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Mr. Gillette’s Ideal Order

The kind of man who conceives an ideal order of society is, it seems, predestined to have the befoliaged type of face. There was Plato with his curly tonsorial scenery, Karl Marx with his generous whiskers, Lenin with chin shrubbery, Trotzky with a soup moustache. When one comes to King C. Gillette, famed inventor and manufacturer of the safety razor, one would think that regardless of any idea in his head, he would be clean-shaven. Not so. His book*—a manufacturer’s view of society—possibly explains the razor man’s moustache.

What he proposes is, in effect, a socialistic world-state, the abolition of private capital. His means of attaining it and his reasons for seeking it are unique. He begins in the approved socialistic manner: “No sane man can live on this planet 20 years without realizing that something is very seriously wrong with the world.” But he does not proceed with the usual tirade against the capitalist who “squeezes the last drop of profit” from the laboring classes. He enumerates the economic hardships of the race and then proceeds to trace them to the inefficient industrial structure of society. He demonstrates that:

“One out of every eight persons gainfully occupied is producing nothing in return for his share of the [world] payroll. Of the 87½% engaged in productive labor we see that 50% of their labor is lost through lack of coordination. That leaves them 43¾% productive. We see, again, that at least one quarter of this is lost through expenditure for war, preparation for war and the economic paralysis following war. ... That leaves our factory 34% productive. . . . We cannot measure the loss through the idleness of the incomedrawing class, nor the loss through the production of luxuries which benefit only a few. To say that we are 70% inefficient seems a ridiculously modest estimate. ...

“By this time we are thoroughly enraged. We wish to investigate farther. We pound our desk and say: ‘Send for the manager!’

“And we are told: ‘There is no manager.’

“*What,’ we cry, getting absolutely purple, ‘No manager !’”

So Mr. Gillette, being a first-rate business manager himself, proposes a remedy. The basic fault, he finds, with the present system is competition. It makes for endless duplication. The art of selling, including advertising, which occupies many people today is a clear waste which gets the consumer nothing. He calculates that in the U. S. there are 3,552,952 people who are paid, fed, clothed, solely for the purpose of persuading people that one product is better than another. Let’s abolish them, he says, or rather put them to producing something and we'll all be much better off. Let’s abolish the waste and guarantee every man who is willing to work a decent living, and then we’ll get rid of the “unnatural” inflation of the acquisitive instinct which makes men try to “do” the public out of everything they can. We can then put all the people in the insurance business at work to produce something; we can do the same for 95% of our judges and lawyers—if there is no longer private property to fight over. We will do away with bankers, brokers and moneylenders by abolishing interest and dividend-bearing properties. Our only money will be labor credits, which bear no interest, and which can be exchanged only for the actual necessities and common luxuries of life.

How is this to be achieved? By a giant corporation—the People’s Corporation. Let it be created as a sort of super-holding corporation, to acquire, first all securities, then all land and the physical property of production. Let nothing be expropriated. Let everything be paid for at market prices. By an ingenious system of pyramiding (the issuance of non-interest bearing, legal tender, industrial notes on property already acquired) the whole of the world’s wealth could be acquired for about 20% of its value without cheating anybody.

What have we finally? A great world-wide producing corporation. The entire population would live in a few cities. Every bit of land would produce whatever it was best fitted for. Likewise a gigantic civil service would put every man in his proper place.

If a few odd hundreds of thousands of acres of land were needed to furnish next year’s wheat supply, the exact portion of the world best suited for that purpose would be so used. An agricultural army, recruited at whatever wages were necessary to secure the requisite numbers, would move out from the cities in the Spring, perform the necessary work, proceed to another area to do a different kind of work there, etc. Mr. Gillette calculates that an army of 5,000,000 men properly directed could do all the world’s farming in six months of the year. There could be no unemployment or need, because the corporation could always employ a man to supply his own needs.

The present system of individual home manufacture in which there are 20,000,000 cooks and 20,000,000 kitchens would be supplanted by efficient quantity production, Everything would be done by wholesale and everything would be efficient. As for children, the State would pay their parents the cost of bringing them up—and if their parents did not want them, they would be reared at State institutions in charge of experts.

It is a remarkable, a “devastating” idea. From a practical standpoint it bristles with difficulties. A question would be whether people would care to live in such a well-organized society.

After all, the acquisitive instinct and competition—the two factors which have produced hardship and inefficiency in the present system—have also been the chief factors in bringing man from barbarism to civilization. The destruction of these two things—if they can be destroyed—will always be a dangerous experiment.