Part 29

The goods of the round world are gathered into local distributing centres, carried across continent and ocean, and scattered in tiny parcels to the millions upon millions of remote consumers. Each section contributes its particular wealth. The ice goes south, the oranges go north, the coffee goes west, the tobacco goes east, the manufactures go everywhere.

If we could watch a little globe in action and see the coal pouring slowly up out of little holes, and flowing off in black streaks across land and sea; the oil going with it, but farther and faster; the wheat yellowing whole provinces, heaped up in golden mountains, carried off in thick yellow streams in train-loads and shiploads; the gloves of France on the hands of Americans, the tools of Americans in the hands of Russians; the whole flux and swing of our social circulation wherein one man’s life is fed and strengthened by the fruit of thousands of far-born foreigners,—if we could get this clearly in mind, the organic relation of society would be plainer.

On what line of race-advantage has this tremendous evolution come to pass? Why distribute so widely? Why is it not better to produce and consume locally, each man for himself, as Tolstoi would have us?

The advantage is easily demonstrated if we accept the working plan of organic evolution. If the development of Society is in the universal line of march; if it is, if not an “object,” at least an observed tendency, for the loose scarce-human proto-social stuff to move on steadily toward an always-increasing degree of common intelligence, common activity, common enjoyment, common peace, and power, and love,—then every process which promotes this movement is advantageous.

Since the development of a society requires common service, and that common service requires for its wise direction a common consciousness, therefore every modification of human activity which develops common consciousness is advantageous. Since the line of advance in socialisation is from a state of self-supporting individualism toward a state of collectively supporting socialism, therefore every extension of our economic processes along that line is advantageous. Self-support develops only egoism. Mutual support develops mutualism. The more general the base of our maintenance, the more general our advance toward omniism—toward that degree of common consciousness which shall best protect, supply, and develop everyone.

When each man took care of himself, he had no interest in, or love for his neighbour; when their small “spheres of influence” touched, there was a combat. In such conditions no Society was possible. When small communities or large are self-supporting, they have no interest in, or love for each other; this stage of development is the stage of war. Their “spheres of influence” touch, and there is combat. When the economic processes of the world are in common—and they are already beginning to be so—we have the sure basis for common consciousness, for international peace, and all high development; only hindered by the preserved ghosts of previous national, local, and personal “states of mind.”

That mutual love which Tolstoi and his kind would see established depends primarily on the widest extension of our common interest, the widest distribution of our specialised production. The law of organic advantage in such relation is clear. Self-support is a very short range of life. Any trifling accident may break the circuit, and the individual is lost. The wider the circuit of distribution the safer the component individual. With the universal insurance of Society’s whole working base, there is the largest wealth possible; the largest safety, the smallest risk from any source. There is also, still more importantly, a gain in development.

In a large well-running organism there is room for rest, for the accumulating of energy to apply to special needs. Too prolonged disuse will ultimately eliminate the neglected part, to be sure; but for the time being, a well-organised society can support in idleness those whose service is no less valuable for being intermittent and irregular. The basic “vital organs” work all the time. The later “special organs” not only may but must rest. Our “special senses,” our delicate nervous system, the dominating brain, are easily injured by use which is perfectly normal to heart or lung. By wide distribution society is enabled to support all its parts, whether active or passive, and so preserve a greater sum of usefulness. We approximate the same idea in any mutual benefit or insurance society.

It is to broaden the base of supplies and extend the time of payment—a sort of physical credit system. A society where the widest possible range of productivity is maintained, with the largest margin for emergencies, is richer and stronger than one which has “all its eggs in one basket.” So the underlying laws of social advantage have worked upon the human race, developing transportation facilities, physical, mechanical, and psychical (meaning here those purely mental agreements and hypotheses by which we facilitate commerce), until we have a system of distribution which would seem, at first sight, quite equal to the needs of the world.

But well we know that it is not! Bitterly and deeply we know that it is not. Some malign force is working at cross-purposes to clog and check and divert this social circulation, and produce the morbid conditions we know so well—the congestion of supplies in some quarters, with the ensuing train of social diseases, and the lack of supplies in other quarters, with another train of diseases consequent.

If there is one conspicuous fact in social economics, it is this peculiar perversion of our distribution system. Those streams of coal and wheat and oil are mysteriously checked at various points, they accumulate where they are not wanted, they filter, slow and scant, in insufficient driblets where there is most need. They are violently pumped out in sudden jerks, they sullenly retreat and coagulate for long, slow periods. What is it that ails our all-important processes of distribution? Merely the human mind. Only our superstitions. Simply the action of false concepts upon conduct again, our old enemies, the Ego concept and the Want theory, gaining headway in these vast currents of modern industry, and doing in large conspicuous ways the same evil they always did, less visibly. From the very beginning, the men through whom these great processes must needs be carried on, have been labouring under a delusion. They supposed that all this commerce and exchange was due to their individual exertions, and that the purpose of it all was to pay them. Better proof of the elastic capacity of the human brain could hardly be asked.

That a man carrying a pack on his back should say, “I do it,” is natural; that he should still say, “I do it,” when he puts the pack upon a mule and drives the beast unwillingly along, is still natural. But that this “I” should swell and swell from mule train to train of cars, from canoe to Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, is marvellous. Now that such a myriad “we” do all this work for such a myriad “us,” it would seem as if the various component “I’s” might have been lost in the shuffle before now. Not a bit.

Acting under the Ego concept, with a sense of justice and of ownership dating from the Ego period, we have arduously bent our minds to the development of a system of laws more elaborately ramified than the twigs of a tree; to follow and preserve the individual rights along every broadening branch of social growth. Governed by the Want theory and its derivatives, we have planted an arbitrary system of inter-individual exchange, like a set of interlocking toll-gates, along every inch of these great roads of progress.

Let us analyse again this group of allied errors, the Want theory. “Work is an expenditure of energy by an individual man whereby to obtain something for the gratification of his wants.” This rests on the assumption that what the man needs to gratify his wants is to be had only by his working. As we know that he does not himself manufacture the articles needed to gratify his wants, but that these articles all and several are made by other people; we assume further that each man owns what he makes, and will not give it up to another without value received—“If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” And as the supplies of the world are assumed to belong to the existing inhabitants in private ownership, each newcomer, unless inheriting a share in the privately owned world, is expected to “work” before he receives anything.

Confronted by the glaring fact that a new human creature cannot work before he receives anything, but must be supplied with many social products for many years before he can produce in return, we then fall back on the parent and say, “the new human being shall receive nothing from Society except so much as his father is able to earn,” i. e., pay for in work. That system of supplying the young by the unaided activities of the parent, which we find among animals, we assume to be the best for the human race, and so the final distribution of social products is filtered through, not the consuming capacity, but the “earning” capacity of individuals.

If the man with ten children is but a low-grade workman, his earning capacity being but $1.50 a day at our rating, his children receive from Society less than fifteen cents’ worth of supplies each. Their consuming capacity is naturally much greater, but under our assumption that the father represents the family as an economic unit, and that the family shall be restricted in consumption within his power of production, the children are thus supplied with the equivalent of one-tenth an individual’s output.

In some ways we have recognised the mischievous results of this method of distribution, and have begun to supply some of the necessities of life on a wiser plan, as in our system of public education, where we frankly reverse the position. We therein say: “Children are members of Society. The maintenance and progress of Society require that its members be educated to some degree. This degree of common education the individual earning power of the parent cannot provide, but the collective funds of the community can.” So we publicly distribute education, and even enforce it—or try to—on the clear ground that the output of the future citizen depends on his income in youth, and that Society cannot afford to leave that income to be measured by a fraction of a low-grade worker’s output.

Some strictly logical and scientific-minded thinkers do indeed object to this free public education, maintaining that since effort is only made to satisfy wants, therefore, if you satisfy any of man’s wants, you decrease by so much his efforts, you lower the output of Society.

The advocates of free public education, though still clinging to their idols in other departments of life, maintain that education is a different matter, and point with honest pride to the results, showing that a publicly educated community does produce more and behave better than one wherein each man must provide as he can for his children. But in spite of this patent proof they still refuse to fairly admit the new principle involved, and to fairly give up their fallacious old one.

The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply of energy which he may or may not discharge, but that he will not discharge it unless forced to by necessity. If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy whatever, he will not work. This does apply, fairly enough, to an animal’s effort to take things, but does not apply to man’s effort to make things. The fact is that a man has energy according to (a) his physical well-being, and (b) his access to social stimulus; and that, having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the forced retention. The practical question before existing Society is how to supply the most energy to its members and direct it to the most use.

In free education we do supply the young social factor with both energy and direction, so that he grows up better able to work and to work rightly than if left to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory, that the way to make a man work is not to give him anything until he does.

The real process of distribution is to circulate our stores of social nourishment as widely and freely as possible, that we may be always more and more able to work. We are quite consistent in this Pay theory of ours. We carry it out even in regulating the amount of our payment. We hold that not only shall a man have nothing unless he works, but that he shall in no case have more than the equivalent of his work, that no person shall receive anything unless he has “earned” it, given a full equivalent. We are forced to admit that in the life about us this principle is a conspicuous failure; we see those who work the most getting the least; we see those who have the most working the least; and we seek to explain this anomaly by a modification of the Pay concept to this effect: that a man should be paid not only in regard to the amount, but to the value of his work.

With this idea we thought we had reached the height of justice, yet we are forced to admit that this does not serve, either: that the men who do the most valuable work for Society are precisely those least paid, sometimes most punished, and that the men receiving the largest rewards are often the most ordinary functionaries and sometimes rascals. Does anyone presume to claim that selling kerosene oil is so precious a service to Society that the head pedlar should have more money than anybody on earth? Is the maker of steel rails or huge cannon a nobler servant than the maker of bread or the teacher of children? All these are forms of social service truly, but are they fairly paid? The facts do not bear out our theory at all, and we only attribute it to other malign influences, never dreaming that our basic idea is wrong. In sociological law there is no relation whatever, either in amount or quality, between normal human work and any possible “pay,” any more than there is between the work of an eye and a leg and the amount of blood they get. Normal human work is organic action. It is a result of previous good received, not an effort to obtain goods withheld.

That under the system of slave labour a man will work under fear of pain is true. That under the system of wage labour a man will work under hope of a reward is true. But both these systems are transient, superficial, soon outgrown by any live society; neither of them affects in the least the underlying organic law of human work. Our conscious minds have not kept pace with social growth. We are trying to administer the processes of an advanced society on lines of pre-social theories. If anyone seeks to point out these great sociological facts, we cry, “These are Utopian dreams, millennial visions; you are a thousand years ahead of your times!”

Whereas it is we—we, the general public, with all these hereditary heirlooms in our heads in place of facts—that are ten thousand years behind them! We try to explain and assist the highly developed and absolutely interdependent social processes by arguments from a long-outgrown era of individualism. Theories of individual effort, incentive, reward, competition, and “survival of the fittest,” we apply to our own organic functions. If they do not fit, so much the worse for the functions!

If we were individuals, like the beasts, it would all hang together well enough, thus: Here is a Bear. His business is the same old series, maintenance, reproduction, and improvement; to be, to re-be, and to be better. All of these ends he serves by the exercise of his own personal abilities. These abilities, being purely personal, are only called into exercise by personal wants or impulses. If the Bear found his food on a plate before his cave every day he would indeed suffer from fatty degeneration; his powers would decay, he would become less and less Bear because he did less and less Bear-ing.

And conversely, if suitable difficulties (not too great) intervene between him and his food, he develops the faculties to meet the difficulties, and improves. If he is not a smart or strong Bear, and cannot get much for himself and the little Bears, why, let them die; better Bears will survive them, and the race improve by their absence. If too much survival of the fittest left too much food for the survivors, so that they became less fit, why up would pop others less fit also to compete for the food, and thus a beautiful level of Bearishness is maintained. This method of evolution we see plainly and admire, perhaps unduly, as a “natural law.” All laws are natural. If not natural—they are not laws; we only thought they were.

The essential difference between us and the Bears is in our organic relation. The Bears have no common interests, common functions, common good; we have. A perfect balance of highly superior Humans, muscular and ferocious, with just food supply enough to keep up the fighting, and just fighting enough to keep down the food supply, is scarcely a social ideal. The social organism alters the matter completely. The human race improves through production and exchange of products—Work. The work of the human race improves under laws of organic evolution, of increasing specialisation and interdependence. As society advances a man profits less and less by what he does for himself, more and more by what others do for him.