ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM
§ 1.
Marx gave to Socialism a theory of world-wide social development, and
rescued it altogether from the eccentric and localized associations of
its earliest phases; he brought it so near to reality that it could
appear as a force in politics, embodied first as the International
Association of Working Men, and then as the Social Democratic movement
of the continent of Europe that commands to-day over a third of the
entire poll of German voters. So much Marx did for Socialism. But if
he broadened its application to the world, he narrowed its range to
only the economic aspect of life. He arrested for a time the
discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it
an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented
by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness,
while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of
affairs, rendered it unsubstantial and unattractive to people who had
any real knowledge of administration.
It was left chiefly to the little group of English people who founded
the Fabian Society to supply a third system of ideas to the amplifying
conception of Socialism, to convert Revolutionary Socialism into
Administrative Socialism.
This new development was essentially the outcome of the reaction of
its broad suggestions of economic reconstruction upon the circle of
thought of one or two young officials of genius, and of one or two
persons upon the fringe of that politic-social stratum of Society, the
English "governing class." I make this statement, I may say, in the
loosest possible spirit. The reaction is one that was not confined to
England, it was to some extent inevitable wherever the new movement in
thought became accessible to intelligent administrators and officials.
But in the peculiar atmosphere of British public life, with its
remarkable blend of individual initiative and a lively sense of the
State, this reaction has had the freest development. There was,
indeed, Fabianism before the Fabian Society; it would be ingratitude
to some of the most fruitful social work of the middle Victorian
period to ignore the way in which it has contributed in suggestion and
justification to the Socialist synthesis. The city of Birmingham, for
example, developed the most extensive process of municipalization as
the mere common-sense of local patriotism. But the movement was
without formulæ and correlation until the Fabians came.
That unorganized, unpaid public service of public-spirited
aristocratic and wealthy financial and business people, the "governing
class," which dominated the British Empire throughout the nineteenth
century, has, through the absence of definite class boundaries in
England and the readiness of each class to take its tone from the
class above, that "Snobbishness" which is so often heedlessly
dismissed as altogether evil, given a unique quality to British
thought upon public questions and to British conceptions of Socialism.
It has made the British mind as a whole "administrative." As compared
with the American mind, for example, the British is State-conscious,
the American State-blind. The American is no doubt intensely
patriotic, but the nation and the State to which his patriotism points
is something overhead and comprehensive like the sky, like a flag
hoisted; something, indeed, that not only does not but must not
interfere with his ordinary business occupations. To have public
spirit, to be aware of the State as a whole and to have an
administrative feeling towards it, is necessarily to be accessible to
constructive ideas--that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the
history of thought in Victorian Great Britain, one sees a constant
conflict of this administrative disposition with the individualistic
commercialism of the aggressively trading and manufacturing class, the
class that in America reigns unchallenged to this day. In the latter
country Individualism reigns unchallenged, it is assumed; in the
former it has fought an uphill fight against the traditions of Church
and State and has never absolutely prevailed. The political economists
and Herbert Spencer were its prophets, and they never at any time held
the public mind in any invincible grip. Since the eighties that grip
has weakened more and more. Socialistic thought and legislation,
therefore, was going on in Great Britain through all the Victorian
period. Nevertheless, it was the Fabian Society that, in the eighties
and through the intellectual impetus of at most four or five
personalities, really brought this obstinately administrative spirit
in British affairs into relation with Socialism as such.
The dominant intelligence of this group was Mr. Sidney Webb, and as I
think of him thus coming after Marx to develop the third phase of
Socialism, I am struck by the contrast with the big-bearded Socialist
leaders of the earlier school and this small, active, unpretending
figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip,
the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice. He emerged as a
Colonial Office clerk of conspicuous energy and capacity, and he was
already the leader and "idea factory" of the Fabian Society when he
married Miss Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a Conservative Member of
Parliament, a girl friend of Herbert Spencer, and already a brilliant
student of sociological questions. Both he and she are devotees to
social service, living laborious, ordered, austere, incessant lives,
making the employment of secretaries their one extravagance, and
alternations between research and affairs their change of occupation.
A new type of personality altogether they were in the Socialist
movement, which had hitherto been richer in eloquence than discipline.
And during the past twenty years of the work of the Fabian Society
through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming
the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that
statement of intention for granted, _how is the thing to be done_?
They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists
that everything would be all right when the People came to their own;
and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who
believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of
chest notes and red flags. They insisted that the administrative and
economic methods of the future must be a secular development of
existing institutions, and inaugurated a process of study--which has
long passed beyond the range of the Fabian Society, broadening out
with the organized work of the New University of London, with its
special School of Economics and Political Science and of a growing
volume of university study in England and America--to the end that
this "_how?_" should be answered....
The broad lines of the process of transition from the present state of
affairs to the Socialist state of the future as they are developed by
administrative Socialism lie along the following lines.
1. The peaceful and systematic taking over from private enterprise, by
purchase or otherwise, whether by the national or by the municipal
authorities as may be most convenient, of the great common services of
land control, mining, transit, food supply, the drink trade, lighting,
force supply and the like.
2. Systematic expropriation of private owners by death-duties and
increased taxation.
3. The building up of a great scientifically organized administrative
machinery to carry on these enlarging public functions.
4. A steady increase and expansion of public education, research,
museums, libraries and all such public services. The systematic
promotion of measures for raising the school-leaving age, for the
public feeding of school children, for the provision of public baths,
parks, playgrounds and the like.
5. The systematic creation of a great service of public health to take
over the disorganized confusion of hospitals and other charities,
sanitary authorities, officers of health and private enterprise
medical men.
6. The recognition of the claim of every citizen to welfare by
measures for the support of mothers and children and by the
establishment of old-age pensions.
7. The systematic raising of the minimum standard of life by factory
and other labour legislation, and particularly by the establishment of
a legal minimum wage....
These are the broad forms of the Fabian Socialist's answer to the
question of _how_, with which the revolutionary Socialists were
confronted. The diligent student of Socialism will find all these
proposals worked out to a very practicable-looking pitch indeed in
that Bible of Administrative Socialism, the collected tracts of the
Fabian Society,[21] and to that volume I must refer him. The theory of
the minimum standard and the minimum wage is explained, moreover, with
the utmost lucidity in that Socialist classic, _Industrial Democracy_,
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It is a theory that must needs be
mastered by every intelligent Socialist, but it is well to bear in
mind that the method of the minimum wage is no integral part of the
general Socialist proposition, and that it still lies open to
discussion and modification.
[21] _Fabian Tracts._ (Fabian Society, 5_s._)
§ 2.
Every movement has the defects of its virtues, and it is not, perhaps,
very remarkable that the Fabian Society of the eighties and nineties,
having introduced the conception of the historical continuity of
institutions into the Propaganda of Socialism, did certainly for a
time greatly over-accentuate that conception and draw away attention
from aspects that may be ultimately more essential.
Beginning with the proposition that the institutions and formulæ of
the future must necessarily be developed from those of the present,
that one cannot start _de novo_ even after a revolution; one may
easily end in an attitude of excessive conservatism towards existing
machinery. In spite of the presence of such fine and original
intelligences as Mr. (now Sir) Sydney Olivier and Mr. Graham Wallas in
the Fabian counsels, there can be no denial that for the first twenty
years of its career, Mr. Webb was the prevailing Fabian. Now his is a
mind legal as well as creative, and at times his legal side quite
overcomes his constructive element; he is extraordinarily fertile in
expedients and skilful in adaptation, and with a real horror of open
destruction. This statement by no means exhausts him, but it does to a
large extent convey the qualities that were uppermost in the earlier
years, at any rate, of his influence. His insistence upon continuity
pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and
developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism without
the overt change of any existing ruling body. His impetus carried this
reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite.
Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the
unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the
implication that organization alone, without popular support, might
achieve Socialism. Socialism was to arrive as it were insidiously.
To some minds this new proposal had the charm of a school-boy's first
dark-lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and became a
plot. Functions were to be shifted, quietly, unostentatiously, from
the representative to the official he appointed; a bureaucracy was to
slip into power through the mechanical difficulties of an
administration by debating representatives; and since these officials
would by the nature of their positions constitute a scientific
bureaucracy, and since Socialism is essentially scientific government
as distinguished from haphazard government, they would necessarily run
the country on the lines of a pretty distinctly undemocratic
Socialism.
The process went even further than secretiveness in its reaction from
the large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism. There arose
even a repudiation of "principles" of action, and a type of worker
which proclaimed itself "Opportunist-Socialist." It was another
instance of Socialism losing sight of itself, it was a process quite
parallel at the other extreme with the self-contradiction of the
Anarchist-Socialist. Socialism as distinguished from mere Liberalism,
for example, is an organized plan for social reconstruction, while
Liberalism relies upon certain vague "principles"; Socialism declares
that good intentions and doing what comes first to hand will not
suffice. Now Opportunism is essentially benevolent adventure and the
doing of first-hand things.
This conception of indifference to the forms of government, of
accepting whatever governing bodies existed and using them to create
officials and "_get something done_," was at once immediately fruitful
in many directions, and presently productive of many very grave
difficulties in the path of advancing Socialism. Webb himself devoted
immense industry and capacity to the London County Council--it is
impossible to measure the share he has had in securing such great
public utilities as water supply, traction and electric supply, for
example, from complete exploitation by private profit seekers, but
certainly it is a huge one--and throughout England and presently in
America, there went on a collateral activity of Fabian Socialists.
They worked like a ferment in municipal politics, encouraging and
developing local pride and local enterprise in public works. In the
case of large public bodies, working in suitable areas and commanding
the services of men of high quality, striking advances in Social
organization were made, but in the case of smaller bodies in
unsuitable districts and with no attractions for people of gifts and
training, the influence of Fabianism did on the whole produce effects
that have tended to discredit Socialism. Aggressive, ignorant and
untrained men and women, usually neither inspired by Socialist faith
nor clearly defining themselves as Socialists, persons too often of
wavering purpose and doubtful honesty, got themselves elected in a
state of enthusiasm to undertake public functions and challenge
private enterprise under conditions that doomed them to waste and
failure. This was the case in endless parish councils and urban
districts; it was also the case in many London boroughs. It has to be
admitted by Socialists with infinite regret that the common
borough-council Socialist is too often a lamentable misrepresentative
of the Socialist idea.
The creation of the London Borough Councils found English Socialism
unprepared. They were bodies doomed by their nature to incapacity and
waste. They represented neither natural communities nor any
practicable administrative unit of area. Their creation was the result
of quite silly political considerations. The slowness with which
Socialists have realized that for the larger duties that they wish to
have done collectively, a new scheme of administration is necessary;
that bodies created to sweep the streets and admirably adapted to that
duty may be conspicuously not adapted to supply electric power or
interfere with transit, is accountable for much disheartening
bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and
denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and
entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim
Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned
out to be a very bad friend and a very poor tool....
In all these matters the real question at issue is one between the
emergency and the implement. One may illustrate by a simple
comparison. Suppose there is a need to dig a hole and that there is no
spade available, a Fabian with Mr. Webb's gifts becomes invaluable. He
seizes upon a broken old cricket-bat, let us say, uses it with
admirable wit and skill, and presto! there is the hole made and the
moral taught that one need not always wait for spades before digging
holes. It is a lesson that Socialism stood in need of, and which
henceforth it will always bear in mind. But suppose we want to dig a
dozen holes, it may be worth while to spend a little time in going to
beg, borrow or buy a spade. If we have to dig holes indefinitely, day
after day, it will be sheer foolishness sticking to the bat. It will
be worth while then not simply to get a spade, but to get just the
right sort of spade in size and form that the soil requires, to get
the proper means of sharpening and repairing the spade, to insure a
proper supply. Or to point the comparison, the reconstruction of our
legislative and local government machinery is a necessary preliminary
to Socialization in many directions. Mr. Webb has very effectually
admitted that, is in fact himself leading us away from that by taking
up the study of local government as his principal occupation, but the
typical "Webbite" of the Fabian Society, who is very much to Webb what
the Marxist is to Marx, entranced by his leader's skill, still clings
to a caricature distortion of this earlier Fabian ideal. He dreams of
the most foxy and wonderful digging by means of box-lids,
table-spoons, dish-covers--anything but spades designed and made for
the job in hand--just as he dreams of an extensive expropriation of
landlords by a legislature that includes the present unreformed House
of Lords....
§ 3.
It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the Fabian
Socialist movement was at all quickened to the need of political
reconstruction as extensive as the economic changes it advocated, and
it is still far from a complete apprehension of the importance of the
political problem. To begin with, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, having completed
their work on Labour Regulation, took up the study of local government
and commenced that colossal task that still engages them, their book
upon _English Local Government_, of which there has as yet appeared
(1907) only one volume out of seven. (Immense as this service is, it
is only one part of conjoint activities that will ultimately give
constructive social conceptions an enormous armoury of scientifically
arranged fact.)
As the outcome of certain private experiences, the moral of which was
pointed by discussion with Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the present writer in
1902 put before the Fabian Society a paper on Administrative
Areas,[22] in which he showed clearly that the character and
efficiency and possibilities of a governing body depend almost
entirely upon the suitability to its particular function of the size
and quality of the constituency it represents and the area it
administers. This may be stated with something approaching scientific
confidence. A local governing body for too small an area or elected
upon an unsound franchise _cannot_ be efficient. But obviously before
you can transfer property from private to collective control you must
have something in the way of a governing institution which has a
reasonably good chance of developing into an efficient controlling
body. The leading conception of this Administrative Area paper
appeared subsequently running through a series of tracts, _The New
Heptarchy Series_, in which one finds it applied first to this group
of administrative problems and then to that.[23] These tracts are
remarkable if only because they present the first systematic
recognition on the part of any organized Socialist body of the fact
that a scientific reconstruction of the methods of government
constitutes not simply an incidental but a necessary part of the
complete Socialist scheme, the first recognition of the widening scope
of the Socialist design that makes it again a deliberately
constructive project.[24]
[22] See Appendix to _Mankind in the Making_. (Chapman and
Hall, 1905.)
[23] 1. _Municipalization by Provinces._ 2. _On the Reform
of Municipal Service._ 3. _Public Control of Electric Power
and Transit._ 4. _The Revival of Agriculture: a National
Policy for Great Britain._ 5. _The Abolition of Poor Law
Guardians._ Others to follow. (Fabian Society, 1905-6.)
[24] This generalization is a sweeping one, and would need,
were one attempting to give more than a very broad
impression of the sequence of Socialist ideas, considerable
modification. Such earlier tracts as _The New Reform Bill_,
_Facts for Londoners_, _Facts for Bristol_, dealt mainly
with the question of machinery.
It is only an initial recognition, a mere first raid into a great and
largely unexplored province of study. This province is in the broadest
terms, social psychology. A huge amount of thought, discussion,
experiment, is to be done in this field--needs imperatively to be done
before the process of the socialization of economic life can go very
far beyond its present attainments. Except for these first admissions,
Socialism has concerned itself only with the material reorganization
of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the
reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either
accepted existing intellectual conditions and political institutions
as beyond its control or assumed that they will obediently modify as
economic and administrative necessity dictates. Declare the Social
revolution, we were told in a note of cheery optimism by the Marxist
apostles, and political institutions will come like flowers in May!
Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network
of skilled experts spread over the country, and your political forms,
your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you.
The student of history knows better. These confident claims ignore the
psychological factors in government and human association; they
disregard a jungle of difficulties that lie directly in our way.
Socialists have to face the facts; firstly, that the political and
intellectual institutions of the present time belong to the present
condition of things, and that the intellectual methods, machinery and
political institutions of the better future must almost inevitably be of
a very different type; secondly, that such institutions will not come
about of themselves--which indeed is the old superstition of _laissez
faire_ in a new form--but must be thought out, planned and organized
just as completely as economic socialization has had to be planned and
organized; and thirdly, that so far Socialism has evolved scarcely any
generalizations even, that may be made the basis of new intellectual and
governmental--as distinguished from administrative--methods. It has
preached collective ownership and collective control, and it has only
begun to recognize that this implies the necessity of a collective will
and new means and methods altogether for the collective mind.
The administrative Socialism which Mr. Webb and the Fabian Society
developed upon a modification of the broad generalizations of the Marx
phase, is as it were no more than the first courses above those
foundations of Socialism. It supplies us with a conception of methods
of transition and with a vision of a great and disciplined
organization of officials, a scientific bureaucracy appointed by
representative bodies of diminishing activity and importance, and
coming to be at last the real working control of the Socialist State.
But it says nothing of what is above the officials, what drives the
officials. It is a palace without living rooms, with nothing but
offices; a machine, as yet unprovided with a motor. No doubt we must
have that organization of officials if we mean to bring about a
Socialist State, but the mind recoils with something like terror from
the conception of a State run and ruled by officials, terminating in
officials, with an official as its highest expression. One has a
vision of a community with blue-books instead of a literature, and
inspectors instead of a conscience. The mystical democracy of the
Marxist, though manifestly impossible, had in it something attractive,
something humanly and desperately pugnacious and generous, something
indeed heroic; the bureaucracy of the Webbite, though far more
attainable, is infinitely less inspiring. But that may be because the
inspiring elements remain to be stated rather than that these
practical constructive projects are in their nature, and incurably,
hard and narrow. Instead of a gorgeous flare in the darkness, we have
the first cold onset of daylight heralding the sun. If the letter of
the teaching of Mr. and Mrs. Webb is bureaucracy, that is certainly
not the spirit of their lives.
The earlier Socialists gave Socialism substance, _rudis indigestaque
moles_, but noble stuff; Administrative Socialism gave it a physical
structure and nerves, defined its organs and determined its functions;
it remains for the Socialist of to-day to realize in this shaping body
of the civilized State of the future the breath of life already
unconfessedly there, to state in clear terms the reality for which our
plans are made, by which alone they can be realized, that is to say,
_the collective mind of humanity, the soul and moral being of
mankind_.