Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence - Upton Sinclair - Страница 3

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The thought of the time has familiarised us with the evolutionary view of things; we understand that life is the product of an inner impulse, labouring to embody itself in the world of sense; and that the product is always changing—that there is nothing permanent save the principles and laws in accordance with which development goes on. We understand that the universe of things was evolved by slow stages into what it is to-day, that all life has come into being in the same way. We have traced this process in the far-distant suns and in the strata of the earth; we have traced it in the vegetables and in the animals, in the seed and in the embryo; we have traced it in all of man’s activities, his ways of thinking and acting, of eating and dressing and working and fighting and praying.

This book is an attempt to interpret in the light of evolutionary science the social problem of our present world; to consider American institutions as they exist at this hour—what forces are now at work within them, and what changes they are likely to produce. The subject-matter dealt with is not abstract speculation, but rather the everyday realities of the world we know—our present political parties and public men, our present corporations and captains of industry, our present labour unions and newspapers, colleges and churches. The thing sought is an answer to a concrete and definite question: What will America be ten years from now?

Inasmuch as the people who are most interested in practical affairs are very busy people, I judge it to be a common-sense procedure to set forth my ideas in miniature at the outset; so that one may learn in two or three minutes exactly what my book contains, and judge whether he cares to read it.

It is my belief that the student of a generation from now will look back upon the last two centuries of human history and interpret them as the final stage of a long process whereby man was transformed from a solitary and predatory individual to a social and peaceable member of a single world community. He will see that men, pressed by the struggle for existence, had united themselves into groups under the discipline of laws and conventions; and that the last two centuries represented the period when these laws and conventions, having done their unifying work, and secured the survival of the group, were set aside and replaced by free and voluntary social effort.

The student will furthermore perceive that this evolutionary process had two manifestations, two waves, so to speak; the first political, and the second industrial; the first determined by man’s struggle to protect his life, and the second by his struggle to amass wealth. The culmination of the first occurred successively in the English revolutions, the American and French revolutions, and the other various efforts after political freedom. After each of these achievements the historian notices a period of bitterness and disillusionment, a sense of failure, it being discovered that the expected did not occur, that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity did not become the rule of men’s conduct. After that, however, succeeds a period of enlightenment, it having been realised that the work has only been half done, that man has been made only half free. The political sovereignty has been taken out of the possession of private individuals and made the property of the whole community, to be shared in by all upon equal terms; but the industrial sovereignty still remains the property of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or taxed by a king, but he can be starved and exploited by a master; his body is now his own, but his labour is another’s—and there is very little difference between the two. So immediately there begins a new movement, the end of which is a new revolution, and the establishment of THE INDUSTRIAL REPUBLIC.

What do I mean by an Industrial Republic? I mean an organisation for the production and distribution of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who receive the full value of what their labour produces. I mean an industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people; a community in which the means of production have been made the inalienable property of the State. My purpose in writing this book is to point out the forces which are now rapidly developing in America; and which, when they have attained to maturity, will usher in the Industrial Republic by a process as natural and as inevitable as that by which a chick breaks out of its shell or a child comes forth from the womb at the proper hour. I believe that the economic process is whirling us on with terrific momentum toward the crisis; and I look to see the most essential features of the great transformation accomplished in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912.

If I had been a tactful person I should have kept that last statement until far on in my argument. For I find many people who are interested in the idea of an Industrial Republic, and some few who are willing to think of it as a possibility; but I find none who do not balk when I presume to set the day. Yet the setting of the day is a vital part of my conviction, and I should play the reader false if I failed to mention it in this preliminary statement of my argument. It is a conviction to which I have come with the diligent use of the best faculties I possess, and after a preparation of a sort that is certainly unusual, and possibly even quite unique.

Perhaps I cannot do better by way of introduction than to explain just what I mean. Our country has passed through two great crises, when important political and social changes came with startling suddenness. I refer to the Revolution and the Civil War; and to the latter of these crises, or rather the period of its preparation—1847 to 1861—I once had occasion to give two years of an interesting kind of study. I read everything which I could find in the two largest special collections in the country; not merely histories and biographies, but the documents of the time, speeches and sermons and letters, newspapers and magazines and pamphlets. I literally lived in the period; I knew it more intimately than the world that was actually about me. My purpose was to write a novel which should make the crisis real to the people of the present; and so I had to read creatively, I had to get into the very soul of what I read. I had to struggle and to suffer with the people of that time, to forget my knowledge of the future, and to watch through their eyes the hourly unfolding of the mighty drama of events.

There were so many kinds of men—statesmen and business men, lawyers and clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had to study them all, and see the thing through the eyes of each of them. And of course, I could only play at ignorance, for I knew the future; and I saw all their mistakes, and the reasons for them, and the pity and the folly and the tragedy of it all. Knowing, as I did, the great underlying forces which were driving behind the events, I saw all these people as puppets, moved here and there by powers of whose existence they never dreamed.

And, of course, all the while I was also reading my morning newspaper, and watching the world of to-day; and inevitably I found myself testing the people of the present by these same methods. I would find myself seeking for the forces which were at work to-day, and striving to reach out to the future to which they were leading. I would find myself, by the way of helping in this interpretation, comparing and balancing the two eras, and transposing its figures back and forth. This famous educator or this newspaper editor of to-day—what would he have been saying had he lived in 1852? And this clergyman friend of mine, this politician—where would he fit into that period? Or if Yancey had been alive to-day, what would he have been doing? Where should I have found Seward—what parts would Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips and Jefferson Davis have been playing?

It was really a fascinating problem in proportion. The men of fifty years ago stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar men of the present stand thus to an unknown crisis—and now find the crisis. When I had finished “Manassas” I took up the writing of “The Jungle”; which is simply to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to seek for this latter crisis, and to try to understand it—to get into the heart of it, and live it and follow it to its end, just as I had done with the earlier one. So now I feel that I have much the same sort of power as Cuvier, the naturalist, who could construct a prehistoric animal from a bit of its bone. I have far more than the bone of this monster—I have his tail, beginning far back in the seventies; and I have the whole of his huge body—the present. I have counted his scales and measured his limbs; I have even felt his pulse and had his blood under the microscope. And now you ask me—How many more vertebræ will there be in the neck of this strange animal? And what will be the size and the shape of his head?

So it is that I write in all seriousness that the revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, not as a dreamer nor as a child, but as a scientist and a prophet.