THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM
Socialism is one of the simplest ideas in the world. It has always
puzzled me how there came to be so much bewilderment and
misunderstanding and miserable mutual slander about it. At one time I
agreed with Socialism, because it was simple. Now I disagree with
Socialism, because it is too simple. Yet most of its opponents still
seem to treat it, not merely as an iniquity but as a mystery of
iniquity, which seems to mystify them even more than it maddens them.
It may not seem strange that its antagonists should be puzzled about
what it is. It may appear more curious and interesting that its
admirers are equally puzzled. Its foes used to denounce Socialism as
Anarchy, which is its opposite. Its friends seemed to suppose that it
is a sort of optimism, which is almost as much of an opposite. Friends
and foes alike talked as if it involved a sort of faith in ideal human
nature; why I could never imagine. The Socialist system, in a more
special sense than any other, is founded not on optimism but on
original sin. It proposes that the State, as the conscience of the
community, should possess all primary forms of property; and that
obviously on the ground that men cannot be trusted to own or barter
or combine or compete without injury to themselves. Just as a State
might own all the guns lest people should shoot each other, so this
State would own all the gold and land lest they should cheat or
rackrent or exploit each other. It seems extraordinarily simple and
even obvious; and so it is. It is too obvious to be true. But while it
is obvious, it seems almost incredible that anybody ever thought it
optimistic.
I am myself primarily opposed to Socialism, or Collectivism or
Bolshevism or whatever we call it, for a primary reason not
immediately involved here: the ideal of property. I say the ideal and
not merely the idea; and this alone disposes of the moral mistake in
the matter. It disposes of all the dreary doubts of the
Anti-Socialists about men not yet being angels, and all the yet
drearier hopes of the Socialists about men soon being supermen. I do
not admit that private property is a concession to baseness and
selfishness; I think it is a point of honour. I think it is the most
truly popular of all points of honour. But this, though it has
everything to do with my plea for a domestic dignity, has nothing to
do with this passing summary of the situation of Socialism. I only
remark in passing that it is vain for the more vulgar sort of
Capitalist, sneering at ideals, to say to me that in order to have
Socialism "You must alter human nature." I answer "Yes. You must alter
it for the worse."
The clouds were considerably cleared away from the meaning of
Socialism by the Fabians of the 'nineties; by Mr. Bernard Shaw, a
sort of anti-romantic Quixote, who charged chivalry as chivalry
charged windmills, with Sidney Webb for his Sancho Panza. In so far as
these paladins had a castle to defend, we may say that their castle
was the Post Office. The red pillar-box was the immovable post against
which the irresistible force of Capitalist individualism was arrested.
Business men who said that nothing could be managed by the State were
forced to admit that they trusted all their business letters and
business telegrams to the State.
After all, it was not found necessary to have an office competing with
another office, trying to send out pinker postage-stamps or more
picturesque postmen. It was not necessary to efficiency that the
postmistress should buy a penny stamp for a halfpenny and sell it for
twopence; or that she should haggle and beat customers down about the
price of a postal order; or that she should always take tenders for
telegrams. There was obviously nothing actually impossible about the
State management of national needs; and the Post Office was at least
tolerably managed. Though it was not always a model employer, by any
means, it might be made so by similar methods. It was not impossible
that equitable pay, and even equal pay, could be given to the
Postmaster-General and the postman. We had only to extend this rule of
public responsibility, and we should escape from all the terror of
insecurity and torture of compassion, which hag-rides humanity in the
insane extremes of economic inequality and injustice. As Mr. Shaw put
it, "A man must save Society's honour before he can save his own."
That was one side of the argument: that the change would remove
inequality; and there was an answer on the other side. It can be
stated most truly by putting another model institution and edifice
side by side with the Post Office. It is even more of an ideal
republic, or commonwealth without competition or private profit. It
supplies its citizens not only with the stamps but with clothes and
food and lodging, and all they require. It observes considerable level
of equality in these things; notably in the clothes. It not only
supervises the letters but all the other human communications; notably
the sort of evil communications that corrupt good manners. This twin
model to the Post Office is called the Prison. And much of the scheme
for a model State was regarded by its opponents as a scheme for a
model prison; good because it fed men equally, but less acceptable
since it imprisoned them equally.
It is better to be in a bad prison than in a good one. From the
standpoint of the prisoner this is not at all a paradox; if only
because in a bad prison he is more likely to escape. But apart from
that, a man was in many ways better off in the old dirty and corrupt
prison, where he could bribe turnkeys to bring him drink and meet
fellow-prisoners to drink with. Now that is exactly the difference
between the present system and the proposed system. Nobody worth
talking about respects the present system. Capitalism is a corrupt
prison. That is the best that can be said for Capitalism. But it is
something to be said for it; for a man is a little freer in that
corrupt prison than he would be in a complete prison. As a man can
find one jailer more lax than another, so he could find one employer
more kind than another; he has at least a choice of tyrants. In the
other case he finds the same tyrant at every turn. Mr. Shaw and other
rational Socialists have agreed that the State would be in practice
government by a small group. Any independent man who disliked that
group would find his foe waiting for him at the end of every road.
It may be said of Socialism, therefore, very briefly, that its friends
recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as
decreasing liberty. On the one hand it was said that the State could
provide homes and meals for all; on the other it was answered that
this could only be done by State officials who would inspect houses
and regulate meals. The compromise eventually made was one of the most
interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do
everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that
had ever been desired in it. Since it was supposed to gain equality at
the sacrifice of liberty, we proceeded to prove that it was possible
to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality. Indeed, there was not
the faintest attempt to gain equality, least of all economic equality.
But there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate
liberty, by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and
interferences. But it was not the Socialist State regulating those
whom it fed, like children or even like convicts. It was the
Capitalist State raiding those whom it had trampled and deserted in
every sort of den, like outlaws or broken men. It occurred to the
wiser sociologists that, after all, it would be easy to proceed more
promptly to the main business of bullying men, without having gone
through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them. After
all, it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build
it; it was even possible, with luck, to inspect the house in time to
prevent it being built. All that is described in the documents of the
Housing Problem; for the people of this age loved problems and hated
solutions. It was easy to restrict the diet without providing the
dinner. All that can be found in the documents of what is called
Temperance Reform.
In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the
good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the
bad. All that official discipline, about which the Socialists
themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over
bodily by the Capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic
tyrannies of a Socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a
Capitalist State. For the vital point is that it did not in the
smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a Capitalist State. It
simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its
victims. It did not enable any man to build a better house; it only
limited the houses he might live in--or how he might manage to live
there; forbidding him to keep pigs or poultry or to sell beer or
cider. It did not even add anything to a man's wages; it only took
away something from a man's wages and locked it up, whether he liked
it or not, in a sort of money-box which was regarded as a
medicine-chest. It does not send food into the house to feed the
children; it only sends an inspector into the house to punish the
parents for having no food to feed them. It does not see that they
have got a fire; it only punishes them for not having a fireguard. It
does not even occur to it to provide the fireguard.
Now this anomalous situation will probably ultimately evolve into the
Servile State of Mr. Belloc's thesis. The poor will sink into slavery;
it might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery.
That is to say, sooner or later, it is very probable that the rich
will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the
bargain; and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like
outlaws. But for the purpose of my own argument it is not necessary to
carry the process so far as this, or indeed any farther than it has
already gone. The purely negative stage of interference, at which we
have stuck for the present, is in itself quite favourable to all these
eugenical experiments. The capitalist whose half-conscious thought and
course of action I have simplified into a story in the preceding
chapters, finds this insufficient solution quite sufficient for his
purposes. What he has felt for a long time is that he must check or
improve the reckless and random breeding of the submerged race, which
is at once outstripping his requirements and failing to fulfil his
needs. Now the anomalous situation has already accustomed him to
stopping things. The first interferences with sex need only be
negative; and there are already negative interferences without number.
So that the study of this stage of Socialism brings us to the same
conclusion as that of the ideal of liberty as formally professed by
Liberalism. The ideal of liberty is lost, and the ideal of Socialism
is changed, till it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor.
The first movements for intervention in the deepest domestic concerns
of the poor all had this note of negative interference. Official
papers were sent round to the mothers in poor streets; papers in which
a total stranger asked these respectable women questions which a man
would be killed for asking, in the class of what were called gentlemen
or in the countries of what were called free men. They were questions
supposed to refer to the conditions of maternity; but the point is
here that the reformers did not begin by building up those economic or
material conditions. They did not attempt to pay money or establish
property to create those conditions. They never give anything--except
orders. Another form of the intervention, and one already mentioned,
is the kidnapping of children upon the most fantastic excuses of sham
psychology. Some people established an apparatus of tests and trick
questions; which might make an amusing game of riddles for the family
fireside, but seems an insufficient reason for mutilating and
dismembering the family. Others became interested in the hopeless
moral condition of children born in the economic condition which they
did not attempt to improve. They were great on the fact that crime was
a disease; and carried on their criminological studies so successfully
as to open the reformatory for little boys who played truant; there
was no reformatory for reformers. I need not pause to explain that
crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.
Finally one thing may be added which is at least clear. Whether or no
the organisation of industry will issue positively in a eugenical
reconstruction of the family, it has already issued negatively, as in
the negations already noted, in a partial destruction of it. It took
the form of a propaganda of popular divorce, calculated at least to
accustom the masses to a new notion of the shifting and re-grouping of
families. I do not discuss the question of divorce here, as I have
done elsewhere, in its intrinsic character; I merely note it as one of
these negative reforms which have been substituted for positive
economic equality. It was preached with a weird hilarity, as if the
suicide of love were something not only humane but happy. But it need
not be explained, and certainly it need not be denied, that the
harassed poor of a diseased industrialism were indeed maintaining
marriage under every disadvantage, and often found individual relief
in divorce. Industrialism does produce many unhappy marriages, for the
same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms
were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness.
Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided.
Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of
sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with
the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest
promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and
gathering the tares into the barn. And since the serpent coiled about
the chalice had dropped his poison in the wine of Cana, analysts were
instantly active in the effort to preserve the poison and to pour away
the wine.