The Jungle
horrors to point out first. But consider the waste in time and energy
incidental to making ten thousand varieties of a thing for purposes of
ostentation and snobbishness, where one variety would do for use!
Consider all the waste incidental to the manufacture of cheap qualities
of goods, of goods made to sell and deceive the ignorant; consider the
wastes of adulteration,—the shoddy clothing, the cotton blankets, the
unstable tenements, the ground-cork life-preservers, the adulterated
milk, the aniline soda water, the potato-flour sausages—”
“And consider the moral aspects of the thing,” put in the ex-preacher.
“Precisely,” said Schliemann; “the low knavery and the ferocious
cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the bribing,
the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the hurrying and
worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of
competition—they are but another form of the phrase ‘to buy in the
cheapest market and sell in the dearest.’ A government official has
stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter
dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not
only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human
stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have
been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years
before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and
energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would
do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and
five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and
rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying,
the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of
the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of
ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers
studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the
hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and
haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers
idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the
stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the
overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments
and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the
starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of
markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster,
advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into
cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates;
consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital
energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material
in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then
take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of
administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste—”
“I do not follow that,” said the editor. “The Cooperative Commonwealth
is a universal automatic insurance company and savings bank for all its
members. Capital being the property of all, injury to it is shared by
all and made up by all. The bank is the universal government
credit-account, the ledger in which every individual’s earnings and
spendings are balanced. There is also a universal government bulletin,
in which are listed and precisely described everything which the
commonwealth has for sale. As no one makes any profit by the sale,
there is no longer any stimulus to extravagance, and no
misrepresentation; no cheating, no adulteration or imitation, no
bribery or ‘grafting.’”
“How is the price of an article determined?”
“The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and it is
determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The million workers
in the nation’s wheat fields have worked a hundred days each, and the
total product of the labor is a billion bushels, so the value of a
bushel of wheat is the tenth part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an
arbitrary symbol, and pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then
the cost of a bushel of wheat is fifty cents.”
“You say ‘for farm work,’” said Mr. Maynard. “Then labor is not to be
paid alike?”
“Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we should
have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners. Of course the
wages may be left the same, and the hours varied; one or the other will
have to be varied continually, according as a greater or less number of
workers is needed in any particular industry. That is precisely what is
done at present, except that the transfer of the workers is
accomplished blindly and imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements,
instead of instantly and completely, by a universal government
bulletin.”
“How about those occupations in which time is difficult to calculate?
What is the labor cost of a book?”
“Obviously it is the labor cost of the paper, printing, and binding of
it—about a fifth of its present cost.”
“And the author?”
“I have already said that the state could not control intellectual
production. The state might say that it had taken a year to write the
book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that
every _bon mot_ of his had cost a purse of gold. What I outline here is
a national, or rather international, system for the providing of the
material needs of men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will
work longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in
his own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear the same
kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I do not think the
same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay for such thinkers as
the majority selects. I wish such things to be left to free effort, as
at present. If people want to listen to a certain preacher, they get
together and contribute what they please, and pay for a church and
support the preacher, and then listen to him; I, who do not want to
listen to him, stay away, and it costs me nothing. In the same way
there are magazines about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints, and
flying machines, and athletic records, and I know nothing about any of
them. On the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could
earn some spare money without paying tribute to an exploiting
capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose of
interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche, the
prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the inventor of the
noble science of clean eating; and incidentally, perhaps, for the
discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific breeding of men and
women, and the establishing of divorce by mutual consent.”
Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. “That was a lecture,” he said with
a laugh, “and yet I am only begun!”
“What else is there?” asked Maynard.
“I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of competition,”
answered the other. “I have hardly mentioned the positive economies of
co-operation. Allowing five to a family, there are fifteen million
families in this country; and at least ten million of these live
separately, the domestic drudge being either the wife or a wage slave.
Now set aside the modern system of pneumatic house-cleaning, and the
economies of co-operative cooking; and consider one single item, the
washing of dishes. Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing
for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a
day’s work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied
persons—mostly women to do the dish-washing of the country. And note
that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is
a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of
prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate
children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay.
And now consider that in each of my little free communities there would
be a machine which would wash and dry the dishes, and do it, not merely
to the eye and the touch, but scientifically—sterilizing them—and do it
at a saving of all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the time! All of
these things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take
Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and read about the new
science of agriculture, which has been built up in the last ten years;
by which, with made soils and intensive culture, a gardener can raise
ten or twelve crops in a season, and two hundred tons of vegetables
upon a single acre; by which the population of the whole globe could be
supported on the soil now cultivated in the United States alone! It is
impossible to apply such methods now, owing to the ignorance and
poverty of our scattered farming population; but imagine the problem of
providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand
systematically and rationally, by scientists! All the poor and rocky
land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our children
play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell! The most favorable
climate and soil for each product selected; the exact requirements of
the community known, and the acreage figured accordingly; the most
improved machinery employed, under the direction of expert agricultural
chemists! I was brought up on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness
of farm work; and I like to picture it all as it will be after the
revolution. To picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four
horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and
dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a
day! To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity,
perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and
potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To every other kind of
vegetable and fruit handled in the same way—apples and oranges picked
by machinery, cows milked by electricity—things which are already done,
as you may know. To picture the harvest fields of the future, to which
millions of happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by
special trains, the exactly needful number to each place! And to
contrast all this with our present agonizing system of independent
small farming,—a stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated with a yellow,
lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from four o’clock in the morning
until nine at night, working the children as soon as they are able to
walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from
all knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and
invention, and all the joys of the spirit—held to a bare existence by
competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too
blind to see his chains!”
Dr. Schliemann paused a moment. “And then,” he continued, “place beside
this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of
physiologists, that most of the ills of the human system are due to
overfeeding! And then again, it has been proven that meat is
unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce
than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more
likely to be unclean. But what of that, so long as it tickles the
palate more strongly?”
“How would Socialism change that?” asked the girl-student, quickly. It
was the first time she had spoken.
“So long as we have wage slavery,” answered Schliemann, “it matters not
in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to
find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then
the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old,
dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down—it will be cheaper to