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As soon as progressive capitalism is at all developed, reforms are thus automatically aided by the Socialist vote, without the necessity of active Socialist participation thus leaving the Socialists free to attend to matters that depend wholly on their own efforts; namely, the organization and education of the non-capitalist masses for aggressive measures leading towards the overthrow of capitalism.
Capitalism makes sure that innovators are rewarded for their time and skills. Property rights are enshrined in enforceable contracts. In non-capitalist societies, people are busy inventing ways to survive or circumvent the system, create monopolies, or engage in crime. But Baumol fails to sufficiently account for the different levels of innovation in capitalistic countries.
They have succeeded, in a comparatively few cases, in temporarily increasing the wages and in diminishing the hours of labor in certain branches of industry a benefit so limited, both as to duration and amount, that it cannot justly be said to have inured to the general advantage of the non-capitalist class.
One of the grounds on which it is proposed by some Socialists to give manual labor a special and preferred place in the movement is that it is supposed to be the only numerically important non-capitalist element that is at all well organized or even organizable. Let us see, then, to what degree labor is organized and what are the characteristics of this organization.
For there will be abundant time before democratic machinery can reach that point in its evolution, when the non-capitalist masses can make the first and smallest use of it against their small and large capitalist masters.
Governments are evidently ready to proceed to illegality for the sake of self-preservation even from a perfectly legal attack, if it threatens to destroy them or to transfer the government into the hands of the non-capitalist classes.
If we are advancing towards Socialism, it is not because the non-capitalist classes, when compared with the capitalists, are gradually gaining a greater share of wealth or more power in society.
If it were possible to infuse with this spirit all or the greater part of the non-capitalist class in the United States, this would, I believe, be one of the gravest calamities which could befall us as a nation; for it would degrade the mass of our voters, and make free government here very difficult, if it did not entirely change the form of our government, and expose us to lasting disorders and attacks upon property.
One would have supposed that the inability to take any non-capitalist paper as a model of truthfulness and competence would have caused Mr. Sinclair, and those who agree with him, to look somewhat more critically at their assumptions. They would have asked themselves, for example, where is the fair body of truth, that Big Business prostitutes, but anti-Big Business does not seem to obtain?
But if they do not, then unless their political aim is pure cantankerousness, they must contemplate a working political combination between the Socialist members in Parliament and just that non-capitalist section of the Liberal Party for which Chesterton and Belloc speak.
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