Once, in England, after the Great Plague, labor awoke to find there was more work for men than there were men to work.Instead of workers competing for favors from employers, employers were competing for favors from the workers.Wages went up and up, and continued to go up, until the workers demanded the full product of their toil.Now it is clear that, when labor receives its full product capital must perish.And so the pygmy capitalists of that post-Plague day found their existence threatened by this untoward condition of affairs.To save themselves, they set a maximum wage, restrained the workers from moving about from place to place, smashed incipient organization, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal penalties punished those who disobeyed.After that, things went on as before.
The point of this, of course, is to demonstrate the need of the surplus labor army.Without such an army, our present capitalist society would be powerless.Labor would organize as it never organized before, and the last least worker would be gathered into the unions.The full product of toil would be demanded, and capitalist society would crumble away.Nor could capitalist society save itself as did the post-Plague capitalist society.The time is past when a handful of masters, by imprisonment and barbarous punishment, can drive the legions of the workers to their tasks.
Without a surplus labor army, the courts, police, and military are impotent.In such matters the function of the courts, police, and military is to preserve order, and to fill the places of strikers with surplus labor.If there be no surplus labor to instate, there is no function to perform; for disorder arises only during the process of instatement, when the striking labor army and the surplus labor army clash together.That is to say, that which maintains the integrity of the present industrial society more potently than the courts, police, and military is the surplus labor army.
It has been shown that there are more men than there is work for men, and that the surplus labor army is an economic necessity.To show how the tramp is a by-product of this economic necessity, it is necessary to inquire into the composition of the surplus labor army.
What men form it? Why are they there? What do they do?
In the first place, since the workers must compete for employment, it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find employment.The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his skill and efficiency.Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor.
The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and idiots.A man finds his place according to his ability and the needs of the system, and those without ability, or incapable of satisfying the needs of the system, have no place.Thus, the poor telegrapher may develop into an excellent wood-chopper.But if the poor telegrapher cherishes the delusion that he is a good telegrapher, and at the same time disdains all other employments, he will have no employment at all, or he will be so poor at all other employments that he will work only now and again in lieu of better men.He will be among the first let off when times are dull, and among the last taken on when times are good.Or, to the point, he will be a member of the surplus labor army.
So the conclusion is reached that the less fit and less efficient, or the unfit and inefficient, compose the surplus labor army.Here are to be found the men who have tried and failed, the men who cannot hold jobs,--the plumber apprentice who could not become a journeyman, and the plumber journeyman too clumsy and dull to retain employment; switchmen who wreck trains; clerks who cannot balance books; blacksmiths who lame horses; lawyers who cannot plead; in short, the failures of every trade and profession, and failures, many of them, in divers trades and professions.Failure is writ large, and in their wretchedness they bear the stamp of social disapprobation.Common work, any kind of work, wherever or however they can obtain it, is their portion.
But these hereditary inefficients do not alone compose the surplus labor army.There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men;and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer skilled.{3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-smitten industries.In this connection it is not out of place to note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who are suffering because of American inroads.And, last of all, are the unskilled laborers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel, the helpers, lumpers, roustabouts.If trade is slack on a seacoast of two thousand miles, or the harvests are light in a great interior valley, myriads of these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their fellows in kindred unskilled employments.
A constant filtration goes on in the working world, and good material is continually drawn from the surplus labor army.Strikes and industrial dislocations shake up the workers, bring good men to the surface and sink men as good or not so good.The hope of the skilled striker is in that the scabs are less skilled, or less capable of becoming skilled; yet each strike attests to the efficiency that lurks beneath.After the Pullman strike, a few thousand railroad men were chagrined to find the work they had flung down taken up by men as good as themselves.
But one thing must be considered here.Under the present system, if the weakest and least fit were as strong and fit as the best, and the best were correspondingly stronger and fitter, the same condition would obtain.There would be the same army of employed labor, the same army of surplus labor.The whole thing is relative.
There is no absolute standard of efficiency.
