Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/11

10 Now, let us carry this dream of Aristotle farther in the light of actual experience. Let us assume that in the remote future of the human race the soil of the whole earth had passed into the hands of individual owners, and man had attained by the progress of knowledge to the absolute control over Nature. Suppose the perfection of mechanical contrivance to have gone so far that machinery itself is produced and tended by machinery, and human labor is thus minimized if not superseded. What would be the result of such a state of things? In consequence of the attractive power which large capital exercises upon small, a comparatively small number of wealthy persons would hold exclusive possession of all machinery and other implements of labor. The whole income of the nation, all the goods requisite for the necessities and enjoyments of life would fall to these few alone and that rightfully according to the views now current.

Under such circumstances, human labor being wholly valueless, what would become of the non-possessing mass if the capitalists did not furnish them the bread of charity? What else would remain to these unfortunates than to die of starvation or to reverse the existing conditions of production and possession if not by cunning, then by force?

It will be said that this picture is merely a horrible fancy, that such a state of things can never be reached. This, I admit, not because the thing: itself is inconceivable but because sane men and women will never let it go so far. But can we deny that our present social life, founded upon Capitalist rule and Wage-Labor, moves in a direction which, if it should continue unchanged, must bring us with every passing day nearer to the social conditions just depicted? Must we not admit that even now, the income of the nation is distributed in a manner which subjects at least a part of the proletariat to the want just described?

In such a state of affairs it becomes the duty of every good and thoughtful human being to ask himself the question:

"How are the present economic and social conditions to be so changed as to attain an equitable distribution of the income of the people and to lessen the daily-increasing poverty of the workers?"

Let us examine more closely the problem that is to be solved.

Two cardinal features characterize our present methods of production and distinguish them from those of the past, namely, wages labor and production upon a large scale.

Whereas formerly, productive labor was chiefly performed by slaves, serfs or bondsmen, all rights of ownership in human beings ceased at the French Revolution. Rightfully, legally, every worker is free and his own master. But as a matter of fact he is anything else rather than free. Cut off from the means and conditions of employment, with no other possession than his labor power, he is forced to work for wages in the employ