IS SOCIALISM POSSIBLE?
I will not pretend to be impartial in this matter, and to discuss as
though I had an undecided mind, whether the world would be better if we
could abolish private property in land and in many things of general
utility; because I have no doubt left in the matter. I believe that
private property in these things is no more necessary and unavoidable
than private property in our fellow-creatures, or private property in
bridges and roads. The idea that anything and everything may be claimed
as private property belongs to the dark ages of the world; and it is not
only a monstrous injustice, but a still more monstrous inconvenience.
Suppose we still admitted private property in high roads, and let every
man who had a scrap of high road haggle a bargain with us before we
could drive by in a cab! You say life would be unendurable. But indeed
it amounts to something a little like that if we use a railway now; and
it is quite like that if one wants a spot of ground somewhere upon which
one may live. I see no more difficulty in managing land, factories, and
the like, publicly for the general good, than there is in managing roads
and bridges, and the post office and the police. So far I see no
impossibility whatever in Socialism. To abolish private property in
these things would be to abolish all that swarm of parasites, whose
greed for profit and dividend hampers and makes a thousand useful and
delightful enterprises costly or hopeless. It would abolish them; but is
that any objection whatever?
And as for taking such property from the owners; why shouldn’t we? The
world has not only in the past taken slaves from their owners, with no
compensation or with a meagre compensation; but in the history of
mankind, dark as it is, there are innumerable cases of slave-owners
resigning their inhuman rights. You may say that to take away property
from people is unjust and robbery; but is that really so? Suppose you
found a number of children in a nursery all very dull and unhappy
because one of them, who had been badly spoilt, had got all the toys
together and claimed them all, and refused to let the others have any.
Would you not dispossess the child, however honest its illusion that it
was right to be greedy? That is practically the position of the
property-owner to-day. You may say, if you choose, that property-owners,
land-owners for example, must be bought out and not robbed; but since
getting the money to buy them out involves taxing the property of some
one else, who may possibly have a better claim to it than the land-owner
to his, I don’t quite see where the honesty of that course comes in. You
can only give property for property in buying and selling; and if
private property is not robbery, then not only Socialism but ordinary
taxation must be. But if taxation is a justifiable proceeding, if you
can tax me (as I am taxed) for public services, a shilling and more out
of every twenty shillings I earn, then I do not see why you should not
put a tax upon the land-owner if you want to do so, of a half or two
thirds or all his land, or upon the railway share-holder of ten or
fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound on his shares. In every change
some one has to bear the brunt; every improvement in machinery and
industrial organisation deprives some poor people of an income; and I do
not see why we should be so extraordinarily tender to the rich, to those
who have been unproductive all their lives, when they stand in the way
of the general happiness. And though I deny the right to compensation I
do not deny its probable advisability. So far as the question of method
goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the
property owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid
cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day.
But, apart from the justice of the case, many people seem to regard
Socialism as a hopeless dream, because, as they put it, “it is against
human nature.” Every one with any scrap of property in land, or shares,
or what not, they tell us, will be bitterly opposed to the coming of
Socialism; and, as such people have all the leisure and influence in the
world, and as all able and energetic people tend naturally to join that
class, there never can be any effectual force to bring Socialism about.
But that seems to me to confess a very base estimate of human nature.
There are, no doubt, a number of dull, base, rich people who hate and
dread Socialism for purely selfish reasons; but it is quite possible to
be a property owner and yet be anxious to see Socialism come to its own.
For example, the man whose private affairs I know best in the world, the
second friend I named, the owner of all those comfortable boots, gives
time and energy and money to further this hope of Socialism, although he
pays income tax on twelve hundred a year, and has shares and property to
the value of some thousands of pounds. And that he does out of no
instinct of sacrifice. He believes he would be happier and more
comfortable in a Socialistic state of affairs, when it would not be
necessary for him to hold on to that life-belt of invested property. He
finds it—and quite a lot of well-off people are quite of his way of
thinking—a constant flaw upon a life of comfort and pleasant interests
to see so many people, who might be his agreeable friends and
associates, detestably under-educated, detestably housed, in the most
detestable clothes and boots, and so detestably broken in spirit that
they will not treat him as an equal. It makes him feel he is like that
spoilt child in the nursery; he feels ashamed and contemptible; and,
since individual charity only seems in the long run to make matters
worse, he is ready to give a great deal of his life, and lose his entire
little heap of possessions if need be, very gladly lose it, to change
the present order of things in a comprehensive manner.
I am quite convinced that there are numbers of much richer and more
influential people who are of his way of thinking. Much more likely to
obstruct the way to Socialism is the ignorance, the want of courage, the
stupid want of imagination of the very poor, too shy and timid and
clumsy to face any change they can evade! But, even with them, popular
education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next
generation we shall find Socialists even in the slums. The unimaginative
person who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold
land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most
tenacious passive resister to Socialistic ideas; and such, I fear, we
must reckon, together with the insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable
enemies, as irremovable pillars of the present order. The mean and timid
elements in “human nature” are, and will be, I admit, against Socialism;
but they are not all “human nature,” not half human nature. And when, in
the whole history of the world, have meanness and timidity won a
struggle? It is passion, it is enthusiasm, and indignation that mould
the world to their will—and I cannot see how any one can go into the
back streets of London, or any large British town, and not be filled up
with shame, and passionate resolve to end so grubby and mean a state of
affairs as is displayed there.
I don’t think the “human nature” argument against the possibility of
Socialism will hold water.
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