Communications

...Because little reliance is placed in the program upon small cooperatives of producers, it is not of great moment whether they fail or not...

...Professor Commons says: "In every case I know of, in every country, where working men have formed the so-called producers' cooperatives, in order to become, as they say, their own employers, these producers' cooperatives have failed, because laborers as a class are incompetent to elect a boss...

...Only those upholding an extreme view of the rights of private property would think it confiscatory to regulate profits by agreement or by law, or for a person to agree or, if the facts warrant, for him to be compelled by law to sell his property...

...Presumably, this control of credit power being left to the vote of the members of the cooperative banks will be more wise than that of present-day banks...

...The guilds were a characteristic outpouring of the ages of faith...

...It proposes that even company commanders be regimented into associations, but the program does not say what the business men's associations shall do, since the business men are to be deprived of all essential authority...

...While the Socialists propose immediate expropriation of industrial property, this so-called "Catholic" program proposes only eventual and gradual expropriation of such property...

...DuBrul closes with an attack on the guilds...

...There are other contradictions of Father McGowan's premises in his conclusions...

...I would not condemn business men so much...

...They know they can get high wages, short hours, and job security only because it is the capitalists who take the first risk, and who, therefore, must do the planning and managing...

...They would meet together to plan for the supply of goods the market needs and to prevent profiteering by any particular group...

...It is older than the very old fable of the quail and her young in the farmer's grain fields...

...When the cursing is deleted, one finds three sets of arguments...

...Like the Socialists, they brush aside the fact that business men are continually improving the business system whenever and wherever they can see that improvements are possible...

...R. A. McGowan...

...Intellectuals" seem to be unable to understand why the unionists seem to prefer to work under bosses selected by the owners, than to be "free" under bosses selected by themselves in cooperatives...

...The whole Soviet scheme of commissars is presented under another name, in the joint boards of representatives of city workers, farmers, and consumers, proposed in this program to administer even the cooperatives "if they fail in immediately important matters...

...Locke's devotion to youth compelled her to give up the art she loved, to devote herself to the Newman school which her husband founded, showing a spirit of unselfishness and humility which raft through her life...

...It would be interesting to learn just how these banks are to function...

...and it is truly cooperative since we produce for others to use and use what others produce...

...Ernest F. DuBrul...

...CAROLINE LOCKE New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—In the death of Caroline Locke, who* died on January 25 in her home in La Jolla, California, the memories of those who knew her are stirred and saddened...

...A system that throws a million out of work in the best of times and five million in hard times is more like an automatic explosive than an automatic semaphore...

...The program does not assume high wisdom and character...

...It seems to me that this program, based on the same fundamental fallacies of Karl Marx and seriously offered as "Catholic," deserves analysis and criticism...

...Based on the conditions at that time, Marx built up his whole theory of what was going to happen forever and ever after, unless his program was adopted as the only cure...

...Rev...

...DuBrul's fears for freedom are founded possibly upon the failure to realize how beneficial is the institution of private ownership...

...As for labor's contentment with merely bargaining with employers, let me refer Mr...

...How do the proponents of this program expect to guarantee that their cooperatives will always elect better managers...

...An economic congress composed of representatives of cooperators in their various organizations would be a congress of free men strong in their property ownership or, in some cases, in a close approach thereto, and strong in their brotherhood...

...In that article Professor Commons points out that Marx wrote his communist manifesto at the end of the year 1847, following ten years of the lowest degradation reached by the people of England and Europe since the time of the Napoleonic wars...

...But the same scheme under the Russian commissars made him a slave to the tyranny of the representatives of the Soviets...

...Are Socialism, Russia, the Soviets, and Karl Marx to be given credit for all of this...

...Although Father McGowan's premises express fear of regimentation of men under capitalism, the program proposes far more rigid regimentation under the catch word of "cooperation...

...Through its economic parliament this program would dictate where the worker must work, just as the Soviets have been doing through their supreme council...

...So too, is a big income "malum in se," as well as a big profit, or a big inheritance, hence these are to be expropriated by taxation...

...This program would put us into the very same sort of "lock step" proposed by Socialists, where none can take a step that all others do not take at the same time...

...The trade-unions have learned the cold fact that they cannot manage business as a union, nor as a class...

...The Socialist would expropriate by brute force and revolution, while this program proposes to do the same thing by the less bloody, but equally effective method of legal and constitutional change...

...The only difference is that the Socialist envisions his formation as marching in world-wide unison, whereas this program would have its rigid formations only occupation-wide...

...An oblique and hesitant statement is made that confiscation is intended...

...A system that causes such unemployment, that pays so many of its workers less than a living wage and that divides "society into two widely different castes," of which "one holds power because it holds wealth," while the other is "the needy and powerless multitude," is far from cooperative...

...they would not be permitted, however, to amass such great wealth in the means of production as to wreck the freedom of others...

...Business men saw a fork in the road and made changes in the capitalistic system which Marx could not predict, and business is now on February 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 411 a quite different road than Marx prophesied it would be treading long before now...

...Business learned long ago that it could not operate under mob rule—not even the rule of small mobs...

...In the final stage, they would be one element out of several in the control of industry...

...This is also the substance of the scheme of cooperatives proposed in this program...

...Does the title go to the one in question by mere preemption...

...Of course, the program assumes that big business is "malum in se" or it would not devise ways and means of reducing business to the "little business" stage, as it does...

...IN ANSWER TO MR...

...Experience in both cases shows that selection by those above produces better leadership, both in the Church and in business, than does the "calling" of pastors by parishioners, or of electing a business boss by the workers...

...It also hopefully assumes that men will become better Christians, and it believes that as they set their faces toward cooperation they will not be tempted by Mammon so much as now...

...With the Socialists, this group fails to realize that our present priceregulated, spontaneous, flexible, voluntary cooperation is far superior to the forced rigid cooperation that their plan contemplates through "legal and constitutional changes that must be faced...

...It isn't a netf theory...

...Changing the beneficiaries does not change the actual fact that the program is to compel present owners to give up their property to others who have no title in it under the present system...

...The Socialist proposes to make the state the beneficiary of the expropriation, while this program would turn the property of present owners over to the employees of the industrial concern...

...In the case of unionowned concerns their union officials would probably choose the directors...

...So far, experience in Russia does not seem to confirm this theory...

...Professor Commons points out that leaders of Socialists are generally "professionals" or "intellectuals," who flatter or idealize the laborers, whereas the unionist leaders, being laborers themselves, know by experience that they can get more out of capitalism by bargaining with it than they can by taking it over and managing it collectively...

...DuBrul's letter to Socialism, Socialists, Soviets, Russia, and Karl Marx be stricken from the record as camouflaged cursing...

...Business adventurers of the Reformation and French revolution eras, it is true, wielded one of the swords that killed the guilds...

...the pastoral letter of the American hierarchy and Pope Leo's encyclical on the condition of labor advocate diffusion of ownership, and diffused real ownership can be held only cooperatively in large industries...

...These guilds, it is said, were discarded once by business men...

...Finally, this group, along with the Socialists, does not see that the scheme of cooperation it proposes is one that business found it necessary to discard long ago, when industry was much less complex than now...

...Production for others to use and the use of what others produce is merely division of labor...

...Under the capitalist system, individual laborers may rise out of the class, even to be millionaires, but socialism requires that all laborers shall rise as a class by becoming their own boss as a class...

...Moreover, no flat equality is assumed...

...But kings, the Protestant revolters and the doctrinaire-deist individualists of the eighteenth century dealt deadly blows, too...

...Therefore, business long ago rejected as unworkable, the mob rule theory of cooperativism...

...While it lasted, the guild system was the bright spot in city industry during all recorded history...

...This is incompetency...

...The guild system was, indeed, growing anaemic...

...As a, matter of fact, sometimes they fail and sometimes not...

...he sees that cooperation means the application of the guild system to modern times...

...The program's advocates would probably deny that it contemplates confiscation because it proposes to pay the owners for the property taken, in a very naive way by paying the owner with his own money...

...individuals would be encouraged to advance beyond the rest...

...Join property owners into a brotherhood and the bulwark is almost indestructible...

...The bishops' pro412 THE COMMONWEAL February 17, 1926 gram of social reconstruction advocates consumers' cooperation, producers' cooperation, management sharing and copartnership...

...It assumes a modicum of wisdom and character, growing greater with experience and responsibility as the years pass in response to the motive of real, though limited, gain, self-control, and brotherhood...

...DuBrul to the Baltimore and Ohio plan, the statement of the American Federation of Labor, the cooperative banks and insurance companies, and unemployment insurance, all of which are included in the program I tentatively outlined...

...they were killed...

...For various reasons when labor elects a boss, it is not on the grounds of his efficiency and discipline, but on the grounds of his sympathy...

...As Professor Commons shows, the substance of socialism is to have the wage-earners, who must obey orders, elect the foremen, superintendents, and executives, who must give the orders...

...and it would be deadly to freedom because it would permit no one to advance beyond the rest, and because an economic congress would be a dictator...

...In all but one of the other intermediary steps they would be sharing along with others in the choice of directors only, and they would merely confer with executives about methods of management...

...Although the premises display fear of "Wall Street," the program wants cooperative banks and insurance companies to use credit power to control industry...

...Neither this group nor the Socialists realize that the price of any commodity or service, precisely signals all those concerned with that commodity or service, whether as consumers, producers, or distributors...

...Private property is one of the strongest bulwarks of freedom...

...This makes one pause...

...The present system is declared to be automatically effective because it has an automatic semaphore that starts or stops production in accord with the will-to-buy and the abilityto-pay...

...Today each of us produces almost entirely for other people's consumption, and consumes almost entirely what others have produced...

...By confusing private ownership with common ownership, these epithets, besides, are a scandal to the weak...

...The program proposes to limit the return on stock to the interest rate, and to divide the remaining money among all the workers of a concern, whose share should be used to buy up the concern and turn it into a cooperative...

...A difference in time and method taken to expropriate does not change the fact of expropriation...

...But the guilds did not merely die...

...And it is to arouse thought in regard to the guild system and how it may be applied in the United States to industry, agriculture, and trade that I attempted hesitatingly* to outline what many are thinking is the road we must travel back to the guilds...

...Alice E. Warren...

...The statement that the wage-earners would choose their own bosses under the cooperative system is true only of the smallest producers' cooperatives, and these occupy a very minor part in the program...

...DuBRUL Washington, D. C. TO the Editor:—I move that all references in Mr...

...TO the Editor:—In The Commonweal of November 18 is a communication from Father F. A. MoGowan, entitled A Catholic Economic Program...

...The whole program is postulated on the same impossible theory held by the Socialists, that collective humanity are marvels of wisdom, angels in character, and besides, will willingly submit their own opinions and abilities to the vote of the majority...

...that all its elements are truly working together in supplying humanity's wants...

...A third set of arguments contends that the program assumes that big business and big wealth are mala in se* Yet the program definitely states that big business is necessary today and nowhere implies that "big wealth" is an evil in itself...

...When they, too, are cursed as socialistic and Marxian, then where are we at...

...In this manner the workman, the farmer, the consumer, and the small investor are to be made "free...

...But as the rest of society gradually moves on through other more experimental steps toward cooperation, it is to be expected that these small producers' cooperatives will be able to work more freely and will be less handicapped...

...But what are we to do with some business concerns that do not make profits, and are there to be no more bankruptcies, due to various forms of business incompetency on the part of managers...

...With the Socialists the proposers of this program fail to see that the present system is really cooperative in the true sense of the term...

...Unfortunately, however, for the success of Marx's logic, capitalism took an entirely different turn from what he insisted was the only path it could follow...

...The Atlantic Monthly for November, 1925, contains an article written by Professor John R. Commons, under the title, Marx Today: Capitalism and Socialism...

...One is led to inquire just how any program becomes entitled to be called a "Catholic" economic program...

...and the Catholic social movement throughout the world lays great stress upon the cooperative movement in all its phases...

...And, of course, those same boards would say when the cooperatives have failed...

...The program's plan of cooperativism as opposed to the form of capitalism we now have, is based on the same assumption of the Socialists that there is no freedom in the worker's present liberty to work wherever he can find work that suits him...

...The beauty of her paintings and her brilliant mind were in their way reflections of the genius of her uncle, Father Isaac Hecker, who founded the Paulist order, and in the Catholic Church, made, so to speak, a new era...

...It is illogical to apply such terms, however vaguely, to a cooperative system based on personal ownership...

...If business were less oligarchic today and less keen for the largest profit possible, such a congress might now prevent some of our market gluts, unemployment, and profiteering...

...If they don't, who will pay the losses of the cooperatives...

...Because there is no "economic parliament" giving orders to all of us, many people fail to see that business has an automatic semaphore, signalling workers and business men where to work as society needs them, when to increase or reduce production of any commodity in conformity with society's present willto-buy and ability-to-pay...

...So, too, other intellectuals cannot understand why we Catholics prefer to stay in a church whose hierarchy is selected from above, excepting only the Pope himself, who is elected by cardinals who had been selected by a preceding Pope...

...The second set of arguments is that cooperation is and would be inefficient because the wage-earners would choose their own bosses, because it assumes that collectively men are wise and angelic, and because producers' cooperatives now fail...