What the "bourgeois" wants to know is just how Socialism is going to work. He cannot conceive of industry without capitalism, any more than he can conceive of the world without the sun. Some concrete picture must be presented to his mind that will enable him to understand that while capital is not only good, but essential, the capitalist is not only bad, but superfluous. Nothing less than a picture of industry actually in operation without capitalism will suffice; and this, therefore, I have attempted to draw. No pretence is made that the picture is the only possible Socialist state, or that it will ever be realized in the exact shape in which it is drawn. The only claim to be made for it is that it furnishes a fair account of an industrial community from which exploitation, unemployment, poverty and prostitution are eliminated; that such an industrial community is more practical because far more economical than our own; and that it is the goal towards which, if we survive the dangers attending the present conflict between capital and labor, industrial and ethical evolution are inevitably driving us.
Again, there is probably no feature connected with Socialism that it is more important to demonstrate and define than its economy. It occurred to me that we possessed in our official reports, and particularly in the 13th Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor, figures which would enable us to arrive at a considerable part of this economy with some mathematical certainty. I pointed out my plan to Mr. J. Lebovitz, of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., who has a better talent for statistics than myself, and I cannot but congratulate myself and my readers upon the results to which, thanks to his help, we have jointly come.
It must be admitted that the figures in our possession do not enable us to estimate the whole economy of Socialism; but they do enable us to give a tentative estimate of how many hours a workingman would have to work to produce the things which the average workingman consumes if no account be taken of profit, rent, interest, and the cost of distribution. Of course, though profit, interest and rent would be eliminated in a coöperative commonwealth, we should still be subject to the cost of distribution and, therefore, the figures we arrive at are incomplete in the sense that we have to take into account the fact that they do not include this cost. But there would be economies exercised in a coöperative commonwealth, such as the economy of insurance, of advertising, of unnecessary sickness, of strikes and lockouts, of the cost of pauperism, crime and in some measure that of dependents, defectives and delinquents, etc., which would probably pay the cost of distribution. I feel, therefore, that although our figures are not absolute, they do furnish a starting-point more satisfactory than has heretofore been obtained.