Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/13

 12 State to do to further the transition already begun to the co-operative method of production, and to bring this change to its consummation in the way most advantageous to the community?

We shall see that to answer this question we need do no more than collate the facts before our eyes, a clear proof that the present age is in the midst of the process of social remodelling.

First as to the workers themselves. The main point is that they become clearly conscious of their own situation and that they recognize and respect their own inherent nobler nature.

I have stated in the foregoing that as a rule the worker's wages barely suffice for scanty maintenance for himself and his family. If any one doubts this relation, the so-called iron law of wages, let him refer to the testimony recently given by the Committee of the German Board of Trade in an opinion upon the seizure of wages.

There he will find, word for word, this statement:

"We cannot let pass without qualification the assertion that there is a considerable difference between the laborer's wages and the means of subsistence requisite for his scant maintenance. It is exactly this point, the rate of wages, upon which practically the whole great social question turns. The workingmen insist upon the insufficiency of the wages rate. The employers do not deny this, but explain the rate of wages as a link in the chain of economic phenomena which they cannot arbitrarily change (under the pressure of the market in the midst of which they themselves stand) without destroying the whole chain. So long as this controversy is not settled, and we fear it is an everlasting one (sic), so long shall we be obliged to maintain the opinion as the only correct one, that the expressions 'wages of labor' and 'necessary means of subsistence' are in general identical."

The "indestructible chain of economic phenomena!" Indeed a more striking expression could not have been found! True the capitalist rulers of labor are not prevented by it from heaping capital upon capital, but heavily does the "chain of economic phenomena" press upon the laboring class. Yet, even here the poet's word proves true:

"There dwelleth a spirit of Good in all Evil."

The ruling industrial system, by making indispensable the assemblage of masses of workers at one point, gives the first impulse to the removal of the evil itself has created. As man first sees his own features in the mirror, so the laborer first awakens to a full appreciation of his own pitiable situation when, in the misery of masses of his comrades in suffering the image of his own lot stares him in the face. Sharing the life of his companions in toil, men placed like himself and equally oppressed, in constant contact and interchange of thought with them, working together for reciprocal support and the common defense against common danger, there arises a class con-