University of Santa Clara - Redwood Yearbook (Santa Clara, CA)

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10 THE BEDWOOD. movement make their strong appeal. The state which they hold out and the condition of society under it is indeed alluring and purposely concocted to at- tract those dissatisfied with the present state of affairs. For this reason it can- not be amiss to critically examine this proposed state and determine a few of its necessary consequences. Victor Cathrein, in his admirable work on Socialism, has summed up the numberless difficulties with which the Socialists ' state will be confronted upon its inauguration. These difficul- ties may, however, in the main be re- duced to five principal heads which I in the ensuing pages shall briefly out- line. These difficulties are, in order: 1. Difficulty of organization. 2. The difficulty of supplying dif- ferent wants. 3. Difficulty of the assignment of employments. 4. Difficulty of assigning remunera- tion. 5. Difficulty of supplying a motive to work. l have said necessary consequences because So- cialists tliemseives are very reserved in statements as to the future condition of their state and the manner in which they will conduct it. Bellamy in his novel Looi ing Backward received harsh criti- cism and denunciationfrom his comrades for the Utopia he pictured, and Socialists all over the world pro- nounced him a dreamer. There are, however many necessary consequences attendant upon the adop- tion of Socialism which must follow a Collectivist state in which all the means of production are na- tionally owned. These necessary difficulties therefore are real ar- guments against the doctrine, Hilquit and Bernstein to the contrary noth withstanding. 1. To state briefly the difficulty of organization, either all the productive property of the United States would be worked from one center as one business, keeping work and wages uniform or else each state, dis- trict, county or town would be granted local autonomy. In the first instance such a system would require a huge amount of clerical work to determine the various demands and necessities of the commonwealth. In meeting this contention Socialists are wont to point to our huge corporations, syndicates and industries with their el- aborate systems, but they overlook the important fact that there exists an im- mense chasm between one company run for one purpose and a common- wealth made up of several millions of such companies. Compare for example the difference in time and labor in com- piling the smallest details as to articles of clothing, underwear, food and so on which every family needs, with the dif- ficulty of coinpiling a simple census which in itself is a huge task. Then again such an ascertainment of neces- sities would be required at least every month and even then there are many necessaries which cannot be foreseen and which would provoke weekly and even daily statistics. The entire ar- rangement would call for an army of officials bound by no private interest to the faithful administration of their office and subject to gross blunders which might prove fatal to the entire plan.

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THE REDWOOD. the production of thirty. Therefore to each let us give share and share ahke. This indeed is a plausible argument, but we shall find it based on a false as- sumption. Consider for a moment a simple illustration. A. is a man who is at the head, let us say, of a great peach-packing industry, the only one in the world. He has un- der him ten thousand employes. Now for the past ten years he has annually packed one million crates of peaches. This is his maximum capacity and al- though there is a greater supply of peaches he cannot succeed in pack- ing more with his present equipment. Let us now suppose that A. is taken seriously ill and B, his office man, sub- stitutes. During the year in which B manages the system two million crates of peaches are packed with the same number of employes and with the same tools of production. After a regime of one year A again assumes the manager- ship and returning to his own system succeeds in packing but one million crates for the ensuing year and so on for the following years of his manager- ship. Since both A. and B. used the same establishment, the same employes and the same means of production it is clear that the increased capacity of the industry under the regime of B was due simply and solely to his special ability in systematization and to his superior directive powers. Returning now to the Fabian argu- ment it will be seen that what they have overlooked is the fact that capital cannot be represented by a product such as thirty, for although yesterday it was thirty, tomorrow it will be sixty, and the day after perhaps one hun- dred, and though one of these factors five, remains constant, the other varies from six to twelve to twenty and so on. In like manner although labor remains more or less constant Ability varies and therefore we can determine which of the two produces the greater part of wealth. Since we are able to do this, justice and the natural law demand that we render unto Caesar the things which belong to Caesar and we are right in giving to the greater producer the greater share of the spoils. We are safe in stating therefore that the Fa- bian claims for the injustice of the present order are false. We have already examined the main arguments advanced by the two great schools of Socialism by which they claim to have demonstrated the injus- tice of the present order of distribution, and we have found them wanting in soundness. Therefore we might here make an application of the saying of the old Ro- man legists: Cessante ratione; cessat ipsa lex and say that since all the reasons for the change are a falsity, the necessity of the change itself is a fal- sity and we might consider the ques- tion settled once and for all. There is, however, a vast army of men and women to whom arguments of this nature do not appeal and it is mainly to them that the leaders of the

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THE REDWOOD. 11 In the second alternative or local au- tonomy where distribution would be from stations operating over a small territory, such a compilation of statis- tics might possibly be accomplished, but in this event, another and even more serious objection arises. Through the happenings of time and chance, ability and management, various in- equalities in productive wealth would arise in the divers municipalities or districts. Santa Clara, for example, would be making 20 per cent more than San Francisco and Socialists are con- fronted once more with the inequality they seek to abolish. Nor could this be remedied by allowing the com- rades to migrate to any community they saw fit ; for to be successful the Collectivist plan necessitates a rigid fixity in the number of workers and consumers. For to provide employ- ment to an ever fluctuating population would be an impossibility. Hence eith- er one could move about freely when and where he chose or he could not. Under the former hypothesis the So- cialist state could not operate. Under the latter the individual would be re- duced to something like slavery. 2. The second difficulty of the Col- lectivist state which flows as a neces- sary consequence from the nature of the plan, is that of supplying different wants. Under the present system of distribution we have numberless trad- ers large and small catering to the in- dividual tastes of their consumers un- der the incentive of greater profit. How different, however, under the commun- istic order would be the state of affairs. Each person would present his or her labor ticket or money if it is used, and obtain a community chair, a commun- ity hair brush or a community overcoat. Such a system is destructive of person- al liberty and grown men and women would be reduced to boarding school children and dealt with as soldiers in a presidio. Some Socialists, however, claim that one will be able to obtain whatever he chooses, providing he has worked the necessary labor time to pay for it. But this answer brings us back to the clerical difficulty wherein each individual want must be determined every week. For we must not forget that there will not be the countless traders and manufacturers to ascertain the desires of the people, but all pro- duction will be operated by the Collect- ivist state, managed by state officials who will have no personal interest in their work and who will only be too glad to finish their day ' s work and have it over with. If, on the other hand, the state produces without determin- ing exactly the consumptive capacity of the people they fall into the error of haphazard production whereby vast quantities of goods would lie idle and unconsumed in the state or communal storehouse and be a drain upon those whose tastes were not so finicky. 3. The third objection to the Social- istic state is in assigning employments. Who is to do what? Here the com- monwealth would have the Hercu-