Upton Sinclair

(Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.)

It has been indicated that the new society will be different in different countries and in different parts of the same country, in different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I set forth my ideas.

One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to society an equivalent amount of service.

When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get, if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the only question society will ask is, Have you performed services equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?" Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.

The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be, as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this will be built a system of special payments for special services, which are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement, applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of development, and to which different conditions apply.

Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of course, office-work and management—everything that enters into these industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error—what our great corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.

But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant, such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this, except by paying a higher wage, or by reducing the number of hours in the working day, which is the same thing. The only other method would be to have the state assign men to their work, and that would be bureaucracy and slavery, the essence of everything we wish to get away from in our co-operative commonwealth.

What we shall have, so far as concerns our basic industries, is a government department, registering with mathematical accuracy the condition of supply and demand in all the industries of the country. Our demand for shoes is increasing, for some reason or other; a thousand more shoe-workers are needed, therefore the price of labor in the shoe industry is increased five cents per day—or whatever amount will draw that number of workers from other occupations. On the other hand, there are too many people applying for the job of driving trucks, therefore we reduce slightly the compensation for this work. There are more men who want jobs in Southern California than in Alaska, therefore the payment for the same grade of work in Alaska has to be higher. All this is not merely speculation, it is not a matter of anybody's choice; it is an automatic, self-adjusting system, subject to precise calculations. The only change from our present system is from guesswork to exact measurement. At present we do not know how many shoes our country will require next season, neither do we know how many shoes are going to be made, neither do we know how many people can make shoes, nor how many would like to learn, nor how many would like to quit that job and take to farming. It would be the simplest matter in the world to find out these things—far simpler that it was to register all our possible soldiers, and examine them physically and mentally, and train them and feed them and ship them overseas to "can the Kaiser."

Of course, we drafted the men for this war job; but in the new world nobody is drafted for anything. It is any man's privilege to starve if he feels like it; it is his privilege to go out into the mountains and live on nuts and berries if he can find them. Nobody makes him go anywhere, or makes him work at anything—unless, of course, he is a convicted criminal. To the free citizen all that society has to say is, if he buys any products, he must pay for those products with his own labor, and not with some other man's labor. Of course, he may steal, or cheat, as under capitalism; our new world has laws against stealing and cheating, and does its best to enforce them. The difference between the capitalist world and our world is merely that we make it impossible for any man to get money legally without working.

Under these conditions the average man wishes to work, and the only question remaining is, how shall he work? If he wants to work by himself, and in his own way, nobody objects to it. He is able to buy anything he pleases, whether raw materials or finished products. If he wants to buy leather and make shoes after his own pattern, no one stops him, and if he can find anyone to buy these shoes, he can earn his living in that way. He is able to get land for as long a time as he wants it, by paying to the state the full rental value of that land, and if he wants to farm the land, he can do so, and sell his products. As a matter of theory, he is perfectly free to hire others to farm the land for him, or with him. There is no law to prevent it, neither is there any law to prevent his renting a factory and buying machinery, and hiring labor to make shoes.

But, as a matter of practical fact, it is impossible for him to do this, because the community is in the business of making shoes, and on an enormous scale, with great factories run democratically by the workers, and there is very small chance of any private business man being able to draw the workers away from these factories. The community factories have all the latest machinery; they apply the latest methods of scientific management, and they turn out standard shoes at such a rate that private competition is unthinkable. Of course, there may be some special kind of shoes, involving an intellectual element, in which there can be private competition. This kind of manufacture is covered in our second method of payment; but before we discuss it, let us settle the problem of our most important basic industry, which is agriculture.