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We voted for that plan at a big meeting with all of us present, six thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made long speeches about it, and it wasn’t too clear, but nobody asked any questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut – because they made it sound like anyone who’d oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how we were to know otherwise? Hadn’t we heard it all our lives – from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers and in every newspaper we ever read and in every movie and every public speech? Hadn’t we always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there’s some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan – and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know madam we were marked men, in a way, those of us who lived though the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century Factory. What is it that Hell is supposed to be? Evil – plain, naked, smirking evil, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we saw and helped to make – and I think we’re damned, every one of us, and maybe we’ll never be forgiven…
Do you know how it worked that plan, and what it did to people ? Try pouring water into a tank where there is a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six – for your neighbour’s supper – for his wife’s operation – for his child’s measles – for his mother’s wheel chair – for his uncle’s shirt – for his nephew’s schooling – for the baby next door – for the baby to be born – for anyone anywhere around you – it’s theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures – and after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hoe, without end… From each according to his ability, to each according to his need…
We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t stand, working the acetylene torch ten hours a day – together, and you don’t all get a bellyache – together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs comes first ? when it’s all one pot’ you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you ? if you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht – and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on this earth – why can’t he demand a yacht from me too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t? Then hy can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? …Oh well … Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, madam, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. Hoe else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars – rotten whining, sniveling beggars all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to '‘he family'’, and they owed him nothing in return and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ – so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and hoping that the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work that had become the coin of the realm – so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?
to be continued....
The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the
expense of everybody else
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