A Cityless and Countryless World
An Outline of Practical Co-Operative Individualism
Henry Olerich
[A condensed and edited version of the book
originally published by Gilmore & Olerich, Holstein, Iowa, 1893 /
CHAPTER 12 - Commercial and Mercantile Systems]
In order to give you a clear idea of our commercial and mercantile
systems, it becomes necessary to begin at the bottom. Along the
motor-lines, about four miles apart, a side-track passes through a
large warehouse, store-house, and factories in which the farm products
of the community are stored away for safe keeping and for
transportation. All products from the farm are hauled into these
store-houses with land engines, and from the store-houses it is taken
either to the depots for exportation, to the mill or factory, or to
the kitchen of the big-house for consumption. In these store-houses
the land-engines and farming implements are also kept. The railroad
depots are located generally wherever a motor- line crosses it. The
railroads communicate with sea-ports and with all other parts of the
country. Fast electric vessels carry on the foreign commerce. But
foreign commerce is not so extensive now as it formerly was. Nearly
every country now produces its own commodities with advantage.
Domestic commerce is also greatly simplified. There are no populous
cities to which the agricultural products must be shipped; and from
which the agriculturists and inhabitants of country places, under your
system, receive the agricultural implements and other manufactured
commodities. The population, as you see, is almost evenly distributed
over the productive land area from which they obtain their material
subsistence.
The motor-lines are built, equipped and run by the contiguous
communities between which they are located, except the freight cars,
which each community furnishes and operates for itself. No passenger
fare is charged on a motor. It is presumed that the transportation
between the several communities is nearly equal.
Our railroads are built and equipped by voluntary subscriptions. When
a certain scope of country wants a railroad, the inhabitants, who feel
so inclined, of the adjacent communities which are interested in the
road will advance the money. A few communities, each subscribing
75,000 days labor, can build quite a piece of road. Of course each
individual advances as much as he wishes. The community, as such,
takes no part in it; all such is left to the individual s own choice.
The work of building railroads is done by gangs of men, who make that
their profession, and who are provided with the very best tools,
graders, and everything necessary to produce the best results with the
least amount of labor. After the roads are built and equipped, they
are operated at 10 per cent above cost until all the subscriptions
have been paid back to those who advanced them, after which they are
always operated at cost. Every one who rides on the train pays fare,
the same as you do. The only difference is, that we ride at cost on an
economically operated railroad, while you are paying the stockholders
a large dividend on an extravagantly operated one.
We have three kinds of parties that do business: 1. The collectivity
which we call the community. 2. The collectivity which we call the
family. 3. The individual.
One big-house of every community, we call the Com -- meaning … a
common business place; a place where the community's business is
transacted, such as selling the products of the community, which are
not needed for home consumption; issuing money, receiving the
remittances from all families and communities sales, paying all the
families and communities bills, doing the printing for the community,
etc.
Each family of a community buys for its own use whatever it needs,
such articles as dry goods, groceries, furniture, etc., and the
individuals buy at the family stores. The storekeeper buys for the
store what he thinks the people may want. So we see that each
individual buys and sells with his own money, such articles as
clothing, meals, railroad tickets, barber and laundry tickets,
furniture for his private apartment, private luxuries, and all other
things that he appropriates for his private use. The individual has no
dictator; no censor.
We have no such a thing as profit in our mercantile system, or any
other of our systems. Every article is sold at cost, including, of
course, the cost of buying and selling; and nothing but productive
labor will buy it. Profit is wrong because it is always paid by a
person who receives nothing for it; and it is paid to the person who
does nothing for it. Of course, we have no law prohibiting the taking
of profit, but under a healthy, free competition, profit is gradually
and entirely eliminated by the practically equal opportunity enjoyed
by each individual and by each community. No individual or community
holds any monopolistic advantages over another. A stranger can buy as
cheaply in any family store as a member of the community can. Prices,
including transportation charges, are nearly uniform … all over
the same country. You also want to bear in mind that under keen, free
competition and a comparatively uniform supply, prices rarely ever
fluctuate. Thus you see we have no place for a speculator and a
schemer. He would not make enough, with his profession, in ten years
to buy a meal. Nothing less than a fair, honest share of productive
labor receives the approval of one's companions; and no person would
want to bear the burden of public contempt in order to avoid his fair
share of the labor, when a day s labor is so short, the labor so easy
and pleasant, the compensation so abundant.
Every big-house has a mercantile department in which nearly all kinds
of goods, such as an individual wants, are kept for sale. The men,
women and children who work in the sales department receive wages, or
pay, the same as a miner, a farmer or a conductor. They are not
interested whether they sell or not. They derive no benefit from
misrepresenting goods. It is the same to them whether they sell a
cheap article or a high priced one. They derive no benefit from lying,
from suppressing the truth, or from otherwise deceiving or persuading
a customer to buy an article he really does not want.
[Elsewhere in the world] incomplete division of labor, single- handed
efforts, and inconveniences resulting from them necessarily produce a
small return for the labor expended; and the products which it does
produce under such conditions are rude and unfinished. Think, if every
one had to make his own watch, how long it would take one, and what a
watch it would be after one had it completed.
[Under cooperative individualism] all of man's career, from his
genesis until his death, is a comparative history of kindness,
freedom, harmony and happiness.
On the first of every year an invoice and census are taken by each
big-house, and from these a community invoice and census is
summarized. The summarized invoice exhibits the total commodities on
hand of the whole community. It also exhibits the increase or decrease
of any particular kind of goods, as well as the total increase or
decrease of wealth and capital during the last year. By the aid of
this invoice the individual, the family and the community can
ascertain in what direction their labor can be advantageously
increased or diminished during the current year. If we find by the
invoice that the wealth of the community is diminishing, we have to
lengthen our day's labor so as to produce more; and if the wealth
increases faster than we desire, we shorten the day s labor. [A]ll
wealth must be produced by the application of labor to land, and …
anything which is not produced by labor is not wealth.
[U]nder free competition and a healthy supply and demand, prices do
not fluctuate arbitrarily like they do under your monopolistic laws,
which create an unreliable market and fictitious values. Hence we can
be and are all well informed on market prices.
[I]t is not competition, like some economists try to make people
believe, but monopoly which makes earth such a cruel, poor world to
live in. Profit is one form of monopoly in trade and commerce. You
will notice that in our social and industrial world there is a keen
competition everywhere. One community, family and individual endeavor
to do better and more work in the same time than another. But a
competitor is always a laborer, winning his race by his superior
merit. He always earns his own living, besides giving the benefit of
his superior merit to the world at large.
But notice the difference in the profit-taker. He receives something
for which he does nothing, and the person who pays him the profit,
pays for something for which he receives nothing. For this reason a
profit-taker may grow rich by living an idle life, by being a social
parasite, like all your profit-takers are as such. He simply
appropriates what others have already earned. A competitor never lives
from the labor of another. The community which makes the best and
cheapest shoes, sells the most, and this is just what it should be,
for every one should be allowed to buy as cheap as he can. Under keen
competition every community will naturally drift into those
occupations for which it is best adapted and in which it is most
proficient. Just as it is with the community, so it is with the family
and with the individual.
The profit-taker endeavors to achieve his victory by monopolistically
tearing down his neighbor, while under freedom a competitor relies on
the superiority of his own merits without interfering with the race of
his neighbor. Competition is the only power of which we know that can
gently shift every person, family, community, etc., into that social
and industrial sphere for which each is best adapted. A competitor,
under freedom, is never robbed of what he produces; he always
possesses at least as much wealth as he would if he were the only
inhabitant of a world. Monopoly, in its various forms, is the thief
and robber.
[Outside of cooperative individualism], you either live in the
country, almost cut off from trade and commerce, or you live in a
crowded city or town where the smoke and offensive odor enters every
crevice, door and window, and where you are more or less starving for
want of wholesome air. Where scarcely a vegetation opens its mouth to
exhale the life-giving oxygen and to inhale the excessive carbonic
acid which impairs the health of animal life. Where a portion of
mankind are living an idle, wasteful life in a palace built by the
labor of the poor, and another large class of industrious persons are
eking out a miserable existence in a poor, filthy hovel. Under your
profit system each must grab all he can or he must starve. In order
that a few may amass comparatively worthless fortunes, many are
trampled in the mire who can never rise again under the burden of your
social and industrial system. Perhaps from one-half to three-fourths
of your commercial and mercantile work is unproductive and destructive
labor.
[In the United States] railroad corporations not infrequently receive
large public donations of land, etc., to build the roads with, and
after they are built they become the gambling stock on which large
dividends are paid by the hand of labor. You have so many places of
business where goods are spoiling for want of customers; and with your
monopolistic profit system, every merchant is trying to freeze out his
neighbor. [With cooperative individualism, there are] no middle-men
who have to live from profit which must be taxed to the goods when
sold to the consumer or producer; no army of mercantile schemers, the
successful ones of whom live and grow rich from the labor and wrecked
fortunes of others; no traveling salesmen; no countless warehouses and
elevators, in which the rich speculator stores the grain and other
commodities in order to create a fictitious market. Each one of our
communities buys and preserves what it needs for its own consumption
directly from some other community; and so each community also sells
what it has to spire to some other purchasing community. Thus each
purchase and sale is a wholesale, even if it amounts to only a
nickle's worth. [Elsewhere], a business man must live from the profits
of his sales. He must sell or become impoverished. Under such a
condition, in order to save himself from bankruptcy, he is tempted to
lie, to misrepresent on the one hand and to suppress the truth on the
other; he is tempted to persuade customers by deceptive means to
purchase things they do not really want. He must strain every nerve
and muscle to keep want from his door. His wife and children in many
cases, where the business place is remote from the residence, scarcely
ever see him. In the morning he leaves early and in the evening he
returns late. Many of your business men have lost nearly all their
social qualities and are little more than mere business worms with the
shadow of death hovering on their countenances. Your business man is a
mental slave also. In order to be successful in his business he must
either be ignorant and superstitious himself, living in a little
narrow, mental world, or he must tacitly, and sometimes even avowedly,
sanction the ignorance and superstition of his customers. For, very
likely, if he expresses his honest convictions concomitant with a
higher state of culture in all directions, he offends some of his
customers from the profit of whose purchases he must live, and
financial ruin would be the result.
CONTENTS
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