revolution of 1917 in that country, the Marxist Communists were so
completely victorious that they were able to form a Government far more
powerful than the Tsar had ever really been. But as the Tsar had not
allowed Fabian Societies to be formed in Russia to reduce Socialism
to a system of law, this new Russian Government did not know what to
do, and, after trying all sorts of amateur experiments which came to
nothing more than pretending that there was Communism where there
was nothing but the wreck of Capitalism, and giving the land to the
peasants, who immediately insisted on making private property of it
over again, had to climb down hastily and leave the industry of the
country to private employers very much as the great ground landlords
of our cities leave the work of the shops to their tenants, besides
allowing the peasant farmers to hold their lands and sell their produce
just as French peasant proprietors or English farmers do.
This does not mean that the Russian Revolution has been a failure. In
Russia it is now established that capital was made for Man, and not
Man for Capitalism. The children are taught the Christian morality of
Communism instead of the Mammonist morality of Capitalism. The palaces
and pleasure seats of the plutocrats are used for the recreation of
workers instead of for the enervation of extravagant wasters. Idle
ladies and gentlemen are treated with salutary contempt, whilst the
worker’s blouse is duly honored. The treasures of art, respected and
preserved with a cultural conscientiousness which puts to shame our
own lootings in China, and our iconoclasms and vandalisms at home, are
accessible to everyone. The Greek Church is tolerated (the Bolsheviks
forbore to cut off their Archbishop’s head as we cut off Archbishop
Laud’s); but it is not, as the Church of England is, allowed without
contradiction to tell little children lies about the Bible under
pretence of giving them religious instruction, nor to teach them to
reverence the merely rich as their betters. That sort of doctrine is
officially and very properly disavowed as Dope.
All this seems to us too good to be true. It places the Soviet
Government in the forefront of cultural civilization as far as good
intention goes. But it is not Socialism. It still involves sufficient
inequality of income to undo in the long run enough of its achievements
to degrade the Communist Republic to the level of the old Capitalist
Republics of France and America. In short, though it has made one of
those transfers of political power which are the object of revolutions,
and are forced through by simple slaughter and terror, and though
this political transfer has increased Russian self-respect and changed
the moral attitude of the Russian State from pro-Capitalist to
anti-Capitalist, it has not yet established as much actual Communism as
we have in England, nor even raised Russian wages to the English level.
The explanation of this is that Communism can spread only as Capitalism
spread: that is, as a development of existing economic civilization and
not by a sudden wholesale overthrow of it. What it proposes is not a
destruction of the material utilities inherited from Capitalism, but
a new way of managing them and distributing the wealth they produce.
Now this development of Capitalism into a condition of ripeness
for Socialization had not been reached in Russia; consequently the
victorious Communist Bolsheviks in 1917 found themselves without any
highly organized Capitalistic industry to build upon. They had on their
hands an enormous agricultural country with a population of uncivilized
peasants, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, cruel, and land-hungry.
The cities, few and far between, with their relatively insignificant
industries, often managed by foreigners, and their city proletariats
living on family wages of five and threepence a week, were certainly
in revolt against the misdistribution of wealth and leisure; but they
were so far from being organized to begin Socialism that it was only
in a very limited sense that they could be said to have begun urban
civilization. There were no Port Sunlights and Bournvilles, no Ford
factories in which workmen earn £9 in a five-day week and have their
own motor cars, no industrial trusts of national dimensions, no public
libraries, no great public departments manned by picked and tested
civil servants, no crowds of men skilled in industrial management
and secretarial business looking for employment, no nationalized and
municipalized services with numerous and competent official staffs,
no national insurance, no great Trade Union organization representing
many millions of workmen and able to extort subsidies from Capitalist
governments by threatening to stop the railways and cut off the coal
supply, no fifty years of compulsory schooling supplemented by forty
years of incessant propaganda of political science by Fabian and other
lecturers, no overwhelming predominance of organized industry over
individualist agriculture, no obvious breakdown of Capitalism under
the strain of the war, no triumphant rescue by Socialism demonstrating
that even those public departments that were bywords for incompetence
and red tape were far more efficient than the commercial adventurers
who derided them. Well may Mr Trotsky say that the secret of the
completeness of the victory of the Russian Proletarian Revolution
over Russian Capitalist civilization was that there was virtually no
Capitalist civilization to triumph over, and that the Russian people
had been saved from the corruption of bourgeois ideas, not by the
famous metaphysical dialectic inherited by Marx from the philosopher
Hegel, but by the fact that they are still primitive enough to be
incapable of middle class ideas. In England, when Socialism is
consummated it will plant the red flag on the summit of an already
constructed pyramid; but the Russians have to build right up from the
sand. We must build up Capitalism before we can turn it into Socialism.
But meanwhile we must learn how to control it instead of letting it
demoralize us, slaughter us, and half ruin us, as we have hitherto done
in our ignorance.
Thus the fact that the Soviet has had to resort to controlled
Capitalism and bourgeois enterprise, after denouncing them so
fiercely under the Tsardom in the phrases used by Marx to denounce
English Capitalism, does not mean that we shall have to recant in the
same way when we complete our transfer of political power from the
proprietary classes and their retainers to the Socialist proletariat.
The Capitalism which the Russian Government is not only tolerating but
encouraging would be for us, even now under Capitalism, an attempt to
set back the clock. We could not get back to it if we tried, except
by smashing our machinery, breaking up our industrial organization,
burning all the plans and documents from which it could be
reconstructed, and substituting an eighteenth for a twentieth century
population.
The moral of all this is that though a political revolution may be
necessary to break the power of the opponents of Socialism if they
refuse to accept it as a Parliamentary reform, and resist it violently
either by organizing what is now called Fascism or a _coup d’état_ to
establish a Dictatorship of the Capitalists, yet neither a violent
revolution nor a peacefully accepted series of parliamentary reforms
can by themselves create Socialism, which is neither a battle cry nor
an election catchword, but an elaborate arrangement of our production
and distribution of wealth in such a manner that all our incomes
shall be equal. This is why Socialists who understand their business
are always against bloodshed. They are no milder than other people;
but they know that bloodshed cannot do what they want, and that the
indiscriminate destruction inseparable from civil war will retard
it. Mr Sidney Webb’s much quoted and in some quarters much derided
“inevitability of gradualness” is an inexorable fact. It does not,
unfortunately, imply inevitability of peacefulness. We can fight over
every step of the gradual process if we are foolish enough. We shall
come to an armed struggle for political power between the parasitic
proletariat and the Socialist proletariat if the Capitalist leaders of
the parasitic proletariat throw Parliament and the Constitution over,
and declare for a blood and iron settlement instead of a settlement by
votes. But at the end of the fighting we shall all be the poorer, none
the wiser, and some of us the deader. If the Socialists win, the road
to Socialism may be cleared; but the pavement will be torn up and the
goal as far off as ever.
All the historical precedents illustrate this. A monarchy may be
changed into a republic, or an oligarchy into a democracy, or one
oligarchy supplanted by another, if the people who favor the change
kill enough of the people who oppose it to intimidate the rest; and
when the change is made you may have factions fighting instead of
voting for the official posts of power and honor until, as in South
America in the nineteenth century, violent revolutions become so common
that other countries hardly notice them; but no extremity of fighting
and killing can alter the distribution of wealth or the means of
producing it. The guillotining of 4000 people in eighteen months during
the French Revolution left the people poorer than before; so that when
the Public Prosecutor who had sent most of the 4000 to the guillotine
was sent there himself, and the people cursed him as he passed to his
death, he said, “Will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?”
That did not affect the Capitalist makers of the French Revolution,
because they did not want to make the bread of the poor cheaper: they
wanted to transfer the government of France from the King and the
nobles to the middle class. But if they had been Socialists, aiming
at making everything much cheaper except human life, they would have
had to admit that the laugh was with Citizen Fouquier Tinville. And
if William Pitt and the kings of Europe had let the French Revolution
alone, and it had been as peaceful and parliamentary as our own
revolutionary Reform Bill of 1832, it would have been equally futile as
far as putting another pennorth of milk into baby’s mug was concerned.
Whenever our city proletarians, in the days before the dole (say 1885
for instance), were driven by unemployment to threaten to burn down
the houses of the rich, the Socialists said “No: if you are foolish
enough to suppose that burning houses will put an end to unemployment,
at least have sense enough to burn down your own houses, most of
which are unfit for human habitation. The houses of the rich are good
houses, of which we have much too few.” Capitalism has produced not
only slums but palaces and handsome villas, not only sweaters’ dens but
first-rate factories, shipyards, steamships, ocean cables, services
that are not only national but international, and what not. It has also
produced a great deal of Communism, without which it could not exist
for a single day (we need not go over all the examples already given:
the roads and bridges and so forth). What Socialist in his senses
would welcome a civil war that would destroy all or any of this, and
leave his party, even if it were victorious, a heritage of blackened
ruins and festering cemeteries? Capitalism has led up to Socialism
by changing the industries of the country from petty enterprises
conducted by petty proprietors into huge Trusts conducted by employed
proletarians directing armies of workmen, operating with millions of
capital on vast acreages of land. In short, Capitalism tends always to
develop industries until they are on the scale of public affairs and
ripe for transfer to public hands. To destroy them would be to wreck
the prospects of Socialism. Even the proprietors who think that such
a transfer would be robbery have at least the consolation of knowing
that the thief does not destroy the property of the man he intends to
rob, being as much interested in it as the person from whom he means to
steal it. As to managing persons, Socialism will need many more of them
than there are at present, and will give them much greater security in
their jobs and dignity in their social standing than most of them can
hope for under Capitalism.
And now I think we may dismiss the question whether the return of
a decisive majority of Socialists to Parliament will pass without
an appeal to unconstitutional violence by the capitalists and their
supporters. Whether it does or not may matter a good deal to those
unlucky persons who will lose their possessions or their lives in the
struggle if there be a struggle; but when the shouting and the killing
and the house burning are over the survivors must settle down to some
stable form of government. The mess may have to be cleared up by a
dictatorship like that of Napoleon the Third, King Alfonso, Cromwell,
Napoleon, Mussolini, or Lenin; but dictatorial strong men soon die or
lose their strength, and kings, generals, and proletarian dictators
alike find that they cannot carry on for long without councils or
parliaments of some sort, and that these will not work unless they are
in some way representative of the public, because unless the citizens
co-operate with the police the strongest government breaks down, as
English government did in Ireland.
In the long run (which nowadays is a very short run) you must have
your parliament and your settled constitution back again; and the
risings and _coups d’état_, with all their bloodshed and burnings and
executions, might as well have been cut out as far as the positive
constructive work of Socialism is concerned. So we may just as well
ignore all the battles that may or may not be fought, and go on to
consider what may happen to the present Labor Party if its present
constitutional growth be continued and consummated by the achievement
of a decisive Socialist majority in Parliament, and its resumption of
office, not, as in 1923-24, by the sufferance of the two Capitalist
parties and virtually under their control, but with full power to
carry out a proletarian policy, and, if it will, to make Socialism the
established constitutional order in Britain.
76
CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY
Let us assume, then, that we have resigned ourselves, as we must sooner
or later, to a parliamentary settlement of the quarrels between the
Capitalists and the Socialists. Mind: I cannot, women and men being
what they are, offer you any sincere assurances that this will occur
without all the customary devilments. Every possible wrong and wicked
way may be tried before their exhaustion drives us back into the right
way. Attempts at a general strike, a form of national suicide which
sane people are bound to resist by every extremity of violent coercion,
may lead to a proclamation of martial law by the Government, whether
it be a Labor or a Capitalist Government, followed by slaughtering
of mobs, terroristic shelling of cities (as in the case of Dublin),
burning and looting of country houses, shooting of police officers at
sight as uniformed enemies of the people, and a hectic time for those
to whom hating and fighting and killing are a glorious sport that makes
life worth living and death worth dying. Or if the modern machine gun,
the bombing aeroplane, and the poison gas shell make military coercion
irresistible, or if the general strikers have sufficient sense shot
into them to see that blockade and boycott are not good tactics for
the productive proletariat because they themselves are necessarily
the first victims of it, still Parliament may be so split up into
contending groups as to become unworkable, forcing the nation to fall
back on a dictatorship. The dictator may be another Bismarck ruling in
the name of a royal personage, or a forceful individual risen from the
ranks like Mahomet or Brigham Young or Signor Mussolini, or a general
like Cæsar or Napoleon or Primo di Rivera.
In the course of these social convulsions you and I may be outraged,
shot, gas poisoned, burnt out of house and home, financially ruined,
just as anyone else may. We must resign ourselves to such epidemics
of human pugnacity and egotism just as we have to resign ourselves to
epidemics of measles. Measles are less bitter to us because we have at
least never done anything to encourage them, whereas we have recklessly
taught our children to glorify pugnacity and to identify gentility and
honor with the keeping down of the poor and the keeping up of the
rich, thus producing an insanitary condition of public morals which
makes periodic epidemics of violence and class hatred inevitable.
But sooner or later, the irreconcilables exterminate oneanother like
the Kilkenny cats; for when the toughest faction has exterminated all
the other factions it proceeds to exterminate itself. And the dictators
die as Cromwell died, or grow old and are sent to the dustbin by
ambitious young monarchs as Bismarck was; and dictators and ambitious
monarchs alike find that autocracy is not today a practical form of
government except in little tribes like Brigham Young’s Latter Day
Saints, nor even complete there. The nearest thing to it that will now
hold together is the presidency of the United States of America; and
the President, autocrat as he is for his four years of office, has
to work with a Cabinet, deal with a Congress and a Senate, and abide
the result of popular elections. To this parliamentary complexion we
must all come at last. Every bumptious idiot thinks himself a born
ruler of men; every snob thinks that the common people must be kept in
their present place or shot down if society is to be preserved; every
proletarian who resents his position wants to strike at something or
somebody more vulnerable than the capitalist system in the abstract;
but when they have all done their worst the dead they have slain must
be buried, the houses they have burned rebuilt, and the hundred other
messes they have left cleared up by women and men with sense enough to
take counsel together without coming to blows, and business ability
enough to organize the work of the community. These sensible ones may
not always have been sensible: some of them may have done their full
share of mischief before the necessary sanity was branded into them by
bitter experience or horrified contemplation of the results of anarchy;
but between the naturally sensible people and the chastened ones
there will finally be some sort of Parliament to conduct the nation’s
business, unless indeed civilization has been so completely wrecked in
the preliminary quarrels that there is no nation worth troubling about
left, and consequently no national business to transact. That has often
happened.
However, let us put all disagreeable possibilities out of our heads
for the moment, and consider how Socialism is likely to advance in
a Parliament kept in working order by the establishment of two main
parties competing for office and power: one professing to resist the
advance and the other to further it, but both forced by the need for
gaining some sort of control of the runaway car of Capitalism to
take many steps when in power which they vehemently denounced when
in opposition, and in the long run both contributing about equally
(as hitherto) to the redistribution of the national income and the
substitution of public for private property in land and industrial
organization.
Do not fear that I am about to inflict a complete program on you. Even
if I could foresee it I know better than to weary you to that extent.
All I intend is to give you a notion of the sort of legislation that
is likely to be enacted, and of the sort of opposition it is likely
to provoke; so that you may be better able to judge on which side you
should vote when an election gives you the chance, or when a seat on
some parliamentary body, local or central, calls you to more direct
action. You must understand that my designs on you do not include
making you what is called a good party woman. Rather do I seek to add
you to that floating body of openminded voters who are quite ready
to vote for this party today and for the opposite party tomorrow if
you think the balance of good sense and practical ability has changed
(possibly by the ageing of the leaders) or that your former choice
has taken a wrong turn concerning some proposed measure of cardinal
importance. Good party people think such openmindedness disloyal; but
in politics there should be no loyalty except to the public good. If,
however, you prefer to vote for the same side every time through thick
and thin, why not find some person who has made the same resolution in
support of the opposite party? Then, as they say in Parliament, you can
pair with her: that is, you can both agree never to vote at all, which
will have the same effect as if you voted opposite ways; and neither of
you need ever trouble to vote again.
We are agreed, I take it, that practical Socialism must proceed by the
Government nationalizing our industries one at a time by a series of
properly compensated expropriations, after an elaborate preparation
for their administration by a body of civil servants, who will consist
largely of the old employees, but who will be controlled and financed
by Government departments manned by public servants very superior
in average ability, training, and social dignity to the commercial
profiteers and financial gamblers who now have all our livelihoods at
their mercy.
Now this preparation and nationalization will hardly be possible
unless the voters have at least a rough notion of what the Government
is doing, and approve of it. They may not understand Socialism as a
whole; but they can understand nationalization of the coal mines quite
well enough to desire it and vote for its advocates, if not for the
sake of the welfare of the nation, at least for the sake of getting
their coal cheaper. Just so with the railways and transport services
generally: the most prejudiced Conservatives may vote for their
nationalization on its merits as an isolated measure, for the sake of
cheaper travelling and reasonable freights for internal produce. A few
big nationalizations effected with this sort of popular support will
make nationalization as normal a part of our social policy as old age
pensions are now, though it seems only the other day that such pensions
were denounced as rank Communism, which indeed they are.
There is therefore no hope for Capitalism in the difficulty that
baffled the Soviet in dealing with the land: that is, that the
Russian people were not Communists, and would not work the Communist
system except under a compulsion which it was impossible to apply on
a sufficiently large scale, because if a system can be maintained
only by half the ablebodied persons in the country being paid to do
nothing but stand over the other half, rifle in hand, then it is not
a practicable system and may as well be dropped first as last. But a
series of properly prepared nationalizations may not only be understood
and voted for by people who would be quite shocked if they were called
Socialists, but would fit in perfectly with the habits of the masses
who take their bread as it comes and never think about anything of a
public nature. To them the change would be only a change of masters,
to which they are so accustomed that it would not strike them as a
change at all, whilst it would be also a change in the remuneration,
dignity, and certainty of employment, which is just what they are
always clamoring for. This overcomes the difficulty, familiar to all
reformers, that it is much easier to induce people to do things in
the way to which they are accustomed, even though it is detestably
bad for them, than to try a new system, even though it promises to be
millennially good for them.