I once heard a Socialist of world-wide renown accuse Bernard Shaw of
an inconsistency which, to him, was little short of inexplicable. To
every charge of inconsistency, Shaw is always ready with the effective
rejoinder: “_l'homme absurde est celui qui ne change jamais_.” To
Shaw, the stationary is the stagnant, evolution is progress. That rare
literary phenomenon, a master of the comic spirit, Shaw is not only
willing to admit for the nonce the inconsistencies in his own make-up:
he is positively eager to make thereof genuine comic capital.
To the public, Shaw is his own greatest paradox. What defence, they
ask, can be devised for a man rooted in Nietzscheism, who champions the
Socialism which Nietzsche mocked? Reconcile the ardent apostle of the
levelling democracy of a Social-Democratic Republic with the avowed
advocate of the doctrines of Ibsen and Nietzsche, the intellectual
aristocrats of this distinctly social era? Identify the agitation for
international disarmament, for universal peace, with one who sings
of arms and the superman? The Irish Nietzsche, the daring pilgrim in
search of a moral Ultima Thule, with one who has forcibly declared the
impossibility of anarchism? The evangelist preaching the brotherhood
of man with one who repudiates the pacifying sedative: “Sirs, ye are
brothers,” in the statement that he has no brothers, and if he had, he
would in all probability not agree with them? What faith is to be put
in the economic grounding of one who, in the course of two or three
years, turned from vigorous defence of Marx's value theory to its
“absolute demolition, on Jevonian lines, with his own hand”?
It is very difficult to understand Shaw's fundamental philosophy of
Socialism without a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary course of
his thought. The particular brand of Socialism denominated Shavian is
not a bundle of prejudices of an immature youth, but the integration
of years of day-by-day observations of life and character, as well
as of political and economic science. The diversities of Socialistic
faith have been wittily exhibited by Shaw in the opening scenes of the
third act of _Man and Superman_. Roughly speaking, there are three
kinds of Socialists: theoretical, Utopian and practical. Lassalle and
Marx, Liebknecht and Bebel, Guèsde and Jaurès, Hyndman and Kropotkin,
Shelley and Morris, George and Bellamy, Shaw and Webb, carry the stamp
of the cobweb-spinner, the dreamer, or of the man of affairs. It is
Shaw's supreme distinction that, beginning as doctrinaire, he has
ended as practical opportunist. He has sought to traverse the chasm
between democracy and social-democracy, by the aid of a solid economic
structure, rather than by the rainbow bridge of sentimentality and
Utopism. No scheme finds favour in his eyes which does not irresistibly
commend itself to his intelligence. He has found the “true” doctrine of
Socialism in repudiation of the follies of Impossibilism.
Shaw has unhesitatingly given credit to Henry George for the great
impetus he gave to Socialism in England, and, in particular, for the
important part George played in his own career. In speaking of the
memorable evening in 1882, when, under the inspiration of George's
stirring and eloquent words, he first began to realize the importance
of the economic basis, Shaw recently wrote:[66]
“One evening in the early eighties I found myself--I forget
how and cannot imagine why--in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
Street, London, listening to an American finishing a speech
on the Land Question. I knew he was an American, because he
pronounced 'necessarily'--a favourite word of his--with the
accent on the third syllable instead of the first; because he
was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not
customary among shy people like the English; because he spoke
of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange
eighteenth-century superstitions; and because he explained with
great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who
had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous
decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed, also,
that he was a born orator, and that he had small, plump, pretty
hands.
“Now at that time I was a young man not much past twenty-five,
of a very revolutionary and contradictory temperament, full of
Darwin and Tyndall, of Shelley and De Quincey, of Michelangelo
and Beethoven, and never having in my life studied social
questions from the economic point of view, except that I had
once, in my boyhood, read a pamphlet by John Stuart Mill
on the Irish Land Question. The result of my hearing the
speech, and buying from one of the stewards of the meeting
a copy of 'Progress and Poverty' for sixpence (Heaven only
knows where I got that sixpence!), was that I plunged into
a course of economic study, and at a very early stage of it
became a Socialist and spoke from that very platform on the
same great subject, and from hundreds of others as well,
sometimes addressing distinguished assemblies in a formal
manner, sometimes standing on a borrowed chair at a street
corner, or simply on the kerbstone. And I, too, had my
oratorical successes; for I can still recall with some vanity
a wet afternoon (Sunday, of course) on Clapham Common, when I
collected as much as sixteen and sixpence in my hat after my
lecture, for the Cause. And that all the work was not mere gas,
let the feats and pamphlets of the Fabian Society attest!
“When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of
1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with
me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have
been far more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was
not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.... He
saw only the monstrous absurdity of the private appropriation
of rent, and he believed that if you took that burden off
the poor man's back, he could help himself out as easily as
a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing. But the moment he took
an Englishman to that point, the Englishman saw at once that
the remedy was not so simple as that, and that the argument
carried us much further, even to the point of total industrial
reconstruction. Thus George actually felt bound to attack
the Socialism he had created; and the moment the antagonism
was declared, and to be a Henry Georgeite meant to be an
anti-Socialist, some of the Socialists whom he had converted
became ashamed of their origin and concealed it; whilst others,
including myself, had to fight hard against the Single Tax
propaganda.”
However carefully other English Socialists have endeavoured to minimize
or deny outright the momentous influence of Henry George, certainly
Shaw has neither denied nor belittled their debt. “If we outgrew
'Progress and Poverty' in many ways, so did he himself too; and it
is perhaps just as well that he did not know too much when he made
his great campaign here; for the complexity of the problem would have
overwhelmed him if he had realized it; or, if it had not, it would have
rendered him unintelligible. Nobody has ever got away, or ever will
get away, from the truths that were the centre of his propaganda: his
errors anybody can get away from.” And yet Shaw's insularity and sense
of British superiority sticks out in the statement that certain of the
English Socialists, including himself, regretted that George was an
American, and, therefore, necessarily about fifty years out of date in
his economics and sociology from the point of view of an older country!
The absurdity of such a contention is glaringly patent on comparison
of _Progress and Poverty_ with the tracts of the Fabian Society during
its early period: George was at least fifty years ahead of the English
Socialists, instead of the reverse. With that grandiose conceit which
is an essential item of his “stock in trade,” Shaw has expressed his
eagerness to play the part of Henry George to America. “What George
did not teach you, you are being taught now by your great Trusts and
Combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over
as national property as cheerfully as you took over the copyrights of
all my early books, you would find them excellent institutions, quite
in the path of progressive evolution, and by no means to be discouraged
or left unregulated as if they were nobody's business but their own.
It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you
were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken
nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your
country as you do yourselves; and my ambition is to repay my debt to
Henry George by coming over some day and trying to do for your young
men what Henry George did nearly a quarter of a century ago for me.”
While Henry George and his _Progress and Poverty_ were the prime
motors in directing Shaw to Socialism, it was Karl Marx and his
_Capital_ that first shunted Shaw on to the economic tack. In 1884,
the Unitarian minister, Mr. Philip H. Wicksteed, contributed to
_To-Day_ a criticism of Marx from the point of view of the school
of mathematician-economists founded in England on the treatise on
Political Economy published by the late Stanley Jevons in 1871.[67] Mr.
Wicksteed, whose writings on Dante and Scandinavian literature are well
known, was a remarkable linguist, a popular preacher, and an excellent
man. To the fact, however, that he was a mathematician is largely
attributable his deep interest in Jevons' theory of value, which
scientifically demolished the classical theory of Adam Smith, Ricardo
and Cairnes, with its adaptation to Socialism by Hodgskin and Marx.
To his mathematical training, also, may be ascribed the lucidity and
logical clarity of his application of the Jevonian machinery to Marxian
theory. So abject was the deification of Marx by English Socialists at
that time that Hyndman, whom Shaw thought should answer the article,
pooh-poohed Wicksteed as beneath his notice. But the Omniscience and
Infallibility of Marx were rudely shaken: Mr. Wicksteed's article had
to be answered. Some years later Hyndman accused Shaw of having “rushed
in” to defend Marx; but the question here is not of what Mr. Hyndman
thinks: it is a question of fact. Shaw was earnestly requested by the
proprietors of _To-Day_ to answer Mr. Wicksteed; but he replied at
once that though he had read _Das Kapital_ he was not an economist,
and that the reply should come from someone with a real mastery
of the subject. At last, after a discussion one day in St. Paul's
Churchyard, Frost disconsolately remarked to Shaw that if he wouldn't
do it, he supposed he, Frost, must. Suddenly Shaw realized, as he very
recently told me, that none of the others, so far as he could see,
knew any more about the subject than he himself did; and he consented
on the solemn condition that Wicksteed was to be allowed space for a
rejoinder. Shaw was not so blind as not to be deeply impressed by his
own ignorance of what Carlyle called the “dismal science”; he realized
the importance to himself of getting a sound theoretic basis. “I read
Jevons,” he afterwards wrote, “and made a fearful struggle to guess
what his confounded differentials meant; for I knew as little of the
calculus as a pig does of a holiday.” In his article entitled _The
Jevonian Criticism of Marx_, which was more of a counterblast than
a thorough analysis and discussion of Mr. Wicksteed's epoch-making
article, Shaw had not a word to say in defence of Marx's oversight
of “abstract utility.”[68] Quite clever in its Shavian way, Shaw's
article did not get at the root of the matter at all, which was not
unnatural, considering that he was a novice, and, as he afterwards
freely admitted, completely wrong in the bargain. After the appearance
of Mr. Wicksteed's brief rejoinder on pages 177-179 of the same volume,
the incident was, for some time, closed.
The discussion only whetted Shaw's interest and left him determined to
get to the bottom of the economic question. He had been tremendously
impressed by the first volume of _Das Kapital_, “the real European
book,” as he called it, which he had read in the French translation.
Even when he was under this first tremendous impression, his
misgivings found expression in a published letter, in which he
jocularly pointed out that what Marx had proved was that we were all
robbing each other, and not that one class was robbing another. A joke,
founded on clever ignorance, may be a poor beginning for a career;
yet in this way was Shaw's career as an economist begun. Shaw never
doubted, so green was he, that Hyndman or some other leader would at
once expose the fallacy in his letter, and teach him something thereby.
The fact that nobody did probably started the misgiving that led him to
devote so much time and thought to economics.
It was not without many struggles, however, that Shaw was eventually
persuaded to see the fallacies in Marx's economics. In the Hampstead
Historic Society, that mutual aid association, and in long private
discussions with Sidney Webb, Shaw kept at the subject of Marx,
defending him by every shift he could think of. All the time, at
bottom, Shaw was satisfied neither with his own position nor with
Webb's, which was that of John Stuart Mill. He had always mistrusted
mathematical symbols since the time of his school days, when a
plausible schoolboy used to prove to him by algebra that one equals
two--presumably by one of the inadmissible division-by-zero proofs. The
boy always began by saying: “Let x = a.” Shaw saw no harm in admitting
that, and the proof followed with apparently rigorous exactness. “The
effect was not to make me proceed habitually on the assumption that one
equals two,” I once heard him say with a boyish laugh; “but to impress
upon me that there was a screw loose somewhere in the algebraic art,
and a chance for me to set it right some day when I had time to look
into the subject.” And so, when he saw Jevons' x's, his differentials
and his infinitesimals, Shaw at once thought of the plausible boy,
and was fired to find that loose screw in Jevonian economics. The
difficulty he felt most was that he could not, among Socialists, get
into a sufficiently abstract atmosphere to arrive at the pure theory of
the thing. It was essential to divorce the discussion absolutely from
the social question. Fortunately, yet oddly enough, it was Wicksteed
himself who helped Shaw to what he wanted. One of Wicksteed's friends,
a prosperous stockbroker named Beeton, began inviting a circle of
friends interested in economics to his house. The _To-Day_ discussion
had established friendly relations between Shaw and Wicksteed;
and Shaw secured an entry to this circle and “held on to it like
grim death” until after some years it blossomed out into The Royal
Economic Society, founded the _Economic Journal_, and outgrew Beeton's
drawing-room. Mr. Shaw once remarked to me that his great difficulty
was to see through Marx's fallacy in assuming that abstract labour
was the unique factor by which the celebrated equation of Value was
divisible. “I couldn't, for the life of me,” said Mr. Shaw, “see any
sense in the equation 2a + 3b = 8c. I actually bought an Algebra and
tried to recapture any early knowledge I might have had, but it was all
gone.” And only the other day I ran across this book, _The Scholar's
Algebra_, by Lewis Hensley, at a second-hand book-shop in London. Under
date “22-8-87” appears the following, written in Shaw's remarkably neat
stenography: “What sudden freak induced me to purchase this book? I saw
it offered at a second-hand book-shop in Holborn for one and sixpence.
For a time I was puzzled by a notion that the symbols referred to
things instead of to numbers. For instance, 2a + 3b appeared to me as
absurd as 2 wrens + 3 apples.”
In a letter to me Mr. Shaw once related the following story of his
economic education--a story which gives the lie to his own strictures
on University education. And in conversation he recently admitted to me
that this economic training corresponded closely to the highest form
of University instruction.[69] “During those years Wicksteed expounded
'final utility' to us with a blackboard except when we got hold of some
man from the 'Baltic' (The London Wheat Exchange), or the like, to
explain the markets to us and afterwards have his information reduced
to Jevonian theory. Among university professors of economics Edgeworth
and Foxwell stuck to us pretty constantly, and W. Cunningham turned
up occasionally. Of course, the atmosphere was by no means Shavian;
but that was exactly what I wanted. The Socialist platform and my
journalistic pulpits involved a constant and most provocative forcing
of people to face the practical consequences of theories and beliefs,
and to draw mordant contrasts between what they professed or what their
theories involved and their life and conduct. This made dispassionate
discussion of abstract theory impossible. At Beeton's the conditions
were practically university conditions. There was a tacit understanding
that the calculus of utilities and the theory of exchange must be
completely isolated from the fact that we lived, as Morris's mediæval
captain put it, by 'robbing the poor.'”
In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which followed
during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense advantage in that
nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone through this discipline,
which required considerable perseverance and deep scientific
conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in his finding out Marx and
Hyndman completely as economists. In Shaw's present view Marx was
less an economist than a revolutionary Socialist, employing political
economy as a weapon against his adversaries: to Marx, the economic
theory of Ricardo was simply a “stick to beat the capitalist dog.” To
Hyndman, doubt of any part of the “Bible of the working classes” was
Socialist heresy: the whole issue resolved itself into the question
whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.[70] No doubt the
influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic studies was
his need of a weapon; but he did not stop to ask whether the steel came
from a Socialist foundry or not. “The Marxian steel was always snapping
in my hand,” he once remarked to me. “The Jevonian steel held and
kept its edge, and fitted itself to every emergency. And then, just as
one loves a good sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory
for its own sake.” As a literary artist also, accustomed to express
himself in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination
to extricate the theory from its “damned shorthand” of mathematical
symbols, and put it into human language.[71]
On the appearance of the English translation from the third German
edition of _Das Kapital_, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, in 1887,
Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles.[72] These articles of
Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by Wicksteed was complete. In
Shaw's article, _Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal_, a review
of the _Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons_, which appeared in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_, May 29th, 1886, he says: “He (Jevons) was
far too orthodox in his practical conclusions for those materialists
of the science--the revolutionary Socialists--who saw in him a mere
'bourgeois economist,' as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have
had any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any economic
pretensions at all; but it is remarkable that the most successful
attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come from Mr. Philip
Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who is an able follower of
Jevons in economics.” Shaw was now the complete Jevonian, had thrown
the Marxian theory completely over, and exactly located the step Marx
missed. Shaw himself readily admits that Marx came within one step of
the real solution. Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian
economics, he left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In
Marx, Shaw discerned one who “wrote of the nineteenth century as if it
were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as
it goes; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey the high Tory,
sat comfortably down before it in their office and study chairs as if
it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until the Day of Judgment
with an occasional coat of whitewash.” While refusing to deify Marx as
a god, Shaw lauds him with what is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics.
“He (Marx) never condescends to cast a glance of useless longing at
the past: his cry to the present is always, 'Pass by: we are waiting
for the future.' Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or
dreadful to him. There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to
chance or providence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism,
nor enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar
sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights
which command a view of the past, present and future of human society.
Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the law of social
development, and knows what must come. The thread of history is in his
hand.”
The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's admonition:
“Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and read Marx for the
history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their
application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.” Shaw stood
upon the shoulders of giants, for Jevons had laid the foundations, and
Wicksteed it was who first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw
in Marx's analysis of wares.[73] But in that remarkably succinct and
lucid style for which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed
the questionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the
latent errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the
economist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor
even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted
Marx; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will give
these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are worthy of
enumeration.[74] In the first place, Shaw objected to Marx's dogmatic
assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian theory that “wares in
which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced
in the same time, have the same value”; and for the simple reason that
the Jevonian theory called this dogma into question. In the second
place, following Wicksteed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting
that the abstract labour used in the production of wares does not
count unless it is useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping
the wares of the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly
useful work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as a
quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclusively to
disconnect value from mere abstract human labour. Marx thus adroitly
begs the question: as Shaw says: “It is as if he (Marx) had proved by
an elaborate series of abstractions that liquids were fatal to human
life, and had finished by remarking: 'Of course, the liquids must be
poisonous.'” Armed with the fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian
weapons of “the law of indifference” and “the law of the variation
of utility,” Shaw was enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that
value does not represent the specific utility of the article, but
its abstract utility; and not its total abstract utility, but its
final abstract utility--at the “margin of supply,” in Wicksteed's
phrase--_i.e._, the utility of the final increment that is worth
producing. Translated into terms of labour, this means that the value
of the ware represents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in
it, but the “final utility,” in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human
labour socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it: “Instead of
wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have been
expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been expended on
them because they are of equal value (or equally desirable), which is
quite another thing. That slip in the analysis of wares whereby Marx
was led to believe that he had got rid of the abstract utility when
he had really only got rid of the specific utility, was the first of
his mistakes.” Under certain ideal conditions, there is a coincidence
between “exchange value” and “amount of labour contained”; but as these
ideal conditions seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific
validity attaches to the Marxian statement that “commodities in which
equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in
the same time, have the same value.” Lastly, Shaw insists that if
Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm,
Marx's theory of “surplus value.” The proprietor's monopoly completely
upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory of value is
based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles that Marx's
assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of the labour force,
is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx did not see that it is
impossible, according to the “law of indifference,” for one part of the
stock of a commodity available at any given time to have value whilst
another part has none, since no man will give a price for that which
he can obtain for nothing. Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate
labour power from steam power, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says:
“Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the
accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery, etc., cannot
possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right then a capital of
ten thousand pounds, invested in a business requiring nine thousand
pounds for machinery and plant, and one thousand pounds for wages (or
human labour power), would only return one-ninth of the surplus value
returned by an equal capital of which one thousand pounds was in the
form of plant and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of
fact, the 'surplus value' from both is found to be equal.”[75]
[Illustration: =A Study of Six Socialists.=]
From a drawing by H. G. Wells, here reproduced by his permission.
Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not matter in the
least so far as the soundness of Socialism was concerned. For, as he
once expressed it in a letter to me, “if you steal a turnip the theory
of the turnip's value does not affect the social and political aspect
of the transaction.” But, of course, Hyndman and the few Socialists who
had read Marx and nothing else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic
articles in the _National Reformer_. In view of the fact that the
opponents of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists
by alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory
and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted in
accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely forced the
quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime object was to make
it clear that the Fabians were quite independent of the Marxian value
theory. A heated controversy on the subject in the _Pall Mall Gazette_
of May, 1887, engaged in by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not
down the ghost of the value theory; for the controversy was reopened in
_To-Day_ two years later. _An Economic Eirenicon_, by Graham Wallas,
was followed by _Marx's Theory of Value_, contributed by H. M. Hyndman,
in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian demonstration
without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian attack. Whereupon Shaw
“went for” Hyndman in his most aggravating style in an article entitled
_Bluffing the Value Theory_, which finished the campaign except for a
series of letters in _Justice_ by various hands, the tenth of which,
in July, 1889, was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw
on the same subject, written at different times, which appeared in the
_Daily Chronicle_. William Morris never made any pretence of having
followed the controversy on its abstract technical side; and perhaps
the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was a sort of manifesto
which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign, in which Hyndman, Bax,
Aveling and Morris declared that all good Socialists were Marxites!
Shaw was once denounced in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for
pooh-poohing Marx as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once
remarked to me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx
as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by Shaw,
entitled _The Illusions of Socialism_, Shaw pointed out why it was that
a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could never be as
acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like that of Marx, which
seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged to the labourer.[76]
From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second heresy
of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the Class
War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy. To
Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War doctrine
is always the same. “All you have to do is to form a working-class
association, declare war on property, explain the economic situation
from the platform and at the street corner, and wait until the entire
proletariat (made 'class-conscious' by your lucid lectures) joins
you. This being done simultaneously in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid,
Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing remains but a simultaneous movement
of the proletarians of all countries, and the sweeping of capitalism
into the sea because 'ye are many: they are few.' What can be easier
or more scientific?” But a study of the history of Socialism led
Shaw to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces
every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize the
imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned before
the end of the first year by the “damned wantlessness” of the real
proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed, after apparently
converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral World. When Marx
planned the Socialist side of “The International” in the sixties,
he showed his contempt for the trade-union side, with the result:
“On the trade-union side a great success.... On the Socialist side,
futility and disastrous failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the
most appalling massacres known to history.” Marx can scarcely be said
to have tried to organize the class-conscious proletariat; but the
moment his useless vituperation of Thiers, “brilliant as a sample of
literary invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips,” made
known to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization,
they abandoned him in horror and left the International memberless.
In Germany, “Liebknecht made no serious headway until he became a
parliamentarian, playing the parliamentary game more pliably than
Parnell did, though always 'old-soldiering' his way with the greenhorns
by prefacing each compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy
never compromised.” In France, Jaurès and Millerand have not so much
abandoned the Class War doctrine as wholly neglected and ignored it,
thus reducing the old Guèsdist Marxism to absurdity. In England, “the
once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation has been forced by
the competition of the quite constitutional Independent Labour Party
to give up all its ancient Maccabean poetry, and, after a period of
uselessness and surpassing unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with
a speciality for abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of
Ultra-Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival if
only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be considered as
swallowing the other.”
Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical
standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon which it
rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists have for long
been making overdrafts upon their _Capital_. Shaw has never sought
to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble of substituting the
sort of class-consciousness called snobbery, mighty as is that social
force, for the economic class-consciousness of the German formula. In
Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman and the Marxists use the term “Class
War” to denote a war between all the proletarians on one side and all
the property-holders on the other--in Schaeffle's phrase “a definite
confrontation of classes”--which will be produced when the workers
become conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of
the property-holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up in his
words:
“The people understand their own affairs much better than Marx
did, and the simple stratification of society into two classes
... has as little relation to actual social facts as Marx's
value theory has to actual market prices. If the crude Marxian
melodrama of 'The Class War; or, the Virtuous Worker and the
Brutal Capitalist,' were even approximately true to life, the
whole capitalist structure would have tumbled to pieces long
ago, as the 'scientific Socialists' were always expecting it
to do, instead of consolidating itself on a scale which has
already made Marx and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had
become in the time of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses
of 'surplus value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of
the well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial
luxury and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism
has created, as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible
proletarian bodyguard of labourers whose immediate interests
are bound up with those of the capitalists, and who are, like
their Roman prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their
Primrose partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger
social considerations, than their masters, simply because they
are more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income of
the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first to
suffer.”[77]
In Shaw's opinion, the social struggle does not follow class lines at
all, because the people who really hate the capitalist system are,
like Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy, Hyndman, Marx and Lassalle, themselves
capitalists, whereas the fiercest defenders of it are the masses of
labourers, artisans, and employees whose trade is at its best when the
rich have most money to spend. Socialists like Shaw, who “do not accept
the class war,” are simply expressing “first, a very natural impatience
of crying 'War, War!' where there is no war; and, second, their despair
at seeing Socialism, like Liberalism, perishing because it is trying
to live on the crop of home-made generalizations so plentifully put
forth during the great Liberal boom of 1832-80 by middle-class paper
theorists like Malthus, Cobden, Marx, Comte and Herbert Spencer--fine
fellows, all of them, but stupendously ignorant of the industrial
world.” The basic divergence between the Fabian and the “S. D. F.”
policy is epitomized in Shaw's words: “There is a conflict of interests
between those who pay wages and those who receive them; and this is
organized by the trade unions. There is another conflict of interests
between those workers and proprietors whose customers live on rent (in
its widest economic sense), and those whose customers live on wages;
but the lines of this conflict run, not between the classes, but right
through them, and do not coincide with the lines of the trade union
conflict. And any form of Socialist organization, or any tactics
toward the trade union movement, based on the theory that the lines
of battle _do_ run between the classes and not through them, or _do_
coincide with the trade union lines of battle, will prove, and always
has proved, disastrously impracticable.” Shaw exasperatingly said in
a recent article[78] that he refused to agree with anybody on any
subject whatsoever. “Let them agree with me if my arguments convince
them. If not, let them plank down their own views. I will not have my
mouth stopped and my mind stifled.” And those mystic forces--historical
development and Progress with a large P--in which the Marxists
rest their firmest hope, Shaw regards in the spirit of Ingoldsby's
sacristan:
“The sacristan he said no word to indicate a doubt;
But he put his thumb unto his nose, and he spread his fingers out.”
There are two factors which strongly militate against the progress of
Socialism; the resolute adherence of Socialists to those theories and
policies of Marx which time, experience, and modern economic science
have combined to discredit; and the tendency of the popular mind to
confuse Socialism with Anarchism.[79] Shaw's most important negative
and destructive achievements consist in those amazingly clever and
interesting papers in which he attempts to expose Marx's theory of
value as an exploded fallacy, to show that the Class War will never
come, and to demonstrate the impossibilities of Anarchism. In the
_technical_ sense of Socialist economics, Shaw occupies the opposite
pole to Individualism and Anarchism. And yet in a very definite and
general sense, Shaw is a thorough-paced individualist and anarchist.
If individualist means a believer in the Shakespearean injunction “To
thine own self be true!”, in the Ibsenic doctrine “Live thine own
life!”, then Shaw is an individualist heart and soul. If anarchist
means an enemy of convention, of tradition, of current modes of
administering justice, of prevailing moral standards, then Shaw is
the most revolutionary anarchist now at large. If, on the other hand,
Individualist means one who distrusts State action and is jealous
of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one
and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, then Shaw is
most certainly not an Individualist. If Anarchist means dynamitard,
incendiary, assassin, thief; champion of the _absolute_ liberty of
the individual and the removal of all governmental restraint; or even
a believer, as Communist, in a profound and universal sense of high
moral responsibility present in all humanity, then Shaw is a living
contradiction of Anarchism.
Shaw opposes Individualist Anarchism since, under such a social
arrangement, the prime economic goal of Socialism: the just
distribution of the premiums given to certain portions of the
general product by the action of demand, would never be attained.
As this system not only fails to distribute these premiums justly,
but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist
Anarchism is, in Shaw's view, “the negation of Socialism, and is, in
fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any
sane man dare carry it.” The Communist Anarchism of Kropotkin, Shaw
also opposes because of his own lack of faith in humanity at large, in
the present state of development of the social conscience. If bread
were communized, the common bread store obviously would become bankrupt
unless every consumer of the bread contributed to its support as much
labour as the bread he consumed cost to produce. Were the consumer
to refuse thus to contribute, there would be two ways to compel him:
physical force and the moral force of public opinion. If physical force
is resorted to, then the Anarchist ideal remains unattained. If moral
force, what will be the event? The answer reveals Shaw as a confirmed
sceptic in regard to the value of public opinion as a moral agent.
“It is useless,” he avers, “to think of man as a fallen angel. If the
fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted into the discussion
at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil
who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize
that in disregarding his neighbours' happiness, he is taking the surest
way to sacrifice his own.” Under Anarchistic Communism, public opinion
would no doubt operate as powerfully as now. But, in Shaw's opinion,
public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which
operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Keen,
incisive, pitiless, his words descriptive of _public opinion_ show how
little he is tinged with the poetry, the passion, and the religion
which are the very life blood of Socialism.
“Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary,
and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the
reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships
Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going
to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his
pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe....
But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work
for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed, it
is just the other way; public opinion has been educated to
regard the performance of daily manual labour as the lot of
the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire
property and leave off working. Even members of the professions
rank below the independent gentry, so-called because they are
independent of their own labour. These prejudices are not
confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant
also among the workers.... One is almost tempted in this
country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the
snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that
they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus
are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain
irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as
genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the
higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy,
ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty
titles, precedence and dignities, and all the detestable fruits
of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who
lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that
poverty favours virtue was clearly invented to persuade the
poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the
next.”[80]
When Shaw attended the International Socialist Congresses in Zurich
and in London, he reported them in the _Star_ as unsparingly as he
would have reported a sitting of Parliament. The Socialists, amazed
and indignant at their first taste of real criticism, concluded that
Shaw was going over to the enemy. This Fabian policy of unsparing
criticism, inaugurated and carried out ruthlessly by Shaw, ended
in freeing the Fabians, in great measure, from the illusions of
Socialism, and in imparting to their Society its rigidly constitutional
character. An incident, which Mr. Shaw once described in a letter
to me, gives one some insight into the causes of his reaction
against the German Socialists' policy of playing to the galleries by
spouting revolutionary rant and hinting catastrophically of impending
revolutions.
“At the Zurich Congress I first became acquainted with the
leaders of the movement on the Continent. Chief among them was
the German leader Liebknecht, a '48 veteran who, having become
completely parliamentarized, still thought it necessary to
dupe his younger followers with the rhetoric of the barricade.
After a division in which an attempt to secure unanimity by
the primitive method of presenting the resolution before the
Congress to the delegates of the different nations in their
various languages in several versions adapted to their views,
so that whilst they believed they were all saying 'Yes' to the
same proposition, the wording was really very different in the
different translations, and sometimes highly contradictory,
it turned out that the stupidity of the English section had
baffled the cleverness of the German-Swiss bureau, because
the English voted 'No' when they meant 'Yes,' and upset the
apple-cart. Happening to be close to Liebknecht on the platform
at the luncheon adjournment, I said a few words to him in
explanation of the apparently senseless action of the English.
He looked wearily round at me; saw a comparatively young
Socialist whom he did not know; and immediately treated me to a
long assurance that the German Social Democrats did not shrink
from a conflict with the police on Labour Day (the 1st of May);
that they were as ready as ever, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
I turned away as soon and as shortly as I could without being
rude; and from that time I discounted the German leaders as
being forty years out of date, and totally negligible except
as very ordinary republican Radicals with a Socialist formula
which was simply a convenient excuse for doing nothing new.
“When the German leaders visited London in the eighties they
treated the Fabian Society as a foolish joke. Later on they
found their error; and Liebknecht was entertained at a great
Fabian meeting; but to this day the German Socialist press does
not dare to publish the very articles it asks me to write,
because of my ruthless criticism of Bebel, Singer, and the old
tradition of the 'old gang' generally. My heresy as to Marx is,
of course, another horror to the Germans who got their ideas of
political economy in the '48-'71 period.”
After 1875, let us recall, the old pressure and discontent of the
eighteen-thirties descended upon England with renewed force. In 1881,
“as if Chartism and Fergus O'Connor had risen from the dead,” the
Democratic Federation, with H. M. Hyndman at its head, inaugurated the
revival of Socialist organization in England. Like those other haters
of the capitalist system--the capitalists Ruskin, Morris, Tolstoy,
Marx and Lassalle--Hyndman “had had his turn at the tall hat and was
tired of it.” Shortly after the formation of the Democratic Federation,
the Fabian Society, a revolting sect from the Fellowship of the New
Life, founded by Professor Thomas Davidson, came into being. Hyndman
and his Marxists, Kropotkin and his Anarchists, did not realize, with
Shaw, that the proletariat, instead of being the revolutionary, is in
reality the conservative element of society. They refused to accept
this situation, not realizing that they were confronted by a condition,
not a theory. “They persisted in believing that the proletariat was an
irresistible mass of Felix Pyats and Ouidas.” On the point of joining
the Democratic Federation, Shaw decided to join the Fabian Society
instead. He did accept the situation, helped, perhaps, as he once said,
by his inherited instinct for anti-climax. “I threw Hyndman over,
and got to work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a
respectable _bourgeois_ footing; hence Fabianism. Burns did the same
thing in Battersea by organizing the working classes there on a genuine
self-respecting working-class basis, instead of on the old romantic
middle-class assumptions. Hyndman wasted years in vain denunciation of
the Fabian Society and of Burns; and though facts became too strong for
him at last, he is still at heart the revolted bourgeois.” Prior to
the year 1886, there had been no formal crystallization of the Fabian
Society into a strictly economic association, avowedly opportunist in
its political policy; after September 17th of that year the thin edge
of the wedge went in. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary League
contains the nucleus of the Fabian policy of to-day.[81] The Fabian
Society was a dead letter until Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas joined
it; from that moment, it became a force to be reckoned with in English
life. Almost from the very first, as Mr. Sidney Webb once wrote me,
the Society took the colour of Shaw's mordantly critical temperament,
and bore the stamp of his personality. The promise of the Fabians lay
in their open-mindedness, their diligence in the study of advanced
economics, and their resolute refusal of adherence to any formula,
however dear to Socialist enthusiasts, which did not commend itself
unreservedly to their intelligence. By 1885, it had only forty members;
and in 1886, it was still unable to bring its roll of members to a
hundred names. In 1900, it boasted a membership of eight hundred, and
at present about twenty-six hundred names are found upon its rolls.[82]
It is neither possible nor advisable for me to record the history of
the Fabian Society--that may be found in the numerous publications of
the Society. But I cannot refrain from stating that the membership
increased by forty-three per cent, in the year 1906-7, that this was
a year of unprecedented activity; and that the Society has recently
been greatly strengthened by the accession of many well-known men in
English public life. There were then _eight_ Fabians in the London
County Council; and in Parliament, Labour and Socialism have in the
last five years been better represented, I believe, than ever before
in the history of that body. I have recently talked at length with
many of the ablest Socialists in England. The remarkable growth of the
Fabian Society and the Socialist representation in English literature,
I was told again and again, is not due to any sudden and untrustworthy
inflation of Socialist values, but is largely due to the fact that
Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, and their coterie have been
planting the seeds for twenty years. Such ideas as are embodied in Mr.
Lloyd George's budget and the Old Age Pension Bill are unmistakable
marks of that gradual Socialist leavening of English political
thought upon which the Fabians have been engaged ever since 1884.
“The recent steady influx into the Fabian Society,” Mr. Bland said to
me energetically, “is a clear proof to my mind that the ideas which
have been lurking in the air for a long, long time are at last taking
definite shape simultaneously in the minds of a great many people. Such
men as Bernard Shaw have brought this thing to pass.”[83]
During the years from 1887 to 1889, the years we are especially
concerned with at present, compensation for its paucity of numbers was
found not only in the intellectual capacity, but also in the economic
inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness of the leaders in the Fabian
Society. This is best revealed in Shaw's sketch of this period:
“By far our most important work at this period was our renewal
of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracy of
which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which has been getting
rustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his
contemporary, Karl Marx.... In 1885 we used to prate about
Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages as if
it were still 1870. In spite of Henry George, no Socialist
seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of economic
rent: its application to skilled labour was so unheard of that
the expression 'rent of ability' was received with laughter
when the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and
discussions; and as for the modern theory of value, it was
scouted as a blasphemy against Marx.... As to history, we
had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about the
evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage
labour. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line
dividing the _bourgeoisie_ from the proletariat, and declared
that there were only two classes really in the country. We
gave lightning sketches of the development of the mediæval
craftsman into the manufacturer and finally into the factory
hand. We denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the
Malthusians advocated it, which is saying a great deal; and we
raged against emigration, national insurance, co-operation,
trade-unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything
else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing
at all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was,
not that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no
detailed knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed
them ready-made as articles of faith; and when opponents like
Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we sneered at the demand
without being in the least able to comply with it. The real
reason why Anarchist and Socialist worked then shoulder to
shoulder as comrades and brothers was that neither one nor the
other had any definite idea of what he wanted, or how it was
to be got. All this is true to this day of the raw recruits
of the movement, and of some older hands who may be absolved
on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer
true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even
the British Association burst out laughing as one man when an
elderly representative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the
air of one who was uttering the safest of platitudes, accused
us of ignorance of political economy; and now not even a
Philosophical Radical is to be found to make himself ridiculous
in this way. The exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney
by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic
review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself.
The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of
engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets as
their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of the Ten
Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be only too glad
to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening out any such
champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and
swashbucklers of advanced economics.”[84]
Not without reason have the Fabians been called the Jesuits of the
Socialist evangel in England. The “waiting” of the Fabian motto is
synonymous, not with inaction, but with unflagging energy.[85] The
Fabians eschewed pleasures and recreations of every kind in favour of
public speaking and public instruction; their policy has always been
one of education and permeation. In the year ending April, 1889, to
take a single example, the number of lectures delivered by members of
the Fabian Society alone was upwards of seven hundred. In addition
to writing or editing many publications of the Fabian Society, Shaw
has delivered, in the last twenty-odd years, considerably more
than a thousand public lectures and addresses. Until the close of
1889, the Fabians had confined their propagandist campaign to three
directions: publication of manifestos and pamphlets; delivery of public
addresses and holding of conferences, and exciting efforts towards
the permeation of the Liberal party. In December, 1889, the Fabian
Society published the well-known book, _Fabian Essays in Socialism_,
edited by Shaw, and containing, in addition to two essays of his own,
essays by Sidney Olivier, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb,
Annie Besant and Graham Wallas.[86] The authors, constituting the
Executive Council of the Fabian Society, made no claim to be more than
communicative learners: the book was the outcome of their realization
of the lack of anything like authoritative, and at the same time
popular, presentations of the political, economic, and moral aspects of
contemporary Socialism.
[Illustration: =Facsimile of Cover Design of Fabian Essays (1890).=]
In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously avowing
themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly revolutionary.
The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from the illusions and
millennial aspirations of the great mass of Socialists. It is a society
of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm, bowing to the fetishism
neither of George nor of Marx. Towards Marx and Lassalle, some of
whose views must now be discarded as erroneous or obsolete, the
Fabian Society insists on the necessity of maintaining as critical an
attitude as these eminent Socialists themselves maintained towards
their predecessors St. Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic
and revolutionary as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain
anarchistic and revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and
constitutional, in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly
scientific and economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the
Socialist movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the
faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers.[87] While the rank and
file of the “S. D. F.” have been the very good friends of the Fabians,
the radical differences in their respective policies have precluded all
possibility of amalgamation. As succinctly stated by Shaw: “The Fabian
Society is a society for helping to bring about the socialization
of the industrial resources of the country. The Social-Democratic
Federation is a society for enlisting the whole proletariat of
the country in its own ranks and itself socializing the national
industry.” The policy of the one is fundamentally opportunist; of the
other, implacably sectarian. The Federation counts no man a Socialist
until he has joined it, and supports no man who is not a member; the
Fabians advise concentration of strength to elect that candidate, be
he Socialist or not, who gives the greatest promise of advancing,
in greater or less degree, the general cause of Socialism. The
Federation persistently claims to be the only genuine representative
of working-class interests in England; the Fabians have never advanced
the smallest pretensions in that direction. Its policy finds ample
justification in the recent history of Continental Socialism. The
tactics of the German Socialist Party, in the last few years, have been
“Fabianized” by sheer force of circumstances; to-day, this party is, in
great measure, both opportunist and constitutional, the two essential
features of Fabian policy. Sharpened in wit by rigorous persecution,
Liebknecht and his successor Bebel have learned the art of politics
through experience and exigency. In contemporary France is witnessed
the signal triumph of Fabian Socialism. The policy of Jaurès, although
under the frown of the “International,” will be continued in France;
and Guèsde, despite his barren victory at the International Socialist
Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, will remain only _vox clamantis in
deserto_. The history of the Fabian Society, which is the history of
Shaw, in the last twenty years, bears evidence that the Fabians have
stood in the very forefront of the battle for collectivist measures,
municipal reforms, civic virtue and social progress. As Shaw wrote in
1900:
“In 1885 we agreed to give up the delightful ease of
revolutionary heroics and take to the hard work of practical
reform on ordinary parliamentary lines. In 1889 we published
'Fabian Essays' without a word in them about the value
theory of Marx. In 1893 we made the first real attack
made by Socialists on Liberalism, on which occasion the
Social-Democratic Federation promptly joined in the Liberal
outcry against us. In 1896 we affirmed that the object of
Socialism was not to destroy private enterprise, but only
to make the livelihood of the people independent of it by
socializing the common industries of life, and driving private
enterprise into its proper sphere of art, invention and new
departures. This year we have led the way in getting rid
of the traditional association of our movement with that
romantic nationalism which is to the Pole and the Irishman
what Jingoism is to the Englishman.... In short, the whole
history of Socialism during the past fifteen years in England,
France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and America, has been
its disentanglement from the Liberal tradition stamped on
Marx, Engels and Liebknecht in 1848, and its emergence in
a characteristic and original form of its own, modified by
national character, and, in England, calling itself Fabianism
when it is self-conscious enough to call itself anything at
all.”[88]
Strangely enough, in view of all the facts, it is customary to regard
Shaw as a purely destructive and negative spirit. The truth is that
Shaw stands for certain definite beliefs, certain undoubted principles.
His is the belief of the unbeliever, the principle of the unprincipled,
the faith of the sceptic.
Not less important than his destructive achievements has been his
constructive work in practical affairs as Vestryman and Borough
Councillor. Prior to 1895, roughly speaking, the vestries were
ignorantly boasted of as the truest products of a representative
democratic government. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once
remarked to me, “is that the vestry, as it was actually elected in
those days--a few people getting together when nobody knew of it and
at some place of which the public was not notified, and electing
themselves members--could scarcely be called a representative
democratic body. We Socialists finally began to realize that the way
to get at the vestry was to put a programme into their hands. So we
sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies--a pamphlet entitled,
'Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of the sort. The vestrymen were
thus forced to the wall and driven to decide upon issues. They actually
began to make up their minds on many subjects of which hitherto they
had had no conception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline,
began to take on a truly representative character. The _personnel_ of
the vestry was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected
who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise were
willing to do any amount of hard work. I was 'co-opted'--_i.e._, chosen
by the committee, by agreement with the opposite party, obviously
beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was fortunate enough to escape
the terrors of a popular election.”
It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details of
Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor. Suffice it to
say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon the performance
of his duties, and prosecuted them for several terms with great zeal
and tireless energy. His various letters to the Press during that
period, and occasional reminiscences, show that he was always outspoken
and vehement in behalf of all reforms which tended to the betterment of
the poorer classes, equalization of public privileges of men and women,
better sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries
as promise to give the people at large better service and greater value
for their money than privately operated concerns. The most tangible
result of his work as Vestryman and Borough Councillor is his book,
_Municipal Trading_, which he once told me he regarded as one of the
best and most useful things he had ever done.[89]
At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood as
the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London County
Council--the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known actor, Mr.
George Alexander. “I was beaten,” Mr. Shaw recently told me, “because I
alienated the Nonconformist element by favouring the improvement of the
Church schools. I was convinced that such improvement would lead to the
betterment of the education of the children. The Nonconformists were
enraged beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror
upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I remember
one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost foaming at the
mouth, and protesting with violent indignation that he would not pay a
single cent towards the maintenance of the schools of the Established
Church. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'don't you know that you pay
taxes now for the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of
Malta?' Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment,
it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to
London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing at the
time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed, the schools
badly ventilated, and the conditions generally unsatisfactory. 'Improve
all the conditions,' I said; 'appoint your own inspectors, and in the
course of time you will control the situation. Pay the piper and you
can call the tune.' But I could not override the tremendous prejudice
against the Church, and I was badly beaten.” One of Shaw's intimate
friends told me not long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C.
for Shaw was his intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign,
that he and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had
ever lived! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with it,
was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of the
Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day were exactly
those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told was quite as near his
meaning as most people contrived to get without reading him. And only
the other day a well-known politician and a friend of Shaw's made the
remark to me that Shaw was an “impossible political candidate,” too
rash and individualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many
people--even some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances
might confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic
reformer.
And yet it is noteworthy that as far back as the year 1889 Shaw was
asked to stand as a Member of Parliament. Below is given the text
of a letter, from Shaw, at 29, Fitzroy Square, W., London, dated
March 23rd, 1889, to Mr. W. Sanders, then Secretary of the Election
Committee of the Battersea branch of the S. D. F., now a prominent
Fabian and recently member of the London County Council. This letter,
a copy of which was most kindly given me by Mr. Sanders, was sent in
reply to a letter from him to Mr. Shaw asking him to allow his name
to be put forward as a candidate for the parliamentary representation
of Battersea subsequent to a conference between the Battersea L. and
R. Association and the Battersea branch of the S. D. F. Mr. Shaw was
mistaken in addressing Mr. Sanders as the Secretary of the Election
Committee of the Battersea L. and R. Association.
“DEAR SIR,--
“I wish it were possible for me to thank the Battersea L.
and R. Association for their invitation, and accept it
without further words. But there is the old difficulty which
makes genuine democracy impossible at present--I mean the
money difficulty. For the last year I have had to neglect
my professional duties so much, and to be so outrageously
unpunctual and uncertain in the execution of work entrusted
to me by employers of literary labour, that my pecuniary
position is worse than it was; and I am at present almost
wholly dependent on critical work which requires my presence
during several evenings in the week at public performances.
Badly as I do this at present, I could not do it at all if
I had parliamentary duties to discharge; and as to getting
back any of the old work that could be done in the morning, I
rather think the action I should be bound to take in Parliament
would lead to closer and closer boycotting. As to the serious
literary work that is independent of editors and politics, I
have never succeeded in making it support me; and in any case
it is not compatible with energetic work in another direction
carried on simultaneously. You must excuse my troubling you
with these details; but the Association, consisting of men
who know what getting a living means, will understand the
importance of them. As a political worker outside Parliament I
can just manage to pay my way and so keep myself straight and
independent. But you know, and the Association will know, how
a man goes to pieces when he has to let his work go, and then
to run into debt, to borrow in order to get out of debt by
getting into it again, to beg in order to pay off the loans,
and finally either to sell himself or to give up, beaten.
“If the constituency wants a candidate, I see nothing for it
but paying him. If Battersea makes up its mind to that, it can
pick and choose among men many of whom are stronger than I. And
since it is well to get so much good value for the money as can
be had, I think poor constituencies (and all real democratic
constituencies are poor) will for some time be compelled to
kill two birds with one stone, and put the same man into both
County Council and Parliament. This, however, is a matter which
you are sure to know your own minds about, and it is not for me
to meddle in it.
“Some day, perhaps, I may be better able to take an extra duty;
for, after all, I am not a bad workman when I have time and
opportunity to show what I can do; and I need scarcely say that
if the literary employers find that there is money to be made
out of me, they will swallow my opinions fast enough,
“I am, dear Sir,
“Yours faithfully,
“G. BERNARD SHAW.
“Mr. W. Sanders.”
In many quarters, even among his Socialist _confrères_, Bernard Shaw
is regarded as primarily destructive in his proposals. And yet, at
different times and in various places, he has constructively outlined
his programme of complete Socialism. In essential agreement with such
Collectivists as Émile Vandervelde, Jean Jaurès and August Bebel,
Shaw differs from them only in regard to the successive mutations
in the process of Socialist evolution. The gradual extension of the
principle of the income tax--_e.g._, a “forcible transfer of rent,
interest, and even rent of ability from private holders to the State,
without compensation,” is the scheme of capitalistic expropriation the
Collectivists have in mind. By a gradual process of development, the
imposition of gradually increased taxes, the State will secure the
means for investment in industrial enterprises of all sorts. Instead of
forcibly extinguishing private enterprises, the State would extinguish
them by successfully competing against them. Thus, as Proudhon said,
competition would kill competition; in America, Mr. Gaylord Wilshire
never tires of exclaiming: “Let the Nation own the Trusts.” If, as
Shaw claims, the highest exceptional talent could be had, in the open
market, for eight hundred pounds, say, nearly half the existing wages
of ability and the entire profits of capital would be diverted from
the pockets of the able men and the present possessors of capital, and
would find its way into the pockets of the State. The vast sum thus
accruing to the State would swell the existing wages fund, and would
be employed in raising the wages of the entire community. After the
means of production have been Socialized, and the State has become the
employer, products or riches will be distributed roughly, “according to
the labour done by each man in the collective search for them.” In his
celebrated tilt with Shaw, Mr. W. H. Mallock attacked the validity of
the economics which furnish the substructure of _Fabian Essays_.[90]
Mr. Mallock's contention resolves itself into the assertion that
exceptional personal ability, and not labour, is the main factor in
the production of wealth. Far from repudiating this assertion, Shaw
embraced it, he said, in the spirit of Mrs. Prig: “Who deniges of it,
Betsy?” We support and encourage ability, Shaw contends, in order that
we may get as much as possible out of it, not in order that it may get
as much as possible out of us. Give men of ability and their heirs the
entire product of their ability, so that they shall be enormously rich
whilst the rest of us remain as poor as if they had never existed,
and “it will become a public duty to kill them, since nobody but
themselves will be any the worse, and we shall be much the better for
having no further daily provocation to the sin of envy.” Accordingly,
the business of Society is “to get the use of ability as cheaply as
it can for the benefit of the community, giving the able man just
enough advantage to keep his ability active and efficient. From the
Unsocialist point of view this is simply saying that it is the business
of Society to find out exactly how far it can rob the able man of the
product of his ability without injuring itself, which is precisely
true (from that point of view),” though whether it is a “reduction of
Socialism to dishonesty or of Unsocialism to absurdity” may be left
an open question. “If Mr. Mallock will take his grand total of the
earnings of Ability,” Shaw asserts, “and strike off from it, first,
all rent of land and interest on capital, then all normal profits,
then all non-competitive emoluments attached to a definite status in
the public service, civil or military, from royalty downwards, then
all payments for the advantages of secondary or technical education
and social opportunities, then all fancy payments made to artists and
other professional men by very rich commonplace people competing for
their services, and then all exceptional payments made to men whose
pre-eminence exists only in the imaginative ignorance of the public,
the remainder may with some plausibility stand as genuine rent of
ability.” And to Mr. Mallock's assertion that “men of ability will not
exert themselves to produce income when they know that the State is
an organized conspiracy to rob them of it,” Shaw characteristically
retorts, “Mr. Mallock might as well deny the existence of the Pyramids
on the general ground that men will not build pyramids when they know
that Pharaoh is at the head of an organized conspiracy to take away the
Pyramids from them as soon as they are made.”
Shaw holds the fundamentally sound view that “as to the entire
assimilation of Socialism by the world, the world has never yet
assimilated the whole of any ism, and never will.” In that most subtle
and distinguished of all his contributions to the Socialist literature
of our time, _The Illusions of Socialism_, Shaw has expressed his
firm conviction that it is not essential for the welfare of the world
to carry out Socialism in its entirety. Unfettered by the dogmas of
a political creed, unhampered by the bonds of a narrow partisanship,
Bernard Shaw stands forth as a great and free spirit in his prophetic
declaration that, long before it has penetrated to all corners of
the political and social organization, Socialism will have relieved
the pressure to which it owes its elasticity, and will recede before
the next great social movement, leaving everywhere intact the best
survivals of individualistic liberalism. And far from agreeing with
Ibsen in his impossibilist declaration that the State must go, Shaw not
only asserts that we must put up with the State, but also expresses no
doubt whatsoever that under Social-Democracy the few will still govern.
It is a mark of Shaw's British practicality and clear-sightedness that
he recognizes in the State a practical instrumentality for effecting
and directing social reform. The State is indispensable as a means
for making possible one great consummation: the development of the
strong, sound, creative personality. The unsocial man he regards as a
“hopelessly private person.” The opportunity for the free development
of the individual he regards as the fundamental prerequisite and
condition for the individual's social and material well-being.[91]
“That great joint-stock company of the future, the Social-Democratic
State, will have its chairman and directors as surely as its ships
will have captains.” But this admission involves no endorsement, on
Shaw's part, of the State as at present constituted, “Bakounine's
comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established
Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial,
criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems
to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view
of the ordinary 'educated man,' who believes that institutions make
men instead of men making institutions.” The State, as at present
constituted, Shaw views as simply a huge machine for robbing and
slave-driving the poor by brute force. While he laughs at the
Individualism expressed in Herbert Spencer's _The Coming Slavery_, at
the Anarchy expressed in the word _Liberty_, and in those “silly words”
of John Hay on the title-page of Benjamin Tucker's paper, Shaw is,
nevertheless, both an individualist and an intellectual anarchist. The
alleged opposition between Socialism and Individualism, Shaw has always
strenuously maintained, is false and question-begging. “The true issue
lies between Socialism and Unsocialism, and not between Socialism and
that instinct in us that leads us to Socialism by its rebellion against
the squalid levelling down, the brutal repression, the regimenting and
drilling and conventionalizing of the great mass of us to-day, in order
that a lucky handful may bore themselves to death for want of anything
to do, and be afraid to walk down Bond Street without a regulation hat
and coat on.” Like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin, Shaw sees the whole
imposture through and through, “in spite of its familiarity, and of the
illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendour, its
prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its
high moral pretension.”
At bottom, it was a deeply religious, a fundamentally humanitarian
motive, which drew Shaw into Socialism. The birth of the social passion
in his soul finds its origin in the individual desire to compass the
salvation of his fellow man. A burning sense of social injustice, a
great passion for social reform, directed his steps. In his inmost
being he felt his complicity in the social ills of the world. He
realized that only by personally seeking to effect the salvation of
society could he achieve the salvation of his own soul. The Will to
Socialism was thus grounded in a profound individualism: he felt their
organic connection. Socialism was the need of the age; and it could
only be achieved through the freedom and development of the individual.
That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the very
truth itself when he said that Bernard Shaw “has done something that
has never been done in the world before. He has become a revolutionist
without becoming a sentimentalist. He has revolted against the cant
of authority, and yet continued in despising the cant of revolt.” To
Shaw, the middle-class origin of the Socialist movement is in nothing
so apparent as in the persistent delusions of Socialists as to an
ideal proletariat, forced by the brutalities of the capitalist into
an unwilling acquiescence in war, penal codes, and other cruelties
of civilization. “They still see the social problem,” Shaw wittily
remarks, “not sanely and objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of
a melodrama, with its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning,
troubled middle, and happy ending. They are still the children and the
romancers of politics.”[92]
Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the world
is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer fears,
but only laughs at him. “I, the Socialist, am no longer a Red Spectre.
I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good: I embrace the change. It puts the
world with me.... All human progress involves, as its first condition,
the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible
man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is
the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself.
Both extremes have their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as
a corrective to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my
good sense to defend myself against my folly.” Shaw is the very man
of whom his own Don Juan said: “He can only be enslaved whilst he is
spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.”
FOOTNOTES:
[66] Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the
_Progress and Poverty_ dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The
letter, dated December, 1904, was kindly lent me by Mr. Henry George,
Jr.
[67] In the early eighties the monthly magazine _To-Day_ was purchased
by three Socialists: Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh
Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled _Das Kapital: a Criticism_,
appeared in _To-Day_, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884;
publishers, The Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs.
H. H. Champion and J. C. Foulger.
[68] This article appeared in _To-Day_, New Series, Vol. III., pages
22-26, 1885.
[69] The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, Foxwell,
Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham,
Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly--from November
to June--during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came to an
end through the formation of what was formally entitled _The Economic
Club_, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be
worthy of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his _Alphabet of Economics_
to this club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract
economics, and he occasionally contributed something to the programme
himself. On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the
society on the subject of _Interest_.
[70] As late as 1905 Mr. E. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that
Jevons was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the
Marxian theory of value in the interests of social order and political
stability. Compare his article, _Socialism and Bourgeois Culture_, in
_Wilshire's Magazine_, 1905.
[71] This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three
parts, of _Das Kapital_, English translation, which appeared in the
_National Reformer_.
[72] The _National Reformer_, now extinct, then the weekly organ of
the National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant; policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These
articles, three in number, under the general heading _Karl Marx and
'Das Kapital,'_ appeared in Vol. I., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117, 118. On
receiving a cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the
_National Reformer_ could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent
Mrs. Besant had made a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw
characteristically hurled back with indignant gratitude.
[73] These ideas seem to have found expression simultaneously in
England and Austria. Compare _The Theory of Political Economy_, by W.
S. Jevons, London, 1871; _Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre_, by
Anton Menger, Vienna, 1871.
[74] The question of the validity of the Marxian theory is not now a
live subject in England. Mr. Hyndman's defence of the Marxian position
is to be found in his _Economics of Socialism_, in which he attempts
to demonstrate the “final futility of final utility.” It is still a
mooted question on the Continent; compare, for example, the works of
Böhm-Bawerk, perhaps the most eminent of the “Austrian School” of
political economists.
[75] These conclusions were reached before the third volume of
_Capital_ appeared. The editor of the first volume, Mr. Frederick
Engels, promised that the third volume, when it appeared, would
reconcile these and other seeming contradictions. Marx does seem to
have modified certain of his theories in the third volume.
[76] In the _Pall Mall Gazette_ the following articles appeared: _Marx
and Modern Socialism_, by Shaw, May 7th, 1887, page 3; Hyndman's
reply, May 11th, page 11; Shaw's rejoinder--_Socialists at Home_
(this heading doubtless a jibe of the editor), May 12th, page 11;
Hyndman's rejoinder, May 16th, page 2; Mrs. Besant's article on the
same subject, May 24th, page 2. In _To-Day_, Vol. XI., New Series,
1889, appeared: _An Economic Eirenicon_, by Graham Wallas, pages
80-86; _Marx's Theory of Value_, by Hyndman, same volume, pages
94-104; Shaw's reply, _Bluffing the Value Theory_, following Hyndman,
May, 1889, pages 128-135, was lately reprinted by Eduard Bernstein in
_Sozialistische Monatshefte_. Shaw's letter in _Justice_ appeared on
page 3 of the issue of July 20th, 1889. The fine essay, entitled _The
Illusions of Socialism_, quite penetrating in its psychology, although
caviare to the ordinary reviewer, originally appeared in German in
_Die Zeit_ (Vienna), in 1896: No. 108, October 24th, and No. 109,
October 31st; later it appeared in English in _Forecasts of the Coming
Century_, edited by Edward Carpenter, Manchester: Labour Press, 1897;
it afterwards appeared in French in _L'Humanité Nouvelle_ (Ghent and
Paris), August, 1900, edited by Auguste Hamon, the well-known Socialist
and the French translator of Shaw's plays.
[77] _The Class War_, in the _Clarion_, September 30th, 1904.
[78] Shaw's position in regard to the Class War is ably set forth in
his three articles, under the general heading, _The Class War_, which
appeared in the _Clarion_, London; dates: September 30th, October 21st
and November 4th, 1904.
[79] In 1888 Shaw wrote two very clever articles, which so far seem
to have escaped attention, although the disguise is so thin as to
be negligible. These two articles are, respectively, _My Friend
Fitzthunder, the Unpractical Socialist_, by Redbarn Wash--note the
anagram--(_To-Day_, edited by Hubert Bland, August, 1888), and
_Fitzthunder on Himself--A Defence_, by Robespierre Marat Fitzthunder
(_To-Day_, September, 1888). These very amusing papers, both written
by Shaw, it is needless to say, constitute a _reductio ad absurdum_ of
the unpractical and revolutionary Socialist; Fitzthunder is evidently
a composite picture, made up from a number of Shaw's Socialist
_confrères_.
[80] Fabian Tract, No. 45: _The Impossibilities of Anarchism_, a paper
by Shaw, written in 1888, read to the Fabian Society on October 16th,
1891, and published by the Fabian Society, July, 1893.
[81] Compare the former chapter; complete details are to be found in
Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 12-15.
[82] In the twenty-seventh Annual Report on the work of the Fabian
Society (for the year ended March 31st, 1910), the membership is given
as 2,627.
[83] Worthy of record in connection with the new policy of the Fabian
Society, although discussion is outside the scope of this work, is
the movement inaugurated by Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A. R. Orage,
afterwards joint-editors of the London Socialist organ, _The New
Age_, in the foundation of the Leeds Art Club in 1905. “The object of
the Leeds Art Club,” their syllabus read, “is to affirm the mutual
dependence of art and ideas.” This movement, supported by a group of
able lecturers, proved so successful and so stimulating as to eventuate
in the formation of the Fabian Art Group (Bernard Shaw presiding over
the initial meeting), the declared object of which is “to interpret the
relation of Art and Philosophy to Socialism.” Admirable pamphlets and
brochures have been published under its auspices; and its meetings, and
the Fabian Summer School in Wales, have been addressed by many of the
most brilliant and advanced thinkers in England.
[84] Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 15-16; date, 1892.
[85] The Fabian motto, suggested by Mr. Frank Podmore, runs: “For the
right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring
against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time
comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in
vain and fruitless.”
[86] This book has now gone into its seventieth thousand, and has been
republished in both Germany and America. It is regarded to-day as the
standard text in English for Socialist lecturers and propagandists.
[87] Compare Fabian Tract No. 70: _Report on Fabian Policy_, the
bombshell thrown by the Fabian Society into the International Socialist
Workers' and Trade Union Congress, 1896.
[88] _Socialism and Republicanism_, in the _Saturday Review_, November
17th, 1900.
[89] For highly appreciative summaries of _The Common Sense of
Municipal Trading_ (Archibald Constable and Co.), and of Shaw's
article, _Socialism for Millionaires_ (first published in the
_Contemporary Review_ of February, 1896, and afterwards, in 1901,
as Fabian Tract No. 107), compare Mr. Holbrook Jackson's monograph,
_Bernard Shaw_, pages 114-131.
[90] _Fabian Economics_, in the _Fortnightly Review_, February, 1894.
Mr. Mallock purposed to show how the defenders of a broad and social
Conservatism, as outlined by himself, “may be able, by a fuller
understanding of it, to speak to the intellect, the heart, and the
hopes of the people of this country (England), like the voice of a
trumpet, in comparison with which the voice of Socialism will be merely
a penny whistle.” Shaw delightfully termed his rejoinder, _On Mr.
Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance_, which brought forth, in the
same magazine, not one, but two rejoinders from Mr. Mallock. In 1909
an attack by Mr. Mallock on Mr. Keir Hardie in the _Times_ provoked
Shaw to a fierce onslaught on his old opponent, and the Fabian Society
presently republished the correspondence and the old _Fortnightly_
article under the title, _Socialism and Superior Brains_. The latter,
in a shilling edition, is also published by A. C. Fifield, London, in
the _Fabian Socialist Series_.
[91] In his analysis of the situation in his native land, he insisted
that Home Rule was a necessity for Ireland, because the Irish would
never be content, would never feel themselves free, until Home Rule was
granted them. It was not a question of logic, but a question of natural
right.
[92] _Socialism at the International Congress_, in _Cosmopolis_,
September, 1896.
THE ART CRITIC
“Produce me your best critic, and I will criticize his head
off.”--_On Diabolonian Ethics._ In _Three Plays for Puritans_.
Preface, p. xxi.