VI

"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 inimmense 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, butsuch 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.

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 hasbeen 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 notsee 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 wombof 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.

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 millionin 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, Cœur 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 everincreasing 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, "Ifyou 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 thewage-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 employeesallies 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 feelsthe 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 arequickto follow, whereas when prices soar high, wages areslowto 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.

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 thecollective 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 revoltthus 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 Cœur 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 beenready 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 thePullman 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 thelatter might raise no objection. In Pennsylvania, in the case of the York Manufacturing Companyvs.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 BuffaloExpress, 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 Companyvs. Delaney and others, enjoined by Justice Bookstaver, in the Supreme Court of New York, from publishing their side of the controversy with theSunas 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 theinjunction 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 theirtransatlantic 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 unionhors de combatat a stroke.

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 Valedecision 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]TheCommunist Manifesto, Kerr edition, page 8.[117]InCentralization 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'sEthics and the Materialistic Conception of History, may be named as excellent examples of what Socialists have done in this direction.[123]InThe 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, beingA 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]VideWar 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]SeeReport 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.

[116]TheCommunist Manifesto, Kerr edition, page 8.

[117]InCentralization 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'sEthics and the Materialistic Conception of History, may be named as excellent examples of what Socialists have done in this direction.

[123]InThe 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, beingA 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]VideWar 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]SeeReport 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.

The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months before the publication of theCommunist Manifesto, in "La Misère de la Philosophie,"[137]the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P. Proudhon'sLa 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, thescornful 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 absorbinghis 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 samesense 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 toLabour 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 famousEhernes 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, histheory of the manner in which surplus value is producedfrom Thompson, simply because Thompson frequently used theterm itself.[143]Marx never claimed to haveoriginated the term. It is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even, and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet entitledThe 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 ofProperty 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 noteever 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.

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 theNew Rhenish Gazette. Unlike the firstRhenish 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 authoritiessuppressed 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 hiscommand, 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 theNew 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 twosmall 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 wesuffer 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 likewisehis 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.

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 withits 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 isnothing 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 littlescientific, 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.

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 societiesin which the capitalist mode of production prevailspresents 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. Theauthor 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 historicaldevelopment, 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 thepossession 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.

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