Index :: 1852 Socialism

Semi-Weekly Tribune/New York Tribune November 16, 1852

SOCIALISM

The American Artisan in an article entitled "Socialism," and containing many excellent ideas, puts forth the following assertions:

"With the advancement of civilization and the commerce comes the day of trial. Two classes are created.  It is so now; it always has been so. One class is the virtual slave of the other.  In the South they hover around the overseer’s house on the plantation. In the North they are gathered around the clacking mill on the banks of our streams, or are crowded in the byways of our cities.  Each year as the country advances in Wealth, Power and Prosperity, does the condition of this class become worse.  Thus it always has been—it is so now.  Cannot this be altered? Is it inevitable? Is liberty indeed fit only for rural swains?"

This is an old doctrine: it has been taught by good and wise men; but for all that we hold it none the less untrue and pernicious.

The condition of factory laborers cannot, on the whole or for any length of time, be worse than that of farm laborers and mechanics.  For, any considerable inequality, either in the difficulty or toilesomeness of the work, the comforts of living, or the wages earned, must soon right itself.  The branches offering harder work, poorer living, and less wages, must in due time find themselves deserted, and compelled to change, and rise to the general level if they would have laborers.  If then, as the country advances in Wealth, Power and Prosperity, the condition of manufacturing laborers becomes worse, if follows that the condition of all who depend on their labor for their living becomes so.  That is to say, it follows that the condition of the immense majority of the population deteriorates as the country improves,--a manifest absurdity, and palpable contradiction of the facts.

If this doctrine were true, the dictate of Christianity, philanthropy and good sense would be to arrest the progress of the country; to restrain the production of wealth; to put a check upon invention and industry; to confine the people to the single employment of tilling the soil; and to prevent every great enterprise requiring the association of large amounts of capital, with the use of labor-saving machinery of improved scientific process, and the employment numbers of workmen. Instead of welcoming and favoring that march of industry and science which is the great characteristic of the time, and which is held to be the sure barrier against a relapse of society into barbarism, we ought at once to turn our faces backward to the middle ages, or to emigrate to Turkey all of us together.  For no advance in wealth, power and prosperity can be other than evil when purchased by the degradation and deeper enslavement of the great mass of our fellow-beings.

Nay, if this doctrine be true, the peace maintained at a large expense, between rich and poor, and thought to be so advantageous to all, ought instantly to be broken, and civil and social war to break forth.  If it be true, all society is antagonism, every man’s interest is at war with every other man’s, all science and all material improvement are folly, and all history but the record of ever deeper and blacker degradation.  And the sooner universal chaos and destruction put an end to the vast mistake of creation the better.

But it is not true: The great inequality in social condition and the distinction of upper and lower classes does not date from the culmination of civilization and commerce, and from the increase of wealth, but much earlier, from the very beginning of society, in poverty, ignorance and excessive weakness.  There, where war, slavery, and cruelty are native, where the few strong assume to rule over the feeble many, calling in superstition to consecrate their authority—there it is that this antagonism of classes and of interests begins and exists in most perfect intensity.  It is in poverty, ignorance and the absence of manufacturing industry, machinery, science, that one class is make the slave of the other.  Doubtless a great historic, providential purpose is thereby worked out.  That purpose is briefly the creation of wealth and endowment of Man with control over the forces of nature.  And as it is accomplished, slavery is gradually alleviated and abolished, the authority of the few over the many, the distinctions of classes, and the discomfort, ignorance, dependence and degradation of those who work with their hands tend to disappear.  This is the fact universally.  If you doubt it compare the state of the world a thousand years ago with that of the present day.  Or take a single country as England or France, for instance, and put side by side the workers of three hundred years ago and of the year 1852.   No doubt there are great and crying evils even now, but on the whole there has been very great improvement. The workers of today are more intelligent, more comfortable and more manly than those of the earlier period.

Equally true is the statement with reference to the United States.  It is an error to say that the condition of the laborers at Lowell and Manchester is inferior to that of persons in the same sphere of life fifty or a hundred years ago.  It is absurd to say that it is as bad or worse than the condition of slaves.  In the large cities where European immigrants congregate, and whither interruptions in the healthy growth of the country, caused by the stoppage of manufactures, send thousands of native workers to struggle for the employment suddenly taken from them elsewhere, we find exceptional cases of poverty and suffering.  But as general thing our laborers are housed, clothed and fed better than formerly, and their privileges of education and mental culture are enhanced.

And what is true as fact is equally true as principle.  An invention may yield the rich capitalist who buys it up and applies it, a degree of profit which no other individual derives therefrom, but compared with the advantages it yields to society at large, that profit is the merest trifle. A railroad may pay its stockholders good dividends, but the benefits it confers on the whole community are infinitely greater than all the company can show on its books.  Within forty years capitalists have made money by spinning and weaving cotton, but the result is that the laborer to-day has cloth for sixpence a yard what forty years ago cost him half a dollar a yard.  The balance of advantages is necessarily on the side of the most numerous and least powerful class. That is to say, that instead of their circumstances becoming worse as the country advances in wealth, power and prosperity, they improve.  They are undoubtedly much inferior to what they are destined to become as humanity at large attains to still more perfect conditions, but they have been and are improving along with the general prosperity.  And this, we contend, is by the very nature of the case, by virtue of a universal law.  When a country is growing poor, the laboring class are the greatest sufferers; when it is growing rich they are the most benefited.

This being the case, it is supremely for their interest that their country should advance in Wealth, Power and Prosperity.  The interest of the wealthy class is the same.  Therefore the law of social and industrial development is Harmony of Interests. To say that general antagonism lies at the foundation of Society, and that by the increase of industry and wealth the rich grow richer and poor poorer, is a mistake.

There is then, a great evil in such vague talk as that quoted above, concerning the oppression of Labor by Capital, and the need of measures to protect the former against the latter.  It propagates hostility for which there is no good ground and which can end in nothing. Capital may oppress Labor, but it can be only amid general impoverishment; then wages fall, and the poor are at the mercy of the rich; but amid general prosperity wages rise, and the workers become more comfortable and independent. The best protection of Labor against Capital is to be found in enlarging the joint earnings of both, for in any such enlargement labor ever gets the larger proportion.  Capital labor ever gets the larger proportion.  Capital receives more in amount than before, but its proportion of the joint product is diminished; Labor receives at once more in amount, and in proportion, and thus the interests of both are harmonious.  Thus too, those who make inventions and apply new processes and machines, and introduce and extend special branches of industry are not the foe, but the friend of laboring people.  Depend upon it, Humanity is not mistaken in the great industrial and scientific movement going on throughout the world.  And yet if the interests of Labor and Capital were antagonistic, and the conditions of the greater number were constantly deteriorating, it would all be a mistake.

Socialism or the establishment of cooperative institutions is, then, not Reform strictly speaking.  It is not the patent remedy for a disease, but the more complete development of a healthy growth. It is not the negation of Society as now or heretofore existing; but the more thorough inauguration of its vital principle, the fulfillment of its promises and hopes.  It is not to be attained through the warfare of Labor against Capital, or through any other sort of warfare, but as the crowning glory of the Wealth, Power, and Prosperity with which invention, industry and science are endowing the family of Man.