INDUSTRIAL LAW
INDUSTRIAL WAR
[1886]
Anyone who has attentively read the discussion of the so-called labor question during the past few months, must have observed that a strict definition of terms and phrases is the first thing needed in the discussion, and the one thing that has most been wanting. The loose use of terms tolerated by the economists has been extended by the newspapers, adopted erroneously by the preachers, abused by the professional labor reformers, and finally entirely misunderstood by the employed, until the popular notion of the matter has become little else than a tangle of fallacies and misconceptions of social facts, relations, and possibilities. He who says “social,” nowadays, takes license to promulgate vague and whimsical notions or projects, having for their general aim to bridge the traditional gulf between meum and tuum, or to take from one of his neighbors and give to another, according to his good judgment of what would be more “just.” As an illustration of misuse of terms I mention the use of “capital and labor” to designate employer and employee, and as an illustration of the abuse of catch phrases I refer to the almost suicidal misuse of “An injury to one is an injury to all” in the south-western strike.
The only attempt I have met with, in this discussion, to define what the labor question is, formulated it in this way: “With the growth of democracy the political power has passed into the hands of a numerical majority, while property is in the hands of a minority. There is therefore danger lest the former use the political power to plunder the latter, unless the latter conciliate the former by timely concessions.” If this were the question, it would, no doubt, be serious enough. It would mean that political institutions are not the safeguard of liberty and property under democracy, any more than they were such under older political forms; but that they are still only convenient means for those who can control the institutions to violate liberty and property to their own advantage. It would mean that all our boasted political progress was in question, for institutions that cannot guarantee property cannot be stable. Democracy would either have to yield at once to communism, as the only realization of its own principles, or it would be overthrown by a monarchical reaction to secure property. Furthermore, if the question were as stated, it would be one that would arise amongst the property classes, and would be suggested by alarm for their interests; it would not be a question raised amongst the employed, and bearing on their struggle for their interests. The question would therefore be a political question and a property question; it would not be a labor question.
If I attempt, out of the vague, sentimental, and declamatory expressions of the parties interested, and their friends, to formulate the question they try to raise, it seems to me to be this: How can those who have neither land nor capital, and who must therefore enter the organization of society as wage-workers, get their living, or get a better living, or get more than they now get out of the stock of goods in society, for the productive effort which they put into the work of society? The socialists answer this question by saying that a committee should be appointed to apportion the work of society, and distribute the product, according to some standards which each school of socialists says can easily be defined, but upon which no two schools are agreed. The professorial socialists say that some more “just” distribution ought to be found, that supply and demand will not do, that the socialistic schemes will not do, and that “ethics” must be asked to decide. The press, the pulpit, the politicians — all who solicit the power that the wages-class, by virtue of numbers, now possesses — stand eagerly ready to flatter and cajole it by any proposal or proposition that will please it.
Is the question above stated properly raised, or properly forced upon public attention? I venture to maintain that it is not. The question of how we shall get our living is common to all of us but that insignificant minority which has inherited land or capital enough to support a family without work. The question is no more anxious and perplexing to artisans or handicraftsmen than it is to the mass of the farmers, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, teachers, book-keepers, merchants, and editors, or to the aged, invalid, women, and others who depend upon small investments. It is constantly alleged in vague and declamatory terms that artisans and unskilled laborers are in distress and misery or are under oppression. No facts to bear out these assertions are offered. The wages-class is not a pauper class. It is not a petitioner for bounty nor a social burden. The problem how that part of society is to earn its living is not a public question; it is not a class question. The question how to earn one's living, or the best living possible in one's circumstances, is the most distinctly individual question that can be raised. A great deal might be done, by instruction and exhortation, to inform the individual mind and conscience — especially of parents — so that this question might be more wisely solved than it now is. Such would be a legitimate field for discussion, and the social consequences of foresight and early self-denial, such as are now employed by the best parents and young people amongst us, would be incalculable; but no public question can properly be raised as to how some shall make it easier for others to get a living, when the first are already fully burdened with the task of getting a living for themselves. Here, as at every other point in any unbiased attempt to deal with this subject, it is found that the real question is whether we shall maintain or abandon liberty with responsibility.
It is sometimes said to be a shocking doctrine that the employee enters into a contract to dispose of his energies, because this would put him on the same plane with commodities. This objection has been current amongst the German professorial socialists for years, and it has recently been made much of here by those who catch eagerly at the sentimental aspects of this subject. Every man who earns his living uses up his vital energy. He may till his own land and live on his own product, or he may raise a product and contract it away in exchange for what he wants, or he may contract away his time, or his productive energies, or “himself,” for the commodities that he needs for his maintenance. In the first case, there is no social relation at all. In the last two cases, no distinction can be made affecting the dignity or the interests of the man which is anything more than a dialectical refinement. The lawyer, doctor, clergyman, teacher, and editor each makes a commodity of himself just as much as the handicraftsman does; each renders services that wear him out; each takes pay for his services; each is “exploited” just as much by those who pay as the handicraftsman is. We men have a way of inflating ourselves with big words on this earth, as if we thus gained dignity or were any the less bound down to toil and suffering. If wages were abolished, or if the socialistic state were established, not a feature of the case would be altered. Men would be worn out in maintaining their existence, and the only question would be just what it is now: Can each one get more maintenance for a given expenditure of himself by living in isolation, or by joining other men in mutual services?
The wages system, then, is part of the industrial organization. An American farmer is his own landlord, tenant, and laborer; if he finds it hard to get a living, he has no employer against whom he can strike; he may curse the ground, or shake his fist in the face of heaven, but that will not help him. He must either work harder or cut down his enjoyments to the measure of his production. If, however, the three interests are separated in a higher organization of society — if the farmer makes a contract by which he yields the use of his land to another, and himself becomes a landlord, and if the new tenant employs a laborer, then the personal rights and interests of three men come into play, and impinge upon each other at every change which before would have affected different interests of the same person. The first farmer could not as employee strike against himself as employer, but the three new parties have antagonistic interests which must be adjusted and readjusted from time to time by some force or other. If, then, we regard the economic forces of supply and demand as the only, the proper, and the inevitable regulators of the complex and highly refined interests that arise between the members of a highly organized society, then “justice” can mean nothing but the unrestricted play of supply and demand. Nobody will be bound to cease grumbling at the result, but each will accept it as the best that he could get in a world of toil and disappointment. He will be satisfied that his neighbors have not robbed him. If, on the other hand, we do not believe that there are any economic forces at work in the matter, or that, if there are any, they work under any necessary laws, then we must regard the adjustment of interests as a product of arbitrary effort. There can then be no right and no justice at all; the only thing to be expected is war, industrial war, carried on by the parties in interest each for himself and to the utmost. Such is the only result to which we can come, and the socialists have generally reached it. There is no doubt that it is a clear issue between two schools of political economy which are diametrically opposed to each other. If there are economic laws, then it behooves us to find them out and submit to them; for they must control all economic interests, and only under them can we establish peace, order, and justice. If there are no economic laws, then war is the normal and only possible condition of society, unless we take refuge under the pitiless despotism of the socialistic state, with its hierarchy of volluptuaries at the top and the stolid barbarism of its brutish masses at the bottom. To reject the economic laws, accept the condition of industrial war, and then look to “ethics” to rule the social tempest, is beneath discussion.
An industrial war is not like a military combat. It is an extension of the old commercial war, which consisted in inflicting a positive harm on one's self in the hope of causing a contingent harm to one's enemy. It is at best like the schoolboy game known as “cutting jackets.” The industrial war simply aims to see who can stand it longest. It is currently asserted that a man has a right to strike. That assertion involves one of the incorrect uses of the word “right,” which are so common in this discussion. When a man “strikes” he exercises his will under liberty, that is to say, he exercises a prerogative, for it is the first prerogative of a free man to make or unmake contracts. He is also at liberty under our institutions, as at present existing, to combine with others of the same interest and the same way of thinking. However the other party to the contract has the same liberty. Hence, when both employers and employees combine, the battle is set for the industrial war.
There is a form of strike that would not be irrational, and would be in accordance with sound political economy; that is, if the employees should all stop work, maintaining that the employer could not fill their places except on the terms demanded by them, and should put their contention to the test by waiting to see whether he could or not. A lockout would be rational in the converse and corresponding case. It would then cost loss of time to the parties interested, but nothing more to them and nothing to anybody else. A strike, in which the employees take possession of the plant and hinder others from taking their places, is inconsistent with the peace and order of a modern civilized state. Such a device having once been employed, must inevitably be developed and elaborated in the effort to make it succeed. It could only produce anger and retaliation. It is an effort to coerce one of the parties to a bargain. Undoubtedly a man who has a bargain to make will do wisely to strengthen himself by all means in his power for the negotiation; but the man who pays wages parts with his capital, and, if he parts with it on terms to which he is coerced, he is wronged. He, in his turn, then, will defend his interests to the utmost.
The two chief extensions of the strike which have been made in the way of perfecting the methods of industrial war are the more intense organization and discipline of the employees and the boycott. The former has produced a conflict of organized with unorganized labor, and would, if it could be carried out, outlaw any employee who should choose to preserve his independence and liberty. The employees, while denouncing monopoly, have here employed the monopoly principle in its most outrageous form, and they seek to raise wages by crushing any one who will not come into the close combination which they regard as essential to the coercion they hope to exercise. In reaching about for means of this coercion, they have employed the strike to compel the employer to become their ally and discharge any one who stays out of their organization.
The boycott is a further attempt to find a point of reaction for the coercive apparatus. The original case of boycotting, from which the device got its name, was very generally approved, or at least not condemned, because it was set in operation against an Irish landlord. It was plain in that case, however, what the device was, and how monstrous an innovation it was in a civilized society. If, without process of law, a man can be so extruded from human society that he cannot buy or sell, hire, let, beg, borrow, lend, employ, or be employed, what becomes of the security of life, liberty, or property? Of course no such result could be brought about unless the boycotters could bring terrorism to bear on the whole community, including, at last, jurors, judges, and witnesses, to force people who are not parties to the quarrel to depart from the legal and peaceful enjoyment of their own will and pleasure to take part in the boycott. It is the severest trial to which our institutions have yet been put, to see whether they can protect in his rights a man who has incurred for any reason unpopularity amongst a considerable number of his neighbors, or whether democratic institutions are as powerless in this case as aristocratic institutions were when a man incurred the hostility of a great noble.
The doctrines that are preached about the relations of employer and employee would go to make that relationship one of status and not of contract, with the rights and duties unevenly divided. The relationship would then be one like marriage, entered by contract, but, when once entered upon, not solvable except by some process of divorce, and, while it lasts, having its rights and duties defined by law. It is very remarkable that just when all feudal relations between landlord and tenant are treated with disdain and eagerly assailed, there should be an attempt to establish feudal relations between employer and employee. An employer has no obligation whatever to an employee outside of the contract, any more than an editor has to his subscribers, or a merchant to his customers, or a house-owner to his tenants, or a banker to his depositors. In a free democratic state employees are not wards of the state; they are not like Indians, or freedmen, or women, or children. If it can be shown that any law or custom of our society keeps down the man who is struggling for himself, every fair-minded man could and would join the agitation for its removal; but when we are asked to create privileges or tolerate encroachments, resistance is equally a social duty.
These extravagant and cruel measures, therefore, produce war inside of our society. Industrial factions arise, which are organized under monarchical or oligarchic forms, and which threaten to carry out their program at all cost to the community. They are doomed to fail. They will not be overcome by conciliation and concession because they are not animated by the spirit from which any concession will secure peace, but only larger demands. They will fail because they will come into collision with the sober sense of the community. It is indeed a great experiment to grant the fullest liberty and the greatest political equality, in the faith that the unsuccessful will not only regard without envy the prosperity of the successful, but also will help to secure and defend it; but it is a fallacy in every point of view that, because those-who-have-not outnumber those-who-have, therefore those-who-have-not will plunder those-who-have. Still more certainly, the measures that have been used to assist the employed class against the employers will fail, because they are irrational and at war with economic forces. There are a great many cases in sociology where the sum of the parts is not the whole, but is zero. The trades-union is one of them; a national trades-union, or an international trades-union, of all employees, instead of being invincible would be nil. If by all going out to-day all could force an advance in wages, by all going back to-morrow all would restore the old rate. The human race cannot lift itself by the boot-straps in this way any more than in any other. If we want more wages, the only way to get them is by working, not by not working.
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