The Jungle
art, not the jeweled idol of our society churches—but the Jesus of the
awful reality, the man of sorrow and pain, the outcast, despised of the
world, who had nowhere to lay his head—”
“I will grant you Jesus,” interrupted the other.
“Well, then,” cried Lucas, “and why should Jesus have nothing to do
with his church—why should his words and his life be of no authority
among those who profess to adore him? Here is a man who was the world’s
first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement; a man
whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that
wealth stands for,—for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth,
and the tyranny of wealth; who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man
of the people, an associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town;
who again and again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth
and the holding of wealth: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth!’—‘Sell that ye have and give alms!’—‘Blessed are ye poor, for
yours is the kingdom of Heaven!’—‘Woe unto you that are rich, for ye
have received your consolation!’—‘Verily, I say unto you, that a rich
man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ Who denounced in
unmeasured terms the exploiters of his own time: ‘Woe unto you, scribes
and pharisees, hypocrites!’—‘Woe unto you also, you lawyers!’—‘Ye
serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?’ Who drove out the business men and brokers from the temple with
a whip! Who was crucified—think of it—for an incendiary and a disturber
of the social order! And this man they have made into the high priest
of property and smug respectability, a divine sanction of all the
horrors and abominations of modern commercial civilization! Jeweled
images are made of him, sensual priests burn incense to him, and modern
pirates of industry bring their dollars, wrung from the toil of
helpless women and children, and build temples to him, and sit in
cushioned seats and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of
dusty divinity—”
“Bravo!” cried Schliemann, laughing. But the other was in full
career—he had talked this subject every day for five years, and had
never yet let himself be stopped. “This Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried.
“This class-conscious working-man! This union carpenter! This agitator,
law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist! He, the sovereign lord and master of
a world which grinds the bodies and souls of human beings into
dollars—if he could come into the world this day and see the things
that men have made in his name, would it not blast his soul with
horror? Would he not go mad at the sight of it, he the Prince of Mercy
and Love! That dreadful night when he lay in the Garden of Gethsemane
and writhed in agony until he sweat blood—do you think that he saw
anything worse than he might see tonight upon the plains of Manchuria,
where men march out with a jeweled image of him before them, to do
wholesale murder for the benefit of foul monsters of sensuality and
cruelty? Do you not know that if he were in St. Petersburg now, he
would take the whip with which he drove out the bankers from his
temple—”
Here the speaker paused an instant for breath. “No, comrade,” said the
other, dryly, “for he was a practical man. He would take pretty little
imitation lemons, such as are now being shipped into Russia, handy for
carrying in the pockets, and strong enough to blow a whole temple out
of sight.”
Lucas waited until the company had stopped laughing over this; then he
began again: “But look at it from the point of view of practical
politics, comrade. Here is an historical figure whom all men reverence
and love, whom some regard as divine; and who was one of us—who lived
our life, and taught our doctrine. And now shall we leave him in the
hands of his enemies—shall we allow them to stifle and stultify his
example? We have his words, which no one can deny; and shall we not
quote them to the people, and prove to them what he was, and what he
taught, and what he did? No, no, a thousand times no!—we shall use his
authority to turn out the knaves and sluggards from his ministry, and
we shall yet rouse the people to action!—”
Lucas halted again; and the other stretched out his hand to a paper on
the table. “Here, comrade,” he said, with a laugh, “here is a place for
you to begin. A bishop whose wife has just been robbed of fifty
thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds! And a most unctuous and oily of
bishops! An eminent and scholarly bishop! A philanthropist and friend
of labor bishop—a Civic Federation decoy duck for the chloroforming of
the wage-working-man!”
To this little passage of arms the rest of the company sat as
spectators. But now Mr. Maynard, the editor, took occasion to remark,
somewhat naïvely, that he had always understood that Socialists had a
cut-and-dried program for the future of civilization; whereas here were
two active members of the party, who, from what he could make out, were
agreed about nothing at all. Would the two, for his enlightenment, try
to ascertain just what they had in common, and why they belonged to the
same party? This resulted, after much debating, in the formulating of
two carefully worded propositions: First, that a Socialist believes in
the common ownership and democratic management of the means of
producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a Socialist
believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the
class conscious political organization of the wage-earners. Thus far
they were at one; but no farther. To Lucas, the religious zealot, the
co-operative commonwealth was the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of Heaven,
which is “within you.” To the other, Socialism was simply a necessary
step toward a far-distant goal, a step to be tolerated with impatience.
Schliemann called himself a “philosophic anarchist”; and he explained
that an anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence
was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws
save those of its own being. Since the same kind of match would light
every one’s fire and the same-shaped loaf of bread would fill every
one’s stomach, it would be perfectly feasible to submit industry to the
control of a majority vote. There was only one earth, and the quantity
of material things was limited. Of intellectual and moral things, on
the other hand, there was no limit, and one could have more without
another’s having less; hence “Communism in material production,
anarchism in intellectual,” was the formula of modern proletarian
thought. As soon as the birth agony was over, and the wounds of society
had been healed, there would be established a simple system whereby
each man was credited with his labor and debited with his purchases;
and after that the processes of production, exchange, and consumption
would go on automatically, and without our being conscious of them, any
more than a man is conscious of the beating of his heart. And then,
explained Schliemann, society would break up into independent,
self-governing communities of mutually congenial persons; examples of
which at present were clubs, churches, and political parties. After the
revolution, all the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual activities of
men would be cared for by such “free associations”; romantic novelists
would be supported by those who liked to read romantic novels, and
impressionist painters would be supported by those who liked to look at
impressionist pictures—and the same with preachers and scientists,
editors and actors and musicians. If any one wanted to work or paint or
pray, and could find no one to maintain him, he could support himself
by working part of the time. That was the case at present, the only
difference being that the competitive wage system compelled a man to
work all the time to live, while, after the abolition of privilege and
exploitation, any one would be able to support himself by an hour’s
work a day. Also the artist’s audience of the present was a small
minority of people, all debased and vulgarized by the effort it had
cost them to win in the commercial battle, of the intellectual and
artistic activities which would result when the whole of mankind was
set free from the nightmare of competition, we could at present form no
conception whatever.
And then the editor wanted to know upon what ground Dr. Schliemann
asserted that it might be possible for a society to exist upon an
hour’s toil by each of its members. “Just what,” answered the other,
“would be the productive capacity of society if the present resources
of science were utilized, we have no means of ascertaining; but we may
be sure it would exceed anything that would sound reasonable to minds
inured to the ferocious barbarities of capitalism. After the triumph of
the international proletariat, war would of course be inconceivable;
and who can figure the cost of war to humanity—not merely the value of
the lives and the material that it destroys, not merely the cost of
keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and equipping them for
battle and parade, but the drain upon the vital energies of society by
the war attitude and the war terror, the brutality and ignorance, the
drunkenness, prostitution, and crime it entails, the industrial
impotence and the moral deadness? Do you think that it would be too
much to say that two hours of the working time of every efficient
member of a community goes to feed the red fiend of war?”
And then Schliemann went on to outline some of the wastes of
competition: the losses of industrial warfare; the ceaseless worry and
friction; the vices—such as drink, for instance, the use of which had
nearly doubled in twenty years, as a consequence of the intensification
of the economic struggle; the idle and unproductive members of the
community, the frivolous rich and the pauperized poor; the law and the
whole machinery of repression; the wastes of social ostentation, the
milliners and tailors, the hairdressers, dancing masters, chefs and
lackeys. “You understand,” he said, “that in a society dominated by the
fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of
prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So we have, at
the present moment, a society with, say, thirty per cent of the
population occupied in producing useless articles, and one per cent
occupied in destroying them. And this is not all; for the servants and
panders of the parasites are also parasites, the milliners and the
jewelers and the lackeys have also to be supported by the useful
members of the community. And bear in mind also that this monstrous
disease affects not merely the idlers and their menials, its poison
penetrates the whole social body. Beneath the hundred thousand women of
the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are
not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public; and beneath
them, in turn, are five million farmers’ wives reading ‘fashion papers’
and trimming bonnets, and shop-girls and serving-maids selling
themselves into brothels for cheap jewelry and imitation seal-skin
robes. And then consider that, added to this competition in display,
you have, like oil on the flames, a whole system of competition in
selling! You have manufacturers contriving tens of thousands of
catchpenny devices, storekeepers displaying them, and newspapers and
magazines filled up with advertisements of them!”
“And don’t forget the wastes of fraud,” put in young Fisher.
“When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising,”
responded Schliemann—“the science of persuading people to buy what they
do not want—he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house of
capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen