Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 08.djvu/539

LEFT SOCIALISM 475 SOCIALISM sequent on our present industrial system. The first national convention on Social Insurance was held in Chicago, in June, 1913, and the second, under the auspices of the United States Government, was held in December, 1916. SOCIALISM, in its broader meaning, is the conception that the production and distribution of »H those commodities which satisfy the wants of the people should be under the collective, democratic control of the people as a whole, with the result that use would be the only in- centive to industry, and that the private profit of capitalistic enterprise would be eliminated as an element. With this defi- nition no Socialist will quarrel. It is chiefly in how this end is to be achieved, and the form in which the public indus- tries are to be administered, that So- cialists differ, on which differences are based the various groups, some of which are so widely separated in their sympa- thies from the others that only by the broadest generalization may they be con- sidered as the component parts of the one movement. Socialism had its origin in the inven- tion and establishment of steam-driven machinery, by which means the handi- crafts system of production was gradually transformed into the present large scale system of capitalist industry. Previous to the introduction of machinery each worker had produced commodities in his home and sold his surplus to his imme- diate neighbors. Such inventions as the power loom not only multiplied the pro- ductive power of the individual workers many hundreds of times, but made neces- sary the factory system of production, whereby great numbers of men and women were brought together under the roof of the factory which housed the machinery. The machinery, however, re- mained the property of one owner, on whom all the workers became dependent for their means of livelihood, since large scale production, by its vast superiority, had killed the handicrafts industries. This autocratic, economic power over the workers enabled the owner of the machi- nery to dictate the terms on which they were to work, with the result that the hours became as long as human endur- ance could bear and that wages were cut down to the barest means of subsistence. From these conditions, growing gradually worse, trades unionism had its inception. The workers banded together for mutual protection against the masters, and by the strength of their organization were enabled gradually to counteract the evil tendencies. The vast improvements in the conditions of the workers during the past century are largely the result of the activities of the labor unions, together with the legislation in their favor inspired and supported by them and their sym- pathizers. But since their object is mere- ly to increase wages and shorten the hours of the working day, they are not, in them- selves, in any way a part of the Socialist movement. Socialism had its definite origin in those groups of keen idealists who imme- diately saw the injustice in a system which provided that the machinery of social production should be in the hands of private ownership. They held that since the factories produced the needs of the people, for their consumption, the people should own and control them. Or, a little more definitely, since the workers used the machinery of production to pro- duce the needs of life, they should own them, as they had owned their own tools under the handicrafts system. This lat- ter conception, somewhat more narrow, was undoubtedly the first. It persists to the present day in the Guild Socialist and Syndicalist movements, off-shoots of the main Socialist movement, and will be considered later. The first one to formulate the idea of collective ownership of the tools of pro- duction was Robert Owen, himself not a workingman, but, peculiarly enough, the owner and manager of a large tex- tile factory in New Lanark, on the Clyde. Owen has been considered the father of Socialism, in England at least. Owen improved the conditions of the several hundreds of workers in his own mills, shortening the hours and raising wages, limiting child labor, and then strove he- roically to persuade other employers that self-interest, if not a sense of humanity, should impel them to follow his example, since better conditions enabled his work- ers to reach a higher degree of produc- tiveness. He was, however, only scorn- fully laughed at, and his failure led him to elaborate more radical schemes for the betterment of the workers. He, there- fore, presented various plans for the establishment of isolated communist colo- nies, in which factories were to be estab- lished, to be owned collectively by the colonists, the profits of their industry to be shared equally between them. These plans were in several cases actually car- ried out, one of them in this country, at New Harmony, Ind. All failed, but Owen nevertheless made a strong impres- sion on a number of educated English- men, who accepted his fundamental prin- ciples and modified them in an effort to render them more practical. At about the same time, during the first two or three decades of the last cen- tury, Francois Fourier, in France, was proposing similar communist enterprises,