Part 22

To speak of capitalism as endowed with a soul, is indeed a paradox. But the conception of soul is itself paradoxical. The man of science dispenses with it in so far as he can. All that compels us rationally to posit the existence of soul, is its works, good and evil. The hypothesis of a human soul has been forced upon us by the fact that there is in the action of man an element that transcends the needs and purposes of the body, an element that we often see growing into such commanding importance that it reduces the body to the rank of mere instrument. Capitalism, too, appears to subserve purposes that transcend its proper ends. To what end, in profit-making, is the destruction of personality, the corruption of the sentiment of humanity, that the Socialists attribute to capitalism? To the Socialists themselves capitalism appears endowed with a soul, to whose purposes capital's immediate processes are merely instrumental. Only, the soul is one of unmixed evil.

II

Capitalism, like every other social system, implies a class that rules and a class that is controlled. The ruling class--_pace_ those political theorists who refuse to know that a ruling class exists--is composed of the capitalist employers. And how do the capitalist employers differ from any others of the masters that the world has known? Not merely in that they possess accumulations and pay wages in money. These are incidental facts. What is essential is that the capitalist employers, in so far as they are truly such, are controlled in all their active dealings by the principle of commercialization.

And commercialization is a psychical phenomenon. It is the substitution, in economic conduct, of a process of calculation for a process of feeling and will. The antithesis between the two processes has long been recognized by practical men, under the form of the contrast between "business" and "sentiment." That much maligned abstraction of the economists, "the economic man," is nothing but the capitalistic entrepreneur, reacting as he must to a competitive situation. What the orthodox economists failed to observe is that so-called "economic conduct" is class conduct. It is confined to the merchants and manufacturers of a competitive régime, whose daily life consists in the manipulation of exchange values. Employers who enjoy a monopoly, independent laborers, and even the typical wage earners of capitalism, may--indeed, must--permit their actions to be governed by other motives, as well as by that of profit. But the capitalist employer in a competitive trade is quickly taught by bitter experience that it is not his function to judge and choose. His business is to calculate; and the less non-economic principles of action interfere with his decisions, the more certain he is of success. All elements essential to his business present themselves in the guise of exchange values. All magnitudes, thus, are commensurate: you compare one with the other and choose the greater. Intelligence is required for the ascertaining of relative magnitudes. But the calculation once made, action is determined. Whether you are a man of strong will or weak will, of active feelings or passive, you do not hesitate when, in effect, a dollar is offered you in exchange for fifty cents.

It is cool intelligence, not dominant personality, that, under a purely capitalistic system, determines the distribution of the seats of power. The capitalist employers are our ruling class, but of all classes that have ever held power, they least resemble personal rulers. They calculate, but conditions beyond their control determine. And, to be most successful, they must divest their calculations of all elements that are irrelevant to profit making. If I am a capitalist employer, operating under conditions of keen competition, I buy no more readily from an honest man than from a rogue, provided the rogue can give good title to the things he sells. I hire men, Teutons or Slavs or Latins, white, black or yellow, with a sole view to their effectiveness for purposes of profit. I may have private opinions on religion or politics or morals; on the use of alcohol or opium or tobacco. But unless I can relate such manifestations of virtues or vices to the point of profit, I must suppress these opinions, in my active dealings with men. It follows, then, that in all that concerns the capitalist employer, in all that concerns his essential rulership, he is a respecter of the liberties of men.

No one, it is true, is a capitalist employer, pure and simple. In his social life, every one is likely to retain some of his age-old prejudices, and to seek to enforce age-old oppressions. As a business man, no one would be so foolish as to refuse to sit in the same board of directors with any other capable business man, Hellene or [Greek: barbaros]. In his club life, on the other hand, many a business man affects a patrician exclusiveness. The most Christian business man does not refuse to deal freely with atheists, but very likely he refuses to admit them to his house. As a mine operator I should employ negroes as skilled or unskilled laborers, as foremen or bosses, if such employment were favorable to financial results. I might none the less, as a citizen, attempt to exclude them from public office. In business hours, the exercise of personal, political or religious oppression is penalized by technical inefficiency and pecuniary loss. Out of business hours, however, every man tends still to revert to the aboriginal state of manhood, narrow, illiberal, obstinate, oppressive.

Capitalism, furthermore, is far from having attained complete dominance, even in business affairs. Personal whim, as a co-determinant of action, is not obsolete, but merely obsolescent. The president of a great manufacturing corporation of the Middle West detests cigarettes, and has promulgated the rule that no men whose fingers are cigarette stained shall be added to his staff. Mr. Henry Ford intends to confine the benefits of employment in his mills to men who are "worthy," that is, to men who conform to certain standards of conduct that are good in their employer's eyes. There are employers who will not tolerate in their shops the presence of Socialists; others who have engaged in a crusade to exterminate "knockers." In all such cases of essentially personal discrimination an attempt is made, however, to justify it on abstract grounds of efficiency. Cigarette smokers, loose livers, Socialists and "knockers" are poor workmen, assert these employers. The assertion, we all know, is far from being universally true. In so far as it is false, however, it is a gracious falsehood in the light of the spirit of capitalism. It is a concession to the principle that pecuniary considerations alone justify an invasion of personal liberty.

Discrimination on personal grounds is, moreover, so exceptional as to count as amiable eccentricity. It is recognized as a handicap, which can be overcome only by striking superiority in other directions. Mr. Ford may watch over the private conduct of his employees, because he is able to pay much higher wages than anyone else. The manufacturing concern to which reference has been made may discriminate against able workmen with cigarette stained fingers, because it is efficiently organized, and enjoys a monopoly position. Such instances are necessarily rare, and are interesting only as a contrast to the businesses controlled strictly by the spirit of capitalism.

Personal oppression may still be exercised within business hours: but it represents an added cost, readily determined by scientific management. The machinery for its suppression is in motion; it cannot forever survive. There is no equally effective machinery for the elimination of the personal oppression that emerges out of business hours. In one's business calculations, one regards a social prejudice, even if it is directed against oneself, as irrelevant to practical action, so long as it finds expression only beyond the realm of business. A persistent slanderer of alien races finds no difficulty in raising a loan from a foreign banker, provided that the security he offers is good. No element of revenge in the relations between Parisian banks and German customers has appeared since the Zabern incident. Indirectly, however, the social influence of capitalistic toleration is very considerable. One who has an alien partner may continue to cherish the heroic myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority, but it will be through desire for consistency, not out of conviction. International financial forays upon weak nations, like the late Six Power loan, have the effect of weakening many a national prejudice. National, racial and religious prejudices retain their pristine vitality only where capitalism has not yet reached a high state of development. It is in Russia and Rumania, economically backward states, not in England and America, the most capitalistic of all, that the policy of expelling heterogeneous elements flourishes. It is in the Old South, still in a precapitalistic stage, that the social gulf between the races is widest. It is on the Pacific Coast, whose whole volume of capitalistic industry could be overmatched by that of a city like Newark, that detestation of an alien race rises to the rank of a political issue.

III

Toleration and its counterpart, personal liberty, these are the first constituents of the soul of capitalism. Capitalistic toleration, it is true, originates in interest, and is limited by interest. If capitalism admonishes me to tolerate atheism in my foreman, so long as it does not interfere with his efficiency, it equally admonishes me to extirpate excessive piety in his person, if, for example, intervals of ecstatic contemplation divert his attention from my interests. Morally such toleration is vastly inferior to that which is founded upon a broad sentiment of humanity and a recognition of the presumption involved in the prescribing of rules to one's fellow man. But ethical toleration can find lodgment only in the breasts of the chosen few. "Neither do I condemn thee." Of all the miracles, is not this expression of toleration the greatest? Millions upon millions have repeated the sentiment devoutly; but to how few has it become a rule of life!

Capitalistic toleration, on the other hand, is a sentiment not too refined for the most vulgar souls. Indeed, its appeal is probably strongest to the very most vulgar; certainly, to the most selfish. A high-minded employer may seek to bring up his working-folk in the way they should go--that is, his own conception of the Way. It is the greedy materialist who says: "What do I care how my workmen eat and drink and play, what they read, how they vote, worship and marry? It's all one to me, so they deliver the goods." Ethical toleration selects for its votaries the few and the unselfish; capitalistic toleration selects the many and the selfish. And it is for this reason that the liberty based upon capitalistic toleration is the broadest and most substantial of all. "City air makes free," says the proverb. Not because the city is the abode of choice souls, but because the city is capitalistic.

The struggle for religious liberty, it may be said, antedates capitalism. This is not wholly true; the hot beds of religious liberalism in early modern times were the cities, already becoming capitalistic. The Independents and Quakers of England, the Huguenots of France, the Calvinists of Holland, the Lutherans of Germany, represented a germinating capitalism. If the spirit of capitalism was not yet highly evolved, neither were the liberties sought broadly conceived. The Charter and their own valiant spirits won for the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay freedom to worship God. But there was no freedom, in Massachusetts Bay, to go forth from the Puritan settlement and dance around a maypole. Precapitalistic freedom meant only the removal of specific oppressions, sometimes grave, sometimes trivial, imposed by the constituted authorities. From the natural human disposition to interfere in one another's affairs, to standardize humanity, to excise variations above and below the normal, there never was any freedom, except upon the lawless frontier, until capitalism appeared upon the earth.

A class freedom! say the Socialists, and a hollow one! That the Socialists are permitted to go up and down upon the earth, teaching doctrines that they themselves proclaim to be subversive of the interests of those whom they designate as the ruling class, is sufficient evidence that the freedom is not properly described as hollow. If Karl Marx had appeared in the days of Charles the Great to teach doctrines equally subversive of the existing order, he would have found short shrift indeed. That it is a class freedom is, however, true, in a sense. The capitalist employer, who deals with many men in the course of his business, must learn to tolerate many personal idiosyncracies, and must in turn be met with toleration by many. The forced repetition of acts of toleration tends to mold the temperament of the capitalist employers as a class, and to establish among them a large measure of personal freedom. This repetition is lacking in the experience of the worker. Dealing with one employer alone, or with only a few employers in infrequent succession, the laborer is less likely to appreciate the significance of the toleration he enjoys, or to learn from the business process itself the need of toleration towards others.

Nevertheless, under capitalism the laborer does undoubtedly make gains in personal liberty which he could not have made under earlier systems. We know what the Spartans did with the Helots who varied above the type of servile manhood. They assassinated them. We know what the Romans did with slaves who thought too manfully. They crucified them. In the long ages of serfdom in Western Europe, what was the natural fate of the serf who held his head too high? The commonplace facts of his torturings were seldom regarded worthy of mention in the Chronicles. Within the last century, however, men have been beaten to death in Europe for daring to maintain their preferences in mating against the wishes of their lords.

Class liberty? Does it mean nothing to the Republican mechanic in Birmingham, Alabama, that a Democratic employer would be universally regarded as a fool for concerning himself with the politics of his men? Does it mean nothing to the Roman Catholic workman that he may live for years in a Protestant community without once encountering discrimination against him on account of religion? Those who affirm that the liberty of capitalism, even in its overflow to the working class, is hollow and meaningless, can never have permitted their study or their imagination to sound very thoroughly the depths of human injury and wretchedness.

So much, however, must be granted: that the liberty afforded the worker by capitalism has its offsets. If the employer no longer regards himself as justified in ordering the private life of his workman, neither does he feel responsible for protecting the workman against the distress accompanying sickness or superannuation, or even commercial disorder. The worker has paid for his freedom with increased insecurity of his lot. But that the freedom has been bought too dear, would be hard to maintain. Let us suppose that a landowner organizes his possessions upon a feudal plan, and invites working families to come and serve him, yielding implicit obedience to him in all personal matters as well as in matters pertaining to the technique of production. In return for their ungrudging services, let him guarantee them a sufficiency of food, rough clothing, and rude housing, together with rights to maintenance in disability and old age. How many workers will make haste to attach themselves to him? Where workers have tasted of capitalistic freedom, it is safe to say that none would accept the offered privileges.

IV

If capitalism had offered the working class nothing but the crumbs of middle class liberty, the diatribes of the revolutionaries would be not without justification. For admittedly, liberty has been gained in far greater measure by the capitalist employer than by the workman. But capitalism has done vastly more for labor than this. It has given rise to that most interesting and important of all modern social phenomena, the solidarity of labor. As an active, working concept, the fraternity of labor is just as certainly a product of capitalism as is social toleration. The latter is the soul of capitalism, as it manifests itself in the class of employers, the former, as it manifests itself in the class of employees.

To this statement a Socialist will at once take exception. The sentiment of brotherhood, the Socialists claim, originates in the common experiences of poverty and hard labor. But the men at the passages of the Jordan who slew one another over the pronunciation of Shibboleth were doubtless manual workers, and were certainly poor. The merciless strife between Saxon and Celt in England was primarily between men who were all poor and workers. The participants in the Sicilian vendettas, in the Scottish clan struggles, in the Kentucky feuds, might well be honored with the title proletariat, by virtue of poverty and laboriousness of life. Fraternity is too luxurious a plant to bloom upon a barren soil of universal labor and poverty. Every one who reads the documents of middle nineteenth century America is aware of the uncompromising hostility of the American workingman toward the distressed Irish seeking an escape from famine. Later, there is abundant evidence of working class contempt and hostility directed toward the immigrating workmen from Germany and Scandinavia. Twenty years ago it was the Dago that experienced the inhospitality of the workingmen toward their alien brothers; today it is the Wapp--the collectivity of unfortunates of uncouth ways and unimaginable speech that seek refuge here from the poverty and oppression of southeastern Europe. No middle class worshipper of a family tree rooted in the old colonies can hold the Wapp in more profound detestation than do many of our recent arrivals. "Zese tam fools [the Wapps], zey ruins zis tam counthry."

It is the attitude of the unions, we are told, that in the North represents the chief obstacle to the progress of the negro away from the menial services and the unskilled employments. It was the working class that forced, first Chinese, and later Japanese exclusion. It is working class politics that demands a white Australia, and vexes the British Empire over the question of emigration from India. "Workingmen are brothers," say the Socialists. Not by birth and native instincts. Not by virtue of community in labor and poverty. If there is such a thing as a fraternity of labor, it is begotten of capitalism.

An active sentiment of brotherhood, does, unquestionably, spring up under capitalism. Differences of race and religion dwindled to insignificance among the coal miners in the great strike of 1904. The Lawrence and Paterson strikes, and the strike in the copper country, have offered abundant evidence of the growing strength of the feeling of working class solidarity. It would be difficult to cite a single recent strike in which men and women of traditionally hostile races and creeds have not coöperated with the utmost harmony and good will.

No one will deny that the more conscious the workers are of the pressure of capitalism, the more rapidly does the feeling of solidarity develop. This is the moral gain that is afforded by labor disputes. It is a gain which is not to be had without its cost, in the disorganization of industry, the impoverishment of multitudes of working families, the destruction of life and property, and the loosing upon society of evil passions. Is the gain worth its cost? In the opinion of many observers of our social movement, the cost is tremendous, but few of these observers attempt to strike a balance between cost and gain. This is because they have failed to recognize working class solidarity as a significant step in moral progress.

The development of solidarity among American workingmen is proceeding rapidly; in other countries its progress is not less manifest. This is true despite the fact that the problem of creating harmony between hostile races and religions is more serious where uninterrupted continuity on the same soil renders easy the survival of ancient prejudices. The hostility between Czech and German, between Magyar and Slav, is mitigated when the representatives of these warring races work side by side in the same factory, oppressed by the same factory regulations, impoverished by the same crises. Evidence is accumulating, to prove that the internationalism of labor is becoming a reality. It may not be true that French workingmen are already so utterly averse to the idea of shooting down their German brethren as the Socialistic literature and the spokesmen of Socialist and Labor parties would have us believe. But there is very much more than a fervent hope in working class anti-militarism. If French and German workmen might at present fail to refuse to kill one another in war, the time is perhaps not far distant when the outcome of an international war may be rendered problematical through the extension of working class solidarity.

For the working class, solidarity is producing results quite analogous to those produced in the class of capitalistic employers by the pursuit of profit. Solidarity is unthinkable without a measure of toleration. The American trade unionist learns to tolerate the alien origin, the broken speech and uncouth manner, the strange religion, and the unexpected outlook upon life, of the foreign workman who must either become a brother unionist and faithful ally, or a scab and an enemy. And out of this toleration is created a sphere of personal freedom from social encroachment such as no workman of an earlier epoch ever enjoyed. Fraternity and liberty, these are the positive acquisitions won by labor out of the very oppression of capitalism. Of the revolutionary trinity only equality remains beyond the visible horizon. And even equality may be brought nearer, if not realized, through the further perfecting of working class liberty and fraternity.

V