The Social Revolution/Part 2/Chapter 4
necessary if we were to raise the wages of labor to raise production above its present amount.
It will be one of the imperative tasks of the social revolution not simply to continue but to increase production. The victorious proletariat must extend production rapidly if it is to be able to satisfy the enormous demands that will be made upon the new regime.
INCREASE IN PRODUCTION.
There are various means by which production can be increased. Two of the most important of these have already attained great significance. Both have been applied with great results by the trusts of America from which very much can be learned concerning the methods of the social revolution. They show us how at a single stroke the productivity of labor can be increased simply by concentrating the total production in the most perfect industrial plants and throwing all those out of operation which do not attain a definite standard. The Sugar Trust, for example, a few years ago consigned all but about one-fourth of the industrial plants which it possessed to idleness and in this one-fourth it has produced as much as previously in the whole number. The whiskey trust also obtained eighty large distilleries and, at once put out of operation sixty-eight out of the eighty. It is only operating twelve distilleries but in these twelve it produces even more than hitherto in the eighty. A proletarian regime could proceed in the same manner. It could do this even easier because it would not be hindered by private property. Where individual industries are private property, the culling out of the inefficient by way of free competition is a very slow process. The trusts can only displace the less productive industries through the fact that they have destroyed private property in them by uniting all under one head. The method which the trusts can only apply to a relatively small sphere of production may be extended by a proletarian regime to the whole sphere of social production, since it will have totally abolished capitalistic private property. This method of increasing productivity by the culling out of inefficient industries will not be distinguished from the similar operation by the trusts of to-day simply by the extent of the operation but also in that it will include other methods and other purposes. The new regime will carry out this change principally in order to increase wages. The Trust on the other hand goes its way without regard to the laborers. Those laborers who are rendered superfluous by reduction of surplus industries it simply discharges. It utilizes them mainly as a means of pressing down the wages of the laborers who are at work and in increasing their dependence. Very naturally a victorious laboring class would proceed differently. It would transfer the laborers rendered superfluous by the closing of industries to other industries where their activity would continue. The trusts rather make the laborers superfluous because it is not their intention to perceptibly increase production. The greater the increase in the amount of products the greater the supply and the lower, under otherwise equal conditions, is the price. The trusts fight against all decline in prices. They would much rather limit production than extend it. When they produce only in the most efficient plants, this is done simply to reduce the cost of production and to increase profits, with the same or even an increased price, and not for the purpose of extending production. A proletarian regime, however, would act for the purpose of extending production, for it does not desire to raise profits but rather wages. It also would increase the number of laborers in the best industrial plants and it would thereby increase production, because in each plant more classes of laborers would work together. How possible this is and how much production will be influenced thereby I can explain by an example whose figures are taken wholly from the imagination and have no equivalent in reality but that nevertheless are not simply fantastic pictures but a real representation of things which find their counterpart in the trusts. Take, for example, the German textile industry which includes to-day a round million laborers (in 1895 993,257). Of these the great majority (in 1895 587,579) were occupied in plants which employed not more than 50 laborers. We take it for granted that the larger and the more comprehensive plant is always technically the more perfect. To be sure this is not true in all cases. It is possible that a factory with 20 laborers may be technically better organized than one in the same branch of industry with 80 laborers. But on an average the former statement would hold true and we can accept it all the more readily as we use it only as an example for the purpose of illustration and not as a proposition. Let us take it for granted that the most imperfect factories are those employing less than 50 laborers. All these would be closed and the work in them transferred to those factories in which more than 50 laborers were employed. These could then be divided into two shifts working one after the other. If the hours of labor are ten to eleven a day now each shift could then have its hours reduced to eight. From that time on the industry would run daily six hours more and its machinery would be so much the better used, while at the same time the hours of labor for each laborer would be shortened by two hours. We can take it for granted that the production of each individual would not be decreased thereby as we have had countless examples showing that the advantages of the shortened labor time generally, at least, outweigh the disadvantages. Considering that a laborer in the most imperfect industry to-day produces an amount of product which represents the value of 2,000 marks and that labor in the great industries is 100 per cent more productive (Sinzheimer makes a similar estimate of the productivity of the large and small industries) so that each laborer in a great industry would produce the value of 4,000 marks. The half million laborers in the small factories of the textile industries produce an amount of products having a value of a billion marks. The other half million laborers in the great industries produce in the same time an amount of products valued at two billion marks. The million of laborers can produce a product of the value of three million marks.
Under the new regime when the laborers were all concentrated in the great factories with more than fifty laborers, each laborer would produce to the value of 4,000 marks a year and the total production of the textile laborers would amount to four billion marks or one billion more than they formerly produced. For the purpose of comparison we consider that values would still be produced.
We can go still further and close not simply the small but the medium sized factories and concentrate the total textile production in the great factories employing more than 200 laborers. The total number of laborers employed in such factories in 1895 amounted to 350,306, or almost one-third of the total textile workers. Under these conditions it would be necessary to work the laborers in three shifts in order to employ all the laborers in the great factories alone and in order to avoid the night work while shortening the labor time of a day to five hours or half of the present time. To-day the laborer in the great industry produces perhaps four times as much as the one in the small industry, or according to our previous wholly arbitrary illustration about 8,000 marks a year. By the shortening of the labor time his product would not be reduced in equal degree because the better rested laborer will produce more than the over-worked one. We may accept the hypothesis that he could produce as much in eight hours as he to-day produces in ten. We would not be reckoning things too optimistically if we went further and considered that by shortening the labor time from eight to five hours the production of the laborer would not be lowered more than 25 per cent, certainly not as much as 37 per cent. Accordingly each laborer would produce at least 5,000 perhaps 6,000 marks in each year, and all together would produce five to six billion. The total production would therefore, as compared with the present, be doubled and the wages could be correspondingly doubled and this absolutely without any reference to confiscation of capital while at the same time the labor time would be reduced one-half. Indeed under certain conditions the increase of wages on the basis of the figures here given could be still greater. Let us assume that of the present yearly product of the textile industry, which we have called three billion, one billion is applied to wages and the second to the purchase of raw materials, machines, etc., and the third to the profit of capital. Now under the new regime six billion would be produced. Of this two would be applied to raw materials, machines and such like. One would serve for compensation to the expropriated capitalists and the completion of the previously mentioned social activity. This would leave three billion for wages. This would permit a tripling of wages. And all this without any new plans or new machinery, but simply through the closing of the little industries and transference of their laborers to the large ones. We simply need to do on a large scale what the trusts are doing on a small. It is only the private ownership of the means of production that hinders the development of modern production.
This method develops still another side. Our critics are very ready to tell us that for a long time it will be impossible to socialize production because the number of existing productive establishments is much too great and it will take too long a time for competition to crush out all the little industries and therewith create a possibility of socialist production. If the number of all the industrial plants in the German empire amounts to 2½ million and those of the textile alone to over 200,000, how could one possibly manage such a number of industries nationally?
Certainly the task appears alarming but it is very much reduced when we consider that the proletarian regime will apply the methods of the trust, and while it will expropriate all the industries at once, only the best equipped large industries will be further operated. Of the 200,000 textile industries there are only 3,000 which employ more than 50 workingmen. It is clear that the concentration of industry in these latter plants would very much simplify the task of the social regulation of production. It will be still simpler when we consider that the new regime will have closed up all plants employing less than 200 laborers. Of the 200,000 there would then only remain 800. To control and supervise this number of industries is certainly no longer an impossibility.
Here again there is another significant point of view. Our opponents and the pessimists in our own ranks measure the ripeness of our present society for social production by the number of ruins which are still strewn round it and of which it is still incapable of ridding itself. Over and over again the great number of little industries that still exist is triumphantly pointed out. But the ripeness for Socialism does not depend on the number of little industries that yet remain, but upon the number of great industries which already exist. Without a developed great industry socialism is impossible. Where, however, a great industry exists to a considerable degree it is easy for a socialist society to concentrate production and to quickly rid itself of the little industry. The socialist birds of ill omen, that simply know enough to announce the coming of ill luck by their warning croaks, continuously raise an obstinate clamor about the fact that the number of little industries in the German empire has increased 1⅛ per cent from 1882 to 1895. But they are blind to the fact that in the same period the number of large industries with more than fifty employes increased about 90 per cent, while the gigantic industries employing over 1,000 persons increased in the neighborhood of 100 per cent. It is this increase that is the preliminary condition of socialism and this is richly fulfilled. Even if the small industry does not absolutely decrease, that simply shows that the number of ruins which the proletarian regime will have to sweep away is still considerable. Meanwhile the trusts promise to greatly assist us in this respect.
In other directions also they offer us a forecast. The present trusts increase their profits not merely through increasing the productivity of their employes but also by economies of different forms. Socialist production must make use of these same methods in still higher degree. Among these economies are those relating to machinery, by products and cost of transportation. Taking an example from the textile industry, which demands a wholly different expenditure to transport the raw material and acessories to production for 200,000 than for 800,000 industrial plants. The same is the case with the cost of the supervision of industries. Of the 200,000 industries, the smallest to be sure demands practically no supervision. In this class are those with less than five laborers. Here the manager is also a worker. Over 12,000 exceed this limit. But their supervision also demands considerably more directive power than those of 800. Other savings are attained in that the trusts abolish the struggle of competing industries for markets. Since their appearance in the United States the number of commercial travelers employed has decreased. One of the most striking of these cases is instanced by J. W. Jenks in his treatise concerning the trust. The extension of production has so increased that the number of unskilled laborers employed in these plants have increased 51 per cent and of the skilled 14 per cent. At the same time the number of commercial travelers has decreased 75 per cent. Jenks also states that many trusts have, according to their own statements, saved from 40 to 85 per cent of their advertising expenses.
Finally the raising of wages in industry would set free a large number of labor powers whose existence to-day is merely parasitic. They maintain a wretched existence to-day in their little shops, not because these shops are a necessity but because their possessors are in despair of finding their bread in any other place or because they cannot earn enough by wage labor and seek a supplementary occupation.
Of the almost two million people who are occupied to-day in the German Empire in trade and commerce (exclusive of the post office and railroads) and hotel keeping perhaps a million would, with a sufficiently high wage in industry and sufficient demand for labor powers, be transferred from parasitic to productive activity.
These are the two methods for increasing the productive powers of the laboring class: The abolition of parasitic industry and the concentration of industries in the most perfect plants. By the application of these two means a proletarian regime can raise production at once to so high a level that it would be possible to considerably increase wages and simultaneously reduce the hours of labor. Every increase in wages and reduction of hours must again increase the attractiveness of labor and draw new laborers to production who were formerly parasitic, such for example as servants, small merchants, etc. The higher the wages the more laborers. But in a socialist society one can transform this saying into "the more workers the fewer the illdoers in society, the more produced and the greater the wages." This law would be absurd in a society of free competition where the greater the supply of laborers, under otherwise equal conditions, the lower the descent of wages. It is a law of wages for the socialist system of production.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE PRODUCTIVE
PROCESS.
The application of the two above mentioned methods of the trust to production have not exhausted the resources of the proletarian regime in relation to the increase of production. The productive process considered as a continuous transaction, as a reproductive process demands an undisturbed continuation, not simply of production, but also of circulation. If production is to go on without interruption it is necessary not simply that there be laborers for the creation of products, but it is also necessary that there be no break in the securing of raw materials and essentials of production, the necessary tools and machines, and the means of sustenance for the laborers, and that no interruption occur and that the finished product find a sale.
A stoppage in circulation signifies an economic crisis. It stops in some cases because too much is produced of some wares. In this case the industrial plants from which these products came cannot further function in their full capacity because of the lack of sale for their products. They receive no money for their products and the result of this is they lack the means to buy raw materials, to pay wages and so forth.