Page:Johann Jacoby - The Object of the Labor Movement - tr. Florence Kelley (1887).djvu/7

 6 no claim upon any part of it. The whole belongs legally to the capitalist, and the workers cannot well find any logical argument for claiming a part of what is rightfully theirs and legally another's. If they insist upon having the whole of what is their own they insist upon the Social Revolution, for no measure less radical can secure it for them. But if they consent to be bought off by their plunderers with a share of the booty they assume a position which is not conducive to the speedy abolition of legalized robbery.

In practice profit-sharing has been characterized as embodying the principle of the fly on the window pane which, being close to the eye, shut out the view of the dome of St. Peter's. For profit-sharing has been found by shrewd employers to occupy the minds of workers with petty economies and with watching each other in order to insure the largest possible "share" to the exclusion of larger considerations of class interest. That this is the real object of the arrangement is indicated by two facts. It is in the employing class and not in the working class that profit-sharing finds its apostles, and this is an unfailing danger signal. And in the second place, it is adopted chiefly by a certain class of employers to whom it offers especial advantages in the struggle for existence. The most powerful monopolies do not share their profits with their employes because they do not especially need to attach the "hands" to the "concern." Employers of labor upon a small scale cannot as a rule share profits with their employes, their margin is too small. It is the middle class of employers who, hard-pressed to fight the large capitalists on the one hand and the labor organizations on the other, are thankful to buy peace with their own employes upon upon such favorable terms as profit-sharing offers.

Socialists therefore do not recommed profit-sharing. If enlightened workers accept it when offered they are not thereby blinded; they know that profit-sharing bears no criticism from an economic standpoint, but would if disinterested, be mere philanthropy; they know that there is no standard by which the workers' share can be determined, and they fully understand that the trifling increase in their annual income is merely the price which employers gladly pay for decided advantages obtained in the economy and intensity of the labor thus paid for and in the immunity from strikes. But Socialists do not, with Jakoby, recognize profit-sharing as a means to a peaceful solution of the labor question.

The second point upon which Socialists will not agree with Jakoby is his assumption of the possibility of effort for a peaceful solution of the Labor Question on the part of the State and the Capitalist class.

The individual employer who could recognize his employe "as his own equal and treat him accordingly," gives place more and more to the corporation "with no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned." And it were folly indeed to