WE have now come to the point at which we must leave our account of what has taken place in the development of society, and must give our views as to how the inevitable transformation of Civilisation into Socialism is most likely to happen; what is going on at present that tends towards this; and what the tactics of those should be who desire the change and are working for it.
We are driven to consider these matters from the point of view of our own British population, as it is through these that the British socialist must work directly, although with the assured hope that in so doing he is furthering the 269 cause of social transformation throughout all modern civilisation.
As above hinted, things have much changed since scientific Socialism has been definitely promulgated in this country.
Ten years ago, from the time at which we are writing, the British working classes knew nothing of Socialism, and, except for a few who had been directly influenced by the continental movement, were, on the surface and by habit, hostile to it. A Socialist lecturer in those days almost invariably found himself in opposition, not only to the members of the middle classes who might be present, but also to the working men amongst his audience; who, not being able even to conceive of the ideas which he was putting forward, at the best took refuge in the Radicalism to which they were accustomed.
In short the working man of our generation, even when an advanced politician, looked on himself as a free citizen like any other man, and had no consciousness of his position as a proletarian, or that the reason for his existence, as a workman, was that he 270 might produce profit by his labour for his master. His ideal (again as a workman) was good wages and constant employment; that is, enough to enable him to live without much trouble in a constant condition of inferiority. His ideal of prosperity as an individual was becoming a master and extracting profits from his old associates, like the French soldier, who is conventionally supposed to carry the Marshal's baton in his knapsack. This is now so much changed that the mass of the working classes is beginning to feel its position of economical slavery; there is no longer amongst 1t any hostility to Socialism; and those working men who take genuine interest in general politics are in favour of Socialist tendencies as far as they understand them; so that nowadays the Socialist lecturer rather finds a difficulty in drawing out opposition to his views, until he begins to deal with details.
On the other hand, though the working class is awakening to a consciousness of its condition, it is sluggish in political activity. But this is, no doubt, a passing 271 phase with the workmen, easily accounted for by their absorption in the immediate industrial struggle; and on this side also, progress is certainly being made. The old battle between the workmen and the manufacturers is still, necessarily, going on; but is changing its character. There is in it less of the mere dispute between two parties to a contract admitted as necessary by either, and more of an instinct of essentially opposed interests between employers and employed, and even of revolt; the working men are beginning to assume that they have a right to some share 1n the control of manufacture; the masters for their part perceive this new spirit, and have begun a definite attack on the organisations which are instinct with it. One occasion has arisen which has appealed strongly to the instincts of the working classes generally, and has united them in a socio-political demand, to wit the eight hours legal day; whatever may be said as to the effect that an enactment in this sense would have, the demand at any rate expresses the desire of the workmen to manage their own affairs, 272 and to curtail the power of the capitalist class.
Moreover, it is a demand which can only be sustained with the collaboration of the workmen of Europe at least, if not of all civilisation, so that it has the further advantage of bringing the British proletarian into friendly contact with his continental brother for the furtherance of a tangible and immediate common gain.
A necessary accompaniment of the wages and capital system, with its competition for employment amongst the propertiless proletariat, is the floating mass of workmen rejected for the time by the labour-market; this mass of unemployed has a continuous tendency to increase as machinery and the organisation of the factory grow toward perfection, the complement to this phenomenon being the cycles of inflation and depression, which are also a necessary consequence of the great machine industry, and the worldmarket which it feeds. At every fresh depression this matter of the unemployed becomes more pressing and 273 harder to be dealt with, and although the regular recurrence of these crises was denied for a long time, it has now been generally admitted. The periods of depression, which were at first short and sharp, and separated by long times of prosperity, have grown to be of longer duration if comparatively not so severe. As a consequence, the lack of employment over large sections of the population is becoming chronic. It is thought by some of those who further the legal eight hours’ day that this measure would do much towards absorbing the mass of the unemployed; but though its immediate effect might be felt in this direction, yet when the labour-market steadied after the change, it would be found that the evil was little lessened. The chronic lack of employment will have to be dealt with by more direct methods, which will more definitely attack the Freedom of Contract (so-called), of which more hereafter.
It has been said that the condition of the working classes has much improved within this century; this is true in an absolute sense of the skilled artisans; 274 though the improvement has not touched the fringe of labour at all. Even as to skilled workmen, relatively to the enormous increase of wealth in the country, they are in a worse and not in a better condition; this combined with the fact that their political power has grown, makes it certain that they will claim an ever-increasing share in the wealth that they produce; and such betterment they can obviously only obtain at the expense of the capitalist class. The improvement therefore on these terms of a part of the workmen by no means indicates stability in the present fabric of society. For the prosperity of the middle classes gives a standard of comfort to the workmen; and on the other hand it is growing clearer to them that the obstacles to attaining a like welfare are artificially economical, and not essential, and can be done away with by means of combined action in industrial and political directions.
Meantime, though the middle class has increased enormously in numbers, and become very much richer as a class, 275 yet it has its own unprosperous fringe, which has grown beyond measure, mostly because of the great diffusion and consequent loss in market-value of education. This intellectual proletariat, as it has been called, is one of the most disruptive elements of modern society, as it is largely in sympathy with the wage-earners, and is quick to catch up with new ideas, while the position of most of its members is worse than that of an average skilled workman. It must be said by the way that in Germany this element of the poor but educated section of the middle classes is even more important than here.
We have then a large body of proletarian producers, with important allies among the middle classes themselves, who are in an inferior economic position to those whose sole business is making a profit out of them, who do not produce at all. But this better-off working class is above the condition of abject poverty, and its intelligence and education is as a body little, if at all, inferior to that of the class that keeps it in subjection. Added to that, it has, as above 276 said, now obtained considerable political power, which is shared to a great extent by the unskilled workmen, with whom they now make common cause.
It seems certain therefore that the workmen, with their eyes fixed on the necessity for their bettering themselves as a class, and the growing consciousness that this can only be done by limiting the power and consequent riches of their masters, will press forward their case politically; that is, by forcing legislation in their favour from the present possessing classes; which will in the long run come to this, that they will deprive those classes of all the privilege that makes them a master-class.
It seems to us that it is along this line, which the workmen are now beginning to take up of themselves, that progress towards revolution will be made. For it must be remembered once more that the great mass of those who are pushing forward by this road, are only very partially conscious of whither it is tending; seeing, not the birth of a new society founded on general equality of condition, but rather a higher and less 277 precarious standard of livelihood and something more of social recognition from their superiors; in short, it is the ideal, not of Socialists, but of men moved by the growing instinct towards Socialism. It must here be noted as to this commonplace and unideal side of the movement, that, throughout modern history, there has been in all democratic fermentations a discrepancy, indeed often an instinctive antipathy, between the theoretic movement, as conceived of by thinkers, and the actual popular or working-class struggle. The latter intent on immediate advantages, and unconscious of any ideal; the former full of the ideal which they have grasped intuitively from the first, but finding the necessary steps towards it so repulsive to them, that they are incapable of taking action. Sir Thomas More, for example, who imagined a society free from the evils of privileged commercialism, which was first raising its head in his time, had no sympathy with the western rebels in England or with the Peasant War in Germany. The French Utopists condemned popular revolutionary action. Robert Owen, though 278 the most humane of men, looked upon Chartism as an interruption to his cooperative schemes, and deprecated it.
The progress of the revolutionary idea is shown by the fact that, in our own times, there is nothing but a trace of this jarring left. The workmen are not unwilling to accept the theorists as leaders; while the theorists fully and frankly recognise that it is through the instinctive working-class movement towards the bettering of life, by whatever political-economical methods, that their ideal of a new society must be sought. This period of practical unity of aim between the theorist and the agitator for immediate gains, must be considered to date from the Communist Manifesto published by Marx and Engels in 1847.
In short, while it is essential that the ideal of the new society should be always kept before the eyes of the mass of the working-classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected; so it is no less essential that the theorists should steadily take part in all action that tends towards Socialism, 279 lest their wholesome and truthful theories should be left adrift on the barren shore of Utopianism.
The demands for legislation at present formulated by the working-classes generally, and adopted, so far as they go, by Socialists, are manifestly incomplete, and if granted would still leave us with the evils of the capitalist system little touched. For example, the legal eight hours’ day, if carried, would, as above pointed out, result in a quite temporary absorption of the unemployed, and also it would not of itself permanently increase the wages of the employed. In order that the condition of the unskilled workmen should be raised to something like a human level, it would be necessary in our opinion that, first of all, a minimum legal wage should be enacted; and this also would be illusive if it were not supplemented by the enactment of a legal maximum for all the necessaries of life; since, otherwise, prices would rise in some sort of proportion to the higher wages enforced by the new legislation. But it must not be supposed that any such measures would be of permanent 280 value except as preludes to the assumption by the community of all the means of production and exchange, to wit, the land, the mines, the railways, the factories, etc., and the credit establishments of the country. It is a matter of course that we do not expect to see this done by catastrophe,—that some Monday morning the sun will rise on a communised state which was capitalistic on Saturday night.201
Various schemes for accomplishing this transfer gradually have been suggested. These must be tested by experience; suffice it here to say that the pith of them is to work by municipalities and trade organisations for the decentralisation of administration, and the acquirement of control over the industries of the country. It is an encouraging sign of the times that even now, both in Paris and London, there seems to be a tendency for the municipal bodies to supplement, and even to supersede the functions of 281 the national legislatures. The Bill prepared by the present Government (clearly with the intention of pleasing the country electors) for the formation of District and Parish Councils, though their powers will be but small, is nevertheless an important step, if only as providing a democratic machinery, which can be hereafter used for socialistic purposes.
It should here be stated that there are current amongst Socialists two views on the method of dealing with the modern bureaucratic state, not involving any ultimate opposition to each other, but the result of looking on the matter from different points of view. To some the national-political systems seem so difficult of attack, and to serve so clearly the end of keeping some kind of society together during the transition period, that they look forward to the new society developing itself under the political shell of the old bureaucratic states, which could to a certain extent be used by the revolutionists, rather than to any disruption of them prior to the realisation of the new social system.
Others again agree with us in the 282 above stated views, that while the national systems cannot at present be directly attacked with success as to their more fundamental elements, yet that these can, and should be, starved out by the continuous action of two principles, one federal and international, the other local. That is to say, there should take place a gradual and increasing delegation of the present powers of the central government to municipal and local bodies, until the political nation should be sapped, and give place to the federation of local and industrial organisations. We consider that this is essential in view of the fact that these latter would have much greater capacity for dealing with the details of the change. And indeed much of their work could go on during the period in which the old political nations were weakening into dissolution, or, as may be better said, were becoming rudimentary. For example, in the steps towards communisation of industries which would result from the law of minimum and maximum, the regulations would necessarily have to be in the hands of these local bodies (County and District 283 Councils, etc.) It is becoming clear to every one that it is absurd for the central legislation to have to do with the details of life in places of which it knows little or nothing. Instances of such cases will keep on multiplying, until it will be found that the centre has nothing to do herein, and the interest in it will be then transferred to the localities. A similar line of argument applies to the trades. Even now there is at least a foreshadowing of practical unanimity of the miners, masons, cotton operatives, and others of this country, agreeing first of all amongst themselves, and then with the same trades in France, Germany, etc. This is, there is little doubt, the beginning of the Industrial Federation, to which we shall revert in the next chapter.
But the central state being supplanted by local bodies in local administration and by the industrial bodies independent of locality, there would remain the third function which it exercises at present, to wit the regulation of international affairs; and it is clear that in modern times the question of peace and war is almost 284 altogether wielded by capitalistic exigencies, so that this function also would fail the political nation when capitalism fell. There would be nothing left for it to do; it would simply die out. Indeed we may be sure that the growing understanding on industrial questions is already tending, by destroying national jealousies, to the making an end of the destructive part of the functions of central governments. Hence, even before the political nation falls into its last stages of decay, we may hope to see a central arbitrating body depriving it of the business which in the past has seemed especially essential to it.
This is already gone so far that an important proposal is on foot as a plank in the socialist programme: namely, the suggestion of the formation of an international board of arbitration, immediately for the purpose of avoiding war by the adjudication of disputes. This might easily be made to develop into an international Parliament. The substitution of arbitration for war would not indeed of itself bring Socialism about, but, by getting rid of an obvious and 285 acknowledged brutality, it would bring into relief the veiled economic tyranny oppressing us, and thus advance Socialism.
Such to our mind is the only means, joined to the gradual shifting of the opinions and aspirations of the masses, for bringing about the beginning of the Socialistic system. Armed revolt or civil war may be an incident of the struggle, and in some form or another probably will be, especially in the latter phases of the revolution; but in no case could it supplant the afore-mentioned change in popular feeling, and it must, at all events, follow rather than precede it.
It is clear that the first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary administration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system—in other words, of an administration whose every act will be of set purpose with a view to Socialism.
We can therefore see clearly before us a struggle which will end in realising a 286 society wherein the means of production are communised, and a relative equality of condition as compared with modern capitalistic society will be attained. This and nothing less than this will be the beginning of Socialism in the true sense of the word; but it cannot stop at this point, but must have an immediate further development, and one which we can conceive of as being directly deducible from it. This must form the subject of our next and concluding chapter.
201. On the ridiculous assumption that this is intended rests many a “crushing” indictment of Socialism, e.g. it constitutes the marrow of Herr Eugene Richter’s Socialdemocratische Zukunfts-bilder [London 1893] (Pictures of the Socialistic Future).Back