position. Both employers and employed (in the current industrial sense) have made great profit by it: the middle-class generally has suffered severely. A proper organisation of work would have prevented this.
It can easily be shown that this national organisation of employment, with graded incomes according to service rendered, is the only remedy of poverty. The chief root of poverty is, as I said, the insufficiency of properly paid work, and this is entirely due to the haphazard and unsystematic nature of our industrial order. The private employer looks only to the actual demand of commodities, or to the actual funds for buying commodities. He has no interest in the moneyless unemployed; indeed, he finds it a convenience to have a large number from which he may select his workers. As a result, a large proportion of our people are unable to demand their normal share of commodities because they are not employed, or because they have no wage; and they are not employed because they do not demand commodities. Plainly, the community alone can alter this paradoxical state of things; and, since the community is now compelled by its more humane sentiments to carry the poor on its shoulders, it may at length be induced to see that it would be better to set them on their own feet. In a properly organised industrial system a worker will be paid by the commodities which he or she actually produces, or their exchange-value. There can be no such thing as a superfluous worker.
