The Socialist Movement/Chapter 10

by James Ramsay MacDonald

CHAPTER X

THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

Socialism is a tendency, not a revealed dogma, and therefore it is modified in its forms of expression from generation to generation. The goal remains the same, but the path twists and twines like every other human path. Its wayside aspects also change, and the people who walk upon it do not remain the same. At one time an expanding industry draws men in one direction, as a gold discovery in new lands draws men from old fields of labours and casts a new glamour over men's vision. At another time thought is inspired by some impulse imparted by scientific discovery when every idea which dominates man is moulded by that impulse. At yet another time some outstanding cause becomes the centre of all vital intellectual force and every other movement tends to express itself in relation to that cause. Thus we have seen during the past century the magnets round which men's minds have centred change again and again and human interests change with them. Political enfranchisement, scientific discovery, the accumulation of wealth, religion have dominated thought, and have created philosophies, outlooks, systems of criticism, motives. Fluctuations in the Socialist movement and a varying emphasis placed upon aspects of the Socialist creed, have marked these changes as the tides mark the varying course of the moon.

 

1. Saint-Simon and Fourier.

Long before there was what can be called a Socialist movement, there were men groping after the Socialist plan, examining society with lanterns lit from the lamp of Socialism, making demands which were partial discoveries of Socialism itself, in the same way that many pioneers set foot on America before America itself was explored.

The word Socialism itself appears to have been first used in this country in 1835 to describe Owen and his work. It was adopted by the Frenchman Reybaud and applied by him to the theories of Saint-Simon and Fourier. At that time it was used to indicate theories of social reconstruction in which the state had no part—moral and idealistic movements of Utopists; and when Marx and Engels opened a new chapter in the history of the movement by insisting upon the political character of the transformation, they chose the word Communist as their title, and, in the famous Communist Manifesto, attacked the Socialism of their predecessors. One of the amusing tricks which the whirligig of time has brought, is a complete inversion of the application of these terms.^[1]

The French Revolution not only stirred up into confidence all the optimistic expectation of human nature but taught it to speak, to educate, to agitate. It was springtime on the earth. The people had not experienced themselves; their friends had not been disillusioned. Years afterwards Owen, so typical of his age, could serenely argue that simple reason would convert kings and that a worthy homily addressed to the angel at the gate of Paradise would induce her to lower her sword. This enthusiastic naïveté was also the soul of Saint-Simon who was the first to draw to himself a company that can be called Socialist. These pioneers were queer folk. They were children to the day of their death. The strange being, Saint-Simon, with his valet solemnly wakening him every morning with the salutation: "Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do," is separated from us by worlds of feeling. And yet his lack of humour and his crystalline sincerity which made him cheerfully accept the terrible poverty of his later years, endear him to us.

In 1817, when he was forty-three years of age, he first wrote on social matters, and for eight years, till his death, he continued to sketch out the pathway to human freedom. He had the spirit of organisation in him. He felt that the disintegration of society which followed upon the end of feudalism and marked the beginning of commercialism was ruinous, and his plea was that men of science should manage industry benevolently and wisely in the interests of the whole people. He put the coping-stone on his system by his last work, The New Christianity, in which he laid down the fundamental doctrine of social religion, that humanity is a fraternity and should act as such. On the side of economics he had a very clear vision that accumulated property was being used for exploiting purposes. That was the explanation of poverty, and to put an end to poverty a moral society would bend every energy. This mingling of economics and morals was Saint-Simonian Socialism. The founder had few followers during his lifetime, but he left a school behind him.

Like all schools, it evolved and threw out shoots. Comtism was one of its branches, another branch grew out towards modern Socialism. It is this branch which I must trace.

Its first-fruits was a community of enthusiasts, able and well-educated, who lived from a common purse. But it also produced ideas. The idea of association was amplified and enriched at its hands and given an historical setting. Association was shown to be an historical tendency which alternated with one in the opposite direction. The reign of anarchy, war, exploitation, had worked itself out when it produced the proletariat; the reign of co-operation, of organic unity, was about to begin with religion as its inspiration. At the same time the economics of Saint-Simonism were elaborated, and the necessity of the communal control of the instruments of production was proved by a reasoned sequence of argument. Society was to be a differentiated organisation in which merit alone was to determine the place of a man, and the value of his services was to determine the character of his reward. But on its mystical side it toppled over as so many fantastic religious movements have done. When men treat the flesh as anything but flesh and allow themselves to wander on the bewitched paths of symbolism and mysticism, they are in danger of becoming the slaves of the earthy realities which they think they have dissolved, or of becoming mad; and the blight of both misfortunes ended the school of Saint-Simon. But its healthy tenets never died. They were discussed by bands of men wherever discontent, either intellectual or economic, agitated Europe. Society kept them in her heart. Saint-Simonism quickened the social movement of the century.

Fourier, for instance, wrote before Saint-Simon, but it was Saint-Simonian influence that made Fourierism a living thing. Fourier makes the small commune, which he calls the Phalanstery, the governing unity of his ideal world. He has no fantastic hierarchy of wise men. In that respect he keeps upon solid earth. He was as democratic as Saint-Simon was aristocratic, as decentralising as Saint-Simon was centralising. The locality is where wealth is actually created, and there one finds the causes of bad distribution. So Fourier fixed his eye upon the commune. The problem he placed before him was how the mechanical advantages of large industries could be secured without lowering the workmen to the status of a mere machine. With that in view he constructed, on paper, his Phalanstery. It was to consist of about three hundred families who were to co-operate in production with commonly owned instruments. Their consumption, however, could be as individualistic as they liked. Policy and economy might induce them to join in the common meal but they were not to be compelled to do so. Machines would lighten toil and not supplant the workman; they would therefore be freely introduced into the Phalanstery. Agriculture would be organised so as to fit in with other industry. Both sales and purchases would be made on a large co-operative scale; wealth would be created and distributed with an economy which men had never experienced. Then came the free play of Fourier's imagination. Theatres, temples, gardens, galleries, balls, concerts were to bless and enliven the people, and the whole organisation was to be kept harmonious because, in Fourier's view, a free man will do what is rational and harmonious. The Phalanstery was to be the home, not the prison, of human nature. He argued that it must work because it was harmonious. Therefore it failed. Fourier assumed that he himself was the average man, and yet he had abandoned business because he had found it dishonest! He forgot that his father had punished him for telling the truth. At the end of his life he was patiently waiting—he had waited for ten years—convinced that some honest wealthy man would knock at his door and supply him with the money necessary for making his scheme a success. Through such transparent spirits the social doctrines of the French Revolution were focused and the Socialist theory was the result.

But Fourier was discussed and found adherents. A sheet was published as his organ and experiments were made with his scheme. In 1837 he died at the age of 65, leaving his strange mixture of innocence and insight, quackery and sagacity, to add its gleams of light to the dawn breaking over Europe.

Two plans of association had now been submitted: the centralised aristocracy of Saint-Simon, a feeble child of tottering feudalism and youthful commerce, and the communal self-government of Fourier. Both were fantastic; both contained true suggestions and brought out some lines of further advance. Both helped to throw light upon the problems of poverty which were casting menacing shadows over France, and both encouraged the stricken proletariat to agitate, to think, to combine, and to hope. The superficial] optimism of the French Revolution passed as a mirage, and the dark and confusing entanglements of democracy and commercialism gathered round the workers. But the new propaganda gave them heart. In 1831 the workers of Lyons rose to the cry "Live working or die fighting." As a shepherd gathers his sheep from the hills into a banded flock, so the Time Spirit was gathering men into a movement.

 

2. Robert Owen and Chartism.

I must turn from France to England. Some of the boldest pioneers of the new movement belonged to this country, for here the evil side of the Industrial Revolution manifested itself earliest and most dramatically. It was British pamphleteers who examined and explained most carefully how the Industrial Revolution led to the impoverishment of the poor and the exploitation of the worker. "The right to the whole Produce of Labour" is a characteristically British contribution to Socialist economics.

The beginnings of the national movement can be traced back into the eighteenth century through what were mainly political associations meeting in taverns and obscure places. But the British political movement has always had a social purpose more or less clearly within its vision, and the theories of land nationalisation and of the bad influence of machinery, published by men like Thomas Spence and championed by his followers, the Spencean Philanthropists, were an early disturbing element in Radical politics.^[2] Robert Owen imparted both volume and definiteness to the movement.

Owen had the same characteristics as Saint-Simon and Fourier, a simple-hearted faith in human perfectability, a transparent honesty of purpose, an absolute blindness to social resistance, an incapacity to appreciate a flaw or a stain in his own system. It was a type of character which could influence only an age before society had been studied scientifically, but which was invaluable for the stirring up of men's hopes and the launching upon the world of new ideas which could gain precision and accuracy as they went along. Be it remembered that in these days Socialism had to be an inspiration, a discovery of the spiritual insight; it could not be a scientific system of criticism, method or construction. The knowledge to make it such was not then available.

The work of Owen is too well known to need more than summary mention here. His birth in 1771, his rapid rise to fortune, his management of the New Lanark Mills from 1800, his experiments in education, his theories regarding the influence of environment on character, his agitation in favour of the state protecting the physically and economically weak by legislation, the new chapter in his life which opened in 1817 when he declared in his memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee which considered the Poor Law, that misery was caused by competition between men and machinery and that it could be cured only by the co-operative use of the means of production and their subordination to the well-being of the masses, the beginning of his community experiments in 1825, his labour stores with their unique methods of exchange, and finally those pathetic closing years unshadowed by a doubt and unclouded by a thought of failure ending with the appeal to take him home to die where he first saw the light, sum up a life of tenderness, innocence, single-heartedness, the usefulness but not the beauty of which has long been recognised. Its activities were the yeast which made the whole body of English social reform ferment. From it came the positive view of the state as a protector of the weak—and particularly our code of factory legislation; the co-operative movement is its direct fruit; public education and trade unionism owe it much.

From the failure of Owen's schemes arose much more good than from the success of other men's schemes. Since he has lived it has been impossible for men to refuse to ponder over great fundamental social changes. Chartism was one of the first results of Owenism, and it was substantially in advance of Owenism in its method. That, the discerning eyes of Marx and Engels saw. It was political. It sought "no isles of the blest in the quiet sea of rest." It did not trouble its head about communities; it saw that economic problems were national not municipal; it saw further that national problems could only be solved by national machinery. That was the philosophy of the Charter. The Reform of 1832 had blessed the middle class only. Why were the working classes left out in the cold? They did not want to be in for mere ceremony's sake. They wanted to be in because the feast was spread inside. They stood like the foolish virgins at a barred door, without having the comfort which the foolish virgins had—that they themselves were to blame. "We will get the land," they sang in one of their songs, "only when we get the Charter." The Charter was a means to an end. In the background of the Chartist mind was land reform, reduction of factory hours, better education, the control of machinery, associated industry. Chartism rose and fell. It is said that the workmen have always suffered from dishonest leaders. That does not go to the root of the matter, and is misleading. The Chartist movement shows not the dishonest leader but the wind-bag charlatan leader. The people have been sold, but only after they have shown an incapacity to choose leaders.

Thus, in the 'thirties, we find a condition in England similar to what we have found in France. Gropings after association, an optimism regarding the curability of economic misery, an uncertainty as to method, a blindness as to social resistance, a gathering together of the people in more or less revolutionary companionships, that is what we see. To enable me to show the next grouping of these mobile and confused elements, I must again go abroad—to Germany this time.

 

3. Marx and Engels.

The French Revolution had wiped off the map the lingering shadow of the Holy Roman Empire known as the kingdom of Germany, and the Treaty of Vienna had painted in again an impossible set of German states with Austria as their political chief, but with Prussia as their real head. From those ruins and these impossibilities, the spirit of nationalism rose up. It was taught in the schools; it glowed like molten metal from the literature of the time. "Young Germany" heralded the March revolution of 1848. The spirit of nationalism, hating Austria, turned to Prussia to be its champion. In Prussia, every thought took a political turn. The organisation of the state, the power of the state, the majesty of the state; politics, working class combinations, revolution, the idea of corporate unity, of national wholeness—in these directions the minds of the Prussians and of the German nationalists ran.

Lassalle began first. Born in 1825, he joined Marx and his friends in their revolutionary activities of 1848, but his temperament prevented him from doing conspicuous work in the organising, the moulding, the negotiating through which Socialism passed from the stages to which Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism and Owenism had brought it. Lassalle's work therefore belongs to the German movement alone and was done at a period somewhat later than I have now reached and where I must pause, as it is the most momentous period in the history of Socialism. It belongs to the biography of Karl Marx, not to that of Lassalle.

Marx was a Jew and a disciple of Hegel. His intellect was of the massive order which conceives big systems, which follows them through their ramifications, and which at the same time is capable of taking instant action on the passing incidents of the day. He was born in 1818, in 1841 he finished his university studies, and next year he embarked upon the stormy waters of Prussian democratic polities. This marks the dividing line between the new and the old Socialist leaders. The German never thought of utopian experiments. He began with statecraft, with democratic government, straight away. Moreover, he had received from Hegel a conception of social evolution. He saw society as a whole. Institutions were historical products, not the benevolent, or malevolent, work of men's hands. He was not always consistent on this point, however, although it is this view which was embodied in his wider generalisations. The misery around him could be cured only by social change. Prussia became too hot for him and he sought security in Paris. Herehe came in contact with the Socialist movement, such as it then was, and Proudhon became his companion.

But Proudhon was a Frenchman and belonged to the old generation of utopists. As he himself confessed towards his end, the greater part of his work consisted of unsystematised gropings after general laws and conceptions, and he inherited to the full the legacy of simple-minded optimism which the French Revolution left as a dowry to two generations of French social reformers and thinkers. And yet he had moved towards the border-line of the new epoch, for one of the points of disagreement between himself and the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier was that these latter believed too much in sudden transformations. But he had come to see in governments nothing but tyrannies, and thus he forbade himself from ever joining the ranks of the newer movement. It is not to be wondered at that he and the systematic Marx fell out, and it was two Germans, Marx and Engels, and not a German and a Frenchman, who opened the new volume of the history of the Socialist movement.

The preliminary preparation was complete. The economic theory of Socialism was becoming pretty clear, political means were being thrust upon the workers of both Great Britain and Germany, utopian communities had failed absolutely. Two things were required. The vague uncertainties of aim and means had to be swept aside, the moral inanities of some of the schools had to be suppressed, the mind of Socialism had to be made definite. That was the first thing. The second was to place the whole movement on a political footing and to make it understand that it was a period in social evolution and not merely a dream of ingenious and kind-hearted men.

This Marx and Engels did, and their first great act towards that end was the publication of the Communist Manifesto just before the Revolution of 1848. Earlier in the year, Marx had published a scathing criticism of Proudhon, and hot foot upon that came the clarion call of the Manifesto commanding all the workers of the world to unite to end their misery. Amidst the most heart-rending poverty and destitution in London, Marx strove to complete his work on both its intellectual and its political sides. Having to live sometimes on the proceeds which the pawnbroker handed over the counter, this brave and unbendable spirit wrote what has been called "the Bible of Socialism,: Das Kapital. He died in 1883, and his body rests on the slope of Highgate Cemetery looking Londonwards. Engels died in 1895 and his ashes, according to his wish, were scattered on the sea.

How did these men perform their work? They started as Hegelians of the Left—pupils of the great philosopher, who, whilst never able to emancipate themselves from the Hegelian method, had thrown off the Hegelian idealism. If the workers were to be emancipated at all, they felt it was to be by a grim struggle against the classes which were exploiting them. They took the proletariat up to a high mountain and showed it the wide panorama of progress. At every stage class was in conflict with class; and that lesson was soon learned. It dispelled all sorts of delusions about idealistic methods. Then another lesson was taught. The motive of the clashings was economic. History was not to be interpreted by spiritual and rational impulses but by economic appetites. Thus idealism received another deadly blow. Socialism thus hardened, interpreted as the grand final stage of the struggle between the classes, appealed with new definiteness and new force to the masses. Its vagueness vanished. It became a cause which the meanest intellect could grasp and in which the humblest worker could play a part. The reign of the bourgeoisie was challenged at every point. The wage-earner felt his common interest and was taught his common strength. In his various nationalities he gathered together into a common camp; he looked across the boundaries of his nations and found the comradeship of men bending under a lot similar to his own; and the old clarion call came upon his ears: :Wage workers of the whole world! Unite!" Marx worked for immediate practical effects and he secured them. He sacrificed some of the intellectual accuracy of the Socialist case, but he made the Socialist movement.

 

4. Marxism and Revisionism.

I must emphasise what Marx actually did. He contributed nothing to Socialism as a theory except in the sense that a gardener selects from a mass of herbage those plants which are of use, cultivates them, improves their strain, and produces them for the world to admire. This work is neither mean nor of a secondary value. "As to Socialism," says one of his most recent critics, "in relation to the future organisation of society, Marx has wellnigh not alluded to it."^[3] Marx's reply would probably have been that he left such vain speculations to utopists. He explained the mechanism of capitalism; he explained historical evolution; he showed from both explanations the necessity of Socialism; he formed the army, and gave it the determination which was to bring Socialism into existence. He made many mistakes, both in stating his theories and in forecasting events, but they were the mistakes of the man of action who had to do a certain definite piece of work, and his errors helped him. None of them vitiated the value of his labours or took a jot away from their utility. The Socialist movement will return to idealism, for, though sometimes an unrecognised power, idealism has always existed in Socialism. But in Marx's time the great need was to organise the movement and engraft it upon the mind of the masses, to give it political form, to gather the democracy under its banners and start them on their march. That done, Marx can be revised. The new problems which continue to face this army as it moves onwards necessitate frequent references to first principles, modifications of old dogmas, withdrawals of old forecasts. The goal remains, for it is the creation of such self-evident truths as this: That he who controls the economic conditions of liberty, controls liberty itself, and that association is better than separation, and co-operation than competition. But the path is trod by succeeding generations for diverse reasons. One generation follows it because it is harassed by misery, another, because it is illumined by reason; and these diverse motives exist side by side in the movement, their relative strength constantly fluctuating.

Thus, to-day we have what is called the revisionist movement—which, however, is not always so much a departure from Marx as from Marxians. I have shown elsewhere in this book why I do not accept some of Marx's explanations—for, after all, he was a commentator on Socialism, not the inspired instrument through which the Socialist faith was revealed. In his book the English title of which is Evolutionary Socialism^[4]—the book which originated the revisionist movement in Germany—Mr. Bernstein parts company with Marxists on the following points amongst others. He denies that there is an imminent prospect of the breakdown of bourgeois society; he asserts that in the working of capitalism there is not a decreasing number of capitalists, all of them large, but that there is an increasing number of all kinds of capitalists; he rejects the dogma that in every department of industry concentration is proceeding with equal rapidity, and he challenges this with special reference to agriculture. He also emphasises the fact that the leaven of Socialism is now permeating the capitalist lump, and that therefore Socialist organisations must work as transforming factors in society, and not only as revolutionary agencies. Marx in his earlier years (at any rate up to 1871, when the Paris Commune somewhat modified his view) considered that the conquest of political power by the democracy was to be the signal of revolution; now great sections of the Socialist movement hold that that conquest is to be the occasion for transformation. Mr. Bernstein also modifies the Marxian view of the materialist conception of history and of economic necessity, of the class war and of value. And he does this whilst continuing to proclaim himself a Socialist, because he takes the true scientific view that every dogma and every theory is subject to the law of evolution as well as society itself.

 

5. Lassalle and the German Party.

I must now outline the growth of the movement itself, beginning with Germany, which deservedly occupies the premier place in such a history.

It was not until 1862 that Lassalle's activities were of any importance to the Socialist movement. The political reaction had begun in Prussia as the nationalist forces gathered themselves together for that struggle which only ended with the French war and the establishment of the German empire. The Liberals who then ruled Prussia, and who were about to be swept by Bismarck away into insignificance, "hoist by their own petard of nationalism" which carried militarism in its womb, had opened their pusillanimous policy of "standing where they were." Lassalle separated from them, declared that it was folly to prate about things which were unreal and verbal, and appealed to Prussia to take its stand upon the actual facts and go back upon democratic rule. The fires of Lassalle's nature were again ablaze. In 1862 he delivered a lecture which was nearly as epoch-making as the Communist Manifesto, and it was published under the title of The Working Men's Programme. Its purpose was to show that the Prussian working men had now to unite for political purposes. The police paid attention to both the lecture and the orator who, after a trial and an appeal, was sentenced to pay a fine of about £15.

Events then happened which were in some ways curiously like what occurred in our own country shortly after 1880 when the workers began to lose confidence in the Liberal Party. The working men of Leipzig, having left Liberalism, called a Labour congress. To this Lassalle sent an Open Letter in which he appealed to the workers to form a political party with social aims; he stated the Iron Law expressing the tendency of wages to fall to the bare subsistence level and nothing more; and he advocated the establishment by state capital of self-governing productive associations in which every workman was to get the full product of his labour. The Congress adopted his proposals, and he addressed a few great meetings. The Universal German Working Men's Association was formed at Leipzig on May 28rd, 1863. It made one demand—universal suffrage. A working class social programme was so much decorative effort unless the working classes had the vote. The German movement was begun. The melodramatic ending of its leader and hero in 1864, struck it like a storm, and when the blast was over it was found that the organisation was left in a bad way. It had no leaders, no money, and no coherence.

Immediately after the founding of Lassalle's organisation another event happened, paralleled also in our later British experience. Liberal-Labour associations were formed, partly in opposition to Socialism, but partly also in opposition to the growing dominance of Prussia, and they were therefore strongest outside Prussia. As a member of one of these, August Bebel first won his spurs. But the organisations speedily drifted away from Liberalism where, from the very nature of the case, they could have no abiding place. The union of these associations declared first of all for universal suffrage; in 1868 it gave in its adhesion to Marx's organisation, the International, and in the following year at Eisenach it formed itself into the Social Democratic Working Men's Party. The two German organisations then came to be known as the Lassalle and the Eisenach parties. The one was Prussian, the other was South German and Saxon. This division in German Socialism curiously enough survives to this day. Both sections were represented in the Parliament of the North German Confederation,^[5] but disagreed as to policy. They agreed in advocating a peace with France without annexation of territory, and their members were sent to prison. With the peace came a desire to join the two bodies. In Liebknecht and Bebel the Eisenach party had leaders, the Lassalle party had none. At Gotha in 1875 they joined hands, and formed the Socialist Working Men's Party of Germany. The united movement bounded forward, and the authorities made up their minds to hamper it. Two attempts made upon the Emperor's life in 1878 gave them their chance, and after an appeal to the country legislation to repress Socialism was carried. Newspapers were forfeited, meetings were prohibited, the organisation was paralysed. The effect was to throw the people back upon themselves. They acted without organisation. Each man took a himself the responsibility of finding out what he ought to do. Literature was smuggled into the country, the law was got round in many ways; at election after election the Socialist vote increased. The anti-Socialist laws and the social reform legislation of Bismarck had both failed to remove the menace of red working-class polities, and in 1890 the repressive policy came to an end. Since then there have been changes in organisation, there have been ups and downs, there have been internal controversies—particularly as regards parliamentary policy and the relation of the Socialist parties in the legislatures to other parties, but the history of Social Democracy in Germany has been a steady advance onwards.

The maximum vote of the party before the Gotha union had been 852,000 in 1874; in 1877 it was 493,000; it dropped during the first years of repression, but rose from 1884, reaching 1,427,000 in 1890, 2,107,000 in 1898, 3,010,000 in 1903, and 3,258,968 in 1907. Its 1903 vote elected 81 members to the Reichstag; that of 1907, however, only elected 43. It is on the upgrade again, and the election of 1911 bids fair to be a record one for the party.

In connection with the German Socialist movement one has to observe a special feature in German politics. Individualism as a political system never took root in the German mind. German public life was too much influenced by German philosophy for that to happen. Consequently, state activity has always been assumed—even by the most anti-Socialist chancellors and municipal authorities—as legitimate. We inherited from our Liberalism a suspicion of the state: the inheritance of modern Germany was a trust in the state. Thus German Socialism has been an intellectual power, even when politically it has appeared to be impotent.

 

6. The French Party.

The French Party has its tap root touching the Revolution, and it grew up through the schools, like Saint-Simonism, to which I have already referred. The revolutionary idealism of France finds the yoke of party galling and hard to bear. It blazed up in 1848, and again in 1871, and in both cases the flame was stamped out by the ruthless foot of the military. The hero of 1848 was Louis Blanc; the hero of 1871 was the people. Upon the heads of both, the prejudice that has written so much of our histories has put the crown of the fool and the knave, and no heads, in reality, are less justly decorated by that symbol.

The national workshops of the first revolution were started and managed contrary to Louis Blanc's advice, and in a spirit antagonistic to him. Yet upon his back the burden of their ludicrous failure has been placed. The scenes of popular riot, bloodshed and disorder which compose the lurid picture generally painted to represent the Commune are little more than visions of the prejudiced and frightened imagination. Probably never did an army in occupation rule a city with more mercy and calmness than the communists ruled Paris, with their assassins thundering at their gates. The suppression of peace Radicalism in Great Britain in the days of Pitt was attended by more blundering cruelty and wanton persecution than can be crowded into those terrible days in Paris by any historian, however prejudiced, who sticks to the facts. After the Commune the Socialist movement in France lay like a land that had been crossed by fire. But a few workers soon came together again. The authorities struck at them and scattered them. For a while Socialism was baffled.

But Jules Guesde returned from his exile in Geneva, whither his communist activities had driven him, founded L'Egalité in 1877, struck at the Anarchists who were. busy in France at the time, preached Marxism, and the trade union congress which met at Lyons in 1878 resolved to call an international gathering of working men at Paris in the following year. The gathering was suppressed, and police barred the doors of the hall in the faces of the delegates. This only helped the French movement. Recruits came in fast; the trade union movement became more sympathetic. A representative gathering of working men held in Marseilles in 1879 adopted the name of the Socialist Labour Congress. It was wildly revolutionary, but the programme it accepted was drafted by Guesde and Lafargue, who was Karl Marx's son-in-law. Next year the final struggle between Socialists and trade unionists of the old school took place. The former were apparently worsted, but the latter had no determination, no zeal, and no cause, so they could make no use of their victory. Socialism marched gaily along.

But there was weakness in the movement, and it was shown in the elections of 1881. Why were they disappointing? One group gave one answer, another gave another. The leaders set upon each other, and the movement split into two camps at St. Etienne next year. The division was between the Possibilists (those who were willing to approach Socialism through Socialistic reforms), led by Paul Brousse, who has been Mayor of Paris since, and the Impossibilists (those who anticipated a revolution and a more or less sudden break with the past), led by Jules Guesde. Strict Marxism was in reality the rock upon which the party crashed. Still, the French workmen had not enough camps, and a definite movement against parliamentary action was begun and the General Federation of Labour formed. The blood of revolution jumped through the French veins, and the half-dozen different groups into which the movement very quickly split appeared to be necessary to suit all dispositions. The two most important, however, were the so-called Impossibilists, led by Guesde, and the Independents, in whose ranks were several brilliant professional men like Jaurés and Millerand. Jaurés had been elected to the Chamber as a Radical in 1885, but was defeated in 1889 when he returned to his professorial chair. In 1893 he appeared as a Socialist candidate, and has been in the Chamber ever since.

The elections of 1893 sent forty Socialists to the Chamber of Deputies.^[6] Suddenly over the political horizon blazed the menace of the Dreyfus affair. The Guesdists said, "It is nothing to us"; Jaurés said, "It is everything." Civil war again broke out in the party. Jaurés supported Millerand when he joined the Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry (1899) in order to expunge the Dreyfus blunder from French history. The battle between the camps raged with fury until the International Socialist Congress sitting in Amsterdam in 1903 proclaimed peace. The groups united, the few individuals remaining outside soon ceased to count, and to-day the only division in the working-class movement in France is the Socialist Party on the one hand, and the anarchist General Federation of Labour on the other.

During the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry when Millerand was Minister of Commerce, several measures of Socialistic significance were passed and the Socialist influence on the government was considerable. But on the resignation of the Premier (1902), when the work of the ministry had been accomplished, the union of the Socialists with the Radical and Liberal sections came to an end. A few years later (1906), when France had to face the problem of the ecclesiastical corporations, the government of the day had once more to lean upon the Socialists for help. It was a Socialist who was put in charge of the bill which settled these corporations. Later on (1909) this Socialist, M. Briand, became premier and held office till 1911. But perhaps partly owing to the opposition within the Socialist ranks to men who have become too closely identified with ministries, and also, perhaps, partly owing to changes which have crept over the men who have joined ministries, ex-ministers have ceased to be members of the Socialist party. The experience is the subject of heated controversy in the French party, in which the opinion at the present moment is strongly hostile to blocs—or, in other words, to co-operate with governments as was the case during the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry.

I can instance the growth of Socialism in France as I did with reference to Germany by giving the votes it has polled at elections. In 1893, 600,000 votes were polled; in 1898, 790,000; in 1902, 900,000; in 1906, 1,120,000; and in 1910, 1,400,000.

 

7. The Italian Party.

Italy is even more anarchist and revolutionary than France, and until middle-class and professional men put themselves at the head of the Socialist movement there, anarchism played havoc with Italian working-class organisation. Not until 1891, when Turati, a well-known lawyer of Milan, put his hand to the plough, was much done to bring Italian Socialism on to the lines of Socialism in other European countries. Crispi's copying of Bismarck's method of repression helped the movement greatly, and the corrupt state of Italian polities and the incompetence of Italian Liberalism gave powerful assistance. The Italian movement was therefore composed of two wings, one practical and political and the other anarchist. The former attracted to it some of the best intellects and most distinguished professional men in Italy—Ferri and Lombroso, Gabrielle d'Annunzio and De Amicis; doctors and scientists, professors and lawyers. The conflicts between the government and the Socialists led to the proclamation of a general strike which resulted in riots and bloodshed in 1903–4, and as the storm struck Socialism the leaders quarrelled and blamed each other for the hurricane. Sincethen, the party has been unable to right itself. Secessions from its ranks have taken place, and at the moment it is rent with internal disputes carried on between the sections. Reformists who are willing to co-operate with any party moving in the right directions, syndicalists who direct attention to the need of more trade union organisation and are rather anarchist in their depreciation of parliamentary action, integralists who sit on the fence between the two and talk vainly and impotently of union between them, form the three great camps of Italian Socialism.

 

8. The Belgian Party.

The Socialist movement in Belgium is as well knit as that in Italy is disjointed. It has the financial help of what is perhaps the most successful form of co-operation in the world; it has a solid trade-union movement behind it; it is capably led by Vandervelde; it has been singularly free from the criticisms of "impossibilists" which have proved to be such a drag upon Socialism elsewhere.

The International Association had a strong grip on the country, but on its dissolution, disruption came upon the Belgian working-class movement. But by and by a new start was made, and in 1885 the Belgian Labour Party was formed. It has been pointed out often that this party is very much like the present British Labour Party. It declined to call itself Socialist though such was its inspiration; it was a union of workmen and of those who took a stand on economic grounds with wage-earners, to voice the needs of the workers. Of the Belgian movement Vandervelde has written "From the English, it adopted self-help and free association principally under the co-operative form; from the Germans, political tactics and fundamental doctrines which were for the first time expounded in the Communist Manifesto; and from the French, it took its idealist tendencies, its integral conception of Socialism considered as the continuation of revolutionary philosophy and as a new religion continuing and fulfilling Christianity." The Belgian movement is severely practical. Associated with it is an enormous co-operative movement; it is always willing to strike a blow for trade unionism; it is in the closest alliance with the Liberals in their opposition to the clerical reactionary government and in their demand for universal suffrage. The Conservative government majority, in spite of the undemocratic electoral machinery of Belgium, has been brought down to vanishing point.^[7] When it disappears a difficult parliamentary situation will be created for the Socialists as they then, either as an independent factor without representation in the Cabinet or as a co-operating wing with representation in the Cabinet, will have to keep a coalition government in office.

 

9. The Party in America and other Countries.

Distracted with revolutionary impulses and with the political unsettlement around, Socialism has taken only a fitful foothold in places like Russia, Spain, Portugal and the minor European States.

The Russian movement is of peculiar interest and is in many respects sui generis. The communal psychology of the Russian which he has inherited from the social organisation of serfdom and communism in which he lived till but a generation or so ago, made him but little susceptible to worldly goods and materialist enticements, and when the political freedom of the rest of Europe began to agitate the minds of the intellectuals of Russia, a movement partly Liberal and partly Socialist began. It found expression first of all in novels like Tchernychevsky's What is to be done? and finally bred Nihilism in polities, and a revival in literature. The untamable Bakunin, the courtly Herzen and the chivalrous Lavroff were in exile, but moved amongst the Russian students whom the revival in learning was sending to universities in France and Switzerland. The movement for educating the peasant and for idealising him began, and this, being suppressed by a frightened government, inaugurated terrorism, in the dark and stormy lanes of which the Socialist movement proper lost itself. Meanwhile, Russia became more and more industrial, and Socialism again appeared in the land. During the final decade of the last century trade unionism of a Social Democratic type attracted great numbers of workers in the larger industrial centres, and in addition to that branches of the Social Democratic Party—originally composed of Russian exiles in Geneva, Paris and London—were formed in Russia. When political liberty appeared to be coming through the Duma, the various Socialist groups united and at one time there were about one hundred Socialist and Labour members sitting in this mock parliament. For the time being reaction is again supreme, and persecution, imprisonment, exile and death have driven the movement underground.

In Finland, eighty-seven Socialists were elected to the Diet at the end of 1910, showing a gain of one seat. In the northern countries Socialism is strong and well organised, and is ably represented in the parliaments; in Austria, keen racial conflicts have tried it sorely, but when universal suffrage was granted in 1906, it returned eighty-seven members to Parliament and secured well over 1,000,000 votes. Switzerland has had a Social Democratic Party since 1888, but this nominally democratic country has been notorious for its repressive measures and its unjust politics. Though the Swiss Socialist vote is equal to a representation of twenty-five members in Parliament, it has only secured six seats.

Japan, not to be outdone in any Western way, has had a Socialist Party since 1901, severely Marxian in its spirit. It has been frequently suppressed by the authorities, and latterly the leaders have been tried on capital charges and some of them executed. Japan is apparently to emulate the political methods of its late enemy, Russia. Argentine and Chili have also Socialist organisations and have been represented at International Socialist Congresses. Australia has both a Labour and a Socialist Party, the former strongly Socialistic though the economic basis of some of its demands is strikingly insecure, the latter Marxist of the rather impossibilist school; New Zealand has avoided a serious Socialist Party because Mr. Seddon led Liberalism into the Socialistic fold. South Africa has a small but vigorous Labour and Socialist movement which finds difficulty in making headway against the active financial powers that have dominated the Colony on the one hand and the conservative agricultural interests that have controlled it on the other. Western Canada has an aggressive Marxian section represented in the legislature; Middle and Eastern Canada has the nucleus of an organisation somewhat like our own Labour Party and Independent Labour Party, and Alberta has returned one Socialist member to its new Parliament.

The movement in America is rapidly assuming importance. At first inspired by foreign advocates and foreign thought, it was hard and dogmatic, and was of no account; but latterly owing to the rise of a powerful revisionist school with Milwaukee—which it captured municipally in 1910—as its head-quarters, it has won adherents in every State, and in the state elections of the fall of 1910, it registered 700,000 votes and won its first seat in the House of Representatives at Washington.

First of all, the new land of America attracted the utopists who journeyed thither to found their New Harmonies and their Phalansteries, but one after another of these died out and even the most successful left no mark upon the public life or political activities of the country. Later on, many Socialist exiles from Europe sought homes there, but the States were not settled and could not respond to the agitations that were distracting the older European governments. From 1870 sections of the International were formed in various places in America, and when this historical Association decayed in Europe its head-quarters were moved across the Atlantic in 1872. There it died. Four years afterwards an attempt was made to form a national movement, the title of which was changed to the Socialist Labour Party in 1877. It was foreign, however, and Anarchism infested it. For years it struggled with its own impossibilism, with splits and rival parties, the most lurid event of these years of uphill fighting being the trial and execution of the Chicago anarchists in 1885. But in 1897 a new chapter in American Socialism was opened with the founding of the "Social Democracy of America.” In 1901 this united with the majority of the Socialist Labour Party, it assimilated itself to the soil, and it is now the successful fighting force of American Socialism. Up to now it has been inspired mainly by intellectuals, but it is getting into closer and closer touch with the Trade Unions through the American Federation of Labour, and in a few years the alliance will be complete.

Two sections of this survey of the world's Socialist movement remain to be reviewed, the British movement and the International, and that will be done in the next chapter.

 

 

1. One of the many displays of ignorance which the anti-Socialist organisations have made, is a leaflet which one of them has published showing how Marx attacked "Socialism" and thereby denounced the errors of his followers! The same mistake has crept into books like Guthrie's Socialism before the French Revolution.
2. Cf. Harriet Martineau's ill-natured sentence: "The committee of the Spenceans openly meddled with sundry grave questions besides that of a community in land; and amongst other notable projects petitioned Parliament to do away with machinery."—History of the Peace, I, p. 52.
3. Dr. M. Tugan-Baranowsky: Modern Socialism.
4. Published in the Socialist Library by the Independent Labour Party.
5. The first electoral successes were won in Germany in 1867, when eight members were returned.
6. The first electoral victories were in 1887.
7. The Party secured representation in 1894 for the first time.