Edward Aveling (1886)
Source: Commonweal, in instalments, from May 1 to July 31, 1886
Note: This series of articles was written in response to criticisms of Socialism by Charles Bradlaugh, Secularist, Liberal M.P., and former colleague of Aveling's. Bradlaugh had earlier debated against H.M. Hyndman, and in 1887 would debate with E. B. Bax in the pages of Commonweal. Aveling left for the USA before the series was complete and did not revisit it on his return.
Transcription and notes: by Graham Seaman for MIA, March 2021
I. Commonweal, May 1 1886, p. 34
II. Commonweal, May 8 1886 pp. 46-7
III. Commonweal, May 15 1886, p. 51
IV. Commonweal, May 29 1886. pp. 69-70
V. Commonweal, June 19 1886, p.93
VI. Commonweal, July 10 1886, p. 117-8
VII. Commonweal, July 31 1886. pp. 141-2
In 1884 a sixteen page pamphlet entitled “Some Objections to Socialism” was published by Mr. Bradlaugh. This article and its successors will be an attempt to show cause against these objections. My reasons for selecting this pamphlet as my text are the following. In the first place it contains the usual list of questions asked and comments made at the end of every lecture on Socialism. These objections of Mr. Bradlaugh practically exhaust the list of the commonplace opponent of Socialism. If they are answered, far be it from me to say that those who urge them will be satisfied. But at least we may hope that the growing number of anxious enquirers into this subject will find some help in their work.
In the second place, the objections are put by the writer of the pamphlet in their strongest possible form. A skilled debater and a controversialist by birth and breeding, Mr. Bradlaugh naturally states the case against Socialism with more clearness and vigour than the ordinary antagonist. The greater includes the less, and if we defeat him we may hold that with him many others thinking as he thinks are also worsted.
Third, the popularity of the author of “Some objections” makes it the more necessary to deal with them. The recognised leader of working-class Atheism, the victor in a prolonged struggle for Parliamentary rights, the typical representative of that aggressive Radicalism, whose aggressiveness we are anxious to turn against the fundamental cause of our social ills — Mr. Bradlaugh is a power among the labour classes. It becomes therefore, the more imperative when we think he is in the wrong on the most vital of questions to show where and how, as it seems to us, he is in the wrong.
After these necessary preliminaries, let me now deal with the objections. For the reasons just given, it will be difficult to treat them in a wholly impersonal way, but as far as is possible they will be discussed as the utterances of a thinker who is the spokesman for many men.
And first, to make plain what I mean by the word “Socialism.” Socialism declares that (1) The basis of society to-day is a commercial one — the method of production and distribution of goods; (2) The evils of our present day society are, in the main, referable to this commercial basis; (3) The only efficient remedy for these evils is a revolution in the method of producing and distributing goods.
Really the most serious (I am inclined to think the only serious) objections to Socialism ought to take the form of controverting these propositions successively. But in this pamphlet, as generally in discussions on Socialism, it is noticeable that the first and second of them are untouched by our opponents. We might fairly ask, nay, we must ask, what is the basis of our social arrangements if it is not a commercial one? Is it a matter of speculative belief, as in Christianity, e.g., or is it a matter of government as by limited monarchy or the right divine of electing a House of Commons? We might equally fairly ask what is the cause of the majority of the evils, such as poverty, prostitution, crime, starvation, of to-day, if it is not the method in which our goods are produced and distributed. But to these questions, as a rule, no answer is forthcoming and certainly none is given in the pamphlet under discussion. In it, no more than in the debate with Mr. Hyndman in St. James’s Hall, are the essential questions of Socialism as an explanation of the past and of the present touched upon. The vital point of the origin of surplus-value from unpaid labour is never even approached.
In fact objections to Socialism almost universally are levelled against the third of our propositions and against two parts of it. One of these is the bogey word “revolution,” and the other is the phrase “efficient remedy.” How impossible it is to deal in full with objections to proposition 3 unless propositions 1 and 2 have been discussed, will be readily understood; and yet that is exactly our fate. We have to discuss objections to the efficiency of a change in the method of production of our goods, without feeling certain that our antagonists know even what that method is, and without feeling certain how far they admit that to this our social evils are, for the most part referable.
And this leads me to that general statement that may be prefixed to the discussion now to be entered upon, and indeed all discussion between Socialists and anti- or non-Socialists. It is this: that every one of the evils that the latter remind us are likely to occur under Socialism, occur with manifold more force under the individualism of our present society. Not one of the difficulties that are put before us is there that does not meet us to-day. To-day they are either not solved satisfactorily or they have been in part solved. And where such difficulties, e.g., as the free expression of opinion meet us, we may fairly urge that their partial solution under the capitalistic system, gives us a sure and certain hope that under a simpler and more righteous one, they will be solved at once more rapidly and more completely. On many questions of detail I shall have occasion as I go on to show that this general principle is true; that every difficulty propounded to the Socialist recoils upon the head of the individualist, and that every question as to how he will do this, that or the other, may be in part answered by the retort “And in what fashion are you doing it?” To all which must be added the obvious statement that whilst under the Socialistic system it is hard to conceive of difficulties with which we are not already face to face under capitalism, there are certainly under this latter a large number of difficulties peculiar to it, and that will vanish when it vanishes.
In the pamphlet to the discussion of which all the above leads, Mr. Bradlaugh, opens with a reference to the “pure-hearted and well-meaning men and women” who have tried to test Socialistic theories by experiment. These “pure-hearted and well-meaning” ones are, of course, dead. Our Parliamentary reports remind us that the same observer recently made quite another characterisation and classification of Socialists in England. They were, in language that I am sure no one now regrets more than the speaker “poets, fools or worse”. This makes the classification of such well-known people calling themselves Socialists as George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, Stewart Headlam, none of whom is a poet, a matter of some difficulty.
However, the dead-and-gone English Socialists are “pure-hearted and well-meaning,” and their experiments at carrying into practical execution Socialism failed. That “as communities none of those attempts have been permanently successful”, is no objection to Socialism. For Socialism to be successful must and will be international. A little island of Socialism in the midst of a vast sea of Commercialism is certain to be swamped. An experiment on a small scale is foredoomed. This it is that gives the answer to that youthful objection usually put in the form of a question: Why does not A. or B. of you Socialists who have a certain amount of means due to the unpaid labour of others, at once cast all these away and try the simpler life? To do this would be worse than suicidal. It would be murderous. As things are to-day under the present method of production of goods, for A. or B. thus to give up all that he has would be, first to increase the quantity of capital available by less scrupulous hands than his for the exploitation of labour; second, to paralyse his own energies in attacking the very system of which he is also the victim.
Let me here quote half-a-dozen lines from the Objections. “In none of these [communities] was the sense of private property entirely lost; the numbers were relatively so small that all increase of comfort was appreciable, and in nearly all the communities there was option of the withdrawal of the individual, and with him a proportion of the property he had helped to create or increase.” In this passage many things meet us. First there is the phrase “private property.” So many fallacies are rife about this that encountering it here for the first time in this criticism, let us once for all remind our objectors that our fundamental objection is to private property in the means of production. It is by the omission of these last five words that so much confusion comes, so much misrepresentation wittingly or unwittingly occurs. Socialists may not be all in accord as to the precise degree of ownership involved in the phrase “my coat,” when the new order of things obtains. But they are all agreed that no man will be able to say, “my machinery, my land,” except in the same sense as he may to-day say “my British Museum.”
Notice again the phrase as to the smallness of the numbers in the community making increase of comfort a perceptible quantity to each individual. By implication what does that say of our present system? Under it increase of comfort cannot become an appreciable quantity for each individual. That is true enough under the capitalistic system, but the reason is not the relative largeness of numbers. It is the method of distribution of our goods that leads to so partial a distribution of comfort. Given that the Socialistic community is co-extensive with mankind, increase of comfort would become an even more appreciable quantity for each individual than it was e.g. in the Oneida attempts.
The next chief points made against Socialism for England are (1) that it is of foreign origin and (2) that it is especially preached “by persons claiming to be scientific Socialists — mostly middle-class men.”
It is quite true that hitherto “Socialistic theory has been specially urged in Germany.” But the reasons that our objector gives for this are not sufficient. He alleges as causes of this effect and of the Socialist leaders there having acquired greater influence — the poverty of the people and “the cruel persecution to which Social Reformers, as well as Socialists, have been subjected by Prince Bismarck's despotic government.” Here there is a complete ignoring of the main reason for the wider prevalence of Socialism in Germany and for its deeper reaching into the minds of the people.
In the first place, I am not at all sure that the German labouring classes are poorer than our own. Let us always remember that in any comparison of this kind and in all discussions on the position of the working-classes, we must take into account the ignoble army of paupers. Every possible, every would-be worker enters into the calculation, and the interesting averages of statisticians have to be discounted by the consideration of the surplus-labour population conveniently ignored in all their optimistic mathematics.
But in truth neither the poverty of the people nor the Socialist Law is the real cause of the greater hold of Socialism in Germany. The really important point is that the first great preachers of the doctrine have been Germans. There has not been in England any scientific teacher comparable with the German teachers.
It is the old story of our lagging behind in the march of science. In almost any branch of so-called Natural Science to-day we have to turn for our best guidance to Germany. Our best Zoology book is a translation of Gegenbauer; our best Chemistry book is by Roscoe and Schorlemmer, as to the respective merits of whom chemists are not likely to dispute; our Physiology is confessedly based on German models and tuition; our Botany books are English versions of Thomé, Prantl, Sachs. And the same general principle holds in respect to Political Economy. We have not in England any thinker who has dealt with this subject as it is dealt with in “Das Kapital.”
With this superiority of teachers goes a like superiority of learners. The German proletariat has to a large extent mastered the scientific principles of Socialism, and understands it as a historical development. Would that this were true of the English proletariat! But to say that it is would be to declare ourselves blind. Our workers feel the pinch of misery not less keenly than their brethren. Not a few among them are as eager as the best of any nation to remove the one great cause of ill. But, not unnaturally under the stress and strain of their wage- slave life, they are something indifferent to the scientific explanation of why things are as they are, and why they must before long be even as these enthusiasts would have them.
After missing these two vital reasons why the Germans are better Socialists than we in this country, Mr. Bradlaugh, in a little paragraph of some six lines, gives us the key to the Radical misunderstanding of our position. “German emigrants to the United States and to Great Britain, speak and write as if precisely the same wrongs had to be assailed in the land of their adoption as in the land of their birth.” Exactly. That is the very thing that shows the keenness of their sight; or rather, that shows they have their eyes open in a way that one would call most ordinary, if it were not that the whole crowd of politicians give no indication of it. Exactly the same wrongs have to be assailed in all countries. There is, in truth, one Aaron's rod of a wrong that swallows up all others — or better, one mother evil of which all the rest are only the teeming spawn. And that is the production and the distribution of goods.
The real question for all serious men and women is not of a peddling extension of the franchise, or a peddling abolition of the House of Lords or a yet more peddling reformation of it, but of the foundation of society, and that foundation is exactly the same in England, Germany, any civilised land. It is for this reason that the limiting title of the St. James’s Hall debate between Messrs. Hyndman and Bradlaugh begged by anticipation the whole question. Against that limiting title Mr. Hyndman very properly protested. “Will Socialism benefit the English people?” Who in the name of all gods and devils are the English people? The point is — Will it benefit the people?
The same narrowness of view comes out in the next paragraph. The revival of Socialist propaganda we are reminded in a pathetic parenthesis has been “largely at the instance of foreigners.” The same sort of objection that the ignorant workmen of one country feel to those that speaking another language undersell them — the same incapacity of recognising a common brotherhood, appears again, in the outcry against scientific Socialism as foreign.
And this leads me to the next point. In spite of the laughter or the sneers of our antagonists we claim for our creed the name Scientific. And on the use and meaning of that name I may perhaps speak with just so much confidence as becomes a student of science. Socialism is based on those five foundations on which all science rests; observation, experiment, recordal, reflection, generalisation.
Another pathetic parenthesis reminds us that the “scientific Socialists” are mostly middle-class men. That is true. But the blame of this recoils on the individualistic and capitalistic society that makes this a necessary fact. For the matter of that, anything with the adjective “scientific” in front of it must be to-day “largely middleclass.” Scientific students and scientific observers are “largely middle-class." What time has the lower class man (that such names should be possible!) working with the sweat and reek of his body to be a scientific anything? No wonder that if he is a Socialist he is of the suffering and impatient order.
Then comes the word with which so much of the conjuring against Socialism is done — “Revolution.” The scientific Socialists — of the middle-class — preach revolution; “a revolution which they say must come in any event, but which they strive to accelerate.” There are two mistakes here along with one correct statement. The correct statement is that it must come. Revolution in the method of production of goods is, as Tony Lumpkin says, “a sure thing.” Our objector is far too shrewd not to be conscious of this himself. He may object to our methods, to our principles. But I do not for a moment doubt but that he knows as well as we do that the capitalistic method is doomed. It is staggering on its last legs. The most that can be hoped by its supporters is that they may be able to prop it up for their time and die before its final collapse.
One mistake, or rather understating of the case, is made in the words “they say.” All things are saying that the change is at hand. The diapason may perhaps close in man, but all the other stops of the organ known as human society are singing or grumbling or wailing to the same tune. The signs of the past and of the present point with innumerable immutable fingers to the inevitable change hurrying on apace.
Do we try to accelerate it? I do not think so. We strive to prepare for it. No man may make this revolution any more than any man may prevent it. Nor can any tell the day or hour or the occasion of its coming. But one thing we dare not do; another thing we must do. We dare not be silent as to its approach. As rightly might one, seeing a railway train rushing down upon a human being, not knowing, be silent as we preach peace when there is no peace. That which we must do is incessantly to cry “The Revolution comes.” Could a word of some among us bring it upon us to-morrow, I do not think the word would be spoken. We are not ready. But that we may be ready, let us by education and by organisation prepare ourselves and one another.
I pass to the objection that Socialists “refuse to be precise as to the method or character of the organisation [of the future], or the lines upon which it is to be carried out.” At times this accusation, in the mouths of less skilled antagonists, becomes an accusation of indefiniteness of aim on the part of Socialists. “What is it you want? — what are you driving at?” asks the average man, as if he were quite in despair. To this question — not propounded exactly in this form by our chosen objector — the answer is perhaps as definite a one as any ever given by reformers at any time. Surely “nationalisation of the land and of all other means of production” is a plain and precise reply. There may be doubts as to how this is to be brought about. There can be no doubt as to what it is that is wanted.
It is only by implication that in “Some Objections” we are accused of vagueness. We are accused of incapacity to give details as to the working out of the daily life of man under Socialism. The accusation is unreasonable. No man can give with any degree of certainty the details of the future under a new order of things. And no man who has read history ought, I think, to expect this. To him that attempts it the past gives its warning as to the foolishness of such an attempt, and for him the future is preparing its contradictions. We can say what we think may happen, as Gronlund has in his “Modern Socialism,” but we dare not say what must and will happen. Only we can comfort one another with this thought: that if, in all the strife and horror of this time, it is not impossible to conceive the working of a just and kindly scheme of life, such a conception will be easy enough to the riper minds of a riper time.
Especially in this connection do our first two general question-answers come in. To one asking for details as to bottle-washing, the making and the getting of the daily newspaper, and the like, we are bound to say, “How is this managed in our terrible society of to-day? In the most effective and equitable fashion, do you think? And do you not believe that these difficulties, over which capitalism is still stumbling, may be surmounted when a scheme of brotherhood replaces one of oppressors and oppressed?”
A pregnant Latin proverb comes to mind. Solvitur ambulando, “it is solved as we walk along.” That is the reply to all these strange, these unconscionable enquiries — Solvitur ambulando. Take care of your principles, and the details will take care of themselves. Be quite clear on the large main idea for which you are working; keep that steadily in front of you, and when you reach it the solution of all these questions of detail will be found lying behind it. Solvitur ambulando.
Taking an illustration on this point from the agitation with which Mr. Bradlaugh's name has been most identified — that against religion; no one asks — or at all events no one ought to ask — anti-religionists for the precise details of the system they would substitute for that in vogue at present. And this, although the change we as atheists would bring about is a very, very small one Compared with that for which Socialists work. I am certainly not prepared to say exactly what is to be done with the Church revenues, the churches themselves, all the Bibles and hymn-books, and such men as my friend the Reverend Stewart Headlam, whom no amount of revolution in religion would ever induce to give up preaching religion. Nor do I know any one else thus prepared. Solventur ambulando.
The fearful upon this point should turn to the history of the Paris Commune in 1871. With what astounding and encouraging ease did that society of working men at once set about its work! How readily each fell into his place! Within that immortal 75 days, the standing army is replaced by an armed people, “municipal councillors chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms,” form the Commune; the police are stripped of all political attributes, and are merely the agents responsible and revocable of the Commune; high State dignitaries vanish and their salaries with them. All public service is done at workmen’s wages. Here be details worked out in truth. Solvebantur ambulando. When for Paris is substituted the civilised world, when the Commune is international, free from traitors within and foes without, and the 75 days have become the thousand years of peace — who can doubt that all things will work together for good to them that love man?
The next paragraph presents this same objection in another phase, and in one that is particularly interesting as showing an unintentional misreading on the part of our antagonist. He quotes the utterances of two men prominently identified with the Socialist movement in England, and quotes them as antagonistic one to the other. Each of the two writers, Mr. H. M. Hyndman and E. Belfort Bax is quite capable of taking care of himself, but I am compelled to point out that in what they have said they by no means contradict one the other. In fact the words of each of them really elucidate, and are necessary to the due understanding of, those of the other. According to the one, Socialism is an endeavour “to substitute an organised co-operation” for present day competition and commercial throat-cutting. According to the other, “no scientific Socialist pretends to have any detailed plan of organisation.” Now, these two utterances, as a glance at the words I have italicised shows, are in nowise irreconcilable. The one clearly by its use of the indefinite article “an” is in harmony with the protest of the other against any one having any detailed plan, cut and dried, to fit into the future. He that has such a plan and holds it to be anything more than a suggestion of possibilities, need not be considered seriously. “Trust him not; he is (quite without intent) fooling thee.”
We now pass to a paragraph whose careful reading and re-reading many times almost leads to the conclusion that to our objector Socialism is only concerned with a change in the method of distribution of goods, and not with the more important change in the method of their production. It is true that in the succeeding paragraphs there is some slight reference to this last; but it is of the very slightest, and is only made indirectly, in dealing with the attacks on “property.” The fact is, that in this pamphlet, as in the St James’s Hall debate, the primary question of Socialism and of our present-day society is never approached, and that primary question is the way in which our goods are produced, the unpaid labour expended in their production, the surplus-value resulting from this, and the source of all capital in that surplus-value.
However, though we regret that our main point is thus unchallenged and ignored, let us take what we have and deal with it. “Socialists declare ... that the exchange of all production [read “products”] must be controlled by the workers; but they decline to explain how this control is to be exercised, and on what principles.” Note first, the unconscious admission that is here made by implication. He that objects to our claim for the control of all exchange by the workers implicitly admits that now much if not all exchange is controlled by the non-workers, — a sufficiently unjust condition of things. Upon the latter part of the sentence my former contentions again come in, with an important modification. Certainly we cannot explain in all details exactly how a more equitable exchange will be effected, though probably any one of us would be personally prepared to say how it might be. Scarcely any thinking Socialist is there who has not in head the general idea of a plan for completely socialising exchange. But knowing that more and wiser heads than his will be busy a little later at the same task, he sees that for him to lay down any assured scheme now would be alike presumptuous and premature. He declines to be led astray by this red herring of argument, and continues preaching principles.
A word that leads me to the important modification noted above. The principles upon which the control of all exchange by the workers can be and even — as principles — will be carried on, we can certainly explain. And the explanation is the more easy, as the principles that will govern exchange in the future will be the direct opposite of those governing it to-day. For injustice, will be substituted justice; for inequality, equality; the inverse proportion which now obtains, whereby he that does least receives most, and he that does most receives least, will be replaced by the receipt on the part of each man of all that is necessary to him, he having worked according as his strength and ability allow. The hideous commercial yard-measure of rewarding a man according to what he has done will be broken asunder. If a man has done all of which he is capable, he is entitled to just so much of the necessaries and of the luxuries of life as his fellow, who also has done all of which he is capable. And this holds true if the one be a Charles Darwin and the other a crossing-sweeper. “She hath done what she could,” said Christ of the Magdalen, and the words in which he rebuked the disciples are at this hour a rebuke to the bourgeois advocate and the bourgeois defendant.
And observe, finally on this point, that the commercial yard-measure is a false one, even on its wielder's own showing. Men are not to-day rewarded in proportion to that which they have done. Confining our attention wholly to the question of exchange, though not without renewing the protest against this narrowing-down of the enquiry, we may fairly ask the individualists whether under their scheme men are not rewarded in exactly the inverse proportion to their expended labour? The middle-man, who has learnt the meaning of “tutissimus ibis in medias res”, receives his hundreds or thousands a year. His office-hours are theoretically, say 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Of these many are never occupied with work at all, and not one of them with work so arduous or so irksome as that of the clerk who writes all his supremely uninteresting letters, or the porter who carries about his supremely uninteresting goods. And the former of these, really working from 9 to 6 say, is “passing rich on” £100 a year; whilst the latter working yet longer and at more severe toil, receives, perhaps, 20s. a week.
It is, I say, by no means difficult to explain the principles on which the control of exchange by the workers will be carried on, if once the principles on which the control of exchange by the non-workers is carried on are understood. But I imagine that another meaning yet is lurking behind Mr. Bradlaugh’s phrase. He is, I fancy, thinking of the difficulty that may occur in carrying out an equitable scheme of distribution. There will be the leaven in our midst of those anxious to get back to the old system, inasmuch as the old system gives more chance of personal aggrandisement. That such a difficulty should meet us is a terrible comment at once upon the individualistic system, and the moral natures that it spawns. But the difficulty is greatly lessened if we reflect that all are to be workers, and really workers. The class of non-workers who, having profited by the unfair condition of things to-day, will hanker after their human flesh-pots, will have vanished as a class. At first certain diseased individuals may be present in sufficiently large numbers to need careful watching, just as criminals, like these a product of commercialism, will at first be many in number. But the number of both these classes will rapidly diminish, until they will become as rare as microcephali or ape-men. Like these a would-be capitalist will appear now and again. Like these, he will be a case of reversion to a lower ancestral condition, and like these, unpleasant and shocking as he will seem, he will not be of the least danger to the community.
The changes are still rung on exchange, and all reference to production is still wholly omitted. One might think from the part of the “Objections” now under discussion, that only the distribution of goods needed changing and not the manner of their production. This strange omission, as I have said, makes the attack on Socialism partial and incomplete. The evils of to-day depend on the way in which goods are made and goods are distributed. Their remedy is in a revolution along both these lines.
Thus we find our opponent agreeing with us “that there are often too many concerned in the distribution of the necessaries of life, and that the cost to the consumer is often outrageously augmented.” But we believe that we go down to the root of the matter when we say that all this middlemanism is due to the hideous system of production for profit, and not merely for consumption. Now, against this system, Mr. Bradlaugh, as far as I know, never protests, and yet that very system is the cause of the over many concerned in distribution, and of the outrageous augmentation of cost to the consumer, against which he does protest.
Again, all these evils of exchange are to be reformed gradually and in detail. Let us suppose that they are; that middlemanism is gradually and in detail reformed off the face of the earth. You then have the very thing for which Socialism contends, as far as exchange of wares is concerned. Only you have it after a longer or shorter time of the misery that it is owned exists as a consequence of the present method of distribution. In a word, the agony is to be protracted instead of ended once for all. And note, of course, that if this slow revolution of the methods of distribution were effected, if, indeed, it could be effected without revolution of the method of production also, the chiefer source of the social ills would still remain.
All this, and the non-understanding of our position by our antagonist, comes out very clearly in his remarks on co-operative societies. These he extols. But in the extolling of them one little phrase creeps in, that is the proverbial fly in the proverbial ointment. They have so many members, so many yearly sales, so much stock-in-trade, so much working capital, and so much annual profit. In this last phrase the cloven foot of capitalism shows.
Whence is this profit to come? Until our opponents can show us any other source of it than unpaid labour somewhere or other, we are bound to regard the co-operative societies themselves as exploiters in so far as they have profit to divide among their members. Remembering this, the words “each [society] keeping its own property,” has a ring only a little less sardonic than those of the man who, having never in his life done a stroke of work, talks at large about his own property.
Extension and perfection of this organisation of co-operative distribution are without doubt desirable, if it is understood that an organisation of co-operative production must accompany it, and that the aim of the workers is not to make profit out of the unpaid labour of those not within the ranks of their organisation, but to get all the means of production and distribution into the hands of the workers. Co-operation really thoroughly carried out, made at once national and international, would, of course, be Socialism pure and simple, i.e., Communism.
On this follows the customary talk about the moral effects of these on the one hand, and the immoral effects of Socialism on the other. The understanding that the effective carrying out of co-operation would be Socialism, will help the reader to discount this antithesis. “The self-reliance of the individual workers who take part in co-operative stores” will certainly not be lessened by Socialism. For this very self-reliance of which there is so much talk, is in reality an unconscious reliance on others, and a reliance on those others yielding to the reliant co-operator more or less of their unpaid labour for him to take as profit on his investment.
So also when we read that “the organisation of all industry under State control must paralyse industrial energy and neutralise individual effort,” we feel that the misconception of the moral is as great as the misconception of the economic position. Of course, the State control that Mr. Bradlaugh dreads is not to us the control by such a State as is now, and ever more shall not be. That primal misconception is the cause of much error. Our antagonists think that we are State Socialists, and are actually anxious to have things taken in hand by the powers that be at the present time. Nothing could be more erroneous than this idea. Even if a rare act for good is done by the State now, its good effect is marred by the fact that it has been taken in hand by the State of to-day. The hands are much too dirty.
And even under the terrible Frankenstein monster that we call the State to-day, when a feeble attempt in the direction of co-operation rather than that of pure Socialism is made, the paralysis of industrial energy, the neutralisation of individual effort are certainly not noticeable. The fact is that our opponents confuse the energy and effort of individuals with their energy and effort to get profit. The energies and efforts of ninety-nine hundredths of men at the present time are solely devoted to the getting more and more of the results of unpaid labour into their own possession. The paralysis of that kind of industrial energy, and the neutralisation of this kind of individual efforts are consummations most devoutly to be wished.
The next phase in the argument is the well-known device of setting against Socialism that large numbered class of people just on the border-line between the exploited and the exploiters. Any one that has ever addressed audiences chiefly made up of this class knows the eagerness with which they respond to any appeal to their selfishness. So demoralised have they become by the frightful society in which they live and by its frightful methods, so narrow is their conception not only of duty but of mere matters of fact, that they take quite seriously the statement that Socialists desire “to take the private economies of millions of industrious wage-earners in this kingdom for the benefit of those who have neither been thrifty nor industrious.” It is difficult to conceive a statement more misleading than this. In the first place we do not desire to take the private economies of wage-labourers. We desire to prevent any one's private economies from being used to exploit the labour of another. Nor is anything to be done for the profit of those who “have been neither thrifty nor industrious,” except in so far as any revolution in the method of production and distribution will better the condition of all men, and so make the number of the non-industrious less. And there is here a complete omission of two facts that even the outraged would-be small capitalist might grasp. First, that it is just exactly the non-industrious people who are now the best off. The richest are the idlest. Second, from the purely selfish point of view the would-be small capitalist may be reminded that he himself would assuredly be better off under the system we propose than he ever could be under the present.
After the very serious mis-statement that Socialism aims at taking “the private economies of millions of industrious wage-earners for the benefit of those who may have neither been thrifty nor industrious” — a mistatement the more serious in that the present system, of which our objector is champion, does precisely this very wrong — we have the time-honoured deprecation of “physical force.” This deprecation always seems to me so queerly out of place in the mouths of those who defend our modern methods. For these, initiated by physical force, are based on physical force and entirely maintained by physical force.
When as an objection to Socialism it is urged that one final and supreme use of physical force may have to be and there; an end of it for ever, we note, first, that it ill becomes the advocates of capitalistic production to complain of their own weapon being turned against their own throat. We note next, as has been noted before in this series of papers, that not to keep constantly before men’s eyes the certainty of such an actual struggle is to preach peace when there is no peace. We note third (and for the repetition of this for the thousandth time the constant repetitions of our antagonists are to blame) that the revolution could and would be a perfectly peaceful one, were it not for the resistance to their perfectly righteous dispossession that will be forthcoming at the hands of the privileged classes, when the process of disgorgement sets in.
Mr. Bradlaugh reads Shelley. Let him turn to the “Masque of Anarchy,” and there he will see how the acute poet-mind foresaw what would happen. When the vast assembly of the free is gathered together, and in measured words declares itself emancipate, the tyrants will pour around their troops of armed emblazonry. We may be sure that, the time coming when the workers declare their intention of taking all the means of production into the hands that have made them, there will follow a bitter period — may it be as brief as bitter! — of fierce resistance to this just decree. But that this is inevitable is no reason whatever for those who recognise more clearly than even their opponents how inevitable this is, to uphold the present iniquitous system — a system that entails more human suffering of the dumb sort in a week than would follow from a year of revolution.
The argument that the inevitable revolution is “in the highest degree difficult, if not impossible,” because “property holders are the enormous majority” is, from our point of view, not water-tight on the general grounds just given. But in itself it is worthless, as we think. First of all, on the mere question of fact. It is doubtful whether with the most liberal estimate of what a property holder is — nay, even with the most radical estimate — the mere number of units supports Mr. Bradlaugh's strange contention. Even acting up to the farce of regarding every possessor of a dozen stamps in a post-office savings-bank as a property holder, it is open to question whether, setting against these all the toilers who have not reached even this extravagance of wealth, and all the paupers — the reserve army of labour — the mere numbers of the latter do not exceed those of the former. But it is not only a question of quantity of property-holders. It is one of the quality of their holdings. It is of no use to support a system that graciously admits of a few thousand depositors in penny savings-banks, if the same system makes possible a Rothschild or a Duke of Westminster. Even if property-holders were in an enormous majority, the enormous majority of property is in a very few hands. Even in the interest of the enormous majority of property holders, and appealing to the lowest of their motives, any change in the method of production of goods would be for them a change for the better.
After this comes the discovery of another contradiction that is not a contradiction. J.L. Joynes has written that the immediate aim of Socialism is “not the abolition of private property, but its establishment ... on the only sound basis.” Mr. Hyndman, in the abortive debate, spoke of “collective ownership of land, capital, machinery and credit.” And these two statements are gibbetted as contradictory. This they in no sense are. Both these gentlemen have in their mind that which we have such difficulty in driving into the minds of our antagonists — the necessity of ending, once for all, private property in the means of production. This need not in any way conflict with the private possession of “my watch, my coat,” and the like, as to which the individualists are so clamorous. How vaguely our opponents think on this point is shown by the concluding sentence of this same paragraph, in which we find the writer saying, “to me it seems impossible that if everything be owned collectively, anything can be owned individually, separately and privately.” The blunder here is, of course, in the word I have italicised, though an odd error in sentiment rather than in thought seems to me running through it. For my own part, I feel quite as private and individual a sense of ownership in things I hold in common with others, as I do in those that are more exclusively mine in the individualist sense. For example, my feeling of ownership in regard to the British Museum is every whit as strong as in regard to my boots, even when the latter have been paid for.
It is really no wonder that our essayist says quite pathetically that he is afraid “Mr. Joynes has in his mind some other unexplained meaning for the words ‘capital’ and ‘property.’” Mr. Joynes has only the meaning for capital that we are always explaining, and never getting understood — “for ever telling, yet untold.” Capital is due to unpaid labour. It would be interesting to have from our antagonists their definition of capital, their explanation of how it is possible for a non-worker to become worth thousands of pounds. Even an attempt at explanation from them would have the charm of novelty.
Then Mr. Bradlaugh turns to statistics, and furnishes us with another weapon against himself. He reminds us that there are of professional men 647,075 in England and Wales; commercial men, 980,128; farmers, 249,907; unoccupied males over twenty (not including recognised paupers), 182,282. Let us add all these together. They come to 2,059,392 out of a population of 25,974,439. Not 1/12th of the whole. Is it not strange that any one quoting these numbers fails to see the enormous injustice of a system that lets some two millions only out of a population of twenty-six millions batten on the unpaid labour of the other twenty-four.
One of our most constant, and, I think, one of our most just causes of complaint against antagonist critics, is their habit of reading into the conditions of the future the conditions of to-day. The habit is fatal to anything like dispassionate argument. As a double example of it, let me take two questions put by the writer of this pamphlet. They are apparently suggested by the fact that Socialists propose to do away with the power of capital, in the hands of a private individual, to buy labour-power — i.e., to purchase slaves. Of course, if labour-power were in all cases fully remunerated, and received the equivalent of the value it had added to the commodity, this particular objection to capitalism would not hold. But since we know (and our opponents know) this is not the case, and since we know (and our opponents know) this never will be the case, as long as the capitalist class has command of all the means of production and the labour class has command of none, — we are bound (and our opponents are logically bound) to antagonise private property in anything that can give one man the power of exploiting, another.
Let us now see what are the two questions to which this idea gives rise. “Does [it] mean that £30 saved by an artisan would not be attacked so long as he kept it useless, but that if he deposited it with a banker who used it in industrial enterprise, or if he invested it in railway shares, it would be forfeited?” That is question No. 1; and you will see the charming confusion of what is now and what will be hereafter that runs through it. In that hereafter, no such hideous thing as a banker who pays interest out of other men's unpaid labour; no such thing as a railway share, the dividend on which is paid out of other men's unpaid labour to some one who has done nothing to earn it, will be conceivable. Is there not, in this connexion, something irresistibly comic, but for the tragedy of it, in the idea of a banker “using” money “in industrial enterprise”? A pretty euphemism this for the calling of one who simply directs money unearned by him into channels whence it returns bearing with it a surplus-value equally unearned by him!
But mark next that word “useless,” and see in it the unconscious confession that in our society of to-day the one use of money is to buy other men's bodies and wring from these unpaid labour. If this criticism seems harsh, let us ask Mr. Bradlaugh if he thinks the artisan’s £30 is useful if going out from him in, say, industrial enterprise or in railroad-making, it comes back to him as exactly £30, and not £31 10s.? And let us further ask him, what is the source of the extra £1 10s.? Alas! to these questions we shall have no answer save from Socialist lips. The source of the extra £1 10s. is unpaid labour. The £30 going out and coming back as £30 might yet have been useful. But the moment it comes back with a farthing more than itself, it ceases to be useful simply; it becomes injurious by an amount roughly measurable by the amount of the surplus-value it brings home with it. Not stopping, for the moment, to enquire too curiously into the usual methods by which money — £30, or more — is “saved,” this much we can say. A man may have the right to use that money and get for it its exact equivalent, neither more nor less; but no man can have the right to receive for such money as he may advance one penny more than its equivalent.
“Oh, but the £30 is his. He has earned it; he has saved it!” cries the apologist for Society.
“Be it so, if you will. The £30 is his. He has earned it. He has saved it. Let him have £30. But the £1 10s., that is not his. He has not earned it. He has not saved it. And to that he has no right.”
Money then, £30 or otherwise, is not attacked when it is invested in other men's paid labour, because it is useless or useful; but because it is injurious to the community.
The second question runs thus: “If an artisan may, out of the fruits of his labour, buy for £3 and keep as his own a silver watch, why is the £3 to be confiscated when it gets into the hands of the Cheapside or Cornhill watch-dealer?” Note the irony of the phrase, “out of the fruits of his labour.” What is really meant is, “out of the fraction of the fruits of his labour he receives as wages.” If the artisan with his £3 gets the equivalent of £3, no more and no less, in the name of honesty let him keep the £3 or their equivalent, be it watch, or food, or clothes. But if he even thinks to get out of the unpaid labour of his fellows 3s., and to make his pounds, guineas, then in the name of honesty confiscate the 3s. The watch-dealer is almost sure to use his £3 to exploit others. How else can he pay Cheapside or Cornhill rents, to say nothing of the family house at Brixton, and maybe a villa at St. John's Wood? But if he will only use his £3 to get their exact equivalent, £3, there need be no talk of confiscation. It is the 3s. that must be confiscated, though if artisan or dealer refuses to take this equitable view of things, and insists upon his right to do what he will with his own, even to the extent of doing what they will not with other people's labour-power, then Society will have to take from him even that which he hath, just as it takes from a man his own knife if he persists in using it to the injury of others.
Once again, then, and let me hope (against hope) for the last time, what we attack is that private property in the means of production, that gives its owner the power to buy human labour-power, to remunerate it inadequately, and to live on the products of unpaid labour.
Edward Aveling.
(To be continued.)