Quoted Text

"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody-almost everybody-voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's not true, either. We throught that we were supposed to think it was good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. We-what's the matter, ma'am? Why do you look like that?"

Quoted Text

"We voted for tthat plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six tthousand 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 of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouith 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 were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives-from our parents and ouir schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newpaper we ever read and 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, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived throught the four years of that plan in the Twntieth 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's 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 neightbor'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 nephews 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 yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your swat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end...From each according to his ability, to each according to his need....

"We're all on big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you dont stand, working an acetylene torch ten hours a day-together, and you dont all get a bellyache-together. What's whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you cant let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If yoiu 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 earth-why cant he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He cant? Then why 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 noby had th right to judge  his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How 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 'the 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 miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, 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?