"STATE SOCIALISM" AND LABOR State Capitalism has a very definite principle and program of labor reform.

It capitalizes labor, views it as the principal resource and asset of each community (or of the class that controls the community), and undertakes every measure that is not too costly for its conservation, utilization, and development--_i.e._ its development to fill those positions ordinarily known as _labor_, but not such development as might enable the laborers or their children to compete for higher social functions on equal terms with the children of the upper classes.
On the one hand is the tendency, not very advanced, but unmistakable and almost universal, to invest larger and larger sums for the scientific development of industrial efficiency--healthy surroundings in childhood, good food and healthy living conditions, industrial education, model factories, reasonable hours, time and opportunity for recreation and rest, and on the other a rapidly increasing difficulty for either the laborer or his children to advance to other social positions and functions--and a restriction of the liberty of laborers and of labor organizations, lest they should attempt to establish equality of opportunity or to take the first step in that direction by assuming control over industry and government.

From the moment it approaches the labor question the "Socialist" part of "State Socialism" completely falls away, and nothing but the purest collectivist capitalism remains.
Even the plausible contention that it will result in the maximum efficiency and give the maximum product breaks down.

For no matter how much the condition of the laborers is improved, or what political rights they are allowed to exercise, if they are deprived of all initiative and power in their employments, and of the equal opportunity to develop their capacities to fill other social positions for which they may prove to be more fit than the present occupants, then the human resources of the community are not only left underdeveloped, but are prevented from development.
In the following chapters I shall deal successively with the plans of the "State Socialists" to develop the productive powers of the laboring people and their children--_as laborers_, together with the accompanying tendencies towards compulsory labor, and formation of a class society.
"Our Home policy," says a manifesto of the Fabian Society (edited by Bernard Shaw), "must include a labor policy, _whether the laborer wants it or not_, directed to securing _for him, what, for the nation's sake even the poorest_ of its subjects should have." (Italics mine.)[46] Here is the basis of the attitude of the "State Socialist" towards labor.

Labor is to be given more and more attention and consideration.
But the governing is to be done by other classes, and the foundation of the new policy is to be the welfare of society as these other classes conceive it,--and not the welfare of the masses of the people as conceived by the masses themselves.
Indeed, a government official has recently pleaded with capital in the name of labor that the time has come when it pays to treat labor as well as valuable horses and cattle.