“These first phases were long, difficult and beset by difficulties of every sort. The society, courageously pursuing its endeavor, had to struggle against the awkward dispositions of a terrain whose yield did not repay the interest on the capital. Then it had recourse to loans, which, while facilitating the means of action, but a burden on the common funds whose redemption would take a long time. Finally, by dint of perseverance, labor and care, the soil was enriched. The seeds buried in the furrows engendered an abundance of produce whose superior quality doubled its value.
“From then on the association was on the path to prosperity. The debts were reduced, to short-term loans paid off on an annual basis and the society members began to receive dividends proportional to their shares. The savings fund grew by a third of the net benefits, permitting the association to buy, as needed, more terrain situated on the perimeter of its farmland.
“The families, thus grouped, live happily. They enjoy a relative wellbeing, and an assurance of future security, for themselves and for their children, who enter into direct participation in the association after them. They are habituated to the active and intelligent life that the association has made for them.
“Love of community is profoundly rooted in human hearts; fraternity has cemented the effect of cohabitation. Good instincts, no longer having to combat envy or poverty, are fully developed. All the members apply themselves as best they can to the task that the prosperity of the colony requires of them; they are working for themselves, since they benefit from it, in proportion to their fatigue and there share in the subscription of the colony.
“Let us pass on now to the colony’s constitution.
“At the head of the association is a managing director, assisted by two deputies and an administrative council, all dependent on the suffrage of the members.
“The income is divided into three parts: the interest derivative of the capital, the dividends providing net benefits and the reserve put into the savings fund.
“Every year, and inventory of the financial year is compiled, and once the interest payments and payments to the savings fund have been deducted, the remaining third is divided between the society members proportionately to the work they have done and the number of their shares.
“The society members have no need to buy the necessities of life externally; the association furnishes them with clothing, footwear, bed linen and so on. As for meals, they are held in common, in one or several rooms, depending on the size of the colony.
“The society members cannot leave the colony without surrendering their shares to it. They do not admit strangers once the initial work is complete, limiting their number to the founders or the founders’ families. In case of the total extinction of a family, the vacant share reverts to the association.
“The statutes fix a maximum of 30,000 francs and a minimum of 5000 francs for the contribution of each society member. The State imposes that clause on the association to prevent capitalists from speculating; by way of compensation, however, it has exempted it from the control of the Finance Commission with respect to the conversion into bonds of the excess of prescribed incomes, deeming that in this case, the capitalization is not to the profit of an individual but that of an entire society. And as its aim, in penalizing the excess of private capital, is to break up fortunes as much as possible, to redistribute them to on a wide scale, the association shares its views. Before the adoption of the reform proposed by the Minister of Finance, the association was similarly exempted from the previous law that imposed a tax of 50% on the excess of its revenues.
“The association is also free of mutual obligations of commerce external to the colony. They are restricted to the circle of the association itself, which furnishes its members with the objects of primary necessity and fabricates, with the products of exploitation, that which nature does not provide in its entirety—clothing, bed linen, shoes, furniture, etc. As for objects of secondary necessity, the colonists can acquire them in the city, or wherever they please. Such purchases are entirely facultative; they no longer have the character of a legal obligation.
“The State, in encouraging the agricultural associations and the industrial associations that I shall mention in due course, wants to develop by this means a spirit of unity and to equalize conditions and fortunes by way of fraternity. It has made them into free communes, which it liberates from all imposition, in order to inspire citizens with an appetite for labor and patriarchal life, liberated from all preoccupation. In a word, it is aiming to render itself unnecessary, or at least only to conserve a central arbitrage, to group around it a nursery of small states independent from one another, relating to it as it is related to the International Congress.
“In order to reach this goal it treats private fortunes with a rigor that is perhaps in contradiction with individual liberty. This precise purpose of this rigor is to bring out the moral and material advantages of social cohesion.
“When the time comes that each association encloses within itself all the material aliments of existence, and cities will have become cities of workers, governing themselves with institutions adapted to their needs, society will form a single immense machine whose innumerable cogwheels will spin, apparently in opposite directions but in reality in perfect accord; the State will no longer be anything but the central axle of that machine.
“From then on, taxation will become local; it will fall within the purview of associations. The State, whose role will be reduced to that of a surveillance commission and a supreme court, will only draw exactly what is needed for the exercise of functions that are purely moral, no longer effective.
“That is where enlightened minds want to lead society. I do not know where they will arrive there, but I assume so, to judge by the progress realized since our epoch. The association, logically, ought to ramify and substitute itself for the egotistical regime of ‘every man for himself.’
“As I said on the subject of the family, society began with the family and will end with it. The association is the only means of dividing society into rational categories, cemented by reciprocal needs and common interest.”
Industry: Industrial Associations
After pausing for a few minutes, Monsieur Landet went on:
“Let us now deal with of industrial associations.
“They are of two sorts: dependent and independent. Dependent associations are those which, not having been founded with common capital, belong to the State, which is both their employer and their sleeping partner. Independent associations are those which, having been founded with common capital, belong entirely to themselves. The former are State factories, the latter the factories of a constituted society.”
“You’re not talking about companies founded on shares?” said Hobson.
“There are none.”
“What?”
“No, there are none. It has been realized that industrial enterprises created for the profit of shareholders outside the exploitation concentrate public fortune in the hands of a few privileged individuals, not by virtue of their intelligence or their personal labor but by virtue of the quantity of money they put into the business and the sum of the work they extract from the workers. It was not just, in fact, that people outside an enterprise shared in it benefits without having done their share of the work.”
“So the State takes possession of all monopolies.”
“Yes. The State attracts to itself, as to a common center, everything that only profits those who have done nothing to merit it, to the prejudice of those who devote their time and effort thereto. It wants to equilibrate the balance of compensations as much as possible, in attributing the fruits of labor to the same people from whom they are acquired. It takes possession of all monopolies in order to divide between the workers the reward that it judges to be unjustly diverted to the shareholders.”
“By dint of claiming to affirm individual liberty, one finishes up annihilating it; one falls into absolutism. The State becomes an imperso
nal power, uniting all prerogatives, all monopolies. Separately, the citizens are nothing; property is generalized to the point at which it no longer has any individual existence; it belongs to everyone and no one; private initiative is stabbed in the heart.”
Monsieur Landet smiled sardonically. “Oh, you really are a product of your century!” he said. “The State becomes an impersonal power, it is true; that general interest sacrifices individual liberty to it, I also admit; but, exchanging liberty for liberty, is it not preferable that it is the State—which is to say, the social body—that takes possession of the ensemble of property rather than a few individuals already favored by fortune? ‘That which profits the State profits individuals; the converse is not the case,’ the Finance Minister said at the podium.
“Enterprises mounted on shares, I repeat, profit a few shareholders whose work makes no contribution to them—people who, already rich, have no further need to increase their fortunes. Before the shareholders, the administrators take the lion’s share, in the secrecy of closed board meetings. The public, in view of whom these enterprises have supposedly been put into operation, pay more dearly for the products, by the amount that swells the dividends of the shareholders, when the contrary ought to be the case. The more the utility these enterprises makes itself felt, the more success they enjoy, and the more dearly the administrators, in accord with the shareholders, make the customers pay. In brief, they raise their prices when their profits impose a duty on them to reduce them.
“And the workman who has been the effective cause of this prosperity? No one thinks about him. He is a cog in the machine, who much furnish a determined sum of work per day. If he does more, so much the better for the shareholders and administrators; if he does not reach his target, he is sacked, and that is that. He is the one who makes the dividends increase, but he is not included in the distribution. The shareholders enjoy an income in tranquility, which is like a rolling snowball, without any cost of effort.
“The workers sustain all the fatigue and the most meager wages, the shareholders have none of the fatigue and all the benefits.”
“Oh! You’re making an apology for socialism!”
“Certainly.”
“You know what its consequences are, though?”
“Better than anyone; I have been the victim of it in 1848 and 1871. In 1848 a bullet fired from a barricade broke my left arm; in 1871 my town house, near the Conseil d’État was burned down. In encouraging its doctrine I’m neglecting my personal interest; I’m not envisaging that which has been, but that which ought to be, that which will be in 2000 years. Personally, I have powerful motives for hating it, but I support it even so, because it is good, just and natural.”
“You’re pursuing an ideal. All that is good, just and natural is often in contradiction with practicality.”
“Today, yes, because those who want to take liberty to excess are the first to use tyrannical reprisals when they have the upper hand. All regimes are like that. Has not the red terror always been followed by the white terror?35 So, you would like one social class to have all the privileges, all the honors, all the enjoyments, by right of birth, and the other to have all the fatigue, all the insults and all the poverty by virtue of fate? No, that can only by temporary; it’s contrary to morality.”
“Then you foresee the triumph of socialism?”
“Complete, dazzling and definitive.”
“I’d be curious to know how it has emerged victorious from the centuries-long struggle that it has sustained against the old institutions.”
“Oh, in a very simple manner: by conciliation. Those who had not, weary of being the mere instruments of those who had, went on strike. They refused to work any longer for the advantage of their employers, shareholders or private masters, if the latter did not allow them to share in the profits, after inventory.”
“And you find that quite natural?”
“It’s logical.”
“Everything, however, requires a director.”
“And what can the director do without the worker? One is the brain, the other the hand. The hand can do nothing without the brain, the brain without the hand. The director is the soul, the workers the body; they obey a directive will as the body obeys the impression of the soul. Deprived of the body, the soul can no longer act; nothing remains but a corpse. Let us invert the comparison; imagine a healthy soul in a paralyzed body; it might experience external impressions and want to act, but it is impotent to move an inert mass. The soul is as necessary to the body as the body is to the soul. That necessity is so obvious that the materialist school confounds the two.”
“The soul is more necessary than the body, since it is the essence of life.”
“What is life without action, without movement, without practical utility? I’ll choose another example, taking for an item of comparison a steam engine. All its wheels, gears and belts move by virtue of the primary impulsion transmitted by the drive-shaft. Suppress the drive-shaft; the wheels creased to turn, the gears to mesh, the belts to relay. The machine stops; it no longer has a soul. Change tactics; remove a wheel—just one—from the assembly; in spite of the primary impulsion transmitted by the drive-shaft, you will only obtain a partial result, without determinant effect. The wheel that you have removed commands another, and so on. And that series of connected mechanisms ends up with a complete action. That complete action gives a result that each component, taken separately, could not obtain. Thus, the drive-shaft can do nothing without the wheels, the wheels nothing without the drive-shaft. They are indispensable to one another. Such is the theory of the association.
“I have had recourse to that parable to bring out the necessity first of conciliation, then of association.
“Those who had not therefore said to those who have: ‘You are the stomach, we are the limbs; you cannot function without us, we cannot function without you. You are the mind, we are the hand. You bring money, we bring labor; money is nothing without labor, labor is nothing without money. United, we can do anything; separated, we can do nothing. Until now, your money has found in us agents of fecundity; our poverty has found in you a means of making a living. Our collaboration has made you rich and left us poor. The moment has come to level the conditions. You have every interest in hearing us. Let us not cut; let us conciliate. Since you, who possess, have need of us and we, who do not possess, have need of you, let us associate in work in which we collaborate. That will be a stimulant to our activity, a recompense for our fatigue. You will profit from it more than us, by the increase in profits that the prospect of our individual interest will realize for you as well as us.’
“The shareholders and employers resisted. The workers were obstinate in their cause, Finally, justice was done to their claim. There was a proportional adjustment of the level of their salaries to the sum of their labor. Spurred on by their own interests, they redoubled their zeal and increased the profits to the point at which, when divided up, the shareholders or employers found a further advantage therein.
“Then enterprises mounted by means of shares were extended so far that the State was troubled by it. Seeing them as rival powers, growing every day, it decreed the annulment of shares of every sort and reimbursed their owners at the issue price. Consequently, the exploitation of the enterprises seized reverted to the State. It maintained the association of workers and placed a managing director at their head, also associated, but in proportion to the responsibility of his functions. The workers’ share was immediately increased by three quarters of that which had previously been reserved for the shareholders and administrators—a share that represented half the net profits.”
“But since the State has nationalized industrial enterprises,” Hobson objected, “what use, on the Bourse, is the annuity of 4½% created by the Finance Minister supposedly to favor the development of commerce and industry?”
“It serves to facilitate the transactions between manufacturers and merchants. The decree that monopolizes enterprises moun
ted by shares does not affect enterprises mounted at individual expense, but it only admits, in establishing a trading company, the association of people participating directly in the enterprise and it limits that trading company to three names. The conscription of income, combined with the association of the workforce, is sufficient guarantee that an employer cannot acquire a disproportionate fortune.
“I shall pass on now to independent associations.
“Independent associations are those that do not derive from the State, but belong to themselves. They are founded with communal capital. The society members are workers in the enterprise. They realize a true association; they are established on the same basis as agricultural associations and, like them, are examples if the conscription of income. There is, however, one detail to note: the ensemble of associations of the same party forms a corporation.
“Every corporation exhibits its products annually at the National Palace, before a jury composed of members elected by each corporation. The jury, having invited the public to write comments in a ledger open at the door of the National Palace, awards a prize to the corporation whose product surpasses the rest and combines three qualities: elegance, solidity and economy.
“The goal of these corporations is the improvement of the practical arts by the spirit of competition.
“Is it not to corporations that we owe those marvels of good taste, in architecture, furniture, costume, sculpture and painting, which, before the great Revolution, marked each century with an original style: the Byzantine, the Gothic, the Romantic, the Renaissance, the Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI styles? All those styles were the consequence of the popular turn of mind. Some were severe, others graceful, but the severe succeeded the graceful without abrupt transition; each had its distinctive character. And how well those works were designed, executed and polished! How well they withstood the insults of time. The reason is that once, independently of the spirit of corporation, people were not as dogged in their haste; they invested time in their work, with a view to solidity and real beauty, whereas today, people are only concerned with appearances, and everything is done at ‘full steam.’ Fragility is built in, under the pretext of promoting commerce.
The World in 2000 Years Page 19