770 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
larger and deeper, and infinitely more difficult problem the problem for which we have such alleged solutions as collectivism, the single tax, Christian socialism, Tolstoyism, communism, and philosophical anarchism. In many, no doubt, this feeling is extremely vague, but it none the less influences conduct and judgment.
This a priori explanation is confirmed and re-enforced by inductive reasoning. What, for example, is^ the attitude of the consistent socialist of the Marx-Engels school toward the labor or trade-union movement ? It is one of scorn, distrust, contempt in theoretical discussion, and of sympathetic interest in practical life. The socialist will tell you that the unions are wasting their energies and running their heads against a stone wall; that nothing of material consequence can possibly be accomplished along their lines, owing to the iron law of wages, the essential nature of capitalism, the helplessness of the individual employer, and so on. "The expropriators must be expropriated," is his formula, and labor cannot come into its own under any condition short of the nationalization of the means of production and the elimination of competitive industry.
And our socialist is consistent. He regards rent, interest, and profit as different forms of "surplus value" value created by the wage-worker and unjustly withheld by the capitalist. He agrees with the employer that the demands of labor for a larger share of the product cannot be met if interest, rent, and profit are to be paid as heretofore. He therefore concludes that trade- unionism is a futile and ignorant attack on mere symptoms.
At the same time the socialist is profoundly indifferent to the woes of the maltreated employer and the persecuted "scab." He blames the system for the friction, conflict, and evil seen on every side ; the aggressive unionist striker is to him as miserable a victim of a vicious order as the assaulted non-unionist or the struggling employer. All this violence, he says to himself, is inevitable. It precedes and foreshadows the great social revolu- tion which alone will permanently solve the labor problem by doing away with capitalistic production, wages, and competition.
What has been said of the collectivist may, with some
