SOCIALISM A DEVELOPING DOCTRINE
§ 1.
So far we have been discussing the broad elementary propositions of
Modern Socialism. As we have dealt with them, they amount to little
more than a sketch of the foundation for a great scheme of social
reconstruction. It would be a poor service to Socialism to pretend
that this scheme is complete. From this point onward one enters upon a
series of less unanimous utterances and more questionable suggestions.
Concerning much of what follows, Socialism has as yet not elaborated
its teaching. It has to do so, it is doing so, but huge labours lie
before its servants. Before it can achieve any full measure of
realization, it has to overcome problems at present but half solved,
problems at present scarcely touched, the dark unsettling suggestion
of problems that still await formulation. The Anti-Socialist is freely
welcome to all these admissions. No doubt they will afford grounds for
some cheap transitory triumph. They affect our great generalizations
not at all; they detract nothing from the fact that Socialism presents
the most inspiring, creative scheme that ever came into the chaos of
human affairs. The fact that it is not cut and dried, that it lives
and grows, that every honest adherent adds not only to its forces but
to its thought and spirit, is itself inspiration.
The new adherent to Socialism in particular must bear this in mind,
that Socialism is no garment made and finished that we can reasonably
ask the world to wear forthwith. It is not that its essentials remain
in doubt, it is not that it does not stand for things supremely true,
but that its proper method and its proper expedients have still to be
established. Over and above the propaganda of its main constructive
ideas and the political work for their more obvious and practical
application, an immense amount of intellectual work remains to be done
for Socialism. The battle for Socialism is to be fought not simply at
the polls and in the market-place, but at the writing-desk and in the
study. To many questions, the attitude of Socialism to-day is one of
confessed inquiring imperfection.[17] It would indeed be very
remarkable if a proposition for changes so vast and comprehensive as
Socialism advances was in any different state at this present time.
[17] The student will find very clear, informing, and
suggestive reading in Kirkup's _History of Socialism_ (A. &
C. Black, 1906). It is a fine, impartial account of these
developments, which may well be used as a corrective (or
confirmation) of this book.
It is so recently as 1833 that the world first heard the word
Socialism.[18] It appeared then, with the vaguest implications and the
most fluctuating definition, as a general term for a disconnected
series of protests against the extreme theories of Individualism and
Individualist Political Economy; against the cruel, race-destroying
industrial spirit that then dominated the world. Of these protests the
sociological suggestions and experiments of Robert Owen were most
prominent in the English community, and he it is, more than any other
single person, whom we must regard as the father of Socialism. But in
France ideas essentially similar were appearing about such movements
and personalities as those of Saint Simon, Proudhon and Fourier. They
were part of a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political
doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries and experiments.
[18] It was probably first used in the _Poor Man's Guardian_
in that year. See _The Life of Francis Place_, by Graham
Wallas, p. 353.
It is only to be expected that early Socialism should now appear as
not only an extremely imperfect but a very inconsistent system of
proposals. Its value lay not so much in its plans as in its hopeful
and confident denials. It had hold of one great truth; it moved one
great amendment to the conception of practical equality the French
Revolution had formulated, and that was its clear indication of the
evil of unrestricted private property and of the necessary antagonism
of the interests of the individual to the common-weal, of "Wealth
against Commonwealth," that went with that. While most men had to go
propertyless in a world that was privately owned, the assertion of
equality was an empty lie. For the rest, primordial Socialism was
entirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the talk of
school-boys. It disregarded the most obvious needs. It did not provide
for any principle of government, or for the maintenance of collective
thought and social determination, it offered no safeguards and
guarantees for even the most elementary privacies and freedoms; it was
extraordinarily non-constructive. It was extreme in its proposed
abolition of the home, and it flatly ignored the huge process of
transition needed for a change so profound and universal.
The early Socialism was immediately millennial. It had no patience.
The idea was to be made into a definite project forthwith; Fourier
drew up his compact scheme, arranged how many people should live in
each _phalange_ and so forth, and all that remained to do, he thought,
was to sow _phalanges_ as one scatters poppy seed. With him it was to
be Socialism by contagion, with many of his still hastier
contemporaries it was to be Socialism by proclamation. All the evils
of society were to crumble to ruins like the Walls of Jericho at the
first onset of the Great Idea.
Our present generation is less buoyant perhaps, but wiser. However
young you may be as a reformer, you know you must face certain facts
those early Socialists ignored. Whatever sort of community you dream
of, you realize that it has to be made of the sort of people you meet
every day or of the children growing up under their influence. The
damping words of the old philosopher to the ardent Social reformer of
seventeen were really the quintessence of our criticism of
revolutionary Socialism: "Will your aunts join us, my dear? No!
Well--is the grocer on our side? And the family solicitor? We shall
have to provide for them all, you know, unless you suggest a lethal
chamber."
For a generation Socialism, in the exaltation of its self-discovery,
failed to measure these primary obstacles, failed to recognize the
real necessity, the quality of the task of making these people
understand. To this day the majority of Socialists still fail to grasp
completely the Herbartian truth, the fact that every human soul moves
within its _circle of ideas_, resisting enlargement, incapable indeed
if once it is adult of any extensive enlargement, and that all
effectual human progress can be achieved only through such
enlargement. Only ideas cognate to a circle of ideas are assimilated
or assimilable; ideas too alien, though you shout them in the ear,
thrust them in the face, remain foreign and incomprehensible.
The early Socialists, arriving at last at their Great Idea, after
toilsome questionings, after debates, disputations, studies, trials,
_saw_, and instantly couldn't understand those others who did not see;
they failed altogether to realize the leaps they had made, the
brilliant omissions they had achieved, the difficulties they had
evaded to get to this magnificent conception. I suppose such
impatience is as natural and understandable as it is unfortunate. None
of us escape it. Much of this early Socialism is as unreal as
mathematics, has much the same relation to truth as the abstract
absolute process of calculation has to concrete individual things;
much of it more than justifies altogether that "black or white" method
of criticism of which I wrote in the preceding chapter. They were as
downright and unconsidering, as little capable of the reasoned middle
attitude. Proudhon, perceiving that the world was obsessed by a
misconception of the scope of property whereby the many were enslaved
to the few, went off at a tangent to the announcement that "Property
is Robbery," an exaggeration that, as I have already shown, still
haunts Socialist discussion. The ultimate factor of all human affairs,
the psychological factor, was disregarded. Like the classic
mathematical problem, early Socialism was always "neglecting the
weight of the elephant"--or some other--from the practical point of
view--equally essential factor. This was, perhaps, an unavoidable
stage. It is probable that by no other means than such exaggeration
and partial statement could Socialism have got itself begun. The world
of 1830 was fatally wrong in its ideas of property; early Socialism
rose up and gave those ideas a flat, extreme, outrageous
contradiction. After that analysis and discussion became possible.
The early Socialist literature teems with rash, suggestive schemes. It
has the fertility, the confusion, the hopefulness, the promise of
glowing youth. It is a quarry of ideas, a mine of crude expedients, a
fountain of emotions. The abolition of money, the substitution of
Labour Notes, the possibility, justice and advantage of equalizing
upon a time-basis the remuneration of the worker, the relation of the
new community to the old family, a hundred such topics were
ventilated--were not so much ventilated as tossed about in an
impassioned gale.
Much of this earlier Socialist literature was like Cabet's book,
actually Utopian in form; a still larger proportion was Utopian in
spirit; its appeal was imaginative, and it aimed to be a plan of a new
state as definite and detailed as the plan for the building of a
house. It has been the fashion with a number of later Socialist
writers and speakers, mind-struck with that blessed word "evolution,"
confusing "scientific," a popular epithet to which they aspired, with
"unimaginative," to sneer at the Utopian method, to make a sort of
ideal of a leaden practicality, but it does not follow because the
Utopias produced and the experiments attempted were in many aspects
unreasonable and absurd that the method itself is an unsound one. At a
certain phase of every creative effort you must cease to study the
thing that is, and plan the thing that is not. The early Socialisms
were only premature plans and hasty working models that failed to
work.
And it must be remembered when we consider Socialism's early
extravagancies, that any idea or system of ideas which challenges the
existing system is necessarily, in relation to that system, outcast.
Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels
meet in the gaols. If A and B rebel against the Government, they are
apt, although they rebel for widely different reasons, to be classed
together; they are apt indeed to be thrown together and tempted to
sink even quite essential differences in making common cause against
the enemy. So that from its very beginning Socialism was mixed up--to
this day it remains mixed up--with other movements of revolt and
criticism, with which it has no very natural connection. There is, for
example, the unfortunate entanglement between the Socialist theory and
that repudiation of any but subjective sexual limitations which is
called "free love," and there is that still more unfortunate
association of its rebellion against orthodox economic theories, with
rebellion against this or that system of religious teaching. Several
of the early Socialist communities, again, rebelled against ordinary
clothing, and their women made short hair and bloomers the outward and
visible associations of the communistic idea. In Holyoake's _History
of Co-operation_ it is stated that one early experiment was known to
its neighbours as "the grass-eating Atheists of Ham Common." I have
done my very best (in Chapter VIII., § 2) to clear the exposition of
Socialism from these entanglements, but it is well to recognize that
these are no corruptions of its teaching, but an inevitable
birth-infection that has still to be completely overcome.
§ 2.
The comprehensively constructive spirit of modern Socialism is very
much to seek in these childhood phases that came before Marx. These
early projects were for the most part developed by literary men (and
by one philosophic business man, Owen) to whose circle of ideas the
conception of State organization and administration was foreign. They
took peace and order for granted--they left out the school-master, the
judge and the policeman, as the amateur architect of the anecdote left
out the staircase. They set out to contrive a better industrial
organization, or a better social atmosphere within the present scheme
of things. They wished to reform what they understood, and what was
outside their circle of ideas they took for granted, as they took the
sky and sea. Not only was their literature Utopian literature, about
little islands of things begun over again from the beginning, but
their activities tended in the direction of Utopian experiments
equally limited and isolated. Here again a just critic will differ
from many contemporary Socialists in their depreciation of this sort
of work. Owen's experiments in socialized production were of enormous
educational and scientific value. They were, to use a mining expert's
term, "hand specimens" of human welfare of the utmost value to
promoters. They made factory legislation possible; they initiated the
now immense co-operative movement; they stirred commonplace
imaginations as only achievement can stir them; they set going a
process of amelioration in industrial conditions that will never, I
believe, cease again until the Socialist state is attained.
But apart from Owen and the general advertisement given to Socialist
ideas, it must be admitted that a great majority of Socialist
communities have, by every material standard, failed rather than
succeeded. Some went visibly insolvent and to pieces, others were
changed by prosperity. Some were wrecked by the sudden lapse of the
treasurer into an extreme individualism. Essentially Socialism is a
project for the species, but these communities made it a system of
relationships within a little group; to the world without they had
necessarily to turn a competitive face, to buy and sell and advertise
on the lines of the system as it is. If they failed, they failed; if
they succeeded they presently found themselves landlords, employers,
no more and no less than a corporate individualism. I have described
elsewhere[19] the fate of the celebrated Oneida community of New York
State, and how it is now converted into an aggressive, wealthy,
fighting corporation of the most modern type, employing immigrant
labour.
[19] _The Future in America._ (Chapman & Hall, 1906.)
Professed and conscious Socialism in its earliest stages, then, was an
altogether extreme proposition, it was at once imperfect and
over-emphatic, and it was confused with many quite irrelevant and
inconsistent novelties with regard to diet, dress, medicine and
religion. Its first manifest, acknowledged and labelled fruits were a
series of futile "communities"--Noyes' _History of American
Socialisms_ gives their simple history of births and of fatal
infantile ailments--Brook Farm, Fourierite "Phalanges" and the like.
But correlated with these extreme efforts, drawing ideas and
inspiration from them, was the great philanthropic movement for the
amelioration of industrialism, that was, I insist, for all its absence
of a definite Socialist label in many cases, an equally legitimate
factor in the making of the great conception of modern Socialism.
Socialism may be the child of the French Revolution, but it certainly
has one aristocratic Tory grandparent. There can be little dispute of
the close connection of Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts, that
commencement of constructive statesmanship in industrialism, with the
work of Owen. The whole Victorian period marks a steady development of
social organization out of the cruel economic anarchy of its
commencement; the beginnings of public education, adulteration acts
and similar checks upon the extremities of private enterprise, the
great successful experiments of co-operative consumers' associations
and the development of what has now become a quasi-official
representation of labour in the State through the Trade Unions. Two
great writers, Carlyle and Ruskin, the latter a professed Socialist,
spent their powers in a relentless campaign against the harsh theories
of the liberty of property, the gloomy superstitions of political
economy that barred the way to any effectual constructive scheme. An
enormous work was done throughout the whole Victorian period by
Socialists and Socialistic writers, in criticizing and modifying the
average circle of ideas, in bringing conceptions that had once seemed
weird, outcast and altogether fantastic, more and more within the
range of acceptable practicality.
The first early Socialisms were most various and eccentric upon the
question of government and control. They had no essential political
teaching. Many, but by no means all, were inspired by the democratic
idealism of the first French Revolution. They believed in a mystical
something that was wiser and better than any individual,--the People,
the Common Man. But that was by no means the case with all of them.
The Noyes community was a sort of Theocratic autocracy; the Saint
Simonian tendency was aristocratic. The English Socialism that in the
middle Victorian period developed partly out of the suggestions of
Owen's beginnings and partly as an independent fresh outpouring of the
struggling Good Will in man, that English Socialism that found a voice
in Ruskin and in Maurice and Kingsley and the Christian Socialists,
was certainly not democratic. It kept much of what was best in the
"public spirit" of contemporary English life, and it implied if it did
not postulate a "governing class." Benevolent and even generous in
conception, its exponents betray all too often the ties of social
habituations, the limited circle of ideas of English upper and upper
middle-class life, easy and cultivated, well served and distinctly,
most unmistakably, authoritative.
While the experimental Utopian Socialisms gave a sort of variegated
and conflicting pattern of a reorganized industrialism and
(incidentally to that) a new heaven and earth, the benevolent
Socialism, Socialistic Liberalism and Socialistic philanthropy of the
middle Victorian period, really went very little further in effect
than a projected amelioration and moralization of the relations of
rich and poor. It needed the impact of an entirely new type of mind
before Socialism began to perceive its own significance as an ordered
scheme for the entire reconstruction of the world, began to realize
the gigantic breadth of its implications.