Social Theories
Importance of social questions--Their moral basis--Attack on
socialism--Contrast between Mazzini's and its theories and
work--Social programme--Cooperation.
Mazzini's faith in the republic came largely of his conviction that it
was the only effective instrument for social legislation. He was
sometimes charged with neglecting social for political reform, with
preaching, as Bakounine put it, a "detestable bourgeois patriotism."
The charge was true for no time of his life, least for his later
years. To him the social question was "the most sacred" as it was "the
most hazardous" problem of the age. He was one of the first to insist
that the rise of the working classes was the great social phenomenon
of the century. Political reform, so he told the Carbonari and the
Chartists, had its only sufficiency and justification, when it was the
instrument of social reform. This did not quite represent his thought,
for he was insistent that questions of political liberty and justice
intimately touched man's moral development; but he held with equal
earnestness that the social question had its independent and undying
importance. "There is no such thing," he wrote, "as a purely political
or purely social revolution; every true revolution has its political
and social character alike."
All his passionate sympathy went out to the disinherited. Compassion,
says one who knew him, shone in his face and vibrated in his voice,
when he spoke of the masses and their hardships. He felt intensely for
a lot, which in the '40s and '50s he believed was growing steadily
worse. Indignantly he spoke of the workman's "poverty-stricken,
cribbed, precarious life, closing in infirm and squalid and unassisted
old age." "The workman has no freedom of contract," he replied to the
old economists, "he is a slave; he has no alternative but hunger or
the pay, however small it be, that his employer offers him. And his
pay is a _wage_; a wage often insufficient for his daily needs, almost
always unequal to the value of his work. His hands can multiply the
employer's capital three fold, four fold, but not so his own pay.
Hence his incapacity to save; hence the unrelieved, irreparable misery
of commercial crises." And even without crises, "his life is poisoned
by a sense of uncertainty and constant dread; and old age,--brought on
prematurely by heavy and often unhealthy work,--awaits him,
threatening, implacable." His "destiny is that of accursed races,--to
live and suffer, curse and die." "A life of poverty and a death-bed in
a hospital,--that is what society in this nineteenth century provides
for two-thirds of its members in almost every country, eighteen
hundred years and more since a Holy One, that men hail as divine,
proclaimed that all are equals and brothers and sons of God."
But he was no pessimist, at all events in later years, when he knew
the workman better, and saw that, in spite of all, he was advancing
and gave promise of infinite further advance. The day of deliverance
was near. The workman's emancipation was inevitable, written in the
decrees of Providence. The labour question was the acknowledged
problem of the time, its solution "the social faith of all men now who
love and know." "The upward movement of the artisan classes in our
towns," he wrote towards the end of life, "dates back now for more
than a century; slow but tenacious in its progress, advancing from
decade to decade by a law of increasing momentum, and in these last
twenty years growing, visibly for all, in intensity and expansion, and
acquiring, as it goes, real power and self-consciousness." It all was
"leading up to a great revolution, an impulse given by Providence,
nevermore to recede, till it has reached its end." And he gloried in
it. Whatever fears he may have had for the working of democracy, he
had none for the labour movement. The rise of the working classes was
"as a flowing tide, that the divine breath has stirred"; and he
watched it "not with fear, but with the loving reverence, with which
one watches a great providential fact."
But just because his faith and love were great, he was not afraid to
point "the men of labour" to the heights. It was his familiar precept
of the moral aim. "Material improvements," he told them, "are
essential, and we will fight to win them; not because men have no
other interest than to be well housed and clothed, but because your
moral development is stopped, while you are, as you are to-day,
engaged in a continual fight with poverty." So too in his rather
scanty references to political economy, he insists that its teaching
must always have reference to a moral ideal. Economics must be "the
expression not of the human appetite but of man's industrial mission."
Otherwise, they "substitute the problem of humanity's kitchen for the
problem of humanity," and teach selfishness for individuals and
classes and industrial warfare. It was not only that economic progress
must aim consistently at personal morality, at making better husbands,
fathers, neighbours, that it must be pure of any spirit of bitterness
or revenge or aught that sins against the brotherhood of man. Besides
all this, it must not be allowed to maim the working man's powers and
duties as a citizen, must never be purchased by the sacrifice of
political liberty or manliness. He pointed for his moral to France in
1849 and 1850, when the French artisans sold their political rights to
Louis Napoleon for the promise of a labour policy. 'Bread and
amusements,' he reminded them, were ever the offer of despots. Outside
liberty and strenuous political interest there was no salvation,
economic or other. The true man will think not only of his class but
of his country, and not of his own country only, but of the sufferings
and rights of men the whole world over. If the working classes forgot
their political duties, thought lightly of political reform, connived
at an unjust foreign policy, they sacrificed one of their nature's
noblest functions, and built their own economic progress on the sand.
And he believed that, France notwithstanding, the people always knew
this in their hearts. The Chartists, he pointed out, with their bare,
imperfect political programme, had more followers than all the French
Socialists. "The last of those you call political agitators," he told
the latter, "will always have more influence with the people than all
your utopias; because at the root of every political question the
people has at least a glimpse of something that appeals to its soul,
something that gives it self-consciousness and raises its trampled
dignity." "The working men of Italy fought like heroes at Milan and
Brescia, in Sicily and at Rome, not for a rise of wages, but for the
honour of the Italian name, for the free life of their nation. The
working men of Paris fought and won in 1848, not because of a
financial crisis or their own poverty, but because the monarchy
dragged France's glory and duty in the mud, because it refused French
citizens a free press, and free right of meeting and association."
It was from this standpoint that he attacked Socialism. We need not
concern ourselves with his strictures on the expired schools of the
early French Socialists, or with his very crude criticism of Louis
Blanc,--criticism, which he would hardly have made in later life, and
which is certainly inconsistent with his own social schemes. We can
neglect, too, much of his attack on the economic side of collectivism,
which he never really understood. It is more to the point to assume a
greater knowledge of modern Socialism than he possessed, and see what
is his essential relationship to it. He had not a few ideas in common
with the Marxite school. His own industrial ideal contained, though he
knew it not, the germs of the socialist community. He looked as
earnestly and confidently as they do to the death of capitalism, and
built his hopes on the development of association; he recognised with
them the inevitable historic evolution of the workers, and that it is
the march of the humble, unknown multitude, and not the hero, which
determines the world's progress; he hailed the time, when classes
would be no more, and all be equals in rights and opportunities, and
he believed that this equality could never be reached under a
capitalist system.
But in root principles he differed from the strict Marxites almost as
essentially as he himself supposed. While with him moral and spiritual
phenomena are the fundamental facts, Marx builds his system on
material phenomena. For the collectivist, man is chiefly the product
of his economic surroundings; for Mazzini, the social and industrial
environment is only "the manifestation of the moral and intellectual
condition of humanity at a given period, and above all of its faith."
For the one, history is the sequence of economic cause and effect, and
the growth of mind and morals is the secondary consequence of economic
facts; with the other, the economic facts, though not neglected, are
subordinated, religion is the master principle of human progress, and
religious systems are the milestones that mark the road. The two
schools are absolutely antagonistic in their conception of the ideal.
Marx and his followers would discover it by the right interpretation
of the drift of facts; if indeed we can call it an ideal, what is
accepted merely as a necessary tendency, and when right and wrong are
judged by the fact, not the fact by right and wrong. Mazzini
understood to the full the value of facts as conditioning the ideal,
as pointing out how far it was attainable at the moment, nay, as in
some degree indicating the ideal itself. But to him right and wrong
had no dependance on the existing fact; facts tended to approximate to
the ideal, because the ideal was sovereign, and Providence guided them
towards it; and it was man's free privilege and bounden duty to help
the work of Providence, and be lord of facts. Mazzini did not kick
against the pricks of economic evolution; he took modern
industrialism as it is, and never wished to thwart the natural
tendencies of industrial discovery. But he claimed that man has power
to turn them to good or evil,--a good or evil that has reference not
to them but to a moral end.
Hence their teaching has differed widely in its practical
consequences. Marx deduced from his economic studies a confident and
detailed prophecy of economic development. It was a faith, whose
assurance and optimism gives it a mighty power to sway men, so long as
faith stays unquestioned. But economic dogmas, especially of the
prophetic kind, are apt to be shaken by the rough wind of facts; and
it has been the fate of Marx' system to be line by line explained away
by its commentators. If it still retains its influence,--and, indeed,
it is a potent influence,--it is because it has quieted scepticism by
shedding much of its founder's doctrine, and because it finds and has
more or less always found expression in a political programme, such as
Mazzini preached, aiming at high ends of liberty and justice. Mazzini,
so confident often in his religious and political horoscopes, here
chose a humbler part. He insisted indeed on one broad economic
principle,--association, and he pointed to certain reforms of
immediate practicability. But he resolutely refused to forecast the
economic future. Humanity, he would repeat, goes on its own way, and
laughs at the man, who finds "the secret of the world under his
pillow." "I think," he wrote, "that our problem is not so much to
define the forms of future progress, as to place the individual under
such conditions as make it easy for him to understand and fulfil it."
He created no great party of the proletariat; it was his as useful
function to fertilise the moral soil, to inspire all classes with a
deeper sense of social obligation, and thus to ease the road for
social progress, whatever particular shape the circumstances of the
time might counsel it to take.
The two men differ again radically in their influence on class
relations. To Mazzini 'the struggle of classes,' however peaceful and
legal in its form, would have been a hateful idea. It is true he
sternly rebuked the short-sighted folly of the richer classes, and he
would find excuses for wild acts or theories of proletariat protest.
But he set his face resolutely against class hatred, against dreams of
violence and revenge, against social revolutions which worked hardship
to the individual. Hopeless as he was of enlisting the upper classes,
at least in Italy, on the side of social reform, he set his hopes on
the middle classes; and from the days of the _Apostolato Popolare_
down to the last years of life, he preached insistently that middle
and working classes must stand together in the social movement. The
whole theory of Duty looked to the harmonising of motives, not to the
brute struggle of opposing social forces. The collectivist takes the
social discord for granted, and bids the workers trust to themselves
alone and win their ends by force, however much force may be disguised
behind the vote. Each principle has its time; the socialist mistake
has been to elevate to a principle, what is the sad necessity of an
uninspired age.
* * * * *
It remains to examine Mazzini's own programme of social
reconstruction. He lays down certain economic axioms. First, private
property must remain, however much the State should try to equalise
fortunes through taxation. Mazzini endorses the familiar argument from
expediency,--the necessity of property to stimulate labour and
encourage invention. But his apology for it is in the main an _à
priori_ one. "Property," he says, "when it is the result of labour,
represents the activity of the body, as thought represents the
activity of the soul; it is the visible sign of our part in the
transformation of the material world, as our ideas and our rights to
liberty and inviolability of conscience are the signs of our part in
the transformation of the moral world. The man who works and produces
has a right to the fruits of his own labour; in this resides the right
of property."[42] There is a flavour of Ricardo and Marx in this, and
it is easy to see a socialist application, unintended by the writer.
Next, the new social organisation must not be the work of compulsion.
He saw that voluntary working-class organisation was an essential
preliminary to any lasting social advance; and, as we shall see, his
own schemes pivot on voluntary societies for cooperative production.
And lastly, schemes of economic change must always aim at increasing
productiveness. He knew that there could be no serious improvement in
the workman's condition, unless the national production were
increased; and he seems to have dimly realised that the two things
must mutually react, any rise in the workman's income increasing the
demand for commodities and thereby stimulating production, and this
increase of production in its turn encouraging a further increase of
the workman's pay.
When we come to the particulars of his economic programme, we find
fertility and boldness of suggestion, but small attempt to work out
the details. He was constitutionally unfitted to be an economist; he
lacked the necessary precision of thought and accuracy of analysis. He
rather despised economic study, at all events when it came from books.
A real knowledge of the economic question is to be found, he says, "in
the workshops and the homes of the artisans," rather than in
"statistics and documents, which are sometimes erroneous, always
incomplete, compiled as they are either by officials, whose tendency
is to conceal the evil, or by private individuals, whose tendency is
to exaggerate it." He trusted to a knowledge of the workman's thoughts
and aspirations, gleaned from close and affectionate intercourse, more
than to any inquiry into the outside facts of his life.
His suggestions were many. Among the more commonplace were free trade
in land, legislation to protect tenants, arbitration between capital
and labour, national insurance (apparently to be compulsory), the
regulation by the state of "that den of robbers," the Stock Exchange.
At one time he wished the state to guarantee work for everybody, but
as he does not mention the proposal later than 1849, it may be assumed
that he relinquished it. For Italy, he suggested a great scheme of
home colonisation on her unreclaimed lands; and it is a curious
instance of his want of accurate enquiry, that in his advocacy of it
he took no account of the all-important factor of malaria. It is
curious, too, that, like many Italians at the opposite pole of
thought, he disliked emigration, and would gladly have checked what
has proved to be one of the chief sources of Italian development. All
these, however, were minor suggestions. His programme rested mainly on
two proposals,--a radical reform of taxation, and the gradual
supersession of capitalism by voluntary cooperative societies of
workmen. His canons of taxation are shortly stated and may be shortly
summarised. Economy in collection, free trade, no taxes on food, the
smallest possible incidence on industry were his fiscal maxims; and he
wished to carry them out by abolishing all indirect taxation and,
apparently too, all special taxes on land, and substituting a single
tax on income, to be graduated and, it would seem, severely graduated.
He also proposed that in all cases of persons dying without heirs
within the fourth degree, estates should lapse to the state.
He looked for more radical change to his scheme of cooperative
production, a scheme which appears in its main outlines as early as
1833, but which he worked out in more detail in the last ten years of
his life. It was a special application of the same principle of
Association, which he had carried into other branches of social and
political activity. He proposed that a great national capital should
be accumulated for the purpose. Church lands, railways, mines, and
"some great industrial enterprises," which he never specified, were to
be nationalised, whether or not with compensation does not appear. At
one time he wished to confiscate in Italy the estates of those, who
fought against the nationalist cause,--a proposal strangely out of
harmony with his usual tolerance. The income from these sources, from
the rents of reclaimed lands and existing national and communal
estates, and from properties which lapsed to the state, would form the
"National Fund" or "tax of democracy." At one time he destined part of
the fund to education, another part to assist any European democracy
struggling for its rights. But its main, and perhaps in his later idea
its only purpose was to assist the spread of voluntary societies for
cooperative production, industrial and agricultural. Any such society,
that could prove its members' honesty and capacity, might claim to
have its capital advanced from the Fund. The loans were to be at 1 or
1½ per cent., and were to be made through special banks administered
by the Communal Councils. Nothing is said as to the repayment of the
loans, but as he contemplated the extension of the societies, till
they ultimately covered the whole field of industry, we may assume
that the loans were to be repaid and passed on to new societies. The
societies were apparently to be left absolutely free as to the
management of their business, the sale of produce, and the disposal of
their net income. To assist their credit, they were to have the right
to deposit any unsold produce in national magazines, and receive in
exchange negotiable notes, which, it seems to follow, would have been
legal tender. The societies were also to be admitted on equal terms
with private firms to contract for government work; this latter was
perhaps the first suggestion of a system, which is now working in
Italy with some success.
Such were Mazzini's sketchy but suggestive economic schemes,--schemes
which, he believed, would ultimately destroy both poverty and
capitalism, without hardship to individuals or danger to liberty,
leavening the social morality with the God-given principle of
association. He seems to have never asked himself what would be the
ultimate destiny of his co-operative scheme; had he done so, he must
have seen that, by however different a road, it was bound to end in
collectivism. It will be recognized now that his plan was in all
essentials identical with latter-day socialism, as put out by its best
exponents, and it may be claimed that in the world of ideas Mazzini
more than Marx is its father. That his scheme would soon come into
working, he had little doubt, at all events in Italy. For in his
social plans, as in all else, his own Italy was ever uppermost in
mind. He knew, when few others knew it, the patience and common-sense
and idealism of the Italian artisan, and he proudly counted on him to
let Italy lead the nations in the solution of the labour question.
FOOTNOTE:
[42] He was once arguing with Sir James Stansfeld as to the
possibility of communism. Stansfeld said, "Why should not all property
be vested in society?" Mazzini replied, "Because that is nonsense.
Society abstractedly is nothing, really a collection of individuals.
Individuals do the work, therefore individuals get the property; they
may give it away if they like, but the right to it is in themselves."
The spirit of the argument is curiously inconsistent with his usual
position.