The Socialist Movement/Chapter 7

by James Ramsay MacDonald

CHAPTER VII

WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT

An examination of some of the objections urged against, and the fears entertained regarding, Socialism will enable me to explain its principles and elucidate its methods and point of view still more clearly.

 

1. Anarchism and Communism.

First of all I shall deal with the relation of Socialism as a system of political and economic thought to other systems with which it is often confused—particularly with Communism and Anarchism.

Communism presupposes a common store of wealth which is to be drawn upon by the individual consumer, not in accordance with services rendered, but in response to "a human right to sustenance." It may be in accordance with Communist principles to make this right to consume depend upon the duty of helping to produce, and to exile from the economic community every one who declines to fulfil that duty. Some Communists insist that one of the certain results of their system will be the creation of so much moral robustness that in practice this question will never arise for actual answer. But be that as it may, the distributive philosophy of Communism is as I have stated, and it contains the difference between that system and Socialism. "From all according to their ability; to each according to his needs" is a Communist, not a Socialist, formula. The Socialist would insert "services" for "needs." They both agree about the comon stock; they disagree regarding the nature of what should be the effective claim of the individual to share in it. Socialists think of distribution through the channels of personal income; Communists think of distribution through the channels of human rights to live. Hence Socialism requires some medium of exchange whether it is pounds sterling or labour notes; Communism requires no such medium of exchange. The difference can best be illustrated if we remember the difference between a customer going to a grocer and buying sugar, and a child of the family claiming a share of that sugar next morning at the breakfast table. Or the position may be stated in this way: Socialism accepts the idea of income, subject to two safeguards. It must be adequate to afford a satisfactory standard of life, and it must represent services given and not merely a power to exploit the labour of others. Communism only considers the sum total required by an individual to satisfy his wants and would limit consumption only as regards the use to which it is put.

Communist economic theories are often joined to Anarchist political ones, and in this conjunction are not unrarely confused with Socialism. Anarchism as a political theory (as a mode of political action the word has a totally different significance) is the negation of the coercive state, and there is far more in common between it and anti-Socialist individualism of the Herbert Spencer type than between it and Socialism, of which it is indeed the direct antithesis, The Anarchist theory presupposes either no state, or a state bound together by moral and social motives by which is maintained a purely voluntary relationship. So we may express the difference between Socialism and Anarchism as being political, the one believing in the continuance of the legislative, and therefore coercive, state, the other believing only in an administrative and voluntary state.^[1] Anarchism is in reality a form of individualism and cannot be dissociated from individualistic theories.

There is another difference. Underlying the philosophy of Anarchism is the belief in the goodness of human nature, which, with the exception of the doctrines of Fourier also shines so brightly in the beliefs and expectations of the earlier Socialists. The Socialism of to-day does not build itself up upon the goodness, but upon the sociality, of human nature.

Besides, as a matter of experience, all over the world, from France to America and from Italy to Japan, the Anarchist movement is in conflict with the Socialist movement, and the earlier history of modern Socialism is stormswept by the furious conflicts of Anarchism with Socialism. And yet, by a curious twisting of actual fact, many people associate these two opposing systems of political thought, as though they were the same, the reason probably being that every kind of opposition to the existing order is grouped together and made identical in minds not accustomed to discriminate in an intelligent way.

 

2. The Abolition of Private Property.

An examination of the current notions regarding the Socialist view about property and what is indeed the real view is equally enlightening. The common idea is that Socialism proposes to abolish private property. That is no less mistaken than is the view that Socialism and Anarchism are one and the same thing. Private property in one of its aspects is a limitation of the liberty of the woods, under which he who had the power took what he wanted, and of the struggle for life—although it may be used to revive this ancient form of liberty and this objectionable method of selection. It puts an end to the strife of keeping—although it may be used to exploit. It runs counter to the physical struggle of the survival of the fittest individual and secures the survival of the fittest community. Of all that Socialism approves, and it consequently aims at eliminating the evil consequences of private property and realising its desirable possibilities. Its proposals and views regarding private property form part of its general purpose of preventing the growth of private interests which prey upon, or are otherwise antagonistic to, social well-being.

It is said that the existing system is based upon the right to private possession. That, however, is a profound mistake. The oft-quoted pronouncement of John Stuart Mill may be quoted again, for it has lost none of its force and none of its truth. He wrote:^[2] "The reward, instead of being proportioned to the labour and abstinence of the individual, is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those who receive the least, labour and abstain the most."

That is, indeed, the position. How any one after reading the reports of any investigation made into social conditions to-day, or after studying the statistics of wealth distribution in this or any other industrial country, can continue to harbour the delusion that society is kept going because the individual possesses private property, is unthinkable. The facts do not fit in with the theory. One of the most dramatic features of society to-day is the vast number included in the propertyless class. Nine-tenths of the wage-earners of the country work with no thought of accumulating property, but with the sole idea of making ends meet day by day, and week by week; the remainder see no fairer prospect ahead than the saving of enough money to invest in some insurance club or to lay by in preparation for the inevitable time of trade depression and unemployment. If it were true that men will work only to own property there is not the inducement for a single week's hard manual labour in modern society. The significance of working-class savings is constantly exaggerated. Only in the very rarest of instances do they give extra enjoyment or mean a higher standard of life; in nearly every case they simply lie in reserve lest a misfortune should come, and they are not sufficient to remove or to modify the one economic motive which makes the working classes toil, namely, the fear of speedy hardship if they cease to toil. They are useful in the day of trouble; they are not large enough to be of appreciable value in the day of steady work. If men could be insured against unemployment and sickness, the workman's savings would cease to have any influence upon his life.

Only a few, a very small class, enjoy to-day the pleasure and the freedom which comes from private property, and a great part of that class has ceased to give active service to society. They loan money rather than use it; they abstract rents rather than make profits. Though it may have been true some time ago that the stream constantly flowing from the status of workman to that of employer, gladdened the heart of the workman and held out prospects to him that one day he might embark on its waters, that stream is very narrow and very shallow now, and, in comparison with the multitudes who never start upon it or who sink in its upper reaches, those who navigate it successfully are insignificant in numbers. Nor are the prizes so good. The master with his independence, his property privileges and liberties, his dignity, has become a manager, a director, with no dignity and very little honour. He has become merely a rich man, and the glamour which civic office, local influence and general respect used to throw upon riches has gone, and has left them cold, glaring and vulgar. Hence the recent changes in business organisation have altered the nature of the appeal that is made to the ambitious plebeian. A generation or two ago the man rose to honour, and that had a selective effect upon the kind of man who rose; now-a-days the man rises to money, to salary, to warehouse and factory authority, and nothing more, and that also has a selective effect on the kind of man who rises. The second method of selection gives poorer results than the first.

Not only do the facts of wealth distribution contradict the assumption that it is the possession of private property which is the basis of our society, but the kind of enjoyment attached to commercial success which is being evolved by business changes is not so great as that which, so far as social respect and personal liberty are concerned, was the lot of the business man who managed his own capital and felt himself and his wealth integral parts of his town to be spent in the service of the town.

The truth is that society to-day is based on the fact that the majority of people can never acquire enough private property to give them much liberty of action and choice in consumption, and that is one of the gravest charges brought against it by Socialism. The reward for which men work to-day, is not private property, but a week's wages.

Now, what is the Socialist view?

The Socialist assumes that individuality requires private property through which to express itself. Man must control and own something, otherwise he does not control and own himself. And as Socialism is not a cut-and-dried set of dogmas to be pieced into a system like one of those puzzles made by cutting up a picture into many confusing fragments, but an idea which is to be realized by a continuation of experimental change, we may rest assured that none of the incidents which are to be met with on the way will abolish private property. The ownership of things will always be a means of expressing personality, and this fact will not be forgotten in the evolution of Socialism. Indeed some Socialists—for instance Kautsky, the most uncompromising of Marxists—have stated that people might own their own houses and their own gardens under Socialism, and provided there is a proper system of taxation intercepting unearned income in the shape of economic rent there is nothing in this concession contrary to Socialist theory.

It also follows from this that objection to inheritance is not an essential part of the Socialist system. The Socialist need not object to the bequeathing of private property as such; he only objects to bequeathing it under conditions which determine that the inheritance of the multitude must be poverty.

In discussing this and kindred questions two guiding facts ought to be kept in mind. The first is that Socialism, on its moral side, is a means to the establishment of true individual liberty; and the second that Socialism, on its economic side, is a system under which an end will be put to exploitation. The second purpose of Socialism is that which sets the bounds to the ownership of private property.

All through history the limitation of the subjects and the rights of property has proceeded side by side with the expansion of liberty. Property in human beings has had to be denied, but it was defended most stoutly and was held to be an unassailable right by philosophers and humanists, as well as by the classes that enjoyed it. And yet the mere liberation of the human body from the scope of private property is not sufficient, because it has been found that the human will—the human personality—can be put in bondage through certain forms of economic possession, so that unless men are to abandon their pilgrimage in search of liberty they must supplement their anti-slavery campaigns with campaigns designed to put an end to private property in those economic forces which may be used to produce a slavery of the will. Now, how is property used at the present time?

In the first place, its chief function to-day, from my present point of view, is that of exploitation. In the form of capital it is required by labour, and with the increase in the amount of capital required to carry on modern industry labour finds it increasingly difficult to be more than the agent of capital and to avoid being the slave of capital. Ledger balances, not moral or human considerations, assign a place to labour in the industrial system. And as labour loses its power to bargain effectively with capital,^[3] it becomes more liable to be ground down in the competitive market in which it is subject to the same laws as any other commodity. Thus it has come about that the ownership of property, justified as it is by the fundamental characteristics and the most primitive requirements of human nature, becomes an instrument for depriving great masses of people of property. The private ownership of the means of production implies the private ownership, by the same class, of the products themselves, and that again implies the exploitation of the workman and his condemnation to a state of poverty. Thus the present system upholds private property in such a way as to confine private property to a comparatively small class in the community.

The present system fails to do the very thing which it proposes to do, because its lack of design means that it defeats itself in its own working. It is like a man so disorganised in his nerve centres that every time he lifts his hand to strike some one else he injures himself.

This is particularly true of private property in natural monopolies, like land. The experience of every people in the world, whether it be a barbaric tribe or a civilised nation, is that, when land becomes subject to private proprietorship, poverty inevitably follows.

In consequence of this the Socialist has come to the conclusion that where industrial capital is not the subject of communal control and use, and where natural monopolies are in the possession of individuals, it is economically impossible for masses of people to acquire private property at all. The socialisation of certain forms of property is a condition necessary for the general diffusion of private property. The nationalisation of industrial capital and of the land is therefore not the first stage of the abolition of all private property, but is exactly the opposite. The result of the operations of a society which allows private property in everything, is determinedly a law of concentration and accumulation, the effect of which may be expressed in biblical language: "Unto every one that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The idea that capitalist society is based on private property Is a mere chimera.

 

3. The Negation of Liberty.

So too as regards liberty, A common view of Socialism is that it will crush liberty out by its, laws, regulations and uniformities. Those who take this view look upon Socialism as a ponderous organisation under which the state will own everything and prescribe how people are to do things, what trades they are to follow, and how they are to employ their leisure moments.

The first answer—and indeed it is the only one worth making—to these objectors is that if they really know what Socialism means, and if their description of it is not a caricature, it is so absurdly irrational and so contrary to human nature and purpose that no one can advocate it except those with twists in their minds, and no community of men will ever adopt it. Socialism would then be but an aberration of the human intellect, and so far from being a serious movement, it would only be a curiosity. This conclusion, however, is so inconsistent with what we know of the intellectual strength of the Socialist ranks, so inconsistent too with its power upon the minds of men, that it must be drawn from premises of error. And that is so. The critical description of Socialism to which I have just referred is a mere clumsy caricature.

I have just explained the Socialist position regarding property, and from that it must have been clear that one of the specifically declared intentions of Socialists is to create the conditions of liberty. Hitherto our ideas of liberty have been narrowed and misled by the pursuit of political liberty. We are just at the end of the liberal epoch, and the liberal epoch is that of the middle and the commercial classes, the classes which enjoyed economic power, and which therefore had to agitate for, and philosophise about, political enfranchisement only. From their particular point of view political enfranchisement was precious as a stamp of social status and as a means of destroying certain inequalities and impediments which the commercialist nineteenth century inherited from the militarist middle ages. Thus the liberty of the liberal epoch meant a condition in which a comparatively small number of people held economic power in a state whose positive political activities were reduced to a minimum. The ring of life was to be kept clear and the heavyweights were to be allowed to dominate it. Such a view of liberty could not be more than a passing thing, could not yield acceptable fruits. But that is the intellectual inheritance with which this generation is encumbered. We have to begin anew our search for the talisman.

First of all, we have to understand that liberty is conditioned; and then we have to understand that it is something which relates to qualities, and not only to quantities.

It is conditioned, for if a man is dependent upon another man's bounty for his very existence, he may live under a state of the most beautiful moral anarchism and yet be a slave. I have shown that owing to the enormous growth of the economic power in modern society, the real effective control on man's outgoings and incomings is becoming more and more economic. To express this, the Socialist uses the term wage-slavery. Much objection is taken to this term, in the elaboration of which we are treated to instructive lessons on the characteristic features of chattel-slavery, all of which are beside the mark, simply because wage-slavery is not chattel-slavery, and no Socialist confuses the one with the other. The characteristic feature of wage-slavery is that men are absolutely dependent for their living upon other men in an economic system the workings of which they cannot control—that the machine, the market, the hierarchy of commercial magnates hold the man in their keeping. Or it may be put in the form of a self-evident proposition thus: If liberty is conditioned, he who controls the conditions controls the liberty. This is one of the reasons why Socialists assert that commerce and the capital required for carrying it on must be under collective, and not individual, control.

But, it is said, whilst the Socialist would submit the economic conditions of liberty to communal control, that control under Socialism would become a tyranny in other ways. It would fashion laws and regulations which would hamper liberty and put shackles upon individual initiative and action.

This consideration is serious only to those who have never grasped the democratic character of the Socialist state. For that state will not be a vast centralised bureaucracy with its head-quarters in imperial offices in Whitehall. Already, thanks very largely to Socialist influences, decentralisation is beginning to appear in our system of administration, and we are preparing to consider views which will have very far-reaching practical importance regarding the relations between central and local legislation and administration. The tendency to decentralise will undoubtedly proceed part passu with the tendency of the state to co-operate more definitely with the individual in working out his liberty.

When this truly democratic view of the state is definitely grasped, the ominous character of the objections I am now considering changes. The frown melts into a smile. The officers who call upon happy families to take to a state institution the latest born so that it may grow up under the inspiring impartiality of a number rather than be weighted and prejudiced by a soft-hearted mother and a family name, appear to be nothing more substantial than the hobgoblins of our youthful days which made us lie awake at nights or run home in the dark with our hair on end. Whole troops of anti-Socialist horrors dissolve into something less real than shadows when sane adults look at them a second time.

Like all crowds, all tribes, all companionships, the Socialist community will be swayed by two contrary motions, the coercion of discipline (the common life) and the freedom of will (the individual life); and each will have an absolute sway in some fields, and in others will have to accept compromises, limitations and modifications. But the problems which this conflict will create will belong to the Socialist state itself, which will certainly not be a stagnant state, and they need not be discussed in detail now. All that has to be done at present is to emphasise the fact that the impulses which have driven men so far on the road in search of liberty will cross the Socialist boundary and remain in full operation after that.

And we must also insist that laws and regulations are not only not antagonistic to liberty, but are the very conditions of liberty. They are the expressions of the social life; they are the signs of warning, the directing finger posts which the experience of the past has set up for the guidance of the future; they are the wisdom which men have picked up onthe way. They are, so to speak, the hard bony structure of conduct which supports—and which alone can support—the mobile activities through which the free will finds play. Moreover, they are what may be called the economies of liberty. For liberty is like wealth, in that it should be carefully used if it is to fulfil its purpose. Laws and regulations prevent its misuse, and make easy its proper use. Where two persons use the road, they have to devise some rule of the road; where two persons do business, they have to agree to the conditions of contract; where two persons form a community, they have to provide for common liberty as well as for individual freedom. Liberty is an adjustment of opposites. When Liberty is sovereign, Control is her chief adviser.

Indeed, liberty in a society becomes a department of duty, not of right, because individual activity can so easily become anti-social and destructive. Consequently, liberty is less a matter of breadths, than of heights and depths and of infinite extensions ahead. The liberty of a boat on a river is not to go hither and thither from bank to bank as the whim of the helmsman directs, but to keep its course according to the rules.

From this view, one cannot blot out the fact that liberty ultimately must depend on human quality. The good man alone is free, and the good man is he who is conscious of his social obligations. "Take my yoke upon you" has been the advice of every great ethical teacher to men in search of liberty. Every restraint upon human activity, every form of restrictive legislation, is not wise, and is not Socialism. For restraint and law are but means towards ends and must accept the test which the complete Socialist theory itself must accept: Is it rational? Is it necessary? Is it a contribution to a wider freedom? But certain it is that when liberty is at last found—if that treasure is ever to be found by unhappy man—it will be in an organised state with just laws and a well-devised system of mutual protection and aid.

 

4. Equality.

And there is one other aim which pilgrim man seems to be seeking to which reference must be made. Underlying the aphorism of Kant that every man is an end in himself is a claim that there is something so special in the possession of human qualities, that it entitles men to stand on a plane of equality one with another. This claim has been associated with Socialism, and its critics have thereupon started on many a mad wild-goose chase after their own shadow. They even believe that they have run the thing to earth. For it is asked, How can men be equal? Equal in what? And so on.

What do Socialists mean by equality? They mean that the inequalities in the tastes, the powers, the capacities of men may have some chance of having a natural outlet, so that they may each have an opportunity to contribute their appropriate services to society. The co-operation of unlikes and inequalities in the production of a harmonious whole is the Socialist's view of the perfect community; at the same time it is his view of the only equality which human nature has ever sought. This is not an aim which can be reached at a given moment in life. It means that at stage after stage in the development of a personality opportunities should be given to it to advance in certain directions, so that in the end the man of artistic imagination may not find himself bound behind a grocer's counter, or the youth of mathematical genius be sent as a "little piecer" to a Lancashire cotton mill.

Consequently, the purpose is generally stated as being to secure "equality of opportunity." Every child starts with every door open in front of him and as he goes on he finds no one closed against him which he can profitably enter. It is somewhat difficult to deny the justice and desirability of such a plan, and as a rule the Socialist is met, not with that opposition, but with arguments showing that Socialism far less than capitalism will solve the problem of how to keep poets away from the backs of counters and young mathematicians from mules. With that I shall deal in the next chapter. Mr. Mallock, however, is bold enough to try and enter the lists against us on the merits of the idea itself. Nobody misunderstands Socialism so courageously as Mr. Mallock, and I refer to his argument in order to make the Socialist idea clear. He says^[4] that the idea is purely abstract and has to be brought down into touch with actuality. And this is how he does it. It implies, he says, that at the beginning of industrial life all should start at the same place and in the same path. That is absurd. If two boys start German together, he argues, one will learn faster than the other, and therefore there is no equality of opportunity between them. Which again is absurd, for the equal start is the equality asked for. His third point is that under Socialism an employee of a state factory would have no more equality of opportunity than an employee of a private concern. Whether he has or has not may be a debatable point, but as I shall try to show in my next chapter Socialist industrial organisation will allow the best men the widest scope of usefulness which can only be secured by equal opportunities for those who run equal up to the point of entering industrial life. He then turns to discuss inventions and inventors, and returns to his subject to point out that failures must be weeded out—a certain result of equality of opportunity. This brings him to wind up his argument, and in surveying it a suspicion seems to have stolen into his mind that he had to pin up its rather fragile structure. So he admits that "an equality of opportunity which is relative" (whatever that may mean) may be a useful ideal, but that "the absolute equality which is contemplated by the Socialists [wherever he got that notion] is an ideal which either could not be realised at all," etc. etc. He set out to discuss equality of opportunity to use faculties; he concluded by pointing out the absurdity of supposing that every man could do the same thing, rise through life in the same way, demand the same kind of facilities, and test, at the expense of the state, whether he was really as great a genius as he himself believed—not one of these points being involved in the proposition which they are supposed to destroy. Mr. Mallock's fifteenth chapter is an admirable illustration of the intellectual quality of the greater bulk of anti-Socialist criticism, and I have only referred to it because it has enabled me to throw up into clearer light what the Socialist view of equality is by indicating what it is not.

 

5. Economic Determinism.

There is another class of objections to which it will be most convenient to refer at this point. They arise from the mistakes of Socialists themselves, and are an inheritance from the first generation of "scientific Socialists." It was necessary that Marx and his contemporaries should attempt to devise some shibboleth which would sharply mark off Socialism from other theories of social reformation and from vague expressions of philanthropic goodness, and not a few of these attempts have suffered and have failed because, in addition to embodying what is essential to a Socialist creed, they have also reflected what were the personal views of the writers on unessential matters, or they have been coloured and moulded in the thought of the time when they were first stated. I shall deal with two of them.

Socialism to-day suffers because it has received an inheritance of scientific materialism from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the intellect of the West was occupied and entranced by the discoveries of biological science, by the rude shaking which biological evolution gave to spiritual expressions and phenomena, by the systematic orderliness in which economic explanations set many historical events, and by the enthusiasm for materialist solutions which was natural to the time. This gave rise to the shibboleth of the materialist conception of history, which a section of Socialist thought still tries to impose on the Socialist movement. The materialist conception of history is the view that the motive for historical change has been primarily economic. Indeed, by using the word “"motive" I weaken the necessitarian character of the materialist theory. For, strictly speaking, motive is alien to it. It works mechanically. The expression "economic determinism" conveys the idea more accurately. This theory, which was held by the fathers of modern Socialism, is a characteristic production of the thought of the middle of the nineteenth century. The influence of physical conditions upon human action was then a play-thing of the intellectuals, and the toy was handled with the most whole-hearted affection by Buckle in his History of Civilization; but Buckle was an individualist of the most rigid kind, so the theory itself is not of necessity Socialist. It was a revolt—an exaggeration of a new and attractive explanation of historical evolution. It drew history away from the dimly understood realms of the spirit and of destiny which really belonged to revealed religion, and from explanations of the vaguest kind, and made it a deduction from climate, from soil, from geography, from geology and above all, from personal and class interest. The theory was so very simple, so very sweeping and comprehensive, explained so much, and was so very new, that the Socialist was bound to adopt it because the existing order which produced the very ugly social features of which he was the sworn enemy was generally defended on theological and metaphysical grounds, or was presented as the fruit of the work of great men, with the result that it seemed to be outside the realm of reason altogether and not subject to a law of evolution. Suddenly a new scientific idea exploded the whole of this, as Guy Fawkes proposed to explode James I and his Parliament. History became a record of social evolution; society had an orderly process of change as well as man or a grain of sand. Kings and nobles were functionaries; reigns were mere commas in the story—sometimes not even so much—and not the beginnings and endings of paragraphs and chapters. One epoch produced the next, the explanation being that economic adjustments were taking place, and that these adjustments were constantly marshalling and re-marshalling the armies of reaction and progress, which for ever were coming into conflict with each other and changing the balance of power within nations and also the methods by which that power was used and expressed. To no active propaganda of the time did the secularisation of historical theory yield more immediate or more abundant fruit than it did to the propaganda of Socialism.

But the materialist conception of history is after all one-sided and inadequate. The service it rendered was the establishment of the science of history by the setting up of a deductive method as well as an inductive one. Having rendered that service the toy began to show signs of wear. It did not satisfy every need. It did not meet every emergency. Its assumptions can never be displaced from the motives in history, but they cannot explain events when considered absolutely and alone. The progress of man is not solely inspired by his pocket, nor by the soil upon which he lives, although these things must always be factors. The hill tribe must have different characteristics from the plain tribe. The exploited people must come into frequent conflict with their exploiters. A wealthy class of disfranchised people must knock at the gates of citizenship demanding admission. But in these conflicts every human quality must have been awakened and must act as allies. Moreover, looking into the future, as true education spreads and comfort becomes more real, the more materialist motives are bound to diminish in their importance in relation to the intellectual and moral ones. If self-respect were a widespread virtue in England to-day, the conflict of the House of Lords with the House of Commons would be much more disastrous to the former than it will be if the economic interests involved are the only incentives to the contest. It is the mind of man, with its ideals, its sense of right and wrong, and its aspirations which makes economic poverty and injustice a serious grievance and gives them that explosiveness which makes them a cause of revolution. We now see all this, and in marshalling the motives which make for change, and which accomplished what change has hitherto taken place, we give due place to those that are intellectual, as well as those that are materialist and economic.

The materialist conception of history is, therefore, in no way essential to the Socialist theory. It undoubtedly was of enormous service to that theory about the middle of last century, but its service to Socialism was of precisely the same nature as its service to the science of history. The Socialist theory depends upon a conception of history which shows the gradual evolution of event, of epoch, of organisation; it does not depend upon any one explanation of why history does present that orderly progress.

Indeed, that is conclusively shown in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves. When the opponents of Socialism seek to raise prejudice in their favour by quotations from these writers which smack of economic determinism, they glean their extracts from the earlier statements of the theory written when, as Engels afterwards explained, "there was not always time, place and opportunities to do justice to the other considerations concerned in and affected by it," (the economic factor).^[5] All that either Marx or Engels (Marx putting more emphasis on the economic factor than Engels, perhaps) meant to argue for was that the economic factor was the prime moving cause. The other causes could not operate without it; it awakened them into activity. I may use the words of Engels himself written to the magazine from which I have already quoted: "The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic evolution rests on the economic evolution. But they all react on one another and on the economic basis." Thus, at best, the problem resolves itself into the relative value of the various creative forces, and, at worst, into a vain contention similar to that as to whether the egg or the hen is first in creation.

When the theory was new, it had to challenge in a most aggressive way those that held the field. It had to be couched in dogmas of sharp cutting hardness. That is the history of most theories. They claim absolute validity at first and are satisfied in the end by a recognition of the fact that they are of relative importance.

 

6. Class War.

Another inheritance from the imperfect views which had to guide the early Socialists is the theory of the class war. Here, again, the superficial statement is one of facts of which we have illustrations every day. Wage-earners combine in trade unions. Employers combine in federations. Strikes and lockouts are declared. Trouble arises about wages, hours, exploitation, and so on. In politics the rich tend to drift together, and the active and intelligent poor tend to drift together. A temperance bill finds "the trade" organised to a man. A land tax finds the landowners and property-holders in general ready to defend all their incomes, and to announce that if they are attacked, the whole of the social fabric is threatened. This is nothing but a class war so far as it goes.

The Socialist, however, has to consider what is the value of these facts for his propaganda and for the realisation of his ideal state. What do they mean and how much do they mean? One thing is quite evident. The existence of a class struggle is of no importance to Socialism unless it rouses intellectual and moral antagonism, for it is only that antagonism which leads to progressive change. And this explains best why the Socialist condemns this struggle which has become repulsive because it creates conditions of injustice, because it results in chaos and because it defeats the realisation of the ideal state of peace and comfort which the leading spirits of mankind have always placed before them as a goal. The motive force of Socialism is therefore not the struggle, but the condemnation of the struggle by the creative imaginative intelligence and by the moral sense. The conflict is an incident in an evolution towards complete social harmony, and the motive for the evolution is not economic but intellectual and moral. The Socialist, therefore, cannot consistently address himself to class sentiment or class prejudice. He, ought, indeed to look away from it, because any victory won as the result of siding with one party in the struggle only perpetuates what he desires to eliminate. The appeal to class interest is an appeal to the existing order, whether the class addressed is the rich or the poor. It is the anti-Socialist who makes class appeals; the Socialist makes social appeals. Class consciousness is an asset of the defenders of the existing order of exploitation. It is evident in the wide social gulf fixed between Liberals and Conservatives, it is behind the boycott of Liberal shopkeepers by Primrose dames, it is the reason for the advice given through The Times at the end of 1910 to society hostesses to send no invitations to Liberal ministers.

The class war found its way into the general body of Socialist dogma quite simply. Marx saw that no proletarian movement could be created in Europe without some passion. The wage-earners had to feel the enemy. They had to be marshalled as a class. The theory of economic determinism in history was a theory of a war of classes. By a conflict between economic classes progress had come. Economic determinism, therefore, not only laid a scientific basis for Socialism, but also provided it with a method. But as the determinist argument was modified, the class war view had to suffer a corresponding modification. When the doctrine of economic determinism was preached in its absoluteness, the class war in all its naked antagonism was a logical corollary; when other than economic factors form the evolutionary drift of society, other motives than those of class interest must form the political parties that are consciously aiding the Socialist evolution. When Engels wrote the apologetic confession which I have just quoted, he also threw the class war as it had been understood up to then out of the armoury of Socialist arguments. The idea of the class war no longer represents the motive forces organising Socialism and forming the Socialist movement. Those who still use it are like those more backward religious communities which express their theologies in the terms used before there was a science of geology.

 

 

1. It is true that some of the fathers of modern Socialism wrote of the final disappearance of the state, but as I have shown elsewhere—Socialism and Government—this is only a verbal declaration, the idea of the state being essential to Socialism.
2. Fortnightly Review, 1879, p. 226.
3. Cf. Chap. II., p. 50.
4. A Critical Examination of Socialism. Chap. XV.
5. Letter in the Sozialistischen Akademiker, October 1895.