Mr Calvin swallowed. The point had been driven home. He swallowed again and cleared his throat.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I stand convicted. It is absurd. But we’ve got to do something. It is a case of life and death for us of the middle class. We refuse to perish. We elect to be absurd and to return to the truly crude and wasteful methods of our forefathers. We will put back industry to its pretrust stage. We will break the machines. And what are you going to do about it?’
‘But you can’t break the machines,’ Ernest replied. ‘You cannot make the tide of evolution flow backward. Opposed to you are two great forces, each of which is more powerful than you of the middle class. The large capitalists, the trusts, in short, will not let you turn back. They don’t want the machines destroyed. And greater than the trusts, and more powerful, is labour. It will not let you destroy the machines. The ownership of the world, along with the machines, lies between the trusts and labour. That is the battle alignment. Neither side wants the destruction of the machines. But each side wants to possess the machines. In this battle the middle class has no place. The middle class is a pygmy between two giants. Don’t you see, you poor perishing middle class, you are caught between the upper and nether millstones, and even now has the grinding begun.
‘I have demonstrated to you mathematically the inevitable breakdown of the capitalist system. When every country stands with an unconsumed and unsaleable surplus on its hands, the capitalist system will break down under the terrific structure of profits that it itself has reared. And in that day there won’t be any destruction of the machines. The struggle then will be for the ownership of the machines. If labour wins, your way will be easy. The United States, and the whole world for that matter, will enter upon a new and tremendous era. Instead of being crushed by the machines, life will be made fairer, and happier, and nobler by them. You of the destroyed middle class, along with labour—there will be nothing but labour then; so you, and all the rest of labour, will participate in the equitable distribution of the products of the wonderful machines. And we, all of us, will make new and more wonderful machines. And there won’t be any unconsumed surplus, because there won’t be any profits.’
‘But suppose the trusts win in this battle over the ownership of the machines and the world?’ Mr Kowalt asked.
‘Then,’ Ernest answered, ‘you, and labour, and all of us, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man. That will be a good name for that despotism, the Iron Heel.’4
There was a long pause, and every man at the table meditated in ways unwonted and profound.
‘But this socialism of yours is a dream,’ Mr Calvin said; and repeated, ‘a dream.’
‘I’ll show you something that isn’t a dream, then,’ Ernest answered. ‘And that something I shall call the Oligarchy. You call it the Plutocracy. We both mean the same thing, the large capitalists or the trusts. Let us see where the power lies today. And in order to do so, let us apportion society into its class divisions.
‘There are three big classes in society. First comes the Plutocracy, which is composed of wealthy bankers, railway magnates, corporation directors, and trust magnates. Second is the middle class, your class, gentlemen, which is composed of farmers, merchants, small manufacturers, and professional men. And third and last comes my class, the proletariat, which is composed of the wage-workers.5
‘You cannot but grant that the ownership of wealth constitutes essential power in the United States today. How is this wealth owned by these three classes? Here are the figures. The Plutocracy owns sixty-seven billions of wealth. Of the total number of persons engaged in occupations in the United States, only nine-tenths of one per cent are from the Plutocracy, yet the Plutocracy owns seventy per cent of the total wealth. The middle class owns twenty-four billions.
Twenty-nine per cent of those in occupations are from the middle class, and they own twenty-five per cent of the total wealth. Remains the proletariat. It owns four billions. Of all persons in occupations, seventy per cent come from the proletariat; and the proletariat owns four per cent of the total wealth. Where does the power lie, gentlemen?’
‘From your own figures, we of the middle class are more powerful than labour,’ Mr Asmunsen remarked.
‘Calling us weak does not make you stronger in the face of the strength of the Plutocracy,’ Ernest retorted. ‘And furthermore, I’m not done with you. There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away.
‘But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity.
‘You see, labour has nothing concrete of which to be despoiled. Its share of the wealth of the country consists of clothes and household furniture, with here and there, in very rare cases, an unencumbered home. But you have the concrete wealth, twenty-four billions of it, and the Plutocracy will take it away from you. Of course, there is the large likelihood that the proletariat will take it away first. Don’t you see your position, gentlemen? The middle class is a wobbly little lamb between a lion and a tiger. If one doesn’t get you, the other will. And if the Plutocracy gets you first, why, it’s only a matter of time when the Proletariat gets the Plutocracy.
‘Even your present wealth is not a true measure of your power. The strength of your wealth at this moment is only an empty shell. That is why you are crying out your feeble little battle-cry, ‘Return to the ways of our fathers.’ You are aware of your impotency. You know that your strength is an empty shell. And I’ll show you the emptiness of it.
‘What power have the farmers? Over fifty per cent are thralls by virtue of the fact that they are merely tenants or are mortgaged. And all of them are thralls by virtue of the fact that the trusts already own or control (which is the same thing, only better)—own and control all the means of marketing the crops, such as cold storage, railroads, elevators, and steamship lines. And, furthermore, the trusts control the markets. In all this the farmers are without power. As regards their political and governmental power, I’ll take that up later, along with the political and governmental power of the whole middle class.
‘Day by day the trusts squeeze out the farmers as they squeezed out Mr Calvin and the rest of the dairymen. And day by day are the merchants squeezed out in the same way. Do you remember how, in six months, the Tobacco Trust squeezed out over four hundred cigar stores in New York City alone? Where are the old-time owners of the coal fields? You know today, without my telling you, that the Railroad Trust owns or controls the entire anthracite and bituminous coal fields. Doesn’t the Standard Oil Trust6 own a score of the ocean lines? And does it not also control copper, to say nothing of running a smelter trust as a little side enterprise? There are ten thousand cities in the United States tonight lighted by the companies owned or controlled by Standard Oil, and in as many cities all the electric transportation-urban, suburban, and interurban—is in the hands of Standard Oil. The small capitalists who were in these thousands of enterprises are gone. You know that. It’s the same way that you are going.
‘The small manufacturer is like the farmer; and small manufacturers and farmers today are reduced, to all intents and purposes, to feudal tenure. For that matter, the professional men and the artists are at this present moment villeins in every thing but name, while the politicians are henchmen. Why do you, Mr Calvin, work all your nights and days to organise the farmers, along with the rest of the middle class, into a new political party? Because the politicians of the old parties will have nothing to do with your atavistic ideas; and with your atavistic ideas they will have nothing to do because they are what I said they are, henchmen, retainers of the Plutocracy.