§3.This consideration brings to the front the antagonism between capital and labour which has in modern times assumed ever graver dimensions and clearer consciousness.In considering the industrial system as an effective economic harmony it is not easy to determine whether the cooperative or the competitive forces are gaining ground.On the one hand, the competition between businesses in the same trade is in all great staple trades giving place to combinations, which not only unite the formerly conflicting businesses, but weld into close unity the capital of various related trades.Trusts, cartels, pools, conferences and various experiments in federal compacts, for regulating output and selling prices, are everywhere engaged in substituting industrial peace for war.Direct and conscious harmony thus grows among formerly antagonistic capitalists and employers.The organisation of labour in the several trades, on the basis of a standard wage upheld by collective bargaining, marks a similar though less close harmony on the side of labour.
But these advances towards conscious harmony among hitherto competing capitalists and labourers have been attended by a widening and intensification of the conscious antagonism between capital and labour within the several trades.Indeed, there are signs of a growing extension of combination for definitely hostile purposes, a ranging of capital on the one side, labour on the other, animated by a broad class consciousness which is new in the history of industry.
In fact, it has all along been inevitable that the combinatory forces, which appeared to make for social solidarity in industry, should be brought up at what appears to be an impenetrable barrier, the class hostility between the owners of instruments of production and the workers.For this hostility is inherent in the distribution which evokes an Unproductive Surplus.So long as economic advantages permit some groups of capitalists, landowners and owners of organising power, to take for themselves large masses of unearned income, which might have gone to improve the conditions of the workers, had they been able to divert it into wages, no false platitudes about the harmony of capital and labour will secure industrial peace.
For that harmony, as we have seen, only extends to the portion of the product distributed as costs.Now, the enormously increased productivity of modern industry has resulted in an increase of the size and relative importance of the surplus, and the large proportion of that surplus which is distributed unproductively in 'unearned' income represents a growing element of discord.
This real divergence of economic interests between capital and labour is not then to be bridged by an economy of costs based upon the fact that, since each factor needs the other, it is interested in its proper remuneration.
The complaints of the existing system made by the workers not merely testify to a growing realisation of their economic weakness and a growing sensitiveness to the inequitable modes of distribution.They are founded on the belief that upon the whole distribution is becoming more inequitable and more wasteful.For though the absolute share of the workers and the standard of real wages have been rising in most countries,2 that rise has not been commensurate with the aggregate increase of wealth.In other words, a larger proportion of the total is passing into unproductive surplus, the factor of discord, a smaller into costs, the factor of harmony.If this is true, it implies inevitably a worsening of the relations between capital and labour.For, so long as the owners of strong or scarce factors of production are rewarded according to their strength or scarcity, no peace is possible.
The absorption of the unassimilated mass of wealth in a higher standard of life for the workers and an enlargement and improvement of the public services is essential to secure the substance and the sense of social harmony in industry.
§4.Leaving out for the moment the claim of the State for public services, this socially sound distribution of the product could only be achieved by a recasting of the governmental structure of the Business, the Trade and industry.Towards this governmental reform many different experiments are afoot.Various modifications of the ordinary wage-system, by way of bonuses upon individual and departmental efficiency of labour, are tried.More direct attempts to harmonise the interests of capital and labour within the business take shape in schemes of profit-sharing, which are sometimes carried further into the closer form of co-partnership, by which the workers own a share of the capital and, by virtue of this ownership may be admitted to a share of the administration.
