Have they any difficulty in finding safe and convenient investments for their savings? 6. What is the advantage of specialized farming over diversified farming? Do we imply, when we advocate diversified farming, that the farmer should "buy nothing that he can raise or make for himself"? 7. Is speculation a "necessary" or an "unnecessary evil"? Is it an evil? REFERENCES BRACE, H. H. The Value of Organized Speculation. Commissioner of Corporations. Report on Cotton Exchanges, Part v. CARVER, T. N. Principles of Rural Economics. Eleventh Census. Real Estate Mortgages; Farms and Homes; Proprietorship and Indebtedness. Twelfth Census. Vol. v, Agriculture; Supplementary Analysis, "The Negro Farmer," pp. 511-579. Thirteenth Census. Vol. v, Agriculture. COULTER, J. L. Coöperation among Farmers. EMERY, H. C. Speculation on the Stock and Produce Exchanges of the United States. HAGGARD, H. R. Rural England. HERRICK, M. T., and Ingalls, R. Rural Credits: Land and Coöperative. JEBB, L. The Small Holdings of England. MARSHALL, ALFRED. Principles of Economics, 6th ed., Book vi, Chap. x. U. S. Department of Agriculture. Year Book; The Crop Reporter. ROGERS, A. S. L. The Business Side of Agriculture. ROWNTREE, B. S. Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium. TAYLOR, H. C. Agricultural Economics; and "The Decline of Landowning Farmers in England,” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 96. WARREN, G. F. Farm Management. WELD, L. D. H. The Marketing of Farm Products. Socialism Defined. CHAPTER XXX SOCIALISM Socialists seek the establishment of industrial democracy through the instrumentality of the State. Our political organization is to become also an economic industrial organization. Socialism contemplates an expansion of the business functions of government until the more important businesses are absorbed. Private property in income-yielding capital and land is to be abolished. Socialists make no war upon capital; what they object to is the private capitalist. They desire to socialize capital and to abolish capitalists as a distinct class. Their ideal, then, is not, as is supposed by the uninformed, an equal division of existing wealth, but a change in the fundamental conditions governing the acquisition of incomes. Socialists usually say that labor creates all wealth. Land and capital, they hold, are merely passive factors of production, and their owners ought not to receive a share of the product unless they personally are useful members of the community. Labor is the active factor, and all production is carried on for the sake of man. Land and capital are simply the tools of man. Socialists admit that the owners of these tools must receive a return for them when industry is organized as it is now; hence they desire that these tools should become public property. They wish to make of universal application the command of the Apostle Paul, " If a man will not work, neither let him eat." Distributive Justice. Socialists, in common with a great many other people who do not accept their attitude toward the organization of industry, desire distributive justice. As to what constitutes justice they are not wholly agreed, but there is among them a tendency to accept equality of needs rather than productivity as a basis. Some, it is true, have advocated an almost mechanical equality, but most socialists today would regard the question of a precise standard for the distribution of income as not of present importance. They are simply agreed in this, that the distribution of the present day is wholly unjust. They think that men today do not have equal chances in life and that there is too much special privilege. The rewards, they think, today go to those who are shrewd and cunning, who are skillful in manipulating stocks and bonds, or who are favored by inheritance with a good start, rather than to those who render great social service. The inventors, poets, authors, scientists, skilled mechanics, and factory managers, they allege, are the large producers, but they do not get the big prizes. Varieties of Socialism. The foregoing characterization applies to most persons who have been called socialists, but the genus contains a number of species which should be distinguished. 1. One group has been called "Utopian." This first group contains those who have become impressed with the evils of the present competitive system and propose the collective ownership of the means of production as a remedy, in much the same spirit with which a physician writes a prescription to cure his patient. There have been many attempts to picture to us how smoothly things would proceed if men could only be persuaded to adopt the collective ownership of land and capital. As a type of this class we may take Robert Owen. His life was contemporaneous with the Industrial Revolution in England, he himself being a successful manufacturer. He saw with his own eyes the evils of unrestricted competition, and was filled with an earnest desire to better the condition of the working classes. He is remembered as a factory reformer and promoter of voluntary coöperation, but yet he regarded these efforts as not sufficiently radical. He thought human nature must be reformed by careful training from childhood in an atmosphere of association, instead of in the self-seeking, commercial atmosphere which surrounded him. He spent his large fortune in an attempt to carry out his ideas regarding the reconstruction of society. Among his projects was the founding of a colony at New Harmony, Indiana, where no private property or competition should exist. After a struggle of two years, the experiment ended, as most other similar enterprises have, a complete failure. In this group would also be placed SaintSimon, Fourier, Cabet, Blanc,1 and Bellamy. 2. The "Marxian" socialists call themselves "scientific," as distinguished from the idealistic writers just mentioned. They insist that they have no cure-all for the ills of society. Socialism in their eyes is, in the main, only an explanation of what is happening. The private capitalistic system is breaking down, they say, and the logical result must be the collective ownership of the means of production as the next stage in social evolution. They say that setting aside all question of “ought " or "desirability," collective ownership is coming, and we might as well adjust ourselves to it. The four leading features of the Marxian philosophy are: (1) the view of society as an evolutionary product; (2) the economic interpretation of history, according to which our whole social life, including our ideas concerning religion, art, marriage, etc., are but a reflex of past and present economic conditions; (3) the doctrine of surplus value, according to which the income of the capitalist class does not represent a return for the sacrifice of "abstinence" or "waiting," but results from the fact that through the ownership of the means of production its members can compel the laboring class to work a longer number of hours than is necessary to produce the wages which the laborers receive, what is produced in this additional number of hours being the source of capitalist income; and (4) the doctrine of the class struggle, which finds a deep antagonism between the capitalist class and the laboring class, that can only result in the overthrow of the former. Most socialists now believe that this victory will be won without bloodshed, as a result of a gradual increase in the strength of the socialist party as a political organization. 3. The Fabian Socialists, of whom the members of the 'Louis Blanc was less "utopian" than the others. He was transitional and in reality paved the way for the German and later "scientific" movement. Fabian Society of England are types, have disapproved both of the founding of utopian settlements and of the philosophy of Marx. The aim of this society has been to spread socialistic ideas by the dissemination of knowledge on the subject, rather than by an organized political movement, advocating this or that reform as opportunity indicated. The membership has come largely from the educated middle class, and has never been very large, although the society has exercised a very great influence. Practically, the views of the more conservative socialists in France and Germany do not differ greatly from those of the Fabians. The following words of the late Jean Jaurès on the method of realizing the socialist ideal are of interest in this connection: "All Socialists, indeed, some openly, others with infinite precautions, some with a mischievous Viennese good-nature, declare it to be untrue that, taken as a whole, the economic material condition of the proletariat is getting worse and worse. It must be conceded, after taking account of the tendency to sink and the tendency to rise, that in the immediate reality of life, the tendency to sink is not the stronger. Once this has been granted, it is no longer possible to repeat after Marx and Engels that the capitalist system will perish because it does not insure to those whom it exploits the minimum necessities of life. It follows from the same admission that it has also become puerile to expect that an economic cataclysm, menacing the proletariat in its very existence, will bring about, by the revolt of the instinct of self-preservation, the 'violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.' "It is not by an unexpected counter-stroke of political agitation that the proletariat will gain supreme power, but by the methodical and legal organization of its own forces under the law of the democracy and universal suffrage. It is not by the collapse of the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by the growth of the proletariat, that the Communist order will gradually install itself in our society." 1 4. The Christian socialists. About the middle of the nineteenth century, such men as Kingsley, Maurice, and Hughes in England were much impressed by the misery of the poor, and they attacked the competitive system as being responsible for the evils which they saw. Voluntary coöperation and the elevation of the workingman's character seemed to them the proper 1 Studies in Socialism (trans. by M. Minturn), pp. 167-169. |