Chapter IV: Why Socialists Preach Discontent

Rich men tell poor men to beware of Socialism because Socialists preach discontent. Rich men also tell poor men to beware of Socialism because Socialists “preach the class struggle,” and try to “array class against class,” politically.

It is all true. Socialists do these things. They make no bones about doing them. They say they would feel ashamed of themselves if they did not do them. If they had a thousand times the power they have, they would do these things a thousand times harder than they do. Just so rapidly as they gain power, they are doing these things harder.

What is it that they do? Let us see.

Socialists preach discontent. Discontent with what? Discontent with home? Discontent with children? Discontent with friends? Discontent with honest labor? Discontent with ambition? Discontent with life as a whole? Why, nothing of the kind.

_Socialists preach discontent only with poverty that is made by robbery, and the ills that follow in its wake._

The Hon. Charles Russell, of England, said in 1912 that 12,000,000 of England’s 45,000,000 population were on the verge of starvation—shall we be satisfied with that?

A recent investigation into the causes of the shockingly high rate of infant mortality in Germany[1] shows that “the children of poverty hunger before they are born. They come into the world ill-developed, weaker than the children of plenty, and with such low resistant powers that infant mortality rages in their ranks like an epidemic.” Shall we be satisfied with that?

Footnote 1:

“The Proletarian Child,” by Albert Langon, published in Berlin.

Here in the United States millions of men cannot get work, while millions of men, women and children are compelled to work for starvation wages. Shall we be satisfied with that?

The census reports show that most people do not own the roofs over their heads, having nothing but the clothes upon their backs and their meager furniture. Shall we be satisfied with that?

We are creating wealth rapidly, but what we make is concentrating into so few hands that a few men hold us as in the hollow of their hands, telling us whether we may work, telling us what wages we shall receive if we work, telling us how much we shall pay for meat, sugar, lumber, clothing, salt and steel. Shall we be satisfied with that?

The Stanley Steel Committee’s investigations showed that, by a system of interlocking directorates, eighteen men control thirty-five billions of industrial property—a third of the entire national wealth. Shall we be satisfied with that?

In times of industrial depression more than 5,000,000 men who want to work are refused the right to do so, because the few men who control everything cannot see a profit for themselves in letting 5,000,000 men work to support themselves. Shall we be satisfied with that?

The cost of living, mounting higher and higher, is crowding an increasing number of unorganized workers into the bottomless pit in which men, women and children suffer the tortures of hell. Shall we be satisfied with that?

Mr. Morgan, with the tremendous money-power that is behind him, is a greater power in this country than the President of the United States, or the Congress of the United States. Shall we be satisfied with that?

Some gentlemen are satisfied with these facts, but Socialists are not. They are preaching discontent. Should we not be worthy of your scorn and contempt if we did not preach discontent? If such discontent is wrong, contentment with the facts against which Socialists cry out must be right. Who has both the candor and the effrontery to say that contentment with such facts is right? Should we be contented with the woolen mill owners of New England who, fattening upon high Republican tariffs, starve men, women and little children with low wages? Should we be contented with the cotton-mill owners of the South, who, under the protection of Democratic state administrations, fill both their mills and the graveyards with little children? Should we be contented with a world in which a few own everything and the rest do everything—a world in which the worker is but a fleeing fugitive from inevitable fate, owning neither his job, nor the roof over his head?

The cry of this wronged worker has come down through the ages, but never was his hold upon the means of life so slight as it is to-day.

“Every creature has a home home—
But thou, oh workingman, hast none.”

So Shelley sang before machinery came. And, oh, the truth of it—the truth of it still! And the pity of it! In these days the inexcusability of it! Yet when we Socialists cry out against it—when we try to awaken the workingman to a realization that a new world was born when the steam engine was born, and that this new world may be and should be for him—we are rebuked by the capitalists because we are “preaching discontent.”

Of course we are preaching discontent. We are going to preach it, if present conditions persist, so long as we have breath with which to preach. We respectfully decline to permit capitalists, as such, to tell us what we may or may not preach. We preach what we please without their leave. They preach what they please without our leave. At intervals, they preach a good deal, through some of the magazines, about religion. Big capital is behind the “Men and Religion Forward” movement, and some other similar movements. These gentlemen who are living in luxury off what they take from us tell us to take religion from them in the magazines and be happy. “In the sweet by and by” we are to get our own, while they get their own now. Socialists are willing to stand in on all of the sweet by and by they can get by and by, but they are also determined to make a prodigious fight for the sweet here and now.

Socialists regard poverty, in this day, as nothing less than a scandal. Before the age of machinery there was reason for some poverty. Now there is none. We can make all the wealth we need and more. We could cut our workday in two and still make all we need. Yet poverty is scourging the world as wars never scourged it. In Germany, England, the United States—wherever capitalism has reached a high state of development—men, women and children are pursued to the grave by poverty or the fear of poverty.

Some gentlemen believe this is all right. They believe this is as it should be. With such gentlemen Socialists do not hope to make headway. With such gentlemen Socialists do not seek to make headway. They belong to the rich class who are grafting off the working class. From them Socialists expect no quarter, nor will they give any. The conflict must go to a finish. There will be no surrender upon the part of the Socialists. The Socialist party will never fuse with any of their parties. If the Socialist party were standing still, instead of going ahead, it would stand still alone for a thousand years before it would go a foot with any capitalist party.

Make no mistake. This is all true. You saw the Greenback party wither and blow away. You saw the Populist party swallowed by the Democratic party. But you will never see the Socialist party wither, nor will you ever see it swallowed. Its members are not composed of material that withers or fuses. Right or wrong, they are actuated by the highest ideal that can move a human being—the ideal of human justice. And they are going down the line on their ideal, regardless of the length of the line or of the obstructions that may be placed in their way. After a man has seen Socialism, he can never thereafter defend capitalism. That is to say, he cannot if he is honest. Two or three out of a million are not. Such persons, not infrequently, are hired by capitalists to “expose” Socialism.

But while Socialists do not hope to make any progress among the rich, they do hope to make progress among the working class. Again, I must explain that Socialists do not consider the working class to be exclusively composed of those who wear overalls. Socialists include in the working class all of those who do useful labor. It matters not whether such labor be done by the digger in the ditch or by the general superintendent of a railroad. Socialists place all of those who do useful labor in the working class. Workers are creators of wealth. Creators of wealth differ from capitalists in this: workers make; capitalists take. Capitalists are profit-seekers. The small merchant takes a profit, but it is not the kind of a profit that the big capitalist takes. The small merchant’s profit represents only his labor, and is, therefore, really wages. The big capitalist’s profits represent no sort of labor. It is such profits that set capitalists and workers at war, because the profits come out of the workers. Socialists call this war the class struggle.

Socialists are opposed to class war. Socialists believe there should be no classes. There would be no classes if everybody worked at useful labor and took no more than belonged to him. But if some men will not work at useful labor, choosing, instead, to make war upon those who are working, who is to blame? Certainly not the workers. They are trying to get nothing that belongs to anyone else. They have never yet been able to keep what belonged to them.

Socialists recognize these facts. They say a class struggle is in progress. Anybody who denies their statement must necessarily know nothing of the existence of trusts, labor unions, courts, lobbyists, crooked legislators, millionaires, paupers, overworked workers, or men who are underworked because they can get no work. Anyone who recognizes the existence of these things cannot well deny either the existence of classes or the existence of a struggle. The dead of this warfare are upon every industrial battlefield, where the fierce desire for profits sends workers to their doom for lack of the safeguards that would have saved their lives. The wounded are in every poverty-stricken home.

Either these statements are true or they are not. If they are true, is it wiser to recognize their truth, or, ostrich-like, to stick our heads in the sand and deny both the existence of classes and the class struggle? Socialists believe it is wiser to recognize the existence of the facts. They deplore the existence of the class struggle, but they can see only harm in closing our eyes to it. If their contention is correct a small body of capitalists are robbing the great working class. If the working class has not found out who is robbing it it cannot find out too quickly. Nor can the working class find out too quickly the methods by which it is being robbed.

It is the advocacy of these ideas that has caused the Socialists to be censured by the rich for trying to “array class against class.” If one class is being robbed by another ought not the class that is being robbed to be politically arrayed against the class that is robbing it? Do we not array those whose houses are broken into by burglars against the burglars? Is not the existence of police forces sufficient proof that we do? If capitalists, working through laws they have made, are robbing the workers of thousands, where burglars take cents, why should not the workers be politically arrayed against the capitalists even more solidly than they are arrayed against burglars?

The workers, either singly or collectively, as in their unions, are already arrayed against the capitalists, so far as fighting for more wages is concerned. Without any help from Socialists, we thus have here class arrayed against class. Socialists seek only to extend this conflict to the ballot-box. They ask the worker to remember when he votes as well as when he strikes that he belongs to the working class. They point out to him that he is robbed under the forms of law and that the robbery cannot be stopped until the operations of capitalist laws are stopped. The operations of capitalist laws cannot be stopped until working men stop them. Working men can stop them only by uniting at the ballot-box and wresting from the capitalist class the control of the government.

In this way only do Socialists try to “array class against class.” They do not try to array men against men. They do not try to engender hatred of Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller, or any other great capitalist. Socialists have nothing against any rich man individually. They regard all great capitalists as the natural and inevitable products of the capitalist system. If the great capitalists are sometimes bad, it is because the capitalist system makes them bad. If the particular capitalists who are bad had never been born, the capitalist system would have made others do the same bad acts. Therefore Socialists are opposed to the system that makes man bad rather than to the men who have been made bad by the system. If every capitalist in the world had gone down with the _Titanic_, Socialists would have expected absolutely no improvement in conditions, because the capitalist system would still have remained. Other men would simply have taken their places, and the wrongs would have gone on. Therefore, Socialists leave it to Democratic and Republican politicians to point out “bad men” and say if this man or that man were in jail we should have no more robbery. The slightest reflection should reveal the fallacious character of such comment. Where are all of the “bad men” of the last two generations? Where are William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E. H. Harriman and the others? They are not simply in jail—they are dead. But who noticed the slightest abatement of robbery when they died? Who will note the slightest improvement of conditions when the “bad men” of the present day are dead? Then how ridiculous it is to say that if Mr. Morgan, Mr. Rockefeller and some others were in jail we should have no more robbery. So long as we have a system that makes men bad we shall have bad men.

Let us now inquire what it is about the capitalist system that makes men bad. We shall not have far to look. It is the private ownership and control, for the sake of private profits, of the means of life. Think how gigantic is this power! All of our food, clothing and shelter is made with machinery. A few own the machinery. The others cannot use it without permission. And, if permission be given, it can be used only upon such terms as the owners offer. Those terms are always the lowest wages for which anybody can be found to work.

Is it any wonder that the few who control this machinery go mad with the desire to accumulate wealth? Is it any wonder that they press their advantage to the limit? Are you sure you would have done less if you had been placed in the same circumstances? I am not sure I should have done less. In fact, I am quite sure I should have done as much, or more, if I could. I say this because I take into account the tremendous power of habit and environment.

An environment of money makes those whom it surrounds forget men. The _Titanic_ was not raced through icebergs to her doom because her owners were indifferent to the loss of human life. The _Titanic_ was raced to her doom because her owners _forgot_ human life. They thought only of the money that would come from the advertisement of a quick trip across the Atlantic. If they had not been made mad by this thought they would at least have remembered their ship, with its cost of $8,000,000. But in their money-madness they forgot not only their passengers, but their own ship. Yet, if the manager of the company had been sailing the ship for the government, without thought of profit, he would have thought of the passengers, the crew, the ship and the icebergs. And if the trusts were owned by the government, the men in charge of them would think of the workers when they fixed wages and of the consumers when they fixed the prices of finished products.

So easy is it to dispose of the argument that Socialism is impracticable because it could not be made to work “without changing human nature.” Some men believe we must forever go on grabbing, grabbing, grabbing, while others go on starving, starving, starving. Human nature will “change” just so rapidly as conditions are changed. If one sits on a red-hot stove, it is “human nature” to arise. But if the stove be permitted to cool, one who sits on it will not arise until other reasons than heat have made him wish to do so. Yet, the human nature of the man in each case is the same. It has in no wise changed. It is only the stove that has changed.

Precisely so will the actions of men change when the production of the necessities of life by the government has demonstrated that no one need ever fear the lack of the means with which to live. The very knowledge that the stomach is taken for granted—that with free opportunity to labor, the material necessities and comforts of life are as assured as the air itself—will destroy the incentive to accumulate more wealth than is needed. Even the richest now consume and waste but a fraction of the wealth they possess. Yet they are spurred on to seek still further accumulations, because it is only so recently, comparatively, that the whole race was fighting for the means of life, that the madness for money is still in the air.

The madness for money will not always be in the air. Human nature is wonderfully adaptive. As soon as the workers take control of the government for the benefit of their class, and demonstrate the perfect ease with which enough wealth can be produced to enable everybody to live as well as the $5,000 a year man now lives, the scramble for wealth will quickly subside. It will not subside instantly, but it will subside. A few may grumble, as their industries are bought and taken over by the government, but they will have to take it out in grumbling. They will not even have to work if they don’t want to. They will have enough money obtained from the sale of their plants to enable them to live without working. But none of their successors will ever be able to live without working, because no opportunity will exist for anyone to obtain the products of another’s labor. Goods will be made and sold by the government at cost. No capitalist will stand between producers and consumers. The people will be their own capitalists, owning their own industrial machinery and managing it through the government.

Those who are opposed to Socialism ask what assurance we have that, under Socialism, the people would be able to manage their government. Others ask why we should not be as likely to have grafters in office under Socialist government as we are now under Democratic or Republican government? Still others believe that a Socialist government would inevitably become tyrannical and despotic, destroying all individual liberty and eventually bringing down civilization in a heap.

Let us answer these objections one by one. And let us first inquire why the people are not now able to manage and control their government.

In the first place, our form of government does not permit the people to control it. The rich men who made our constitution—and they were rich for their day; not a working man among them—purposely made a constitution under which nothing could be done to which the rich might object. That is why the United States senate was created. It was frankly declared in the constitutional convention that the senate was intended to represent wealth. The house of representatives was to represent the people, but the senate was to represent wealth, and the house of representatives could enact no legislation without the consent of the senate. Moreover, the United States supreme court, over which the people have absolutely no control, was created to construe the laws made by congress.

That is the first reason why the people do not now control their government—the framers of the constitution did not intend that they should control it, and the rich men of our day are taking advantage of their opportunity to control it themselves. The second reason is that the capitalist system, based, as it is, upon private profits, makes it highly profitable for the capitalist class to control the government. The robberies of capitalism are committed through laws, and control of the government is necessary to obtain and maintain the laws.

Socialists would abolish the senate, thus vesting the entire legislative power in the house of representatives. They would take from the President the power to appoint justices of the supreme court, and give the people the right to elect all judges. They would take from the United States supreme court the usurped power to declare acts of congress unconstitutional, and give to the people the power to say what acts of congress should be set aside. They would make the constitution of the United States amendable by majority vote, and they would make every public official in the country, from President down, subject to immediate recall at any time, by the vote of the people.

Socialists respectfully offer these reasons, among others, for believing that under Socialism, the people would be able to control their government. Another reason is that, under Socialism, there would be no trust senators or representatives, no representatives of great private banking interests or other aggregations of private capital, because there would be no such private interests.

The reasons are equally plain why, under Socialism, we should not be as certain to have Socialist grafters in office as we are now to have Democratic and Republican grafters. But not one of these reasons is that Socialists believe themselves to be more nearly honest than anyone else. Socialists have no such delusion. Socialists simply point to the fact that all of the present grafting is to secure private profits. When the profit system is abolished, and goods are made for use instead of for profit, nothing will be left to graft for. Public officials could still steal, of course; they could falsify pay-rolls, and probably in many other ways rob the people. But, in the first place, public officials now do little of this sort of clumsy stealing, and, in the second place, whatever stealing of this sort that may be done under Socialism will be punished in precisely the same way that it now is, except more vigorously. Moreover, Socialists do not believe there will be much such stealing, or that it will long continue. And so far as grafting is concerned, when the private profit system that makes grafting is abolished, grafting will be abolished along with it.

Let us now examine the charge that a Socialist government would become tyrannical, despotic, destroy individual liberty, and thus destroy civilization itself.

With all legislative power vested in the house of representatives which is elected by the people, all judges elected by the people and the United States supreme court shorn of its usurped power to declare laws unconstitutional, it is difficult to see how the government could become tyrannical. It is still more difficult when it is considered that, under the Socialist government, the people would have these additional powers:

The power to recall, at any time, any official.

The power to enact, by direct vote, any laws that their legislative bodies might refuse to enact.

The power, by direct vote, to repeal any law that their legislative bodies had enacted.

And the power, by direct vote, to amend their constitutions, both federal and state, any time they wished to do so.

If there could be any tyranny or despotism under such a form of government, gentlemen who profess to believe so are entitled to make the most of it.

Many good persons believe, however, that if Socialism were to come, all individual liberty would be lost. Such persons lack, not only a knowledge of Socialist plans, but a sense of humor. They assume that we now have individual liberty. They do not seem to realize that the average boy, as soon as he is old enough to work, if not before, is grabbed off by necessity and chucked into the nearest job at hand. The boy may have preferred to work at something else; perhaps even he is better fitted for something else. But the pinch of necessity both compels him to work and to take what he can find. He may rattle around in two or three occupations before he finds one in which he stays for life, but the other occupations, like the first one, are not of his choosing. He takes each of them simply because he must have work.

If Socialism would enable the head of every family to earn as good a living as the $5,000–a-year man now gets, the head of no family would be compelled to send his children out to work until they had completed, at least, the high school course. If boys were not compelled to go to work so young, does it not seem likely that, with added years, they would be better able to choose an occupation that would be more nearly suited both to their tastes and their abilities? And if we should destroy the power of poverty to push boys into the occupation nearest to them, should we be justly subject to the charge that we had destroyed, or even impaired, the boys’ individual liberty?

Persons who derive their knowledge of Socialism from capitalist sources have strange, and sometimes awful, ideas of what Socialism is setting out to do. They are told, and many of them believe, that under Socialism, the individual would be a mere puppet in the hands of the government, not arising in the morning until the ringing of the governmental alarm clock, doing during the day whatever odd jobs might be assigned to him by a governmental boss, and going to bed at night when the boss told him to.

Suppose we shake up this trash and let the wind blow through it.

Who would thus tyrannize over the people? “The Socialists,” it is answered. But who, at that time, will the Socialists be? They will constitute at least a majority of the people, will they not? The Socialists will never gain control of the government until they become a majority—the Milwaukee coalition plan of the old capitalist parties can be depended upon to prevent that. Then what you are asked to believe is that a majority of the people will deliberately go about it to create and afterwards maintain a form of government and industry under which the majority as well as the minority will be slaves.

Remember this: Socialism will never do anything that at least a majority of the people do not want done. This is not a promise, it is fact. A Socialist administration could do nothing to which a majority of the people objected. If such an act were attempted, the majority would instantly recall the administration, wipe out its laws, and assert its own will.

And, also, remember this: If the Socialists, after the next election, were to control every department of the government there would be no upheaval, no paralysis of industry. Everybody would go to work the next morning at his accustomed task. The business of socializing industry would proceed in an orderly, deliberate manner. One industry at a time would be taken over. Perhaps the railroads would be taken over first. A year might be required to take them over. But not a wheel would stop turning while the laws were being changed.

Gentlemen who talk about the blotting out of individual liberty under a Socialist government make this fatal mistake. They assume that a minority would control a Socialist government, precisely as a minority now controls this government. And having made this error they naturally easily proceed to the next error—the assumption that if Socialists were to establish such a crazy government, they would not suffer from it as much as anyone else, and, therefore, would maintain it against the will of the others.

There is absolutely no foundation for this “tyranny-loss-of-individual-liberty” charge. A government controlled by the people cannot tyrannize over the people, nor can the abolition of poverty curtail, under democratic government, the individual liberties of the people. Who now has the most individual liberty—the man who is poverty-stricken or the man who isn’t?

Yet Socialists make no pretense of a purpose to create a world in which the worker may blithely amble up to the governmental employment office and demand a job picking a guitar. The worker may amble and demand, but he will not get the job unless there is a guitar to pick. In other words, Socialists expect to exercise ordinary common sense in the conduct of industry. Broadly speaking, the man who is best fitted to do certain work will be given that work to do. It would be absurd to plan or promise anything else. At the same time, the destruction of poverty, and the multiplication of the mass of manufactured goods that will follow the satisfaction of all of the people’s needs, will give the workers greater freedom in exercising their discretion in the choice of an occupation.

At this point in the proceedings somebody always inquires, “Who will do the dirty work?”

Socialists do not expect ever to make the cleaning of sewers as pleasant as the packing of geraniums. They do expect, however, to offer such extraordinarily good compensation for this extraordinarily unpleasant work that the sewers will be cleaned. Why should anyone expect that plan to fail, since the present plan does not fail? We now offer very poor wages for this very unpleasant work, yet the sewers do not go uncleaned. Is it to be supposed that the same men who are now doing this dirty work for low wages would refuse to do it for high wages? Most certainly the government would be compelled to offer wages high enough to get the dirty, but important, work done. It is lack of work that now makes men take dirty work at dirty wages. Under Socialism there can be no lack of work, because the people will own their own industrial machinery and will be free to use it. Furthermore, machinery is now doing much of the dirty work, and, as time goes on, will do more of it.

Socialists are often asked what they will do with the man who will not work. If facetiously inclined, they usually reply that one thing they will certainly not do with him is to make him a millionaire. But, really, the question is absurd. What do the opponents of Socialism believe a Socialist government would do with the man who would not work? Do they believe such a man would be given a hero medal, or be pensioned for life? What is there to do with such a man, but to let him starve? I mean a man having the ability to work and having work offered to him, who would nevertheless refuse to work.

But, outside the ranks of criminals, there is no such man, nor will there ever be. Socialists would punish thieves precisely as capitalists punish them, except for the fact that Socialists would not discriminate in favor of the biggest thieves. To answer the question in a single sentence, Socialists would depend upon the spurs afforded by the desires for food, clothing and shelter, to keep most of the people at work, and the odd man who might choose to steal would be treated in the ordinary way—imprisoned.

But the question, “What will you do with the man who will not work?” reveals a strange belief that is held by those who do not hold much of a clutch upon the facts of life. I have a very dear old aunt who believes from the bottom of her honest heart that the great mass of unemployed are either drunkards or loafers. In discussing the problem of the unemployed with gentlemen who are living upon the sunny side of the street, they almost invariably fire this question, “Why don’t those fellows get out into the country where the farmers are crying for help and can’t get any?”

I was brought up on a farm, and I still remember that not much farming was done in winter. The great demand for extra help comes in mid-summer, when the crops are harvested. During six or eight weeks there is a demand from the farms for more help than they can get. But what man who has a family in the tenements of New York or Chicago can afford to pay his railroad fare to Iowa, Nebraska, or even Ohio, to get six weeks’ work?

In the first place, they have not the money with which to pay their fare. These men live from hand to mouth in the city, running in debt during the week, and paying their debt with the wages they receive Saturday night. If their fares were advanced by the farmers who wanted to hire them they would have little or nothing left from what they might earn on the farms, and, in the meantime, their families in the cities would be starving. Furthermore, farm-work is a trade of which these city workers know nothing. They could learn the trade of farming, of course, but they could not learn it in six weeks. At any rate, in panic times there are more than 5,000,000 out of work in this country, and in no conceivable circumstances is it possible that any considerable part of this number could find work upon the farms even six weeks of the year.

The fact is that the conditions of modern industrial life are so hard that an increasing number of unorganized workers are barely able to live, even when they work. The constantly increasing cost of living, brought about by the trusts through their control of markets and prices, robs these men to the limit, and they have no labor unions to increase their wages. Still, they do not refuse to work, even for a bare, miserable living. On the contrary, they are eager to work. So are the great bulk of the unemployed eager to work for a miserable living.

If, under these horrible conditions, men are willing to work, what reason have we to suppose that any great number would refuse to work under a Socialist government for compensation that would enable each of them to live as well as the $5,000–a-year man now lives? Gentlemen who want to worry about this may worry about it. Socialists are not worrying. If, under Socialism, a few dyed-in-the-wool loafers should appear, Socialists are prepared to deal with them. They do not propose to cease their attempts to rid the world of poverty, merely because of the possibility of the appearance of an occasional loafer.