Socialism To-day

by James Ramsay MacDonald

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SOCIALISM
To-day.

BY

J. RAMSAY
MACDONALD,
M.P.

 

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ONE PENNY.

 

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I.L.P., 23, BRIDE LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.

 

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[Advertisements]

SOCIALISM EXPLAINED.

A SCIENTIFIC STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT.

Socialism
and Society

By J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P.

 

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CONTENTS.

The Problem—Society and the Individual—The Economic Period—
Utopian and Semi-Scientific Socialism—Towards Socialism—
Socialism and the Political Organ.

 

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"Daily News" says:—
"This admirable little work."

"Daily Chronicle" says:—
"Well written, logical, and readable, and we commend it to the study of all social reformers."

"Bristol Daily Mercury" says:—
"It would be difficult to name a work which explains so concisely, clearly, and forcibly the inspiring ideas of the Socialist Movement, or gives a better popular exposition of the Socialist aims and policy."

"Huddersfield Worker" says:—
"The logical process of the book is very convincing. "Socialism and Society" is no put up-job, but a strenuous sustained effort by the best intellect in the Parliamentary Labour Party to give a thoroughly deductive statement of a policy which, on purely practical grounds, carries with it its own recommendation."

"Scottish Co-operator" says:—
"Mr. Macdonald is able to show the falseness of both the Individualist and the Marxist position. He, however, is not content with destructive criticism: he gives a luminous exposition of Socialist theory."

"Reynolds' Weekly Paper" says:—
"Society is no longer regarded as an architectural constriction of fixed parts, but as an organism maturing by the laws of variation and growth. . . . . Mr. Macdonald's book is strongly recommended."

NOW ON SALE.SIXTH EDITION.

(Revised and largely re-written).

236 pp., Cloth 1/6 net, paper 1/- net, Postage 3d. extra'

 

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To be obtained of all Booksellers, or direct from the Publishers
I.L.P., 23, BRIDE LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.

Socialism To-day.

 

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Being the Chairman's Address (expanded and amplified) delivered at the Synod Hall, Edinburgh, Easter 1909.

 

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The year that has just gone has been of no small importance to our Party. In numbers, in activities and in power, we have grown. Our affiliation fees, amounting to £1103 last year, are now £1432. The number of our branches is now just within touching distance of a thousand, and above all, the intellectual activity of the Party, and the interest taken in it outside, as shown by our sales of literature, are thoroughly satisfactory. Moreover, the splendid results which the recent elections for the District Councils in England have given, indicate that the electors are renewing their confidence in the Party.

Need we marvel at our progress? Consider the events of the year. Do they not add to the already convincing wealth of proof that our general conception of industrial evolution is sound? Depression has followed boom, and unemployment has trod hard upon the heels of overtime. During the last ten years, the amount of wealth assessed for Income Tax has increased by £250,000,000, whilst wages, in many trades, have actually decreased, and, in most of the other trades, have failed to do more than keep to an average level. To-day, at the beginning of 1909, the working classes are receiving a share of the national wealth less by £2,000,000 per annum than they were ten years ago, although in the meanwhile that wealth has enormously increased. The display of riches has become more barbaric, more impertinent, more gross, both in its forms and in its lavishment. The unsavoury details of the private lives of the well-to-do have become more frequently the subject of actions in our Courts of Law, and Rome at its worst is being amply reproduced in modern plutocratic society. There has been no cessation in the Capitalist output of moral, industrial, and economic failure. And we stand almost alone giving guidance as to the way onwards. Every proposal of any value made by politicians, has its origin in our work—whether it be afforestation, or national control of railways; the establishment of a rural ppulation on a basis of public ownership of land or the proper incidence of taxation. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission is but a Socialist document—our old proposals paraphrased, brought up to date as to facts and experience, issued at the public expense.

 

Socialism not to come from the Misery
of the People.

At the same time, there has been just that slackening in our hold on the workers which ought to remind us in these days of industrial depression and Capitalist failure, that Socialism is not to come from the misery of the people. And the better-to-do people, conscious also that they are living under a system which must pass away because it cannot secure economic justice, and because its distribution cannot be determined by merit and its property founded on service, run hither and thither like disturbed ants seeking a security they cannot find, frightened by threats of invasion, of taxation, of confiscation of property; and according to the law of Capitalism, their timorousness and ignorance are exploited by some of their own section, and the press that creates their scares is maintained by their subscriptions.

I know that there is a belief still fairly prevalent amongst one school of Socialist theorists that the more Capitalism fails the clearer will the way to Socialism be—that from the misery of the people the Socialist future will arise. I have never shared that faith. For with depression has not come more strenuous thinking, but more despairing action. Poverty of mind and body blurs the vision and does not clarify it. For instance, there is a propaganda at present being conducted by money subscribed by those interested in creating new means of exploiting the public, and by methods which must be loathsome to everybody who has any ideal of public rectitude and political honour. I refer to the Tariff Reform agitation. Its funds exceed those of an ordinary political party. They are made up by subscriptions secretly given by the leading members of the class which most successfully exploits the labour of others—the class of monopolists, the class of capitalists, who would benefit most directly by the exclusion of foreign goods and the consequent raising of prices on the home market. A huge staff of itinerant agents, some of whom have been simply bought from other political organisations owing to the high wages offered, wanders over the face of the country. The public house is a fruitful field for their propaganda. One finds them standing at the bar, or sitting in the parlour, talking the most absurd nonsense to men, who, unable to follow their arguments, are but victims of their untruthfulness. The Corrupt Practices Law has become a dead letter. The upper classes are teaching us the weakness of Democracy, and the impotence of Law.

Although these facts may be observed by every intelligent person, the poor workman, harrassed, beaten, and cowed by industrial strife, turns to the alluring enticements of Tariff Reform without thought of its final effects, without considering the economic forces that will determine distribution when the system is in full working order, and he accepts it in despair, as a striken creature, broken in health and weary under physical suffering, resorts to the quack who backs his prescriptions with sufficiently unscrupulous accounts of their unlimited virtues.

And as Capitalism thus totters along, getting more and more upon the nerves of the people, Militarism reappears as a nervous disease; and, amidst the decay of moral power and authority, force—force in the shape of arms and of accumulated wealth—is regarded by the people as their only safety and succour. But all this is an indication of national decay, not of the evolution of a higher social state. The further Society drifts from a primitive state of organisation, the less and less true does it become that despair and revolution go hand in hand. It is not a Society unnerved with panic and distracted with hunger that advances towards Socialism, but one in which a certain success in satisfying physical needs has awakened mental desires and made easy the exercise of the social instincts and the community-consciousness of the individual. The success of Socialism depends upon the ability of the people to see by the eye of imagination and faith, a purer city and a juster State. A just imagination, gnawing hunger, and deadening toil do not not go together.

Last Year or Two of Special Importance
to the Movement.

The last year or two have been of special importance to our Movement. And when all is told, it will be the I.L.P.—its methods and its conception of Socialism, and above all its creation of the Labour Party as the instrument and medium of the Socialist advance—that will stand out as the great creative political force of these years. Where the members of the I.L.P. have not muddled their minds by becoming members of Socialist organisations with different methods and standpoints, and where the I.L.P. itself has kept clear of joint action with sections which have nothing in common with it but a name, Socialism has flourished; but where dual membership has been common, Socialism has not flourished, the public have been confused, the distinctive features of the I.L.P. have been obscured, and the work of many years thrown away. Dogmatism and narrow-mindedness are alien to the spirit of the I.L.P. The I.L.P. was started for a purpose. There was Socialism in this country before the I.L.P. was founded at Bradford in 1893, and it was because the propaganda of Socialism before that seemed to many Socialists to be conducted in a way which was only retarding the cause, that the new organisation was formed. To-day, there is some reversion to the old ante-I.L.P. methods, and yet these methods are more certainly foredoomed to failure than ever they were. Those of you who know the history of Socialism in this country, more particularly those of you who have made that history and grown up with it, will have to see to it that, during the next two or three years, this reversion does not become strong inside our organisation, and that the work done with so much effort is not undone in a month or so of thoughtless riot and sentimental excess.

 

New Problems Ahead.

Every stage accomplished brings new problems which demand solution, and in bidding you farewell as your Chairman, I should like to dwell for a minute or two upon an important group which I see ahead, and which has matured during the time I have held this position. The problems I refer to deal with the relation between Socialist propaganda and Parliamentary government.

How is Socialism to Come?

The question we have to answer is: How are we to organise ourselves? How is Socialism to come? What is to be our relation to national questions that are not on our programme? Are we to accept the aims and methods of democratic government? Hitherto, we have been a little too content with answering those questions by words and phrases, the meanings of which have not always been specific or definite. We have, for instance, declaimed against Party Government whilst doing our very best to form a new Party with a written Constitution. At one moment, we have proclaimed the eternal justice of majority rule; at another, we have demanded that a Socialist and Labour minority should determine the work of the House of Commons. Many criticised the action of the Labour Party on the Licensing Bill without having spent an hour in considering how, except by some such Bill, the Socialist principle that all monopolies should belong to the State and contribute directly to State income, could be applied to the licensed trade.

Even our great watchword "Independence" has not always been sufficiently well defined. Whilst we were concerned merely with running candidates, it laid down the very clear principle that we ran therm irrespective of the convenience of other parties, and, so far, it was admirable. It has been one of the secrets of our success. But we seem to have been rather averse to discuss "Independence" as a method of Parliamentary action, and under Parliamentary conditions. If, for instance, we held the balance of power between two parties, how would we use it? Would we turn one out in preference to the other, or would we turn out first the one and then the other, and make government impossible until we ourselves were wiped out for the time being by a series of General Elections that were regarded by the country as being nothing but a great nuisance?

These are not hypothetical questions at all. They have arisen in practically every country in the world where there is a Socialist and Labour Party in Parliament. In France, we get them in one form; in Belgium, in another; in Germany, in another; in Italy, in another. In the Commonwealth of Australia, one experiment was tried when Mr. Deakin was in power and Mr. Watson leader of the Labour Partv; in South Australia, a totally different experiment was tried under the Coalition Ministry of which Mr. Price the leader of the Labour Party is the head. Mr. Deakin was the leader of the Party third in numerical strength in the Commonwealth Parliament. Mr. Watson was the leader of the Party second in numerical strength. Mr. Deakin, having pledged himself to work with the Labour Party on certain matters regarding Protection in Australia, was kept in office by them, and allowed to do other work by their support. The Labour Party was not directly responsible for anything, and yet: it kept the Government in office. The South Australian arrangement is that Mr. Price has left the Labour Party, temporarily, with the other members of the Party included in his Ministry. He has done this with the permission of the Party. The Party now meets without him, considers its policy in relation to his, communicates directly with him, and will oppose him whenever it thinks fit. Should he resign office, he would go back into the Party because the arrangement is one of the most complete friendliness, and the situation is candidly accepted by the Party itself.

At Amsterdam, when this question was being discussed in connection with Jaurès and the French Parliamentary bloc, Kautsky stated that at times of national crisis, as, for instance, during a war, Socialists might have to co-operate with a Government, in order to secure national safety. This situation may never arise, but the question will arise: Is national safety only jeopardised in times of war? If not, Kautsky's admission must affect Socialist policy even when there is no war. Then, what is national safety?

The situation I have in mind will meet us sooner or later. It may come immediately after the next General Election, and if we have not given some thought to it before it arises as a practical question to be faced during a crisis, we will fare badly. Then, the temptations of the platform to keep you cheering will overcome the influences to keep you thinking. Only evil awaits the Party whose declared principles of action do not correspond to the practical work which its Parliamentary representatives have to do.^[1]

 

The House of Commons.

But even before we have decided this most intricate question, we shall have been forced to define our attitude to the House of Commons itself. How are we to regard the House of Commons? I sometimes receive resolutions beginning in this way: "Seeing that the Unemployed are of more importance than the rules of the House of Commons"—you know the rest. If I said that I see nothing of the kind, I would of course be misunderstood. So I shall put it in this way—The opposition between Parliamentary procedure and the question of how to deal with the unemployed is purely a fictitious one. The unemployed can never be treated by any Parliament except by one which has rules of procedure, and these rules must prescribe majority responsibility. Every facility given to a minority to impose its will upon the majority is a facility which any minority can use, and not merely a Labour or a Socialist minority. To protect the conditions and the existence of democratic government is just as essential to the building up of the Socialist State as is the solution of the problem of unemployment. The latter is our aim, the former is the only condition under which our aim can be secured. The Party which proposes to strike at the heart of democratic government in order to make a show of earnestness about unemployment will not only not be tolerated by the country, but does not deserve to be.

Socialists must not assume, moreover, that the agitation for scenes and suspensions is merely superficial and should be treated with good-natured tolerance. It is, in its very nature, anti-Parliamentarian. It must evolve into a policy to which, I feel sure, Socialists will not consciously commit themselves, but to which they will be committed, if they are not careful, before they know what has happened. The master of Parliament is the Nation, and if Parliament does not do its work it is no use smashing it; it is little use blaming it, because it is a mere thing in the hands of the electors of the country. If these electors want Parliament to do a certain thing, Parliament, more particularly so long as a body of Independent Labour and Socialist members sit in it, cannot evade its responsibilities. If the majority of electors do not want Parliament to do a certain thing, a minority in Parliament trying to force it to do that thing is not only committing political suicide, but is also adopting precisely the method which its opponents would like it to adopt, and is damaging the cause which it professes to serve. The task of the Socialist is to convert the country, not to agitate Parliament. Parliament is an expression of public opinion up to any given moment. It can simply do what public opinion will allow it to do, and the duty of a Socialist Party inside is to see that it does not lag behind public opinion; whilst the duty of the Party outside is to see that public opinion is properly educated.

The policy we are to adopt depends fundamentally upon how we think Socialism is to come. Is it to be by a sudden change—a sudden change owing to force, or a sudden change owing to legislative action? To me, the first is quite unthinkable. We can cut off kings' heads after a few battles; we can change a Monarchy into a Republic, we can deprive people of their titles, and we can make similar superficial alterations, by force; but nobody who understands the power of habit and of custom in human conduct, who appreciates the fact that by far and away the greater amount of our action is begun, controlled, and specified by the system of social inter-relationships in which we live, move, and have out being: and, still more, nobody who understands the delicate and intricate complexity of production and exchange which keeps modern Society going, will dream for a single moment of changing it by any act of violence. As soon as that act is committed, every vital force in Society will tend to re-establish the relationships which we have been trying to end, and, what is more, these vital forces will conquer us in the form of a violent reaction—a counter revolution. On the morrow of a sudden change we would be fish out of water, and the fish will wriggle back to the water. We have had many interesting disquisitions published from time to time and in many languages about what is to happen on the morrow of the revolution. But it seems to me that whoever writes with scientific faithfulness on this subject can describe but two things—the inability of the wisest to foresee the provisions required for carrying on Society, and the gathering together of natural forces to re-establish the old conditions. When we cut off a newt's tail, a newt's tail grows on again.

Will, then, the change be brought about by a revolutionary Act of the Legislature? This is equally unthinkable to me owing to the resistance of habits of thought and action. Far be it from me to imply that this resistance amounts to immobility. In every form of life there is what I may call an internal accumulation of forces making for change. When these forces are released by the care of the scientific experimenter or by happy accident, they produce what appear to be sudden changes. At the moment, a school of Biologists, small in numbers but supported by some remarkable results, is drawing our attention to the rapidity of certain changes in the evolution of species. The Mutation Theory, supported by De Vries, and the practical experiments in economic horticulture, conducted by Burbank, claim and prove that, under favourable conditions, organisms execute, at a leap, substantial changes which show no tendency to revert to pre-existing forms, but are as fixed as these forms themselves were. The explanation appears to be that tendencies to change accumulate and show themselves suddenly when circumstances draw them out.

 

Practical Problems of Socialism.

In Society to-day we are aware of this pent-up accumulation of forces. Capitalism violates our moral sense as well as our reason. It brings, decade after decade, its prolific crop of industrial failures and these industrial failures present not merely material but also spiritual ugliness. Therein lies the hope and the promise of change which we desire, but we must work scientifically, we must organise, we must release, we must encourage, we must aid those creative forces, and no academic dogma, either regarding the way in which we are to define our Socialism, or the way in which we should carry it out, should be allowed to stand in our path in following Truth as it is revealed to us. We are called upon to take our part as a conscious factor in social evolution. Our problem is to be found at every street corner, in every factory, in every crowd, in every slum, in every workhouse. The axioms we have to use in solving the problem are to be found in the experience that organisation is mightier than disorganisation, law and order mightier than anarchy and chaos, science than rule-of-thumb, the foresight and purpose of intelligence than a happy-go-lucky faith in the virtue of "muddling through." In addition to that, these more recent years have given us something else. They have placed at our disposal the weapon of a political party sharing the responsibilities of legislative work, gathering experience and capacity at the point at which social change is made effective. If it be true, as undoubtedly it is, that during the last three years you may say that some of us have not given you peace, but a sword, the reason is not far to seek. It lies in the fact that our success up to that time only consisted in preparing for further battles. There is no lying down at the end of our day’s labour. There is no finality in our formulæ and modes of expression. Our cause, like the cause of knowledge itself, constantly leads us to new discoveries which require a re-statement of our creeds and a revision of our methods. Socialism shall prevail just as it is served by men who follow it, not as flatterers, but as counsellors, and who employ in its service not their lips only, but their heads and their hearts.

But the sands of time run fast through the glass of life. It was but yesterday, apparently, when you honoured me by electing me to this chair, and to-morrow I resign it again. The years have been crowded with many works, the value of which Time alone can test, but the pleasure I have had in watching the growth of the Party and the way it has been driving its roots down into the intelligence of the people, has been keenly sweet, and my official connection with it at such a time has been a great joy tome. I am all the wiser, I hope, for having presided over your deliberations, I am certainly all the happier for having had such opportunities to serve Socialism, and I know I am all the richer for having experienced the loyalty of my colleagues and the friendship of my comrades.

 

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APPENDIX.

The enterprising editor of the Glasgow Forward sent a circular to various members of the I.L.P. asking their opinion on this part of my address. The letter I sent in reply may make my meaning clearer, and I therefore publish it here.

 

"Why I asked the Question."

"Very great pressure of work has prevented me sending an earlier reply to the request you addressed to me to discuss further the question I put to the Edinburgh Conference as to how a Labour Party would act if it held the balance of power in Parliament.

"I had better explain first of all why I put the question. It was not that I had any answer ready up my sleeve, but that I saw that much that was being said about independence by our speakers did not take into account probable Parliamentary situations, and that, if the expectations of the Party were being formed by a propaganda of false notions, disaster would follow when the Parliamentary Party had to face the circumstances that had been overlooked.

"When the circumstances arise, I am perfectly certain of one thing. No party can possibly create General Election after General Election. The support necessary to enable it to survive this most trying of all tests would be so great that, if it existed, it would elect us in such strength that we would be no mere balancing power to begin with. We would be the Opposition.

"Our friends can be as heroic as they like on the platform and in the Press, but there is a good deal of the footlights about it—and also a good deal of vain imagining regarding Parliamentary conditions. If there were 70 of us in Parliament, and the difference between the other Parties were ten, hardly an appreciable percentage of our explanations of what independence means would apply to such circumstances. Nothing shows more clearly the total lack of preparation for such a state than the fact that probably not more than a score—if even that—of our active men saw during the election of 1906 that it would be better for us if the majority of the Liberal Government was so great as to make it independent of us. The mistake that so many of our political tacticians, like Mr. Burgess, make, is that in drawing up their plans of battle they put the enemy in a nice comfortable position for us to maul him. They give the enemy his tactics, his alliances, his guns, and his shot. They then open the battle, and they walk over him! This is nursery politics. Nothing has happened like it since the Hanoverian generals of decayed and ludicrous memory planned nicely on paper how their soldiers could thrust the Highlanders on the right side. The Highlandman, however, would have no such trick played upon him, and cut his opponent to the brisket.

"I want the I.L.P. to declare for no policy. That will have to be settled when the conditions arise. Our action will then be determined by our numbers, our relative strength, the state of public opinion, the character of the question before the country. But I do appeal to it to take into account all the facts and circumstances, and not, for the sake of satisfying its soul and sentiment, go gaily on listening to the enunciation of policies and cheering phrases which obviously do not take into account some of the most important and a the same time most difficult problems which representation in Parliament presents to it."

 

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P. Lindley & Co., The Pioneer Press, 20, Shudehill, Manchester

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1. See Appendix.