Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/14

 ciation made the following statement: "By using all available statistics, it becomes evident that, deducting rent and interest, the American farmer receives less for his exertion than does the laborer in factory or the hired man on the farm." Prof. L. B. Bailey of the Department of Agriculture in Cornell University, and one of the foremost authorities on agriculture in this country, declared that the "$200.00 a year income farmer is the ideal in American farming." Geo. G. Holmes, Assistant Statistician of the United States Department of Agriculture, in an analysis of the statistics for 1891, gives as his conclusion: "It appears that if you allow interest to the farmers on the farm capital, they earn substantially no wages. On the other hand, if you allow them no interest, they receive $22.61 per month as wages."

This gives a farmer a chance to feel either as a capitalist or as a wageworker. As a capitalist he gets $22.61 per month interest on his investment and works for nothing; while as a wage worker he loses the interest on his money and gets $22.61 per month wages. So we see that as far as incomes are concerned wage workers and farmers find themselves in the same boat. And the reason that neither of them gets much more or less than is necessary to keep themselves in working condition and to raise a new crop of workers is that neither the wage worker or the farmer own the implements of production. The process by which the workers become separated from the means of production will be explained in the next chapter. It will be rather dry reading, but people who get skinned ought to know at least how it is done. Finding out the reason why after all is not nearly as painful as the skinning process itself.

Within the last century a great change has taken place in the relation of men to property. A hundred years ago nearly every craftsman owned the tools with which he worked. Production was carried on privately and the private ownership of the tool insured to the user the product of his labor. This relationship although just from the viewpoint of distribution, because it gave to the owner the product of his toil, was inferior as a means of production to the system which replaced it.

As the tool was merged into the machine and the machine into the great factory, there evolved a wonderful organism, operated by many laborers working together, that is, co-operatively. But while we developed co-operative or social production, we still retained the private ownership of the means of