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Title: What is Exploitation? Author: Randolph Bourne Date: 1916 Language: en Source: Retrieved on November 18, 2010 from http://fair-use.org/the-new-republic/1916/11/04/what-is-exploitation Notes: From The New Republic (November 4, 1916). 12–14.
My western friend who runs a prosperous stove-factory has been finding
fault with my insistent use of the word “exploitation.” My outlook on
life is not sufficiently cheerful, and I am inclined to see malevolence
where everything is, as they say at college, healthy, hearty, and happy.
Our quarrel rose over the Mesaba strike, and my acceptance of an I. W.
W. pamphlet as a plausible account of what was going on there. The
accounts of the insecurity of pay, the petty robberies, the reeking
houses, the bigoted opposition to labor organization, seemed to me to
smell of truth, because I had read the maddening tales of Colorado and
West Virginia, and seen with my own eyes in Scranton and Gary and
Pittsburgh the way workers live, not in crises of industrial war but in
brimming times of peace.
My friend, however, is more robust. He would make no such hasty
impassioned judgments. He would judge nothing without “going to the
mines, working in them for a year or two, being one of the men, getting
their free confidence, then working for a couple of years as a
confidential auditor for the company.” Such Olympian judiciality fills
me with envy and dismay. I feel that his serenity is the normal mood of
healthy activity, facing the modern world. Could he find anything but
scorn for those of us who go around with the vestiges of what it is now
priggish to call a “social conscience”? To him an industrial strike is
like an exciting political contest or the recriminations between “two
kid baseball teams.” Both sides, he says, “squawk a good deal about the
raw stuff the other side is trying to pull off,” but deep down, his
experience convinces him, “they are very uniformly a pretty human
bunch.” He hasn’t been to Mesaba, but his friend the Duluth bread-dealer
assures him that agitators were the cause of all the trouble. They
always are. Trouble, to my friend, is a personal matter. He sees
individuals, laboring as happily as they can expect to labor on this far
from perfumed earth. He sees their contentment disturbed by “outsiders,”
individuals, bitter envious mischievous men who make a business of
setting workmen against their employers. He sees the “outsiders”
deluding, persuading, intimidating honest workers into stopping work and
engaging in careers of lawlessness. He sees the individual employer in
natural self-defense fighting for his rights, defending his proprety,
ousting the agitators, carrying the war into his laborer’s camp. From
the busy office of his stove-factory, it all looks like a personal
quarrel between free and equal individuals. When the state interferes
with its militia and its injunctions, it is not flouting individuality,
but merely doing its business of maintaining order and defending private
property.
Our argument really hinges on whether to the workman all the excitement
and deprivation and delusion is not part of the daily business of
living. I am too tender-minded. What is at the back of my confused hints
that there is “something shameful, something consciously brutal” about
industrial relations? My friend admits that he has in his shop men who
work in places that are noisy and dusty, in hot places, in rooms where
paint is being sprayed. He is sorry. He wishes these things did not have
to be, and he is remedying them as fast as he can. What he will not
admit is that any one is “specifically to blame.” He does not imprison
his men. They come freely to him and ask for employment. He “gives them
such compensation as makes the jobs attractive to them, in competition
with all other jobs in city and country.” He is fair and scrupulous. His
company is in business to produce goods at such cost that people can
afford to buy them. He cannot make his plant a sanatorium — and when he
says this the faintest note of irony steals into his robust voice — for
his wage-earners. The stockholders have built a factory and not a
philanthropic institution. If the workers did not like his factory,
would they send for their brothers and cousins from the old country
across the sea? If these “hunkies” in stove-factory and iron mine were
being “exploited,” would they not drift speedily away to jobs where they
were content? My friend cannot imagine a man being willingly exploited.
There are, no doubt, heartless employers; workmen here and there are
perhaps subject to oppression. But systematic, prevalent industrial
exploitation — and he has worked in all parts of the country and at
every level of skill — my stove-factory friend has never seen. And he
turns aside from my abstract philosophy to the daily manipulation of
stoves and men.
What then do I mean by exploitation? And I have to remind my friend that
my very first industrial experience was one of those rudimentary
patterns of life which, if they are imprinted on your mind early enough,
remain to fix the terms in which you interpret the world. The experience
was leaving school to work for a musician who had an ingenious little
machine on which he cut perforated music-rolls for the players which
were just then becoming popular. His control of the means of production
consisted in having the machine in his house, to which I went every
morning at eight and stayed till five. He provided the paper and the
music and the electric power. I worked as a wage-earner, serving his
skill and enterprise. I was on piece-work, and everything suggested to
my youthful self that it depended only upon my skill and industry how
prosperous I should become. But what startled me was my employer’s lack
of care to conceal from me the fact that for every foot of paper which I
made he received fifteen cents from the manufacturer with whom he had
his contract. He paid me five, and while I worked, spent his time
composing symphonies in the next room. As long as I was learning the
craft, I had no more feeling about our relation than that there was a
vague injustice in the air. But when I began to be dangerously clever
and my weekly earnings mounted beyond the sum proper for a young person
of eighteen who was living at home, I felt the hand of economic power.
My piece-rate was reduced to four and a half cents. My innocence blazed
forth in rebellion. If I was worth five cents a foot while I was
learning, I was worth more, not less, after I had learned. My master
folded his arms. I did not have to work for him. There were neighbors
who would. I could stay or go. I was perfectly free. And then fear smote
me. This was my only skill, and my timorous inexperience filled the
outside world with horrors. I returned cravenly to my bench, and when my
employer, flushed with his capitalistic ardor, built another machine and
looked about for a young musician to work it, I weakly suggested to an
old playmate of mine that he apply for the position.
Enlarge my musician into the employing class of owners and managers and
shareholders of factory and mine and raliroad, and myself into the class
of wage-earners in all these enterprises, and you have the picture of
the industrial system which the I. W. W. agitator has in his mind when
he writes the Mesaba pamphlet to which my friend took such exception.
With my five cents making that huge differential of profit for my
employer, and with my four and a half cents giving his enterprise a
productiveness which, if he had incorporated himself, he could have
turned into additional capitalization, I was a crude symbol of the
industrial system as my mind gradually took in the fact that there was
an industrial system. This was my first experience in “exploitation.” If
there had been fewer musicians available I should have gotten more pay,
and if there had been more available I should probably have gotten even
less. But there would always have been a surplus, and I should have
always felt the power of my employer to skim it, to pull it towards
himself. As long as I continued at work, nothing could have removed my
sense of helplessness. Any struggle I might have made would have been
only towards weakening his pull, and lessening the amount he was able to
skim. He was not robbing me, and no person of sense would have said he
was, but our very relation was an exploitation. There was no medium way
between exploitation and philanthropy.
My stove-factory friend, however, will have none of this theory. If it
is a question of power, he says, then Mike Solomon exploits the stove
company when he is able to get three dollars a day, on account of the
present demand for labor, when two dollars was wealth to him a year ago.
Then I admit that local groups of workers are able — either through lack
of competition or clever politics or display of force — to exercise
temporarily a decisive pull on the surplus and divert more of it to
themselves. It is all a question of power. But as long, I tell him, as
the employer is entrenched in property rights with the armed state
behind him, the power will be his, and the class that does the diverting
will not be labor. My friend, however, does not like these Nietzschean
terms. He is sure that his workmen have just as much power to exploit
him as he has of exploiting them. This is where we differ, and this is
why thought will buzz in an angry murky haze over eight-hour bills and
individual contracts and collective bargaining as long as millions agree
with him. He trusts rights, I trust power. He recognizes only
individuals, I recognize classes.
That is why I can never make him understand what I mean by
“exploitation.” He thinks of it as something personally brutal. He does
not see it inherent in a system, for which no one is “specifically to
blame” only because all are equally guilty of short vision and flimsy
analysis. And yet as I read his letters and clippings, I wonder if he is
not the realist and I the mystic. He punctures my phrases of power and
class with a coarse satisfied hunky to whom work and disease and riot
are all in the day’s work and who would despise the philosophy which I
am so anxiously waving at him. It seems a long way from my dainty
music-bench to the iron range, or the stove-factory. One has to feel
exploitation perhaps before one understands it. I console myself with
the thought that power is itself mystic, and that my friend will have to
get hit with some invisible threat of class-force, as some of his
frightened friends are now getting hit, before he will analyze any
deeper that industrial system of which he is so efficient and loyal an
officer.