It may be called consumers, socialism, as distinguished from the sort of producers, socialism which prevails among trade unionists.As the latter aims at controlling businesses in order to divert directly into wages all surplus profit, so the former aims at controlling businesses in order to divert the same fund into consumers' dividends.Now, if the producers and the consumers of the goods produced in any business were the same, it might seem a matter of indifference in which capacity they took the gain.But they are not.The workers in a particular mill or store buy for their own use a very minute fraction of the goods there produced.Even if the workers, by means of their unions or their cooperative societies, could capture the whole industrial machinery, it would still remain a matter of importance how far they paid themselves in higher wages, how far in consumers, dividends.
For unless their claims as producers and as consumers were properly adjusted in the control of the several businesses, there would be little or nothing to distribute.
Few thoughtful cooperators will claim finality and all-sufficiency for the cooperative idea as embodied in the present movement.
The persistent struggles in the movement itself to temper the absolutism of the consumer by the assertion of cooperative employees to a higher rate of pay than obtains in the outside labour market and to a share of the profits, is an interesting commentary on the problem of social administration of the business.It is widely felt that the view that a business exists in order to supply utilities to consumers is defective as a principle of business government.The claim of the owners of the factors of production employed in the business to some voice in the conduct of that business is not lightly to be set aside by asserting that the factors of production are mere means to the consumer's end.If the consumers themselves own the share-capital or borrow other capital at market rates with good security, the issue of the control of capital need not arise.But the labour employed in a cooperative business has a human interest in the conduct of the business separate from that of the consumers.In virtue of this human interest, these workers impugn the doctrine that the business exists solely for the consumers, and insist that their human interest shall be adequately represented in the conduct of the business and the distribution of its gains.
§9.Those who have followed and accept the general principles of our analysis of industry into human costs of production and human utilities of consumption will be disposed a priori to accept the view that, in the equitable control of every business, the interests of the worker as well as of the consumers should be represented.Regarded from the social standpoint, it is as important that good conditions of employment shall prevail in a business, as that good articles shall be furnished cheaply to consumers.
Nor, as we recognise, can we assume that an enlightened business government by consumers, any more than by capitalists, will necessarily secure these good conditions for employees.Definite and not inconsiderable instances of sweating inside the cooperative movement itself testify to the reality of this need.But it is urged not merely on grounds of equity, as a protection against possible abuses of power by consumers or their representatives, but on grounds of sound economy.For if it be admitted that the employees in a cooperative business have a special human interest, it is idle to argue that it is socially advantageous to leave this interest without representation in the conduct of the business.
The cooperation which assigns all power and all gain to the consumer is in fact vitiated by the same social fallacy as the syndicalism which would assign the same monopoly to the employee, or as the capitalism which does assign it to the profit-monger.Equity and economy alike demand that the interests of all three shall be adequately represented.Social remuneration in its application to the business unit must proceed upon this fundamental principle.A business consists of capital, labour, and the market.To place unlimited control in the hands of any of those factors is wasteful and dangerous.The human defects of uncontrolled capitalism have been made sufficiently apparent.Any adequate experiment in uncontrolled trade-unionism or in syndicalism would disclose similar abuses.The idea of the miners running the mine, or the factory-hands the factory, the railway workers the railway, is not so much unsound in the sense that they must fail to run it properly.For though unlikely, it is at least conceivable that they might have enough intelligence and character to buy competent managers and carry out their detailed instructions.Its fundamental vice consists in ignoring the factor of the market, and in building up a number of separate industrial structures in which the consumers, interests are unrepresented.
