(discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for success in the united states.)
i am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my acquaintance. they will shake their heads sadly and say that i am getting middle-aged and tired. we have seen in russia and hungary and other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque than barricades and councils of action.
in considering this question, i set aside all considerations of abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of capitalist society. i put the question on the basis of cash, pure and simple. it will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful workers. the workers don't want to pay any more than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will they have to pay most. the advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the better way. but we have to consider this question: is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? suppose it should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not getting what we pay for?
here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. will anybody maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those factories for a single day? certainly production must stop during the time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies. also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are organizing your new administrative staff. you may discover to your consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.
and all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you because you are not running things as you promised. you see, the mass of the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. and all the time you are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast? whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?
if we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized production, i admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to turn out the masters by force. but here we have a social system of infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. in the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that machine while keeping it running. the amount of wealth which we could save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so i say, with all the energy and conviction i possess, pay them! pay them anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social disorganization! pay them so much that they can have no possible cause of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! pay them so that every engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the enterprise through! pay them such a price that even judge gary and john d. rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social readjustment!
"ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very beautiful, but it's the old utopian dream of brotherhood and class co-operation. that will never happen on this earth, until you have first abolished capitalism." my answer is, it could happen tomorrow if we had sufficient intelligence to make it happen. that it does not happen is simply absence of intelligence. and will anyone maintain that it is the part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he knows? what is the use of our intelligence, if we abdicate its authority, and give ourselves up to programs of action which we know are blind and destructive and wasteful? we may see a great vessel going on the rocks; we may feel certain that it is going, in spite of everything we can do; but shall we fail to do what we can to make those in the vessel realize how they might get safely into the harbor?
we have had the russian revolution before us for four years. mankind will spend the next hundred years in studying it, and still have much to learn, but the broad outlines of the great experiment are now plain before our eyes. russia was a backward country, and she tried to fight a modern war, and it broke her down. she had practically no middle class, and her ruling class was rotten, and so the revolutionists had their chance, and they seized it. perhaps it would be more correct to say that they came to the rescue of russia, saving her from the hands of those who were trying to force her to fight, when she was utterly exhausted and incapable of fighting.
anyhow, here was your dictatorship of the proletariat. it turned out all the executive experts, or nearly all of them, because they were tainted with the capitalist psychology; and then straightway it had to call them back and make terms with them, because industry could not be run without them. and of course these engineers and managers sabotaged the revolution—every non-proletarian sabotaged it, both inside russia and outside. you denounced this, and protested against this, but all the same it happened; it was human nature that it should happen, and it is one of the things you have to count on, in any and every country where you attempt the social revolution by minority action.
they have got power in russia, and they dream of getting power in america in the same way. but there is no such disorganization in our country as there was in russia, and it would take a generation of civil strife to bring us to such a condition. we have a middle class, powerful, thoroughly organized, and thoroughly conscious. moreover, this class has ideals of majority rule, which are bred in its very bones; and while they have never realized these ideals, they think they have, and they are prepared to fight to the last gasp in that belief. all that the leaders of moscow have to do is to bring about an attempt at forcible revolution, and they will discover in american society sufficient power of organization and of brutal action to put their movement out of business for a generation.
a hundred years ago we had chattel slavery firmly fixed as the industrial system of one-half of these united states. to far-seeing statesmen it was manifest that chattel slavery was a wasteful system, and that it could not exist in competition with free labor. there was a great american, henry clay, who came forward with a proposition that the people of the united states, through their government, should raise the money, about a billion dollars, and compensate the owners of all the slaves and set them free. for most of his lifetime henry clay pleaded for that plan. but the masters of the south were making money fast; they knew how to handle the negro as a slave, they could not imagine handling him as a free laborer, and they would not hear to the plan. on the other side of mason and dixon's line were fanatical men of "principle," who said that slavery was wrong, and that was the end of it. there is a stanza by emerson discussing this question of confiscation versus compensation:
pay ransom to the owner
and fill the bag to the brim.
who is the owner? the slave is owner,
and ever was. pay him.
this, you see, is magnificent utterance, but as economic philosophy it is reckless and unsound. the abolitionists of the north took up this poem, and the slave power of the south answered with a battle-song:
war to the hilt,
theirs be the guilt,
who fetter the freeman to ransom the slave!
and so the issue had to be fought out. it cost a million human lives and five billions of treasure, and it set american civilization back a generation. and now we confront exactly the same kind of emergency, and are coming to exactly the same method of solution. we have white wage-slaves clamoring for their freedom, and we have business men making money out of them, and exercising power over them, and finding it convenient and pleasant. they are going to fight it out in a civil war, and which side is going to win i am not sure. but when the historians come to write about it a couple of generations from now, let them be able to record that there were a few men in the country who pleaded for a sane and orderly and human solution of the problem, and who continued to voice their convictions even in the midst of the cruel and wasteful strife!
