The solution of the mystery is so simple that the 5,000,000 unemployed cannot be kept permanently from understanding it. The reason the five men on the island are starving is because one man owns the island and the others own nothing. If the island were community property, the five men would each own a share of the contents of the barns and storehouses, and would not be starving. If the 100,000,000 people of America owned the productive machinery of America, then instantly the unemployment crisis would pass like an evil dream. The farm-workers who need shoes would exchange their food with the starving shoe-workers, and the starving shoe-workers would have jobs. They would want clothing, and so the clothing-makers would start to work; and so on all the way down the line. There is only one thing necessary to make this possible, and that is the thing which we have agreed to call the social revolution. CHAPTER LVIII THE IRON RING (Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production, and makes true prosperity impossible.) We have seen that in an exploiting society there is a surplus which is taken by the exploiter; and that under the modern system this surplus must be sold at a profit before production can continue. The vital fact in such a society is that the worker has not the money to buy back all that he produces; therefore it is inevitable that a surplus product should accumulate. When this happens, production must be cut down, and during that period the worker is without a job, and without means of living. The fact that he needs the product does not help him; the point is that he has not the money to buy it. In such a society the productive machinery is never used to the full. The machinery is controlled by a profit-seeking interest, seeking an opportunity to make sales, and restricting production according to the prospect of sales. So the actual product bears no relationship to the possible product, and people who live in an exploiting society can form no conception of true prosperity. For, you see, the market is limited by the competitive wage system. We have seen that in our own rich, prosperous country only one family out of six has more than $1,000 a year income; only one family out of twelve has $2,000 a year. It does not make any difference that the warehouses are bursting with goods; a family constitutes a market of so many dollars a year, and then, so far as the profit system is concerned, that family is non-existent; that family stops consuming, and the productive machinery is halted to that extent.