ninety per cent of our total wealth.
+
+There is a peculiarity of modern capitalism which enables the great
+capitalists to control vastly more wealth than they own. Take any group
+of large capitalists, and it will be found that they _control_ a much
+greater volume of capital than they _own_. The invested capital of a
+multitude of small investors is in their keeping, and they can and do
+use it for purposes of their own. Thus we have a concentration of
+capitalist control which goes far beyond the concentration of ownership.
+And this concentration of the essential control of the capital of a
+country becomes more and more important each year. It is recognized
+to-day that the most important capitalist is not he who himself owns the
+greatest amount of capital, but he who controls the greatest amount,
+quite irrespective of its ownership.
+
+The growth of immense private fortunes is an indisputable evidence of
+the concentration of wealth. In 1854 there were not more than
+twenty-five millionaires in New York City, their total fortunes
+aggregating $43,000,000. There were not more than fifty millionaires in
+the whole of the United States, their aggregate fortunes not exceeding
+$80,000,000. To-day there are several individual fortunes of more than
+$80,000,000 each. New York City alone is said to have over two thousand
+millionaires, and the United States more than five thousand. By a
+curious mental process, the _New York World_, when the first edition of
+this little book appeared, sought to prove in a labored editorial that
+the increase of millionaires tended to prove an increasing diffusion of
+wealth rather than the contrary. It is hardly worth while, perhaps,
+making any reply to such puerility. Every student knows that the
+multimillionaire is only possible as a result of the concentration of
+wealth, that such fortunes are realized by the absorption of numerous
+smaller ones. Further, it is only necessary to add that all the
+millionaires of 1854, together with the half millionaires, owned not
+more than about $100,000,000 out of the total wealth, which was at that
+time something like $10,000,000,000. In other words, they owned not more
+than one per cent of the wealth of the country. In 1890, when the wealth
+of the country was slightly more than $65,000,000,000, Senator Ingalls
+could quote in the United States Senate a table showing that the
+millionaires and half millionaires of that time, 31,100 persons in all,
+owned $36,250,000,000, or just fifty-six per cent of the entire wealth
+of the United States.[114] Professor Ely accepts the logic of the
+statistical data gathered in Europe and the United States, and says
+"such statistics as we have ... all indicate a marked concentration of
+wealth, both in this country and Europe."[115]
+
+
+VII
+
+Summing up, we may state the argument of this chapter very briefly as
+follows: The Socialist theory is that competition is self-destructive,
+and that the inevitable result of the competitive process is to produce
+monopoly, either through the crushing out of the weak by the strong, or
+the combination of units as a result of a conscious recognition of the
+wastes of competition and the advantages of coöperation. The law of
+capitalist development, therefore, is from competition and division to
+combination and concentration. As this concentration proceeds, a large
+class of proletarians is formed on the one hand, and a small class of
+capitalist lords on the other, an essential antagonism of interests
+existing between the two classes. Petty industries may continue to
+exist, though, upon the whole, the tendency is toward their extinction.
+In certain industries, their number may even increase, but their
+relative importance is constantly decreasing. While Socialism does not
+preclude the continued existence of small private industry or business,
+it does require and depend upon the development of a large body of
+concentrated industry, monopolies which can be transformed into social
+monopolies whenever the people may decide so to transform them. These
+conditions are being fulfilled in the evolution of our economic system.
+
+The interindustrial and international trustification of industry shows a
+remarkable fulfillment of the law of capitalist concentration which the
+Socialists were the first to formulate; the existence of petty
+industries and businesses, or their numerical increase even, being a
+relatively insignificant matter compared with the enormous increase in
+large industries and businesses, and their share in the total volume of
+industry and commerce. In agriculture, concentration, while it does not
+proceed so rapidly or directly as in manufacture and commerce, and while
+it takes directions and forms unforeseen by the Socialists of a
+generation ago, proceeds surely nevertheless. Along with this
+concentration of capital and industry proceeds the concentration of
+wealth into proportionately fewer hands. While a certain diffusion of
+wealth takes place through the mechanism of capitalist concentration, by
+developing a new class of highly salaried officials, and enabling
+numerous small investors to own shares in great industrial and
+commercial corporations, it is not sufficient to balance the
+expropriation which goes on in the competitive struggle, and it is true
+that a larger proportion of the national wealth is owned by a minority
+of the population than ever before, that minority being proportionately
+less numerous than ever before. Further, the peculiar financial
+organization of modern capitalist society enables the ruling capitalists
+to control and use to their own advantage the wealth of others invested
+in industrial and commercial corporations. Thus to the concentration of
+ownership must be added the concentration of control, which plays an
+increasingly important part in capitalist economics.
+
+Whatever defects there may be in the Marxian theory, as outlined by Marx
+himself, and whatever modifications of his statement of it may be
+rendered necessary by changed conditions, in its main and essential
+features it has successfully withstood all the criticisms which have
+been directed against it. Economic literature is full of prophecies, but
+in its whole range there is not an instance of prophecy more literally
+and abundantly fulfilled than that which Marx made concerning the trend
+of capitalist development. And Karl Marx was not a prophet--he but read
+clearly the meaning of certain facts which others had not learned to
+read, the law of social dynamics. That is not prophecy, but science.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by R. T. Ely,
+page 95.
+
+[95] _Capital_, Vol. I (Kerr edition), page 837.
+
+[96] _Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos.
+Dietzgen, Friederich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere_,
+Stuttgart, 1906.
+
+[97] H. W. Macrosty, _The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry_
+(Fabian Tract).
+
+[98] _Our Benevolent Feudalism_, by W. J. Ghent, pages 17-21.
+
+[99] A factor of tremendous importance in the maintenance of petty
+industries and business establishments in this country, which Marx could
+not have anticipated, has been the unprecedented volume of foreign
+immigration. Not only have some menial personal services--such as shoe
+cleaning, for example--been transformed into regular businesses by
+immigrants from certain countries, but the massing together of
+immigrants, aliens in language, customs, tastes, and manners, provides a
+very favorable soil for the development of small business enterprises.
+
+[100] _The Social Revolution_, by Karl Kautsky, Part I, page 144. See
+also the argument by Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, that Socialism
+will not oppose petty agriculture by private individuals working their
+own farms.--_Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, October, 1898, page 70.
+
+[101] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, page 144.
+
+[102] The figures are quoted from _Socialism Inevitable_, by Gaylord
+Wilshire, pages 325-326.
+
+[103] The table is quoted from _Socialism Inevitable_, by Gaylord
+Wilshire, page 326.
+
+[104] The cost of raising wheat in California, where large farming has
+been most scientifically developed, is said to vary from 92.5 cents per
+100 pounds on farms of 1000 acres to 40 cents on farms of 50,000 acres.
+
+[105] _The American Farmer_, by A. M. Simons, page 97.
+
+[106] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by Richard T.
+Ely, page 255.
+
+[107] _Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus_, by Edward Bernstein, page
+47.
+
+[108] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, by Richard T.
+Ely, pages 261-262.
+
+[109] _Essai sur la repartition des richesses et sur la tendance à une
+moindre inégalité des conditions_, par Leroy-Beaulieu, page 564.
+
+[110] _Statistics and Economics_, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III,
+Distribution.
+
+[111] _Statistics and Economics_, by Richmond Mayo-Smith, Book III,
+Distribution.
+
+[112] Cf. _Riches and Poverty_, by Chiozza Money, M.P.; also, _Fabian
+Tract_, No. 5.
+
+[113] _The Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States_, by
+Charles B. Spahr (1896).
+
+[114] _Writings and Speeches of John J. Ingalls_, page 320.
+
+[115] _Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, page 265.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CLASS STRUGGLE THEORY
+
+
+I
+
+No part of the theory of modern Socialism has called forth so much
+criticism and opposition as the doctrine of the class struggle. Many who
+are otherwise sympathetic to Socialism denounce this doctrine as narrow,
+brutal, and productive of antisocialistic feelings of class hatred. Upon
+all hands the doctrine is condemned as an un-American appeal to passion
+and a wicked exaggeration of social conditions. When President Roosevelt
+attacks the preachers of the doctrine, and wrathfully condemns
+class-consciousness as "a foul thing," he doubtless expresses the views
+of a majority of American citizens. The insistence of Socialists upon
+this aspect of their propaganda is undoubtedly responsible for keeping a
+great many outside of their movement who otherwise would be identified
+with it. If the Socialists would repudiate the doctrine that Socialism
+is a class movement, and make their appeal to the intelligence and
+conscience of all classes, instead of to the interests of a special
+class, they could probably double their numerical strength at once. To
+many, therefore, it seems a fatuous and quixotic policy to preach such a
+doctrine, and it is very often charitably ascribed to the peculiar
+intellectual and moral myopia of fanaticism.
+
+Before accepting this conclusion, and before indorsing the Rooseveltian
+verdict, the reader is bound as a matter of common fairness, and of
+intellectual integrity, to consider the Socialist side of the argument.
+There is no greater fanaticism than that which condemns what it does not
+take the trouble to understand. The Socialists claim that the doctrine
+is misrepresented; that it does not produce class hatred; and that it is
+a vital and pivotal point of Socialist philosophy. The class struggle,
+says the Socialist, is a law of social development. We only recognize
+the law, and are no more responsible for its existence than for the law
+of gravitation. The name of Marx is associated with the law in just the
+same manner as the name of Newton is associated with the law of
+gravitation, but Marx is no more responsible for the social law he
+discovered than was Newton for the physical law he discovered. There
+were class struggles thousands of years before there was a Socialist
+movement, thousands of years before Marx was born, and it is therefore
+absurd to charge us with the creation of the class struggle, or class
+hatred. We realize perfectly well that if we ignored this law in our
+propaganda, making our appeal to a universal sense of abstract justice
+and truth, many who now hold aloof from us would join our movement. But
+we should not gain strength as a result of their accession to our ranks.
+We should be obliged to emasculate Socialism, to dilute it, in order to
+win a support of questionable value. History teems with examples of the
+disaster which inevitably attends such a course. We should be quixotic
+and fatuous indeed if we attempted anything of the kind. Such, briefly
+stated, are the main outlines of the reply which the average Socialist
+gives to the criticism of the class struggle doctrine described.
+
+The class struggle theory is part of the economic interpretation of
+history. Since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, the modes of
+economic production and exchange have inevitably grouped men into
+economic classes. The theory is thus admirably stated by Engels in the
+Introduction to the _Communist Manifesto_:--
+
+"In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production
+and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it,
+form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be
+explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; and,
+consequently, the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of
+primitive society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history
+of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling
+and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a
+series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where
+the exploited and oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its
+emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the
+bourgeoise--without, at the same time, and once and for all,
+emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class
+distinctions, and class struggles."[116]
+
+In this classic statement of the theory, there are several fundamental
+propositions. First, that class divisions and class struggles arise out
+of the economic life of society. Second, that since the dissolution of
+primitive tribal society, which was communistic in character, mankind
+has been divided into economic groups or classes, and all its history
+has been a history of struggles between these classes, ruling and ruled,
+exploiting and exploited, being forever at war with each other. Third,
+that the different epochs in human history, stages in the evolution of
+society, have been characterized by the interests of the ruling class.
+Fourth, that a stage has now been reached in the evolution of society
+where the struggle assumes a form which makes it impossible for class
+distinctions and class struggles to continue if the exploited and
+oppressed class, the proletariat, succeeds in emancipating itself. In
+other words, the cycle of class struggles which began with the
+dissolution of rude, tribal communism, and the rise of private property,
+ends with the passing of private property in the means of social
+existence and the rise of Socialism. The proletariat in emancipating
+itself destroys all the conditions of class rule.
+
+
+II
+
+As we have already seen, slavery is historically the first system of
+class division which presents itself. Some ingenious writers have
+endeavored to trace the origin of slavery to the institution of the
+family, the children being the first slaves. It is fairly certain,
+however, that slavery originated in conquest. When a tribe was conquered
+and enslaved by some more powerful tribe, all the members of the
+vanquished tribe sunk to one common level of servility and degradation.
+Their exploitation as laborers was the principal object of their
+enslavement, and their labor admitted of little gradation. It is easy to
+see the fundamental class antagonisms which characterized slavery. Has
+there been no uprisings of the slaves, no active and conscious struggle
+against their masters, the antagonism of interests between them and
+their masters would be none the less apparent. But the overthrow of
+slavery was not the result of the rebellions and struggles of the
+slaves. While these undoubtedly helped, the principal factors in the
+overthrow of chattel slavery as the economic foundation of society were
+the disintegration of the system to the point of bankruptcy, and the
+rise of a new, and sometimes, as in the case of Rome, alien ruling
+class.
+
+The class divisions of feudal society are not less obvious than those of
+chattel slavery. The main division, the widest gulf, divided the feudal
+lord and the serf. Often as brutally ill-treated as their
+slave-forefathers had been, the feudal serfs from time to time made
+abortive struggles. The class distinctions of feudalism were constant,
+but the struggles between the lords and the serfs were sporadic, and of
+comparatively little moment, just as the risings of their slave
+forefathers had been. But alongside of the feudal estate there existed
+another class, the free handicraftsmen and peasants, the former
+organized into powerful guilds. It was this class, and not the serf
+class, which was destined to challenge the rule of the feudal nobility,
+and wage war upon it. As the feudal class was a landed class, so the
+class represented by the guilds became a moneyed and commercial class,
+the pioneers of our modern capitalist class. As Mr. Brooks Adams[117]
+has shown very clearly, it was this moneyed, commercial class, which
+gave to the king the instrument for weakening and finally overthrowing
+feudalism. It was this class which built up the cities and towns from
+which was drawn the revenue for the maintenance of a standing army, thus
+liberating the king from his dependence upon the feudal lords. The
+capitalist class triumphed over the feudal nobility, and its interests
+became in their turn the dominant interests in society. Capitalism in
+its development effectually destroyed all those institutions of
+feudalism which obstructed its progress, leaving only those which were
+innocuous and safely to be ignored.
+
+In capitalist society, the main class division is that which separates
+the employing, wage-paying class from the employed, wage-receiving
+class. Notwithstanding all the elaborate arguments made to prove the
+contrary, the frequently heard myth that the interests of Capital and
+Labor are identical, and the existence of pacificatory associations
+based upon that myth, there is no fact in the whole range of social
+phenomena more self-evident than the existence of an inherent,
+fundamental antagonism in the relationship of employer and employee. As
+individuals, in all other relations, they may have a commonality of
+interests, but as employer and employee they are fundamentally and
+necessarily opposed. They may belong to the same church, and so have
+religious interests in common; they may have common racial interests,
+as, for instance, if negroes, in protecting themselves against the
+attacks made in a book like _The Clansman_, or, if Jews, in opposing
+anti-Semitic movements; as citizens they may have the same civic
+interests, be equally opposed to graft in the city government, or
+equally interested in the adoption of wise sanitary precautions against
+epidemics. They may even have a common industrial interest in the
+general sense that they may be equally interested in the development of
+the industry in which they are engaged, and fear, equally, the results
+of a depression in trade. But their special interests as employer and
+employee are antithetical.
+
+It cannot be denied that, in certain circumstances, these other
+interests may become so accentuated that the class antagonisms are
+momentarily lost sight of, or completely dwarfed in importance; nor is
+such a denial implied in the Socialist theory. It is not difficult to
+see that in the case of a general uprising against the members of their
+race, in which their lives are imperiled, Jewish employers and employees
+may forget their _class_ interests and remember only that they are Jews.
+So with negroes and other oppressed races. The economic interests of the
+class may be engulfed in the solidarity of the race. It is not
+difficult, either, to see that in the presence of some great common
+danger or calamity, class interests may likewise be completely
+subordinated. An admirable example of this occurred at the time of the
+San Francisco earthquake and fire. The enormous demand for labor
+occasioned by that disaster practically enabled the artisans, most of
+whom were organized into unions, to demand and obtain almost fabulous
+wages. But there was no thought of taking advantage of the calamity. On
+the contrary, the unions immediately announced that they would make no
+attempt to do so. Not only that, but they voluntarily waived rules which
+in normal times they would have insisted upon with all their powers. The
+temporary overshadowing of the economic interests of classes by other
+special interests which have been thrust into special prominence, is
+not, however, evidence that these class interests do not prevail in
+normal times. Recognition of this fact effectually destroys much
+criticism of the theory.
+
+The interest of the wage-worker, as wage-worker, is to receive the
+largest wage possible for the least number of hours spent in labor. The
+interest of the employer, as employer, on the other hand, is to secure
+from the worker as many hours of service, as much labor power, as
+possible for the lowest wage which the worker can be induced to accept.
+The workers employed in a factory may be divided by a hundred different
+forces. They may be divided by racial differences, for instance; but
+while preserving these differences in a large measure, they will tend to
+unite upon the basis of their economic interests. Some of the great
+labor unions, notably the United Mine Workers,[118] afford remarkable
+illustrations of this fact. If the difference of religious interests
+leads to division, the same unanimity of economic interests will sooner
+or later be developed. No impartial investigator who studies the
+influence of a great labor union which includes in its membership
+workers of various nationalities and adherents of various religious
+creeds, can fail to observe the fact that the community of economic
+interests which unites them is a powerful factor making for their
+amalgamation into a harmonious civic whole.
+
+With the employers it is the same. They, too, may be divided by a
+hundred forces; the competition among them may be keen and fierce, but
+common economic interests will tend to unite them against the
+organizations of the workers they employ. Racial, religious, social, and
+other divisions and distinctions, may be maintained, but they will, in
+general, unite for the protection and furtherance of their common
+economic interests.
+
+So much, indeed, belongs to the very primer stage of economic theory.
+Adam Smith is rather out of fashion nowadays, but there is still much in
+"The Wealth of Nations" which will repay our attention. No Socialist
+writer, not even Marx, has stated the fundamental principle of the
+antagonism between the employing and employed classes more clearly, as
+witness the following:--
+
+"The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as
+possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the
+latter in order to lower the wages of labor.... Masters are always and
+everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination,
+not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. To violate this
+combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of
+reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals.... Masters too
+sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of
+labor.... These are always conducted with the utmost silence and
+secrecy, till the moment of execution.... Such combinations, however,
+are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the
+workmen; who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind,
+combine of their own accord to raise the price of labor. Their usual
+pretenses are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the
+great profits which the masters make by their work. But whether these
+combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard
+of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always
+recourse to the loudest clamor, and sometimes to the most shocking
+violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the extravagance
+and folly of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their
+masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters
+upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and
+_never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate,
+and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so
+much severity against the combinations of servants, laborers, and
+journeymen_."[119]
+
+Thus Adam Smith. Were it essential to our present purpose, it would be
+easy to quote from all the great economists in support of the Socialist
+claim that the interests of the capitalist and those of the laborer are
+irreconcilably opposed. That individual workers and employers will be
+found who do not recognize their class interests is true, but that fact
+by no means invalidates the contention that, in general, men will
+recognize and unite upon a basis of common class interests. In both
+classes are to be found individuals who attach greater importance to the
+preservation of racial, religious, or social, than to economic,
+interests. But because the economic interest is fundamental, involving
+the very basis of life, the question of food, clothing, shelter, and
+comfort, these individuals are and must be exceptions to the general
+rule. Workers sink their racial and religious differences and unite to
+secure better wages, a reduction of their hours of labor, and better
+conditions in general. Employers, similarly, unite to oppose whatever
+may threaten their class interests, without regard to other
+relationships. The Gentile who is himself an anti-Semite has no qualms
+of conscience about employing Jewish workmen, at low wages, to compete
+with Gentile workers; he does not object to joining with Jewish
+employers in an Employers' Association, if thereby his economic
+interests may be safeguarded. And the Jewish employer, likewise, has no
+objection to joining with the Gentile employer for mutual protection, or
+to the employment of Gentile workers to fill the places of his
+employees, members of his own race, who have gone out on strike for
+higher wages.
+
+
+III
+
+The class struggle, therefore, presents itself in the present stage of
+social development, in capitalist countries, as a conflict between the
+wage-paying and the wage-paid classes. That is the dominating and
+all-absorbing conflict of the industrial age in which we live. True,
+there are other class interests more or less involved. This is
+especially true in the United States with its enormous agricultural
+industry, to which the description of the industrial conflict cannot be
+applied. There are the indefinite, inchoate, vague, and uncertain
+interests of that large, so-called middle class, composed of farmers,
+retailers, professional workers, and so on. The interests of this large
+class are not, and cannot be, as definitely defined. They vacillate,
+conforming now to the interest of the wage-workers, now to the interest
+of the employers. Thus the farmer may oppose an increase in the wages of
+farm laborers, because that touches him directly as an employer. His
+relation to the farm laborer is substantially that of the capitalist to
+the city worker, and his attitude upon that question is the attitude of
+the capitalist class as a whole. At the same time, he may heartily favor
+an increase of wages for miners, carpenters, bricklayers, shoemakers,
+printers, painters, factory workers, and non-agricultural laborers in
+general, for the reason that while a general rise of wages, resulting in
+a general rise of prices, will affect him slightly as a consumer, and
+compel him to pay more for what he buys, it will benefit him much more
+as a seller of the products of his farm. In short, consciously very
+often, but unconsciously oftener still, personal or class interests
+control our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and actions.
+
+It is impossible with the data at our disposal at present to make such
+an analysis of our population as will enable us to determine the
+particular class interests of the various groups. Of the twenty-four
+million men and boys engaged in industry there are some six million
+farmers and tenants; three million seven hundred and fifty thousand farm
+laborers; eleven million mechanics, laborers, clerks, and servants; one
+million five hundred thousand professional workers, agents, and the
+like; and about two million employers, large and small. Accurately to
+place each of these groups is out of the question until such time as we
+have a much more detailed study of our economic life than has yet been
+attempted. We may, however, roughly relate some of the groups.
+
+First: It is evident that the interests of the eleven million
+wage-earners are, as a whole, opposed to those of the employing class.
+There may be exceptions, as in the case of those whose very occupation
+as confidential agents of the capitalists, overseers, and the like,
+places them outside of the sphere of working-class interests. They may
+not receive a salary much above the wage of the mechanic, yet their
+function is such as to place them psychologically with the capitalists
+rather than with the workers. It is also evident that, while their
+_interests_ may be demonstrably antagonistic to those of the employers,
+not all of the wage-earners will be _conscious_ of that fact. The
+_consciousness_ of class interests develops slowly among rural and
+isolated workers, especially as between the small employer and his
+employee. And even when there is the consciousness of antagonistic
+interests among these workers it is very difficult for them actively to
+express it. Hence they cannot play an important part in the actual
+conflict of classes.
+
+Second: We may safely place the three million seven hundred and fifty
+thousand farm laborers, as regards their economic _interests_, with the
+general mass of wage-workers, with one important qualification. So far
+as they are in the actual relation of wage-paid laborers, hired by the
+month, week, or day, and bearing no other relation to their employers,
+they belong, in their economic interests, to the proletariat. But there
+are many farm laborers included in our enumeration who do not hold that
+relation to their employers. They are the sons of the farmers
+themselves, expecting to assume their fathers' positions, and their
+position as wage-paid laborers is largely nominal and fictitious. How
+many such there are it is impossible to ascertain with anything like
+certainty, and we can only say, therefore, that the position of the
+class, as such, must be determined without including these. But while
+this class has economic interests similar to those of the industrial
+proletariat, because of their isolation and scattered position, and
+because of the personal relations which they bear to their
+employers--farmer and laborer often working side by side, equally hard,
+and not infrequently having approximately the same standards of
+living--these cannot, to any very great extent, become an active factor
+in the class conflict in the same sense as the industrial wage-workers
+can, by engaging in strikes, boycotts, and other manifestations of the
+class war. Still, they may, and in fact do, play an important rôle in
+the _political_ aspects of the struggle. Let a political movement of the
+proletariat arise and it will be found that these agricultural laborers
+will join it not less enthusiastically than their fellows from the
+factories in the cities. It would probably surprise most thoughtful
+Americans if they could see the organization maps in the offices of the
+Socialist Party of the United States, dotted with little red-capped pins
+denoting local organizations of the party. These are quite as common in
+the agricultural states as in the industrial states. So, too, in
+Germany. The movement is politically nearly as strong in the agrarian
+districts as elsewhere. This is a fact of vital significance, one which
+must not be lost sight of in studying the progress of Socialism in
+America.
+
+Third: Of the exact position of the remaining groups it is very
+difficult to speak with anything like assurance. In an earlier chapter
+we have noticed the persistence of the small farm in America, and the
+fact that a class of small farmers forms a very important part of our
+population. As already observed, the economic condition of the small
+farmer is very often little, if any, superior to that of the laborers he
+employs. Elsewhere, I have shown that the actual income of the small
+farmer is not infrequently less than that of the hired laborer.[120]
+This is just as true of the small dealer, and the small manufacturer.
+But mere poverty of income, companionship in misery, the sharing of an
+equally poor existence, does not suffice to place the farmer in the
+proletarian class, as many Socialist writers have shown.[121] The small
+farmers constitute a distinct class. They are not, as the small dealers
+and manufacturers are, mere remnants of a disappearing class. The class
+is a permanent one, apparently, as much so as the class of industrial
+wage-workers. As a class it is just as essential to agricultural
+production as the industrial proletariat is essential to manufacture. It
+is thus a class analogous to the industrial proletariat, and Kautsky has
+well said that the small farmer is the "proletariat of the country." The
+exploitation of the small farmer is not direct, like that of the
+wage-worker by his employer, but indirect, through the great capitalist
+trusts and railroads. It also happens that these derive their chief
+income from the direct exploitation of the wage-workers, so that the
+small farmer and the wage-worker in the city factory have common
+exploiters. As they become conscious of this, the two classes will tend
+to unite their forces in the one sphere where such unity of action is
+possible, the sphere of political action.
+
+This is also true, in some degree at least, of a considerable fraction
+of the one million five hundred thousand workers included in the
+professional and agent classes, and of the two million employers, the
+small dealers and manufacturers being included in this enumeration. That
+there is such a considerable fraction of each of these two classes whose
+interests lead them to make common cause with the proletariat is not at
+all a matter of theory or speculation, but of experience. These classes
+are represented very largely in the membership of the Socialist parties
+of this country and of Europe.
+
+
+IV
+
+Although it is sometimes so interpreted, the theory that classes are
+based upon commonality of interests does not imply that men are never
+actuated by other than selfish motives; that a sordid materialism is the
+only motive force at work in the world. Marx and Engels carefully
+avoided the use of the word _interests_ in such manner as to suggest
+that material interests control the course of history. They invariably
+used the term _economic conditions_, and the careful reader will not
+fail to perceive that although economic conditions produce interests
+which form the basis of class divisions, it is not unusual for men to
+act contrary to their personal _interests_ as a result of existing
+_conditions_. In general, class interests and personal interests
+coincide, but there are certainly occasions when they conflict. Many an
+employer, having no quarrel with his employees and confident that he
+will be the loser thereby, joins in a fight upon labor unions because he
+is conscious that the interests of his class are involved. In a similar
+way, workingmen enter upon sympathetic strikes, consciously, at an
+immediate loss to themselves, because they place class loyalty before
+personal gain. It is significant of class feeling and temper that when
+employers act in this manner, and lock out employees with whom they have
+no trouble, simply to help other employers to win their battles, they
+are lauded by the very newspapers which denounce the workers when they
+adopt a like policy.
+
+It is also true that there are individuals in both classes who never
+become conscious of their class interests, and steadfastly refuse to
+join with the members of their class. The workingman who refuses to join
+a union, or who "scabs" when his fellow-workers go out on strike, may
+act from ignorance or from sheer self-interest and greed. His action may
+be due to his placing personal interest before the larger interest of
+his class, or from being too shortsighted to see that ultimately his own
+interests and those of his class must merge. Many an employer, likewise,
+may refuse to join in any concerted action of his class for either of
+these reasons, or he may even rise superior to his class and personal
+interests and support the workers because he believes in the justness of
+their cause, realizing perfectly well that their gain means loss to him
+or to his class. This ought to be a sufficient answer to those shallow
+critics who think that they dispose of the class struggle theory of
+modern Socialism by enumerating those of its leading exponents who do
+not belong to the proletariat.
+
+The influence of class environment upon men's beliefs and ideals is a
+subject which our most voluminous ethicists have scarcely touched upon
+as yet. It is a commonplace saying that each age has its own standards
+of right and wrong, but little effort has been made, if we except the
+Socialists, to trace this fact to its source, to the economic conditions
+prevailing in the different ages.[122] Still less effort has been made
+to account for the different standards held by the different social
+classes at the same time, and by which each class judges the others. In
+our own day the idea of slavery is generally held in abhorrence. There
+was a time, however, when it was almost universally looked upon as a
+divine institution, alike by slaveholder and slave. It is simply
+impossible to account for this complete revolution of feeling upon any
+other hypothesis than that slave-labor then seemed absolutely essential
+to the life of the world. The slave lords of antiquity, and, more
+recently, the Southern slaveholders in our own country, all believed
+that slavery was eternally right. When the slaves took an opposite view
+and rebelled, they were believed to be in rebellion against God and
+nature. The Church represented the same view just as vigorously as it
+now opposes it. The slave owners who held slavery to be a divine
+institution, and the priests and ministers who supported them, were just
+as honest and sincere in their belief as we are in holding antagonistic
+beliefs to-day.
+
+What was accounted a virtue in the slave was accounted a vice in the
+slaveholder. Cowardice and a cringing humility were not regarded as
+faults in a slave. On the contrary, they were the stock virtues of the
+pattern slave and added to the estimation in which he was held, just as
+similar traits are valued in personal servants--butlers, waiters,
+valets, footmen, and other flunkies--in our own day. But similar traits
+in the slaveholder, or the "gentleman" of to-day, would be regarded as
+terrible faults. As Mr. Algernon Lee very tersely puts it, "The slave
+was not a slave because of his slavish ideals and beliefs; the slave was
+slavish in his ideals and beliefs because he lived the life of a
+slave."[123]
+
+In the industrial world of to-day we find a similar divergence of
+ethical standards. What the laborers regard as wrong, the employers
+regard as absolutely and immutably right. The actions of the workers in
+forming unions and compelling unwilling members of their own class to
+join them, even resorting to the bitter expedient of striking against
+them with a view to starving them into submission, seem terribly unjust
+to the employers and the class to which the employers belong. To the
+workers themselves, on the other hand, such actions have all the
+sanctions of conscience. Similarly, many actions of the employers, in
+which they themselves see no wrong, seem almost incomprehensibly wicked
+to the workers.
+
+Leaving aside the wholesale fraud of our ordinary commercial
+advertisements, the shameful adulteration of goods, and a multitude of
+other such nefarious practices, it is at once interesting and
+instructive to compare the employers' denunciations of "the outrageous
+infringement of personal liberty," when the "oppressor" is a labor
+union, with some of their everyday practices. The same employers who
+loudly, and, let it be said, quite sincerely, condemn the members of a
+union who endeavor to bring about the discharge of a fellow-worker
+because he declines to join their organization, have no scruples of
+conscience about discharging a worker simply because he belongs to a
+union, and so effectually "blacklisting" him that it becomes almost or
+quite impossible for him to obtain employment at his trade elsewhere.
+They do not hesitate to do this secretly, conspiring against the very
+life of the worker. While loudly declaiming against the "conspiracy" of
+the workers to raise wages, they see no wrong in an "agreement" of
+manufacturers or mine owners to reduce wages. If the members of a labor
+union should break the law, especially if they should commit an act of
+violence during a strike, the organs of capitalist opinion teem with
+denunciation, but there is no breath of condemnation for the outrages
+committed by employers or their agents against union men and their
+families.
+
+During the great anthracite coal strike of 1903, and again during the
+disturbances in Colorado in 1904, it was evident to every fair-minded
+observer that the mine owners were at least quite as lawless as the
+strikers.[124] But there was hardly a scintilla of adverse comment upon
+the mine owners' lawlessness in the organs of capitalist opinion, while
+they poured forth torrents of righteous indignation at the lawlessness
+of the miners. When labor leaders, like the late Sam Parks, for example,
+are accused of extortion and receiving bribes, the employers and their
+retainers, through pulpit, press, and every other avenue of public
+opinion, denounce the culprit, the bribe taker, in unmeasured terms--but
+the bribe giver is excused, or, at worst, only lightly criticised. These
+are but a few common illustrations of class conscience. Any careful
+observer will be able to add almost indefinitely to the number.
+
+It would be easy to compile a catalogue of such examples as these from
+the history of the past few years sufficient to convince the most
+skeptical that class interests do produce a class conscience. Mr. Ghent
+aptly expresses a profound truth when he says: "There is a spiritual
+alchemy which transmutes the base metal of self-interest into the gold
+of conscience; the transmutation is real, and the resulting frame of
+mind is not hypocrisy, but conscience. It is a class conscience, and
+therefore partial and imperfect, having little to do with absolute
+ethics. But partial and imperfect as it is, it is generally
+sincere."[125] No better test of the truth of this can be made than by
+reading carefully for a few weeks the comments of half a dozen
+representative capitalist newspapers, and of an equal number of
+representative labor papers, upon current events. The antithetical
+nature of their judgments of men and events demonstrates the existence
+of a distinct class conscience. It cannot be interpreted in any other
+way.
+
+
+V
+
+A great many people, while admitting the important rôle class struggles
+have played in the history of the race, strenuously deny the existence
+of classes in the United States. They freely admit the class divisions
+and struggles of the Old World, but deny that a similar class antagonism
+exists in this country; they fondly believe the United States to be a
+glorious exception to the rule, and regard the claim that classes exist
+here as falsehood and treason. The Socialists are forever being accused
+of seeking to apply to American life judgments based upon European facts
+and conditions. It is easy to visualize the class divisions of
+monarchical countries, where there are hereditary ruling classes--even
+though these are only nominally the ruling classes in most cases--fixed
+by law. But it is not so easy to recognize the fact that, even in these
+countries, the power is held by the financial and industrial lords, and
+not by the kings and their titular nobility. The absence of a
+hereditary, titular ruling class serves to hide from many people the
+real class divisions existing in this country.
+
+Nevertheless, there is a perceptible growth of uneasiness and unrest; a
+widening and deepening conviction that while we may retain the outward
+forms of democracy, and shout its shibboleths with patriotic fervor,
+its essentials are lacking. The feeling spreads, even in the most
+conservative circles, that we are developing, or have already developed,
+a distinct ruling class. The anomaly of a ruling class without legal
+sanction or titular prestige has seized upon the popular mind; titles
+have been created for our great "untitled nobility"--mock titles which
+have speedily assumed a serious import and meaning. Our financial
+"Kings," industrial "Lords," "Barons," and so on, have received their
+crowns and patents of nobility from the populace. President Roosevelt
+gives expression to the serious thought of our most conservative
+citizenry when he says: "In the past, the most direful among the
+influences which have brought about the downfall of republics has ever
+been the growth of the class spirit.... If such a spirit grows up in
+this republic, it will ultimately prove fatal to us, as in the past it
+has proven fatal to every community in which it has become
+dominant."[126]
+
+With the exception of the chattel slaves, we have had no hereditary
+class in this country with a legally fixed status. But
+
+
+     "Man is more than constitutions,"
+
+
+and there are other laws than those formulated in senates and recorded
+in statute books. The vast concentration of industry and wealth,
+resulting in immense fortunes on the one hand, and terrible poverty on
+the other, has separated the two classes by a chasm as deep and wide as
+ever yawned between czar and moujik, kaiser and vagrant, prince and
+pauper, feudal baron and serf. The immensity of the power and wealth
+thus concentrated into the hands of the few, to be inherited by their
+sons and daughters, tends to establish this class division hereditarily.
+Heretofore, passage from the lower class to the class above has been
+comparatively easy, and it has blinded people to the existing class
+antagonisms, though, as Mr. Ghent justly observes, it should no more be
+taken to disprove the existence of classes than the fact that so many
+thousands of Germans come to this country to settle is taken to disprove
+the existence of the German Empire.[127] The stereotyping of classes is
+undeniable. That a few men pass from one class to another is no disproof
+of this. The classes exist and the tendency is for them to remain
+permanently fixed, as a whole, in our social life.
+
+But passage from the lower class to the upper tends to become, if not
+absolutely impossible and unthinkable, at least practically impossible,
+and as difficult and rare as the transition from pauperism to princedom
+in the Old World is. A romantic European princess may marry a penurious
+coachman, and so provide the world with a nine days' sensation, but
+such cases are no rarer in the royal courts of Europe than in our own
+plutoaristocratic court circles. Has there ever been a king in modern
+times with anything like the power of Mr. Rockefeller? Is any feature of
+royal recognition withheld from Mr. Morgan when he goes abroad in state,
+an uncrowned king, fraternizing with crowned but envious fellow-kings?
+The existence of classes in America to-day is as evident as the
+existence of America itself.
+
+
+VI
+
+Antagonisms of class interests have existed from the very beginning of
+civilization, though not always recognized. It is only the consciousness
+of their existence, and the struggle which results from that
+consciousness, that are new. As we suddenly become aware of the pain and
+ravages of disease, when we have not felt or heeded its premonitory
+symptoms, so, having neglected the fundamental class division of
+society, the bitterness of the strife resulting therefrom shocks and
+alarms us. So long as it is possible for the stronger and more ambitious
+members of an inferior class to rise out of that class and join the
+ranks of a superior class, so long will the struggle which ensues as the
+natural outgrowth of opposing interests be postponed.
+
+Until quite recently, in the United States, this has been possible.
+Transition from the status of wage-worker to that of capitalist has been
+easy. But with the era of concentration and the immense capitals
+required for industrial enterprise, and the exhaustion of our supply of
+free land, these transitions become fewer and more difficult, and class
+lines tend to become permanently fixed. The stronger and more ambitious
+members of the lower class, finding it impossible to rise into the class
+above, thus become impressed with a consciousness of their class status.
+The average worker no longer dreams of himself becoming an employer
+after a few years of industry and thrift. The ambitious and aggressive
+few no longer look with the contempt of the strong for the weak upon
+their less aggressive fellow-workers, but become leaders, preachers of a
+significant and admittedly dangerous gospel of class consciousness.
+
+President Roosevelt has assailed the preachers of class consciousness
+with all the energy of a confirmed moralizer. It is evident, however,
+that he has never taken the trouble to study either the preachers or
+their gospel. Never in his utterances has there been any hint given of a
+recognition of the fact that there could be no preaching of class
+consciousness had there been no classes. Never has he manifested the
+faintest recognition of the existence of conditions which develop
+classes, out of which the class consciousness of the propagandists
+springs naturally. He does not see that there is danger only when the
+preachers are not wise enough, nor sufficiently educated to see their
+position in its historical perspective; when in blind revolt they
+engender class hatred, personal hatred of the capitalist by the worker.
+But when there is the historical perspective, wisdom to see that
+economic conditions develop slowly, and that the capitalist is no more
+responsible for conditions than the worker, there is not only no
+personal hatred for the capitalist engendered, but, more important
+still, the workers get a new view of the relationship of the classes,
+and their efforts are directed to the bringing about of peaceful change.
+
+The Socialists, accused as they are of seeking to stir up hatred and
+strife, by placing the class struggle in its proper light, as one of the
+great social dynamic forces, have done and are doing more to allay
+hatred and bitterness of feeling, and to save the world from the red
+curse of anarchistic vengeance, than all the Rooseveltian preaching in
+which thousands of venders of moral platitudes are engaged. The
+Socialist movement is vastly more powerful as a force against Anarchism,
+in its violent manifestations, than any other agency in the world.
+Wherever, as in Germany, the Socialist movement is strong, Anarchism is
+impotent and weak. The reason for this is the very obvious one here
+given. Class divisions are not created by Socialists, but developed in
+the womb of economic conditions. Class consciousness is not something
+which Socialism has developed. Before there was a Socialist movement, in
+the days of Luddite attacks upon machinery, and Captain Swing's
+rick-burners, there was class consciousness expressed in class revolt.
+Modern Socialism simply takes the class consciousness of the worker and
+educates it to see the futility of machine-destroying, or other foolish
+and abortive attacks upon capitalists and their property, and organizes
+it into a political movement for the peaceful transformation of society.
+
+
+VII
+
+Nowhere in the world, at any time in its history, has the antagonism of
+classes been more evident than in the United States at the present time.
+With an average of over a thousand strikes a year,[128] some of them
+involving, directly, tens of thousands of producers, a few capitalists,
+and millions of noncombatants, consumers; with strikes like this,
+boycotts, lockouts, injunctions, and all the other incidents of
+organized class strife reported daily by the newspapers, denials of the
+existence of classes, or of the struggle between them, are manifestly
+absurd. We have, on the one hand, organizations of workers, labor
+unions, with a membership of something over two million in the United
+States; one organization alone, the American Federation of Labor, having
+an affiliated membership of one million seven hundred thousand. On the
+other hand, we have organizations of employers, formed for the expressed
+purpose of fighting the labor unions, of which the National Association
+of Manufacturers is the most perfect type yet evolved.
+
+While the leaders on both sides frequently deny that their organizations
+betoken the existence of a far-reaching fundamental class conflict, and,
+through ostensibly pacificatory organizations like the National Civic
+Federation, proclaim the "essential identity of interests between
+capital and labor"; while an intelligent and earnest labor leader like
+Mr. John Mitchell joins with an astute capitalist leader like the late
+Senator Marcus A. Hanna in declaring that "there is no necessary
+hostility between labor and capital," that there is no "necessary,
+fundamental antagonism between the laborer and the capitalist,"[129] a
+brief study of the constitutions of these class organizations, and their
+published reports, in conjunction with the history of the labor struggle
+in the United States, in which the names of Homestead, Hazelton, Coeur
+d'Alene and Cripple Creek appear in bloody letters, will show these
+denials to be the offspring of hypocrisy or delusion. If this
+much-talked-of unity of interests is anything but a stupid fiction, the
+great and ever increasing strife is only a matter of mutual
+misunderstanding. All that is necessary to secure permanent peace is to
+remove that misunderstanding. If we believe this, it is a sad commentary
+upon human limitations, upon man's failure to understand his own life,
+that not a single person on either side has arisen with sufficient
+intelligence and breadth of vision to state the relations of the two
+classes with clarity and force enough to accomplish that end, to make
+them understand each other.
+
+Let us get down to fundamental principles.[130] Why do men organize into
+unions? Why was the first union started? Why do men pay out of their
+hard-earned wages to support unions now? The first union was not started
+because the men who started it did not understand their employers, or
+because they were misunderstood by their employers. The explanation
+involves a deeper insight into things than that. When the individual
+workingman, feeling that from the labor of himself and his fellows came
+the wealth and luxury of his employer, demanded higher wages, a
+reduction of the hours of labor, or better conditions in general, he was
+met with a reply from the employer--who understood the workingman's
+position very well, much better, in fact, than the workingman himself
+did--something like this, "If you don't like this job, and my terms,
+there are plenty of others outside ready to take your place." The
+workingman and the employer, then, understood each other perfectly. The
+employer understood the position of the worker, that he was dependent
+upon him, the employer, for opportunity to earn his bread. The worker
+understood that so long as the employer could discharge him and fill his
+place with another, he was powerless. The combat between the workers and
+the masters of their bread has from the first been an unequal one.
+
+Nothing remained for the individual workingman but to join with his
+fellows in a collective and united effort. So organizations of workers
+appeared, and the employers could not treat the demands for higher wages
+or other improvements in conditions as lightly as before. The workers,
+when they organized, could take advantage of the fact that there were no
+organizations of the employers. Every strike added to the ordinary
+terrors of the competitive struggle for the employers. The manufacturer
+whose men threatened to strike often surrendered because he feared most
+of all that his trade, in the event of a suspension of work, would be
+snatched by his rival in business. So, by playing upon the inherent
+weakness of the competitive system as it affected the employers, the
+workers gained many substantial advantages. There is no doubt whatsoever
+that under these conditions the wage-workers got better wages, better
+working conditions, and a reduction in the hours of labor. It was in
+many ways the golden age of trade unionism. But there was an important
+limitation of the workers' power--the unions could not absorb the man
+outside; they could not provide all the workers with employment. That is
+an essential condition of capitalist industry, there is always the
+"reserve army of the unemployed," to use the expressive phrase of
+Friederich Engels. Rare indeed are the times when all the available
+workers in any industry are employed, and the time has probably never
+yet been when all the available workers in all industries were employed.
+
+Notwithstanding this important limitation of power, it is
+incontrovertible that the workers were benefited by their organization.
+But only for a time. There came a time when the employers began to
+organize unions also. That they called their organizations by other and
+high-sounding names does not alter the fact that they were in reality
+unions formed to combat the unions of the workers. Every employers'
+association is, in reality, a union of the men who employ labor against
+the unions of the men they employ. When the organized workers went to
+individual, unorganized employers, who feared their rivals more than
+they feared the workers, or, rather, who feared the workers most of all
+because rivals waited to snatch their trade, a strike making their
+employees allies with their competitors, the employers were easily
+defeated. The workers could play one employer against another employer
+with constant success. But when the employers also organized, it was
+different. Then the individual employer, freed from his worst terrors,
+could say, "Do your worst. I, too, am in an organization." Then it
+became a battle betwixt organized capital and organized labor. When the
+workers went out on strike in one shop or factory, depending upon their
+brother unionists employed in other shops or factories, the employers of
+these latter locked them out, thus cutting off the financial support of
+the strikers. In other cases, when the workers in one place went out on
+strike, the employer got his work done through other employers, by the
+very fellow-members upon whom the strikers were depending for support.
+Thus the workers were compelled to face this dilemma, either to withdraw
+these men, thus cutting off their financial supplies, or to be beaten by
+their own members.
+
+Under these changed conditions, the workers were beaten time after time.
+It was a case of the worker's cupboard against the master's warehouse,
+purse against bank account, poverty against wealth. The workers' chances
+are slight in such a combat! A strike means that the employers on one
+side, and the workers on the other, seek to force each other to
+surrender by waiting patiently to see who first feels the pinch of
+hardship and poverty. Employers and employees determine to play the
+waiting game. Each waits patiently in the hope that the other will
+weaken. At last one--most often the workers'--side weakens and gives up
+the struggle. When the workers are thus beaten in a strike, they are not
+convinced that their demands are unreasonable or unjust; they are simply
+beaten because their resources are too small to enable them to stand the
+struggle.
+
+When the master class, the masters of jobs and bread, organized their
+forces, they set narrow and sharp boundaries to the power of labor
+organizations. Henceforth the chances of victory were overwhelmingly on
+the side of the employers. The workers learned by bitter and costly
+experience that they could not play the interests of individual
+employers against other employers' interests. Meantime, too, they have
+learned that they are not only exploited as producers, but also as
+buyers, as consumers. For long, dominated by economic theories, the
+Socialists refused to recognize this aspect of the labor struggle,
+though the workers felt it strongly enough. They set their fine-spun
+theories against the facts of life. Their contention was that wages
+being determined by the cost of living, it mattered nothing how much or
+how little the workers got in wages, the cost of living and wages
+adjusted themselves to each other. But in actual experience the workers
+found that when prices fall, wages are _quick_ to follow, whereas when
+prices soar high, wages are _slow_ to follow. Wages climb with leaden
+feet when prices soar with eagle wings. Because the workers are
+consumers, almost to the last penny of their incomes, having to spend
+practically every penny earned, that form of exploitation becomes a
+serious matter.
+
+But against this exploitation the unions have ever been absolutely
+powerless. Workingmen have never made any very serious attempt to
+protect the purchasing capacity of their wages, notwithstanding its
+tremendous importance.[131] The result has been that not a few of the
+"victories" so dearly won by trade union action have turned out to be
+hollow mockeries. When better wages have been secured, prices have often
+gone up, most often, in fact, so that the net result has been little to
+the advantage of the workers. In many cases, where the advance in wages
+applied only to a restricted number of trades, the advance in prices
+becoming general, the total result has been against the working class as
+a whole, and little or nothing to the advantage of the few who received
+the advance in immediate wages. At this point, the need is felt of a
+social revolution, not a violent revolution, be it understood, but a
+comprehensive social change which will give to the workers the control
+of the implements of labor, and also of the product of their labor. In
+other words, the demand arises for independent, working-class action,
+aiming at the socialization of the means of production and the product.
+
+
+VIII
+
+A line of cleavage thus presents itself between those, on the one hand,
+who would continue the old methods of economic warfare, together with
+the advocates of physical force, and, on the other hand, the advocates
+of united political action by the working class, consciously directed
+toward the socialization of industry and its products. The measure of
+the crystallization of this latter force is represented by the strength
+of the political Socialist movement. Whoever has studied the labor
+movement during the past few years must have realized that there is a
+tremendous drift of sentiment in favor of that policy in the labor
+unions of the country. The clamor for political action in the labor
+unions presages an enormous advance of the political Socialist movement
+during the next few years.
+
+The struggle between the capitalist and working classes must become a
+political issue, the supreme political issue. This must result, not only
+because the collective ownership of property can best be brought about
+by political methods, but also because the capitalists themselves have
+taken the industrial struggle into the political arena to suit
+themselves; and when the workers realize the issue and accept it, the
+capitalists will not be able to resist them. One is reminded of the
+saying of Marx that capitalism produces its own gravediggers. In taking
+the industrial issue into the political sphere, to suit their own
+immediate advantages, the capitalists were destined to reveal to the
+workers, sooner or later, their power and opportunity.
+
+Realizing that all the forces of government are on their side, the
+legislative, judicial, and executive powers being controlled by their
+own class, the employers have made the fight against labor political as
+well as economic in its character. When the workers have gone on strike
+and the employers have not cared to play the "waiting game," choosing
+rather to avail themselves of the great reserve army of unemployed
+workers outside, the natural resentment of the strikers, finding
+themselves in danger of being beaten by members of their own class, has
+led to violence which has been remorselessly suppressed by all the
+police and military forces at the command of the government. In many
+instances, the employers have purposely provoked striking workers to
+violence, and then called upon the government to crush the revolt thus
+made. Workers have been shot down at the shambles in almost every state,
+no matter which political party has been in power. Nor have these forces
+of our class government been used merely to punish lawless union men and
+women on strike, to uphold the "sacred majesty of the law," as the
+hypocritical phrase goes. They have been also used to deny strikers the
+rights which belonged to them, and to protect capitalists and their
+agents in breaking the laws. No one can read with anything like an
+impartial spirit the records of the miners' strike in the Coeur
+d'Alene mine, Idaho, or the labor disturbances in the state of Colorado
+from 1880 to 1905 and dispute this assertion.
+
+Most important of all has been the powerful opposition of the makers and
+interpreters of the law. A body of class legislation, in the interests
+of the employing class, has been created, while the workers have begged
+in vain for protective legislation. In no country of the world have the
+interests of the workers been so neglected as in the United States.
+There is practically no such thing as employers' liability for accidents
+to workers; no legislation worthy of mention relating to occupations
+which have been classified as "dangerous" in most industrial countries;
+women workers are sadly neglected. Whenever a law of distinct advantage
+to the workers in their struggle has been passed, a servile judiciary
+has been ready to render it null and void by declaring it to be
+unconstitutional. No more powerful blows have ever been directed against
+the workers than by the judiciary. Injunctions have been issued, robbing
+the workers of the most elemental rights of manhood and citizenship.
+They have forbidden things which no law forbids, and even things which
+the Constitution and statute law declare to be legal.
+
+Mr. John Mitchell refers to this subject, in strong but not too strong
+terms. "No weapon," he says, "has been used with such disastrous effect
+against trade unions as the injunction in labor disputes. By means of
+it, trade unionists have been prohibited under severe penalties from
+doing what they had a legal right to do, and have been specifically
+directed to do what they had a legal right not to do. It is difficult to
+speak in measured tones or moderate language of the savagery and venom
+with which unions have been assailed by the injunction, and to the
+working classes, as to all fair-minded men, it seems little less than a
+crime to condone or tolerate it."[132] This is strong language, but who
+shall say that it is too strong when we remember the many injunctions
+which have been hurled at organized labor since the famous Debs case
+brought this weapon into general use?
+
+In this celebrated case, which grew out of the Pullman strike, in 1894,
+Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union, was arrested
+and arraigned on indictments of obstructing the mails and interstate
+commerce. Although arraigned, he was not tried, the case being
+abandoned, despite his demands for a trial. President Cleveland's strike
+commission subsequently declared, "There is no evidence before the
+commission that the officers of the American Railway Union at any time
+participated in or advised intimidation, violence, or destruction of
+property." Realizing that it had no sort of evidence upon which a jury
+might be hoped to convict, a new way was found. Debs and his officers
+were enjoined in a famous "blanket" injunction directed against Debs and
+all other officials of the union, and "all persons whomsoever." For an
+alleged violation of that injunction, Judge Woods, without trial by
+jury, sentenced Debs to six months' imprisonment and his associates to
+three months'. The animus and class bias of the whole proceeding may be
+judged from the fact that President Cleveland selected to represent the
+United States Government, at Chicago, Mr. Edwin Walker, general counsel
+at that very time for the General Managers' Association, representing
+the twenty-four railroads centering or terminating in Chicago. And these
+railroads were operating in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law at
+the time.[133]
+
+In 1899 an injunction was issued out of the United States Circuit Court
+of West Virginia against "John Smith and others," without naming the
+"others," in the interest of the Wheeling Railway Company. Two men,
+neither of them being John Smith, nor found to be the agent of "John
+Smith and others," were jailed for contempt of court![134] In 1900
+members of the International Cigarmakers' Union, in New York City, were
+enjoined by Justice Freeman, in the Supreme Court, from even approaching
+their former employers for the purpose of attempting to arrange a
+peaceable settlement! The cigarmakers were further enjoined from
+publishing their grievances, or in any manner making their case known to
+the public, if the tendency of that should be to vex the plaintiffs or
+make them uneasy; from trying, even in a peaceful way, in any place in
+the city, even in the privacy of a man's own home, to persuade a new
+employee that he ought to sympathize with the union cause sufficiently
+to refuse to work for unjust employers; and, finally, the union was
+forbidden to pay money to its striking members to support them and their
+families. In the great steel strike of 1901, the members of the
+Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers were enjoined from
+peaceably discussing the merits of their claim with the men who were at
+work, even though the latter might raise no objection. In Pennsylvania,
+in the case of the York Manufacturing Company _vs._ Obedick, it was held
+that workmen had "no legal right" to persuade or induce other workmen to
+quit, or not to accept, employment.[135] In the strike of the members of
+the International Typographical Union against the Buffalo _Express_, the
+strikers were enjoined from discussing the strike, or talking about the
+paper in any way which might be construed as being against the paper. If
+one of the strikers advised a friend not to buy a "scab" paper, he was
+liable under the terms of that injunction to imprisonment for contempt
+of court. The members of the same union were, in the case of the Sun
+Printing and Publishing Company _vs_. Delaney and others, enjoined by
+Justice Bookstaver, in the Supreme Court of New York, from publishing
+their side of the controversy with the _Sun_ as an argument why persons
+friendly to organized labor should not advertise in a paper hostile to
+it. In 1906 members of the same union were enjoined by Supreme Court
+Justice Gildersleeve from "making any requests, giving any advice, or
+resorting to any persuasion ... to overcome the free will of any person
+connected with the plaintiff [a notorious anti-union publishing company]
+or its customers as employees or otherwise."[136]
+
+These are only a few examples of the abuse of the injunction in labor
+disputes, hundreds of which have been granted, many of them equally
+subversive of all sound principles of popular government. There is
+probably not another civilized country in which such judicial tyranny
+would be tolerated. It is not without significance that in West
+Virginia, where, as a result of an outcry against a number of
+particularly glaring abuses of the power to issue injunctions, the
+legislature passed a law limiting the right to issue injunctions, the
+Supreme Court decided that the law was unconstitutional, upon the ground
+that the legislature had no right to attempt to restrain the courts
+which were coördinate with itself.
+
+Even more dangerous to organized labor than the injunction is what is
+popularly known by union men as "Taff Vale law." Our judges have not
+been slow to follow the example set by the English judges in the famous
+case of the Taff Vale Railway Company against the officers of the
+Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, a powerful labor organization.
+The decision in that case was most revolutionary. It compelled the
+workers to pay damages, to the extent of $115,000, to the railroad
+company for losses sustained by the company through a strike of its
+employees, members of the defendant union. That decision struck terror
+into the hearts of British trade unionists. At last they had to face a
+mode of attack even more dangerous than the injunction which their
+transatlantic brethren had so long been contending against. Taff Vale
+law could not long be confined to England. Very soon, our American
+courts followed the English example. A suit was instituted against the
+members of a lodge of the Machinists' Union in Rutland, Vermont, and the
+defendants were ordered to pay $2500. A writ was served upon each member
+and the property of every one of them attached. Since that time,
+numerous other decisions of a like nature have been rendered in various
+parts of the country. Thus the unions have been assailed in a vital
+place, their treasuries. It is manifestly foolish and quite useless for
+the members of a union to strike against an employer for any purpose
+whatever, if the employer is to be able to recover damages from the
+union. Taff Vale judge-made law renders the labor union _hors de combat_
+at a stroke.
+
+
+IX
+
+The immediate effect of the revolutionary judicial decision in England
+was to arouse the workers to the necessity for class-conscious political
+action. The cry went up that the unions must adopt a policy of
+independent political action. There is no doubt whatever that the
+tremendous advance of the Socialist movement in England during the past
+few years began as a result of the attack made upon the funds of the
+labor unions. From the moment of the Taff Vale decision the Socialist
+movement in England took rapid strides. A similar process is going on in
+this country, gathering momentum with every injunction against organized
+labor, every hostile enactment of legislatures, and every use of the
+judicial and executive powers to defeat the workers in their struggle
+against capitalism. The workers are being educated to political
+Socialism by the stern experiences resulting from capitalist rule.
+Underneath the thin veneer of party differences, the worker sees the
+class identity of the great political parties, and cries out, "A plague
+on both your houses!" The Socialist argument comes to him with a twofold
+force: not only does it show him how he is enslaved and exploited as a
+producer, but it convinces him that as a citizen he has it in his power
+to control the government and make it what he will. He can put an end to
+government by injunctions, to the use of police, state, and federal
+troops to break strikes, and to the sequestration of union funds by
+hostile judges. He can, if he so decides, own and control the
+government, and, through the government, own and control the essentials
+of life: be master of his own labor, his own bread, his own life.
+
+If we take for granted that the universal increase of Socialist
+sentiment, and the growth of political Socialism, as measured by its
+rapidly increasing vote, presage this great triumph of the working
+class; that the heretofore despised and oppressed proletariat is, in a
+not far distant future, to rule instead of being ruled, the question
+arises, will the last state be better than the first? Will society be
+bettered by the change of masters?
+
+The very form of the question must be denied. It is not a movement for a
+change of masters. To regard this struggle of the classes as one of
+revenge, of exploited masses ready to overturn the social structure that
+they may become exploiters instead of exploited, is to misread the whole
+movement. The political and economic conquest of society by the working
+class means the end of class divisions once and forever. A social
+democracy, a society in which all things essential to the common life
+and well-being are owned and controlled by the people in common,
+democratically organized, precludes the existence of class divisions in
+our present-day economic and political sense. Profit, through human
+exploitation, alone has made class divisions possible, and the Socialist
+régime will abolish profit. The working class, in emancipating itself,
+at the same time makes liberty possible for the whole race of man, and
+destroys the conditions of class rule.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[116] The _Communist Manifesto_, Kerr edition, page 8.
+
+[117] In _Centralization and the Law: Scientific Legal Education, An
+Illustration_, edited by Melville M. Bigelow.
+
+[118] See, for instance, _The Coal Mine Workers_, by Frank Julian Warne,
+Ph.D. (1905).
+
+[119] Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Book I, Chapter VIII.
+
+[120] _The Common Sense of Socialism_, by John Spargo, page 131 (1908).
+
+[121] See, for instance, _The American Farmer_, by A. M. Simons, page
+130; _Agrarfrage_, by Karl Kautsky, pages 305-306.
+
+[122] Mr. Ghent's excellent work, _Mass and Class_, and Karl Kautsky's
+_Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History_, may be named as
+excellent examples of what Socialists have done in this direction.
+
+[123] In _The Worker_ (New York), March 25, 1905.
+
+[124] Cf., for instance, _The Labor History of the Cripple Creek
+District_, by Benjamin McKie Rastall (1908), and Senate Document No.
+122, being _A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado,
+from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive_, by Carroll D. Wright (1905), for evidence
+of this from sources not specially friendly to the miners.
+
+[125] _Mass and Class_, page 101.
+
+[126] _Message to Congress_, January, 1906.
+
+[127] _Mass and Class_, page 53.
+
+[128] Vide _War of the Classes_, by Jack London, page 17.
+
+[129] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitchell, page ix.
+
+[130] The remainder of this chapter is largely reproduced from my little
+pamphlet, _Shall the Unions go into Politics?_
+
+[131] This aspect of the exploitation of the laborers has been brought
+to the front very dramatically by the many recent "strikes" against high
+rents and high prices for meat and other commodities. Rent strikes and
+riots against high prices have become common events in our large cities.
+
+[132] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitchell, page 324.
+
+[133] See _Report of Commission of Investigation_, Senate Ex. Doc. No.
+7, Fifty-third Congress, third session.
+
+[134] Particulars are taken from a pamphlet by five members of the New
+York Bar and issued by the Social Reform Club, New York, in 1900.
+
+[135] See the article by Judge Seabury, _The Abuses of Injunctions, in
+The Arena_, June, 1903.
+
+[136] See the New York daily papers, January 31, 1906.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM
+
+
+I
+
+The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the
+materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months
+before the publication of the _Communist Manifesto_, in "La Misère de la
+Philosophie,"[137] the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P.
+Proudhon's _La Philosophie de la Misère_. Marx had worked out his theory
+at least two years before, so Engels tells us, and in his writings of
+that period there are several evidences of the fact. In "La Misère de la
+Philosophie," the theory is fundamental to the work, and not merely the
+subject of incidental allusion. This little book, all too little known
+in England and America, is therefore important from this historical
+point of view. In it, Marx for the first time shows his complete
+confidence in the theory. It needed confidence little short of sublime
+to challenge Proudhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating
+critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful satire, and fierce
+invective of the attack, have rather tended to obscure for readers of a
+later generation the real merit of the book, the importance of the
+fundamental idea that history must be interpreted in the light of
+economic development, that economic evolution determines social life.
+The book is important for two other reasons. First, it was the author's
+first serious essay in economic science--in the preface he boldly and
+frankly calls himself an economist--and, second, in it appears a full
+and generous recognition of that brilliant coterie of English Socialist
+writers of the Ricardian school from whom Marx has been unjustly, and
+almost spitefully, charged with "pillaging" his principal ideas.
+
+What led Marx to launch out upon the troubled sea of economic science,
+when all his predilections were for the study of pure philosophy, was
+the fact that his philosophical studies had led him to a point whence
+further progress seemed impossible, except by way of economics. The
+Introduction to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"
+makes this perfectly clear. Having decided that "the method of
+production in material existence conditions social, political, and
+mental evolution in general," a study of economics, and especially an
+analysis of modern industrial society, became inevitable. During the
+year 1845, when the theory of the economic interpretation of history was
+absorbing his attention, Marx spent six weeks in England with his
+friend Engels, and became acquainted with the work of the Ricardian
+Socialists already referred to.[138] Engels had been living in England
+about three years at this time, and had made an exhaustive investigation
+of industrial conditions there, and become intimately acquainted with
+the leaders of the Chartist movement. His fine library contained most of
+the works of contemporary writers, and it was thus that Marx came to
+know them.
+
+Foremost of this school of Socialists which had arisen, quite naturally,
+in the land where capitalism flourished at its best, were William
+Godwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and
+John Francis Bray. With the exception of Hall, of whose privately
+printed book, "The Effects of Civilisation on the People of the European
+States," 1805, he seems not to have known, Marx was familiar with the
+writings of all the foregoing, and his obligations to some of them,
+especially Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, were not slight. While the
+charge, made by Dr. Anton Menger,[139] among others, that Marx took his
+surplus value theory from Thompson is quite absurd, and rests, as
+Bernstein has pointed out, upon nothing but the fact that Thompson used
+the words "surplus value" frequently, but not at all in the same sense
+as that in which Marx uses them,[140] we need not attempt to dispute the
+fact that Marx gleaned much of value from Thompson and the two other
+writers. While criticising them, and pointing out their shortcomings,
+Marx himself frequently pays tributes of respect to each of them. His
+indebtedness to any of them, or to all of them, consists simply in the
+fact that he recognized the germinal truths in their writings, and saw
+far beyond what they saw.
+
+Godwin's most important work, "An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice,"
+appeared in 1793, and contains the germ of much that is called Marxian
+Socialism. In it may be found the broad lines of the thought which marks
+much of our present-day Socialist teaching, especially the criticism of
+capitalist society. Marx, however, does not appear to have been directly
+influenced by it to any extent. That he was influenced by it indirectly,
+through William Thompson, Godwin's most illustrious disciple, is,
+however, quite certain. Thompson wrote several works of a Socialist
+character, of which "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution
+of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the newly
+proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth," 1824, and "Labour
+Rewarded. The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure
+to Labour the Whole Products of its Exertions," 1827, are the most
+important and best known. Thompson must be regarded as one of the
+greatest precursors of Marx in the development of modern Socialist
+theory. A Ricardian of the Ricardians, he states the law of wages in
+language that is almost as emphatic as Lassalle's famous _Ehernes
+Lohngesetz_, which Marx made the butt of his satire.[141] Accepting the
+view of Ricardo,--and indeed, of Adam Smith and other earlier English
+economists, including Petty,--that labor is the sole source of exchange
+value,[142] he shows by cogent argument the exploitation of the laborer,
+and uses the term "surplus value" to designate the difference between
+the cost of maintaining the laborer and the value of his labor product,
+assisted, of course, by machinery and other capital, which goes to the
+capitalist. By a most labored argument, Professor Anton Menger has
+attempted to create the impression that Marx took, without
+acknowledgment, his _theory of the manner in which surplus value is
+produced_ from Thompson, simply because Thompson frequently used the
+_term itself_.[143] Marx never claimed to have originated the term. It
+is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even,
+and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet entitled _The Source and Remedy of
+the National Difficulties_. _A Letter to Lord John Russell_, published
+in London in 1821, in which the phrase "the quantity of the surplus
+value appropriated by the capitalist" appears.[144] Nor did Marx claim
+to be the first to distinguish surplus value. That had been done very
+clearly by many others, including Adam Smith.[145] What is original in
+Marx is the explanation of the manner in which surplus value is
+produced.
+
+John Gray's "A Lecture on Human Happiness," published in 1825, has been
+described by Professor Foxwell as being "certainly one of the most
+remarkable of Socialist writings,"[146] and the summary of the rare
+little work which he gives amply justifies the description. Gray
+published other works of note, two of which, "The Social System, a
+Treatise on the Principle of Exchange," 1831, and "Lectures on the
+Nature and Use of Money," 1848, Marx subjects to a rigorous criticism in
+"A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Thomas Hodgskin's
+best-known works are "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital,"
+1825, and "The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted,"
+1832. The former, which Marx calls "an admirable work," is only a small
+tract of thirty-four pages, but its influence in England and America was
+very great. Hodgskin was a man of great culture and erudition, with a
+genius for popular writing upon difficult topics. It is interesting to
+know that in a letter to his friend, Francis Place, he sketched a book
+which he proposed writing, "curiously like Marx's 'Capital,'" according
+to Place's biographer, Mr. Wallas,[147] and from which the conservative
+old reformer dissuaded him. John Francis Bray was a journeyman printer
+about whom very little is known. His "Labour's Wrongs and Labour's
+Remedy," published in Leeds in 1839, Marx calls "a remarkable work," and
+in his attack upon Proudhon he quotes from it extensively to show that
+Bray had anticipated the French writer's theories.[148]
+
+The justification for this lengthy digression from the main theme of the
+present chapter lies in the fact that so many critics have sought to
+fasten the charge of dishonesty upon Marx, and claimed that the ideas
+with which his name is associated were taken by him, without
+acknowledgment, from these English Ricardians. As a matter of fact, no
+economist of note ever quoted his authorities, or acknowledged his
+indebtedness to others, more generously than did Marx, and it is
+exceedingly doubtful whether even the names of the precursors whose
+ideas he is accused of stealing would be known to his critics but for
+his frank recognition of them. No candid reader of Marx can fail to
+notice that he is most careful to show how nearly these writers
+approached the truth as he conceived it.
+
+
+II
+
+When the February revolution of 1848 broke out, Marx was in Brussels.
+The authorities there compelling him to leave Belgian soil, at the
+request of the Prussian government, he returned to Paris, but not for a
+long stay. The revolutionary struggle in Germany stirred his blood, and
+with Engels, Wilhelm Wolf, the intimate friend to whom he later
+dedicated the first volume of "Capital," and Ferdinand Freiligrath, the
+fiery poet of the movement, Marx started the _New Rhenish Gazette_.
+Unlike the first _Rhenish Gazette_, the new journal was absolutely free
+from control by business policy. Twice Marx was summoned to appear at
+the Cologne assizes, upon charges of inciting the people to rebellion,
+and each time he defended himself with superb audacity and skill, and
+was acquitted. But in June, 1849, the authorities suppressed the paper,
+because of the support it gave to the risings in Dresden and the Rhine
+Province. Marx was expelled from Prussia and once more sought a refuge
+in Paris, which he was allowed to enjoy only for a very brief time.
+Forbidden by the French government to stay in Paris, or any other part
+of France except Brittany, which, says Liebknecht, was considered
+"fireproof," Marx turned to London, the mecca of all political exiles,
+arriving there toward the end of June, 1849.
+
+His removal to London was one of the crucial events in the life of Marx.
+It became possible for him, in the classic land of capitalism, to pursue
+his economic studies in a way that was not possible anywhere else in the
+world. As Liebknecht says: "Here in London, the metropolis (mother city)
+and the center of the world, and of the world of trade--the watch tower
+of the world whence the trade of the world and the political and
+economical bustle of the world may be observed, in a way impossible in
+any other part of the globe--here Marx found what he sought and needed,
+the bricks and mortar for his work. 'Capital' could be created in London
+only."[149]
+
+Already much more familiar with English political economy than most
+English writers of his time, and with the fine library of the British
+Museum at his command, Marx felt that the time had at last arrived when
+he could devote himself to his long-cherished plan of writing a great
+treatise upon political economy as a secure basis for the theoretical
+structure of Socialism. With this object in view, he resumed his
+economic studies in 1850, soon after his arrival in London. The work
+proceeded slowly, however, principally owing to the long and bitter
+struggle with poverty which encompassed Marx and his gentle wife. For
+years they suffered all the miseries of acute poverty, and even
+afterward, when the worst was past, the principal source of income, at
+times almost the only source in fact, was the five dollars a week
+received from the _New York Tribune_, for which Marx acted as special
+correspondent, and to which he contributed some of his finest work.[150]
+There are few pictures more pathetic, albeit also heroic, than that
+which we have of the great thinker and his devoted wife struggling
+against poverty during the first few years of their stay in London.
+Often the little family suffered the pangs of hunger, and Marx and a
+group of fellow-exiles used to resort to the reading room of the British
+Museum, weak from lack of food very often, but grateful for the warmth
+and shelter of that hospitable spot. The family lived some time in two
+small rooms in a cheap lodging house on Dean Street, the front room
+serving as reception room and study, and the back room serving for
+everything else. In a diary note, Mrs. Marx has herself left us an
+impressive picture of the suffering of those early years in London.
+Early in 1852, death entered the home for the first time, taking away a
+little daughter. Only a few weeks later another little daughter died,
+and Mrs. Marx wrote concerning this event:--
+
+"On Easter of the same year--1852--our poor little Francisca died of
+severe bronchitis. Three days the poor child was struggling with death.
+It suffered so much. Its little lifeless body rested in the small back
+room; we all moved together into the front room, and when night
+approached, we made our beds on the floor. There the three living
+children were lying at our side, and we cried about the little angel,
+who rested cold and lifeless near us. The death of the dear child fell
+into the time of the most bitter poverty ... (the money for the burial
+of the child was missing). In the anguish of my heart I went to a French
+refugee who lived near, and who had sometimes visited us. I told him our
+sore need. At once with the friendliest kindness he gave me two pounds.
+With that we paid for the little coffin in which the poor child now
+sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, and even
+the last small resting place was long denied her. What did we suffer
+when it was carried away to its last place of rest!"[151]
+
+The poverty, of which we have here such a graphic view, lasted for
+several years beyond the publication of the "Critique," on to the
+appearance of the first volume of "Capital." When this struggle is
+remembered and understood, it becomes easier to appreciate the life work
+of the great Socialist thinker. "It was a terrible time, but it was
+grand nevertheless," wrote Liebknecht years afterward to Eleanor Marx.
+As this is the last place in which the personality of Marx, or his
+personal affairs, will be discussed in this volume, and in view of
+constant misrepresentations on the part of unscrupulous opponents of
+Socialism, a further word concerning his family life may not be out of
+place. Those persons who regard Socialism as being antagonistic to the
+family relation, and fear it in consequence, will find no suggestion of
+support for that view in either the life of Marx or his teaching. The
+love of Marx and his wife for each other was beautiful and idyllic. A
+true account of their love and devotion would rank with the most
+beautiful love stories in literature. Their friends understood that,
+too, and there is a world of significance in the one brief sentence
+spoken by Engels, when told of the death of his friend's beautiful wife,
+who was likewise his own dear friend: "Mohr [Negro, a nickname given to
+Marx by his friends when young, on account of his mass of black hair and
+whiskers] is dead too," he said simply. He knew that from this blow Marx
+could not recover. It was indeed true. Though he lingered on for about
+three months after her death, the life of Marx really ended when the
+playmate of his boyhood, and the lover and companion of all the years of
+struggle, died with the name of her dear "Karl" upon her lips.
+
+Marx was an ideal father as well as an ideal husband. Always
+passionately fond of children, he could not resist the temptation to
+join the games of children upon the streets, and in the neighborhoods
+where he lived the children soon learned to regard him as their friend.
+To his own children he was a real companion, always ready to amuse and
+to be amused by them.
+
+
+III
+
+The studious years spent in the reading room of the British Museum
+complete the anglicization of Marx. "Capital" is essentially an English
+work, the fact of its having been written in German, by a German writer,
+being merely incidental. No more distinctively English treatise on
+political economy was ever written, not even "The Wealth of Nations."
+Even the method and style of the book are, contrary to general opinion,
+much more distinctly English than German. I do not forget his Hegelian
+dialectic with its un-English subtleties, but against that must be
+placed the directness, vigor, and pointedness of style, and the cogent
+reasoning, with its wealth of concrete illustrations, which are as
+characteristically English. Marx belongs to the school of Petty, Smith,
+and Ricardo, and their work is the background of his. "Capital" was the
+child of English industrial conditions and English thought, born by
+chance upon German soil.
+
+Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, English economic thought
+was entirely dominated by the ideas and methods of Ricardo, who has been
+described by Senior, not without justice, as "the most incorrect writer
+who ever attained philosophical eminence."[152] So far as such a
+sweeping criticism can be justified by looseness in the use of terms, it
+is justified by Ricardo's failing in this respect. That he should have
+attained the eminence he did, dominating English economic thought for so
+many years, in spite of the confusion which his loose and uncertain use
+of words occasioned, is not less a tribute to Ricardo's genius than
+evidence of the poverty of political economy in England at that time. In
+view of the constant and tiresome reiteration of the charge that Marx
+pillaged his labor-value theory from Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray, or some
+other more or less obscure writer of the Ricardian school, it is well to
+remember that there is nothing in the works of any of these writers
+connected with the theory of value which is not to be found in the
+earlier work of Ricardo himself. In like manner, the theory can be
+traced back from Ricardo to the master he honored, Adam Smith.
+Furthermore, almost a century before the appearance of "The Wealth of
+Nations," Sir William Petty had anticipated the so-called Ricardian
+labor-value theory of Smith and his followers.
+
+Petty, rather than Smith, is entitled to be regarded as the founder of
+the classical school of political economy, and Cossa justly calls him
+"one of the most illustrious forerunners of the science of statistical
+research."[153] He may indeed fairly be said to have been the father of
+statistical science, and was the first to apply statistics, or
+"political arithmetick," as he called it, to the elucidation of economic
+theory. He boasts that "instead of using only comparative and
+superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments," his method is to speak
+"in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense;
+and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature;
+leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites,
+and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others."[154]
+The celebrated saying of this sagacious thinker that "labor is the
+father and active principle of wealth; lands are the mother," is more
+Marxian than Ricardian. Petty divided the population into two classes,
+the productive and non-productive, and insisted that the value of all
+things depends upon the labor it costs to produce them. This is, as we
+shall see, entirely Ricardian, but not Marxian. But these are the ideas
+Marx is supposed to have borrowed, without acknowledgment, from
+comparatively obscure followers of Ricardo, in spite of the fact that he
+gives abundant credit to the earlier writer. It has been asked with
+ample justification whether these critics of Marx have read either the
+works of Marx or his predecessors.
+
+Adam Smith, who accepted the foregoing principles laid down by Petty,
+followed his example of basing his conclusions largely upon observed
+facts instead of abstractions. It is not the least of Smith's merits
+that, despite his many digressions, looseness of phraseology, and other
+admitted defects, his love for the concrete kept his feet upon the solid
+ground of fact. With his successors, notably Ricardo and John Stuart
+Mill, it was far otherwise. They made political economy an isolated
+study of abstract doctrines. Instead of a study of the meaning and
+relation of facts, it became a cult of abstractions, and the aim of its
+teachers seemed to be to render the science as little scientific, and
+as dull, as possible. They set up an abstraction, an "economic man," and
+created for it a world of economic abstractions. It is impossible to
+read either Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, but especially the latter,
+without feeling the artificiality of the superstructures they created,
+and the justice of Carlyle's description of such political economy as
+the "dismal science." With a realism greater even than Adam Smith's, and
+a more logical method than Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, Marx restored
+the science of political economy to its old fact foundations.
+
+
+IV
+
+The superior insight of Marx is shown in the very first sentence of his
+great work. The careful reader at once perceives that the first
+paragraph of the book strikes a keynote which distinguishes it from all
+other economic works comparable to it in importance. Marx was a great
+master of the art of luminous and exact definition, and nowhere is this
+more strikingly shown than in this opening sentence of "Capital": "The
+wealth of those societies _in which the capitalist mode of production
+prevails_ presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its
+unit being a single commodity."[155] In this simple, lucid sentence the
+theory of social evolution is clearly implied. The author repudiates,
+by implication, the idea that it is possible to lay down universal or
+eternal laws, and limits himself to the exploration of the phenomena
+appearing in a certain stage of historical development. We are not to
+have another abstract economic man with a world of abstractions all his
+own; lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, imaginary
+communities nicely adapted for demonstration purposes in college class
+rooms, and all the other stage properties of the political economists,
+are to be entirely discarded. Our author does not propose to give us a
+set of principles by which we shall be able to understand and explain
+the phenomena of human society at all times and in all places--the
+Israel of the Mosaic Age, the nomadic life of Arab tribes, Europe in the
+Middle Ages, and England in the nineteenth century.
+
+In effect, the passage under consideration says: "Political economy is
+the study of the principles and laws governing the production and
+distribution of wealth. Because of the fact that in the progress of
+society different systems of wealth production and exchange, and
+different concepts of wealth, prevail at different times, and at various
+places at the same time, we cannot formulate any laws which will apply
+to all times and all places. We must choose for examination and study a
+certain form of production, representing a particular stage of
+historical development, and be careful not to attempt to apply any of
+its laws to other forms of production, representing other stages of
+development. We might have chosen to investigate the laws which governed
+the production of wealth in the ancient Babylonian Empire, or in
+Mediæval Europe, had we so desired, but we have chosen instead the
+period in which we live."
+
+This that we call the capitalist epoch has grown out of the geographical
+discoveries and the mechanical inventions of the past three hundred
+years or so, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its
+chief characteristic, from an economic point of view, is that of
+production for sale instead of direct use as in earlier stages of social
+development. Of course, barter and sale are much older than this epoch
+which we are discussing. In all ages men have exchanged their surplus
+products for other things more desirable to them, either directly by
+barter or through some medium of exchange. In the very nature of things,
+however, such exchange as this must have been incidental to the life of
+the people engaging in it, and not its principal aim. Under such
+conditions of society wealth consists in the possession of useful
+things. The naked savage, so long as he possessed plenty of weapons, and
+could get an abundance of fish or game, was, from the viewpoint of the
+society in which he lived, a wealthy man. In other words, the wealth of
+pre-capitalist society consisted in the possession of use-values, and
+not of exchange-values. Robinson Crusoe, for whom the possibility of
+exchange did not exist, was, from this pre-capitalist viewpoint, a very
+wealthy man.
+
+In our present society, production is carried on primarily for exchange,
+for sale. The first and essential characteristic feature of wealth in
+this stage of social development is that it takes the form of
+accumulated exchange-values, or commodities. Men are accounted rich or
+poor according to the exchange-values they can command, and not
+according to the use-values they can command. To use a favorite example,
+the man who owns a ton of potatoes is far richer in simple use-values
+than the man whose only possession is a sack of diamonds, but, because
+in present society a sack of diamonds will exchange for an almost
+infinite quantity of potatoes, the owner of the diamonds is much
+wealthier than the owner of the potatoes. The criterion of wealth in
+capitalist society is exchangeable value as opposed to use-value, the
+criterion of wealth in primitive society. The unit of wealth is
+therefore a commodity, and we must begin our investigation with it. If
+we can analyze the nature of a commodity so that we can understand how
+and why it is produced, and how and why it is exchanged, we shall be
+able to understand the principle governing the production and exchange
+of wealth in this and every other society where similar conditions
+prevail, where, that is to say, the unit of wealth is a commodity, and
+wealth consists in an accumulation of commodities.
+
+
+V
+
+The visit to America, in 1907, of a distinguished English critic of
+Socialism, Mr. W. H. Mallock, had the effect of thrusting into
+prominence a common misconception of Marxian Socialism, and it is highly
+significant that, except in the Socialist press, none of the numerous
+comments which the series of university lectures delivered by that
+gentleman occasioned, called attention to the fact that they were based
+throughout upon a misstatement of the Marxian position. Briefly, Mr.
+Mallock insisted that Marx believed and taught that all wealth is
+produced by manual labor, and that, therefore, it ought to belong to the
+manual workers. In order that there may be no misstatement of our
+amiable critic's position, it will be best to quote his own words. He
+says, in Lecture I: "The practical outcome of the scientific economics
+of Marx is summed up in the formula which is the watchword of popular
+Socialism. 'All wealth is due to labor; therefore all wealth ought to go
+to the laborer'--a doctrine in itself not novel, but presented by Marx
+as the outcome of an elaborate system of economics"[156] (page 6). The
+careful reader will notice that Mr. Mallock does not profess to give
+the exact words of Marx, nor refer to any particular passage, but says
+that the formula quoted by him is the "practical outcome" of the
+economic system of Marx, "presented by Marx" as such. But to quote
+again: "Wealth, says Marx, not only ought to be, but actually can be
+distributed amongst a certain class of persons, namely, the laborers....
+Because these laborers comprise in the acts of labor everything that is
+involved in the production of it" (page 7). Again: " ... Marx makes of
+his doctrine that labor alone produces all economic wealth" (page 7).
+Also: " ... that theory of production which the genius of Karl Marx
+invested with a semblance, at all events, of sober, scientific truth,
+and which ascribes all wealth to that _ordinary manual labor which
+brings the sweat to the brow of the ordinary laboring man_" (page
+12).[157] All the foregoing passages are taken from a single lecture,
+the first of the series. We will take only a few from the others: " ...
+the doctrine of Marx that all productive effort is absolutely equal in
+productivity" (Lecture III, page 46); "Marx based the ethics of
+distribution on what purported to be an analysis of production" (Lecture
+IV, page 61); " ... Count Tolstoy, ... like Socialists of the school of
+Marx, declares that ordinary manual labor is the source of all wealth"
+(Lecture IV, page 76). "One is the attempt of Marx and his school,
+which represents ordinary manual labor as the sole producer of wealth"
+(Lecture IV, page 81); " ... the Marxian doctrine ... that manual labor
+is the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture V, page 115). It would be easy
+to add many other quotations very similar to these, but it is
+unnecessary. From the quotations given we can gather Mr. Mallock's
+conception of what Marx taught regarding the source of wealth.
+
+It will be seen that Mr. Mallock alleges: (1) That Marx believed and
+taught that all wealth is produced by ordinary manual labor; (2) that he
+held, as a consequence, that all wealth ought to belong to the manual
+laborers, thus basing an ethic of distribution upon production; (3) that
+he taught that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productive
+value, in other words, that ten hours' work of one kind is economically
+as valuable as ten hours' of any other kind, so long as the labor is
+productive.
+
+It is not easy to command the necessary self-restraint to reply with
+dignity to such wholesale misrepresentation as this. There is not the
+slightest scintilla of a foundation in fact for any one of the three
+statements. Not a single passage can be quoted from Marx which justifies
+any one of them. As we shall see, Marx specifically repudiated each one
+of them, a great deal more forcefully than Mr. Mallock does. That such
+misrepresentations of Marx should have been permitted to pass
+unchallenged in so many of our great colleges and universities is to our
+national shame. We will briefly consider the teaching of Marx under each
+of the three heads.
+
+First, the source of wealth. It is true that such phrases as "Labor is
+the source of all wealth" are constantly met with in the popular
+literature of Socialism, but so far as that is the case it is not due to
+the teaching of Marx, but rather in spite of it. In the writings of the
+early Ricardian Socialists these phrases abound, but nowhere in all the
+writings of Marx will such a statement be found. For many years the
+opening sentence in the Programme of the German party contained the
+phrase "Labor is the source of all wealth and of all culture," _but it
+was adopted in spite of the protest of Marx_. The Gotha Programme was
+adopted in 1875. A draft was submitted to Marx and he wrote of it that
+it was "utterly condemnable and demoralizing to the party." Of the
+passage in question, he wrote: "Labor is _not_ the source of all wealth.
+Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and of such, to be
+sure, is material wealth composed) as is labor, which itself is but the
+expression of a natural force, of human labor-power."[158] That the
+clause was adopted was a bitter disappointment to Marx, and was due to
+the insistence of the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle. To say that Marx
+held labor to be the sole source of wealth is to misrepresent his whole
+teaching.[159]
+
+But while the Lassallians, and before them the Ricardians, used the
+_phrase_, it is evident that they assumed the inclusion of what Marx
+calls "Nature." They know very well that labor, mere exertion of
+physical strength, could produce nothing. If, for instance, a man were
+to spend all his strength trying to lift the pyramids, alone and unaided
+by mechanical power, it is quite evident to the meanest intellect that
+his exertions would not produce a single atom of wealth. It is equally
+obvious that if we take any use-value, whether it be an exchange-value
+or not being immaterial, we cannot eliminate from it the substance of
+which it is composed. Take, for example, the canoe of a savage, which is
+a simple use-value, and a meerschaum pipe, which is a commodity. In the
+canoe we have part of the trunk of a tree taken from the primeval
+forest, one of Nature's products. But without the labor of the savage it
+would never have become a canoe. It would have remained simply part of
+the trunk of a tree, and would not have acquired the use-value it has as
+a canoe. But it is likewise true that without the tree the canoe could
+not have existed. So with our meerschaum pipe. It is not simply a
+use-value: it is also an article of commerce, an exchange-value, a
+commodity. Its elements are, the silicate mineral which Nature provided
+and the form which human labor has given it. We can apply this test to
+every form of wealth, whether simple use-values or commodities, and we
+shall find that, in Mill's phrase, wealth is produced by the application
+of human labor to _appropriate natural objects_.
+
+This brings us to the second point in Mr. Mallock's criticism, namely,
+that Marx held that only "ordinary manual labor" is capable of producing
+wealth, and that, therefore, all wealth ought to go to the manual
+laborers. One looks in vain for a single passage in all the writings of
+Marx which will justify this criticism. It may be conceded at once that
+if Marx taught anything of the kind, the defect in Marxian theory is
+fatal. But it must be proven that the defect exists--and the _onus
+probandi_ rests upon Mr. Mallock. One need not be a trained economist or
+a learned philosopher to see how absurd such a theory must be. Suppose
+we take, for example, a man working in a factory, at a great machine,
+making screws. We go to that man and say: "Every screw here is made by
+manual labor alone. The machine does not count; the brains of the
+inventors of the machine have nothing to do with the making of screws."
+Our laborer might be illiterate and unable to read a single page of
+political economy with understanding, but he would know that our
+statement was foolish and untrue. Or, suppose we take the machine itself
+and say to the laborer: "That great machine with all its levers and
+wheels and springs working in such beautiful harmony was made entirely
+by manual workers, such as molders, blacksmiths, and machinists; no
+brain workers had anything to do with the making of it; the labor of the
+inventors, and of the men who drew the plans and supervised the making,
+had nothing to do with the production of the machine"--our laborer would
+rightly conclude that we were either fools or seeking to mock him as
+one.
+
+Curiously enough, notwithstanding the frequent reiteration of this
+criticism of Marx by Mr. Mallock, he himself, in an unguarded moment,
+provides the answer by which Marx is vindicated! Thus, speaking of the
+great classical economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill,
+he points out that they included "all forms of living industrial effort,
+from those of a Watt or an Edison down to those of a man who tars a
+fence, grouped together under the common name of labor" (Lecture I, page
+16). And again: "At present the orthodox economists and the socialistic
+economists alike give us _all human effort_[160] tied up, as it were, in
+a sack, and ticketed 'human labor'" (Lecture I, page 18). Now, if the
+Socialist includes in his definition of labor "all human effort," it
+stands to reason that he does not mean only "ordinary manual labor" when
+he uses the term. Thus Mallock answers Mallock and vindicates Marx!
+
+Of course, Marx, like all the great economists, includes in his concept
+of labor every kind of productive effort, mental as well as physical, as
+Mr. Mallock, to the utter destruction of his disingenuous criticism,
+unconsciously--we must suppose--admitted. Take, for example, this
+definition: "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be understood
+the aggregate of those _mental and physical_ capabilities existing in a
+human being, which he exercises when he produces a use-value of any
+description."[161] As against this luminous and precise definition, it
+is but fair to quote that of Mr. Mallock himself. He defines labor as
+"the faculties of an individual _applied to his own labor_"[162]--a
+meaningless jumble of words. The fifty-seven letters contained in that
+sentence would mean just as much if put in a bag, well shaken, and put
+on paper just as they happened to fall from the bag.
+
+Marx never argued that the producers of wealth had a _right_ to the
+wealth produced. The "right of labor to the whole of its produce" was,
+it is true, the keynote of the theories of the Ricardian Socialists. An
+echo of the doctrine appeared in the Gotha Programme of the German
+Socialists to which reference has already been made, and in the popular
+agitation of Socialism in this and other countries it is echoed more or
+less frequently. Just in proportion as the ethical argument for
+Socialism is advanced, and appeals made to the sense of justice, the
+rich idler is condemned and an ethic of distribution based upon
+production becomes an important feature of the propaganda. But Marx
+nowhere indulges in this kind of argument. Not in a single line of
+"Capital," or his minor economic treatises, can any hint of the doctrine
+be found. He invariably scoffed at the "ethical distribution" idea. In
+the judgment of the present writer, this is at once his great strength
+and weakness, but that is beside the point of this discussion. Suffice
+it to say, though it involves some reiteration, that Marx never took the
+position that Socialism _ought_ to take the place of capitalism,
+because the producers of wealth _ought_ to get the whole of the wealth
+they produce. His position was rather that Socialism _must_ come, simply
+because capitalism _could not_ last.
+
+Finally, we come to the charge that Marx taught that "all productive
+effort is absolutely equal in productivity." Incredible as it may seem,
+it is nevertheless a fact that everything Marx has to say upon the
+subject is directly opposed to this notion, and that, as we shall see
+later on, his famous theory of value is not only not dependent upon a
+belief in the equal productivity of all productive effort, but would be
+completely shattered by it. Not only Marx, but also Mill, Ricardo, and
+Smith, his great predecessors, recognized the fact that all labor is not
+equally productive. Of course, it requires no special genius to
+demonstrate this. That a poor mechanic with antiquated tools will
+produce less in a given number of hours than an expert mechanic with
+good tools, for example, is too obvious for comment. The Marx assailed
+by Mr. Mallock, and numerous critics like him, is a myth. The real Marx
+they do not touch--hence the futility of their work. The Marx they
+attack is a man of straw, not the immortal thinker. Endowed
+
+
+     "With just enough of learning to misquote,"
+
+
+their assaults are vain.
+
+
+VI
+
+Having thus disposed of some of the more prevalent criticisms of Marx as
+an economist, we are ready for a definite, consecutive statement of the
+economic theory of modern Socialism. First, however, a word as to the
+term "scientific" as commonly applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of
+the friendliest of Socialist critics have contended that the use of the
+term is pretentious, bombastic, and altogether unjustified. From a
+certain narrow point of view, this appears to be an unimportant matter,
+and the vigor with which Socialists defend their use of the term seems
+exceedingly foolish, and accountable for only as a result of
+enthusiastic fetish worship--the fetish, of course, being Marx.
+
+Such a view is very crude and superficial. It cannot be doubted that the
+Socialism represented by Marx and the modern political Socialist
+movement is radically different from the earlier Socialism with which
+the names of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, and a host of other
+builders of "cloud palaces for an ideal humanity," are associated. The
+need of some word to distinguish between the two is obvious, and the
+only question remaining is whether or not the word "scientific" is the
+most suitable and accurate one to make that distinction clear; whether
+the words "scientific" and "utopian" express with reasonable accuracy
+the nature of the difference. Here the followers of Marx feel that they
+have an impregnable position. The method of Marx is scientific. From the
+first sentence of his great work to the last, the method pursued is that
+of a painstaking scientist. It would be just as reasonable to complain
+of the use of the word "scientific" in connection with the work of
+Darwin and his followers, to distinguish it from the guesswork of
+Anaximander, as to cavil at the distinction made between the Socialism
+of Marx and Engels and their followers, and that of visionaries like
+Owen and Saint-Simon.
+
+Doubtless both Marx and Engels lapsed occasionally into Utopianism. We
+see instances of this in the illusions Marx entertained regarding the
+Crimean War bringing about the European Social Revolution; in the theory
+of the increasing misery of the proletariat; in Engels' confident
+prediction, in 1845, that a Socialist revolution was imminent and
+inevitable; and in the prediction of both that an economic cataclysm
+must create the conditions for a sudden and complete revolution in
+society. These, I say, are Utopian ideas, evidences that the founders of
+scientific Socialism were tinctured with the older ideas of the
+Utopists, and even more with their spirit. But when we speak of
+"Marxism," what mental picture does the word suggest, what intellectual
+concept is the word a name for? Is it these forecasts and guesses, and
+the exact mode of realizing the Socialist ideal which Marx laid down, or
+is it the great principle of social evolution determined by economic
+development? Is it his naïve and simple description of the process of
+capitalist concentration, in which no hint appears of the circuitous
+windings that carried the actual process into unforeseen channels, or
+the broad fact that the concentration has taken place and that monopoly
+has come out of competition? Is it his statement of the extent to which
+labor is exploited, or the _fact_ of the exploitation? If we are to
+judge Marx by the essential things, rather than by the incidental and
+non-essential things, then we must admit his claim to be reckoned with
+the great scientific sociologists and economists.
+
+After all, what constitutes scientific method? Is it not the recognition
+of the law of causation, putting exact knowledge of facts above
+tradition or sentiment; accumulating facts patiently until sufficient
+have been gathered to make possible the formulation of generalizations
+and laws enabling us to connect the present with the past, and in some
+measure to foretell the outcome of the present, as Marx foretold the
+culmination of competition in monopoly? Is it not to see past, present,
+and future as one whole, a growth, a constant process, so that instead
+of vainly fashioning plans for millennial Utopias, we seek in the facts
+of to-day the stream of tendencies, and so learn the direction of the
+immediate flow of progress? If this is a true concept of scientific
+method, and the scientific spirit, then Karl Marx was a scientist, and
+modern Socialism is aptly named Scientific Socialism.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[137] An English edition of this work, translated by H. Quelch, was
+published in 1900 under the title _The Poverty of Philosophy_.
+
+[138] Cf. F. Engels, Preface to _La Misère de la Philosophie_, English
+translation, _The Poverty of Philosophy_, page iv.
+
+[139] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_, by Anton Menger, 1899.
+
+[140] Edward Bernstein, _Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer_, page
+ix.
+
+[141] _Criticism of the Gotha Programme_, from the posthumous papers of
+Karl Marx.
+
+[142] It should perhaps be pointed out here, to avoid misunderstanding,
+that Ricardo hedged this doctrine about with important
+qualifications--not always observed by his followers--till it no longer
+remained the simple proposition stated above. See Dr. A. C. Whitaker's
+_History and Criticism of the Labour Theory of Value in English
+Political Economy_, page 57, for a suggestive treatment of this point.
+
+[143] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour._
+
+[144] Cf. _Capital_, Vol. I, page 644, and Vol. II, page 19, Kerr
+edition.
+
+[145] Cf., for instance, _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapter VI.
+
+[146] Introduction to Menger's _The Right to the Whole Produce of
+Labour_.
+
+[147] _The Life of Francis Place_, by Graham Wallas, M.A., London, 1898,
+page 268.
+
+[148] For this brief sketch of the works of these Ricardian Socialist
+writers I have drawn freely upon Menger's _The Right to the Whole
+Produce of Labour_, and Professor Foxwell's Introduction thereto.
+
+[149] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht,
+translated by E. Untermann, 1901, page 32.
+
+[150] Much of this work has been collated and edited by Marx's daughter,
+the late Mrs. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, and her husband, Dr. Edward Aveling,
+and published in two volumes, _The Eastern Question_ and _Revolution and
+Counter-Revolution_.
+
+[151] The note is quoted by Liebknecht, _Memoirs of Marx_, page 177, and
+in the Introduction to _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, by the
+editor, Eleanor Marx-Aveling.
+
+[152] _Political Economy_, page 115.
+
+[153] Luigi Cossa, _Guide to the Study of Political Economy_, English
+translation, 1880.
+
+[154] _The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty_, edited by Charles
+Henry Hull, Vol. I, page 244.
+
+[155] The italics are mine.--J. S.
+
+[156] All quotations from Mr. Mallock are taken from the volume
+containing the text of his lectures, entitled _Socialism_, published by
+The National Civic Federation, New York, 1907.
+
+[157] The italics are mine.--J. S.
+
+[158] _Letter on the Gotha Programme_, by Karl Marx, published in the
+collection of the posthumous writings of Marx and Engels, edited by
+Mehring, 1902. See a translation of the letter by Dr. Harriet E.
+Lothrop, _International Socialist Review_, May, 1908.
+
+[159] I note that my friend, Mr. J. R. Macdonald, M.P., "Whip" of the
+Labour Party in the British House of Commons, so misrepresents Marx in
+his admirable little book, _Socialism_, page 54.
+
+[160] Italics mine.--J. S.
+
+[161] The italics are mine. The passage occurs on page 186, Vol. I, of
+_Capital_, Kerr edition. In the last of the series of lectures printed
+in his book, Mr. Mallock attempts a reply to the criticism of an
+American Socialist, Mr. Morris Hillquit who quoted this passage from
+Marx to show that Mr. Mallock was in error in saying that Marx regarded
+manual labor as the sole source of wealth. He evades the real point,
+namely, that Marx clearly included mental as well as physical labor in
+his use of the term, and with an ingenuity equaled only by the
+disingenuousness of the argument, seeks refuge in the fact that it does
+not cover the special "directive ability" which is a special function,
+"a productive force distinct from labor." The trick will not do. The
+fact is that Marx clearly and precisely covers that point in another
+place. The reader is referred to Chapter XIII of Part IV, Vol. I, of
+_Capital_, pages 363-368, Kerr edition, for a brilliant and honest
+treatment of the whole subject of the place of the "directing few" in
+modern industry. We shall treat the matter briefly later on.
+
+[162] Italics mine.--J. S. The passage occurs in Lecture III, page 36.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+OUTLINES OF SOCIALIST ECONOMIC THEORY
+
+
+I
+
+The _geist_ of social and political evolution is economic, according to
+the Socialist philosophy. This view of the importance of man's economic
+relations involves some very radical changes in the methods and
+terminology of political economy. The philosophical view of social and
+political evolution as a world-process, through revolutions formed in
+the matrices of economic conditions, at once limits and expands the
+scope of political economy. It destroys on the one hand the idea of the
+eternality of economic laws and limits them to particular epochs. On the
+other hand, it enhances the importance of the science of political
+economy as a study of the motive force of social evolution. With Marx
+and his followers, political economy is more than an analysis of the
+production and distribution of wealth; it is a study of the principal
+determinant factor in the social and political progress of society,
+consciously recognized as such.
+
+The sociological viewpoint appears throughout the whole of Marxian
+economic thought. It appears, for instance, in the definition of a
+commodity as the unit of wealth _in those societies in which the
+capitalist mode of production prevails_. Likewise wealth and capital
+connote special social relations or categories. Wealth, which in certain
+simpler forms of social organization consists in the ownership of
+use-values, under the capitalist system consists in the ownership of
+exchange-values. Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between
+persons established through the medium of things. Robinson Crusoe's
+spade, the Indian's bow and arrow, and all similar illustrations given
+by the "orthodox" economists, do not constitute capital any more than an
+infant's spoon is capital. They do not serve as the medium of the social
+relation between wage-worker and capitalist which characterizes the
+capitalist system of production. The essential feature of capitalist
+society is the production of wealth in the commodity form; that is to
+say, in the form of objects that, instead of being consumed by the
+producer, are intended to be exchanged or sold at a profit. Capital,
+therefore, is wealth set aside for the production of other wealth with a
+view to its exchange at a profit. A house may consist of certain
+definite quantities of bricks, timber, lime, iron, and other substances,
+but similar quantities of these substances piled up without plan will
+not constitute a house. Bricks, timber, lime, and iron become a house
+only in certain circumstances, when they bear a given ordered relation
+to each other. "A negro is a negro; it is only under certain conditions
+that he becomes a slave. A certain machine, for example, is a machine
+for spinning cotton; it is only under certain defined conditions that it
+becomes capital. Apart from these conditions, it is no more capital than
+gold _per se_ is money; capital is a social relation of
+production."[163]
+
+This sociological principle pervades the whole of Socialist economics.
+It appears in every economic definition, practically, and the
+terminology of the orthodox political economists is thereby often given
+a new meaning, radically different from that originally given to it and
+commonly understood. The student of Socialism who fails to appreciate
+this fact will most frequently land in a morass of confusion and
+difficulty, but the careful student who fully understands it will find
+it of great assistance. Take, as an illustration, the phrase "the
+abolition of capital" which frequently occurs in Socialist literature.
+The reader who thinks of capital as consisting of _things_, such as
+machinery, materials of production, money, and so on, finds the phrase
+bewildering. He wonders how it is conceivable that production should go
+on if these things were done away with. But the student who fully
+understands the sociological principle outlined above comprehends at
+once that it is not proposed to do away with the _things_, but with
+_certain social relations expressed through them_. He understands that
+the "abolition of capital" no more involves the destruction of the
+physical things than the abolition of slavery involved the destruction
+of the slave himself. What is aimed at is the social relation which is
+established through the medium of the things commonly called capital.
+
+
+II
+
+In common with all the great economists, Socialists hold that wealth is
+produced by human labor applied to appropriate natural objects. This, as
+we have seen, does not mean that labor is the sole source of wealth.
+Still less does it mean that the mere expenditure of labor upon natural
+objects must inevitably result in the production of wealth. If a man
+spends his time digging holes in the ground and filling them up again,
+or dipping water from the ocean in a bucket and pouring it back again,
+the labor so expended upon natural objects would not produce wealth of
+any kind. Nor is the productivity of mental labor denied. In the term
+"labor" is implied the totality of human energies expended in
+production, regardless of whether those energies be physical or mental.
+In modern society wealth consists of social use-values, commodities.
+
+We must, therefore, begin our analysis of capitalist society with an
+analysis of a commodity. "A commodity," says Marx, "is, in the first
+place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
+human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether,
+for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no
+difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object
+satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or
+indirectly as means of production."[164] But a commodity must be
+something more than an object satisfying human wants. Such objects are
+simple use-values, but commodities are something else in addition to
+simple use-values. The manna upon which the pilgrim exiles of the Bible
+story were fed, for instance, was not a commodity, though it fulfilled
+the conditions of this first part of our definition by satisfying human
+wants. We must carry our definition further, therefore. In addition to
+use-value, then, a commodity must possess exchange-value. In other
+words, it must have a social use-value, a use-value to others, and not
+merely to the producer.
+
+Thus, things may have the quality of satisfying human wants without
+being commodities. To state the matter in the language of the
+economists, use-values may, and often do, exist without economic value,
+value, that is to say, in exchange. Air, for example, is absolutely
+indispensable to life, yet it is not--except in special, abnormal
+conditions--subject to sale or exchange. With a use-value that is beyond
+computation, it has no exchange-value. Similarly, water is ordinarily
+plentiful and has no economic value; it is not a commodity. A seeming
+contradiction exists in the case of the water supply of cities where
+water for domestic use is commercially supplied, but a moment's
+reflection will show that it is not the water, but the social service of
+bringing it to a desired location for the consumer's convenience that
+represents economic value. Over and above that there is, however, the
+element of monopoly-price which enters into the matter. With that we
+have not, at this point, anything to do. Under ordinary circumstances,
+water, like light, is plentiful; its utility to man is not due to man's
+labor, and it has, therefore, no economic value. But in exceptional
+circumstances, as in an arid desert or in a besieged fortress, a
+millionaire might be willing to give all his wealth for a little water,
+thus making the value of what is ordinarily valueless almost infinite.
+What may be called natural use-values have no economic value. And even
+use-values that are the result of human labor may be equally without
+economic value. If I make something to satisfy some want of my own, it
+will have no economic value unless it will satisfy the want of some one
+else. So, unless a use-value is social, unless the object produced is of
+use to some other person than the producer, it will have no value in the
+economic sense: it will not be _exchangeable_.
+
+A commodity must therefore possess two fundamental qualities. It must
+have a use-value, must satisfy some human want or desire; it must also
+have an exchange-value arising from the fact that the use-value
+contained in it is social in its nature and exchangeable for other
+exchange-values. With the unit of wealth thus defined, the subsequent
+study of economics is immensely simplified.[165]
+
+The trade of capitalist societies is the exchange of commodities against
+each other, through the medium of money. Commodities utterly unlike each
+other in all apparent physical properties, such as color, weight, size,
+shape, substance, and so on, and utterly unlike each other in respect to
+the purposes for which intended and the nature of the wants they
+satisfy, are exchanged for one another, sometimes equally, sometimes in
+unequal ratio. The question immediately arises: what is it that
+determines the relative value of commodities so exchanged? A dress suit
+and a kitchen stove, for example, are very different commodities,
+possessing no outward semblance to each other, and satisfying very
+different human wants, yet they may, and actually do, exchange upon an
+equality in the market. To understand the reason for this similarity of
+value of dissimilar commodities, and the principle which governs the
+exchange of commodities in general, is to understand an important part
+of the mechanism of modern capitalist society.
+
+This is the problem of value which all the great economists have tried
+to solve. Sir William Petty, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart
+Mill, and Karl Marx developed what is known as the labor-value theory as
+the solution of the problem. This theory, as developed by Marx, not in
+its cruder forms, is one of the cardinal principles in Socialist
+economic theory. The Ricardian statement of the theory is that the
+relative value of commodities to one another is determined by the
+relative amounts of human labor embodied in them; that the quantity of
+labor embodied in them is the determinant of the value of all
+commodities. When all their differences have been carefully noted, all
+commodities have at least one quality in common. The dress suit and the
+kitchen range, toothpicks and snowshoes, pink parasols and
+sewing-machines, are unlike each other in every other particular save
+one--they are all products of human labor, crystallizations of human
+labor-power. Here, then, say the Socialists, as did the great classical
+economists, we have a hint of the secret of the mechanism of exchange in
+capitalist society. The amount of labor-power embodied in their
+production is in some way connected with the measure of the exchangeable
+value of the commodities.
+
+Stated in the simple, crude form, that the quantity of human labor
+crystallized in them is the basis and measure of the value of
+commodities when exchanged against one another, the labor theory of
+value is beautifully simple. At least, the formula is simplicity itself.
+At the same time, it is open to certain very obvious criticisms. It
+would be absurd to contend that the day's labor of a coolie laborer is
+equal in productivity to the day's labor of a highly skilled mechanic,
+or that the day's labor of an incompetent workman is of equal value to
+that of the most proficient. To refute such a theory is as beautifully
+simple as the theory itself. In all seriousness, arguments such as these
+are constantly used against the Marxian theory of value, notwithstanding
+that they do not possess the slightest relation to it. Marxism is very
+frequently "refuted" by those who do not trouble themselves to
+understand it.
+
+The idea that the quantity of labor embodied in them is the determinant
+of the value of commodities was held by practically all the great
+economists. Sir William Petty, for example, in a celebrated passage,
+says of the exchange-value of corn: "If a man can bring to London an
+ounce of silver out of the earth in Peru in the same time that he can
+produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other;
+now, if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can get two ounces of
+silver as easily as formerly he did one, then the corn will be as cheap
+at ten shillings a bushel as it was before at five shillings a bushel,
+_cæteris paribus_."[166]
+
+Adam Smith, following Petty's lead, says: "The real price of everything,
+what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the
+toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really worth to the
+man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it
+for something else, is the toil and labor which it can save to himself,
+and which it can impose on other people.... Labor was the first price,
+the original purchase money, that was paid for all things.... If among a
+nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labor to kill
+a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver would naturally be
+worth or exchange for two deer. It is natural that what is usually the
+produce of two days' or two hours' labor, should be worth double of what
+is usually the produce of one day's or one hour's labor."[167]
+
+Benjamin Franklin, whose merit as an economist Marx recognized, takes
+the same view and regards trade as being "nothing but the exchange of
+labor for labor, the value of all things being most justly measured by
+labor."[168] From the writings of almost every one of the great
+classical economists of England it would be easy to compile a formidable
+and convincing volume of similar quotations, showing that they all took
+the same view that the quantity of human labor embodied in commodities
+determines their value. One further quotation, from Ricardo, must,
+however, suffice. He says:--
+
+"To convince ourselves that this (quantity of labor) is the real
+foundation of exchangeable value, let us suppose any improvement to be
+made in the means of abridging labor in any one of the various processes
+through which the raw cotton must pass before the manufactured stockings
+come to the market to be exchanged for other things; and observe the
+effects which will follow. If fewer men were required to cultivate the
+raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were employed in navigating, or
+shipwrights in constructing, the ship in which it was conveyed to us; if
+fewer hands were employed in raising the buildings and machinery, or if
+these, when raised, were rendered more efficient; the stockings would
+inevitably fall in value, and command less of other things. They would
+fall because a less quantity of labor was necessary to their production,
+and would therefore exchange for a smaller quantity of those things in
+which no such abridgment of labor had been made."[169]
+
+It is evident from the foregoing quotations that these great writers
+regarded the quantity of human labor crystallized in them as the basis
+of all commodity values, and their real measure. The great merit of
+Ricardo lies in his development of the idea of social labor as against
+the simple concept of the labor of particular individuals, or sets of
+individuals. In the passage cited, he includes in the term "quantity of
+human labor" not merely the total labor of those immediately concerned
+in the making of stockings, from the cultivation of the raw cotton to
+the actual making of stockings in the factory, but all the labor
+indirectly expended, even in the making and navigating of ships, and the
+building of the factories. One does, indeed, find hints of the social
+labor concept in Adam Smith, but it is Ricardo who first clearly
+develops it. Marx further developed this principle, and all criticisms
+of the labor-value theory in Marxian economic theory which are based
+upon the assumption that quantity of labor means the simple, direct
+labor embodied in commodities fall of their own weight.
+
+Thus, if we take any commodity, we shall find that it is possible to
+ascertain with tolerable certainty the amount of direct labor embodied
+in it, but that it is equally as impossible to ascertain the amount of
+the indirect expenditure of labor power which entered into its making.
+In the case of a table, for example, it may be possible to trace with
+some approximation to accuracy the labor involved in felling the tree
+and preparing the lumber out of which the table was made; the labor
+directly spent in bringing the lumber to the factory, and the direct
+labor expended in making out of the lumber a finished table; allowance
+may also be made for the labor embodied in the nails, glue, stain, and
+other articles used in making the table. So we have a fairly accurate
+statement of the direct labor embodied in the table. But what of the
+labor used to make the tools of the men who felled the trees and
+prepared the lumber? What of the coal miner and the iron miner and the
+tool maker? And what of the numerous and incalculable expenditures of
+labor to make the railroads, the railway engines, and to provide these
+with steam-power? What, also, of the machinery in the factory, and of
+the factory buildings themselves, and, back of them, again, the tool
+makers and the providers of raw materials? It is obvious that no human
+intellect could ever unravel the tangled skein of human labor, and that
+in actual exchange there can be no calculation of the respective labor
+content of commodities. If the law of value holds good, it must operate
+mechanically, automatically. And this it does, through the incidence of
+bargaining and the law of supply and demand.
+
+We have noted elsewhere the variations in human capacity and
+productiveness. Superficial critics still frequently charge Marx with
+having overlooked this very obvious fact, whereas it has not only been
+fully treated by him, but was actually covered by Smith and Ricardo
+before Marx! With these writers and their followers it is the law of
+averages which solves the difficulties arising from variations in
+individual capacity and productivity. It is the _average_ amount of
+labor expended in killing the beaver which counts, not the actual
+individual labor in a specified case. Nor did these writers overlook the
+important differentiation between simple, unskilled labor and labor that
+is highly skilled. If A in ten hours' labor produces exactly double the
+amount of exchange-value which B produces in the same time devoted to
+labor of another kind, it is obvious that the labor of B is not equal in
+value to that of A. Quantity of labor cannot, therefore, be measured, in
+individual cases, by time units. Despite a hundred passages which,
+detached from their context, seem to imply the contrary, Adam Smith
+recognized this very clearly, and attempted to solve the riddle by a
+differentiation of skilled and unskilled labor in which he likens
+skilled labor to a machine; and insists that the labor and time spent in
+acquiring the skill which distinguishes skilled labor must be
+reckoned.[170]
+
+Another frequent criticism of the Marxian theory has not only been
+answered by Marx himself--is, in fact, ruled out by the terms of the
+theory itself--but was amply replied to by Ricardo.[171] The criticism
+in question consists in the selection of what may be called "unique
+values," or scarcity values, articles which cannot be reproduced by
+labor, and whose value is wholly independent of the quantity of labor
+originally necessary to produce them. Such articles are unique specimens
+of coins and postage stamps, autograph letters, rare manuscripts,
+Stradivarius violins, Raphael pictures, Caxton books, articles
+associated with great personages--such as Napoleon's snuffbox--great
+auks' eggs, and so on _ad infinitum_. No possible amount of human labor
+could reproduce these articles, reproduce, that is to say, the exact
+utilities in them. Napoleon's snuffbox might be exactly duplicated so
+far as its physical properties are concerned, but the association with
+Napoleon's fingers, the sentimental quality which gives it its special
+utility, is not reproducible. But the trade of capitalist society does
+not consist in the manufacture and sale of these things, which, after
+all, form a very insignificant part of the exchange-values of the world.
+
+
+III
+
+Marx saw the soul of truth in the labor-value theory, as propounded by
+his predecessors, especially Ricardo, and devoted himself to its
+development and systematization. He has been accused of plagiarizing his
+theory from the Ricardians, but it is surely not plagiarism when a
+thinker sees the germ of truth in a theory, and, separating it from the
+mass of confusion and error which envelops it, restates it in scientific
+fashion with all its necessary qualifications. This is precisely what
+Marx did. He developed the idea of social labor which Ricardo had
+propounded, disregarding entirely individual labor. He recognized the
+absurdity of the contention that the value of commodities is determined
+by the amount of labor, either individual or social, _actually embodied
+in them_. If two workers are producing precisely similar commodities,
+say coats, and one of them expends twice as much labor as the other and
+uses tools and methods representing twice the social labor, it is
+clearly foolish to suppose that the exchange-value of his coat will be
+twice as great as that of the other worker, regardless of the fact that
+their utility is equal. Labor, Marx pointed out, has two sides, the
+qualitative and the quantitative. The qualitative side, the difference
+in quality between specially skilled and simply unskilled labor, is
+easily recognized, though the relative value of the one compared with
+the other may be somewhat obscured. The secret of that obscurity lies
+hidden in the quantitative side of labor. Here we must enter upon an
+abstract inquiry, that part of the Marxian theory which is most
+difficult to comprehend. Yet, it is not so very difficult, after all, to
+understand that the years devoted to learning his trade, by a mechanical
+engineer, for instance, during all of which years he must be provided
+with the necessities of life, must be reckoned somewhere and somehow;
+and that when they are so reckoned, his day's labor may be found to
+contain, concentrated, so to speak, an amount of labor time equivalent
+to two or even many days' simple unskilled labor time. It may be, and in
+fact is, quite impossible to set forth mathematically the relation of
+the two, for the reason that the process of developing skilled labor is
+too complex to be unraveled. Of the fact, however, there can be no
+doubt.
+
+The real law of value, then, according to Marx, is as follows: Under
+capitalism, _in free competition_, the value of all commodities, other
+than those unique things which cannot be reproduced by human labor, is
+determined by the amount of _abstract_ labor embodied in them; or,
+better, by the amount of social human labor power necessary, on the
+average, for their production. We may conveniently illustrate this
+theory by a concrete example. Let us, therefore, return to our
+coat-makers. Now, always assuming their equal utility, no one will be
+willing to pay twice as much for the coat produced by the slow worker
+with poor tools as for the other. If the more economical methods of
+production employed by the man who makes his coats in half the time
+taken by the other man are the methods usually employed in the
+manufacture of coats, and the time he takes represents the average time
+taken to produce a coat, then the average value of coats will be
+determined thereby, and coats produced by the slower, less economical
+process will command only the same price in the market, the fact that
+they may embody twice the amount of actual labor counting for nothing.
+If we reverse the order of this proposition, and suppose the slower,
+less economical methods to be those generally prevailing in the
+manufacture of coats, and the quicker, more economical methods to be
+exceptional, then, all other things being equal, the exchange-value, of
+coats will be determined by the amount of labor commonly consumed, and
+the fortunate producer who adopts the exceptional, economical methods
+will, for a time, reap a golden harvest. Only for a time, however. As
+the new methods prevail, competition being the impelling force, they
+become less and less exceptional, and, finally, the regular, normal
+methods of production and the standard of value.
+
+It is this very important qualification, fundamental to the Marxian
+theory, which is most often lost sight of by the critics. They persist
+in applying to individual commodities the test of comparing the amounts
+of labor-power actually consumed in their production, and so confound
+the Marxian theory with its crude progenitors. In refuting this crude
+theory, they are quite oblivious of the fact that Marx himself
+accomplished that by no means difficult feat. To state the Marxian
+theory accurately, we must qualify the bald statement that the
+exchange-value of commodities is determined by the amount of labor
+embodied in them, and state it in the following manner: _The
+exchange-value of commodities is determined by the amount of average
+labor at the time socially necessary for their production._ This is
+determined, not absolutely in individual cases, but approximately in
+general, by the bargaining and higgling of the market, to adopt Adam
+Smith's well-known phrase.
+
+Now, this theory applies to those things, exclusive of the category of
+"unique values," which cannot be made by labor and are commonly supposed
+to owe their value to their rarity. For example, we may take diamonds. A
+man walking along the great wastes of the African _karoo_ comes across a
+little stream. As he stoops to drink, he sees in the water a number of
+glittering diamonds. To pick them out is the work of a few minutes only,
+but the diamonds are worth many thousands of dollars. The law of value
+above outlined applies just as much to them as to any other commodity.
+The value of diamonds is determined by the amount of labor expenditure
+necessary _on an average_ to procure them. If the normal method of
+obtaining diamonds were simply to go to the nearest stream and pick them
+out, their value would fall, possibly to zero:--
+
+
+     "When we have nothing else to wear
+     But cloth of gold and satins rare,
+     For cloth of gold we cease to care--
+       Up goes the price of shoddy."
+
+
+IV
+
+Most writers do not distinguish between price and value with sufficient
+clearness, using the terms as if they were synonymous and
+interchangeable. Where utilities are exchanged directly one for
+another, as in the barter of primitive society, there is no need of a
+price-form to express value. In highly developed societies, however,
+where the very magnitude of production and exchange makes direct barter
+impossible, and where the objects to be exchanged are not commonly the
+product of individual labor, a medium of exchange becomes necessary; a
+something which is generally recognized as a safe and stable commodity
+which can be used to express in terms of its own weight, size, shape, or
+color, the value of other commodities to be exchanged. This is the
+function of money. In various times and places wheat, shells, skins of
+animals, beads, powder, tobacco, and a multitude of other things, have
+served as money, but for various reasons, more or less obvious, the
+precious metals, gold and silver, have been most favored.
+
+In all commercial countries to-day, one or other of these metals, or
+both of them, serves as the recognized medium of exchange. They are
+commodities also, and when we say that the value of a commodity is a
+certain amount of gold, we equally express the value of that amount of
+gold in terms of the commodity in question. As commodities, the precious
+metals are subject to the same laws as other commodities. If gold should
+be discovered in such abundance that it became as plentiful and easy to
+obtain as coal, its value would be no greater than that of coal. It
+might, conceivably, still be used as the medium of exchange, but it
+would--unless protected by legislation or otherwise from the operation
+of economic law, and so given a monopoly-price--have an exchange-value
+equal to that of coal, a ton of the one being equal to a ton of the
+other--provided, of course, that its utility remained. Since the
+scarcity of gold is an important element in its utility valuation,
+creating and fostering the desire for its possession, that utility-value
+might largely disappear if gold became as plentiful as coal, in which
+case it would not have the same value as coal, and might cease to be a
+commodity at all.
+
+Price, then, is the expression of value in terms of some other
+commodity, which, generally used for that purpose of expressing the
+value of other commodities, we call money. It is only an approximation
+of value, and subject to a much greater fluctuation than value itself.
+It may, for a time, fall far below or rise above value, but in a free
+market--the only condition in which the operation of the law may be
+judged--sooner or later the equilibrium will be regained. Where monopoly
+exists, the free market condition being non-existent, price may be
+constantly elevated above value. Monopoly-price is an artificial
+elevation of price above value, and must be considered separately as the
+abrogation of the law of value.
+
+Failure to discriminate between value and its price-expression, or
+symbol, has led to endless difficulty. It lies at the bottom of the
+naïve theory that value depends upon the relation of supply and demand.
+Lord Lauderdale's famous theory has found much support among later
+economists, though it is now rather unpopular when stated in its old,
+simple form. Disguised in the so-called Austrian theory of final
+utility, it has attained considerable vogue.[172] The theory is
+plausible and convincing to the ordinary mind. Every day we see
+illustrations of its working: prices are depressed when there is an
+oversupply, and elevated when the demand of would-be consumers exceeds
+the supply of the commodities they desire to buy. It is not so easy to
+see that these effects are temporary, and that there is an automatic
+adjustment going on. Increased demand raises prices for a while, but it
+also calls forth an increase in supply which tends to restore the old
+price level, or may even force prices below it. In the latter case, the
+supply falls off and prices find their real level. The relation of
+supply to demand causes an oscillation of prices, but it is not the
+determinant of value. When prices rise above a certain level, demand
+slackens or ceases, and prices are inevitably lowered. Prices may and do
+fall with a decreased demand, but it is clear that unless the producers
+can get a price approximately equal to the value of their commodities,
+they will cease to produce them, and the supply will diminish or cease
+altogether. Ultimately, therefore, the fluctuations of price through the
+lack of equilibrium between supply and demand adjust themselves, and
+prices must tend constantly to approximate values.
+
+Monopoly-price is, as already observed, an artificial price in the sense
+that the laws of free market exchange do not apply to it. The "unique
+utilities," things not reproducible by human labor, command what might
+be termed natural monopoly-prices. There are many other commodities,
+however, the price of which is not regulated by the quantity of social
+human labor necessary to produce them, but simply by the desire of the
+purchasers and the means they have of gratifying it and the power of the
+sellers to control the market and exclude effective competition. Since
+Karl Marx wrote, the exceptions to his law of value have become more
+numerous, as a result of the changes in industrial and commercial
+conditions. The development of great monopolies and near-monopolies has
+greatly increased the number of commodities which, for considerable
+periods, are placed outside the sphere of the labor-value theory, their
+price depending upon their marginal utility, irrespective of the labor
+actually embodied in them or necessary to their reproduction. It may, in
+the opinion of the present writer, be said in criticism of the followers
+of Marx that they have not carried on his work, but largely contented
+themselves with repeating generalizations which, true when made, no
+longer fit all the facts. But that is not a criticism of Marx, or of his
+work. What he professed to make was an analysis of the methods of
+production and exchange in competitive capitalist society. His followers
+have largely failed to allow for the enormous changes which have taken
+place, and go on repeating, unchanged, his phrases.
+
+Professor Seligman has pointed out that Ricardo's contention that value
+is determined by the cost of production, and the contention of Jevons
+that value is determined by marginal utility, are not mutually
+exclusive, but, on the contrary, complementary to each other.[173] The
+present writer has long contended that the marginal utility theory and
+the Marxian labor-value theory are likewise not antagonistic but
+complementary.[174] This is not the place to enter into the elaborate
+discussion which this contention involves. Only a brief indication of
+the argument for the claim is here and now possible. First, as we have
+seen, Marx is very careful to insist that utility is essential to value,
+and that the utility must be a social utility. But social utility does
+not come of itself, from the skies or elsewhere. It is, so far as the
+vast majority of commodities is concerned, the product of labor. It is
+true that the value of a thing is never independent of its social
+utility; it is likewise true that this is determined by the social labor
+necessary to the reproduction of that utility. To regard the two
+theories as antagonistic, it seems to be necessary to say either (1)
+that the quantity of social labor necessary to produce certain
+commodities determines their value, utterly regardless of the amount of
+their social utility, or (2) that we estimate the social utility of
+commodities, estimate what we are willing to pay for them, utterly
+regardless of the labor necessary, on an average, for their
+reproduction. The latter contention would be absurd, and the former
+would involve the abandonment of the initial premises of the Marxian
+theory, contained in his definition of a commodity. In so far as the
+basis of social utility is the social labor necessary for its
+production, the labor-value theory of Marx may be said, I think, to
+include the marginal utility law, as one of the forms in which it
+operates.
+
+
+V
+
+Labor, the source and determinant of value, has, _per se_, no value.
+Only when it is embodied in certain forms has it any value. If a man
+labors hard digging holes and refilling them, his labor has no value.
+What the capitalist buys is not labor, but labor-power. Wages in general
+is a form of payment for a given amount of labor-power, measured by
+duration and skill. The laborer sells brain and muscle power, which is
+thus placed at the temporary disposal of the capitalist to be used up
+like any other commodity that he buys. The philosopher Hobbes, in his
+"Leviathan," clearly anticipated Marx in thus distinguishing between
+labor and laboring power in the saying, "_The value or worth of a man is
+... so much as would be given for the Use of his Power_." The power to
+labor assumes the commodity form, being at once a use-value and an
+exchange-value. At first sight it appears that piecework is an exception
+to the general rule that the capitalist buys labor-power and not labor
+itself. It seems that when piece-wages are paid it is not the machine,
+the living labor-power, but the product of the machine, labor actually
+performed, that is bought. Superficially, this is so, of course, but it
+does not affect the principle laid down, because, as a matter of fact,
+the piecework system is only one of the means used to secure a maximum
+of labor-power. The average output of pieceworkers in a trade always
+tends to become the standard output for the time-workers, and, on the
+other hand, the average wage of pieceworkers tends to keep very near the
+standard of time-wages.
+
+Now, as a commodity, labor-power is subject to the same laws as all
+other commodities. Its price, wages, fluctuates just as the price of all
+other commodities does, and bears the same relation to its value. It may
+be temporarily affected by the preponderance of supply over demand, or
+of demand over supply; it may be made the subject of monopoly in certain
+cases. There is, therefore, no such thing as an "iron law" of wages, any
+more than there is an "iron law" of prices for other commodities.
+Lassalle took the Ricardian law of wages and, by means of his
+characteristic exaggeration, distorted it out of all semblance to truth.
+Says Ricardo: "The natural price of labor, therefore, depends on the
+price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the
+support of the laborer and his family. With a rise in the price of food
+and necessaries, the natural price of labor will rise; with the fall in
+their price, the natural price of labor will fall."[175] This Lassalle
+made the basis of his famous "iron law," according to which 96 per cent
+of the wage-workers were precluded from improving their economic
+position. Lassalle's chief fault lay in that he made no allowance
+whatever for either state interference, or the organized influence of
+the workers themselves. He also attaches too little importance to what
+Marx calls the traditional standards of living.[176] It is nevertheless
+true that the price of labor-power, wages, tends to approximate its
+value, just as the price of all other commodities tends, under normal
+conditions, to approximate their value.
+
+And just as the value of other commodities is determined by the amount
+of social labor necessary on an average for their reproduction, so the
+value of labor-power is likewise determined. Wages tend to a point at
+which they will cover the average cost of the necessary means of
+subsistence for the workers and their families, in any given time and
+place, under the conditions and according to the standards of living
+generally prevailing. Trade union action, for example, may force wages
+above that point, or undue stress in the competitive labor market may
+force wages below it. While, however, a trade union may bring about what
+is virtually a monopoly-price for the labor-power of its members, there
+is always a counter tendency in the other direction, sometimes even to
+the lowering of the standard of subsistence itself to the minimum of
+things required for physical existence.
+
+To class human labor-power with pig iron as a commodity, subject to the
+same laws, may at first seem fantastic to the reader, but a careful
+survey of the facts will fully justify the classification. The capacity
+of the worker to labor depends upon his securing certain things; his
+labor-power has to be reproduced from day to day, for which a certain
+supply of food, clothing, and other necessities of life is essential.
+Even with these supplied constantly, the worker sooner or later wears
+out and dies. If the race is not to be extinguished, a certain supply of
+the necessities of life must be provided for the children during the
+years of their development to the point where their labor-power becomes
+marketable. The average cost of production in the case of labor-power
+includes, therefore, the necessities for a wife and family as well as
+for the individual worker. Far from being the iron law Lassalle
+imagined, this law of wages is one of considerable elasticity. The
+standard of living itself, far from being a fixed thing, determined only
+by the necessities of physical existence, varies according to
+occupational groups; to localities sometimes, as a result of historical
+development; to nationality and race, as a result of tradition; to the
+general standard of intelligence, and the degree in which the workers
+are organized for the promotion of their economic interests. The advance
+in the culture of the people as a whole, expressing itself in
+legislation for compulsory education, the abolition of child labor,
+improvement of housing and general sanitary conditions, and so on,
+tends to raise the standard of living. Finally, the fluctuations in the
+price of labor-power due to the operation of the law of supply and
+demand are much more important than Lassalle imagined.
+
+This living commodity, labor-power, differs in one remarkable way from
+all other commodities, in that when it is used up in the process of the
+production of other commodities in which it is embodied, it creates new
+value in the process of being used up, and embodies that new value in
+the commodity it assists to produce. In the case of raw materials and
+machinery this is not so. In the manufacture of tables, for example, the
+wood used up is transformed into tables, embodied in them, but the wood
+has added nothing to its own value. The same is true of machinery. But
+with human labor-power it is otherwise. The capitalist buys from the
+laborer his labor-power at its full value as a commodity. But the
+laborer, in embodying that labor-power in some concrete form, creates
+more value than his wages represents. For the commodity he sells, his
+_power_ to labor, he has been paid its full value, namely, the social
+labor-cost of its production; but that power may be capable of producing
+the equivalent of twice its own cost of production. This is the central
+idea of the famous and much-misunderstood Marxian theory of
+surplus-value, by which the method of capitalism, the exploitation of
+the wage-workers, and the resulting class antagonisms of the system are
+explained. This theory becomes the groundwork of all the social theories
+and movements protesting against and seeking to end the exploitation of
+the laboring masses. To understand it is, therefore, of paramount
+importance.
+
+
+VI
+
+As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Marx was not the first to
+recognize that the secret of capitalism, the object of capitalist
+industry, is the extraction of surplus-value from the labor-power of the
+worker. Nor was he the first to use the term. By no means a happy term,
+since it adds to the difficulty of comprehending the meaning and nature
+of _value_, Marx took it from the current economic discussion of his
+time as a term already fairly well understood. What we owe to the genius
+of Marx is an explanation of the manner in which surplus-value is
+extracted by the capitalist from the labor-power of the worker, and the
+part it plays in capitalist society.
+
+The essence of the theory can be very briefly stated, but its
+demonstration involves, naturally, a more extensive study. Under normal
+conditions, the worker will produce a value equivalent to his means of
+subsistence, or to the wages actually paid to him, in a very small
+number of hours. If he owned and controlled the means of
+production,--land, machinery, raw materials, and so on,--he would,
+therefore, need to work only so many hours as the production of the
+necessities of life for himself and his family required. But the laborer
+in capitalist society does not own the means of production, that
+condition being quite incompatible with machine production upon a large
+scale. A separation of the worker from the ownership of the means of
+production has taken place as one of the inevitable results of
+industrial evolution. So the laborer must sell the only commodity he has
+to sell, namely, his labor-power. He sells the utility of that commodity
+to the capitalist for its exchange-value, or market price. Like any
+other commodity, the utility of labor-power, its use-value, belongs to
+the purchaser, the capitalist. It is his to use as he sees fit. He has
+it used to produce other commodities which he in turn hopes to sell--has
+the labor-power used up in the manufacture of other commodities, just as
+he has the raw materials used up. He buys, for example, the labor-power
+of the workers for a day of ten hours. In five hours, say, the worker
+creates value equivalent to his wages, but he does not cease at that
+point. He goes on working for another five hours, thus producing in a
+day double the amount of his wages, the exchange-value of the
+labor-power he sold the capitalist. Thus the capitalist, having paid
+wages equivalent to the product of five hours, receives the product of
+ten hours. This balance represents the surplus-value (_Mehrwerth_).
+
+This takes place all through industry. If the capitalist employs a
+thousand workers under these conditions, each day he receives the
+product of five thousand hours over and above the product actually paid
+for. This constitutes his income. If the capitalist owned the land,
+machinery, and raw materials, absolutely, without incumbrances of any
+kind, the whole of that surplus-value would, naturally, belong to him.
+But as a general rule this is not the case. He rents the land and must
+pay rent to the landlord, or he works upon borrowed capital and must pay
+interest upon loans, so that the surplus-value extracted from the
+laborer must be divided into rent, interest, and profit. But how the
+surplus-value is divided among landlords, moneylenders, creditors,
+speculators, and actual employers is a matter of absolutely no moment to
+the workers as a class. That is why such movements as that represented
+by the followers of Henry George fail to vitally interest the working
+class.[177] The division of the surplus-value wrung from the toil of the
+workers gives rise to much quarrel and strife within the ranks of the
+exploiting class, but the working class recognizes, and vaguely and
+instinctively feels where it does not clearly recognize, that it has no
+interest in these quarrels. All that interests it vitally is how to
+lessen the extent of the exploitation to which it is subjected, and how
+ultimately to end that exploitation altogether. That is the objective of
+the movement for the socialization of the means of life.
+
+Such, briefly stated, is the theory. We may illustrate it by the
+following example: Let us say the average cost of a day's subsistence is
+the product of five hours' social labor, which is represented by a wage
+of $1 per day. In a factory there are 1000 workers. Their labor-power
+they have sold at its exchange value, $1 per day per man, a total of
+$1000. They use up $1000 worth of labor-power, then. They also use up
+$1000 worth of raw material and wear out the plant to the extent of $100
+in the course of their work. Now, instead of working five hours each,
+that being the amount of time necessary to reproduce the value of their
+wages, as above described, they all work ten hours. Thus, in place of
+the $1000 they received as wages for the labor-_power_ they sold, they
+create labor _products_, valued at just twice that sum, $2000. According
+to our suppositions, therefore, the gross value of the day's product
+will be $3100, the whole of it belonging to the capitalist, for the
+simple and sufficient reason that he bought and paid for, at their full
+value as commodities, all the elements entering into its production, the
+machinery, materials, and labor-power. The capitalist pays,--
+
+
+     For labor-power                           $1000
+     For materials                              1000
+     For repairs and replacement of machinery    100
+                                                        -----
+     He receives, for the gross product         3100    $2100
+     The surplus-value is, therefore            1000
+
+
+and this sum is the fund from which rent, interests, and profits must be
+paid.
+
+It will be observed that there is no moral condemnation of the
+capitalist involved in this illustration. He simply buys the commodity,
+labor-power, at its full market price, as in the case of all other
+commodities. No ethical argument enters into it at all. It is very
+evident, however, that the interest of the capitalist will be to get as
+much surplus-value as possible, by buying labor-power at the lowest
+price possible, prolonging the working day, and intensifying the
+productivity of the labor-power he buys, while the interest of the
+workman will be equally against these things. Here we have the cause of
+class antagonism--not in the speeches of agitators, but in the facts of
+industrial life.
+
+This is the Marxian theory of surplus-value in a nutshell. Rent,
+interest, and profit, the three great divisions of capitalist income
+into which this surplus-value is divided, are thus traced to the
+exploitation of labor, resting fundamentally upon the ownership by the
+exploiting class of the means of production. Other economists, both
+before and since Marx, have tried to explain the source of capitalist
+income in very different ways. An early theory was that profit
+originates in exchange, through "buying cheap and selling dear." That
+this is so in the case of individual traders is obvious. If A sells to B
+commodities above their value, or buys commodities from him below their
+value, it is plain that he gains by it. But it is equally plain that B
+loses. If one group of capitalists gains what another group loses, the
+gains and losses balance each other; there is no gain to the capitalist
+class as a whole. Yet that is precisely what occurs--the capitalist
+class as a whole does gain, and gain enormously, despite the losses of
+individual members of that class. It is that gain to the great body of
+capitalists, that general increase in their wealth, which must be
+accounted for, and which exchange cannot explain. Only when we think of
+the capitalist class buying labor-power from outside its own ranks,
+generally at its natural value, and using it, is the problem solved. The
+commodity which the capitalist buys creates a value greater than its own
+in being used up.
+
+The theory that profit is the wages of risk is answerable in
+substantially the same way. It does not in any way explain the increase
+in the aggregate wealth of the capitalist class to say that the
+individual capitalist must have a chance to receive interest upon his
+money in order to induce him to turn it into capital, to hazard losing
+it wholly or in part. While the theory of risk helps to explain some
+features of capitalism, the changes in the flow of capital into certain
+forms of investment, and, to some small extent, the commercial crises
+incidental thereto, it does not explain the vital problem, the source of
+capitalist income. The chances of gain, as a premium for the risks
+involved, explain satisfactorily enough the action of the gambler when
+he enters into a game of roulette or faro. It cannot be said, however,
+that the aggregate wealth of the gamblers is increased by playing
+roulette or faro. Then, too, the risks of the laborers are vastly more
+vital than those of the capitalist. Yet the premium for their risks of
+health and life itself does not appear, unless, indeed, it be in their
+wages, in which case the most superficial glance at our industrial
+statistics will show that wages are by no means highest in those
+occupations where the risks are greatest and most numerous. Further, the
+wages of the risks for capitalists and laborers alike are drawn from the
+same source, the product of the laborers' toil.
+
+To consider, even briefly, all the varied theories of surplus-value
+other than these would be a prolonged, dull, and profitless task. The
+theory of abstinence, that profit is the just reward of the capitalist
+for saving part of his wealth and using it as a means of production, is
+answerable by _a priori_ arguments and by a vast volume of facts.
+Abstinence obviously produces nothing; it can only save the wealth
+already produced by labor, and no automatic increase of that saved-up
+wealth is possible. If it is to increase without the labor of its owner,
+it can only be through the exploitation of the labor of others, so that
+the abstinence theory in no manner controverts the Marxian position. On
+the other hand, we see that those whose wealth increases most rapidly
+are not given to frugality or abstinence by any means. It may,
+certainly, be possible for an individual to save enough by practicing
+frugality and abstinence to enable him to invest in some profitable
+enterprise, but the source of his profit is not his abstinence. That
+must be sought elsewhere. Abstinence may provide him with the means for
+taking the profit, but the profit itself must come from the value
+created by human labor-power over and above its cost of production.
+
+Still less satisfactory is the idea that surplus-value is nothing more
+than the "wages of superintendence," or the "rent of ability." This
+theory has been advocated with much specious argument. Essentially it
+involves the contention that there is no distinction between wages and
+profits, or between capitalists and laborers; that the capitalist is a
+worker, and his profits simply wages for his useful and highly important
+work of directing industry. It is a bold theory with a very small basis
+of fact. Whoever honestly considers it, must, one would think, see that
+it is both absurd and untrue. Not only is the larger part of industry
+to-day managed by salaried employees who have no part, or only a very
+insignificant part, in the ownership of the concerns they manage, but
+the profits are distributed among shareholders who, as shareholders,
+have never contributed service of any kind to the industries in which
+they are shareholders. Whatever services are performed, even by the
+figure-head "dummy" directors of companies, are paid for before profits
+are considered at all. This is the invincible answer to such criticisms
+as that of Mr. Mallock, that Marx and his followers have not recognized
+"the functions of the directive ability of the few." When all the
+salaries of the directing "few" have been paid, as well as the wages of
+the many, and the cost of all materials and maintenance of machinery,
+there remains a surplus to be distributed among those who belong neither
+to the "laboring many" nor the "directing few." That profit Mr. Mallock
+cannot explain away. Marx himself, in "Capital," called attention to the
+"directing ability of the few," quite as clearly as Mr. Mallock has
+done. He first shows how the "collective power of masses" is really a
+new creation; that it involves a special kind of leadership, or
+directing authority, just as an orchestra does; then he proceeds to
+point out the development of a special class of supervisors and
+directors of industry, "a special kind of wage laborer.... The _work of
+supervision becomes their established and exclusive function_."[178]
+Socialists, contrary to Mr. Mallock, have not overlooked the function
+exercised by the directing few, but they have pointed out that when
+these have been paid, their salaries being sometimes almost fabulous,
+there is still a surplus-value to be distributed among those who have
+not shared in the production, either as mental or manual workers. As Mr.
+Algernon Lee says:--
+
+"The profits produced in many American mills, factories, mines, and
+railway systems go in part to Englishmen or Belgians or Germans who
+never set foot in America, and who obviously can have no share in even
+the mental labor of direction. A certificate of stock may belong to a
+child, to a maniac, to an imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and
+it draws profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds may lie
+for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, while an estate is being
+disputed, before their ownership is determined; but whoever is declared
+to be the owner gets the dividends and interest "earned" during all that
+time."[179]
+
+It is an easy task to set up imaginary figures labeled "Marxism," and
+then to demolish them by learned argument--but the occupation is as
+fruitless as it is easy. It remains the one central fact of capitalism,
+however, that a surplus-value is created by the working class and taken
+by the exploiting class, from which develops the class struggle of our
+time.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[163] _The People's Marx_, by Gabriel Deville, page 288.
+
+[164] _Capital_, Vol. I, Kerr edition, page 41.
+
+[165] Professor J. S. Nicholson, a rather pretentious critic of Marx,
+has called sunshine a commodity because of its utility, _Elements of
+Political Economy_, page 24. Upon the same ground, the song of the
+skylark and the sound of ocean waves might be called commodities. Such
+use of language serves for nothing but the obscuring of thought.
+
+[166] William Petty, _A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions_ (1662),
+pages 31-32.
+
+[167] _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapters V-VI.
+
+[168] Benjamin Franklin, _Remarks and Facts Relative to the American
+Paper Money_ (1764), page 267.
+
+Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: "The first sensible
+analysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem
+almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New
+World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together
+with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its
+lack of historical traditions with a surplus of _humus_. That man was
+Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern
+political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth
+(_A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_),
+and published in 1721." _A Contribution to the Critique of Political
+Economy_, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page
+62.
+
+[169] David Ricardo, _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_,
+Chapter I, § III.
+
+[170] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, Chapter X.
+
+[171] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter I, Sec. 1,
+§ 4.
+
+[172] See "The Final Futility of Final Utility," in H. M. Hyndman's
+_Economics of Socialism_, for a remarkable criticism of the "final
+utility" theory, showing its identity with the doctrine of supply and
+demand as the basis of value.
+
+I refer to the theory of final or marginal utility as the "so-called
+Austrian theory" for the purpose, mainly, or calling attention to the
+fact that, as Professor Seligman has ably and clearly demonstrated, it
+was conceived and excellently stated by W. F. Lloyd, Professor of
+Political Economy at Oxford, in 1833. (See the paper, _On Some Neglected
+British Economists_, in the _Economic Journal_, V, xiii, pages 357-363.)
+This was two decades before Gossen and a generation earlier than Menger
+and Jevons. In view of this fact, the criticism of Marx for his lack of
+originality by members of the "Austrian" school is rather amusing.
+
+[173] _Principles of Economics_, by Edwin R. A. Seligman (1905), page
+198.
+
+[174] Cf., for instance, my little volume, in the _Standard Socialist
+Series_ (Kerr), entitled _Capitalist and Laborer_; Part II, _Modern
+Socialism_, page 112.
+
+[175] _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, Chapter V, § 35.
+
+[176] _Value, Price, and Profit_, by Karl Marx, Chapter XIV.
+
+[177] It is worthy of note that the taxation of land values, commonly
+associated with the name of Henry George, was advocated as a palliative
+in the _Communist Manifesto_ of Marx and Engels.
+
+[178] _Capital_, by Karl Marx, Vol. I, Chapter XIII, of Part IV.
+
+[179] _The Worker_ (New York), February 5, 1905.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+OUTLINES OF THE SOCIALIST STATE
+
+
+I
+
+Many persons who have thought of Socialism as a scheme, the plan of a
+new social edifice, have been disappointed not to find in all the
+voluminous writings of Marx any detailed description of such a plan, any
+forecast of the future. But when they have grasped the fundamental
+principles of the Marxian system of thought, they realize that it would
+be absurd to attempt to give detailed specifications of the Socialist
+state. As the Socialist movement has outgrown the influence of the early
+Utopians, its adherents have abandoned the habit of speculating upon the
+practical application of Socialist principles in future society. The
+formulation of schemes, more or less detailed, has given place to firm
+insistence that Socialism must be regarded as a principle, namely, the
+efficient organization of wealth production and distribution to the end
+that the exploitation of the wealth producers by a privileged class may
+be rendered impossible. Whatever contributes to that end is a
+contribution to the fulfillment of the Socialist ideal.
+
+Still, it is natural and inevitable that earnest Socialists and
+students of Socialism should seek something more tangible by way of a
+description of the future state than the bald statement that it will be
+free from the struggle between exploiting and exploited classes. The
+question is, can we go further in our attempt to scan the future without
+entering the realms of Utopian speculation? If Socialism is, objectively
+considered, a state of society which is being developed in the womb of
+the present, are there any signs by which its peculiar form and spirit,
+as distinguished from the form and spirit of the present, may be
+visualized? Within certain limits, an affirmative answer seems possible
+to each of these questions. There are certain fundamental principles
+which may be said to be essential to the existence of Socialist society.
+Without them, the Socialist state cannot exist. Regardless of the fact
+that Karl Marx never attempted to describe his ideal, to give such a
+description of his concept of the next epoch in evolution as would
+enable us to compare it with the present and to measure the difference,
+it is probable that every Socialist makes, privately at least, his own
+forecast of the manner in which the new society must shape itself.
+
+There is nothing Utopian or fantastic in trying to ascertain the
+tendencies of economic development; nothing unscientific in trying to
+read out of the pages of social evolution such lessons as may be
+contained therein. So long as we bear in mind that our forecasts must
+not take the form of plans for the arbitrary shaping of the future,
+specifications of the Coöperative Commonwealth, but that they must, on
+the contrary, be based upon the facts of life--not abstract principles
+born in the heart's desire--and attempt to discern the tendencies of
+social and economic evolution, we are upon safe ground. Such forecasts
+may indeed be helpful, not only in so far as they provide us with a more
+or less concrete picture of the ideal to be aimed at, but also, and even
+more important, in that they at once enable us to gauge from time to
+time the progress made by society toward the realization of the ideal,
+and to formulate our policies most effectively. Especially as there are
+certain fundamental principles essential to the existence of a Socialist
+state, we may take these and correlate them, and these principles,
+together with our estimate of economic tendencies, drawn from the facts
+of the present, may provide us with a suggestive and approximate outline
+of the Socialist society of the future. So far we may proceed with full
+scientific sanction; beyond are the realms of fancy and dream, the
+Elysian Fields of Utopia.[180] We must not set about our task with the
+mental attitude so well displayed by the yearning of Omar--
+
+
+     "Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
+     To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
+     Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
+     Remold it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"
+
+
+From that spirit only vain dreams and fantastic vagaries can ever come.
+What we must bear in mind is that the social fabric of to-morrow, like
+that of yesterday, whose ruins we contemplate to-day, will not spring
+up, complete, in response to our will, but will grow out of social
+experience and needs.
+
+
+II
+
+One of the greatest and most lamentable errors in connection with the
+propaganda of modern Socialism has been the assumption of its friends,
+in many instances, and its foes, in most instances, that Socialism and
+Individualism are entirely antithetical concepts. Infinite confusion has
+been caused by setting the two against each other. Society consists of
+an aggregation of individuals, but it is something more than that in
+just the same sense as a house is something more than an aggregation of
+bricks. It is an organism, though as yet an imperfectly developed one.
+While the units of which it is composed have distinct and independent
+lives within certain limits, they are, outside of those limits,
+interdependent and inter-related. Man is governed by two great forces.
+On the one hand, he is essentially an egoist, ever striving to attain
+individual freedom; on the other hand, he is a social animal, ever
+seeking association and avoiding isolation. This duality expresses
+itself in the life of society. There is a struggle between its members
+motived by the desire for individual expression and gain; and, alongside
+of it, a sense of solidarity, a movement to mutual, reciprocal
+relations, motived by the gregarian instinct. All social life is
+necessarily an oscillation between these two motives. The social problem
+in its last analysis is nothing more than the problem of combining and
+harmonizing social and individual interests and actions springing
+therefrom.
+
+In dealing with this social problem, the problem of how to secure
+harmony of social and individual interests and actions, it is necessary
+first of all to recognize that both motives are equally important and
+necessary agents of human progress. The idea largely prevails that
+Socialists ignore the individual motive and consider only the social
+motive, just as the ultra-individualists have erred in an opposite
+discrimination. The Socialist ideal has been conceived to be a great
+bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea
+in _Punch_ some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the
+Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers,
+strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their
+allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace
+of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision.
+Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming
+Slavery," and it must be confessed that the early forms of Socialism
+which consisted mainly of detailed plans of coöperative commonwealths
+afforded some excuse for the idea. Most intelligent Socialists, if
+called upon to choose between them, would probably prefer to live in
+Thibet under a personal despotism, rather than under the hierarchies of
+most of the imaginary commonwealths which Utopian Socialists have
+depicted.
+
+Even in the later propaganda of the modern political Socialist movement,
+there has been more than enough justification for those who regard
+Socialism as impossible except under a great bureaucracy. In numberless
+Socialist programmes and addresses Socialism has been defined as meaning
+"The social ownership and control of all the means of production,
+distribution, and exchange." Critics of Socialism are not to be
+seriously blamed if they take such "definitions" at their face value and
+interpret them quite literally. It is not difficult to see that in order
+to place "all means of production, distribution, and exchange" under
+social ownership and control, the creation of such a bureaucracy as the
+world has never seen would be necessary. A needle is a means of
+production quite as much as an electric power machine in a factory is,
+the difference being in their degrees of efficiency. A jackknife is,
+likewise, in certain circumstances, a means of production, just as
+surely as a powerful planing machine is, the difference being in degrees
+of efficiency. So a market basket is a means of distribution quite as
+surely as an ocean steamship is; a wheelbarrow quite as much as a
+locomotive. They differ in degrees of efficiency, that is all. The idea
+that the housewife in the future, when she wants to sew a button upon a
+garment, will be obliged to go to some department and "take out" a
+needle, having it properly checked in the communal accounts, and being
+responsible for its return, is, of course, worthy only of opera bouffe.
+So is the notion of the state owning wheelbarrows and market baskets and
+making their private ownership illegal. "The socialization of _all_ the
+means of production, distribution, and exchange," literally interpreted,
+is folly. But none of those using the phrase must be regarded as
+seriously contemplating its literal interpretation. For many years the
+phrase was included in the statement of its "Object" by the English
+Social Democratic Federation, and even now it appears in a slightly
+modified form, the word "all" being omitted,[181] perhaps because of its
+tautological character. For several years the writer was a member of the
+Federation, actively engaged in the propaganda, and how we spent much of
+our time explaining to popular audiences in halls and upon street
+corners that the socialization of jackknives, needles, sewing machines,
+market baskets, beer mugs, frying pans, and toothpicks was not our aim,
+is a merry memory.
+
+When this is understood, the nightmare of the bureaucracy of Socialism
+vanishes. It is no longer necessary to fret ourselves asking how a
+government is to own and manage everything without making slaves of its
+citizens. The question propounded by that venerable and distinguished
+Canadian scholar, Professor Goldwin Smith,[182] whether a government can
+be devised which shall hold all the instruments of production,
+distribute to the citizens their tasks, pick out inventors,
+philosophers, artists, and laborers, and set them to work, without
+destroying personal liberty, loses its force when it is remembered that
+Socialism involves no such necessity.
+
+The Socialist ideal may be said to be a form of social organization in
+which every individual will enjoy the greatest possible amount of
+freedom for self-development and expression; and in which social
+authority will be reduced to the minimum necessary for the preservation
+and insurance of that right to all individuals. There is an
+incontestable right of the individual to full and free self-development
+and expression so long as no other individual's right to a like freedom
+is infringed upon. No individual right can be an _absolute_ right in a
+society, but must be subject to such restrictions as may be necessary to
+safeguard the like right of every other individual, and of society as a
+whole. _Absolute_ personal liberty is not possible; to grant it to any
+one individual would be equivalent to denying it to others. If, in a
+certain community, a need is commonly felt for a system of drainage to
+protect the citizens against the perils of a possible outbreak of
+typhoid or some other epidemic disease, and all the citizens agree upon
+a scheme except two or three, who, in the name of personal liberty,
+declare that their property must not be touched, what is to be done? If
+the citizens, out of solicitude for the personal liberty of the
+objecting individuals, abandon or modify their plans, is it not clear
+that the liberty of the many has been sacrificed to the liberty of the
+few, which is the essence of tyranny? Absolute individual liberty is
+incompatible with social liberty. The liberty of each must, in Mill's
+phrase, be bounded by the like liberty of all. Absolute personal liberty
+is a chimera, a delusion.
+
+Even the Anarchist must come to a realization of the fact that liberty
+is not an absolute, but a relative and limited, right. Kropotkin, for
+example, realizes that, even under Anarchism, any individual who did
+not live up to his obligations, or who persisted in conducting himself
+in a manner obnoxious or injurious to the community, would have to be
+expelled.[183] This is very like Spencer's practical abandonment of the
+doctrine of _laissez faire_ individualism. Says he: "Many facts have
+shown us that while the individual man has acquired liberty as a citizen
+and greater religious liberty, he has also acquired greater liberty in
+respect of his occupations; and here we see that he has simultaneously
+acquired greater liberty of combination for industrial purposes. Indeed,
+in conformity with the universal law of rhythm, _there has been a change
+from excess of restriction to deficiency of restriction_. As is implied
+by legislation now pending, the facilities for forming companies and
+raising compound capitals have been too great."[184] Here is a very
+definite confession of the insufficiency of natural law, the failure of
+the _laissez faire_ theory, and a virtual appeal for restrictive and
+coercive legislation.
+
+This is inevitable. The dual forces which serve as the motives of
+individual and collective action, spring, unquestionably, from the fact
+that individuals are at once alike and unlike, equal and unequal. Alike
+in our needs of certain fundamental necessities, such as food,
+clothing, shelter, coöperation for producing these necessities, for
+protection from foes, human and other, we are unlike in tastes,
+appetites, temperaments, character, will, and so on, till our diversity
+becomes as great and as general as our likeness. Now, the problem is to
+insure equal opportunities of full development to all these diversely
+constituted and endowed individuals, and, at the same time, to maintain
+the principle of equal obligations to society on the part of every
+individual. This is the problem of social justice: to insure to each the
+same social opportunities, to secure from each a recognition of the same
+obligations toward all. The basic principle of the Socialist state must
+be justice; no privileges or favors can be extended to individuals or
+groups of individuals.
+
+
+III
+
+Politically, the organization of the Socialist state must be democratic.
+Socialism without democracy is as impossible as a shadow without light.
+The word "Socialism" applied to schemes of paternalism, and to
+government ownership when the vital principle of democracy is lacking,
+is a misnomer. As with Peter Bell--
+
+
+     "A primrose by a river's brim,
+     A yellow primrose was to him"
+
+
+and nothing more than that, so there are many persons to whom Socialism
+signifies nothing more than government ownership. Yet it ought to be
+perfectly clear that Russia, with her state-owned railways, and liquor
+and other monopolies, is no nearer Socialism than the United States. The
+same applies to Germany with her state railways. Externally similar in
+one respect to Socialism, they radically differ. In so far as they
+prepare the necessary forms for Socialism, all examples of public
+ownership may be said to be "socialistic," or making for Socialism. What
+they lack is a spiritual quality rather than a mechanical one. They are
+not democratic. Socialism is political democracy allied to industrial
+democracy.
+
+Justice requires that the legislative power of society rest upon
+universal adult suffrage, the political equality of all men and women,
+except lunatics and criminals. It is manifestly unjust to exact
+obedience to the laws from those who have had no share in making them
+and can have no share in altering them. Of course, there are exceptions
+to this principle. We except (1) minors, children not yet arrived at the
+age of responsibility agreed upon by the citizens; (2) lunatics and
+certain classes of criminals; (3) aliens, non-citizens temporarily
+resident in the state.
+
+Democracy in the sense of popular self-government, the "government of
+the people, by the people, and for the people," of which political
+rhetoricians boast, is only approximately attainable in any society.
+While all can equally participate in the legislative power, all cannot
+participate directly in the administrative power, and it becomes
+necessary, therefore, to adopt the principle of delegated authority,
+representative government. But care must be taken to preserve a maximum
+of power in the hands of the people. In this respect the United States
+Constitution is defective. It is not, and was not intended by its
+framers to be, a democratic instrument,[185] and we are vainly trying
+to-day to make democratic government through an undemocratic medium. The
+political democracy of the Socialist state must be real, keeping the
+power of government in the hands of the people.
+
+How is this to be done? Direct legislation by the people might be
+realized through the adoption of the principles of popular initiative
+and referendum. Or, if representative legislative bodies should be
+deemed best, these measures, together with proportional representation
+and the right of recall, might be adopted. There is no apparent reason
+why _all_ legislation, except temporary legislation as in war time,
+famine, plague, and such abnormal conditions, could not be directly
+initiated and enacted, leaving only the just and proper enforcement of
+the law to delegated authority. In practically all the political
+programmes of Socialist parties throughout the world, these principles
+are included at the present time; not merely as means to secure a
+greater degree of political democracy within the existing social state,
+but also, and primarily, to prepare the required political framework of
+democracy for the industrial commonwealth of the future.
+
+The great problem for such a society, politically speaking, consists in
+choosing wisely the trustees of delegated power and authority, and
+seeing that they justly and wisely use it for the common good, without
+abuse, either for the profit of themselves or their friends, and without
+prejudice to any portion of society. Will there be abuses? Will not
+political manipulators and bosses betray their trusts? To these
+questions, and all other questions of a like nature, the Socialist can
+only give one answer, namely, that there is no such a thing as an
+"automatic democracy," that eternal vigilance will be the price of
+liberty under Socialism as it has ever been. There can be no other
+safeguard against the usurpation of power than the popular will and
+conscience ever alert upon the watch-towers. With political machinery so
+responsive to the popular will when it is asserted and an alert and
+vigilant electorate, political democracy attains its maximum
+development. Socialism requires that development.
+
+
+IV
+
+With these general principles prevised, we may consider, briefly, the
+respective rights of the individual and of society. The rights of the
+individual may be summarized as follows: There must be freedom of
+movement, including the right to withdraw from the domain of the
+government, to migrate at will to other territories. Freedom of movement
+is a fundamental condition of personal liberty, but it is easy to see
+that it cannot be made an absolute right. Quarantine laws, for social
+protection, for example, may seriously inconvenience the individual, but
+be imperatively necessary for all that. There must be immunity from
+arrest, except for infringing others' rights, with compensation of some
+kind for improper arrest; respect of the privacy of domicile and
+correspondence; full liberty of dress, subject to decency; freedom of
+utterance, whether by speech or publication, subject only to the
+protection of others from insult, injury, or interference with their
+equal liberties, the individual being held responsible to society for
+the proper use of that right. Freedom of the individual in all that
+pertains to art, science, philosophy, and religion, and their teaching,
+or propaganda, is essential. The state can have nothing to do with these
+matters, they belong to the personal life alone.[186] Art, science,
+philosophy, and religion cannot be protected by any authority of the
+state, nor is such authority needed.
+
+Subject to the ultimate control of society, certainly, but normally free
+from collective authority and control, these may be regarded as
+imperative rights of the individual. Doubtless many Socialists, in
+common with many Individualists, would considerably extend the list.
+Some, for instance, would include the right to possess and bear arms for
+the defense of person and property. On the other hand, it might be
+objected with good show of reason by other Socialists that such a right
+must always be liable to abuses imperiling the peace of society, and
+that the same ends would be served more surely if individual armament
+were made impossible. Again, some Socialists, like some Individualists,
+would include in the category of private acts outside the sphere of law
+and social authority the union of the sexes. They would do away with
+legal intervention in marriage and make it and the parental relation
+exclusively a private concern. On the other hand, probably an
+overwhelming majority of Socialists would object. They would insist that
+the state must, in the interest of the children, and for its own
+self-preservation, assume certain responsibilities for, and exercise a
+certain control over, all marriages. They would have the state insist
+upon such conditions as mature age, freedom from dangerous diseases and
+physical defects. While believing that under Socialism marriage would no
+longer be subject to economic motives,--matrimonial markets for titles
+and fortunes no longer existing,--and that the maximum of personal
+freedom together with the minimum of social authority would be possible
+in the union of the sexes, they would still insist upon the necessity of
+that minimum of legal control.
+
+The abolition of the legal marriage tie, and the substitution therefor
+of voluntary sex union, which so many people believe to be part of the
+Socialist programme, is not only not a part of that programme, but is
+probably condemned by more than ninety-five per cent of the Socialists
+of the world, and favored by no appreciable proportion of Socialists
+more than non-Socialists. There is no such thing as a Socialist view of
+marriage, any more than there is a Republican or Democratic view of
+marriage; or any more than there is a Socialist view of vaccination,
+vivisection, vegetarianism, or homeopathy. The same may be said of the
+drink evil and tobacco smoking. Some Socialists would prohibit both
+smoking and drinking; others would permit smoking, but prohibit the
+manufacture of intoxicating liquors; most Socialists recognize the
+evils, especially of drunkenness, but believe that it would be foolish
+at this time to state in what manner the evils must be dealt with by the
+Socialist state.
+
+Our hasty summary by no means exhausts the category of personal
+liberties, nor does it rigidly define such liberties. To presume to do
+that would be a piece of charlatanry, social quackery of the worst type.
+It is not for the Socialist of to-day to determine what the citizens of
+a generation hence shall do. The citizens of the future, like the
+citizens of to-day, will be living human beings, not mere automatons;
+they will not accept places and forms imposed upon them, but make their
+own. The object of this phase of our discussion is simply to show that
+individual freedom would by no means be crushed out of existence by the
+Socialist state. The intolerable bureaucracy of collectivism is wholly
+an imaginary evil. There is nothing in the nature of Socialism as it is
+understood to-day by its adherents which would prevent a wide extension
+of personal liberties in the social régime.
+
+In the same general manner, we may summarize the principal functions of
+the state[187] as follows: the state has the right and power to organize
+and control the economic system, comprehending in that term the
+production and distribution of all social wealth, wherever private
+enterprise is dangerous to the social well-being, or is inefficient;
+the defense of the community from invasion, from fire, flood, famine, or
+disease; the relations with other states, such as trade agreements,
+boundary treaties, and the like; the maintenance of order, including the
+juridical and police systems in all their branches; and public education
+in all its departments. It will be found that these five functions
+include all the services which the state may properly undertake, and
+that not one of them can safely be intrusted to private enterprise. On
+the other hand, it is not at all necessary to assume that the state must
+have an _absolute monopoly_ of any one of these groups of functions in
+the social organism. It would not be necessary, for example, for the
+state to prohibit its citizens from entering into voluntary relations
+with the citizens of other countries for the promotion of international
+friendship, for trade reciprocity, and so on. Likewise, the juridical
+functions being in the hands of the state would not prevent voluntary
+arbitration; or the state guardianship of the public health prevent
+voluntary associations of citizens from taking measures to advance the
+health of their communities. On the contrary, all such efforts would be
+advantageous to the state. Our study becomes, therefore, a study of
+social physiology.
+
+The principle already postulated, that the state must undertake the
+production and distribution of wealth wherever private enterprise is
+dangerous, or inefficient, clarifies somewhat the problem of the
+industrial organization of the Socialist régime, which is a vastly more
+difficult problem than that of its political organization. Socialism by
+no means involves the suppression of all private industrial enterprises.
+Only when these fail in efficiency or result in injustice and inequality
+of opportunities does socialization present itself. There are many
+petty, subordinate industries, especially the making of articles of
+luxury, which might be well allowed to remain in private hands, subject
+only to such general regulation as might be found necessary for the
+protection of health and the public order. For example, suppose that the
+state undertakes the production of shoes upon a large scale as a result
+of the popular conviction that private enterprise in shoemaking is
+either inefficient or injurious to society in that the manufacturers
+exploit the shoemakers on the one hand, and, through the establishment
+of monopoly-prices, the consumers upon the other hand. The state thus
+becomes the employer of shoeworkers and the vender of shoes to the
+citizens. But A, being a fastidious citizen, does not like the factory
+product of the state any more than he formerly did the factory product
+of private enterprise. Under the old conditions, he used to employ B, a
+shoemaker who does not like factory work, a craftsman who likes to make
+the whole shoe. Naturally, B was not willing to work for wages
+materially lower than those he could earn in the factory. A willingly
+paid enough for his hand-made shoes to insure B as much wages as he
+would get in the factory. What reason could the state possibly have for
+forbidding the continuance of such an arrangement between two of its
+citizens?
+
+Or take the case of a farmer maintaining himself and family upon a
+modest acreage, by his own labor. He exploits no one, and the question
+of inefficiency does not present itself as a public question, for the
+reason that there is plenty of farming land available, and any
+inefficiency of the small farmer does not injure the community in any
+manner. What object could the state have in taking away that farm and
+compelling the farmer to work upon a communal, publicly owned and
+managed farm? Of course, the notion is perfectly absurd.[188] On the
+other hand, there are things, natural monopolies, which cannot be safely
+left to private enterprise. The same is true of large productive and
+distributive enterprises upon which great masses of the people depend.
+Land ownership[189] and all that depends thereon, such as mining,
+transportation, and the like, must be collective.
+
+It will help us to get rid of the difficulty presented by petty
+industry and agriculture if we bear in mind that collective ownership is
+not, as is commonly supposed, the supreme, fundamental condition of
+Socialism. It is proposed only as a means to an end, not as the end
+itself. The wealth producers are exploited by a class whose source of
+income is the surplus-value extracted from the workers. Instinctively,
+the workers struggle against that exploitation, to reduce the amount of
+surplus-value taken by the capitalists to a minimum. To do away with
+that exploitation social ownership and control is proposed. If the end
+could be attained more speedily by other methods, those methods would be
+adopted. It follows, therefore, that to make collective property of
+things not used as a means of exploiting labor does not necessarily form
+part of the Socialist programme. True, some such things might be
+socialized in response to an urgent demand for efficiency, but, of
+necessity, the struggle will be principally concerned with the
+socializing of the means of production which are used as means of
+exploitation by a class deriving its income from the surplus-value
+produced by another class. It is easy enough to see that, according to
+this principle of differentiation, it would be necessary to socialize
+the railroad, but not at all necessary to socialize the wheelbarrow;
+while it would be necessary to socialize a clothing factory, it would
+not be necessary to take away a woman's domestic sewing machine.
+Independent, self-employment, as in the case of a craftsman working in
+his own shop with his own tools, or groups of workers working
+coöperatively, is quite consistent with Socialism.
+
+In the Socialist state, then, certain forms of private industry will be
+tolerated, and perhaps even definitely encouraged by the state, but the
+great fundamental economic activities will be collectively managed. The
+Socialist state will not be static and, consequently, what at first may
+be regarded as being properly the subject of private enterprise may
+develop to an extent or in directions which necessitate its
+transformation to the category of essentially social properties. Hence,
+it is not possible to give a list of things which would be socialized
+and another list of things which would remain private property, but
+perfectly possible to state the principle which must be the chief
+determinant of the extent of socialization. With this principle in mind
+it is fairly possible to sketch the outlines at least of the economic
+development of the collectivist commonwealth; the conditions essential
+to that stage of social evolution at which it will be possible and
+natural to speak of capitalism as a past and outgrown stage, and of the
+present as the era of Socialism.
+
+Socialists, naturally, differ very materially upon this point. Probably,
+however, an overwhelming majority of the leaders of Socialist thought in
+Europe and this country would agree with the writer that it is fairly
+probable that the economic structure of the new society will include at
+least the following measures of socialization: (1) Ownership of all
+natural resources, such as land, mines, forests, waterways, oil wells,
+and so on; (2) operation of all the means of transportation and
+communication other than those of purely personal service; (3) operation
+of all industrial production involving large compound capitals and
+associated labor, except where carried on by voluntary, democratic
+coöperation, with the necessary regulation by the state; (4)
+organization of all labor essential to the public service, such as the
+building of schools, hospitals, docks, roads, bridges, sewers, and the
+like; the construction of all the machinery and plant requisite to the
+social production and distribution, and of things necessary for the
+maintenance of those engaged in such public services as the national
+defense and all who are wards of the state; (5) a monopoly of the
+monetary and credit functions, including coinage, banking, mortgaging,
+and the extension of credit to private enterprise.
+
+With these economic activities undertaken by the state, a pure democracy
+differing vitally from all the class-dominated states of history,
+private enterprise would by no means be excluded, but limited to an
+extent making the exploitation of labor and public needs and interests
+for private gain impossible. Socialism thus becomes the defender of
+individual liberty, not its enemy.
+
+
+V
+
+As owner of the earth and all the major instruments of production and
+exchange, society would occupy a position which would enable it to
+insure that the physical and mental benefits derived from its wealth,
+its natural resources, its collective experience, genius, and labor,
+were universalized as befits a democracy. It would be able to guarantee
+to all its citizens the right to labor, through preventing private or
+class monopolization of the land and instruments of production and
+social opportunities in general. It would be in a position to make every
+development from competition to monopoly the occasion for further
+socialization. Thus there would be no danger to the state in permitting,
+or even fostering, private industry within the limits described. As the
+organizer of the vast body of labor essential to the operation of the
+main productive and distributive functions of society, and to the other
+public services, the state would automatically, so to speak, set the
+standards of income and leisure which private industry would be
+compelled, by competitive force, to observe. The regulation of
+production, too, would be possible, and as a result the crises arising
+from glutted markets would disappear. Finally, in the control of all the
+functions of credit, the state would effectually prevent the
+exploitation of the mass of the people through financial agencies, one
+of the greatest evils of our present system.
+
+The application of the principles of democracy to the organization and
+administration of these great economic services of production, exchange,
+and credit is a problem full of alluring invitations to speculation.
+"This that they call the Organization of Labor," said Carlyle, "is the
+Universal Vital Problem of the World." This description applies not to
+what we commonly mean by the "organization of labor," namely, the
+organization of the laborers in unions for class conflict, but to the
+organization of the brain and muscle of the world to secure the greatest
+efficiency. This is the great central problem of the socialization of
+industry and the state, before which all other problems pale into
+insignificance. It is comparatively easy to picture an ideal political
+democracy; and the main structural economic organization of the
+Socialist régime, with its private and public functions more or less
+clearly defined, is not very difficult of conception. These are
+foreshadowed with varying degrees of distinctness in present society,
+and the light of experience illumines the pathway before us. It is when
+we come to the methods of organization and management, the _spirit_ of
+the economic organization of the future state, that the light fails and
+we must grope our way into the great unknown with imagination and our
+sense of justice for guides.
+
+Most Socialist writers who have attempted to deal with this subject
+have simply regarded the state as the greatest employer of labor,
+carrying on its business upon lines not materially different from those
+adopted by the great corporations of to-day. Boards of experts, chosen
+by civil service methods, directing all the economic activities of the
+state--such is their general conception of the industrial democracy of
+the Socialist régime. They believe, in other words, that the methods now
+employed by the capitalist state, and by individual and corporate
+employers within the capitalist state, would simply be extended under
+the Socialist régime. If this be so, a psychological anomaly in the
+Socialist propaganda appears in the practical abandonment of the claim
+that, as a result of the class conflict in society, the public ownership
+evolved within the capitalist state is essentially different from, and
+inferior to, the public ownership of the Socialist ideal. It is
+perfectly clear that if the industrial organization under Socialism is
+to be such that the workers employed in any industry have no more voice
+in its management than the postal employees in this country, for
+example, have at the present time, it cannot be otherwise than absurd to
+speak of it as an industrial democracy.
+
+Here, in truth, lies the crux of the greatest problem of all. We must
+face the fact that, in anything worthy the name of an industrial
+democracy, the terms and conditions of employment cannot be wholly
+decided without regard to the will of the workers themselves on the one
+hand, nor, on the other hand, by the workers alone without reference to
+the general body of the citizenry. If the former method fails to satisfy
+the requirements of democracy by ignoring the will of the workers in the
+organization of their work, the alternate method involves a hierarchical
+government, equally incompatible with democracy. Some way must be found
+by which the industrial government of society, the organization of
+production and distribution, may be securely and fairly based upon the
+dual basis of common civic rights and the rights of the workers in their
+special relations as such.
+
+And here we are not wholly left to our imaginations, not wholly without
+experience to guide us. In actual practice to-day, in those industries
+in which the organization of the workers into unions has been most
+successful, the workers, through their organizations, do exercise a
+certain amount of control over the conditions of their employment. Their
+right to share in the determination of the conditions of labor is
+conceded. They make trade agreements, for instance, in which such
+matters as wages, hours of labor, apprenticeship, output, engagement and
+discharge of workers, and numerous other matters, are provided for and
+made subject to the joint control of the workers and their employers. Of
+course, this share in the control of the industry in which they are
+employed is a right enjoyed only as a fruit of conquest, won by war and
+maintained by ceaseless vigilance and armed strength. It is not
+inconceivable that in the Socialist state there might be a frank
+extension of this principle. The workers in the main groups of
+industries might form autonomous organizations for the administration of
+their special interests, subject only to certain fundamental laws of the
+state. Thus the trade unions of to-day would evolve into administrative
+politico-economic organizations, after the manner of the mediæval
+guilds, and become constructive agencies in society instead of mere
+agencies of class warfare as at present.
+
+The economic organization of the Socialist state would consist, then, of
+three distinct divisions, as follows: (1) Private production and
+exchange, subject only to such general supervision and control by the
+state as the interests of society demand, such as protection against
+monopolization, sanitary laws, and the like; (2) voluntary coöperation,
+subject to similar supervision and control; (3) production and
+distribution by the state, the administration to be by the autonomous
+organizations of the workers in industrial groups, subject to the
+fundamental laws and government of society as a whole.[190]
+
+
+VI
+
+Two other functions of the economic organization of society remain to be
+considered, the distribution of labor and its remuneration. In the
+organization of industry society will have to achieve a twofold result,
+a maximum of general, social efficiency, on the one hand, and of
+personal liberty and comfort to the workers on the other. The state
+would not only guarantee the right to labor, but, as a corollary, it
+would impose the duty of labor upon every competent person. The Pauline
+injunction, "If any man will not work, neither shall he eat," would be
+applied in the Socialist state to all except the incompetent to labor.
+The immature child, the aged, the sick and infirm members of society,
+would alone be exempted from labor. The result of this would be that
+instead of a large unemployed army, vainly seeking the right to work, on
+the one hand, accompanied by the excessive overwork of the great mass of
+the workers fortunate enough to be employed, a vast increase in the
+number of producers from this one cause alone would make possible much
+greater leisure for the whole body of workers. Benjamin Franklin
+estimated that in his day four hours' labor from every adult male able
+to work would be more than sufficient to provide wealth enough for human
+wants; and it is certain that, without resorting to any standards of
+Spartan simplicity, Franklin's estimate could be easily realised to-day
+with anything approaching a scientific organization of labor.
+
+Not only would the productive forces be enormously increased by the
+absorption of those workers who under the present system are unemployed,
+and those who do not labor or seek labor; in addition to these, there
+would be a tremendous transference of potential productive energy from
+occupations rendered obsolete and unnecessary by the socialization of
+society. Thus there are to-day tens of thousands of bankers, lawyers,
+traders, middlemen, speculators, advertisers, and others, whose
+functions, necessary to the capitalist system, would in most cases
+disappear. Because of this, they would be compelled to enter the
+producing class. The possibilities of the scientific organization of
+industry are therefore almost unlimited. Every gain made by the state in
+the direction of economy of production would test the private enterprise
+existing and urge it onward in the same direction. Likewise, every gain
+made by the private producers would test the social production and urge
+it onward. Whether socialized production extended its sphere, or
+remained confined to its minimum limitations, would depend upon the
+comparative success or failure resulting. The state would not be a force
+outside of the people, arbitrarily extending its functions regardless of
+their will. The decision would rest with the people; they would _be_ the
+state, and would, naturally, resort to social effort only where it
+demonstrated its ability to serve the community more efficiently than
+private enterprise, with greater comfort and liberty to the individual
+and to the community.
+
+While in the Socialist régime labor would be compulsory, it is
+inconceivable that a free people would tolerate a bureaucratic rule
+assigning to each individual his or her proper task, no matter how
+ingenious the assignment might be. Even if the bureaucracy were
+omniscient, such a condition of life would be intolerable. Just as it is
+necessary to insist that all must be secured in their right to labor,
+and required to labor, it is necessary also that the choice of one's
+occupation should be as far as possible personal and free, subject only
+to the laws of supply and demand. The greatest amount of personal
+freedom compatible with the requisite efficiency would be secured to the
+workers in their chosen occupations through their craft organizations.
+
+But, it will be objected, all occupations are not equally desirable.
+There are certain forms of work which, disagreeable in themselves, are
+just as essential to the well-being of society as the most artistic and
+pleasing. Who will do the dirty work, and the dangerous work, under
+Socialism? Will these occupations also be left to choice, and, if so,
+will there not be an insurmountable difficulty arising from the natural
+reluctance of men to choose such work?
+
+In answering the question and affirming the principle of free
+choice--for so it must be answered--the Socialist is called upon to show
+that the absence of compulsion would not involve the neglect of these
+disagreeable, but highly important, social services; that it would be
+compatible with social safety to leave them to personal choice. In the
+first place, much of this kind of work that is now performed by human
+labor could be more efficiently done by mechanical means. Much of the
+work done by sweated women and children in our cities is in fact done in
+competition with machines. Machinery has been invented, and is now
+available, to do thousands of the disagreeable and hurtful things now
+done by human beings. Professor Franklin H. Giddings is perfectly right
+when he says: "Modern civilization does not require, it does not need,
+the drudgery of needle-women or the crushing toil of men in a score of
+life-destroying occupations. If these wretched beings should drop out
+of existence and no others take their places, the economic activities of
+the world would not greatly suffer. A thousand devices latent in
+inventive brains would quickly make good any momentary loss."[191]
+
+When, in England, a law was passed forbidding the practice of forcing
+little boys through chimneys, to clean them, chimneys did not cease to
+be swept. Other, less disagreeable and less dangerous, means were
+quickly invented. When the woolen manufacturers were prevented from
+employing little boys and girls, they invented the piecing machine.[192]
+Thousands of instances might be compiled in support of the contention of
+Professor Giddings, equally as pertinent as these. Another important
+point is that the amount of such disagreeable and dangerous work to be
+done would be very much less than now. That would be an inevitable
+result of the scientific organization of industry. It is likely that, if
+the subject could be properly investigated, it could be shown that the
+amount of such labor involved in wasteful and unnecessary advertising
+alone is enormous.
+
+Addressing an audience composed mainly of scientific men upon the
+subject of Socialism, the writer was once questioned upon this phase of
+the subject. "Gentlemen," was the reply, "it is impossible for me to
+say exactly how the intelligence of the people in a more or less remote
+future will solve the problem. The Socialist state will be a democracy,
+not a dictatorship. But if I were dictator of society to-day and wanted
+to solve the problem, I should assign to such men as yourselves all the
+most disagreeable and dangerous tasks I could find. This I should do
+because I should know that at once your inventive brains would begin to
+devise mechanical and other means of doing the work. You would make
+sewer cleaning as pleasant as any other occupation in the world." There
+was, of course, nothing original in the reply, but the men of science
+recognized its force, and it fairly states one important part of the
+Socialist answer to the objection we are discussing. Still, with all
+possible reduction of the quantity of such work to be done, and with all
+the mechanical genius brought to bear upon it, we may freely concede
+that, for a long time to come, there must be some work quite dangerous,
+altogether disagreeable and repellent, and a great difference in the
+degree of attractiveness of some occupations as compared with some
+others. But an occupation repellent in itself might be made attractive,
+if the hours of labor were relatively few as compared with other
+occupations. If six hours be regarded as the normal working day, it is
+quite easy to believe that, for sake of the larger leisure, with its
+opportunities for the pursuit of special interests, many a man would
+gladly accept a disagreeable position for three hours a day.
+
+The same holds true of superior remuneration. Under the Socialist
+régime, just as to-day, many a man would gladly exchange his work for
+less pleasant work, if the remuneration offered were higher. To the old
+Utopian ideas of absolute equality and uniformity of income these
+methods would be fatal, but they are not at all incompatible with
+modern, scientific Socialism. Nothing could well be sillier, or more
+futile, than the Rooseveltian attacks upon the Socialism of to-day as if
+it meant equality of possession, or equality of anything except
+opportunity.[193] Finally, in connection with this question, we must not
+forget that there is a natural inequality of talent, of power. In any
+state of society most men will prefer to do the things they are best
+fitted for, the things they can do best. The man who feels himself to be
+best fitted to be a hewer of wood or a drawer of water will choose that
+rather than some loftier task. There is no reason at all to suppose that
+leaving the choice of occupation to the individual would involve the
+slightest risk to society.
+
+While equality of remuneration, meaning by that uniformity of reward
+for labor, is not an essential condition of the Socialist régime, it may
+be freely admitted that _approximate equality of income_ is the ideal to
+be ultimately aimed at. Otherwise, if there should be the present
+inequality of remuneration, represented by the enormous salary of a
+manager like Mr. Schwab, to quote a conspicuous example, and the meager
+wage of the average laborer, class formations must take place and the
+old problems incidental to economic inequality reappear. There is no
+need to regard uniformity of reward for all as the only solution of this
+problem, however. Given such an industrial democracy as is herein
+suggested as the essential condition of Socialism, there is little
+reason to doubt that gradually, by the free play of economic law,
+approximate equality would be attained. This brings us to the method of
+the remuneration of labor.
+
+
+VII
+
+Socialists are too often judged by their shibboleths, rather than by the
+principles which those shibboleths imperfectly express, or seek to
+express. Declaiming, rightly, against the wages system as a form of
+slave labor,[194] the "abolition of wage slavery," forever inscribed on
+their banners, the average man is forced to the conclusion that the
+Socialists are working for a system in which the workers will divide
+their actual products and then barter the surplus for the surplus
+products of other workers. Either that, or the most rigid system of
+governmental production and a method of distributing rations and
+uniforms similar to that which obtains in the military organization of
+present-day governments. It is easily seen, however, that such plans do
+not conform to the democratic ideals of the Socialists, on the one hand,
+nor would either of them, on the other hand, be compatible with the wide
+personal liberty herein put forward as characteristic of the Socialist
+state.
+
+The earlier Utopian Socialists did propose to do away with wages; in
+fact, they proposed to do away with money altogether, and invented
+various forms of "Labor Notes" as a means of giving equality of
+remuneration for given quantities of labor, and providing a medium for
+the exchange of wealth. But when the Socialists of to-day speak of the
+"abolition of wages," or of the wages system, they use the words in the
+same sense as they speak of the abolition of capital: _they would
+abolish only the social relations implied in the terms_. Just as they do
+not mean by the abolition of capital the destruction of the machinery
+and implements of production, but the social relation in which they are
+used to create profit for the few, so, when they speak of the abolition
+of the wages system, they mean only the use of wages to exploit the
+producers for the gain of the owners of the means of production and
+exchange. Though the name "wages" might not be changed, a money payment
+for labor in a democratic arrangement of industry, representing an
+approximation to the full value of the labor, minus only its share of
+the cost of maintaining the public services, and the weaker, dependent
+members of society, would be vastly different from a money payment for
+labor by one individual to other individuals, representing an
+approximation to their cost of living, bearing no definite relation to
+the value of their labor products, and paid in lieu of those products
+with a view to the gathering of a rich surplus value by the payer.
+
+Karl Kautsky, perhaps the greatest living exponent of the theories of
+modern Socialism, has made this point perfectly clear. He accepts
+without reserve the belief that wages, unequal and paid in money, will
+be the method of remuneration for labor in the Socialist régime.[195]
+When too many laborers rush into certain branches of industry, the
+natural way to lessen their number and to increase the number of
+laborers in other branches where there is need for them, will be to
+reduce wages in the one and to increase them in the other. Socialism,
+instead of being defined as an attempt to make men equal, might perhaps
+be more justly and accurately defined as a social system based upon the
+natural inequalities of mankind. Not human equality, but equality of
+opportunity, and the prevention of the creation of artificial
+inequalities by privilege, is the essence of Socialism.
+
+What, it may be asked, will society do to prevent the hoarding of wealth
+on the one hand, and the exploitation of the spendthrift by the
+abstinent upon the other? Here, as throughout this discussion, we must
+be careful to refrain from laying down dogmatic rules, giving
+categorical replies to questions which the future will settle in its own
+way. At best, we can only reason as to what possible answers are
+compatible with the fundamental principles of Socialism. Thus we may
+safely answer that in the Socialist régime society will not attempt to
+dictate to the individual how he shall spend his income. If Jones
+prefers _objets d'art_, and Smith prefers fast horses or a steam yacht,
+each will be free to follow his inclinations so far as his resources
+will permit. If, on the contrary, one should prefer to hoard his wealth,
+he would be free to do so. The inheritance of such accumulated property,
+other than personal objects, of course, might be denied, the state being
+made the only possible inheritor of such accumulated property. Even in
+the absence of such a regulation, the inheritance of hoarded wealth
+would not be a serious matter and would speedily adjust itself. There
+would be no opportunity for its _investment_, so that at most
+individuals inheriting such property would be enabled to live idly, or
+with extra luxury, until it was spent. The fact of inheriting property
+would not give the individual power over the life and labor of others.
+By either method, full play for individual liberty would be coupled with
+full economic security for society. There would be no danger of the
+development of a ruling class as a result of natural inequalities.
+
+With such conditions as these, it is not difficult nor in any sense
+romantic to suppose that the tendency to hoard wealth would largely
+disappear. In the same way we must regard the possibilities of the
+exploitation of man by man developing in the Socialist state, through
+the wastefulness and improvidence of the one and the frugality,
+abstinence, and cunning of the other, as slight. With the credit
+functions entirely in the hands of the state, the improvident man would
+be able to obtain credit upon the same securities as from a private
+creditor, without extortion. Society would further secure itself against
+the weakness and failure of the improvident by insuring all its members
+against sickness, accident, and old age.
+
+
+VIII
+
+The administration of justice is necessarily a social function in a
+democratic society. All juridical functions should be socialized in the
+strict sense of being maintained at the social expense for the free
+service of its citizens. Court fees, advocates' charges, and other
+expenses incidental to the administration of justice in present society
+are all anti-democratic and subversive of justice.
+
+Finally, education is likewise a social necessity which society itself
+must assume responsibility for. We have discovered that for
+self-protection society must insist upon a certain minimum of education
+for every child able to receive it; that it is too vital a matter to be
+left to the option of parents or the desires of the immature child. We
+have made a certain minimum of education compulsory and free; the
+Socialist state would make a minimum--probably much larger than our
+present minimum--compulsory, but it would also make _all_ education
+free. From the first stages, in the kindergartens, to the last, in the
+universities, education must be wholly free or equality of opportunity
+cannot be realized. So long as a single barrier exists to prevent any
+child from receiving all the education it is capable of profiting by,
+democracy is unattained.
+
+Whether the Socialist state could tolerate the existence of elementary
+schools other than its own, such as privately conducted kindergartens,
+religious schools, and so on, is by no means agreed upon by Socialists.
+It is like the question of marriage, a matter which is wholly beyond the
+scope of present knowledge. The future will decide for itself. There are
+those who believe that the state would not content itself with refusing
+to permit religious doctrines or ideas to be taught in the schools, but
+would go further, and, as the protector of the child, guard its
+independence of thought in later life as far as possible by forbidding
+religious teaching of any kind in schools for children below a certain
+age. It would not, of course, attempt to prevent parental instruction in
+religious beliefs in the home. Beyond the age prescribed, religious
+education, in all other than public institutions of learning, would be
+freely admitted. This restriction of religious education to the years of
+judgment and discretion implies no hostility to religion on the part of
+the state, but complete neutrality. Not the least important of the
+rights of the child is the right to be protected from influences which
+bias the mind and destroy the possibilities of independent thought in
+later life, or make it attainable only as a result of bitter, needless,
+tragic experience. This is one view. On the other hand, there are
+probably quite as many Socialists who believe that the state would not
+attempt to prevent the religious education of children of any age, in
+schools voluntarily maintained for that purpose, independent of the
+public schools. They believe that the state would content itself with
+insisting that these religious schools must be so built and equipped as
+not to imperil the lives or the health of the children attending them,
+and so conducted as not to interfere with the public schools,--all of
+which means simply that, like vaccination, and the form of marriage
+contract, the question will be settled by the future in its own way.
+There is nothing in the fundamental principles of Socialism, nor any
+body of facts in our present experience, from which we can judge the
+manner of that settlement.
+
+
+In this brief outline of the Socialist state as the writer, in common
+with many of his associates, conceives it, there are many gaps. The
+temptation to fill in the outline somewhat more in detail is strong, but
+that is beyond the borderland which divides scientific and Utopian
+methods. The purpose of the outline is mainly to show that the ideal of
+the Socialism of to-day is something far removed from the network of
+laws and the oppressive bureaucracy commonly imagined; something wholly
+different in spirit and substance from the mechanical arrangement of
+human relations imagined by Utopian romancers. If the Socialist
+propaganda of to-day largely consists of the advocacy of laws for the
+protection of labor and dealing with all kinds of evils, it must be
+remembered that these are to _ameliorate conditions in the existing
+social order_. Many of the laws for which Socialists have most
+strenuously fought have their _raison d'être_ in the conditions of
+capitalist society, and would be quite unnecessary under Socialism. If a
+reference to one's personal work may be pardoned, I will cite the matter
+of the feeding of school children, in the public schools, at the public
+expense. I have, for many years, advocated this measure, which is to be
+found in most Socialist programmes, and which the Socialists of other
+countries have to a considerable extent carried into practical effect.
+Yet, I am free to say that the plan is not my ideal of the manner in
+which children should be fed. It is, at best, a palliative, a necessary
+evil, rendered necessary by the conditions of capitalist society. One
+hopes that in the Socialist régime, home life would be so far developed
+as to make possible the proper feeding and care of all children in their
+homes. This is but an illustration. The Socialist ideal of the state of
+the future, when private property is no longer an instrument of
+oppression used by the few against the many, is not a life completely
+enmeshed in a network of government, but a life controlled by government
+as little as possible; not a life ruled and driven by a powerful engine
+of laws, but a life as spontaneous and free as possible--a maximum of
+personal freedom with a minimum of restraint.
+
+
+     "These things shall be! A loftier race
+     Than e'er the world hath known shall rise
+     With flower of freedom in their souls
+     And light of science in their eyes."[196]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[180] Cf. _Das Erfurter Program_, by Karl Kautsky.
+
+[181] Cf. Ensor's _Modern Socialism_, page 351.
+
+[182] _Labour and Capital: a Letter to a Labour Friend_, by Goldwin
+Smith, D.C.L. (Macmillan, 1907).
+
+The reader of Professor Smith's little book is referred, for the
+Socialist answer to his criticisms, to a small volume by the author of
+this book: _Capitalist and Laborer: an Open Letter to Professor Goldwin
+Smith_, D.C.L. (Kerr, _Standard Socialist Series_), 1907.
+
+[183] _La Conquête du pain_, Pierre Kropotkin, 5th edition, Paris, 1895,
+page 202.
+
+[184] _The Principles of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer, Vol. III, page
+534.
+
+[185] Cf. _The Spirit of American Government_, by J. Allen Smith, LL.B.
+Ph.D., for a discussion of this subject.
+
+[186] This statement must not be interpreted too narrowly, of course.
+While the nature of these things makes possible an infinitely wider
+range of personal liberty than is possible in some other things,
+individual liberty must _ultimately_ be governed by the liberty of
+others. A fanatical religious sect practicing human sacrifice, for
+instance, could not be tolerated by any civilized society. Obscenity in
+art is another example.
+
+[187] I use the word "state" throughout this discussion in its largest,
+most comprehensive sense, as meaning the whole political organization of
+society.
+
+[188] This view is fully shared by Kautsky, _Agrarfrage_, pages 443-444,
+and by Paul Lafargue, _Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, October,
+1898, page 70.
+
+[189] Of course, this does not mean that there must not be private _use_
+of land.
+
+[190] The student who cares to pursue the subject will find that this
+analysis is, in the main, agreed to by the most eminent exponents of
+Marxian Socialism to-day. Cf., for instance, Kautsky's _Das Erfurter
+Program_; the same writer's _The Social Revolution_, especially pages
+117, 159; Vandervelde, quoted by Ensor, _Modern Socialism_, page 205;
+also, Vandervelde's _Collectivism_, page 46. Jaurès, the brilliant
+French Socialist, may not perhaps be strictly included in the category
+of "eminent Marxists," but he accepts the position of Kautsky, see
+_Studies in Socialism_, by Jean Jaurès, pages 36-40. See, also, Engels,
+_Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland_, published in _Die Neue
+Zeit_, 1894-1895, No. 10; Kautsky, _Die Agrarfrage_; and Simons, _The
+American Farmer_. That most of these deal with petty agriculture rather
+than petty industry is true, but the principle holds in regard to both.
+
+[191] "Ethics of Social Progress," by Professor Franklin H. Giddings in
+_Philanthropy and Social Progress_ (1893), page 226.
+
+[192] "The Economics of Factory Legislation," in _The Case For the
+Factory Acts_, by Mrs. Sidney Webb, page 50.
+
+[193] See, for instance, Mr. Roosevelt's speech at Matinecock, L.I.,
+near Oyster Bay, July 11, 1908, as reported in the daily papers by the
+Associated Press. Also, the Republican National Platform, 1908, which
+states that Socialism stands for "equality of possession," while the
+Republican Party stands for "equality of opportunity"--a complete
+misrepresentation, both of Socialism and the Republican Party!
+
+[194] For condemning the wages system as a form of slavery, Socialists
+are often vigorously condemned, but there are few sociologists of repute
+who question the truth of the Socialist claim. Herbert Spencer, for
+example, is as vigorous in asserting that wage-labor is a form of
+slavery as any Socialist. See _The Principles of Sociology_, Vol. III,
+Chapter 18.
+
+[195] See Kautsky's _Das Erfurter Program_, and also _The Social
+Revolution_, especially pages 128-135; Anton Menger, _L'État
+Socialiste_, page 35; and Vandervelde's _Collectivism_, pages 149-150.
+
+[196] J. Addington Symonds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MEANS OF REALIZATION[197]
+
+
+I
+
+You ask me how the goal I have described is to be attained: "The
+picture," you say, "is attractive, but we would like to know how we are
+to reach the Promised Land which it pictures. Show us the way!" The
+question is a fair one, and I shall try to answer it with candor, as it
+deserves. But I cannot promise to tell how the change will be brought
+about, to describe the exact process by which social property will
+supplant capitalist private property. The only conditions under which
+any honest thinker could give such an answer would necessitate a
+combination of circumstances which has never existed, and which no one
+seriously expects to develop. To answer in definite terms, saying, "This
+is the manner in which the change will be made," one would have to know
+the exact time of the change; precisely what things would be socialized;
+the thought of the people, their temper, their courage. In a word,
+omniscience would be necessary to enable one to make such a reply.
+
+All that is possible in this connection for the candid Socialist is to
+point out those tendencies which he believes to be making for the
+Socialist ideal, those tendencies in society, whether political or
+economic, which are making for industrial democracy; to consider frankly
+the difficulties which must be overcome before the transition from
+capitalism can be effected, and to suggest such means of overcoming
+these as present themselves to the mind, always remembering that other
+means may be developed which we cannot now see, and that great storms of
+elemental human passion may sweep the current into channels unsuspected.
+
+Those who are familiar with the writings of Marx know that, in strange
+contrast with the fundamental principles of that theory of social
+evolution which he so well developed, he lapsed at times into the
+Utopian habit of predicting the sudden transformation of society.
+Capitalism was to end in a great final "catastrophe" and the new order
+be born in the travail of a "social revolution." I remember that when I
+joined the Socialist movement, many years ago, the Social Revolution was
+a very real event, inevitable and nigh at hand, to most of us. The more
+enthusiastic of us dreamed of it; we sang songs in the spirit of the
+_Chansons Revolutionaires_, one of which, as I recall, told plainly
+enough what we would do--
+
+
+     "When the Revolution comes."
+
+
+Some comrades actually wanted to have military drill at our business
+meetings, merely that we might be ready for the Revolution, which might
+occur any Monday morning or Friday afternoon. If this seems strange and
+comic as I relate it to-day, please remember that we were very few and
+very young, and, therefore, very sure that we were to redeem the world.
+We lived in a state of revolutionary ecstasy. Some of us, I think, must
+have gone regularly to sleep in the mental state of Tennyson's May
+Queen, with words equivalent to her childish admonition--
+
+
+     "If you're waking call me early,"
+
+
+so fearful were we that the Revolution might start without us!
+
+There can be no harm in these confessions to-day, for we have grown far
+enough beyond that period to laugh at it in retrospect. True, there is
+still a good deal of talk about the Social Revolution, and there may be
+a few Socialists here and there who use the term in the sense I have
+described; who believe that capitalism will come to a great crisis, that
+there will be a rising of millions in wrath, a night of fury and agony,
+and then the sunrise of Brotherhood above the blood-stained valley and
+the corpse-strewn plain. But most of us, when we use the old term, by
+sheer force of habit, or as an inherited tradition, think of the Social
+Revolution in no such spirit. We think only of the change that must
+come over society, transferring the control of its life from the few to
+the many, the change that is now going on all around us. When the time
+comes that men and women speak of the state in which they live as
+Socialism, and look back upon the life we live to-day with wonder and
+pity, they will speak of the period of revolution as including this very
+year, and, possibly, all the years included in the lives of the youngest
+persons present. At all events, no considerable body of Socialists
+anywhere in the world to-day, and no Socialist whose words have any
+influence in the movement, believe that there will be a sudden, violent
+change from capitalism to Socialism.
+
+If it seemed necessary, abundant testimony to the truthfulness of this
+claim could be produced. But I shall content myself with two
+witnesses--chosen from the multitude of available witnesses for reasons
+which will unfold themselves. The first witness is Marx himself. I
+choose his testimony, mainly, because there is no other name so great as
+his, and, secondly, to show that his profoundest thought rejected the
+idea of sudden social transformations which at times he seemed to favor.
+It is 1850. Marx is in London, actively engaged in a German Communist
+movement with its Central Committee in that great metropolis. The
+majority are impatient, feverishly urging revolt; they are under the
+illusion that they can make the Social Revolution at once. Marx tells
+them, on the contrary, that it will take fifty years "not only to change
+existing conditions but to change yourselves and make yourselves worthy
+of political power." They, the majority, say on the other hand, "We
+ought to get power at once, or else give up the fight." Marx tries
+vainly to make them see this, and resigns when he fails, scornfully
+telling them that they "substitute revolutionary phrases for
+_revolutionary evolution_."[198] Mark well that term, "revolutionary
+evolution," for it bears out the description I have attempted of the
+sense in which we speak of revolution in the Socialist propaganda of
+to-day. And mark well, also, that Marx gave them fifty years simply to
+make themselves worthy of political power.
+
+As the second witness, I choose Liebknecht, whose name must always be
+associated with those of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle, in Socialist
+history. Not alone because of the fact that Liebknecht, more than almost
+any other man, has influenced the tactics of the international Socialist
+movement, but for the additional reason that detached phrases of his are
+sometimes quoted in support of the opposite view. Words spoken in
+oratorical and forensic passion, or in the bravado of irresponsible
+youthfulness, and texts torn from their contexts, are used to show that
+Liebknecht anticipated the violent transformation of society. But heed
+this, one of many similar statements of his maturest and profoundest
+thought: "_But we are not going to attain Socialism at one bound. The
+transition is going on all the time_, and the important thing for us ...
+is not to paint a picture of the future--which in any case would be
+useless labor--_but to forecast a practical programme for the
+intermediate period, to formulate and justify measures that shall be
+applicable at once, and that will serve as aids to the new Socialist
+birth_."[199]
+
+So much, then, for quotations from the mightiest of all our hosts. What
+I would make clear is not merely that the greatest of Socialist
+theorists and tacticians agree that the change will be brought about
+gradually, and not by one stroke of revolutionary action, but that, more
+important still, the Socialist Party of this country, and all the
+Socialist parties of the world, are based upon that idea. That is why
+they have their political programmes, aiming to make the conditions of
+life better now, in the transition period, and also to aid in the happy,
+peaceful birth of the new order.
+
+
+II
+
+Having disposed of the notion that Socialists expect to realize their
+ideals by a single stroke, and thus swept away some of the greatest
+obstacles which rise before the imagination of the student of
+Socialism, we obtain a clearer vision of the problem. And that is no
+small advance toward its solution.
+
+Concerning the political organization of the Socialist state, so far as
+the extension of political democracy is concerned, not much need be
+said. You can very readily comprehend that this may be done by legal,
+constitutional means. Step by step, just as we attain power enough to do
+so, we shall extend the power of the people until we have a complete
+political democracy. Where, as in some of the Southern States, there is
+virtually a property qualification for the franchise, where that remnant
+of feudalism, the poll tax, remains, Socialists, whenever they come into
+power in those states, or whenever they are strong enough to force the
+issue, will insist upon making the franchise free. And where, as in this
+state, there is a sex qualification for the franchise, women being
+denied the suffrage, they will work unceasingly to do away with that
+relic of barbarism. By means of such measures as the Initiative and
+Referendum, and election of judges by the people, the sovereignty of the
+people will be established. It may be that without some constitutional
+amendments it will be found impossible to make political democracy
+complete. In that case, moving along the line of least resistance, they
+will do all that they can within the limits of the Constitution as it
+is, changing it whenever by reason of their power they deem that
+practicable.
+
+As to the organization of the industrial life of the Socialist state,
+bringing industry from private to public control, here, too, Socialists
+will work along the line of least resistance. First of all, it must be
+remembered that there are tendencies to that end within society at
+present. Every development of industry and commerce, from competition to
+monopoly, so far as it centers the control in few hands and organizes
+the industry or business, makes it possible to take it over without
+dislocation, and, at the same time, makes it the interest of a larger
+number to help in bringing about that transfer. In like manner every
+voluntary coöperative organization of producers makes for the Socialist
+ideal. This is a far less important matter in the United States than in
+England and other European countries. Finally, we have the enormous
+extension of public functions developed already in capitalist society,
+and being constantly extended. Our postal system, public schools, state
+universities, libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, bureaus of
+research and information, hospitals, sanatoria, municipal ferries, water
+supply, fire departments, health boards, lighting systems, these, and a
+thousand other activities of our municipalities and states, and the
+nation, are so many forms created by capitalism to meet its own needs
+which belong, however, to Socialism and require only to be infused with
+the Socialist spirit. This will be done as they come under the
+influence of Socialists elected to various legislative and
+administrative bodies in ever increasing number as the movement grows.
+
+All this is not difficult to comprehend. What is more likely to perplex
+the average man is the method by which Socialists propose to effect the
+transfer of individual or corporate property to the collectivity. Will
+it be confiscated, taken without recompense; and if so, will it not be
+necessary to take the bank savings of the poor widow as well as the
+millions of the millionaire? On the other hand, if compensation is
+given, will there not be still a privileged class, a wealthy class, that
+is, and a poorer class? These are the questions I see written upon your
+faces as I look down upon them and read the language of their strained
+interest. Every face seems a challenge to answer these questions. I
+shall try to answer them with perfect candor, as far as that is possible
+within the limits of our time. May I not ask you, then, to follow
+carefully a brief series of propositions, or postulates, which I shall,
+with your permission, lay before you?
+
+_First:_ The act of transfer, whether it take the form of confiscation
+or otherwise, must be the will of a legal majority of the people. If the
+unit is the city, a legal majority of the citizens there; if the unit is
+the state, then a legal majority of the citizens of the state; if the
+unit is the nation, then a legal majority in the nation. I use the term
+"legal majority" to indicate my profound conviction that the process
+itself must be a legal, constitutional process. Of course, in the event
+of some great upheaval occurring, such as, for example, the rising of a
+suffering and desperate people in consequence of some terrific panic or
+period of depression, brought on by capitalist misrule, or by war, this
+might be swept away. Throughout the world's history such upheavals have
+occurred, when the people's wrath, or their desperation, has assumed the
+form of a cyclone, and in such times laws have been of no more
+resistance than straws in the pathway of the cyclone sweeping across the
+plain. Omitting such dire happenings from our calculations--for so we
+must wish to do--we may lay down this principle of the imperative
+necessity for a legal majority, acting in legal manner.
+
+_Second:_ The process must be gradual. There will be no _coup de force_.
+No effort will be made to socialize those industries which have not been
+made ready by a degree of monopolization. This we can say with
+confidence, if for no other reason than that we cannot conceive a legal
+majority being stirred sufficiently to take action in the absence of
+some degree of oppression or danger, such as monopoly alone contains.
+Further, as a matter of hard, practical sense, it is not conceivable
+that any government will ever be able to deal with all the industries
+at one time. The railroads may be first to be taken, or it may be the
+mines in one state and the oil wells in another. The important point is
+to see that the process of socialization _must_ be piecemeal and
+gradual. This does not mean that it must be a _slow_ process, suggesting
+the slowness of geologic formations, but that it must be gradual,
+progressive, advancing from step to step, and giving opportunities for
+adjusting things. Otherwise there would be chaos and anarchy.
+
+_Third:_ The manner of the acquisition must be determined by the people
+at the time, and not fixed by us in advance, according to some abstract
+principle. If the people decide to take any particular individual or
+corporate property without compensation, that will be done. And they
+will have great historic precedents for their action. The Socialists of
+Europe could point to the manner in which many of the feudal estates and
+rights were confiscated, while American Socialists could point to the
+manner in which, without indemnity or compensation, chattel slavery was
+abolished.
+
+So much is said merely by way of explanation, first, that the manner of
+acquiring private and corporate property and making it social property
+is not to be decided in advance, and secondly, that there are historic
+precedents for confiscation. On the other hand, there is no good reason
+why compensation should not be paid for such properties. You start! You
+have been more shocked than if I had said we should seize the properties
+and cut the throats of the proprietors! Be assured: I am not forgetting
+my promise to be frank with you, nor am I expressing my personal opinion
+merely when I say that there is nothing in the theory of modern
+Socialism which precludes the possibility of compensation. There is no
+Socialist of repute and authority in the world, so far as my knowledge
+goes, who makes a contrary claim. I should regard it as unworthy to lay
+down as the Socialist position views which were my own, and which were
+not shared by the great body of Socialist thinkers throughout the world.
+It is not less nor more than the truth that all the leading Socialists
+of the world agree that compensation could be paid without doing
+violence to a single Socialist principle, and most of them favor
+it.[200]
+
+Once more I shall appeal to the authority of Marx. Engels wrote in 1894:
+"We do not at all consider the indemnification of the proprietors as an
+impossibility, whatever may be the circumstances. How many times has not
+Karl Marx expressed to me the opinion that if we could buy up the whole
+crowd it would really be the cheapest way of relieving ourselves of
+them."[201] Not only Marx, then, in the most intimate of his discussions
+with Engels, his bosom friend, but Engels himself, in almost his last
+days, refused to admit the impossibility of paying indemnity for
+properties socialized, "_whatever may be the circumstances_."
+
+Now, as to the difficulties--especially as to the widow's savings. The
+socialization of non-productive wealth is not contemplated by any
+Socialist, no matter whether it consist of the widow's savings in a
+stocking or the treasures in the safe deposit vaults of the rich. Mere
+wealth, whether in money or precious gems and jewels, need not trouble
+us. Non-productive wealth is outside of our calculation. In the next
+place, as I have attempted to make clear, the petty business, the
+individual store, the small workshop, and the farm operated by its
+owner, would not, necessarily, nor probably, be disturbed. We have to
+consider only the great agencies of exploitation, industries operated by
+many producers of surplus-value for the benefit of the few. Let us, for
+example, take a conspicuous industrial organization, the so-called Steel
+Trust. Suppose the Socialists to be in power: there is a popular demand
+for the socialization of the steel industry. The government decides to
+take over the plant of the Steel Trust and all its affairs, and the
+support of the vast majority of the people is assured. First a
+valuation takes place, and then bonds, government bonds, are issued.
+Unlike what happens too often at the present time, the price fixed is
+not greatly in excess of the value the people acquire--one of the means
+by which the capitalists fasten their clutches on the popular throat.
+The Socialist _spirit_ enters into the business. Bonds are issued to all
+the shareholders in strict proportion to their holdings, and so the poor
+widow, concerning whose interests critics of Socialism are so
+solicitous, gets bonds for her share. She is therefore even more secure
+than before, since it is no longer possible for unscrupulous individuals
+to plunder her by nefarious stock transactions.
+
+So far, good and well. But, you may rightly say, this will not eliminate
+the unearned incomes. The heavy stockholders will simply become rich
+bondholders. Temporarily, that is true. But when that has been
+accomplished in a few of the more important industries, they will find
+it difficult to invest their surplus incomes profitably. There will also
+be a surplus to the state over and above the amounts annually paid in
+redemption of the bonds. Finally, it will be possible to adopt measures
+for eliminating the unearned incomes entirely by means of taxation, such
+as the progressive income tax, property and inheritance taxes. Taxation
+is, of course, a form of confiscation, but it is a form which has
+become familiar, which is perfectly legal, and which enables the
+confiscatory process to be stretched out over a long enough period to
+make it comparatively easy, to reduce the hardship to a minimum. By
+means of a progressive income tax, a bond tax, and an inheritance tax,
+it would be possible to eliminate the unearned incomes of a class of
+bondholders from society within a reasonable period, without inflicting
+injury or hardship upon any human being.
+
+I do not, let me again warn you, set this plan before you as one which
+Socialism depends upon, which must be adopted. I do not say that the
+Socialist parties of the world are pledged to this method, for they are
+not. The subject is not mentioned in any of our programmes, so far as I
+recall them at this moment. We are silent upon the subject, not because
+we fear to discuss it, but because we realize that the matter will be
+decided when the question is reached, and that each case will be decided
+upon its merits. Still, it is but fair to express my belief that it is
+to the interest of the workers, no less than of the rest of society,
+that the change to a Socialist state be made as easy and peaceable as
+possible. Socialists, being human beings and not monsters, naturally
+desire that the transition to Socialism shall be made with as little
+friction and pain as possible. Left to their own choice, I am confident
+that those upon whom the task of effecting the change falls will not
+choose the way of violence, if the way of peace is left open to them.
+
+Within the limits of this opportunity, I have tried to be as frank as I
+am to myself in those constant self-questionings which are inseparable
+from the work of the serious propagandist and honest teacher. Further I
+cannot go. If I have not been able to tell definitely how the change
+_will_ be wrought, I have at least been able, I hope, to show that it
+_may_ be brought about peaceably and without bloodshed. If this has
+given any one a new view of Socialism--opened, as it were, a doorway
+through which you can get a glimpse of the City Beautiful, and the way
+leading to its gates--then my reward is infinitely precious.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[197] From the stenographic report of an address given to some students
+of Socialism in New York, October, 1907.
+
+[198] Cf. Jaurès, _Studies in Socialism_, page 44.
+
+[199] Quoted by Jaurès, _Studies in Socialism_, page 93.
+
+[200] The reader is referred to Kautsky's books, _Das Erfurter Program_
+and _The Social Revolution_, and to Vandervelde's admirable work,
+_Collectivism_, for confirmation of this statement.
+
+[201] Quoted by Vandervelde, _Collectivism_, page 155.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+(Titles in Italics)
+
+
+A
+
+Abbé Lancellotti, quoted, 27-28.
+
+_Abuses of Injunctions, The_, 196 n.
+
+_A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, 93, 202, 206,
+  212, 245 n.
+
+Adams, Mr. Brooks, 156.
+
+Adler, G., 64 n.
+
+AFRICA:
+  American investments in, 118;
+  cannibalism in, 78;
+  Moors in, 95;
+  slavery in, 26.
+
+Agriculture, concentration in, 121, 131-137.
+
+Aix-la-Chapelle, conference of sovereigns at, 49.
+
+_A Lecture on Human Happiness_, 206.
+
+_A Letter to Lord John Russell_, 206.
+
+"Alfred" (Samuel Kydd), quoted, 23.
+
+Alliance de la Democratie Socialiste, the, 69 n.
+
+Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the, 195.
+
+Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the, 197.
+
+AMERICA:
+  class divisions and struggles in, 163-169, 176-178, 182-184, 192-197;
+  concentration of wealth in, 124-150;
+  discovery of, 94-97;
+  first cotton from, used in England, 30-31;
+  foreign capital invested in, 118;
+  Socialism in, 4, 167.
+  _See also_ UNITED STATES.
+
+American Association for the Advancement of Science, 146.
+
+_American Farmer, The_, 136 n., 168 n., 306 n.
+
+_American Federationist, The_, 13 n.
+
+American Federation of Labor, 183.
+
+American Railway Union, the, 194.
+
+American Revolution, the, 79.
+
+_A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_,
+  245.
+
+ANARCHISM:
+  Socialism and, 2;
+  weak where Socialism is strong, 181.
+
+Anaximander, 232.
+
+_Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress_, 97 n.,
+  102 n.
+
+_An Inquiry concerning Political Justice_, 204.
+
+_An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth_, 204.
+
+Anstey, Mr., satire on Socialist régime, 281.
+
+Anthracite coal strike, 1903, 174.
+
+_Arena, The_, 196 n.
+
+_A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado_, etc., 174 n.
+
+Argyles, relation of Mrs. Marx to the, 66.
+
+Aristotle, 81.
+
+Arkwright, English inventor, 19.
+
+ASIA:
+  American capital invested in, 118;
+  savages in Central, 95;
+  supposed origin of feudalism in, 106.
+
+Atheism, Marx and, 69, 70 n.
+
+Athens, 104.
+
+_A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions_, 244 n.
+
+_Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friederich Engels,
+  und Ferdinand Lassalle_, 64 n.
+
+Australia, American capital invested in, 118.
+
+_Austrian Labor Almanac, The_, 66 n.
+
+"Austrian" school of economists, the, 257.
+
+Aveling, Edward, 93 n., 210 n.;
+  Eleanor Marx, 210 n., 212.
+
+
+B
+
+Bachofen, 101.
+
+Baden, concentration of wealth in, 140-142.
+
+Bakeshops, concentration of ownership of, 124.
+
+Bakunin, Michael, 66, 69 n., 88.
+
+Bantu tribes of Africa, 102.
+
+Bax, E. Belfort, 61 n., 67 n., 93 n.
+
+Beaulieu, Leroy, 141.
+
+Beer, M., 87 n.
+
+Bellamy, Edward, 9.
+
+Bernstein, Edward, 139, 203, 204 n.
+
+Bigelow, Melville, 156 n.
+
+Bismarck, Marx and, 92.
+
+"Blacklisting," 173.
+
+Blanc, Louis, 12.
+
+Bolte, letter from Marx to, 88 n.
+
+Bookstaver, Justice, 196.
+
+Bootblacks, 127.
+
+Bray, John Francis, 203, 207.
+
+_Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker_, etc., 120.
+
+Brisbane, Albert, 55.
+
+British Museum, Marx and the, 209, 210, 213.
+
+Brook Farm, 53.
+
+Brooks, George, 69 n.
+
+Buffalo _Express_ strike, 196.
+
+
+C
+
+Cabet, Étienne, 54, 57-60, 231.
+
+California, cost of growing wheat in, 131.
+
+Call, Henry Laurens, 146.
+
+Campanella, 9.
+
+Cannibalism, 78, 102, 103.
+
+_Capital_:
+  dedication of, 208;
+  English character of, 213-214;
+  Liebknecht on, 209;
+  quoted, 28, 29, 87, 93 n., 115, 206, 228 n., 239, 274, 275;
+  relation of to Socialism, 119.
+
+CAPITAL:
+  nature of, 236;
+  Socialists advocate abolition of, 237.
+
+_Capitalist and Laborer_ (Spargo), 259 n., 284 n.
+
+Capitalist income, the source of, 266 _et seq._
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 217, 302.
+
+Cartwright, English inventor, 20.
+
+Casalis, African missionary, quoted, 77.
+
+_Case for the Factory Acts, The_, 310.
+
+_Centralization and the Law: Scientific Legal Education_, 156 n.
+
+_Chansons Revolutionaire_, 325.
+
+_Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, A Comparison_, 93 n.
+
+Chartism and Chartists, 53, 67, 203.
+
+Chase, Salmon P., 45.
+
+Chicago, trial of E. V. Debs at, 194.
+
+Child Labor, 21-26, 31, 39.
+
+Children, feeding of school, 321.
+
+China, Socialism in, 71.
+
+CHRISTIANITY:
+  embraced by Heinrich Marx, 63-65;
+  Marx and, 68-70;
+  Roman Empire and, 89;
+  Robert Owen and, 51.
+
+_Christianity and the Social Crisis_, 86 n.
+
+Cigar stores, concentration of ownership of, 124.
+
+Civil War, the, 85.
+
+_Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, The_, 204.
+
+_Clansmen, The_, 158.
+
+_Clarion, The_, 7 n.
+
+Class consciousness, 151, 165;
+  President Roosevelt on, 151, 180;
+  Robert Owen and, 48-49;
+  Weitling and, 56.
+
+CLASS DIVISIONS:
+  of capitalism, 157 _et seq._;
+  of feudalism, 156;
+  of slavery, 155;
+  of the United States, 163 _et seq._;
+  ultimate end of, by Socialism, 200.
+
+Class environment, influence of, on beliefs, etc., 171-175.
+
+Class struggle theory, the, 155 _et seq._
+
+Cleveland, President, 194.
+
+Clodd, Edward, quoted, 76, 82 n.
+
+_Coal Mine Workers, The_, 160 n.
+
+Coeur d'Alene, 183, 192.
+
+Coleridge, Robert Owen and, 31.
+
+_Collectivism_, 306 n.
+
+Cologne assizes, Marx tried at, 208.
+
+Colorado, labor troubles in, 174, 192.
+
+Columbus and the discovery of America, 94-97.
+
+_Coming Slavery, The_, 6, 282.
+
+Commercial crisis in England, 1815, 39-41.
+
+COMMODITY:
+  definition of a, 236, 239-241;
+  labor power as a, 263 _et seq._;
+  money as a, 255-256;
+  sunshine called a, 241 n.;
+  value of a, determined by labor, 243-254.
+
+_Common Sense of Socialism, The_, (Spargo), 168.
+
+Communism, political, 13, 14, 15, 54, 55;
+  primitive, 97, 101-102.
+
+Communist League, the, 60, 61.
+
+_Communist Manifesto, The_:
+  birth-cry of modern Socialism, 53;
+  joint authorship of, 62, 73-74;
+  publication of, 62;
+  quoted, 71, 72, 73, 153-154;
+  summary of, by Engels, 72;
+  taxation of land values advocated in, 268 n.
+
+Compensation, Socialism and, _see_ CONFISCATION.
+
+Competition, 98-101, 114, 115, 148, 149.
+
+_Comrade, The_, 10 n., 68 n.
+
+Concentration of capital and wealth, the, 115 _et seq._
+
+_Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, The_, 67, 74.
+
+Confiscation of property, Socialism and, 331, 333-337.
+
+Constitution, the, and Socialism, 329-330.
+
+Consumer, exploitation of the, 189.
+
+Cooke-Taylor, R. W., 23 n., 24.
+
+Coöperation, among animals, 98, 99;
+  Owen and, 45;
+  under Socialism, 299, 300, 305.
+
+_Corn-Law Rhymes, The_, 1.
+
+Cossa, Luigi, quoted, 215.
+
+Cotton manufacture in England, 29 _et seq._;
+  Engels and, 67.
+
+Credit functions in Socialist régime, 300-302.
+
+Crimean War, the, 36-38, 232.
+
+Cripple Creek, 174 n., 183.
+
+_Criticism of the Gotha Programme_, 205, 224.
+
+Crompton, English inventor, 19.
+
+Cromwellian Commonwealth, the, 114.
+
+
+D
+
+Dale, David, 24.
+
+Dante, Marx and, 68.
+
+DARWIN, CHARLES:
+  appreciation of his work by Marx, 93;
+  compared to Marx, 73, 93;
+  letter from, to Marx, 93;
+  on the struggle for existence, 98;
+  quoted, 98.
+
+_Das Erfurter Program_, 279 n., 305 n., 315 n.
+
+_Das junge Deutschland in der Schweiz_, 70 n.
+
+Davenay, M., letter from Herbert Spencer to, 6.
+
+Debs, E. V., 193, 194.
+
+DEMOCRACY:
+  application of principles of, to industry in Socialist régime, 287,
+  302-305;
+  only approximately attainable, 288-289;
+  Socialism and, 287-290, 302-305, 329-330.
+
+_Descent of Man, The_, 98.
+
+Deville, Gabriel, quoted, 237.
+
+Diary of Mrs. Marx quoted, 211-212.
+
+_Die Agrarfrage_, 168 n., 297 n., 306 n.
+
+_Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland_, 306.
+
+_Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der bestehenden
+  Volkswirthschaft_, 64.
+
+_Die Neue Zeit_, 64 n.
+
+_Die Voraussetzungen des Socializmus_, 139.
+
+Directive ability, 228 n., 273-275.
+
+Direct legislation, 289, 329-330.
+
+_Directory of Directors, The_, 117.
+
+_Disclosures about the Communists' Process_, 61.
+
+Drinkwater, partner of Robert Owen, 29-31.
+
+
+E
+
+_Eastern Question, The_, 210 n., 212 n.
+
+_Economic Foundations of Society, The_, 87 n.
+
+_Economic Interpretation of History, The_ (Rogers), 94 n., 95 n.
+
+_Economic Interpretation of History, The_ (Seligman), 81 n., 82 n.,
+  83 n., 85 n., 91 n.
+
+_Economic Journal, The_, 198 n.
+
+_Economics of Socialism, The_, 38 n., 257 n.
+
+_Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, The_, 215 n.
+
+Edison, 227.
+
+_Effects of Civilization on the People of the European States, The_,
+  203.
+
+_Eighteenth Brumaire, The_, 90.
+
+_Elements of Political Economy_ (Nicholson), 241 n.
+
+Elliott, Ebenezer, quoted, 1.
+
+Ely, Professor R. T., 46, 115, 132, 140;
+  quoted, 79, 138, 148.
+
+Emerson, R. W., on Robert Owen, 50-52.
+
+ENGELS, FRIEDERICH:
+  birth and early training, 66-67;
+  collaboration with Marx in authorship of _Manifesto_, 62;
+  first meeting with Marx, 67;
+  friendship with O'Connor and Owen, 67;
+  his _Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844_, 67;
+  joins International Alliance with Marx, 61;
+  life in England, 67;
+  linguistic abilities, 67;
+  journalistic work, 67;
+  poem on, 74;
+  quoted, 17, 54, 73-74, 91, 105, 120, 153-154, 186, 306 n., 334-335;
+  share in authorship of _Manifesto_, 73;
+  views upon confiscation of capitalist property, 335.
+
+England, industrial revolution in, 19 _et seq._;
+  Social Democratic Federation of, 283-284;
+  trade unions in, 45, 197-199.
+
+Ensor, R. C. K., 283, 306 n.
+
+Equality, Socialists and, 2, 312, 316.
+
+Eskimos, the, 102.
+
+_Essai sur la repartition des richesses et sur la tendance à une moindre
+  inégalité des conditions_, 141 n.
+
+_Essay on Robert Owen_, 50 n.
+
+_Essays on the Formation of Human Character_, 34.
+
+_Ethics and the Materialistic Conception of History_, 171 n.
+
+Europe, growth of Socialism in, 4.
+
+Everet's wool-dressing machine, 27.
+
+
+F
+
+_Fabian Tracts, The_, 124 n., 144 n.
+
+_Factory System and the Factory Acts, The_, 24.
+
+Family, _see_ Marriage.
+
+Farmers, class interests of, 164, 166-169.
+
+Farms, mortgages and ownership of, 133-134;
+  number of, in United States, 133;
+  permanence of small, 134;
+  under Socialism, 128 n.
+
+Ferdinand and Isabella, 95.
+
+_Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer_, 204 n.
+
+Ferri, Enrico, 78, 93 n.
+
+Feudalism, duration of, 107;
+  nature of, 108-110;
+  origin of, 106-107;
+  theory of, 108.
+
+Feuerbach, Ludwig, 89.
+
+_Feuerbach, the Roots of the Socialist Philosophy_, 86 n., 89 n.
+
+_Figaro, The_, 6.
+
+"Final Utility" theory of value, the, 257.
+
+Fourier, Charles, 32, 46, 48, 50, 54, 231.
+
+Foxwell, Professor, 206, 207 n.;
+  quoted, 206.
+
+France, concentration of wealth in, 141.
+
+Franklin, Benjamin, 244, 245, 307;
+  estimate of, by Marx, 245 n.;
+  his views upon value, 245;
+  quoted, 245.
+
+Freeman, Justice, 195.
+
+"Free Soil" movement, the, 57.
+
+Freiligrath, F., 208.
+
+_French and German Socialism_, 46 n.
+
+
+G
+
+Garrison, W. Lloyd, 85.
+
+Garwood, John, poem by, quoted, 35.
+
+Gentz, M., 49.
+
+George, Henry, 268 n.
+
+German Socialists in America, F. Engels on, 120.
+
+GERMANY:
+  Anarchism weak in, 181;
+  ribbon loom invented in, 27;
+  Socialism in, 167;
+  use of loom in, forbidden, 28.
+
+_Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie_, 64 n.
+
+Ghent, W. J., 32, 83, 124, 171 n., 178;
+  quoted, 175.
+
+Gibbins, H. de B., quoted, 21, 22, 26.
+
+Giddings, Professor F. H., quoted, 310.
+
+Giffen, Sir Robert, 143.
+
+Gildersleeve, Justice, 196.
+
+Glasgow, conference of manufacturers in, 39.
+
+_God's England or the Devil's?_ 69 n.
+
+Godwin, William, 203, 204.
+
+Gompers, Samuel, quoted, 13 n.
+
+Gossen, 257 n.
+
+Gotha Programme of German Socialist Party, 205, 224, 229.
+
+Gray, John, 203, 206.
+
+Green, J. Richard, 79.
+
+_Growth of Monopoly in English Industry, The_, 124 n.
+
+_Guaranties of Harmony and Freedom, The_, 55.
+
+_Guide to the Study of Political Economy_, 215.
+
+
+H
+
+Hall, Charles, 203.
+
+Hall, Professor Thomas C., 89 n.
+
+Hamburg, loom publicly burned in, 28.
+
+Hanna, Marcus A., 183.
+
+Hargreaves, English inventor, 19.
+
+Harrington, 82.
+
+Hazelton and Homestead, 183.
+
+Heath, Frederic, 55 n.
+
+Hebrews, religious conceptions of the, 86.
+
+Heine, Heinrich, 66.
+
+_Herr Vogt_, 61.
+
+Hillquit, Morris, 46 n., 228 n.;
+  quoted, 55-57.
+
+_History and Criticism of the Labor Theory of Value_, 205 n.
+
+_History of Socialism_, 46 n.
+
+_History of Socialism in the United States_, 46 n., 55 n.
+
+_History of the Factory System_, 23.
+
+Hobbes, 261.
+
+Hodgskin, Thomas, 203, 207.
+
+Hull, Henry, 215 n.
+
+Huxley, Professor, 77, 98.
+
+Hyndman, H. M., 38 n., 257 n.
+
+
+I
+
+Ibsen, 15.
+
+Icaria, 59.
+
+Idaho, class struggle in, 183, 192.
+
+Immigration, 127 n.
+
+Individualism, Socialism and, 280.
+
+_Industrial History of England, The_, 21 n., 22 n., 26 n.
+
+Industrial revolution in England, the, 19 _et seq._
+
+Ingalls, Senator John J., 148.
+
+Initiative and Referendum, the, 289, 329-330.
+
+Injunctions in labor disputes, 193 _et seq._
+
+International Alliance, the, 61.
+
+International Cigarmakers' Union, 195.
+
+_International Socialist Review, The_, 11, 88 n., 224 n.
+
+International Typographical Union, 196.
+
+Iron Law of Wages, the, 262-265.
+
+Isaiah, quoted, 9.
+
+
+J
+
+Jaurès, Jean, 306 n., 327 n., 328 n.
+
+_Jesus Christ and the Social Question_, 69 n.
+
+Jevons, Professor W. S., 257 n.
+
+Jones, Lloyd, biographer of Owen, 19.
+
+Jones, Owen's first partner, 29.
+
+_Justice_ (London), 61 n., 67 n.
+
+
+K
+
+_Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, 17 n., 64 n., 66 n., 93 n., 209 n.,
+  212 n.
+
+_Karl Marx's Nationaloekonomische Irrlehren_, 92 n.
+
+Karl Marx on Sectarianism and Dogmatism, 88 n.
+
+Kautsky, Karl, 66 n., 171 n., 297 n., 305 n., 306 n., 324 n.;
+  quoted, 128, 168.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 96.
+
+Kirkup, Thomas, 46 n.
+
+Kropotkin, Peter, 99, 100, 285, 286 n.
+
+Kydd, Samuel ("Alfred"), 23 n.
+
+
+L
+
+Labor, defined by Mallock, 228-229;
+  by Marx, 228.
+
+_Labor Defended against the Claims of Capital_, 206.
+
+_Labor History of the Cripple Creek District_, 174 n.
+
+Labor Notes, 314.
+
+Labor-power, a commodity, 263 _et seq._;
+  determines value, 243-254.
+
+_Labour and Capital; a Letter to a Labour Friend_, 284 n.
+
+_Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy_, 207.
+
+_La Conquête du pain_, 286 n.
+
+Lafargue, Paul, 128 n., 297 n.
+
+Lamarck, 72.
+
+_La Misère de la Philosophie_, 201, 203 n.
+
+Land, ownership of, under Socialism, 297;
+  under tribal communism, 72, 97.
+
+_La Philosophie de la Misère_, 201.
+
+Lassalle, Ferdinand, 64 n., 204 n., 225, 262-263, 264, 265.
+
+Lauderdale, Lord, 49, 257.
+
+_Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money_, 206.
+
+Lee, Algernon, quoted, 172, 275.
+
+Leibnitz, 64, 77;
+  quoted, 76.
+
+Leslie, John ("J. L."), quoted, 74 n.
+
+_L'État Socialiste_, 315.
+
+Liebknecht, W., 64 n., 66 n., 212 n.;
+  quoted, 17, 93, 209, 327-328.
+
+_Life of Francis Place_, 207 n.
+
+_Life of Robert Owen_ (anonymous), 30 n.
+
+Lincoln, Abraham, 43-44.
+
+Lloyd, W. F., 257 n.
+
+Locke, 64.
+
+Lockwood, George Browning, 39 n., 41 n.
+
+London, Jack, 182 n.
+
+Lothrop, Harriet E., 224 n.
+
+Lovejoy, 85.
+
+Lubbock, Sir John, 101.
+
+Luddites, the, 26, 36.
+
+Luther, Martin, 80, 88.
+
+Lyell, 77.
+
+
+M
+
+Macdonald, J. R., 225.
+
+Machinery, introduction of, 19, 20, 26-29.
+
+Machinists' Union sued, 198.
+
+McMaster, 79.
+
+Macrosty, H. W., 124.
+
+Maine, Sir Henry, 101.
+
+Mallock, W. H., 119, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 230, 274, 275.
+
+Malthus, 98.
+
+Marr, Wilhelm, 70 n.
+
+Marriage, Socialism and, 292-293.
+
+MARX, KARL:
+  birth and early life, 63-65;
+  _Capital_ written in London, 209;
+  collaborates with Engels, 62, 73;
+  conversion to Socialism, 68-70;
+  correspondent for New York _Tribune_, 210;
+  death, 213;
+  domestic felicity, 212-213;
+  edits _Rhenish Gazette_, 65, 67;
+  expelled from different countries, 209;
+  finds refuge in England, 209;
+  first meeting with F. Engels, 67;
+  his attacks upon Proudhon, 201-202;
+  his obligations to the Ricardians, 203;
+  his surplus value theory, 203, 205, 206, 266-270;
+  in German revolution of 1848, 208;
+  Jewish ancestry, 63-64;
+  marriage, 65-66;
+  mastery of art of definition, 217;
+  misrepresentation by Mallock of his views, 221-230;
+  opposes Bakunin, 69-70;
+  parents' religious beliefs, 64-65;
+  poverty, 210-212;
+  quoted, 27, 28, 29, 61, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 115, 191, 202, 217, 236,
+  239, 245 n., 263, 274, 275, 327, 334-335;
+  related to Argyles through marriage, 66;
+  scientific methods of, 231-234;
+  spiritual nature of, 68-70;
+  starts _New Rhenish Gazette_, 208;
+  views on confiscation of capitalist property, 334-335;
+  views on Social Revolution, 326-327.
+
+_Mass and Class_, 83 n., 171 n., 175 n., 178 n.
+
+Massey, Gerald, quoted, 52 n.
+
+Mayo-Smith, Richmond, 142, 143.
+
+Mazzini, G., 60.
+
+Mehring, Franz, 64 n., 224 n.
+
+Menger, Dr. Anton, 203, 205, 206 n., 207 n.
+
+_Message to Congress_, 177.
+
+Methodism, 89.
+
+Middle Ages, the, 107.
+
+Mill, John Stuart, 216, 217, 227, 242.
+
+Mitchell, John, 183;
+  quoted, 193.
+
+_Modern Socialism_ (Ensor), 306 n.
+
+_Modern Socialism_ (Spargo), 259 n.
+
+Money, as a commodity, 255-256;
+  various articles used as, 255.
+
+Money, Chiozza, M.P., 144.
+
+Monopoly, 115, 116, 149, 258, 259.
+
+More, Sir Thomas, 9, 58, 59.
+
+Morgan, J. P., 179.
+
+Morgan, Lewis H., 97, 101, 102 n.
+
+Morris, William, quoted, 2, 20.
+
+_Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_, 99 n., 100 n.
+
+
+N
+
+Napoleon, 114, 250.
+
+National Association of Manufacturers, the, 183.
+
+National Civic Federation, the, 183, 222 n.
+
+_Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, The_, 206-207.
+
+"New Christianity" of Saint-Simon, the, 68.
+
+New Harmony, 43, 44, 45, 51.
+
+_New Harmony Communities, The_, 39 n., 41 n.
+
+New Lanark, 31-34, 41, 50.
+
+_New Moral World, The_, 11.
+
+Newton, Sir Isaac, 152.
+
+Newton, Wales, 45.
+
+New York _Sun_, the, 196.
+
+Nicholson, Professor J. S., 241 n.
+
+_Northern Star, The_, 67.
+
+Norway, 2.
+
+_Notes on Feuerbach_, 86 n.
+
+
+O
+
+_Oceana_, 82.
+
+_Organized Labor_, 183 n.
+
+_Origin of Species, The_, 72.
+
+_Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The_, 105.
+
+_Our Benevolent Feudalism_, 124.
+
+OWEN, ROBERT:
+  advises Cabet, 60;
+  as cotton manufacturer, 29-34;
+  at Aix-la-Chapelle, 49;
+  Autobiography of, 24 n.;
+  becomes Socialist, 41;
+  begins agitation for factory legislation, 31;
+  biography of, 19;
+  dying words of, 50;
+  Emerson's view of, 50-52;
+  Engels' estimate of, 17;
+  establishes infant schools, 32;
+  first to use word "Socialism," 11;
+  founder of coöperative movement, 45;
+  his failure, 45;
+  improves spinning machinery, 30;
+  Liebknecht on, 17;
+  Lincoln and, 43-44;
+  New Harmony, 43-45;
+  New Lanark, 31-34;
+  presides over first Trade Union Congress, 45;
+  proposes establishment of communistic villages, 41;
+  quoted, 24, 25, 34, 35, 37-38, 39-41;
+  scepticism of, 18;
+  speech to manufacturers, 39-41;
+  views on crisis of 1815, 37;
+  views of Fourier's ideas, 50.
+
+Owen, Robert Dale, letter of, to Lincoln, 44.
+
+Owenism, synonymous with Socialism, 11.
+
+
+P
+
+Peabody, Professor, 69 n.
+
+Peel, Sir Robert, 31.
+
+Petty, Sir William, 214, 215, 242, 244;
+  quoted, 215, 216, 243-244.
+
+_Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley_, 76 n., 82 n.
+
+Place, Francis, 207.
+
+Plato, 9.
+
+Podmore, Frank, 19 n.
+
+_Political Economy_ (Senior), 214 n.
+
+_Poverty of Philosophy, The_, 201 n.
+
+_Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States, The_, 144 n.
+
+Price, an approximation of value, 254 _et seq._
+
+Prices and Wages, 189.
+
+_Principles of Economics_ (Seligman), 259 n.
+
+_Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_, 246 n., 249 n., 262 n.
+
+_Principles of Sociology, The_, 286 n., 313-314 n.
+
+Private property, origin of, 97, 102-103;
+  transformation to social, 331-337;
+  under the Socialist régime, 128, 296-300, 316-317.
+
+Protestant Reformation, the, 80, 114.
+
+Proudhon, P. J., 66, 201, 202.
+
+Pullman Strike, the, 193-194.
+
+
+Q
+
+_Quarterly Journal of Economics, The_, 15.
+
+Quelch, II., 201 n.
+
+
+R
+
+Rappites, the, 45.
+
+Rastall, Benjamin McKie, 174 n.
+
+Rauschenbusch, Professor, 86.
+
+Referendum, the, 289, 329-330.
+
+_Reformateurs Modernes_, 11.
+
+_Remarks and Facts relative to the American Paper Currency_, 245 n.
+
+_Reminiscences of Karl Marx_, 68 n.
+
+Rent of Ability, the, 273-275.
+
+_Report of the Royal Commission on Labour_, 70 n.
+
+_Republic, The_, 12.
+
+Republican Party, the, 2, 312 n.
+
+Revisionism, 132.
+
+_Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, 210, 212 n.
+
+_Revolution in Mind and Practice, The_, 49 n.
+
+Revolution of 1848, 208.
+
+_Revue Politique et Parliamentaire_, 128, 297 n.
+
+Reybaud, L., 11.
+
+Ricardians, the, 202-208, 229, 242.
+
+Ricardo, David, 205, 214, 215, 216, 217, 227, 242, 245, 246, 247, 248,
+  250;
+  quoted, 245-246, 262.
+
+_Riches and Poverty_, 144.
+
+_Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, The_, 205 n., 206 n., 207 n.
+
+Riley, W. Harrison, 68 n.
+
+Rockefeller, John D., 179.
+
+Rogers, Thorold, 83, 84, 94 n., 95 n.
+
+Roosevelt, President, 151, 180, 312 n.;
+  quoted, 177.
+
+Ruge, Arnold, 66.
+
+Russell, Lord John, 206.
+
+
+S
+
+Sadler, Michael, 26 n.
+
+Saint-Simon, 7, 9, 12, 46, 48, 231, 232.
+
+Salt, H. S., 26 n.
+
+San Francisco, disaster in, 158-159.
+
+Sanial, Lucien, 129, 145.
+
+Saxony, concentration of wealth in, 143.
+
+Scarcity values, 249-250.
+
+Schiller, quoted, 85.
+
+Seabury, Judge, 196 n.
+
+Seligman, Professor E. R. A., 81 n., 82, 83, 84, 85 n., 91, 259.
+
+Senior, Nassau, 214.
+
+_Shall the Unions go into Politics?_ 184 n.
+
+Simons, A. M., 136, 168 n., 306 n.
+
+Slonimski, Ludwig, 92 n.
+
+Smith, Adam, 160, 206, 214, 215, 227, 242, 247;
+  quoted, 161-162, 244.
+
+Smith, Professor J. Allen, 289 n.
+
+Smith, Professor Goldwin, 284.
+
+_Social Democracy Red Book_, 55 n.
+
+_Social Meaning of Modern Religious Movements in England, The_, 89 n.
+
+SOCIALISM:
+  and assassination, 1, 3;
+  coöperation under, 299, 300, 305;
+  credit functions under, 300-302;
+  definition of the word, 9;
+  democracy essential to, 287-289;
+  education under, 318-320;
+  first use of the word, 10-11;
+  freedom in religious, scientific, and philosophical matters under,
+  291-292;
+  freedom of the individual under, 284-287;
+  in Europe, 4;
+  in Germany, 4, 167, 181;
+  in United States, 4, 167;
+  inheritance of wealth under, 316-317;
+  justice under, 318;
+  labor and its reward under, 311-316;
+  monopolies and, 115, 128, 148-150, 332-333;
+  not opposed to individualism, 280 _et seq._;
+  private property and industry under, 295-300, 335;
+  realization of, 323 _et seq._;
+  relation of the sexes under, 293;
+  religion and, 291-292, 319;
+  religious training of children and, 319-320;
+  scientific character of, 231-234;
+  Utopian and scientific compared, 42;
+  wages under, 313-315;
+  wealth under, 316-317, 335;
+  women's suffrage and, 288, 329.
+
+_Socialism_ (Macdonald), 225 n.
+
+_Socialism_ (Mallock), 221 n.
+
+_Socialism and Social Democracy_, 10 n.
+
+_Socialism Inevitable_, 130, 131.
+
+_Socialism Utopian and Scientific_, 35 n., 47 n., 48.
+
+Socialist Party organizations among farmers, 167.
+
+Social Revolution, the, 324-328.
+
+_Social Revolution, The_, 128 n., 306 n., 315 n., 334 n.
+
+Sombart, Professor Werner, 132.
+
+_Some Neglected British Economists_, 257 n.
+
+_Songs of Freedom_, 26 n.
+
+Sorge, F. A., 120.
+
+Spahr, Charles B., 144.
+
+Spargo, John, 10, 168.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, 6, 8, 282, 313-314 n.;
+  quoted, 7, 286.
+
+_Spirit of American Government, The_, 289 n.
+
+Standard Oil group, the, 117.
+
+_Statistics and Economics_, 142-143.
+
+Stone, N. I., 245 n.
+
+_Studies in Socialism_, 306 n., 327 n., 328 n.
+
+_Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society_, 79 n., 115 n., 138 n.,
+  140 n., 148.
+
+_Sun_, New York, the, 196.
+
+SURPLUS VALUE:
+  early uses of the term, 205, 206;
+  the theory developed by Marx, 206, 266;
+  the theory explained, 266-270;
+  various theories of, 271-275.
+
+Symonds, J. Addington, 322 n.
+
+
+T
+
+"Taff Vale law," 197-199.
+
+Taxation as a means of achieving Socialism, 336-337.
+
+Taxation of land values, 268 n.
+
+Tendencies to socialization within existing state, 279, 330-331.
+
+Texas, Cabet advised to experiment in, 60.
+
+_The People's Marx_, 237 n.
+
+_The Social System, a Treatise on the Principles of Exchange_, 206.
+
+Thompson, William, 203, 204, 205.
+
+Tolstoy, 15, 222.
+
+TRUSTS, _see_ CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL _and_ MONOPOLY.
+
+
+U
+
+Unionism, principles of labor, 184 _et seq._
+
+United Mine Workers' Union, the, 159-160.
+
+UNITED STATES:
+  classes in, 164-169, 176-179;
+  concentration of wealth and capital in, 124-150;
+  farms and farm mortgages in, 133-134;
+  millionaires in, 146-148;
+  Socialism in, 4, 167;
+  strikes in, 182.
+
+United States Steel Corporation, 138.
+
+
+V
+
+VALUE:
+  and price, 254-259;
+  early labor theory of, 242-252;
+  Marxian theory of, 250-254;
+  other theories of, 259.
+
+_Value, Price, and Profit_, 263 n.
+
+Vandervelde, Émile, 306 n., 315 n., 334 n., 335 n.
+
+Vasco de Gama, 96.
+
+Veblen, Professor Thorstein, quoted, 15.
+
+_Volkstribun_, the, 57.
+
+
+W
+
+Wallace, Alfred Russell, 77, 81.
+
+Wallas, G., 207.
+
+_War of the Classes, The_, 182 n.
+
+Warne, Frank Julian, 160 n.
+
+Watt, James, 20, 227.
+
+Wealth, defined, 217-221;
+  inheritance of, under Socialism, 316-317, 335.
+
+_Wealth of Nations, The_, 160, 162 n., 206 n., 213, 244 n., 249 n.
+
+Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 310.
+
+Weitling, Wilhelm, 14, 54, 55, 56, 57.
+
+Whitaker, Dr. A. C., 205 n.
+
+Wilshire, Gaylord, 130 n., 131 n.
+
+Wolf, Wilhelm, 208.
+
+_Worker, The_, 172, 275.
+
+_World as it is, and as it might be, The_, 55.
+
+Wright, Carroll D., 174 n.
+
+_Writings and Speeches of John J. Ingalls_, 148 n.
+
+
+Y
+
+Youmans, Professor, 77.
+
+
+Z
+
+Zola, Émile, 15.
+
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+
+The Bitter Cry of the Children
+
+By JOHN SPARGO
+
+Introduction by Robert Hunter
+
+_Illustrated, cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62_
+
+
+     "The book will live and will set hundreds of teachers and social
+     workers and philanthropists to work in villages and cities
+     throughout the country.... Whatever our feeling as to the remedy
+     for starved and half-starved children, we are grateful for the
+     vivid, scholarly way in which this book marshals the experience of
+     two continents in awaking to the physical needs of the children who
+     are compelled to be in school though unfit for schooling.... School
+     teachers need this book, social workers, librarians, pastors,
+     editors, all who want to understand the problem of poverty or
+     education."--WILLIAM H. ALLEN in _The Annals of the American
+     Academy_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Common Sense of the Milk Question By JOHN SPARGO
+
+_Cloth, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+New Worlds for Old
+
+By H. G. WELLS _cloth, $1.50; by mail, $1.61_
+
+
+     "H. G. Wells presents what is probably the most alluring statement
+     of the claims of socialism that has ever been put forward. The book
+     has all the charms of Mr. Wells's style. He suffuses with the
+     subtle grace of poetry and humor statements which in the mouth of
+     any one else would be commonplace and dry. He does not offend. He
+     does not rant. He studies to be genial, sensible, and sympathetic;
+     he succeeds in being all of these things."--_New York Evening
+     Mail._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Social Unrest
+
+Studies in Labor and Social Movements
+
+By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS _Cl., $1.50 net; by mail, $1.61_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
+
+A History of Socialism
+
+By THOMAS KIRKUP
+
+Third edition revised
+
+_Cloth, 8vo, 400 pages and index, $2.25 net; by mail, $2.37_
+
+
+     "The chapter on the growth of Socialism has been completely
+     rewritten in order to bring it up to date.... He is singularly free
+     from the exaggerated statement and declamatory style which
+     characterize the writing of so many socialists, and the concluding
+     pages of the present volume show him at his best.... None have
+     surpassed Mr. Kirkup in philosophical grasp of the essentials of
+     Socialism or have presented the doctrine in more intelligible
+     form."--_The Nation._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Socialists at Work
+
+By ROBERT HUNTER, author of "Poverty"
+
+_Cloth, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62_
+
+
+     "It is a vivid, running characterization of the foremost
+     personalities in the socialist movement throughout the world. Such
+     a book does real service in presenting the truly significant facts
+     in the modern spread of socialistic propaganda and in stating in
+     definite terms the principles on which socialists are agreed and
+     the immediate aims of their organizations. The world-sweep of the
+     movement has never before been so clearly brought before the
+     American reading public."--_Review of Reviews._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Christianity and the Social Crisis
+
+By the Rev. WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH, Professor of Church History in
+Rochester Theological Seminary
+
+_Cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
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+
+Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Socialism, by John Spargo
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