Chapter 31
The Scientific Segregation of SCARCITY AND PLENITUDE
2No matter how it is to come about, it is evident from a trend study on the basis of a synthesis of the mechanico-efficiency, philosophic and mathematical viewpoints that all categories of PRODUCE, PRODUCTS and SERVICES, attaining a constant production source and means potentially sufficient (with full ‘‘safety factor’’ allowance) to supply that product, produce, or service to all people on earth, must automatically become socialized.
3 To clarify: The air that we breathe is normally and to all intents and purposes socialized—because it is in such obvious abundance. However, in a case of a theater fire when air becomes a scarcity it is not only in a competitively sought category, but, exquisitely in a mortally combative category. Air, mechanically conditioned, is not socialized. Its use must be ordinarily paid for, even as a hidden overhead surcharge in movies, department stores, et cetera. Water supply is in many localities socialized because plenitudinous; in others, it is individually acquired by purchase because of its scarcity.
4 It is not merely the technical advance in the means of production or even the power to run the means of production or the plenitudinous of raw source that nurtures such potential socialization. Other important factors are world wide ‘‘availability-integration,’’ through rapid and plenitudinous transportation means and the attainment of an almost negligible-in-cost instantaneous world inter-communication system to report and adjust ‘‘availability’’
5 Up to the time of the outbreak of the World War there was a distinct scarcity of mechanical transportation and communication means relative to population. World export markets had not yet become glutted and the export outlet for the produce of any industrial country made possible price control in that country without abatement of production. It did not matter to the home producer that he ‘‘dumped’’ abroad his exported material at half the price of his home asking, because the home market was primarily so much larger that he could afford to dump his surplus at cost to maintain semi-scarcity domestic prices. For instance, the U. S. Steel Corporation did this in the Orient for years. More recently, producers of metals have been protecting their domestic ‘‘market’’ by exporting scrap to Europe and Asia, while reserving their ‘‘new’’ steel for domestic customers and taking from mines on high markets only. (Incidentally, there is no difference in metals refined from scrap and those refined from ore.)
6 With the advent of the World War, the great reaching out of the primary industrial nations for new foreign markets came to an inevitable impasse. The total of world population involvement had at last potentially been reached. By virtue of the scarcity and profit principle and because of production SURFEIT the victors in the fight for control of the foreign markets—a prime cause of the War, just as it is in the background of the now-being-agitated second world war—were unable to alter the fact that the world’s production means had at last attained an ability not only of production but of distribution of ‘‘adequate’’ proportions in primary survival categories to all people. Inevitably EFFICIENCY, which controls evolution, will have to adjust men’s affairs, whether through war or creative intellectual means, to this fact.
7 There was involved, in this world surfeiting, even more than the actually apparent numerical attainment of production means balancing potential consumption. Integration through transportation and communication brought about a strange revelation, namely, that the production means in the previously non-integrated geographical entities had been devised on a basis of ‘‘safety factor’’ production for all local needs in periods of potential high isolation. For example, every cold locality had by experience ‘‘planned’’ to endure long winter isolation. The whole commercial set-up was, therefore, prior to the World War based upon the warehousing or storage of surpluses for local isolation periods. When multi-amplified trackless transportation integrated these communities, a resulting total means of production and surplus of safety factor storage inventory was revealed equaling many times the potential integrated consumption on a mobilized short ‘‘time-lag’’ basis.
8 It is evident that artificial means such as tariffs, moratoriums, bonuses, discounts and plowings-under cannot long defer the full recognition of and adjustment to this attainment by man, striven for by every scientific thinker, and every unselfish person for multi-thousands, if not millions of years. To be sure, inefficient pile-up of surplus AFTER FULL DISTRIBUTION is a problem, but one of research only—cotton for wall sections of prefab houses, vegetable excesses for conversion to plastics, et cetera. One million of the billion given to Hopkins for his A.A.A. production limitation advanced to research would do the trick.
9 There are, then, two categories of production: one, the scarcity category, and the other the plenitudinous category.
10 In the scarcity category no artificial trading stimulus is required. It is necessary only that goods produced be adequately exposed for sale, at a selling price determined by specific adequacy in proportion to demand and supply. This applies to any new mechanical invention unit, to abstract services and to ‘‘what nots.’’ It is the only true measure at present available for the determination of the adequacy of man’s new inventions, products and services in relation to popular use ability.
11 Conversely to the status of these ‘‘scarcities,’’ Mr. Clarence Francis, President of the General Foods Corporation, in a talk before the N. Y. Stock Exchange Institute, said with uncomprehending surprise and implied rebuke that stocks on the N. Y. Stock Exchange representing the food producing industry constitute but 3% of the market value of all company equities on the ‘‘Big Board.’’
12 ‘‘Yet,’’ he pointed out, ‘‘this is our largest individual industry in the United States, employing more than one third of the country’s total population. The annual value of the worlds plant food is about five times greater than the yearly value of the world’s mineral production. The American public spends considerably more for food than it does for automobiles.’’
13 Mr. Francis drew a further interesting word picture indicative of the proportion of the food to other industries: ‘‘A hen seen scratching in the front yard of a pig iron furnace in blast appears insignificant. Yet the annual farm value of chickens and their eggs is more than two and one half times as great as the yearly wholesale value of our pig iron output.’’
14 The fact that Mr. Francis finds so small a proportion of food producers’ equities listed on the Big Board, in inverse proportion to the size of the food industry, is very important. It makes clear that as any mammoth production category of mans essential ‘‘needs’’ approaches plenitudinous classification it also approaches relative socialization, and, therefore, is no longer subject to individual speculation. Individual speculation must be confined to the categories of scarcity production.
15 A. mechanical contrivance may be not only theoretically correct, but also mechanically highly efficient; but if it is an instrument that only a few people can technically operate despite its having a designed field of use in the popular retail category, it must be admitted that this particular machine is not popularly adequate and hence its functioning must remain in the scarcity category. Some other machine must be invented having a more timely relationship to man’s intellectual control of the human mechanism before the mechanical service approaches the plenitude category and socialization. This is exemplified by the 40 year lag between the invention of the steam railroad and popular patronage, which required first the invention of the air brake, then shield tunneling, automatic coupling, dynamite, et cetera, before it became popular; in other words, popular confidence and use were withheld until contiguous inventions were brought about by supplementary individual ingenuity for which credit backing had first to be created. (See Charts.) The contiguous inventions to railroading are now so replete and have been so plentifully produced that the r.r. system is generally evolutionarily necessitous of socialization.
16 One hundred years after the invention of the first steam railroad train, New York’s vast subterranean railway system became socialized in actuality as a compound of a plenitude of individual inventions, power and credit speculations. The 50 fare is but a stamp tax overhead refund of a broad subsidy. It does not purchase a metered ride. One may ride a quarter of a mile or 100 miles for a nickel on the world’s largest, safest and most intricate r.r. system, possibly the world’s most superior engineering achievement to date. But the socialization of New York’s subways did not come about either by revolutionary proletarian seizure or a voluntary vacating of the premises by capitalism. It came about through emergency compromises, bankruptcies and receiverships subsequent to potentially certified ‘‘plenitude.’’ Despite legal accounting and the politco-financial maelstrom abstractly circling about the subway system of New York, ten million Murphys ride in the subway daily in innocence of the frustrating-to-Fincap confusion involved, as the system spreads constantly in smoothly and safely operated efficiency.
17 Neither of the political extremes of viewpoint has recognized in full (though it is now slowly creeping by inadvertence into their cosmos) the inevitable segregation by evolution of the scarcity and plenitude categories. Socialism, as theory, presumes a totality of plenitude; capitalism a totality of scarcity of all things. Wherever captialism has found ‘‘plenty’’ it has sought, through legal means and political privilege, arbitrarily to manipulate the ‘‘plenty’’ down to ‘‘scarcity’’ so that demand and supply activity might be maintained.
18 Soviet Russia, representing socialism, STARTED in a condition of primary scarcity in all but a few agrarian categories. Nevertheless, Russia assumed an economic procedure based on a socialistic philosophy of plenty in the face of scarcity, which was as paradoxical as any capitalistic country’s philosophy of scarcity in the face of plenty.
19 Obviously, scarcity has to be recognized. There must transpire, therefore, a scientific segregation between plenty and scarcity, and a scientific administration of the highly disturbing-to-society fluctuations of the borderline categories. In socialistic countries competition is already being allowed in the scarcity fields, and in capitalistic countries categories of plenty are now being willy nilly socialized with horrific belly-aching. It occurs in capitalistic realms in the guise of ‘‘emergency enactments’’: our old friend ‘‘Emergence Through Emergency.’’
20 In view of our present mechanization attainment, thinking or voicing a thought that assumes as attainable that which political parties call ‘‘recovery’’ is utterly puerile. The RECOVERY notion infers for the capitalist a RETURN, RETROGRESSION or ROLLING BACK of the years to a set of conditions that in some specific year were of special gratification to the individual speaker’s outlook.
21 THERE IS NO GOING BACK. What is called ‘‘unemployment’’ is the borderline nomenclature for what will in due course be recognized as socialization of leisure, formerly an acquisition of distinct scarcity. With this socialization, ‘‘relief’’ funds will emerge as socialized ‘‘income’’ from the scientific investment of knowledge. So-called ‘‘unemployment’’ is here ultimately to stay and is going to increase geometrically except as, from time to time, it is contracted by the inception of some temporarily intense activity of replacement of old by new and more adequate mechanisms.
22 The last broad field of application of the industrial principle is in the realm of industrially reproduceable scientific shelter. This application will result in activity so tremendous as temporarily to take up all voluntary slack in unemployment, provided the latest emergent and popularly recognized efficient working hours and wage scales are progressively lessened in the first category and increased in the latter.
23 There is inherent in the new scientific repro-shelter industry such an advanced state of mechanization (delivery of houses by radio-controlled aircraft will be commonplace) that its accelerating ability will very quickly disemploy the worker so far as LONG hours of machine tending are involved. The breakdown in hours will not be along the line of forty, thirty or twenty hours a week, but will be on an annual service basis. Workers will go into their jobs on a periodic service arrangement. A work stint broken down into a few hours a week, calling for a workers year-round anchorage in one locality, stewing and fussing aimlessly in order to render that short service, makes it impossible for the worker to decentralize efficiently and purposefully for play, rest and education which, attended to, would fit him for exquisite service ability, were he employed on a periodic basis. This will pay social extra-dividends. A magnificent start in this direction is outlined in the following (by Louis Stark) from the N. Y. Times of March 3, 1938:
2425An employee on a weekly wage, who refused to be dismissed, led Jay C. Hormel, Austin, Minn., packer, to work out a method of guaranteeing an annual wage based on the assumption that the employer’s duty is to make every effort to keep men at work. Mr. Hormel described his plan today to the Senate Unemployment Committee.
26When the demand for a new product declined precipitately, he felt impelled to drop some men, but one of them, who had given up a $9 weekly income from a peanut stand for $20 with the packer, said:
27 ‘‘You can’t do this to me.’’
2829This set Mr. Hormel to studying the reasons behind the hourly wage, and in the end he retained his men, found other things for them to do, and added new products. He even went into housing, erecting thirty-four houses to keep his men occupied.
30As a result of his experience, which began in a modest way with nineteen men in 1931, Mr. Hormel said that last year 2,373 out of nearly 4,000 employes were on an annual wage.
31While ‘‘on paper’’ the books seemed to show that the plan had cost $300,000 a year, Mr. Hormel said that the money was still in the till as he had received the equivalent in better workmanship and savings in such items as electric light and water bills.
32 With the knowledge that they were secure for a year, the workmen had developed responsibility for his business. Not only that, he added, but the face of the small city had completely changed since the plan was undertaken. He said he could not explain it, but people seemed to buy more automobiles and more houses with the same amount of annual income.
33 Recently, Mr. Hormel said, the men, who had had an independent union, obtained a charter from the Committee for Industrial Organization. Senator Byrnes asked why his employes had joined the C.I.O. if they had been contented.
34 ‘‘Our people believe that if they have some strong union throughout the packing industry it would raise the level of the industry,’’ was the reply. ‘‘They also feel that the union helps get petty grievances settled. The only difference between the C.I.O. and the independent union is now that we have to excuse four or five fellows once in a while to go to a convention.’’
35 Mr. Hormel explained that the work of his plant was budgeted on a forty-hour week basis through collective bargaining. If one kind of work disappeared, he said that men were transferred to the ‘‘extra gang’’ at the same rate of pay until the company developed some new product or some steady employment for them. If men must be dropped, they get one year’s notice, but that is ‘‘theoretical’’ as none has been dismissed.
36 The trend of an annual wage plan is now politically on the horizon. In February, 1938, President Roosevelt cited the necessity of placing housing workers on an annual wage to permit their rendering intense service during peak seasons and avoid starvation through the balance of the year. This item may be the most important emergence of the current emergency. Any minimum-wage-maximum-hour legislation will be meaningless without an inclusion of the ‘‘year round’’ factor, and it is upon this factor of inclusion that Congress intuitively waits before voting enactment of the Wage Hour Bill.
37 When the industrialization of shelter has come into full swing the work of attending machines will have to be apportioned among all potential workers on some schedule such as that of annual maneuvers of an Army Reserve Corps. Each worker will put in perhaps but two weeks’ service a year at the machine. The rest of the year will be his own in which either to employ himself in providing advanced services at high return in the scarcity categories, by amusing or serving other men, or he may simply amuse or improve himself.
38 What has this to do with speculation?
39 Everything. It is speculation itself. The specific purpose for reciting the foregoing speculative prediction was to develop speculation as to whether Stock Exchange machines could play a part in a world where the tendency toward socialism implies, for the average thinker, utter socialization, and the mere mention of ‘‘Stock Exchange’’ is anathema to the socialist. The evident trend toward socialization of the plenitudes has awakened in many minds the fallacial notion of the impending socialization of all of man’s activities in the not distant future.
40 Reviewing: My contention is that socialization will occur only in the plenitude categories. In the scarcities, competition greater than ever will ensue.
41 The sooner the capitalist and the communist realize that their respective ‘‘dreams’’ or methods of social welfaring, upon which each individual of both categories intemperately hangs his special undigested habits of resentment-reflex at any correction of direction, are not to be invalidated, but that, contrariwise, the valid phases of the ‘‘dreams’’ of both are automatically by evolution to be invoked and amplified, not as an ‘‘ist’’ or an ‘‘ism,’’ but as a scientific segregation and recomposition of ‘‘a place for everything and everything in its place,’’ the quicker shall we be able to incept popularly the thrilling pioneering of efficient mutual interservice. It will be thrilling because untainted with irrational compromise and ‘‘the taking of bread and butter out of the mouths of babes.’’
42 A trend in this direction is to be discovered within the field of education (e-duco: ‘‘lead out’’), that tampered with but never abandoned field, which contains the embryonic means of ultimate man-emancipation throughout the vicissitudes of establishment of
43 The Scientific Segregation of Scarcity and Plenitude 263 the world s industrial laboratory on the North American continent. The means is socialized literacy, which provides the key to abstraction, to science, to teleology, deep-rooted and subconsciously the MEETING PLACE of all ideals.
44 While Fincap snobbishly kept his hands off the public schools and universities in the U. S. his control of private universities for the sake of dumping his legal-for-trust-fund mortgages, as well as his fear-born necessity of controlling the ramifications of education and scientific development lest these articulate themselves in a manner disrupting to profit, militated against the procurement by private universities of the pulmotoring governmental aid in the same degree that it accrued to insurance companies and savings banks in the ‘32 crisis. Wherefore, the great universities, whose vast top-heavy endowments from self-advertising-Fincap were invested in bankrupt mortgages, became prime victims of the crash.
45 That these universities have not folded up is due to three factors: (1) the fact that their financial portfolios contained some of the securities the interest on which was advanced by the R.EC. to save the popular depositors, which advance could not discriminate against other ‘‘holders’’; (2) the rehabilitation of the mortgage situation by Federal Housing Act ‘‘pep’’; and (3) the provision of liquid cash for their routine maintenance by subscription amongst the graduates of the universities to operate the primarily non-mortgaged university plants.
46 Since the ’29 ‘‘fold up’’ of so many of Fincap’s material monopolies, innumerable men in the scientific, technical and professional world dropped from the payroll of their former patron, have, as unworldly and embittered pawns, espoused the cause of Communism. The swelling of the ranks of Communism by these scientifically minded, university dropped or ‘‘laid off’’ people has recently changed the tenor of the Communist Party in America. Its self-deflating, original vituperance is fast disappearing under thdr thoughtful council. Communism is becoming for Americans a semi-digestible philosophy.
47 Before the high socialization of the plenitudinous essentials in America has been fully established, the Communist Party will
48 have evolved into a body which has discarded its religious habit of non-thinking, blind ‘‘ideology’’ and conversely will be fully considerate of the utter necessity of a socialization-program’s comprehension of an ever constant necessity of inclusion and refinement, and adaptability to change, which is, in effect, mathematics ENERGY TIME manifest. Not until the Communist Party IS dominated by an awareness of the complete necessity of science’s leadership of the popular cause (which latter in turn is the inspiration of all invention not by external command, but by inner longing necessitation) will it, Communism, be effectively articulate as a political philosophy and ‘‘cause’’ in America.
49 Pro-socially inspired science was the inventor of the machines which later evoked the Marxian trend observation and Marx’s tactical regulations.
50 Man as ‘‘science’’ is causal; man as ‘‘politics’’ is resultant.
51 Communism as it first entered this country—that is, Communism as a political entity as differentiated from the spontaneously mushroomed communes of early New England—exaggerated and perverted the survival and growth problems of industrial man. The dialectics of Marxian Communism as interpreted in a peasant country, Russia, quite properly brought into prominence the illiterate agrarian manual worker as the (generally speaking) sole concern of the government. The illiterate agrarians represented 99% of the then non-industrialized Russian population.
52 In order to attain objectives in the ‘‘U. S.’’ land of industrial pioneering leadership, Communists will have to abandon their agrarian era’s revolutionary approach to serfdom when broaching the plea to scientists to join their ranks with conditional insistence that the scientist adopt their rules of progress, which are just second hand dogma of science’s ORIGINAL thought.
53 Science has no rules of personal conduct. Science articulates the first means of progress. Paradoxical to its ego, Communism will have to join the scientist to be successful. It futilely urges science to limit itself ‘‘down’’ to joining Communism. A true scientist joins naught but universal mechanics.
54 In Russia, where the establishment of socialism at the outset disenfranchised the scientist and philosopher due to fear of the perverted outlook of professors long patronized by the Czarist bully, the original attitude toward the scientist and his pertinence to social survival and progress has now been completely reversed. In Russia today the scientist, inventor and mechanical pioneers are given first consideration. They are the nuclei of popular credit maintenance. They receive twice as long vacations as manual workers and are afforded access to mechanisms and data that are withheld from those whose activity is confined to the minimum manual social stint.
55 The political agents of Russian Communism, not understanding the new land of high industrialization (for the nonce America) or the underlying forces at play, converted to their political cause in their first contact only escapist-ineffectuals who, non-digested by American industry, were stagnating in the immigration pools of large American cities. Proselytizing by this type of individual resulted only in the romantic and dramatic enrollment ‘‘in the cause’’ of a relatively small number of disgruntled, unemployed manual laborers and pathological ‘‘Bohemians.’’ The latter, assigned to canvas the ‘‘white collars’’ found that their ‘‘clever’’ and vituperative prattling called forth no sympathetic consideration among those conversant with American ways and world trends. The proselytizers did, of course, win favor with many equity-loving though relatively ineffectual intellectuals, dilettante or otherwise.
56 Sum-totally the intellectual uplift involved in the educational ‘‘shot in the arm’’ of an Americanizing-industrializing ‘‘Communism’’ in the land of its own first spontaneous experiment, together with the emergency necessities of deranged Fincap’s progeny to think for survival’s sake, coupled also with the main body-politics’ horror and disgust over Naziism, will suddenly let in the light of segregation of the clouds into the simple plenitude and scarcity categories.