search long and in vain for a Conservative in public life who would not
admit that reforms are desirable or even urgent, though few might be
prepared with precise statements about particulars.... But their (the
Liberals') confidence in reform, in their ability to improve the body
politic by certain definite measures, is gone. The old Liberal spirit
animating a whole party is dead. It may seem an odd remark to make just
after the late election, but the evidence is abundant, and the
explanation simple. Domestic reform on a large scale and on
individualist lines has reached its limit; but to many Liberals, to many
eminent and authoritative Liberals, reform on socialist lines is
abhorrent.... Consequently there is a large party called Liberal, which,
through the faults of its opponents and the accidents of time, is
successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than
it has been for twenty years a party of homogeneous confidence in
domestic reform, while on the world outside the British islands it looks
with passivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of
assisting oppressed peoples."
* * * * *
"Theoretical Socialism of a logical and thoughtful kind, not entangled
with Radicalism, has made much progress of late years, more especially,
so far as my own experience goes, in the educated and professional
classes; but in practice it bides its time, with confidence perhaps, but
with a consciousness that the time will be long coming. That is a
different spirit from the buoyant expectancy of the old Liberalism."
Granted the necessity of idealism to individual and social health, Mr.
Street's views do not conduce to optimism. Here we have a competent
observer telling us that the only note of idealism he finds in
contemporary intellectual life is a growing, but half-hearted, belief in
Socialism, which is more noticeable "in the educated and professional
classes."
There is another note of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street
ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in
antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a
revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it
has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the
poetry of Browning and Walt Whitman.
But this form of idealism cannot be said to differentiate our time from
the Early Victorian era, for it found its classic expression back in the
middle of the last century in Max Stirner's _Der Einzige und sein
Eigentum_, a book which has been forgotten amid the growing
consciousness of the organic solidarity of society. But Mr. Street is
possibly justified in ignoring this tendency, for as a school of thought
it has committed suicide in the person of Nietzsche's Overman attempting
to construct out of materials drawn from his inner consciousness a pair
of stilts on which to tower above "the herd."
What is the lure of Socialism that is appealing, according to Mr.
Street, to more and more of our "educated and professional" people? For,
in spite of what Professor Veblen truly says of the "negative and
destructive" (in the quotation at the head of this paper) character of
socialist ideals, Socialism must hold up some positive ideals to attract
such growing numbers of the educated classes. To convince oneself of the
actuality of this appeal it is only necessary to run over the writers'
names in the tables of contents in our popular magazines. The proportion
of socialists is surprisingly large and is constantly growing. There can
be no doubt that the percentage of Socialists among writers of
distinction is larger than the percentage of socialists in the
population at large.
Socialism does present certain very definite positive ideals. The first
of these is "Comfort for All" (to use a chapter-heading from Prince
Kropotkin's too little known book, "_La Conquete du Pain_"). The second
is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to
be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual
development of every individual, considered not as an isolated,
self-centred entity, but as a member of an interdependent society; or,
in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist
Manifesto, the socialist ideal is "an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
It may be noted that all that is vivifying in the ideal of individualism
is included in this third positive ideal of Socialism, so that, it is
now seen, Mr. Street was fully justified in making no separate mention
of the ideal of individualism. There can be no doubt that it is the
immensely richer literary and artistic life promised by this third ideal
of Socialism that accounts for the phenomenon noted by Mr. Street.
The beauties of the positive ideals of the socialist Utopias have been
sufficiently lauded by scores of writers from Sir Thomas More to Bellamy
and Mr. H. G. Wells. What it is desired to emphasize here is the
"negative and destructive" (from the standpoint of the established
order) aspects of socialist ideals; for it is the Nihilism of Socialism
that explains why Mr. Street's "educated and professional" socialists
have more patience than confidence in awaiting the realization of their
ideal. The Nihilism of Socialism turns aside many, who have felt the
lure of the socialist ideal, into what Professor Veblen calls, "some
excursion into pragmatic romance,"[7] such as Social Settlements,
Prohibition, Clean Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts, Neighborhood
Guilds, Institutional Church, Christian Science, New Thought, Hearstism,
or "some such cultural thimble-rig." Yet more, there are many of the
"educated and professional classes" who call themselves socialists,
because they cherish the charming delusion that it is possible to
separate the positive from the negative ideals of Socialism, and to work
(in a dilettante fashion) for the former while blithely anathematizing
the latter.
It is the purpose of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme
for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently
zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a
consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the
cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and
inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be
disassociated, save by an act of intellectual suicide; that, in a word,
the Nihilism[8] of Socialism is of the very essence of Socialism.
But, here, a most important distinction should be noted. Socialism,
viewed as a political propaganda, is purely positive in its demands. In
fact, all its demands may be reduced to two--Collectivism and Democracy.
That the people shall own the means of production, and the producers
shall control their products--that is the sum and substance of all
Socialist platforms. Socialist parties do not attack Religion, the
Family, or the State. But socialist philosophy proves conclusively that
the realization of the positive political and economic ideals of
Socialism involves the atrophy of Religion, the metamorphosis of the
Family, and the suicide of the State.
The Nihilism of Socialism springs from the Materialist Conception of
History, and this is precisely the portion of the socialist doctrine
that is usually ignored or half-understood by the enthusiastic young
intellectuals who are in growing numbers joining the Socialist movement
on both sides of the Atlantic. While the Communist Manifesto, written
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847, is throughout founded on this
conception, the first clearly formulated statement of the conception
itself is to be found in the Preface to the "Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy," published by Karl Marx in 1859, the same
year in which Darwin and Wallace made public their independent and
almost simultaneous discoveries of the theory of Natural Selection. This
first statement runs thus:
"In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their
will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage
of development of their material powers of production. The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society--the real foundation, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political, and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social
existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the
property relations within which they had been at work before. From
forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."[9]
This statement contains a whole Revolution in embryo. Viewed from the
standpoint of the established order, it is the very Quintessence of
Nihilism. In a word, it teaches the material origin of Ideas. In the
last analysis, every idea can be traced back to the economic and
telluric environments. In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, "philosophy
revealed to them (Marx and Engels) the basic principle that, in the last
resort, the world is not governed by Ideas, but, on the contrary, the
Ideas by the material world." This doctrine involves a new epistemology,
the distinguishing mark of which is its denial of the immaculate
conception of thought. The human mind, according to Marx and Dietzgen,
can only bring forth thought after it has been impregnated by the
objects of sense perception.[10]
Here we have a thorough-going system of materialist monism. "Ours is
the organic conception of history," says Labriola. "The totality of the
unity of social life is the subject matter present to our minds. It is
economics itself which dissolves in the course of one process, to
reappear in as many morphological stages, in each of which it serves as
a substructure for all the rest. Finally, it is not our method to extend
the so-called economic factor isolated in an abstract fashion over all
the rest, as our adversaries imagine, but it is, before everything else,
to form an historic conception of economics, and to explain the other
changes by means of its changes."[11]
In another place he says: "Ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing
comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of
new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience
of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was
little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical
envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise
consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought,
also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by
little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical hypotheses to
take refuge finally in this prosaic assertion: in the interpretation of
history we must limit ourselves to the objective co-ordination of the
determining conditions and of the determined effects." He reiterates:
"Ideas do not fall from heaven; and, what is more, like the other
products of human activity, they are formed in given circumstances, in
the precise fulness of time, through the action of definite needs,
thanks to the repeated attempts at their satisfaction, and by the
discovery of such and such other means of proof which are, as it were,
the instruments of their production and their elaboration. Even ideas
involve a basis of social conditions; they have their technique; thought
also is a form of work. To rob the one and the other, ideas and thought,
of the conditions and environment of their birth and their development,
is to disfigure their nature and their meaning."[12]
This socialist materialism does not refuse the inspiration of ideals.
"By granting that society is dominated by material interests," Dietzgen
explains, "we do not deny the power of the ideals of the heart, mind,
science, and art. For we have no more to deal with the absolute
antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher
synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends
on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the
production and distribution of earthly goods."[13]
Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political
and juridical institutions are all to be explained in the last analysis
by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This
ruthless materialism crushes belief in God, in the Soul, in immortality.
It leaves no room for any shred of dualism in thought. It is true that
the German Social Democracy included in the famous Erfurt Programme
(adopted in 1891--the first clearly Marxian socialist platform ever
promulgated) a demand for a "Declaration that religion is a private
matter. Abolition of all expenditure from public funds upon
ecclesiastical and religious objects. Ecclesiastical and religious
bodies are to be regarded as private associations, which order their
affairs independently." It will be seen that this is nothing more than a
demand that the State withdraw its sanction of religion as France has
recently done in the Clemenceau law. But Ferri does nothing but draw the
necessary conclusions from socialist premises when he writes: "God, as
Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no need;
he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not the
_unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that which
humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which
decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.
"It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to
each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion
that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the
unknown."[14]
Joseph Dietzgen has thus stated what may be called the law of the
atrophy of religion: "The more the idea of God recedes into the past the
more palpable it is; in olden times man knew everything about his God;
the more modern the form of religion has become, the more confused and
hazy are our religious ideas. The truth is that the historic
development of religion tends to its gradual dissolution."[15]
The characteristic attitude of the socialist materialist toward
Christianity appears very clearly in the following excerpt from
Professor Ferri's "Socialism and Modern Science":
"It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt
(1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private
affairs[16] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious
intolerance under all its forms.... But this breadth of superiority of
view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final
victory.
"It is because Socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs,
whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human
psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined
to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific
culture. This is why Socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a
special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to
disappear. It has assumed this attitude, although it knows that the
absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most
powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions
have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies
of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under
the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer
keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip"
(page 63).
It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought
in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in
luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in
supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the
devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a
teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative
trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one
increasing purpose runs," tends, by retarding the prompt perception of
relations of material cause and effect, to lower the industrial
efficiency of the community.[17]
The socialist materialist can look forward with unruffled serenity to
the passing of religion, since his very definition of religion as "a
popular striving after the illusory happiness that corresponds with a
social condition which needs such an illusion,"[18] implies that it
cannot pass away till it has ceased to be needful to human happiness.
From the point of view of this Socialist materialism, the monogamous
family, the present economic unit of society, ceases to be a divine
institution, and becomes the historical product of certain definite
economic conditions. It is the form of the family peculiar to a society
based on private property in the means of production, and the production
of commodities for sale. It is not crystallized and permanent, but, like
all other institutions, fluid and subject to change. With the change in
its economic basis, the code of sexual morality and the monogamous
family are sure to be modified; but, in the judgment of such socialists
as Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, we shall probably remain
monogamous, but monogamy will cease to be compulsorily permanent.[19]
"What we may anticipate," says Engels, "about the adjustment of sexual
relations after the impending downfall of capitalist production is
mainly of a negative nature and mostly confined to elements that will
disappear. But what will be added? That will be decided after a new
generation has come to maturity: a race of men who never in their lives
have had any occasion for buying with money or other economic means of
power the surrender of a woman; a race of women who have never had any
occasion for surrendering to any man for any other reason but love, or
for refusing to surrender to their lover from fear of economic
consequences. Once such people are in the world, they will not give a
moment's thought to what we to-day believe should be their course. They
will follow their own practice and fashion their own public
opinion--only this and nothing more."[20]
Changed economic conditions are already reflected in the disintegration
of the traditional bourgeois belief in the permanency of the existing
forms of the family and the home. A portentous sign of the times for the
conservatives is the appearance of Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons' book on
"The Family," the most scholarly work on the subject by a bourgeois
writer that has yet appeared. Like all bourgeois writers Mrs. Parsons
has been very chary of using materials furnished by Socialist scholars.
Very striking is the absence from her very extensive bibliographical
notes of the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel and Ferri. But she was
compelled to avail herself freely of the wealth of materials provided by
the scholarly and industrious researches of Morgan, Kautsky, and Cunow.
In her now famous Fifteenth Lecture on "Ethical Considerations," she
suggests various modes of ameliorating the condition of Woman, and
improving conjugal and family relations; but she is again and again
driven to admit that the economic independence of women is a condition
precedent to her "reforms." Most of her suggestions are tinged with the
utopian fancifulness characteristic of the bourgeois theorist. Two
excerpts will illustrate these points sufficiently:
"Again reciprocity of conjugal rights and duties is desirable for
parenthood. If marriage have a proprietary character, neither the owner
nor the owned is entirely fit to develop free personalities in his or
her children. Moreover the idea of marital ownership more or less
involves that of parental ownership, and the latter, as we have seen, is
incompatible with a high type of parenthood. The custom of proprietary
marriage inevitably leads, for example, to restrictions upon female
education. Now just in so far as a woman's education is limited is she
handicapped as an educator of her children. It is unfortunate that in
the _emancipation of woman_ agitation of the past half-century the
reformers failed to emphasize the social as adequately as the
individualistic need of change. If women are to be fit wives and mothers
they must have all, perhaps more, of the opportunities for personal
development that men have. All the activities hitherto reserved to men
must at least be open to them, and many of these activities, certain
functions of citizenship[21] for example, must be expected of them.
Moreover, whatever the lines may be along which the fitness of women to
labor will be experimentally determined, the underlying position must be
established that for the sake of individual and race character she is to
be a producer as well as a consumer of social values.[22] As soon as
this ethical necessity is generally recognized the conditions of modern
industry will become much better adapted to the needs of women workers
than they are now, the hygiene of workshop, factory, and office will
improve, and child bearing and rearing will no longer seem incompatible
with productive activity" (pages 345-347).
Here follows the paragraph upon which the Reverend Doctor Morgan Dix and
other clerical defenders of the economic conditions that cause marital
and non-marital prostitution pounced with such avidity:
"We have therefore, given late marriage and the passing of
prostitution,[23] two alternatives, the requiring of absolute chastity
of both sexes until marriage or the toleration of freedom of sexual
intercourse on the part of the unmarried of both sexes before marriage,
_i. e._, before the birth of offspring. In this event condemnation of
sex license would have a different emphasis from that at present. Sexual
intercourse would not be of itself disparaged or condemned, it would be
disapproved of only if indulged in at the expense of health or of
emotional or intellectual activities in oneself or in others. As a
matter of fact, truly monogamous relations seem to be those most
conducive to emotional or intellectual development and to health, so
that, quite apart from the question of prostitution, promiscuity is not
desirable or even tolerable. It would therefore, seem well from this
point of view, to encourage early trial marriage,[24] the relation to be
entered into with a view to permanency, but with the privilege of
breaking it if proved unsuccessful and in the _absence of offspring_
without suffering any great degree of public condemnation.