II.5. Standard of Living and Outlook

To try to demonstrate in detail the effect that so differently constituted a standard of living as that of the American worker exerts on social feeling would be rash. I must leave it in particular to the specialists of the philosophy of nutrition to uncover the connections that obtain between the anti-socialist cast of mind of the American worker and his predominantly meat-and-pudding diet or his abstinence towards alcohol. Abstinence fanatics well disposed to capitalism will be ready to discover close relations between the poison of alcohol and the poison of socialism. But let us leave that.

So much is certain: the American worker lives in comfortable circumstances. On the whole he does not know the oppressive misery of housing; he is not driven out of his home, because it is no home, like the “Stube” of the big-city worker in continental Europe, into the tavern; rather he can give room in ample measure to the impulses of the finest egoism, as comfortable domesticity develops it. He is well fed, and does not know the discomforts that must of necessity arise in the long run from the crossing of potatoes with alcohol. He dresses like a gentleman and she like a lady, and so he does not even outwardly become aware of the distance that separates him from the ruling class. What wonder if in such a situation discontent with the “existing order of society” settles only with difficulty in the heart of the worker. Especially when his tolerable, indeed comfortable standard of living appears to him secured for good. And that it could be until now, surely. For we must never forget what a steady course the “economic upswing” in the United States has taken — apart from brief interruptions — during the last two generations, in which, after all, socialism ought properly to have taken root. And evidently not in spite of capitalism, but through it.

A glance at the quite general figures of the statistics is enough to dispel every doubt of the reality of this “upswing” (which, after all, the sparrows and every commercial councillor whistle from the roofs). In industry, trade and transport there were:

In the measure that the material situation of the wage-labourer improved, in the measure that the growing comfort of his standard of living let him experience the temptations of a materialist dulling, he had to learn to love the economic system that shaped his lot for him; he had to learn slowly to fit his mind into the peculiar mechanism of the capitalist economy; he had finally himself to fall under the spell that the speed of change and the growing bulk of measurable magnitude exert irresistibly, after all, on almost everyone in this wonderful time. A strain of patriotism — the proud consciousness that the United States went ahead of all other peoples on the path of (capitalist) “progress” — strengthened the web of his businesslike cast of mind and made him into the sober, calculating, unideal man of business that we know today. On roast beef and apple pie all socialist utopias came to grief.

But for the worker to be able to rejoice from his heart in these fine things, a series of other circumstances had after all still to combine in his favour. I should like to say: his ideal standard of living too had to be a comfortable one. On that the following pages shall inform.