trusts in the hope of restoring competition among small family-owned firms or partnerships. The wage earner would remain a wage earner; instead of trying to convert him into a property owner or partner, enlightened social policy would see to it that his job was secure, his working conditions tolerable, his wages equitable, and his opportunity to organize unions unimpeded by archaic legal obstacles.

Debate on the left now confined itself to such questions as whether these goals could be achieved without socializing the means of production or at least subjecting industry to sweeping public controls, whether the labor movement should devote itself to pure and simple unionism or press for a broad program of political reforms, and whether unions should be organized on craft or industrial lines. But almost everyone on the left agreed, even those who looked forward to the day when the workers would control the state and thereby own the means of production (in theory), that workers would continue to sell their labor as if it were a commodity, if not to private employers then to the state itself. To think otherwise, it was now agreed—to postulate a return to handicraft production or a restoration of proprietorship in some new form—betrayed a failure of nerve, an inability to come to terms with modern life, a sentimental fixation on the past, a "petty bourgeois" sensibility, an outlook hopelessly clouded by "romantic," "populistic," "individualistic," "nostalgic," and otherwise contemptibly retrograde illusions of self-sufficiency. Samuel Gompers, the conservative exponent of bread-and-butter unionism, resorted to the same terms of abuse, in denouncing the "petty bourgeois" heresy, as the most doctrinaire socialists. The one element in his early exposure to Marxism that Gompers never renounced was the certainty that history advances in a single direction, that no one escapes the iron laws of historical motion, and that opposition to historical necessity represents the worst kind of escapism. ^*

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The growing acceptance of wage labor is only one indication of the narrowing of political debate in the twentieth century. Another indication is the narrowing of the kind of questions asked about work. In the nineteenth century, people asked whether the work was good for the worker. Today we ask whether workers are satisfied with their jobs. A high level of "job satisfaction" then serves to refute those who deplore the division of labor, the decline of craftsmanship, and the difficulty of finding work that

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