(Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its chances for success in the United States.) I am aware that the suggestion of paying for the industries we socialize will sound tame and uninspiring to a lot of ardent young radicals of my acquaintance. They will shake their heads sadly and say that I am getting middle-aged and tired. We have seen in Russia and Hungary and other places, so many illustrations of the quick and easy way to expropriate the expropriators that now there is in every country a considerable group of radicals who will hear to no program less picturesque than barricades and councils of action.
In considering this question, I set aside all considerations of abstract right or wrong, the justification for violence in the overthrow of capitalist society. I put the question on the basis of cash, pure and simple. It will cost a certain amount of money to buy out the owners, and that money will have to be paid, as it is paid at present, out of the labor of the useful workers. The workers don't want to pay any more than they have to; the question they must consider is, which way will they have to pay most. The advocates of the dictatorship of the proletariat are lured by the delightful prospect of not having to pay anything; and if that were really possible it would undoubtedly be the better way. But we have to consider this question: Is the program of not having to pay anything a reality, or is it only a dream? Suppose it should turn out that we have to pay anyhow, and that in the case of violent revolution we pay much more, and in addition run serious risk of not getting what we pay for?
Here are enormous industries, running at full blast, and it is proposed that some morning the workers shall rise up and seize them, and turn out the owners and managers, and run the industries themselves. Will anybody maintain that this can be done without stopping production in those factories for a single day? Certainly production must stop during the time you are fighting for possession; and the cruel experience of Russia proves that it will stop during the further time you are fighting to keep possession, and to put down counter-revolutionary conspiracies. Also, alas, it will stop during the time you are looking for somebody who knows how to run that industry; it will stop during the time you are organizing your new administrative staff. You may discover to your consternation that it stops during the time you are arranging to get other industries to give you credit, and to ship you raw materials; also during the time you are finding the workers in other industries who want your product, and are able to pay for it with something that you can use, or that you can sell in a badly disorganized market.
And all the time that you are arranging these things, you are going to have the workers at your back, not getting any pay, or being paid with your paper money which they distrust, and growling and grumbling at you because you are not running things as you promised. You see, the mass of the workers are not going to understand, because you haven't made them understand; you have brought about the great change by your program of a dictatorship, of action by an "enlightened minority"; and now you have the terror that the unenlightened majority may be won back by their capitalist masters, and may kick you out of control, or even stand you up against a wall and shoot you by a firing squad. And all the time you are worrying over these problems, who can estimate the total amount the factory might have been producing if it had been running at full blast? Whatever that difference is, remember, it is paid by the workers; and might that sum not just as well have been used to buy out the owners?
If we were back in the old days of hand labor and crude, unorganized production, I admit that the only way to benefit the slaves might be to turn out the masters by force. But here we have a social system of infinite complexity, a delicate and sensitive machine, which no one person in the world, and no group of persons understands thoroughly. In the running of such a machine a slight blunder may cost a fortune; and certainly all the skill, all the training, all the loyal services of our expert engineers and managers is needed if we are to remodel that machine while keeping it running. The amount of wealth which we could save by the achieving of that feat would be sufficient to maintain a class of owners in idleness and luxury for a generation; and so I say, with all the energy and conviction I possess, pay them! Pay them anything that is necessary, in order to avoid civil war and social disorganization! Pay them so much that they can have no possible cause of complaint, that the most hide-bound capitalistic-minded judge in the country cannot find a legal flaw in the bargain! Pay them so that every engineer and efficiency expert and manager and foreman and stenographer and office-boy will stay on the job and work double time to put the enterprise through! Pay them such a price that even Judge Gary and John D. Rockefeller will be willing to help us do the job of social readjustment!
"Ah, yes," my young radical friends will say, "that sounds all very beautiful, but it's the............