The Socialist Movement/Chapter 1
THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL
1. Mutual Aid.
Mutual aid amongst men has played at least as great a part in human history as the struggle for life. Within his clan and tribe the individual has striven for mastery over other individuals. Chiefs have plotted and murdered, thrones have brought many rivals to their steps, and sexual selection has been picking and choosing survivors and offspring since the beginning of time. But this individual selection has always had a social setting. If it resulted in weakness it was not a man who died but a clan that was swept away; if it resulted in strength it was not a tyrant who was born but a nation that was founded. Romantic history is the story of heroes; scientific history is the story of peoples. The conflicts and movements that make history have been the conflicts and movements of masses and organisations. The colossal historical figure has been the man endowed with the capacity to gather up in himself the life of his time.
For dramatic purposes we think of some Adamic beginning—a desert island, a solitary man, an enemy's footprint on the sand. But whether we are explaining economic or political or ethical laws, we immediately proceed to bring a second man into friendly contact with the first so as to create barter, a market, subdivision of labour, an alliance, mutual interest, for one or other of these things is the driving wheel of progressive change. The wattles are set up and the mound and ditch made, but for the village not for the individual; the castle is built, but to protect the retainers as well as the lord; the king is chosen, but he is the representative man of his people. Personal power is representative. It is the centre of mass power. Laws are passed and obeyed for the good of the whole, to repress the strong and protect the weak, to punish the dishonest and reward the honest, not at first that individuals may have justice done to them, but that the community may exist and flourish. Conceptions of individual rights and of justice come much later. The conflict of nations and clans brings feudalism—the organisation of a mass whose existence is threatened and which is threatening the existence of other masses. The subdivisions of labour and responsibility, of power and of honour; the relations of clansman and chief, of baron and king; the economic structure of slave, chattel slave and lord of the manor, were not the creation of individual will and forethought, but the response to a law of mutual aid as imperative as that law which determines that the bee must pack its cells as octahedrons and not as cubes.
The conception of individual right comes to play a part in history only after social solidarity has been secured. Visions of the existence of such a right flash like comets across history long before they enter a system of practical politics. From these visions have come, in our own history, Lollardy, John Ball and the peasant rising, the extreme wings of the Independent schisms during Cromwell's time, the early Socialist agitation; but they were only the dreams of its coming perfection which troubled Society, and they but led to the shedding of blood or to the visitation of vengeance by the powers that were. They were not to be understood even, until many generations after their leaders had died, had been lampooned, and had been put, like many another precious thing, on the dust heaps and in the lumber rooms.[1] Social organisation arises to protect the whole, but it is first of all captured by the strong and exploited by them. This double thread of exploitation and revolt against exploitation runs right through history.
2. The Individual in the Community.
The explanation that these revolts of the oppressed were only the antagonism of a subject and exploited class to a ruling and exploiting one lacks historical background, and is therefore inadequate. The exploiting class had a necessary function to perform. If it put a yoke of subjection on the necks of other classes, it was because the organisation which society required in order that it might exist at all, implied such a differentiation into classes, with political and economic inequalities, and consequently with opportunities to prey upon the mass and use power for personal and class ends. John Ball's sermons, to the ethics of which no one can take objection, could no more have been carried into effect in the days of the Henrys than the Sermon on the Mount can be carried into effect to-day. On the surface, the whole history of human progress within communities and nations is a series of class struggles. Liberty "slowly broadens down" from class to class as the enfranchised sections of the nation tend to become the whole of the nation. In the earlier stages of society the custody of national functions must be in the hands of a few because the military officer is also the political authority. But when the factory takes the place of the battlefield in national importance, the custodianship of national interests must pass into more hands, and the propertied and middle classes are enfranchised and their economic interests taken special care of. Finally, when the state becomes a democratic organisation and co-operates with the individual in all spheres of his activity, the movement for political democracy has ripened and has produced its natural social fruits. Political power, in the nature of things, must, then, be used for economic (amongst other) ends. For, whilst the political aim of a class may be power, or honour, or wealth, for the mass of the people there is but one aim possible, a general raising of the standard of life. It has been customary, especially since Maine's time, to consider Democracy as nothing but a form of government. That is totally wrong. It is a kind of government. With a social democracy polities really become national for the first time, and community consciousness takes the place of class consciousness.
From this point of view historical evolution assumes a meaning and an interest of special import. We start with the group—originally a family. The solitary individual must have been more brute than man—indeed, the creature that became man had ceased to be solitary. The human group is not the creation of thought but of instinct and habit. Love is historically older than reason. But the group as it becomes older, more fixed and better organised has a double life and function. It protects itself as a group; and in this way it develops a system of government, of ethics, of religion, of defence; it also protects the individual. "For," as Aristotle, who is sometimes. claimed as the father of Individualists as Plato is claimed as the father of Socialists, wrote, "as the State was formed to make life possible, so it exists to make life good" (The Politics, Welldon, p. 5). These two purposes run through history, sometimes working in harmony, sometimes appearing in opposition. In the ancient village community of India and in some French villages before the Revolution, the group life reached its fullest stage of development. In India, caste brought the individual into a most complete subjection to communal life. From his birth he had his function assigned to him. The sons of carpenters were carpenters, the sons of barbers became barbers. They were not individual workmen at all; they were village functionaries having a share in the village wealth, as an organ of the body has a share in the nutriment and life of the body. They did not receive wages; they had a claim upon communal wealth in a communist way. At the other extreme we have our own modern city where the individual, within certain bounds set by his economic position, whilst obeying codes of law of a social character is free to go and come, to serve and accept service of his own will.
Between these two there are many gradations which mark a well-defined historical evolution. Perhaps no code of national law and custom has observed the balance between group life and individual life more successfully than that of Israel. These people were a chosen race, but their religion was as individualistic as it was racial. The individual Jew, unlike the individual Hindu, was never merged in his race. He retained the rights of individuality. And so we have in the Mosaic code and its amplifications the most careful safeguards against slavery and a deadening poverty. Every seventh year Jewish slaves are liberated; clothes taken in pawn must be restored at the end of the day; every seventh year is a fallow year for the fields when they become common property; the rights of the people to the soil are protected by legal and religious penalties. The code, it has been frequently argued, partook of some of the qualities of some modern legislation and was more complete on paper than in practice. But be that as it may, here it is, an expression of the sense of justice and an indication of the economic ideals of the religious leaders of the people. As the nation increases in prosperity economic circumstances arise to create a wealthy and luxurious class on the one hand, a poverty-stricken class on the other. The revolt against that is embodied in the writings of the prophets, and they flare with a glow of indignation against the economic disruption of the ancient religious government; they denounce the rich, the man who is adding field to field, the usurers, in language which sounds harsh and wild to us now when it is used to describe our own conditions. The community of Israel with its adjustments of social and individual right and its moral restraints imposed upon economic processes, went down before a capitalist civilisation, just as the Indian village community is decaying to-day before the advance of Western economic civilisation. From this it has been argued that a society organised as Israel was can never survive the assault of a people like our own to-day. But the Socialist reply is that whilst the organisation of Israel could not withstand the world pressure of its time, its spiritual and moral characteristics have always remained as enticing ideals in the minds of men, and thereby provide not only a proof that they are to find another opportunity of expression in society, but an earnest that the world pressure will change so as to aid rather than stultify that opportunity. other words, Socialism reads history in the historical spirit.
3. The French Revolution.
The critical point in European history, when the rights of the individual asserted themselves in modern times against an oppressive, because dead, form of social organisation, was the French Revolution. Feudalism had worked itself out. The fighting organisation of the state, by reason of its own success, had enabled new forms of communal activity to grow up under its protecting influence. The life of the community changed its character, and the time had been reached when a new communal organisation was required. The Revolution did not affect France alone, nor did France alone contain the elements which burst out into violence. France happened to be the stage upon which the new life fought for an expression in the most dramatic way. A forerunner had appeared in Protestantism when individual reason challenged the bondage to which ecclesiastical authority had doomed it. Before Protestantism there was the Renaissance when the mind of the West insisted upon looking upon the world with bare eyes. But Protestantism had carried liberty only up to a certain point. True it had been accompanied by an interesting upstirring of political thought and action, because reason can never be enlivened at one point without feeling the effect in all its activities. Luther was attacked by his enemies in the Diet of Worms for aiding and abetting social disorder; Carlstadt and Münzer accused him of not being revolutionary enough. The Kingdom of God was founded by the sword and "the Word" in Münster. So, too, in our own Puritan times. Democratic doctrine welled up from the same source as religious revivalism, But not until the French Revolution, two centuries and a half later, did the new wine burst the old bottles. Protestant reformations, geographical discovery, the making of roads and the extension of commerce, the triumph of natural science, the creation of a rich trading class all went to produce it; the special circumstances of France alone determined the stage upon which the blood was to flow and the collapse of the old was to be the most deafening and terrible.
The French Revolution paralysed the social organism in order that the rational abstraction "All men are born free and equal" might be proclaimed from the housetops. To begin with, Europe was plunged into wars; European communities were cut up and carved according to the vain wills of soldiers and diplomatists; generations had to pass before nations found the boundaries, and citizens the groupings, which were natural to them and within which alone they could develop themselves. Europe took a century to recover from the shock and the shattering which it received when France rose and swept the old away in torrents of blood and by the brute force of armies.
In Great Britain, where the change took place without disruption, we can trace the current of progress much more easily than we can trace it anywhere else. The man who was to be born "free and equal" was the man of property, the man belonging to the middle class. The richer members of that class had used their wealth particularly during the eighteenth century for the purposes of political bribery. "To acquire political power at the expense of the country gentlemen was the first and one of the chief causes of that political corruption which soon overspread the whole system of parliamentary government" (History of the Eighteenth Century. Lecky, vol. i. p. 202). The rich man was enfranchised in 1832 and immediately proceeded to settle the political policy of the state as an honest citizen; his religious views were accepted and he won his religious freedom; his economic interests became predominant. He required only the most rudimentary form of social organisation for his protection. An army and navy for big things and a policeman for small things satisfied him. For the rest he only desired to be let alone. He could look after himself. The explanation is that he held enough property to secure to him all the other liberties he required. Markets were good, profits were high, he had a substantial balance at his bank. Under these circumstances, he only wanted the removal of certain old communal restrictions so as to enable him "to be an end in himself." This is the Liberal epoch—the epoch of the government of the man who, having control of the economic forces of his society, finds freedom. Hence, it is the epoch of a political and intellectual individualism of the mechanical and not the organic type. It is marked by an extension of commerce, by vast accumulations of wealth, by the creation of commercial empires, by the rapid march of scientific discovery, by the perfecting of the means of production and by the concentration of industrial capital. But, above all, it is distinguished by the growth of political democracy.
The actual programme of the French Revolution did not include democracy. Rousseau's theoretical sovereignty of the people was to be made subject to important limitations, and it was to control practical policy only at odd moments of sentimental fervour. The fathers of the American Constitution took as much pains to limit democracy as to proclaim it. With ourselves, the Reform Act of 1832 was never intended, at least by its promoters in Parliament, to be a democratic measure—nor a first step towards democracy. It proceeded from the aristocracy and was, at the time, consistent with aristocratic government. But something happens with all these beginnings. They have laws of their own being. They tend to fulfil themselves. Their sequel turns out to be the very thing which their authors disclaimed. Man acts; natural law fulfils his action. Thus the offspring of Whiggism is Liberalism, and the child of a reforming aristocracy is democracy. Social organisation being for the wellbeing of the whole community, the will to which it is obedient in its actions must in the end be the will of the community directly expressed by majority rule. The political sovereignty by which alone the organisation can act tends to be democratic.
4. The Century of Individualism.
The last century in England is known as the century of individualism, because during its two middle quarters in particular the pendulum swung far towards the extreme of individual liberty of the atomic or mechanical kind. The community as an organic unity, as the medium through which individual liberty has to be expressed, became a shadow. The oscillation passed from the hampering organisation of feudalism to the desolating anarchy of laissez-faire.
But even during the nineteenth century communal action did not disappear; towards the end of the century, indeed, it became strong.. The state had to protect the child from the factory, then the woman, then the young person; it had to provide education; it had to impose responsibilities like Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation upon the "free" employers; it had to regulate hours and conditions of labour; it had to legislate on matters of housing and public health. At the same time municipalities had to provide their own water, gas and tram services, their own houses, their own works departments, and, turning their attention to other interests, they had to open libraries, museums, art galleries, and arrange for concerts and recreations for their citizens, who, but for communal action, would have been kept away from culture altogether. Thus at the moment of the greatest triumph of anarchist individualism, the fact that man is a social. being and that the mutual aid of a community is a necessary factor in individual liberty and progress, was asserting itself.
The individualism of the nineteenth century was indeed only a reaction from feudalism. At no time was it able to rule alone. When uncontrolled, it worked fearful havoc as is shown in the early chapters of our factory life. We are now at that point where these experiences are being systematised. They are no longer being regarded as the few exceptions to the working of another policy. They are becoming the main policy itself. We are being guided by the thought that individualism[2] requires for its maintenance and development a well-organised and active state which will be the communal personality owning property, educating and controlling the individual, guarding his liberties, preventing the growth of economic interests antagonistic to him, co-ordinating those co-operative activities in which he must engage in order that he may be free and have the widest rational field in which to enjoy his liberty. We are not to go back to feudalism or to the village community. Were that so, no time need be wasted by any one in considering our proposals. He who seeks to turn back the leaves of history may be disregarded. The epoch of caste, of status, of silent and subordinate classes, is over. The individual, clothed in the equality which is the consequence of the Kantian ethical precept that every man has the right to be treated as an end in himself, has arisen. For him we have to provide a social system, for he, too, is gregarious and not solitary. He has the communal as well as the individualist personality. Hence it is that the French Revolution and the general movement of the human spirit to which it was a response, have handed over to us the task of reconciling individual right and communal activity, individual freedom and social organisation, democracy and differentiation of political functions.
At this historical point Socialism is born, and its task is to effect the reconciliation.
- ↑ Only yesterday has justice been done to men like John Ball, Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, and the truth has been told about such uprisings as the Peasants' Revolt in England or the Hussite Rebellion in Germany.
- ↑ I do not like to use this word because it is so misleading. When used as the antithesis of Socialism, the word means mechanical or anarchist individualism; Socialism is itself a theory of individualism because socialists contend that only under Socialism will men be free. For convenience, however, I use individualism in the popular slip-shod way as the opposite of Socialism, because no other handy word will serve my purpose.